I made my way home through Malbry Park. I’ve always liked that place. It’s safe; its changes are always predictable. The leaves are already autumnal now; a sparrowlike scatter of small boys were throwing sticks at a horse-chestnut tree, without much success. The tree is old, and takes its time; the conkers not quite ready. In a week or two, however, they will be plump and glossy.

I used to like conkers as a boy; of course, in those days there was no Devine to tell us all how reckless we were. In those days our pockets were full of them—strikers and chippers and smashers—and our combats were gladiatorial all around the Lower Quad, with the heroes carried in state on the shoulders of the adoring crowd, while the vanquished slunk off, unnoticed, unmourned, to rejoin the proletariat.

I thought about Harry, dying alone to spare his friends the tedium. And I thought about the last time we’d met, and felt a pang that it should have been so many years ago.

What happened to the three of us? What happened to our friendship? It’s hard to think back to those days now, not because my memory fails but because I remember too clearly. That’s the price we pay, of course, for having survived St. Oswald’s so long. Current events blur and recede, while the past becomes clear and pitiless. Passing the Thirsty Scholar, I stopped for a modest libation, and found the place full of strangers, laughing and talking and living their lives.

A brandy, I think. For Harry Clarke. And another for myself.

I don’t suppose I shall sleep tonight. As if I didn’t have enough on my mind, with the Honours Boards, and the pigeonholes, and Gunderson, for whom I shall draft a letter—a sharply worded letter, I think, pointing out the fact that when parents are incapable of curbing their son’s bullying tendencies, we of the Old Guard are forced to invoke the time-honoured rule—in loco parentis. What happens in School should stay in School. Isn’t that what they pay us for?

And as for the Head—whose toxic interference in every aspect of School life has become far too disturbing to be dispelled by a podex joke, a licorice allsort, or a Gauloise—I find myself, for the first time, considering our erstwhile Mole with something approaching sympathy. The interloper within our walls knew how to bring down a citadel with nothing but guile and a handful of stones—and tonight, as I drink my brandy, I wonder where that Mole is now. Gone to ground? In prison? Dead? Watching our decline from afar?

This Head fails, the School goes down.