The Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

  Not, at any rate, until this very last day of term.

  Now, after Culpepper had pulled in a particularly large haul from the luckless card players, followed by a jubilant yodel, a loud tattoo on the table with his fists, an enormous draught of port and a belch which set the silver sporting trophies rattling in their glass-fronted case, Steve jumped to his feet and stood directly behind him. He tapped him on the shoulder and said, in a tone of quiet fury:

  “Look, Culpepper—are you actually a member of this club?”

  Culpepper turned around slowly. When he saw who was addressing him, his face relaxed into a contemptuous smile.

  “Oh, come on, Richards, don’t be such an arsehole. It’s the last day of term.”

  “I’m not being an arsehole. This is a members’ club and I’m asking you if you’re a member.”

  “Of course I’m not. Nor are any of these people.”

  “Then get out.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m telling you, as a prefect, to get out of this room now.”

  Culpepper laughed spitefully. “And what are you going to do if I don’t? Put me in detention?”

  “Yes,” said Steve, all too aware that the whole room had gone silent and that this conversation was being closely followed by everyone present. “You can go in the first detention of next term.”

  “There’s one flaw in that proposal,” said Culpepper, after a measured pause. “Next term is the Oxbridge term, and I will be here, because I’ll be taking the entrance exam, but you won’t, because your grades aren’t going to be good enough.” And still he saved the worst insult until last: because that was when he used the name, the one name that no one in the sixth form had used for as long as anyone could remember. “Now, do you mind if we get back to our game— Rastus?”

  With that he returned to his pack of cards, and began to shuffle them placidly: until all at once, Steve seized hold of his collar, and there was a sudden, unthinkable thud and a crack as he slammed Culpepper’s head down against the table with murderous force.

  “Jesus Christ, Steve!”

  And now there was blood everywhere. It oozed in thick rivulets down the card table and ran over the edge in little cascades. Culpepper was motionless for a second or two—with shock, presumably—then stumbled into an upright position, like a punchdrunk bull, and stared around him. When he got Steve into focus he lunged at him wildly, but there were already three people to hold him back. A couple of the card players had grabbed Steve too, by now, and for a few hideous moments the two adversaries stared at each other, one of them breathless with rage, the other scarcely able to stand, his face and his blazer and shirt and hair all clotted with crimson blood. Bayley ran off to get help, and when Mr. Warren arrived with his first-aid kit, it was quickly decided that an ambulance had to be called. Meanwhile Steve, unresisting, was frogmarched down to the Chief Master’s study.

  He was the second person to be expelled from the school that day.

  Doug, Philip and Benjamin came to see him as he stood waiting to be called in for his interview. It was fairly clear that he had been crying, but now he seemed unnervingly calm and softly spoken.

  “You know what happened,” he said accusingly, to Doug and Philip. “You were there in the room with us that day. I’m not making it up. Think about it.”

  Then a voice from behind the door called “Richards!,” and he was gone.

  “So what was that about?” Benjamin asked. “What did he mean?”

  The three of them were lying on the grassy bank leading down to the rugby fields. It was after four o’clock on this blazing, humid afternoon, and the school was almost deserted. His friends had brought a four-pack of Carling Black Label, but Benjamin, conscious of his status as always, felt obliged to abstain. It was all right for the others: they wouldn’t be coming back next term.

  “Steve’s got this idea into his head,” Doug answered slowly, his eyes closed against the burning sun, “that Culpepper did something to him, the day of his big exam. Gave him something.”

  “Like what?”

  “A drug.”

  Benjamin laughed; the very idea made him nervous. “How could he possibly have done that?”

  “What do you think, Phil?”

  “If it happened,” Philip said, “it happened when we were all in the room together.”

  “All right then.” Doug sat up. “Let’s think about it.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Benjamin protested. “Which room do you mean?”

