The boy took a seat at a desk at the front. I’ve always thought room 59 had a vaguely nautical character; two double rows of wooden desks facing an elevated deck, on which I stand like a captain on the deck of his pirate ship, surveying the galley slaves below. This time I felt like a High Court judge listening to a plaintiff. Harrington’s voice was as colourless as it had always been, but I thought that this time there was a tremor there—perhaps of some concealed emotion.

“It’s a friend of mine,” he said. “Sir, I think he’s in trouble.”

A friend of mine. That usually means a problem of a delicate nature. I wondered why Harrington, of all people, should have chosen to come to me with such a problem, instead of to the Chaplain, the School’s official counselor in matters of the heart and soul.

“It isn’t me,” said Harrington. “It really is a friend of mine.”

Well, the boy didn’t have many friends. If he wasn’t talking about himself, it could only be Nutter or Spikely, the other two-thirds of the threesome. David Spikely, an average boy from an average family. Rather slow in French, perhaps; but there was nothing to suggest the boy might have a problem. And Charlie Nutter: pale; uninteresting; with patches of eczema on his hands. Never spoke a word in class. Never drew attention.

But his father was Stephen Nutter, one of our local MPs; a rubber bulldog of a man, known for his outspoken views. I’d always guessed that Nutter, MP, might have been disappointed in his rather ordinary son—some men feel the need to affirm themselves through their offspring, and I’d imagined Nutter Senior to have had something very different in mind when he became a father. Mrs. Nutter was pale and bland—rather like her son, in fact—a thin, sharp-faced woman, active in local charities, who often appeared in the Malbry Examiner, promoting some good cause or other. Between them, I doubted that Charlie Nutter had much of a chance to get into trouble of any kind.

“Does—your friend—know you’re talking to me?”

Johnny Harrington shook his head. From my vantage point I could see the pencil-straight parting in his hair.

“Then what makes you think he’s in trouble?” I said. “Has he told you so?”

“No, sir.”

“Then what?”

I’ll admit that the fact that he’d come to me made me feel strangely paternal. Perhaps I’d judged the boy too fast; after all, he was new to the School—in fact, new to most schools—and he might have had trouble settling in. For the first time, I considered the possibility that my robust approach to pastoral care might not have been the best in his case.