The Floating Body (18 page)

The cat’s name was Alfred—short for Alfred the Great. This name was bestowed upon him in recognition of his gigantic size. Alfred was pampered—and, more significantly, fed—by the Dean and his wife (the theoretical owners of the feline) as well as by the staff in the school kitchen and most of the boys. The result was a cat that waddled even when it slinked.

I won’t say that Alfred was the fattest cat in Christendom, but he would certainly have been in the running for the title. In fact, any halfway decent bookie would have given good odds on his winning.

Alfred was a cat with secrets. He certainly believed himself to be vastly superior to the mere humans that surrounded him. I always thought it was a pity cats don’t have eyebrows, since that would have allowed Alfred to look sarcastically at the rest of us from behind lowered eyebrows.

And there he was, slinking, in a wobbling sort of way, in the direction of the town, probably, I thought, intending a bohemian night of debauchery interspersed with occasional fights which Alfred—as the heavyweight in the scrap—would easily win.

I was standing in the shadows in front of the Head Master’s house as these thoughts trickled idly through my mind. They were interrupted by a slight noise from the far side of the quad.

I turned and stared into the purple shadows, looking for any sign of movement. I kept very still and very quiet for what felt like half a lifetime. And then I was rewarded. I saw a dark figure move cautiously in front of the dorm building opposite, slinking in front of the windows; slinking not with an Alfred-like waddle, but in a sleek and surreptitious way.

At least, this is what I imagined I saw.

The moon and clouds were not really helping much at that point, the moon having faded as if its batteries were running down, and the little illumination it provided being obscured by patches of cloud, rather like gloved fingers covering a lantern.

Then there was another sound. It was not much of a sound—merely the scraping of leather on cobblestones—but it was enough.

Rather than reveal myself by walking boldly across the intervening space and demanding ‘Who’s there?’, I decided to embark on an undercover operation.

Keeping close to the buildings, in the deepest and darkest of the shadows, I began moving cautiously in the direction of the scraping sound and shadowy movement opposite.

As I moved I lifted my feet and employed the ‘cat-like tread’ so well described by Mr Gilbert.

I reached the place where I thought there had been an intruder and found—nothing.

But I was certain that someone had been there and I had just missed them. I was standing quite close to the windows of McKell’s flat. Perhaps, I reasoned, the intruder (or intruders—could there have been more than one?) had avoided me by slipping into the building.

I followed.

The corridors of the dormitory building were brightly enough lit and I blinked as I stepped in out of the dark. A quick patrol back and forth showed the ground floor to still be completely deserted. Then I checked out the floor above.

Which is how I came across a closed study door (odd—I thought I had opened all the study doors a short time before) with the sound of whispered voices coming from behind it.

Stepping forward silently, I stood and listened, trying to pick up the thrust of the indistinct conversation. But the conspirators were speaking far too softly for this to be possible.

At one point I thought I heard the word ‘paper’ but nothing else.

So I pushed the door open and discovered—huddled in secret conference—the odious Conway and Wynyard.

‘What are you two doing here?’ I demanded ferociously.

Their mouths opened, flapped a bit and then fell silent without uttering a syllable.

‘You both know where you should be—in the cathedral. I’ll speak to you about your punishment tomorrow. In the meantime, get a move on. Now!’

I almost barked the final word, and Conway and Wynyard stood up and took off like a pair of startled rabbits who’d just heard the local poacher loading his shotgun.

I looked around the deserted study they had left behind. Was there any clue here to what devious plan they might be plotting? I could see nothing but a jumble of untidy school books and half-completed assignments.

I could hear their footsteps clattering hurriedly down the stone staircase. I followed them, still deep in thought. Had it been these two I had caught a possible glimpse of in the cathedral close—suspiciously close to the windows of McKell’s flat? If so, what had they been up to? Had I come across them at the beginning or end of their scheme?

And what had that whispered conversation meant? What ‘paper’ had they been talking about? And where had they been when I’d conducted my main search of the school buildings?

