It took Bishop some time to restore order in the hall. Finally, however, the certificates were all distributed, though much less formally than had been intended, and the students dispersed, followed by the staff. Bishop was left alone on the platform, looking down at the empty rows of seats. After all that planning and preparation, he thought. The Chief would be heartbroken. He had put a good face on it, of course, adopted a smiling manner, but underneath he would be feeling it deeply. Bishop knew that.
It was all Mafferty’s doing. Mafferty had brought this ceremony, which summed up and epitomized everything the School stood for, into chaos and disrepute. Since the discovery of the essay, Bishop had been thinking about Mafferty a good deal. He had remembered passing Mafferty not far from the Principal’s office. What had he been doing there? And there was his flight from the hall just a short while ago. Everyone else had stayed to help. But not Mafferty, no. Mafferty had fled, no other word for it. Cowardly of course, like all his kind. There was no longer any doubt in Bishop’s mind: Mafferty was the person responsible. Well, he was not going to get away with it. Nemo me impune lacessit, Bishop thought, his breast swelling with indignation. What Mafferty needed was a straight left to the jaw.
Looking out over the hall, he thought of the years in which he had served the Chief, their long association. Through thick and thin, he said to himself, and something inside his throat thickened suddenly. I won’t let you down, Donald. A friend showed his mettle in time of true need. Donald would be needing him at this very moment. But where was Donald?
He began, logically enough, by looking in the Principal’s office, but there was nobody there. Staying only long enough to slip Donald’s little bottle of tranquillizing tablets into his pocket, he went out again into the corridor. Where next? The School lay in silence around him. There were no teachers on the premises now, no students. The thought of Donald wandering unhappily about the building was peculiarly painful to Bishop. He might of course be brooding in his own quarters on the other side of the house. In that case he would have to be left alone. Or perhaps … Bishop raised his head and looked up towards the ceiling. Perhaps the chief had taken refuge from the storm of life on the top floor amid storage cupboards and workrooms. It was worth a try, he thought.
However, as he was making his way back along the corridor he heard a mutter of voices, and emerging on to the wide landing at the end found himself confronted by a number of stocky men in overcoats.
‘Hullo,’ Bishop said. ‘Can I be of any assistance?’
The men advanced in a body, one slightly to the fore. They were all smiling now. When they got near enough they all held out hands to be shaken.
‘How do you do?’ the leader said. ‘How is it going?’
‘Quite well thanks,’ Bishop said. The handshaking took some time and was marked by considerable confusion. After it there was an uncertain pause, during which the smiles of the men dimmed slowly.
‘You have come to enroll, I take it,’ Bishop said.
‘Roll?’
The men looked at one another gravely. There was a brief interchange among them in some foreign tongue. Then the spokesman turned back to Bishop.
‘Mr Roll?’ he said. ‘I am Yanar. This is Tatesh. This one is Oksuz.’
Suddenly Bishop remembered what the chief had said about visiting Turks.
‘He over there is Ajikguz,’ the spokesman said. ‘It means open-eye.’ He smiled broadly and all the others smiled too, as if this last named person was a bit of a joke.
‘You are the Turkish Delegation,’ Bishop said.
‘That is right, sir.’
‘The Principal is not available for the moment,’ Bishop said. ‘He was called away on very urgent business. He asked me to show you round the school.’
‘Good, Mr Roll. Understood perfect.’
‘No, no,’ Bishop said. ‘I am Bishop. I am the Senior Tutor.’
The whole of the Turkish Delegation nodded at this, except the man whose name meant open-eye. He said something in low tones to the spokesman, who looked tolerantly at Bishop and said, ‘Ajikguz English not so good, Mr Roll. It got rusted.’
‘No, no,’ Bishop said again. ‘I’m afraid you’ve got hold of the wrong – ’
‘He is Bishop of this School,’ the spokesman said reprovingly to Open-eye. ‘Mr Roll is Bishop. He is looking after the welfares of the students. That is named pastoral care. All the up-to-date schools and colleges have pastoral care, don’t you know that, Osman? Sometimes called Dean, sometimes called Bishop. You better make a note.’
The Turkish Delegation took notebooks and pens from inside pockets and began to write. Bishop thought of making a further attempt to clarify the situation, but the Turkish Delegation was so obviously pleased to have found at this early stage of the visit something to write about, that he decided to postpone things for the moment, and try later on. Besides, the spokesman, Yanar, was obviously a figure of authority among them and Bishop, with thoughts of Asian self-esteem in his mind, did not want the man to lose prestige.
‘Well,’ he said, when they looked up from their notebooks, ‘shall we go this way?’
He led them from class room to class room, explaining the courses offered at the School, doing his best, too, to set out the educational principles which governed them, as he knew that Donald would have wished him to do this. This tour of inspection took a long time because the patient, thick-fingered Turkish Delegation wrote down almost everything he said, breathing audibly as they wrote.
‘Well, I hope,’ Bishop said, when they were all assembled again on the landing, ‘that this visit will prove of some use to you in the – ’
‘We are all strongly interested,’ Yanar said, ‘in your langauge laboratory, Mr Roll.’
‘That is on the next floor,’ Bishop said, glancing at his watch. It was nearly half-past six. He had been engaged with these people for well over an hour. Thoughts of Donald returned to his mind. ‘That will have to be our last port of call today, I’m afraid,’ he said. He led the way towards the stairs, the bulky Turks falling into single file behind him.
Inside the language laboratory they stood in a group in the middle of the floor, and Bishop was starting to explain the use to which the various equipment was put, when he thought he heard a distant crowing sound of laughter.
‘The whole thing,’ he said, ‘can be monitored by the teacher from this central control panel. But the students in the individual booths – Excuse me.’ He went to the door, opened it and looked up and down the corridor. There was no sign of anyone.
‘They can work independently,’ he said, returning. ‘At their own pace. They can check their own responses, you see, go through the drills as often as they like.’ Again he heard the laughter. It sounded nearer now. ‘They are partitioned off,’ he said loudly, ‘and besides they have earphones plugged in to the receiver so that nobody disturbs anyone else.’
‘Excuse please,’ Yanar said. ‘I heard one man laughing.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Bishop said. ‘These are the individual booths, you see.’ He began shepherding the Delegation towards the far side of the room, away from the corridor. Open-eye, however, did not accompany them. He had picked up a pair of earphones from the teacher’s desk and was regarding them intently.
‘But I am sure,’ Yanar said. ‘It came from outside, in the corridor.’
‘Perhaps one of the students,’ Bishop said. ‘They are a high-spirited lot. They come up here sometimes. To play ping-pong, you know.’
‘Ping-pong?’
