A good form master knows how to delve without seeming to question openly; he knows when to use the velvet glove and when to deploy the iron fist. He knows when to tackle a problem head-on and when to skirt it delicately; in short, a good form master has to be part detective, part social worker, part saint. I am not that Master. My general pedagogic approach is based on a policy of benevolent neglect—it works in the case of most boys, but neither Harrington nor his friends seemed to respond to my methods. No, I needed someone else; someone who spoke the boys’ language; someone who had the authority, but also the humanity, to cross the gulf between Master and pupil. I knew who I needed; a man who had earned the boys’ liking and trust; someone who knew them better than I; someone who could advise us both.

And so, at the end of the morning, I went in search of Harry Clarke.

Chapter 4

4

Michaelmas Term, 1971

I remember arriving in ’71 as a Junior Master. Eric Scoones had been there two years. In fact, he was the reason that I’d applied for the job in the first place; Eric and I had been good friends ever since we were schoolboys. Now we were newbies together again—along with the young Dr. Devine, an Alka-Seltzer of a man, fresh out of college and fizzing with energy and ambition.

So many things have changed since then; and yet, at the same time, nothing has. We still live in isolation, like goldfish in a series of tanks, moving in the same circles, term after term, year after year. Nothing much ever happens here—and when something does, it happens with the suddenness of a dropped stone falling into the water, leaving a series of ripples that all too soon smooth over.

I first encountered Harry Clarke near the end of my first half term. St. Oswald’s staff do not generally fraternize with members of other departments, and Harry Clarke, although his form room was directly above my own, was attached to a department that was famously antisocial, of which the head was Mr. Fabricant, an Oxford man with an eye twitch, who in his youth had written a book on the life of the Marquis de Sade, thereby earning himself an undeserved reputation for sexual permissiveness. As a result, I barely knew Harry Clarke, except as a face in the Common Room, to which he rarely came, except at Headmaster’s Meetings. That day, I’d gone into room 54—that was Dr. Devine’s room, the next one along the corridor from mine—to borrow a box of coloured chalks. For some reason the German Department had them all, and was stockpiling them in the back of Devine’s store cupboard. Well, when I say “borrow”—I was hoping Devine would be out. From what I already knew of him, he wasn’t the philanthropic type.