It was with a head full of questions rather than answers that I hurried out of the building, intent on taking my assigned seat in the cathedral.

I caught up with Conway and Wynyard at the foot of the stairs and marched them across the darkened quad.

‘What were you two talking about in there?’ I asked. ‘I heard the word “paper” mentioned—what paper?’

Conway and Wynyard looked at each, and I realised I was not about to get the truth. It was the glance of co-conspirators desperately trying to work out where to go with this.

‘It was a piece of paper, sir,’ said Wynyard.

‘Yes, I’d worked out that much,’ I responded sarcastically.

‘It was a paper that . . . that had . . .’ mumbled Conway, trying to extemporise inventively, ‘. . . that had . . .’

‘His sister’s address on it,’ offered Wynyard with a stroke of inspiration.

‘I see,’ I said, coming to a halt and putting my hands on my hips. ‘You wanted to write to your sister and you’d forgotten your own address, is that it?’

‘Yes, sir . . . I mean, no, sir . . .’ Conway fumbled, failing to catch the ball that had been flicked to him.

‘It was his married sister, sir. He had her new address on a piece of paper,’ volunteered Wynyard, his brain working a little faster than his colleague’s.

‘That’s right, sir,’ yelped Conway, gleefully seizing the rope that had been flung to him. ‘My married sister, sir. Her new address, sir. And I’d lost it somewhere in the study. And we were looking for it, sir. So I could write her a letter, sir.’

‘About what?’

This produced a blank stare, and then a jumble of words, ‘Oh, just about . . . well, school . . . and what I’d been doing . . . and that sort of thing, sir.’

‘When you were supposed to be in the cathedral for Speech Night?’

This reminder generated no reply but made both Bounders pick up their pace and hurry into the cathedral.

Wynyard mumbled, ‘We’re late, sir,’ over his shoulder as they fled.

I went in after them.

As I took my seat—at the back so as not to disturb anyone—the Head Master was just introducing Jack.

‘As I’m sure many of you will know,’ he was saying, ‘Mr Lewis is one of the most distinguished scholars of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Oxford University. We are most fortunate to have him with us tonight. And I call upon Mr Lewis to deliver his talk, which, he tells me, is entitled “Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools”. Mr Lewis . . .’

There was a polite rattle of applause as Jack stepped up to the lectern.

As always Jack seized his audience’s attention at once and kept it with the vigorous rumble of his voice, his carefully chosen words and the intelligent gleam in his eye.

For me it was a delight to be hearing Oxford’s best lecturer once again. For a moment I drifted away as I realised how much I’d missed hearing Jack speak to an audience like this. Then I shook myself into consciousness again, to focus on what he was saying.

And it turned out to be about Natural Law—those basic moral principles knowable by all people, and written upon all hearts. With great clarity, and with common sense, he defended the existence of an objective moral code that applies at all times, in all places and in all cultures.

He supported this by quoting not only from the Ancient thinkers Plato and Aristotle, and the Christian thinkers Augustine and Aquinas, but also from eastern thinkers such as Confucius and the sages of Hinduism.

He spelled out the common thread that ran through them all—the thread that used common sense and uncommon wisdom to draw upon the same universal, objective moral code.

Then he took deadly aim at some of the English textbooks used in the upper forms of our schools. These, he said, often set out to undermine the objective, universal morality of the Natural Law.

As he spoke I remembered a philosophy lecture I’d heard at Oxford, promoting a concept called ‘emotivism’—the idea that all moral statements were just expressions of an emotion. Praising something as morally good, or condemning it as morally bad, is nothing more—said the lecturer on that occasion—than a grunt of pleasure or a growl of pain. There was no rational content to any moral utterance, he told us. This struck me as an odd, and possibly dangerous, idea at the time.

Jack hammered home his case that moral relativism is, in the end, self-defeating. The moral relativist can never protest to the friend who lies to him or cheats him that such actions are ‘morally wrong’ since he has reduced all moral judgments to mere subjective sentiments.

