1

We were up at the Rings, racing about, playing war games without agreeing on the rules. Giles shouted something from the top of the bank and ran off, I ran the other way, tripped and slid down into a chalky hollow, and crouched there, while my heartbeat thumped in my ear and the wind poured over the grassy ramparts. Was I meant to hunt for Giles now, or was Giles already hunting for me? I pulled my watch round on my wrist and waited while the second hand made two circuits of the dial. No sound of footsteps, though now and again the clank of farm machinery came from a few fields away. I heard an awkward cry, and looked up – high above, dark against the cloudy blue, a buzzard sailed past, seemed to note our positions, flapped and circled twice before sliding away across the crest of the hill and out over the thousand-foot drop below. Then almost at once there was a light rhythmic sound, coming closer, the little giveaway jiggle of Giles’s pedometer in his trouser pocket. He was coming from behind me, moving quite fast along the bank above, and I didn’t risk looking up – I stayed hunched in my hollow while he paused, no more than ten feet away, savouring his advantage . . . but it seemed he hadn’t seen me, he swore under his breath, and after ten seconds he jogged on. When I got up and crept on all fours to the top of the ditch, I saw him a hundred yards off, on the far side of the circle, strolling along in plain view against the sky. He had his hands in his pockets, as if to say the game was over, or that he’d never really been playing it.

We met at the trig point. Giles, with a scrambling of heels on its smooth concrete surface, pushed himself up and sat on it. In this bare, windswept landscape the little pillar of the trig point was a monument, as cryptic in its way as the prehistoric stones along the Downs. I examined the small brass benchmark buried in its side, an arrow and a number. The grooves for mounting a theodolite on the pillar’s flat top made a three-pointed symbol, almost hidden now under Giles’s thighs. ‘You could fix a machine gun on here,’ he said. ‘Any Germans coming up from the farm wouldn’t stand a chance.’

As far as I understood it, I’d been playing a Jap; so we were fighting on different fronts. I said, ‘Is this all your land?’

He looked round, as if to be sure. ‘This is all ours,’ he said. ‘Over there, of course, you get on to Denhams’ land.’

Below the Rings the path that ran the whole length of the Downs vanished westwards in a fine white furrow, crossed a quarter of a mile off by the track that led down to Woolpeck. A Land-Rover was making its slow way along it now, rocking and tilting over the deep ruts. The farm buildings themselves lay far below, the long L of the barns and the three gables of the house showing tiny but distinct, the tennis court marked out in white on the left. A small figure, a mere speck of chaff, was crossing the yard and disappeared behind the house, where I imagined the bell on its rope being rung for tea, the sound carried off in the glitter of wind and distance. I looked at my watch again, then squinted up at Giles on his pillar, handsome with the sun behind him. He was only three months older than me but growing faster, and impressively big. ‘Should we go down now?’ I said. He sat staring at the view as if to say I was missing the point of being here and perhaps of the whole walk.

Mrs Hadlow had told me at breakfast that on a day like today you could see for fifty miles from the Rings, but I asked Giles anyway.

‘From here? You can see for eighty miles,’ he said.

‘Eighty miles is a very long way, isn’t it,’ I said. It was all the way to London, or Birmingham.

‘On a clear day,’ said Giles, ‘you can see five counties, though I don’t expect you to know what they are. They’re Berkshire, Oxfordshire, of course . . .’ – he gazed out.

‘Gloucestershire,’ I said, ‘Wiltshire.’

‘Wiltshire,’ said Giles, half turning round, and frowning as though something had caught his eye.

‘And Buckinghamshire!’

He stared at me, with a hint of mockery, or even doubt, as I peered in the general direction of Gloucestershire. Where the boundaries divided one county from another was impossible to guess on the gleaming expanse of the plain below, where details were soon lost in the wash of the April light. I shivered, gooseflesh under my shirt in spite of the sun; though now and then there was a quiet lull, ten seconds of scented warmth tucked up in the cold wind that flowed endlessly over England. I ran off a few yards and gazed at the featureless circle behind us, the scruffy grass dotted with sheep droppings, though no sheep could be seen or heard. When I looked back, Giles had sprung down from the trig point and set off towards the track, shouting something I couldn’t make out.

I went scrabbling and jumping down after him, nearly out of control in the steep chalky channel of the track, Giles far ahead, and then out of view, so that I stopped chasing; it was a relief to let him go. I felt the start of a stitch, and waited for a minute with my hands on my hips, catching my breath. From here, halfway down, I picked up the bleat of the lambs and ewes in the lower fields, and when I looked back, the bare mass of the hill behind me had risen against the sky. I was happier by myself. These games with Giles were undermined from the start by a feeling that we were too old to be playing them. And his violence when he caught me, his Chinese burns, and bending my fingers back, made me dread them too. I stood listening to the birdsong, and then carried on down, skirting long slimy puddles in the ruts of the lower track; by now the bright distances were hidden from view and the places that ten minutes earlier had lain below us like objects on a tray had slipped back behind woods and hedgerow trees into the everyday mystery of the landscape.

Near the bottom of the hill a gate stood open into a field on the right and when I went in through the rough grass and looked over the bushes I could see a thin stretch of the empty lane below and the main entrance to the farm; but there was no sign of Giles. The house itself stood back from the road beyond a meadow and the square dark hedge of its front garden. It was built of red brick, and you could see, from a slight change of colour, that the left-hand end, with the third gable, had been added on later. The house stared out at the hill from ten square windows. The farmyard with all its noise and business lay behind the house, but it was the vast primeval fact of the hill in front of it that seemed to place it and define it and almost to mesmerize it.

There was the country sound of a dozen miscellaneous things unself-consciously happening, and under it the sigh, like a gathering wave, of a car approaching – from round the corner a red Citroën DS swung into view, and sped along the lane just below me; the sun flashed from its windscreen as it slowed and turned into the driveway of the farm. I’d never seen the cabriolet before, with its soft black roof – and the other thing, glimpsed for a second, was that the driver was on the left-hand side. I knew at once it was Giles’s father, he was expected and now he was here: as the brake lights came on and the car turned into the yard behind the house I found myself running through the scene, in the hall or the kitchen, where at last we would meet, and I would have the chance to thank him. My pulse raced at the thought, but the rehearsal reassured me. I was anxious for a moment, almost guilty, after a whole day messing about here without him, but also relieved he had turned up to take charge. It was an inroads of order and purpose, a touch of discipline brought into the holidays, and for me perhaps some protection from Giles himself. Now the breeze rose behind me and rustled the hedge, there was a jiggle and a grunt, he said nothing and I barely saw him, just an eye and teeth, I was flat on my front in the stony grass, the wind knocked out of me, a burning pain in my left arm, and Giles on top of me, fumbling for my right arm and pulling it back. ‘Got you, you dirty mongrel,’ he said. ‘Got you! Bloody half-nelson!’

2

The red-tiled hallway ran straight through the house, from the rarely used front door, which had a window in it, to the muddy obscurity of the back door, where everyone went in and out, prising off their wellingtons on a rough old boot-jack and flinging them down under a row of hung-up coats. The kitchen was on the right, the lavatory and a cheerless little office on the left, and to move down the hall, past the stairs and the dining-room door towards the sitting room at the front, was to step into the light. Giles’s father came out of the dining room now, a silhouette before he saw us and smiled.

‘Dad,’ said Giles, ‘this squalid individual is Dave. As you will no doubt have realized.’

‘Dave, very good to meet you,’ Mark Hadlow said, shaking hands and nodding slowly as he held my eye for a long five seconds, a warm and searching look. I felt he was entirely reassured by what he saw there, and also somehow shy of looking at the rest of me. ‘We’re all so delighted you were able to join us.’

‘What else would he doing, Dad, honestly?’ said Giles.

‘Well, thank you very much for having me, sir,’ I said, taking him in – hair silky brown, mouth thin and decisive but his brown eyes large and kindly. I had my own feeling for fathers, their looks and atmospheres, what they allowed to their children, and to other people’s, the quality of their attention. You only ever saw part of them, of course, they had jobs you only partly understood, but they were a proof of family life, and the whole thing working. Fathers had characters, like masters, heavy or funny or remote, but their power was of a different kind. As a rule they were very nice to you, and treated you more considerately than their own child, who was your friend. In that first moment, Mark Hadlow gave off something specially reassuring, a sense of fairness.

‘Give me a hand, old chap?’ he said to Giles, and swept us back out with him into the yard. The DS19 was drawn up next to Mrs Hadlow’s Riley – it loomed and gleamed there, sunk on its special suspension close to the ground. Mark opened the boot while I drifted round, peering in at the black and chrome of the dashboard, the empty hoop of the steering wheel, the unexpected absence of walnut and poshness. The bonnet was still warm after the run from London, and the importance of London seemed to radiate off it. ‘Sit in, if you like, Dave,’ Mark said, but I said, ‘Oh, it’s all right, sir,’ and then, ‘Can I help?’ Giles showed he was able to carry a box of French wine bottles, and his father balanced a second box on his raised knee as he slammed the boot shut. I had never known anyone buy a whole case of wine before. I trotted in after them, feeling futile, but excused.

The boxes were stowed in the cold pantry and we stood for a minute in the kitchen. ‘So has Giles been looking after you?’ Mark said, and I sensed that perhaps it was more than a routine question.

‘I just took him up to the Rings,’ Giles said, and tugged out his pedometer. ‘Six and three-quarter miles, Dad.’

‘You do know you have to adjust that contraption, don’t you, Giles, to your own pace,’ and he gave me a look that was nearly a wink. ‘Anyway, it’s a decent walk, you must be dying for tea – I know I am’ – going back towards the door. ‘Audrey not in yet?’

‘Not till six, Dad.’