‘Table-tennis.’ Bishop had broken out in a gentle perspiration. ‘We believe in promoting physical health here,’ he said. ‘In fact that is one of the principles of the School. We offer the students an all-round education. No aspect of personality is neglected.’
‘Write it,’ Yanar said to the rest of the Delegation. He did not have the look of a man whose mind is completely at rest.
‘They can come up here and let off steam,’ Bishop said. ‘No, no,’ he said to Open-eye, who had put on the earphones and was now smiling and moving his head, as if in acknowledgement of sound issuing forth. ‘You won’t hear anything that way. It is not plugged in.’
He took up the end of the flex attached to the earphones. ‘Mens sana in corpore sano,’ he said to Yanar. ‘You know the old tag?’
Holding the flex he moved towards the wall where the sockets were. The flex, however, was not long enough by several feet to be plugged in while Open-eye remained in his present position. ‘Will you move this way a bit?’ Bishop said.
Open-eye, hampered no doubt by the earphones, did not seem to have heard him. He was still nodding and smiling.
‘This way,’ Bishop said. He gave a tug on the flex, bringing Open-eyes head down a little and obliging him to move a step or two forward.
‘Not far enough,’ Bishop said.
At this point there was another burst of laughter from outside, unnervingly loud now, on four notes, the last a sustained crowing one.
‘All work and no play,’ Bishop said, using his free hand to get out a handkerchief and wipe the sides of his neck, ‘makes Jack a dull boy. It is the old idea of the Greek gymnasium.’
‘Jack?’ Yanar said suspiciously. ‘The Greeks we do not like.’
‘A general term,’ Bishop said. He was slowly drawing Open-eye, by means of a series of commanding twitches on the lead, step by step across the room. ‘Another couple of feet and we’re there,’ he said.
‘We do not like educational methods of Greeks,’ Yanar said. ‘That is not the laughter of ping-pong.’ He went suddenly to the door, opened it and looked out. ‘There was a man,’ he said, returning. ‘In a black dress. Long, like a Chorak?’
‘Chorak?’
‘In my country,’ Yanar said, ‘only women wear the chorak. He went very quick round the corner.’
One of the students, having a breather,’ Bishop said.
Yanar went over and removed the earphones from Open-eye’s head. ‘Laughing and dressed womanish,’ he said to Bishop. ‘Is he Greek?’
He said some words sharply in Turkish. The whole Delegation began to regard Bishop with hostility.
‘Thank you, Mr Roll,’ Yanar said stiffly. ‘We are leaving now.’
‘Very well,’ Bishop said.
They went down the stairs together in silence, and said goodbye in the main entrance hall. The Delegation did not offer to shake hands and it was sadly apparent to Bishop that the visit, though attended with so much note-taking and initial good will, had not been an unqualified success, that the Delegation, in fact, were almost certainly leaving under the impression that the School harboured laughing Greek transvestites. There was nothing he could do about it, however, and besides he was very worried about the Chief, so as soon as the Turks were off the premises he made his way back as quickly as possible to the top floor.
The corridor running past the language laboratory was deserted, but when he reached the point at which this was intersected by another, shorter one, he suddenly saw a gowned figure standing stock still some twenty yards away on his left. Bishop was startled by the figure’s absolute stillness, by what seemed some painful distortion of the features, and by the gown–it had not occurred to him that the Chief would still be wearing his gown, and he now understood Yanar’s misapprehension.
He advanced some paces and saw that what he had taken for distortion was in fact caused by a fixed smile. The Chief glanced round as if seeking some means of escape and what made this odd was the fact that the smile did not disappear. There was a strong sense of incongruity in Bishop’s mind, as he began to move quickly forward, between this smile and the hunted manner in which Donald glanced about him.
‘We got everything sorted out, in the end,’ Bishop said. ‘Everything is all right now, Donald.’
His fingers closed over the little box of pills in his pocket.
Lavinia was standing before the mirror in her room, putting the finishing touches to her costume, taking occasional swigs from a large whisky designed to put her in the party mood. She was now, in appearance and in her own conception of herself, the orgiastic Goddess of Love, whose cult was notorious throughout antiquity for the abandoned behaviour of its devotees. Her costume consisted almost entirely of glass beads. Numerous strings of them fell from neck to waist, attached to a loose neckband of smooth glass. The upper part of her body, beneath the beads, was naked. Her beautiful arms could conceal themselves under the cascading glass or ripple out when she raised them, like a swimmer’s limbs emerging from spume. Her large breasts gleamed voluptuously through the bead screen. So that they should tone in better with the pale, opalescent effects of the glass, she had painted her nipples silver. Below the waist she wore silver lamé briefs and a thin snake belt attached, from which strings and strings of glass beads descended to her ankles.
Lavinia surveyed herself in the mirror and was pleased with what she saw. The whole effect was one of shift and glimmer and change. The pale, faintly gleaming droplets of glass glittered and shifted in their own light, and cast light by reflection of the flesh below. This interaction, the glitter from the cut surfaces of glass with the denser, satiny gleam of the skin, made for a glamorous flux of light: when she moved, even slightly, the whole front of her shimmered, glittered. When she walked forwards towards the mirror her smooth heavy thighs bulked nakedly through the beads, with barbaric marmoreal splendour. Her face too, was deeply impressive. She had decided, instead of wearing a mask, to paint a mask on. She had given herself silver lips, cheekbones, eyelids; great black eyebrows going in cruel oriental sweeps to the temple. The face that looked at her now was unrecognizable: magnificent, cruel and strange.
She stood there for some time, delighted with the effect. One of the elements in her pleasure was the fact that Mr Honeyball would be there. Though her feelings towards him had completely changed since the contretemps in the bathroom, she was not averse to reminding him of what he had that day through pusillanimity missed – pusillanimity or some equally inexcusable blundering. She hated a feeble or ineffectual man, and his failure to arrive at her bedroom at the proper time, after she had actually set him on the stairs leading up there, proved him to be one such. Nothing, she felt, could excuse such a failure, nothing but some sort of stroke or seizure experienced by Mr Honeyball in the throes of anticipation and the exertion of climbing the stairs. This had manifestly not happened. Mr Honeyball had simply done a bunk, thus involving her in all that trouble with the plumber.
Such behaviour puts a man Beyond the Pale, Lavinia told her strange, cruel face in the mirror. Its difference from her everyday face renewed her sense of the possibilities of the evening. Mr Honeyball was not the only pebble on the beach after all. She experienced the familiar excitement, unchanged since childhood, of being prepared for a party, for some encounter that might fulminatingly change the course of her whole life. Perhaps tonight was the night. A childlike wonder at her own existence came sweeping over her. Here’s to you, she thought to herself, taking a swallow of the whisky. Her attention was distracted suddenly by the flickering of the television set in the corner. She had switched it on earlier to watch a beauty competition, but then the nine o’clock news had come on, and it had been so gloomy, so fraught with disaster, that Lavinia had become oppressed, feeling her world threatened, and she had turned the sound down, leaving the announcer mouthing, doing his nightly mime of kindly, concerned uncle. Now, however, there were suddenly pictures of emaciated black people, sitting and lying here and there in a sort of compound. Something to do with the famine, she thought vaguely.
