“Mind? Certainly not! I can think of absolutely nothing that would give me greater pleasure!” Hive plonked back into his chair. His foot knocked against something hard. He looked down. It was his camera case. “Oh, dear!” he said, dolefully.
“Is something amiss?”
“Oh, dear!” Mr Hive said again. He tasted his little finger. Mr Clay stared at him anxiously.
“The fact is,” said Mr Hive, “that I have just remembered a most important engagement.”
From Mr O’Toole, who had been slumped in an attitude of world-weary detachment since parting with his glass, came a quiet but unmistakeably derisive snigger.
“Most important,” repeated Mr Hive.
The headmaster frowned. He looked up at Booker, newly returned from the bar. “Mr Hive says he has an engagement, Booker. You didn’t mention anything about that.”
“Well, I didn’t know, did I? Anyway, perhaps it’s not all that urgent. Eh, Mr Hive?” He spoke without taking his eyes off the drinks that he was carefully transferring from a tray.
“The boys will be most disappointed,” said Mr Clay.
Hive took out his watch.
“Is your appointment fixed at any particular time?” Booker asked him.
“Well...”
“The school is very near,” urged Mr Clay. “There will, of course, be refreshments.”
A gutteral comment, between swallows, from O’Toole.
It sounded like “Cocoa”.
“You tempt me,” said Mr Hive. “Indeed you do. I remember something my old headmaster said to me during my last term at Harrow. ‘Never hesitate to hand on the lamp, Hive,’ he said, ‘for it will burn all the more brightly if you do.’ ”
“How true,” said Mr Booker.
“
“Puss! Puss!”
They ignored Mr O’Toole.
“I must not be late, mind. Much depends upon my not being late.”
“I think I may safely guarantee that, Mr Hive. Half-past nine—a quarter to ten at the outside. Eh, Booker?”
“We generally manage to clear things up by then, sir.”
“Excellent. Excellent. So what do you say, then, Mr Hive?” The headmaster reached determinedly for his yet untasted sherry.
“Of course he will,” said Mr Booker.
Mr Hive, after some deprecatory chuckles, downed his brandy as a gesture of good fellowship and said that, damn him, the night was young and he really thought he would. “I’m a very easily persuaded fellow,” he added, suddenly and unaccountably sad.
“Incidentally...” Mr Clay hesitated, drank precisely half his sherry, and went on: “I should be rather interested—purely for introductory purposes—the boys, you know—to hear what your profession, ah, actually is.”
“Was,” corrected Mr Hive. He was looking dreamily down the room towards the shifting white blur of the barmaid’s
“You are retired?”
“On the insistence of my doctors. Certain occupational maladies—sciatica, things like that. It was the variation in temperature, you know.”
“I see,” said Mr Clay, who didn’t. “You mean your work took you abroad a good deal?”
“I seldom slept in my own bed.”
Mr Clay, a home-loving man, looked sympathetic. “The foreign service must entail a good deal of hardship, of which ordinary people know little. It is not all balls and levees, I am sure.”
Mr Hive frowned. “I don’t remember any levees.”
The headmaster felt a twinge of annoyance. The man was being singularly obtuse. But diplomats doubtless were so by nature. And they were, of course, bound by the Official Secrets Act. It would not do to drive the man, by too direct a catechism, into a blank denial of his profession. That would not be fair to the boys.
“Did you serve many years in the, ah...?”
“For nearly quarter of a century,” replied Mr Hive with a promptness and warmth that immediately dispelled the headmaster’s fear of over-fishing. “This would have been my silver jubilee year.”
“Fancy that!” said Booker.
O’Toole’s fingernail had begun to ring his glass once more.
Mr Clay pursued his advantage. “I should be surprised if in so long a period you had not received some tokens
