Night of the Twelfth

by Michael Gilbert

  ‘It must have been a remarkably fine house. Before they started adding all those bits on to it.’

  Mr Fairfax looked surprised, and said, ‘Built in 1775 by a nabob who came home from India with a fortune squeezed out of the natives and died of syphilis five years later.’

  ‘Poetic justice,’ said Manifold. ‘But I imagine what you really meant was, what do I make of you all. It’s early days to say, of course, but I expect I shall get along all right.’

  ‘You’ve taught in preparatory schools before?’

  ‘Didn’t Colonel Brabazon give you the details?’

  ‘It was all done in such a hurry that I didn’t get anything in writing. He mentioned Broughton House. That was in Cheshire, wasn’t it? It closed down unexpectedly at the end of last term.’

  ‘It wasn’t unexpected,’ said Manifold. ‘At least, not by me. It had been going downhill for years. It was the drains that finished it off. Coupled with three cases of diphtheria.’

  ‘Had you much experience before that?’

  ‘I helped my father run his school in Kenya. It was going very nicely, until our new black masters took it over for peanuts and kicked us out.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mr Fairfax. Manifold, with his obvious air of maturity and his very slightly run down appearance, was beginning to make more sense to him. ‘You may find this an unusual school in some ways. I don’t mean that it’s a school for abnormal boys. As far as I know, they’re all perfectly normal. But we do specialize in taking boys whose parents are abroad, in the services, or on business. One boy we have to keep a very special eye on is Jared Sacher.’

  ‘Is that Ben Sacher’s son?’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Only what I’ve read in the papers. He’s the Israeli Ambassador in London, isn’t he? The Arabs have already had two tries at killing him. He sounds a remarkable man.’

  ‘His son is a remarkable boy. There are others – Peter Joscelyne is one – who have no real home. His parents are separated and the mother lives abroad.’

  ‘What does he do in the holidays?’

  ‘He sometimes spends them with one of his friends. He spent half-term with the McMurtries. That’s Alastair McMurtrie, our head boy. A very sound type. When they’ve nowhere else to go the boys are very welcome here in the holidays.’

  ‘Friends for your own children.’

  ‘That would be so,’ said Mr Fairfax shortly, ‘but in fact I have no children of my own.’ He took a list from his desk. ‘That’s the nominal roll of One-B. They’ll be your main responsibility. They’ve got a bit out of hand lately. Your predecessor had a lot of educational theories, but not much common sense. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble with them. Keep an eye on Paine. He’s the oldest and inclined to be the ring-leader.’

  Manifold said that he would keep an eye on Paine.

  ‘You’ll be taking One-A for French. That’s our scholarship form. Only seven boys, but a very good lot. McMurtrie, Sacher and Joscelyne I’ve mentioned. Roger and Billy Warlock. You wouldn’t think they were brothers to look at them. Their father’s Peter Warlock, the actor. Terence Paxton. His father’s a barrister. Who have I left out? Oh yes. Monty Gedge. He’s the fat boy. Every school seems to have one. It’s nothing to do with what he eats. Paxton eats twice as much as Gedge and stays thin as a rake. Now – I expect you’ve got questions you’d like to ask me.’

  ‘Only one at the moment. What disciplinary powers do I possess?’

  ‘A good question.’ Mr Fairfax went again to his desk and took out two little booklets, composed of a number of tear-out pages, like small cheque books. The printing in one book was in black, the other in red. He said, ‘We call these merits and demerits. The boys refer to them as blacks and reds. You award them for conduct which deserves them.’

  ‘And the awarding of a demerit is the only power of punishment that I possess?’

  ‘No. Single boys or whole forms can be kept in and given extra work during the free hour, between five and six in the evening. Or in extreme cases, during the Saturday evening when we normally have a film show.’

  ‘May I beat them?’

  The directness of the question seemed to take Mr Fairfax aback. He said, ‘In no circumstances whatsoever. No one is allowed to lay hands on a boy except me.’

  ‘I just wanted to know,’ said Manifold easily.

  ‘In serious cases, you can award a double demerit. The boy will have to bring it to me and explain what happened. If I am not satisfied with his explanation, I will beat him. But I don’t expect to have to do so more than once or twice a term.’ He added, ‘I am not as didactically opposed to corporal punishment as some modern educationalists seem to be, but I can assure you that I am fully aware of the dangers, both to the beater and the beaten.’

