by Joan Aiken
‘That means she wants to get rid of me,’ said Cousin Eunice to Cosmo. ‘So I’ll say goodbye for now, and see you on Friday about four o’clock. And I’ll phone you this evening at five.’ She ran down the front steps with a quick flip of her hand.
‘A very distinguished lady, Professor Doom,’ Mrs Robinson said. ‘That’s right, Goodger, take Cosmo’s cases up to Ruskin dormitory. You are lucky to have an aunt like that, I daresay she’ll be no end of help to you with your maths and science. Now I’ll just show you where your bedroom is, and then it will be time for prayers. And after that I know Mr Gabbitas wants a word with you; he’s the headmaster, as you probably know.’
Cosmo followed Mrs Robinson, deciding not to correct the mistake about Eunice being his aunt; what did it matter, anyway? The stairs were covered with tremendously thick, durable coconut matting, and there were old school photographs, with dates, all the way up the wall. Above, a strong smell of lino and furniture polish, and doors opening on to classrooms; then up again, more stairs, to a higher landing, where there were dormitories, containing, he was glad to see, only four or five beds each; he had imagined long rows like hospital wards.
‘Here is yours, Ruskin, and this is your bed in the corner,’ Mrs Robinson said. Goodger had already left his cases. There was a chest of drawers, a chair, and a washstand. ‘You can unpack tonight, there won’t be time now. I’ll take you down to your form room, you are in Remove.’
‘What is Remove?’
‘It is the name of the form that you are in,’ Mrs Robinson said patiently. ‘There are the Juniors at the bottom of the school, then first, second and third Preparatories, then Remove, that’s you, then first and second Intermediate, then first, second and third Shell, and then the Seniors. So you are about in the middle.
‘What queer names.’
‘Shell comes from the French échelle, that means a ladder. Now, here is your form room.’
They were down on the floor below again. Mrs Robinson opened a door to display a room full of busily occupied grey-and-white figures who were getting books out of lockers and putting them on tables.
‘Charley!’ she called. ‘This is Cosmo Curtoys, will you show him where he’s to sit and take him over to prayers. And why is your tie such a mess, may I ask?’ She untied, retied and tightened the offending tie in three swift movements. Charley, a boy who was freckled all over like a bird’s egg, submitted with a resigned grin.
‘Right, then, Cosmo, I’ll be seeing ye later.’ Mrs Robinson vanished as a bell began to ring.
‘That’s for prayers,’ said Charley. ‘Come on.’
Everybody in the room – there seemed about a dozen, in fact there were ten as Cosmo later discovered – clattered down the stairs, out through a side door, down some iron steps, and along a covered way to the school hall, which was a large wooden building with a stage at one end. Cosmo noticed on the way a wintry-looking garden, a hard tennis court which was at present one huge puddle with yellow leaves floating in it, a swing, a see-saw, a stretch of soggy lawn, some gravel paths. It all looked dismal.
In the school hall they stood in rows, a row to a form. Cosmo, squinting sideways, found that there were four girls and six boys in his row, not counting himself. Several people turned and stared at him from rows in front; he felt very conspicuous in his new, tidy uniform.
Two people, a man and a woman, came briskly on to the platform; a hymn was sung – ‘He who would valiant be’ – one that Cosmo knew, which was a relief – prayers were said, then they all dispersed again. The members of Remove went back to their classroom, where they found a red-nosed, sandy-haired man waiting for them.
‘Ah, we have a new member today, Cosmo Curtoys,’ he said. ‘You had better sit there, Cosmo.’
There were three tables in the room, with four chairs at each; the man indicated an empty place, and Cosmo went to it and sat down. He was beside a girl with plaits, who gave him a cool look.
‘Actually you pronounce my name Curtis,’ he said to the sandy man.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘My name. It’s pronounced Curtis.’
A titter ran round the room. Cosmo flushed.
