The Floating Body (3 page)

At this reply I threw up my hands in despair and sent the boy scuttling back to his study, with a firm and strict command that he was to start doing his own prep for next week’s exam.

‘Sorry I’m late, Head Master,’ I said as I stepped into the drawing room in the Head Master’s house. ‘I had to deal with some boys in the quad.’

‘I quite understand, dear boy, I quite understand,’ muttered Dr Rogers, all the while, I was convinced, trying to remember who I was.

Dr Adrian Rogers was an impressive looking man: tall, with a distinguished face and high forehead surrounded by waves of white hair. He was like the Head Master from Central Casting. And his manner matched his appearance. A good deal of the success of Nesfield Cathedral School—and it was successful—came, I was certain, from the impression that Dr Rogers made on parents, benefactors and the board of governors.

I glanced around the room and saw that I was the last to arrive—all my fellow masters were already assembled and were scattered around the tastefully furnished drawing room, each one balancing a cup and saucer in his hand.

The Deputy Head and House Master, Gareth McKell, had not bothered to change out of his hiking clothes, but he had, at least, left his haversack and mud-caked climbing boots behind in his flat. Wearing such casual attire to the Head Master’s afternoon tea was something no one but McKell would dream of doing.

Next to him was our Classics Master, Henry Beard, with his grizzled, grey hair and his permanently bitter and unhappy expression. Beside him was the much younger Mathematics Master, Dave Fowler. Like me he was also a recent addition to the staff. He had red hair plastered with too much Brylcream, a rather smug expression, and what I always thought of as furtive, scheming eyes.

Sprawled in an armchair was History Master Geoffrey Douglas, the most totally relaxed and easy-going schoolmaster I had ever encountered. He sipped on his cup of tea with his lazy eyelids half closed.

And leaning against the back of that same armchair was our young Music Master and Choir Master, Ryan Carleton. He smiled at me and nodded as a signal to let me know he had passed on my excuses for my delayed arrival.

Our school nurse, Mary Flavell, had retired to a distant corner of the room, keeping in the background as she always did.

Dr Rogers’ wife, Brenda, was also in the room, supervising the maid and ensuring that everyone had a cup of tea and a scone with jam and cream.

‘How do you take your tea, Mr Morris?’ she asked me. ‘I know I’ve asked you before, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten.’

‘Black please, Mrs Rogers,’ I replied. ‘Black and very sweet. With a slice of lemon if you have one.’

Hearing his wife utter my name reminded our venerable Head Master of who I was and he turned to me with a gleam of recognition and an anxious look on his face.

‘I was just telling the others, Mr Morris,’ he said, ‘before you arrived, about the difficulty we find ourselves in with respect to our Speech Night. Which I need not remind you is only two weeks away.’

He seemed to think this was sufficient explanation and that I had now been brought fully up to date and was as completely informed as everyone else in the room.

‘What Dr Rogers means,’ volunteered Geoffrey Douglas, picking up the slack, ‘is that at the moment we seem to have a Speech Night without a guest speaker.’

‘What’s happened?’ I asked, sounding as puzzled as I looked. ‘I thought that chap, the geologist chappie—I’ve forgotten his name—was coming as guest speaker. You organised him, didn’t you, McKell?’

McKell nodded and took a sip of his tea.

‘What’s put a spanner in the works?’ I asked, turning back to Dr Rogers.

‘Mumps,’ growled the Head unhappily. ‘The wretched man has come down with mumps. His sense of timing is most unfortunate. We were just discussing,’ he said, waving his hand vaguely in my direction, ‘before your somewhat late arrival, whom we could get as a substitute at this very late notice.’

He looked around the room as if accusing every staff member of being part of a conspiracy to ruin this year’s School Speech Night.

‘So far,’ resumed Dr Rogers, ‘without success.’ Then his eyes lit up as he said, ‘You wouldn’t have an idea, would you, Mr Morris? For a substitute guest speaker, I mean?’

‘Well . . .’ I began cautiously as I took a sip of my tea. ‘There is one man.’

‘Go on, dear boy, go on,’ urged the Head.

