‘Anyway,’ said Toby, ‘he’s not the only absentee. Bill Muggeridge hasn’t pitched up yet.’
‘The Crumwallises would very much rather he didn’t pitch up at all,’ said Glenda. ‘They don’t feel he gives the place tone. The awful thing is that one almost agrees. I do rather object to the sort of chap who farts in public and then says “Better out than in.” ’
‘He said earlier,’ chirrupped little Mr Makepeace, ‘that Onyx was insisting on coming.’
‘Oh my God—it only needed that. Just introducing her is an embarrassment. On what grounds would she be coming?’
‘Well, Muggeridge said she was complaining he never takes her anywhere. And she has taught with us now and then.’
‘Fill-in hours. She’s about the only person that even Crumwallis is reluctant to employ. Normally he’s quite happy to go out and grab someone from the street. I say, look: a parent.’
And indeed a car—not a Daimler, but a puce Ford Fiesta—had coasted down the drive.
‘A parent,’ repeated Glenda. ‘Anybody know it? They can take it through to the ancestral ballroom.’
‘Oh—it looks—yes—it’s the Wevewent Martins,’ said Mr Makepeace, who knew all the vicars, rectors, rural deans and curates in a twenty-mile radius. ‘He’s the vicar of Bwimstone Parva.’
‘Ah, well, since you know him . . .’
‘He’s awfully low—church, I mean.’
‘Could you,’ said Glenda sweetly, ‘just perhaps bend a little for once?’
But as Percy Makepeace twittered through the hall and down the corridor with his clerical acquaintance, two more cars drew up in the Burleigh driveway. One by one the teachers squared their shoulders and assumed the burden of the festivities.
• • •
By eight-thirty the headmaster’s sitting-room was nicely full. Fifty or sixty parents were present, and were talking in nervous or gushing little groups which centred on one or other of the teachers. Mr McWhirter had shuffled in, looking like a morose vagrant, some ten minutes late, and had taken up a position in front of the fire. Only the bolder or more totally disillusioned parents braved his forthright opinions of their sons and heirs. More regrettably still, Bill Muggeridge arrived, looking what he was—an ex-fourth-division footballer: bulky, grubby, in an unbrushed suit and with a button missing from his shirt. In tow was the equally regrettable Onyx. How she had got that name no one dared ask. To give it to a child would seem unnaturally insensitive; to assume it oneself would argue a capacity for self-inflicted wounds beyond even Onyx’s nature. She was a dreary, promiscuous, disorganized piece of human driftwood, who kept having babies of dubious provenance. She slouched from parent to parent, latching on to those who looked as if they would listen to her woes—not realizing, perhaps, that this was hardly the purpose of Parents’ Evening.
Most of the parents, however, had come intending to talk about their boys, either out of a genuine or an assumed interest in them; and few of them were prepared to waste time on Onyx when there were real teachers on whom to vent their parental concern.
‘James is such a sensitive little boy,’ the Rev. Martins was saying to Glenda Grower, ‘and so easily discouraged. He has to be tempted to learn.’
‘Yes,’ said Glenda, noncommittally. ‘Certainly he doesn’t give the impression that history is where his main interest lies.’
‘Frank’s never going to be more than your average brain,’ said Major Tilney to Toby Freely. ‘In the old days they’d have thumped enough into him to get him through his exam. I suppose you have to find some other method. The main thing is, he seems happier this term as a boarder.’
‘Yes, he does seem to be settling down well,’ said Toby Freely. ‘It’s small enough to have a sort of family atmosphere.’
‘Hmmph,’ said Major Tilney. ‘I don’t see the headmaster and his wife as homemakers, to be brutally frank. But from what I can gather from his scrawls you’re doing a good job.’
‘He’s a boy,’ said Mrs Cantribb, greatly daring, to Mr McWhirter, knowing very well the nature of his teaching methods, ‘who responds to stimulus.’
‘He’s a numbskull,’ said Mr McWhirter witheringly. ‘You can’t stimulate when there’s nothing there to respond.’
The headmaster, who had just finished dispensing multi-racial condescension to Mr Patel and was now turning gratefully to Dr and Mrs Frome, gazed with ill-disguised apprehension in the direction of Mr McWhirter.
