Mr Arbuary was a tall, bespectacled man with a sandy moustache, increasing in stoutness as the years advanced, and balding at about the same rate. His wife, once stout herself, was skin and bone due to her nervous complaint, with lank fair hair and eyes as darting as a rabbit’s. Their combination had produced children who were physically like neither of them except that they were blue-eyed and were not sallow-skinned or black-haired. Yet among the children there was a distinct family resemblance: a longish face in which the features were cut with a precision that lent them an aristocratic air, a tendency to stare. Margery and Georgina, when they were ten and nine respectively, were pretty. Harriet, at eight, gave little indication of how she would be in the future. Jonathan, the oldest, had already been told by the Classics master, Old Mudger, that he was not without good looks.
The house that was both school and home was on the outskirts of a seaside town, at the end of a brief, hydrangea-laden drive. In purchasing it and deciding to start a boarding-school, Mr Arbuary did his homework carefully. He recalled his own schooldays and all that had gone with them in the name of education and ‘Older values’. He believed in older values. At a time when the country he returned to appeared to be in the hands of football hooligans and trade unionists such values surely needed to be reestablished, and when he thought about them Mr Arbuary was glad he had decided to invest his wife’s legacy in a preparatory school rather than an hotel, which had been an alternative. He sought the assistance of an old schoolfellow who had spent the intervening years in the preparatory-school world and was familiar with the ropes. This was the Classics master whom generations of boys came to know as Old Mudger when Mr Arbuary had enticed him to the new establishment. Mrs Arbuary – presenting in those days a motherly front – took on the responsibility of catering and care of the boys’ health. The boarding-school began with three pupils, increasing its intake slowly at first, later accelerating.
‘Now,’ Georgina prompted on the first afternoon of the Easter holidays in 1988. ‘Anything good?’
The furniture-room, in the attics above the private part of the house, was the children’s secret place. They crouched among the stored furniture that, ten years ago, their mother had inherited with the legacy. That morning the boys had gone, by car mostly, a few by train. In contrast to the bustle and the rush there’d been, the house was as silent as a tomb.
‘Nothing much,’ Jonathan said. ‘Really.’
‘Must have been
Jonathan said that the winter term in the other side of the house had been bitterly cold. Everyone had chilblains. He recounted the itching of his own, and the huddling around the day-room fire, and his poor showing at algebra, geometry and Latin. His sisters were not much impressed. He said:
‘Half Starving got hauled up. He nearly got the sack.’
Three times a year Jonathan brought to his sisters the excitement of the world they were protected from, for it was one of the Headmaster’s rules that family life and school life should in no way impinge upon one another. The girls heard the great waves of noise and silence that came whenever the whole school congregated, a burst of general laughter sometimes, a masters voice raised to address the ranks of boys at hand-inspection times in the hall, the chatter of milk-and-biscuits time. They saw, from the high windows of the house, the boys in their games clothes setting off for the playing-fields. Sometimes, when an emergency arose, a senior boy would cross to Private Side to summon their father. He would glance at the three girls with curiosity, and they at him. On Sundays the girls came closer to the school, walking to church with their mother and the undermatron, Miss Mainwaring, behind the long crocodile of boys, and sitting five pews behind them.
‘Why did Half Starving get hauled up?’ Georgina asked.
The junior master was called Half Starving because of his unhealthily pallid appearance. As such, he had been known to the girls ever since their brother had passed the nickname on. By now they’d forgotten his real name.
‘Because of something he said to Haxby,’ Jonathan said. At lunch one day Half Starving had asked Haxby what the joke was, since the whole table had begun to snigger. ‘No joke, sir,’ Haxby replied, and Half Starving said: ‘What age are you, Haxby?’ When Haxby said nine, Half Starving said he’d never seen a boy of nine with grey hair before.
Georgina giggled, and so did Harriet. Margery said: ‘What happened then?’
‘Another boy said that wasn’t a very nice thing to say because Haxby couldn’t help his hair. The boy – Temple, I think it was – said it was a personal remark, and Half Starving Said he hadn’t meant to make a personal remark. Then he asked Haxby if he’d ever heard of the Elephant Man.’
‘The
‘A man in a peepshow who looked like an elephant. Someone asked Half Starving if Haxby reminded him of this elephant person and Half Starving said the elephant person had had grey hair when he was a boy also. Then someone said Haxby might be good in a peepshow and Half Starving asked Haxby if travelling about sounded like a life he’d enjoy. Everyone laughed and afterwards Cuthbert hauled Half Starving up because of the noise.’
Cuthbert was the school’s nickname for the children’s father. Jonathan had felt embarrassed about using it to his sisters at first, but he’d got over that years ago. For his own part, Mr Arbuary liked simply to be known as ‘the Headmaster’.
‘I think I know which Haxby is,’ Margery said. ‘Fupny-looking fish. All the same, I doubt anyone would pay to see him in a peepshow. Anything else?’
‘Spencer II puked in the dorm, first night of term. All the mint chocs he brought back and something that looked like turnips. Mange-coloured.’
‘Ugh!’ Harriet said.
Baddle, Thompson-Wright and Wardle had beep caned for giving cheek. Thompson-Wright had blubbed, the others hadn’t. The piano master had been seen on the promenade with one of the maids, Reene.
Jonathan’s sisters were interested in that. The piano master’s head sloped at an angle from his shoulders. He dressed like an undertaker and did not strike the girls as the kind to take women on to the promenade.
‘Who saw them?’ Georgina asked.
‘Pomeroy when he was going for Old Mudger’s tobacco.’
‘I don’t like to think of it,’ Margery said. ‘Isn’t the piano master meant to smell?’
Jonathan said the piano master himself didn’t smell: more likely it was his clothes. ‘Something gets singed
