Bird to thank God again for the food we had just eaten. The room gradually emptied, and Clarence and the maids began to clear the tables.

My brother was waiting for me in the passage. He was smiling.

“You are a bloody fool, Denton. I couldn’t think what had happened to you. When I turned up here without you Bird was furious. He sent me back the next morning to look for you; and I had three days in London with Bill, so I didn’t mind. We rang up all the hospitals and told the police; we thought you might have been run over. You were a sod, to disappear like that!”

I was glad that he had had three days’ holiday because of me. We went into the changing-room and walked up and down while I told him all I could remember. I finished up by saying, “When you leave at the end of this term I’m going to leave too.”

“Don’t be a fool, you’re not seventeen yet,” he answered impatiently.

“I only agreed to come back for this term.”

“Oh well, don’t let’s bother about it now. You’d soon settle down if you stopped worrying.”

I left him and went up to my study. This would be my first term free of fagging; that, at least, was one relief. When I opened the door I found Wilks making faces at Bradbourne. He was always making strange faces and sounds to attract attention.

“Hullo, Welch, have you decided to come back after all?” he asked.

I nodded and tried to look bold. Bradbourne saw my face twitch, so he jumped up and pulled me on to his knee.

“Come and tell your uncle all about it,” he said soothingly, bumping me up and down as if I were a baby.

I felt silly but I did not try to get off. Bradbourne was much stronger than I was; besides, I liked him. He said he was going to be a doctor, and one of his front teeth had been broken by a cricket ball.

“You bold, bad boy,” he pronounced after I had finished my story. “You deserve to be beaten.”

He turned me over on his knees and beat me playfully with a ruler. He hit hard and I felt the ruler biting into me. My body twitched and jerked until I fell on to the floor; then I quickly got up and ran out of the room. Bradbourne’s laugh and Wilks’s strange noises flowed after me down the passage.

I put on my straw hat and went to the Music Schools.

Capture13

          

Getting used to school again in those first days was strange. Everyone thought that I had run away for a different reason and so they all treated me differently. Thus I found that I had been moved up two forms because I was supposed to be frightened of Dr. Thorne.

I had been very unpopular with him the term before when I had been in his French class. He had made me sit at a special desk away from the others, and had become so furious when I signed my name Denton Welch instead of D. Welch that he had purposely trodden on the dark glasses he always wore in summer.

I was glad that I had missed his form, but fear of him had not made me run away.

The Remove where I now found myself was quite peaceful. Mr. Ward’s flat face dominated it like a placid, soapstone sphinx. His eyes had a sphinx’s far-away look too.

He would tell us strange stories about food. How the rich had eaten vermin cooked in liqueurs during the Siege of Paris. Rats, stewed in Green Chartreuse; mice, swimming in Benedictine.

His eyes would sparkle as he imitated a newly created duchess imploring her guests to begin.

He told us how, as a child, he had once eaten swan for dinner.