were at a distance. I played by myself from necessity, and sat alone when I couldn’t be bothered to play. The woman in the gatehouse hadn’t suggested I find friends and I’d felt no need of them. The idea I might want to share my conkers with him was absurd.
‘I warned you.’ Watched by his friends, he made good his promise and I rocked back, hands to my already bleeding nose as someone started laughing.
‘You want the conkers?’
‘Uuu wan da conkers . . . ?’ His voice mocked the pain in my nose, my split lip, the trouble I had speaking.
‘Have the conkers.’
Closing my fingers round a handful, I threw them as hard as I could straight into his face and then punched him hard while his eyes were still shut. He rocked back as I’d done and I punched again, harder, splitting my knuckles. The boy was some inches bigger and obviously older but he sat down hard on his bottom and cowered back to stop me hitting him again.
St Luce had rusting wrought-iron gates to the forecourt, with an arch through the main building that led to a courtyard beyond. ‘You, boy, your name . . . ?’ I turned to see an old man shambling from a door that had been shut seconds earlier. ‘Well?’
‘Jean-Marie.’
A boy laughed, a different boy from before, falling into silence when the old man glared at him. ‘He’s young. He doesn’t know our ways. You will give him two weeks’ grace. You understand me?’
‘Yes, headmaster.’
‘Your family name?’ He said kindly.
‘D’Aumout, sir . . . Jean-Marie Charles d’Aumout.’
He was asking so the others would learn it, I realised many years later. Dr Morel was the old headmaster and the new headmaster’s father. In his seventies, and looking impossibly old to me then, he put an arm around my shoulders and steered me under the arch through the school and into a dark courtyard overlooked by rooms on all sides. A smaller arch led through to whatever was at the back of the building. ‘You’d better come too,’ he said over his shoulder to my attacker, who followed after us like an unwilling shadow. ‘Duras,’ said the boy, sticking out his hand.
I stared at it.
‘You have to shake.’
‘You hit me.’
‘You still have to. That’s the rules.’
I took his offered hand and he nodded. ‘Emile Duras,’ he said. ‘I’m in the second class.’ The old man chose that moment to turn and smiled to see us shaking.
‘Don’t be late,’ he told Emile. ‘But first show him to class.’
‘Which one, sir?’
‘You can read?’ the man asked me.
‘Yes, sir.’ The old woman had taught me the rest of my letters.
‘What’s fifty minus twenty?’
‘Thirty, sir.’
The old man looked thoughtful, then decided. ‘You can be in my class. I’m putting you in Emile’s care. His punishment for what happened.’
‘Sir . . .’ Emile protested.
‘You expect me to believe he punched you first?’
‘What you believe and what can be proved are different.’
Dr Morel sighed. ‘Leave the law at home, Duras. Leave it to men like your father.’ Taking the other boy’s face in his hands he turned it sharply until they met each other’s eyes. ‘Now, the truth. Did you hit him?’ The boy’s face narrow and watchful, his curls dark and his nails clean. I was surprised by that. I hadn’t met anybody whose nails were clean. He seemed to be considering what it would cost him to admit this.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said.
So I first met Emile Duras, son of a lawyer and here because his father paid for him to come here to be educated. He went home at the weekends, which made him an outsider. His father was a rich lawyer and as St Luce was for the sons of destitute nobles, of whom there were enough to fill five classes of forty boys each, that also made him an outsider. But the biggest thing that set him apart, the thing that sent him out to punch me when other boys told him that was what he must do, was his name. Had he been de Duras, should such a family exist, his life would have been easier. The lack of the particule, the de in his name, set him apart from the others and from me, although I was too young to realise it.
My first day was simple. I trailed behind Emile and sat quietly at the desk I was given and answered the three questions the old headmaster asked me. Luckily I knew the answers to those, because there were others to which I did not. When Emile dipped his head for silent reading I did the same, looking over to see which page he read and fumbling to find my place. I read the page three times – and, though it made little sense, when asked to read a line I did in as clear a voice as I could manage. ‘The glory of great men should always be measured by the means they have used to acquire it . . .’
Emile’s sentence came from further down the list of quotations because he sat two desks away. In the weeks to come we managed to sit side by side, when it became obvious our brief fight had made us friends. Emile’s sentence read, ‘Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us consider how happy those are who already possess it.’
Later I learnt the name Rochefoucauld, later still who he was and why his maxims were famous. His name reminded me of the cheese I’d eaten with le Régent and Emile brought me a sliver from home, wrapped in paper. It tasted as I remembered, of mould and horses’ hooves clipping on brick and dung beetles and sun.
I learnt a lot from Emile in my first two weeks at St Luce, which boys and which masters to avoid and which could be trusted, and at the end of that I discovered what two weeks’ grace meant and that Emile had truly become my friend. A boy – older and bigger, because all the boys were older and bigger, since I was the youngest and smallest in the school – walked up to me and tried to take my work book, having had his own stolen, the loss of which was punishable by beating. And instead of letting it happen, Emile stepped up beside me and together we saw off the would-be thief.
It was a friendship that was to last for years and only be broken by something bigger than friendship and fiercer than shared bonds. That was so far into the future we could barely imagine it from a world of small boys where days stretched for ever and our memories hungrily swallowed every detail of the world around us.
‘You can be good at sport, you can be good at learning, you can be good with your fists . . .’ Emile grinned ruefully and touched the yellowing fringes of the black eye I’d given him a few weeks earlier. Out of friendship I touched my lip, although the scab was mostly off and the swelling long gone. The written rules were on a board in the main hall. They were few and easy to understand. The unwritten rules more numerous and more complex. In the school as in the later world I was to find: but like the rules of the later world they could be simplified and reduced to those that really mattered. That was what Emile was doing, while standing with his legs apart and his hands behind his back as his father might do in court. ‘You should punch, but you should also read to yourself.’
I looked at him.
‘The
