No Winding Sheet (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “If you have water-lilies you need goldfish,” said young Mr. Scaife.

  “If you have goldfish, a heron will get them,” said Mr. Phillips.

  “A heron won’t come down to a space which is entirely enclosed by high buildings,” argued Scaife.

  “Why don’t we ask the boys for suggestions? Make a good subject for an essay,” said the junior English master. “After all, the school is as much theirs as ours.”

  “Well, gentlemen,” said Mr. Ronsonby, “I don’t think this is a matter which can be settled out of hand. Perhaps you would all go away and give it your earnest consideration. I shall call another staff meeting at the end of next week and, if necessary, take a vote.” He motioned Burke to stay behind as the others filed out. “I like the idea of that water-lily pond,” he said.

  “Well, I can be sure of three votes in favour of it, my own, and those of Filkins and I think Scaife. Filkins can see his gardening club as honorary custodians of the pond. They’ll revel in doing the planting and he’ll see that they make a success of it. He’s got a very tidy little pool in his own back garden, so there’s nothing he doesn’t know about fish and water plants.”

  The English master set his essay subject to the second, third, and fourth years, as anybody higher up the school was not likely to stay long enough to receive much benefit from any amenity which the governors provided. This was pointed out by the senior English master, who added that, in any case, the fifth and sixth were far too busy with preparing for public examinations to be pestered with an essay which had nothing to do with their work.

  The bulk of the middle school, it seemed, favoured a trampoline for the gymnasium or a school swimming-bath, or (a project which the music master had been fighting for years) the formation of a school pop group with instruments and a microphone, all to be provided by the governors.

  The staff, meeting with Mr. Ronsonby again on Friday afternoon, settled almost unanimously for the lily pond, and Margaret Wirrell was instructed to get leaflets from leading firms (not necessarily local ones this time) and submit them to Mr. Filkins. When he had whittled the possible firms down to three or four, Mr. Ronsonby promised to bring up the subject at the governors’ meeting on the following Wednesday “and see what they think,” he said. “After that, if they agree to give us the pond, they may prefer to get estimates and tenders for themselves, so I shall make it clear that our list merely offers some suggestions. They will like to know that we have taken that amount of trouble over the matter, and that we are enthusiastically in favour of the pond.”

  “I hope the official opening won’t interfere with the school journey,” said young Scaife in an aside to his friend Marmont.

  “There is no chance of that, Mr. Scaife,” said Burke. “The opening will be early enough in the term to avoid any clash. It is not ideal that the journey is to take place in school time, anyway.” (Mr. Scaife and the other masters who were going to Greece thought that it was.) “Unfortunately, to obtain the concession of cheap fares, Mr. Pythias had to settle for June. Had it not been an outing of high educational value, Pythias would never have applied for school-time leave or had it granted.”

  This brought back the missing Pythias to everybody’s mind. His absence by this time had been taken as a matter of course by the rest of the staff, although they had not ceased to speculate about it, but now that his name had cropped up again in this public way, Scaife asked, “I suppose there’s no news of him, Headmaster?”

  “If there were, Mr. Scaife, the staff would be the first people to know.”

  The masters dispersed to dismiss their classes. Mr. Ronsonby never held staff meetings outside school hours. There were more reasons for this than mere consideration for the staff. The school was rich in out-of-school activities and the various clubs were held directly school was finished on a Friday afternoon. Friday was the day for the choir with or without the orchestra. The poultry club (with arrangements for weekend feeding) had chosen Friday and so had the chess club and other out-of-school societies. Mr. Ronsonby was known to be greatly in favour of the clubs and to look very kindly upon those who gave up their time to run them. He knew, however, that to keep his staff after school hours merely to attend a staff meeting would not only breed resentment among the teachers, but would result in the winding-up of the clubs, for no boy, however keen, would be willing to hang about for half an hour or more, even if the staff themselves would be prepared to carry on the clubs so much later than usual.

