With something approaching gaiety, Mr Slymne climbed the steps in the Tower to his room two at a time and added the findings that Glodstone only read adventure yarns to his dossier on the man. Downstairs, there came the sound of fighting in the dormitory. Mr Slymne rose from his desk, descended the stairs and ten minutes later had changed the whole pattern of his life by beating three boys without a qualm.
Chapter 5
'Heard about Slimey's conversion?' Major Fetherington said at breakfast the next morning. Glodstone peered over the Daily Express.
'Don't tell me he's joining the Church. God help his parishioners.'
'No such luck. The fellow's finally come round to a proper way of dealing with boys. Beat three little blighters last night for pillow-fighting in dorm.'
Mr Glodstone put down his paper and glared at the Major with his gimlet eye. 'You're joking, of course.'
'Damned if I am. Cleaves, Milshott and Bedgerson. Saw their backsides this morning when they were changing for early PT. A nicer set of welts too you couldn't wish for.'
'Extraordinary. Didn't think the runt had it in him,' said Glodstone, and turned back to his paper only slightly puzzled.
But when Mr Slymne came in five minutes later, Glodstone was genuinely startled. 'Good God,' he said loudly, 'Never thought I'd live to see the day when you'd join us for breakfast, Slymne.'
Slymne helped himself to bacon and eggs and smiled almost cordially. 'Thought it would make a change,' he said, 'One tends to get stuck in a rut. I'm thinking of taking up jogging too.'
'Just don't do yourself an injury,' said Glodstone unpleasantly. 'We wouldn't know how to get along without your conscientious objections. But then I hear you don't have any now. Beat some boys last night, eh?'
'They asked for it and they got it,' said Mr Slymne, managing to ignore the sarcasm.
'Nothing like consistency,' said Glodstone, and stalked out of the dining-room. That morning his classes suffered from his short temper and were set essays to write while Glodstone brooded. Slymne's change of behaviour was disconcerting. If the damned fellow could suddenly alter his habits and start beating and take up jogging, Glodstone felt hard done by. Slymne had always been a comforting standard of wetness against which Glodstone could measure his own forthright and manly behaviour. Damn it, the next thing the wretched Slymne would do was get married. Glodstone, staring out of the window, felt a new wave of resentment boiling up inside him at the thought. Adventure had eluded him. So had romance. And he was growing older.
'Might not be a bad thing to marry some woman after all,' he muttered to himself, but apart from a distant cousin with no money, who had once proposed to him on Valentine's Day, there were no women of his social background he could think of who would do. There were some divorced mothers, of course, whose presence at the beginning of term or on Open Day had excited him, but their visits were too brief for him to get to know them. Anyway, they were hardly his sort. Glodstone dismissed them from his thoughts until he remembered La Comtesse de Montcon. He had never met her, but Anthony Wanderby, her son by a previous marriage, was in his House and while Glodstone disliked the little blighter he was a typical American spoilt brat in the Housemaster's eyes and always malingering he appreciated the crested envelopes and notepaper on which La Comtesse wrote to him from her Château in France. Glodstone had endowed La Comtesse in his too-frequent mentions of her in the staff-room he stuck to the French with all those qualities of beauty and nobility he had never encountered outside his books, but which had to exist somewhere. Certainly the Château existed. Glodstone had looked it up in his Michelin map for Périgord and found it apparently standing above the river, La Boose, a tributary of the Dordogne. A narrow road ran down beside the river and the hillsides opposite were coloured green which meant they were forested. It had often occurred to him to take the Bentley and find some excuse for dropping in but...Anyway, there was no point in pining over her. There was doubtless some damned Frog, Monsieur Le Comte, in attendance.
But that evening, after a restless day, he went up to his rooms early and sat sucking a pipe, studying the map again and turning over La Comtesse's brief letters to him. Then he folded them carefully away and replaced them in the cigar-box he kept in his desk before knocking out his pipe on the window sill and turning in.
'Damn Slymne,' he muttered as he lay in the darkness.
He would have damned him far more had he seem Mr Slymne move from the roof of the chapel opposite and descend the circular steps holding his camera carefully with his left hand while feeling the wall with his right. He paused at the bottom, made sure the quad was empty, and crossed to the Tower with the camera and 300mm lens concealed under his jacket. Ten minutes later, after locking himself in his bathroom and pulling the dark blind over the window, he had loaded the developing tank.
For Peregrine, the strange contortions of character in Glodstone and Slymne were too complex to be noticeable. He took them as usual quite literally at face value and since Glodstone's face with its neat moustache, monocle and glass eye gave the impression of strength and authority, while Slymne's didn't, he despised the latter. Besides, he enjoyed a man-to-man friendliness with Glodstone as a result of his enthusiastic reading of every book in his library, to the present where he was allowed to help to polish the Bentley on wet Sunday afternoons. There in the garage with rain pattering on the glass cupola above them (the place had once been a coach-house with a few old bridles still hanging on the walls) he imbibed the code of the English gentleman which was Glodstone's special mania. He had already merged Richard Hannay, Bulldog Drummond and every other upstanding hero, including James Bond, into a single figure in his mind and had conferred their virtues on Mr Glodstone. In fact, his reading had gone further than Gloddie's which stopped around 1930. James Bond was one such character. Glodstone wasn't too sure about Bond.
'The thing is,' he told Peregrine one afternoon when they had unstrapped the bonnet of the Bentley and were polishing the great engine, 'The thing is with Bond that he's not your everyday decent chap who gets caught up in an adventure quite by chance. He's a sort of paid government employee and anyway his attitude to women's pretty rotten and sordid. And he's always flying about and gambling and generally living it up. Not a gentleman, what?'
'No sir,' said Peregrine and struck Bond off his list.
Glodstone sat down on the running-board and took out his pipe. 'I mean to say, it's his job to deal with crime. The damned fellow is a professional. He's told what to do and he has official backing. Now the real thing isn't like that. It happens accidentally. A chap is driving along and he stops for a breather and he sees murder done and naturally he has to do something about it, and by Jove he does. Takes the swine on outside the law and if he gets caught that's the luck of the draw. And another thing is, he's as fit as a fiddle and he sticks to the countryside which he knows like the back of his hand and your genuine crooks don't. That's the way it really is.'
In the presence of the Bentley, Peregrine's feelings were almost religious. Mr Glodstone's clichés opened up an idyllic world where simple chaps made simple decisions and crooks were simply crooks and got what was coming to them. It corresponded exactly with his own view of life; one day he'd be lucky enough to see murder done and would do something about it.