The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [147]
“Is it all right if I show Paul round a bit, Headmaster?”
The HM seemed to welcome the idea. “Keep out of prep, if you can. You’ll want to see the chapel. And the library. Actually,” he said, with a glance at the window, practical and proprietary, as if regretting he couldn’t join them, “it’s not a bad evening for a hike round the Park.”
“There’s a thought,” said Peter, with a deadpan stare at Paul.
“Get out on the Upper Tads! Get into the woods! What …!”
“Well, we could …” The old fool seemed to be chasing them into each other’s arms.
“Now, I’m just going to check on the repairs,” he said, moving away towards the door of the Fifth Form.
“Well, I rather want Paul to see that too, if that’s all right,” said Peter.
“Most unfortunate, just before our Open Day,” the HM continued in a confidential tone to Paul. He opened the left half of the double door and peered in in his brusquely suspicious way. “Well, they’ve made some progress”—allowing Paul and Peter to follow him into the room, where instead of the bowed heads of boys doing prep they found the tables pushed back against the walls, sacks of rubble, and at the far end, above an improvised scaffold of ladders and planks, a large ragged hole in the ceiling. There was a smell of damp, and a layer of gritty dust over every surface. During Musical Appreciation on Tuesday evening, Matron’s bath had overflowed, the water finding its way down through the old ceiling beneath, where it must have built up for a while above the suspended 1920s ceiling before dripping, and pouring, and then crashing down excitingly in a mass of plaster on to a desk that the boys had only just vacated. The programme was still on the blackboard, in Peter’s famous handwriting, Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra and the William Tell overture, which had barely hit its stride when the first warm splat of water hit Phillipson’s neck.
“Have you had a chance to admire the original ceiling, Headmaster?” said Peter, unsure if he meant to amuse him or annoy him.
“My whole concern,” said the Headmaster, with that snuffling frankness that was his nearest shot at humour, “has been to get the thing patched up by Saturday!”
Peter scrunched his way among the herded chairs, Paul following, perhaps unsure of the seriousness of the event, peering around with a half-smile in the little primitive shock of being back in a classroom. “Matron must be mortified,” Peter said, attributing finer feelings to her than she had given vent to at the time. He climbed up one of the A-shaped ladders supporting the platform Mr. Sands and his son had been working from. “I’ve taken some photographs for the archives, by the way, Headmaster,” he said, looking down with a precarious sense of advantage. The archives were a purely imaginary resource that the HM none the less wouldn’t want to deny. He and Paul gazed up at him with the usual mingled concern and impatience of the earthbound. “It’ll be wonderful if we can open up the whole thing.”
“I advise you to make the most of it now,” said the Headmaster. “It’s the last chance you’ll ever get.” And again he glanced with a rough suspicion of humour at Paul.
“Perhaps we could open it all up during the long vac?”
The Headmaster grunted, drawn against his will into a slightly undignified game. “When Sir Dudley Valance covered it up he knew exactly what he was doing.”
But Peter got Paul to climb up too, the planks jumping and yielding under their joint weight, and gripped his arm with insouciant firmness as they raised their heads and peered into the shadowy space between one ceiling and another. Their shoulders blocked most of the light through