Chapter 3

September 7, 2005

Now I try to be fair. Really I do. I treat all my boys the same, you know; but unless you’re Bob Strange, who despises all boys equally, or Eric Scoones, who has no form, and thus makes such small distinction between them that he scarcely ever remembers their names, you’re bound to feel more or less affection for one individual or another.

My Brodie Boys, for instance—Allen-Jones, Sutcliff, Tayler, and McNair—in spite of their propensity to wreak mayhem at every turn, hold a special place in my heart. I’ve always had rather a soft spot for the jokers and the subversives. But every decade or so, there’s one—a smart-aleck; a troublemaker—a boy whose face keeps popping up in all the wrong circumstances and who, years later, can still pop up in a Master’s dreams when one’s dream self, clad only in a mortarboard and a pair of yellow swimming trunks, attempts to teach a subject about which he knows nothing at all to a disruptive class in which that one boy, grinning like an ape, plays the role of ringleader.

The truth is that no Master, however venerable, is ever entirely without insecurities, and there are boys—not so many of them in my case, no more than six in a whole career—who are capable of sniffing out those insecurities, of using them, of twisting them, of single-handedly making a good class into a bad class, a bad class into the stuff of dread.

Johnny Harrington was one of them. That pale-faced, bland, insufferable boy, with his impeccable uniform and his air of barely concealed contempt. How I hated him, then and now—and as he came toward me, with a smile that might almost have been sincere, I felt the past rush in on me like a cloud of mustard gas.

“Why, it’s Mr. Straitley!” he said. “Good Lord, you haven’t changed a bit. How long has it been? Twenty-four years? Don’t say you don’t remember me?”

I drew the flap of my gown across the tea-stained crotch of my trousers. Not quite trusting myself to speak, I gave the man a curt nod.

The smile broadened still further. “Of course. We’ll catch up later,” he said. “Maybe after the meeting.”

• • •

Of all the boys I’ve watched grow up, moving from larva to chrysalis, and then to dubious butterfly, in time taking wing as accountants, bankers, journalists, researchers, soldiers—God help them, sometimes even teachers, which, according to Eric Scoones, rank even higher on the perversion scale than Clive Punnet, who ate his wife—none have surprised me as utterly as little Johnny Harrington.