Then Jack targeted the textbooks that taught exactly these ideas. These books, in sly and suggestive ways, he said, were debunking objective moral virtues such as courage and honour as nothing more than meaningless sentiments that may change from time to time and from culture to culture.

The damage this does to the younger generation was Jack’s real concern. These destructive textbooks fail the purpose of education, he said, because they fail to link the great timeless moral virtues to those proper emotions, found in great literature, that will encourage the younger generation to resist their base appetites and take responsibility for each other and for preserving what is best in human society.

The result, Jack suggested, would be a civilisation that had ceased to be a flourishing, growing garden and had become instead a bunch of cut flowers on display in a vase. Cut off from the soil that nourishes them, flowers will eventually wither and die—and that, he said, is what will happen to our civilisation if we cut off the virtues of decent living from the soil of Natural Law out of which such virtues grow.

The result would be a new generation from which we could never demand—or expect—decent civilised behaviour.

Teaching moral relativism makes moral behaviour impossible.

It would be like, he said, castrating a ram—turning it into what sheep farmers call a ‘wether’—and then sending it into a field full of ewes and telling it to breed. Without an objective moral foundation, the virtues of decent living become barren and die.

Hinting, I thought, at the rising shadow of Hitler in Germany, Jack said that, without timeless morality and objective truth, everything is reduced to a struggle for power. We end up in Hobbes’ famous ‘state of nature’ where the powerful rule over, and exploit, the powerless. And in such a state, as Hobbes said, ‘the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.

Jack concluded that we must stop using textbooks in the senior school that claim to ‘explain away’ all our rational moral instincts. Such ‘explaining away’ ends with nothing left to explain, and with the whole notion of explanation becoming a hollow mockery.

As Jack sat down, applause rippled across the building. Looking at the faces of our senior boys, I thought they looked interested and startled by what they’d just heard. Their parents, however, tended to look more puzzled than anything else—interested but puzzled. Perhaps, I thought, they’d get their sons to explain it to them later.

Various votes of thanks followed, and the evening concluded with us all rising to sing the national anthem. I was pleased to discover that during my sweep of the school buildings I had missed the whole of the dreary presentation-of-prizes part of the evening.

The official party on the platform processed out, leaving the rest of us free to rise from our pews and start the slow shuffle to the doors.

I eased my way through the crowd of parents and hurried forward to take charge of the junior school. I kept them seated until most of the cathedral had cleared and then mustered them out into the quad. Here I lined them up, counted them off and sent them back to their dorms.

As the juniors made their way to their staircase, I turned around and saw the Famous Four emerging from the cathedral. I caught their eye and called them over.

‘Something more on the Conway and Wynyard front,’ I told them. I explained that I had caught those two rotters cutting Speech Night, slinking around and whispering about some ‘paper’ or other.

‘My concern,’ I explained, ‘is that those two have somehow got their hands on the term paper that they—and all the middle school—will be examined on next week.’

‘How can we help, sir?’ asked Hamilton.

‘Keep an eye open for what they’re up to,’ I replied.

Little Cardew leaped in to say, ‘We’re already doing that, sir.’

‘Yes, I know you are, and I appreciate it. But now you need to step up the surveillance. Watch those two like a hawk—or, rather, like four hawks.’

They all agreed enthusiastically, and as Hamilton, Clifford, Redway and Cardew walked off, I could hear them planning a roster between them for keeping watch.

The next morning, between second and third schools, I made my way to the Senior Common Room for a cup of tea. I was surprised to find Detective Inspector Locke and Sergeant Drake waiting for me, and with them, Jack and Warnie.

‘Good morning, inspector,’ I said, ‘what are you doing here?’ Sounding, I thought, like a bit of bad dialogue from one of those BBC radio plays.

‘Ah, Mr Morris,’ responded the policeman, ‘just the man we were waiting for.’ With these words he patted a brown paper parcel he had tucked under his arm and said, ‘I’d like an opportunity to talk to you and Mr Lewis in private about this—if you can spare the time?’