  Manifold inspected Form One-B with interest. With equal interest Form One-B inspected him. He took a piece of paper, a ruler and a pencil from the desk and divided the paper neatly into boxes, one representing each of the twelve desks in front of him. He then directed his attention to the large spotty boy in the front left hand desk and said, ‘Name?’

  ‘Paine, sir.’

  ‘Yes, I thought you must be,’ said Manifold. He inscribed the name in the left hand box and repeated the process until all twelve boxes were full. Then he said, ‘That is your form order – for the moment. Paine number one, Simmons number two, and so on, down to Shepherd, number twelve. Now, to work. History. The reigns of the Tudors. A fascinating period.’ He turned over the pages of the text book in front of him. ‘How far had you got with Mr Millison?’

  ‘It was about page 83,’ said Simmons.

  ‘It wasn’t,’ said Paine. ‘We hadn’t got to Elizabeth.’

  ‘Of course we had. Just because you were asleep–’

  Manifold hit the desk hard with the flat of his hand. It made a slamming noise which echoed round the room. In the silence which followed he said, still pleasantly, ‘When I ask a question it will be answered only by the boy I happen to address. Understood, Paine?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You’re quite certain that you had finished with the reign of Bloody Mary?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good. Then tell me the name of one of the bishops she burned at the stake.’

  Paine opened his mouth slightly, and then said, ‘I can’t remember the exact names, sir.’

  ‘Simmons?’

  ‘Cranmer.’

  ‘Right. Change places with Paine.’

  ‘Change places?’

  ‘Certainly. Having answered the question correctly, you go up. Paine goes down. Jump to it.’ The last words came out with such a crack that Simmons shot out of his desk like a rabbit startled by the sudden report of a gun.

  ‘I see that I must explain my system to you. We will have a question-and-answer session each period, based on the work done the period before. A wrong answer you go down, a right answer you go up. At the end of the week, the boy at the top gets a merit. The boy at the bottom gets a demerit. If the same boy is at the bottom two weeks running he gets a double demerit. Three weeks, a treble demerit. Right? Another burnt bishop, Paine?’

  ‘Er–’

  ‘Hills?’

  ‘Latimer, sir.’

  ‘Up Hills, down Paine.’

  By the end of the half hour which followed Paine was sweating freely and was occupying the desk one from the bottom. Relieved as any boxer on the ropes to hear the bell, he gathered his books together and made thankfully for the door. Manifold said gently, ‘Sit down, Paine.’

  ‘But that was the bell, sir. We’ve got Maths with Mr Diplock next.’

  ‘The bell, Paine, is a notification to me that the period is over. Not a signal for a stampede. It seems to me that you need some practice in form-room deportment. You will all come here at five o’clock this evening, and we will see if we can manage things in a more orderly fashion. Goodbye for the moment.’

  ‘We shall have to double up some of the parts,’
said Latrobe. ‘Thirteen characters and only eight of us. Granville Barker says that Shakespeare constructed the last scenes so that, at a pinch, the same boy could play Viola and Sebastian. It means cutting out the confrontation and juggling some of the exits and entrances.’ ‘That looks like two parts for you, Peter,’ said Alastair McMurtrie. ‘Who have you got for me, Connie?’

  ‘Sir Toby Belch, I think.’

  ‘Why do I always get the large, coarse comic characters?’

  ‘Think it out,’ said Jared Sacher.

  ‘Malvolio for you, Roger, and Maria for Billy.’

  This seemed natural casting since Roger was tall and serious, Billy was small, dark and cheerful.

  ‘Terence, you can do Sir Andrew. Monty can be Feste and both sea captains. That is, if we don’t cut out the first Sebastian scene altogether. The great advantage of doing Shakespeare is that most of the audience know the plot, so you don’t have to do too much explaining.’

  ‘I suppose I’m Olivia,’ said Jared Sacher.

  ‘You suppose correctly,’ said Latrobe, and blushed very slightly as he said it.

  ‘Then who’s going to be Orsino?’

  ‘I thought I might take that part myself.’

