Maxwell’s Reunion Read online

  Maxwell’s Reunion

  M J Trow

  Text copyright © 2013 M J Trow

  All Rights Reserved

  First published by Hodder

  This edition first published in 2013 by:

  Thistle Publishing

  36 Great Smith Street

  London

  SW1P 3BU

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  1

  It was the Day of Days, the one they’d all dreamed of for years; the day the Headmaster shook their hands and called them by their Christian names. He who had never touched them before; he who never used a first name when a surname would do. The Great Man had no past, no future. He would not grow old as those who left grew old.

  ‘Peter.’ The name reverberated round the quad and echoed in the far cedars, bouncing off the sight screens and skimming the pale blue waters of the pool. To the others, he was Max, or Maxie, according to those strange intimacies that schoolboy hierarchies have. ‘Oxford, isn’t it?’

  ‘Cambridge, sir,’ the boy said, reflecting anew on how on the ball the Great Man was.

  ‘Yes, of course. Philosophy.’

  ‘History, sir.’

  ‘Quite, quite. Anthony – Cambridge?’

  ‘Oxford, sir.’ None out of three wasn’t bad.

  Everyone had looked at Anthony Bingham, most of them not quite sure who he was. To all of them, for the last seven of their educational apprenticeship, he’d been simply Cret. Short for Cretin. Not that any of them actually knew what a cretin was or how his height measured up.

  The Headmaster worked his way down the line of the soon-to-be Old Boys in those purple ties the Upper Sixth habitually wore in their last term; a special privilege bestowed upon them so that the bursar could make even more money out of their parents. The Great Man had left off his gown and looked curiously small in his grey, clerical suit. His eyes still flashed fire but the voice that had been known to shatter glass in the chapel quad was soft and he was gentle. The hand that swung the cane now touched the shoulder. And, horror of horrors, he was human after all.

  They’d wandered away after he’d dismissed them, one or two of them glancing back as the Great Man vanished into the shadows. There were sniggers, billowing on the breeze. Someone had once said, when they were all whining new bugs of eleven with their shining morning faces and new satchels, that whenever the Headmaster turned a corner, he was sneaking off for a date with Miss Shrivell, the octogenarian secretary of Halliards School. The boys themselves dreamed of Heaven with Miss Clarke, the Matron’s number two. Many was the lad who ran deliberately into a rugger post just to have his head cradled by her.

  The little host of leavers reached the seat on the dais overlooking the First Eleven Square, that hallowed turf where not even the Headmaster’s dog was allowed to pee. Peter Maxwell ran his finger one last time over the words carved deep into the wood. ‘Who spot the verb and stop the ball shall say if England stand or fall.’ He’d never known who wrote it, but he could spot the verb with the best of ’em. That was the thing about the Romans – so predictable. They always put their verbs at the end of their sentences. He’d stopped many a ball too, not always in the heroic way of the First Eleven or the First Fifteen. Rugger balls usually stopped him, seconds before the opposing pack bore down in a slaughter of liniment and jockstraps. Cricket balls had magnetic cores designed to catch him in the crotch every time. And as for England standing or falling … well, do you really consider those things when you’re eighteen, with the world at your feet?

  In January, President de Gaulle had refused Britain’s entry to Common Market. ‘Ungrateful bastard!’ the boys of the Day of Days had agreed with their history master, mindful of what France owed to Britain in the dark days of the 1940s. In May the lads had gone to the pictures to drool over Ursula Andress in a bikini and sheath knife and to discover that Sean Connery’s James Bond was shaken, perhaps, but never stirred. David Asheton, sitting next to Maxwell now on the Altar, had a collection of interesting photographs of Christine Keeler in his gym locker and he had written personally to Mandy Rice-Davies, asking for her autograph but hoping for her underwear. At the Brandenburg Gate, President Kennedy, hair blowing in the Wind – like the answer, my friend – had told an incredulous crowd that he was a doughnut. Andrew Muir had threatened to send back his prefect’s badge in protest that the new five-pound notes showed Britannia without her helmet. Had his father spent the war years in Catterick for this?

  England would stand, of course, Peter mused. And England would be right.

  ‘Maxwell!’ The sound of his name brought him back to the here, the now. ‘Peter Maxwell, I’m talking to you, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Sorry, Cret. I was miles away.’

