day of one horrendous week Adrian had collected single cube calls from Sargent for absurd minor offences: whistling in his study during prep; having his hands in his pockets while watching a match; failing to cap a retired schoolmaster who had been walking down the High Street and whom Adrian had never even had pointed out to him before as a cappable entity. On each of Sargent's cube calls that particular week Purely's had been the name listed. On the fifth day Adrian had sidled apologetically into Purdy's cube to find it empty.
'The bird had flown, my old love,' he had tried to explain to Sargent when returning his unsigned chit. 'But I did abstract Purdy's sponge-bag from his bedside, just to prove that I was in his cube.'
That afternoon Sargent and Purdy had fought each other on the Upper. After that Adrian was left alone.
Of course prefects could do each other favours as well.
'Oh Hancock, there's a not-half scrummy scrum-half in your Colts Fifteen, what's his name?'
'What, Yelland you mean?'
'That's the one. Rather fabulous. You . . . er . . . couldn't find your way clear to sending him over one morning, could you? As a little cubie?'
'Oh all right. If you'll send me Finlay.'
'Done.'
Adrian as a new boy had been startled to find, on his first ever cube call, that the prefect whose signature he needed slept naked with only one sheet to cover him and was extremely hard to wake up.
'Excuse me, Hollis, Hollis!' he had squeaked desperately in his ear.
But Hollis had just groaned in his sleep, rolled an arm over him and pulled him into his bed.
The only really enjoyable part of the cube call for Adrian was the burglary. Officially all the Houses were locked until seven, which was supposed to make it pointless to set off early on a cube call and take the thing at a leisurely pace. But there were larder, kitchen and changing-room windows that could be prised open and latches that could yield to a flexible sheet of mica. Once inside all you had to do was creep up to the dorm, tiptoe into the target prefect's cube, adjust his alarm clock and wake him. That way you could start the call at half past five or six and save yourself all the flap and hurry of trying to complete it in forty minutes.
'Yup,' Adrian told Bullock. 'Don't you worry your pretty little head about it. I reckon I know a way into every House.'
Two days later the whole school awoke to
From three in the morning until half past six, Tom, Adrian, Bullock and Sampson, working from maps and instructions drawn up by Adrian, had invaded the Houses and left copies in studies, common rooms, libraries and in piles at the foot of staircases. They had seen no one and been seen by no one. They had come down to breakfast in their House as apparently amazed and excited by the appearance of the magazine as everyone else.
In school, before morning chapel, they joined the knots of people under the noticeboards in the colonnade, twittering about its contents and trying to guess who the authors were.
He had been wrong to worry that the sophistication of the others' contributions would outshine his. His brand of salacious populism was far more interesting to the school than the recondite pedantry of Bullock and Sampson, and much less aggressive than Tom's style of Open Field Beat. The most feverish speculation of the day centred around the identity of Woody Nightshade. Everywhere Adrian went he heard snatches of his article being quoted.
'Hey there, Marchant. Fancy a quick round of the Biscuit Game?'
'They can chop off your hair, my children, but they can't chop off your spirit. We are winning and they know it.'
'A school isn't an ante-room for real life, it is real life.'
'Passive resistance!'
'Let's set our own syllabus. Fail their exams, pass our own.'
The school had never known anything like this. At the eleven o'clock break on the morning of its appearance there was no other topic of conversation in the Butteries.
'Go on, admit it, Healey,' Heydon-Bayley said to Adrian, his mouth full of cream-slice, 'it was you wasn't it? That's what everyone's saying.'
'That's odd, someone told me it was you,' said Adrian.
He found it achingly frustrating not to be able to crow about his part in it. Bullock, Sampson and Tom revelled in the anonymity, but Adrian longed for applause and recognition. Even jeering and hissing would have been something. He wondered if Cartwright had read his article. What would he think of it? What would he think of the
He watched very closely to see how people reacted when accused of being a contributor. He was always trying to improve his mastery of the delicate art of lying and the spectacle of people telling the truth under pressure repaid close study.
He noticed that people said things like:
'Yeah, it was me actually.'
'Piss off, Aitcheson! Everyone knows it was you.'
'Oh God! How did you find out? Do you think Headman knows?'
Adrian memorised all the replies and reproduced them as faithfully as he could.
And then the authorities had struck back.
Adrian's Housemaster, Tickford, rose to his feet after lunch that same day, as did the other eleven Housemasters in the other eleven Houses.
'All copies of this magazine will be collected from studies by the prefects before Games this afternoon and destroyed. Anyone found in possession of a copy after three o'clock will be severely punished.'