‘Put the kettle on, old chap, would you,’ said Mark. ‘Now, where’s your mother?’ – and he went out down the hall calling ‘Cara . . . Cara . . .’, almost chanting it, like a line from a song, and I didn’t know at first, as I followed after, that it was Mrs Hadlow’s name, though I knew, of course, what it meant. They ran into each other in the doorway of the sitting room, and when they came back towards me she seemed changed from the stern Mrs Hadlow of lunchtime by the fact of her husband coming home and calling out her name. In this moment of enlightenment I saw the next stage of our meeting starting before I’d made my little speech, which to me was the crucial part of the first stage. I said,

‘I just wanted to thank you, very much, Mr Hadlow . . .’ but Mrs Hadlow, Cara, saw straight away the thing Mark had missed, the ripped and filthy left sleeve of my shirt.

‘It looks as though you’ve taken a bit of a tumble, Dave.’

‘Oh, lord,’ said Mark. ‘What happened there?’ Giles hovered inhibitingly in my mind as I held out my arm with the torn shirt and the long jewelled graze underneath.

‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Hadlow,’ I said. There was a narrow opening for clarity and justice which I heard myself decline. ‘We were just playing a game, up on the hill.’

‘Hmm.’ She pushed back the torn sleeve, examined the scratch and the graze with the suspended judgement of a schoolfriend’s mother. ‘Giles’s games can be fairly boisterous affairs, I’m afraid. Let’s get that cleaned up’ – and she took me back to the kitchen, where Giles was eating a biscuit as the kettle creaked into life on top of the Rayburn. She fetched out a black tin from under the dresser; I was torn between noble silence and making a thing of the sting of the TCP. ‘It’ll heal up best without a dressing,’ she said.

Now Giles hovered in person, coolly intrigued. ‘He’s fine, aren’t you, Dave,’ he said, and once both his parents had turned away he smiled and punched me on the shoulder.

‘We like to meet the Exhibitioners,’ Mark Hadlow said as we sat down to tea in the dining room, ‘but we don’t believe we own them, you know. We think of you as ours, but not ours.’

‘Well, yes, quite,’ I said, as though used to this kind of frankness.

‘That’s why we don’t suggest meeting you until some way into the first year. We feel you should find your feet. Then we hope to become good friends.’

‘Doesn’t always work,’ said Lydia.

‘Julian Donnington,’ said Giles, and rolled his eyes.

‘We haven’t given up hope on Julian Donnington,’ his mother said.

‘You’ve met Andrew Ward,’ Mark said, ‘and Peter Sealyham?’

‘Yes, sir. Well, Mr Yule introduced us.’ The thing was it went against the norm to talk to seniors unless you were a fag or a tart, and I couldn’t really be friends with the Hadlow Exhibitioners from earlier years. The next time we’d met in Top Washrooms, Ward had looked straight through me.

‘And you’ve settled in all right, I have the feeling?’

‘Yes, I’ve settled in very well, sir,’ I said, and glimpsed the dark dormitory under the phrase. The pressing thing I knew I couldn’t say to him or, worse, to Giles was that I was homesick, at night especially, after lights out, and it could lead to another worry, that they might think I was homesick here, at Woolpeck.

‘Bampton’s a friendly school,’ Mark went on, ‘and a civilized one, that’s half the point of it.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, interested by this view of the place.

‘It’s not a bear pit, like some of the older public schools. And of course it’s much smaller than most of them. You haven’t had any trouble . . . you know?’ – and again he looked me in the eye, very warmly and firmly. ‘No, I wouldn’t expect it.’

Giles winced and shifted. ‘Anyway, there’s lots of, um . . .’ and cleared his throat in an unnecessary way.

‘Well . . .’ I said, unsure of myself. I glanced across the table, at Cara, and her silent brother Peter, whose farm this was, and at Lydia, with her bored way of leaning back in her chair and occasionally shaking her head. The still-unpoisoned mood of my four years at Bishop Alfred’s hadn’t prepared me for the day-and-night sneers and jokes and random violence at Bampton.

‘And your mother’s managing all right?’ said Mark, pressing on.

‘Really, Dad . . .’ said Lydia.

‘It must be hard for her, sweetheart, being on her own, and with Dave away. You hadn’t boarded before, I think?’

This was almost too understanding. ‘No, sir . . . I think she was more upset than me at the start.’

‘Well, I can imagine,’ looking at Cara now, but she merely raised her eyebrows, as if to say it had never bothered her. My mother in term time was the image called up by her Wednesday letters – the handwriting itself was her presence, more vivid than the few things the letter described, with many exclamation marks, work, a visit to Wantage, small ordinary events that covered four sides of blue Basildon Bond in a brave avoidance of the real subject: not only that she missed me, but that she knew how much more I missed her.

‘We think rather well of the Art man – Gregson,’ Cara said.

‘Oh, yes, he’s very nice,’ I said.

‘And there’s a new English teacher, Hudson?’ Mark said – ‘whom we hear good things of.’

‘Yes, I haven’t had him yet,’ I said.

‘Hudson’s a ruddy ponce,’ said Giles.

‘Do watch your language, Giles,’ Mark said, and I blushed though I wasn’t sure which bit of language it was he was objecting to.

‘Have another sandwich, Dave,’ Cara said. ‘Jam, or paste . . .? Or both!’ – and she gave me one of her rare smiles as she pushed the plate towards me.

I was helping to take out the tea-things when a young man called Roly appeared at the back door – he had driven over from Challow to play tennis with Lydia, and was wearing a tracksuit. ‘Do you know the area at all?’ he said, when she introduced me.

‘He lives in Foxleigh,’ said Lydia, ‘he’s known it all his life.’

‘In Foxleigh, really? – golly . . .’ and he nodded and stared at me pleasantly enough. ‘I always think Foxleigh’s a nice little town.’

‘Let’s get out and play while it’s still light,’ said Lydia.

I went back to see if there was anything else to carry, I wasn’t sure what was happening next, but Mark said, ‘I’m just going to look round the garden, Dave, if you’re not too tired out from your six and three-quarter miles earlier.’

‘Oh, thank you, sir,’ I said, and we giggled at each other.

‘You might want your jacket.’

I ran back with it, and Mark unbolted the front door, with the bordered glass panel in it, and ushered me out onto the front path. We walked along, past the playroom window, and across a strip of lawn to inspect the pond. Mark had a look of London about him still, in his brown suede shoes, grey flannels and sports jacket, and red silk tie.

We stood side by side and leaned forward to peer into the water, Mark’s face, half shadow, half reflection, filling the pale stripe above my own. It seemed a good time to try again, if it wasn’t already too late: ‘I just wanted to thank you very much, sir, for all your support –’ though the words came out stiffly, and Mark shushed them away before I had finished.

‘No, no, Dave, don’t thank me. My father was the one who endowed the Exhibitions, I just keep them ticking over.’

‘Oh, I see . . .’ I said, not sure if Mark’s father was still alive to be thanked.

‘The best thanks you could give us is to enjoy your time at Bampton.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said anyway.

‘Get the most out of all it has to offer. If you round it off with a scholarship to Oxford, we’ll be delighted. But we won’t mind in the least if you want to do something different.’ He put his hand on my shoulder, and gazed down at me, practical but kindly. ‘Ah, darling,’ he said, but he was looking past me now – Cara had come out to join us. ‘Hello, there!’ she said, as if she’d hadn’t been with him five minutes before. We went on across the lawn talking, with me in between them, at a dawdling pace that made the walk itself seem as important as getting to the far side – and then up the bank to the rustic shelter at the end of the tennis court, to watch Roly and Lydia knocking up.

That night I went first in the bathroom, shut my bedroom door in a mood of fragile security, then got undressed and put on my pyjamas determinedly deaf to what I knew was waiting, when I turned off the light and curled up facing the window in the chilly darkness: the inward surge of the feeling, the shaming and engulfing emotion, a grip on the heart and in the throat, unsayable. Then I heard the click of the door-handle, a glimpse of light over my shoulder, and a voice cooing, ‘Winny?’

3

After breakfast I sat for some time in the downstairs lavatory, half listening for voices as my eye traced squares in the pattern of the lino. In the window a little plastic fan span round intermittently and let in a cold raw smell from the farmyard beyond. I wasn’t sure what was happening next, and the desire to get out of another walk or game was mixed with a dread of causing trouble; I felt I would stand out just as much in my absence as I did when I tagged along. There was a basket on the floor with old copies of The Field and Berkshire Life, the glossy paper weirdly softened by damp; at the bottom of the pile the damp had gone further and fused the pages in a stiff swollen wad, which creaked and scrunched when I bent it. So the minutes passed.

I came out into the hall just as Cara’s Uncle George was cautiously descending the stairs. He’d nodded at me amiably yesterday when I arrived, but it seemed that he took all his meals in his room, and I hadn’t set eyes on him since. ‘You haven’t seen my stick, I suppose,’ he said.

I gazed up at his shadowy bulk framed in the narrow space of the staircase, walled on both sides. ‘Is it the one with a silver knob, sir?’ I ran off to where I’d seen it propped, in the corner of the sitting room.

‘Don’t need the damn thing,’ said George, when I handed it over, ‘but Cara says I have to have it.’ He moved off holding it in front of him, without it touching the floor, like something purely ceremonial. I found myself following, then watching as George reached up for his cap and the brown mac that hung under it. ‘So how are you getting on?’ he said, handing the stick back to me for a moment.

‘Oh, very well, thank you, sir,’ I said.

He gave me a kindly but doubting look, as he shrugged on the coat. ‘You’ve met Ernest already, I expect?’

‘Ernest . . .’ I said. ‘I’m not entirely sure.’

‘Come and have a word with him, then,’ said George, turning towards the back door.

‘Should I tell Giles?’ I said. ‘I think we were supposed . . .’ but the dilemma had solved itself, and after a moment I followed him, relieved to be under the old man’s protection, and putting off any thoughts of Giles’s revenge, and the forms it might take tonight. I was still holding the dark stick with its silver knob as we crossed the weedy expanse behind the house; I tried using it myself for a step or two.

When we reached the gate into the farmyard, George said, ‘I’m not absolutely clear where you’re from.’

‘Well, I’m at school with Giles, sir,’ I said.

He cleared his throat and glanced down at me. ‘Giles must be older than you.’

‘Yes, I’ll be fourteen later in the month.’

‘But I happen to know you’re in the class above him. So you’re cleverer than him.’

