The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [123]
“Lithe?”
“Lithe,” said Dupont, waving the kukri sinuously in the air. “Just one little syllable, but you’ll find it takes as long to say it as glorious, which has three. Lithe … lithe …”
“For god’s sake be careful with that weapon, won’t you. It’s designed for chopping chaps’ heads off.”
“I am being careful, sir,” said Dupont, wounded into a blush. Since his removal from the music-room he’d been slightly wary of Peter, and seemed not to trust his own voice, with its weird octave leaps in the middle of a word. In a minute Peter came and looked over his shoulder at the wide blade: it was the angle in the middle that made the back of his thighs prickle.
“It’s a vicious-looking thing, Nigel …”
“Indeed it is, sir!” said Dupont, with a grateful glance. Strictly speaking, only prefects were addressed by their first names. He turned the kukri over, one side gleaming steel, the other a still dimly shiny blue-black. His fingers themselves were black from the wadding. “It’s perfectly balanced, you see, sir.” He held it tremblingly upright, one stained finger in the notch at the foot of the blade. It swung there, like a parrot on a perch.
There were a number of pictures to be hung, and Peter asked the boys where they should go. It was their Museum—surely Dupont’s idea, but loyally co-authored with Milsom 1; Peebles and one or two others were involved but had melted away once the hard work of cleaning out the stable and whitewashing the walls had begun. It was clear they just wanted to play with the exhibits. “Let’s hang the Headmaster’s mother,” said Peter, and saw the boys giggle and look at each other. He held up a gloomy canvas in a shiny gilt frame. “Very generous of the Headmaster to lend this, I feel, don’t you?” They all gazed at it in the state of comic uncertainty that Peter liked to create. A round-faced woman in a grey dress peered out as if in suppressed anxiety at having produced the Headmaster. “Where shall we put the late Mrs. Watson?” Horses had clearly been thought to need little light—just the half-door at the front, and one small window high up at the back. The overhead bulb in a tin shade left the upper walls in shadow. “Right up at the top, perhaps …?”
“Does that mean she’s dead, sir?” said Milsom.
“Alas, yes,” said Peter, with a certain firmness. There were some things they shouldn’t be encouraged to joke about—though her death was surely the reason she’d been unhooked at last from the Headmaster’s sitting-room wall.
“We do need more lights, sir,” said Dupont. He had ideas of using the Victorian oil-lamp lent by Hethersedge, but this was a hazard even Peter had drawn the line at.
“I know we do—I’ll have a word with Mr. Sands about it.”
“I feel we should put her in a prominent position, sir,” said Milsom.
Peter smiled down at him, with a moment’s conjecture about what lay ahead in life for such a respectful boy. “I feel you’re right,” he said, and climbed up to fix the old girl on the wall above the weapons cabinet. It was a central spot, though it turned out the edge of the lampshade threw everything above her chin into deep shadow. “Ah, well,” said Peter, rather imposing on the boys his own belief that it didn’t matter. They went to get on with their work, glancing up at her doubtfully from time to time.
Peter opened a cardboard box and picked out the framed photograph of Cecil Valance, huffed and then spat discreetly on the glass, and gave it a vigorous wipe with his handkerchief. Inside, between the glass and the mount, were many tiny black specks of harvesters, which had got in there and died perhaps decades ago. “Where shall we hang our handsome poet?” he said. “Our very own bard …”
“Oh, sir …,” said Milsom; and Dupont dropped the kukri and came over.
“Shall we put him here, sir, right above the desk?” he said.
“We could, couldn’t we?” The desk itself was an exhibit—part of a jumble of Victorian furniture and household objects, clothes-baskets, clothes-horses, coal-scuttles, that had been roughly