This was the main entrance of the Hall itself—and there, where the staircase divided, was the Copley portrait of Admiral Eden himself still dominating it—the old fellow's grandfatherly expression strangely at odds with the desperate sea battle being fought in the picture's background. Perhaps he was attempting to compute his prize money. . . he was likely happier presiding over middle class schoolboys here than being gawped at in some museum by the descendants of the men he had so often flogged at the gratings.
Butler's footsteps echoed sharply as he strode across the marble floor and up the staircase. On the left the battle honours of Eden Hall.. . Capt. S. H. Wrightson 1934-38— the compulsive escaper— DSO, MC . . .
and on the right, among the academic honours... N. H. Smith 1957-62— Open Exhibition, The King's College, Oxford. That was under the 1967 list. And there was Smith again in the 1970 names— First Class Honours in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. So Smith had changed subjects, from English to P.P.E.—a proper radical subject grouping if Dingle's suspicions had any foundation to them .. .
Cautiously Butler climbed higher. From marble staircase to mahogany parquet flooring; from mahogany floor to the solid oak of the second floor stairway. Next the polished oak of the dormitories—and there, dummy2.htm
on the left, the door to the attic stairs.
This one was locked, as Dingle had said it would be. But he had also said that the door was a feeble one, secured with a cheap lock and opening inwards on to a small landing of its own. So for once brute force seemed to be the proper recipe. Butler examined the door briefly, to pinpoint the exact target area. Then he took one pace back, balanced himself on his left leg and delivered a short, powerful blow with the flat of his heel alongside the doorknob.
Beyond the door there was another change of atmosphere, not so subtle and unrelated to the school itself: the varnished woodwork was cruder and the plaster rougher under the dust of ages. This was the entrance to the servants' world, the night staircase by which they had answered calls from the bedrooms below. And somewhere at the other end of the house would be a second stair leading from the attics directly down to the kitchen and the other half of their life of fetching, cleaning, carrying and cooking.
And this, thought Butler without any particular rancour, would probably have been his world in the days of Admiral Eden and his sons and grandsons—not Major John Butler, late of the 143rd Foot, but perhaps at best Butler the butler to the Edens. In his arguments with Hugh Roskill about the good old days he admired and regretted so deeply Butler had been struck by that quaint irony: Roskill, the liberal, always saw himself among the masters, while Butler, the conservative, could never imagine himself on the gentleman's side of the green baize door leading to the servants' quarters.
And here (though without the green baize) were those quarters in their cobwebby reality: a rabbit warren under the eaves—though now the warren was jammed not with housemaids and footmen and pantry-boys, but with all the accumulated and discarded paraphernalia of years of prep, school life: piles of fraying cane-bottomed chairs, rolls of coconut matting, strange constructions of painted wood and canvas which Butler recognised at second glance as the stage furniture of "HMS Pinafore", or maybe
"The Pirates of Penzance".
It was a mercy that Dingle had been precise in his directions and that the slope of the roof itself made it easy to follow them: the records should be at the very end of the warren.
Just why they were located so far from easy access perplexed Butler to begin with, for the passageway between the objects was narrow. But perceptibly the school debris thinned and in the last room but one—
he could see the light of the end window ahead—gave place finally to objects which likely dated from the Eden family era: cracked Victorian pots, an elephant's foot stool and a pile of rusty, but still nasty-looking native spears, the relics of some colonial trophy of arms that had once graced the walls below.
And the end room itself explained the location of the old records. The big round gable-end window, nearly a yard in diameter, let in plenty of light and two long framework shelves crammed with files ran at right angles to it. Beside the window was an old card table and one of the cane-bottomed chairs placed for the comfort of anyone who wished to consult the records. Evidently no one had desired to do that for a long time, thought Butler, running his finger through the thick dust on the table top.
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But someone had done the filing nevertheless, in big, old-fashioned box files—parents' accounts, heating, lighting, kitchen ... he ran his dusty finger across them. Visits (Educational), Visits (Foreign exchange), Masters (Assistant)—the boys' records must be on the other side.
BOYS (Medical)
Butler's eye flashed down the lines of years—Smith's would be well down towards the end—'54, '55, '56
—'57 was fourth from the last. Presumably the head kept the most recent decade ready to hand in his study, banishing one old year annually to this attic.
A small cloud of dust rose from the table as he set the box on it.
Andrews B. J., Archer C. W., Ashcroft-Jones D. F. . . . he thumbed quickly towards the back of the file . . . Pardoe E.B. —a sickly boy, Pardoe, with a sheaf of notes from matron to testify to his ailments
— Trowbridge D. T. —he had overshot the mark . . . Spencer G. I. —
Smith N. H.
Butler smoothed down the pages. Outside he could hear the wind whistle past the window beside his face. It had been still in the garden below, shielded by the tall trees, but up here there would generally be a breath of wind. He could hear the rumble of the traffic on the road outside and somewhere near there was a tree branch rubbing against the house. He fancied he could even distinguish the distant roar of the sea on the pebble beach away over the treetops.
"Boozy" Smith's vital and fast developing statistics were all here, anyway, measured and recorded: the puny eight-year-old had been transformed by Eden Hall's stodgy pies and puddings into a plump thirteen-year-old.
Measles without complications at nine and mumps when he was still too young for complications at ten . . . what was needed was some nice distinguishing scar, at the very least an appendix scar. Or a broken bone.
But scars and breaks there were none. And apparently no dental records either—that was a disappointment. The O positive blood group was something, but not much—if it was a positive identification they wanted he would need something much better than this juvenile information. Sore throats and athlete's foot just weren't good enough.
He pushed the file to one side. It was likely that these would be even Jess, eloquent than the medical material, in which case this whole farce would be unproductive.
BOYS (Academic)
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He knew better now where to reach Smith N. H.—it was pleasant to discover in passing that Pardoe's poor health was offset by singular academic brilliance.
He cocked his head: by some freak of sound he could hear the sea quite distinctly...
But Smith's academic record was, as he had feared, undistinguished by special aptitudes. Dingle's memory was, as usual, exact: better at maths on the whole than English— essays lacking in imagination. . . . They were never going to identify Smith's remains by the condition of his youthful imagination.
BOYS (Sport)
A useful opening bat (right-handed). . .