‘Tell her to meet me, first night of term,’ Tottle’s message was. ‘Round by the carpentry hut. Seven.’
Tottle claimed that he had looked round and smiled at Margery in church. The third Sunday he’d done it she’d smiled back. Without any evidence to the contrary, Jonathan had denied that. ‘You bloody little tit,’ Tottle snapped, driving his fist further into Jonathan’s stomach, hurting him considerably.
Tottle was due to leave at the end of next term, but Jonathan guessed that after Tottle there would be someone else, and that soon there would be messages for Georgina as well as Margery, and later for Harriet. He wouldn’t have to be involved in that because he’d have left himself by then, but some other means of communication would be found, through Reene or Mrs Hodge or Hodge. Jonathan hated the thought of that; he hated his sisters being at the receiving end of dormitory coarseness. In the darkness there’d been guffaws when the unclothing of Reene by the piano master had been mooted – and sly tittering which he’d easily joined in himself. Not that he’d even believed Pomeroy when he said he’d seen them on the promenade. Pomeroy didn’t often tell the truth.
But it wasn’t the pursuit of his sisters that worried Jonathan most: it was what they would learn by the carpentry shed or in the seclusion of the hydrangeas. It stood to reason that their pursuers would let things slip. ‘Cuthbert’, Tottle would say, and Margery would laugh, saying she knew her father was called Cuthbert, Then, bit by bit, on similar occasions, all the rest of it would tumble out. You giggled when the Hen was imitated, the stutter she’d developed, her agitated playing with a forefinger. Cuthbert’s walk was imitated, his catchphrases concerning the older values repeated in self-important tones. ‘Bad taste’ another catchphrase was. When the pomposity was laid aside and severity took its place he punished ruthlessly, his own appointed source of justice. When the rules were broken he showed no mercy. Other people’s fathers were businessmen or doctors, Bakinghouse’s was a deep-sea salvage operator. No one mentioned what they were like; no one knew.
‘Margery,’ Jonathan said in the furniture-room when Georgina and Harriet were receiving tuition from their father. ‘Margery, do you know what a boy called Tottle looks like?’
Margery went pink. ‘Tottle?’ she said.
‘He’s one of the first three leading into church. There’s Reece and Greated, then usually Tottle.’
‘Yes, I know Tottle,’ Margery admitted, and Jonathan knew from her casual tone that what Tottle had said about Margery smiling back was true.
‘Tottle sent you a message,’ Jonathan said.
‘What kind of a message?’ She turned her head away, trying to get her face into the shadows.
‘He said to meet him by the carpentry shed next term. Seven O’clock the first evening.’
‘Blooming cheek!’
‘You won’t, will you, Margery? He made me promise I’d tell you, otherwise I wouldn’t have.’
‘Of course I won’t.’
‘Tottle’s not all that nice.’
‘He’s not bad-looking if he’s the one I’m thinking of.’
Jonathan didn’t say anything. Bakinghouse’s father might turn into some kind of predator when he was at the bottom of the sea, quite different from the person Bakinghouse knew. A businessman mightn’t be much liked by office people, but his family wouldn’t know that either.
‘Why d’you think Mummy’s so nervy, Margery?’
‘Nervy?’
‘You know what I mean.’
Margery nodded. She didn’t know why their mother was nervy, she said, sounding surprised. ‘When did Tottle give you the message, Jonathan?’
‘Two days before the end of term.’
Lying in bed the night before, he had made up his mind that he would pass the message on when Georgina and Harriet were occupied in one of the classrooms the next day. Best to get it over, he’d thought, and it was then that he began to wonder about their mother. He never had before and clearly Margery hadn’t either. He remembered someone saying that the Hen was probably the way she was because of Cuthbert. ‘Poor old Hen,’ a voice in the dorm had sympathized.
‘Don’t tell the others,’ Margery pleaded. ‘Please.’
‘Of course not.’
Their mother overheard things in the laundry-room when boys came for next week’s sheet and clean pyjamas, and in the hall when she gave out the milk. As someone once said, it was easy to forget the poor old Hen was there.
‘Don’t meet him, Margery.’
‘I told you I wouldn’t.’
‘Tottle’s got a thing on you.’
Again Margery reddened. She told her brother not to be silly. Else why would Tottle want to meet her by the carpentry shed? he replied; it stood to reason. Tottle wasn’t a prefect; he hadn’t been made a prefect even though he was one of the oldest boys in the school. Had he been a prefect he wouldn’t have been the third boy to enter the church on Sundays; he’d have led a battalion, as the five houses into which the school was divided were called. He wasn’t a prefect because the Headmaster didn’t consider him worthy and made no secret of the fact.
‘It’s nothing like that,’ Margery persisted.
Jonathan didn’t want to argue. He didn’t even want to think about Tottle now that the message had been delivered. He changed the conversation; he asked Margery about Miss Mole, one of the mistresses who taught her, and about whom Margery was sometimes funny. But he hardly listened when she told him. It hadn’t occurred to him before that Tottle was in some way attempting to avenge himself.
There was roast lamb for lunch. The Headmaster carved it. There was mint sauce, and carrots and mashed potatoes.
‘I think we learned a thing or two this morning,’ the Headmaster said, ‘I hope we can compliment ourselves on that.’
Was he as bad as they said? Jonathan wondered. It was ridiculous to say he was like Mussolini, yet it had been said. ‘Bully-boys are always a bit comic,’ a boy called Piercey had suggested. ‘Hitler. Mussolini. Cromwell. The Reverend Ian Paisley.’
‘Jonathan.’ His mother smiled at him, indicating that he should pass a dish to Harriet. By the end of the holidays she would be far less taut; that was always so. She and Mrs Hodge and Monica would launder blankets and clean the dormitory windows and polish the linoleum and wash down walls where it was necessary. Then all the beds had to be made and the dining-hall given a cleaning, the tables scrubbed and the serving range gone over with steel-wool. Hodge would clean the dining-hall windows because they were awkwardly placed. Crockery that had been broken during term would be replaced.
‘Sorry,’ Jonathan said, moving the dish of carrots towards his youngest sister. By the end of the holidays, though still subdued and jumpy, Mrs Arbuary would be more inclined to take part in mealtime conversation. Her hands would not quiver so much.
‘Mrs Salkind telephoned in the middle of our labours,’ the Headmaster reported. ‘Apparently the Salkinds are being posted abroad. Did you know this, Jonathan? Did Salkind say?’
Jonathan shook his head.
‘Apparently to Egypt. Some business thing.’
‘Did Mrs Salkind give notice?’ The hopeful note in his mother’s tone caught in Jonathan’s imagination. With a bit of luck all the other parents might give notice also. Again and again, that very afternoon, the telephone might ring and the news would be that father after father had been posted to distant parts. The school would close.
On the contrary,’ the Headmaster replied. ‘No, quite the contrary. Our Master Salkind will be flown back and forth at the expense of some manufacturing company. Heavy-duty vehicle springs, I believe it is, that pay the piper where Salkind senior is concerned. I recall correctly, Jonathan?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’
‘No cause for fear, old chap. Heavy-duty vehicle springs, if I am not wildly astray, once featured long in a conversation with the senior Salkind. Buses, lorries, military transports. Now, it seems, the good man is to instruct the Egyptians in their manufacture, or else to set up a factory, or generally to liaise. The good Mrs Salkind did not reveal.’