Ten
To Derek Johns: Agent Emeritus, consigliere, and friend
An English school, July 1928
Tom Locke, twelve, tall for his age, goose-pimpled and shivering, practically naked in his knitted bathers, was hopping about under the trees at the end of the lake. They were about to be put through swimming, and Tom felt there was a genuine opportunity to disappear up one of the larches and avoid this frankly absurd dunking, the last of term. Yesterday the Beaks had carpeted him because he’d been swimming – well, yes, without permission – and after dark, but so what, he’d wanted to observe the nocturnal bird life and lake-life, he’d explained it perfectly clearly – or would have, if they’d given him a chance – and now they were forcing him in when it was cold and he didn’t feel like it. This morning the lake looked like a lake which might give a chap pneumonia.
Soft needles cushioned his feet; grey-black water gleamed in front of him. The other boys, squawking, slapped their hard faded towels at each other. A bit of dank sun slid through the branches above.
Tom had goggles and a phenomenal lung capacity for such a skinny boy. He would go under gracefully and glide through the greenest murk, slipping between spirals of slime, hardly disturbing whoever lurked down there. It was like flying through water. Surfacing, he would go eye to gelatinous eye with half-submerged toads, breathe a little, and sink again. Underwater was lovely to him. But today he didn’t feel like it. He flung two quick arms up, grabbed, pulled and slithered, and was up, on a scratchy branch, in the shadows of the shaggy heart of the larch, where cobwebs and grey ghosts of old growth hung in the remnants of winter.
It was bloody cold up there too. Must be some kind of meteorological front, he thought, and glanced around for birds’ nests, insects, lichens.
As it was the third time this term, in the third school of the past four years, that Tom had decided to do what he wanted instead of following instructions, and as the usual measures had had no effect, his father was called upon to appear. Tom knew perfectly well that his father would not appear. His father had only recently started appearing out of his study, where he had been lurking ever since he came home from the war ten years ago. Why would he suddenly appear in front of the Head? He never had been what one could reliably call reliable, why would he start now? Riley Purefoy would as usual take his place.
This delighted Tom. Discipline rolled off his back, but a visit from Riley was a jewel beyond measure.
Tom was standing outside the Head’s study when Riley appeared, and grinned like a loon at the sight of him. Riley grinned back, his constricted harlequin smile. Just then, two seniors lounged past, which distracted Tom for a moment. One of them, Slater, had on a previous occasion suggested that Tom’s mother was negligent, as she never appeared at sporting events. ‘Oh no,’ Tom had said, ‘I have no ma’ – with a flick of his big blue eyes – very like his mother’s, in fact – which had led Slater to think that perhaps Locke’s mater was a runaway. ‘Has she bolted then?’ Slater had asked, scenting prey. ‘You could put it that way,’ Tom had said, with the slightly amused-looking expression he used for covering what he point-blank refused to talk about. His mother – Julia. Julia. Joooolia – had been dead for ten years, died having Kitty, the kid sister – bad bargain probably. Of course he didn’t talk about her. A chap wouldn’t even talk about a living mater, let alone a dead one. And anyway Nadine was a perfectly good substitute.
And anyway if he started talking about mothers he’d have to start thinking about them, and fathers too. Nadine had said, during Tom’s last exeat, ‘Peter is so much better than he has been, isn’t he, Tom, since he went to France with Riley? I’m so glad he’s writing his book now.’
The book was about Homer and the Great War. Tom had shrugged. Perhaps when Peter came out of his study he wasn’t as odd and unpleasant as he used to be, and he smelt a bit better, but Tom still had nothing to say to him.
Not that any of that was any of Slater’s beeswax. So Slater had been confused, and, not being very intelligent, had marked Locke as an enemy and potential victim.
Now, as they ambled by, Slater and his companion caught sight of Riley’s face, or to be precise its unlikely shape, and the scars which held it together. They stalled, walked on, giggled, then turned back and behind Riley’s head started a little dance of mockery, fingers pulling at the flesh of their own young faces, eyes rolling, at Tom.
Tom flared.
‘What