cloisters outside the head master’s study. The organ bellowing out bass tones that reverberated through your ribcage. The vast expanse of playing fields sloping down to the Thames. The rowers thrashing up the river. And the mud being ground into your face while you played the Wall Game.
Strange, Max thought, that the situation he was now in was so closely linked to Eton. If it hadn’t been for the school, he wouldn’t have joined the Office. He wouldn’t have been sent to Saudi – and later to Moscow. And he wouldn’t be in The Hague now.
Pallesson cast a shadow over everything, but the endgame was fast approaching and only one of them was going to come out of this in one piece.
Max checked his watch. He was quarter of an hour early, and he knew that if anything annoyed M. J. Keate more than a boy being late, it was a boy that was early.
Max wondered if the other beaks at Eton realised what a dark horse Keate was. On the surface, a slightly bumbling tutor. But underneath, a covert, active spy. Max knew that Keate was always economical as to the extent of his work with Tryon. But he assumed it was more than he let on.
He walked round the corner, past the school office into the cloister below Upper School. To a passing tourist, the noticeboards stuck on the stone pillars were random information. To Max, the team sheets posted on them had meant the difference between exhilaration and utter depression. He remembered the day he’d walked up to see who else had been picked to play in the first eleven football team, assuming that he was a certainty. But his name hadn’t been on the sheet. Max felt sick even thinking about it now. He walked on through School Yard, past the Founder’s statue into the inner cloister. The last time he’d been here was when he was expelled.
In four years, he’d never taken in the spirit and tranquillity of this quadrangle. Jutting out from the walls were memorials to fallen Old Boys in both wars, dedicated by their mothers and sisters.
For Valour, one large slab of marble read. King Edward VII was quoted: In their lives … they maintained the traditions that have made Eton renowned.
The last Old Etonian, of many, to be awarded the VC caught Max’s eye.
1982 VC Lt Col H Jones Parachute Regiment
‘Colonel H – Falkland Islands,’ Max said out loud. He could remember being captivated by this charismatic soldier who led from the front and died in front of his men. Then he realized that time was running away from him and he was going to be late.
The gate at the foot of Keate’s garden path still made a nasty squeak. Max remembered suggesting that a bit of oil would do the trick. ‘It’s the noisy gate that gets the oil,’ Keate had chuckled to himself. ‘But still, don’t you dare. How else am I to know when someone’s coming?’
As Max walked up the path he knew Keate would be watching from the big Georgian study window. He didn’t look up though. If he waved, his old tutor wouldn’t wave back. And then he’d feel like a small, insecure boy. Or that was how he’d always felt in the past – at least, until he’d learnt not to look up.
Max knew the door wouldn’t be locked. It never was. He pushed it open and walked into the familiar hallway, which was clad with oak panels. How often had he stood in here, waiting for Keate to finish tutoring other boys? A hundred times probably, but only one day really stuck in his memory.
He remembered being taken aback when Keate had apologized for keeping him waiting. It was so out of character; the old boy never did that. And there’d been a sudden awkwardness about him.
‘It’s about your father, Ward,’ Keate had mumbled. ‘Not good news, I’m afraid.’ Then Keate had paused, as if he couldn’t get the words out. The delay only lasted for a second, but it felt to Max like an eternity. He remembered being frozen to his chair. Paralysed by whatever it was that Keate couldn’t say. ‘I’m afraid he’s dead. Terrible shock. Dreadful.’
Max hadn’t taken much else in at the time. Keate had spared him the details.
Trying to shake off the memory, he paused to look at the frieze on the wall opposite Keate’s study. He hadn’t seen it before.
‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ Keate said over his shoulder. ‘Some jacques took the oak panelling down to get at the pipes and found it underneath. Dates back to the sixteen hundreds. English Heritage went mad – told us we can’t smoke near it. Come on in.’
Max followed his tutor into a large, bright study.
‘Help yourself, old lad,’ Keate said breezily, as if they’d already talked at length that day. Max was used to his dismissive familiarity. He’d always been like that. Never one to make a fuss about a departure or a return. Even if they were divided by years. It was probably his way of dealing with being so close to his protégés one minute, and seeing them gone the next.
Keate beckoned towards his drinks cupboard in the corner of the room. For the first time, Max really took in the magnificence of the piece. The arched scallop frieze, the carved shell and Vitruvian scroll, the big heavy doors.
‘Beautiful cupboard, Keate,’ he remarked.
‘What’s the matter with you? Been there for years. My aunt Mary gave it to me, bless her. George II. Mahogany. Hopefully she’ll leave me her flat in Sloane Avenue, too. Cranmer Court. Rather nice block. Amazing old girl. Still does The Times crossword every day and rants about split infinitives. But there you go. I’m rambling. Are you in love? Old boys always come and see me when they’re in love. God knows why.’
Max wasn’t really listening to him. He stood with his back to Keate, studying the painting hanging behind the desk. The old man had always been blasé about it, as if embarrassed that he knew so much about the Flemish and Dutch masters. This ‘very poor example’ of Jan Asselijn’s work, he would say dismissively, was all he could afford.
But like all the great tutors, Keate had instilled his pupils with an everlasting interest in the subject that was his passion. Max remembered him taking a few of them to Windsor Castle to study Hendrick Avercamp’s paintings. Pallesson had been forensically attentive and ingratiatingly unctuous on that visit. As ever, he had to appear the most interested and enlightened.
‘Well, I might be,’ Max mumbled. ‘But that isn’t why I’ve come to see you.’
Max still had his back to Keate while he poured himself a weak glass of Islay whisky and water. It was at Eton that he’d been introduced to the peaty taste, drinking with a boy in his house whose father owned one of the distilleries on the island.
Keate watched him, remembering the boy he had once been. When his father’s accountants sifted through the wreckage after his death, they had found the coffers were empty. Keate, loath to see natural talent go to waste, had been prepared to make up the shortfall. But Max got himself kicked out. Keate had felt disappointed rather than let down. Nevertheless it had created a hiatus in their relationship.
Max sat down and faced his old tutor as he fiddled with some papers on his cluttered desk.
‘Why did the Office take me on, Keate?’
Keate took his glasses off and looked up at Max. ‘Why? Probably because no one else would have had you. You weren’t exactly flavour of the month on your departure from this establishment.’
‘That isn’t an answer, and you know it,’ Max replied impassively.
Keate couldn’t follow his drift. Why the sudden desire to go over old ground? He assumed his former student wasn’t looking for affirmation that he was a brilliant linguist – the best he had ever come across – or that he possessed an equally remarkable talent for lateral thought. Those were the skills he had used to sell Max Ward to Tryon, and they were hardly a secret.
But those weren’t the talents that had made him beseech Tryon to take Max on. Keate had an almost religious belief in the Instructions of Amenemopa, the great Egyptian leader. And in all his years he had never come across a boy in whom he had such faith to promote Maat – a world of truth and order. In