The door of her bedroom opened behind her. Through her mirror she saw her husband enter, neatly dressed as a referee.
‘Hello,’ she said, with some constraint. ‘So here you are. I was wondering where you had got to.’ She regarded him with apprehension. Not having seen him since the afternoon, when he had strode away laughing, she had no idea how much he might have discovered since about the injury to the plumber and the events leading up to it. She was half expecting him to upbraid her, but he merely nodded, as if he had been asked to confirm something, then stood in his referee’s outfit. ‘Have some whisky,’ she said.
‘No, thank you.’ Confronted by this shimmering stranger whom he knew to be his wife, Cuthbertson was confused. Bishop had insisted on four pills, afterwards accompanying the chief to the door of his room. Knowing the slowing-down effect the pills had on him, Cuthbertson had made a point of changing into his costume at once and had then made his way to his office, where he had spent the intervening time sitting at the desk, looking before him. Stray resolutions had come to him during this time, worthy of inclusion in the file, but he had made no move to write them down. Now, though a little too portly for running, he looked every inch the referee, with his dignified gravity, neatly creased navy blue shorts, white stockings and Royal Corps of Signals blazer. On his feet black plimsolls. He looked a man whose whistle and raised forefinger footballers would obey. His eyes, through the lenses of his glasses, surveyed his wife with a drugged steadiness for some time, then transferred themselves to the silent TV screen. Amid wrecked-looking huts and hovels, within some sort of enclosure, bundles of whitish rags were lying here and there, quite still.
‘Is it more bombs?’ Cuthbertson said, enunciating with care, and making a slow gesture towards the screen.
‘No, it is these people dying of starvation,’ Lavinia said. ‘They should not show pictures like that, in my opinion. I was beginning to feel quite worried about you,’ she added, referring again to his long absence.
‘Worried,’ Cuthbertson repeated without particular inflection. He had never said anything to Lavinia about his pills, being unwilling that she should know his weakness. ‘It looks as though there has been an explosion there,’ he said.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ Lavinia said. ‘Have a spot of whisky. I’m having some.’ She did not want to risk any differences of view just then, conscious as she was of being in the wrong rather, of having behaved injudiciously that afternoon. Presumably Donald knew nothing much about it as yet, otherwise he would have made some reference. All the same she was uneasily aware that she had not heard the last of the injured plumber, and wished to postpone all reckonings until the morrow, until after her triumphant apotheosis as Goddess of Love. Moreover, she had noted, though preoccupied with her own troubles, the chaos in the hall that afternoon, and had surmised that something, apart from the ambulance men, must have ocurred to disrupt Donald’s degree ceremony. These things, she felt instinctively, must be avoided as topics of conversation. ‘Put you in the party mood,’ she said, pouring herself another large whisky.
‘I am not worried,’ Cuthbertson said. His lips felt stiff, as if they were not following exactly the intention of his speech.
‘I mean me,’ Lavina said. ‘I was worried.’
‘What about?’
‘It doesn’t matter now.’
Both of them turned, having reached this impasse, to look at the television screen. A woman with enormous eyes and skin stretched tight over the facebones was looking out at them. The camera advanced on this starving face in dream-like motion, gently, soundlessly enlarging it until its suffering filled the screen. Cuthbertson found himself listening for the faint hiss that should have accompanied this, resembling as it did to him a cunning, high-speed process of inflation.
‘They ought not to show such pictures,’ Lavinia said. ‘Those people have a right to privacy.’
She turned back to the mirror and began touching up the silver on her eyelids. Cuthbertson surveyed her glinting back with a sort of cautious curiosity. The sedative was beginning to take its fullest effect now. His tongue felt heavy, and he could not tell whether his mouth was open or not, whether his lips were in contact or had fallen apart.
After some moments his gaze returned helplessly to the television screen. In a drugged silence, like sleepwalkers, figures in whitish robes, some of them hooded, moved slowly against a sort of low wall, or stockade. In the gritless, effortless silence the figures had a less than human immediacy, were only slightly more palpable than shadows. In slow succession Cuthbertson watched forms, faces, receding, advancing ballooning from the baked earth, sinking soundlessly back again. Image followed image in a drifting dance.
Cuthbertson listened again for the pumping, animating hiss. His right hand at his side felt heavy, resisted for some while all efforts to raise it. Succeeding finally, he touched his lower jaw, realized that his mouth was closed, and began to fiddle with the referee’s whistle which was slung round his neck on a braided white cord.
‘I hope you’ve remembered your mask,’ Lavinia said, turning her face from the mirror to look at him. She had added two tapering silver stripes below the broader black ones that swept from brow to temple.
Cuthbertson nodded again. The glittering shifts in reflection that were taking place all over his wife’s body hurt his eyes and confused his mind, after that beautiful slow dance on the screen. With her strangely painted face and myriad glass gleams she did not seem human, not a natural body, but a thing contrived, assembled. There was nothing at all about her that struck him as familiar. She rustled and hissed, and the glass beads were like moving, rippling scales that flexed with light across her body.
He fingered the whistle round his neck. ‘The mask is in my pocket,’ he heard his own remote and leaden voice enunciate. Glancing sideways he saw a row of dead people on the screen, their bodies stretched out with a sort of voluptuous ease, as if they were sleeping after some feast. The time had come, he realized suddenly, for him to ask his question. ‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘that week we spent down in Cornwall, before we were married? We had a little cottage above the bay.’
‘Yes,’ she said, turning her painted face towards him. ‘Yes, I remember.’
‘I gave you some daffodils.’ Cuthbertson said.
‘Did you?’
‘Why did you cry?’
‘Why did I what?’
‘Why did you cry?’ Cuthbertson said. ‘Why did you cry when I gave you the daffodils?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Lavinia said. ’I can’t remember anything about any daffodils. It is twenty years ago.’
‘Twenty-two,’ he said. He stood silent, incredulous, waiting in spite of her words for the explanation. He had been so sure that she would be able to clear the matter up. ‘There must have been some reason,’ he said. ‘You must remember.’
‘I cried a lot in those days,’ Lavinia said. She drank some more whisky. ‘Put your mask on, let’s see the whole ensemble,’ she said.
