The Long Room Read Online Free Page A

spooned Farex into his gummy mouth and prayed that it would help him to grow strong. Such a skinny little thing he’d been, a child of bones as light as a bird’s, of cloud-pale skin, of deep blue shadows beneath his eyes, concavities beneath his ribs. Not a fussy eater, no; he’d swallow whatever she gave him, but it never seemed enough to bulk him out. Tubular his bones were when he was a child, and hollow – goodness no sooner poured into him than it ran straight out. Still peaky now, although no longer quite so thin.
    In truth, there’s not a lot to think about tonight, in thematter of meals tomorrow. The planning has been done, was done a week ago, as the thinking for the week ahead is now in progress. For dinner when Stephen comes there will be tomato soup, and corned beef hash with potatoes and boiled carrots, followed by peaches and evaporated milk. Corned beef, being tinned, is one of those foods that keep from week to week but fresh meat isn’t safe to store for very long.
    Coralie is looking forward to tomorrow afternoon. The shops are interesting at this time of the year, brave with gold and green and scarlet, with cheerful tins of Quality Street and bumper packs and things you wouldn’t see otherwise: chestnuts, Turkish Delight, tangerines like precious gems in their wrappings of blue tissue. There’s a feeling of brightness and excitement, even though it’s cold and the days are full of rain.
    Is it raining now? Hard to say, when the windows are shut and the curtains drawn and Coralie secure within her walls in the lee of Didcot Power Station. Above her, less than half a mile away, colossal towers of steam rise up into the darkness of the night but here, in this squat brick house, the lamps are lit, the cat’s asleep and the television is chattering in the corner of the room. There’ll be no need to pull aside an edge of curtain and peer into the outside world until the morning. And, when the morning comes, so too will her son, her peely-wally boy, her clever boy, her Stephen.

Saturday
    Country clothes, weekend clothes, moss-green and fawn-flecked tweed, leather buttons like carved conkers, checked cotton shirts and cavalry twill. Stephen’s brogues were neatly polished. That Saturday morning, before he left for Didcot, he walked round to the corner shop to buy the milk he had forgotten the night before and, although it was not likely he would encounter anyone he knew in the network of streets where he lived just off Western Avenue, it was not inconceivable, and therefore he was correctly dressed. If he were to see anyone from the Institute he probably wouldn’t acknowledge them in any case: an early lesson on the course he took as a new recruit warned against hailing any colleague met by chance lest that colleague was working under cover. ‘Only think what damage you might do to a tricky operation if you were to cry “Good morning, Jim” to an operative who at that moment was calling himself Jack.’ Nevertheless, acknowledged or not, if Stephen is to be recognised, it must be for what he is: a man off to the country for the weekend. By the same token, from Monday to Friday, he is equally appropriately dressed in a three-piece suit and tie. These are the cuirass, the greaves and gauntlets of the modern man.
    Stephen thought of Jamie Greenwood, also in his country clothes, somewhere in a field that morning. What exactly is a shooting jacket? Is it a garment that has pockets for dead animals and guns? Waterproofed, presumably – or blood-proofed– against the seepage from the rabbit’s wounds and the torn flesh of the pheasant. His images of Greenwood are necessarily indistinct for he has not yet seen the man himself, either in the flesh or in a photograph. But he is easy to imagine. Stephen has seen many young men just like him, at Oxford and at the Institute. Tall men with loud voices who inhabit their clothes as if they were bespoke and never bought from ordinary shops. Or, indeed, as if