‘Every school should have its eccentrics,’ he said, bravely. ‘We are fortunate that ours is a man of genuine, first-rate scholarship.’
Dr and Mrs Frome looked at Mr McWhirter as if not entirely convinced. Then they turned to the headmaster and launched into the topic all three of them had closest to their hearts: the Fromes’ only son.
The Fromes were certainly among the smartest parents present that evening, though in no ostentatious way. They were, like their son, smooth. Dr Frome was in his forties, with a clean-cut profile and the remains of Rupert Brooke good looks. His decisive, no-nonsense manner had given him the reputation of being a good doctor, and this had been only slightly dented by one or two spectacularly wrong diagnoses. His wife was also handsome—blonde, tactfully made-up, with a figure and face preserved by hard work and frequent attendance at beauty specialists. There was a slight gush in her manner which gave the impression that she was the stupider of the two. The impression was wrong. If Dr Frome had not been stupid, he would not have sent his son, of whom he thought a lot, to a school like Burleigh. Snobbery had fought with economy, and the two had reached a very silly compromise.
‘Of course, as you know, Hilary did want to transfer to the Comprehensive for his GCE year,’ said Mrs Frome. ‘But we’re delighted at the thought of his being head boy here.’
‘I know he’s going to do a first-rate job,’ said Edward Crumwallis, gazing towards the door, where Hilary Frome was already doing a first-rate job with two of the more important parents.
‘Nevertheless, there are still the GCEs,’ said Dr Frome. ‘And Hilary’s strengths are on the mathematics/scientific sides (as my own were). I want to have a good talk with Mr Makepeace and Mr Farraday . . .’
There seemed the suspicion of an implied threat here that Mr Crumwallis did not at all like.
‘He couldn’t be in better hands,’ he said, spuriously confident. ‘Makepeace has a first from Reading, you know.’ (How he wished he could have said Oxford. Still, it was close.) ‘Top-class chap in his field. Hilary couldn’t have a better coach for GCE Maths.’
‘There’s the question of discipline . . .’ said Dr Frome.
Similar preoccupations were at the back of the mind of Hilary Frome himself, as, with the front of his mind, he made conversation with the overdressed parents of one of the boarders. Hilary Frome had made no decisions yet about his future, beyond the one crucial decision that it was going to be a distinguished one. He was going to make a splash—the nature of which was still to be determined. An obvious possibility was an academic splash, and throughout his years at Burleigh he had chafed at the mediocrity of the school, the variable nature of the teaching, the dimness of its reputation, all of which seemed to preclude the splash academic. Of course, if he settled for Burleigh for one more year, there was the position of head boy, with all the possibilities for mischief of a sophisticated and enticing sort that that would bring with it. But at what cost! Still, it was as well not to close off any possibility of future splash, so he stood there, in his immaculate green blazer and flannels, his tie neatly knotted, his profile presented most becomingly to Mr and Mrs Channing, as he acted the role of head boy in some long-forgotten boys’ book by Talbot Baines Reed or Annesley Vachell.
‘Tommy’s soccer is improving enormously,’ he said at random, having no idea, nor caring, whether this was true or not.
‘Oh, really?’ said the heavily over-painted Mrs Channing. ‘He always says he doesn’t care for the game. Of course, Tommy is an awfully sensitive little boy.’
Sensitivity, b
e it noted, was the quality most often claimed for their offspring by the parents in the course of their conversations and consultations that evening. With the unpredictability of fashion, it seems that sensitivity has replaced brains or athletic ability as the quality all boys should aim at. Certainly, if they were to be believed, Burleigh was a positive hot-house of delicate blossoms.
‘Oh yes, I think all of us here can see that, Mrs Channing,’ said Hilary Frome.
‘One would have shuddered to send him to a public school,’ said the lady, who had in fact sat long and agonized in calculation of the cost of doing so. ‘But we decided the boarding section at Burleigh was so small—like a large, warm family. It sounded such a friendly place—’
‘Oh, it is. Awfully friendly,’ said Hilary Frome.
‘Tommy does need a little love,’ said Mrs Channing.
Hilary Frome gave the most tremendous inward smirk.
