Maxwell’s Match (2 page)

Maxwell threw the arrival a cat nip mouse. The great piebald beast flicked an ear and padded upstairs for a quiet nap before resuming the hunt. He had no need of such artificial prophylactics. He’d call in to the kitchen for eats on the way out.

‘And when is all this happening?’ Jacquie settled back on Maxwell’s chest again.

‘Two weeks today. The Grimond bloke is coming down on the Sunday. I go up the same day. I imagine it’ll be sub-le Carré at the end; me and him being swapped back like spies on some windswept bridge.’

‘That’s assuming they want you back,’ she murmured and he pressed a cushion, lovingly, over her face.

2

It had to be said that Peter Maxwell was not cock-a-hoop with the idea, going into his place of work on the Sabbath. In the old days, when his hair was still chestnut and that nice Mr Bonar Law was at Number Ten, he had his own key to the door of Leighford High and came and went as he pleased. Many was the UCAS reference he’d scribbled in the dead of a Leighford night, huddled in coat and scarf against the Autumn cold, cocooned by the over-glassed, leaky box that some sixties architect considered ultra-chic.

Now it was all alarms and pre-set buttons, CCTV cameras and electronics beyond his comprehension. The kids of Year Eleven had taken a deputation, stirred up by Peter Maxwell, to the Headmaster, on the suspicion that there were secret cameras in the loos.

‘Not my idea, Betty,’ the Head of Sixth Form said again to the long-suffering caretaker Bert Martin. Ever a stranger to others’ susceptibilities, Maxwell called a spade a spade. Earlier generations of kids and most of the staff called Bert Martin ‘Doc’ after the boots. Maxwell called him ‘Betty’ after ‘All My Eye of a Yarn and Betty Martin’, but since he knew the Latin original and its meaning, everybody, including Bert Martin, thought it best to let it go.

‘What time’s he coming, then?’ Martin asked. ‘This whatsisface?’

‘Graham,’ Maxwell waited while the keeper rattled his keys. ‘Anthony. Don’t you hate people with Christian names for surnames? Causes endless confusion in my book. Thanks, Betty. I’ll be in my office.’

‘I’m not a bloody receptionist, you know,’ Martin reminded him.

‘Right,’ Maxwell winked at his man, clicking his teeth. He bounced up the wide stairs that led to the mezzanine floor.
Macbeth
’s posters still fluttered sadly in the post-production anticlimax. It hadn’t been too bad in the end, apart from everybody sniggering at the witches and Lady MacB drying up completely while washing her damned spots. Most of the comments were flattering enough. The
Leighford Advertiser
seemed to like it, allowing for the pre-pubescence of its editor. In the awful cold turkey of the after-show experience, both Donna and Tanya could be seen weeping buckets in the Sixth Form Common Room, along with Sanjit. Maxwell had risked his reputation and his career by putting an avuncular arm around both girls and they had sniffed their way to their lessons. With Sanjit he’d merely nodded wisely. It was a man thing.

The Head of Sixth Form hauled off his hat in front of the photograph of the Secretary of State for Education with a nauseating Legs Diamond smiling over her left shoulder and genuflected as well as a middle-aged man in a hurry could, before rounding the corner to his own inner sanctum.

He unlocked, banged on the kettle switch and threw his hat onto the desk.

‘Memos, memos everywhere,’ he murmured. ‘Christ, I need a drink.’ Around the walls of his magic den, the film posters that represented a quarter of his life stretched out in endless line. A tortured Victor McLaglen pointed a damning finger at him in
The Informer
; a distraught Vivien Leigh ran towards him from burning Atlanta in
Gone With the Wind
; Michael Caine stared blankly at him from behind his scenic shades in
The Ipcress File
almost mouthing the words ‘Hello, I’m an espionage expert’ and four terrified actors, wet and still hysterical, prayed to him in the roaring rapids in
Deliverance
.

The Spring Term. Maxwell stretched out on the low chair and closed his eyes. Why didn’t they stop all this nonsense of the wandering Easter, the moveable feast? It played merry Hamlet with his revision schedules and for the first time since the introduction of pay for teachers, he actually approved of a government initiative – the six term year. Well, he was a funny age.

‘Mr Maxwell?’ The Head of Sixth Form jerked his eyes open. God. Had he dropped off? The years clinging perilously to the chalk face had clearly taken their toll. ‘Your caretaker showed me up. Anthony Graham.’

‘Ah,’ Maxwell took the man’s hand. He was a rather cadaverous young man, like the corpse in the Death and the Maiden painting by Baldung, only with more hair. ‘My friends call me Max.’

‘Max. I’m Tony.’

‘This brown stuff is what passes for coffee at Leighford, Tony. Join me?’