  ‘Are you coming to the party tonight?’ Cret was tired of repeating himself. Maxwell was so preoccupied these days.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Annabel’s.’

  ‘Cranton tart!’ somebody snorted.

  ‘Don’t you think she looks like Mandy Rice-Davies?’ John Wensley asked. It was an odd question coming from the Preacher. The others hadn’t realized he knew what a girl was.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ the same somebody countered. And that somebody should know; he was David Asheton, lanky, fair haired, everybody’s idea of an arsehole. That was because the flocked to him like iron filings to a magnet.

  ‘What time?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Any time you bloody well like, me ol’ mucker,’ Cret said. ‘Annabel will be there, legs open …’

  ‘What about her mother?’ Richard Alphedge worried about these things.

  Asheton dismissed it. ‘Nah, too old. Crinkle-cut tits if ever I saw any.’

  ‘When did you see anybody’s tits?’ Richard asked. It was a fair question. There were those who wondered exactly how much mouth and how much trousers pertained in Asheton’s case.

  ‘Dickon, Dickon.’ Asheton placed a fond arm around the smaller lad’s shoulders. ‘When you’re experienced in the ways of the world …’

  Andrew Muir burst his bubble. ‘She was six at the time.’

  ‘Aye, aye,’ they all chorused.

  ‘No, no, Ash was only seven. Be fair. Nothing kinky about our Ash. Not then. He gravitated to sniffing the saddles of little girls’ bicycles much later!’

  ‘Talking of which …’ David Asheton became conspiratorial. ‘Anyone caught the latest Titbits? Absolute corker on page four.’

  ‘You’re disgusting, Ash, do you know that?’ Muir asked.

  Maxwell laughed. ‘Worse than that. You’re blind!’

  And their laughter joined his and rang across the lengthening afternoon shadows that crossed the fields of Halliards. Had they listened to anything other than each other and the beating of their hearts on this Day of Days, they would have heard the single, solemn bell ringing out the hour. Four of the clock and all was well.

  ‘Well?’ Quentin asked Maxwell. ‘Are you going to do it?’

  ‘Do what?’ Maxwell half turned on the Altar seat.

  ‘Chuck your blazer into the pool. We all said we would.’

  They all laughed again. ‘Yes, we did, didn’t we?’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Well, what the hell. Before that, though … Cret. What’s it to be?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘
Life!’ Maxwell shouted, hauling off the old school tie so that purple silk ran like gossamer through his fingers. ‘What’ll do with yours?’

  ‘Simple!’ Bingham grinned. ‘.After a promising start as President of the school’s Law Society, I shall become a barrister at twenty, take silk the following year and be a High Court judge by the time I’m twenty-five. Napoleon was a general at twenty- five, you know.’

  Maxwell knew. ‘And the woolsack?’ he asked.

  Muir chuckled. ‘Leave his mother out of it.’

  ‘How about you, Stenhouse?’ Maxwell wanted to know.

  ‘Life?’ Muir mused. ‘Ah, where would we be without it? I don’t know. After university, journalism, I think. After all, winner of the Literary Essay Prize three times in a row isn’t exactly chance, is it? I’ll be editor of The Times by the time I’m twenty-four.’ Stenhouse always had to go one better than Cret. ‘William Pitt was Prime Minister at twenty-four, you know.’

  Maxwell knew that too. ‘Quent?’

  The Captain of Games yawned and squared his shoulders, to remind them all how broad they were. ‘I’ll make a mint on the Stock Exchange. Become a bull or a bear or whatever it is and retire as a bloody millionaire. And all at twenty-three! Victor fucking Ludorum yet again!’ He smiled broadly, lolling back on the Altar, gazing up at the cloudless blue of the summer sky. ‘And not being a sad bastard of a historian, I couldn’t tell you anybody who’d arrived by that age.’

  Neither, though he was an historian, could Peter Maxwell, ‘Alphie, what about you?’

