Читать книгу A Glasgow Trilogy - George Friel - Страница 9

CHAPTER THREE

While Percy Phinn was attending Bach’s Mass a search- party was out from the gang that bowed to him as patron, chairman, and final arbiter. They were frightened, and they wanted advice. Some of them laughed at Percy behind his back, some of them argued he was ‘dead clever’, but they all agreed he would never do them a dirty trick and they were all scared of him a little, especially when he fixed them with his big, sad eyes and lectured them on the good life. And now they needed help from somebody clever, somebody older, somebody they could trust. It could only be Percy. That was the unanimous decision, taken in full assembly in the cellar. But they couldn’t find him. He wasn’t in Johnny Hay’s billiards-room (billiards was the one game where he showed any talent), he wasn’t in the public library, he wasn’t in the house, he wasn’t at the corner watching the big girls go by, he wasn’t in the playground refereeing five-a-side football, he wasn’t at the swings pushing the kids higher and higher, he wasn’t anywhere. He had simply vanished. It showed how clever he was. They were baffled. They had never heard of the Bute Hall or Bach either. They were only ten or eleven years of age. Hughie Savage, the oldest of them, was not quite twelve. He couldn’t read very well, but he was shrewd and he could write out a three-cross double with no difficulty. He was far cleverer than his teachers ever suspected, and his line of humour was to put on a la-dee- da voice and speak in what he thought was an English accent. He had a big head on a bull neck and his ears stuck out like a couple of cabbages.

The scattered groups of the search-party returned by arrangement to the cellar at half past nine. When they were all present for the second time that evening Savage took the chair and reported Percy’s disappearance. The chair he sat on was a high-legged one with a broken back and a foot-rail. It was the chair Miss Elginbrod had sat on when Percy was in her class, but the back spars and the shoulder-rest came off one afternoon when she threw a cheeky boy across the room. He fell against it and knocked it over. When he got to his feet he kicked it apart in a fury while Miss Elginbrod whipped him round the legs with her strap. She sent it to the janitor for repair, and the janitor put it away in the cellar till he could find time to look at it. Death found him first, and the chair had lain there ever since, in the cellar below the school, the secret headquarters of the gang that Percy sponsored.

This was no picayune cellar. It was a sprawling low- roofed vault stretching below the main building and out under the playground, where it ended in an unexplored boundary of evil darkness. Not even Frank Garson had ever touched that far-off invisible wall, and when the Three High Clavigers of the Bethel Brotherhood ordered him to make a map of the cellar because Miss Elginbrod had praised his drawing and handwriting he left his sketch open at that side and along it he wrote in a scroll Here Be Rats. A door in the basement, at the end of an L-shaped line of wash-hand basins, opened to a dim and dangerous staircase that went steeply down to the bowels of the building, and that was commonly supposed to be the only door to the cellar. But because of the gradient on which the school was built there was another door to the cellar in Tulip Place, a blind alley round the corner from Bethel Street. It was a small, inconspicuous, dark-green door, hacked by many initials, and behind it was a chute. That was where the coal for the boilers had been delivered before the school changed over to electrical heating, and then the door was locked for good and forgotten.

Percy had a key to it from his father’s days as janitor. Three other keys were cut from his and given to the three oldest members of the Brotherhood. The cellar became their church, the scene of enrolment, expulsion, and initiation rites. It was to be entered only from the blind alley after the school was locked up for the night. Percy found a word for the keyholders who alone had the power to permit entry. He got it when he was grazing in a dictionary in the reference room of the library. He called them the Clavigers. To be a Claviger in Percy’s gang was the highest rank you could reach. He gave himself the title of Regent Supreme because the boys knew those two words, but he went to great trouble to explain to them what they meant apart from their occurrence in a television advert.

Over the undated years the cellar had become a junk- house, a dark neglected dump where people threw things they didn’t know what to do with. Scores of old registers, tied in tape and going back for decades, were stacked against a wall and crowned by bundles of ancient group mental tests and verbal ability tests, pupils’ record cards, report cards and medical histories. Nobody had ever dared destroy them. Such documents are intimidating. They have their own over-weening life. To burn them would be as brutal and immoral as committing murder. And you could never be sure they wouldn’t be wanted one day. Somebody might ask for the date of birth or the father’s name or the IQ of a pupil who had left years ago and was now in Barlinnie Prison for house-breaking. It would never do to reply, ‘The records have been destroyed.’ The whole point of keeping records is that they are kept after they are kept. Otherwise why keep them?

