The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [114]
Peter went into the sun-baked music-room and flung open the window; there was a pleasant sally of cool morning air over the sill. With a few kicks and long-armed tweaks he straightened the two rows of wooden chairs on the brown linoleum. The room’s single adornment, above the blocked-off fireplace, was an oleograph of Brahms, “Presented by his Family in Memory of N. E. Harding 1938–53”; Peter sometimes tried to imagine the family deciding on this particular gift.
He set the Acorn Songbook on the stand of the upright piano and went quickly through today’s songs. Most of the boys couldn’t read music, so it was a matter of drumming and coaxing the tune into them by remorseless repetition. They paid no more attention to the words than they did with hymns. The words were a given: high-flown, old-fashioned, accepted with a childish mixture of respect and complete indifference. Now the bell rang, the whole school held its breath, and then let go in a babble and clatter that rose dimly upstairs from the floor below. Again the momentary and instantly mastered sense of dread. He started playing “Für Elise,” waiting for the noise beyond to particularize in the slap of sandals and knock at the door. He always let them catch him in mid-performance, and when he’d shouted “Come in!” he carried on playing, imposing a nice uncertainty on the class as to whether or not they could talk.
The piano was at right angles to the rows of boys, so he glanced at them along his left shoulder as he played. One day he meant to stun them with the Liszt Sonata, but for now he kept prudently to this simple piece, which some of the boys themselves played with Mrs. Keeping; he was nearer their level than he intended to admit. “Good morning,” he murmured, concentrating rather hard on the second section; one or two replied. The different forms had quite distinct atmospheres. He liked the Fifth Form, for their humour and ingenuity, and because it was clear that they liked him; sometimes the humour had to be kept in check. He stood up and looked at them, his frown as he went along the rows stirring odd gleams and doubts in their attentive faces. He was firm in suppressing any hint of favouritism, though he saw the flame of it rise expectantly in Dupont and Milsom 1.
“Well, my little song-birds,” said Peter, “I hope you’re all in the mood to make a din.”
“Yes, sir,” came a dutiful chorus.
“I asked you a question,” said Peter.
“Yes, sir!” came a lustier sound, breaking into giggles. Peter gazed round the room in deep abstraction, at last noticing the boys and raising his eyebrows in mild anxiety:
“I’m sorry … did you say something?”
“YES! SIR!” they shouted, the laughter at this awful old gag contained by an undeniable excitement. The sense of being free to give a wildly corny performance was one of the pleasures of teaching in a prep-school. A great innocence was there to be tapped, even in the surlier and spottier boys, the nocturnal students of Peyton Place. Peter glanced past them, through the open window, at the wide hazy vista of fields and woods. It would be horribly shaming if Chris or Charlie or any of his London friends saw him carrying on like this, but the fact was the boys loved it.
“Let’s have that in scales,” he said, going over and striking the A below middle C, and in his large unembarrassed baritone, crescendo: “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Sir!” So the boys sang it, climbing inexorably through the keys, in rapid repeated climaxes of assent that soon became mere yapping syllables.
Peter started them off with “The Saucy Arethusa,” “page thirty-seven as you must surely know by now …,” and as they were still finding the place he launched out