‘Why not? It’s good of you to give up your Sunday.’

‘I live here anyway,’ Maxwell said. ‘How was the journey?’

‘Fine.’

‘You drove?’

‘Yes. I’m parked by the steps. Is that all right?’

‘Perfect.’ Maxwell rattled the mugs in his hunt for the school spoon. ‘Especially if you’re in the space marked “Head”. Tell me … Tony, are you happy about this? The exchange, I mean?’

‘Well … er …’

Both men laughed.

‘No,’ Maxwell broke the ice. ‘Me neither. Your Head a particularly deranged sort, is he?’

‘Off the wall. Yours?’

‘As a wagon-load of monkeys. Still, I suspect I’m getting the better deal.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, the food can’t be worse than Leighford, believe me. Word to the wise,’ he patted the side of his nose, ‘real people don’t eat quiche.’

Graham laughed again, taking Maxwell’s proffered seat. ‘That’s Jesus,’ he pointed to the Head of Sixth Form’s scarf, dangling from the door handle.

‘I’m impressed. Don’t tell me you’re a Cambridge man?’

‘Peterhouse.’

Maxwell’s face fell. ‘Ah, not quite, then. What did you read? Legs said you were a Housemaster.’

‘Legs?’

‘Diamond. You know, the gangster. Actually, anyone less like a smooth psychotic killing machine I can’t imagine.’

‘Well, I’m a linguist at heart. French with German. I’m not quite sure how I drifted into the pastoral bit.’

‘Ah, indeed. Drift is the right word for it. The Geographers use it a lot, don’t they? Tectonics or something. Seems to go with the vagueness of the subject. How’s the coffee?’

‘Fine,’ Graham smiled.

‘Liar,’ Maxwell growled.

Graham was taking in the room. ‘Now, don’t tell me you’re a film buff?’

‘I dabble.’ Maxwell was modesty itself.

‘Me too,’ Graham enthused. ‘You know, they ought to re-release
The Informer
. Wonderful stuff. We’ve got a film society at Grimond’s. You must go to one of their screenings. I never miss.’

‘Excellent,’ Maxwell said. ‘I will. Now, come on. Let me show you round the zenith of flat-topped sixties kitsch, over a school built for four hundred that now houses three times that. A learned institution where our Maths GCSE results have been known to reach double figures.’

Graham looked oddly at him.

‘Just kidding,’ Maxwell slapped the cadaver on the back and led him out to the harsh light of the mezzanine day. ‘They never have.’

The lights along the Shingle twinkled in the black-purple that stretched away from 38 Columbine. Maxwell was sitting in his swivel, the modelling chair in which he escaped from the cares of the 21st century. He’d cracked Eleven Zed’s explanation for British appeasement in the ’30s, resisting the urge to consign the lot to his wastebasket having smothered their books in red ink. Unable to face yet another explanation of the outbreak of plague in 1665 from Year Seven, he pushed their pile of books out of sight and trundled up to his attic, that Holy of Holies on top of the world where another quarter of his life stretched out under the lamplight.

Three-hundred-and-twenty-three plastic horsemen, immaculately modelled and painted, sat on their troop-horses patiently, waiting for word from the Sapoune Heights. On the desk in front of him, under the fixed magnifying lens, lay William Perkins, number three-hundred-and- twenty-four.

‘Trumpeter to you, Count,’ Maxwell said, although to be fair, the cat hadn’t asked.

The great beast was dozing, dreaming of the rat-haunted night and the crack of bones in his jaws. Why the idiot who provided the tinned stuff should closet himself up here with those weird bits of white he proceeded to stick together and change their colour, Metternich couldn’t imagine.

‘Hence, oh, bugger …’ the tiny bugle slipped from Maxwell’s fingers and vanished somewhere in the darkness of the carpet. Why, oh why had he bought a brown one? He joined the piece of plastic on the floor, patting the tufts in the blackness until he found it. ‘Oh, shit. Sharp, aren’t they,’ his crimson head bobbed up again. ‘Plastic bugles? As Perkins was in the 11
^th
, he’d have spent most of his time playing
Coburg
on this instrument.
Coburg
, Count, it’s the slow march of the 11
^th
Hussars, in honour of their Colonel, Prince Albert. Of Coburg. Get it? What do we know of Trumpeter Perkins, I hear you ask? Not a lot, really.’

Maxwell concentrated, frowning as he stuck the plastic bugle onto the plastic back. ‘He enlisted in 1846. Rode the Charge of course, hence his inclusion in the Diorama of Fame. Became a Trumpet-Major eventually. Lived in Forest Gate, Essex – well, I suppose somebody had to. Do you know …’

That black plastic thing shattered Metternich’s peace. The sharp, metallic ring it made always evoked the same response in his Master. Sure enough, as Metternich watched, Maxwell reached across and started talking into it. At least that made the ringing stop.