Scattered alongside these sacred but forgotten documents there were blackboard compasses, blackboard rulers, pointers, pyramids, cones, cylinders and spheres, a carton of inkwells with the bakelite rims chipped off by vandals so that they fell through the hole cut for them in the pupils’ desks, the broken pole of a dead traffic warden, a punctured hose, brooms, spades, shovels and rakes, brown paper piled four feet high with the salvaged string wound round the sheets, a pail of stucco, a barrel half-full of washing-soda, empty bleach bottles put aside to be filled with ink made from a powder, political maps of Europe, Asia and Africa dating from before the First World War, a coal-scuttle and a stirrup pump. On one side of the outmoded boiler was a woodwork bench with a vice that wouldn’t screw up tight, and on the other a ziggurat of broken dual desks. In front of the desks was an old piano with occasional dumb keys. It had been put there twenty-two years ago, when an insistent music- teacher asked for and got a new piano. The janitor filled in the correct form to have the old one uplifted, but somehow nothing was ever done about it. On top of the piano was the large hand-bell that had been rung to assemble and dismiss the school before the electric bells were put in. It was a heavy bell, solid brass, and Savage said it was worth at least a fiver as scrap metal, but Percy wouldn’t let him hawk it.

Across the cellar from the broken desks, under a tangle of legless chairs, educational publishers’ catalogues, pre- war copies of the Scottish Educational Journal, and five dozen derelict reading books called The Sunshine Way, were six tea-chests, three along and two deep, containing the costumes and small props used in the annual school concert. But there had been no annual concert for five years, and in that time there had been two new headmasters and Percy’s father had died of a thrombosis, so that nobody in the school knew exactly what was in them.

There were two weak ceiling lights in the cellar, but the Brotherhood preferred not to switch them on during council meetings. They lit six candles, using the bleach bottles as candlesticks, and the dim unsteady light, with flickering shadows on the walls receding into the damp darkness where the rats were, gave a proper obscurity to the arguments of the assembly.

‘I vote we carry on without the Regent,’ said Hugh Savage, Chief Claviger, whose Christian name was locally pronounced ‘Sheuch’.

‘No, I object,’ said Specky, Second Claviger, sitting on the inverted coal-scuttle to the right of Savage’s chair. He was a brassy, blethering confident boy, wearing thick convex glasses with thin wire frames, a Schools Health Service issue, and he talked like a book.

‘Well, we’ll vote for it,’ said Skinner, Third Claviger, sitting on a drawing-board placed across the pail of stucco. He was always called Skinny in affectionate abbreviation of his surname. It was only a fortuitous anomaly that he happened to be a chubby child.

The Three High Clavigers faced the ruck of the Brotherhood, obedient troopers who sat, knelt or squatted on the grimy stone floor. Savage was the strong arm, Specky was the brains and Skinny was the kind heart. In that cavernous gloom they looked like three subterranean judges addressing a jury of sooterkins.

‘I’m in this,’ Frank Garson shouted from the front row. ‘It was me that found it. You can’t decide, Sheuch. You’ve got to wait for Percy. That’s the rule for urgent business.’

‘Don’t you call me Sheuch when I’m in the chair,’ Savage checked him crossly. Then he leered forward. ‘Anyway, how can it be urgent if we’ve got to wait for Percy? And you should be in the dock, so you should, but I move that Probationer Garson’s expelled. Come on, get him in the dock!’

Garson was pushed and pulled by four of Savage’s faction and forced to stand behind a dual desk on the left of the chair.

‘What’s the charge?’ he screamed.

‘You broke the first commandment,’ said Judge Savage. ‘All for one and one for all, united we stand but divided we fall. That’s Percy. Percy’s a poet, ye know.’

‘That’s our motto,’ Garson objected hotly. ‘It’s not a commandment.’

‘Doesn’t matter, you still broke it,’ the judge answered swiftly. ‘You wanted to keep it all for yersel’. If Specky hadn’t have been with you we wouldn’t have knew a thing about it.’

