by Tom Sharpe
‘Which brings us back to the main point of contention,’ said the Headmaster. ‘The Bloxham match is the high point in our sporting calendar. It is of social importance for the school too. A great many parents attend and we’d be doing ourselves no good in their eyes if we allow ourselves to lose it. I am therefore overriding your ban, Mr Slymne. You will find some less time-consuming means of imposing your will on the boys. I don’t care how you do it, but please bear in mind that Groxbourne is a games-playing school first and foremost.’
‘But surely, Headmaster, the purpose of education is to—’
‘Build character and moral fibre. You’ll find our purpose set out in the Founder’s Address.’
From that moment of defeat, Mr Slymne had suffered further humiliations. He had tried to get a job at other, more progressive schools, only to learn that he was regarded as totally unsuitable precisely because he had taught at Groxbourne. Forced to stay on, he had been despised by the boys and was made an object of ridicule in the common-room by Mr Glodstone who always referred to him as ‘our precious little conscientious objector’. Mr Slymne fought back more subtly by raising the level of Geography teaching above that of any other subject and, at the same time, exercising his sarcasm so exclusively on boys from Glodstone’s house that they failed their O levels while other boys passed.
But the main thrust of his revenge was confined to Glodstone himself and over the years had developed into almost as demented an obsession as Glodstone’s lust for adventure. Mr Slymne’s was more methodical. He observed his enemy’s habits closely, made notes about his movements, watched him through binoculars from his room in the Tower, and kept a dossier of boys to whom Glodstone spoke most frequently. Originally, he had hoped to catch him out fondling a boy – Slymne had bought a camera with a telescopic lens to record the event incontrovertibly – but Glodstone’s secret sex life remained obstinately concealed. He even failed to rise to the bait of several gay magazines which Mr Slymne had ordered in his name. Glodstone had taken them straight to the Headmaster and had even threatened to call the police in if he received any more. As a result, Mr Slymne and the entire school had had to sit through an unusually long sermon on the evils of pornography, the detrimental effects on sportsmen of masturbation, referred to in the sermon as ‘beastliness’, and finally the cowardly practice of writing anonymous letters. The sermon ended on the most sinister note of all. ‘If any of this continues, I shall be forced, however unwillingly, to refer these matters to the police and the long arm of the law!’
For the first time in his agnostic life, Mr Slymne prayed to God that the sex-shop owner in Soho to whom he had sent his order wouldn’t solicit Mr Glodstone’s custom again, and that the Headmaster’s threat wasn’t as all-inclusive as it had sounded. It was a view evidently shared by the boys, whose sex life over the next few days became so restricted that the school laundry was forced to work overtime.
But it was thanks to this episode that Mr Slymne first glimpsed Mr Glodstone’s true weakness. ‘The damned scoundrel who sent that stuff ought to have known I only read decent manly books. Rider Haggard and Henty. Good old-fashioned adventure yarns. None of your filthy modern muck like Forever Amber,’ Glodstone had boasted in the common room that evening. ‘What I say is that damned poofters ought to have their balls cut off, what!’
‘Some of them appear to share your opinion, Glodstone,’ said the Chaplain. ‘I was reading only the other day of an extraordinary case where a man actually went through some such operation and turned himself into a woman. One wonders …’
But Slymne was no longer listening. He put his coffee cup down and went out with a strange feeling that he had found the secret of Glodstone’s success and his popularity with the boys. The wretched man was a boy himself, a boy and a bully. For a few extraordinary seconds things reversed themselves in Mr Slymne’s mind; the boys were all adults and the staff were boys, boys grown larger and louder in their opinions and the authority they wielded but still small, horrid boys themselves in their innermost being. It was as though they had been stunted in perpetual adolescence, which explained why they were still at school and hadn’t dared the risks and dangers of the outside world. As he crossed the quad with this remarkable insight, as curious in its transposition of his previous beliefs as one of the negatives held up to the light in his darkroom, Mr Slymne felt a sudden relief. He was freed from the responsibilities of his career. He was no longer a schoolmaster, no longer an elderly thirty-eight, he was eighteen, no, fifteen, and entitled to a fifteen-year-old’s ebullient spirits and unfeeling harshness, but with the marvellous difference that he had years of adult experience and knowledge on which to rely in his war with Glodstone. He would destroy the bully before he had finished.
