In At The Deep End

by Anabel Donald

  I looked out of the window. A terrific view for the first few hundred yards, of the grounds and the khaki figures tending it. Beyond that, the M40. A bit like my flat, give or take twenty acres of land.

  I couldn’t feel any evil – the evil Martin Kelly had described. Just a naïve little clockwork man. Officer Commanding a 1950s theme park, and a touch of the Lewis Carrolls in the photographs.

  ‘I haven’t been idle, since you rang,’ said the Major. I didn’t suppose he was ever idle, but I looked surprised, since he seemed to expect it. ‘Time spent in intelligence is never wasted, huh?’

  ‘Always make your plans three deep,’ I replied obligingly.

  ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘Absolutely agree. Monty?’

  It could have been a maxim of General Montgomery’s. Then again I could have lifted it from Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, my second favourite fictional private eye. ‘I can’t remember,’ I said. ‘What did your intelligence work reveal?’

  ‘I spoke to an old Rissingtonian well placed at the BBC. Asquith, 75–80.’ He waited for a response. I could have asked what he meant by 75–80, but you’d expect the Major to talk like a school magazine, and I could guess. Instead I said I knew Asquith, which I did, very slightly. I’d worked for him once, years ago. I didn’t add that I’d found him a lazy, arrogant wanker who delegated everything except credits and credit.

  ‘He tells me Protheroe will do,’ he said. ‘Huh?’

  For the Major’s purposes, perhaps he was right. Alan Protheroe had never in his career willingly offended, or even opposed, anybody above the figurative rank of corporal.

  ‘He’s an excellent producer,’ I said, lying.

  ‘And you’re working for him. So I can trust you. Huh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘And we’ll give you all the help we can. Go anywhere, talk to anyone. I’m proud of Rissington Abbey. It’s been my life’s work.’

  ‘You were in the Army for some time, surely.’

  ‘Of course. Of course. And the Army’s more than just a career.

  I’d thrown myself into it, heart and soul. No private life. Too much so, p’raps. When I left, I was at a loose end. I tried my hand at business – I’m not bad at man-management, but shuffling bumf was never my strong point. Then I saw an advertisement for a housemaster’s job here, and met Anthea – my wife Anthea – and there I was, both at once, private life and a worthwhile job, d’you see?’

  ‘Where’s your wife now?’ In bed, if she had any sense.

  ‘She’s away, visiting a friend. She’s taken a few weeks off, this term. A well-earned rest.’

  A rest? For a headmaster’s wife, in term-time?

  ‘She’ll be back next week. You can talk to her then. You’ll want to do that. She’s a key figure here. Wonderful woman. But I mustn’t dictate to you, must I, huh? Choose your junior officers wisely and then let them get on with it. That’s my motto. Just let me know your plans.’

  So I was to have carte blanche at Rissington Abbey.

  Good, in one way. Plenty of access to the people I wanted.

  Bad, in another. Such was the Major’s ingenuous enthusiasm – he was chuckling, widening his eyes at me, rubbing his hands together – that I could see myself having to absorb cassettefuls of unwanted detail, with him breathing down my neck. How could a sixty-year-old headmaster be so naive? If he really invited a cynical documentary production team to his teddy bears’ picnic, he’d sure as hell get a big surprise.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ I said, ‘but you realize that this is just preliminary research. Alan hasn’t yet decided who we’ll use for the programme.’

  ‘I understand that,’ he said buoyantly, ‘but I can’t believe he’ll decide against us. Not once you really find out what makes us tick. You will be filming soon, won’t you? This summer? The grounds look their best in summer.’

  ‘No chance,’ I said. ‘Even if Rissington Abbey is chosen, the project is still only at the research stage. It’ll be shooting next year, sometime.’

  ‘As late as that?’ He was obviously disappointed. Childlike, I thought. He wanted what he wanted, now. It wasn’t as if the school was going anywhere. ‘Never mind. Never mind,’ he said wistfully. ‘Let me put you in the picture,’ and he was off.

  I’d set the tape running so I watched him and only half-listened. He was rather charming, I realized, perhaps because he was so passionate and vulnerable. The more I was with him, the more I liked him. Not that I ever thought we’d be mates: he would never be my choice for an evening out. But I wanted to protect him.