‘I’m thinking of my old university tutor, C. S. Lewis. He’s very highly regarded at Oxford. His lectures on Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature are extremely popular and well attended. He’s certainly a good speaker—and he’s thought rather a lot about educational trends. I know that from my correspondence with him. So perhaps he would be suitable—if he is available.’

‘An Oxford man,’ said Dr Rogers, more to himself than the rest of room. He closed his eyes and rocked back on his heels deep in thought. ‘Yes, an Oxford man always goes down well with the parents, and with the governors. Yes, an Oxford don would be most acceptable. Which college is the fellow of?’

‘Magdalen,’ I replied.

‘Magdalen, Magdalen,’ muttered the Head approvingly. ‘Yes, a thoroughly sound college. A Magdalen man would be most acceptable. Might he come, do you think?’

‘I’ve always found him most agreeable,’ I said. ‘He’s helped me out of an awkward spot on previous occasions. I’m happy to write to him, if you wish.’

‘Oh, I do wish, I do indeed,’ urged Dr Rogers. ‘In fact, you must write to him this very afternoon. Do it quickly. Ensure it gets into the afternoon post. Indeed, when you’ve written your letter you must walk down to the post office in the town to get it into the mail at once.’

I wasn’t at all sure that Jack, as Lewis was known to all his friends, would be able to come—but I was happy to write the letter, and I was hoping he would accept. It would be a pleasure to see him again—and to engage in another of our ‘great wars’, our on-going debates about deep and serious matters.

As I was thinking these thoughts, the maid began clearing up the afternoon tea things, always the signal that it was time for us to leave. The masters straggled out of the room like a herd of cows following their well-worn tracks at milking time.

I was the last the leave because the Head tugged at my coat sleeve as I approached the door and said, ‘Be sure to write immediately, my dear boy. We need an answer as soon as possible.’

I agreed.

‘And in this afternoon’s post please,’ he added as he ushered me out of his drawing room, and out of his house.

My flat was on the ground floor of the terrace house in the cathedral close shared by the single men on the staff. I sat at a window looking out at the grassy slopes beyond the school grounds—slopes that fell gently down towards the River Ness, which strolled, rather than ran, in its slow, meandering way around the town.

Then I picked up my pen and began.

‘Dear Jack,’ I wrote, ‘thank you for your letter, and I apologise for not replying sooner. In fact, I feel guilty even now because I am pressed into writing at this moment to ask if a favour might be possible. You see, the school has a problem . . .’

In a page or so I spelled out the difficulty of the missing guest speaker for Speech Night. I gave him the date in question, knowing that it fell during the last week of Trinity term at Oxford, and expressed the hope that he might find a way to help us out.

I folded the page, sealed it into an envelope that I addressed and stamped, and left my flat. I had promised the Head I would walk into the town and post the letter immediately, and that was my plan.

As I descended the stairs, came out of the terrace house—the last one in the row—and started across the quad, I saw a few boys around the noticeboard in the archway leading to the Old School.

Two of them were writing on one of the notices. This I took to be a good sign—boys signing up for the trials for the cricket team, I hoped. So I walked across to see what fish I had caught with my notice.

As I approached I saw that two older boys—broad-shouldered, solid looking boys from the Upper Sixth, I assumed—were writing on the noticeboard and laughing unpleasantly as they did so. Drawing nearer I saw it was Conway and Wynyard, the two toughs I had intercepted in the company of young Stanhope earlier in the afternoon.

They completed their notations on the board and withdrew, still chuckling to each other in that same unpleasant manner.

Stepping up to the board I ran my eye down the list of the names of boys entered for the cricket trials. I saw Hamilton, Clifford, Redway and Cardew—and that pleased me very much. There were several other names of more marginal candidates and of some complete duffers whose hopes rose above their abilities. Then at the end of the list was the name ‘Stanhope’.

For a moment that puzzled me since Stanhope was no athlete and had little interest in games. In fact, all he could do in trying out for the cricket team would be to embarrass himself.

Then the penny dropped. It was not Stanhope who had entered his name—it was Conway and Wynyard. That was what they were up to when I saw them at the noticeboard. This was their revenge for their run-in with Stanhope. Their aim was to encourage him to make a fool of himself in the nets in front of the rest of the school.