‘You should always put up your hand before speaking to a member of the staff,’ the sandy man told him. ‘Right: Curtis it shall be. I hope you have all imbibed that piece of information,’ he said to the rest of the form. ‘Cosmo has just come from Australia; I daresay he will be able to tell us all about marsupials and, er, billabongs, when it comes to geography. At present, however, we have to address ourselves to the decimal system.’
Cosmo had done the decimal system and found it no problem. But after about ten minutes a head poked round the door and said,
‘Cosmo Curtoys to the headmaster’s office.’
‘He prefers his name to be pronounced Curtis,’ said the sandy-haired man. Everybody laughed openly this time. Cosmo stood up with hot cheeks. What was so funny about his name, for heaven’s sake?
He followed the head (it belonged to one of the boys from the Senior form) along a highly-polished passage to a half-open door.
‘Here’s Cosmo Curtoys, sir.’ He made no attempt to pronounce the name correctly, perhaps feeling that Cosmo was too young for such a privilege.
‘Ah yes; come in, and shut the door.’
Mr Gabbitas, the headmaster, was the white-haired man who had read the prayers. He had a face, Cosmo thought, like a Saluki, long, and rather sweet; he should have long drooping silky ears on either side to complete the effect.
‘Sit down, my dear Curtis,’ (he got the name right). ‘I won’t keep you a minute, because I expect you will be wanting to get to know your form mates.’ Cosmo did not argue about this but sat down as directed. The headmaster’s room was small and snug with three very interesting pictures on the walls; he would have liked to take a good look at them, but Mr Gabbitas was saying,
‘Now, all of this will seem quite strange to you for a while, I expect; your cousin tells me that you were living right out in the wilds and having lessons sent by post, is that right? Seeing such a lot of strange faces will be rather tiring for you at first, but I expect you will soon settle down; this is not really such a big school, and I hope you will find us all a very friendly set of people.’
He paused and smiled and Cosmo felt he was expected to say something but could not think of anything suitable.
‘Now,’ went on Mr Gabbitas, ‘I have decided – I have talked about this with the other members of the staff here and we have decided – that, on the whole, it will be more sensible if we don’t tell the other boys and girls in the school about your sad loss.’
Loss, thought Cosmo stolidly; he picked the right word there.
‘You have been through a very unhappy time,’ Mr Gabbitas continued, ‘and we think it will be best for you if it is not talked about and discussed and made into a mystery; which can so easily happen, can’t it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So all that has been said about you, Cosmo, is that your relatives are in Australia, and you have come over here by yourself to go to school, and are staying with your very distinguished cousin. And, if you agree, we’ll keep it that way.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Are you quite happy about this, eh? You agree that it’s best to put painful things behind you – just try and take part in the ordinary life of the school. Where I am sure you will soon find friends.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘However,’ Mr Gabbitas went on, ‘I don’t know if your cousin has told you that, as well as being a headmaster, I am a psychiatrist; that is, a kind of mind doctor. If you find at any time, Cosmo, that you feel unhappy or worried or puzzled – that you aren’t managing to settle down – you can always come and see me and I’ll try to help you. Just tell your form-master, Mr Cheevy – or Mrs Robinson – and they will fix a time for you to come. All right? Now you had better run along, as we are both going to be very busy.’ He gave Cosmo a sweet – rather too sweet?
– smile, creasing up his eyes, to show that the interview was over, and Cosmo found his way back to the Remove form room. Well, anyway, he thought, now I know that the sandy-haired man is called Mr Cheevy.
During the day he got the rest of his form sorted out. The four girls were Rebecca, Sheil, Tansy and Meredith. Rebecca was German, large, fair-haired, and cheerfully good at everything she did. Sheil was small and silent, with a slight cast in one eye; Tansy had bright brown ringlets and giggled a lot; Meredith was the dark girl with plaits who had given him the cool measuring look when he first sat down.
