Maxwell’s Reunion (2 page)

‘Nurse,’ the familiar voice said.

Maxwell rasped into the receiver, the best Mr Gruntfuttock he’d ever done.

‘No, she’s not,’ came the voice.

‘Not what?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Pregnant. Carly Turnball.’

‘I won’t have you speaking of my sixth form in that way, Matron,’ Maxwell scolded. ‘The girl’s name is Turn
bull
.’

‘Whatever,’ the nurse said. ‘She’s not pregnant.

‘Not the Holy Ghost, then?’

‘Not anybody, Max. Just the usual little bit of attention-seeking.’

‘Well, thank you, Sylv, that puts half the male population of Leighford’s minds at rest, I should think. At least, I’ve always assumed half the male population of Leighford have minds; for the rest, I’m not so sure. Now, to more pressing matters. Reunions.’

‘What?’

‘You know, gets-together, geriatric ups of the knee. Assorted chaps of the Old Pals’ Battalion who were once joined at the hip contacting each other after a century or so. Ever been to one?’

‘You’re talking about men, I assume?’

Maxwell was.

‘Don’t know. Is it a girlie thing, particularly? I did go to an old nursing one once. God, it was awful. All of us bitching about the ones who weren’t there and feeling really pissed off because Janet Chamberlain
had
caught that orthopaedic surgeon after all and could have bought the rest of us ten times over. Jesus, the knives were out that night.’

‘Sylvia Matthews, wash your mouth out!’ Maxwell scolded. ‘I didn’t know you had an envious bone in your body.’

Peter Maxwell really knew very little about Sylvia Matthews’ body. There was a time when she had minded about that. Minded because she had been in love with him. That was then. Before he’d met Jacquie and she’d met Guy. She still loved him in her way. It was the only way you could love Mad Max.

‘Well, I’ve been invited to one, Count – a reunion, that is. Any thoughts?’

The cat known as Metternich – the Count to the man who paid his vet bills – yawned ostentatiously. He was twelve pounds of black and white fur, about as lovable as anthrax with attitude.

‘Well, you say that,’ Maxwell wagged his finger at him, on the hand that wasn’t wrapped around his Southern Comfort, ‘but I’m not so sure.’ The two of them sat opposite each other in the lounge of 38 Columbine, the master sprawled in an armchair, Maxwell on the settee. ‘Listen again.’ He cleared his throat and read from the letter that had arrived that morning. ‘“Dear Maxie, you won’t remember me, but that isn’t the point. Thirty-five years ago we were the Magnificent Seven riding to do battle against the bandits of Ignorance and Indifference.” You know, I never remembered old Stenhouse being that poetic, not when we were at school. Oh, he won prizes, of course, but that was because nobody else entered the competition. Stenhouse, Count. It was a sort of joke. His name was Muir, you see, so it’s Stenhouse Muir, like in the football team over the border. You know …’ Maxwell caught the animal’s cold-killer eyes, the fixed mouth, the motionless whiskers. ‘Well, it’s all before your time, I expect.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Wonder what happened to old Queen of the South?’ His mind clicked back to the matter in hand. ‘But I digress. Old Stenhouse goes on. “Water under the bridge but now, shock, horror, they’re closing the old place down. That’s right, Halliards is to be no more. In fact, it’s already no more as a school. There are plans afoot to develop it as a conference centre or something similar, so before that happens, I’ve asked the trustees if we, the Class of ’63, can have one last sad wander over the place prior to a first-class piss-up at Graveney Manor.” God, I remember the Graveney, Count. I’d fallen head over heels for a girl called Prudence from Cranton, the girls’ school down the road. No, don’t laugh. I’d have thought you’d go for that – you know, Prudence Kitten? Ooh, of course, that’s before your time too, isn’t it?’

Metternich yawned again, before curling his leg over his left ear. He did this now and again to remind the old duffer whose territory he shared that he could do these things. Some nights, he’d noted, Maxwell couldn’t even make the stairs.

‘You see, there’s something about the halcyon days, Count.’ Maxwell tossed Muir’s letter aside and lolled back in his armchair, cradling his amber drink. ‘Something that says, “Leave them alone. Or perhaps they won’t be halcyon any more.” Whaddya think? Cranton, eh? God, those were the days.’

Whatever it was that Metternich thought, the great piebald beast wasn’t telling, not tonight. It was that hour of cocking tails and pricking whiskers, the hour the rodents rode in the Year of the Rat. He longed for the hunt, with the wind in his nostrils and his eyes pools of murder under the Columbine lamplight. To everything, Metternich knew, there was a season. A time to kill and a time to hunt, a time for every purpose under Heaven. He bounced off the armchair he’d made his own with years of kneading and pirouetted across the carpet to the staircase and the cat-flap, heading for the outer dark.

