Song at Twilight Read Online Free

nondescript. He was also rather small for his age. I felt very sorry for the child, but, having a class to teach, I was unable to stand around any longer and so, with one last glance at the boy and his elegant mother with her tiny waist and high-heeled shoes, I left the room and made my way down the corridor to confront the fourth form and the passé simple .
    Some days later I heard from Timothy's form teacher that she was worried about the boy. He was very quiet indeed, even for a new boy.
    Most of the children in the first year at Blenkinsop's arrived in the school having already been to school together and therefore knowing each other, but Timothy, whose parents had just returned from ten years in Jeddah, had been to school out there until now. That, combined with his coming late to a new school, was enough to make any child quiet, I thought. But I agreed that he did not look like the sort of child who might settle in and make friends quickly. I had noticed him occasionally over the preceding few days, wandering alone and disconsolate along the school's endless corridors, all of which smelt of boiled cabbage and disinfectant. He had dark circles under his eyes and usually looked as though he had been crying.
    Once I stopped to ask him if he could find his way, and smiled at him in what I hoped was a kindly fashion. He muttered an inaudible reply and shuffled off down the passage, dragging his hand behind him along the wall.
    I turned and watched him go just in time to see a large seventeen-year-old who was coming in the other direction with his spiky hair and his collar turned up and with the cockiest of cocky swaggers push him roughly over and say rudely,
    "Out the way, squit."
    I called the boy over to me and gave him a piece of my mind, but as is the way with cocky seventeen-year-olds, he lied his way out of the situation, swearing as he gazed sincerely into my eyes and, dare I say it, with an impudence that was almost sexual, that I had misheard him and that the whole incident had been a mistake. I glowered at the lout and walked away musing as I did so on the pungent smell of unwashed boy half drowned by the reek of cheap after-shave which had greeted me.
    That year I did not teach Timothy's class and so any encounter which I had with him was purely accidental but I did, for some reason – from curiosity perhaps, or compassion, or stifled maternal instincts – watch that child from a distance, enquiring occasionally from his teachers about his progress.
    On the whole his teachers seemed to be quite pleased with him. He was not especially clever, but neither was he stupid. He tried hard and turned his work in on time.
    I wondered how he fared on the rugby field. He looked to me like the sort of boy for whom the mere thought of a game of rugby on a frozen pitch might bring tears to the eyes and so I was quite surprised to be told that, although not naturally a sportsman, he was plucky enough and by no means a shirker. To my mind it was surprising that any but the toughest and the most insensitive of boys should care for rugby especially since I had learned by the grapevine that the rugby coach had a habit of running his hand inside the shorts of the younger boys to check that they weren't wearing underpants which were forbidden during sports for reasons which I shall never understand. I have sometimes thought that only women should become teachers. There are, of course, many bad women teachers but the behaviour of some of the more inadequate men who are drawn into the profession is nothing short of depraved.
    But to return to Timothy, he apparently shone in one respect. He had a very beautiful treble voice and was soon co-opted into the choir where he sang like an angel.
    During chapel I would sometimes glance at him singing in the choir stalls. Timothy looked at his best when he was singing, as is often the case with people who are doing something well, and concentrating on doing it. He stood with his shoulders back