‘Well, I’m not sure,’ I said delicately. I felt what I said might somehow get back to Giles.

We made our way past the big open-sided barn that housed the dwindling cliff of last year’s straw. The baler stood dusty but dangerous at the far end, and the broad canvas belt of the elevator angled up towards the roof. ‘But your parents,’ George said. ‘Not English.’

Again the answer required some tact. ‘My mum’s English, I live with her.’

‘Yes, I see . . .’ said George, tactful in his turn, but not giving up. ‘She’s separated from your father, perhaps.’

It was a decision to be taken, each time, and the fact was I only knew what I knew. I twisted the stick round in my hands and said, ‘The thing is, you see,’ as if I were an old man explaining to a child, ‘my father was from Burma, but I’m afraid he’s dead now.’

‘So you’re half-Burman,’ said George, without any fuss. ‘You should probably give that to me.’ I handed back the stick and found myself blushing. ‘Now, watch this muck here, we haven’t got our wellies on.’ We were passing the open gates of the large cow-shed where a thick slew of straw and cow shit spread into the yard. Inside, barely visible in the gloom, a man raised his pitchfork in reply to George’s greeting. I was glad the cows were out, not because they frightened me at all, but because I wouldn’t be asked to prove it. I thought perhaps the man with the fork was Ernest, but George said, ‘That’s Stanley, by the way, he’s worked here all his life.’

‘Yes, I think Giles mentioned him,’ I said. Stanley was a bastard, who never let Giles and his friends climb on the tractors or make camps out of bales.

Along the far side of the barn was a ridged concrete track leading off towards the fields where the cows grazed; George turned down here now. It was interesting, in its way, but not pretty. ‘I’ve got this walk, you see,’ he said, ‘which takes about eighteen minutes, unless I get nattering to one of the men. If it’s a longer hike I’m after I head over towards Denhams’, which can take an hour or more. Have you been up the hill yet?’

‘Yes, sir, we went there yesterday. The Rings, you mean.’

‘I don’t get up there much now. Was it fun?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it was quite windy.’

‘Well I know what you mean,’ said George with a frown, focusing already on what lay beyond the end of the main barn. As we turned the corner I took a moment to see what it was, a breeze-block wall about as high as myself, and beyond it a rough mass of something, a coal-heap covered in a brown tarpaulin, which twitched and then slid sideways – it was only a second’s confusion, but I seemed to slip too, as if the earth had moved. ‘Now, now, Ernest,’ said George, going up to the pen while I hung back. The wall reached to his chest, and he leant over it and scratched Ernest’s shoulder with the silver knob of his stick. Ernest moved, with a delayed shudder and stamp, but he couldn’t move far, because of the narrow space he was in. All I could see from five yards away was an immense brown back, with the thick root of a tail at one end and the high broad hump of the neck at the other, patched with dirty white, like melting snow on a ploughed field. So this was a bull, a great story-book terror, physically stronger than anything outside a zoo. The bull’s head hung out of view, under the massive muscular yoke of its neck and shoulders. ‘I’ve brought someone to see you,’ said George; and to me, ‘Go round and say hello.’

The end of the pen was a five-bar steel gate, its everyday latch reinforced by a heavy chain and a knotted red nylon rope. Ernest’s furry white face loomed behind the bars. I wasn’t sure if he could see me or not – if I was an irritant or an irrelevance; his small brown eyes under white lashes seemed worryingly inadequate, fixed on the stultifying sameness of his pen but perhaps on some larger scheme of violence. His wet pink nose was stuck with wisps of the straw that his forelegs were planted in, up to his bulging knees. But his ears stood out alertly, the left ear with a bright yellow tag stapled to it, and he twitched his head now and then as if determined to shake the tag off. When he did this, the fold of white wattles that hung like a gathered curtain from his chin to his knees swung heavily from side to side.

‘Does he live here all the time?’ I said.

‘What’s that? No, no,’ said George. ‘He’ll be out when he’s got his next job to do. Won’t you, Ernest?’ I nodded responsibly. ‘Give him a scratch, he likes that.’ I smiled tensely, and stayed where I was. This left it up to George himself to show how well the two of them got on. ‘He’s been polled, you see,’ he said. ‘No horns to worry about.’ Behind the ears I could see two overgrown lumps – which way the horns had grown, and how long they had been, I could only imagine. I felt that when Ernest lowered his head he assumed they were still there.

He was close to the wall of the pen, with about enough space for one more creature the same size to stand beside him. George started smacking his rump, quite hard but with a pally expression, so that in a minute Ernest shifted round, thrust up his head with a fierce bellow, lifted his tail and dropped a heavy heap of dung into the straw. He almost stumbled as he backed away, his shoulder crashed against the gate as he tried to turn round, and the gate sang and rattled in its place. I saw that if Ernest did put his head down and flatten the gate I would be right in his path. We’d had a film about bullfighting at school and a bull, like a ship, took a while to turn round. So I came back and stood beside Uncle George in the shelter of the wall. ‘What would he weigh, sir, I wonder?’ I said.

‘Ernest? Ooh, by now he’d be a good fifteen hundredweight.’

‘Really, sir . . .’ – I took this in doubtingly, three-quarters of a ton, as we stood and looked at him. In a minute George leant over and Ernest let the old man stroke his muzzle once or twice before he twitched his ears and stamped again. The little silence fell when neither guest nor host knows if a matter has run its course.

‘Goodness, though,’ George said, ‘Burma. Have you spent any time there?’

‘Oh . . . no, sir, I haven’t,’ I said, and peered closely at Ernest in the blur of feelings that the place, the mere name of the place, set working in me.

‘You’ve read about this latest business?’

‘Well, a bit, yes, at school, in fact. The coup d’état, you mean, sir?’

‘The coup d’état,’ said George slowly, ‘exactly so.’ He scratched Ernest’s head between his vanished horns, and at this the bull twitched again and staggered sideways away from us. ‘All very terrible.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ I said, with a tingle of inadequacy that passed down my arms into my unoccupied hands. George rested his own consoling hand on my shoulder, and I gazed in a kind of compound embarrassment at the unreachable subject of Burma and at Ernest’s under-parts, the large hanging triangle of flesh that carried and concealed his thing, and behind his thing, and hard to get my mind round, the vast shape, heavy as dumbbells, purple as liver, swinging and knocking against his knees as he moved. George took his hand away, I said, ‘Well, thank you very much, sir,’ and we set off back past the barns. We might have been there for two minutes or much longer – and I had a peculiar feeling of having failed a test with Uncle George, or not understood what was expected of me.

‘The thing is, Mr Pollitt,’ I said, ‘I’m the Hadlow Exhibitioner.’

‘Are you now? Yes, I think I knew that. Well, I said you were clever’ – genially, but as if his own cleverness had briefly been doubted. ‘What are your favourite subjects?’

It was a standard adult question, but he asked it without the usual condescension. ‘Well, English,’ I said.

‘Oh, English, yes.’

‘And French too.’

‘Have you been in France?’

‘Not yet, sir, no . . . And also, I’d have to say, History.’

‘What are you doing in History?’

‘Well, at the moment we’re doing the Civil War.’

‘Ah, yes, awful business,’ he said, and shook his head, rather as if he remembered it personally, and regretted his part in it. ‘Now, are you a Roundhead or a Cavalier?’

I weighed it up. ‘I think a Cavalier,’ I said, and looked solemn because of the other meaning the words had at school. ‘What about you, sir, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘Oh I was a Cavalier too, at your age. You may well become a Roundhead, at least for a while, later on. I know I did.’ I thought this was unlikely, but I noted what the old man was saying. ‘How long are you stopping with us?’ he asked, as we came back across the yard. I said I was going home on Monday. ‘And you live in Foxleigh? Well, that’s not far away. Perhaps you’ll come back and see us in the summer.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, not sure if this was an invitation.

‘Do you play tennis?’

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘Peter’s a good tennis-player. As, in fact, is Lydia. She’s got the reach for it.’

We’d stopped again briefly a few yards from the back door. The lower wing, jutting out from the rear of the house, closed off the yard, with the broad open porch below, where the bell, like a school bell, hung with a rough cord dangling from its clapper. George raised his stick and pointed to a window on the floor above. ‘That’s my room,’ he said. ‘I’m out of people’s way up there, but of course I can see who’s coming and going.’ The thin ellipse of light from a tilted Anglepoise glowed in the glass but showed little of the room. ‘It means I can get on with my work,’ he said, and smiled in a way that made me think I must be keeping him from it. ‘It may not be up your street . . . you know . . . but feel free to knock on my door any time if you’re at a loose end. We might have another little chat before you leave.’ He smiled thoughtfully, not at me, but at a space just over my left shoulder. Then, with a shake of his stick, as if chasing off a dog, he turned and went back indoors.

4

I stood there, under the bell, for a minute, thinking that if I lifted my hand to the rope and rang it, Giles would probably appear – then just in time I thought I could say that I’d searched for him and couldn’t find him. I opened the door of the boot room, which was dusty and cobwebbed, dried mud on the stone floor, a smell of motor oil and fertilizer, and I poked round in there for a while, among the buckets and boxes. Overhead I heard slow footsteps, that must have been Uncle George back in his room, a chair being dragged, then the faint voice of a wireless. I tugged open the heavy door on the far side, and went down a few steps onto a brick path under apple trees where hens were pecking about. This was another part of the farm I hadn’t seen before. Along one side of it ran the high bulging yew hedge which screened the near end of the tennis court – a bright desert of sunshine ten yards away which I pictured with a kind of awe as I dawdled in the gloom among the hens. The hens had a couple of chicken-wire runs, with a rough little carpentered kennel at one end and a gate like a guillotine at the other, to shut them in at night. Now they were randomly out and about, eyeing and pecking up scattered seed, bits of grit and grass, clucking fretful objections as I moved among them; one strutting past me in a devious preoccupied way and five seconds later hopping up the steps into the boot room behind me – I leapt back myself, only panicked it more by shouting and flapping, it squawked and leapt up onto the table, knocked over some canes, pecked wildly at the window for five seconds before darting back out through the door into the orchard, with a run of ruffled clucks that seemed to say oh for god’s sake, and left me with a sense of a small unobserved misdemeanour, that might soon have turned into a scene and a telling-off. I closed the door firmly and went back down through the trees.

