It's Murder at St. Basket's (5 page)

“
But
everybody
saw it. We have a thousand witnesses.”

“Well, I tried to mention that, but I didn't get a chance.” I changed the subject. “Anyhow, it wouldn't have mattered what I said, she wouldn't have believed me anyway.”

“Poor old David,” Margaret said. “Do you think they might have to amputate his leg?”

“I should think they might,” Plainfìeld said. “It might become infected, you know.”

“I didn't think he'd be able to sleep, the way he's hurting,” I said.

“Margaret had some aspirins,” Plainfield said. “We gave him some.”

“How many?”

“Four,” Margaret said. “That's all I had.”

“That seems like a lot,” I said. “You can get poisoned by aspirins.”

“Not possibly from four, I'm sure,” Plainfield said.

“Well, we don't know. We ought to be careful.”

“Perhaps we could get him some booze,” Margaret said. “My father always takes booze when he's sick.”

“Margaret, your father takes booze for everything,” Plainfield said. His parents and Margaret's know each other, from living near each other in Kent, which is one reason why they both ended up going to St. Basket's.

“I think that's right, though,” I said. “I remember in this history of the West I was reading, this cowboy broke his arm in a horse accident or something and it got all gangrene, and when they amputated it they gave him a lot of booze first so he wouldn't feel the pain.”

“It wouldn't hurt to try,” Leslie said. “I can't bear listening to him groaning all night.”

“Where can we get some booze?” I said.

“From Margaret's father,” Leslie said.

She got up off the bed and began slugging him in the shoulder. “Don't be rude, Leslie.”

“Hey, stop it, Margaret.”

“Don't be rude anymore.”

“Cut it out, Margaret,” I said. “I'm trying to worry about David.”

She stopped and we sat and thought for a while. “Well, listen,” I said finally, “what about one of you calling up your parents and telling them?”

“Oh, we couldn't do that,” Margaret said. “Miss Grime would never let us phone.” There was Margaret being nice and blindly following the rules again. “Margaret,” I said, “can't you
understan
d that you don't always have to do what people tell you?”

“Surely everybody should have respect for the rules.”

“In America the girls don't always obey if they think the rule is wrong. In America the girls are just as rebellious as the boys.”

“But this isn't America,” she said.

I couldn't argue with that, and besides we had a more important thing to worry about, which was that it
was
against the rules to use the telephone.

You weren't allowed to call your parents unless it was an emergency, like somebody was dying. Of course, this
was
an emergency, but Miss Grime didn't think so, and naturally she was the decider of emergencies. “We'd have to go down to South End Green and use the phone booth there.”

“We're not allowed to use call boxes, either.”

Leslie and I groaned. “We
know
that, Margaret,” Leslie said.

“I think you should call your father, Leslie,” I said.

He frowned. “Actually, I don't know what good my father could do. I don't suppose he'd believe us in preference to Miss Grime.”

“You're his son,” I said. “If you really beg and insist, he'd believe you, wouldn't he?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I should think he might.”

I could see that Leslie didn't really want to call his father. It was interfering with the bosses in the Establishment. “You sound like you're scared to call up your own father, Plainfield.”

He raised up one eyebrow. “Surely you're joking, Quincy.”

So that was decided. But it's pretty easy to decide you're going to do something, and not always so easy to actually do it. All around St. Basket's are these typical red brick houses, mostly three or four stories high—the kind they have everywhere in Hampstead. Hampstead High Street, where the main part of Hampstead is, is about a mile away across a section of the Heath, but down at the bottom of the hill St. Basket's is on there's a kind of little shopping district called South End Green, where there's the Hampstead Classic movie theatre, a few little restaurants, a couple of pubs and things like a newspaper store—which the English call a news agent's—and a dress shop and so forth.

There are also a couple of phone booths there, too, kind of like red sentry boxes. On
Sunday
afternoons, when we get to go out, we usually go down to South End Green and buy sweets, which is what the English call candy, or go into a tea shop for tea and some kind of cake. It sounds pretty boring, but when you've been cooped up in school all week it seems like an adventure.