‘… he was a bog attendant at an underground lavvy somewhere in the City? Fancy that. War Office?’

‘Max. Sylv.’

‘Nursie, darling.’

‘Is this a good time?’

Maxwell laid Trumpeter Perkins down on his face to let his bugle dry. ‘Always a good time for you, Sylv.’

There had been a time when Sylvia Matthews’s heart would have leapt at those words. Now, it just gave her a warm glow. She’d loved Peter Maxwell once and loved him still in a way. But there was her Guy and his Jacquie and an ocean of ifs in between. It had been time for them both to move on. They had. But Sylvia was still Matron at Leighford High, the Florence Nightingale of the comprehensive system, patrolling the corridors with her lamp and Morning After pills.

‘Thought I’d fill you in on your swap-mate.’

‘Tony? You bitch, I’d thought you’d never ring. Do tell.’

‘Well, he seems very nice. Not at all the snob I thought he’d be. Into films, just like you.’

‘Now, Sylvia Matthews, wash your mouth out. Snob, indeed. There but for the grace of a careless job application thirty odd years ago …’

‘You’ve never taught in the Private Sector, have you, Max?’

‘Amazingly, no. The nearest I’ve come is a Grammar School. I’m looking forward to Grimond’s. The staff there will all be Oxbridge by way of MGS.’

‘MGS?’

‘Mighty great shitheads. You know the type.’

‘Well, Tony’s not like that.’

‘I’m sure he’s not,’ Maxwell reached across for his nightly tumbler of Southern Comfort, the amber nectar glowing in the half light. ‘Will he cope, do you think? At Leighford?’

‘Will he be doing any teaching?’

‘That’s up to Legs, I suppose. Can he, d’you think?’

‘Ten Bee Four might have him for elevenses,’ Sylvia was surmising, knowing her charges as well, if not better, than Maxwell. ‘Incidentally, while I remember, you won’t be seeing Michelle Whitmore for a while.’

‘Termination?’

‘Septic piercings.’

‘Ah, the curse of the artistically challenged. And don’t tell me where on her person; I haven’t long eaten. What of Private Tony?’

‘Bit of a mummy’s boy, I’d say. Daddy was a civil servant.’

‘Retired?’

‘Dead, I believe.’

‘Well, that’s the Civil Service for you.’

‘He’s got a way with him, though.’

Maxwell felt rather than heard the silence. ‘Oh?’

Sylvia could hear his eyebrow rising. ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Just a way he has of … oh, focussing, I suppose.’

‘Focussing?’ Maxwell repeated. ‘Come on, Sylv. I invented body language, remember? What are you talking about?’

‘Well, he looks at you. Listens. Really listens. You know Legs, how his eyes are always glancing everywhere else in case somebody more important is passing …’

‘You’re being unkind, Nurse Matthews,’ Maxwell scolded. ‘He’s put his personality down somewhere and can’t find it, that’s all.’

‘And Maurice Bell,’ Sylvia went on. ‘He’s always just staring at my cleavage.’

‘Oh, thank God,’ Maxwell patted his chest. ‘I thought it was just mine.’

‘Well, Tony really cares. Or if he doesn’t, he’s a bloody good actor. And ideas. He’s really full of them. I must admit, I’m a fan. He was very taken with you.’

‘Aw shucks!’ Maxwell rolled his head in the best Slim-Pickens-deep-South anyone was likely to see East of the Pecos. ‘I jest bet he says that to all the good ol’ boys.’

‘No, seriously. He said you’d fit like a hand in a glove at Grimond’s. Said you were larger than life. The sort of master he’d had at school.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Maxwell chuckled. He’d heard that before. ‘The vanishing breed.’

‘I told him the kids call you Mad Max.’

‘As well they might. Here I am, fifty-something, in the prime of my life, with another desperate round of GCSE and A-levels imminent and I’m going to waste my time doing … what? Buggered if I know.’

‘You’re going to enjoy yourself, Max,’ Sylvia told him. ‘Relax for a bit. You owe it to yourself.’

‘Sylv,’ he said. ‘I am feeling guilty.’

‘What about?’

‘Foisting Tony on you.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ she blustered. ‘It’s not so bad. It’s only for a fortnight.’

‘Keep me posted,’ Maxwell smiled and hung up, shaking his head. ‘Methinks, Count,’ he looked wryly at the cat, ‘the lady doth not protest nearly half enough.’

Maxwell said his farewells as dawn climbed behind Leighford abattoir, as it normally did about that time each Monday morning.