At the far end of the orchard there was a red-brick wall, a mossy slate roof, an old outbuilding adrift from the house and as hidden from the farmyard as it was from anyone serving and volleying on the far side of the hedge. There was something I very much wanted to do, by myself, and I thought this might be a good place to do it; then hid the thought when I heard voices. I followed the path round the corner of the shed – which had a window, flung open at right angles, the single large pane containing the image of a small teenage boy, transparently reflected against the green, his face hard to read among the shadows of the trees.

There was a grunt of laughter from inside the shed – ‘Well, please don’t jump to conclusions!’, a voice which I took a weird two or three seconds to know was Lydia’s: I stood watching myself, now doubly unsure what to do. ‘I’m not jumping anywhere, love,’ said a deeper voice, Cara, of course, but in a patient, humorous tone. ‘I mean . . . you can jump wherever you like.’ A rustle and scrape, a throat-clearing. ‘Mm, well . . .’ My mind had them engaged in some task together, some routine of work that this outhouse was kept for, and which filled the gaps in their talk with small scratchings and shufflings. The talk was alert, but its pace sedated. ‘You know,’ said Cara, ‘Daddy’s quite prepared to pay for Roly too.’ After a further short pause they both spoke together, ‘Well, thanks, Mum / We just want you to be careful . . .’ The fear of being caught had me scuffling on past the window as if on my way to somewhere else.

‘Exploring?’ – this was Cara, much brighter and louder, so that I turned round. She was standing at the open door of the shed in shabby blue trousers, with a paintbrush raised in one hand and a rag bunched up in the other; she cocked her head as if to hear my answer. Was exploring a good thing, or was she seizing my likely excuse for being there and turning it on me? The three bright syllables were a lesson in ambiguity. ‘I rather fear Giles has abandoned you.’

‘Well, I’m not absolutely sure,’ I said.

‘Typical, Mum,’ said Lydia. I came closer. Through the door I could see her in profile, sitting on a kitchen chair, with her right hand, nearer me, raised to her right shoulder. In contrast to Cara, she looked formal for the place and the time, in a red dress and dangling earrings, her wavy fair hair swept up and back, but she had kicked off her shoes. I could only see the canvas at an oblique angle but I understood now that Cara was painting her portrait.

‘Let’s take a break,’ she said. At which Lydia got up, chased her toes into her shoes, and made off to the house, red evening dress sweeping the young nettles. Cara stayed on the step, weighing things up. ‘Are you interested in painting?’ she said.

‘I am quite, in fact,’ I said.

‘Are you? Whom do you like?’

‘Well, last term I got rather keen on Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema,’ I said.

‘Oh, I see . . .’

‘We did him with Mr Gregson.’

‘I’m starting to wonder about Mr Gregson.’

‘And Francis Bacon I also quite like.’

She turned her laugh into a clearing of the throat. ‘Well, you’d better come in.’

‘Oh, if you’re sure. I didn’t know this was here, Mrs Hadlow,’ I said, stepping into the room with a cautious feeling – the whitewashed brick walls and open rafters made it twice the size you expected. There was a chemical tang, paints and turps, a table with tubes and jars of brushes, and in the set-up of easel and chair and a jug of tulips something new in my experience, but recognized at once, an artist at work.

Cara had her cigarettes in her cardigan pocket, and lit one with a lighter and stood back as I walked round. I had the feeling the cigarette set the limit for the time I should spend there, and her tolerance of my visit. ‘I mostly work here. In London there’s just too much going on.’

‘Oh, yes, I suppose,’ I said. I examined the portrait of Lydia, still a swirl of red lines with only the face done in detail, and not that much like Lydia, at least as I knew her; but I’d never seen a proper painting at this early stage. Then I gazed at a couple of pictures leaning against the wall, still-lifes of broken brown pots, a trowel and an old trug, which must be things from the boot room where I’d just been poking around, offered in quite a new light.

‘You don’t have to say anything,’ Cara said. ‘The young can be lethal critics.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s very interesting.’

‘Most of these things aren’t finished, and one doesn’t want premature criticism, you know?’

‘No, quite,’ I said.

‘Wait and see the finished picture before you put your oar in.’

I smiled nervously. ‘Well, thank you for letting me look,’ I said.

She blew out a jet of smoke, and squashed the rest of the cigarette beside others in a saucer. ‘Is Giles being foul to you? I rather suspect he is.’

‘Oh!’ I said, embarrassed and annoyed and relieved, all at once. Life here seemed to have these invitations to disloyalty, perhaps standard in full-size families, which I wasn’t used to. I chose a phrase of Mum’s, ‘I think sometimes, Mrs Hadlow, he doesn’t know his own strength!’

‘Hmm, I wonder about that . . .’ she said, and looked at me as if he was a problem for both of us. ‘Does he bully you at school?’

‘No, not really,’ I said quickly, and it seemed worth explaining, ‘we don’t actually see much of each other at school, you know, being in different forms.’

‘No, I suppose,’ she said.

I stood looking for a moment at Lydia’s pinkish face on the canvas, which seemed to me a mystery of family as well as art. The eyes were what Cara had worked on most, and they stared back disconcertingly. She started cleaning a brush on a rag, plunged it in a jar of turps, the pink clouding to grey. She said,

‘Of course, Giles is at a difficult age.’

‘Yes,’ I said, absorbing this confidence uncertainly.

‘I have the feeling he’s quite popular at school?’

I shook my head. ‘Oh, I think so,’ I said. There were things you couldn’t talk about with parents, such as how certain people fancied Giles, and how he fancied himself.

‘But I mustn’t cross-examine you!’

‘No, that’s all right,’ I said.

‘We keep doing it.’

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘Well, I’ll see you at lunch.’

‘Oh . . . yes,’ I said, colouring as I took in the instruction. ‘Goodbye!’ – and I stepped out of the shed, and went back briskly towards the house, the hens murmuring ominously as I came through. ‘Pay no attention to me . . .’ I said, when I stopped and looked around. Cara had gone back into her studio, I was alone, and a compulsion I’d felt the day before, on the tennis court, to get into the yew hedge, rose up in me again now I was on its other side. I’d had a glimpse of gloomy tunnels there, beneath the lowest branches, that a dog might get through, and perhaps a boy of my size. On this side, bendy strips of chickenwire kept the hens from going through. It looked dry when I knelt down, and in a minute, though the pressure was painful on my wounded left arm, I had crawled in and wriggled through the needly dust to the centre of the hedge. I lay there with my knees pulled up and a low bright view of the court beyond, the net hanging slack between the posts, and two magpies patrolling the far base line.

5

At breakfast that morning I’d heard Cara reminding Uncle Peter that Elise liked Irish whiskey, and later telling Mrs Over, ‘You know Elise won’t touch pudding’; but it wasn’t till just before lunch that I found out who Elise was. ‘Your mother gets in at five to four, remember,’ Cara said. It was part of the adventure of being here that the Hadlows explained nothing about themselves.

Mark looked rather critically at his watch, and then squared his shoulders. ‘Want to go and meet Gran at the station?’ he said. Giles sounded reasonably keen, and I saw the chance for a first ride in the DS; though under the imagined excitement of the moment when it rose on its hydropneumatic suspension I saw a new challenge shaping in the unexpected presence of another guest. There was an hour to kill after lunch, and we drifted round outside, ending up at the tennis court, where Giles got me to crank the net up as high as I could, and then did some work on his serve. ‘Don’t worry if you can’t get to them,’ he said, as I trudged back and forth to retrieve the balls.

At half past three we presented ourselves in the yard, where Mark was getting the car ready. Its black roof folded down into a surprising space behind the rear seats; a red leather cover fitted over it, and buttoned like a glove.

‘I pronounce this car,’ said Giles, ‘a UFO.’

‘The car of the future,’ said Mark, and smiled at him sweetly, a shared happiness I hadn’t seen till then.

‘An ugly foreign object,’ Giles said.

I threw up my hands and stared, I was pretty sure of myself. ‘I don’t know how he can say such a thing, sir,’ I said.

‘Well . . .’ said Mark, with an intake of breath.

‘It’s the most beautiful car I’ve ever seen.’

‘Yes, thank you, Dave, very much for that,’ said Mark. ‘It pains me to say it, but my son has no sense of beauty.’ Giles smirked at his own provocation, and I felt he was secretly absorbing the praise of his father’s car. ‘Just get a Jag, Dad,’ he said, as he tipped the seat forward for me to climb into the back, then took the passenger seat himself. Mark himself of course got in on the left. ‘You comfortable back there?’ he said, and pressed the ignition, and it was the moment I’d been waiting for when the body of the whole car rose like a hovercraft and settled itself comfortably off the ground. Giles turned and grinned at me, in spite of himself, and Mark said smoothly over his shoulder, ‘That’s all there is to it, Dave.’ We floated off at once across the potholes of the yard and along the chalky roughness of the drive.

The floating sensation was only part of the novelty. I had never been in an open-top car before – there was the surprise of moving off, the air stirring already around us, and once we were out in the lane the absence of anything between us and the trees and gateways and swiftly reorganizing landscape as we picked up speed, while the trees and the gateways set up their own rhythmic bluster, fast irregular patterns of whooshes and thumps: I felt full of air, almost stifled by it. It was a day with a stealthy almost summery warmth, though once we had climbed and turned onto the main road I was shivering – I grinned back at Mark as our eyes met again in the rear-view mirror. Then we slowed at a cross-roads and it was warm, and the smell of the engine mixed for a second or two with the complicated scent of the hawthorn in the hedges. It seemed the sloping windscreen and the raised side windows wrapped Giles and his father in a cockpit of quiet while funnelling the fierce draught into the rear seat, sleeking and riffling my hair. We passed along the road that ran under the Downs, with the great bare flank of the hill reaching upwards on the right, and the sweep of the Vale stretching far away to the left. The road itself plunged up and down, with solid white lines on the blind crests and hidden dips which Mark just about observed. He had to wander out wide to see past the van or the tractor and trailer in front, Giles acting as lookout. ‘Take him, Dad, take him!’ he shouted, as we closed in fast on a struggling Morris Oxford and I braked hard in the back. After ten minutes Mark indicated, slowed and swung into a side road with a narrow bridge over the railway line and a view down the empty track. In thirty seconds we’d pulled up in the forecourt of Challow station.

