widely revealed, though not in a smile. ‘You’re a fat white slug,’ she shouted at Mrs Digby-Hunter.
Sergeant Wall attempted to quieten the girl, but her fingernails scratched at his face and her fingers gripped and tore at the beard of Mr Beade, who had come to Sergeant Wall’s aid. Dympna did not move from her chair. She was looking at Mrs Digby-Hunter, smoking quietly, as though nothing at all was happening.
‘It’ll be in the newspapers,’ shouted Barbara.
She was taken from the kitchen, and the Digby-Hunters could hear her sobbing in the passage and on the back stairs. ‘She’ll sell the story,’ said Dympna.
Digby-Hunter looked at her. He attempted to smile at her, to suggest by his smile that he had a fondness for her. ‘What story?’ he said.
‘The way the boys are beaten up.’
‘Now look here, Dympna, you know nothing whatsoever about it. The boys at Milton Grange are here for a special purpose. They undergo special education –’
‘You killed one, Mr Digby-Hunter.’ Still puffing at her cigarette, Dympna left the kitchen, and Mrs Digby-Hunter spoke.
‘My God,’ she said.
‘They’re upset by death,’ said her husband tetchily. ‘Naturally enough. They’ll both calm down.’
But Mr Beade, hearing those remarks as he returned to the kitchen, said that it was the end of Milton Grange. The girls would definitely pass on their falsehoods to a newspaper. They were telling Sergeant Wall now, he said. They were reminding him of lies they had apparently told him before, and of which he had taken no notice.
‘What in the name of heaven,’ Digby-Hunter angrily asked his wife, ‘did you have to go engaging creatures like that for?’
They hated her, she thought: two girls who day by day had worked beside her in the kitchen, to whom she had taught useful skills. A boy had come and stood beside her in the sunshine and she had offered him a chocolate. He had complained of a pain, and she had pointed out that he must make his complaint to the headmaster, since that was the rule. She had explained as well that corporal punishment was part of the curriculum at Milton Grange. The boy was dead. The girls who hated her would drag her husband’s boarding- school through the mud.
She heard the voice of Sergeant Wall saying that the girls, one of them hysterical but calming down, the other insolent, were out to make trouble. He’d tried to reason with them, but they hadn’t even listened.
The girls had been in Milton Grange for two and a half months. She remembered the day they had arrived together, carrying cardboard suitcases. They’d come before that to be interviewed, and she’d walked them round the house, explaining about the school. She remembered saying in passing that once a year, at the end of every July, a Conservative fete was held, traditionally now, in the gardens. They hadn’t seemed much interested.
‘I’ve built this place up,’ she heard her husband say. ‘Month by month, year by year. It was a chicken farm when I bought it, Beade, and now I suppose it’ll be a chicken farm again.’
She left the kitchen and walked along the kitchen passage and up the uncarpeted back stairs. She knocked on the door of their room. They called out together, saying she should come in. They were both packing their belongings into their cardboard suitcases, smoking fresh cigarettes. Barbara appeared to have recovered.
She tried to explain to them. No one knew yet, she said, why Wraggett had died. He’d had a heart attack most probably, like Mr Beade said. It was a terrible thing to have happened.
The girls continued to pack, not listening to her. They folded garments or pressed them, unfolded, into their suitcases.
‘My husband’s built the place up. Month by month, year by year, for seventeen years he has built it up.’
‘The boys are waiting for their tea,’ said Dympna. ‘Mrs Digby-Hunter, you’d better prick the sausages.’
‘Forget our wages,’ said Barbara, and laughed in a way that was not hysterical.
‘My husband –’
‘Your husband,’ said Dympna, ‘derives sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on children. So does Beade. They are queer men.’
‘Your husband,’ said Barbara, ‘will be jailed. He’ll go to prison with a sack over his head so that he won’t have to see the disgust on people’s faces. Isn’t that true, Mrs Digby-Hunter?’
‘My husband –’
‘Filth,’ said Dympna.
She sat down on the edge of a bed and watched the two girls packing. She imagined the dead body in the bedroom that was never used, and then she imagined Sergeant Wall and Mr Beade and her husband in the kitchen, waiting for the school doctor to arrive, knowing that it didn’t much matter what cause he offered for the death if these two girls were allowed to have their way.
‘Why do you hate me?’ she asked, quite calmly.
Neither replied. They went on packing and while they packed she talked, in desperation. She tried to speak the truth about Milton Grange, as she saw the truth, but they kept interrupting her. The bruises didn’t show on the boys because the bruises were inflicted in an expert way, but sometimes hair was actually pulled out of the boys’ scalps, small bunches of hair, she must have noticed that. She had noticed no such thing. ‘Corporal punishment,’ she began to say, but Barbara held out hairs that had been wrenched from the head of a boy called Bridle. She had found them in a wastepaper basket; Bridle had said they were his and had shown her the place they’d come from. She returned the hairs to a plastic bag that once had contained stockings. The hairs would be photographed, Barbara said; they would appear on the front page of a Sunday newspaper. They’d be side by side with the ex- headmaster, his head hidden beneath a sack, and Mr Beade skulking behind his beard. Milton Grange, turreted baronial, part ivy-clad, would be examined by Sunday readers as a torture chamber. And in the garden, beneath the beech trees, a man would photograph the deck-chair where a woman had slept while violence and death occurred. She and her husband might one day appear in a waxworks, and Mr Beade, too; a man who, like her husband, derived sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on children.