  “I shall need to give up my Monday evenings as well,” said Mr. Phillips, attempting a martyred air as he left with Mr. Filkins. “If choir and orchestra are to be involved, they will need rehearsing more than once a week. When it gets nearer the date of the opening, I may need to ask for some school time as well.”

  “You’ll be quite popular so long as you ask for last lesson on a Friday afternoon,” said Mr. Filkins. “Nobody does any work after break on a Friday. It’s simply a matter of keeping sufficient order to ensure that somebody doesn’t actually burn the school down. Jodley, in my form, is a member of your orchestra. You are welcome to him any time you like.”

  “He is our tympanist.”

  “I’ll bet he is. Has he busted a drum or the cymbals yet?”

  “You know,” said the junior English master to his senior colleague, “when we have the next staff meeting I’d like to suggest to the Old Man that we include some verse speaking in the opening-day programme.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Well, the school is named after Sir George Etherege. Wouldn’t it be a thought if we had some of Sir George’s verses spoken?”

  “Such as what?”

  “Well, I thought of getting the verse-speaking choir to make a rather theatrical bow to the mayoress and the wife of the chairman of the governors—they are bound to be sitting together—and give them the first stanza of ‘Ladies, though to—’”

  “Though to what?” asked his senior sardonically. “A poem written by a man who was alive throughout the reign of Charles Two is hardly—never mind. Spit it out. I’ve forgotten it.”

  “Ladies, though to your conquering eyes

  Love owes his chiefest victories,

  And borrows those bright arms from you

  With which he does the world subdue,

  Yet you yourselves are not above

  The empire nor the griefs of love.”

  “Have you forgotten, or didn’t you know, that the town clerk’s wife is staying with friends because the chairman of the governors—”

  “Oh, Lord! I’d forgotten that!”

  “Forget the verse speaking, too.”

  “I don’t see why the choir and the orchestra should have it all their own way. Then there’s Pybus. He will make the art room a showplace not only with the boys’ work, but with his own.”

  “Pybus can’t draw, paint or sculpt.”

  “The boys turn out some good stuff.”

  “Oh, yes, he’s a good teacher, but he can’t produce the goods himself. I’ll tell you who ought to have gone in for art in a big way and that’s Pythias. Did he ever show you any of his work?”

  “No, not that I remember. I wonder where he’s got to?”

  “Don’t we all. Anyway, if you’d seen what Pythias can do, you’d remember all right. He showed some of us one or two pictures, but Pybus wouldn’t have been over-enthusiastic about them, I daresay. There’s a lot in that gag—Shaw’s, was it?—he who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.”

  “Aimed at the literary critics, I suppose, but unfair, if so. Many of them are very good writers themselves. But this showmanship business. Filkins wants to stage an exhibition of cut flowers and garden produce. There might be promotion for anybody whose work catches the governors’ eyes. I don’t want to be left out of the running.”

  “Filkins has his uses. At least he got his boys to clear up that mess in the quad.”

  “He says he didn’t. Carpenter wants to fix up a cricket match on opening day—fathers
and older brothers against the school. It looks as though everybody is aiming at a place in the sun except you and me.”

  “Not to worry, my poor ambitious lad. I certainly don’t.”

  “It will be a damn good thing when the whole business is over. Failing anything by Sir George Etherege—God! How we could have spread ourselves if only we’d been named after Tennyson or Matthew Arnold! Oh, what do you think about Kipling’s ‘If’? Always goes down well with the older generation.”

  “Yes, but most of them have given up the struggle to live by its precepts.”

  “If they ever tried them out! Then, of course, there’s ‘Rabbi ben Ezra.’ Strange to say, most boys like that rather sickening piece.”

  “If you’re going all out for the tried and trite, what’s the matter with ‘Gunga Din’? I’d abandon the whole verse speaking idea, if I were you,” said Burke, when, unable to obtain consolation from his senior colleague, the young man canvassed his views.

