Talking to Strange Men (7 page)

Candidates usually sit the Public Schools Entrance in June. The examination is the same for all schools within the Headmasters' Conference but papers are marked and results judged at the particular school of the candidate's, or more probably his parents', choice. There was no question but that Angus would go on to Rossingham. His father had gone there and Ian was there. And Guy Parker was also going to
Rossingham, it was an understood thing that they would be attending the same public school, and no one, as far as Angus knew, had ever disputed this. Later, in all fairness though, he couldn't have categorically stated that Guy had actually told him so.

The results came and Angus was in, which was no great surprise to anyone. It was holiday time and the Camerons were all off to their annual fortnight in Corfu, so he had no opportunity of seeing Guy Parker until after they got back. Besides, he hadn't felt any pressing need to see Guy. He knew they would both be going to Rossingham in a month's time and they'd be bound to meet a couple of times before that.

He went round to the Parkers' because Mrs Parker phoned up and asked him and Mungo to lunch on one of the days both his parents were working at the same time. Mungo was only a little kid of ten then and it was always a bit of a problem getting him looked after in the holidays. When he got there Angus realized he had never actually asked Guy if he had passed that exam, though he was bound to have done. It was a well-known fact that you had to be quite dim not to pass and Guy was very bright. They were alone together in the place the Parkers called the playroom, having exiled poor old Bean to the kitchen with Mrs Parker and Guy's little sister.

‘Have you got all your gear yet?' Angus asked. ‘I reckon those hats are the end, the pits. We had to go to London to get mine. Tuckers don't stock them any more.'

Had Guy looked embarrassed or ashamed? If he had Angus hadn't noticed, but perhaps he hadn't. For a moment or two he didn't say anything, then:

‘I don't have to have a hat.'

‘Yes, you do. It's on the list.'

‘They don't wear hats at Utting.'

Angus didn't have to ask him to elucidate. He knew at once. Guy had the grace to looked abashed. They were silent. It was a long awkward unpleasant silence. And in those minutes, while Guy took from his bookshelves the paperback novel of espionage he was going to lend Angus, while they descended the stairs together in response to Mrs Parker's
shout of ‘Lunch!', Angus felt the first real pain of his life. Or he thought of it that way, perhaps it wasn't. But no one had ever done anything like that to him before, no one had ever deceived him.

Going to schools like Hintall's was supposed to start you off on the stiff upper lip thing. He could remember his Scottish grandfather calling it that. He hadn't had much faith in it himself but perhaps it was true. At any rate he was able to conceal his feelings and eat Mrs Parker's lunch – he even remembered what it was, a very good lunch too, steak and kidney pie, scalloped potatoes, fresh garden peas, blackcurrant shortcake and cream – and to keep his cool. After lunch Guy explained. He didn't want to go to Rossingham. It was conventional, reactionary and old-fashioned.

‘I mean, look at that hat thing.'

‘What hat thing?'

‘Well, having to wear a bloody straw boater. Who needs it?'

Utting was progressive. They took girls in at all levels. They did a Russian course. They had an amazing new technology department. You could play polo if you wanted or learn to fly a helicopter.

‘Are you kidding?' said Angus.

‘Well, they've definitely got a helicopter. And an ice rink. And it's all first names and everyone gets to have a bedroom of their own.'

Angus took his pain home with him. He thought it was only being deceived that he minded but he found he also minded the loss of Guy. He would not see Guy again until half-term and probably not then, for the half-term holidays of Rossingham and Utting would not necessarily coincide. Three months, which was the length of a term, is a very long time when you are thirteen years old. Guy ought to have told him, at least when they sat the exam if not before, that he planned on going to a different school. But this dislike of being deceived was as nothing compared to their separation.

People said of their family that Ian and Mungo were like their father, tall and skinny and fidgety, while he was like their mother, not only in physical appearance but in temperament too. He was supposed to be placid. Angus did not
think anyone was ever very much like anyone else. He wasn't placid but he was good at not showing his feelings. No one suspected at home that he was unhappy, that he carried Guy's betrayal around with him as the boy in the fable carried the fox that gnawed at his insides.