‘That’s not true,’ Garson shouted, wriggling in the dock between his jailers. ‘Specky wouldn’t have knew a thing about it if I hadn’t told him.’

‘That’s right,’ Specky admitted, standing up to address the judge. ‘I said it was a matter for the Brotherhood and he said we ought to tell the cops but he never said he wanted it all for himself.’

‘No, of course, he wouldn’t say it,’ Savage complained. ‘But that’s what he meant to do all right. Get the bell and expel him!’

‘You can’t do it like that,’ Specky whispered, horrified.

‘That’s wrong,’ Skinny called out, indignant.

The campanologist, so named and appointed by Percy to perform the rituals of admission, expulsion, summoning and dispersal, grabbed the bell from the piano and Garson darted at once from the clutch of his warders and struggled with him. The bell rang irregularly as they wrestled for it.

‘A barley, a barley!’ Skinny yelled in distress, and the contestants stood frozen. The assembly murmured against the brawl, condemning the decision that had provoked it. Savage saw he hadn’t the support for an expulsion and tried again quickly.

‘I propose an equal division then. Right here and now. Elect two tellers and share it out without Percy.’

‘Twenty tellers couldn’t count it,’ Garson protested vehemently. ‘And if they could you couldn’t spend it. I said the cops because I saw it was too much for us but when Specky said report it I agreed because he’s a Claviger and I’m not, but I meant report it to Percy, I never meant you, you big ape!’

‘Who’s an ape? You’re an ape,’ said Savage. He had a talent for repartee.

‘I still say you can’t decide without Percy,’ Garson argued. ‘Not on an urgent matter, not without Percy.’

‘Yes, we can,’ Savage overruled him. ‘It’s an urgent matter. You’re just after admitting it. Percy said we had to decide urgent matters for ourselves, it’s important matters we’re supposed to tell him.’

‘But this is important,’ Garson said. ‘That’s what I’m saying.’

‘You’re just after saying it was urgent. Is it urgent or is it important? Make up your mind, you can’t have it both ways.’

Savage grinned in the anticipation of victory and called out to the assembly, confusing them by the phrasing of his command.

‘Hands up those who agree it’s urgent.’

But before he could seize the victory he felt was within his grasp the troops were suddenly paralysed with fear. Someone was coming down the chute from the door in Tulip Place.

‘It’s Percy, it’s Percy!’ Frank Garson yelled in relief as a tall round-shouldered youth slouched into the range of the candlelight.

‘What’s going on here?’ a mournful voice asked, a voice that had only recently been broken and sounded as if it was still being mended. ‘I just thought yous was in here when I couldn’t see a soul anywhere outside.’

Frank Garson rushed at him and clung to him.

‘Help me, Percy! Save me! They’re going to put me out of the Brotherhood. We were all out looking for you. We need you, Percy! We need you! Sheuch’s trying to confuse me because I said it was urgent so he said we could decide it for ourselves but I said it was too important to decide without you, and he said I couldn’t have it both ways, but if it’s urgent it’s important too, isn’t it?’

Percy rocked on his toes and heels at the question and decided not to answer it.

‘What were you putting him out for?’ he asked, scowling round the meeting to remind them he had the seeing eye and they had better tell him the truth.

‘Where’d ye get to?’ Savage asked, boldly facing the seeing eye. ‘We’ve been looking for you all night, so we have.’

‘I was at a concert listening to a choir singing,’ Percy answered in his faraway voice, his sad eyes dreamily focused on the furthest wall where the rats lived. ‘It was rare, so it was. If we could get that piano there tuned I could start a choir with you lads if we could get somebody to play it.’

‘That’s just what I’ve been saying for years,’ Savage agreed insolently.

‘Scottish education, ach!’ Percy snorted in bitterness.

‘Percy, please!’ Frank appealed to him, shaking his arm. But Percy was beyond his reach, mounted on his high horse again.

‘They’re supposed to learn you culture and how to live and they don’t give you anything about philosophy or music. They never learn you how to write music for example. All they hammer into you is sums and spelling. If I could just read music I could form yous into a world- famous choir so I could. See the Vienna Boys’ Choir?’

‘No, where are they?’ Savage asked eagerly, looking round the cellar with dramatic jerks of his head. ‘Are they here the night?’

