Silent Noon Read Free

housemaster. Belinda should have been in the First, really, but she was a precocious child, and the curriculum at St Mary’s was known for its rigour.
    “It would be unconventional,” observed Mr Pleming, when the request was put to him after the first housemasters’ meeting of the year, just before the boys started to
arrive.
    “This is an unconventional place,” Mr Flood replied.
    “You have a point,” said Mr Pleming, stroking his moustache.
    Had the suggestion appealed to his competitive spirit – an attitude sharpened by the fact that St Mary’s had not been requisitioned during the war? Fears of reprisals against
English-born staff and boys had forced his institution’s temporary relocation to Lincolnshire, while the girls’ school had managed to maintain three mistresses and a student body of
twenty native islanders throughout the Occupation years. Even today the girls lorded their pluck over his pupils, recalling tales of chemistry lessons undertaken covertly at night and the secret
practice of using pages torn from
Juncker’s German-English Dictionary
as kindling.
    “It might even do the boys good,” ventured Mr Flood, who felt that he might have lost the Head’s attention.
    “Quite right. Something to distract them from the Cray business.”
    “That wasn’t what I had in mind, exactly.”
    The Head checked himself.
It is with very great sadness that we announce the passing of a student
, a last-minute addendum to his summer letter to parents had begun.
Although many
members of the school community will remember those years when we mourned such losses with bitter frequency, in peacetime it is an exceptional occurrence and perhaps all the more shocking for
this…
    “A civilizing influence, then?” he asked. “But are you sure Belinda wouldn’t feel slightly out of her depth?”
    “She’s had a difficult few months, Headmaster. She’s grown up a lot this year.”
    That spring, an illicit smog had floated over the high walls that surrounded the St Mary’s estate and left its residue on the tennis courts and hacking trails. It had been carried indoors
by girls fresh off the hockey pitch and infected their clothes and hair and the mugs of steaming cocoa that they carried upstairs at bedtime. Parents had once believed that the strong female
example set by the Head and her retinue of bluestocking spinsters would constitute a solid barrier against attacks on their daughters’ ignorance. But the pernicious cloud had penetrated even
their best defences.
    It was no secret that, in the absence of boys, some girls were more likely to make idols of their teachers. The staff encouraged it, to an extent, as a means of fostering loyalty to the
institution. Most would agree it was far preferable for a girl to spend several weeks mooning over a mistress or one of the prefects than to become entangled in mature liaisons with members of the
opposite sex, of which, at St Mary’s, there were next to none. A surly groundskeeper and the director of accounts – myopic and prone to spitting his sibilants – were the only
men.
    This had all been very well before the capsized boat and the rumours that subsequently began to circulate about a particular member of staff, the English mistress, Miss Gallo. The lot of it
fuelled by adolescent hysteria, thought Mr Flood, who had been shocked to learn that his daughter was one of the girls being questioned over the affair. Of course, the questioning led to nothing
– only tears from the other students and stubborn, stoical silence from Belinda. The child who had closed herself in her room for the duration of the summer was a stranger to him, a
ghost.
    But the fact remained that she needed an education, a point repeatedly stressed to him by his wife until he had finally capitulated and taken it up with Mr Pleming.
    “Obviously, she would live at home,” said Mr Flood, following the Head out of the common room into the corridor. The smell of beeswax floor