The train wasn’t signalled yet, and we drifted down the platform. A couple waiting with a cat in a box gave Mark an unassuming smile that admitted they didn’t know him personally but knew who he was. Mark smiled blandly back as he passed. I felt the reflected glory of being with him, and the waiting couple’s curiosity about me as well. I stooped and looked in at the cat and felt rather sorry for it. Giles walked along the very edge of the platform with his arms out for balance. There was a country stillness, with birdsong and bleating of lambs again on the air, and then round a bend half a mile down the line the flat-faced locomotive came into view and three or four carriages shivered into place behind it. My heart was racing, I didn’t know why. ‘Don’t you miss the romance of steam, Dave?’ said Mark. ‘Yes, sir!’ I said, though I could only recall being in a steam train once, years before, when Mum and I went up to Maidenhead for the day. The train pulled in, powerful and grimy, and romantic enough for me. The engine’s roar as it crawled past us to a stop was inhuman, but in the light that gleamed through the carriages three or four figures were standing and moving towards the doors. ‘There’s Gran!’ shouted Giles. She had already lowered the window to reach for the handle when Giles jerked the door open – a man behind her caught hold of her arm. She stepped down, small but impressive, with swept-back auburn hair and prominent dark eyes; in her short dark coat and black court shoes she brought an unignorable note of elegance to the little country station. Mark came up and kissed her, on both cheeks, as she handed her suitcase to Giles. When I was brought forward and Mark said, ‘Mummy, this is Dave Win, a friend of Giles’s from Bampton,’ she gave me a quick doubting look, as if I was another example of her grandson’s mischief. I put out my hand and said, ‘How do you do, Mrs Hadlow,’ and she wrinkled her nose and said, ‘Not Hadlow, but still,’ in a soft rasping voice. She shook my hand in one jerk, up-and-down, as if trying to shake it off, and I felt for a split second the ridges of rings under her thin leather gloves.

When she saw the car waiting with the roof down she cocked her head, as if torn between the glamour and the discomfort. ‘My hair!’ she said.

‘You’ll be all right, will you, Mummy?’ said Mark.

‘I’ve just had it done,’ she said, in a quietly difficult way.

‘You’ll be OK in the front, Gran,’ said Giles. ‘I’ll go in the back with Winny.’ It was the first time he’d used my school nickname with the family, and his grandmother gave me another odd look. She found a fine blue mist of a scarf in her coat pocket and tied it lightly over her hairdo before we started off. And she seemed to enjoy the ride, which Mark took more sedately going back. There was just one moment when he went too fast over a crest in the road and we all gave a sickened shout. She half turned and stared at me – ‘All very thrilling!’ she said, and it was then that I realized, from the way she said it, that she must be French.

We all came together for drinks before dinner, when she changed the mood very notably – the tone was heightened but inhibited; she was the centre of attention, pretending unnervingly that she was at home. She wore black high heels, and what Mum would have called a cocktail dress, dark red, with a star-like silver brooch. Mark passed her a whiskey with a lot of ice in it and we all watched her as she tried it. ‘Ah, that’s better,’ she said, and her little shiver and secretive smile somehow helped us to picture the strong cold drink slipping down inside her.

‘We don’t have to stand. Mummy, you take that comfortable chair.’ In the hovering scramble that followed I found my place last, and next to her, on the black-leather pouffe which broke wind softly as I sat on it.

‘Really, Dave . . .’ said Giles.

‘Oh, darling, could I try one of yours?’ Elise said, and watched as Cara got up to offer her a cigarette. ‘Thanks,’ she said, blowing out the first smoke with a quick repeated nod, as if settling to her theme. ‘Well, it is charming to be here again,’ she said, beaming around, ‘after so long.’

‘It’s been too long,’ said Mark, and Cara said, ‘I know, ages,’ but as if it couldn’t be helped. ‘We’ve not been here ourselves all that much in the past year, as Mark’s been so busy.’

‘And will Peter be joining us?’ said Elise.

‘Pete’s been over at Denhams’ all day,’ said Cara, ‘you may catch him later on.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Elise – any further explanation deflected by the arrival of Uncle George, who took her in with his pleasant nod and smile, as though not quite sure if he’d greeted her already. There was a mild gleam of chivalry in the air between these two senior figures, as well as a tacit insistence, in Elise’s playful glances, that she was, even so, a good ten years younger than him. I was caught up barely consciously in family resemblances, Mark as father and now as son, the round jaw and wide mouth of Elise carried over undeniably into Giles.

‘So what news of the play, Gran?’ said Lydia, who didn’t look like her at all.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Elise, shaking the subject away, which only made us more interested in it.

‘It would be great if you did it,’ said Mark.

Crouching there, sipping at my small glass of cider, I was an extra, but conspicuous by being next to her. I watched the ash on her Kensitas lengthen, wondered whether to act, but when she tapped it abstractedly above the ashtray I saw how she was in control. ‘Oh, they want me, you know, but is it the sort of thing I should be doing?’

‘What is it, again?’ said Giles.

His grandmother stared as if fascinated at a spot on the carpet, and we sat watching her with a sudden anxious interest in the answer. ‘Well, it’s S. Keel,’ she said, ‘though of course very much updated.’

‘Updated to when?’ said Cara.

‘What is it?’ said Giles again.

Mark translated. ‘Eschyle,’ he said quietly, ‘Aeschylus – Agamemnon, isn’t it, you said, Mummy?’

‘Very much the present,’ Elise said. ‘Modern dress, you know,’ with a simple gesture, a turn of her right hand, as if she might wear what she had on now.

Uncle George said, ‘And you of course will be Electra . . .’

Elise laughed dryly at this. ‘Dear George . . . The director seems to see me as Clytemnestra.’

‘A great part, Gran,’ said Lydia.

Elise looked at her with teasing sharpness. ‘You see me wielding an axe, do you?’ she said.

‘I do!’ said Lydia, and I peeped up at Elise, unsure how much she herself could be teased. It felt risky to me, but she went on in a reasonable tone,

‘It’s true there are precious few rôles these days for women over fifty.’

Cara said, ‘There’s Queen Margaret, isn’t there,’ in a reasonable tone of her own. ‘And what’s she called, Volumnia?’

‘One day no doubt I will come to those parts,’ Elise said.

‘I mean, how old is Clytemnestra?’ said Lydia.

‘Well . . .’ – Mark raised his eyebrows as if trying to work it out exactly. If she turned out to be younger than Elise surely that would be all right – or would it only draw attention to the fact that Elise was already too old to be playing her?

‘Personally, I’m still hoping for your Portia,’ said Uncle George.

‘Vroom, vroom!’ said Giles.

‘Not Porsche, you idiot,’ said Lydia, though everyone found this joke, which had been really stale at school last term, quite funny.

At dinner there was wine for the adults on top of the whiskey and gin, and soon a rising noise of conversation. Mrs Over served us all from the sideboard, and I jumped up to carry the plates, out of good manners and a tingly disconnection and excitement from the cider. ‘Thank you,’ she said, but I felt she resented it too. I put a flourish into it, Mark and Cara played along, Elise said it was far too much and sent it back, and Lydia said, ‘Why on earth is Dave waiting on us?’ ‘I don’t mind!’ I said, with a bow as I set down her plate. I served Giles next, and he looked at me quite nicely and said, ‘You make an excellent skivvy, Winny. Well done!’ Mrs Over switched off the overhead light as she went out and we were lost for a minute in the near-darkness of candlelight before details softly reappeared, eyes widened and glittered, the shadows beyond filled with dim hints of colour, and the talk, that had faltered for a moment, picked up again. We’d just started eating when Uncle Peter came in, paused outside the circle to get his bearings, answered Uncle George’s questions about where he’d been with a phrase and a grunt, and took his place opposite me. I beamed at him, to put him at his ease, and he seemed for a second to acknowledge me as his gaze ran round the table. Mrs Over came back in – ‘This plate’s hot, mind,’ she said, and helped him to the vegetables and gravy, and he took a kind of mothering from her without seeming to notice it. I hardly remembered, none of us seemed to, that it was Peter’s own table we were all sitting down at.

I was next to Lydia, who’d more or less ignored me so far, as a friend of Giles’s, but who now said cosily, ‘Mum says Giles has been beating you up.’

‘Oh . . . I wouldn’t say beating me up, exactly,’ I said, not looking at Giles, but listening to see if he’d heard; he was talking, almost arguing, after his own glass of cider, with his father about politics.

‘You must try not to mind it,’ Lydia said, ‘it’s just jealousy.’

Now I looked at him quickly, handsome and already grown-up tonight in the candlelight, and with his monthly allowance, and everything else that was waiting in the shadows behind him – ‘I don’t think it can be jealousy, really,’ I said.

‘It’s . . . well, it’s various things, isn’t it,’ said Lydia. ‘It’s always so funny when the new Exhibitioners come for their weekend, and now he’s at the school himself – and you being obviously much cleverer than him . . .’

‘Oh, Giles is quite clever,’ I said – and I half understood that I meant Giles knew about the London Underground and the Common Market, and was in the Debating Society already, which I was still shy of going to.

‘And then you went straight into the Fourth Form while Giles is stuck in the Remove – I know all about it!’ She had the firmness, the lack of sentiment, of all the Hadlows, and she had something else, a way of laughing about them. Still, I felt I couldn’t mention the main reason Giles wanted to hurt me, though I looked in her face and wondered if it was as obvious to her.

As we came through afterwards, Elise seemed much friendlier. I tried to slip past her but she beamed at me warmly. ‘What fine silky hair you have,’ she said, and ran her long fingers through my fringe as if I’d been her own child. I beamed anxiously back. ‘Lydia tells me you’re from Burma,’ she said, and the hint of a guttural r seemed to colour the country with her own unknown assumptions about it.