  And so Doug and Philip explained. It all hinged on the fact that King William’s expected its pupils to study for an additional O-level in the sixth form, at the same time as their A-levels. Sometimes this could lead to problems with the examination timetable, and on this particular Tuesday morning, Doug, Philip, Harding, Richards, Culpepper, Gidney and Procter all had to take O-level papers which clashed with their A-levels. Their A-level papers, as a result, had to be rescheduled for the afternoon, and between the hours of 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m., they had to be closeted somewhere away from the rest of the school, so that no cheating could take place. For two and a half hours, then, they were locked up together in Mr. Nuttall’s room, with nothing more exciting to look forward to than the arrival of Mr. Tillotson at 1:15 with a plate of sandwiches and seven cups of tea. (If he could find his way.)

  “Now hang on,” said Doug. “Did we all know beforehand that we were getting tea?”

  “Yes, I think so,” said Philip. “I certainly did.”

  “OK. So we knew the tea was coming. Fine. Now—” (he closed his eyes again) “—I’m trying to remember. Did anything happen in those two and a half hours, apart from the sandwiches and the tea and Culpepper finding the medal?”

  “Of course it did. There was Harding’s joke.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Doug, drily. “Sean’s joke. How could I forget?”

  “Sean’s joke?” said Benjamin, for whom old habits died hard, and who remained perennially curious about his erstwhile friend’s antics.

  “We’ll come to that in a bit,” Doug promised. “You’ll split your sides. Now then: when exactly did Culpepper find the medal?”

  “Just after the tea arrived.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Positive.”

  “Well, that’s a giveaway, isn’t it?”

  “Why’s it a giveaway?” said Benjamin. “You’re not explaining this very well.”

  “OK, listen.” Doug sat up, put his lager can down on the grass and applied himself to the task of laying out the facts. “We all get a plate of Mrs. Craddock’s delicious crab paste sandwiches, or whatever. Yum yum, munch munch, thank you very much. Then the tea arrives. One big pot, seven cups and saucers. But just for the moment, Culpepper seems to have lost interest in his din-dins, and he’s decided to start rummaging around in the lost property box beneath Nuttall’s bookcase: no doubt hoping to root out some hardcore pornography, for which he has a notorious predilection. Anyway, he hasn’t been talking to the rest of us all morning. You know what he’s like. Ever since we published that letter your brother wrote to him, me and Philip have been persona non grata. So we just let him get on with it and do his own thing.

  “Now, the upshot is that he doesn’t find any blow jobs or split beavers, unfortunately, but he does come across something interesting: Steve’s St. Christopher’s medal, which went missing about a year ago, and caused an almighty rumpus as we all remember. So he turns round, and he hides it in his hand, and he says . . . Let me get this right . . . He says, ‘Richards, I think you should come and see this.’ And then—then he says, ‘Actually, I think that everyone should.’ ”

  “That’s right,” said Philip. “He did say that.”

  “So we all go over, like good little boys, and he puts the medal down on Nuttall’s desk, and says to Richards, ‘There you are— now do you believe that I never took it?’ And Steve looks pretty surprised, and doesn’t know what to do, and Cu
lpepper says to him, ‘I think that a gentleman might consider an apology in order, at this point,’ or some such bollocks. So Steve does the decent thing, he apologizes, and what’s more he does it really nicely, you can see that he means it, and then . . .”

  “I know, I know,” Philip interrupted, excited. “Then we all stand by the desk, and look at the medal while Steve puts it round his neck again, and Culpepper wanders off back to the tea tray. All by himself.”

  “Exactly,” said Doug, and explained to Benjamin: “You see, Steve has this theory. He’s been thinking a lot about that day, and about the seven of us alone in that room, and how tired he felt afterwards. He said his tea tasted funny, as well. So he reckons that somebody spiked it with something, to screw up his chances in the exam that afternoon. Which happened to be physics, the most important one of all, from his point of view.”

  “But where does the medal come in?”

  “Culpepper could still have taken it, last Sports Day,” Philip said. “Then he hangs on to it for a year, not really knowing what to do with it. And then—bingo—he comes up with this plan, and he’s got the perfect diversionary tactic. He knows we’re going to be in Mr. Nuttall’s room. He knows the lost property box is there. He can keep the medal in his pocket and then fish it out when the time comes, so everyone goes over to have a look and he can do his dirty work with the tea cups. Simple.”

