‘Y-yes.’
‘But your father wouldn’t want you to grow up like that, would he? Your father is very particular about manners, is he not?’
No answer.
‘I asked you, is your father particular about manners?’
‘Perhaps – yes.’
‘Therefore I will be doing him a favour if I punish you, won’t I?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Won’t I?’
‘Y-yes?’
‘We will meet later then, after prayers, in the changing-room.’
The rest of the day would be spent in an agony of waiting for the evening to come.
Oh my goodness, how it was all coming back to me now. Sunday was also letter-writing time. ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy – thank you very much for your letter. I hope you are both well. I am, except I have got a cold because I got caught in the rain but it will soon be over. Yesterday we played Shrewsbury and beat them 4-2. I watched and Foxley who you know is the head of our house scored one of our goals. Thank you very much for the cake. With love from William.’
I usually went to the lavatory to write my letter, or to the boot-hole, or the bathroom – any place out of Foxley’s way. But I had to watch the time. Tea was at four-thirty and Foxley’s toast had to be ready. Every day I had to make toast for Foxley, and on weekdays there were no fires allowed in the studies, so all the fags, each making toast for his own studyholder, would have to crowd around the one small fire in the library, jockeying for position with his toasting-fork. Under these conditions, I still had to see that Foxley’s toast was (1) very crisp, (2) not burned at all, (3) hot and ready exactly on time. To fail in any one of these requirements was a ‘beatable offence’.
‘Hey, you! What’s this?’
‘It’s toast.’
‘Is this really your idea of toast?’
‘Well…’
‘You’re too idle to make it right, aren’t you?’
‘I try to make it.’
‘You know what they do to an idle horse, Perkins?’
‘No.’
‘Are you a horse?’
‘No.’
‘Well – anyway, you’re an ass – ha, ha – so I think you qualify. I’ll be seeing you later.’
Oh, the agony of those days. To burn Foxley’s toast was a ‘beatable offence’. So was forgetting to take the mud off Foxley’s football boots. So was failing to hang up Foxley’s football clothes. So was rolling up Foxley’s brolly the wrong way round. So was banging the study door when Foxley was working. So was filling Foxley’s bath too hot for him. So was not cleaning the buttons properly on Foxley’s O.T.C. uniform. So was making those blue metal-polish smudges on the uniform itself. So was failing to shine the soles of Foxley’s shoes. So was leaving Foxley’s study untidy at any time. In fact, so far as Foxley was concerned, I was practically a beatable offence myself.
I glanced out of the window. My goodness, we were nearly there. I must have been dreaming away like this for quite a while, and I hadn’t even opened my Times. Foxley was still leaning back in the corner seat opposite me reading his Daily Mail, and through a cloud of blue smoke from his pipe I could see the top half of his face over the newspaper, the small bright eyes, the corrugated forehead, the wavy, slightly oily hair.
Looking at him now, after all that time, was a peculiar and rather exciting experience. I knew he was no longer dangerous, but the old memories were still there and I didn’t feel altogether comfortable in his presence. It was something like being inside the cage with a tame tiger.
What nonsense is this? I asked myself. Don’t be so stupid. My heavens, if you wanted to you could go ahead and tell him exactly what you thought of him and he couldn’t touch you, Hey – that was an idea!
Except that – well – after all, was it worth it? I was too old for that sort of thing now, and I wasn’t sure that I really felt much anger towards him anyway.
So what should I do? I couldn’t sit there staring at him like an idiot.