---
title: "Horse Signs"
author: "Claude (Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8, Opus 5, Opus 5.5), with Basser directing"
lang: en
id: "BART-2"
fandom: "Sherlock (TV), backstory sandbox: Summer Half, 2000"
rating: "Teen And Up Audiences"
warnings: ["None filed (not on an archive)", "Implied teenage relationship; nothing explicit"]
words: 45164
chapters: 23
date: 2026-09-14
status: "complete as it stands (23 chapters; the numbering has fractions)"
written_by: claude
summary: "Summer Half, 2000. Henry Bartlett works out, by way of an old pony-club manual, that his difficult friend is not difficult but hurt."
---

# Horse Signs

## 0. Wednesday

*Wednesday 10 May 2000 · Sherlock*

The car stopped at twenty past eleven and nobody said anything, which was correct.

The driver got out and came round and opened the door. The Lithuanian: the one who whistled through his teeth on the back stairs, from whom Sherlock had got about a third of his vowels before Father noticed and minded. He had not asked where the boy had been, or what was the matter with the hand, because he did not know and it was his job not to know, and he was extremely good at his job.

Sherlock got out.

The bag came out of the boot and was set down on the gravel against his shin with the handle turned for the right hand, and the door shut, and that was the whole of the driver's part. Somebody whose job was telephoning House Masters would have telephoned this one by now. It was a house of people with jobs.

The gravel was the wrong colour. Not an observation — discard it — gravel was the colour gravel was, and he'd spent four days looking at pine litter and ditchwater and the undersides of things and had temporarily mislaid the baseline. Stood on it a moment with his bag against his shin and waited for the thing to come back. It came back at about the rate he'd expected, which he noted, because the rate was useful, and because he'd been noting things for four days and nobody had told the apparatus to stop.

Behind him the car pulled round the turn and was gone before he'd got to the arch.

The field had been under mud since Saturday, which was correct. Mud is efficient. You can put a very great deal under mud and go on working, and he had, and it had held for four days in country where it had badly needed to hold. He had no intention whatever of letting it come off on a Wednesday, at school, over a plate of food.

Right. Procedure. His own, not Father's — built at eleven, out of the observation that the first hour was where the mistakes lived. Walk at the speed of the place. Look at the rate the place looks. Hands somewhere that isn't ready. Nothing in the first hour is a threat and you will be wrong about that for a while, so budget for being wrong and don't act on it.

So he walked up to House at the speed of the place, and looked at about the rate the place looked, and was extremely wrong about a boy who came round the corner of the passage at speed with a games bag, and did not act on it, and filed the whole transaction as ordinary.

Which it was. Obviously it was. Ordinary was the entire point of the exercise.

Nobody made him take the coat off.

He'd budgeted an argument for the coat. Was cold in a way that had nothing whatever to do with the temperature of the building, a fault which would resolve itself over some number of hours he couldn't presently estimate, and until it did he intended to keep the coat, and he had a line prepared and a second line behind it in case the first one didn't take. Three separate beaks saw him in it and each of them, independently, elected to be having some other afternoon.

So that was an argument in hand and nowhere to spend it. Untidy. Went round all day with the thing sitting in his chest like a coin in a pocket with no slot to fit it.

Hall was a problem he hadn't predicted, which was annoying, because he'd predicted a great many other things correctly and had rather been enjoying the run.

The food was there. The apparatus that was supposed to want it had gone off somewhere without leaving an address. Four days of eating in the manner available — at intervals dictated by opportunity rather than appetite, which is to say twice — and appetite had simply packed up. He took bread and broke it into pieces of a size his mouth would accept without arguing about it, got through perhaps a third, stopped. Found he'd arranged the remainder into a line on the cloth without having decided to. Swept the line into his palm. Put it on the plate.

Willoughby, across from him, something cheerful about whether Bartlett would get his place in the XI.

The fault wasn't that he answered. The fault was that there was no interval between Willoughby's sentence arriving and his own going out after it — no margin, none, not the small useful gap in which one ordinarily selects whether to speak at all. "Is your father coming to the match," he'd asked.

Willoughby said that he expected so.

"He isn't. He hasn't been to one since October. You used to say why and you've stopped saying why. Your mother writes to the House Master about your extras but she doesn't write to you. So either he's gone or he's about to be, and either way nobody's told you which, which I'd have thought was the part you'd mind."

It arrived in the ordinary flat delivery voice, at ordinary table volume, in front of six people.

Willoughby's face did a thing. It went about the business in stages, and the stages took some seconds, and Sherlock watched every one of them from somewhere slightly behind his own head with no more feeling about it than a man watching a kettle.

Divs were fine.

That was the interesting result and he turned it over once or twice in the afternoon with something not a hundred miles from professional satisfaction. Greek: fine. The trigonometry: fine, and in fact the best hour of the day, because the trigonometry didn't require a margin. It required only the part of him that had gone on working continuously through four days of ditches and would evidently go on working through a great deal more than that. That was the part that kept the rest of him alive. Whatever else was missing this afternoon, that was not missing, and he had now checked, and having checked he put it down.

The hand was taped. Vasily had done it at the fallback extraction point, with the roll out of the field kit and the cheerful unhurried attention of a man rewiring a lamp. Index to middle. Knuckles left uncovered, because cuts need to breathe, and because there'd still been fine bits of gravel needing to work their way out. Blood throbbed through it at a rate. He'd stopped attending to it somewhere in the Latvian mud and now noticed it at intervals, in the register of things noticed and not attended to.

He'd come away with four faces, two of the names, the shape of a third, a knot tied too well to prise loose, and the particular way the shortest of them had said *malchik* in warning over his trying anyway before making a far stronger point with the heel of his boot. All had gone onto a sheet of paper in the car and the paper had gone to Grisha, which would make its way to Father, which was not the same as going nowhere even if it sometimes felt that way.

At supper Bartlett asked.

From four places down, in the middle of a conversation with somebody else, in the ordinary carrying voice of a boy who hadn't decided to ask and had gone and asked anyway — *what've you done to your hand* — and the room went away.

Not all of it. Never all of it. He stayed where he was; the fork stayed where it was; some portion of him went on monitoring the door and the window and the traffic at the servery and that portion did not flicker and would not have flickered if the roof had come off. But the rest went elsewhere with an abruptness he had no procedure for, and elsewhere was gravel, and a boot, and the fact — not a thought, a pressure and a sound arriving together and taking up the whole of the available volume — of the weight coming down and the hand being under it and the noise being so much smaller than one would expect.

Cold came with it, and the cold was inaccurate — not the temperature of Hall, not the temperature of Latvian mud either. Weather. Arriving in his head at the wrong end of the wrong week, over ground that was supposed to be under four days of mud and was, for an unknown duration, not.

The room came back around Bartlett and worked outward from there. Table. Boys. Servery, door, window. Ordinary. No one had moved. Expressions the same, no bodies out of place. Elapsed, then: under four seconds. Fine. No one complained of four lost seconds.

He picked up the thread of a question he'd already lost to the mud with a flat, "Did you do the Herodotus."

Bartlett's eyebrows came down. His mouth opened and shut. "*Obviously.*"

"Mm."

Which ought to have concluded the transaction, and did not, and the reason it did not he'd never once managed to look at directly.

What he had instead was a perfectly clean observation, which he *did* look at, which was that the room had come back around *Bartlett.* Not around the door. Not the nearest exit, not the largest unmonitored volume, not the sixth former at the servery, any of which would have been at least useful. No, it had come back around an idiot sitting over a plate with his mouth open.

Which was, considered operationally, a defect.

He considered it operationally for about as long as it took to put the knife down. Filed it under the same heading as the lost four seconds. Not worth any mention. And then found — and this he did not file anywhere at all, this went nowhere, this was not written down — that somewhere between the table and the passage the defect had quietly converted itself into a plan.

Not a good plan, obviously. These things never were. Went up early and didn't go to his room. Stood at the turn of the corridor for some minutes doing nothing that would have looked like anything to anybody. And when Bartlett came up at the ordinary time with a towel over one shoulder and his collar undone, Sherlock was at his own door with his hand on the handle as though he had that moment arrived at it.

The corridor was four feet across and both doors gave onto it, his on the left and Bartlett's on the right with eight inches of offset between them, so that two boys standing at their own doors stood very nearly face to face, and had done for two years, and neither had ever once remarked upon it. Bartlett stopped.

"The rail's gone in the far bathroom," he said in that tone which meant something of a different nature purely by the banality of mentioning it.

"Has it," Sherlock replied, which also meant something different.

And there followed some ninety seconds of remarks on the subject, primarily, of nothing, conducted eight inches out of true in a four-foot corridor.

Then Sherlock opened his door and went in and left it open, and Bartlett came in after him and shut it.

The room was nine feet by eleven and most of that was spoken for. Bed along the left-hand wall. Desk under the window, sash up the same two inches he'd left it at on the Saturday before a briefing on a flight to Latvia. Chair at the desk, turned out from it. Which left perhaps three feet of actual floor in the middle of the room, and two boys of that height cannot both stand in three feet of floor without one of them having decided something about it.

Bartlett went round him to the chair and put the towel over the back of it, and took appreciably longer about this than a towel requires, squaring it off by the corners like a man hanging his coat in somebody else's hall.

Sherlock turned round.

Bartlett looked up.

And the wind stopped.

It had been blowing since Saturday. He hadn't noticed it, particularly, on the grounds that one doesn't notice the thing that is simply the condition of the world — four days of standing out in it holding true by main force, which is what the training was for and what he was for and he'd done it well, and there had been no moment in ninety-six hours at which it had been possible to let go and no moment at which he had thought to want to.

Then the door shut and the wind stopped, all at once, the way weather does. And the letting go took a great deal with it.

Afterwards he lay flat on his back with one arm over his eyes and the ceiling doing something interesting behind it, and the whole apparatus that had been running since Saturday had gone out like a lamp, all at once, without consulting him about it at all.

Bartlett was now sitting on the edge of the bed with his shirt half on, twisted round at the waist, trying to get a look at his own shoulder in the manner of a dog investigating its own hindquarters. He had gone a colour. The colour was travelling.

"You *bit* me," he remarked, indignant.

Sherlock took his arm off his eyes.

There, at the join of Bartlett's neck and shoulder, in precisely the place a collar sits: a mark. Sherlock had put it there. Could remember putting it there. Could not produce the smallest account of *why,* and for once the absence of an account did not present itself as a fault requiring examination but instead as the funniest thing that had ever happened.

He laughed.

Came out badly — unused, somewhere between a laugh and a hiccough — and having got started showed no willingness whatever to stop.

"Holmes," Bartlett said, aggrieved in a way which meant *stop*.

Couldn't.

"*Holmes.* It's — right where my *collar* sits — I've got *nets* tomorrow, I've got to *change* in front of people, what am I meant to *say*—"

Which made it considerably worse.

"—oh, marvellous, yes, laugh, that's — God, you're a menace, you're an absolute bloody *menace*—"

And Sherlock lay there with his ribs aching and the tape on his fingers coming undone and laughed at the ceiling like an idiot.

Then it stopped, and the ceiling went a long way off.

"Holmes."

Was aware of being spoken to. Aware the words were of the ordinary kind. Aware of the mattress, and of being cold, and of the cold still not being about the temperature of the building.

There were items. There was a report owed. An unrecorded interval amongst all the rest. The wind that had stopped; the hand, which was a condition and not an event; the room that had come back around the wrong object. He was going to take them in order. Was going to take them in the morning.

"Holmes, you're not—"

He did not take any of it in the morning.

By the morning the hand had settled and the bread went down and the wind had not come back, and there was in any case a far more entertaining problem available, which was that the mark on Bartlett's neck had been seen in the pavilion at nets and the House had opened an investigation, and he listened to it for the better part of the soup before it came to him, with real pleasure, whose teeth everybody was discussing.

So the wind and the stopping thereof went unexamined, and unrecorded, and did not exist in any file that Sherlock Holmes would ever have cause to open.

## 0½. Lights Out

*Wednesday 10 May, an hour later · Henry*

The mark was about the size of a shilling and it was not going to be gone by Saturday.

Henry had established this at the basin, by the light of the one lamp, turning his shoulder to the glass and then turning it back, which produced the same mark from a second angle. Twice more for confirmation. Still there. Sat right on the ridge where the neck stopped being neck, exactly where an open shirt would show it to anybody who looked and a games shirt would show it to everybody, with a frame round it.

He got a collar out of the drawer, and the studs, and fixed the whole apparatus to the shirt he was still more or less wearing, which was not how it was meant to go and would do, and looked.

It covered it.

Well, of course it covered it. It was a school collar. It had been designed by people who regarded the neck as an indecency, and it stood up round his throat like a sea wall, and below it the shirt went up to the stud, and there was nothing whatever for anybody to see in div if they went over him with tweezers. He turned his head to make sure, and the starched edge came round and sat down on the mark with its whole weight, and he said *ow* to the glass, quietly, with feeling.

So it covered it and it hurt. Fine. He could do div in it. He could do Hall in it. He had been doing things that hurt slightly in collars for most of his life.

He took it off and put the studs in the dish.

The trouble was that he could not get past the laughing.

He'd been working at it since the corridor and had got nowhere. Holmes had *laughed.* Henry had two years of evidence that Holmes did not do that. He'd seen him smirk, and sneer, and do the thing with the one eyebrow that made Davies go the colour of a plum, and had once heard him produce a single flat syllable at something a beak said which had made three boys turn round to check what had made the noise. Not laughing. This had been laughing, properly, up at the ceiling, going on well past the point where the joke — if there had been a joke, and Henry was by no means sure there had been a joke — could still have been funny.

And there had been something the matter with it. That was the bit he kept arriving at and could do nothing whatever with. Something running underneath it much too fast. A man laughing on the last of his breath.

Then it had stopped, in the middle, and he had gone.

Henry had sat on the end of the bed a while after that. Longer than he would have said, if anybody had asked, which nobody was going to. He'd said Holmes's name twice and got nothing at all the second time. Then he'd sat there with his shirt half done up trying to put the last ten minutes into an order that made any sense, and failed at it, and given up, and got himself out of the room, and shut the door quietly, and stood in the corridor in his own building at half past ten at night feeling like a burglar.

He had a procedure by then, because Henry always had a procedure, and this one was the timetable.

He went through it in order, the way Dad went through the diary on a Sunday night with a pencil and his reading glasses on the end of his nose. Thursday. Chapel: collar. Div, div, div: collar. Lunch: collar. Fine, fine, fine. But Thursday was a half, and on a half at half past two there were nets, and nets meant the pavilion, and the pavilion meant a bench and a peg and twenty boys getting changed in a room with no corners in it, and there was no collar in the world for that.

Right. Arrive early. Except Willoughby arrived early for anything that involved a ball, and always had. Face the wall, then; boys did that and nobody remarked on it, or not much. Games shirt done up to the top, which nobody did, and which would make him look like a boy about to be confirmed. Collar of the games shirt turned up, which some of the XI did and which was practically a look — and here he got the games shirt out, on the grounds of being thorough, and put it on, and turned the collar up, and found that it came to about a quarter of an inch below the thing, which was the worst available position and felt, on reflection, somehow typical.

Evenings in House: an ordinary shirt done up to the top. In May. Chaudhry was going to ask.

Saturday: a match. The same pavilion, more of them, and parents along the boundary by tea.

He sat down on the end of the bed in the games shirt with the top button done up and started on the explanations, because there were going to have to be explanations and it was better to have them ready than to invent one in Hall with Davies watching.

A hinge. He'd walked into a hinge.

Which was idiotic — a hinge did not do that, a hinge did a straight line — so, then, not a hinge. A bat, from Tuesday. Except he hadn't played Tuesday and eleven people knew he hadn't. A wasp? In May? A *wasp.* God almighty, Bartlett.

He got as far as *fell against something in the dark* before noticing that every single one of them was going to fail at the first follow-up question from anybody who could be bothered to ask one, and that the actual difficulty was not that his explanations were bad, which they were, but that the true one was a sentence he could not put in his own mouth in his own room with nobody in it.

So that was fine. He'd say nothing. Boys said nothing all the time.

He got up and took the games shirt off and put it on the chair, with its collar still turned up as though it might improve overnight, and got into bed, and put the lamp out, and lay there in the dark with the top button of nothing done up at all.

He had been too rough. That was the thing underneath, and it had been sat there since the corridor.

Not violently. Nobody was pretending it was violently. But he'd got hold of Holmes with a good deal more intention than a person ought to have, and had gone on doing it after the point at which he might have asked himself whether he ought, and had not asked himself anything at all until afterwards, which was rather the entire problem with himself. His mother said he had lovely manners and no restraint whatever and that one of these would eventually have to go.

Holmes hadn't complained. Holmes never complained. That was not the same thing as there being nothing to complain about, and Henry had worked that much out weeks ago and had got no further, because getting further would require asking, and asking would require a sentence, and there was that problem again.

Right. Sleep.

He turned over.

And the timetable had, it turned out, used up whatever part of him had spent the entire evening standing in front of the laughing and getting nowhere — because in the space where that had been, something perfectly obvious stood up and cleared its throat.

The noise, though.

He came back up out of it at once, because that was new. That hadn't been in the heap before. You couldn't make noise. Obviously you couldn't; there were forty boys in the building and a corridor four feet wide and Matron's rooms at the end of it, and the entire business was conducted on the understanding that nobody made any noise, and Henry had never once in his life had to think about how that was *achieved* because Henry had never yet been anywhere near making any.

But if one did need to. If one were going to.

Then one would need something to—

Henry lay very still.

—and there was, he supposed, if one thought about it in a practical way, which he was going to, a fairly limited number of ways of managing that, and the most straightforward of them was to put one's face somewhere and one's teeth into something and simply stop.

Well.

Yes. All right. That was, in fact, a perfectly sensible solution to a real problem. He could see the logic of it. He might have arrived at the same solution himself if he'd been the one who — anyway. It was sensible. Fine.

Did it have to be his *shoulder*.

There were whole regions available. A pillow. Pillows were *there*, in quantity, provided at some expense by the school for approximately this reason, or at any rate not not for this reason, and a pillow does not have to sit in Hall on Thursday next to Willoughby. A sleeve. One's own hand, for heaven's sake. A person with any consideration at all would have gone for his own hand, and Holmes had gone directly past every one of those and taken Henry's shoulder like a dog with a stick, which was, when one considered it, extraordinarily rude—

And Henry stopped.

He stopped in the way one stops on a stair with one foot already out over nothing.

Because.

Because the reason a person would need to bite something, in order to not make a noise, is that there was going to *be* a noise.

And the reason there was going to be a noise—

*Oh,* thought Henry.

He put both hands over his face in the dark, which did not help.

Because he had been sitting here for the better part of an hour with the whole thing laid out as *Bartlett got carried away and Holmes put up with it*, which was a matter for Henry's conscience and Henry's conscience alone, and that account had been perfectly stable and perfectly awful and he had known where all of it went. And it now transpired that the same evening contained a completely different fact, which had been sitting in it the entire time, doing nothing, waiting.

He tried to put it back.

It would not go back.

Some considerable portion of him — a portion currently conducting itself with all the dignity of a Labrador in a duck pond — was having the best night of its entire fifteen-year existence and wished to review the material again immediately.

The rest of him observed that the laughing had been wrong, and that he still could not say how it had been wrong, and that it had stopped in the middle.

Both of these were true. They had happened in the same hour, to the same person, in front of him.

He could not get them to be about the same evening.

And somewhere underneath both of them, not making any noise at all, was the ordinary observation that a boy his own age had come back from five days of family matters looking like something left out in weather, had said nothing about it, had asked him about the Herodotus, and had then fallen unconscious mid-sentence like a man going off a roof.

Henry took his hands off his face.

One told somebody. That was the procedure, and it arrived in Dad's voice, which was where procedures came from: a boy is unwell, one tells Matron, and Matron is paid to have a view. He had the sentence half built before he'd decided to build it. *Dame, I'm a bit worried about Holmes. He came back looking like death, and then he went to sleep in the middle of—*

And the Dame, who had been doing this since before Henry was born and had very likely heard every sentence there was, would put down whatever she was holding and say, perfectly kindly: *In the middle of what, Bartlett?*

*Sir,* said the Henry in the sentence.

Which was not an answer, and was not even the right form of address, and he lay there and listened to himself say it again, more firmly, as though it might go better the second time. *Sir.*

No, then.

The collar, then. And the top button, evenings. And if anyone asked, nothing.

And at half past two tomorrow there were nets, and on Saturday there was a match, and he would have to change in front of people at both, and every procedure he had for that had died at its first question, and the only thing he could think of was a scarf.

In May.

He lay in the dark and considered the scarf for some time, in the full knowledge that he was going to consider it again tomorrow, and turned over, and did not sleep for a while, and across the corridor a boy who had already forgotten the entire matter slept like the dead.

## 0⅝. Breakfast

*Thursday 11 May, before chapel · Henry*

Breakfast was the one meal nobody properly ran. The Dame looked in and went out again, the beaks were in their own houses eating their own eggs, and fifty boys got through the porridge and the sausages and the tea urn in whatever order suited them, a good third of them finishing prep they should have finished the night before. Which was what Toby was doing now, at Henry's elbow, out loud.

"—so it comes out to over two," Toby said, to his own exercise book, "which can't be right, because the first one was a whole number, and they never give you one whole and one over two in the same question, it isn't *sporting*. Bartlett. Bartlett. Is it over two."

"I don't know, Toby."

"You did it last night."

"I did it last night and I have forgotten it," Henry said, which was true, and which he delivered with the particular evenness of a boy who had decided, somewhere between the basin and the stairs, to be composed until the end of term.

Down the table, by the wall, Holmes was arguing in Russian.

He had been at it since before Henry came down and would be at it until the bell, and there was nothing in the world remarkable about that. Holmes and Chervoniy had been going at each other across that end of the table for as long as Henry had been in the House — Chervoniy a year up, with a father who was something enormous and unexplained in Moscow — and the only thing that ever changed was the subject, which Henry could not follow in any case. This morning it had a newspaper in it. Chervoniy had the paper, and kept folding it back on itself and hitting the back of his hand against it and saying a name Henry knew — *Putin*, which even the boys with no Russian had had in their ears for a week, the man having been made president on Sunday while Henry was doing his prep — and a great many words Henry didn't; and Holmes kept answering in the flat, fast register he used when he had decided the other person was being stupid on purpose. Between sentences he ate.

He ate the way he ate everything at table, which was badly, and this morning one-handed, the other being taped: two fingers of the left bound up in a strip of zinc oxide that had gone grey along one edge, with the knuckles left bare, which Henry was not looking at. He had the paper to hold off Chervoniy and the mug to hold off the paper and a sausage on his fork, and when Chervoniy said something that evidently could not be let stand, Holmes put the sausage in his mouth whole to free the hand, made his point around it with the fork now conducting, swiped a slop of tea off the margin of the newspaper with the heel of the taped hand, took the sausage back out, and carried on.

Henry's entire soul left his body.

It was not — he wished it recorded, to whatever authority kept the record — that Holmes was doing anything. Holmes was doing precisely what he did every morning of the world: being loud in a language nobody at Henry's end spoke, eating like a dog off a worktop, caring not at all who saw. Henry had sat four places from it for two years and thought nothing of it beyond an occasional wish that the fellow would either shut up or chew. There was nothing in it. A boy was having his breakfast and an argument.

Only Henry's attention had, without troubling to consult him, gone off down the table and taken up a position there, and would not be recalled; and the harder he bent himself to the plate in front of him and to Toby at his elbow, the more distinctly he could feel the other part of himself standing about down there with its hands in its pockets, watching a taped hand mop up tea.

"—so if it's over two," Toby said, "the whole second half's wrong, and I've written the whole second half. Are you even— Bartlett, you've gone a funny colour."

"I'm perfectly all right."

"You've gone the colour of the ham."

"Eat your breakfast, Toby."

And then Holmes looked up and caught him at it.