With something approaching gaiety, Mr Slymne climbed the steps in the Tower to his room two at a time and added the findings that Glodstone only read adventure yarns to his dossier on the man. Downstairs, there came the sound of fighting in the dormitory. Mr Slymne rose from his desk, descended the stairs and ten minutes later had changed the whole pattern of his life by beating three boys without a qualm.
5
‘Heard about Slimey’s conversion?’ Major Fetherington said at breakfast the next morning. Glodstone peered over the Daily Express.
‘Don’t tell me he’s joining the Church. God help his parishioners.’
‘No such luck. The fellow’s finally come round to a proper way of dealing with boys. Beat three little blighters last night for pillow-fighting in dorm.’
Mr Glodstone put down his paper and glared at the Major with his gimlet eye. ‘You’re joking, of course.’
‘Damned if I am. Cleaves, Milshott and Bedgerson. Saw their backsides this morning when they were changing for early PT. A nicer see of welts too you couldn’t wish for.’
‘Extraordinary. Didn’t think the runt had it in him,’ said Glodstone, and turned back to his paper only slightly puzzled.
But when Mr Slymne came in five minutes later, Glodstone was genuinely startled. ‘Good God,’ he said loudly. ‘Never thought I’d live to see the day when you’d join us for breakfast, Slymne.’
Slyme helped himself to bacon and eggs and smiled almost cordially. ‘Thought it would make a change,’ he said. ‘One tends to get stuck in a rut. I’m thinking of taking up jogging too.’
‘Just don’t do yourself an injury,’ said Glodstone unpleasantly. ‘We wouldn’t know how to get along without your conscientious objections. But then I hear you don’t have any now. Beat some boys last night, eh?’
‘They asked for it and they got it,’ said Mr Slymne, managing to ignore the sarcasm.
‘Nothing like consistency,’ said Glodstone, and stalked out of the dining room. That morning his classes suffered from his short temper and were set essays to write while Glodstone brooded. Slymne’s change of behaviour was disconcerting. If the damned fellow could suddenly alter his habits and start beating and take up jogging, Glodstone felt hard done by. Slymne had always been a comforting standard of wetness against which Glodstone could measure his own forthright and manly behaviour. Damn it, the next thing the wretched Slymne would do was get married. Glodstone, staring out of the window, felt a new wave of resentment boiling up inside him at the thought. Adventure had eluded him. So had romance. And he was growing older.
‘Might not be a bad thing to marry some woman after all,’ he muttered to himself, but apart from a distant cousin with no money, who had once proposed to him on Valentine’s Day, there were no women of his social background he could think of who would do. There were some divorced mothers, of course, whose presence at the beginning of term or on Open Day had excited him, but their visits were too brief for him to get to know them. Anyway, they were hardly his sort. Glodstone dismissed them from his thoughts until he remembered La Comtesse de Montcon. He had never met her, but Anthony Wanderby, her son by a previous marriage, was in his house and while Glodstone disliked the little blighter – he was a typical American spoilt br
at in the Housemaster’s eyes and always malingering – he appreciated the crested envelopes and notepaper on which La Comtesse wrote to him from her château in France. Glodstone had endowed La Comtesse – in his too-frequent mentions of her in the staff room he stuck to the French – with all those qualities of beauty and nobility he had never encountered outside his books, but which had to exist somewhere. Certainly the château existed. Glodstone had looked it up in his Michelin map for Périgord and found it apparently standing above the river, La Boose, a tributary of the Dordogne. A narrow road ran down beside the river and the hillsides opposite were coloured green which meant they were forested. It had often occurred to him to take the Bentley and find some excuse for dropping in but … Anyway, there was no point in pining over her. There was doubtless some damned Frog, Monsieur Le Comte, in attendance.
But that evening, after a restless day, he went up to his rooms early and sat sucking a pipe, studying the map again and turning over La Comtesse’s brief letters to him. Then he folded them carefully and replaced them in the cigar box he kept in his desk before knocking out his pipe on the window sill and turning in.
‘Damn Slymne,’ he muttered as he lay in the darkness.