‘They’re only boys like you except that they speak German,’ Percy explained, snubbing the Chief Claviger. For some time he had regretted ever appointing him. Savage seemed too coarse a type to do his job properly. ‘But they’ve had a chance yous have never had because the Germans have always had a great love for music. The world’s greatest composers are Germans like Batch and Baith-hoven.’

He rocked, toe to heel, heel to toe, dreaming how he would love to be the salvation of these poor neglected urchins by introducing them to the good things of life.

‘Oh, Percy, listen!’ Frank pleaded, clutching him, shaking him.

They were all clamouring at him, everybody shouting at once, demanding attention, trying to explain. He came sadly out of his dream. He gathered there was something worrying them. He submitted wearily to the duty of helping them and dismissed Savage from Miss Elginbrod’s chair with a peremptory gesture and sat there himself. Nobody would ever say he shirked his duty. And he liked to sit where Miss Elginbrod used to sit. It was a kind of mild revenge. He put himself in the pose of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’ as he had seen it on the cover of a book he got for sixpence on the barrows in Ren field Street, and waited patiently till his supreme position got silence. He liked silence even better than he liked music. That was why he didn’t like his mother. She was always nattering.

‘Gi’ me a report,’ he growled.

‘Frank, Frank, Frank!’ the Brotherhood chanted. ‘He’s the one that knows! Let him report!’

Savage huffed away from them, kicked a stack of old examination papers containing, though he didn’t know it, his father’s score of five out of forty in mental arithmetic thirty years ago.

‘A frank report, eh?’ Percy smiled down at them from his throne. ‘Frank is always frank. That’s what you call a pun, lads. I had nobody to tell me these things, that’s why I like to tell you. Shakespeare was very fond of puns, and I like a good pun myself, so I do.’

‘I like a pun too,’ Savage muttered to the dusty sheets. ‘A pun o’ chocolates.’

Frank Garson went back to his place behind the lid of a dual desk, but this time without two warders holding him. He was the only child of a motor-mechanic who worked in the garage at the far end of Bethel Street, an intruder in a gang that respected his intelligence but distrusted his cleanliness. He seemed a cut above them because his father had a good job, and they couldn’t understand why he was so keen to be a member, even ambitious to be a Claviger. It made them suspicious. But they all liked him in the end because he was always straight. His mother had deserted his father for a West Indian bus-driver four years ago, and he could remember her only dimly as a bright-eyed woman with comforting arms and a good kissing mouth. He remembered also a cosy smell, quite different from the smell of chalk that accompanied Miss Elginbrod. But he could never talk of his mother. A boy whose mother had run off with a coloured man inherited a shame, and the fact that he was clever, clean and loyal, and that his father was a non-smoker, non-drinker and churchgoer, merely made him more of an oddity to his mates. Their fathers were drunken, idle and cruel, but they knew their mothers just had to put up with it. What kind of a mother then had Frank Garson that ran away from a good husband? Frank knew she was condemned, and he carried her guilt always with him. Dark-haired, rosy-cheeked, innocent-faced, and well-spoken except when excitement made him stutter a little, he would have suited a choirboy’s collar.

‘The new janny,’ he began, conquering his stutter in the hush that respected his report, ‘he doesn’t know where anything is, so he asked me to help him because the janny in Comely grove asked him for the lend of the gipsy costumes we had in our school concert when your father was the janny because the Comely grove are going to do a gipsy cantata at Christmas in the Bell field Halls and he didn’t know where they were but the janny in Comelygrove knew we had them all right, so the new janny asked me to look for them in the cellar because anything you can’t find must be in the cellar he said. So I asked Jasper, that’s the teacher that came when Miss Elginbrod retired, you’ve seen him, he comes here on a mo’bike and he’s got big bushy eyebrows and a blue chin, that’s what we call him, that or Bluebeard, but his right name’s Whiffen, and he let me come down here at two o’clock to look for them and I came down through the basement, the janny opened the door for me and then left me, and I found them in the tea-chests over there.’

He stopped, his mouth working. He felt his stammer coming on, and he fought against it.

‘End of Part One,’ Savage called out from the rear. He put on a television advert voice and chanted as he performed a Red Indian war dance round the back and flanks of the assembly. ‘Use the new super duper scientific formula automatic aw-tae-buggery Freezing Point. Never go without a Freezing Point. In a man’s world a girl needs a Freezing Point. Washes whiter than black and prevents flavour blur. Get one now, get one tomorrow, get one last week. The time is out of joint till you get a Freezing Point. And now back to Maverick.’

