A Bit on the Side Read Online Free PDF

Headmaster’s philosophy did not vary except in the allegorical garb of his discourse. It was a circle that came full, ending where it had begun: with the school and its time-worn customs, tried and true, that made men of boys.
    Later, in scanning a Horace ode with the aid of a Kelly’s Key, Olivier found himself distracted, in turn, by the Headmaster’s overwhelming confidence in the established rites of passage through his school and by the dining-hall maid’s transgressions. Were her sins the weaponry of insurrection, intended as such or simply so because they happened? What passed through her thoughts as she implemented another disturbance or discomfort? And why was it that the Headmaster’s beliefs and a woman’s recidivistic stratagems seemed now to cling together like proximate jigsaw pieces? Angustam amice pauperiem pati, robustus acri militia puer condiscat, Horace had written; and Olivier matched Latin and English as best he could, his key’s translation not being word for word.
    Of course, the Headmaster did not know – as authority before him had not known – that the dining-hall maid had in her girlhood been, herself, a fragment of tradition, supplying to boys who now were men a service that had entered the unofficial annals. There was that too, Olivier reminded himself, before he returned to winkling out which word went with which.
    *
    At the end of the day the dining-hall maids, and the dormitory maids, and those with diverse duties, went home, some sharing the available space in the cars that a few of them drove, others on bicycles, some on foot to the village. Among those who walked was the girl who was now a woman. She smoked on the leafy back drive, a little behind two of her colleagues, one of whom lit the way with a torch. The skin of the boy she admired was still as smooth as porcelain though not as white, and without the blush of pink that porcelain flesh went in for. She loved the sallow tinge, the dark eyes gazing out of it, the fringe that so perfectly followed the forehead’s contour.
    His image filled her consciousness as she walked on, his voice the voice of boys who had long ago tenderly spoken her name. He knew, as she had guessed he would be the one to know, because he was the kind. She’d always known the kind.
    *
    The first of the late bells sounded, rhythmically clanging. Younger boys gathered up their books, and then their footsteps were muffled in the corridors, no conversation exchanged because noise was forbidden while the Upper and Middle School classes continued their preparation. Olivier read Cakes and Ale, the orange-backed book hidden from view behind Raleigh and the British Empire and a guide to laboratory experiments. Was it Chapman, do you think ? a note interrupted this, passed along the row of desks to him. Maybe, he scribbled and passed the scrap of paper back to New-combe. You had to lie. They’d be suspicious if you kept denying it whenever they mentioned anyone.
    Someone would guess: one after another she had caused the incidents to happen so that someone would guess. As certain as he was about everything else, so he was certain that this last conjecture was not fanciful. He knew no more; he doubted that he ever would. In his mind’s eye he saw her as once or twice he had when he’d been out and about at this time himself: in her navy-blue coat, the belt tied loosely, a headscarf with horses on it.
    *
    ‘Cheers, Bella,’ the two in front called out, one after the other, as they turned into Parsley Lane. ‘Cheers.’
    She loathed that cheap word, so meaningless, used all the time now. ‘Good night,’ she called back.
    Voices and the occasional laugh accompanied the bobbing torchlight in Parsley Lane. She went a different way and heard only the hooting of an owl. She came to the Railwayman, where there were voices and laughter again, and then the television turned loud in Mrs Hodges’ front room.
    Her mother, still alive, would be in her bed: she pretended