I dismissed this as grubby schoolboys with limited imaginations pursuing pointless feuds, and went on my way.

Crossing the cobblestoned quad towards the gate leading out of the close and onto the town high street, I passed the windows of the House Master’s flat. The electric lamps were lit within, spreading a warm yellow glow in the cool evening light and making the front room of McKell’s flat look like a stage set.

As I looked in I saw McKell open a large cupboard and place inside his hiking boots—the same hiking boots I had seen slung over his shoulder upon his return earlier in the afternoon. What was surprising was that the boots were still filthy. The spikes on the boots could be seen quite clearly, even from where I stood in the quad, to be thickly caked with clay and dried mud.

‘How lazy,’ I muttered to myself. I would not have put McKell down as the type who would pack his boots away without cleaning them first.

I must have been staring because at that moment Muriel McKell, the Deputy’s sister who kept house for him—McKell being a single man—entered the room. She looked out of the window straight at me. An indescribable look flashed across her already sour face—she was even less friendly than her brother—and she strode purposefully across the room and pulled the curtains closed over the windows.

I felt a little uncomfortable. I had been seen apparently spying into another master’s flat. But it was hardly my fault, was it? If he left the curtains open and the room was lit, then he was almost painting a picture in the purple shadows of the twilight that had begun to fall.

Shrugging my shoulders I told myself I had nothing to feel guilty about, walked out of the gate and down the high street.

The post office was in the middle of the town, at the bottom of the gentle slope of the high street, in between Jarrett Brothers’ Jewellery and a pub called
The Pelican
.

It was
The Pelican
that I visited having slipped the letter into the red post box. In the pub I had a pint and a friendly game of darts with a couple of locals, then headed back up the high street towards Nesfield Cathedral and the cathedral close and school that lay behind it.

I was back in time to take my place, with the other masters, at the head table in the school dining hall. It was Thursday night, and Thursday meant ham, potato and peas. The menu was entirely predictable and never varied.

When dinner was over and the boys had been dismissed to go back to their study cubicles for their evening prep, I did my rounds of the school before returning to my own flat.

Under the archway leading into the Old School I paused once again at the noticeboard to see if any new names had been added to the list for the cricket trials. There were no new names, but there had been a change—Stanhope’s name had been crossed out, and then had been written in again on a fresh line.

What had happened was obvious: on his way to the dining hall Stanhope saw that his name had been put on the list as a joke. He crossed it out. But then, I assumed, Conway and Wynyard had returned and written it up again.

Completely unamused by these schoolboy japes, I retired for the night.

Jack’s answer to my letter arrived quickly: yes, he could manage a visit, and he would be happy to come as guest speaker for the School Speech Night. ‘My current course of lectures has now been completed,’ he wrote. ‘Bennett has agreed to take my pupils for that last week in term, and I have a few ideas about education that I’d be happy to air. So I look forward to seeing you again, and joining battle once more over a worthy subject. Is it permissible to bring Warnie along to keep me company?’

I hurried, clutching Jack’s letter in my hand, to the Head Master’s study.

‘Good news, Head Master,’ I said. ‘My old Oxford tutor has agreed, despite the short notice, to be our guest speaker at the School Speech Night.’

‘Splendid, simply splendid!’ cried the Head at hearing this news. ‘Well done, young . . .’

And at that point he ran out of steam, having forgotten my name once more.

‘Morris,’ I said, filling the blank, ‘Tom Morris.’

‘Of course, of course! You don’t imagine I’d forgotten your name, do you? Certainly not. I was just breathless at the good news. Now tell me some more about this Oxford man who is coming to be our guest speaker.’

‘Lewis is his name, sir—C. S. Lewis, a fellow of Magdalen College and a university lecturer in the School of English Language and Literature.’

‘Splendid,’ said Dr Rogers once more, rubbing his hands together in delight. ‘That will look fine upon our printed programs for the night.’

‘He did ask me if he might bring his brother with him,’ I added, ‘for company. His brother is Major Warren Lewis, ex-British Army, retired.’

‘Most certainly. They will both be welcome. The dean has two spare rooms in his house, and I’m sure Cowper and his good wife will be happy to accommodate them there.’