Obediently, still as if in the toils of some net that was subtly, persistently hampering all his moments, slowing him down, Cuthbertson took the rubber mask from the side pocket of his referee’s blazer, and put it on. It was a naturalistic mask, flesh-coloured and straight-featured, with black hair swept straight back to blend through a cunning curve of the rubber into Cuthbertson’s own hair: a severe, level-browed mask perfectly suited to the persona of a referee.
‘That’s marvellous,’ Lavinia said. ‘Except for your height there would be no way of knowing. Unless someone knew you by the knobbles on your knees, but that is not likely, is it?’
‘No, not really,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘There are not many so familiar with my knees as that.’
The mask he was wearing did not cover his ears, but went down almost as far as his chin, being provided with a straight, rather sarcastic aperture for him to speak through with his own voice. This voice sounded heavily vibrant to him at present, and as though occurring only on his own side of the mask like some sort of interior tuning device. Putting his glasses on over the mask, he looked at himself in the mirror and saw a creature in which there was nothing to recognize. The straight-browed mask looked back at him. In spite of the blunting effect of the sedative, Cuthbertson felt an impulse of panic forming somewhere in the depths of his being. For the moment it was no more than discomfort like the first twinge of pain, but he knew it, he recognized it for his companion of the last four weeks of dawns. Now, however, a new element was contained there, intensely alarming, yet at odds with fear: a path, a potential for escape. He stood, motionless, in his mask, senses muted by the drug. It was not the terrible impulse to laughter, though something of that still remained. Deep within him was a movement of energy that warred with fear. While he was striving to apprehend this more clearly, the television screen was suddenly filled with the familiar face of the Prime Minister: the cherubic mouth; the pouches under the eyes defying all the cosmetician’s art, badge both of weariness and probity; the smooth, statesmanlike sweeps of silver hair.
‘They said he was going to make a statement,’ Lavinia said. ‘I want to hear something positive for a change, instead of all these people crying woe.’
She swished over to the set with a running gleam of reflections, and turned up the sound.
… deny it, they were in time to hear the Prime Minister say, And I do not confirm it either. It is not so simple as that. There are those on the other side who would deny it out of hand. Or confirm it. But I do not intend to insult your intelligence by simplifying the issues. The issues facing us are too complicated for that. Now you may think I am advocating political opportunism. Playing it by ear. Sitting on our backsides and playing it by ear.
‘Do you mean to say,’ Cuthbertson said, ‘that you remember nothing about it?’
‘Nothing.’
While well aware, the Prime Minister said, of the dangers and pitfalls, we take an optimistic view. A qualified view of opt— … a view of qualified optimism. Our strength, as always, is in the people of these islands. Our people are never better than when their backs are to the wall. But let us be quite clear where our backs are, where the wall is. There are people today who seem in doubt about these vital issues.
‘That is what we need,’ Lavinia said. ‘Some plain speaking.’
‘You can’t cry and remember nothing,’ Cuthbertson said.
‘So let me just say this to the British people,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘We are going to see this through together.’
‘That man,’ Lavinia said, ‘inspires me with complete – ’
At this point the doorbell rang.
‘Heavens!’ Lavinia said. ‘They are starting to arrive. Will you go down and let them in? I’ll be down in a minute.’
The first couple were a Pierrot and a Milkmaid. Cuthbertson, wearing a mask, opened the door then backed away a little. This behaviour, in reality governed by fear at seeing the strange masked figures in the vivid light of the overhead porch lamp, was taken by these first guests as a piece of play-acting. They advanced with outlandish gestures, Pierrot doing a sort of short, high-stepping dance sequence, the Milkmaid courtesying and twirling her pink sateen skirt to reveal comical red and white football stockings. Cuthbertson recovered his self-possession, and with a dim sense of rising to the occasion, moved one hand slowly up to his whistle and managed a short blast on it, pointing at the same time with his other hand towards the bar, which went across one corner of the room and had a barman in a maroon jacket behind it. He had no idea who these people were. They laughed, and exclaimed in feigned voices, and moved past him towards the bar.
Lavinia came shimmering down, and music filled the room: some women singing ‘Ten Cents a Dance’. Several more people arrived together. Being masked, and not allowed to speak in their own personas, they nearly all announced themselves with some sort of exaggerated or outrageous gesture on entering. Batman stretched his black crêpe membranes and flapped. The pigtailed Chinaman bowed humbly. A mottled toad with an enormous papier mâché toad’s head actually hopped about the floor. The room became crowded very quickly. Everyone was in the grip of the conspiracy to conceal identity. Those whose masks made drinking difficult contrived to turn away and move their masks briefly in order to drink.
Cuthbertson had retired to a corner where he sat on the floor against the wall, in numb silence, pale knees pressed together. Stray thoughts passed through his mind. Built the place up with my own hands. Saw the possibilities right from the start. No qualifications myself. Regard it as my life’s work … These customary phrases which normally gave him strength, were rendered dubious by the presence of this loud, garish throng. So difficult was it to believe that he had actually opened his doors to these people, that he began to suspect they had emerged from some sort of breeding-place within the walls. He could open the windows, break the walls … This slowly gathering dream of demolition was interrupted by the appearance before him of a hefty female tennis player with a flaxen wig, a simpering mask, and frilly white pants beneath short white pleated skirt. She was carrying a tennis racquet.
‘We sporting types should stick together,’ this creature said, in a high-pitched obviously falsified voice. ‘Do you mind if I sit beside you? If I get out of line you can point to the penalty area, can’t you?’ She sat down beside Cuthbertson with ostentatious adjustments of her skirt. Her legs were covered with pale hair.
‘Who are you?’ Cuthbertson said, but the Tennis Player appeared not to hear this. Her mask had a round red patch on each cheek. ‘The toad is very good, isn’t he?’ she said, nodding across the room. The toad was standing near the bar talking to a sheikh, whose face was concealed by the folds of his headdress and by dark glasses. ‘Or is it a she, do you think?’ the Tennis Player said. ‘Difficult to tell, isn’t it? I find that very exciting, don’t you? Not knowing what sex people are. Awfully good idea, people keeping their masks on till midnight. By the way, have you seen our host?’
With difficulty, with a sense that words were forming like drops, like some sort of condensation, on the inside of his mask, but were not perceptible on the other side, Cuthbertson repeated the word ‘host’ and leaned forward interrogatively.
‘Cuthbertson,’ the Tennis Player said. ‘Donald Cuthbertson. Do you know what he came as? No, probably not. It was a well-guarded secret.’
Cuthbertson’s lips laboured again behind the aperture cut in the mask. ‘Referee,’ he said.
‘I can see that,’ the Tennis Player said. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m a bit worried about him.’
‘It’s me,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘Cuthbertson.’ More people entered the room, headed by a tall person in a tin helmet, his face covered by a primitive gas-mask with a respirator like an abbreviated trunk. Behind him was a man with a three-cornered hat, a mask with an eye patch, and a hook at the end of his arm.