He hadn’t remembered the cedars being so bare. In his day, in the swinging sixties, they’d spread their mighty arms, it seemed to him, across the sky itself, cradling, and protecting. The Altar was still there, in the crisp, pale moon, and he ran his fingers over the words carved into the wood; worn now and crumbling, but he knew what they said. ‘Who spot the verb and stop the ball …’ There was a shiver and something dark ran over the pile of debris that filled the pool. He’d swum in that pool countless times, arcing through the chilled water in the house games days, chlorine burning his nostrils as he came up for air, the cheers deafening as his fingers touched tile at the end of the race. He looked up at the dark silhouette of the buildings, like an old, abandoned film set. The fives courts, still ringing with the thud of ball and the roar of the teams, tumbling over each other. The chapel with its sanctuary candle still glowing and a solitary treble voice intoning the Te Deum, lamenting all the souls who had passed. In Big School he knew, as he knew his tables, the litany of the fallen, the dead of two world wars; he had read them so many times: Archer, R.J., Royal Engineers; Atherton, F.O., Hampshire Regiment; Bannerman, S.L.T., Artists Rifles … How often had he run his eyes down the list while the chaplain droned on in a prayer from Michel Quoist, ‘Lord, I am a five- pound note …’

At the First Eleven Square he stopped, hearing again the faint click of leather on willow, saw the smiling schoolboy faces turn to sneers and applause to contempt. The wind was suddenly chill on the night air, rustling the cedars, creeping through the grass of early hours. He shouldn’t be here. But he’d always be here. He hadn’t been here for years. And yet he’d never left.

As he reached the edge of the field and heard his footsteps crunch on the gravel, he looked up to the great canopy with its turrets and its bell rope, like a black lance taut on its housings, piercing the moonlit clouds. His days of verb-spotting were over. It was time to stop the ball.

2

The weekend starts here. Peter Maxwell strode his narrow world like a colossus, barring the gate to the devious little herberts who consistently tried to sneak through the carpark. What bastard put the Head of Sixth Form on gate duty on a Friday afternoon? Peter Maxwell knew the answer – Bernard Ryan, destined to be a Deputy Head for ever. Maxwell knew. He was biding his time.

‘All right if I go through, Max?’ A bland, bespectacled face beamed at him above the half-lowered window. It had all the bonhomie of a basilisk.

Maxwell nodded. ‘Only because it’s you, Headmaster.’

James Diamond, BSc, MEd, was always flustered when his Head of Sixth Form called him Headmaster, and since Maxwell always did call him that, fluster was his usual state.

‘Charmless nerk,’ Maxwell muttered as the Head’s Peugot snarled out on to the road, only to have to screech to a halt a second later by order of Mrs Silliphant, the lollipop lady, she who had been thrown out of the SS for being too nasty.

Maxwell chuckled. ‘Sterling work, Silli. Ah, Gazza. Third Friday running, unless my memory is totally shot to hell.’

‘But I’ll miss my bus, sir,’ Gazza whined, hauling his backpack off his shoulder. He hadn’t seen Maxwell lurking by the shrubbery and he’d fancied his chances. He should really have known better.

‘Indeed you will,’ Maxwell nodded, ‘because now you’ll have to go all the way round, the way everybody else goes. That’s probably an extra three, maybe four minutes. You’ll probably miss a couple of buses in that time and have to walk all the way home, like we did in olden times. Life’s a learning curve, isn’t it?’

Gazza flounced off the way he’d come, longing to swear under his breath, but knowing better. Everybody knew that Mad Max had radar sensors for ears. Dave Bradshaw had called him a bastard once, from three hundred metres. They never saw him again.

The sound of her horn brought Maxwell from his flower-bed and he peered in through the open window. ‘Electric windows, Woman Policeman? Whatever next? The vote, perhaps?’

‘Sorry I’m late, Max.’

‘Not at all.’ He hauled his holdall from its hiding place behind the japonica and clambered in. ‘Gave me a chance to catch a few miscreants guilty of malfeasance.’

She reached across and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You say the most incomprehensible things,’ she said.

He looked at her in the Friday afternoon light. Jacquie Carpenter, detective constable. Early thirties, clever, bright, loyal, the only woman in his life. Her auburn hair cascaded over her shoulders and her grey eyes sparkled as he buckled himself in. ‘Now, are you sure about this?’ he asked again, as he had countless times over the past few days.