His dismay turned to anger. He had borrowed the Yugall paperback from Guy – it was
Mole Run
– but when he had finished it, instead of taking it round to the Parkers' house he got Mungo to put it through the letter box when he was passing on his way to his fencing class. A couple of days after that the Rossingham autumn term started.

Angus missed Guy very much. New school was strange anyway, and although the old fagging system had been abolished and things were quite civilized compared to in his father's day, although bullying had virtually gone, there was still bewilderment to contend with and mystifying rules. He told himself he hated Guy and was glad to see the back of him. Soon he made a couple of friends, one of them being Bruce Reynolds, who he supposed he could say was now his closest friend. Half-term passed without occasion to go near the Parkers but when the Christmas holidays came, a few days after Rossingham broke up, Guy phoned.

His mother took the call. He heard her speak Guy's name and then he went and hid in the top-floor lavatory, not answering when she called him. He knew she would tell Guy he would call him back, which in fact she had done. Angus thought he and his brothers were lucky to have a mother who never fussed, who wouldn't dream of asking such searching questions as where had he got to and what was he up to and why hadn't he answered when she called him. On the other hand he knew better than to ask her to tell lies for him over the phone or anywhere else. She would never have stood for that.

He didn't call Guy back. The Parkers always went away for Christmas, to Mrs Parker's sister in Devon or Mr Parker's sister in France, and by the time they got back the new term would have started. By Christmas Eve he was rather regretting he hadn't called Guy back. He was missing him again. Among his Christmas presents was the new Yugall novel. Guy and he were crazy about espionage fiction and
they loved all the great masters of the genre but their current favourite was Yves Yugall, whom for a while they preferred even over Len Deighton, though it was a close-run thing.

Yves Yugall had written about twenty books by that time and he and Guy had read them all,
Mole Run
being the latest. The latest in paperback, that is, for they couldn't afford to buy hardcovers. Of course the books always came out in hardcover about a year before the paperback appeared but they just had to wait unless they could get them out of the library. The new one,
Cat Walk
– Yugall always had the name of an animal in his titles – was from his mother and father along with the track suit he had asked for and the really good ballpoint pen they thought he ought to have. It was a brand new hardcover, seven pounds ninety-five and with an artist's impression of the Brandenburger Tor on the jacket.

Angus read it at a sitting, or a lying really. He read it in bed on Christmas night, staying awake till three to do so. When he had finished it he thought, I've read it and he hasn't. Too bad. If we were still friends I'd have passed it on to him the moment I finished it. Probably what he would have done was to send Guy a coded message – a note by hand of Mungo or some little pal of his – letting him know he had the book and to come and get it. Guy would have had to break the code and decipher the message. But they were good at that. It had really started because their parents all made a fuss about the amount they used the phone and what it cost.

Cat Walk
went back to school with Angus. Bruce wasn't interested, he didn't want to read it. Angus started thinking a lot about Guy and one night he dreamed about him. He was at Utting, visiting Guy, and it was an amazing place with bedrooms like in an hotel with en suite bathrooms, and an ice rink and saunas and one helicopter to every ten boys, flying lessons being a weekly event. Guy had his own built-in cupboards in his room and a chest of drawers and two bedside cabinets instead of the drawer under his bunk and narrow hanging cupboard which was the lot of boarders at Rossingham. When Angus woke up he thought that if the dream had gone on he would have secretly put
Cat Walk
into the top drawer of the chest in Guy's room for Guy to find when next he opened it to take out a pair of socks.

It was funny how the idea of doing this obsessed him. If he wanted to make things up with Guy there was no reason why he shouldn't have sent him the book in a parcel or, if that was rather costly, given him the book at half-term. This term their breaks coincided, being the middle week of February.

