'That's right. Adrian Healey.'
'Staveley. I'm not Cricket. Our man's giving the team a pep talk. It's morning break at the moment. Come; through to the staff room and savage a Chelsea bun with us.'
The staff room was baronial and crowded with what seemed to Adrian like a greater number of masters than Chartham had boys.
'Ah, Chartham's new blood!' boomed the headmaster. 'Come to give us a spanking, have you?'
'Oh well, I don't know about that, sir,' Adrian shook his hand. 'They tell me that you're hot stuff. Double figures would satisfy us.'
'That false modesty doesn't do, you know. I can smell your confidence. You're St Matthew's bound, I understand?'
'That's right, sir.'
'Well then, you'll be pleased to meet my Uncle Donald who's staying here until Cambridge term begins. He'll be your Senior Tutor at St Matthew's of course. Where is he? Uncle Donald, meet Adrian Healey, Chartham Park's new secret weapon, he's joining you at Michaelmas. Adrian Healey, Professor Trefusis.'
A short man with white hair and a startled expression turned and surveyed Adrian.
'Healey? Yes indeed, Healey. How do you do?'
'How do you do, Professor?'
'Healey, that's right. Quite right. Your entrance paper was very encouraging. Pregnant with promise, gravid with wit.'
'Thank you.'
'And you're a cricketer?'
'Well, not really. I've been trying to coach a bit, though.'
'Well best of luck, my dear. My nephew Philip has a youth like yourself on the staff- he'll be going to Trinity - who is said to have done much with the Narborough side. Quite the young thaumaturge, they tell me.'
'Oh dear. I think that means we can expect to be marmalised. I was hoping Narborough would have sunk into overconfidence.'
'Here he comes now, you'll be umpiring together. Let me introduce you.'
Adrian turned to see a young man in a cricket-sweater making his way towards them. It had to happen one day. It was bound to have done. Adrian always imagined that it would be in the street or on a train. But here? Today? In this place?
'I already know Hugo Cartwright,' he said. 'We were at school together.'
'Hello, Adrian,' said Hugo. 'Ready to be pounded into the dust?'
They put on their white coats and walked down to the ground.
'What sort of a wicket have you got for us?' Adrian asked.
'Not bad, slight leg-to-off slope from the pavilion end.'
'Got any bowlers who can use it?'
'We've a little leg-spinner I have hopes for.'
Adrian winced: he hadn't properly inoculated his team against leg-spin. It could run through a prep-school batting line-up like cholera through a slum.
'Does he have a googlie?'
'Ha-ha!' said Hugo.
'Bastard.'
He looked different but the same. Adrian's eyes could see the real Cartwright not too far beneath the surface. Behind the strengthened features he saw the smoother lines of the boy, within the firmer stride he read the former grace. His memory could scrub off four years of tarnish and restore the shining original. But no one else would have been able to.
If Clare had been with him and he had said, 'What do you think of that man there?' she would probably have wrinkled her nose and replied, 'Okay, I suppose. But I always think blond men look sinister.'
Everyone has their time, Adrian thought. You can meet people of thirty and know that when their hair is grey and their face lined, they will look wonderfully at their best. That Professor, for one, Donald Trefusis. He must have looked ridiculous as a teenager, but now he has come into his own. Others, whose proper age was twenty-five, grew old grotesquely, their baldness and thickening waistlines an affront to what they once were. There were men like that on the staff at Chartham, fifty or sixty years old, but whose true characters were only discernible in hints of some former passion and vigour that would come out when they were excited. The headmaster, on the other hand, was a pompous forty-one, waiting to ripen into a delicious sixty-five. What Adrian's own proper age was, he had no idea. Sometimes he felt he had left himself behind at school, at other times he thought he would be at his best in tubby and contented middle age. But Hugo . . . Hugo he knew would always be growing away from his fourteen- year-old perfection: the clues to his former beauty would become harder to find as each year passed, the golden hair would seem pale and weak at thirty, the liquid blue of the eyes would harden and set at thirty-five.
Summer's lease hath all too short a date, Hugo old boy, thought Adrian, but your eternal summer shall not fade. In my imagination you are immortal. The man walking beside me is merely The Picture of Hugo Cartwright, ageing and coarsening: I have the real Hugo in my head and he will live as long as I do.
'I think we'll bat first, sir,' the Narborough captain announced after winning the toss.
'That's it, Malthouse,' said Hugo. 'Knock 'em up and bowl 'em out.''