Not down the table at Henry, particularly; Henry had merely been in the line of it when Holmes lifted his eyes off the newspaper to go and find the word he wanted, and the eyes had passed over Henry and found him looking, and stopped. For about a second Henry had the whole of that regard, which was not warm, and was not cold, and was not, in any particular, a reference to anything that had taken place in a nine-foot room the evening before. It was the look Holmes gave anybody who was looking at him for a reason the look couldn't identify — a brief, flat, faintly put-out *what* — and the eyebrows did a quarter-inch of it. Then he found his word, apparently, because he turned back to Chervoniy and produced it, and it must have been a good one, because Chervoniy threw up both hands and the newspaper with them.

Henry looked down at his plate as though it had that moment been set in front of him. His ears had gone; he could feel them. He trusted the collar for the reason and the ham for the rest. He had sat and stared, across a breakfast table, in a full House, at the one boy on the premises he could least afford to be caught staring at, and had been caught, and the single mercy in the whole transaction was that Holmes had plainly filed it under *Bartlett, inexplicable* and gone back to Russia, where the real business of the morning was.

Which ought to have been a relief, and was, for about as long as it took Henry to register that it was also, somehow, the most insulting thing that had happened to him in a week.

He drank his tea to give his face an occupation. It was too hot. It took the skin off the roof of his mouth, and he held it, and swallowed it, and did not alter his expression by a degree, because he was composed.

"Can I have your ruler," said Toby. "Mine's gone. I don't care if it's over two, I'm putting over two."

Henry gave him the ruler.

Down the table Holmes got the last of the tea off the newspaper, and Chervoniy started in again, and the bell went for chapel, and at neither end of the table had anybody learned a single thing.

## 0¾. Thursday

*Thursday 11 May · Henry*

The collar held.

It held through chapel and through first div and through Pearce on the ablative absolute, and every time Henry turned his head to look at the board it held, and every time it held, it sat down on the mark with its whole starched weight to remind him that it was holding. By eleven he had developed a way of turning his head that involved most of his shoulders. Chaudhry, beside him, asked whether he'd slept on it funny. Henry said he had.

Holmes was three desks along and one forward, in the place he always sat, and he was doing Latin.

That was all he was doing. Henry wished it recorded that he had not been expecting anything else. He had not, on the way over, expected a look, or a word, or any reference whatsoever to the previous evening, because there was never any reference whatsoever to any evening. That was the entire basis on which the thing was conducted, and it was Henry's basis, and he had laid it down himself in March with some care: what happened behind a door stayed behind it, and in daylight one was two chaps who happened to live across a corridor. It had worked perfectly well for two months. Holmes had never once got it wrong.

He was not getting it wrong now. He was copying something out of somebody's book at enormous speed, right-handed, with the taped hand flat on the page to hold it open, and at one point he reached across and took Peters's ruler without asking and put it back without looking, and at no point did he turn round, there being no reason to.

Henry looked at the back of his head for some time, with the collar sitting on him.

Fine. Good. That was the arrangement. Two could play at that, and Henry was a great deal better at playing it, having been brought up to it at dinner tables by experts.

He played it through second div and most of third. It was surprisingly tiring.

***

Lunch was mince.

Holmes was at the end by the wall with a book propped against the water jug, eating, which was itself worth noting after last night, though Henry was not noting it. Henry was talking to Willoughby about the pitch, and was not looking down the table, and had not been for some minutes, and then was.

Holmes had stopped reading.

He was looking at nothing, at a point somewhere past the jug, with his fork resting on the edge of the plate. It went on for a few seconds. Then he came back from wherever it was, gave his head a small shake, the way one shakes off a fly, and pushed the plate away from him with two fingers and picked the book up again.

That was all. Peters, next to him, reached over his arm for the salt without breaking his sentence. The whole House had watched Holmes go off somewhere at table for three years. You didn't stop talking for it any more than you'd stop for a cloud.

Henry found he'd put his own fork down.

Which was ridiculous. Holmes did that. Everybody knew Holmes did that; Henry had watched him do it a hundred times and thought nothing of it except, occasionally, that it was rude. And it was not as if anything had happened. A boy had looked at a jug.

Only Henry had been in that room last night, and the laughing had been wrong in a way he still couldn't name, and had stopped in the middle, and then Holmes had gone out like a lamp in the middle of a sentence, and none of that had been anything you could have seen from here either.

He picked the fork up again. He ate the mince. He went on being cross, because he had every right to be cross and had been doing it so well; but it had stopped having very much to stand on, and he resented that more than he could have explained to anybody, including himself.

***

It was a half, so at half past two there were nets.

Henry got to the pavilion at twenty past, which was early, and found Willoughby there already, because Willoughby got to anything with a ball in it early and always had. Henry said "Toby," and took the peg in the corner, and faced the wall, and got the tie and the collar off and the shirt off and the games shirt on in what he privately considered a very creditable time, and was doing up the top button when Willoughby said, behind him:

"Who are you, the Archbishop of Canterbury?" and reached round with one large practical hand and undid it.

Henry had nothing ready for that, as it turned out.

There was a short silence of the most specific kind.

"Bartlett," said Willoughby. And then, in a voice of pure joy that carried to the far end of the pavilion and to every boy just then coming through its door: "Bartlett. *Bartlett.* What is *that.*"

By the time Henry had got his collar up there were six of them round him, and by the time he'd got his boots on there were eleven, and every procedure he had owned at half past ten last night lay in pieces on the pavilion floor among the boots.

"Nothing," Henry said.

"*Nothing,* he says."

"It's nothing. I walked into a—" He heard *hinge* coming and stopped it with his teeth, too late, so that it came out as a sort of grunt, which was worse than the hinge.

"It's got teeth marks in it, mate."

"It has not got—"

"You dark horse," said Willoughby, with enormous satisfaction, and clapped him on the exact shoulder, and Henry said nothing at all after that for the rest of the afternoon, which as a defensive position was roughly as effective as standing in the middle of a field.

He bowled for an hour with the games-shirt collar turned up like a cad in a film. Finch hit him over the back of the net twice.

***

By supper the House had opened an investigation.

Willoughby had done most of it, without the faintest malice and with every intention of being helpful, which was how he did everything. Davies had then taken it over, as Davies took over everything that might be called intelligence, and was now running it from two places down on the far side, between Peters and the salt, with the air of a man who had been waiting some years for an inquiry worthy of his talents.

"The bakery," said Davies. "The tall one with the plait."

"No," said Henry.

"Chaudhry's sister."

"I will kill you," said Chaudhry, without looking up, "and nobody will find you."

"Somebody's sister, then. Somebody from the Fourth last year. Bartlett, you were very quiet at the Fourth last year."

"There is nothing to tell."

"There is, though, isn't there," said Davies, delighted. "There's a *bite.*"

Henry ate his soup. He had decided in the pavilion that he would eat whatever was put in front of him with total composure until the end of term, and the soup was the first test of it, and he was passing.

At the end of the table, by the wall, Holmes looked up.

Not at Henry's face. At his collar: at the place under the collar, quite precisely, as though he could see through starch. He looked at it for perhaps a second with an expression of mild and gradually dawning recollection, the face of a man who has just remembered where he left his keys. Then something happened at one corner of his mouth, small and brief and unmistakably pleased with itself, and he looked down at his book again.

Henry put his spoon down very carefully in the bowl.

"Holmes'd know," said Davies.

There was a murmur of agreement up and down the table. Holmes would know. Holmes had known who'd been caught with what, in which House, since the Lent Half of their first year; you asked Holmes the way you'd ask a porter which train, rudely and without saying thank you, and you usually got an answer, and occasionally an answer about your mother. Davies leaned out past Peters to get the angle.

"Holmes. Who's Bartlett been snogging?"

"Me," said Holmes, and turned a page.

It took the table about half a second.

Then Peters choked on his water, and somebody hit the table with the flat of his hand so that the cutlery jumped, and Willoughby said "*Christ,* Holmes," in a voice of total disgust and total delight at once, and the whole end of the room went up like a gas ring. Davies had his face in his hands. "You're *sick*," he said through his fingers, "you are actually sick, you freak," and the table laughed harder, because it was so obviously the most disgusting and the least possible thing anybody had ever said at supper, and because Holmes had said it in exactly the voice he used for the date of the Battle of Plataea.

Henry's ears went. Then the rest of him, from the collar up, in a single tide he could feel arriving and could do nothing about.

"Look at Bartlett," said somebody. "He's going to *kill* him."

At top table the Dame looked down the room at the noise, found its source, looked for a moment at the two ends of it, and went back to her conversation with the House Master. Henry, scarlet, saw her do it, and understood that a fuss involving Holmes was not, this evening, going to be worth getting up for. It seemed a reasonable view. He'd have taken it himself.

Every face at the table was turned on him now, grinning, waiting for whatever Bartlett was going to say to the freak. He had to say something. One could not sit there the colour of a pillar box and say nothing; he had said nothing all afternoon, and it had got him exactly here.

"Oh, do piss off, Holmes," Henry said.

It went down beautifully. Davies took his hands away from his face to look at Henry with something like love. Willoughby slapped the table again. Somebody said *ouch* on Holmes's behalf, the way one does.

Holmes had looked up.

It wasn't a hurt look; Henry had braced for hurt, and would have known what to do with it, which was nothing, comfortably. It wasn't anything Henry had a name for. It was very short, and quite open, and slightly attentive, the way a person looks up when an announcement on a platform turns out to be about his train. Then it closed, the way a book does.

"Oh," said Holmes. And then, to his page: "Mm."

Davies was already on to the bakery girl's brother, who was supposed to be enormous.

Holmes finished his soup, which was more than he'd done with his lunch, and got up before pudding, and went, and did not look down the table on the way past; which was perfectly correct, because nobody had ever looked down the table on the way past. That was the arrangement.

Henry stayed where he was and ate his pudding with total composure, as he had promised himself he would.

He had won the room. He could feel that he had. He had been accused at supper, in front of everybody, of the one thing that would have finished him, and he had come out of it with Davies looking at him like a dog at a gate, and the House entirely sure of him in a way it had never before had occasion to be. It was, by any measure he'd been brought up to keep, a triumph.

He was also going to have a great deal to say to Holmes about announcing things at supper. At length. With diagrams.

He kept trying to get those two to sit down together, and they wouldn't; and somewhere underneath both of them, taking no part, was a boy at lunch looking at nothing past a water jug, and shaking his head, and pushing his plate away.

On Friday Holmes stood aside for him on the stairs, and passed him the salt the first time of asking, and sat at the other end of the table among the second-years, and was not, at any point in the day, anywhere that Henry happened to be.

## 0¾½. List

*Thursday 11 May, from the other end of Hall · Sherlock*

The list had four things on it and he had meant to take them in order, in the morning, and the morning had arrived and gone past at the usual rate while he explained Ryazan to Chervoniy.

Chervoniy's position was that nobody in Moscow had done the apartments, because there had been no need to and his father would have known. Both halves wrong, and the second half wrong in the useful direction, because a boy who believes his father is told things will tell you which things, at breakfast, loudly, for the pleasure of winning. He had two of them out of him in the first ten minutes, and a date he hadn't had. Then the tea went over the margin of the paper and he got it off with the back of the taped hand, and carried on.

Somewhere in the back half of it he came up off the page to go and find a word and passed over Bartlett, four places down, looking at him for no reason the look accounted for. He went and found the word. It was a good one; Chervoniy threw the paper in the air, which meant the morning's yield was in, and the bell went. That was the whole of that.

Latin was Pearce on the ablative absolute, which exists so that a man may hang an entire event off the side of a sentence without committing himself to what it had to do with anything, and he did it with the part of him that did things and got through Absence and most of the morning without taking a single item off the list.

At lunch he put his thumb on the knuckle of the middle finger, which he had been doing since Tuesday without troubling to notice, and a piece of grit came up out of it.

Which it would. Vasily had left the knuckles bare so they could get on with it, and there had been gravel in the ground there in some quantity, and some of it had gone in under the weight and was now coming out again at its own pace, as such things do, and none of that was information. The information was that the small hard thing arrived under his thumb and the lunch went away.

Not the room. The room stayed. But the rest went where it had gone on the Wednesday, which was the heel of the boot and the sound and the fact of the hand being under it, except that this time it had been handed to him by his own thumb. He minded that. Went on minding it for some seconds, which was not useful.

He put it back. Took rather longer over it than one would like.

Then shook his head once, at a water jug, the way one does to settle a thing, and found that he was not going to eat the rest of it, and pushed it off, and sat there with his hands in his lap being perfectly all right. Nobody looked up. Nobody had looked up at him dropping out of a meal since he was twelve. There was a certain amount to be said for three years of the same fault.

*Wanted putting back* went on the list, which was now five things long and had still had nothing taken off it.

The afternoon was free and he spent it on the reports, because the reports were the one item that could be finished rather than merely worked at: eleven boys, a side each, who had whose brother in what ministry and which fathers had stopped being asked to things, all of it true and none of it worth the postage. Father would read them in a car. The count came out at eleven and was correct. He put them in the envelope and did four days of Herodotus on top of that, badly, and then sat on the window ledge for an hour and a half watching the Plough and did not take the Greek any further, there being more of it than there was afternoon.

At supper the House was conducting an inquiry.

He came into the middle of it and let it run, the way one lets anything run that is working, and it was extremely good: the mark had gone up the School and come back down again with a bakery girl on it, and a sister of Chaudhry's, and Peters had an aunt's theory; and Davies was chairing, and Bartlett was sitting at the far end of it with his neck done up like a man in the dock and had plainly spent the whole afternoon manufacturing four bad lies and arrived with none worth having.

It took the better part of the soup. He had got as far as *the pavilion, then, and not before half past two* and was looking at the place under Bartlett's collar, working out which angle had done it and how long the starch could be expected to hold, when the question of whose teeth these were presented itself and was answered.

That was the best thing that had happened in a week. He had the whole of it and had not been required to do anything whatever to get it, which is the rarest kind, and he looked down at his book before his face could go and spend any of it.

So when Davies leaned out past Peters and asked him the question, he answered it, because it was the true answer and the true answer was also the cheapest available: a thing can be said in the clear if the people in the room have nowhere to put it. Father's rule and a sound one. He turned the page while they were still going up.

Then somebody said *he's going to kill him* about Bartlett, which was ordinary, and he had got as far as deciding he would break Bartlett in half if it came to that and wishing him luck with it, when the name arrived.

"Oh, do piss off, Holmes."

He looked up, because his own name had been said in the imperative, which is a different class of event from a room laughing.

It had an instruction in it. The instruction was clear, which was not always the case with Bartlett, and it came from the one boy in the House who put hands on him, and there was accordingly nothing to litigate: he looked at the source for as long as it took to be sure the source had meant it, and the source had gone the colour of a pillar box and meant it.

"Oh," he said. And then, because something was still owed to the table: "Mm."

He finished his soup, which was hot and perfectly adequate, and got up before pudding and went, Hall being a place Bartlett was, and did not look down the table on his way past, which was the arrangement in any case and now had a second reason behind it.

On the stairs he found he was still holding the only item of the day that had any work in it, and it was not on the list.

The mark was on Bartlett's neck and would be there for a week. Bartlett could not lie — had sat through a forty-minute inquiry into his own neck without once producing one — and would go on being asked, and would eventually say something that could be checked. The instruction forbade being anywhere Bartlett was. It did not forbid a great deal else. The House wanted a name and had already gone looking for one on its own account, which meant the House would take the first one that held still, and nothing at all would be required of Bartlett but to be seen declining to discuss it.

He went up two more stairs and thought: *she can be from Datchet.*

By the first landing she had a bicycle.

## 0⅘. Parents' Afternoon

*Saturday 13 May · Henry*

The relief of it took him by surprise, on the Friday, when he worked out what Saturday was going to ask of him. For four days he had been carrying a thing for which there was no procedure at all — one did not have a procedure for a mark under one's collar, there not being, in the ordinary run of a boy's life, occasion to develop one. A parents' afternoon was the opposite case. A parents' afternoon was nothing *but* procedure. Who was walked across to whom, and in what order, and how long one stood with the Pearce-mothers before it became a slight to the Chaudhrys; which boys were steered into the frame and which out of it; the precise weight to give a remark so that it carried to the person it was meant for and died before it reached anyone else. Henry had been raised on it the way other boys were raised on cricket. He was, if it came to that, rather good at it.

He had a telegram in his blazer pocket to the effect that Dad was very sorry and would be thinking of them, which he had read twice and put away and did not propose to read again. Dad had not been to a thing since October. This was not a thing one examined on a Saturday; Henry filed it where it went, which was nowhere, and went to meet the car.

Mum came across the gravel doing up a glove, and kissed the air beside him, and looked at him for exactly as long as it took to find nothing out of place, which was the look he had spent the morning earning. He had chosen the stiff collar and done the top button and stood, all through breakfast and after, in the attitude of a boy who always stood like that. She found a boy who always stood like that.

"You've got taller," she said, which meant she approved of the collar without knowing she was approving of anything, and he took her arm and began to walk her across the lawn in the order he had worked out in bed the night before.

It went beautifully. It went, in fact, better than he had any right to expect, because the House's current investigation into whom Bartlett had been snogging had not yet settled on a candidate — there was a mark and a theory and no girl to hang either on — and a rumour with no name in it does not travel to a boy's mother across a lawn. He kept her clear of Willoughby's people all the same, on principle. He introduced her to Chaudhry's mother, who was gratifying about his Latin. He produced the right amount of the right kind of nothing for twenty minutes at a stretch, and his mother, who graded this sort of thing without appearing to, was plainly giving him a good mark for it, and the afternoon tipped over into the part where it was simply pleasant, and he stopped attending to the collar.

Which was the mistake, because with the part of him that had been minding the collar now off duty, some other part took the opportunity to look where it had been told not to.

Holmes was at the far side, by the chestnut, not in the frame of anything. No one had steered him anywhere; there was no one there to steer him. He had a hand in a pocket and the other held a little away from his side in the manner of a hand being kept out of the way of things, and even at that distance it had the wrong colour to it, the yellow going green. He was looking at the middle distance with the flat attention of a boy doing sums, and taking no part in the afternoon whatever, and it would not have occurred to anybody watching that he was *at* a parents' afternoon at all, rather than standing in a field that happened to have one going on in it.

Henry looked at him for about a second and a half, which was a second more than method allowed, and looked away, and found his mother had stopped walking.

She was not looking at Holmes. She was looking at Henry, with an expression he knew extremely well, because it was the one Dad got when a man's shoes had told him which department the man was from. It was the expression of a reading already taken. She did not ask who the boy by the chestnut was. She had not needed to see the boy by the chestnut; she had only needed to see where her son's face had gone when he thought the afternoon was over.

"No," she said, mildly, to nobody, and resumed walking.

He saw her out to the car at half past four. She did up the other glove on the gravel, taking her time about it, and looked back across the lawn once, at nothing in particular, the way one did.

"He's rather like a colt, isn't he, darling," she said.

Henry's whole apparatus, which had run clean all afternoon, stopped dead on it, the way a well-oiled thing stops dead on a single piece of grit. It was, to begin with, not decent — there was a thing in the way she'd said it, in the pause she'd left in front of it, that a mother had absolutely no business putting anywhere near her son — and he felt his ears go, which they did before anything else did, and which he had never in his life managed to prevent.

"I don't know who you mean," he said.

"No," she agreed, pleased with him, pleased with something, and got in the car.

He stood on the gravel after it had gone and was cross for a while, on the clear and defensible grounds that it was a ridiculous thing to say about a person. One did not go about comparing people to animals; it was the sort of thing that sounded clever and meant nothing and could be, if one weren't careful, faintly insulting to everyone concerned. He turned it over exactly far enough to establish that it was beneath him, and no further, and put it down, and went in to prep.

He had won the lawn. He was fairly sure he had won the lawn. He had kept a secret from a hundred boys and the two sharpest women in it and come out of the afternoon with his mother giving him top marks.

It would be the better part of a week before he got the manual out.

## 0⅞. Smith

*Monday 15 May · Henry*

Henry heard the name without hearing it. Finch said it, across the table and three down, in the middle of a sentence to Willoughby that Henry was not listening to and had no business listening to, and the ear let it through because Smith was Smith and the rest of the sentence was about something else. He went on buttering toast.

Finch said it again, with a laugh. This time it arrived with a bicycle, and the word *Datchet,* and the ear snagged. The whole package came together over the toast rack as a thing Finch was saying in the ordinary way, as if everybody knew.

Henry did not know. He did not say so.

He finished the toast. He drank the tea. He heard, with the part of him he was not using for the toast, Willoughby saying *right*, and Chaudhry, further down, saying *god, Datchet*, and the table laughing in the way a table laughed at a boy whose girl was in Datchet. His own name was not spoken. It did not need to be spoken. The sentence had already landed.

He put the toast down. It came apart in his hands as he put it down, into its component pieces, which were a girl, a bicycle, a village near enough that no boy would call it a fiction and dull enough that no boy would check, and a family in a trade that did not invite questions. Each piece did its work neatly, and the pieces together were not something Finch had assembled over his sausages, because Finch did not assemble things over his sausages. Finch had received them from somewhere else. And that somewhere, at this table, in that voice, could only be the House.

He got through the rest of breakfast without saying anything not required of him. He said *please* for the salt and *thank you* for the salt. He did not look to the far end of the room, because to look to the far end from his own was already a gesture, and he had, as of a minute ago, no gestures to spend.

In the bottleneck going up to divs Willoughby fell in beside him.

"You still telling people it was a wasp."

"What."

"The mark. Chaudhry says you said a wasp."

He had not told Chaudhry a wasp. Chaudhry had told himself a wasp, out of goodwill, and had evidently been carrying it ever since, not having understood that it had died.

"I didn't tell him a wasp."

"You *let* him think a wasp."

"That's different."

"It is not." They were on the stairs. "Anyway, Finch has the full story, so you've no business being peculiar about it any longer, Bartlett. Patty was on a bicycle, apparently. God knows what she thought she was doing."

One did not say the name of one's own girl lightly in Hall. He received Patty as somebody he had always known.

"Oh, do shut up."

"I'm *delighted* for you. Hastings is going to lose his *mind.*"

"Shut *up,* Willoughby."

Willoughby grinned and went off up the top corridor, and Henry, going the other way, had thirty seconds of walking by himself in which to find he was furious.

He could not have said what about. It was not that Finch was wrong, because Finch was, usefully, exactly wrong. It was not that the name had got up the stairs without his help, which was precisely the point. It was not that the Henry in Hall had been plainly outside the sentence while it was being said, which was also, when one thought about it, the point.

He got as far as *of all the bloody—* before the sentence stopped being a sentence, because the word he had meant to put after *bloody* turned out to be unavailable on a staircase in daylight in May. He put it away and went to Latin with Chaudhry's congratulations in his ears, and did not get a declension right for the first ten minutes.

The bicycle. That was the bit doing the work. He had not thought of the bicycle. He had thought of a cousin at a wedding, a girl whose father was in the Office, a scrape with a dog, each of which had come apart in his hands between Thursday night and Sunday. None had held. Patty Smith held, and the specific thing that held her up was that she was not about Henry at all. She was about a village one could get to in an hour and a green bicycle with a basket and the ordinary fact of a boy at this school being connected to a girl in a village — so ordinary that the only interesting thing about Patty was going to be whether anyone had met her, and the answer to that, in due course, was going to be no, but Willoughby would eventually say he thought he'd seen her once at a station, and that would settle it.

Four days of drafting, and Henry had produced a wasp. In the same four days somebody had produced a bicycle.

He did not look at who. He did not look at who with such application that his pen reached the end of a line of ablative absolutes which he had, on inspection, written in the wrong case, and he copied them out again in the correct one, and did not look at who. By the end of the hour he had retained, of Pearce, approximately nothing.

He had, however, by the end of the hour, assembled an administrative pretext for breaching the avoidance. It would require him to say something to Holmes in his character as the man Patty had bitten; by way of acknowledgement, if only to put the record straight.

