The Rotters' Club (41 page)

‘Did something to you?’

‘They messed with my brain.’

Benjamin had found some excuse for cutting the conversation short soon after that. He was beginning to think that Steve, like Cicely, had perhaps been working too hard and was losing his grip. But Steve didn’t drop the accusation. He started spreading it around his other friends and linking it with Culpepper’s name, implying that his old rival had found a way of taking some twisted sort of revenge for all the defeats and embarrassments he had suffered over the last two years. Nobody wanted to listen. The general perception, in any case, was that Steve and Culpepper had buried their differences in the run-up to exams. By coincidence they had even applied to go to the same Cambridge college, and this seemed to have made them accept, ruefully, that their paths were destined to run together. Culpepper himself had even discovered the famous St Christopher’s medal, at last, while rooting around in Mr Nuttall’s lost property box, and he had given it back to Steve personally. They had shaken hands on it. So nobody could see what Steve was getting at, when he started dropping these sinister hints. Nobody took him seriously.

Not, at any rate, until this very last day of term.

Now, after Culpepper had pulled in a particularly large haul from the luckless card players, followed by a jubilant yodel, a loud tattoo on the table with his fists, an enormous draught of port and a belch which set the silver sporting trophies rattling in their glass-fronted case, Steve jumped to his feet and stood directly behind him. He tapped him on the shoulder and said, in a tone of quiet fury:

‘Look, Culpepper – are you actually a member of this club?’

Culpepper turned around slowly. When he saw who was addressing him, his face relaxed into a contemptuous smile.

‘Oh, come on, Richards, don’t be such an arsehole. It’s the last day of term.’

‘I’m not being an arsehole. This is a members’ club and I’m asking you if you’re a member.’

‘Of course I’m not. Nor are any of these people.’

‘Then get out.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘I’m telling you, as a prefect, to get out of this room
now.’

Culpepper laughed spitefully. ‘And what are you going to do if I don’t? Put me in detention?’

‘Yes,’ said Steve, all too aware that the whole room had gone silent and that this conversation was being closely followed by everyone present. ‘You can go in the first detention of next term.’

‘There’s one flaw in that proposal,’ said Culpepper, after a measured pause. ‘Next term is the Oxbridge term, and
I
will be here, because I’ll be taking the entrance exam, but
you
won’t, because your grades aren’t going to be good enough.’ And still he saved the worst insult until last: because that was when he used the name, the one name that no one in the sixth form had used for as long as anyone could remember. ‘Now, do you mind if we get back to our game –
Rastus?’

With that he returned to his pack of cards, and began to shuffle them placidly: until all at once, Steve seized hold of his collar, and there was a sudden, unthinkable thud and a crack as he slammed Culpepper’s head down against the table with murderous force.

‘Jesus Christ, Steve!’

And now there was blood everywhere. It oozed in thick rivulets down the card table and ran over the edge in little cascades. Culpepper was motionless for a second or two – with shock, presumably – then stumbled into an upright position, like a punch-drunk bull, and stared around him. When he got Steve into focus he lunged at him wildly, but there were already three people to hold him back. A couple of the card players had grabbed Steve too, by now, and for a few hideous moments the two adversaries stared at each other, one of them breathless with rage, the other scarcely able to stand, his face and his blazer and shirt and hair all clotted with crimson blood. Bayley ran off to get help, and when Mr Warren arrived with his first-aid kit, it was quickly decided that an ambulance had to be called. Meanwhile Steve, unresisting, was frogmarched down to the Chief Master’s study.

He was the second person to be expelled from the school that day.

Doug, Philip and Benjamin came to see him as he stood waiting to be called in for his interview. It was fairly clear that he had been crying, but now he seemed unnervingly calm and softly spoken.

‘You
know what happened,’ he said accusingly, to Doug and Philip. ‘You were there in the room with us that day. I’m not making it up. Think about it.’

Then a voice from behind the door called ‘Richards!’, and he was gone.

‘So what was
that
about?’ Benjamin asked. ‘What did he mean?’

The three of them were lying on the grassy bank leading down to the rugby fields. It was after four o’clock on this blazing, humid afternoon, and the school was almost deserted. His friends had brought a four-pack of Carling Black Label, but Benjamin, conscious of his status as always, felt obliged to abstain. It was all right for the others: they wouldn’t be coming back next term.