The boys were not so easy to sort out because there were more of them. Cosmo could see at once that the freckled Charley was the form leader; he was so, not because he was brighter than the rest, but because he was so tremendously active and confident; and his friend Molesworth, whom everyone called Moley, was therefore the second in command, not because of any commanding qualities, but because he was Charley’s friend. Moley, actually, seemed quite decent; he was rather quiet and pale, with an unimpressive face, but he had a habit of making short, dry, funny remarks. Often these were in such a low voice that only the people sitting at his own table caught them, but Cosmo heard one; as Mr Cheevy gathered up his books and left the room when the bell went at the end of the period, Cosmo noticed that the master’s hands shook quite badly; a couple of papers slipped from his grasp and the obliging Rebecca leapt to pick them up and hand them back.
‘He won’t win the egg-and-spoon race,’ muttered Moley, deadpan.
Cosmo was surprised into laughing, and several people looked at him with raised eyebrows; evidently newcomers were not supposed to laugh at jokes.
It was easy to pick out the form outcast; that was the boy called Tom Bunthorne, whom everybody, including the staff, addressed as Bun. He was a big, heavy boy, clumsy in his movements and always in a muddle; he was never able to answer a single question correctly, and the remarks he made were so stupid that everybody sighed when he opened his mouth. But he never gave up trying; he had a big, hopeful smile that showed a lot of unbrushed teeth. His skin was dry and flaky and he smelt rather badly too – a sweetish musty smell, not unlike that of Lob, thought Cosmo, who was sitting between him and Meredith. Evidently before Cosmo’s arrival Bun had been stuck by himself at the end of a table.
Then there were a couple of boys who were friends, and talked almost exclusively to each other: Andy and Lot, they were called, Cosmo discovered later; they were day boys and disappeared at lunchtime, going off to Lot’s house where they both had lunch; Cosmo began to see what Cousin Eunice had meant about day boys being left out of things.
Lunch was something of a trial. The dining room was huge, with ten tables that each held twenty people; everybody raced in when the gong went, and friends kept places for each other, sometimes bagging whole sides of tables for groups or gangs.
‘You want to sit by me?’ Bun offered with his hopeful smile.
‘All right,’ Cosmo said resignedly. There was only one place left, so he had to; but he could see already that to be Bun’s friend was to share his isolation. Probably Bun tried to make friends with every new boy who came, and as soon as they found anybody better they dropped him. His rough-skinned face, with its pale eyes and ever-open mouth seemed to hold already the expectation of this disappointment.
Mrs Robinson, on Cosmo’s other side, was at the end of the table, serving slices of cold meat.
‘Cosmo’s from Australia,’ she told the table at large. ‘He’ll be able to tell us all about the bush. Have you seen lots of kangaroos, Cosmo?’
Cosmo felt himself redden as everybody looked at him. It seemed so dull to confess that he had lived in a part where there were no kangaroos. He said,
‘Well, I did see one once, when my mother and I were crossing the desert in a Land Rover. We stopped at night to sleep, and I woke up and went for a walk. It was moonlight and I saw what I thought was a funny-shaped tree stump, so I walked towards it, and it got up and hopped away.’
Quite a few people laughed, but he noticed disbelieving expressions on the faces of Charley and Moley, who were sitting at the top of the table. And of course they were right; the episode was a true one, but it had happened to his brother Mark, not to him. He had been too small for that trip, but Mark had told him about it.
He was thankful when most people at the table began talking about some football match and forgot him; except Bun, that is, who plied him with boring questions about Australia until the end of the meal.
In the afternoon people were supposed to play football or hockey, but as the rain was still pelting down there were indoor sports in the school hall, taken by Mr Breadbury, the games master, an irascible little man with bright red spots on each cheekbone, who was frightfully quick at giving orders in a shrill shout.
‘Now we’ll play Do This and Do That – do this!’ He stood on one leg. ‘Do that!’ He bent down and put his head between his legs. ‘Do this!’ He sank down like a frog. ‘You – new boy – you’re out!’ Cosmo, who had never heard of the game, gathered confusedly that you were supposed to obey one set of orders but not the other. Everybody looked at him despisingly.