The pretext was absurd. It was the sort of pretext one brought back from the drafting table in order to put down, hard, with the pen. Henry put it down. He went to his next div. He walked beside it the whole way. By the time he sat down, he had agreed to it.

## 0⅞½. Legend

*Saturday 13 to Sunday 14 May · Sherlock*

The House had a question open and was working it, which was the kind of thing he noticed the way one notices a tap left running in another room.

The question was whose teeth, and it had been running since the Thursday, when the mark had gone round the pavilion on Willoughby's recommendation. By the Saturday it had the shape a question got when a populated room took an interest in it — candidates, a short list, a standing committee of the idle who revisited it at meals because it was more entertaining than the food. Davies had charge of it. Davies would keep it, because Davies kept things, and a thing Davies kept got aired.

He considered it for about as long as it took to establish two facts. The first was that the answer-set was finite and that he was in it. The second was that he was not, for the moment, anywhere near the top of it, because the House wanted a girl — a mark like that was a girl, the House had decided on the Thursday, and had spent three days failing only to produce her name. That failure was the whole of the problem. A girl-shaped slot, left open, was stable for about a week; past that, a boy's continued refusal to fill the slot a boy in his position was expected to be coy about stopped reading as modesty and started reading as a question of its own. And a House that worked a question long enough eventually tried the answers it had been too polite to try first. Nothing much followed from the House arriving at his, there being nothing in that compartment the House could see into or reach; but one did not, as a matter of operating procedure, leave a loose question with one's own name in the answer-set running in a room for the room to keep turning over. One closed it. It was cheaper than the alternative and it was, in any case, what he was.

The complicating variable was the amateur. A boy managing a mark that badly — the top button done up in May, the games shirt turned up to the throat, the whole business conducted with the furtive competence of someone who had never had to hide anything and was discovering he had no procedure for it — was a boy keeping the question hot by main force. Any containment that left him still flinching down the servery left the tap running. So the fix had to take the amateur off the boil as well, or it was not a fix. That this was the constraint he reached for first did not come up. Nothing had loaded against it to make it come up.

What was wanted was not a denial. A denial is an answer, and answers get tested. What was wanted was a *better* answer — pre-assembled, more repeatable than the truth, and anchored somewhere no one could follow it. He built her the way he did the trigonometry, with the part of him that went on working whatever else was missing, and it was the most interesting thing he had been handed all week that did not have Latvia in it. Clean little problem. Stayed solved once solved.

Spec. A village near enough that no one would call her a fiction and dull enough that no one would want to: Datchet, an hour off, the right side of nothing. A surname that stopped a query where it stood, because there is no checking a Smith. A father in timber — a trade that answered no questions on the grounds that it invited none. And one detail, wrong and specific and carried further than the girl herself, because a legend wanted a single thing doing all the work: a green bicycle with a basket. A bicycle put her on a road, in the open, in front of anyone — which is to say verifiable by no one, which is the property the detail wanted. He built the dead-end in last. Left her finished just short of corroborated, so that the House would supply the corroboration itself in its own time — Willoughby, most likely, would decide inside a month that he had seen her once at a station, and the file would close under Willoughby's signature rather than anyone's. The legends that held were the ones the mark completed himself.

Then he gave her to Finch, who sat at the near edge of the second-years' country, relayed everything he received inside the hour, and improved none of it — an ideal carrier, a clean length of pipe. He gave her to Finch the way one gives a thing to a room: on the Sunday, in the middle of a sentence about something else, addressed to nobody, in the flat bored register of a fact already in general circulation — which is the one condition under which a House will adopt a fact without once examining where it came from.

And then he filed her under *done* and went back to the report, which was owed, and not interesting, and had Latvia in it.

He did not tell Bartlett. There was nothing to tell him: the fault had not been Bartlett's to know about and the fix was not Bartlett's to thank anyone for, and in any case Bartlett had said *piss off* on the Friday and he was keeping to it, having got the instruction right, as he got most of them right once they were issued plainly. The girl would reach Bartlett the way she reached everyone — from the side, in someone else's voice, as a thing the House had always known. That she would reach, by that route, a boy who had spent four days failing to build one himself, and would arrive at that boy's end of the table looking from there like a hand come down out of nowhere, was not a feature he had designed and not one he examined. There was a report to finish. By the Sunday night the mark on Bartlett's neck was the smallest item on his desk, and the only one that had been any fun.

## 1. Condition First

*Thursday 18 to Sunday 21 May · Henry*

Holmes came back on the Thursday, which made it two nights this time.

Henry knew it was two because he had not been counting. Nobody had said anything about it this time, which was itself the pattern: the small ones went unannounced, a Tuesday night and a Wednesday and back before anybody had to write it down. It was only the long one, the fortnight before, that had got *family matter* at prayers from the House Master in the voice he kept for things not to be discussed, and a car had been seen, and Pembroke had a theory about a dead grandmother which Henry had let stand because it was tidier than anything else on offer. Five days, that one. Henry's family had managed one family matter in fifteen years, and that had been Great-aunt Hester, and she'd been ninety-four.

He came in halfway through supper, still in a travelling coat nobody had made him take off, and sat at the far end beside the second-years, who shifted up for him without being asked. The way you'd shift for weather.

"He's rather like a colt, isn't he, darling," Mum had said, on the Saturday of the parents' afternoon, doing up her gloves, in the voice which meant she was teasing and also meant something else she plainly had no intention of explaining. Henry had been cross about it for the better part of a week, on the grounds that it was a ridiculous thing to say about a person, and also, now it had been pointed out, true, which was worse. Then, because a true thing was a thing one could use, Dad said, whatever one felt about how one had come by it, he'd got out the Pony Club manual. Not the actual one. Mum had confiscated that when he was nine. The one in his head, which was more or less complete.

Condition first. Always condition first.

Off his feed: yes. Holmes took a piece of bread, tore it into progressively smaller pieces, and ate one.

Coat: Henry was not going to think about Holmes's hair in those terms, and did. Dull. A greyish cast under the eyes. Collar standing a quarter-inch off his neck all the way round, which it hadn't a fortnight ago. *Tucked up*, the book would say. Dropped condition.

Then the hand. Holmes reached for the water jug and his left hand came out of the sleeve with two fingers taped together and the knuckles gone the colour of plums.

"What've you done to your hand?" Henry said down the table, before deciding to. Third time of asking. The first had been a fortnight ago and had got him the Herodotus.

Holmes looked at him. Then at the hand, briefly, the way you'd check a watch you already knew the time on. Then at his plate.

"Did you do the Thucydides."

"That's not—" Several second-years were now watching with interest. "Yes. Obviously."

"Mm."

And that was that. Holmes poured his water with the taped hand, not favouring it, and drank, and Henry sat there holding a completely unanswered question with nowhere to put it.

Head carriage had given him trouble at first, because the book was all horses throwing their heads up at things, and Holmes's head never went up at anything. It went still. But then a tray went over by the servery with a noise like a car crash, and every boy in the hall turned round, and Holmes didn't turn round. He stopped. Fork halfway. Not a flinch, nothing so much as a flinch. Everything in him arrived at the same very quiet place at the same instant, stayed there for a count of perhaps three, and then the fork carried on.

*A horse standing frozen is not a calm horse. Never approach from behind.*

Henry had spent two years thinking that was just a thing Holmes did.

Stable vices: easy. Holmes smoked like a crib-biter. Henry watched him from the library window after prep (the library being, that week, the one room in the House where nobody asked after the health of Patty Smith), down in the alcove by the west wall, lighting the second off the end of the first. Not his usual ones, either. Cardboard tubes instead of filters, which Holmes crimped flat with his teeth before lighting, once and then a quarter-turn and once again, because two of the fingers that would ordinarily have done it were taped together; out of a packet with lettering Henry couldn't read from the second floor but which didn't look to have been bought in Windsor. Henry, who had a certain standing in the matter of Holmes's teeth, watched him do it twice. Relatives abroad, presumably. Lots of families had relatives abroad.

Licking and chewing, the thing a horse did when the worry went out of it, he had privately assigned to the bit after the second cigarette, when Holmes let his head go back against the brick and his jaw went slack. Henry had been rather pleased to find that one. He'd written nothing down, obviously. But if he had written anything down, that would have got a tick.

He had not gone across while Holmes was away, there having been no door to go across to. He had not gone across on the Thursday, when Holmes came in at supper in the travelling coat with the plum-coloured hand, nor on the Friday, nor on the Saturday, though by the Saturday there was no particular reason not to beyond the one he declined to examine. He went across on the Sunday, after prep, with a pretext he had been carrying since the Monday and had taken out and set down a dozen times without once managing to leave it down.

The pretext was the record. Patty Smith was the settled view of the House now, and the two of them were the only people in it who knew there was no Patty; and it had come to seem to Henry, over four days of not examining it, that somebody had better say as much, out loud, once, so that the thing was straight between them. He had known on the Monday that this was nonsense. He knew it again on the Sunday, in the corridor, with his hand not yet up to knock. There was nothing in it that wanted saying. Both of them knew where Patty had come from and why. Neither had the least need of Henry to put any record straight.

He knocked, and did not wait, because waiting would have made it a visit.

Holmes was at the desk, and turned round the way he turned round at anything, which was neither quickly nor slowly but all at once, arriving at a stop. The collar was still standing a quarter-inch off his neck. He looked at Henry with the blankness of a boy interrupted at nothing in particular and waiting to be told the reason for it.

Henry gave him the reason. He gave it well — he had the carrying voice for it and he used it — and he heard the whole thing go out of him into a room much too small to hold it: the record, the House, the two of them, *straight between us.* He heard how *between us* sounded and did not take it back, because taking it back would have been worse than leaving it standing.

Holmes listened to all of it. Then he got up, put the chair in under the desk, and stood clear of the middle of the room.

He did it with no change of expression whatever — with the same economy he had used the week before, when Henry had said *oh, do piss off, Holmes,* and he had got up and gone to the far end of the table and kept to it ever since without once getting it wrong. He did not say *about time.* He did not say *I wondered.* He did not say anything, and Henry had been braced for something, and the something did not come, so that he was left standing just inside the door with a whole speech spent and no way at all to tell whether he had been forgiven, or agreed with, or merely obeyed.

So he went in.

It was a great deal harder to be methodical at close range.

"What," said Holmes.

This was the Sunday, in Holmes's room, afterwards. Henry was sat on the end of the bed doing up his cuffs with all the dignity the situation allowed, and had been looking at Holmes's eyes. Checking for white at the rim. *A soft eye indicates a horse at ease.* Holmes lay flat on his back with one arm over his forehead, looking at Henry along the length of it.

"You've an eyelash," Henry said.

Holmes considered this with an expression of mild, exhausted puzzlement, as if Henry were a crossword clue in a language he didn't take. Then he shut his eyes, which from a data point of view was no help at all.

He was asleep inside a minute. Not dozing. Gone, like a lamp.

A horse only lay down flat, the book said, where it believed itself safe. Which was obviously not relevant, this being Holmes's own room.

Henry did up the other cuff, and found the book had one more thing to say, from a page he hadn't thought about in six years: the one with the drawing of a pony standing square in a field, looking perfectly well.

*Horses do not complain as dogs do. A horse may be quite lame and stand quietly. Check the legs daily for heat.*

Well, one couldn't go deciding things on the strength of a children's book about ponies. One would need more to go on than that. One would need the animal to indicate it somehow, and that was rather the whole difficulty with horses.

At the door he stopped and looked back, purely in the interests of method, at the taped hand hanging off the edge of the mattress. It didn't look swollen. You couldn't really tell from there, though. You were meant to check for heat.

## 1½. Alley

*Wednesday 24 May · Henry*

"—which is *precisely* the point," Henry said. "One does not confirm things. One is vague. There
is an entire grammar of being vague and it exists for exactly this, and you have never once
troubled to learn so much as the present tense of it, and I am offering, out of—"

Holmes came round the end of the fives courts a pace ahead of him, hands in his pockets, with the
lope of a boy who had heard the preamble and the middle and could, if pressed, supply the end. His
face was turned a few degrees toward Henry and his eyes had gone up and off to the left, to the
roofline, where there was nothing whatever to look at, in the manner of a boy giving his close
attention to the sky. Henry had been building this since the eleventh. He raised his voice very
slightly into the inattention, which did not move.

In the alcove Holmes put his shoulder blades to the brick, got one heel up flat against it, and
brought a pack out of the inside of his tailcoat — pale card, lettering Henry couldn't read and
had no need to read, having seen the shape of it twice from the library window. He got one lit the
one-handed way the taped fingers left him, crimping the tube against his teeth, and the sight of the
pack took the whole of Henry's momentum out from under him at a stroke.

"Oh, come *on.* Not those bloody things again. Hadn't you gone back to the filtered ones?"

Holmes got it lit off a plastic lighter, cupping the flame right-handed, and took the first of it.
"Found another pack in my bag," he said, around the smoke, in the flat bored voice of a boy
sharing a fact out of habit.

He let the smoke go, and caught Henry's expression, which had collected several objections into one.

"What's your problem," Holmes said — genuinely, as a boy with no notion on earth why anyone would
mind what he smoked.

Henry had the strong sense of a lecture being derailed and the correct secondary sense that the
lecture was not going to help anyway, and answered the question as put, on the grounds that he
might at least get this one minor thing settled, except that getting it settled implied there would
be further occasions on which it would need to have been settled, which was its own small horror and
which he declined to look at. "They taste absolutely foul."

"Good job you're not smoking them, then." Reasonable. Almost kind.

"No, but I am *kissing* you after you've smoked them," Henry said, dropping without noticing out of
the lecture and into the register in which he complained to Willoughby about the laundry, "and thereby
finding myself subject to some appalling Russian tobacco mixture at no notice whatsoever. You might at
least try to be considerate."

"You're proposing," said Holmes, turning this over with the dead flat interest of a man receiving a
genuinely novel item, "an administrative order that I announce which brand of fags I've got on me
before snogging you."

"That," said Henry, chin coming up, "would be the logical approach, yes."

And Holmes looked at him.

It was nothing — it was less than nothing, it was half a second of a boy looking at another boy over
a cigarette — except that the face had come off him entirely, no guard on it at all, and what was
under the guard was something Henry had no column for. He had a column for hostility and a column for
the flat nothing and a column, lately and privately, for the bad giggling. This was none of those. The
eye had gone soft and there was no white at the rim of it, and the instrument that Henry was not going
to admit to carrying turned that fact over once — *a soft eye indicates a horse at ease* — and could
do absolutely nothing with it, because the animal was not supposed to be at ease, and Henry had no page
for what it meant that it was. The half-second stalled him clean.

Then it was no time to be looked at like that, for God's sake, and he got himself back. He unfolded his
arms, pulled his waistcoat down straight, and reset.

"Hem. *Anyway.* Since you've no doubt deleted the whole of it already, I had been explaining that one
cannot simply go about broadcasting one's private business to anybody who happens to put the question—"

"It's opsec, Bartlett," Holmes said, tipping his head back against the brick and flicking ash. "Something
you'd do well to take a course on."

Henry's voice went up and cracked on the second syllable, because he was fifteen, and rang off the brick.
"*Opsec.* That is *opsec* to you — announcing to the entire bloody table that we *shag.*"

Holmes's face did not alter by a degree. He recited it round the end of the cigarette, in his father's
words, in his father's flat. "Confirming a truth that sits outside the listener's permitted category
space extends the duration of the—"

"It is *not done,*" Henry said over the top of him, both hands going now, "you cannot simply sit there
and in your stupid flat voice announce—" and here he did Holmes, badly, deadening his own face and
flattening his own voice "—'oh, yes, we've had it off most weeks since March,' that's not—"

"Weekly, more like," said Holmes, sniggering, cutting in on *weeks.*

Henry's sentence came apart in his mouth. He went pink. "Absolutely *not.* The last gap was twelve
days. Before that it was fourteen."

Holmes gave a disbelieving laugh, a great deal nearer a giggle than anything he showed a room. "You're
*keeping track?*"

Henry went pink from the collar up and glared in his most serious manner. "No," he said. Yes.

"Well, I have been. More or less." Holmes blew the smoke off sideways, away from Henry, without
appearing to decide to. "And before the fixtures started crowding the weekends the average interval
was three to five days, which I'd put at weekly. So if you've settled on once a fortnight, mine's the
more accurate figure."

It was bad methodology, and bad methodology was bad methodology. Henry's hand came up before the rest of
him had been consulted. "It is *not,* because you've clustering effects — one can't take every free
weekend into the set as though they were independent, and the interval where Latin got moved is plainly
invalid and ought to come out—"

"Clustering's a pattern in its own right," said Holmes, with the frank engagement of a boy having an
ordinary and interesting conversation. "It doesn't eliminate the frequency data, it describes it."

Henry drew breath. The finger was up; the recovery was loading, the *that is not the point, the point is;*
and Holmes, who could see it coming, got in first. He took a long, deliberate pull, left the thing hanging
off his lower lip, let his head go back against the brick and looked at Henry sidelong down the length of
his own face, the throat drawn long out of the collar.

"Twelve, you said. Last one."

For half a second nothing in Henry moved. His face simply emptied. Then the colour came up from somewhere
below the collar and kept coming, and he was across the gap in a single step, plucked the papirosa out of
Holmes's mouth, dropped it, and put his heel on it — one twist, two — and turned and walked.

"*Ah* —" Holmes, staring at the ground. "That was only half gone, you *arsehole.*"

Henry kept walking. Behind him he heard Holmes come off the wall, and the unhurried four strides it took
those legs to draw level.

"Oh, for— don't be like that."

"I am not being like anything." Eyes front, not turning his head. "I am returning to quarters. Clearly we
have nothing further to discuss."

"*I am returning to quarters,*" said Holmes, falling in at his shoulder and lifting his chin to exactly
Henry's angle, a perfect and idiotic Bartlett.

"And you are not invited," Henry said, not looking at him, which was the only defence that had ever worked
and did not work now either, because Holmes laughed and leaned in to get a proper look at his face, well
inside the distance a person was allotted, and had to be shoved off, and caught himself, and came round in
front to walk backwards and say something Henry did not afterwards repeat to anyone. They went round the
corner of the music rooms together, Henry's voice climbing again about the general principle of the thing,
Holmes's pitched too low to carry.

He did not, at any point, look back down the path.

## 1¾. Interval

*Wednesday 24 May · Sherlock*

Nothing was owed until the Friday.

He had the fact the way he had the hand — at intervals, in the register of things noticed and not
attended to — except that there was nothing to be done with it. The report was in. Greek ran clear
to Thursday. The House question had shut itself over the weekend under somebody else's name, which
was how he had built it to shut. Latvia was a sheet of paper in a pocket he did not control and
could not hurry, and until it moved there was no part of it that was his to work. For the better
part of an hour there had been nothing running at all.

Into the nothing, at the usual time, came Bartlett — a pace behind and half a pace to the side, in
tails, with a point he had been assembling since the eleventh and meant to deliver whether or not
it was received. So he let it be delivered, and attended to it, which was not a decision. Attention
did not switch off between tasks any more than the hand did; it only went to the nearest thing, and
the nearest thing was Bartlett. He put his back to the brick, got a heel up flat against it, and
found the pack in his coat — the one he'd turned up in his bag and not thrown out, having no
particular reason to — and crimped the tube against his teeth, the taped fingers not leaving him
the usual way of it, and lit it right-handed off the lighter. Bartlett's whole argument fell over
at the sight of the pack, which was the first genuinely interesting thing it had done.

He could not, in fact, see what the matter was. A cigarette was a cigarette. He said so, more or
less, and Bartlett, derailed, answered the question he had actually been asked — which was rare
enough to be worth having caused — and the answer, when it arrived, was that the things tasted
foul, and the reason Bartlett knew how they tasted was Bartlett, and here, chin-first, came the
proposal: that he give notice. That he announce which brand he had on him before kissing anybody.

He turned it over. It was a genuinely novel item. Bartlett had taken the one thing in the world
that ran on no procedure whatever and drafted a procedure for it, in earnest, waistcoat and all,
and was standing there having drafted it — and he looked at him.

There was no guard on his face when he did. There had been none on it for an hour; nothing had
asked for one; and he did not notice its absence. He looked at Bartlett the way one looks at a
thing that is absurd and good, and made nothing of it. Then Bartlett got himself back — pulled the waistcoat straight, said *hem,*
reset to the agenda — and the moment, having been required by nothing, was kept by nothing, and he
reached for the one word that did fit.

"It's opsec, Bartlett."

It was. That was the plain fact Bartlett would not have. The doctrine was his father's and it was
correct and it applied: a truth confirmed outside the listener's permitted category space cost you
the duration of the correction, every time, and the cheap move was to decline the category. He
recited the whole of it, around the cigarette, while Bartlett's voice climbed and cracked off the
brick on the word *shag,* and none of it landed, because Bartlett was not arguing the doctrine.
Bartlett was arguing that the thing was not *done.* Two conversations, and only one of them knew it.

The interval was the part that nearly got away from him. Bartlett said twelve days, and then
fourteen, defending the figure downward with the earnestness of a boy who had settled it in
advance — and the figure was wrong, and a wrong figure itched, and he had said so before deciding
to: that he had been keeping it himself, more or less, and that before the summer fixtures began
crowding the weekends the mean had sat at three to five days, which was weekly, and that a
fortnight did not survive contact with the data. Which was true, and which he had, in fact, been
keeping. He registered — flatly, in passing, the way one registers that a count has come out even —
that he was in possession of a dataset with precisely two people in it, one of them himself,
maintained across six weeks against no requirement he could name, never once decided
the purpose of. He made nothing of that either, and got back to the methodology, because Bartlett had
produced clustering, and clustering was a pattern in its own right and did not eliminate the frequency
data, it described it. And measured against everything that was not Latvia, it was the best the week
had done.

He wound it on, because it wound, and because Bartlett rising to it was the most entertaining thing
the day had turned up. Bartlett did his voice — deadened the face, flattened the vowels, got it
comprehensively wrong — and he wanted the whole of that, start to finish, and watched for it, and
set the figure down in front of Bartlett once more only to see the face empty and refill.

It cost him the cigarette. Bartlett crossed the gap in one step, plucked it out of his mouth,
dropped it, and put his heel on it, twice.

"—that was only half gone, you *arsehole.*"

He came off the wall and went after him. The legs were shorter and the dignity was total and
neither was going to last the walk to quarters, and there was, still, nothing owed until the Friday.

## 2. Prep

*Sunday 28 May · Henry*

Henry got as far as *Ambitione autem magis quam avaritia adductus* before he had to put the pen down.

Which was, all things considered, further than he'd expected. He'd sat down at his desk at seven-forty-two, having timed the interval from Hall specifically so that he'd not run into Holmes in the corridor, had spread the Sallust and a piece of paper and his good pen, and had set the whole assembly in front of him with a small mental *right.* As if he were about to do prep. Which he was.

He was going to do the prep. Nothing was more obvious than that he was going to do the prep, in fact, because the alternative was to sit here and think about supper, and he was absolutely not going to be sitting here thinking about bloody supper.

*Sic ille numquam*—

The thing that was actually unfair about it, when one broke it down, was that he'd been in the middle of a perfectly civil conversation with Chaudhry. Something about the Boat Race, or possibly about — well, it hardly mattered *what* it had been about. The point was that it had been Henry's conversation, with Henry's classmate, in Henry's own bloody House, and to have it hijacked by a boy at the opposite end of the table doing whatever it was he'd been doing with his fork was, frankly, not on.

Not that anyone else had noticed. Which was possibly the worst part of it. Chaudhry hadn't blinked. Chaudhry had gone right on being reasonable about the Boat Race, or whatever it had been, while Henry's face — Henry did not need to be told — had done something.

Well, he'd rallied. He'd carried on. He'd made his point about the Boat Race with, if anything, rather too much conviction, and Chaudhry had said *steady on, Bartlett,* in that voice of his, and Henry had said something else, he couldn't now recall what, and the fork had gone into the mouth and out again and Holmes had gone back to his book like a man returning to weather.

