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asking questions. Also the latest Penguin Modern Poets, The Mersey Sound, which he didn’t really think was poetry at all; and Poems of To-day, in fact published over fifty years ago, and full of things that he loved and knew by heart, such as Drinkwater’s “Moonlit Apples” and Valance’s “Soldiers Dreaming.” The room had a hard square armchair in prickly moquette and up against the window a ladies’ dressing-table with three mirrors and a stool, which was where Paul sat each night to do his writing. Whenever he looked up he saw himself, the Bryant nose in triumphant triplicate, his two profiles playing hide and seek with each other. He’d been keeping his diary since he left school, a top-secret record, and the volumes themselves, black quarto notebooks, were growing harder to hide as they amassed. At home he had a box under the bed in which old school projects and browning newsprint concealed a lower layer of private things, frail mementoes of boys at school, three issues of Manifique!, with muscle-men in posing pouches, sometimes clearly drawn on afterwards, and then the diaries themselves, in which Paul let himself go in a way that these publications weren’t allowed to.

Now he leant forward, like a schoolboy shielding his work, and wrote: “June 29th 1967: hot and sunny all day.”As he wrote he pressed very hard with his biro into the page, so that the paper itself seemed to spread and rise in a curl at the margins. When closed, the book showed exactly how much of it had been used up. The written pages, their edges crinkly and darkened, were a pleasing proof of industry, the rest of the book, clean, trim and dense, a pleasing challenge. This week had been rich in material, and he had summed up the girls at work and given Geoff Viner a franker appraisal than was possible in the bank itself. Now he had his chat with Geoff in the toilets to write up, and the whole unexpected adventure at “Carraveen.” “It turns out Mrs. J was married to Dudley Valance, C’s brother. But she also had big affair with Cecil V before WW1, said he was her first love, he was madly attractive but bad with women. I said what did she mean. She said, ‘He didn’t really understand women, you know, but he was completely irresistible to them. Of course he was only 25 when he was killed.’ ” At the foot of the page, where the edge of his writing hand had rested, the greasy paper resisted the ink, and he had to go over some of the words twice: “completely irresistible,” he wrote again, “only 25”—the effect bold and clumsy, like the writing of someone who was still drunk or slightly mad.

2

PETER ROWE CAME OUT of his room on the top floor, crossed the landing, and looked over the banister into the great square stairwell. Below him he could hear and then for a moment see a small boy hurrying downwards, saw a raised arm struggling into a jacket. “Don’t run!” Peter shouted, with such abrupt and godlike effect that the boy looked up in horror, lost his footing, and slid down bump bump bump on the hard oak treads into the hall. “Now you know why,” Peter said, more quietly, and went back into his room.

He had the first period free, then it was the Fifth Form for singing. He filled his kettle at the basin, vaguely rinsed a mug for his Nescafé: the granules started melting and fizzing on the wet bottom. Then he lit himself a cigarette, first of the day, and squinting in the smoke tugged his bed up fairly straight and covered its irregularities with his rug. Along the corridor, he knew, Matron would be going from dorm to dorm, head down, breathing through her mouth. Wherever she found a bed improperly made, its corners loose, its top sheet less than taut, she stooped and tossed it, like a bull, made a total mess of it, and wrote the offending boy’s name on a card. The card was then pinned on the board by the staff-room, and in break the delinquents would have to pant upstairs and set about making the whole thing again from scratch, square and smooth and tight as a strait-jacket. Peter felt a twinge of guilty relief at his exemption from this regime.

He started on