  He talked about the school with the irrepressible eagerness of a genuine enthusiast. As enthusiasts often do, he told me more than I could take in, or wanted to know. He described how they overcame problems I didn’t understand, how they improved on arrangements he hadn’t properly told me about in the first place, all with a springy optimism that began to make me feel almost guilty. I’d never use any of this, I thought, as he outlined his dream programme for me.

  ‘One of our best views? Huh?’ he said, pointing out of the window. ‘We think so. You’ll want to use that. I thought you could begin coming up the drive, p’raps, show how well the boys keep it. All the work in the garden’s done by the boys. Isn’t that a thing?’

  ‘Are they supervised?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course. They are always supervised. That’s the duty of care we owe them. The garden’s under the very competent command of Lieutenant Archibald. Courtesy rank, of course. Used to be a RSM in the Scots Guards. Runs the CCF.’

  ‘CCF?’

  He laughed explosively. ‘Sorry, m’dear. Keep forgetting you’re a civilian. A young and pretty civilian, if I may say so.’

  I didn’t let men get away with that garbage usually. But the Major was beyond redemption. As well ask a Martian not to be green as to introduce him to the arguments of Andrea Dworkin. Not that I’d ever managed to follow them. I blamed her for that, not me. She didn’t so much argue as swing an octopus around her head.

  ‘The CCF?’ I said again.

  ‘Combined Cadet Force.’ He explained.

  It sounded like an apprentice scheme for the Army. I was listening enough to ask, ‘So you have guns here?’

  ‘Rifles, yes. No handguns.’

  ‘Are they kept locked up?’

  ‘Of course . . .’ He explained some more. I wasn’t really interested in guns.

  He described Lieutenant Archibald’s domain, presumably to reassure me that the guns were kept under a complicated system of double locking, burglar alarms, etc.

  ‘Major, what would you say was the aim of the school?’

  He stopped. We’d been standing at the window: he was pointing out the rifle-range. He’d want me to see that, I was sure. Maybe I could get out of it . . . ‘A clean slate,’ he said. ‘Whatever their difficulties before they come here, they start with a clean slate. And we hope they leave with one.’

  Apart from the school, he loved his wife. He talked of her proudly, with an almost painful enthusiasm. That was her idea . . . This innovation was one of her most successful . . . We must include the Annigoni portrait of her in the documentary.

  Annigoni. That must have cost a bit, I thought.

  ‘I’d like to see that. Where is it?’

  ‘In the Mess. Of course, of course you’ll see it. But you already know how beautiful she is.’ He indicated the photographs. ‘Black and white, d’you see? Huh? Wonderful, aren’t they? The work of our Founder. He was Artistic.’ So the pop-eyed white-haired git in the front hall, presumably her father, took the photographs of Mrs Ellis as a child and young girl.

  ‘Artistic, aren’t they?’ he repeated. Oddly, it wasn’t a dirty word to him, or a dismissive one. It was a fact of nature. Did I know that Monty did excellent needlepoint? No, I didn’t, and I didn’t imagine I’d ever need to, unless I got terribly drunk one night and played Trivial Pursuits. That would be the only condition that would induce me to play it.

  But Our
Founder had taken photographs, and printed them himself, in the darkroom he’d installed in one of the cellars of GHQ, I should see it. We should use it in the documentary. It had been fully equipped several times since the death of Our Founder, of course, because technology changed so fast, and the boys had to have every chance. Every chance, I supposed, to be ‘artistic’, so when they were on the General Staff in World War Three they could wile away the time in the headquarters bunker by playing the violin or taking photographs or doing needlepoint, like Monty.

  Perhaps Monty was his hero because he too only reached average height standing on a breeze-block.