Then they played hideous games with bags of beans, tossing them from hand to hand at top speed, one team trying to race the other. Cosmo was hopeless at those too, but a lot of the other boys were equally bad; only the girls shone here, whipping the bags nimbly from one to the next. Then they played an even worse game, where one team stood in the circle made by the other team and had a football hurled at their legs: you were supposed to jump into the air to avoid the ball. When it hit you, you were out. Here Charley, bouncing, agile, and seemingly tireless, stayed in longer than anybody except Rebecca. Charley’s friend Moley did not take part in these games; he had a weak heart, somebody said; he sat cross-legged against the wall, shouting encouragement to his friend.
Cosmo was immensely relived when this period was over and they went on to a physics lesson with the red-headed Mr Ramsden; it was good to be in a real lab with benches and retorts and Bunsen burners, things that Mark and he had always longed for as they tried to do experiments out of The Book of Practical Science.
Then there was tea: bread and jam and strong tea like tar-water. Instead of the staff, as at lunch, members of the Senior form sat at the heads of tables and poured the tea. Bun again hopefully kept a place for Cosmo, and Cosmo again resignedly sat in it.
Then there were two hours of homework, done in silence. During this period Eunice phoned. No, Cosmo told her, he was fine; he needed nothing. Yes, school was okay; no, truly, he didn’t want anything. Which was true, except, perhaps, to fall down a black well for ever. ‘See you on Friday, then,’ she said, and hung up.
Then there was supper, sardines on toast and stewed apple. By now the day seemed to have been going on for about six months.
As they left the dining room he happened to be beside Meredith, and he asked her,
‘What do we do now?’
‘Whatever you like,’ she said coolly. ‘You are free till bedtime, which is half past eight for our lot.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Piano practice,’ she said, and took a music case from a rack, and walked away.
Cosmo went back to his form room. Charley, Moley, Rebecca, Sheil, Tansy and another boy were there; instantly, on entering the room, Cosmo had the uncomfortable feeling that they had been talking about him. He went to his locker and pretended to hunt among the books that had been given him.
‘Who do you hate worst in the school, Rebecca?’ said Tansy, breaking the silence with her giggle.
‘Miss Mossop. Ugh! She’s like a rotton potato.’
‘Chris?’
‘Bun. Wish he’d catch Housemaid’s Knee and Athlete’s Foot and Tennis Elbow and die.’
They all laughed.
‘Charley? Who do you hate worst?’
Charley pondered. ‘Old Gabby Gabbitas,’ he said at last. ‘Because of his do-gooding.’
‘Oh, I dunno. Yes I do. The picture of our Sainted Foun-dah, dear old Canon Morningquest, over the middle dining table. It makes me want to regurgitate.’
They laughed again.
Cosmo, pretending that he had found what he came for, retreated. He could hear a buzz of talk break out as soon as he closed the door.
Wandering without purpose he remembered that, in the basement, next to the lab where they had done their physics, another door had a sign that said PLAYROOM.
He made his way to it, along a damp basement passage that smelt of laundry and shoe polish. There were voices coming from inside this door also, and he opened it with wary apprehension, as one might approach cannibals dancing round a boiling pot. But inside the room, which was large and cold and contained a ping-pong table and a Corinthian bagatelle board, there were only two people. He recognized them as members of the form below Remove who had joined in the sports that afternoon: a boy and girl called Frances and Tim. They had pushed the ping-pong table against the wall and were sliding on the polished lino, trying to achieve one complete turn as they slid the length of the room.
Cosmo watched them for a while.
‘D’you want to play ping-pong?’ asked the girl Frances, who looked quite good-natured.
‘No thanks,’ he said quickly, and then wished he had said yes. Mark and he had played a lot, and Ma sometimes joined in; she was formidably good. He wandered aimlessly back upstairs and found with relief that it was nearly half past eight and he could go to bed. The other three boys with whom he shared Ruskin dormitory were all from different forms, and older; they went to bed later. He was able to get undressed and into bed before they appeared, but he could not sleep; his heart felt as heavy as if a magnet were dragging it down. However, he pretended to be asleep when the elders came up, so as not to have to talk to them. One of them said,
‘He comes from Australia, doesn’t he?’ evidently with a nod towards Cosmo.