there, pressing very hard, until Jonathan promised that he would deliver the message to Margery as soon as possible in the holidays. When Jonathan had first been a pupil in his father’s school, when he was seven, no one had even seemed to notice his sisters, but during the last year or so – because they were older, he supposed – all that had changed. Boys he wasn’t friends with asked questions about them, boys who’d never spoken to him before. Once, at lunch, Half Starving had warned a boy not to speak like that about the Headmaster’s daughters. ‘Fancy them yourself, sir?’ someone else shouted down the table, and Half Starving went red, the way he always did when matters got out of hand.
‘Tell her to meet me, first night of term,’ Tottle’s message was. ‘Round by the carpentry hut. Seven.’
Tottle claimed that he had looked round and smiled at Margery in church. The third Sunday he’d done it she’d smiled back. Without any evidence to the contrary, Jonathan had denied that. ‘You bloody little tit,’ Tottle snapped, driving his fist further into Jonathan’s stomach, hurting him considerably.
Tottle was due to leave at the end of next term, but Jonathan guessed that after Tottle there would be someone else, and that soon there would be messages for Georgina as well as Margery, and later for Harriet. He wouldn’t have to be involved in that because he’d have left himself by then, but some other means of communication would be found, through Reene or Mrs Hodge or Hodge. Jonathan hated the thought of that; he hated his sisters being at the receiving end of dormitory coarseness. In the darkness there’d been guffaws when the unclothing of Reene by the piano master had been mooted – and sly tittering which he’d easily joined in himself. Not that he’d even believed Pomeroy when he said he’d seen them on the promenade. Pomeroy didn’t often tell the truth.
But it wasn’t the pursuit of his sisters that worried Jonathan most: it was what they would learn by the carpentry shed or in the seclusion of the hydrangeas. It stood to reason that their pursuers would let things slip. ‘Cuthbert’, Tottle would say, and Margery would laugh, saying she knew her father was called Cuthbert, Then, bit by bit, on similar occasions, all the rest of it would tumble out. You giggled when the Hen was imitated, the stutter she’d developed, her agitated playing with a forefinger. Cuthbert’s walk was imitated, his catchphrases concerning the older values repeated in self-important tones. ‘Bad taste’ another catchphrase was. When the pomposity was laid aside and severity took its place he punished ruthlessly, his own appointed source of justice. When the rules were broken he showed no mercy. Other people’s fathers were businessmen or doctors, Bakinghouse’s was a deep-sea salvage operator. No one mentioned what they were like; no one knew.
‘Margery,’ Jonathan said in the furniture-room when Georgina and Harriet were receiving tuition from their father. ‘Margery, do you know what a boy called Tottle looks like?’
Margery went pink. ‘Tottle?’ she said.
‘He’s one of the first three leading into church. There’s Reece and Greated, then usually Tottle.’
‘Yes, I know Tottle,’ Margery admitted, and Jonathan knew from her casual tone that what Tottle had said about Margery smiling back was true.
‘Tottle sent you a message,’ Jonathan said.
‘What kind of a message?’ She turned her head away, trying to get her face into the shadows.
‘He said to meet him by the carpentry shed next term. Seven O’clock the first evening.’
‘Blooming cheek!’
‘You won’t, will you, Margery? He made me promise I’d tell you, otherwise I wouldn’t have.’
‘Of course I won’t.’
‘Tottle’s not all that nice.’
‘He’s not bad-looking if he’s the one I’m thinking of.’
Jonathan didn’t say anything. Bakinghouse’s father might turn into some kind of predator when he was at the bottom of the sea, quite different from the person Bakinghouse knew. A businessman mightn’t be much liked by office people, but his family wouldn’t know that either.
‘Why d’you think Mummy’s so nervy, Margery?’
‘Nervy?’
‘You know what I mean.’
Margery nodded. She didn’t know why their mother was nervy, she said, sounding surprised. ‘When did Tottle give you the message, Jonathan?’
‘Two days before the end of term.’
Lying in bed the night before, he had made up his mind that he would pass the message on when Georgina and Harriet were occupied in one of the classrooms the next day. Best to get it over, he’d thought, and it was then that he began to wonder about their mother. He never had before and clearly Margery hadn’t either. He remembered someone saying that the Hen was probably the way she was because of Cuthbert. ‘Poor old Hen,’ a voice in the dorm had sympathized.
‘Don’t tell the others,’ Margery pleaded. ‘Please.’
‘Of course not.’
Their mother overheard things in the laundry-room when boys came for next week’s sheet and clean pyjamas, and in the hall when she gave out the milk. As someone once said, it was easy to forget the poor old Hen was there.
‘Don’t meet him, Margery.’
‘I told you I wouldn’t.’
‘Tottle’s got a thing on you.’
Again Margery reddened. She told her brother not to be silly. Else why would Tottle want to meet her by the carpentry shed? he replied; it stood to reason. Tottle wasn’t a prefect; he hadn’t been made a prefect even though he was one of the oldest boys in the school. Had he been a prefect he wouldn’t have been the third boy to enter the church on Sundays; he’d have led a battalion, as the five houses into which the school was divided were called. He wasn’t a prefect because the Headmaster didn’t consider him worthy and made no secret of the
