Gentlemen and Players

by Joanne Harris

  “I got this slip this morning, sir,” he said, holding out the piece of paper. He has never forgiven me for my intervention in his lesson, or for the fact that I witnessed his humiliation in front of the boys. As a result he addresses me as “sir,” like a pupil, and his tone is flat and colorless, like Knight’s.

  “What is it?”

  “Assessment form, sir.”

  “Oh, gods. I’d forgotten.” Of course, the staff appraisals are upon us; heaven forbid that we should fail to complete all the necessary paperwork before December’s official inspection. I supposed I had one too; the New Head has always been a great fan of internal appraisal—as introduced by Bob Strange, who also wants more in-service training, yearly management courses, and performance-related pay. Can’t see it myself—your results are only as good as the boys you teach, after all—but it keeps Bob out of the classroom, which is the essential.

  The general principle of appraisal is simple; each junior member of staff is individually observed and appraised in the classroom by a senior master; each Head of Section by a Head of Year; each Head of Year by a Deputy, that is, Pat Bishop or Bob Strange. The Second and Third Masters are assessed by the Head himself (though in Strange’s case, he spends so little time in the classroom that you wonder why he bothers). The Head, being a geographer, does hardly any teaching at all but spends much of his time on courses, lecturing teams of PGCE students on racial sensitivity or drug awareness.

  “It says you’ll be observing my lesson this afternoon,” said Meek. He didn’t look too pleased about it. “Third-form computer studies.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Meek.” I wondered which joker had decided to put me in charge of computer studies. As if I didn’t know. And with Meek, of all people. Oh well, I thought. Bang goes my free period.

  There are some days in a teaching career where everything goes wrong. I should know; I’ve seen a few—days where the only sensible thing to do is to go home and go back to bed. Today was one of them; an absurd parade of mishaps and annoyances, of litter and lost books and minor scuffles and unwelcome administrative tasks and extra duties and louche comments in the corridors.

  A run-in with Eric Scoones over some misbehavior of Sutcliff’s; my register (still missing and causing trouble with Marlene); wind (never welcome); a leak in the boys’ toilets and the subsequent flooding of part of the Middle Corridor; Knight (unaccountably smug); Dr. Devine (equally so); a number of annoying room changes due to the leak and e-mailed (ye gods!) to all staff workstations, with the result that I arrived late to my morning cover period—English, for the absent Roach.

  There are many advantages to being a senior master. One is that having established a reputation as a disciplinarian, it is rarely necessary to enforce it. Word gets round—Don’t mess with Straitley—and a quiet life for all ensues. Today was different. Oh, it happens occasionally; and if it had happened on any other day I might not have reacted as I did then. But it was a large group, a lower third—thirty-five boys, and not a single Latinist among them. They knew me only by reputation—and I don’t suppose the recent article in our local press had helped much.

  I was ten minutes late, and the class was already noisy. No work had been set, and as I walked in, expecting the boys to stand in silence, they simply glanced in my direction and went right on doing precisely what they’d been doing before. Games of cards; conversations; a rowdy discussion at the back with chairs kicked over and a powerful stench of chewing gum in the air.

  It shouldn’t have angered me. A good teacher knows that there is fake anger and real anger—the fake is fair game, part of the good teacher’s armory of bluff; but the real must be hidden at all costs, lest the boys—those master manipulators—understand that they have scored a point.

  But I was tired. The day had started badly, the boys didn’t know me, and I was still angry over the incident in my back garden the night before. Those high young voices—like fuck he can, he’s too old!—had sounded too familiar, too plausible to be easily dismissed. One boy looked up at me and turned to his desk mate, sniggering. I thought I heard the phrase—nuts to you, sir!—amidst a clap of ugly laughter.

  And so I fell—like a novice, like a student teacher—for the oldest trick in the book. I lost my temper.

  “Gentlemen, silence.” It usually works. This time it didn’t; I could see a group of boys at the back laughing openly at the battered gown I had omitted to remove following my midmorning break duty. Nuts to you, sir, I heard (or thought), and it seemed to me that if anything, the volume increased.