We hated to wait until Sunday to call Plainfìeld's father. We didn't know what kind of a mess David Choudhry might be in by that time. But there wasn't anything else we could do.

Saturday is a pretty good day around St. Basket's. Sunday you have to get dressed up in your blazer and all that stuff, and walk up about a mile to church. It doesn't matter what religion you belong to, or even if you're religious at all, you have to go the Church of England, which is the official English religion.

But on Saturday we didn't have to do much, except, of course, clean up our rooms, which we never did anyway. So the first thing we did was bring David Choudhry some breakfast. Despite being in agony, he was pretty hungry, because he'd missed dinner the night before. Breakfast was the usual slop: two pieces of cold bacon, all the delicious ice cold toast you could eat, and a boiled egg. The English eat their eggs differently from us. They don't dump it out into a dish, but they knock off the top of the shell and scoop out the bites with a tiny spoon. It takes about a year to eat an egg that way. You have to set it into a little egg cup so it stands up, and before I got the hang of it I kept knocking it over so that the yolk leaked all over the table. It wasn't any great loss. You could always fill up on cold toast.

Anyway, we skipped the egg and just brought David a pile of cold toast and some milk. Mrs. Rabbit said, “The lad is supposed to come to meals, not ‘ave ‘is meals come to ‘im,” but she didn't really care.

Then we sat around trying to figure out what to do. The leg was pretty swollen. First we discussed putting it in traction, which I knew how to do from my first aid course at the Y. Of course I'd never actually done it, but at least they'd told me how.

“What's traction, Quincy?' David asked.

“You sort of pull the leg out with a rope or something, and then tie it up in a splint so it heals right.”

“Bloody hell,” David said.

“I can't help it, Choudhry, that's what you have to do. That's what the doctor would do.”

“But he'd give me anesthetic first.”

The
next idea we had was to wrap it up with something. That was Margaret's idea. “In battle pictures they always wrapped the legs of the wounded.”

Leslie and I groaned. “Don't be so stupid, Margaret,” Leslie said. “That's to keep it from bleeding.”

In the end, we didn't do anything. Being swollen and all, it hurt a lot just when David had a sheet lying on it. He didn't want anybody to touch it. “If I lie perfectly still and don't move, it doesn't hurt so much,” he said.

So we put Margaret's footstool down into the bed to make a kind of tent so the sheet would stay off his leg, gave him some more aspirin, and then Leslie and I went into the yard and kicked the football around— that's soccer, remember—until we'd got pretty covered with mud. Everything gets pretty muddy in England during the winter, because the ground doesn't freeze. You can get pretty slopped up playing football if you feel like it, and going to a place like St. Basket's makes you feel like getting slopped up pretty often.

At noon we fixed David some lunch, and just dribbled the day away doing nothing. He wasn't feeling any better at suppertime, and because he hadn't done anything to make him tired, he didn't feel much like going to sleep at bedtime. We let him keep his light on so he could read. I woke up at one o'clock for some reason and he was still reading, but when Leslie and I got up in the morning he was asleep with his light still on and his hand still holding his book.

The funny thing was, when we went to church Miss Grime didn't say, “Where's David Choudhry?” or anything like it at all. She just ignored the whole subject. And it made me feel that she knew more about what had happened to Choudhry than she was letting on. I mean, I didn't guess that Jaggers told her he'd slugged David with the hockey stick; I didn't think he would do that. But probably she had a pretty good idea of what had happened. And that confused me. Why not take Choudhry to see Corps-Deadly? I mean, what was the harm in that? She could always tell him that David had tripped or something when he was playing field hockey, and even if David said that Jaggers had hit him, nobody would believe him against Miss Grime. The whole thing didn't make much sense. During church I kept puzzling over it, so that I missed most of what was going on, which wasn't unusual for me, but I still couldn't come up with anything.

