dog across the lawn and back to the house.
Dr Kemp was working in his study. Mrs Kemp was there
too, keeping him company with tea and fig rolls which
I'd helped her to bring from the kitchen. While he was
shuffling accounts, deciding which bills it was best to pay
and which could be put aside a little longer, she leafed
through a riding magazine she'd already read many times
before. Wagner lay sleeping at her feet. The study was a
fine, tall room with panelled walls and a corniced ceiling.
There were books everywhere, and stacks of sheet music
on the mantelpiece of a grand fireplace. The hearth itself
was heaped with papers. The formidable faces of the past
headmasters of Foxwood Manor peered gloomily down
from a row of oil paintings.
Sunlight fell through a high window, reflected from the
snow outside. I was moping in a corner, nibbling a
biscuit. The only sounds were the steady rhythm of the
dog's breathing, the scratching of the headmaster's fountain
pen and the flick-flick-flick of Mrs Kemp's fingers on
familiar pages.
They both glanced up at the tromping of footsteps in
the corridor above their heads. Wagner cocked an ear
without opening his eyes. A heavy tread and a lighter,
softer footfall: the movement of other people elsewhere
in the house was strangely unsettling for Dr and Mrs
Kemp. He sighed with exasperation and cleared his
throat to say something, but she quickly put in, with a
smile in her voice to try and keep him sweet, 'He's
revisiting his childhood, that's all. There's no harm in it.'
Then, when they heard the rattle of a door and the clank
of the pulleys as one of the lifts started to move, as Dr
Kemp tutted and puffed to himself, she added, 'It says
"No boys to use the lifts". Martin Pryce is not a boy, and
nor is the sweet little Sophie. Try to ignore them, dear,
they'll be gone in a day or two.'
'How will they be gone?' he snorted. 'The lane is
blocked, the telephone is out of order, his swanky car has
a flat tyre and a flat battery. How will they be gone?' He
made a great play of tossing a sheaf of bills into the air,
so that they fell back onto the desk in an untidy heap. 'I
had the lifts installed for you, and for nobody else.'
'Please, dear, try not to get worked up,' she said, and
she reached to him and squeezed his hand. She turned to
me, a bit embarrassed that I should hear them wrangling,
and said, 'We must remember it's Alan's Christmas
holiday too. We should let him try to enjoy himself a bit.'
Pryce had been touring the school, revisiting the
half-remembered corners of his childhood. He had Sophie
in tow; with nowhere else to go, she was a helpless
satellite. And I too had been in his thrall, following him
from dorm to dorm, where he'd trailed his fingers along
the frames of bed after bed and recited the names of the
boys who'd slept there, a list of half-forgotten names like
the mumbled words of a prayer. For a while, I'd tagged
along as he mooched through the bathrooms, watched
him lie down in one of the baths – in all his clothes, of
course, so that he looked like a corpse in a deep, white
coffin – and do a clownish reminiscence of long-ago
matrons and masters-on-duty. At the further end of the
top corridor, he'd pulled open a tiny door and peered up
a narrow staircase to the attic in the roof of the house –
a mysterious place traditionally out of bounds to the boys
on pain of dreadful punishment, but which, according to
Foxwood legend, had once or twice been visited in the
dead of night by the daring and foolhardy.
I'd said I'd never been up there. Pryce said that he had,
but shrugged and looked away when Sophie scoffed.
Now, from the headmaster's study, we heard them
come down in one of the lifts. Mrs Kemp signalled to me
with a little smile that I was excused, so I picked up
another fig-roll and hurried along the bottom corridor –
to rejoin the tour, for something to do, to be with anyone
else for a change from the Kemps. The three of us veered
in and out of the
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