‘Well . . .’ I said, ‘I’m not from Burma, really . . . you see, my father was,’ and I went straight on, ‘we’re doing Twelfth Night next term.’ The presence of a famous actress had had a sort of alcoholic effect on me, over dinner, as she talked about films and directors; the fact that I’d never heard of the great Elise Pleynet made this sudden exposure to her fame all the more convincing.

‘Doing . . .’ she said.

‘I mean we’re putting it on. You know, in the theatre at school.’

‘Ah, the famous school play. What fun!’

‘Well, it’s just the Junior School play—’

‘And Giles will be in it – am I right?’

‘Yes, I expect.’

‘Well, Orsino . . . yes. Can’t you see it?’ – and she made one of her slight hand gestures, seemed to mock Giles but still believe in him. ‘Mark, you know,’ she said confidentially, ‘was once in the school play at Bampton.’ She looked across at him, to see if he could hear. ‘He was the Duke of somewhere or other, in Henry the Fifth, I think it was, and he looked simply marvellous in his robes, everybody said so, but it was clear from the moment he stepped on the stage that he simply wasn’t an actor.’ She shook her head as she reached for her handbag, and took out her cigarette case. ‘He didn’t have to open his mouth, one simply knew. He was just . . . Mark!’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I see . . .’, and again felt a little disloyal.

She flicked a silver lighter, sent out a first focused jet of smoke. ‘Well, I must come and see whether Giles has got the knack!’

‘If you can,’ I said, feeling this raised the stakes for my own first appearance on stage.

‘Somehow I think he’ll be better at it than his father . . .’ She smiled at me. ‘And it will be so useful for you. You will learn about lighting . . . or costumes perhaps . . .’ – she shrugged happily at the possibilities.

‘Mr Clark’s put me down as Fabian,’ I said, ‘but really I’d like to play Antonio.’

She looked at me consideringly. ‘Well, no one remembers Fabian . . .’ And then, ‘Have you acted before?’

‘Not really,’ I said, ‘not real acting’; at school I’d won myself some unlikely friends and even a first magic taste of popularity by mimicking people – the masters mainly, rather than other boys. A lot of people did it, but I did it better, with a secret feeling that I had a gift that was quite different in kind from being good at French and History and having an Exhibition.

‘I wonder . . .’ she said. There was something sad, but resourceful, about her. ‘Well, why not?’ She glanced round. ‘Let’s sit . . .’, folding herself downwards with quick stiff elegance onto the settee, where I perched beside her, excited but hoping to be rescued in a minute or two. The others were still standing by the door, Uncle George explaining something on the framed county map which hung there. ‘If you have the gift,’ she said, ‘you can do anything. But it will be difficult for you.’ She gave me the pondering stare of someone needing to be frank as well as supportive. ‘Not because of your talent, but because of how people see you. I can tell you, I have worked with . . . I’ve worked with all sorts of people, Algerians, for instance, and with the most fascinating Indian actors. It’s not easy for them. Well, in India, of course, they make their own films, but in France, and in England, these actors by and large have to play what we call the mauvais rôles . . . you understand?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Or of course you can do radio.’

‘Yes . . .’ I said, feeling we were getting rather ahead of ourselves.

‘No one can see you then!’

‘Well . . .’ I said, staring for a moment at her pale powdered face, her auburn crown, not entirely following what she was so confidently saying, the scale of this unthought-of problem.

‘At school it may well be different, I expect you all have to muck in. Why not have a coloured Romeo! At my school in Grenoble we had a beautiful girl from Sénégal who acted all the time – Molière, Rostand . . .’ – she seemed to see her just beside me. ‘She dreamt of a life on the stage, poor thing, but the only parts she ever got were as a coloured maid, you know, or a slave-girl or something. It was only at our little lycée that she could be Bérénice.’

‘Or Clytemnestra,’ I said.

Elise gazed at me, I thought I’d tripped myself up, but she laughed and said, ‘She was made for Clytemnestra,’ so that I felt she had probably decided we were friends and, more than that, that I’d seen the wisdom of her advice. Mark came over, and I sensed he was pleased we were getting on, and I was pleased myself by her attention, and the privilege of it, something always to remember. I got up and made space for him, and it was only in the moment I turned away that I let myself feel what had happened.

I was in bed, with the light still on, when Giles came to my room again – a stealthy turn of the handle and he was in, and closed the door behind him. ‘Ah, Winny!’ he said, and smiled at me with his head on one side. Tonight he was wearing the red pyjamas with black piping that I knew from school, tight on him now, the jacket unbuttoned.

I said, ‘I saw you stealing that glass of port after dinner.’

‘You can’t steal things in your own home, Winny, for heaven’s sake. Now budge up . . .’

‘Anyway, it’s not your home,’ I said.

He was pulling up the bedclothes as I tried to hold them down. ‘Well, it will be my home, as a matter of fact, if my uncle Peter dies without issue. It will all be left to me, now shove up,’ and after a five-second struggle he was more or less in there beside me. ‘You’re quite strong, aren’t you, for a . . .’ – he looked in my face as if to find the word.

‘Buzz off, Hadlow!’ I said. I wondered about shouting it, though his warm hard pressure against me in bed was different from the roughness of him in our fights out of doors. I had to make space for him, or fall off the bed on the other side, so I clung on. He had the smell of the day on him still, but toothpaste breath. ‘Ow!’ I said, ‘my arm!’ – again I just hissed it, still being a decent sport. I was tense for the rabbit punch, the Chinese burn, and pretended with a racing heart that I was bored and annoyed, and not frightened, and all at sea with conjecture that Giles knew something about me and was leading me on.

‘This is cosy,’ he said.

‘Hmm,’ I said, tense with the novelty of being in bed with another boy. The nylony shininess of his pyjamas might have been beautiful if Giles had been somebody else, such as Morgan or Roberts.

‘I’m sorry about your arm, Winny,’ he said, and ran his fingers up and down it almost gently. I shifted away again, though he was heavier and bigger than me, there was a furtive fight that must have made a bit of noise, and then he was half out of bed. ‘You really are a tart, Winny,’ he said, panting and laughing sourly, and I said, ‘I’m not, you’re the tart,’ and then he got on top of me and kissed me, pushed and slithered his lips over mine as I tried to twist my head away – somehow I struggled out from under him and half fell out of bed, onto the thin bedside rug. After this he was abruptly on his dignity. He stood up and buttoned his pyjama jacket. ‘I’ve had it with you, Winny, I really have,’ he said, and went out without properly closing the door.

6

The next evening I was the first person into the sitting room, and though it was still quite light outside I closed the curtains and turned on the lamps, feeling by now that I knew how things were done here. It was a room with a different atmosphere from the rest of the house, red-and-white striped wallpaper, framed hunting prints, a glass-fronted cabinet with plates and china figurines displayed. Above the fireplace there was a broad mirror which in daytime reflected the hedge and the rise of the Downs outside, but now, with the curtains closed, made the large room feel oddly claustrophobic. The fire had been laid but not lit, and I sat down next to it, in a provisional way, and opened my copy of Le Grand Meaulnes, though I wasn’t really taking it in. In a minute or two there were footsteps in the hall, and Elise entered, wearing her red evening frock, with black handbag and a black shawl round her shoulders. I jumped up and said, ‘Bonsoir, madame,’ and she nodded and crossed the room with a thin smile as if deferring her reply until she’d got a drink. As she squinted at the bottles she shivered, and pulled her shawl tighter.

‘No fire?’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘do you want me to light it?’

She shot me a look. ‘Normally I think the woman does it’ – and in fact Mrs Over knocked and came in at that moment, knelt down and touched a match to the crumpled-up paper, and sat back on her heels to watch it take. We looked on as she set the mesh guard in front of the fire, then she nodded and went out without saying a word. The first smell of burnt paper and pine twigs in the room seemed to mix with her evident feeling that we could have lit the thing ourselves.

Elise came round the sofa clutching her thick tumbler of whiskey and we stood together watching the first crackle and hiss, little streams of smoke pulled upward, flames sauntering the length of a twig, the slither and soft crash of the fire falling in on itself as the kindling burned up. Then she looked round, with a moment’s indecision about where we would each sit. ‘You were there,’ she said.

‘Oh – I don’t mind,’ I said, picking up my book to clear a space for her nearest to the fire. She shook her head and smiled graciously, but in the air, with the encouraging scent of the fire, there was a strange embarrassment. For a moment she moved towards a small hard chair further off, then turned back, with a shrug, and sat down in the armchair facing me, as if it couldn’t matter less. I smiled at her, wanting to ask her more about what she had said last night, and at the same time hoping to avoid the subject altogether.

‘What are you reading?’ she said.

‘Oh, it’s Le Grand Meaulnes,’ I said, and sat forward to hand it to her. It had struck me last night that she might know something useful about it, that I couldn’t have got from an English person. She held it at arm’s length, with a mocking smile, as if calling up very distant memories, then handed it back with a quick shake of the head. Of course she didn’t have her glasses on.

‘Et il vous plaît, monsieur, ce roman?’

‘Ah . . .! Oui, beaucoup, madame!’ I said, not sure if the monsieur was flattering or mocking. ‘Et à vous aussi?’

‘En France, il est très connu, tout le monde l’a lu,’ which didn’t answer my question, but then I felt it would be rude to press her. ‘Vous l’étudiez à l’école, j’imagine?’

‘Oui, oui, absolument,’ I said, with the worldly new personality that came over me when speaking French. ‘Nous avons étudié la première partie pendant le trimestre passé, et il nous faudra avoir lu le reste avant que nous ne retournions à l’école à la fin des vacances.’ This was a sentence that ran through a set of points and I hoped I’d come out of it on the right subjunctive; Elise’s look was somewhere between amusement and mild offence. But just then everyone else came in together, and my suave new persona slipped into hiding.

‘Did I hear you practising your French, Dave?’ Mark said.

‘He speaks French well,’ said Elise.