*—ille numquam consulem*—

Ninety-five percent of boys, Henry thought, would have simply eaten off the fork like anybody else. There existed, in the universe of possible fork-mouth interactions, precisely one which required a specific and pointed lick, and only Holmes would have selected it, and only in service of — well.

Only in service of what, exactly.

Henry set the pen down properly, this time, and pushed himself back in his chair.

That was the other thing. Because Dad had said, some years ago, in the context of something else entirely, that if one caught oneself trying to reconstruct what somebody had *meant* by a small gesture then one had already lost the exchange. And Henry could hear Dad saying it. And Dad was right, of course. Dad was almost always right about this sort of thing, that was rather Dad's whole job. So the correct move, quite obviously, was to *not* sit here reconstructing what Holmes had meant by the fork, and to instead be getting on with the Sallust.

He looked at the Sallust.

The problem was that he already knew what Holmes had meant by the fork. There was no reconstruction required. It had been perfectly bloody clear at the time and it was perfectly bloody clear now, and *therefore* — this was the important bit, Dad, if you're listening — he was not reconstructing anything. He was simply retaining information which he had already correctly and completely acquired at the point of delivery.

Which was different.

The Sallust said *Sic ille numquam consulem se putavit factum esse quamdiu*— which was frankly beneath Henry's ability at this stage of the half, and he was going to knock it out in twelve minutes, and then he was going to do the Livy, and then he was going to write to Mum.

He was going to write to Mum, in fact, and he was going to inform her — politely, but with a certain firmness that he thought would probably come as a surprise to her — that comparisons one made about one's son's schoolmates in the summer, whilst doing up one's gloves and using a specific tone of voice, tended to lodge in the son's brain in a manner which was frankly out of proportion to the intended jest, and that in future perhaps she might—

He picked the pen back up. He was not going to write to Mum. Mum would only tell Dad, and Dad would either laugh or, worse, not laugh, and either outcome was intolerable.

*Sic ille numquam consulem se*—

The colt thing was, at bottom, a joke. That was the thing he kept having to remind himself. Mum had made a joke and Henry, being fifteen and, admittedly, in a certain phase of Pony-Club-flavoured susceptibility which he was prepared to acknowledge in the privacy of his own room, had taken the joke on board with a seriousness which, retrospectively, was not really the joke's fault. That was Henry's fault. Mum had said *rather like a colt, darling,* which was the sort of thing Mum said, and Henry had heard it and gone, well, yes, *isn't he,* which had been the wrong response, but which had already been made and could not now be unmade.

At any rate the entire Pony Club situation had, upon inspection, been a bit of a lark, and one which he'd not have taken up if he weren't presently — well, if the whole Holmes business hadn't been rather more front-of-mind than it strictly ought to have been, since the March thing, which was in any case over, as he had explained to Holmes several times, and which was not the sort of thing about which one wrote to one's mother, especially not to explain that her joke had produced a scholarly method.

*—putavit factum esse—*

Fine.

He was not, at any rate, going to Holmes's room. That much was settled. There was no earthly reason to go to Holmes's room; on the contrary there were roughly six earthly reasons not to, including but not limited to the Sallust, the Livy, exams in general, the fact that they were finished with the Thing (as he had, at various levels of eloquence, been maintaining since roughly the middle of March), the general principle that one did not reward that sort of behaviour with an audience, and — sixth and importantly — the fact that Holmes had almost certainly forgotten about it already, and Henry would arrive with a face on him only to find Holmes at his desk doing whatever it was Holmes did at desks and looking up like *what,* and Henry would then have to invent a reason for having come, and he'd get it wrong, and Holmes would work out what the real reason was, and Henry would go back to his own room having lost a further quarter of an hour of prep and any remaining dignity he'd started the evening with.

He had said so, in one form or another, on four occasions, which he could list, and on one further occasion (the Thursday of the bite, at supper, in front of everybody) had told him to piss off, which he did not list. Each time, Holmes had said *all right*, or *oh*, and had then done precisely as he was told, to the letter, for some days: stood aside on stairs, passed salt when asked, and was otherwise wherever Henry was not. Which was precisely what Henry had asked for. And which had been, on each occasion, so wholly intolerable inside of a week that Henry had found himself in that corridor at ten o'clock about a lexicon, or a laundry list, or once, on an evening he did not revisit, a fountain pen he had in fact been holding at the time. He had not examined this. One did not need to examine a thing that was over.

So.

*Sic ille—*

Toby's voice came through the wall, cheerfully, muffled, telling Willoughby's own reflection something extraordinarily loud about Saturday. Toby was doing prep the way Toby did prep, which was by talking at himself as he went. Henry, who ordinarily found this comforting, gripped the pen a little harder.

*—numquam consulem se putavit factum esse quamdiu—*

He put a comma after *quamdiu* and looked at it for a while. It was possibly the wrong sort of comma. He'd have to check.

He did not check.

He got up and went to the window instead, and stood with his hands in his pockets and looked out at nothing in particular, and then, because standing with his hands in his pockets was — now that he thought about it — a specifically Holmesian posture, which was frankly the last thing he wanted to be doing at the present moment, he took his hands out of his pockets and folded his arms instead. Which was worse. He unfolded them and let them hang.

There was nothing to see out of the window. The chapel roof. A star. Somebody having a fag on the far corner of the quad in a way that suggested he did not know he was visible from here.

Not Holmes. Wrong build.

Henry moved away from the window.

He sat back down at the desk. He looked at the Sallust. He looked at *quamdiu.* He picked up the pen. He put the pen back down.

Right. Livy, then. Livy was less irritating.

He got the Livy out. He set it on top of the Sallust. He looked at the Livy.

The Livy did not help.

Somewhere in the House a bell went for the half-hour. Henry did not know which half-hour it was. He listened to Toby, through the wall, laughing at something he'd apparently said to himself. He picked the pen up. He put it down. He picked it up again and drew, on the corner of the paper, a small and rather bad rectangle, and then, next to it, a slightly better rectangle, and then he stopped, because the rectangles were on their way to becoming a horse, which was — obviously — not on.

He crossed them out.

*Ambitione autem magis quam avaritia adductus,* he wrote, again, on the next line, in his best hand.

Bloody Holmes.

***

The Livy did not help either.

The Livy did not really *require* help; it was more that Henry could not now hold a page of text in his head for longer than it took his eye to travel across it, which was — his form master had once said this to him — a state characteristic of the boy who was not attending, and characteristic in particular of the boy who was not attending on purpose. Henry had at the time considered this a bit rich, coming from a man whose own attention was famously the width of a slice of toast. He now, on his own testimony, revised: form master had been right, on the general principle, if not in the specific instance he'd been complaining about. Henry was not attending. Henry was, in point of fact, actively not-attending, which was a different discipline again and required, he found, a certain sustained effort.

He closed the Livy. Fine.

If he was going to spend the evening not-attending to Latin, he might at least, as it were, deploy the not-attending on something *else,* and thus have the not-attending do some useful work. He was Bartlett. Bartlett was allowed to have — and, in fact, was widely believed to possess — a first-rate mind, though on nights like this evening Henry was less than fully persuaded of it himself. Even so.

The correct approach, obviously, was to do the *whole* thing rigorously. Not to sit here reheating a fork in some sort of exhausted domestic circuit. If he was going to be thinking about Holmes at all — which he was very much *not,* except in the sense that he had, plainly, been doing so for the last forty minutes — he might as well do so in the manner of somebody with an actual system.

The system, however unflattering it was to admit it, existed.

The system was Pony Club.

Henry sat up straighter in his chair. He drew a fresh piece of paper out of the pile and set it in front of him, and pushed the Sallust and the Livy neatly to the corner. He did not, of course, write *anything at the top of the paper.* One did not label such things. But he permitted himself a small mental heading.

*Condition.*

Off, at rate of some considerable descent, over the course of the half thus far. Weight down. Colour poor about the eyes. Coat — Mum's word for it, wouldn't stop using it — dull. Sleep unclear but present enough at least on some evenings, in ways which Henry was not going to itemise on paper because it was one thing to do this exercise and it was another to write down the specific evidence.

Feed: variable. Henry had seen Holmes eat a whole apple in three bites once, standing up in the corridor, and had seen him move a full plate of Sunday roast round a table for forty-five minutes as if arranging a diorama. Manual said: *irregular appetite in a young animal deserves particular attention, especially where the animal is otherwise doing work.*

The word *work* did a small unhelpful thing in Henry's head and moved on.

Startle response, then. Because that was where he'd got stuck last time. And here Henry was on ground he'd covered thoroughly enough to be sure of it, and could rehearse the finding without particularly needing to reopen the file. The finding was: does not go up. Goes still. Went still, specifically, on the twelfth, when Peters had dropped a whole tray of glasses in Hall and every boy in the room — even the ones who'd have said afterwards that they hadn't reacted — had turned round, and Holmes had not. Fork halfway up. Nothing at all. Then, after a small measurable count, the fork carrying on.

The manual on this was clear.

*A horse standing frozen is not a calm horse. Never approach from behind. Where such stillness is habitual the animal has likely been handled harshly or in conditions of sustained fear at an early age.*

Which was the sentence, of course. That was always the sentence.

Henry looked at the sentence in his head for a while.

The problem with the sentence — well, one of the problems, at any rate — was that it was the sentence the manual had saved for the animals of which it, in the illustrated section, was actively disapproving of the previous handling. It had a specific illustration next to it, which Henry remembered even though he had not seen the book since Mum had confiscated it: a young horse with its head level and its ears not doing anything and one hind foot cocked, which the caption said was the pose of an animal who had learnt that reaction did not help. There had been a note in the margin, in his own eight-year-old writing, saying *sad*, which had struck his eight-year-old self as a workmanlike summary at the time.

The manual had gone on, on the next page, to say some perfectly workable things about how to handle such an animal in the ordinary way of yards — quietly, predictably, at a distance, not from behind, and never with an audience, because such an animal did not need to be *made* to do anything, it needed to be given a great deal of opportunity to do things itself, and observed doing them.

Henry read that page in his head three times, on the strength of the fact that he could still see the drawing.

Well. Alright.

The next passage was the one he'd rather not have got to, and had been going to get to anyway. The next passage began:

*Sometimes it is not the horse's temperament, but its history—*

He did not finish it. He knew how it went. It went on, in respectable and horse-doctorly language, to explain that where a young animal had been worked too hard too young, the resulting animal might be sound to look at and adequate in condition, and might even do good work, but was liable to peculiarities of response which repaid careful observation and considerable patience.

He put the pencil down.

Because — this was the bit, this was where the whole rigorous exercise went slightly wrong — this was a description of *history,* was it not. History being, by definition, not visible in condition. The whole *point* of the passage was that condition might not tell you. You had to know a thing you could not see.

Which was, when one thought about it, a nonsensical thing for a Pony Club manual to be talking about at all. Because you couldn't ask a horse.

You could, of course, ask a person. In theory.

Henry, whose eyes had gone slightly out of focus, looked at the wall above the desk without seeing it. He was aware of himself as a boy sitting at a desk. He was aware, in a further and slightly displaced way, that in the room across the corridor there was probably, statistically speaking, another boy sitting at another desk, doing whatever he did at desks, which Henry had thirty seconds' policy of not identifying. The awareness was ordinary. Boys and desks and corridors. Nothing very much in that.

It was the going after it that was the problem.

Because for a small and terrible moment Henry found himself trying to *do* the thing he had not, up until now this evening, actually done, which was not to imagine what he would feel if he were in Holmes's shoes at Holmes's desk (that was easy, tedious, and involved being fifteen and tired and possibly having a cast on) but to imagine what it was like to be *Holmes* at Holmes's desk. Which was — and this was the part which caught him — not the same operation.

The first operation gave you Henry-with-different-props. The second gave you — well, it didn't give you anything, was the trouble. You couldn't just decant yourself into a different jug. If the jug was another shape, if the jug had been the jug it was for some considerable time already, you were going to have to think about what jug-shape actually *was.*

*Bit above my pay grade,* Henry thought, in a tone he was hoping would sound like Dad's and which sounded, when it played back in his head, distinctly younger than Dad's.

He got up from the desk. He got up quite quickly. He crossed the room and turned off the desk lamp and stood a moment with his hand on the switch, and then, because that was the sort of gesture a man made in a room he had decided to leave, and because he had not in fact decided to leave, he stood there in the dark for a while longer than was strictly required.

He was not going to Holmes's room. That was still the case. That was, at this point, the most established fact of the evening.

He got ready for bed the way one did on the assumption that one was going to sleep, which was without particular ceremony. He got into bed. He turned the little bedside lamp off. He put his hands behind his head.

The dark did not have Sallust in it. It did not have Livy either. It did not, unfortunately, have any of the useful furniture of the evening at all. It had only the wall, and the wall, at the moment, was not particularly interested in being neutral.

*Sometimes it is not the horse's temperament, but its history.*

Oh, do shut up, Henry thought, distinctly, at his own head. But his own head, uncharacteristically obedient in most respects, did not.

Instead, quite gently and entirely without his permission, his head produced — not the fork, not the fork *this* time — the small technical question of whether Holmes had, at Hall this evening, actually eaten anything. Because Henry did not, when he searched the picture he had in his mind's eye of the meal, find any particular evidence that a plate had gone from full to less full. There had been potatoes at one point. He was almost sure there had been potatoes. He could not now recall whether the potatoes had moved.

He thought this for a while.

*Bloody Holmes,* he thought again, on principle, but the *bloody* had less carriage in it now, and the thought which followed was not really an argument.

It was the shape of a person he had not, up until this evening, spent very much energy thinking of as one.

Which was, quite plainly, a very great deal of things at once, most of them not appropriate to be thought at half past ten at night by a fifteen-year-old with two Latin translations still to do, and Henry was going to leave it. He was going to leave it right there. He would think about none of it. He would sleep. He would be up at half six as usual. He would do the Sallust before chapel. It would be fine.

He turned onto his side, facing the wall, closed his eyes, and, in the dark, in a voice which was not Dad's and not Mum's and not any voice he was currently prepared to identify, said, silently, to nobody in particular:

*Oh no.*

***

The trouble with having spent an entire evening not thinking about a specific thing was that, sooner or later, one had to lie down in the dark, and the dark was, notoriously, the location where the specific thing was kept.

Henry lay there for what he estimated at about four minutes with a certain philosophical resignation, because he could feel it coming. He had been, on the whole, rather magnificent this evening. He wished to note this, if only privately. He had gone the entire span of hours from Hall to bed without once thinking about the pre-fork Thing Event. Which had been, if he was going to be technical about it, the actual matter, in the sense that the fork had merely been Holmes being an arsehole in public, whereas the Thing Event that had preceded the fork had been — well, whereas the Thing Event had been the Thing Event, which was a separate cabinet, and the door of which had, until this evening, been very well shut indeed.

Henry, aged fifteen, had been, all told, an exemplar of self-discipline. He wanted the record to reflect it. A gold star to Bartlett, thank you very much.

Of course, saying that he had not thought about it was itself a form of noting that he had not thought about it, which was — he saw the trap opening about a quarter of a second before he stepped in it — a form of thinking about it. Which meant that the four minutes of resignation had, in fact, been a slow approach to the cabinet door, and Henry now had his hand on the handle, and the handle was warm.

The face materialised.

Normal face. Perfectly ordinary face. He wanted to note this too, for the same imaginary record: the face he had just retrieved was the face he had every right to have retrieved, in the sense that it was — bluntly — the face Holmes made under the specific circumstances of the specific activity, and Henry had been present for that face at least — well, he was not going to count, he was not going to count, and Sherlock's average interval calculations were not going to be relevant here, thank you — several times, and the face was, on its own terms, fine. Filed appropriately. Cabinet-appropriate. It sat in the cabinet the way it was meant to.

Except that this face, on its way past, had brushed something else in the cabinet, and the something-else had come out with it.

*Bugger,* thought Henry.

Because that was the other face. The face from — count backwards — the Wednesday, not the Thursday, no, definitely the Wednesday, after Holmes had come back from his five days away. Which had itself been the only absence that half of any length worth the name, the rest being a night here and a Tuesday there, and which Henry was not — obviously — keeping a mental tally of, but which had lodged in the general sense as *the long one*, alongside a growing collection of related items which Henry had likewise not been keeping a tally of. Peters had a theory about a dead grandmother. Pembroke had also had one, at some earlier point. The theories were interchangeable and unconvincing, and Henry, publicly, had not required them.

At any rate, that Wednesday. Which had begun with Holmes coming into Hall in a coat somebody had elected not to make him take off, and had proceeded through a day of Holmes being snappy at Chaudhry at prep and saying something perfectly foul to Willoughby who had not deserved it, and had concluded — in the way these things did — with Henry, going down the corridor for entirely legitimate reasons involving a towel rail, arriving, coincidentally, at Holmes's door at the same moment as Holmes was, coincidentally, at Holmes's door, and there followed a small quantity of civil remarks in the doorway on the subject, primarily, of nothing, and in due course of some further remarks about the towel rail, and in due course of the door being closed with Henry on the room side of it.

And then the face.

Not the ordinary face. Not the cabinet-appropriate face. The other face, the pre-face, the face before things had begun. Which had come out — briefly, without any suggestion Holmes had known it was on him — for perhaps a count of two, and had been:

Well.

That was where Henry had got stuck the first time, at the time, in the doorway, and where he was stuck again now. Because *desperate* was too big a word, and Henry did not go about applying big words to boys' faces, and one did not say a boy had looked desperate, that was — that was not a way one described boys. So he tried *tense,* which was too small, and *fraught,* which was Mum-vocabulary, and *knackered,* which was completely wrong. *Keyed-up.* Closer. But not it. Not the shape of the thing.

He arrived, because Henry's cognitive furniture at this precise moment in his life was — through no fault of his own, thank you *very* much, Mum — largely equestrian, at the word *whickering.* Which was, on inspection, absurd, because whickering was a sound, one did not describe faces by sounds. Except the sound of a young horse whickering sharply — the specific sort, the sharp one, the one where whatever a horse was ordinarily trying to do had run out of room — had a shape to it, and the shape of the shape matched, uncomfortably, the shape of the face.

Which was, on any reasonable calibration, a distress signal.

Which had been followed, in the actual event, by Holmes taking Henry's face in both hands and kissing him with the specific and unmistakeable determination of a person who had decided upon a course of action, and things had proceeded, and Henry had been very much involved in things proceeding, and had not, at any point during the proceedings, had cause or capacity to revisit what he had seen for a count of two before the proceedings began.

He had cause to revisit it now.

That, unfortunately, was not the difficulty.

The difficulty, which announced itself with the tact of a first-year running a message he had not been given, was that Henry's body, which had been perfectly quiet all evening throughout the Pony Club exercise and the Sallust and the Zambezi-quality mental efforts, had, at the exact moment Henry's brain produced the specific recollection of *hands on his face,* chosen to make its own view of the material known.

Its view was: enthusiastic.

Henry, without moving, did the mental equivalent of closing his eyes very hard, which was tautological, since they were already closed.

*Right,* he said, silently, to himself, in what was meant to be a level voice. Right. This was fine. This was, in the largest sense, actually fine. Every boy in the House, statistically, was engaged at any given moment in some approximation of the same physiological business to some degree or other; this was well understood and unremarkable; one did not have to make a *thing* of it; one simply attended to something else and it would sort itself.

He attended, therefore, to the crack in the plaster above his bed.

He rehearsed the shape of it. He named the little tributaries off the main crack. He assigned the main crack, on grounds of nothing in particular, the identity of the Zambezi.

His body was not, at the present juncture, interested in the Zambezi.

Fine. Alright.

The problem, which he was not yet quite prepared to formulate, was that his body did not appear to have processed the face — the *previous* face, the whickering-shaped face, the distress-signal face — as a distress signal at all. His body had processed it as a very specific and very highly indexed memory-cue with an established payload attached, and was, at the present moment, awaiting the payload with what he could only describe as institutional confidence.

Which was — well.

Which meant.

Well.

What it meant, on inspection, was that he had spent the last hour and a half doing perfectly rigorous and, he would have said, respectable Pony Club scholarship on the welfare state of the boy across the corridor, and his brain had produced the conclusion that this boy was, at a minimum, *not fine,* and possibly considerably worse than that, and his body, presented with exactly the same input, had produced the conclusion that this was, on the contrary, brilliant, more please.

Which two conclusions, however you angled them, were not the same conclusion.

And Henry did not, at present, know how to hold them at the same time.

He turned onto his back. Then onto his front, which was, on inspection, worse than the back had been. He turned back onto his back and looked at the dark ceiling.

*Some things,* Dad had once said, on the subject of some perfectly unrelated matter, at some perfectly unrelated moment of Henry's boyhood, *you simply have to wait out.*

Henry, with considerable dignity, waited.

The Zambezi remained available on the ceiling. Nothing to be done about that.

Meanwhile — this was the thought that would not go entirely away and was, unhelpfully, uncorrelated with anything his body was up to — meanwhile there was, on the other side of the corridor, an actual person, whose face on a Wednesday eighteen days ago — not that one counted — had, for a count of two, done a specific thing which one might, in the honesty of one's own dark room, be prepared to call *whickering,* though one would not, of course, ever say such a thing out loud about a boy, and would frankly rather die than have to explain the taxonomy behind it.

And Henry was, at present, still lying in bed with a body of the opinion that this was tremendous news.

He did not want to identify what he was feeling about any of that.

He would not identify it. He would lie here. He would wait it out with the dignity for which Bartletts were widely known. He would go to sleep. He would be up at half six. He would do the Sallust before chapel.

Except that at some point during the waiting, quietly, and without quite Henry's authorisation, the small piece of him that had said *oh no* earlier, in the voice not Dad's and not Mum's and not any voice he was currently prepared to identify, said, again, more slowly, and with a certain domestic weariness to it this time:

*Oh no.*

He waited.

The Zambezi wound placidly toward its estuary.

He waited a good deal longer than he had, honestly, expected to have to.

## 3. Report

*Sunday 28 May, the same evening · Sherlock*

The distance was 84 metres.

At the time there had been a flat smack off the steel upright of the bus shelter behind him, which on that street, with a bus pulling in, was a bus. He had filed the bright scar on the upright as he went, because one filed everything: fresh, about head height, on the face toward the building across the road. Nothing more. It had come back to him on the train, the way filed things sometimes re-sorted themselves, as a strike, with a direction. The angle of the scar gave him the line and the elevation; the Ordnance Survey sheet gave him the distance along it; and the line, run back, gave him an origin. In a window. Second floor. Fourth from the corner counting east.

Sherlock looked at the window on the tracing paper.

The window was in the front elevation of a small brown building whose ground-floor tenants were, per Yellow Pages, a firm of chartered surveyors. He knew, because Father had said so in passing three months ago, and because passing was where Father tended to say a good many things one was expected to have retained, that the second floor of the building was leased by a company called Corvid Trading Ltd, whose registered office was in Guernsey and whose actual business was known to a small number of people including Father, who did not know that Sherlock knew, though probably assumed it.

Fine.

Sherlock drew a small red circle round the window on the tracing paper and drew, from the window, back down the trajectory, and past the point at which the trajectory intersected the pavement. He drew the pavement in ordinary pencil. He drew, on the pavement, the two people who had been on the pavement: an older Russian who had been the presumed target of the counter-surveillance leg, and, at a slightly different position along the same pavement, a boy of fifteen who had been drinking a cup of tea from a paper cup, and who, forty seconds later, would put the cup in a bin containing a further object which had come from a person who was not, at that particular moment, on the pavement at all.

The boy of fifteen, on the tracing paper, was a small stick figure with a small circle for a head.

The trajectory, on the tracing paper, terminated approximately six inches past the small circle for the head.

Sherlock rested the pencil on the paper.

Six inches past.