  ‘If music be the food of love, play on,’ said Peter Joscelyne softly, and Billy kicked Roger Warlock on the ankle and got a return blow in the stomach.

  ‘Less of that,’ said Latrobe sharply. ‘This is an English Literature class, not a Judo session.’

  ‘Is this thing definitely on, then?’ said McMurtrie.

  ‘All fixed. For the last Saturday of term. On the lawn if it’s fine. In the gym if it’s wet. So you’ve got just over five weeks to learn your parts. We can have a first run through, reading lines, on Saturday, last period before lunch. Now we’d better get back to Chaucer.’

  Lucy Fairfax helped herself to a large glass of pre-luncheon sherry and said, ‘What’s the new man like? I hope he’s not a drip like Millison.’

  ‘He’s not a drip,’ said Mr Fairfax.

  ‘I caught a glimpse of him in first break. He looks reasonably virile.’ As she said this she gave her husband a sly glance out of the corner of her brown eyes. Her husband said, ‘I expect he is. Don’t drink too much of that stuff or the boys will smell your breath.’

  ‘Once they get into the dining-room,’ said Lucy, ‘they won’t smell anything but cabbage. Cook has burnt it again.’

  ‘I hear you pulverised One-B,’ said Alastair McMurtrie. Manifold inspected the seven boys who made up One-A. Most of them he could already identify. McMurtrie, freckled, snub-nosed, well-developed, with the build of a second-row forward. Jared Sacher, a dark beauty with alarmingly intelligent eyes. Peter Joscelyne, small, quiet and withdrawn. The Warlock brothers, totally unlike each other, yet each with a hint of their father’s often-photographed face. The fat boy with the permanent smile must be Monty Gedge and that left – forgotten the name – father a barrister – Paxton. Terence Paxton.

  ‘We had quite a lively first meeting,’ he agreed.

  ‘I found Paine sitting in a corner after lunch mumbling dates to himself.’

  ‘They’re a bunch of stupid kids,’ said Sacher. ‘It was only that Mr Millison was such an ass. I’m sorry, sir. But he was. You know what started the rot? It was in Scripture. One of them asked him what a harlot was. Well, really! That’s been a standing joke for years. All he had to say was, it’s the biblical name for a tart and they’d have known where they were.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘According to those that were present he blushed and said, “Well, Paine, it’s – um – a girl who has – er – lost her way.” After that they pulled his leg until it nearly came off. When anyone on one of his walks took a wrong turning, they used to shout in unison, “Come back, you harlots”.’

  ‘Are you going to be very strict with us?’ said Joscelyne. ‘You needn’t be, you know. Actually we do a lot of work.’

  ‘You do a lot of talking,’ said Manifold. ‘I’ve no objection to you talking, but as this is meant to be a French lesson, all conversation from now on will be in French. Vous me donnerez, l’un après l’autre, une description exacte de ce que vous avez fait pendant le mi-trimêstre.’

  ‘Quant à ça,’ said Sacher, ‘si je vous rends une conte exacte, je jure que vous ne le croyerez point.’

  ‘That’s just Sacher showing off,’ said McMurtrie. ‘His father takes him to France in the holidays. Moi je passe les trois jours–’

  ‘Passai.’

  ‘Je passai les trois jours chez moi. J’ai mangé beaucoup.’

  ‘Vous n’avez pas mangé beaucoup,’ said Joscelyne. ‘Vous avez mangé trop. Et vous avez été – what’s the French for disgustingly sick?’

  ‘It’s not bad beer,’ said Nigel Ware. ‘They do at least keep it in wooden barrels, not in metal cylinders.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Manifold. ‘And I don’t mind telling you I can do with it.’

  ‘You seem to have put the fear of God into One-B. If TEF would let us beat them up occasionally, we’d have no trouble at all. In my humble opinion six with a gym-shoe is more effective than any number of paper demerits.’

  ‘On the other hand, I enjoyed One-A.’

  ‘Yes, they’re a remarkable crowd. We haven’t had a better scholarship form in the two and a half years I’ve been here. McMurtrie and Joscelyne have both got first-class brains, but Jared Sacher’s a freak. To talk to him sometimes you’d think he was a disillusioned middle-aged man.’

