As he walked the last lap to the House, Laurie realized sinkingly that the last of his effervescence had subsided, and that from now on only stone-cold will-power would push him through. He wished, for the first time in nearly four years, that during the next hour the School could be burnt down.
From the study window he heard Harris saying, “Get your eyes seen to. Odell’s there.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Harris.” The small boy at the door took a nervous step into the room. “Please, Odell, Lanyon says will you see him in his study, please?”
“What, now?” drawled Laurie with the calm convention expected. For a moment this summons—which usually meant trouble of a disciplinary kind—only struck him as embarrassingly ill-timed. It wasn’t till the fag had gone that he saw Harris looking at him, and Carter at the floor. There was a dragging silence where the usual pleasantries should have been.
Laurie remarked casually, “What the heck does he want, I wonder?” and, as no one answered, went out into the corridor. For this purpose it was in order to use the door.
At the foot of the stairs, surrounded by dark green paint of the resistant kind used in station waiting rooms, he stood still. This, he knew with a certainty exceeding all the other certainties of the day, was the most awful thing that had ever happened to him in his life. Carter must have told someone, and somehow … The palms of his hands felt sticky and cold. He had been prepared to face Jeepers, even the Headmaster. He had been ready for anything, except this.
From the moment of conceiving Lanyon as a cause, there hadn’t been much time to contemplate him as a human being; perhaps because the thought of him in any kind of equivocal or humiliating situation was so improbable, and indeed hardly bore thinking of. That Lanyon might be grateful for the campaign on his behalf was the last thing Laurie had contemplated. Lanyon would never so compromise his dignity; it would be a sufficient gesture if he ignored the episode. Head prefects didn’t thank people for starting riots in Houses; on the contrary. And no Head of any House had ever stood for less nonsense than he. It was an academic question whether anyone would get fresh with Lanyon twice, for no one, as far as Laurie knew, had tried it once.
As he began, draggingly, to mount the stairs, Laurie’s dominant wish was that he were not too senior to be beaten, which would have been quick, simple and relatively unembarrassing.
He had got to the door. His footsteps must have been heard by now; there could be no more procrastination. He knocked.
“Come in,” said Lanyon briskly. At this point Laurie ceased to feel any awkwardness. Fright had swallowed everything. Concerned only not to show it, he walked in.
Lanyon was sitting in his armchair, doing something with a penknife to a propelling pencil. He looked up. He was slight and lean, with dusty-fair hair and eyes of a striking light blue which were narrowed by the structure of the orbit above, giving him a searching look even when he smiled. He wasn’t smiling.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Odell. Shut the door.”
Laurie shut it, feeling sick in the pit of his stomach, and waited. The length of the wait was always proportioned to the offense; but he was past measuring time. Lanyon made some further adjustment of the pencil, screwed down the lead, shut the knife and put it in his pocket. As always he was extremely neat, his hair brushed and recently trimmed, his shirt looking as if he had just put it on. He had spent last year’s summer holidays working his passage to Iceland and back in a trawler, and had recently been accepted for a projected research expedition to the Arctic. The biggest toughs in the School, when they stood against Lanyon, looked muscle-bound or run to seed. Lines of decision showed around his eyes and mouth; at nineteen, he was marked already with the bleak courage of the self-disciplined neurotic. Laurie, who was in no state to be analytical, only thought that Lanyon looked more than usually like chilled steel. Suddenly it seemed certain that the prevailing rumor had got garbled in transit, and almost certainly didn’t even refer to Lanyon at all. Laurie waited as if at the stake, clenching his lower jaw.
Having disposed of the penknife, Lanyon looked up again. His light eyes raked Laurie, coldly, from head to foot.
They tell me,” he said, “that you appear to be going out of your mind. Is there anything you want to say about it?”
“No, Lanyon,” said Laurie mechanically. He could have feigned noncomprehension, but with Lanyon one didn’t try anything on.
“Had it occurred to you,” said Lanyon evenly, “that if anything needs organizing in this House, the prefects are capable of seeing to it without any help from you?”
“Yes, Lanyon.” Laurie looked, for relief, away to the work table in the window. It was very tidy, like Lanyon himself.
“Of course, the prefects are only used to routine work. If they ever decide to get up a revival meeting, or some other form of mass hysteria, no doubt they’ll ask for your expert advice before they begin.”
Laurie said nothing. His gaze fell from the work table to the waste-paper basket standing under it.
“Do you often,” Lanyon asked, “have attacks like this?”
“No,” said Laurie. The wastepaper basket was full. It would have been overflowing if the contents had not been rammed down. The mass of torn papers stirred in his mind some dimly remembered sense of dread.
“Well, another time”—he could feel a hard blue stare tugging his own eyes back—“if you find your exhibitionism getting too much for you, I suggest you join the Holy Rollers, and give yourself some scope. You don’t want to waste your gifts, merely landing one school in a mess it wouldn’t live down in ten years.”
“I’m sorry, Lanyon.” But Laurie was hardly aware of speaking. He had seen, among the papers, the torn boards of the cloth-bound notebooks only issued to the Senior School, in which permanent material, the indispensable stuff of exam revision, was kept. There were three or four of them, probably more.
“Don’t stand there like a dummy.” The compressed snap in Lanyon’s voice was more alarming than a shout. “Do you realize you’ve been behaving like a dangerous lunatic, yes or no?”
“Yes,” said Laurie. To his own amazement he added, “I suppose so.”
Lanyon rested his hand with the pencil on the arm of the chair and leaned forward slightly. His eyes looked like chips of blue enamel. “You suppose so?” he said softly. “You suppose so?”
“Sorry,” said Laurie quickly.
“So I should hope.” Lanyon leaned back again, looking as if he had just brushed off some dirt and supposed it had been worth the trouble. In the slanting light from the window, the lines around his mouth were deepened to hollows. “Very well, then. When I have your word there’ll be no more of this nonsense, you can go.” There was a pause. Laurie swallowed; it seemed to him that it must be audible across the room. “Well? Have you got softening of the brain, Odell? You heard what I said.”
Pushing his voice up through his throat, which felt as if it were lined with sandpaper, Laurie said, “I’m sorry, Lanyon. I’ll give my word if—if it isn’t true about you leaving.”
“What did you say, Odell?” Lanyon stared at him, level-eyed. This time, though he felt as if the back of his neck would crack, Laurie met it without looking away. “Have you gone completely crazy? Who the hell do you think you are, standing here when a prefect sends for you and asking me questions about what I’m going to do? You need to see a doctor, I should think.”