  Richard adopted the pose for which he was famous when he’d wowed everybody in the school play the previous year, clutching a rubber asp to his inflated bosom. ‘Olivier will ask me to join him at the Old Vic,’ he said, ‘so I’ll probably give RADA a miss. Then it’s Hollywood and wall-to-wall Oscars. And I’m not putting any daft age limit on this. Age cannot wither me nor custom stale my infinite variety.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ Asheton thumped him on the shoulder. ‘Life’s been one long bloody act for you, Alphie – you know what I’m talking about. Once a sham, always a sham. To save you the chore of asking me, Maxie, I shall be taking over from Hugh Hefner any day now, with wall-to-wall women as my playthings. Fluffy little bunnies wherever you look.’

  ‘That’s it?’ Muir asked.

  ‘A lifetime of shagging,’ Asheton murmured. ‘My dear boy, what finer ambition could there be?’

  ‘What about you, Preacher?’ Maxwell asked. No one really knew John Wensley, the quiet one, the one somehow forever in the corner, in the shadows.

  Wensley shrugged. ‘Whatever comes,’ he said, ‘I’ll go with it.’

  ‘Yes, well …’ Asheton sighed. ‘What about you, Max? What do you want to be when you grow up?’

  ‘Me?’ Maxwell was peeling off his blazer, the pocket heavy with pens and the woven gilt of his school badge, the timetable still neatly folded away. ‘I don’t know, I’ll probably be …’

  ‘… the Head of Sixth Form at a third-rate comprehensive somewhere on the South Coast. I shall be nearly fifty-four, by which time Napoleon Bonaparte was dying from his wallpaper and William Pitt had already shuffled off the mortal coil muttering something about Mrs Bellamy’s meat pies.’

  ‘Sir?’ Duane looked up at the Great Man from the thankless task in hand.

  ‘Hmm?’ Maxwell looked down at the lad. Twelve, psychotic. Serial bed-wetter. Villa supporter. ‘Oh, nothing, Duane. Now, tell me, is there any more chewing gum on the underside of that desk?’

  ‘No, sir. Just some writing – about Mr Blenkinsop. I remember him. He was …’

  ‘Right you are.’ Maxwell also remembered Blenkinsop and cut the lad short. ‘And if Mr Malleson tells you to stop chewing again in his class, what will you do?’

  Duane had to think about it. ‘Stop chewing,’ he said.

  ‘Excellent. And what will you not do, Duane?’

  ‘Tell him to fuck off … sir!’

  ‘Exactly. That’s what they refer to in education today as target setting. Now, we’ll keep this little incident to ourselves, shall we? Just you and me and Mr Malleson?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Otherwise it’s Mr Diamond, the Headmaster. And you don’t want a good letting off from him, do you?’

  ‘Oh, he’s an old …’

  Maxwell’s hand was in the air. ‘Etonian, Duane? Unlikely, but you’d better leave it there. It’s half past four. Ain’t you got no ’ome to go to?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Duane grumbled, wondering which uncle Mum would be staggering back with tonight. ‘See you, Mr Maxwell.’

  ‘Indeed you will.’ Maxwell snapped into his Dixon of Dock Green mode, saluting sharply. ‘And mind ’ow you go!’

  Duane looked up at Peter Maxwell. At least with Malleson you knew what he was talking about … well, most of the time. But Maxwell, he was fucking mad, that’s what he was. Duane took to the stairs, while the taking was good.

  Peter Maxwell strolled back to his office, the one County Hall had wanted to paint turquoise. He had said a polite ‘no thank you’ to the Deputy Head, who had arrived with a colour swatch; he’d die in a ditch first. He was quite prepared to erect a barricade of children and lob chalk at the decorators if push came to shove. Besides, he already had his wallpaper, those sprawling posters of the silver screen where Rita Hayworth risked lung cancer posing as Gilda, Jimmy Stewart was being a nosey neighbour in Rear Window and Marlon Brando didn’t look too well in Apocalypse Now. He put his coffee cup down with the others on the side table and checked tomorrow’s lesson plan. Mother of God! – 8F3. Better check the Valium and the body armour. He picked up the phone.

  ‘Nurse,’ the familiar voice said.

  Maxwell rasped into the receiver, the best Mr Gruntfuttock he’d ever done.

  ‘No, she’s not,’ came the voice.

  ‘Not what?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Pregnant. Carly Turnball.’

  ‘I won’t have you speaking of my sixth form in that way, Matron,’ Maxwell scolded. ‘The girl’s name is Turnbull.’

  ‘Whatever,’ the nurse said. ‘She’s not pregnant.

