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Chapters (93)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Prologue
  4. Chapter 1
  5. Part One
  6. Chapter 1
  7. Chapter 2
  8. Chapter 3
  9. Chapter 4
  10. Chapter 5
  11. Chapter 6
  12. Chapter 7
  13. Chapter 8
  14. Chapter 9
  15. Chapter 10
  16. Part Two
  17. Chapter 1
  18. Chapter 2
  19. Chapter 3
  20. Chapter 4
  21. Chapter 5
  22. Chapter 6
  23. Chapter 7
  24. Chapter 8
  25. Chapter 9
  26. Chapter 10
  27. Chapter 11
  28. Chapter 12
  29. Part Three
  30. Chapter 1
  31. Chapter 2
  32. Chapter 3
  33. Chapter 4
  34. Chapter 5
  35. Chapter 6
  36. Chapter 7
  37. Part Four
  38. Chapter 1
  39. Chapter 2
  40. Chapter 3
  41. Chapter 4
  42. Chapter 5
  43. Chapter 6
  44. Chapter 7
  45. Chapter 8
  46. Chapter 9
  47. Part Five
  48. Chapter 1
  49. Chapter 2
  50. Chapter 3
  51. Chapter 4
  52. Chapter 5
  53. Chapter 6
  54. Chapter 7
  55. Chapter 8
  56. Chapter 9
  57. Chapter 10
  58. Chapter 11
  59. Part Six
  60. Chapter 1
  61. Chapter 2
  62. Chapter 3
  63. Chapter 4
  64. Chapter 5
  65. Chapter 6
  66. Chapter 7
  67. Part Seven
  68. Chapter 1
  69. Chapter 2
  70. Chapter 3
  71. Chapter 4
  72. Chapter 5
  73. Chapter 6
  74. Chapter 7
  75. Chapter 8
  76. Chapter 9
  77. Chapter 10
  78. Chapter 11
  79. Part Eight
  80. Chapter 1
  81. Chapter 2
  82. Chapter 3
  83. Chapter 4
  84. Chapter 5
  85. Chapter 6
  86. Chapter 7
  87. Chapter 8
  88. Chapter 9
  89. Epilogue
  90. Acknowledgments
  91. Reading Group Guide
  92. About the Author
  93. Copyright

Chapter 3

3

Michaelmas Term, 1981

I thought of talking to Spikely, but decided against it. I had no doubt that it was he who had made the complaint against Harry. I was equally convinced that Harrington had set him up to it: and bearing in mind the amount of time that the three boys spent in Harry’s room, and knowing Harry as I did, I was sure that if Charlie Nutter was having doubts about his own sexuality, Harry would have given him any reassurance he could.

Harrington, with his narrow views, would hardly have been expected to approve. Spikely, I guessed, was easily led. And from that to the two boys lodging a complaint against Harry with the Chaplain—a complaint that, without my intervention, the Chaplain would have duly passed on to the Head, and to the Governors—

Yes, I misled him deliberately. I don’t regret that, even though it caused me some trouble later. What I regret was not seeing the signs. But my mind was taken up with other things; and once the crisis was over, Harrington and his two friends faded once more into the background.

It had been a busy few weeks. Over the second half of the Michaelmas term, I’d been engaged in a number of domestic affairs, including some Sixth-Form Latin coaching; the impending arrival of twenty French exchange students from La Baule, with all the disruption that would entail; another untimely fall of snow; and that School production of Antigone, which, aside from having claimed the souls of two of my brightest fifth-formers, also meant that Harry was taken up with rehearsals every lunchtime and every night till the end of term.

Then there were the rabbits. A rather nasty incident involving a half dozen rabbits in a run at the back of the School and cared for by members of my form as part of a science project—all of them found dead one day by the boy assigned to feed them.

At first I assumed that a fox had got in. But there were no marks on the rabbits, which were discovered neatly laid out side by side in their little pen, damp, but otherwise intact. Rumours of black magic instantly ran through the Middle School. The boy, a susceptible youngster by the name of Newman, was very upset by the whole thing, and was duly offered counseling by the Chaplain and the Satanic Mr. ­Speight, the combined influence of which froze him into a rigid pillar of misery—rather like a rabbit himself, caught in two sets of headlights.