‘Open the book,’ said Digby-Hunter. ‘Learn it.’
He left the window and returned to his desk. He sat down. ‘What d’you want, Wraggett?’ he said.
‘I think I’d better go to bed, sir.’
‘Bed? What’s the matter with you?’
‘There’s a pain in my neck, sir. At the back, sir. I can’t seem to see properly.’
Digby-Hunter regarded Wraggett with irritation and dislike. He made a noise with his lips. He stared at Wraggett. He said:
‘So you have lost your sight, Wraggett?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Why the damn hell are you bellyaching, then?’
‘I keep seeing double, sir. I feel a bit sick, sir.’
‘Are you malingering, Wraggett?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then why are you saying you can’t see?’
‘Sir –’
‘If you’re not malingering, get on with the work you’ve been set, boy. The French verb to drink, the future conditional tense?’
‘Je boive –’
‘You’re a cretin,’ shouted Digby-Hunter. ‘Get out of here at once.’
‘I’ve a pain, sir –’
‘Take your pain out with you, for God’s sake. Get down to some honest work, Wraggett. Marshalsea?’
‘If the two angles at the base of DEF,’ said Marshalsea, ‘are equal to the two angles at the base of ABC it means that the sides opposite the angles –’
His voice ceased abruptly. He closed his eyes. He felt the small fingers of Digby-Hunter briefly on his scalp before they grasped a clump of hair.
‘Open your eyes,’ said Digby-Hunter.
Marshalsea did so and saw pleasure in Digby-Hunter’s face.
‘You haven’t listened,’ said Digby-Hunter. His left hand pulled the hair, causing the boy to rise from his seat. His right hand moved slowly and then suddenly shot out, completing its journey, striking at Marshalsea’s jaw-bone. Digby-Hunter always used the side of his hand, Mr Beade the ball of the thumb.
‘Take two triangles, ABC and DEF,’ said Digby-Hunter. Again the edge of his right hand struck Marshalsea’s face and then, clenched into a fist, the hand struck repeatedly at Marshalsea’s stomach.
‘Take two triangles,’ whispered Marshalsea, ‘ABC and DEF.’
‘In which the angle ABC equals the angle DEF.’
‘In which the angle ABC equals the angle DEF.’
In her sleep Mrs Digby-Hunter heard a voice. She opened her eyes and saw a figure that might have been part of a dream. She closed her eyes again.
‘Mrs Digby-Hunter.’
A boy whose name escaped her stood looking down at her. There were so many boys coming and going for a term or two, then passing on: this one was thin and tall, with spectacles. He had an unhealthy look, she thought, and then she remembered his mother, who had an unhealthy look also, a Mrs Wraggett.
‘Mrs Digby-Hunter, I have a pain at the back of my neck.’
She blinked, looking at the boy. They’d do anything, her husband often said, in order to escape their studies, and although she sometimes felt sorry for them she quite understood that their studies must be completed since that was reason for their presence at Milton Grange. Still, the amount of work they had to do and their excessively long hours, half past eight until seven at night, caused her just occasionally to consider that she herself had been lucky to escape such pressures in her childhood. Every afternoon, immediately after lunch, all the boys set out with Mr Beade for a brisk walk, which was meant to be, in her husband’s parlance, twenty minutes of freshening up. There was naturally no time for games.
‘Mrs Digby-Hunter.’
The boy’s head was moving about in an eccentric manner. She tried to remember if she had noticed it doing that before, and decided she hadn’t. She’d have certainly noticed, for the movement made her dizzy. She reached beneath the deck-chair for the box of All Gold. She smiled at the boy. She said:
‘Would you like a chocolate, Wraggett?’
‘I feel sick, Mrs Digby-Hunter. I keep seeing double. I can’t seem to keep my head steady.’
‘You’d better tell the headmaster, old chap.’
He wasn’t a boy she’d ever cared for, any more than she’d ever cared for his mother. She smiled at him again, trying to make up for being unable to like either himself or his mother. Again she pushed the box of chocolates at him, nudging a coconut caramel out of its rectangular bed. She always left the coconut caramels and the blackcurrant boats: the boy was more than welcome to them.
‘I’ve told the headmaster, Mrs Digby-Hunter.’
‘Have you been studying too hard?’
‘No, Mrs Digby-Hunter.’
She withdrew her offer of chocolates, wondering how long he’d stand there waggling his head in the sunshine. He’d get into trouble if the loitering went on too long. She could say that she’d made him remain with her in order to hear further details about his pain, but there was naturally a limit to the amount of time he could hope to waste. She said:
‘I think, you know, you should buzz along now, Wraggett –’
‘Mrs Digby-Hunter –’
‘There’s a rule, you know: the headmaster must be informed when a boy is feeling under the weather. The headmaster comes to his own conclusions about who’s malingering and who’s not. When I was in charge of that side of things, Wraggett, the boys used to pull the wool over my eyes like nobody’s business. Well, I didn’t blame them, I’d have done the same myself. But the headmaster took another point of view. With a school like Milton Grange, every single second has a value of its own. Naturally, time can’t be wasted.’
‘They pull the hair out of your head,’ Wraggett cried, his voice suddenly shrill. ‘They hit you in a special way, so that it doesn’t bruise you. They drive their fists into your stomach.’
‘I think you should return to your classroom –’
‘They enjoy it,’ shouted Wraggett.
‘Go along now, old chap.’
‘Your husband half murdered me, Mrs Digby-Hunter.’
‘Now that simply isn’t true, Wraggett.’
‘Mr Beade hit Mitchell in the groin. With a ruler. He poked the end of the ruler –’
‘Be quiet, Wraggett.’
‘Mrs Digby-Hunter –’
‘Go along now, Wraggett.’ She spoke for the first time sharply, but when the boy began to move she changed her mind about her command and called him back. He and all the other boys, she explained with less sharpness in her voice, were at Milton Grange for a purpose. They came because they had idled at their preparatory schools, playing noughts and crosses in the back row of a classroom, giggling and disturbing everyone. They came to Milton Grange so that, after the skilled teaching of the headmaster and Mr Beade, they might succeed at an examination that would lead them to one of England’s great public schools. Corporal punishment was part of the curriculum at Milton Grange, and all parents were apprised of that fact. If boys continued to idle as they had idled in the past they would suffer corporal punishment so that, beneath its influence, they might reconsider their behaviour. ‘You understand, Wraggett?’ said Mrs Digby-Hunter in the end.
Wraggett went away, and Mrs Digby-Hunter felt pleased. The little speech she had made to him was one she had heard her husband making on other occasions. ‘We rap the occasional knuckle,’ he said to prospective parents. ‘Quite simply, we stand no nonsense.’
She was glad that it had come so easily to her to quote her husband, once again to come up to scratch as a wife. Boys who were malingering must naturally receive the occasional rap on the knuckles and her husband, over seventeen years, had proved that his ways were best. She remembered one time a woman coming and taking her son away on the grounds that the pace was too strenuous for him. As it happened, she had opened the door in answer to the woman’s summons and had heard the woman say she’d had a letter from her son and thought it better that he should be taken away. It turned out that the child had written hysterically. He had said that Milton Grange was run by lunatics and criminals. Mrs Digby-Hunter, hearing that, had smiled and had quietly inquired if she herself resembled either a lunatic or a criminal. The woman shook her head, but the boy, who had been placed in Milton Grange so that he might pass on to the King’s School in Canterbury, was taken away. ‘To stagnate’, her husband had predicted and she, knitting another pullover for him, had without much difficulty agreed.