‘That’s right,’ the Tennis Player said. ‘I take it you don’t know what he came as? Noisy in here, isn’t it? I’d no idea she’d asked so many.’
‘Who are you?’ Cuthbertson said, advancing his mask towards the astonishing, unchanging, simpering mask of the other.
‘Gorgeous Gussie,’ the Tennis Player said. ‘Couldn’t you tell?’
Before there could be any reply to this, the music, a saxophone rendering of ‘Moonlight and Roses’, increased suddenly in volume, and several people began to dance.
A shimmering form detached itself from the crowd and stood before them, the mask of silver and black paint giving her face a cruel fixity and authority. Standing very close to them she raised her arms and swayed slightly, and her whole body glittered and hissed.
‘I say,’ Gorgeous Gussie said. ‘What a marvellous costume. She is not wearing anything but beads.’
‘People have got to dance,’ the Goddess of Love said. ‘It is absolutely compulsory.’
‘I have reason to think this is a man,’ Cuthbertson said.
‘What does that matter?’ the Goddess said. ‘You two must dance together.’
‘Mustn’t disappoint our hostess.’ Gorgeous Gussie got up, laying her tennis racquet against the wall behind her. ‘It is Lavinia, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘Not Lavinia, no,’ the goddess said, turning away, sharply, with a swish of beads.
Cuthbertson and Gorgeous Gussie moved towards the middle of the floor where a number of couples were dancing. The music had changed to an old-fashioned waltz. Cuthbertson took the large, slightly moist paw of his partner and put an arm round her waist. They began to circle clumsily. The noise in the room was now very loud. A globe-shaped lamp on a stand near the wall began to swivel slowly, flashing alternate rays of red and blue and white across the room. The blare of the saxophone, the noise of voices and laughter, the revolving light, the close proximity of Gorgeous Gussie’s thick satiny body and simpering mask – all combined to confuse and distress Cuthbertson, in whom the drug had effected a temporary impairment of the power of judging distances, so that he was continually being startled by the fact that his feet returned to the floor sooner than expected. In addition to this, he was bewildered by the constant flushing and paling of masks and costumes around him, and by the variegated expressions of the masks themselves. At one point he tried to break free, get off the floor, but laughing masks and sad masks and coldly formal masks bobbed around him, blocking every way. The music changed suddenly, quickened. Gorgeous Gussie wiggled her hips and clapped her hands. Her mask kept up a fixed simper at Cuthbertson.
*
At the far end of the bar, facing towards the dancers, slightly apart from everyone else, the Toad and the Sheikh continued their conversation.
‘I’m afraid it was rather a contretemps,’ the Toad said. ‘Well, perhaps that is overstating it.’ His toad’s head, made of papier mâché, fitted right over his own head, like a helmet, and his voice emerged through the wide but narrow toad’s mouth with a curiously muffled effect. ‘It was a chapter of accidents, really,’ he said, feeling hot and guilty inside his helmet.
Briefly, presenting things in a light as favourable to himself as possible, he gave the Sheikh an outline of the afternoon’s events, leading up to his unfortunate failure to consummate things with Lavinia. ‘It was the appearance of the ambulance,’ he said, raising his mournful toad’s face, ‘that finally defeated me. It arrived just at the wrong moment.’
The Sheikh regarded him in silence. Dark glasses concealed the upper part of his face, the folds of his headdress the lower. ‘For the true man of action,’ he said at last, ‘there is no such thing as the wrong moment. You appear to me to have bungled the whole business.’
The Toad lowered his head.
‘She will be offended, of course,’ the Sheikh said. ‘However, I do not think the situation is beyond repair. That wounded self-esteem may work in my favour, as a late-comer in the field. Balm to her ego, you know.’ The Sheikh smiled, looking across the room at the dancers. ‘You have to be a bit of a psychologist, in our business,’ he said. ‘You have to know what you are doing. For example, which do you think is she, our hostess?’
‘I don’t know who anyone is,’ the Toad said. ‘Except you, of course.’
‘You haven’t been using your eyes. It is Cleopatra, without a doubt. There she is, over there, dancing with the pirate. I’ve been watching her for some time now. I’ll go over in a little while and ask her if she’d like to try my asp for size.’ He laughed, and Toad made hollow sounds of laughter too, through his aperture.
‘Home-grown,’ the Sheikh said. He laughed again, and pushed back the sleeve of his robe to glance at his watch. It was ten forty-five. He felt exhilarated at the thought that he would be striking a blow for the Party, if he were successful with Mrs Cuthbertson, at more or less the same time as Kirby would be planting his bomb. Very fitting, indeed poetic, he thought, if her conquest could coincide exactly with the explosion: diplomacy and terror going hand in hand…
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t make any favourable recommendations about you in my report, I’m afraid, not on this afternoon’s showing. In fact, it would be better not to go into any detail. In that way the people up at Headquarters will not enter it as a black mark against you. You will not emerge with either credit or blame. It is the best I can do for you, I’m afraid. And if I succeed with the lady I will mention you as the introducing agent and go-between.’
‘Thank you,’ Toad said, with gratitude and humility.
‘Well, here’s to Cleopatra.’ The Sheikh raised his glass. ‘The serpent of Old Nile, to quote the bard.’
‘And here’s to a rent-free office on the premises,’ Toad said. He had to raise his mask a little in order to drink.
‘Mark her well,’ said the Sheikh. ‘Dancing and laughing there, tricked out as an Egyptian queen. On such unworthy objects greats causes and movements sometimes depend. We are all in travesty now. But the day is coming, and coming sooner than – ’
‘Excuse me.’
Turning, they saw a figure in an old-fashioned crash helmet, dark green in colour, fitting closely round the face like a medieval knight’s. The face itself was obscured by enormous black goggles.
‘What on earth are you?’ the Sheikh said.
‘Despatch Rider,’ this person said. ‘First World War. Do you know which is our host?’
He peered through his goggles at the Toad and Sheikh. The lenses were scratched and grainy, so that sight was darkened and blurred by them. He had been in the pub till closing-time, celebrating with Weekes their acquisition of the lease on a house in Stratford-on-Avon, a perfect place, Weekes said, for a School. The noise, and the changing effects of the light, and the large quantity of beer he had drunk, confused his mind and vision, gave him a sense of being involved in some strange, clamorous, irridescent twilight, full of flickering shapes and forms. He was unwilling, however, to remove the goggles, partly because of the edict against it, mainly because he didn’t know where Bishop was, nor what he looked like, and couldn’t risk being recognized until he had a chance of running Cuthbertson to earth, and getting his cheque changed. They needed every penny now, to get the School going.