‘Ah . . . merci, madame,’ I said, and Giles sniggered and said, ‘Oui, oui, sacrebleu.’

She looked at me, blinked as she chose her words. ‘The grammar,’ she said, ‘is . . . remarkable. But he must work, work, work on his accent.’

‘I don’t suppose they get much chance to speak French at school, Mummy,’ Mark said.

‘Not really, sir,’ I said.

‘It’s all just vocab,’ said Giles. ‘And verbs.’

‘Do try to remember, Giles,’ said Elise, ‘that you are a quarter French yourself.’ I wanted to explain that she was the first completely French person I’d ever met, but I was too ashamed by what she’d said about my accent.

As we sat down to dinner, Cara said, ‘We should really have a game of something later.’

‘We haven’t had a game for ages,’ said Mark. I pictured the boxes waiting in the window seat and felt the mixture of dread and anxious resolve that gripped me whenever a game I didn’t know was suggested, or one pack of cards was shuffled briskly with another.

Lydia said, ‘Not pontoon, though, please, Dad.’

‘Not likely,’ said Cara, ‘we don’t want to bankrupt poor old Dave!’

‘Or me!’ said Elise, ‘thanks very much,’ so that the far more serious threat of playing cards for money seemed already to be in the room.

‘Giles cleaned us all out the last time we played pontoon,’ Cara explained: ‘what was it, you beast, twenty-five pounds you took off us by the end?’

‘Twenty-six pounds ten, Mum.’ I grinned at this and Giles, enjoying my discomfort, went on pleasantly, ‘Dave could do just the same to all of us tonight.’

‘I’m sure he would be very embarrassed if he did,’ said Elise, and at the mere suggestion I found myself blushing.

‘I’ve never played it at all,’ I said, just in case pontoon might still be an option.

‘And I don’t think your mum would like it if you did, do you,’ said Mark.

I winced and said, ‘I’m afraid she wouldn’t, sir,’ childishly grateful to him for thinking of her, despite Giles’s mocking stare across the table. If I lost my entire £4 to the Hadlows, who effectively paid my school fees, she would see it as a small social disaster, though to clean them all out would surely be even more embarrassing.

I thought perhaps they would forget about it, but at the end of dinner Mark said, ‘Is it Plutocracy?’ with a grin that showed he at least was up for it, and I found myself clearing the place mats and sweeping the crumbs off the table as if eager for a game. Lydia went to the playroom to get the box, Uncle George waved at us, and went back upstairs, and Cara in one of her brisk stage directions said, ‘Are you seeing to those ewes, then, Pete?’ ‘I’m going to look at the ewes now,’ Peter said, as if it had been his own idea. He got up and went out and a minute later I heard him in the passage saying goodnight to Mrs Over.

Plutocracy was clearly a family favourite: the corners of the box had been mended more than once with Sellotape, and inside, with the board and the cards and counters and money, was a list of the many times they’d played it before, and who had won. Mark had given way, over the past year or so, to Giles, though Cara had won it last Christmas (‘Fluke’ in brackets after her name, in Giles’s writing). Now Lydia was dealing out cards with pictures on them, sacks, picture frames, gold bars. ‘I won’t try to explain the rules in full,’ Cara said, ‘you’ll just have to pick it up as we go along.’

‘It’s really quite simple, Dave,’ said Mark. ‘You need to build up your reserves in the strongest currency you can.’

‘Yes, right,’ I said, with a shake of the head, and thinking I would probably work it out, just by mimicking the others.

‘You ought to explain about the exchange rates, though,’ said Lydia, who had finished setting out the board on the table between us, and was standing red, white and black chips in columns between her fingers. It looked a bit like Monopoly, which I did know the rules of, but rather than Monopoly’s right-angled struggle from hardship to affluence through districts of London, the board for Plutocracy showed a map of the whole world. All the borders of the countries were drawn in, though some were left unnamed; my eye slid quickly over the blank of Burma to examine Japan, where Tokyo was marked with a red circle ringed in blue.

‘The red circles are the major stock exchanges,’ said Mark. ‘Tokyo opens first, obviously.’

‘And also closes first,’ said Lydia meaningfully.

‘Oh . . . yes, of course,’ I said, ‘absolutely,’ and Giles looked at me for a moment with the smile of a competitor for whom all claims of friendship or remorse are as nothing.

Lydia stared at her watch. ‘Eight forty-five,’ she said.

‘I hope we won’t be too late,’ said Elise, pulling her shawl round her.

‘Just let me win, Gran,’ said Giles, ‘and you can all go to bed.’

‘I should warn you, Dave,’ said Mark, ‘that this game may take some time. Indeed it has been known to run on over three days. But since you’re leaving us in the morning, we’ll try and get you in bed by midnight.’

‘Oh, thanks very much, sir,’ I said, and peeped round at them all, with their competent secretive expressions, their look of boredom, almost, at the merely preliminary business of the game.

‘So, Mum, you’re starting,’ said Giles. Cara promptly discarded a sack and a barrel, shook the die briskly in the plastic cup and rolled it out across Russia. It was a 4.

‘Aha!’ she said, taking a pull on her cigarette and surveying the board through the smoke. She gave Lydia £1,000 and received a tiny railway engine, like a bracelet charm, in return. With a pleasant but self-absorbed expression she jumped it from London to Dover to Calais to Paris to Frankfurt.

Lydia said quietly, ‘Well played,’ and then nodded at me: ‘so – your turn, Dave.’

‘So . . .’ I said, ‘you have to, um’ – and I threw the die and with a little bit of muttered coaching from Cara, set out into the unknown.

Afterwards, I couldn’t remember the game in any coherent way, and though I ended up winning I spent most of the time taking pointless chances, breaking unexplained rules and paying enormous forfeits. ‘Dave’s playing for high stakes here,’ Mark said at one point, an hour or so in, when I had a brief climax of lightning advance and accumulation, jetting at dawn from one stock exchange to another – just for a moment I thought perhaps this was all there was to it, just for a moment I looked at the world from behind a great rampart of art and gold bars, and stood up trembling to pour myself a glass of squash. ‘Oh, bad luck, Winny!’ said Giles, and I turned to see all my money and my chips being incomprehensibly swept away from me and into the little compound in front of him. It was almost a relief. Half an hour later, he did something much worse to his mother, I couldn’t understand it, and Lydia had to look in the rules, but it seemed it was just about allowable. Cara thrust her entire possessions across the table with a set look, as if reminding herself she was playing with children – she sat back, lit a fresh cigarette, then got up and went to the drinks tray, almost as if abandoning the game: ‘If at first you don’t succeed,’ she said, and all the Hadlows joined in loudly: ‘try a gin.’ I laughed and watched her squinting through the smoke as she plucked up the bottle.

By eleven o’clock Elise was yawning behind her cards, and I sensed that her act of being a good sport for the sake of the family was wearing thin: she took her turns very decisively, but I wasn’t sure she had much more grasp of the rules than I did. I felt invested in the game with a strange beetling politeness which I hoped disguised my bewilderment, and as the night extended, a kind of distress. The others marched cheerily on, as if I was learning from my mistakes. I was the Hadlow Exhibitioner, after all, and I guessed they were taking my clueless deals and doomed mergers as a maverick boldness. The tone of their play was an increasingly fraught kind of fun, of emerging triumphs and gripping dilemmas; there were strange fading shouts of horror and joy, and a further little traffic in muttered side-remarks which showed their complete absorption in the game, to a pitch where the world of the not-game almost ceased to exist. I was grinning but on the brink of tears when I said I had to go to the lavatory, and in that chilly room with its bare lightbulb and smell of the nearby farmyard I stood for a minute and pulled myself together.

When I came back in I found the game had continued without me – I didn’t know if I was wounded or quietly pleased. A minute later Elise was destroyed – all at once she had nothing left. ‘I’m out,’ she said, lifting her hands as if at some unimagined horror, while Mark with a murmured ‘Sorry, Mummy,’ absorbed her last chips and cards and carried straight on. She gave me a shrewd little look as she got up to fix herself a last drink – I envied her freedom as my turn came back round, and I did something blindly and I hoped suicidally: there was a great intake of breath. ‘That was bold,’ said Cara. I threw the die again. ‘Ah, well done though,’ said Mark, with a competitive smile. By now perhaps I really was into my part – my six took me nimbly eastwards over green Thailand and black Burma: I landed on Tokyo unsure if I’d done something clever or better still made the stupidest mistake of my life. ‘Oh dear, oh dear . . .’ said Giles, which could have meant anything. ‘I very much think you’ve got him,’ said Cara.

I smiled at my holdings as if calmly assessing my options. I don’t believe Cara or Lydia told me to, I just found myself shouting, ‘Capital!’ and then staring round at them all to see the effect.

‘Hang on a minute,’ said Giles, outraged, but the others slumped back, blinking in the effort of mental arithmetic, and after five seconds broke into a staggered laugh. ‘Well, well – well done, Dave,’ said Mark, in quiet admiration. And then the three of them leant forward and in a slow collective gesture pushed all their heaps of chips and money into one great jumbled wall just in front of me. It was a victory too accidental to relish, and my main feeling was relief that the game was over at last, just coloured by an unexpected sense of shame that I’d deprived them all – even Giles – of the pleasure of winning themselves.

As Giles and I were saying goodnight, Elise smiled narrowly at me. ‘Vous partez quand?’ she said.

‘Oh . . . demain matin, madame, à dix heures,’ I said, almost reluctant to remind Mark.

‘Ah – moi aussi . . . If you have a moment we might run through a scene together in the morning, before we go our separate ways? “You that way, we this way”, as the play says.’

‘Oh, yes . . . thank you,’ I said, ‘merci, madame!’ – I looked up at Mark, who was smiling at this happy outcome, and I thought perhaps the great Mme Pleynet truly did want to help me, in her impatient and alarming way.

In a china box on the dressing table I found three old keys, and when I tried the second one in the bedroom door the lock turned at once with a nice oiled snap and I gasped with a fairytale sense of security and an inrush of regret about the previous nights. I came back from the bathroom and locked the door as quietly as I could, and the feeling that I’d dreaded, alone, was held off, so it seemed, by the awkward glow of my victory downstairs and the gift of the key.