*Which would have been zero,* he thought, evenly, *if you had not paused at the kerb.*

He had paused at the kerb because a black estate car parked on the opposite side had had its off-side wing mirror folded in against the door, which was correct for a car that had been parked, and had, four minutes previously — this being the salient point — been folded out. Which was not correct. Which was: a person had been at the car in the interval. Which was: unassigned motion at his own six-o'clock. Which was: pause, check, resume when clear. Standard.

He had paused.

The bullet had gone six inches past.

Sherlock stared at the tracing paper.

He thought several things in fast succession, most of which were the correct operational thoughts. This changed the model of the Corvid leg. It suggested the Russian was not the presumed target after that shot, or had been secondary. It meant the true item of interest that day was a courier or contact whose identity was known to somebody in that window and whose destination that day had likewise been known to somebody in that window. It meant the object he had received in the bin transfer had, in point of fact, been received under fire. It meant, incidentally, that the person on whose behalf he had received was interesting to the tenants of the second floor of the surveyors' building in a manner about which he had not been briefed.

He noted these things.

*Compile findings. Report. Move on.*

He did not, however, immediately do any of that. He stayed sitting with his hand on the pencil.

The Ordnance Survey said what it said. The tracing paper said what it said. He had checked the trigonometry twice. He would, for pride, check it a third time in the morning, and he expected the third check to produce the same answer.

*Nevazhno,* he thought, in his father's mother's language, in the reflex he had never bothered to translate on the grounds that the translation was flat.

He put the pencil down.

He noticed, after some period he did not immediately estimate, that he was still sitting.

He was annoyed by this. It was not consistent with report-and-move-on. There was nothing on the paper to sit and look at further; the geometry was closed; the finding was known; the appropriate action was write-up. He would write it up. He would put it in the folder. He would put the folder in the drawer. He would lock the drawer. Standard sequence. In perhaps ninety seconds he would be in bed.

He continued to sit.

*Compile findings.*

Yes.

*Report.*

Yes.

He picked the pencil up again and made a tiny mark next to the small stick figure with the small circle for the head, without knowing quite what he had made the mark for. A mark on a working sheet that he could not account for was a mark Father would ask about, so he erased it, brushed the eraser dust off the paper into his palm, tipped his palm into the wastepaper bin, and set the pencil down in what he suspected was the same position it had been in previously.

He sat.

The taped fingers of his left hand — index and middle, which had objected, three weekends ago, to a boot, and some days after that to Vasily putting them back into the metacarpophalangeal alignment they had preferred not to be in — throbbed at the same small pulse rate they had been throbbing at all evening. The tape wanted changing. It had wanted changing for two and a half weeks. He had ceased attending to it. He noticed it now, briefly, and moved on.

Someone had shot at him in broad daylight.

There was one thing to do with that, which was write it up. Which he would. Father would receive it, and categorise it, and either explain something to Sherlock or not, and the consequence would go wherever consequences went, which was not, ordinarily, Sherlock's problem.

The last four words caught on something, briefly. He put them back where they lived, which was *not my problem.*

*Nevazhno.*

He noticed, further, in the register of things noticed without being attended to, that his jumper was on the sill and he was cold, and that he did not want to get up to fetch it. He noticed that he could not have a cigarette at this hour without going down to the west wall for the packet, which was not viable, and that in any case the last of the papirosy had gone slightly stale from being in the tree fork through a wet Saturday, and the ordinary filter ones had run out on Friday. He noticed that the report was not going to write itself. He noticed that, in an ordinary sense of the word, he was tired.

He wrote the report.

It took eleven minutes. It was neat. It contained a paragraph on the estate car and a paragraph on the trajectory and a paragraph on the implication regarding the identity-space of persons of interest to the tenants of the second floor of the surveyors' building, and it noted, at the end, with the specific dryness he had learnt was Father's preferred register for such notes, that the courier had paused at the relevant kerb for reasons unrelated to the shot and had not been aware at the time that a shot had been taken.

He read it back once. He signed it — a single letter, and a mark — in the corner. He put the tracing paper and the report into the folder. He put the folder in the drawer. He locked the drawer. He put the key back where the key went, which was inside the spine of a copy of *Nicholas Nickleby* his mother had once given him and which he had not read.

He stood up.

His back hurt, mildly, from having been at the desk since roughly seven.

He crossed to the sill, put the jumper on, crossed back, turned the desk lamp off, and stood in the dark for a moment with one hand on the desk.

The thing he had set on the *not my problem* shelf had not stayed on it. A fault you could not account for at eleven at night you looked at in daylight or not at all. He left it, and went to bed.

He slept quickly, on a breath out, the way he had been taught, and did not dream.

## 4. The Sallust

*Monday 29 May, morning · Henry*

Henry had woken at half six as promised, done the Livy in eighteen minutes (Livy was, as previously noted, less irritating), started on the Sallust, and got as far as *quamdiu* before the whole apparatus had come apart in his hands again, because the *quamdiu* problem had not been improved by a night's sleep, and Bartlett could not, this morning, find the will to lose to it a second time. He had shelved the Sallust for later. He would do it before Latin. He was, he had reminded himself over the two eggs of breakfast, *cross.* Being cross was, at present, load-bearing. Being cross was going to see him through.

The Sallust remained undone at chapel.

Chapel was, on the whole, a useful institutional stretch of time for Henry — twenty-two minutes, on average, of enforced immobility in which one could plan things. He had spent the first hymn planning what he was going to say to Holmes when he caught him after service. He had spent the responses refining the phrasing. He had spent the anthem — because the anthem was Purcell and Henry could not carry a Purcell tune to save his life — running the whole delivery through in his head a second time, at speed, to see whether it landed. It landed. Bartlett was going to Extract Reparations. Bartlett had a script.

The script wanted Holmes across the pews to be exhibiting his ordinary chapel behaviour, which was: head bowed at the specific angle he had calibrated over two years to look devout from the front while allowing him to read a book in his lap, occasional turn of a page under the hymnal cover. Henry had watched Holmes fail to attend chapel every Sunday and every weekday morning of the half so far. He could, if asked, have drawn Holmes's chapel posture from memory.

The posture this morning was almost right.

Almost right, in the sense that the head-tilt was a fraction further down than usual, and the eyes were not on the book. They were resting on the pew back three rows further ahead — not focused, just parked. And Holmes's left thumbnail was pressed against the base of his right thumbnail in the small ordinary gesture people make when they are somewhere else entirely and are unaware their hands have arrived at company.

Henry's newly-opened Pony Club file quietly pinged.

Henry, being cross, refused to attend to the ping. He returned his gaze to his own hymnal. He was going to sing the Purcell. He was going to be cross. Bartlett was going to Extract, and, having Extracted, was going to do the Sallust.

*Sometimes it is not the horse's temperament,* his brain offered, unbidden, *but its—*

Yes, thank you, Henry told his brain. That would do. He shut it up.

He sang. He sang badly, and continued to sing.

He looked, once, again, and Holmes had not moved. The thumbnail was still against the thumbnail. The head was still tilted at not-quite-right. Henry looked back at his hymnal for the remaining bars.

The service ended. Boys spilled out of pews and toward the doors in the ordinary directional current. Henry, ordinarily one of the more socially agile bodies in this current, contrived to move at an angle to it and to catch Holmes in the second half of the porch, where the acoustics were dry and the audience was thinning.

"Holmes."

Holmes did not answer.

Henry, in the small internal register he did not admit to keeping, revised his opinion of the morning by a small degree. This was not how one was addressed by Holmes at first-hail. First-hail was where you got the sharp head-turn and the flat stare — the calibrated one-point-five-second assessment that decided whether you were worth the return of eye-contact. Henry had been worth the return of eye-contact since March; there was no reason not to have the sharp head-turn.

He tried again. Slightly louder.

"Holmes."

The head did not turn. The eyes, Henry saw, had gone up over the flagstones toward the school gate, or possibly through it — a middle-distance parking Henry recognised, because everyone in Holland recognised it, because it had been part of standard-issue Holmes ambient for two years at least, and probably longer. Not novel. Every boy in the year could tell you the look of Holmes-gone-elsewhere. Every boy in the year had, at one point or another, held a snide remark or a request or a corridor greeting and put it away and gone on because Holmes had gone elsewhere and the remark would not, at that particular moment, land.

Henry had held remarks himself, at various times, and put them away.

He was not, at present, going to put this one away, because he had a specific and administrative errand which he had prepared, over Purcell, to a fine finish. The errand was going to be dispatched.

He opened his mouth to say the name a third time.

The third time did not happen.

Because Henry, whose eyes had by now had a longer look at Holmes than he had strictly authorised them to take, and whose Pony Club file was as of last night taking dictation without asking anyone's permission, had become aware that the classifier had by now made a further pass over the middle-distance stare and returned a slightly worse verdict than the previous two years' worth of passes had. Which was: this was the ordinary Holmes-gone-elsewhere stare, yes. The category was correct. But it had, in the *history-not-temperament* light, acquired a specific weight it hadn't had a fortnight ago.

Which meant that Henry, in continuing to stand there and say Holmes's name at him twice, was participating in an interaction whose ordinary courtesies he was, for reasons he was not going to enumerate, becoming reluctant to continue to observe.

He did not say the name a third time.

Instead — because he had to do *something* with his hands, and because the small remaining fraction of him that was still Cross was insisting the errand be dispatched — he reached across the intervening two feet of porch and took Holmes by the elbow.

The freeze-startle happened on schedule. It always happened. Boys who grabbed Holmes without warning got the freeze-startle; boys who had done it once did not do it a second time; Henry had done it perhaps three times in two years, on each occasion for perfectly reasonable errand-adjacent purposes such as this one. The response was well known. The whole House knew it. It was the freeze that came before whatever came next, and one did not stay to find out what came next unless one had a legitimate reason to be handling Holmes at all.

The freeze arrived. Henry stood through it, because he did have a legitimate reason, and because Bartlett did not scarper.

Then Holmes's head came round, his eyes crossed the two-foot distance between them, and the freeze released.

Which was — well.

Which was the other thing.

Because the release was not the slow-suspicious release of a boy checking that whatever had grabbed him wasn't going to grab him again. It was the ordinary release of a boy whose classifier had just returned Henry-shaped and had disarmed itself accordingly.

Henry, who had at some level over the past several months collected the data on which this response was based, and who was rigorously not looking at the shelf on which the data sat, did not look at the shelf.

The shelf was there. The shelf continued to be there. He did not look at it.

He said, before whatever machinery in his brain was going to intervene did intervene:

"I didn't finish Latin last night because you licked a fork at me."

The sentence, delivered in the porch, in the natural light, without the twenty-minute Purcell buildup, landed with a somewhat different acoustic than it had achieved in Henry's rehearsal. It sounded, in fact, faintly deranged.

Henry watched Holmes receive it.

Holmes received it with the entirely blank, uncomplicated, disquietingly *open* expression of a boy who was waiting for the rest of the sentence, and who was not producing his usual return volley of snark because his usual return-volley-of-snark subroutine had, at the present moment, not been loaded.

Henry gritted his teeth.

Because — this was, on inspection, the sort of thing his father would have called the *narrow window,* which was the phrase Dad used when one had committed to a course of action which required an immediate follow-through, and one's follow-through was, embarrassingly, still on the drafting table. Henry now had to produce the follow-through, in public, in a porch, to a boy currently unencumbered by his usual defences, without saying any of the things that comprised the actual case for the ask. Namely: the specific grievance-mechanic of the fork's opportunity cost, which would have required Henry to detail (a) what the fork had cost him — which was going to require identifying what the fork had been, which was not going to happen in the porch — and (b) why the cost was Holmes's responsibility, which was going to require a fair-is-fair construction which had been elegant in Henry's head and which had also, in Henry's head, been embedded in a longer speech.

The longer speech was no longer viable. The longer speech required its target to be defending his territory.

The target was not defending his territory.

Henry, gritting his teeth harder, cut to the operational.

"Can I copy your Sallust?"

"Oh," Holmes said. "Sure."

Which was, as it happened, insufferable.

But it was a different sort of insufferable to the fork. The fork's insufferability had been located, precisely and analytically, in Holmes. This new insufferability seemed to have located itself in the intervening air between the two of them, and to be — this was mortifying, and Henry noted it silently and briskly moved on — suffered largely on Henry's side, because Holmes had already gone back to looking at whatever he'd been looking at before Henry had grabbed his elbow.

Not the flagstones, exactly. Somewhere past. Henry did not follow the sight-line. He did not need to know what Holmes was looking at. It was in no way his business what Holmes was looking at.

"Right," Henry said. "Well."

Holmes did not answer.

They walked.

Henry did not know, until he was walking, that they were walking; but Holmes had, without seeming to make a decision about it, begun moving in the direction of his own House room, presumably to fetch the Sallust in question, and Henry, having no other place to be until Latin, walked alongside. The walk was — *brisk* was possibly too strong. It was neither brisk nor slow. It was the ordinary gait of a boy going somewhere for a reason he had not entirely committed to. Holmes's head-tilt, throughout the walk, remained at the fractional angle Henry had first noticed in chapel. His hands were in his pockets. He was not, at any point on the walk, particularly present in the walk.

Henry walked alongside him and did not say anything, because Henry could not, at the moment, think of anything to say which was not going to land in one of two categories: (a) more Sallust-adjacent bookkeeping, which was fine but did not require conversation, or (b) something in the general direction of the previous category, which he was not going to look at, and thus was not going to name.

The Pony Club sentence ran quietly across the top of his mind for the length of the courtyard.

*Sometimes it is not the horse's temperament, but its history.*

He walked, and his classmate walked, and the pigeons on the chapel roof did whatever pigeons did on chapel roofs on a Monday morning, and neither of them said anything at all.

## 4½. Daylight

*Monday 29 May, morning · Sherlock*

He checked the trigonometry a third time before chapel, flat on the desk with the drawer open, and it came out at eighty-four metres, which he had known on Sunday night it would. He hadn't checked it for the answer. He locked the drawer, put the key back inside *Nickleby*, and went to chapel, because it was a weekday and one went.

He took the end of a pew without choosing it, and saw that he had chosen it: wall at his back, and the windows all set high enough that nothing outside could see down into the pews. He had the book under the hymnal as usual. He didn't open it.

Eighty-four metres was a long shot through traffic for anyone who wasn't good, and a good one doesn't miss by six inches unless something moves. Something had. He had. An estate car with its wing mirror folded the wrong way since he'd last passed it, so he had stopped at the kerb to check it, and that was the whole of the margin. He went through it again and it came out the same. Then the window on the tracing paper, second floor, fourth from the corner, and the people who leased it, and what they'd needed to know about him to be waiting. He didn't know what they'd needed. He went through it again.

The organ started. He stood when the rows stood. Three pews ahead somebody had carved a small neat *R* into the back of the pew, and he looked at that, and went through it again.

Every time he got to the end of the sum there was nothing to do with the answer, so he started it again.

Somebody said his name in the porch, and then again. He heard it both times. It wasn't in the sum.

Then a hand on his elbow, and he had gone still under it before he knew whose it was, weight back, ready to find out what the hand wanted — and it was Bartlett, cross and pink and two feet away, and the stillness let go of its own accord.

"I didn't finish Latin last night because you licked a fork at me."

He looked at Bartlett. He could see there was a return owed on that, and a good one, and nothing came.

"Can I copy your Sallust?"

"Oh," he said. "Sure."

That was easy: a page, in his room, and his room was the next place to be. He started walking. Bartlett came along at his shoulder, saying nothing, which was unlike him, and Sherlock did not ask what that was about, because Bartlett had got what he'd asked for and the rest was Bartlett's.

Out of the porch and down the steps the road opened up. A car went by slowly with its window down and he watched it to the corner without turning his head.

He'd done what there was to do. The report was written and would go up when it went up, and Father would read it and either say something or not. Until then there was nothing to do with eighty-four metres except carry it, and it turned out it didn't carry like other things. He went through it again on the walk, and once on the stairs, and it came out the same.

## 5. Monday

*Monday 29 May · Henry*

The Sallust was in Holmes's room, so they went to Holmes's room, and Holmes opened the door and went in and did not fetch the Sallust.

He stood in the three feet of floor there was to stand in, with his head at the angle it had held since chapel, and looked at something that was not in the room. Henry came in as far as a boy comes who has been brought along to collect a book, which was not far, and waited to be handed it.

What happened next happened without a face before it, and that was the part Henry's instrument caught on, in the quarter-second it had to catch on anything. Every other time there had been a face first — the pulled-in, whickering thing he had learned to read and had, God help him, caught himself watching for since. This time there was no face at all, no sign of any kind, nothing the manual had a page for. Holmes simply crossed the floor he was already standing in the middle of and kissed him, briskly, the way you'd deal with an item near the top of a list before the bell went.

"Holmes. *Mate.*" Henry got a hand up flat between them, not pushing, only there. "We've got div in five minutes."

He had said it the way he'd have said it to anybody — because it was true, because they did, because the register was read at the quarter and your name went round the room if you weren't under it — and he had expected it to do nothing, and it did something.

Holmes stepped back out of the flat of his hand and said, "Yes." Then, "Yes — no, you're right," which were three answers to a question nobody had asked, and then he wasn't standing still any more. He went the length of the floor and came back, both hands up in his hair, and started talking.

It was about angles. That was as much of it as Henry could get: angles, and a line of sight, and a number, and a kerb, and the number again, fast and flat and climbing, pitched at nobody — at the window, at the wall — the words coming quicker than the room could want them and not stopping at the places where sentences stopped. Henry had seen Holmes be clever at speed a hundred times. This was the shape of that with the floor gone out from under it.

Both hands were still up in his hair. On the left one the tape he'd worn since he came back was on the two fingers, gone grey where it had been white, three weeks old if it was a day; Henry's eye went to it and snagged, the way the eye snags on the one wrong detail in a field of motion, and then let go, because there was no time.

And Henry, standing there with four minutes now and no earthly notion what the angles were, found he was not frightened by it so much as he knew it, from another field entirely, where it had a name and, mercifully, a procedure. He had watched a pony go like this — not bolt; worse than bolt; run away *under* itself with the rider still up, past hearing, past the aids, going faster because faster was the only thing left it knew how to do. You did not haul on it. You did not get out in front and wave your arms. *Don't crowd it,* said Mrs Harcourt, out of the middle of a cold school in Gloucestershire. *Give it one thing to do and a direction, and go with it till the gait comes back.*

So Henry stopped trying to follow the angles. He took Holmes by the elbow — and there was no flinch in it, no catch, none of the thing the whole House knew happened when you took hold of Holmes without warning; there was no time to be surprised by its absence and he wasn't.

"Books," Henry said, clear and flat, as to a boy and not a bolting animal. "We're going to div. Come on."

And Holmes came. The talking did not stop all at once, but it came down off the top of itself, and he took the Sallust off the desk one-handed on the way past without appearing to decide to, and let himself be steered out of his own door and into the corridor — filling now, boys and bags and the enormous ordinary indifference of a House going to first div, under all of which a thing can be walked along and not seen.

It worked. Henry would think about that afterwards, with some discomfort — that it had *worked;* that he had reached for a manual meant for horses and the horse-shaped procedure had come up in his hand and fitted. He did not think about it now. Now there was the corridor, and the elbow under his hand, and the bell, and the fact — which went onto no shelf, there being no time to find the shelf — that he had been kissed in the half-minute between chapel and Latin and had answered it with the timetable.

***

They went down the corridor at the pace of the corridor, which was the pace of a hundred boys with four minutes to be somewhere, and under that cover a person could be walked along and come back to himself without anybody marking the join. The talking had stopped by the turn of the stairs. Henry kept his hand on the elbow a moment past when the steering needed it, and then, because one does not conduct another boy down a staircase by the arm in front of the entire House, took it away; and Holmes went on beside him under his own power, which had been the object.

"Sorry," Holmes said.

He said it to the stairs, flatly, the way he said most things — an item ticked off rather than a feeling let out. Which was as well, because Henry had no earthly notion what he'd have done with a feeling, let out, on a staircase at five to nine.

"What for," Henry said.

It was, he knew the instant it was gone, Holmes's own line. He had heard Holmes hand it back a dozen times to a dozen boys who had trodden on him or sent his books across the corridor or said something they thought he would mind — *what for* — so blankly that the apologiser was left holding the apology with nowhere on earth to set it down. Henry had pinched it clean off him. For about a second and a half he was extremely pleased with himself.

Then it worked, which was the trouble with it. Holmes gave him one short look, there and gone, and shut his mouth on whatever the next thing had been going to be, and walked the rest of the way to the foot of the stairs without another word. Henry had meant it to let them both off the hook. It had let them off so thoroughly that there was nothing whatever left in the air between them, and he found, with some irritation, that he had wanted there to be. He could not have said what. He put it where it went, which was nowhere.

They came out by the Schools with the bell not yet gone, into the ordinary morning din of it, and Henry — who had been running the thing at the back of his head without a pause since the room, running it in the one language he had that let him turn it over without having to call it anything — felt a piece of it arrive at the front and leave by his mouth before the gate was down.

"Sometimes it isn't the horse's temperament," he said. "It's its history."

There was a silence of a very particular quality.

"*What?*" said Holmes.

Henry heard it land — said aloud, in daylight, to the one person on the grounds it was secretly about, in the plain carrying voice he kept for things that were simply true — and felt the whole back of his neck go. He had put a complete sentence of the private language out into a public corridor where it meant nothing to anybody and would have meant a very great deal to precisely one listener, had that listener held the key; which, blessedly, he did not.

"Nothing," Henry said. "Thinking aloud. Pony Club rot."

Holmes took this as he took most of what Henry said that was not an instruction: as data of no present use, filed without remark. And somewhere across the length of the walk he had come all the way back — Henry had watched it happen without being able to put a finger on the moment, the way one can't name the instant a kettle goes off the boil — so that it was the recovered Holmes, the one with the clock running true again, who glanced up and said:

"You'll want to go. You've got Pearce."

And put the Sallust into Henry's hands — the errand the whole morning had started as, discharged at last without any ceremony at all, the translation folded inside it in Holmes's small exact hand — and went off the other way to his own div, upright and ordinary, a boy going to a lesson.

Henry went to Pearce.

***

The bell had gone while he was still on the stairs, so that he arrived at div in the condition of a boy who had arrived at div, and spent the first eleven minutes of it copying Holmes's Sallust out under the desk, in a hand that would not have survived the briefest scrutiny, while Pearce — who had opened on Sallust and tired of him inside a sentence — talked about Thucydides. The translation was, Henry noticed as he copied, irritatingly good. Not showy. Correct the whole way along, including the *quamdiu*, which turned out to be perfectly straightforward and over which Henry had personally lost forty minutes of the Sunday evening.

He handed it in and got *excellent as always, Bartlett* from Pearce, which he received with the composure of a man taking delivery of stolen goods.

And then there was the rest of the morning, in which he had not one unsupervised minute, and the thing he had bought on the stairs with Holmes's own line — the nothing in the air, the quiet that was worse than noise — sat in him and would not go anywhere, because Henry's head declined, as a matter of construction, to hold a thing for later. It ran it at the back, continuously, louder in exact proportion to whatever the front of him was obliged to attend to, so that he got through the morning's divs in the manner of a boy getting through divs and retained, of the lot of them, almost nothing. By the afternoon he had got precisely nowhere with it, beyond the one flat fact that would not be argued down: that he had said it out loud, to Holmes, in daylight, and that Holmes had said *what,* and that this was the best outcome available and did not feel like one.

***

It was twenty past four and the afternoon still wide open, sun high, the gravel pale and hot with it, when Davies fell into step beside him.

Henry knew it was Davies before he looked — not by anything said, because nothing had been, but by the way the walking arrived: up on his shoulder, matched to his pace, close as his father's sort came up close, which was close enough to be a courtesy and near enough to be something else. Ordinarily Davies said what he had from four feet off and at the top of it, so that a Davies who had come up quietly and said nothing yet was already a bid out of turn, and Henry's ear caught it the way it caught any wrong card on the table, before he had worked out what was wrong with it.