  “English is a major school subject, far more important than music and art and cricket matches and flowers and mixed veg.”

  “So is maths, but it’s not a show-off subject.”

  “I happen to know that Gibbs is going to exhibit a working model of Stephenson’s Rocket that his lower-fifth history class have made. A perishing waste of time I call it. That’s not history teaching,” said the junior English master, who was still racking his brains to think of something to put on show, to young Mr. Scaife, the next confidant.

  “It keeps his lads happy. They’re all on the fidget just waiting to leave. I call them the factory-hands-and-union-block-vote brigade,” said Scaife.

  “Well,” said Mr. Burke, who overheard all this, “anything is preferable to school, I expect, for some of them. The growing boy can’t wait to burst the bonds of the prison house. Has it ever struck you that school is purgatory to a dull boy?”

  “Well, he retaliates by making it purgatory for the likes of us,” said the senior English master. “Anyway, when I think of myself I think of the Apocrypha: ‘And some there be that have no memorial,’ so cheer up, laddie. Those words will apply to most of us, no doubt, in time.”

  “Then I propose,” said Mr. Scaife, “that we have the names of the staff inscribed with a sculptor’s chisel on the surround of the governors’ lily pond.”

  8

  Digging Up the Past

  Margaret Wirrell, who had gone out with the others from another staff meeting, followed the headmaster to his room.

  “I’ve looked up those garden-pond people,” she said, “but don’t you think it might seem a bit like forcing the governors’ hands if we give them a list of possible firms who would do the job?”

  “Yes, I think it might. I do not intend to confront them with a list, but only to hold it in reserve in case they ask me whether I have any ideas. I do hope they will agree to the pond. I like the thought of it very much. It will be ornamental and also out of reach of the boys. I imagine, too, that these pools come within a fairly wide price range, always an advantage when you have no idea of how much the donor is prepared to spend.”

  “Maybe I’ll persuade my husband to let us have one for our own garden. I know just where I’d like it and we’ve got plenty of room.”

  “I’m sure about the pond and the fish, but I’m not too sure about the water-lilies,” said Mr. Ronsonby. “Don’t they need a lot of sunshine? With tall buildings all around, they may find themselves in the shade most of the time. On the other hand, the quad is a good size, so there may not be any problems. Oh, well, Filkins will know.”

  Mr. Ronsonby had had to inform the education committee of Pythias’s disappearance, and from them it had percolated to the governors. The first question the headmaster was asked at the governors’ meeting was, “No news of Pythias, I suppose?”

  “I’m afraid not, Sir Wilfred.”

  “I never liked the idea of appointing a foreigner,” said another governor.

  “Nonsense, Manning,” said the chairman. “The man was well qualified and spoke perfect English. Educated over here, as a matter of fact, wasn’t he, Ronsonby?”

  “Yes, Sir Wilfred, so far as his university training was concerned. He took a good degree in geology and metallurgy.”

  “Off on a toot looking for oil, and in our country, too, I’ll be bound,” said Manning. “Anyway, let’s get down to business.”

  Mr. Ronsonby’s suggestion that, if the governors were kind enough to make the school an opening-day present, a lily-pond would be most welcome was received with approval, especially by Mr. Manning, whose brother-in-law was in landscape gardening with special interest in shrubs, greenhouses, garden chalets, paving slabs, and garden pools.

  Manning was not the most popular member of the governing body, for he seemed to regard himself in duty bound to carp and cavil at every suggestion put forward by his fellow-members, but on this occasion the governors realised that, so long as his brother-in-law was commissioned to supply and sink the pond and to establish the plinth of stone around the quad (this was not in the builder’s contract) they could count on some reduction in the price of their gift. As they themselves had no central fund on which to draw, the money for the pool and payment for the work involved would come out of individual pockets, so any lessening of that particular load was extremely welcome.

