Maxwell’s Reunion Read Free

happened to old Queen of the South?’ His mind clicked back to the matter in hand. ‘But I digress. Old Stenhouse goes on. “Water under the bridge but now, shock, horror, they’re closing the old place down. That’s right, Halliards is to be no more. In fact, it’s already no more as a school. There are plans afoot to develop it as a conference centre or something similar, so before that happens, I’ve asked the trustees if we, the Class of ’63, can have one last sad wander over the place prior to a first-class piss-up at Graveney Manor.” God, I remember the Graveney, Count. I’d fallen head over heels for a girl called Prudence from Cranton, the girls’ school down the road. No, don’t laugh. I’d have thought you’d go for that – you know, Prudence Kitten? Ooh, of course, that’s before your time too, isn’t it?’
    Metternich yawned again, before curling his leg over his left ear. He did this now and again to remind the old duffer whose territory he shared that he could do these things. Some nights, he’d noted, Maxwell couldn’t even make the stairs.
    ‘You see, there’s something about the halcyon days, Count.’ Maxwell tossed Muir’s letter aside and lolled back in his armchair, cradling his amber drink. ‘Something that says, “Leave them alone. Or perhaps they won’t be halcyon any more.” Whaddya think? Cranton, eh? God, those were the days.’
    Whatever it was that Metternich thought, the great piebald beast wasn’t telling, not tonight. It was that hour of cocking tails and pricking whiskers, the hour the rodents rode in the Year of the Rat. He longed for the hunt, with the wind in his nostrils and his eyes pools of murder under the Columbine lamplight. To everything, Metternich knew, there was a season. A time to kill and a time to hunt, a time for every purpose under Heaven. He bounced off the armchair he’d made his own with years of kneading and pirouetted across the carpet to the staircase and the cat-flap, heading for the outer dark.
    He hadn’t remembered the cedars being so bare. In his day, in the swinging sixties, they’d spread their mighty arms, it seemed to him, across the sky itself, cradling, and protecting. The Altar was still there, in the crisp, pale moon, and he ran his fingers over the words carved into the wood; worn now and crumbling, but he knew what they said. ‘Who spot the verb and stop the ball …’ There was a shiver and something dark ran over the pile of debris that filled the pool. He’d swum in that pool countless times, arcing through the chilled water in the house games days, chlorine burning his nostrils as he came up for air, the cheers deafening as his fingers touched tile at the end of the race. He looked up at the dark silhouette of the buildings, like an old, abandoned film set. The fives courts, still ringing with the thud of ball and the roar of the teams, tumbling over each other. The chapel with its sanctuary candle still glowing and a solitary treble voice intoning the Te Deum, lamenting all the souls who had passed. In Big School he knew, as he knew his tables, the litany of the fallen, the dead of two world wars; he had read them so many times: Archer, R.J., Royal Engineers; Atherton, F.O., Hampshire Regiment; Bannerman, S.L.T., Artists Rifles … How often had he run his eyes down the list while the chaplain droned on in a prayer from Michel Quoist, ‘Lord, I am a five- pound note …’
    At the First Eleven Square he stopped, hearing again the faint click of leather on willow, saw the smiling schoolboy faces turn to sneers and applause to contempt. The wind was suddenly chill on the night air, rustling the cedars, creeping through the grass of early hours. He shouldn’t be here. But he’d always be here. He hadn’t been here for years. And yet he’d never left.
    As he reached the edge of the field and heard his footsteps crunch on the gravel, he looked up to the great canopy with its turrets and its bell rope, like a black