  However plausible they tried to make it sound, Benjamin still didn’t want to believe them. “What would he have put in the tea?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Doug, shrugging. “I don’t do chemistry. Unlike Culpepper.”

  They all three fell silent for a while.

  “It doesn’t make sense to me,” said Benjamin, “that anyone could think of anything so . . . wicked.”

  “You’ve got a lot to learn, if those books of yours are going to be any good,” said Doug scornfully. “Not everybody goes through life like you do, auditioning for the part of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Of course he could do it. For God’s sake, they both want to go to the same college, doing the same subject. For two years, Richards has beaten him at everything they’ve done. And he’s black, don’t forget. Don’t think that doesn’t count. D’you think Culpepper could stand turning up at Cambridge and finding it was going to be the same thing all over again?”

  Benjamin was chastened. It all seemed to make sense, now. “I suppose not,” he said.

  The sun was beginning to draw back and melt into the haze. Traffic fumes from the Bristol Road were drifting their way, clogging the hot and heavy air.

  “Do you think we should do anything?” Philip asked. “Tell someone?”

  “Tell them what?” Doug shook his head, resigned. “We can’t prove anything.”

  “Yes, I know, but . . .” Benjamin felt a sense of the world’s unjustness welling up inside him. But his anger was formless, ungraspable, and all he managed to say was, “Poor Steve . . .”

  Philip echoed these words, and added: “And now look what’s happened to him. Now he’s really blown it.” He threw his empty lager can across the playing fields in a slow, angry curve. Then he said: “We haven’t told him about Harding’s joke.”

  Doug laughed shortly, mirthlessly. “You tell him.”

  Philip glanced at Benjamin and asked, “Do you want to hear it?”

  “Mm?” He had already forgotten there was another part to the story, and was thinking about Cicely instead; Cicely and her illness, and how she, like Steve, had been defeated by these exams. It had been a disastrous time for both of them. “Yes,” he said, eventually. “Why not?”

  “OK.” Philip sighed, and leaned forward, clasping his knees. It was hardly the prelude to a sparkling anecdote. “Well, just after all this had happened—a couple of minutes after—there’s another strange thing. We’re all sitting there—Steve and Culpepper have got their books, me and Doug and Gidney and Procter are playing cards, Harding’s sipping his tea—when suddenly there’s this noise at the window. A little bump. And then it happens again. Someone’s throwing something against the window, right? So Culpepper goes over to investigate, and he sees that little pipsqueak Ives standing on the drive outside. He’s got a crumpled-up ball of paper in his hand, and that’s what he’s been throwing at the window. So he throws it up again and says to Culpepper, ‘That’s for you!,’ and Culpepper catches it and Ives runs off.

  “Well, he comes back into the middle of the room and opens up the paper. Everyone’s looking at him by now. And what do you suppose it is?”

  Benjamin couldn’t guess.

  “It’s only the exam paper, isn’t it? The physics exam paper. The very thing that Steve and Culpepper aren’t supposed to see. The whole reason they’ve been locked up in this room for half the day.”

  “Wow. So how did Ives get hold of it?”

  “Nobody thinks about that, at the time. About twenty people have taken that exam this morning. Any one of them can have chucked the paper away into a waste bin, or passed it over to him . . . There are any number of ways. The important thing now is the moral dilemma it poses. Or doesn’t pose, to be precise. There’s no moral dilemma for Steve—you throw the thing away, and don’t take another look at it—and there’s none for Culpepper either—you read it through from start to finish and spend the next thirty minutes going through your text books for the answers. The question is, which of these particular philosophies is going to win the day?