‘I’m afraid not, old boy,’ the Sheikh said. ‘You’ll have to wait for the witching hour.’
He nodded and moved away. The Despatch Rider watched him thread his way through the dancers to the opposite side of the room. Here the goggles lost track of him in the murk. All the same there had been a similarity in build and gait to Cuthbertson, and the Despatch Rider was not convinced that this was not his host. When he looked round, the Toad was no longer in evidence, but a female tennis player with a flaxen wig and a grotesquely simpering mask, who was carrying what looked like a Guiness away from the bar, knocked lightly against him and said, ‘Oops! Steady the Buffs.’
The Tennis Player had abandoned his falsetto and now spoke in a man’s voice which, although slightly muffled by the mask, was familiar. ‘Cheers!’ he said. ‘Excuse me.’ He turned aside a little, pulled his mask outwards from his face, and tilted his glass to drink. Mafferty, hampered by the goggles, did not succeed in identifying him during this process.
‘Do you know who our host is?’ Mafferty said. ‘It isn’t you, is it?’
‘ ’Fraid not,’ the Tennis Player said. ‘I’m trying to find him myself.’ He drank again ‘Bassum est optimum,’ he said. ‘Beer is best.’
Suddenly Mafferty knew who the Tennis Player was, and extreme caution descended on him, in spite of his drunkenness.
‘You won’t go far wrong on beer,’ the Tennis Player said. ‘Your voice sounds familiar. You’re not a member of staff, by any chance?’
‘No, no,’ Mafferty said, in an artificially deep voice. ‘I am a friend of Mrs Cuthbertson.’
‘Oh. She’s not wearing anything under those beads you know.’
‘Really.’ Mrs Cuthbertson must be the one in strings of beads then, with the black and silver face. If he kept a watch on her, perhaps she would lead him to her husband. Mafferty peered down at his watch: it was gone eleven. He had an hour before the unmasking. It was essential he should escape detection until then. His eye fell on the figure of a referee, sitting against the far wall. ’I only know one person here,’ he said, ‘and that is Mr Mafferty. He told me he was coming as a referee.’
He nodded at the Tennis Player and allowed himself to drift away through the crowd.
‘I didn’t get a real chance to thank you,’ the Sheikh said to Cleopatra, ‘for asking me to your party tonight.’
‘Not at all,’ Cleopatra said. ‘I am delighted you were able to come.’ She was wearing a tall headdress and a rather in-human, bird-like mask with a prominent, beaky nose-piece.
‘Kind of you to say so,’ the Sheikh said. ’I hope you won’t take it amiss if I say something personal to you?’
‘Go ahead,’ Cleopatra said.
‘Let me just say this,’ the Sheikh said. He had decided on a bold frontal approach. ‘Your presence here has made all the difference to me. I am not normally a sociable man. You will not find me in the centre of a crowd. By nature I am solitary. But when I looked across and saw you … I knew at once who you were …’
Cleopatra threw back her head and laughed, on a deep baying note.
‘I am the Principal,’ Cuthbertson said. Returning to his corner after the dance he had found himself face to face with a person resembling a very old woman, corpulent, and with extremely untidy hair.
‘I told her and no mistake,’ this person said. ‘I don’t mince my words, not when it is a matter of principle. I could only listen to the radio when she said so. She brought it to the Home with her, you see.’
The mask that Cuthbertson looked out on from his own referee’s mask was plump-cheeked, wrinkled and shrunken round in the mouth, marked by sagging, drooping skin everywhere. In the soft folds round the eyes there were little white spots.
‘That is a marvellously life-like mask,’ Cuthbertson said. He still found difficulty in forming and uttering words, though the full effects of the sedative were wearing off now, and he was experiencing a return of tension, of that same conflict of impulses which had earlier sent him wandering around the school. ‘I congratulate you on that mask,’ he said slowly.
‘Mask?’ Mrs Mercer said. ‘This is my face, and my eyes as blue as when I was a girl. My waist was no bigger than that.’ She held up two plump, speckled hands making an unsteady hoop with forefingers and thumbs. ‘You could of spanned it,’ she said.
‘Really?’ Cuthbertson said. ‘This is my house, you know,’ he added, after a pause. ‘I am the Principal of this place.’
Mrs Mercer’s head, declining in a dozing sort of way towards her black velvet bosom, was arrested at a certain downward point and jerked up again. ‘Some people can lay no claim to beauty, past or present,’ she said. Since arriving at the party she had spent her time sitting on the floor alongside the bar, drinking rum and peppermint, exchanging occasional remarks with the barman, who had kept her glass replenished. Now, however, with intoxication, her delight at the radio situation could no longer be contained, and she had taken to wandering around telling people about it.
‘Yes,’ Cuthbertson said, ‘I am the Principal.’ A desire to confide in this elderly, trustworthy person was growing within him. ‘I built the place up with my own hands, actually,’ he said. ‘I saw the possibilities right from the start. The place was a ruin when I first saw it. It lies adjacent to open country behind, you know, and the open country was taking over. You will hardly believe this, but one of the first things I saw on my initial tour of inspection was a large brown rat. It sat up on its back legs and looked at me.’
‘Mask indeed,’ Mrs Mercer said. ‘Saucy!’ She gave Cuthbertson’s bare knee a slap. ‘My legs is still as good as they ever was. In shape, but there is the veins, of course.’
‘Of course, of course,’ Cuthbertson said, eager to keep the conversation going. ‘The fact is,’ he added, ‘I never had any qualifications myself, and it was a source of great regret to me as I grew older. I saw in this place an opportunity of giving people what I myself had missed. It had to be commercially viable, of course. I believe in the profit motive. Drake believed in the profit motive. Hawkins believed in the profit motive. Frobisher believed in the profit motive.’
‘You’ve got a nice place here,’ Mrs Mercer said.
‘I have worked hard over the years.’ Cuthbertson looked emotionally at Mrs Mercer through his mask. ‘Striving to build something of permanent value. An institution to be proud of. Commercially viable, but with standards, rigorous standards. And I think I succeeded. Over the years.’
‘All them years,’ Mrs Mercer said. ‘All them years, then this afternoon her radio blew up. She misused the volume.’
‘Now something has gone wrong,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘Badly wrong.’ He advanced his mask earnestly towards her. ‘Something has got in,’ he said.
Mrs Mercer’s head drooped again, was again raised abruptly. Her hair, which under the combined stresses of joy, alcohol and conversation had finally escaped from all control, fell around her face, partially obscuring it. ‘Just this evening,’ she said. ‘She came and asked me if she could listen to the six o’clock news. She came and asked me. After all them years, it was vouchsafed to me. God was good to a lonely old woman.’ She looked up triumphantly through her hair. ‘I told her to go and fuck herself,’ she said.