He would have damned him far more had he seen Mr Slymne move from the roof of the Chapel opposite and descend the circular steps holding his camera carefully with his left hand while feeling the wall with his right. He paused at the bottom, made sure the quad was empty, and crossed to the Tower with the camera and 300mm lens concealed under his jacket. Ten minutes later, after locking himself in his bathroom and pulling the dark blind over the window, he had loaded the developing tank.
*
For Peregrine, the strange contortions of character in Glodstone and Slymne were too complex to be noticeable. He took them as usual quite literally at face value and since Glodstone’s face with its neat moustache, monocle and glass eye gave the impression of strength and authority, while Slymne’s didn’t, he despised the latter. Besides, he enjoyed a man-to-man friendliness with Glodstone as a result of his enthusiastic reading of every book in his library, to the present where he was allowed to help to polish the Bentley on wet Sunday afternoons. There in the garage with rain pattering on the glass cupola above them (the place had once been a coach house with a few old bridles still hanging on the walls) he imbibed the code of the English gentleman which was Glodstone’s special mania. He had already merged Richard Hannay, Bulldog Drummond and every other upstanding hero, including James Bond, into a single figure in his mind and had conferred their virtues on Mr Glodstone. In fact, his reading had gone further than Gloddie’s which stopped around 1930. James Bond was one such character. Glodstone wasn’t too sure about Bond.
‘The thing is,’ he told Peregrine one afternoon when they had unstrapped the bonnet of the Bentley and were polishing the great engine, ‘the thing is with Bond, is that he’s not your everyday decent chap who gets caught up in an adventure quite by chance. He’s a sort of paid government employee and anyway his attitude to women’s pretty rotten and sordid. And he’s always flying about and gambling and generally living it up. Not a gentleman, what?’
‘No sir,’ said Peregrine, and struck Bond off his list.
Glodstone sat down on the running-board and took out his pipe. ‘I mean to say, it’s his job to deal with crime. The damned fellow is a professional. He’s told what to do and he has official backing. Now the real thing isn’t like that. It happens accidentally. A chap is driving along and he stops for a breather and he sees murder done and naturally he has to do something about it, and by Jove he does. Takes the swine on outside the law and if he gets caught that’s the luck of the draw. And another thing is, he’s as fit as a fiddle and he sticks to the countryside which he knows like the back of his hand and your genuine crooks don’t. That’s the way it really is.’
In the presence of the Bentley, Peregrine’s feelings were almost religious. Mr Glodstone’s clichés opened up an idyllic world where simple chaps made simple decisions and crooks were simply crooks and got what was coming to them. It corresponded exactly with his own view of life; one day he’d be lucky enough to see murder done and would do something about it.
But apart from these occasional visions of the future, he was occupied with Games, with the Major’s OU course of shooting, doing the Assault Course, swimming in cold rivers and rock-climbing in Wales during the summer holidays and generally fitting himself for the Army career his father had decided on for him. In schoolwork, he remained a failure. Each year he took his O levels and failed. It was the only cloud on his simple horizon. There were others gathering.
*
On the evening after his spell on the Chapel roof, Mr Slymne locked himself in his bathroom, set up his enlarger and printed the negatives. They showed Glodstone holding an envelope and placing it in a cigar box. But the 8 × 10 prints were not big enough to tell him more. Mr Slymne turned the enlarger round, put several books on the baseboard and focused on the bathroom floor. This time the negative was so enlarged that the print only included Glodstone’s hand, the lower part of his face and the envelope. As it appeared in the developing dish Slymne bent over it eagerly. There was something on the back of the envelope, he could see that now, but it was only when he had transferred the print to the fixer and turned the light on that he recognized in spite of the grain the blob as a crest. A crest? Slymne’s thoughts turned to Glodstone’s background. The man was always boasting about his family but there’d never been any mention of a family crest, and Glodstone was just the sort of fellow to have made a big thing about it.
If it wasn’t his own, what was he doing with crested envelopes? And why keep them in a cigar box?
Anyway, he had learnt something new to add to the dossier. Mr Slymne took the print and was about to wash it when his cautious mind considered the dangers if it were found. It would be extremely awkward having to think of an excuse for photographing Glodstone from the Chapel roof. Far better to destroy them now. He tore the photographs into strips of soggy paper and flushed them down the lavatory. The negatives went too. As he washed the dishes and cleared away, Mr Slymne pondered his next move. It might be possible to provoke Glodstone into some discussion on heraldry. He would have to do it tactfully.