‘I think you can rely on his getting it,’ he said. ‘Would you be so kind as to excuse me for a moment? I have to go and supervise the refreshments.’
• • •
In the large kitchen off the sitting-room Mrs Crumwallis was organizing in no very effective manner the refreshment of the masses. She peered closely at the surrounding mass of faces, comprising ten of the cleaner or nicer-looking boys from the boarding section, who were whispering and fooling among themselves and taking little notice of her. She went over the points for the tenth time.
‘Two biscuits on each saucer,’ she said in her crow-like voice. ‘Go and ask them what they want, then ask them if they want milk and sugar with it, then ask another one the same, and then come back here and get two cups and the biscuits from me. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, Mrs Crumwallis,’ said the ragged chorus.
‘I think they know what’s to be done, Mrs Crumwallis,’ said Hilary Frome, coming in from the sitting-room and taking immediate charge. ‘Pickerage, you start with the parents in the far corner by the door. Tilney, you take the parents around the fireplace. Wattling—you take the ones by the occasional table . . .’
Efficiently the boys were sped on their various errands. Mrs Crumwallis poised herself over her urns in her favourite position, while Hilary Frome acted on Milton’s assurance that they also served who only stood and waited.
• • •
‘It’s just my luck,’ said Onyx Muggeridge to Major Tilney in her plaintive tones, the whine of the professionally put-upon. ‘Men always turn out like that in my life—the ones I’m interested in. I mean, look at Bill—there he was, a footballer with Colchester, a league side, the world all before him. You’d have thought it couldn’t go wrong, wouldn’t you? And now look at him. The original nowhere man. The trouble with me is, I’m too trusting.’
She took the Major’s arm confidingly. Used as he had been in his youth to the drabs of the garrison towns, the Major nevertheless began courteously to disengage himself.
‘Tea or coffee, sir?’
The interruption of young Pickerage, looking up elfishly, was welcome to the Major.
‘Oh, er—is that the choice?’
‘Pretty much, sir. Oh—there is some fruit cup out there.’
‘Well, I’ve never been one for tea or coffee after seven o’clock. I’ll see what the fruit cup’s like.’
• • •
As the cups and saucers were brought round, teachers and parents began to circulate. Dorothea Gilberd edged away from the parents to whom she had been uttering words of reassurance about their little Philip’s future and glided quite at random in the direction of Tom Tedder.
‘Look at her,’ said Onyx Muggeridge spitefully. ‘The human equivalent of cling plastic.’
The Major began to feel that Onyx Muggeridge was not quite what he had come to a parents’ evening for, and was quite grateful when the headmaster disengaged himself with palpable reluctance from the Fromes and sailed in his direction, exuding Manner.
‘Ah, Major Tilney. Boys getting you something, I trust? I can recommend the tea. Thoroughly recommend it.’
‘Wouldn’t know one tea from another. He’s getting me some fruit cup stuff.’
‘Ah—good. We made that up for the boys, but if you prefer . . .’ neighed Mr Crumwallis, congratulating himself on insisting on something that at least looked a bit special.
And certainly, when the Major sipped his, he was surprised at how palatable it was.
• • •
While the meagre refreshments were doled out, or refills were procured, the little groups around the teachers began to break up, and the whole occasion gradually became more flexible. Parent began to talk to parent.
‘I hear from Tommy,’ said Mrs Channing, gazing significantly in the direction of Glenda Grower, ‘that she’s an awfully good history teacher. Burleigh is terribly lucky to have her.’
‘Place needs all the good teachers it can get, from what I can gather,’ said Major Tilney.
‘It’s the salary they pay. And of course we wouldn’t want the fees higher, would we? The only reason they could get Miss Grower on the staff was that Incident at her previous school, you know . . .”
‘Incident? What kind of Incident?’
‘I really wouldn’t like to be more specific. Let’s just say that she’s quite safe in a boys’ school . . .’
Lesbianism held no terrors for the Major, who had long experience of the women’s services. He drained his glass to the dregs, and felt a pleasant, warming, unmistakable sensation rising to his cheeks.
‘I’ll have another one of those, young feller-me-lad,’ he said to Pickerage, who was passing.
