The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [124]
“Do you think Cecil Valance might actually have written his poetry at this desk, sir?” said Milsom.
“I bet he did, sir,” said Dupont.
“Well, I suppose it’s possible …,” said Peter. “The early ones, perhaps—as you know, he wrote the later ones in France.”
“In the trenches, sir, of course.”
“That’s right. Though the handy thing about poems is you can write them wherever you happen to be.” Peter had been doing some of Valance’s work with the Fifth Form—not just the famous anthology pieces but other things from the Collected Poems that he’d found in the library, with the Stokes memoir. The boys had been tickled to read poems about their own school, and young enough not to see without prompting how bad most of them were.
Dupont was looking closely at the photograph. “Can we say when it was taken, sir?”
“Tricky, isn’t it?” There was just the gilt stamp of Elliott and Fry, Baker Street, on the blue-grey mount. Little evidence in the clothes—dark striped suit, wing-collar, soft silk tie with a gemmed tie-pin. He was in half-profile, looking down to the left. Dark wavy hair oiled back but springing up at the brow in a temperamental crest. Eyes of uncertain colour, large and slightly bulbous. Peter had called him handsome, not quite knowing what he meant. If you thought of Rupert Brooke, say, then Valance looked beady and hawkish; if you thought of Sean Connery or Elvis, he looked inbred, antique, a glinting specimen of a breed you rarely saw today. “He died very young, so he’s probably”—Peter didn’t say “about my age”—“in his early twenties.” Strange to think, if he’d lived, he’d have been the same age as Peter’s grandfather, who still played a round of golf a week, and loved jazz, if not quite “Jailhouse Rock.”
“Was he ever married, sir?” asked Milsom earnestly.
“I don’t believe he was,” said Peter, “no …” And climbing on to the desk he asked the boys to pass him the hammer, and drove a nail into the whitewashed wall.
AT THE STAFF-MEETING in the Headmaster’s sitting-room, the talk this week was all about Open Day. “So we’ll have the First XI against Templers, starting at 1:30. What’s the lookout there?”
“A walkover, Headmaster,” said Neil McAll.
The Headmaster smiled at him keenly for a moment, almost enviously. “Well done.”
“Well, Templers are a pretty feeble side,” said McAll drily, but not refusing the praise. “And I’d like to take a couple of extra nets this week, after prep …? Just to knock them into shape.” The Headmaster seemed ready to grant him anything. Peter glanced at McAll across the table, with uncertain feelings. Black-haired, blue-eyed, dressed in sports kit at improbable times of day, he was adored by many of the boys, and instinctively avoided by others. He breathed competition. In his two years at Corley Court, he was credited with dragging the school up from its long-term resting-place at the bottom of the Kennet League.
“Clean whites, of course, Matron?”
“I’ll do my best,” said Matron; “though by tenth week …”
“Well, see what you can do, will you.”
“I’m bringing the seniors’ bath night forward to Thursday,” said Matron, with an air of great strategy.
“Mm? Oh, I see, quite right,” said the HM, frowning over a slight blush. He consulted his list. “Any other activities …? Now, I see I have the Museum.”
“Ah, yes,” said Peter, surprised at how nervous the HM made him, the whole half-watchful, half-indifferent gathering of the staff. He looked across at John Dawes, the most avuncular of the masters, flicking his lighter for the third or fourth time over the bowl of his pipe; and Mike Rawlins beside him, deep in the systematic doodle with which each week he obliterated the roneoed order of business. They’d been sitting at these meetings for twenty years. “Yes, I think we’ll have something to show by Open Day. They’ve got some interesting things together, as well as some rather silly things. It won’t