  “So, Culpepper and Steve start having the most incredible argument. Then the rest of us join in. It’s five against one. Me and Doug and Procter and Gidney and Steve are all for grabbing the paper and throwing it back out of the window. But Culpepper won’t let go. We start chasing him around the room with it. Steve does a rugby tackle on him and brings him to the floor. They’re on the floor, fighting each other for this bloody stupid bit of paper. The only one who doesn’t join in is Harding. He’s still sitting there, sipping his tea like he couldn’t give a toss. And then he says something. He looks down at these two clowns rolling around on the floor and he says, ‘What’s the date?’ And Culpepper can’t believe what he’s hearing. He says, ‘What?,’ as if this is the daftest question in the world. Which it does seem to be, I must say, to the rest of us. But then Harding says, ‘What’s the date on the exam paper?,’ and they look at it, and . . .”

  “And?” said Benjamin, although he thought he could anticipate the answer.

  “1972. June the 20th, 1972.”

  Benjamin threw back his head, and began to laugh, but it was the laughter of admiration rather than genuine amusement. “Yes, of course. He’d just got an old one out of the library. And he’s always getting Ives to run errands for him.”

  Doug was gazing into the distance, his eyes narrowed. “God, I can still see the look on his face, too. He’s sitting there, and he’s just tapping away on the edge of his teacup with that bloody signet ring of his. Clink, clink, clink, he’s going, and you’ve never seen any one look so smug or inscrutable. That crazy pleasure he gets from winding people up. He’d reduced the whole room to chaos. Mayhem. Just for the hell of it.” Drinking down what was left of his warm beer, he added, “Hell’s the right word, too, where he’s concerned. That man—” (Doug chose the phrase carefully) “—is the spawn of Satan. Reluctantly, that’s the conclusion I’ve come to.” He flopped back on to the grass and groaned, rubbing his eyes. “Shit, what a day it’s been. What a bloody school this is. I don’t wonder that Steve cracked in the end. Nobody sane could survive a place like this. It’s nothing but a breeding ground for freaks and weirdos.” He glanced at Benjamin and smiled, half-teasingly. “Look at you, with your prefect’s badge and your desk drawer full of unfinished masterpieces. What’s the matter with you?”

  He struggled to his feet, and the other two followed. It was time to go home.

  “I can’t wait to get out of here,” Doug said, as they headed for the gates, for their last-ever journey together on the number 62 bus. “I tell you, London’s the only place for me
.”

  26

  (N.B. Lois’s diary from this period is sometimes hard to decipher. The letters and numbers at the top of each entry—for instance, 3 + 260 a.m.—refer to the number of years and days after Malcolm’s death. The asterisks at the bottom of each page, usually ranging from one to five, seem to be an assessment of her mood on that particular day.)

  4th August, 1978

  3 + 256 a.m.

  A long and uncomfortable journey to Wales, with the three of us squashed into the back of the car. Gorgeous weather, though, as we drove out of Penybontfawr and up through the Tanat valley. Let’s hope it stays this way for once, hey Lois? Paul of course says that it won’t. He spent most of the drive with his transistor radio stuck to his ear listening to the forecasts. Every time they got worse he sounded happier and happier. “Rain!” he kept saying. “Rain, and lots of it! Thunderstorms! Strong winds later in the week! They’re going to issue a gale warning!” On and on like that, he went, for three hours. Little creep.

  (No no no. See the good in everyone, Lois. Negative Lois. Old Lois.)

  Ben sat and listened to his tape recorder. He’s found some way of plugging Dad’s headphones into the back and now we don’t get a word out of him. I wouldn’t mind but all he ever seems to listen to is his own music. Is my lovely little brother becoming just a tiny bit egocentric? I don’t think so. These tunes make him think of Cicely, I expect, and that is why he likes listening to them so much. And perhaps they make him think of Malcolm, too. I can hear echoes, faint echoes in the things that Ben writes of the music Malcolm liked to share with him.

  You see, Lois, people don’t die. In many ways they don’t die.

  I will watch Ben closely on this holiday. Why has he come with us, anyway? He is too old.

  We arrived at the caravan site at 7 p.m. You cannot call it a site, though. It is just a field, a farmer’s field, on Cilan Head. I have not been here for four years. Malcolm never came here with me, that is a pity. I had forgotten how beautiful it is. Beautiful and restful. The sky is blue, I am no good at describing things.