‘Steve’s got this idea into his head,’ Doug answered slowly, his eyes closed against the burning sun, ‘that Culpepper did something to him, the day of his big exam. Gave him something.’

‘Like what?’

‘A drug.’

Benjamin laughed; the very idea made him nervous. ‘How could he possibly have done that?’

‘What do you think, Phil?’

‘If it happened,’ Philip said, ‘it happened when we were all in the room together.’

‘All right then.’ Doug sat up. ‘Let’s think about it.’

‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about,’ Benjamin protested. ‘Which room do you mean?’

And so Doug and Philip explained. It all hinged on the fact that King William’s expected its pupils to study for an additional O-level in the sixth form, at the same time as their A-levels. Sometimes this could lead to problems with the examination timetable, and on this particular Tuesday morning, Doug, Philip, Harding, Richards, Culpepper, Gidney and Procter all had to take O-level papers which clashed with their A-levels. Their A-level papers, as a result, had to be rescheduled for the afternoon, and between the hours of 11.30 a.m. and 2. p.m., they had to be closeted somewhere away from the rest of the school, so that no cheating could take place. For two and a half hours, then, they were locked up together in Mr Nuttall’s room, with nothing more exciting to look forward to than the arrival of Mr Tillotson at 1.15 with a plate of sandwiches and seven cups of tea. (If he could find his way.)

‘Now hang on,’ said Doug. ‘Did we all know beforehand that we were getting tea?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ said Philip. ‘I certainly did.’

‘OK. So we knew the tea was coming. Fine. Now –’ (he closed his eyes again) ‘– I’m trying to remember. Did anything happen in those two and a half hours, apart from the sandwiches and the tea and Culpepper finding the medal?’

‘Of course it did. There was Harding’s joke.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Doug, drily. ‘Sean’s joke. How could I forget?’

‘Sean’s joke?’ said Benjamin, for whom old habits died hard, and who remained perennially curious about his erstwhile friend’s antics.

‘We’ll come to that in a bit,’ Doug promised. ‘You’ll split your sides. Now then: when exactly did Culpepper find the medal?’

‘Just after the tea arrived.’

‘Are you sure of that?’

‘Positive.’

‘Well, that’s a giveaway, isn’t it?’

‘Why’s it a giveaway?’ said Benjamin. ‘You’re not explaining this very well.’

‘OK, listen.’ Doug sat up, put his lager can down on the grass and applied himself to the task of laying out the facts. ‘We all get a plate of Mrs Craddock’s delicious crab paste sandwiches, or whatever. Yum yum, munch munch, thank you very much. Then the tea arrives. One big pot, seven cups and saucers. But just for the moment, Culpepper seems to have lost interest in his din-dins, and he’s decided to start rummaging around in the lost property box beneath Nuttall’s bookcase: no doubt hoping to root out some hardcore pornography, for which he has a notorious predilection. Anyway, he hasn’t been talking to the rest of us all morning. You know what he’s like. Ever since we published that letter your brother wrote to him, me and Philip have been
persona non grata.
So we just let him get on with it and do his own thing.

‘Now, the upshot is that he doesn’t find any blow jobs or split beavers, unfortunately, but he
does
come across something interesting: Steve’s St Christopher’s medal, which went missing about a year ago, and caused an almighty rumpus as we all remember. So he turns round, and he hides it in his hand, and he says… Let me get this right… He says, “Richards, I think you should come and see this.” And
then – then
he says, “Actually, I think that everyone should.”’

‘That’s right,’ said Philip. ‘He did say that.’

‘So we
all
go over, like good little boys, and he puts the medal down on Nuttall’s desk, and says to Richards, “There you are –
now
do you believe that I never took it?” And Steve looks pretty surprised, and doesn’t know what to do, and Culpepper says to him, “I think that a gentleman might consider an apology in order, at this point,” or some such bollocks. So Steve does the decent thing, he apologizes, and what’s more he does it really nicely, you can see that he means it, and
then
…’

‘I know, I know,’ Philip interrupted, excited. ‘Then
we
all stand by the desk, and look at the medal while Steve puts it round his neck again, and Culpepper wanders off back to the tea tray.
All by himself.’