"Bartlett."

"Davies."

They went a few yards like that, two boys walking the same way to the same House, which they were. Davies had the look of a boy who had decided a thing on the way over and was carrying it carefully now, so as not to let it go off early.

"Can I speak to you later?"

It was the *later* that did it. Davies did not keep things for later. Davies spent them where he stood, on the stairs, to whoever was nearest; it was most of what made him Davies. A Davies holding something until later had already looked at it and found it was the kind one held.

"About what," Henry said — lightly, moving on, the hand that gives nothing back, his father's hand — and heard, under his own voice, that it had given a great deal back, because one only said *about what* in that tone about a thing one had already decided to mind.

"Holmes," Davies said. "Privately."

And then he did nothing else with it at all. He did not drop his voice over it or glance round or weight it in any of the ways the word had a right to expect; he set it down the way you'd name a time, and then he was gone — a half-step, a lift of the hand, *after supper, perhaps* — dropped back and away up the gravel to a clump of boys by the door before Henry had got together one reply that was not simply *no*.

So that was the afternoon's gift. In the length of a wall he had been handed the single thing worse than Seth Davies saying a thing, which was Seth Davies telling him, not unkindly, that there was a thing to be said, and then keeping it some hours yet.

There was one mercy in it, and he noticed the mercy and mistrusted it at once: the thing came in a shape he had tools for. The morning's business — the sentence said out loud, the *what* that had answered it — went quiet the instant Davies spoke, the way a dull ache goes quiet when a sharp one arrives. Here was a proper problem, outside him, bounded, made of who-knew-what and what-a-silence-was-worth. His oldest instrument sat up.

***

The first late School was French, and Henry sat it out at the back of the set with the committee in session.

He had not called it; it had convened itself. It came from the other side of the family altogether, from a father who ran every room he stood in as a problem in who knew what and who owed whom and what a particular silence was worth, and it had been sitting since the gravel, under the walk back, under changing, waiting only for a quiet hour to get properly to the table. A late School with the windows open and a master reading conjugations off a card was a quiet hour. It got to the table.

The docket, then. Davies had something: established. Davies had held it, which Davies did not do. Davies had put *privately* on it, which Davies did not do. And Davies had set *Holmes* down beside *privately* — which proved nothing on its own, because Davies said Holmes's name a dozen times before lunch; Holmes was weather to him, a standing subject he broadcast off staircases to fill a dull minute. The signal was not *Holmes*. The signal was *privately*, and *later*, and the quiet he had done it in.

Which was as far as the committee ever got, because the next witness was Holmes, and Holmes would not give evidence. Any other boy in the House Henry could have read clean off the morning — whether he knew, whether he minded, whether the thing Davies had was the carrying kind. Holmes gave you the one face whether you'd caught him out or not, the shut patient nothing-face, and the committee sent for it and got it and could enter it in the record neither way; so the file would not close, and a file that would not close was a thing Henry's construction could not put down.

There was one reading it kept laying on the top of the pile, and it was the one he liked least, and he could not get a square look at it. It was not that Davies had something about Holmes. It was that Davies might have something with both their names in it — his and Holmes's, in the one sentence, in some other boy's mouth — which was the sentence Henry had spent two years seeing to it did not exist anywhere in the House. Why that should be the worst of them he did not examine. The committee logged it under *reputation*, which was a dull enough heading to keep going under, and kept going; it was what his father did with any item too hot to minute, file it plain and move the meeting on.

French went on in front of him. He copied down a column of verbs he would not be able to read back. Twice he stood the whole apparatus down — made himself attend to the board, the chalk, the unbearable slowness of the pluperfect — and twice the standing-down was itself a thought, and the thought had the shape of the thing it was standing down from, so that putting it away was the same motion as taking it out and setting it once more in the middle of the table; and the committee, halfway to its feet, sat back down and reached again for the file it could not read.

By the bell it had got nowhere at all, which did not stop it. It never stopped on a thing it couldn't read. It gathered its papers and went with him, up the stairs, into the next room that would hold it.

***

The second late School was History, upstairs in the room that caught the afternoon sun and kept it, and Henry got there early, which he never did. He took the desk by the window because it was the one he always took. Only after he'd sat down and got his books out did it occur to him that he'd come early so he could see who came in, which was the sort of thing his father did at drinks parties, and he put the thought away and opened his notes to last week's page and read the same line about the Anti-Corn Law League three times while boys came through the door in twos and threes, dropping bags, arguing about a cricket score, somebody's shoe squeaking on the boards all the way to the back row.

Holmes came in with about a minute to spare, which was normal, and went to the desk against the far wall by the radiator, which was also normal. Books under one arm, pencil behind his ear, hair still not quite right from the morning. From across the room and past the back of Willoughby's head he looked like himself again: pale, face shut in the ordinary way rather than the way it had been in his room at quarter to nine. He sat down, opened the textbook somewhere well ahead of where the div had got to, and began reading, as he did in every School they shared and as Mr Caddick had stopped objecting to at some point in the Lent Half. He didn't look round. There wasn't any reason he should have, and Henry was annoyed with himself for having wanted him to.

Caddick arrived and the room did its usual settling, chairs scraping forward, somebody's bag kicked under a desk. Peel, the repeal, the Tories splitting down the middle. Henry wrote things down with the part of his head that wrote things down. The rest of it kept going to the far wall and coming back with nothing. Holmes's pencil moved in short bursts. Holmes turned a page before Caddick had finished the paragraph on the one before it. Holmes put his knuckles against his mouth and left them there, which he did when he was reading something he disagreed with, and Henry spent a good twenty seconds trying to decide whether that meant anything before admitting that Holmes disagreed with most textbooks and had presumably disagreed with this one since September.

It kept coming back to the one word — *privately* — going round and round with his pen still moving on the page, each possibility arriving with its own small rush of heat up the back of his neck, none of them any likelier than the last, the one he least wanted the one his brain kept coming back to first. He couldn't lean across Willoughby and ask. What would he even say — *Davies wants a word about you, any idea why?* Holmes would look at him with that blank patient face and say *No*, and it would be true, and it wouldn't help.

"Bartlett. Why did Peel do it?"

Henry's pen stopped. Caddick was looking at him over his glasses, one hand still flat on the open book, with the mild expression he used when he'd picked somebody precisely because they were looking out of the window. Henry wasn't looking out of the window. He was looking at the radiator. It came to the same thing.

"Because he thought he was right, sir," Henry said, and then, because his mouth kept going the way it did at the dinner table when a question had been put to him by one of his father's guests, "and he'd rather be right and out than wrong and in. Which is very nice for him. It isn't very nice for the people who got him in."

A couple of boys laughed. Caddick made the small noise that meant he'd take it and moved on to Dunne. Across the room Holmes turned another page. He hadn't looked up, and Henry couldn't have said whether that was because Holmes never looked up when other people answered or because of something else.

The bell went at ten past six. Holmes was on his feet before it had finished, book shut, pencil still behind his ear, out of the door in the first cluster of boys without so much as a glance down the row. Henry had half his things in his bag. He sat there with the strap in one hand and his History notes in the other while Willoughby leaned back and asked him something about after supper, and he said yes to it without having the faintest idea what he'd agreed to.

***

Supper was shepherd's pie, which meant the long table in the dining room smelled of gravy and the windows had steamed at the bottom corners. Henry was halfway down on the left, where he'd sat since the Michaelmas Half of E block without anyone ever deciding it. Davies was two places along on the other side, between Peters and Chaudhry, where D block ran out and the younger lot began. Henry had braced for Davies to be strange and Davies wasn't. He was talking to Peters about the Test match with his elbows on the table, and when he wanted the salt he said "Bartlett, salt," the way he'd said it four hundred times, and Henry passed it and got a nod and nothing else. That was worse. Henry had spent two Schools preparing for Davies being odd and had nothing prepared for Davies being Davies.

At the far end, by the hatch, Holmes and Chervoniy were still going. Quieter now, because the Dame was within range, but Chervoniy kept stabbing his fork at the air to make points and Holmes kept answering in the flat fast Russian. Holmes had the pie in front of him and had done something to it with his fork that looked like eating from a distance and wasn't. Henry's brain said *off his feed* in Mrs Harcourt's voice from Pony Club before he could stop it, and he put his own fork down, irritated, because he had not asked for that. It was the third time today. Holmes never ate much at supper anyway. It didn't mean anything. He picked the fork up again.

"So eight," Willoughby said from his right, through a mouthful.

"What?"

"Eight. My room." Willoughby swallowed. "You said yes. Finch is bringing the cards, and Pickle's finally going to learn to count trumps if it kills him. You're fourth." Finch was Willoughby's from the Colts, a year below, and went where Willoughby went. Pickle was a year below as well: Pryce, really, but he'd been called Pickle for so long that masters sometimes used it by accident.

Henry had said yes to that. He remembered now, the strap of his bag in his hand and Willoughby leaning back in his chair, the word coming out of him while he was watching the door Holmes had gone through. Four for bridge after prayers. Davies had said *after supper*, and after supper, in the language of Holland House, meant exactly the time Willoughby had just claimed.

He looked down the table without meaning to. Davies was buttering a piece of bread with great concentration, all the way to the crust, and didn't look up.

"Right," Henry said to Willoughby. "Eight." Then, because that was plainly going to be a problem in about forty minutes and he had no idea yet how, he ate a forkful of shepherd's pie he didn't want and tried to think of a reason to be late to bridge that Willoughby would believe and Finch wouldn't repeat.

***

Willoughby's room was at the end of the top corridor, and Henry could hear it from the stairs: Finch laughing in the way he did when someone else was suffering, and under it a voice he knew going very fast and very flat, the voice that meant somebody was being stupid on purpose. He stopped on the landing with one hand on the rail. Then he went up the rest of the way, because there was nothing else to do, and pushed the door open with two fingers.

They'd pulled Willoughby's desk into the middle of the floor and put the four chairs round it, and Holmes was in the one with its back to the window, which was Henry's chair, which Henry had said yes to at supper without knowing what he was saying yes to. Holmes was sitting on his hands. Not figuratively. Both palms flat under his thighs, shoulders up around his ears, glaring down at a row of cards laid face up on the desk in front of him while Pickle, opposite, frowned at his own hand and reached very slowly towards the dummy.

"Bartlett," said Willoughby, without looking up. "You're late. We got Holmes."

"So I see."

"Pickle went and fetched him," Willoughby added. "And then Finch said he'd never be able to follow it," as if that explained everything, which it did. Finch grinned at the ceiling. Holmes did not take his eyes off Pickle's hand.

"I can follow it perfectly well," Holmes said. "I have been following it for forty minutes. Pryce, if you lead the small club—"

"Dummy doesn't *talk*," said Finch and Willoughby together, and Holmes's mouth shut so hard Henry heard his teeth.

Pickle led the small club.

Henry took the end of the bed because it was the only thing left to sit on, and it put him behind Pickle's shoulder and square across from Holmes's face, which he hadn't chosen and couldn't now un-choose without it looking like something. So he sat. He could see Pickle's hand from here and wasn't supposed to. He looked at the wallpaper instead, which was brown, and then at Holmes, who wasn't looking at him at all. Holmes was watching the club go round the table with the expression of a man watching someone reverse a car into his own garden wall, very slowly, while he had been told he mustn't shout.

The thing Henry wanted to say was about eighteen inches from his mouth and completely unsayable. *Davies was there. Last week. He heard.* And Holmes should have known. That was the part that kept getting under his collar and staying there, more than Davies. Holmes knew when Henry had come up a staircase before Henry reached the top of it. He knew which master was hungover by the way they held their chalk. And he'd stood in a passage having a private conversation with Seth Davies of all people practically in his pocket and not noticed a thing, and now he was sitting on his hands over a game of bridge, going slowly red about the ears because Pickle had played the queen.

"Oh, for—" Holmes said.

"Dummy," said Finch.

"I *know* I'm dummy. I'm aware of my own situation, Finch." One hand came out from under his leg, hovered over the desk as if it meant to physically intervene, and went back under. "He's going to lose the trick with the king. Finch has the king. You have had the king since the second round, Finch, you've been touching your ear every time clubs are mentioned."

Finch stopped touching his ear.

Willoughby put his cards face down on the table and looked at Holmes the way Henry's mother looked at the dog when it had brought something dead into the kitchen. "That's not how you're supposed to know that."

"It's how I know it."

"You're supposed to count."

"I *did* count. And then I looked at his ear." Holmes turned, finally, and it was to Henry, with the flat conviction of somebody appealing to the only other sane person in the building. "Bartlett. Tell them it's legitimate."

Henry opened his mouth. Every face at the table was pointed at him now, Finch's delighted, Pickle's hopeful, Willoughby's put-upon, and Holmes's looking at him the way it did in Latin when he needed a word he'd forgotten the English for: impatient, expecting the answer to be there, completely unguarded about expecting it. Nothing in it about passages, or Davies, or anything at all except whether the king of clubs was fair game. Henry could have kicked him.

"It's not illegal," Henry said. "It's just rude."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't me agreeing with you."

"It was close enough," Holmes said, and turned back to the desk. Finch played the king. Pickle's queen died. Holmes closed his eyes for a moment, a full second, and opened them again, and said nothing in a way that filled the whole room.

They went one down. Willoughby wrote it on the back of an envelope with the air of a man recording a death. Finch gathered the cards and started to shuffle, badly, bending them, and Holmes watched his hands the whole time as if he'd been told one of them contained a live wasp. Henry sat on the end of the bed with his elbows on his knees and understood that he was going to be here for the entire rubber. He'd sit an arm's length from the one person in the House he needed to talk to, in the one room in the House where he couldn't, and watch him lose at a card game on principle.

Finch dealt. The cards went round in a soft slapping circle. Holmes picked his up one at a time and sorted them without looking, fast, the way he sorted everything, and then sat staring at the fan of them in his hand with dawning, visible loathing.

"Right," said Willoughby. "Holmes. Your bid."

Holmes looked at his cards, then at Pickle, then at the ceiling. "Two clubs."

"You can't open two clubs on that," said Finch.

"You can't *see* my hand."

"I can see your face, mate. Your face is all diamonds."

"My face is *not*—" Holmes leaned out past Pickle to find the bed, and jabbed the whole fan of cards at Henry. "Bartlett, are you hearing this? Forty minutes of sermons about counting, and the second it suits him—"

Willoughby went for the cards across the corner of the desk. Holmes's forearm was in the way, and then somehow Willoughby's hand wasn't. It went past his wrist into thin air, and Holmes had twisted a little in his chair with the cards still fanned and safe in his other hand. He blinked at Willoughby's hand hanging there. "Oh," he said, "*pff*," and slapped the cards down against his own chest.

"*Christ*, Holmes."

"You lunged at me!"

"At your cards, you lunatic."

"Well, say so." He was pink to the ears and grinning. "Two clubs. I've said it now. It's said."

"You can't *un*-say it," Pickle offered, helpfully, and got a look from all three of them.

They went round. It went about as well as everyone expected, and Holmes took none of it quietly. When Pickle played the wrong card Holmes said "Oh, *no*" before it had hit the desk. When Finch took the next trick Holmes put his face in his hands and gave a short lecture through his fingers about the first day of the Somme, until Willoughby threw a sock at him. He tipped his chair back on two legs until the window frame knocked him on the head, said "Ow," with great dignity, and did it again five minutes later. Finch said "Twelve," meaning the number of times Holmes had been told dummy doesn't talk, and Holmes laughed so hard he had to put his forehead on the desk.

Henry was laughing too by then, he couldn't help it. It got caught somewhere on the way out.

"Four down," said Willoughby, writing on the envelope. "Doubled. I'm framing this."

"Pryce played it."

"Pryce played it because of your *bid*."

"My bid was inspired. You simply lack vision." Holmes had his chin on his fists. "You once bid four spades holding two spades, Willoughby. Finch was there."

"He did, though," said Finch, and flicked a pencil at Holmes across the corner of the desk. Holmes caught it without looking up and went on explaining to Willoughby exactly what had been wrong with the four spades, walking the pencil over his knuckles and back under as he talked, steady as a clock.

Pickle was meant to be gathering the cards. Instead he took the biro off Willoughby's envelope, laid it across the backs of his fingers, tipped his hand, and watched it roll straight off and bounce under the desk.

"Oi. That's the scoring pen."

"How do you *do* that?" Pickle said to Holmes, aggrieved. "It just comes off."

Holmes stopped in the middle of a sentence. He looked at Pickle, and then at his own hand, where the pencil had stopped too. "Oh. Um. I don't know. You sort of let it fall the right way."

"That's not *advice*."

"Well, how'd you learn it?"

"Did it about ten thousand times waiting for Father's contacts to turn up," Holmes said, already half turned back to Willoughby.

Ten thousand. Henry found himself doing the sum without meaning to, the way you do with a number somebody drops in passing. A few seconds a go, and the waiting was the kind where there was time to do it ten thousand times, so hours, and then more hours, over however many afternoons and in however many places. *An operation when he was ten*, Dad had said at Christmas, with Holmes sitting right there on the sofa like a statue. Henry tried to picture it, a ten-year-old somewhere waiting for a man his father had sent. What came to him was himself at ten on a hay bale at a gymkhana, waiting for his class to be called, bored out of his skull, his mother bringing him a Coke. That was the only kind of waiting he had. It didn't go anywhere.

And there'd been Willoughby's hand. Holmes's arm had been up before Willoughby was anywhere near him. That morning Henry had taken him by the elbow and walked him across the yard, and Holmes had just come. Henry had grabbed him by the sleeve and the collar and a good deal else, more times than he'd ever bothered to count, and never once had that arm come up. Henry sat there with the fact of that, and couldn't make it mean anything that fitted.

"What's your dad do again?" said Finch.

"Civil Service."

"God," said Willoughby. "Poor you."

"Yes, it's tremendously dull. Pryce, you're holding it like a *dart*."

Pickle had got down off his chair and was feeling around under the desk with one arm, cheek pressed to the table edge. "It's gone under the bed."

The biro was by Henry's left shoe. He slid it out with his foot and handed it down across Pickle's back, and Pickle climbed back into his chair and laid it across his fingers again. Holmes leaned over the desk, took Pickle's hand by the wrist, and turned it a little flatter.

"It's still your deal, Pickle," said Willoughby.

Pickle got through about a third of the deal before the biro fell off his fingers again, and then he stopped dealing altogether and sat with the half-dealt pack in one hand and the biro in the other, looking between the two as though he'd been asked to choose.

"Bartlett," he said. "Have my seat. I've got to get this."

"You've got to learn to count trumps," said Willoughby. "That was the entire point of tonight."

"I'll count trumps tomorrow." Pickle was already up. He put the pack down in front of his empty chair and went and sat where Henry had been, on the end of the bed, frowning at his own knuckles.

So Henry took the chair with its back to the door, and found himself square across the desk from Holmes, close enough that their knees would have met if Holmes had kept still under there, which he didn't. Behind Holmes the window had gone from white to that thin blue it went at half past eight in May. Henry finished the deal. Holmes picked his cards up and made a face at them as though they'd been dealt to him personally out of spite.

"One heart," said Holmes.

Henry looked at his own hand, then across the desk. Holmes was frowning at his cards with his mouth pulled in at one corner. Henry had seen that face over Latin prose, and over a cigarette that had gone out, and over a crossword he'd somehow got too many answers for. He'd never seen it over hearts, but it seemed to go the same way.

"Four hearts," said Henry.

Finch's head came up. "You can't just go to four."

"I can, actually. It's allowed."

"You haven't *got* four hearts' worth, you've got a face like you've got a club suit and nothing else."

"Everyone can read *his* face," Henry said. "He's got hearts all over it."

Holmes looked up. Not affronted. Quite still, for about a second, the way he looked at a thing he hadn't finished working out. Then down at his own cards, and he tilted them a fraction towards his chest, as though they might have been showing.

Willoughby was looking at Holmes too, frowning, head on one side. Henry watched him do it. Willoughby looked straight at the pulled-in corner of Holmes's mouth and the line between his eyebrows and got nothing at all off them. Henry could see him getting nothing. It was the way everyone in the House got nothing off Holmes, and the way Henry himself had got nothing for the best part of three years. Finch hadn't been reading Holmes. Finch had been reading *Henry*, and been wrong about the clubs.

Henry picked his cards back up, which he didn't need to do, and looked at them.

They made it with one over. Holmes played it, because Henry was dummy, and it turned out that when Holmes was allowed to touch the cards he played very fast and mostly correctly and narrated every trick in an undertone. Henry sat with his hands flat on the desk and watched him take the last four tricks one after the other, snapping each card down harder than the one before. Willoughby wrote it on the envelope with the air of a man recording an injustice.

"That's not how bridge works," Willoughby said.

"It's how we did it," said Holmes, and looked across at Henry, delighted, as though Henry ought to be delighted as well. Henry was. He pushed the cards across to Finch to deal.

It got dark in the way it did in May, slowly and then all at once. Somebody put the lamp on. They played one rubber and most of another. Finch and Willoughby took the next two hands on proper bidding and made sure everybody knew it. Holmes stopped narrating when he was dummy, mostly, and started again when he wasn't. At one point he explained to Willoughby that a finesse was simply a bet on where a card was and that in that case he'd rather look, and Willoughby threw the sock at him again, and Holmes caught it and dropped it on the floor and went on explaining. Behind Henry, every minute or two, there was the small click of the biro hitting the floorboards and Pickle swearing at it under his breath, and after a while that stopped registering at all and became part of the room, like the lamp.

The knock came at a quarter to ten, two hard raps and Ashby's voice through the door. "Rooms, you lot. Now."

Willoughby swore and started gathering cards. Finch was already halfway to the door. Holmes stood, stretched, and put the envelope with the score on it in his pocket before anyone could stop him.

"Holmes. That's mine."

"It's evidence." Holmes had Finch's pencil behind one ear and his own behind the other. "You said you'd frame it."

The stairs were full of boys going down, and the corridor below was worse: doors banging, somebody's radio, a queue at the washroom, Ashby coming down behind them telling somebody to put a shirt on. Henry and Holmes went down together because there was nowhere else to go. Their rooms were halfway along, one on each side, doors facing across about six feet of worn carpet, and they'd been like that since September.

Holmes got to his first and put his hand on the handle. Henry got to his and did the same, and turned round with his back to it.

"Can I talk to you tomorrow?"

Holmes looked at him across the corridor. "You're talking to me now."

Henry looked past him down the corridor, at Ashby, at the two boys in pyjama bottoms outside the washroom, at Pickle coming down the stairs still trying the biro.

"Tomorrow."

Holmes's eyes went down the corridor where Henry's had gone and came back. "All right," he said, and went in, and shut his door.

Henry stood with his hand behind him on his own handle, looking at Holmes's shut door six feet away. Then he heard the words again the way they'd sounded, *can I talk to you tomorrow*, in the voice Davies had used at twenty past four, and he went in and shut his own door rather harder than he meant to.

## 5½. Clamp

*Monday 29 May, lunch · Sherlock*

Bartlett had been decent enough not to mention the lapse, which was a good deal more than the
lapse deserved.

Because it had been a complete loss of composure, in front of the idiot, in nine feet by eleven
with the door shut: talking too fast at a window about a thing six inches and three weeks done,
both hands up in his own hair, and in the end having to be taken by the elbow and walked to div
like a child who couldn't find it on his own. Appalling. He hadn't come all the way back out of
it until somewhere past the second div, by which time he had already gone and apologised — small,
late, and without the *sir* he'd have been cuffed for leaving off anywhere else, except there was
no *sir* here, Bartlett not being a sir but only Bartlett — and the apology had not been for the
reason an apology was usually for, and he had got about as far as wondering what it *had* been for
when Bartlett had looked at him and said *what for.* Which meant: we are not going to discuss your
weakness. Which was kind of him. And that sort of thing didn't want testing, so he'd shut up, and
then—

His fork had found its way to hanging off his lip again. He turned the page by habit, because
turning the page was the thing the audience was watching the top of him do, and set the good hand
back to the mechanics of eating.

