St. Oswald’s—which has no official School counselor—has always encouraged boys to go to the School Chaplain for spiritual and moral guidance, but as far as I know, few boys do this. The fact is that Dr. Burke, though sound in his way, and well-meaning, is most definitely one of the Old Guard. A member of staff since the sixties, unmarried and wholly devoted to his work, he has encountered, in his role as School Chaplain, such diverse aspects of adolescent behavior as drug abuse, anorexia, glue-sniffing, depression, various mental disorders, and, of course, sexual issues of all kinds, none of which he had previously encountered, and which even now fill him with disbelief. The thought that one of our boys might be a friend—or even a passing acquaintance—of Dorothy would probably leave him speechless.

The Chaplain’s answer to most things is Pull yourself together, boy, often combined with instructions to play more outdoor sports (he was a rugby man in his youth, and still has the nose to show for it). Nowadays our boys prefer to shelter him from Life’s more brutal realities and to take their problems to a different confessional; that of the Modern Languages lab, where the youthful French assistants are available, both for linguistic advice and contemporary, Gallic sympathy.

“It started last term,” said Allen-Jones. “The Chaplain teaches me RE. And when he gives us homework, I have to go into his form room to hand it in.”

This is common practice at St. Oswald’s; members of staff giving homework sometimes prefer to have it marked before they see the boys again. As Allen-Jones’s story emerged, I began to understand his concern. Apparently, a fifth-form boy by the name of Rupert Gunderson has been giving him trouble since the beginning of term.

“What kind of trouble?” I said.

He shrugged. “Every time he sees me, he hits me and calls me names. It’s really very tedious, sir.” A tiny tremor in his voice indicated how close he was to tears. “I have to go into the Chaplain’s room to hand in my RE homework. And now it’s Gunderson’s form room. I see him all the time. And this morning he said if I came in again, he’d— Well. I’d rather not say, sir.”

“I see.”

It all made sense to me now. Of course, Dr. Burke never spends more time in his form room than he absolutely needs to. It’s a Middle Corridor room, not very far from the Chapel, where he has a very nice office, in which he likes to spend his free time listening to choral music and looking after his collection of orchids.

I considered Gunderson. An undersized, aggressive boy to whom I’d once taught Latin (with little success), I wasn’t surprised to hear that he had found someone younger to bully.