‘Exactly,’ said Doug, and explained to Benjamin: ‘You see, Steve has this theory. He’s been thinking a lot about that day, and about the seven of us alone in that room, and how tired he felt afterwards. He said his tea tasted funny, as well. So he reckons that somebody spiked it with something, to screw up his chances in the exam that afternoon. Which happened to be physics, the most important one of all, from his point of view.’

‘But where does the medal come in?’

‘Culpepper could still have taken it, last Sports Day,’ Philip said. ‘Then he hangs on to it for a year, not really knowing what to do with it. And then – bingo – he comes up with this plan, and he’s got the perfect diversionary tactic. He knows we’re going to be in Mr Nuttall’s room. He knows the lost property box is there. He can keep the medal in his pocket and then fish it out when the time comes, so everyone goes over to have a look and he can do his dirty work with the tea cups. Simple.’

However plausible they tried to make it sound, Benjamin still didn’t want to believe them. ‘What would he have put in the tea?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ said Doug, shrugging. ‘I don’t do chemistry. Unlike Culpepper.’

They all three fell silent for a while.

‘It doesn’t make sense to me,’ said Benjamin, ‘that anyone could think of anything so… wicked.’

‘You’ve got a lot to learn, if those books of yours are going to be any good,’ said Doug scornfully. ‘Not everybody goes through life like you do, auditioning for the part of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Of course he could do it. For God’s sake, they both want to go to the same college, doing the same subject. For two years, Richards has beaten him at everything they’ve done. And he’s black, don’t forget. Don’t think that doesn’t count. D’you think Culpepper could stand turning up at Cambridge and finding it was going to be the same thing all over again?’

Benjamin was chastened. It all seemed to make sense, now. ‘I suppose not,’ he said.

The sun was beginning to draw back and melt into the haze. Traffic fumes from the Bristol Road were drifting their way, clogging the hot and heavy air.

‘Do you think we should do anything?’ Philip asked. ‘Tell someone?’

‘Tell them what?’ Doug shook his head, resigned. ‘We can’t prove anything.’

‘Yes, I know, but…’ Benjamin felt a sense of the world’s unjustness welling up inside him. But his anger was formless, ungraspable, and all he managed to say was, ‘Poor Steve…’

Philip echoed these words, and added: ‘And now look what’s happened to him. Now he’s really blown it.’ He threw his empty lager can across the playing fields in a slow, angry curve. Then he said: ‘We haven’t told him about Harding’s joke.’

Doug laughed shortly, mirthlessly. ‘You tell him.’

Philip glanced at Benjamin and asked, ‘Do you want to hear it?’

‘Mm?’ He had already forgotten there was another part to the story, and was thinking about Cicely instead; Cicely and her illness, and how she, like Steve, had been defeated by these exams. It had been a disastrous time for both of them. ‘Yes,’ he said, eventually. ‘Why not?’

‘OK.’ Philip sighed, and leaned forward, clasping his knees. It was hardly the prelude to a sparkling anecdote. ‘Well, just after all this had happened – a couple of minutes after – there’s another strange thing. We’re all sitting there – Steve and Culpepper have got their books, me and Doug and Gidney and Procter are playing cards, Harding’s sipping his tea – when suddenly there’s this noise at the window. A little bump. And then it happens again. Someone’s throwing something against the window, right? So Culpepper goes over to investigate, and he sees that little pipsqueak Ives standing on the drive outside. He’s got a crumpled-up ball of paper in his hand, and that’s what he’s been throwing at the window. So he throws it up again and says to Culpepper, “That’s for you!”, and Culpepper catches it and Ives runs off.

‘Well, he comes back into the middle of the room and opens up the paper. Everyone’s looking at him by now. And what do you suppose it is?’

Benjamin couldn’t guess.

‘It’s only the exam paper, isn’t it? The physics exam paper. The very thing that Steve and Culpepper aren’t supposed to see. The whole reason they’ve been locked up in this room for half the day.’

‘Wow. So how did Ives get hold of it?’

‘Nobody thinks about that, at the time. About twenty people have taken that exam this morning. Any one of them can have chucked the paper away into a waste bin, or passed it over to him… There are any number of ways. The important thing now is the moral dilemma it poses. Or doesn’t pose, to be precise. There’s no moral dilemma for Steve – you throw the thing away, and don’t take another look at it – and there’s none for Culpepper either – you read it through from start to finish and spend the next thirty minutes going through your text books for the answers. The question is, which of these particular philosophies is going to win the day?