‘I think you’ve got far too much to say,’ Percy reprimanded him severely. ‘And stand still when the court’s in session.’

‘Well, tell him to get to the point then,’ Savage answered shrilly.

‘That’s the point,’ Frank hammered the desk, hating Savage. ‘I found the c-costumes, Percy, and I found something else too, a lot more, in the tea-chests. I gave the c-costumes to the new janny but I didn’t tell him what else I’d seen. I wasn’t sure if I’d seen right so I told Specky. You see there was a big spider came scuttling down the side of the tea-chest when I took the costumes out and I got a fright.’

‘Feart for a spider!’ Savage commented in disgust. ‘Feart for a spider and he wants to get a key one day! That’s the kind of probationer you get nowadays. Before I could get into the gang at all I had to get the Chinese Rub and I had to break seven windows in the scheme and steal a hundred fags and—’

‘I stopped all that,’ Percy interrupted him, frowning at the mention of the barbarous rites used before he civilized the gang. ‘That’s nothing for boasting about. And I’m still waiting to hear what all the excitement’s about.’

‘I hit it with one of those shovels,’ Frank explained, keeping his own course doggedly, ‘and I knocked it on its end, the tea-chest I mean, and a lot of rubbish fell out, paper hats, you know, and decorations and that wand the fairy princess used and I saw a lot of money.’

‘A spider, a big big spider,’ Savage mimicked Frank’s soprano. ‘Andhe lost the heid. I wonder what he would have done if he’d saw one of the rats from the other end up there.’

‘What do you mean, a lot of money?’ Percy asked anxiously. There seemed no escape from dreams of money and talk of money.

‘Pound notes and five-pound notes,’ said Frank. ‘I told Specky. And bags of silver, paper bags and cloth bags, you couldn’t count it. I told Specky at playtime and we came down here after four by the door in the basement to make sure. I couldn’t believe it, I thought maybe it was stage money, but there was too much of it. You couldn’t spend it in years. You remember Miss Elginbrod put on a play about a millionaire that tried to give all his money away in an Alpine village but nobody would take it because they were happier without money. That’s why I thought it was stage money at first. Then I wanted to tell the cops and Sheuch says I was going to break the law you gave us but I would have shared the reward with everybody here, honest I would, cross my throat and spit!’

He went through the actions in his excitement.

‘But Specky said no, report it here,’ he concluded, exhausted by his ordeal. ‘He’ll tell you that’s how it was, you ask him!’

Specky rose from the coal-scuttle, bowed to Percy, turned and bowed to the Brotherhood and went into the witness-desk as willingly as Frank left it. He was going to enjoy this. He liked speaking. He would show them how a formal report ought to be made.

‘Probationer Garson reported to me at afternoon interval,’ he began benignly, ‘that he had seen millions and millions of pounds under the costumes in the tea-chests. He requested me to accompany him in a further visit to procure verification. Immediately following the dismissal of afternoon school we therefore descended together to our present location via the door in the basement when the janny’s back was turned and I personally inspected the receptacles indicated. I ascertained they contained money and I came to the conclusion that the money was genuine currency. However, I differed from Probationer Garson in my estimate of the amount. According to my calculations there are not millions and millions of pounds there at all. There are only—’

‘I didn’t mean millions and millions as millions,’ Frank interrupted him resentfully, clenching his fists to keep his temper. ‘I meant a lot, that was all.’

‘At a tory estimate,’ Specky proceeded, pleased at the chance to use a long-hoarded synonym, ‘I would say there are only thousands of pounds dispersed in three of the six receptacles referred to.’

‘What’s the game?’ Percy asked, wondering whether to be angry with them for trying to kid him or just laugh it off. ‘What are yous up to now?’

‘It isn’t a game, Regent Supreme, sir,’ Specky replied respectfully. ‘It’s true, I’m afraid. When I had made a provisional count of the contents of the first receptacle and then discovered that there was another two also containing money I abandoned the count and summoned an Extraordinary General Meeting in virtue of the powers vested in me as High Claviger. Chief Claviger Savage proposed immediate equal division of the money but I vetoed that in accordance with the constitution as laid down by the Regent Supreme, that is yourself, sir.’