  “I said silence!” I roared—an impressive sound in usual circumstances, but I’d forgotten Bevans and his advice to take it easy, and the invisible finger prodded me midroar in the sternum. The boys at the back sniggered, and irrationally I wondered if any of them had been there last night—think you can take me, you fat bastard?

  Well, in such a situation there are inevitably casualties. In this case, eight in lunchtime detention, which was perhaps a trifle excessive, but a teacher’s discipline is his own, after all, and there was no reason for Strange to intervene. He did, however; walking past the room at just the wrong time, he happened to hear my voice and looked through the glass at precisely the moment that I turned one of the sniggering boys around by the sleeve of his blazer.

  “Mr. Straitley!” Of course nowadays, no one touches a pupil.

  Silence fell; the boy’s sleeve was torn at the armpit. “You saw him, sir. He hit me.”

  They knew he hadn’t. Even Strange knew, though his face was impassive. The invisible finger gave another push. The boy—Pooley, his name was—held up his torn blazer for inspection. “That was brand-new!”

  It wasn’t; anyone could see that. The fabric was shiny with age; the sleeve itself a little short. Last year’s blazer, due for replacement. But I’d gone too far; I could see it now. “Perhaps you can tell Mr. Strange all about it,” I suggested, turning back to the now-silent class.

  The Third Master gave me a reptilian look.

  “Oh, and when you’ve finished with Mr. Pooley, do please send him back,” I said. “I need to arrange his detention.”

  There was nothing for Strange to do then but to leave, taking Pooley with him. I don’t suppose he enjoyed being dismissed by a colleague—but then, he shouldn’t have interfered, should he? Still, I had a feeling he would not let the matter go. It was too good an opportunity—and, as I recalled (though a little late), young Pooley was the eldest son of Dr. B. D. Pooley, Chairman of Governors, whose name I had most recently encountered on a formal written warning.

  Well after that I was so rattled that I went to the wrong room for Meek’s appraisal and arrived twenty minutes into the lesson. Everyone turned round to look at me, Meek excepted; his pallid face wooden with disapproval.

  I sat down at the back; someone had set out a chair for me, with the pink appraisal form on it. I scanned the sheet. It was the usual box-ticking format: planning, delivery, stimulus, enthusiasm, class control. Marks out of five, plus a space for a comment, like a hotel questionnaire.

  I wondered what sort of an opinion I was supposed to have; still, the class was quiet, barring a couple of nudgers at the back; Meek’s voice was reedy and penetrating; the computer screens behaved themselves, creating the migraine-inducing patterns that apparently constituted the object of the exercise. All in all, satisfactory enough, I supposed; smiled encouragingly at the hapless Meek; left early in the hope of a quick cup of tea before the start of the next period; and stuck the pink slip into the Third Master’s pigeonhole.

  As I did, I noticed something lying on the floor at my feet. It was a little notebook, pocket-sized, bound in red. Opening it briefly I saw it half-filled with spindly writing; on the flyleaf I read the name C. KEANE.

  Ah, Keane. I looked around the Common Room, but the new English teacher was not there. And so I pocketed the notebook, meaning to give it back to Keane later. Rather a mistake, or so it turned out. Still, you know what they say about listening at d
oors.

  Every teacher keeps them. Notes on boys; notes of lists and duties; notes of grudges small and large. You can tell almost as much about a colleague by his notebook as by his mug—Grachvogel’s is a neat and color-coded plea for order; Kitty’s a no-nonsense pocket diary; Devine’s an impressive black tome with little inside. Scoones uses the same green accounts books he has been using since 1961; the Nations have charity planners from Christian Aid; Pearman a stack of odd papers, Post-it notes, and used envelopes.

  Now, having opened the thing, I couldn’t resist a glance at young Keane’s notebook; and by the time I realized that I shouldn’t be reading it, I was hooked, lined, and sinkered.

  Of course I already knew the man was a writer. He has that look; the slight complacency of the casual observer, content to enjoy the view because he knows he won’t be staying long. What I hadn’t guessed was how much he’d already seen; the tiffs, the rivalries, the little secrets of the Common Room dynamic. There were pages of it; closely written in handwriting so small that it was scarcely legible; character studies, sketches, overheard remarks, gossip, history, news.