• • •
The headmaster saw the mingling of parents, unchaperoned by teachers, with distaste. A dangerous development: parents left alone were apt to swap causes of dissatisfaction with the school. Already, he could hear, the Major and Mrs Channing had progressed from Glenda Grower to some of the deficiencies of the boarding establishment. It was time to break things up. He joined Mr McWhirter, standing by the fire in the usual lonely state of the one honest man, and, assuming his Manner at its most impressive, he cleared his throat.
‘Errgh.’
The room fell silent, and from his great height he gazed over the room with that familiar expression he put on when being headmasterly—an expression that was at once dyspeptic yet predatory (for were they not, after all, his prey?).
‘It is—ah—splendid and—ah—heartwarming to see you all here enjoying yourselves, and I want to say—ah—how much pleasure it gives my good wife and—ah—myself’ (he could never work out whether it should be ‘I’ or ‘me’) ‘to be able to entertain you in our modest home. But we have business to be done, too, tonight, and I know that many of you are anxious to have a chat to the—ah—instructors of your boys. And I know they are hoping to have a talk to you, too, because all of us here at Burleigh realize how important it is to get a—ah—total picture of the child, of his problems, his hopes, his ambitions, his—ah—ah—Hmmm. Now, Miss Gilberd, our valued teacher of the lower forms, will be in classroom 2B to talk to anybody who might wish to go along and see her; Mr Makepeace will be in 4A; Mr Farraday in the scientific laboratories, of course; Mr Coffin in 5B . . .’
As the recital proceeded, the teachers began to drift off to their appointed confessional boxes, anxious to miss, on any excuse, as much as possible of the headmaster’s address.
‘And if you cannot find the room you want,’ Mr Crumwallis concluded, ‘I know that Hilary Frome, our valued head boy for the next year, will be happy to show you the way.’
He gestured towards the door, where Hilary Frome was standing, flaunting his fair hair and profile, and looking still more like an illustration of one of Baden Powell’s scouting manuals; a fine specimen of British boyhood, who in only a matter of a year or two might be imagined assuming the burden of Empire, and administering imperial justice with rod and gun to one or other of the lesser breeds without the law.
‘And—ah—I shall be in my st
udy, and delighted to meet any of you, should you care to come along for a chat,’ said the headmaster, very much as an afterthought, and clearly hoping they wouldn’t.
It was while the assembly was breaking up, and parents and staff were drifting to their various meeting points, that Major Tilney heard distinctly, through the closed door to the kitchen, a high-pitched hiccup and an outbreak of hysterical boyish laughter.
• • •
Mrs Crumwallis paused in the piling up of cups and saucers and the conserving of uneaten biscuits (so generously supplied by Miss Gilberd) for future boarders’ teas. She squinted in bewilderment at the ten or so boarders who had formed her little band of helpers. A quarter of an hour ago they had been more than a little discontented. When they had sampled her hastily flung-together fruit cup she had distinctly registered—for her hearing was as acute as her eyesight was bad—mutterings of distaste and dissatisfaction.
‘Ugh, what beastly muck,’ Wattling had said.
‘It’s all bitter,’ young Tilney had exclaimed.
Now the discontented group had been transformed into the merriest little gang of kids since the first night of Oliver. The centre of the group was Wattling, perched on a chair surrounded by his admiring peers, and attempting to sing ‘Doh, a deer, a female deer’—revealing, in the attempt, conspicuous deficiencies in his knowledge of the tonic sol-fa.
‘I say,’ said Pickerage, coming in from the sitting-room.
‘I say, I say, I say,’ shouted Wattling in response, switching to his music hall routine.
‘Old Major Tilney just slipped me half a quid,’ said Pickerage. ‘What do you think he did that for?’
‘Perhaps he fancied you,’ said Broughton, the oldest boy, his face flushed a bright, livid pink.
‘Watch it,’ said Tilney. ‘He is my dad.’
‘If I was your dad I’d fancy anyone—hic—rather than you,’ said Martins. ‘I say, Pickerage, have some of the fruit cup. It tastes funny, but when you get used to it, it isn’t half bad.’
‘You boys are supposed to be helping with the washing up,’ said Mrs Crumwallis, in the tones of an aggrieved crow. ‘Look lively. Wattling, bring me those saucers there.’
School for Murder Page 4