‘You couldn’t divide it,’ Frank complained direct to Percy, appealing to him with his hands clasped in prayer. ‘And even if you could you couldn’t spend it. We’d be found out, bound to be! We’d all be in trouble. Please, Percy, tell the cops! Please!’

‘I myself told Chief Claviger Savage equal division was out of the question,’ Specky said with condescending calm to belittle Frank’s hysteria, ‘but he wouldn’t agree. He even proposed to expel Probationer Garson for treason but I opposed that too and said it was a matter for the Regent.’

Percy bowed in regal acknowledgement. He was trying to think, and the chattering in front of him only confused him. There seemed to be something ominously true in what Frank and Specky were telling him, and in that case he must take charge and be cool, calm and collected. He mustn’t get excited, and yet he felt his leg tremble under the weight of his elbow as he resumed his thinker’s pose. The chattering became a clamour.

‘Silence!’ he shouted, in a temper with them.

‘Permission to speak, please!’ Skinny called out, his right hand high.

Percy grunted permission. He must keep patient and listen and try to think at the same time. It was difficult for him. Why was it, he wondered, that some folk were born with a quick brain, shrewd customers, fly men; and better folk needed time and privacy to work things out? Where was the justice or equality in that? But he knew enough to know that silence can be mistaken for wisdom and that nothing is so infectious as panic. So he held his tongue and put on an air of indifference.

‘The majority decision of the Clavigers was to refer the matter to you,’ Skinny started, taking Specky’s place behind the desk, ‘because your father had charge of the cellar and you’re your father’s heir, so if the money in those chests belonged to your father then legally it’s yours, and there was nobody else looked after the cellar, so it must have belonged to your father.’

‘Ach, don’t be daft, Skinny!’ Frank shouted. ‘You’ve seen what’s there. Percy’s father never had that kind of money, never, never, never!’

Skinny turned from addressing the chair to argue with his subordinate.

‘How do you know? That’s for Percy to say. Percy knows what his father had, you don’t. Percy’s the boss, it’s no’ you!’

‘Well, I like that!’ Frank screamed. ‘It’s me that’s been arguing Percy’s the boss, and now you try and tell me!’

Percy felt the first throbbings of a headache. It was the frequency of his headaches, beginning just after he left school, that made him suspect he was an intellectual. They were probably due to the abnormal activity of his brain.

‘You’ve always said you should have had money if you had your rights,’ Skinny turned back to the chair, ‘so maybe this money is your inheritance, maybe that’s why you could never find the money you knew your father ought to have left you if you were to be a great man because that’s where he had hidden it.’

‘Yes, could be,’ said Percy, too overwhelmed to dispute the point. ‘Let me see what yous are all talking about.’

He came clumsily down from Miss Elginbrod’s chair and the Clavigers dragged the three lower tea-chests out of the darkness into the candlelight.

‘That’s how they were, with the three other chests on top of them,’ said Frank ‘and there was all those costumes on top of the money but we put everything back just as it was to keep it hidden.’

Specky, Skinny and Savage pulled out concert costumes, Christmas party decorations and brown paper from the first chest, and Percy stooped over it when they gestured him to look inside. He fumbled out a bundle of notes with an elastic band round them and flipped it through with dumb awe.

‘Those are all fivers,’ said Frank helpfully. ‘But there’s singles as well there, and the bags with the half-crowns and the florins is in the middle one.’

Percy slouched round the other chests and examined them perfunctorily. The money was real. There was no doubt in his mind. And when the three chests were emptied of all the rubbish crammed in them to reveal the money underneath he saw that the bottom of each was covered with notes an inch deep. He felt slightly sick, much as he had felt when an old man in Packing and Dispatch had taken him into a pub and made him drink a pint of beer one night after they had been working late, and there was a quivering and a fluttering in his stomach.

‘Cover it up again,’ he said, stricken with responsibility. ‘Hide it just as it was! And let me think! Let me think!’

‘Oh no, Percy, no!’ Frank whispered in dismay. He had seen the glint of greed, and he was afraid.

Percy ignored him, and the Clavigers hastily and willingly obeyed the order.

‘Now put the chests well back, away back at that wall where the rats are,’ Percy commanded firmly. ‘We’ll need time to think. I want to think about this.’