  ‘He’s a raving beauty,’ said Manifold. ‘A lot of boys are attractive at that age, but only a Jewish boy could look quite like that.’

  Nigel looked at him curiously, and said, ‘Better not let Connie hear you talking like that. He looks on him as his private property.’

  ‘He’s nobody’s property, except his own. By the way, is this all right?’

  ‘Is what all right?’

  ‘Drinking here. The head doesn’t mind?’

  ‘Certainly he doesn’t mind. Why should he?’

  ‘They were rather fussy about it at my last place. If we wanted to drink we had to go a bit farther away. Bad example.’

  ‘We can’t be setting a bad example to the boys,’ said Nigel reasonably, ‘because they don’t come here. At least, not as far as I know. Where was your last place?’

  ‘Broughton House. Up in Cheshire. Drink up and I’ll get you another.’

  Nigel watched him curiously as he made his way to the bar, ordered the drinks, and carried them back. He said, ‘I hope you won’t mind turning this into a threesome. With any luck Elizabeth should be here soon.’

  ‘Is that the very attractive girl I saw helping Mrs Fairfax dish out the cocoa?’

  ‘That’s her. Elizabeth Shaw. Assistant matron, assistant housekeeper, assistant wardrobe mistress and general dogsbody. A very nice kid.’

  ‘Are you–?’

  That’s right,’ said Nigel, ‘we are. But it’s still unofficial. As long as it stays that way Mrs F will tolerate it – just. If it became official I think we should both get the boot. And that would be awkward.’

  ‘You’d get something else pretty quickly.’

  ‘It isn’t as easy as all that. Elizabeth has to look after her stepfather, old Mr Merriam. They’ve got a house in the village. We passed it on the way down from the school. He’s completely paralysed. Not a stroke. Something to do with the nerves in his spine. It came on gradually and couldn’t be stopped.’

  ‘How horrible.’

  ‘He can’t get out of his chair now without help. His sight and hearing are still all right, which is a blessing, because he can read and listen to the wireless. But he can hardly talk at all. Just grunts a bit. Elizabeth seems to understand it.’

  ‘If she has to look after him, how on earth does she manage to do her work at the school?’

  ‘That’s just it. Mrs Loveday, who lives next door, copes with Mr Merriam by day. She’s glad to earn a bit of extra money doing it
. Elizabeth puts him to rights in the morning and takes over when she gets back in the evening.’

  ‘A bit of luck finding a neighbour prepared to help.’

  ‘It certainly was. And that’s what would make it so damned awkward if we had to move.’

  ‘Incidentally,’ said Manifold, trying to visualize what “putting him to rights” might involve, ‘I should have thought it took a bit of doing, looking after him single-handed.’

  ‘She’s a wonderful girl,’ said Nigel. ‘But of course she couldn’t do it if she hadn’t had some early training as a nurse. They teach them to hump people around. I give a hand when I’m down there.’

  They were finishing their second drinks when Elizabeth arrived. She seemed to know most of the characters in the bar by their Christian names. Not a kid, thought Manifold. A competent young woman, in real age a good deal older than the agreeable but juvenile Nigel. And sexually extremely attractive. Not pretty. Her face was too strong for that. It was the way she carried her beautiful body as though she was fully aware of its potentiality, both as magnet and weapon.

  She said, ‘Well. And what are your reactions after one day of Trenchard House?’

  ‘It’s better than his last place,’ said Nigel. ‘They wouldn’t let the masters drink at the local.’

  ‘Dotheboys Hall! Don’t put too much tonic in. I’ve had a hard day and I need a slug of hard liquor.’

  ‘Mrs F being bloody again?’

  ‘As per usual.’

  ‘I thought I saw you having a heart-to-heart after the boys’ supper.’

  ‘You thought right. Holbrow Three, who’s really too young to be at boarding school at all, spilt half his cocoa and I told him to get a cloth from the pantry and mop it up. At that moment–’ Elizabeth took a deep mouthful of her gin – ‘Mrs F surged up and said, “Really, the fees we extract from these poor little boys, we can’t expect them to act as scullery maids as well. Just clean it up for him, would you, Elizabeth”.’

  ‘The sweet creature,’ said Nigel.

  ‘You’d better watch your step, Ken.’