The whisky that Lavinia had drunk before the party, combined with the whisky she had drunk since, and the exhilaration of causing a stir with her costume, had excited her spirits and inclined her to amorous speculations about some of her guests, particularly that friend of Mr Honeyball’s, whom he had praised so highly to her. She had made several attempts to seek him out, and was at the moment extricating herself from a conversation with a man in the costume of an old-fashioned anarchist, whom she had thought might be Baines until a certain mumbling habit with his plosives had betrayed him as Mr Benny, her teacher in the evening pottery class of the previous winter, of whom she had at one time entertained some hopes, until she had discovered that he lived with another man on terms of domestic intimacy. She had invited them both to her party to show there were no ill-feelings, but it was definitely not with a person of that sort that she wanted to spend time talking that evening.
She was moving away from the Anarchist when a person in a dark green crash helmet and huge black goggles drew near her and said, ‘What a marvellous costume. So daring.’
‘Thank you,’ Lavinia said. ‘You look like some kind of beetle.’
‘Despatch Rider. First World War.’ Mafferty had made several trips to the bar, in between efforts to identify Cuthbertson, and was now finding balance something of a problem – the upper part of his body tended to waver from the vertical even when his feet, as now, were carefully planted and at rest. With a confused recollection that his hostess was a goddess of some kind, he said, ’I have come to worship at your shrine.’
Lavinia smiled and shimmered and her beads hissed. This man was drunk, his costume was ridiculous, he was not tall enough for Mr Baines. She took a step or two away, and Mafferty, seeing her form recede into glimmering mists called after her, ‘Is this your consort?’ Lavinia looked over her shoulder, and nodded, and Mafferty said to the Anarchist, ‘There is something I wanted to ask you about, Mr Cuthbertson.’
The Anarchist had a very elaborate mask, going right up over his face and head, bald and domed on top and with a great spade-shaped libertarian beard below. He nodded at Mafferty’s words, but said nothing.
‘It is about the cheque,’ Mafferty said, enunciating with care. ‘The cheque that you gave me this afternoon. It is difficult to read.’
The Anarchist again nodded his imposing head.
‘In fact it is impossible.’ Mafferty peered forward through his goggles. ‘It is illegible,’ he said, wanting to drive the point home.
‘P—p—perhaps I was drunk,’ the Anarchist said. ‘Or am. Or p—p—possibly you are, or were. Or m—m—maybe we b—b—both – ’
‘You are not Cuthbertson,’ Mafferty said loudly. He had a sudden desire to bash the Anarchist in the centre of his mask, cave his false features in.
Suppressing his violent impulse, he turned away. He was in time to see, quite close beside him, the bright form of Lavinia and a tall figure in Bedouin dress whom he recognized as the person he had spoken to earlier. They moved away together across the room. For some moments they were still visible, over the heads of dancers and talking groups, then they disappeared and Mafferty surmised that they must have crouched or sat down together against the wall. His early suspicion that the Arab was Cuthbertson returned to him. Man and wife, he thought dizzily. Snatching a brief tête à tête in the midst of the throng. He began to make his way, very carefully, towards the point at which they had disappeared from view, peering right and left through his goggles at the fixed expressions of the masks which moved in the process of dancing, and changed with the changing light, but registered nothing that naked faces did. He would have liked to take off his goggles; it would have been like returning to the upper air, but he could not be sure that Bishop was not somewhere on the look-out for just such a move. He moved with precarious equilibrium towards the place where Goddess and consort had sunk down below sight.
Before he could make it, however, he found himself accosted by a very old, stout lady with a mass of gingerish brown hair largely obscuring her face. His vision darkened by the goggles, he was at first under the impression that she was wearing a mask of ingenious make, but then he detected movement of eyes and lashes, and a gleam of moisture – apparently an overplus from the eye – caught in one of the shallow folds of her left cheek.
‘Excuse me, dearie,’ this person said. ‘Do you know where the toilet is?’
‘There’s one just off the main hall,’ Mafferty said. ‘It’s the way you came in, actually.’ He pointed over the heads of people to the door. ‘Go straight across the hall,’ he said. ‘You’ll see the door facing you.’ In the midst of saying this he saw the Goddess and the Bedouin, having apparently worked their way along the wall, leaving by that very door. ‘That’s the way I’m going myself,’ he said. He made an attempt to move forward, but the old lady did not give way.
‘Marvellous, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘All the costumes.’ Her head declined slightly, as if she were dozing, and was arrested with something of a jerk. ‘I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a party more,’ she said. ‘Drink in abundance and a very pleasant class of person. When I was a girl, of course…’ She shook the hair out of her eyes and reared up her head suddenly to stare him in the face. ‘What are you supposed to be?’ she said.
‘Despatch Rider. World War One,’ Mafferty said.
‘Mask,’ the old lady said. ‘He asked me if I was wearing a mask. Sauce, I said to him. Saucy! They was often saying things like that. Well if you had listened to everything they said …’
‘Excuse me,’ Mafferty said, trying to edge past. There couldn’t be much more than half an hour left now.
‘Not like some,’ the old lady said. ‘But I told her today. It was vouchsafed to me.’
She raised both hands and parted the hair from her face, which bore an expression of tranquil contentment. ‘I told her to go and fuck herself,’ she said. ‘I must go to the toilet.’
‘This way,’ Mafferty said, seizing his opportunity. ‘I’m going in that direction myself.’
‘Referee, eh?’ Bishop said. ‘You are an anguis in herba. Not only masquerading as a B. A. Cantab, but it was you who disrupted the degree ceremony this afternoon, wasn’t it? It was you who disarranged the Chief’s papers. Do you realize that you have driven the Principal to the verge of a breakdown? A man whose shoes you are not worthy to – ’
Cuthbertson looked steadily through his eye-holes at the simpering mask of the Tennis Player.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.
‘Don’t attempt to deny it, I saw you coming away from the Principal’s office.’
‘Principal’s office?’
‘Don’t prevaricate with me,’ Bishop said, grinding his teeth. ‘You inserted sheets of gibberish among the degree certificates.’
‘All my life,’ the Sheikh said, ‘I have had an ideal of womanhood, but I had given up all hope of realizing it in this earthly existence.’ His voice throbbed with an excitement that gave accents of absolute sincerity to his words. It was eleven-ten: only five minutes to go. ‘Until tonight,’ he said. It was an historic moment: the first bomb to be detonated by the Party in his area. And at the precise moment of the explosion here he was, getting on to the right terms with a potential benefactress. ‘Until tonight,’ he repeated, looking at the strangely painted glistening face of his companion.
They were sitting half-way up the hall stairs, holding hands. The hall light was on and they could see each other by it, though not very clearly. Lavinia’s black stripes merged into the dimness, her silver one glowed phosphorescently. The Sheikh had taken off his dark glasses.