‘But the rats might eat the money,’ Skinny objected. ‘It’s only paper after all.’

‘Some paper!’ chuckled Savage.

‘They’d have to eat their way through all those dresses and things first,’ Specky commented, shrugging.

‘And we’ll be back before then!’ Savage cried. He showed off his good young teeth like an animal showing its fangs as he leered in triumph at Frank Garson. ‘Lovely lolly! All the lolly in the world there! And we’ll be back!’

‘Yes, we’ll be back,’ Percy admitted.

He felt a vague but none the less substantial right to the money. Even though he hadn’t found it himself it had been found in his father’s territory and he was his father’s heir. Indeed, it had been his territory too. Many a Sunday he had been sent down to the cellar to look after the boilers in the days when the school was still heated by steam pipes. Many a Saturday he had spent sweeping it out and making it tidy before it became a neglected dump. It was merely accidental that someone else had found what was in those tea-chests. But the right didn’t lie solely in the finding, it lay just as much in claim to the place. This cellar was his. He wondered where the money came from, but passed on at once. He had met somewhere in his grasshopper reading the remark that science consists in asking the right questions. That meant there were questions it was stupid to ask. For example, where this money came from. There was no answer. Why ask a question that couldn’t be answered? The right question was what to do with it. But first he must frighten the Brotherhood into obedience.

‘Gather round!’ he yelled in his Regent’s voice, and sat again in Miss Elginbrod’s broken-backed chair.

‘This is a very serious matter,’ he declared. ‘There’ll have to be a solemn vow of secrecy. Yous have all got to swear not to say a word about it to anybody and take a blood oath.’

‘That’s the idea! Great!’ Savage cried and rubbed his hands together and gloated.

Percy felt the glow of inspiration. It came to him sometimes when he was instructing the Brotherhood, a warm feeling round his brow and a tingling in his scalp, and he wished it would come oftener, it was so mysterious and thrilling. He took a safety-razor blade from his trouser- pocket, a blade he carried in a metal holder, and lightly and bravely he cut the ball of his thumb.

‘Kneel before me one by one,’ he commanded. ‘And repeat after me.’

They came to him in single file and he bent and dabbed the blood from his thumb on their forehead.

‘I promise not to tell,’ he incanted.

‘I promise not to tell,’ they repeated after him.

They waited in groups round the cellar after the oath had been taken, and then Percy told them they were all to come to a special meeting at eight o’clock the next evening, and they wouldn’t lose by it. They left the cellar by the chute and scattered silently from Tulip Place. Percy ushered them out one by one and locked the door when they were all gone. He stayed there for a moment before hurrying down the chute and running over to the wall where the rats were supposed to be. He had never seen a rat there in his life. He dragged out one of the chests and whipped away the rubbishy garments above the money.

Some of the notes were dirty, and some were fairly clean; some were creased and some had never been folded. He took a long time just looking at them, flipping them over and flipping them over but keeping each bundle in its elastic band. He noticed they were all from the same bank, but the numbers were all mixed up. It would be safe to pass them. He tried to work out just how much was there. If he counted what was in one chest and multiplied by three he might get a rough idea of the total. But Frank Garson was right. He couldn’t count what was in one chest. He kept on losing the place. He would need a bit of paper to write on and keep the score. He attacked the bundle of fivers and tried to do it by short methods: twenty in each bundle was a hundred and ten bundles were a thousand. But when he came to count fifteen, sixteen and seventeen bundles he wasn’t sure if seventeen meant the bundle he had just counted or the one he was just going to count. He gave in and gave it up. He knelt over the chest, his arms thrown across it and his head on his arms, and he wept.

He could have coped with buried Inca treasure and found delight in a sunken galleon or a pirate hoard. He could have revelled in plundering an Egyptian tomb and taken the jewels of Ophir in his stride. Gold in Arizona or diamonds from Africa would have been a thrill within his range. But so much ready wealth in the commonplace form of pound notes and five-pound notes frightened him. It was too stark, too simple, too easy. He knew it was too much as well, but it was his. Not for a moment did he think otherwise, even as tears rolled down his cheeks where a fine floss still waited its first shearing.

‘Oh, God help me!’ he moaned. ‘Please, God! Help me!’