Angus didn't really want to wait that long. He wanted to get the book to Guy and somehow to get it to him in a mysterious way. Bruce had a cousin in the preparatory department at Utting, the junior school. When Bruce's relations came up one Sunday to take him out to tea Angus had the book ready wrapped up with a note to the eleven-year-old inside plus a fifty pence piece. Would they please pass this on to their son when he came home next weekend? The juniors went home most weekends though seniors never did unless, for instance, one's grandfather had a ninetieth birthday or one's sister got married or something.

The note said to get the book secretly into the drawer under Guy Parker's bunk in the study Guy shared with nine others – for this was the reality even at Utting. Bruce's cousin had told him all about it. Weeks went by and Angus heard nothing. For all he knew the cousin might have kept the fifty pee and dropped
Cat Walk
into his study wastepaper basket, if little ones like that had studies. On the other hand, things were much freer and easier at Utting than at Rossingham and the senior houses were very likely not out of bounds to juniors. It might be that the cousin had to do no more than walk openly from Andrade House where he lived into Fleming House which was Guy's house, and up the stairs. He could do it during prep, for Angus had found out that the Lower Fourth at Utting did their prep in the library, not in their studies.

The Camerons took the local daily paper as well as
The Times.
It had a circulation not only in the city but across the whole county. That year 14 February fell on a Monday, the first day of Angus's and Ian's half-term holiday. They had come home the evening before, having been fetched by their mother. Ian got up early on the Monday and rushed
downstairs to get the
Free Press.
Angus found him sitting at the kitchen table reading page seven which, on 14 February, was devoted entirely to St Valentine's Day messages.

Looking over his shoulder, Angus read: ‘Cameron, I.M., Violets are blue, My Valentine is you. Lorna.' He didn't think much of that. Ian looked up at him.

‘There's one for you.'

‘There can't be.'

‘No kidding. You're Cameron, Angus H., aren't you?'

‘There must be lots,' said Angus.

‘I doubt it.' Ian pointed out the piece he had himself inserted: ‘Markham, Lorna: I am, you are, love is. I.M.C.' He seemed proud of it. Angus looked back at the left-hand column where his own name was. ‘Someone must fancy you,' said Ian. ‘D'you know who it is?'

‘Haven't the foggiest.'

‘“Cameron, Angus H.,”' Angus read, ‘“APTHQ KQUCC BEX UDNQ BT DTTW QEAK UW ODKSDB STNQPT.”'

It wasn't signed, or if it was the signature was incorporated in the code. Angus knew who it was, of course. He felt happy. Last year he remembered telling Guy that Ian's girlfriend Lorna had put a Valentine's message in the paper and the two of them had teased Ian who at first had tried to pretend the message wasn't for him. Guy must have thought of that when he was wondering how to thank him, Angus, for the loan of the book in suitably mystifying fashion. Mystifying it was, though. No doubt Guy had used a line from a book to base his code on. That was what they had always done. Angus spent most of the day trying the code on the first lines of all the works he possessed by their favourite authors. It would be a novel of espionage, he was sure of that, and very possibly a novel by Yves Yugall. Angus tried the code on the first lines of
Scorpion Road, Tiger Toll, Monkey Wrench, Tarantula Town
and
Wasp Sting.
Surely Guy wouldn't have used a line from the middle of the book, would he? After all, he would want his code to be deciphered. He would want to give Angus a hard time of it but he would want his code deciphered in the end.

Another thing to be taken into consideration was that Guy
would only have a limited number of books – that is, works of fiction – with him at Utting. And he must have composed the message at Utting, even though he would be at home now. Angus didn't know about Utting, but at Rossingham, what with sports and clubs and flexi-prep and the Combined Cadet Force, there wasn't much time for reading apart from required prep reading and one's housemaster didn't like one to stuff one's drawer with books. What books would Guy have with him? Maybe a school set book? Angus, rather dubiously, tried the code on the first lines of
Julius Caesar, To Kill a Mockingbird,
and though it seemed a bit way out, Daudet's
Lettres de Mon Moulin.
Nothing worked. He pored over the code, going through books all day Tuesday and most of Wednesday, and on Wednesday evening they all went over to some friends of his parents for supper. The friend had two Siamese cats one of which had injured its leg falling out of a tree.