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By Root 1147 0

the hole, and towards the far end of the room this unexpected attic stretched away into complete darkness. It was perhaps two foot six high, the old dry timber smell confused with the rich smell of recent damp. “It’s hard to see,” said Peter. “Hold on …,” and moving slowly he felt for his lighter in his jacket pocket, brought it up to head height and thumbed the flint. “Ruddy thing …” Then he got it going and as he swept his arm in a slow arc they saw festive gleams and quickly swallowing shadows flow in and out of the little gilded domelets overhead. Between these there was shallow coffering, painted crimson and gold, and where the water had come through, bare laths and hanging fragments of horse-hair plaster. It seemed far from the architecture of everyday life, it was like finding a ruined pleasure palace, or burial chamber long since pillaged. Where the ceiling joined the nearest wall you could make out an ornate cornice, two gilded capitals and the murky apex of a large mirror.

“Don’t set the place on fire, will you,” said the Headmaster.

“I promise not to,” Peter said.

“Fire and flood in one week …,” the Headmaster complained.

Peter winked at Paul by lighter-light, gazed slyly at his prim little mouth, slightly open as he peered upwards. “I’ve worked out this used to be the dining-room, you see,” he said, the sound echoing secretively in the space. Then stooping down, “I was talking to the former Lady Valance about it the other night, Headmaster, she said it was her favourite room at Corley, with these absolutely marvellous jelly-mould domes.”

“I’m not happy about you being up there,” said the Headmaster.

“I’m sure she’d love to come and see it again.”

“Now, now, come on down.”

“We’re coming,” said Peter, squeezing Paul’s shoulder, and snapped the lighter shut. He wasn’t sure Paul was any more interested than the Headmaster himself. But the vision of the lost decoration, a glimpse of an uncharted further dimension of the house he was living in, was so stirring to him that it hardly mattered. It was a dream, a craze, put aside now almost ruefully in favour of his other craze, his bank-clerk friend.

“Well, good to have met you,” said the Headmaster as they went back into the hall. “And do bear in mind, if you want us to have your boy, put him down early: a number of OCs have been putting their boys down at birth—which is really the best advertisement a school can have.”

“Oh … well, um … putting them down?” said Paul—but the HM turned, and with a glance at his watch crossed to the huge hall table, an indestructible relic of the Valance days, snatched up the handbell which stood on it and rang it with implacable violence for ten seconds, as if repudiating by his stern management all the nonsense Peter had just been talking. And at once another old noise, high-pitched, echoing, with just a tinge of sadness for the lost silence, rose to life in the rooms beyond. Paul shivered, perhaps surprised by memory, and Peter pressed his hand in the small of his back as they moved towards the main stairs. Almost instantaneously, doors opened, and boys appeared in the hall. “Steady!” the Headmaster shouted wearily. “Don’t run,” and the boys curbed themselves and looked curiously at Paul as they went past. There was a strange atmosphere whenever someone from the outside world appeared in school, and Peter knew it would be talked about. He didn’t normally mind the lack of privacy, but for a moment it felt like being back at school himself. “Let’s get upstairs and have a drink,” he murmured, with a pleasant but unencouraging nod to Milsom 1 as he filed past, clutching his Bible.

“But what about Cecil?” said Paul, hanging back on the third or fourth stair, with a regretful look.

“Do you want to see him first? Okay, just a quick peek”—Peter smiling narrowly at him and wondering if perhaps Cecil wasn’t a codeword after all. He led him back down, and off through the arch into the glazed cloister that ran along the side of the house. Work had already been put up here for the art exhibition. He bumped into Paul, as he halted politely