On Sunday, everybody in England has a big dinner of a roast, mashed potatoes and gravy and those pale white peas they like. Being big on traditions, we did it the same way at St.
Basket's,
too. On account of the roast, the masters usually managed to put up with our table manners on Sunday, and all came streaming up from the Magdala—the Mag, they always called it—which was the pub they usually went to. Not that we wanted them there—they hogged the conversation and cut down on the bun throwing.

So there they were—Jaggers and Shrimpton and Monsieur Pué, the French master, and Forsythe Groin-Fortesque, the art master. Shrimpton made Plainfield say grace, and then we began belting away at the food. We always load up at dinner on Sunday, because Mrs. Rabbit is off Sunday afternoon and all we get for supper is a real tea—tea and bread and jam.

When we put our heads up from grace Shrimpton looked around the table. “Where's Choudhry?” he said.

Nobody said anything. Jaggers just kept his face pointed down at his food and took a big mouthful of potatoes and gravy.

“Quincy, you Yankee sod, dash upstairs and inform Choudhry that his presence is requested at dinner.”

“He's not feeling well, Sir.”

“He's not feeling well? He'll be feeling a lot worse in a minute if he doesn't bloody well get down here. Push off, Quin—”

Groin-Fortesque nudged him in the ribs. Shrimpton looked around, puzzled. It was clear that nobody had clued him in. “What's the matter with Choudhry?” he said. “If he's ill, let's have that senile fraud, Corps-Deadly, look at him. Although for myself I'd rather die than permit Corps-Deadly to practice medicine on me.”

Nobody said anything. “Well?” he demanded.

Suddenly I blurted out, “Sir, he's got a broken—”

“He's got nothing of the kind,” Jaggers whipped in. He stared at me, his eyes narrowed and mean, and I knew he would have belted me half across the room if he'd dared. Then he made himself calm. “He sprained his ankle, Shrimpton. I've excused him from meals until it mends.”

CHAPTER
5

O
N
S
UNDAY AFTERNOON
we were allowed out from the end of dinner until five o'clock to see the sights of London. It gave us plenty of time to call Leslie's father. London isn't like New York or Chicago or, I guess, any other American cities, although I haven't been to them. It's made up of a lot of little sections all joined together. Once these sections were their own little towns, but London kept spreading out right over them, until they were all joined into one huge city. But they still kept the old names, so if you ask somebody where he lives he says Soho, which is where the artists go, or Camden Town, which is kind of a slum, and so forth. I mean, there aren't any borders between these different sections of London or anything, but most of them have their sort of shopping district and main street—the high street, they call it—and I guess each section has its own special thing. At least, the people who live there like to think so, anyway.

Actually, London is a pretty nice place in a lot of ways, if you discount the Limeys. Limey is an insulting term for an English person. It comes from limes, which English sailors used to eat to keep down the scurvy. The idea is that scurvy is caused by a vitamin deficiency, which the sailors got on long trips because all they ate was salt pork and hardtack. So finally somebody figured out about limes being full of vitamins, and the English got over the scurvy and went on to conquer the seas. I know that's right, because if there's anything you learn in England, it's about limes and scurvy. The first thing that anybody thinks when they write a book on England is to put in about limes and scurvy. Naturally you get it in all your classes, too. I guess practically the first word an English kid learns how to spell is scurvy. They even put it into the math books: you know, if it takes seven bushels of limes to cure four sailors of scurvy, how many bushels does it take to cure sixty? As far as any English school is concerned, it doesn't matter if you pass history or geography or anything else, so long as you pass limes and scurvy. It's limes and scurvy that counts.

Anyway, to get back on the track, London is really pretty nice to look at. There are parks everywhere, and because it rains a lot, the grass is fantastically green. The buildings are mostly low, so you don't feel crowded in and you can get the sun, at least when it shines. It's a heck of a lot cleaner than New York, too. There isn't so much smog and people don't fling papers and
garbage
on the streets the way they do in New York. Although the dogs are just as bad here.