  ‘Time marches on,’ he said finally, checking his watch. ‘Five minutes to breakfast.’ He unzipped an inside pocket of his khaki combat jacket, fished out a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, and put them on in a precise series of actions culminating in a final, firm, settling push up his nose. ‘This is a list,’ he said, glancing at it and then handing it to me. ‘I prepared it last night. The people you’ll want to see and the highlights of our life here. An oasis of decency and order in the chaos of modem society. Huh? The only area that’s off-limits to you is the Sports Hall, during exam times. External exams in progress. Most important. We have excellent results. I’ll show you the statistics. You’ll breakfast with us, of course, in the canteen, and I’ll introduce you to the school. After that I usually deal with the bumf, so I’ll leave you in the capable hands of Alistair Brown, my second-in-command. And after break, at 1015, I’ll be at your disposal.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Now I’d got the Major’s go-ahead, I was going to do things my way. I thanked him for the invitation to breakfast, refused it, said I’d be back at ten fifteen and would find my own way about the school. Much better alone. If he could make sure everyone knew who I was and what I was after?

  He didn’t manage to hide his disappointment. ‘I thought I’d just give you a few pointers. Huh? And you must meet Alistair. But you will, you will . . . And I won’t forget it’s your show . . .’

  Back at the hotel, I had a bath, washed my hair, and towelled it dry. That doesn’t take long, it’s so short. Polly keeps nagging me to grow it longer and stop dyeing it red. She mutters about decent cuts and letting it grow out light brown and highlights and how good my features are. I don’t know who she thinks she’s fooling. Besides, I like it cropped.

  Then I called Barty.

  He answered on the third ring.

  ‘Bartholomew O’Neill.’

  ‘Alex Tanner,’ I said, mimicking.

  ‘Hello, Alex.’ His voice warmed when he heard mine. I warmed to his warming. ‘Thank you for the party,’ he went on, and I chilled again. Barty’s got a different background to me. He has a background. He’s an honourable and his elder brother’s an earl. Most of the time I think of him as a human being, but now he was in an insincere upper-class mode, thanking me for a party at which he’d done all the work.

  ‘Not at all,’ I came back to him in the same tone. ‘Thanks for your present. And for all the help.’

  ‘Now what’s the matter?’ he said. Affectionately, I suppose, but I snapped anyway.

  ‘Nothing’s the matter. Did you have anything sensible to say to me, or are you just following section 159c of the Bullshit Manners Manual for old Etonians?’

  ‘How’s Polly?’

  ‘Not great. It’ll take her a while to get over it, of course. I’ve got a room at a hotel in Banbury – that’s where I’m speaking from – but I was back with her last night, and probably tonight too.’ ‘Any chance of seeing you?’ ‘Not tonight. I’ll be with Polly . . .’ Even as I put him off, I was glad he’d asked. I hadn’t risked admitting to myself, all those months of not seeing him, how much I’d missed him. What I wanted to do, now this minute, was to abandon Plummer’s stupid little job and drive straight up to London and Barty . . .

  I took a hold on myself. If work went, everything went. It wasn’t only the money, although God knows I needed it as sandbags against the tide of recession that was sweeping England. It was also my independence, and my self-respect.

  ‘I’m working,’ I said.

  ‘Good. What about the weekend?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I thought we could go away.’

  ‘You and me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can’t leave Polly. It’s a bad time for her.’

  ‘What if she went home?’

  ‘I can’t persuade her to. I’ve tried.’

  ‘If I persuaded her to, would you come?’

  I hesitated. I didn’t need to work the weekend, not by any stretch of the imagination. I’d probably have to do Plummer’s job in slow-mo anyway, now that I was in at Rissington Abbey, because I couldn’t afford to be paid for less than a week. The only thing preventing me from accepting Barty’s invitation was fear. If you let fear kick you around, you end up unsafe and sorry. Easier to know than to act on.

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said. There was silence the other end. A pleased silence? I couldn’t tell.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said briskly, as if I’d brought in a difficult shoot under budget. ‘Where’d you like to go?’

  ‘Up to you. I’ll be ready to leave early on Saturday.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what clothes to bring?’

  Now he was teasing. ‘Not particularly,’ I said. ‘Whatever you tell me, I’ll wear a sweatshirt and my 501s. If you want me to change for one dinner, I’ll stretch a point and bring something posh. Since you’re paying. I suppose you’re paying?’

  ‘Just expenses. No daily rate.’

