The Floating Body Read Online Free Page A

replying sooner. In fact, I feel guilty even now because I am pressed into writing at this moment to ask if a favour might be possible. You see, the school has a problem . . .’
    In a page or so I spelled out the difficulty of the missing guest speaker for Speech Night. I gave him the date in question, knowing that it fell during the last week of Trinity term at Oxford, and expressed the hope that he might find a way to help us out.
    I folded the page, sealed it into an envelope that I addressed and stamped, and left my flat. I had promised the Head I would walk into the town and post the letter immediately, and that was my plan.
    As I descended the stairs, came out of the terrace house—the last one in the row—and started across the quad, I saw a few boys around the noticeboard in the archway leading to the Old School.
    Two of them were writing on one of the notices. This I took to be a good sign—boys signing up for the trials for the cricket team, I hoped. So I walked across to see what fish I had caught with my notice.
    As I approached I saw that two older boys—broad-shouldered, solid looking boys from the Upper Sixth, I assumed—were writing on the noticeboard and laughing unpleasantly as they did so. Drawing nearer I saw it was Conway and Wynyard, the two toughs I had intercepted in the company of young Stanhope earlier in the afternoon.
    They completed their notations on the board and withdrew, still chuckling to each other in that same unpleasant manner.
    Stepping up to the board I ran my eye down the list of the names of boys entered for the cricket trials. I saw Hamilton, Clifford, Redway and Cardew—and that pleased me very much. There were several other names of more marginal candidates and of some complete duffers whose hopes rose above their abilities. Then at the end of the list was the name ‘Stanhope’.
    For a moment that puzzled me since Stanhope was no athlete and had little interest in games. In fact, all he could do in trying out for the cricket team would be to embarrass himself.
    Then the penny dropped. It was not Stanhope who had entered his name—it was Conway and Wynyard. That was what they were up to when I saw them at the noticeboard. This was their revenge for their run-in with Stanhope. Their aim was to encourage him to make a fool of himself in the nets in front of the rest of the school.
    I dismissed this as grubby schoolboys with limited imaginations pursuing pointless feuds, and went on my way.
    Crossing the cobblestoned quad towards the gate leading out of the close and onto the town high street, I passed the windows of the House Master’s flat. The electric lamps were lit within, spreading a warm yellow glow in the cool evening light and making the front room of McKell’s flat look like a stage set.
    As I looked in I saw McKell open a large cupboard and place inside his hiking boots—the same hiking boots I had seen slung over his shoulder upon his return earlier in the afternoon. What was surprising was that the boots were still filthy. The spikes on the boots could be seen quite clearly, even from where I stood in the quad, to be thickly caked with clay and dried mud.
    ‘How lazy,’ I muttered to myself. I would not have put McKell down as the type who would pack his boots away without cleaning them first.
    I must have been staring because at that moment Muriel McKell, the Deputy’s sister who kept house for him—McKell being a single man—entered the room. She looked out of the window straight at me. An indescribable look flashed across her already sour face—she was even less friendly than her brother—and she strode purposefully across the room and pulled the curtains closed over the windows.
    I felt a little uncomfortable. I had been seen apparently spying into another master’s flat. But it was hardly my fault, was it? If he left the curtains open and the room was lit, then he was almost painting a picture in the purple shadows of the twilight that had begun to