10. Monty

      Mr Owen had been at the school for no more than a month when, one morning after assembly, he stopped Alexander in the corridor, outside Mr Darrow’s room, and said to him in an aggrieved tone of voice: ‘Montgomery is an hero, is he not?’

      ‘Sir,’ Alexander agreed, after a hesitation, having heard ‘Anne Eero’.

      ‘Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, commander of the Eighth Army and victor of El Alamein, is an hero.’ Mr Owen shifted his feet as if adjusting his balance on a moving deck, and his plimsolls squealed on the stone floor. ‘He is a man who has achieved things. Stupendous things. He is a leader of men,’ said Mr Owen.

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      ‘A leader of men you are not.’

      ‘No, sir,’ Alexander replied, puzzled as to what he might have done to offend Mr Owen. His classmates were passing behind Mr Owen, filing in for the English lesson. John Halloran glanced at Alexander and grimaced in sympathy.

      ‘So?’ demanded Mr Owen. He wiped a hand over the crown of his head, as if to quell his exasperation.

      ‘Sir?’

      ‘What is the connection, MacIndoe? Where is the relevance?’

      Still having no notion what Mr Owen was talking about, Alexander assumed a posture of contrition, fixing his gaze on the books he was holding to his waist.

      ‘Simple question, lad. It’s not an algebra problem. All I want to know is what’s the connection?’

      At the window of Mr Darrow’s room appeared a sheet of paper on which the word ‘MAD’ was crayoned in capital letters. Lionel Griffiths’ head rose into view beside it, with a finger tapping at his temple. All of a sudden Alexander understood. ‘Not that Monty, sir,’ he said.

      ‘I beg your pardon?’ queried Mr Owen, his lip crumpling into a sneer.

      ‘It’s not that Monty, sir.’

      ‘What do you mean, MacIndoe? “Not that Monty”? There is only one Monty.’

      ‘No, sir, there’s another one. It’s the other one, sir. Montgomery Clift.’

      ‘Montgomery Clift?’ Mr Owen repeated in an outraged shriek.

      ‘The actor, sir. The Search. Red River. A Place in the Sun.’

      ‘Yes, yes. I am not an ignoramus, MacIndoe.’ Momentarily deflated, Mr Owen looked without interest at Alexander’s books, and then he looked Alexander in the eye and instantly rediscovered his indignation. ‘Montgomery Clift? The gooey American?’

      ‘Sir.’

      ‘That long lump of unbaked dough?’

      ‘Yes, sir. They think I look like him. Some of them do.’

      ‘Is that so?’ Mr Owen rejoined, and the delayed repercussions of a thought spread across his features, like a gust of wind rippling the grass on a hill. The sneer subsided, to be succeeded by a look of placid distaste. ‘Nothing like him, if you ask me,’ he said.

      ‘I don’t see it either, sir,’ Alexander replied.

      ‘Whatever could they be thinking of, eh?’ Mr Owen rubbed the toe of one plimsoll with the toe of the other, then looked at Alexander’s face as if it were a tepidly amusing drawing that a child had done. ‘Off you go, MacIndoe.’

      The gymnasium was beyond a pair of storage rooms and a padlocked classroom that he was never to see open, at the end of a corridor that smelled of stale canvas and rubber and skin and coconut matting. The way in was through the changing rooms, where in the morning the dairy-white tiles gleamed in the light that came in through the gymnasium door. From the playground the pointed high windows of the gymnasium and the terracotta plaques on the wall gave it the look of a chapel, and there was something church-like in its appearance in the morning, before it had been used. Some mornings Alexander would arrive at school early and enter the corridor by the door that led to the playground, and if nobody was around he would creep between the steel mesh clothes-racks, and go into the quiet, high-ceilinged hall. The painted white lines on the parquet he could see as the patterns on the floor of an aisle, and he could see the vaulting horse, standing against the end wall behind a painted semicircle, as an altar of sorts, capped with its pad of blood-red leather. Between the windows on both sides the wall-bars were arrayed like tiers of memorials. Looped over the bars, the ropes made curves like stone vaulting, rising to the rings by which they were attached to the rafters. Until five minutes before the bell was due to ring he would sit under a window, listening to the voices growing louder outside, fortifying himself with the emptiness of the gymnasium before crossing the playground to his classroom.

      Mr Owen’s lessons always began the same way. They would await his arrival in a line across the centre of the gymnasium, facing the changing-room door, through which the squeak of Mr Owen’s plimsolls would be heard and then, a few seconds before he appeared, his command: ‘To attention!’ Swivelling on his heels, he closed the door, leaving his hand on the knob for a moment, an action that signified that he was not merely shutting a door but imprisoning them for his thirty minutes. ‘All here?’ he would ask, before squeaking towards them, reciting a selection from his roster of nicknames. ‘Hercules Halloran here; Goliath Griffiths here; Tiny Tim Pottinger here,’ he would call out, while Alexander concentrated on the great volume of air above their heads. ‘The Mighty Pickering here; Girly MacIndoe here; Fat Boy Radford here,’ Mr Owen would call out, smiling to himself.

      ‘One day, one day,’ Mick Radford once muttered as he retrieved a medicine ball that Mr Owen had thrown at him, and the phrase became the class’s refrain. ‘One day, one day,’ repeated John Halloran, peeling a handkerchief from his bleeding shin. ‘One day, one day,’ promised Timothy Pottinger, running cold water over a rope burn, before writing ‘One’ on the underside of the tongue of his left plimsoll, and ‘Day’ on the tongue of the right.

      That day arrived at the end of an unseasonably cold week, near the end of term. It was a dark morning, as Alexander would remember, and it became darker and colder during the walk to school. Hail started to fall during assembly, and pools of melting ice were forming in the playground as they crossed to the gymnasium.

      Alexander took his place in the line, underneath the basketball hoop. Locking and unlocking his fingers as Mr Owen would do when watching them exercise, he leaned forward to look at John Halloran. He licked his palm and swiped it across his hair from brow to nape, and blinked as if unable to credit the evidence of his eyes. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ he said. ‘What an abomination. Yes. You. An Johnny Weissmuller you are not, Halloran.’ He put his hands behind his back and flexed his knees, like Mr Owen did, and mimicked Mr Owen’s dry, mirthless laugh: ‘uck, uck, uck’. Roy Pickering bit his lip to prevent a smile. ‘I don’t know what you find so funny, Pickering. You are an fairy, are you not?’ Roy Pickering’s lip was turning white under the pressure of his teeth, and it was then that Alexander saw that Mr Owen had come soundlessly into the gymnasium, and was closing the door.

      ‘You’re dead, Monty,’ whispered Mick Radford. ‘I’ll bring the wreath.’

      But Mr Owen did not appear to have heard Alexander. ‘Come on. Jump to it!