She slammed the Ka into gear. ‘Am I sure I want to spend my precious weekend with a crowd of boring old farts reminiscing about their pubescent stirrings in the dorm? No, I’m not. Am I sure I want to spend the weekend with you? Yes, I am. Besides, I’ve got a new frock.’

‘Ah, and by spending the weekend … you mean … ?’

Her smile was like the Giaconda’s. ‘Let’s see how it goes, Max.’

‘The letter did say spouses welcome,’ he reminded her.

‘And friends?’

‘Ouch!’ He pulled his finger away from her frosty aura.

She laughed, patting his leg. ‘We’ll see how it goes,’ she said. ‘Fill me in on them.’

‘Who?’

‘Your old buddies.’ Jacquie roared off through Leighford, past knots of Leighford Highenas making their way home, scattering chewing-gum wrappers in their wake and proving every known adage about the youth of today.

‘Gemma Hipcrest,’ Maxwell murmured, unwrapping his University scarf and settling himself down.

Jacquie frowned. ‘I thought you went to a boys’ school.’

‘I did,’ Maxwell said, ‘but that doesn’t prevent me from seeing Gemma Hipcrest at …’ He checked his watch. ‘… four-eighteen with a fag cradled in her less than reputable fingers.’

‘Max, you’re a bastard.’

‘True,’ the Head of Sixth Form said, ‘but a just one, I think you’ll find. Rather like Archbishop Temple of nobody’s blessed memory but mine. You see, in your capacity, you can arrest the little buggers. All I can do is make their lives hell on a daily basis for the seven years I have them in my clutches from eleven to eighteen. It’s just not the same. And the Headmaster’s Writ, for what it’s worth, covers behaviour to and from school. From the time the little bastards leave their front doors, we teachers are, God help us, in loco parentis.’ He leaned across to her. ‘Oh, you of little Latin,’ he chided softly. ‘It means “as mad as a parent”,’ and he winced as she hit him.

They purred north, looking for the Winchester bypass as the rush-hour traffic started to build.

‘Well, let’s see.’ Maxwell slid down in his seat, tilting the shapeless tweed hat over his eyes and folding his arms. ‘Of the old gang, the Magnificent Seven, there’s Cret Bingham. Always wanted to be a High Court judge. You can imagine the shock I had when there was a Lord Chief Justice of that name a little while ago – no relation, though, as it turned out. I bet Cret was well pissed off – that’s a phrase I learned from Gemma Hipcrest, by the way, along with “gagging for it” and “I’d rather eat Mr Holton’s shit”.’

‘Cret?’ Jacquie asked, diverting her concentration away from the interchange for long enough to read the Great Man’s face.

‘Don’t ask.’ Maxwell sighed. ‘They were different days. There was a chap in the Remove who was a Sikh or something. We all called him Woggie. He didn’t seem to mind.’

‘God, Max, we’d be looking at a roasting from the CRE today.’

‘Ah, dear girl, but I’m talking about the good old days, the swinging sixties. Enoch “Rivers of Blood” Powell and the Racists were top of the pops. You weren’t even a twinkle in your dear ol’ pappy’s eye. One could call a spade a spade. Good sound, though, your mum and dad.’

‘Hmm?’ She fell for it every time.

‘The Carpenters. Easy listening.’

She cuffed him round the ear with her gear-changing hand.

‘Then there was Quent – George Quentin. He made something of a fortune running the tuck shop. Not to mention Captain of Rugger, Captain of Cricket, Victor Ludorum. No …’ He leaned across again infuriatingly. ‘He wasn’t another chum. It means …’

‘I know what it means!’ she shrieked, pushing him away.

‘Quent swore he’d be a millionaire by the time he was twenty-three.’

‘Was he?’

‘Don’t know.’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘Come to think of it, I did see him interviewed on the telly a few years back. Dimbleby or Paxman, they’re all the same, talking money to the City whizz kids. He was one of them. Grey suit, glass of water, that sort of thing.’

‘So he made it, then?’

‘All power to his elbow. Then there was Stenhouse, the organizer of this little bashette.’

‘Shit, I’ve missed the turn,’ Jacquie muttered. ‘Never mind, I’ll take the next left.’

‘Andrew Muir, aka Stenhouse. Expected to run Fleet Street, press baron par excellence, you know the type; Rupert Murdoch by way of Lord Beaverbrook.’

‘How did he do?’

‘He does a few pieces for the
Mail
from time to time – makes Simon Heffer look like a pinko liberal. Funny thing was, he couldn’t string two words together at school. Christ knows how he won those prizes – bit like the Booker really. I ran the magazine.’