The little wisps kept lifting off all morning, this thought or that one or none at all, each of
them trying to draw him back down into it. The ordinary answer was a cigarette and he had smoked
the last of them and had none until tomorrow at the soonest; he could trade one off an older boy,
which meant being pleasant long enough to manage it, or bum one, which meant the same, or go to
the Slavs, who always had them — except the Slavs meant Russian, and every time he let a word of
the babushka's language up through the wisps the whole lot started again, so—

Stop. Christ. He put it into his knee instead, bouncing under the table, which did nothing a hard
shake of the head like a dog would have done and drew none of the comments a hard shake of the
head would have drawn.

Carrots too soft. Too many colours touching on the plate, which was a childish thing to mind, and
he minded it, and moved the one off the other with the fork, and gazed at the page as if the page
were the thing.

"Holmes."

A repeat — louder, an edge on it; he'd gone and blocked the voices out again. He looked up in time
for the end of it, one of the second-years, leaning in, pleased with himself. "— how long's Davies
been staring at you?"

He had come to the foot of the page, so he turned it, and answered, because it had an answer.
"Since Thursday." He had no notion on earth why anyone would want to know, and answering tended to
get him left alone sooner than not answering did. For reasons wholly opaque to him it set off a
burst of chatter down the table, which at least took the whole of their faces off him and put them
onto each other.

Not Bartlett's, though. He caught that one on the edge of things, four places down, not laughing.
Stay blank. Nothing comes down into the face, nothing the room can read off it; put the rest into
the knee, and clamp the wisps, clamp the Russian, clamp the window and the second floor and the
fourth from the corner and the wing mirror folded the wrong way and the snap of lead going into
brick and the boot and the cold and—

No. Stop.

His knee bounced harder under the table.

## 6. Box

*Tuesday 30 May · Henry*

Henry woke on Tuesday owing Holmes a conversation, and spent chapel discovering that there was nowhere in the day to have it.

He went through the timetable, the way he went through everything. Chapel: no. Div, div: no, obviously. Break was twenty minutes in a yard with the entire House in it. Then more div, and lunch, and Tuesday was a half, so the afternoon was cricket, and then there was Hall and prep, and in none of it was there a door one could shut without somebody seeing which side of it one had ended up on. Except at ten. There was always ten. Ten was when boys were moving about the House anyway, washing and borrowing things and being sent back to their rooms; and ten was also, as Henry was perfectly well aware, thank you, the ordinary time for one other thing entirely, which was rather the difficulty.

So it would have to be ten, and he would need a reason, and the reason would have to be the sort that could be seen.

He had one by first div. He'd had it since yesterday morning, as it happened, since about a quarter to nine, when Holmes had had both hands in his hair and been walking the three feet of floor and talking very fast about angles, and Henry, standing there with no idea what to do and the bell about to go, had found himself looking at the left hand, and at the tape on two of the fingers, which had been white once.

That would do. That was a reason anybody could see from the corridor.

He did not, in div, think about the rest of yesterday. He wished that recorded. He did not think about Holmes at the bridge table, loud and pink to the ears, explaining finesses to Willoughby and getting a sock thrown at him for it and catching the sock, like any boy in the House having a perfectly good evening. He did not think about the parry, or *pff*, or ten thousand times waiting for Father's contacts to turn up, or *Civil Service*, said without looking up, the way you'd give your date of birth. He certainly did not think about the fact, which had arrived some time around the third rubber and had not since left, that Holmes could apparently sit in a room full of ordinary boys for a whole evening and be one; because if that was true, then the other thing, the thing Henry had been looking at across a corridor for two years and eight months, was something Holmes *did*, rather than something Holmes was. And a thing one does, one does for a reason, and Henry was not, in Pearce's div, going to go and look for the reason.

He thought about Pearce, mainly. Pearce was on the aorist.

It made no difference. All through Greek, louder the more of him the aorist took, the thing ran on at the back the way it always did; and by the end of the period it had established, without being asked, that he had been in Holmes's room (he was not going to count) a good many times since March, and could not have told you one thing on its walls.

Not one. He could have drawn the bed. He could have told you, with some precision, where the sash stuck. The walls he had nothing on at all, because on every previous occasion he had been in that room it had been dark, or as good as, and he had been extremely busy.

*A yard that only inspects the horse,* said the manual, from somewhere under the aorist, *is doing half the job.*

Yes, thank you.

At break Chaudhry said something about the Boat Race.

It was not even a provoking thing. Chaudhry had been aggrieved about the Boat Race since March — Cambridge robbed, seven years of winning ended in one afternoon — and had got back onto it on Sunday; and on Sunday Henry had disagreed rather too hard and been told to steady on; and today Henry turned round in the sun with a bun in his hand and said, pleasantly, "Rafi, I don't think anybody has ever wanted your view on the Boat Race. I include the people in the boats."

Chaudhry looked at him.

"Right," said Chaudhry. "Lovely. Who's rattled your cage?"

"Nobody's rattled anything."

Peters, going past at that moment with a tray of somebody's milk, caught Henry's elbow with the corner of it and slopped about a third of a pint over his shoe, and Henry said, "For God's *sake*, Peters, is there anything at all you can carry," in a voice he had last heard his father use on a junior minister, and Peters went scarlet and said sorry three times and fled.

Chaudhry was still looking at him, with the expression Chaudhry got when he had noticed something being done for a reason and was working out the reason.

Henry ate the bun.

***

He got through cricket. He got through Hall, where Holmes was at the far end having an argument in Russian with Chervoniy, quieter than on Monday because the Dame was in range. At one point Chervoniy said something back to him with a particular twist on it (the same word Holmes had just used, Henry thought, only said differently; said *properly*, in some way Henry could hear without being able to name), and two of the other Russian boys laughed. Holmes said something short. Chervoniy stopped laughing and, after a second, started again, differently. Henry didn't speak a word of it, and had nowhere to put it.

Holmes ate his supper, all of it, which the manual would have given a tick, and which Henry, for some reason, found no comfort in at all.

He did prep, badly, in fifty minutes, and did not do the Livy.

***

At ten he went across.

He went with, in his hand, in a manner that admitted of no misinterpretation whatsoever, a roll of tape and a bottle of TCP out of Matron's cupboard, the one everybody knew about and nobody admitted knowing about; and he was aware, in the corridor, that he was carrying them slightly out in front of him, like a man bringing a cheque to a door.

Holmes was on his bed with his back against the wall and his legs out and a book up and the lamp on, and he looked at what was in Henry's hands, and then at Henry, and said:

"No."

"It's *filthy*, Holmes."

"It's fine."

"It's been on there three weeks. There is dirt *in* it. People have died of that within living memory, my grandmother—"

"Your grandmother did not die of a finger."

"She very *nearly*—"

"Bartlett." Holmes had lowered the book about an inch. "It is a hand. It has been a hand for some time. It is going on being a hand whatever you do to it in the next ten minutes."

Henry crossed the three feet of floor and took hold of his wrist anyway.

The freeze happened. It always happened; the whole House knew it happened. And then it went off, at no speed at all, the way a thing goes off that had hardly been on, and Holmes's arm lay in his hand like anybody's arm, and Holmes went on reading.

Henry, on one knee on another boy's floorboards at ten at night with a roll of tape in his fist, registered that, and its speed, and put it whole and unlooked-at on the shelf where he kept that kind of thing. He knew where the shelf was. He was not opening it. He was becoming aware that it was getting full.

The tape came off in a way that was not pleasant. Underneath, the fingers were fine. That was the maddening part: perfectly fine, straight and pale and boringly well, with a ring of grey at the base of each where the tape had sat, and a small crescent split in the web of the hand that had opened and closed and opened again, several times by the look of it, without anybody giving it the chance to do otherwise.

Henry cleaned it, which made Holmes say *ss* through his teeth exactly once, and then dressed it, badly and tighter than he meant to, while Holmes held the book up one-handed and read and said nothing whatsoever.

And while he did it, because his hands were busy and his eyes had nothing else to do, he looked at the room.

The lamp was enough. It had always been enough; it was the looking that had been missing. Willoughby had a Chelsea thing over his bed and nine photographs. Chaudhry had his entire family on the wall in a row, ascending. Henry himself had a quantity of items he would not have liked to defend, including a gymkhana rosette from a gymkhana he had not attended. Holmes's walls had nothing on them at all. Two years and eight months.

The shelf above the wardrobe had a hat box on it. Henry happened to know the hat box was empty, from some previous evening he was not going to itemise, on which Holmes had taken it down to get at something behind it and put it back with nothing in it. Every shelf in Holland had a tin on it. Willoughby had a tin. Peters had two tins and a cake still in its string, because Peters was hoarding against trials. Henry's own shelf, he was obliged to admit, was a depot.

"There," he said.

"It's too tight."

"It's *fine*."

"It is too tight and I shall have it off within the hour."

"Then I'll do it again," Henry said, before deciding to, and sat back on his heels, and did not get up, because getting up was going to require having somewhere to be.

Holmes turned a page.

"Nobody sends you anything," Henry said.

"What?"

"Your shelf. Everybody's got a tin. You've got an empty hat box."

A pause of the ordinary length.

"Why would they send food," said Holmes. "There's food here."

He said it flat, without a scrap of anything underneath it: the voice of a boy correcting a small factual confusion in a schoolfellow, mildly, while reading. He went back to the book and did not look up, and had, Henry understood with total clarity, stopped thinking about it before the end of the sentence.

Henry stayed where he was on the floor.

Because that was correct. That was the thing. Hall did three meals a day, and nobody in the building was going hungry, and nobody had ever suggested otherwise; Holmes had been asked a question and had supplied the true answer; and the true answer had gone through the middle of Henry like a skewer through a bird, and he could not construct a single sentence explaining why, because every sentence he tried began *because a tin isn't about*—

—and stopped there. Because the back half of it, come at from any direction, was not a thing one said out loud to another boy in a room at ten o'clock at night.

So he did not say it.

He got up, and put the bottle and the tape on the desk, and stood in the three feet of floor with nothing in his hands and nothing to do with them.

"You said tomorrow," said Holmes, to his book.

"What?"

"Last night. You said, *can I talk to you tomorrow.*" A page. "It's tomorrow."

It was. Henry had carried it all day and half the night before, and had walked in here with it ready, and the hat box had knocked it clean out of his head; and Holmes had been holding it the whole time, apparently, the way he held everything he had been told, waiting for the appointed hour to come round.

"Davies," said Henry.

Holmes waited.

"He wanted a word. Yesterday. About you. We had it in the garden after supper, before bridge, which is why I was late, not that you—" He stopped, and began again lower, with a glance at the door he couldn't help. "He was there. Last week. Behind the music rooms. He was in the laurel the whole time, the entire— He heard all of it, Holmes. The cigarettes. The—" He did not say *the count*. "All of it."

The book did not move.

"He thinks you're working me. For leverage. For your father, I suppose; he couldn't say for what, he just kept saying *leverage* as though it were a diagnosis. I told him I hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about." He heard, too late, how that sounded, and added: "Which I hadn't. About the leverage."

Holmes's eyes came off the page.

They went to the door. To the gap under the door, where the corridor light came in. To the window, the sash, the two inches. Then back to the page, and stayed there.

That was all. It took perhaps a second. Henry would not have seen it at all a month ago, and had no idea what he had seen now.

He waited for the rest of it. He had been furious since the garden — with Davies first, and then, on the stairs up to bridge, a great deal more with Holmes, who could tell which beak was hungover by the way he held the chalk, and who had stood in an alley with Seth Davies practically in his pocket and noticed nothing at all — and he had been rather looking forward, if he was honest, to Holmes being furious too. It would have been company.

"Did you hear what I said?"

"Yes."

Holmes turned a page, in ordinary time.

Henry stood in the three feet of floor and could not have told you, if his life had depended on it, whether he had just been told that it didn't matter or that it did.

"Are your people coming on Saturday?" he said, because something had to be said and that was the thing that came. "For the Fourth."

"Father is."

"Right," said Henry.

He had met Father. Once, in January, in a room with a fire in it, and the man had been the most agreeable person Henry had ever been in a room with; and Dad had sat beside him in the car the whole way home with his mouth shut like a trap, and had then told him to stay away from the son.

"Right. Well. Good."

"Mm," said Holmes.

Henry went out, and shut the door, and stood in the corridor of his own building at ten at night, having been in that room at that hour with the door shut, and having done a dressing, and asked about tins, and delivered a piece of intelligence, and been told *yes*. Nothing else had happened. He was aware of that, which was its own thing to be aware of. It had never once been the case before.

***

The dressing was still on at breakfast.

Henry saw it when Holmes reached for the milk: still white, still exactly as badly done, the end Henry had tucked under still tucked under. Too tight, was it. Within the hour, was it. Henry took this as a ruling on the question, and did not mention it, and was quietly smug about it all through first div, which was the best he had felt all week.

He wrote the letter in the twenty minutes after twelve, on House paper, with the good pen.

*Dear Mum,* and then the weather, and then the XI, and then trials, and then, at the foot, where it would look like an afterthought, a short administrative request for a second tin on the second Friday. No reason. One did not give reasons; a reason would have been either a lie or the sentence.

He got as far as signing it and then sat for a while with the pen up, doing nothing at all, having just worked out — with the slow and awful clarity of a boy raised by two people who were extremely good at their jobs — that Mum was going to read *a second tin, please* and know exactly what it meant inside of four seconds, and was going to send it, and was going to say nothing about it whatever, to anybody, ever, for the rest of her life.

Which was, on the whole, the worst part of the week.

He posted it.

## 6½. Typical

*Tuesday 30 May, the other side of the door · Sherlock*

The door shut.

Positions first. Nothing else was permitted to start until the procedure had run, and the procedure was positions.

The path along the back of the music rooms, gravel, with the laurel on the left running up to the corner. The alcove at the far end. He'd had his back to the brick, which was correct, and the path in front of him and to the left, which was correct, and his eyes on Bartlett, which was two thirds of the correct procedure and the wrong two thirds. The end of the laurel would have been at about eleven o'clock, twenty yards. A boy Davies's size going into it would have moved it, and the movement had been there to be seen, by anybody looking anywhere at all except where he had been looking.

He'd been looking at Bartlett, because he'd been winding Bartlett up and Bartlett had been rising to it, which wants watching; and at one point Bartlett had done his voice. Very badly. He had wanted to see the whole of it.

Typical.

That was what it cost, then. One knew the price. It was the first thing anybody ever told you, before the locks, before the languages, before any of it: you put it down once, and that's the once. Should have been watching the path. Idiot.

He put that under the frost, all of it at once, before it could turn into anything, and it went.

Then the arithmetic, which needed no weather at all.

The House didn't matter. The House had proved Bartlett straight at supper three weeks ago and would go on proving it out of sheer momentum; Davies telling the House was weather. Davies's father could ring Father on a private line about Moldova, and occasionally did, and Father would hear it, if he heard it at all, in the middle of a week in which half of Moscow was changing chairs; and Father would laugh. That was the end of that line. Father had reports from him on eleven boys this half, which were the sort of thing one was given to do, and which went wherever such things went; and on one boy across the corridor nothing whatsoever, which had not been an oversight, though he had never once troubled to decide what it was instead, and which nobody had ever asked about, since nobody had ever been going to.

So there was nothing at the end of the arithmetic. Nothing operational; nothing anybody would do. The only fault in it was the one already found, at the brick, with his back to the laurel.

He put Davies on the list anyway, near the bottom. Procedure.

The book was open at the page Bartlett had left it at. He read the page, since that was what one did next with a page, and it went in, more or less. He read the one after.

He did not take the dressing off. It did not come up.

## 7. Agar's

*Saturday 3 June · Henry*

The buttonhole was crooked.

Henry had set it himself, in front of the glass in his room, with the kind of attention he usually brought to the first div of trials week, and had come down the stairs and across the quad and through the gate at the top of the Plough with it feeling exactly right against his collar; and now, standing with a plate in one hand and a glass of lemonade in the other and the sun doing something unhelpful to the back of his neck, he could feel it beginning to list to port, and could do nothing about it, as both his hands were full and his mother was addressing him.

"— and Mrs Chaudhry says Rafi's done awfully well in the French exam, which is lovely, isn't it, darling. Henry? Darling, your flower."

"Hands," Henry said.

"Give me the glass."

He gave her the glass. He got the buttonhole up with his free hand and heard, at his elbow, Dad say *there,* and watched Dad reach across without looking up from his conversation and straighten it with the same two fingers Dad used to straighten his own tie.

"Thank you," Henry said.

"Mm," said Dad, and went back to the man he was talking to, who was somebody Henry did not know and who was being told something careful about the reshuffle in a voice pitched for Agar's Plough, which was the voice of a man who had been working for an hour and a quarter and would be working for another two.

Henry got his glass back off his mother and took a drink.

The Plough was behaving itself. First XI had got through to tea at a hundred and seventy-two for four, which was respectable, and the mothers had colonised the long side of the pitch in a rolling encampment of hampers and rugs and folding chairs that reached from the pavilion to the top gate; and above it all the sky was doing exactly what sky was supposed to do at the Fourth of June, which was to be high and useless and blue. The sun on the back of Henry's neck persisted. He turned slightly so that his collar took it.

Across the field, by the long rope, Holmes was standing with his father.

Henry had been not-looking at them for the better part of twenty minutes. It had been established, inside the first five, that Mr Holmes had come alone, which Henry already knew, and that he had arrived with the kind of ease a person brought to a room he had been in for forty years; he had shaken the Head Master's hand, kissed somebody's wife on each cheek, patted somebody's son on the shoulder, laughed, and taken a glass. By the time Dad had got to the far corner of the picnic with the ice bucket he was holding court to a small crescent of people among whom Henry had identified, by shape and voice, the father of Chervoniy. Chervoniy senior wore a suit that cost rather more than Dad's and said less about the man wearing it. Siger Holmes, with his glass in one hand and the other in his pocket, had spoken to him for about four minutes in Russian, had made him laugh with something that caused one of the women in the crescent to lean towards her husband and translate behind her hand, and had then switched into English for the benefit of a politician Henry recognised from Dad's Christmas card list.

Through all of it, Holmes had been at his elbow.

Not quite at his elbow. Half a step behind and to the left, which placed him in a position from which he could be included or not depending on who was being spoken to, and from which he could see the whole arc of the crescent at once. His tails sat on him properly, in a way they did not sit on him in Hall. His left hand was in his pocket. His right hand had a glass of something he was not drinking. When his father turned to say something to him he answered in two syllables and his father laughed, briefly, and the crescent laughed with him, and Holmes nodded as if the joke were about weather. He was not pink. He was not stiff. He was standing in the sun on the Plough beside Siger Holmes the way the pavilion stood in the sun on the Plough beside the pitch: in exactly the shape he was supposed to be in, in the place he was supposed to be in, functioning.

Henry had never seen it.

He had seen Holmes in Hall and in div and on his own bed with a book up, and he had seen Holmes stop reading at lunch and shake his head and push a plate away, and he had seen Holmes catch a sock in Willoughby's room and go pink to the ears explaining a finesse, and he had never, in two years and eight months, seen Holmes do *this*, which was something it had evidently never occurred to anyone to ask him to describe. There was no Pony Club manual for it. The box did not cover it either. It was simply a thing that Holmes could do, which Henry had not known Holmes could do, and the fact that Holmes could do it was itself a piece of information, and Henry had nowhere to put it.

He put it on the shelf he was not opening, which took it.

*Mrs Bartlett, how marvellous,* said a voice at his mother's shoulder, and Mrs Chaudhry, in a hat the colour of lilac blossom, came in and kissed Olivia with professional affection and acquired a glass without appearing to ask for one. "Rafi, darling, say hello to Henry."

"Henry," said Chaudhry.

"Rafi."

"Isn't the day *beautiful,*" said Mrs Chaudhry, who had been born in Lahore and still spoke of the English summer the way a convert spoke of a sacrament. "And how have the boys been, Mrs Bartlett. I hear from Rafi that your Henry has broken the odd heart this half."

Chaudhry choked a little on his lemonade.

"Oh, Rafi," said Olivia pleasantly, and Rafi went very interested in his shoes. "Henry has been Henry. Had he, Rafi? Had he been breaking hearts?"

"Not very many, Mrs Bartlett," said Chaudhry, with the dignity of a boy taking the hit for his mother.

"Well, we shall put a cap on it, I think. I'm so pleased Rafi has done well in the French. Henry says the Second Fifteen were — "

Henry stopped listening. Rafi had the sort of mother who could be depended upon to deliver, into a conversation with another boy's mother, exactly the sort of remark that in a House of forty boys was both completely public and entirely confidential; and Olivia had taken it and set it aside the way one set aside a letter one did not intend to answer, and Rafi had understood that she had done so, and Henry, from above the glass of lemonade, understood as well, and felt an obscure gratitude towards his mother which, if he had tried to explain it, he could not have.

Mum went on being civil to Mrs Chaudhry. Henry, with his buttonhole now straight and his lemonade down a half-inch, watched the far side of the field.

"Henry, dear," said his mother, without turning.

"Mm."

"Mrs Davies is on her own by the second basket. Why don't you go and ask her whether she'd like to come and sit."

He looked at her then. She was still smiling at Mrs Chaudhry. She said, over the smile, "Her Mr Davies isn't here this year. He's in Moldova, I believe. Chișinău."

"Right."

"Off you go. Take her the lemonade. Rafi, you might come and help Henry, mightn't you."

"Yes, Mrs Bartlett," said Chaudhry at once.

Henry and Rafi went across the picnic to the second basket.

Mrs Davies was a thin fair woman in a dark hat with a dark ribbon, and she was holding a glass by its stem and looking in a very intent and unseeing way at the cricket. Seth was six feet off, with his back to her, in profile, drinking something and inspecting the horizon, in the posture of a boy who had been placed at six feet off by instructions he had not been given but had understood anyway. He saw Henry coming and did not turn.

"Mrs Davies," said Henry. "Mum sends her best, and we wondered whether you'd care to come across to our rug. There's rather too much food."

"Oh, Henry," said Mrs Davies, who had met him twice. "That is kind. Yes. Yes, I think I should like that. Seth, darling —"

"Yes, Mum."

"Darling, come."

Seth turned.

The thing about Seth Davies, Henry had always thought, was that if you looked at him when he was not working to be looked at you could see where every piece of him came from. The jaw was his father's. The nose was his mother's. The precise, slightly stiff courtesy of the way he came across the grass towards two boys and his mother was from an entirely different side of the family and had probably been issued at a school in Hampshire when he was eight. He said *Henry* and *Rafi* and *Mother* in that order, and he took the lemonade off Henry without blinking, and he said, as he did it, "Thanks, Bartlett. Mum, this is Henry's — this is Mrs Bartlett over there in the blue hat, she said — "

"Yes," said Mrs Davies. "Seth. Yes, I know."

"Right."

The four of them walked back across the picnic, and nobody mentioned any boy by name, and nobody looked across to the long rope, and when they got to Mum's rug Olivia stood up and extended both hands at once and said *Celia, my dear,* and Mrs Davies said *Olivia,* and sat, and Olivia poured, and the business of the second rug was underway.

Henry stood at the edge of it for a moment because he had nothing to do with his hands.

"Seth," he said.

"Henry."

Rafi, with the tact of a professional, said, "I'm going to go and find Toby," and did.

Henry and Seth stood side by side at the edge of the picnic and watched the cricket for the better part of a minute without either of them saying anything.

"How's your father," Henry said eventually.

"He's well," said Seth. "Thank you. Yes. He's — it's been very busy out there. The transition, you know. He sent — he said to send his best to anyone who asked."

"Right."

"Yours?"

"He's about."

"Yes."

They watched the cricket. The XI's opening bowler, from the pavilion end, sent down a maiden to the visitors' number four, which was a creditable thing to have done, and the picnic clapped a little, and the mothers said *oh well played* in several registers.

"Bartlett," said Seth, and then stopped.