  I scanned the pages, straining my eyes to decipher the minuscule script. Fallowgate was mentioned; and Peanuts, and Favorites. There was a little of our school history—I saw the names Snyde, Pinchbeck, and Mitchell alongside a folded newspaper cutting of that sad old tale. Next to that, a photocopied snippet from a St. Oswald’s official school photograph, a color snapshot of another school’s Sports Day—boys and girls sitting cross-legged on the grass—and a bad portrait of John Snyde, looking criminal, as most men do when seen from the front page of a newspaper.

  Several more pages, I saw, were given over to cartoons, caricatures for the most part. Here was the Head, rigid and glacial, the Don Quixote to Bishop’s Sancho. There was Bob Strange, a hybrid half-human wired into his computer terminal. My own Anderton-Pullitt was there in goggles and flying helmet; Knight’s schoolboy crush on a new teacher was mercilessly exposed; Miss Dare portrayed as a bespectacled, bestockinged schoolmarm with Scoones as her growling rottweiler. Even I was included, hunchbacked and black-robed, swinging from the Bell Tower with Kitty, a plumpish Esmerelda, under my arm.

  That made me smile; but there was some unease in it too. I suppose I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Kitty Teague. All aboveboard, of course, you know—I just never realized it was so damned obvious. I wondered too whether Kitty had seen it.

  Damn the man; I thought to myself. Hadn’t I known from the first that he was an upstart? And yet I’d liked him. Like him still, if truth be told.

  R. Straitley: Latin. Devoted Old Boy of St. Oswald’s. Sixties; smoker; overweight; cuts his own hair. Wears the same brown tweed jacket with the elbow patches every day (well, that‘s a lie, smarty-pants; I wear a blue suit to Speech Days and funerals); hobbies include baiting the management and flirting with the French teacher. Boys hold him in unexpected affection (you’re forgetting Colin Knight); albatross around B. Strange’s neck. Harmless.

  Well, I like that. Harmless, forsooth!

  Still, it could be worse; under Penny Nation’s entry I read Poisonous do-gooder, and under Isabelle Tapi, French tart. You can’t deny the man has a turn of phrase. I would have read on; but at that moment the bell for registration went, and I put it in my desk drawer, with some reluctance, hoping to finish it at leisure.

  I never did. Returning to my desk at the end of school I found the drawer empty and the notebook gone; at the time I assumed that Keane, who, like Dianne, occasionally shares my room, had found it and taken it back. I never asked him, for obvious reasons; and it was only later, when the scandals began to erupt one after the other, that I thought to make the connection between that little red notebook and the ubiquitous Mole, who knew the school so well, and who seemed to have so many insights into our harmless little ways.

  9

  Friday, 15th October

  Another successful week, I think. Not least was my retrieval of that notebook, with its incriminating contents. I believe Straitley may have read some of it, though probably not all. The handwriting is too spindly for his old eyes, and besides, if he had drawn any suspicious conclusions, I would have seen it in his manner before now. Still, it would have been unwise to keep the book. I see that; and I burnt the offending item—not without a pang—before it could fall under hostile scrutiny. I may yet have to revisit the problem—but not today. Today I have other concerns to attend to.

  The October half-term is upon us already, and I mean to be very busy (I’m not just talking about marking books). No, this week I shall be in school almost every day. I have cleared it with Pat Bishop, who also finds it hard to keep away, and with Mr. Beard, the Head of IT, with whom I have an unofficial arrangement.

  All perfectly innocent and aboveboard—after all, my interest in technology is nothing new, and I know from experience that I am best hidden when I am in the open. Bishop approves, of course; he doesn’t really know much about computers but supervises me in his avuncular way, popping out of his office every once in a while to see if I need help.

  I am not a brilliant student. A couple of elementary faux pas have established me as willing, if not especially able, which allows Bishop to feel superior whilst giving me extra cover, should I ever need it. I doubt I shall; if my presence is ever questioned at a later date, I know I can rely on Pat to say that I simply didn’t have the expertise.

