The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

EARLY ON SATURDAY evening Mr. Nigel Denniston decided to begin. He found that the majority of his O-level English Language scripts had been delivered, and he began his usual preliminary task of putting the large buff-coloured envelopes into alphabetical order, and of checking them against his allocated schedule. The examiners' meeting was to be held in two days' time, and before then he had to look at about twenty or so scripts, mark them provisionally in pencil, and present them for scrutiny to the senior examiner, who would be interviewing each of his panel after the main meeting. Al-jamara was the first school on his list, and he slit open the carefully-sealed envelope and took out the contents. The attendance sheet was placed on top of the scripts, and Denniston's eyes travelled automatically and hopefully down to the 'Absentee' column. It was always a cause of enormous joy to him if one or two of his candidates had been smitten with some oriental malady; but Al-jamara was a disappointment. According to the attendance sheet there were five candidates entered, and all five were duly registered as 'present' by the distant invigilator. Never mind. There was always the chance of finding one or two of those delightful children who knew nothing and who wrote nothing; children for whom the wells of inspiration ran dry after only a couple of laboured sentences. But no. No luck there, either. None of the five candidates had prematurely given up the ghost. Instead, it was the usual business: page after page of ill-written, unidiomatic, irrelevant twaddle, which it was his assignment to plough through (and almost certainly to plough), marking in red ink the myriad errors of grammar, syntax, construction, spelling and punctuation. It was a tedious chore, and he didn't really know why year after year he took it on. Yet he did know. It was a bit of extra cash; and if he didn't mark, he would only be sitting in front of the TV, forever arguing with the family about which of the channels they should watch. He flicked through the first few sheets. Oh dear! These foreigners might be all right at Mathematics or Economics or that sort of thing. But they couldn't write English—that was a fact. Still, it wasn't really surprising. English was their second language, poor kids; and he felt a little less jaundiced as he took out his pencil and started.

An hour later he had finished the first four scripts. The candidates had tried — of course they had. But he felt quite unjustified in awarding the sort of marks that could bring them anywhere near the pass range. Tentatively he had written his own provisional percentages at the top right-hand corner of each script: 27 %, 34 %, 35 %, 19 %. He decided to finish off the last one before supper.

This was a better script. My goodness, it was! And as he read on he realized that it was very good indeed. He put aside his pencil and read through the essay with genuine interest, bordering on delight. Whoever the boy was, he'd written beautifully. There were a few awkward sentences, and a sprinkling of minor errors; but Denniston doubted whether he himself could have written a better essay under examination conditions. He had known the same sort of thing before, though. Sometimes a candidate would memorize a whole essay and trot it out: beautiful stuff, lifted lock, stock and paragraph from one of the great English prose stylists; but almost invariably in such cases, the subject matter was so wildly divorced from the strict terms of the question set as to be completely irrelevant. But not here. Either the lad was quite exceptionally able, or else he had been extraordinarily fortunate. That wasn't for Denniston to decide, though; his job was to reward what was on the script. He pencilled in 90 %; and then wondered why he hadn't given it 95 %, or even 99 %. But like almost all examiners, he was always frightened of using the full range of marks. The lad would fly through, anyway. Wonderful lad! Perfunctorily Denniston looked at the name: Dubal. It meant nothing to him at all.

In Al-jamara itself, the last of the Autumn examinations, crowded into just the one week, had finished the previous afternoon, and George Bland relaxed with an iced gin and tonic in his air-conditioned flat. It had taken him only a few weeks to regret his move. Better paid, certainly; but only away from Oxford had he begun fully to appreciate the advantages of his strike-ridden, bankrupt, beautiful homeland. He missed, above all, the feeling of belonging somewhere which, however loosely, he could think of as his home: the pub at night; the Cotswold villages with their greens and ancient churches; the concerts, the plays, the lectures, and the general air of learning; the oddities forever padding their faddish, feckless paths around the groves of the Muses. He'd never imagined how much it all meant to him. The climate of Al-jamara was overwhelming, intolerable, endlessly enervating; the people alien — ostensibly hospitable, but secretly watchful and suspicious. How he regretted the move now!

The news had worried him; would have worried anyone. It was for information only, really — no more; and it had been thoughtful of the Syndicate to keep him informed. The International Telegram had arrived on Wednesday morning: TRAGIC NEWS STOP QUINN DEAD STOP MURDER SUSPECTED STOP WILL WRITE STOP BARTLETT. But there had been another telegram, received only that morning; and this time it was unsigned. He had burned it immediately, although he realized that no one could have suspected the true import of the brief, bleak lines. Yet it had always been a possibility, and he was prepared. He walked over to his desk and took out his passport once more. All was in order; and tucked safely inside was his ticket on the scheduled flight to Cairo, due to leave at noon the following day.