Maxwell’s Match Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘There’s an inter-house Cross Country this afternoon. If you’d like to freshen up first, I’ll take you over. Rather a lot of standing around, I’m afraid.’
    ‘Goes with the territory,’ Maxwell remembered from his school days. ‘I’d be delighted.’
    They crossed the Quad under the awning of the new chapel with its sandstone facings and its arty-farty cross, no doubt something by Basil Spence on a bad day. Boys in rugger shirts clattered past them in their studded boots.
    ‘Jenkins,’ Pardoe stopped one of them. ‘Twentieth man, eh?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’ Jenkins pulled up short.
    ‘Twentieth man is just as important as the first. Understand?’
    ‘Yes, sir,’ the boy smiled and Pardoe ruffled his hair.
    ‘I wouldn’t dare do that,’ Maxwell said as the lad dashed off to join the others. ‘I’d be struck off.’
    ‘Nonsense!’ Pardoe’s comeback was too fast, too abrupt.
    ‘Just an observation,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘One of those little differences that divide our worlds, yours and mine.’
    ‘Your loss,’ Pardoe held open an oak-panelled door.
    ‘Yes,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘I think you’re right.’
    The Head of Tennyson swept into his study, as oak-panelled as the Headmaster’s and the door they’d entered by. The walls were hung with old photographs, the ones Maxwell remembered from his own schooldays, unsmiling young men with arms folded, sitting on their dignity, all tasselled caps, long shorts and incipient moustaches. Where have all the young men gone, long time passing? But it wasn’t the decor that caught Maxwell’s eye first; it was the full colour magazine open on Pardoe’s desk where two blond boys, of uncertain age, writhed naked on a wrestling mat. Pardoe saw it too and swept it quickly into the sleeve of his gown before turning to Maxwell.
    The Head of Sixth Form had never seen a man age so fast. Pardoe was the colour of parchment. ‘Mr Maxwell, I … Could you wait here, please? I’ll have my Captain of House show you to your rooms. Excuse me.’
    And there was no sound but the click of his heels retreating along the corridor.

3
    That night, Maxwell perched under the eaves like a rather puzzled bat. The room must have belonged to the tweeniest of Jedediah Grimond’s servants, up a tight spiral twist of stairs. It had been tastefully done out, Maxwell guessed, in about 1958. Since then, it had probably doubled as a storeroom, where old Latin Primers had mildewed against the day that the Secretary of State for Education should see the light and reintroduce real Classics in schools.
    Dinner was good, rather more substantial than lunch but with the same grace. The Day Boys and Girls had gone home, of course, so that the ranks over the evening meal tables were thinner. Courtesy of the Headmaster, the Boarders were allowed to wear mufti, although most of them seemed to be modelling for Next or else in mourning for Gianni Versace. After nearly three hours of standing on the touch-line as over a hundred grunting, gasping teenagers staggered back from the agonies of Cross Country, Maxwell was more than ready for the vat of Mrs Oates’ minestrone soup that lay waiting on High Table. Maxwell empathized with the runners, like Pheidippides dragging back from Marathon. He remembered it well, the torture in the lungs, the feet of clay. Somewhere in a Warwickshire field, his gymshoe still lay after all these years, sucked from his foot by the clawing mud. And his shin still carried the scar of the barbed wire that he hadn’t seen until it was too late.
    He hob-nobbed with the Headmaster and David Gallow as the evening shadows lengthened and the chandeliers sparkled in the dining hall. He became engrossed after dinner in a postprandial chat in the Senior Common Room with Michael Hemsley, the Head of Watered-Down- Classics, on the merits of Hancock’s Half Hour and its role in Fifties Ultra-Realism.
    Of Bill Pardoe, there was no sign.
    ‘Takes me back, really,’ Maxwell said, lolling