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By Root 1206 0

his weekly letter to his parents, a practice he did keep up as strictly as the boys. “Dearest Mum and Dad,” he wrote, “What a beautiful week it has been. I’m glad, because it’s the semi-final of the garden competition on Sunday. The HM is to be the judge, and as he knows nothing at all about gardens it’s hard to know what he’ll be looking for, colour or ‘concept.’ The boy Dupont whom I’ve told you about has built a rockery with a waterfall, but the HM, who has very plain tastes, may find this too ‘fiddly.’ Besides that, things are building up nicely to Open Day. Colonel Sprague is very involved with organizing it all. He is true to type and rather a monster. I call him the Infolonel Colonel.” Peter smoked for a bit, and drank his coffee. He thought he probably couldn’t divert his parents with the Headmaster’s latest obsession, the spread of supposedly sexy books among the higher forms. It was on the agenda for next week’s staff-meeting. Already this term the HM had confiscated Peyton Place and The Carpetbaggers, both on hearsay rather than any knowledge of their contents, which was doubtless why the boys themselves slogged through them. Dr. No, found in Walters’s tuck-box, had been passed to Peter, as being possibly “more broad-minded,” for a judgement. He’d read it last night at a sitting and found three sentences in it unexpectedly arousing; of course he’d seen the film, which was much more exciting: on the page the plot looked slight and awkward, the whole thing explained by the villain himself in an enormous monologue. He noted a sort of tight-lipped sadism in the accounts of James Bond’s body and the injuries inflicted on it, but as in a movie the wounds all healed by the scene after next. The boys, of course, in the first derangement of puberty, could be “turned on” by just about anything. Peter knew he had been so himself, and so saw the present purge as inherently futile. He stubbed out his cigarette, and told his parents instead about the First XI match against Beasleys.

At 9:35, with the recurrent momentary dread and resolve that come with living by a timetable, Peter opened his door again and went out on to the landing. In the glance he gave back into his room he saw it as a stranger might, as an appalling mess. He went down one circuit of the main staircase, and set off along the broad first-floor corridor. The classrooms at Corley Court occupied six rooms on the ground floor, but the room with the piano was isolated, with the sick-bay, in the rambling far end of the floor above. Boys with temperatures or infectious diseases were harassed through the wall by ragged bursts of folksong or the torturous practice of scales. He passed the Headmaster’s sitting-room, which must once have been a principal bedroom of the house: its high Gothic oriel looked out down the axis of the formal gardens, which now survived only in photographs but had once been a dazzling floral maze. A melancholy fishpond at the centre of the lawn was all that was left.

Peter had got the Corley job in the middle of the year, after the clouded departure of a man called Holdsworth, and took to the house from the start, in part out of natural sympathy for something so widely abused. “A Victorian monstrosity” was the smug routine phrase. He had heard a boy in the First Form opine that Corley Court was “a Victorian monstrosity, and one of the very worst,” with just the same humourless laugh the boy’s father must have used when describing the place. In fact, the house was perfect for a boarding-school—secluded, labyrinthine, faintly menacing, with its own tree-lined park now mown and marked out in pitches. No one, it was felt, could want to live in such a place, but as an institution of learning it was pretty much ideal. Peter had started to research its history. Last year he had signed a petition to save St. Pancras Station, and at Corley too he loved the polychrome brick and the fierce Gothic detail which were such an amusing challenge to more gracious notions of the English country house—though the rooms inside, which had been altered between