At 9.35, with the recurrent momentary dread and resolve that come with living by a timetable, Peter opened his door again and went out on to the landing. In the glance he gave back into his room he saw it as a stranger might, as an appalling mess. He went down one circuit of the main staircase, and set off along the broad first-floor corridor. The classrooms at Corley Court occupied six rooms on the ground floor, but the room with the piano was isolated, with the sick-bay, in the rambling far end of the floor above. Boys with temperatures or infectious diseases were harassed through the wall by ragged bursts of folksong or the torturous practice of scales. He passed the Headmaster’s sitting-room, which must once have been a principal bedroom of the house: its high Gothic oriel looked out down the axis of the formal gardens, which now survived only in photographs but had once been a dazzling floral maze. A melancholy fishpond at the centre of the lawn was all that was left.
Peter had got the Corley job in the middle of the year, after the clouded departure of a man called Holdsworth, and took to the house from the start, in part out of natural sympathy for something so widely abused. ‘A Victorian monstrosity’ was the smug routine phrase. He had heard a boy in the First Form opine that Corley Court was ‘a Victorian monstrosity, and one of the very worst’, with just the same humourless laugh the boy’s father must have used when describing the place. In fact, the house was perfect for a boarding-school – secluded, labyrinthine, faintly menacing, with its own tree-lined park now mown and marked out in pitches. No one, it was felt, could want to live in such a place, but as an institution of learning it was pretty much ideal. Peter had started to research its history. Last year he had signed a petition to save St Pancras Station, and at Corley too he loved the polychrome brick and the fierce Gothic detail which were such an amusing challenge to more gracious notions of the English country house – though the rooms inside, which had been altered between the wars, were disappointingly bright and inoffensive. Only the chapel, the library and the great oak staircase, with its shield-bearing wyverns on the newels, had completely escaped the hygienic clean-up of the 1920s. The library was useful as it was, and the chapel, a real High Victorian gem, was also the site of the school’s strangest feature, the white marble tomb of the poet Cecil Valance.
Peter went into the sun-baked music-room and flung open the window; there was a pleasant sally of cool morning air over the sill. With a few kicks and long-armed tweaks he straightened the two rows of wooden chairs on the brown linoleum. The room’s single adornment, above the blocked-off fireplace, was an oleograph of Brahms, ‘Presented by his Family in Memory of N. E. Harding 1938-53’; Peter sometimes tried to imagine the family deciding on this particular gift.
He set the Acorn Songbook on the stand of the upright piano and went quickly through today’s songs. Most of the boys couldn’t read music, so it was a matter of drumming and coaxing the tune into them by remorseless repetition. They paid no more attention to the words than they did with hymns. The words were a given: high-flown, old-fashioned, accepted with a childish mixture of respect and complete indifference. Now the bell rang, the whole school held its breath, and then let go in a babble and clatter that rose dimly upstairs from the floor below. Again the momentary and instantly mastered sense of dread. He started playing ‘Für Elise’, waiting for the noise beyond to particularize in the slap of sandals and knock at the door. He always let them catch him in mid-performance, and when he’d shouted ‘Come in!’ he carried on playing, imposing a nice uncertainty on the class as to whether or not they could talk.
The piano was at right angles to the rows of boys, so he glanced at them along his left shoulder as he played. One day he meant to stun them with the Liszt Sonata, but for now he kept prudently to this simple piece, which some of the boys themselves played with Mrs Keeping; he was nearer their level than he intended to admit. ‘Good morning,’ he murmured, concentrating rather hard on the second section; one or two replied. The different forms had quite distinct atmospheres. He liked the Fifth Form, for their humour and ingenuity, and because it was clear that they liked him; sometimes the humour had to be kept in check. He stood up and looked at them, his frown as he went along the rows stirring odd gleams and doubts in their attentive faces. He was firm in suppressing any hint of favouritism, though he saw the flame of it rise expectantly in Dupont and Milsom 1.
‘Well, my little song-birds,’ said Peter, ‘I hope you’re all in the mood to make a din.’
‘Yes, sir,’ came a dutiful chorus.
‘I asked you a question,’ said Peter.
‘Yes, sir!’ came a lustier sound, breaking into giggles. Peter gazed round the room in deep abstraction, at last noticing the boys and raising his eyebrows in mild anxiety:
‘I’m sorry… did you say something?’
‘YES! SIR!’ they shouted, the laughter at this awful old gag contained by an undeniable excitement. The sense of being free to give a wildly corny performance was one of the pleasures of teaching in a prep-school. A great innocence was there to be tapped, even in the surlier and spottier boys, the nocturnal students of Peyton Place. Peter glanced past them, through the open window, at the wide hazy vista of fields and woods. It would be horribly shaming if Chris or Charlie or any of his London friends saw him carrying on like this, but the fact was the boys loved it.
‘Let’s have that in scales,’ he said, going over and striking the A below middle C, and in his large unembarrassed baritone, crescendo: ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Sir!’ So the boys sang it, climbing inexorably through the keys, in rapid repeated climaxes of assent that soon became mere yapping syllables.
Peter started them off with ‘The Saucy Arethusa’, ‘page 37 as you must surely know by now…’ and as they were still finding the place he launched out with enormous relish on the first verse: ‘Come all ye jolly sailors bold, Whose hearts are cast in honour’s mould, While English glory I unfold’ – head shaking with the jolliness and boldness, chin tucked in for the gravelly descent on ‘English glory’, the risk of comedy brazened out: ‘Hurrah for the Arethusa!’ He felt he could sing to them all day. A hand was up, the feeble Peebles, as Colonel Sprague called him, had no book. ‘Well, share with Ackerley, use your nous,’ and then they were off. There was something Peter was expecting to happen, and he thought he would listen out for it and wait. For the moment he corrected nothing, the thing was to get them moving: ‘Not a sheet or a tack or a brace did she slack…’ They had sung the song every week this term and could belt it out with their strange uncaring glee; it was he himself, frowning over the piano, who sometimes forgot where they were and joined in furiously with the wrong words. ‘And now we’ve driven the foe ashore, Never to fight with Britons more’ – a reckless boast, overtaken in a moment by an immense bass crack in the air above the roof of the house, far away and right on top of them, so that the room shook and the piano itself gave out a faint jangling thrum. They broke off raggedly, then rushed to the window, but the plane was so far beyond them and moving so fast that they saw nothing. The great scientific fact seemed all the more eloquent and exemplary for that. On the back-drive below, the Headmaster too was standing and gazing at the sky over the tree-tops, his upper lip raised rodent-like as he squinted into the blue. ‘Come on, back to your places,’ said Peter carryingly, before the HM himself could do so; but in fact in the presence, or rather the immediate absence, of this sublime phenomenon, a minute’s mutual wonder seemed to be allowed.