or aid preventing.
The waters wild went o’er his child,
And he was left lamenting.
He indicated the rise and fall of the waves by an undulation of his right hand, and in the sorrowful hush that followed his dramatic reading he looked round the class with gratification. He knew he had a good delivery, and he found a certain pleasure in giving such a touching rendering of corny ballads that children were thrilled to unshed tears. He expected to see here and there a hand furtively brushing a wet eye. Then he exploded at the dry- eyed inattention of a boy in the back row.
A minute later he barged into Mr Daunder’s room and slapped down a dozen or so bits of paper on the headmaster’s desk.
‘I just found Wedderburn playing with – with these,’ he gulped, agonized.
‘What are they?’ said Mr Daunders, putting the stock book aside. He had an annual return to make to the office, and he was puzzled to see the stock book showing him as having a piano more on hand than he thought he had. For any other item he would have balanced the discrepancy in the usual way by putting ‘i’ under the ‘Consumed’ column, but he wasn’t sure he could properly claim to have consumed a piano.
‘They’re bits of a five-pound note,’ Mr Baillie-Hunter moaned. ‘All the bits! Wedderburn was playing with them.’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ Mr Daunders breathed devoutly, a pious ejaculation for divine assistance, his elbow on his desk, his brow on his hand, the stock book and the mysterious extra piano forgotten.
‘He was doing it as a jig-saw puzzle,’ Mr Baillie-Hunter complained miserably. ‘You see, it’s all there! Somebody has cut it in little pieces. You see how clever it is.’
He fitted two or three of the geometric fragments together. ‘It was just a jig-saw to Wedderburn, it wasn’t money, it was a puzzle. He says he found it inside his poetry book. You see, I don’t let them keep their poetry books. I give them out when I take poetry. So anybody could have left them there if he’s telling the truth. And he knows we can’t prove he isn’t.’
‘We’ll have to get to the bottom of this,’ Mr Daunders muttered, and rubbed his palm wearily across his aching eyes. ‘This can’t go on. Ten-shilling notes, pound notes, a five-pound note. Where is it going to end?’
He brooded.
‘Yes, as I told you, I’ve got a very strong feeling there’s too much money floating around this school. Do you know, I’ve had about a dozen parents up lately. Complaining. Their children can’t sleep at night, or when they do they have nightmares. And they’re off their food. They seem to think Jasper’s frightening the weans. Then they say, “Oh it must be all these sweeties they’re eating between meals.” But they can’t tell me where the money’s coming from to buy sweets to that extent. They talk as if it was my job to stop them eating sweets!’
He brooded again.
‘Garson!’ he cried, slapping his desk so hard that the phone tinkled for a moment or two. ‘I’ve got it. Garson knows the answer.’
‘Garson wouldn’t be mixed up in anything dishonest,’ Mr Baillie-Hunter objected indignantly. ‘Garson’s a good boy. He grasped decimals right away.’
‘Maybe so,’ said Mr Daunders. ‘But he’s in on this money epidemic I’m sure. That’s why Savage gave him a beating. Garson knows where all this money’s coming from, and he was going to talk. I’ll make him talk all right! You get him in here now.’
But Garson wouldn’t talk. He still believed that what Percy was doing was wrong, he was still afraid a day of reckoning must come, and he still wanted no part of it. But he was quite clear in his own mind that the discovery of the hoard would never come through him. He had his own code. He was loyal. Loyalty was all that was left to him, even though it was loyalty to a gang that had never completely accepted him. He was worried about Percy most of all. He believed Percy should have taken his side against Savage and not been so neutral, but he still loved him. Percy was the leader and the organizer. He was the eldest. Whoever had to pay one day, Percy would have to pay most. And he wasn’t going to have Percy’s punishment on his conscience. Since it had to come sooner or later let it come later, through the inevitable gathering of circumstance, not because of any words he ever spoke. He had been long prepared to cope with an interrogator who knew much more than Mr Daunders.
‘Now you didn’t just fight about nothing,’ Mr Daunders kept at him, stubbornly drilling through his stony silence. ‘Something must have started it. Tell me what it was.’
Garson recognized it was time to answer. His fingertips went to the bruised and swollen bone under his eye.
‘It was a private matter,’ he said.
‘How private?’ Mr Daunders asked. ‘You can surely tell me. I’m trying to help you.’
‘My family,’ said Garson, warmed to a confidence by the old man’s kind wheedling voice.
‘What do you mean, your family?’ Mr Daunders pushed at him.
‘He-he-he insulted my mother,’ Garson answered, his rosy cheeks rosier, his engaging stammer appearing for a moment. ‘So I hit him and he hit me back, and we-we-we started to fight. It was a fair fight.’
‘I see,’ Mr Daunders murmured, as embarrassed as the boy. He felt he had blundered. He should have known better than to go on once Garson mentioned his family. You never knew what scandals you were going to stumble on if you asked too many questions about a boy’s family in this school. He remembered the muddle he had failed to sort out when he tried to discover why a boy was called Addison, his mother was called Mrs Mappin, and the man she was living with, whose name was on the doorplate, was called Tanner. Mr Tanner called one morning after it was proposed to send Addison to a special school, a school for the mentally handicapped, and Mr Daunders tactfully queried his relationship to the boy.
‘Oh, I’m one of his parents,’ Mr Tanner answered lightly. ‘In a sort of way, you see.’
‘I see,’ said Mr Daunders, wondering who Mr Mappin was if there ever was one, and what had happened to Mr Addison.
The trivial incident had been a lesson to him, but he still felt he should probe Garson. He still felt there was more to the fight with Garson than a schoolboy’s routine insult to a classmate’s parent. He remained convinced Savage was afraid of what Garson knew and had given him a beating to keep him quiet. He believed if he kept on asking questions he would come to the real sore, distinct from the wound about an insulted mother though perhaps connected with it.
‘And what did he say about your mother that annoyed you so much?’ he tried.
Garson looked at him and trembled with a strange pity. The man seemed to want to be shocked. He surrendered. He would repeat just what he had suffered and let this grown-up suffer too. Why should he bear the cruelty of the world alone? But he couldn’t use Savage’s words. He answered in the book-English a bright Scots schoolboy uses when he talks respectfully to his teachers.
‘He accused my mother of eloping with a Negro,’ he said.
‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Daunders sadly. He knew a dead-end when he came to it. But he couldn’t stop worrying away like a dog at a bone. He turned the topic over and attacked it another way.