  Every member of St. Oswald’s staff has an e-mail address. This consists of their first two or three initials followed by the address of the school Web site. In theory, every member of staff should check his e-mail twice a day, in case of an urgent memo from Bob Strange, but in practice, some never do. Roy Straitley and Eric Scoones are among these; many more use the system but have neglected to personalize their mailboxes and have kept the default password (PASSWORD) to access their mail. Even the ones, like Bishop, who imagine themselves to be more computer literate are predictable enough: Bishop himself uses the name of his favorite sportsman, and even Strange, who should know better, has a series of easy-to-guess codes (his wife’s maiden name, his date of birth, and so on).

  Not that I ever had to do much guessing. Fallow, who used the facilities every night, kept a list of user codes in a notebook in the Porter’s Lodge, along with a box of disks (material downloaded from the Internet) that no one had bothered to investigate. By retracing his steps (under a different user identity), I managed to lay quite a convincing trail. Better still, by disabling the firewall on the school’s computer network for a few minutes, and then sending a carefully prepared file attachment to admin@saintoswalds.com, from one of my Hotmail addresses, I was able to introduce a simple virus designed to lie dormant in the system before awakening into dramatic action a couple of weeks later.

  Not the most exciting kind of spadework, I know. All the same, I enjoyed it. This evening I thought I might allow myself a little celebration; a night off, a couple of drinks at the Thirsty Scholar. That turned out to be a mistake; I hadn’t realized how many colleagues—and pupils—frequented the place. I was only halfway through my first drink when I saw a little group of them come in—I recognized Jeff Light, Gerry Grachvogel, and Robbie Roach, the long-haired geographer, with a couple of seventeen-or eighteen-year-olds who might have been St. Oswald’s sixth-formers.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised—it’s no secret that Roach likes to hang out with the boys. Light too. Grachvogel, on the other hand, looked slightly furtive, but then he always does, and he at least has the sense to know (as Straitley puts it) that no good ever comes of getting overfriendly with the troops.

  I was tempted to stay. There was no reason to be shy; but the thought of socializing with them, of letting my hair down, as the ghastly Light would have put it, and having a couple of bevvies, was distinctly unpleasant. Thankfully, I was sitting by the door and was able to make my exit, quick and unobserved, as they made their way toward the bar.

  I recognized Light’s car, a black Probe, in the
alley beside the pub, and toyed with the idea of putting its side window through; but there might be security cameras in the street, I thought, and it would be pointless to risk exposure on a stupid whim. Instead I walked the long way home—the night was mild, and besides, I’d promised myself another look at Roy Straitley’s fence.

  He had already removed the graffiti. I wasn’t surprised; even though he couldn’t actually see it from his house, its simple presence must have irked him, just as it irked him that the boys who had invaded his garden might return. Perhaps I’ll arrange it—just to see his face—but not tonight. Tonight I deserve better.

  And so I went home to my chintz-hung room, opened my second bottle of champagne (I have a case of six, and I mean to see them all empty by Christmas), caught up with a little essential correspondence, then went down to the pay phone outside and made a quick call to the local police, reporting a black Probe (registration LIT 3) driving erratically in the vicinity of the Thirsty Scholar.

  It’s the sort of behavior my therapist tends to discourage nowadays. I’m too impulsive, or so she says; too judgmental. I don’t always consider the feelings of others as I should. But there was no risk to me; I did not give my name, and in any case—you know he deserved it. Like Mr. Bray, Light is a braggart; a bully; a natural rule-breaker; a man who genuinely believes that a few pints under his belt make him a better driver. Predictable. They’re all so predictable.

  That’s their weakness. The Oswaldians. Light, of course, is a complacent fool; but even Straitley, who is not, shares the same foolish complacency. Who would dare to attack me? To attack St. Oswald’s?

  Well, gentlemen. I would.

  CHECK

  1

  The summer of my father’s breakdown was the hottest in remembered history. At first it cheered him, as if this were a return to the legendary summers of his childhood, during which, if I was to believe him, he spent the happiest days of his life. Then, as the sun continued remorseless and the grass on St. Oswald’s lawns veered from yellow to brown, he soured and began to fret.