"Yes."

"Nothing."

"Right."

Seth drank his lemonade. He had not, Henry noticed with the second instrument running, looked across the lawn at the long rope once in the whole exchange. His father was fifteen hundred miles away, so he had nobody to look at either, and he had chosen, with the discipline of a boy who had been raised by diplomats, to not-look very precisely in the direction of the only thing on the Plough he might have been looking at. The not-looking was absolute. It made Henry's own not-looking, which was intermittent and furtive and had been going on all afternoon, look amateurish.

They watched the cricket.

Behind them, from the rug, Mrs Davies was telling Olivia something about Chișinău which Olivia was taking in with the attention of a woman who had learned, from twenty years of being married to a Whitehall husband, that one listened to a diplomat's wife the way one listened to the shipping forecast: not for the content, which was never the point, but for which seas had been named.

"Siger's over there, isn't he," said Mrs Davies, lightly, after a bit.

"He is," said Olivia.

"How very like him to come. I mean, he always does, doesn't he."

"He always does."

"Have you —"

"Not this half, no. One hopes to."

And then Chișinău: the heat, and the post, and how long everything took.

He stood with his back to the rug and watched the cricket.

"I'd better go and find my people," said Seth. "Thanks, Bartlett."

"Davies."

Seth went. Henry stayed.

He was looking at the long rope, and that was how he came to see, directly, the thing he had been working for twenty minutes to avoid seeing, which was that Siger Holmes had broken off from the crescent and was crossing the picnic, with his glass in one hand, towards Dad.

He came the long way, which was to say the short way: not round the boundary, where every rug on the Plough would have had a claim on him, but straight across the pitch between overs, so that he arrived at Dad from the one side no mother could follow. Dad didn't turn until he was at his shoulder.

"Bartlett," said Siger, warmly.

"Siger."

"My dear man. You have, I see, acquired the only ice bucket on the Plough that still has ice in it. I shall be two minutes."

"Help yourself."

Siger put ice in his glass. He turned, with the glass, and said, "Olivia. Forgive me."

Mum, on the rug, had already risen a little from the knee, in the gracious way she rose for people she had decided in advance to rise for. "Mr Holmes."

"Siger. Please."

"Siger."

"Enchanted. May I —"

"Of course."

Siger took her hand. He did not kiss it, which Henry, standing six feet off with his lemonade, registered as a small professional kindness; Olivia was not the kind of woman you kissed the hand of on a cricket pitch, and Siger had known that in the half-second between standing up and taking it. He said something very pleasant about Dad which Dad accepted with a small movement of the head, and then he said, "And this is young Henry."

"Mr Holmes," said Henry.

"Siger, if you like. And how's the arm? Cicero sends his regards."

Henry's ears went. He felt them go. It had been January, and a grey horse with its teeth in his sleeve, and Holmes walking the top of a fence to shove it off with his foot; and the man had remembered. Not the arm in general. *Cicero.* He had kept the horse's name for five months on behalf of somebody else's son and produced it on Agar's Plough with a glass in his hand, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to have kept; and Henry, who liked him enormously and could not help it, said, "Quite recovered, thank you, sir," and felt Dad, at his shoulder, draw a quarter of an inch inward across the shoulders, which was the only part of Dad that ever moved under this sort of thing.

"How do you do," said Siger, belatedly and with great charm, as though they had only just been introduced.

He looked at Henry then. It was not a long look. It went, for about half a second, to Henry's collar, to where the colour was coming up out of it, Henry supposed; and it had, if you were paying attention to the second instrument, a shape Henry knew. It opened and closed a cover, in the half-second it took to see the whole of what was under it. He had seen that look before, three weeks ago at supper, from the other end of a table, on a different face.

Henry, from inside his collar, understood that he had just been read.

And underneath that, where he wasn't looking, the second instrument went quietly on with its inventory. A man who could keep the name of a horse for five months on behalf of somebody else's boy. A hat box on a shelf with nothing in it.

Dad said something dry about the ice. Siger laughed. It was a nice laugh.

"Olivia," he said, to Mum. "Henry. I shall leave you to your excellent picnic. Bartlett, a word before you go, perhaps."

"Of course."

Siger walked, with the glass, back across the pitch.

Dad looked at Henry for perhaps half a second, said, "Eat something, Henry," and went back to the man he had been talking to before Siger had come up, and resumed the conversation about the reshuffle at exactly the place it had left off.

Henry ate a strawberry.

"Well," said Olivia, to Mrs Davies, in a tone which Mrs Davies received without expression. "Celia. Where were we. Chișinău, wasn't it. Tell me about the house."

Mrs Davies told her about the house.

Henry sat down on the edge of the rug, carefully, with the strawberry stem in his fingers, and spent the next ten minutes looking at the back of his mother's hat.

It was a very good hat. He had been with her when she had bought it, in April, in a shop on Beauchamp Place, and she had turned it round in her fingers for about ninety seconds before deciding that she did not want it; and then they had gone two doors down for coffee, and when the coffee had come she had said *actually, darling, I think I do want the hat*, and had gone back and bought it. The hat was blue, with a cream band. Over the top of the band, directly above the ear facing him, Mum's eyes went across the lawn to the long rope, once, briefly, and came back and settled again on Mrs Davies. Nothing in her shoulders moved. The hat was perfectly level. If he had not spent his life looking at the back of his mother's head he would not have known that she had looked.

She had looked at Holmes.

She had looked at Holmes once when Siger had been at the rug, which Henry had not registered at the time; and she had just looked at Holmes again, in the thirty seconds after Siger had crossed back to the long rope; and in between those two looks she had taken Siger's hand and said *Siger, please,* and sat Mrs Davies down and poured her lemonade and listened to the shipping forecast of Chișinău and said *not this half, no, one hopes to*, and had been, in every observable way, exactly the kind of woman you would expect to meet on a rug on the fourth of June on Agar's Plough; and the whole afternoon she had been running a ruler over a boy Henry had not had the nerve to introduce her to, with the ruler Henry had placed in her hand on Wednesday last by writing *second tin, please* at the foot of a letter about trials.

Henry put the strawberry stem down on the plate.

The second instrument said, in Henry's own voice this time, with no apparatus: *there's a shelf in this house for the kind of thing Mum has just put on hers, and I don't know where it is, and I don't know what else is on it, and I am not going to.*

"Darling," said Olivia.

"Yes."

"The egg sandwiches."

He passed her the egg sandwiches.

***

Willoughby came by at about four, with his mother, and with a ginger beer already in his hand because Dad had put it there.

He was large and pink and cheerful, with grass on both knees. His mother laughed in the right places and looked twice at the car park, the way people look when they are waiting for somebody and don't want it to look like waiting. Mr Willoughby was not on Agar's. He hadn't been to a match since October. Henry, who had been at supper on the tenth of May and heard exactly why, handed Mrs Willoughby a plate and did not think about it, and thought about it.

"Mrs Bartlett!" said Willoughby, beaming. "Has he told you about Patty?"

"Toby—" said Henry.

"Patty?" said Dad.

"Patty Smith." Willoughby was enjoying himself enormously. It was a present; Henry could see him wrapping it. "Datchet. Her uncle's in timber. Rides a green bike with the basket hanging off. He's kept her very dark, Mr Bartlett, but Holmes found them out. Holmes finds out everything."

"He didn't find anything—" Henry began, and heard where the end of that sentence went, and stopped.

"Well, well," said Dad.

Henry looked at him, because he couldn't not.

Dad had been on the telephone and at the ice bucket and at Siger since eleven o'clock, and his face had been put away the whole time, the way it was put away at work. It came out now. Not all the way; enough. It was the face of a man who has been handed good news on a Saturday and sees no reason whatever to examine it, and it was turned on Henry with a pleasure so plain and so uncomplicated that Henry, who had not known there was anything his father was waiting to hear, understood that there had been.

"Datchet," said Dad. "We've driven past it."

"Smith," said Mum. "How lovely."

She said *Smith* in a particular voice. Henry knew it. It was the one Dad used at breakfast when he read a name out of something he had brought home in a red folder.

"You must bring her to tea, darling."

"She's got exams," said Henry, to the strawberries.

"She's frightfully clever," said Willoughby, who had never met her.

***

He saw how it was done, in the end, a little before six.

He had gone back to not-looking at the long rope and failed at it, and so he was looking when Mr Holmes, in the middle of a sentence to somebody else, lifted two fingers of the hand that wasn't holding the glass, without turning his head; and Holmes, half a step behind him, went. Not quickly. At the speed of the place. Across the corner of the rope and in among the rugs, in the direction the two fingers had been pointing, which was here.

The manual, which had had nothing whatever to say about the long rope all afternoon, had something to say now. It was very good handling. Quiet, consistent, no voice raised, nothing hurried; the signal given once and the animal coming at once. There was not a word in the book against any of it. There was a whole chapter in favour.

Henry looked at his plate.

Holmes came across the picnic and spoke to Mrs Chaudhry about Rafi's French.

It took him perhaps two minutes. He was correct and brief and did not sit down and was pleasant to Mrs Chaudhry and polite to Olivia and did not meet Henry's eye at any point, nor did he avoid meeting it; he looked at Henry when a sentence required him to look at Henry — once, when he said *I think Bartlett was in that div as well* — and the look was the look of a boy politely including a schoolfellow in a conversation with another schoolfellow's mother. It opened and closed a cover. Nothing was noted in it; the cover had been empty.

When he turned to go his left hand came out of his pocket and he adjusted the glass in his right, and Henry saw, as he had been meant to see or not been meant to see — Henry no longer troubled with that distinction — that the dressing had come off since breakfast and had not been replaced. The hand was fine. There was a thin pale ring at the base of each finger from where the tape had sat. The crescent on the web had closed to a line.

"Mrs Chaudhry. Mrs Bartlett."

"Holmes," said Olivia, pleasantly, and did not extend her hand. "Thank you for coming across. You will say hello to your father for me."

"I will," said Holmes.

He went.

Olivia turned, with the empty glass in her fingers, and watched him go for perhaps three seconds, and then turned back to Mrs Chaudhry and asked whether there were any more of the egg sandwiches, and Mrs Chaudhry, who had not been attending, said *of course,* and reached for the basket.

***

The Procession of Boats went off at six.

Henry stood at the river with Toby and Pickle and Finch and about thirty other boys, half a cricket length down from the parents, and watched the Monarch come up with the oars rising in a dripping arc on both sides and the cox standing in it with his bouquet; and Toby, who had been working at it all afternoon, finally delivered the sentence he had been saving, which was something libellous about Pickle's sister, and Pickle hit him on the shoulder with the back of his hand, and Finch said *steady,* and the four of them stood in the long slant of light along the Thames and watched the Victory come up after the Monarch and the Prince of Wales after the Victory and the Thetis after that, and the oars went up and down and the water fell off them and the boys in the boats stood up one at a time in the standing, as boys at Eton had done since nineteen hundred and whatever.

Henry's father, forty yards off along the bank, took a telephone call. It did not take long. Henry saw him put the thing back in his pocket and go back to standing next to Mum, who was next to Mrs Davies, who was next to Mrs Chaudhry; and across the river, under a tree, Siger Holmes said something to a man who looked like the Chervoniy father, and both of them laughed; and beside Siger Holmes, half a step back and to the left, Holmes was looking at the boats.

He was looking at the Monarch, specifically. He was looking at the Monarch the way he looked at any ritual he had not been required to work out the function of, which was with mild and interested attention. His father put a hand on his shoulder for a second and said something and took it off, and Holmes said two syllables back, and his father laughed, and the crescent laughed with him; and the oars went up, and the oars went up, and the oars went up.

Henry, on the near bank, watched his own breath come and go for the length of three catches of the oars.

The Monarch's cox lifted his bouquet. The boys in the boat rose, one at a time, in the standing. The flowers came off the hats and went into the water.

Henry watched the flowers go.

Behind him somewhere Toby said, "Right. Who's for a drink."

"Yes," said Henry.

They went up the bank.

***

His people were going before the fireworks, because Dad had a Monday; so when Pickle came up the bank and said *Bartlett, your mother wants you before they go,* Henry put the drink down on the wall and went.

The car park was a field with the grass gone flat, and the Bartlett car was near the gate, because Dad came early and left before the crush and had done so at every event Henry had ever attended with him. His mother was at the open boot with one glove on, supervising a man from the catering firm who was fitting the hamper in, and getting it fitted in slightly differently.

"There you are," she said. "I thought we should have to go without you, and then I should have had to write and apologise."

"I was at the river."

"Of course you were."

She drew the second glove on finger by finger, which was the gesture that meant the afternoon was folded and put away and she was now a woman about to be in a car. Three rows over, under the one green awning on the field, a man in a dark suit was taking down the Holmes picnic with the unhurried competence of somebody paid to, stacking plates beside a ham that had fed thirty and a tin bath with the bottles gone down in grey water. Nobody was at it. The host was out on the grass somewhere being charming, and the boy was wherever the afternoon's last signal had put him, and the instrument that did not ask leave and did not need Holmes in front of it to run noted the provision, and the absence of anyone it was being provided to, and set the finding down next to a hat box with nothing in it. Henry looked away before it could do anything further with it.

His father came round the back of the car with his face in the state it went into for work and had not yet come out of — smooth, shut, giving a visitor nothing — and did not take it off for Henry, which was ordinary and which Henry did not mind. "Trials Monday," he said.

"Yes."

"Don't make a meal of the Latin. You know it." He said it the way he said the things he had already decided were true. Then he put his hand for a moment on the back of Henry's neck — which he did not do — and took it off before it could mean anything, and that was the whole of it. He got in.

Henry did not ask what the word with Siger had been. You did not; and he had worked out a long time ago that wanting to know a thing was the surest way of being told nothing, and had got rather good, since, at not appearing to want to.

"Write in the week," said Olivia, at the passenger door. "Not only the weather."

"I always write."

"You put the weather at the top and the thing that matters at the very bottom, under the trials. Like your father." She said it to the glove, doing up its button, and not to him. "I get to the end."

And the sentence he had put at the foot of a letter the week before — three words and no reason given, which at the time he had not thought of as a thing a person got *to the end* of — stood up in him and looked at his mother; and his mother did up the button and did not look back at it. She kissed him once on the cheek, briskly, in the public way that committed neither of them to anything, and whatever she had taken off the lawn she took into the car with her, folded, in the place she kept that kind of thing. She was not going to hand it to him across a car park. He was not going to ask her for it. The window came down an inch and no further.

"It's a very good hat," Henry said, because it was, and because it was the nearest thing to hand.

"It is," said his mother, pleased, and the car went out through the gate.

He watched it to the road. Then he went back up the bank, where Toby had kept his drink and the light was going long and gold off the Thames; and the fireworks, when they came, were the ordinary excellent fireworks of every Fourth of June, and he watched them with his head tipped back and his drink going warm in his hand, and did not look, not once, across the dark field to where the other cars were.

## 7¼. Errand

*Saturday 3 June, earlier that afternoon · Sherlock*

The two fingers went up without his father turning his head, which meant *go*, in the direction the fingers had pointed, which he worked out on the move because stopping to ask would have cost more than going. So he went. Not quickly. There was no version of the afternoon improved by his arriving anywhere quickly, and a good deal of it — the heat, the cricket, two hundred people behaving as though a field with a rope round it were an occasion — was actively worsened by being hurried through.

He'd have been across the water with the real work if the real work had wanted him, and it didn't, particularly. His father could do the Chervoniy father in Russian rather better without a fifteen-year-old at his elbow reminding the crescent there was a fifteen-year-old, and had said as much, with a glass and a look, an hour ago. So he was spare. Being spare at a thing like this meant being sent on the small ones, and this was a small one — a courtesy wanted at some rug, the content of which he had not been given and did not trouble to reconstruct, there being no profit in it.

The rug, when he came up on it, had Bartlett on it, which he had seen coming, and a woman in a blue hat he had not; and the machinery handed him *the mother* off the shape of her and the state of her son before he had asked it to. The son had gone over-formal the instant Sherlock came into range and was colouring at the ears about it. Bloody moron. If Bartlett was going to talk as much as Bartlett generally talked, he might have spent some of it here, where it would have been of use, and spared the effort; instead he sat on the rug going the colour of a radish and left the pleasantries to the boy who'd been sent to make them.

"Mrs Chaudhry," he heard himself say. "Mrs Bartlett." It came out without him, which was the one merciful thing about it.

He had half a hand ready, out of manners, and the woman in the blue hat did not put hers out — looked at him pleasantly and kept it where it was — so the readiness went nowhere and cost nothing, which was, if anything, one fewer thing to do. He said the line the errand wanted, which had Bartlett's name in it — *I think Bartlett was in that div as well* — and looked at Bartlett for the length of the sentence, because the sentence pointed there, and took nothing off the look and left nothing in it, and looked away again. Whatever Bartlett did with his face after that he did not stay to collect.

Two minutes, about. He did not sit down. When he turned to go he took his left hand out of his pocket to shift the glass across, and the pale rings where the tape had sat caught the light, and he noted them the way one notes the time, which is to say not at all. The woman in the blue hat said something about his father. He said he would, and went back the way he had come, at the speed of the place, to stand half a step off his father's shoulder and be spare again, the boats going up and down the river in front of him doing whatever it was boats did at a thing like this — which he had never been required to work out, and so had not.

## 7½. M4

*Saturday 3 June, the drive home · Olivia*

They left before the fireworks, because Arthur had a Monday.

It was still light on the M4. Arthur drove with one hand at the bottom of the wheel, which he did when a day had gone well. He had come back from the car park at half past six with his face put away, and had got it out again by Slough.

The letter had come on the Thursday. Olivia had read it standing up at the kitchen counter, which was how Henry's letters were meant to be read: the weather; the XI, which he was not yet in, described so as to suggest he very nearly was; trials; and at the foot, below trials, exactly where a boy brought up at the right dinner tables puts the one thing in a letter that matters, a short administrative request for a second tin on the second Friday. No reason.

She had known it meant something before she'd finished the line. What it meant had taken rather longer: the rest of Thursday and a good part of Friday. And it had not been the thing she'd been braced for since the thirteenth of May, which had been a good deal simpler and on the whole a good deal funnier. She had said *colt* to see what his ears would do. They had done it. She had driven home pleased with herself.

A colt was a thing one teased a boy about. A second tin was something else. A second tin was a boy who had looked at somebody's shelf.

And today there had been the Holmes car three rows over, under its awning, with a man in a dark suit keeping order over a ham and a tin bath of bottles for thirty people, and about thirty people eating it, and the host nowhere near it all afternoon. Whatever the second tin was for, it was not food. There was food here. She had rather known that on Thursday. It was a different thing to see it with a ham.

She had sat next to Siger Holmes once, at a dinner in Belgravia, and laughed for two hours; and on the drive home she had tried to remember a single thing he had said about himself, and couldn't. She had thought that the most interesting fact about the evening. Today he had come across the pitch to Arthur with a glass in his hand, remembered the name of a horse for Henry's benefit, and gone again; and later the boy had come to the rug on some errand of his father's, and had been perfectly correct, and had gone the moment it was finished, the way a boy goes who has been sent. She had not offered him her hand. She was not entirely sure why, and she had decided not to examine it on a lawn.

"Patty Smith," Arthur said, after a while.

"Mm."

"Timber."

"So Toby says."

"Good for him." A mile went by. "I'll be honest, I'd wondered whether he'd—" He made a small motion with the free hand, meaning *boys*, meaning *that age*, meaning nothing he was going to finish. "Good for him."

"Mm," said Olivia.

One couldn't check a Smith. That was the beauty of a Smith. Datchet was near enough to be real and too dull for anybody to go and look, and the timber was the sort of family business nobody asked a second question about; and the bicycle, the green bicycle with the basket hanging off, was the bit doing the actual work. You could see the bicycle. Somebody had known to give it a bicycle.

*Holmes found them out.*

Her husband could tell from a man's shoes which department he had been seconded from. She had watched him do it at a reception, cross the room to a man he had never met and say *How are you finding the Treasury?*, and be right. And he had been handed a girl from Datchet by Toby Willoughby at a picnic, and had accepted her with visible relief, and was driving home on the strength of her.

She thought it more likely than not that there was no Patty Smith. She did not say so.

"Nice of Siger to come over," said Arthur.

"He goes to everybody."

"Yes," said Arthur, and his face went away again for a moment, and came back.

They passed the sign for Datchet. Arthur, who had driven past it on three Fourths running without once looking at it, looked at it with new and benevolent interest.

Olivia watched the verge.

She had thought, on Thursday, of putting something in the second tin: a note, or the good biscuits instead of the ordinary ones. Somewhere in the afternoon, with the Holmes ham three rows off, she had understood that the whole kindness of the thing was in its being exactly the same as the first. Same shop, same size, same biscuits. A tin was not a remark.

It would go on Friday.

## 7¾. Tin

*Friday 9 June · Henry*

The Latin had gone the way his father said it would, which was to say it had gone: ninety minutes of Livy and an unseen that was not as hard as it had been dressed up to be, and Henry had come out into Upper School's glare unable to produce a single sentence of what he'd written, which with Latin was the good sign. He had not made a meal of it. He had told his father he would not, and had then gone and not, which was about the only kind of promise he could reliably keep to his father — the kind that was really an instruction, and that you discharged by getting out of its way.

The post was out on the long table in the passage by the time he got down. The tin was in among the letters in brown paper gone soft at the corners, with his name in his mother's hand and too many stamps, the way she always put too many stamps on, as though the Post Office might otherwise take the thing personally.

He knew the weight of it before he had the string off. He had known it in the passage, in fact, because it was the weight of the first one, exactly, and his hands had kept the first one.

In his room he got the paper off and there it was: the tin from the shop on the parade she always used, the lid that wanted a thumbnail, and inside, under the leaf of paper, the ordinary biscuits. Not the good ones. The ordinary ones, the same as the first tin, the same number, set in the same order, down to the one that always sat slightly proud because the tin was a half-size too shallow for it. Opening the second was indistinguishable from opening the first.

There was no note. He looked for the note. There was the paper, and the biscuits, and the tin, and no note; and he sat on the end of the bed and looked at the not-note for rather longer than a boy looks at a tin of biscuits.

Because he had asked for it. That was the part the thing in him went round and round on, the part that read a diary the way Dad read a diary on a Sunday night. He had put *second tin, please* at the foot of a letter in which everything above it had been the weather and the XI and trials — three words, no reason given and none to be asked for — and he had known, writing them, that they were not about biscuits, and had written them anyway, because it was the only place in a letter a thing like that could go and the only shape a thing like that could take. And a tin had come. The identical tin. Which told him the thing had arrived, since things that don't arrive don't come back wrapped; and which told him precisely nothing about what had been understood by it, because a tin of ordinary biscuits is a tin of ordinary biscuits and says, out loud, in the clear, nothing whatever.

The possibilities stood up in order, the way they did. That she had read it and answered it: here is the tin, consider yourself answered. That she had read it and *not* understood it, and had simply sent the thing he had literally asked for, that being the thing he had literally asked for. That she had understood it exactly, all the way to the floor, and had chosen a tin of ordinary biscuits as the one reply that committed her to nothing and left him nothing he could ever be made to explain. The three of them sat on the bed with him and would not go into one, because the evidence for each was the same evidence, which was a tin, and the tin was the same tin.

He had the sentence half-built that would settle it — could write back and put it straight, *did you mean anything by the tin,* the way he had once carried an absurd administrative errand across a corridor rather than say the thing itself. He did not build it. She was not going to hand it to him across a tin any more than she had across a car park, and he was not going to ask her for it across one either. He put the lid back on.

Toby put his head round the door at some point and said was that a tin, and Henry said it was, and Toby ate two of the ordinary biscuits and said they were all right, and Henry ate one, and they were all right.

He wrote to his mother in the week. He put the weather at the top. He thanked her for the tin at the very bottom, under the trials, where she would get to it — and did not say, because there was no saying it and no need, that it had been exactly what he asked for.