In the event, he had to do nothing more than listen. Two days later, he was passing his house room when he heard two boys.
‘Tambon says it’s a bloody great castle like the sort of thing you see on telly with towers and everything,’ said a boy Slymne recognized to be Paitter.
‘I bet he sucked up to Wanderby to get himself invited,’ said Mowbray. ‘He’s always doing that and Wanderby’s a grotty snob. Just because his mother’s a countess and he gets letters with crests, he thinks he’s going to marry a royal.’
‘Anyway, the countess is a real old cow according to Tambon. He was scared stiff of her. You ask him what it was like.’
A group of boys clattering down the staircase forced Slymne to move. He hurried along to the staff room deep in thought. Was it pure coincidence that Glodstone kept crested envelopes in a cigar box and that he had a boy in his house whose mother was a countess and used crested notepaper? And if it wasn’t, what did it portend? Probably nothing, but it would be worth looking into. For a moment he considered bringing the subject of Wanderby up in Glodstone’s presence and watching his reaction. But Slymne’s mind, honed by the misery of so many years of insult and dislike, had a new edge of cunning to it. He must do nothing to arouse the slightest glimmer of suspicion in Glodstone. Besides, there was a simple way of finding out if there was any connection between Glodstone and Wanderby’s mother. Slymne bided his time.
His opportunity came at half-term.
‘I’m taking a group of chaps over to the railway museum at York,’ Glodstone announced one evening. ‘Never like to see boys left here when their parents don’t pitch up to take them out.’
‘Giving the Bentley an airing, eh,’ said the Major. ‘The Head won’t like it, old b
oy.’
‘Not going to give him a chance to dislike it. Hired a charabanc for the trip.’
‘A charabanc. Now there’s a word that’s gone out of fashion,’ said the Chaplain.
‘I stick to the old ways, Padre,’ said Glodstone, rubbing his pipe against the side of his nose to give it a greasy shine. ‘They are still the best.’
Mr Slymne noted the archaism. It was another of the irritating facets of Glodstone’s character that he seemed to ignore that the world had changed. But it was good to know that Glodstone would be away when the school was almost empty. Very good.
And so, when the parents had been and the coach with Glodstone’s steam-engine enthusiasts had left, Mr Slymne slipped quietly along the corridor that connected his house with Gloddie’s, carefully checking that each study was empty and that no one was about, and arrived at the door of Glodstone’s rooms. For a moment he hesitated and listened but there were none of the usual sounds of the school. He was safe but his heart was beating palpably fast. Two deep breaths to quieten it and he was inside the room and the door was shut behind him. He crossed to the desk. The cigar box had been in a drawer on the left-hand side. Slymne tried the top one and found only exercise books and a broken pipe. The box was in the second. Keeping below the level of the window, he knelt and opened it. The envelopes were inside with the letters. With sudden decisiveness Slymne reached for the bottom one, took it out, examined the crest on the back and noted the French stamp, and put it carefully into the inside pocket of his jacket. Then he shut the drawer and hurried back to his room.
There he took out the letter and read it through with a growing sense of anti-climax. It was simply a short note written in a large flowing hand informing Mr Glodstone that Anthony would be a week late in returning to school because his father was in Paris and would be flying back to the States on September 10th. The letter was signed ‘Yours sincerely, Deirdre de Montcon.’ Mr Slymne sat staring at it trying to think why Glodstone would want to keep a business letter so carefully in a cigar box and bring it out with the almost reverential look he had seen on his face through the telescopic lens. Perhaps he ought to look at the other letters in the box. They might reveal a more intimate relationship. He would do that when he took this letter back but in the meantime he would photograph it. First he measured the envelope and made a note of its exact dimensions. Then, fitting the 55mm Micro lens to his Nikon, he photographed both the letter and the envelope and finally, moving in to within a few inches, photographed the address on the notepaper and the crest on the back of the envelope. That done, he put the letter and envelope in his pocket and slipped back to Glodstone’s room, all the time listening for any sound that might indicate there was anyone about. But the school was still silent and the musty smell Slymne always associated with its emptiness during the holidays seemed to pervade the place.