  I went to breakfast in a splendid mood. I even looked forward to spending the day at Rissington Abbey. My feet hardly touched the stairs as I ran down, and that’s not a frequent feeling in my weight of boots.

  It was a commercial hotel, mostly, even now the tourist season was starting. The other breakfasters were men. One group was Japanese. Four Japanese in suits with the particular not-quitepolyester shimmer of silk, discussing balance-sheets spread out on the table beside them. I wondered what they were doing here in Banbury. Bringing business, I hoped, even if it was in the form of buying up bankrupt British companies and then running them at a profit using our comparatively skilled low-paid workers. Taiwan on the Thames.

  Because I was so happy about the weekend with Barty, I couldn’t manage to eat as much as I usually do, when it’s free. But I concentrated enough to read the Rissington Abbey prospectus from cover to cover. It didn’t take long. It was mostly advertising, as you’d expect.

  I got a few more facts about the Major and his wife. They’d only been married since 1972, when he’d have been forty-one to her thirty-two. I’d already gathered that the Colonel, the founder of the school, had been her father. So presumably she was now the owner. Unusual for a school to be in private hands. Most English non-State schools were now charitable trusts, run by governors. The Major and Mrs Ellis were the autonomous gods of the imitation Sandhurst on show in the glossy, self-conscious photographs.

  Inside the back cover was a little pocket with extra sheets, presumably the ones that needed constant updating. I glanced down the staff list: mostly Oxford and Cambridge degrees, very few teacher’s certificates. Alistair Brown had an Edinburgh degree: the Major, no degree at all. You didn’t need qualifications, when you married the owner of the place.

  Then I looked at the fees and choked on my coffee. High. Astronomically high. Much, much higher than Eton or Millfield.

  Why would parents pay that kind of money? To get rid of the deeply unwanted, perhaps. An element of revenge: strict discipline. And, at the same time, every chance that a boy who had already been thrown out of cheaper and more traditional schools might remain securely in the grip of a regime which promised, again and again, to be ‘understanding’, ‘sensitive to the needs of adolescents’, ‘flexible in approach’.

  And then I noticed an enigmatic footnote. ‘The figures shown above are standard. A higher fee structure may appl
y in special cases.’ Special cases where a boy was especially ‘troubled’, perhaps? On his way to prison, or a special clinic?

  As I abandoned my second piece of toast I wondered who had sent Olivier there: who had chosen the school and who was paying. His parents, Michel Mouche and Freedom Pertwee, didn’t seem at all standard Rissington material. I would have thought that the mother particularly, still doing her own late-sixties thing in a commune, presumably tie-dyed and marijuana-soaked, would have disapproved of militarism and discipline in all their forms.

  Which went back to the question of who was hiring me. That was still niggling me like a fragment of nut between the teeth, and my mental tongue kept trying to lift it out. My back teeth were full up, actually, because Martin Kelly was there too. What was evil about the school? Why had he bothered to tell me? Why had he given me his notebooks? There was masses of material in there which I couldn’t use, most of it apparently not even relevant to the school.

  My tasks for the day were clear, however. I needed to speak to one at least of the two of Olivier’s friends I had on the list, his housemaster Alistair Brown, and Matilda Beckford’s Tim Robertson. For cover, I’d start a general workup of the school and the Major. And for curiosity, I’d play ‘spot-the-evil’.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When I got back to Rissington Abbey at 1015, the grounds around the drive were deserted. I parked the Nissan near the front door; when I got out I could hear boys’ voices echoing from somewhere behind the main building. It was break time. Presumably they were getting their break rations from a canteen. I was going to walk towards the noise when a man came down the front steps. ‘Miss Tanner?’ he said. ‘Alistair Brown, Second-in-Command. How do you do.’ He had the traces of a Scots accent and a light, well-modulated, baritone voice. He shook my hand firmly, more firmly than I would have expected from his appearance. His handclasp was dry, warm, and, surprisingly, pleasant. I didn’t get the full-scale, electric jolt of a handshake with a really attractive man, but there was an unexpected echo of it. I looked at him more closely. He was in his mid-thirties, tallish, slightly stooped, with thick-lensed brown-rimmed glasses, mouse-brown hair combed straight back from his forehead, and a mild, enquiring expression.