Silent Noon Read Free Page B

mirror.
    ~
    Despite its pretensions to originality, The Carding House School was one of a breed of liberal institutions that had been forced to admit financial defeat after the Crash. The
only thing that made CHS exceptional was the fact of its survival. That, and its remote location: on this austere island it was possible to keep costs low, while the ferry journey and fickle tides
meant fewer visits from inspectors. The grounds had been bought outright after the Great War, death duties rendering it impossible for the Audley family to maintain the two-hundred-acre estate. The
reception rooms were converted into the school’s administrative centre, while the atrium doubled as a hall for concerts and assemblies and the larger kitchen served as a dining room.
Classrooms had been adapted from the library, saloon and gun room, which were connected to the main building by the old servants’ corridor.
    At first there had been just three boarding houses – Ormer, renovated from the huntsman’s lodge; Medlar, the stables; and Wool, so named for the carding house built early in the
previous century for the first Lady Audley’s amusement – but later a fourth was added. Tern House incorporated a set of German barracks erected during the war years. Unrelenting North
Sea winds and rain had left rust trails running down the corrugated roof. Its advantage, as the senior boys’ boarding house, was that it overlooked both the forest and the green. On the other
side of the main building the grounds became poorly lit and neglected, a smaller field here having been used as a timber store during the war. The Audley family vault and the disused old kitchens
had remained under lock and key for as long as anyone could remember.
    All of this was explained to Barney by Robin after breakfast. As they climbed the staircase from the dining room to the headmaster’s quarters, the discussion moved on to the student caste
system.
    “Percy and Cowper are middle-class duffers, like me,” Robin said. “Too thick to pass the common entrance, so our people tell their bourgeois friends they prefer to send us
somewhere
progressive
.” He spoke briskly, bored by the fact of knowing everything. “Shields and Opie are military. They get locked up here because their people are always
shuttling between Blighty and Malaysia, or Singapore, or Hong Kong – not like in the old days, where you’d actually get to live somewhere hot if your old man was posted there.
You’re scholarship, aren’t you?”
    “And Cray?”
    Robin snorted. “He’d have you think he was military because his hundred-times-great-granddad copped it at Waterloo. Cray was always a blowhard, though.” They had stopped
outside a panelled door. “Ratty’s in there. Do you want me to wait for you?”
    “It’s all right.”
    “Godspeed, Holland.” Robin rapped sharply on the door – more loudly than Barney would have done – before shoving both hands in his pockets and sloping off across the
atrium. A voice from inside the office said something that Barney couldn’t make out. He waited for several seconds, wondering if he should knock again or wait to be called.
    “Come in!”
    Barney put his shoulder to the brass panel already patterned with fingerprints and leant his full weight against it.
    This was not the first time that Mr Pleming had watched a new boy struggle like a dung beetle scrambling against a cowpat. He waited just long enough to be sure the lad wouldn’t forget the
indignity of this moment before crossing the room to pull the door open with a swift, hearty motion.
    “Years of practice,” he said to Barney, who did not return his grin.
    The Headmaster’s office was all polished wood and thick-pile rugs and a ceiling like a wedding cake. There was a green baize-covered table in the centre of the room, flanked by
bookshelves. Mr Pleming reached for the cues propped up on an umbrella stand.
    “Do you play?” he asked Barney.
    “Sir,” said the