Tales of the Unexpected

pipe. He glanced up at me through the smoke with those rather small cold eyes and he said, ‘
Ripping
day, isn’t it. Just like summer.’
    There was no mistaking the voice now. It hadn’t changed at all. Except that the things I had been used to hearing it say were different.
    ‘All right, Perkins,’ it used to say. ‘All right, you nasty little boy. I am about to beat you again.’
    How long ago was that? It must be nearly fifty years. Extraordinary, though, how little the features had altered. Still the same arrogant tilt of the chin, the flaring nostrils, the contemptuous staring eyes that were too small and a shade too close together for comfort; still the same habit of thrusting his face forward at you, impinging on you, pushing you into a corner; and even the hair I could remember – coarse and slightly wavy, with just a trace of oil all over it, like a well-tossed salad. He used to keep a bottle of green hair mixture on the side table in his study – when you have to dust a room you get to know and to hate all the objects in it – and this bottle had the royal coat of arms on the label and the name of a shop in Bond Street, and under that, in small print, it said ‘By Appointment – Hairdressers To His Majesty King Edward VII’. I can remember that particularly because it seemed so funny that a shop should want to boast about being hairdresser to someone who was practically bald – even a monarch.
    And now I watched Foxley settle back in his seat and begin reading the paper. It was a curious sensation, sitting only a yard away from this man who fifty years before had made me so miserable that I had once contemplated suicide. He hadn’t recognized
me
; there wasn’t much danger of that because of my moustache. I felt fairly sure I was safe and could sit there and watch him all I wanted.
    Looking back on it, there seems little doubt that I suffered very badly at the hands of Bruce Foxley my first year in school, and strangely enough, the unwitting cause of it all was my father. I was twelve and a half when I first went off to this fine old public school. That was, let me see, in 1907. My father, who wore a silk topper and morning coat, escorted me to the station, and I can remember how we were standing on the platform among piles of wooden tuck-boxes and trunks and what seemed like thousands of very large boys milling about and talking and shouting at one another, when suddenly somebody who was wanting to get by us gave my father a great push from behind and nearly knocked him off his feet.
    My father, who was a small, courteous, dignified person, turned around with surprising speed and seized the culprit by the wrist.
    ‘Don’t they teach you better manners than that at this school, young man?’ he said.
    The boy, at least a head taller than my father, looked down at him with a cold, arrogant-laughing glare, and said nothing.
    ‘It seems to me,’ my father said, staring back at him, ‘that an apology would be in order.’
    But the boy just kept on looking down his nose at my father with this funny little arrogant smile at the corners of his mouth, and his chin kept coming further and further out.
    ‘You strike me as being an impudent and ill-mannered boy,’ my father went on. ‘And I can only pray that you are an exception in your school. I would not wish for any son of mine to pick up such habits.’
    At this point, the big boy inclined his head slightly in my direction, and a pair of small, cold, rather close-together eyes looked down into mine. I was not particularly frightened at the time; I knew nothing about the power of senior boys over junior boys at public schools; and I can remember that I looked straight back at him in support of my father, whom I adored and respected.
    When my father started to say something more, the boy simply turned away and sauntered slowly down the platform into the crowd.
    Bruce Foxley never forgot this episode; and of course the really unlucky thing about it for me was that when I arrived at school I found myself in the same ‘house’ as him. Even worse than that – I was in his study. He was doing his last year, and he was a prefect – ‘a boazer’ we called it – and as such he was officially permitted to beat any of the fags in the house. But being in his study, I automatically became his own particular, personal slave. I was his valet and cook and maid and errand-boy, and it was my duty to see that he never lifted a finger for himself