A Bit on the Side Read Online Free

papers and confiscated objects. A burly, heavily made man, he sat down behind a desk while Olivier stood. ‘Disappointed to note,’ he went on, ‘that you have failed to come up to scratch in any one of the three scientific subjects. Yet it seems you yourself had chosen the scientific side of things.’ He broke off to peer at a piece of paper he had drawn towards him. ‘Your ambitions are in that direction?’
    ‘I was curious to know more about science, sir.’
    ‘Sit down, Olivier.’
    ‘Thank you, sir.’
    ‘You say curious?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘Now tell me why you are curious in that way. Remember I have a duty – and a conscience if I knowingly release upon the innocent world the ignorant and the inept. The fees at this school are high, Olivier. They are high because expectations are high. Your housemaster has said this to you. You are here this morning to be made aware of the seriousness we attach to it. When you went on to the scientific side you were not driven by vocation?’
    ‘No, sir.’
    ‘You indulged a curiosity. You indulged yourself: that can be dangerous.’
    Why did the man have to speak in that pompous, prissy way? Olivier asked himself. If it was self-indulgence simply to wish to learn more since he knew so little, then it was self-indulgence. In what way dangerous? he wondered, but did not ask. That he had failed to perform adequately in the laboratory had not surprised him, nor did it now.
    He said he was sorry, and the Headmaster spoke of the school’s belief in tradition, which he did on all convenient occasions. What he extolled had little, if anything at all, to do with Olivier’s failure. That this was so was a tradition in itself, all deviations from required behaviour assumed to have a source in careless disregard of time-hardened precepts and mores. This Headmaster’s predecessors had in their day advocated such attention to the past, to the achievements of boys when they became men, to the debts they owed. In turn, Olivier’s predecessors had listened with the same degree of scepticism and disdain.
    ‘Shall we put it like this,’ the present Headmaster suggested, ‘that you promise me this morning to knuckle down? That we review the circumstances in, say, five weeks’ time?’
    ‘Or I could give up science, sir.’
    ‘Give up? I hardly like the sound of that.’
    ‘I made a mistake, sir.’
    ‘Do not compound it, Olivier. Failure is a punishment in itself. Perhaps you might dwell on that?’
    With this suggestion Olivier was dismissed. In the great stone-paved hall beyond the study and the drawing-room he forgot at once all that had been said and returned to the subject of the slaughtered birds. Again he reached the conclusion he had reached already: that the culprit was not another boy. Leggett would be seized after the games practices this afternoon and accused under duress. Dawdling on the journey to his classroom, Olivier anticipated that unfair revenge but knew he would still not reveal what he suspected. There was pleasure in not doing so, in holding things back, in knowing what others didn’t.
    *
    Wednesdays until tea were hers. They always had been and she would have hated a change. That middle-of-the-week day she had come to regard as her private Sunday – when her alarm didn’t go off, when the Chapel bell and First School bell, sounding in the distance, could be ignored. Even her unconscious knew what to do: to sleep on until the morning was half gone. It was ragged sleep, made restless with dreams that were always vivid at this time, but that never mattered. Nothing was more luxurious than Wednesday mornings, than imagining between dozing and waking the untidy after-breakfast dining hall, and the silence that came suddenly when classes began, the cutlery carried to the pantries, polished clean there, carried back again, the big oak tables laid for lunch. She had Saturday evening off as well but it wasn’t the same, nothing much really and often she