  ‘Not the Holy Ghost, then?’

  ‘Not anybody, Max. Just the usual little bit of attention-seeking.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Sylv, that puts half the male population of Leighford’s minds at rest, I should think. At least, I’ve always assumed half the male population of Leighford have minds; for the rest, I’m not so sure. Now, to more pressing matters. Reunions.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, gets-together, geriatric ups of the knee. Assorted chaps of the Old Pals’ Battalion who were once joined at the hip contacting each other after a century or so. Ever been to one?’

  ‘You’re talking about men, I assume?’

  Maxwell was.

  ‘Don’t know. Is it a girlie thing, particularly? I did go to an old nursing one once. God, it was awful. All of us bitching about the ones who weren’t there and feeling really pissed off because Janet Chamberlain had caught that orthopaedic surgeon after all and could have bought the rest of us ten times over. Jesus, the knives were out that night.’

  ‘Sylvia Matthews, wash your mouth out!’ Maxwell scolded. ‘I didn’t know you had an envious bone in your body.’

  Peter Maxwell really knew very little about Sylvia Matthews’ body. There was a time when she had minded about that. Minded because she had been in love with him. That was then. Before he’d met Jacquie and she’d met Guy. She still loved him in her way. It was the only way you could love Mad Max.

  ‘Well, I’ve been invited to one, Count – a reunion, that is. Any thoughts?’

  The cat known as Metternich – the Count to the man who paid his vet bills – yawned ostentatiously. He was twelve pounds of black and white fur, about as lovable as anthrax with attitude.

  ‘Well, you say that,’ Maxwell wagged his finger at him, on the hand that wasn’t wrapped around his Southern Comfort, ‘but I’m not so sure.’ The two of them sat
opposite each other in the lounge of 38 Columbine, the master sprawled in an armchair, Maxwell on the settee. ‘Listen again.’ He cleared his throat and read from the letter that had arrived that morning. ‘“Dear Maxie, you won’t remember me, but that isn’t the point. Thirty-five years ago we were the Magnificent Seven riding to do battle against the bandits of Ignorance and Indifference.” You know, I never remembered old Stenhouse being that poetic, not when we were at school. Oh, he won prizes, of course, but that was because nobody else entered the competition. Stenhouse, Count. It was a sort of joke. His name was Muir, you see, so it’s Stenhouse Muir, like in the football team over the border. You know …’ Maxwell caught the animal’s cold-killer eyes, the fixed mouth, the motionless whiskers. ‘Well, it’s all before your time, I expect.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Wonder what happened to old Queen of the South?’ His mind clicked back to the matter in hand. ‘But I digress. Old Stenhouse goes on. “Water under the bridge but now, shock, horror, they’re closing the old place down. That’s right, Halliards is to be no more. In fact, it’s already no more as a school. There are plans afoot to develop it as a conference centre or something similar, so before that happens, I’ve asked the trustees if we, the Class of ’63, can have one last sad wander over the place prior to a first-class piss-up at Graveney Manor.” God, I remember the Graveney, Count. I’d fallen head over heels for a girl called Prudence from Cranton, the girls’ school down the road. No, don’t laugh. I’d have thought you’d go for that – you know, Prudence Kitten? Ooh, of course, that’s before your time too, isn’t it?’

  Metternich yawned again, before curling his leg over his left ear. He did this now and again to remind the old duffer whose territory he shared that he could do these things. Some nights, he’d noted, Maxwell couldn’t even make the stairs.

  ‘You see, there’s something about the halcyon days, Count.’ Maxwell tossed Muir’s letter aside and lolled back in his armchair, cradling his amber drink. ‘Something that says, “Leave them alone. Or perhaps they won’t be halcyon any more.” Whaddya think? Cranton, eh? God, those were the days.’

  Whatever it was that Metternich thought, the great piebald beast wasn’t telling, not tonight. It was that hour of cocking tails and pricking whiskers, the hour the rodents rode in the Year of the Rat. He longed for the hunt, with the wind in his nostrils and his eyes pools of murder under the Columbine lamplight. To everything, Metternich knew, there was a season. A time to kill and a time to hunt, a time for every purpose under Heaven. He bounced off the armchair he’d made his own with years of kneading and pirouetted across the carpet to the staircase and the cat-flap, heading for the outer dark.