‘I had grown reconciled,’ he said, smiling sadly, ‘never to finding it. I had come to terms with my solitude.’
‘There were others,’ Lavinia said. ‘There must have been others.’ For the first time in her life the language she was uttering and hearing corresponded to her sense of reality and fitness. She was enthralled. ‘Others to console you on the way,’ she said, looking at the large face framed by the Arab headdress.
‘I won’t deny it,’ the Sheikh said. ‘I am flesh and blood, after all. I have the usual instincts and appetites.’ He began to describe sexy little circles with his forefinger in Lavinia’s soft palm. ‘But they were only makeshifts, Lavinia,’ he said.
Lavinia rubbed the side of her naked thigh against his gown. ‘It is natural in a man,’ she said. She raised herself on her haunches and moved two steps higher up. ‘Only to be expected,’ she said.
‘In my soul I was always lonely, even desolate,’ the Sheikh said, moving up in his turn.
‘Lonely as the desert breeze,’ Lavinia said smiling phosphorescently. ‘You are dressed the part.’ She moved up two more steps.
‘I had this impalpable ideal,’ the Sheikh said, moving up after her. He placed his right hand on Lavinia’s lower ribs, below the beads. ‘As I say, I had despaired of ever finding her.’ Acting on his own initiative, he moved up two stairs. ‘Until tonight,’ he said.
‘Across a crowded room,’ Lavinia said, humping herself up after him. They were near the top of the stairs now. The Sheikh replaced his hand, but higher up and more to the front, taking the weight of Lavinia’s left breast.
‘Just a look,’ Lavinia said, feeling an access of alertness in her silver nipples, ‘and although the need of the occasion intervened – ’
One knew – ’
‘Beyond any doubt – ’
‘The years fell away – ’
‘All the hopes and fears – ’
They both moved up two steps, and this bought them to the landing.
‘Couldn’t we steal away for a while?’ the Sheikh said. ‘It’s a bit on the public side here.’
As if to lend emphasis to his words, a little old lady went tottering drunkenly across the floor of the hall below them, presumably in search of the lavatory.
‘Couldn’t we?’ the Sheikh said, leaning towards her. One minute and a half to go. A pity he couldn’t have been penetrating Lavinia at the moment of the explosion, but coincidences like that are too exquisite for gross mortals …
‘Why not?’ Lavinia said. ‘No one will miss – ’
‘Excuse me,’ a voice said from below them, and looking away from each other down into the dimness they saw a figure in a high round helmet with a glassy gleam where his face should have been, slowly mounting the stairs towards them.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ the figure said, pausing about halfway up and clinging to the banister.
‘What the hell do you want?’ the Sheikh said.
‘It’s about the cheque.’
‘Cheque? What cheque?’
‘It is absolutely illegible,’ Mafferty said.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Mafferty removed his goggles. Unhampered by them, he was now able to see that the Arab was a complete stranger.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
He turned and began cautiously to descend the stairs again.
‘That is Mr Mafferty, a member of staff,’ Lavinia said.
The Sheikh glanced at his watch again: it was 11.15. Now, now, very now, he thought. To quote the bard. In this obscure corner history was being –
There was a sudden deafening explosion from somewhere at the front of the house, followed at once by the more prolonged, multitudinous sound of shattering glass. The house shuddered briefly and the hall light went out. There were some seconds of complete silence. Then they heard confused shouts from the room below.
‘Bloody hell,’ Baines said. He stood up abruptly. He knew at once what must have happened. That fool Kirby had made a mistake. He remembered his earlier feelings of uneasiness, of misgiving: those restless eyes, that unconvincing doggedness of manner. Kirby had mixed up the streets. Or he had panicked and, remembering the divided counsels up at Headquarters, had planted his bomb outside the first building that looked institutional …
‘There must have been an accident,’ he said, with an instinct of subterfuge, to Lavinia. ‘You’d better phone for an ambulance. Some of those people sound hurt.’
Downstairs, after the first shock, the guests had begun to call out and blunder about in the darkness, except for the Toad and Captain Hook, who had been standing near the wall talking about butterflies when the explosion occurred, and who were now lying stunned on the floor. They were trodden on by various people trying to find a way out. This was not easy, as the bomb had blown in some of the brick-work, and a low pile of rubble was partially blocking the doorway. People stumbled against these stones, bruising and cutting shins and knees. The air was filled with acrid dust. Maid Marian crouched in a corner, whimpering steadily.
A few of the guests, not many, tore off their masks. The darkness was confused by the flaring of matches here and there. These random and shortlived flares, held chest-high while they lasted, cast a weirdly transfiguring glow over faces and masks alike as they peered this way and that, questioning for more light, or a means of escape.
‘Keep still,’ the Tennis Player shouted. He had produced a cigarette lighter which burned with a long slender jet of flame, and he was holding it up in a shaking hand. His grotesquely simpering mask turned from side to side, in an attempt to dominate the company, quell the panic. ‘Now listen carefully to me,’ he said. Catching a mouthful of dust, he began coughing violently.
At this point the Referee stepped forward into the wavering light. His mask surveyed the wreckage of the room, the disordered revellers, with an unchanging expression of probity and fair play.
‘You’ve made your bid,’ he said, in a vibrant, exalted tone. ‘You’ve done your worst, and you have failed. I am the Principal.’
A woman said, in a tone of wonder, ‘My face is bleeding.’
‘Don’t interrupt me,’ the Referee said loudly. ‘I am the Principal. Not content with subversive activities of every kind, tonight you have deliberately tried to wreck the place. I have known for a long time that this was pending, but I did not know from which quarter the attack would come. My Senior Tutor was unable to help me, though an able and experienced administrator.’
‘Is it really you, Donald?’ the Tennis Player said.
‘Stand back,’ Cuthbertson said.
‘Excuse me,’ an elderly female voice said, from the darkness beyond the hall doorway. ‘I was in the toilet. What was that bang?’
‘You fools,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘This place is indestructible. You can never destroy the spirit of a place like this. It will go on and on and on.’
He regarded the glimmering masks and faces. In the unsteady light they were turned to him mutely, expressive of melancholy, lechery, bewilderment, mirth, all silenced by this rhetoric, all subject to the authority of his voice and manner. The blood beat in his temples. His voice took on the triumphant surge of power.
‘I will rebuild,’ he said. ‘Not only that. I will expand. Expand. The logic of the situation demands expansion. Schools up and down the country, with staff conservatively dressed, and properly qualified, sworn to preserve standards. A mighty network of schools. Myself at the heart. Drake believed in expansion. Hawkins believed in expansion. Commercially viable of course, but with standards, rigorous standards. It is what made this country great.’