I got out my school copy of Twelfth Night, and climbed into bed. The text had been heavily marked up all the way through by the boy who’d played Malvolio in an earlier production, his speeches underlined in red biro, and rubbed-out pencil notes in the margin still half-readable. Fabian’s lines lay unmarked between them, like mere filler for Malvolio’s part. They were almost all prose, until just before the end, where I had fourteen lines of verse, which I’d already learned by heart, explaining to Olivia about the baiting of Malvolio. ‘Good Madam, hear me speak’ – from those first words the verse seemed to tell me how to deliver it; but the prose bit that followed was more difficult to remember and to know how to say. I felt Elise had been a bit vague about Twelfth Night, but the thought of being rehearsed by her next morning made it hard for me to get to sleep.

7

At half-past nine we went into the sitting room and the door was pushed to. The room looked very different in the morning, sunlight angled across one wall, Mme Pleynet in her dark blue suit, ready for the journey, hair gleaming in the morning light, the view of the Downs reflected in the mirror, and the clock ticking. ‘Now, we do not have long,’ she said, rather severely.

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ I said, ‘it’s very kind of you to help me like this.’ My speech took less than a minute to say, but I knew she might have detailed criticisms and advice, and the short time that was left probably wouldn’t be enough to get to the bottom of it, and get it right.

‘I have the script here . . .’

‘Oh, you have . . .’

‘You must give the first cue’ – and she passed me a tatty sheaf of paper, slipping free of a large paper clip, with a long column of verse down the top sheet. ‘Or read the Chorus, why not,’ she said, ‘it will be good practice for you,’ half snatching it back and looking at it again before plucking off her glasses and staring over my head with an impressive new remoteness from the room and from the other chorus we must both have been aware of, the cows massing and jostling in the yard behind the house. ‘Line?’

‘Oh! . . . Um,’ and I pitched in, wrong-footed but quick-witted, I felt, and loudly, being the whole Chorus,

‘In time, O Queen, to the great gods I’ll pray;

But in amaze I first would hear you tell

Once more of these great matters —’

‘No, no, no,’ she said, ‘you’re too close. Never crowd the star’ – with a blink of a smile and a tiny gesture of her right hand. I edged backwards past the sofa and stood between the TV and the table with the drinks tray. She stared, then nodded, and I declaimed my three lines again: I was ashamed but even so I felt I made a better fist of them the second time. There was a pause in which she seemed to be thinking of multiple objections to what I’d said, but then her eyes swept round the room, she threw up an arm, and she was off:

‘The Greeks this very day prevail in Troy,

Do you not hear their shouting in the streets,

Far other than the wailing of the vanquished,

As oil with vinegar poured in one jar,

Combined and shaken, never to be mixed,

Such are the cries of triumph and defeat,

Fates co-existent, never to be shared.’

It was such a new voice, fast, swooping, almost growling at times, then running up the scale as if running out of breath, that I stood smiling and terrified, unable to take in a thing she was saying, although noting she’d got several words wrong.

‘The howling Trojans fall upon the ground . . . Upon the —’ she darted a look at me —

‘Um . . . The Trojans howling,’ I said, ‘fall upon their dead, / Whose corpses —’

‘— fall upon their dead, / Whose corpses, husbands, brothers, grandsires old . . . yes?’

‘They mourn —’

‘They mourn . . .’ – she wailed it – ‘They mourn from throats enslaved . . .’

I turned the page, where Clytemnestra’s speech went on for a good thirty lines more, and I started to adjust, felt the madness and excitement of ranting about Troy in the sitting room after breakfast, and then quite soon after all I came in again, my heart speeding up with my new sense of what acting required: ‘Well have you spoken, though a woman!’ – I stared at her, and flinched just a little as she stared back – ‘And shrewdly, with the wisdom of a man!’

Her shoulders slumped, her head dropped with a sigh: ‘Yes, yes. But do try to remember,’ she said, ‘you’re not a character – you’re the Chorus. I’m the one who’s acting.’

She held out her hand for the script and searched forward for her next big speech, while I glanced at my watch, knowing Mark would come in soon to get me. I hoped she would never glimpse my little fantasy of doing Fabian’s speech, and hearing her advice. ‘I think we have time,’ she said, passing back the papers, and taking off her glasses, which I guessed turned me and the whole room back into a blur: she wasn’t going to spot the dog-eared Twelfth Night in my jacket pocket. ‘Now here,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to help me again. Read the Messenger there, do you see?’

I found the place, and cleared my throat, unsure now if being the Messenger was ‘acting’ or not: ‘Great Queen, to Argos in the night —’

‘I think kneel,’ she said.

‘Oh . . .’

‘It’s better for me. Yes, that’s right’ – she glanced down and then lifted her head again.

‘Great Queen, to Argos in the —’ There was a gentle knock, and I looked over my shoulder to see Mark peering round the door.

‘So sorry, Mummy . . .’ – and she stared at him, with a tight little smile that seemed to me to have a long history in it. I stayed on my knees, looking from mother to son, though for me of course Mark still had all the presence and authority of a father. ‘I was just hoping to hear Dave do Fabian’s speech before he goes.’

She looked down at me with sudden concern. ‘No, no, he must do that,’ as if shocked at being kept in the dark about this plan.

‘Oh . . . well . . . if you like . . .’ I said. ‘It’s only a short speech,’ getting to my feet and thinking this sounded cheeky. Mark came and perched on the window seat, and I handed back Agamemnon, found the place in Twelfth Night and passed the book to Elise. She held it mistrustfully at arm’s length, head back, then quickly put her glasses on again. I wasn’t sure now if she was acting, I tried to think of her as Olivia, and not just the famous Elise Pleynet, which I’d started to see was quite a role in itself.

I began, ‘Good Madam, hear me speak,’ and I thought, from the way she pursed her lips, that she heard the humble protest in the words – ‘And let no quarrel, nor no brawl to come, / Taint the condition of this present hour, / Which I have wondered at’ – I smiled and spread my right arm in answer to the lift and the neatness of this little phrase, and felt without looking Mark’s focused attention on me: for a second his attention was a challenge, my mind emptying, and then at once it was a prompt and a motive, a need for the words that flowed steadily out of me, about Toby and Maria, and the plot against Malvolio; the belief that I could do it ran over the fear that I couldn’t. ‘Maria writ / The letter at Sir Toby’s great importance, / In recompense whereof . . . he hath married her!’ Elise herself looked surprised at this, and Mark grinned. ‘How with a sportful malice it was followed / May rather pluck on laughter than revenge, / If that the injuries be justly weighed / That have on both sides passed.’ Now there was a nervous moment, nothing was planned, but I gazed at Elise, and she said magically, without looking at the text, ‘Alas, poor fool! How have they baffled thee!’ And in that moment, not just of acting but of being acted with, I felt something fizz inside me, a certainty that went beyond acting, as I entered the difficult prose bit, mimicking phrases from the fake letter, ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them’ – words everyone knew anyway, which I chanted out in a very ironical tone. ‘And thus’, I wound up, with a big circling gesture, ‘the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.’ Elise and I both for some reason looked at Mark, who sat forward, raised his forefinger, and said, ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’, so that Elise too was smiling when she said, with another shake of the head, ‘He hath been most notoriously abused.’

I stood not knowing what to do, it had happened so quickly, and my pulse raced on though the scene was over. ‘Well, jolly good, I’d say, wouldn’t you, Mummy?’ said Mark. And I remembered her comments last night on my French, that I knew the words, but not how to say them, and I felt sure that this time I’d proved her wrong. At the back of my mind I knew I’d have to take any criticisms she made. She put her head on one side, then the other, made her little moue, little frown, that seemed to teeter between indifference and a reasonable failure to find anything wrong.

‘You speak well,’ she said. ‘Of course, a very short speech.’

‘But one with a lot of different moods in it,’ said Mark encouragingly.

‘And a lot of information,’ said Elise. ‘But, as I say, you put it across very clearly. He knows how to project,’ she said to Mark, ‘which few children of his age do.’

‘Indeed,’ said Mark.

She ran her eye over the lines again, ‘You say, “Sir Toby’s great importance”,’ swelling the phrase. ‘You could make more of that,’ and I said, feeling a tiny correction was praise of everything else, ‘Sir Toby’s great importance’, overdoing it, and knowing too that she was wrong, ‘importance’ here meant something else, meant urging or in fact importuning – we’d been over it in class. But I let this go.

‘We will need your Hamlet, to truly judge!’ she said.

‘Well, thank you . . .’ I said, glowing for a moment before I realized this was a part she was confident I would never, and could never, play.

‘Well, you’d better get your things, Dave,’ said Mark, ‘you’re all packed?’

‘Yes, sir.’ I waited and took back my book. ‘Thank you, Madame Pleynet’ – and she smiled and touched my cheek, as if ‘seeing’ me suddenly, and all my potential. As I went out down the hall I heard her say, ‘Dear solemn little face he has – like a little brown cat,’ and Mark said, ‘Are your things ready, Mummy? Cara wants to make sure you catch the ten thirty-five.’

Giles came out into the yard to see me off. He had his hands in his pockets, and a look of already reclaiming his life here, after the imposition of my stay. ‘See you next term, Winny,’ he said, and smiled, no doubt picturing the horrible things he was hoping to do to me then. For now, the annual ritual was over, and next spring the new Exhibitioner would be a year younger than Giles, and very likely of a more acceptable appearance. Elise’s case was stowed in Cara’s Riley, and Cara came out and shook hands and we all said goodbye. ‘Good luck with the play!’ said Elise. ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, ‘the same to you,’ and she looked slightly taken aback. I opened the right-hand door of the Citroën, I got all that right, and Mark threw his soft leather briefcase onto the back seat beside my overnight bag. It was too cold this morning to have the roof down, and no one would see who we were as we raced through the lanes; but I had a more magical sense, when the button was pressed, the car rose on its suspension and we floated off across the yard and down the drive, of having Mark all to myself, for the fifteen minutes, or more, of the journey home.