  A week before term ended, all the actual construction work on the school building was finished. The interior decorators were still busy, but hoped to be able to report that another few days would, in the words of the foreman, “see us through,” and the contractors had already sent down their experts to pass judgement on what had been a vast and important project. The first floor was not a replica of the ground floor which housed the big school hall, the entrance vestibule, the cloakrooms, and the secretary’s and the headmaster’s offices, but it covered the same amount of space and included the handsome library.

  The second floor was a good deal smaller. The music room and the art room were up there so that the sounds of singing, instrumental discords and, from the art room, the thumping of wet clay and the general mayhem without which, it seemed, no art class could express itself, should not impinge upon the quieter, if more boring activities which were being carried out in the rest of the school. (The woodwork centre, like the gym, was a separate building, reached by a covered way and adjacent to the gym changing rooms.)

  As breaking-up day drew nearer, Ronsonby said to Margaret Wirrell that he hoped he was going to muster a full staff at the beginning of the summer term.

  “Yes,” she said. “We don’t want anybody else falling off the back of a lorry.” Mr. Ronsonby stared at her, but she merely picked up some lists he had given her to type out and went back to her own room.

  On the following Tuesday, the caretaker brought the headmaster a report concerning two second-year boys named Travis and Maycock. The third year in any senior school is the acknowledged repository of nuisances, but the second years are still, so to speak, finding their feet, and these boys had been in no particular trouble before. Moreover, it transpired that they might be credited with praise rather than blame for their part in what had happened.

  Assembly was over. Margaret Wirrell was in her office looking through the morning’s correspondence and Mr. Ronsonby was in conference with the music master to make a final selection of the songs and orchestral pieces to be rendered on opening day, when there came a tap at the headmaster’s door.

  “Just see who that is,” said the headmaster, “and, if it’s a boy, send him away.”

  It was not a boy, but Sparshott. He closed the door behind him, advanced to the headmaster’s desk and said he had come to report another breakin.

  “Good gracious!” said Mr. Ronsonby. “Sorry, Phillips, but perhaps I had better look into this. Now that the buildings are finished we don’t want any vandalism.” Mr. Phillips removed himself and the headmaster turned to the caretaker. “Was it a nuisance breakin or was there intent to create damage or to steal?” he asked.<
br />
  “It’s a kind of tricky story, Mr. Ronsonby, sir, and I can’t do nothing but relate to you my end of it. I was having a bit of an early supper round about eight o’clock last night before making my last rounds of the premises before an early retirement, me having had a bit of a chill on the innards over the weekend with subsequent inconvenience and weakness, when there comes a knock at the front door.

  “‘See who that is, Ron,’ I says to my boy, so he goes to the door and comes back to say as two boys named Travis and Maycock had come to report as somebody unauthorised was in the school. They reckoned they could hear him.

  “Well, sir, of course I goes to the front door myself to see what it’s all in aid of, but the two boys had scarpered. However, Ron had their names and said they was second years, but not knowed for any particular devilment and he reckoned they could be telling the truth, being as we had them other miscreants in the quad earlier on, so I takes him and the dog and we makes a recce and I opens up. Sure enough, there was somebody in the quad, or, rather, there was two somebodies, and it’s my belief, sir, as they was the same two parties as the last time, only this time they hadn’t risked the lights in the hall, but was working by the light of two hurricane lamps or something of that kind.

  “Well, sir, we crope up on ’em, me and the dog, leaving Ron on the front steps, and I lets the dog loose. I reckon he got one of ’em by the trousers, but the cloth tore and the two of ’em—the interlopers, I mean—made a dash for it out the door that leads into the vestibule corridor what I reckon they had left open in view of having to make a getaway. I noted as the swing doors into the hall and the crash-bar doors into the quad was open as the last time we had trespassers. I reckon the dog got a kick in the ribs from the second man, not the one whose trousers he tore, because I heared him, the dog, give a sort of yelp.”

  “And you were on the spot as the result of a report from two boys, but what on earth were boys doing on the school premises at eight o’clock at night?”