far more no-smoking carriages for first-class passengers.
The headmaster took the speech out of his briefcase and placed it on his lap. He looked up as the smoke cleared, and saw him sitting on the other side of the carriage.
29
SEBASTIAN STUBBED OUT his cigarette, leapt up, grabbed his suitcase from the rack above him and left the carriage without a word. He was painfully aware that although the headmaster said nothing, his eyes never left him.
He humped his suitcase through several carriages to the far end of the train, where he squeezed himself into an overcrowded third-class carriage. As he stared out of the window, he tried to think if there was any way out of his present predicament.
Perhaps he should return to first class and explain to the headmaster that he was going to spend a few days in London with his uncle, Sir Giles Barrington, MP? But why would he do that, when he’d been instructed to return to Bristol and hand Dr Banks-Williams’s letter to his father? The truth was that his parents were in Los Angeles attending a ceremony at which his mother was to be awarded her business degree, summa cum laude, and they wouldn’t be arriving back in England before the end of the week.
Then why didn’t you tell me that in the first place, he could hear the headmaster saying, and then your housemaster could have issued you with the correct ticket? Because he had intended to return to Bristol on the last day of term, so when they turned up on Saturday, they would be none the wiser. He might even have got away with it, if he hadn’t been in a first-class carriage, smoking. After all, he’d been warned what the consequences would be if he broke another school rule before the end of term. End of term. He’d broken three school rules within an hour of leaving the premises. But then, he never thought he’d see the headmaster again in his life.
He wanted to say, I’m an Old Boy now and I can do as I please, but he knew that wouldn’t work. And if he did decide to return to first class, there was a risk that the headmaster would discover he only had a third-class ticket; a wheeze he always tried on whenever he travelled to and from school at the beginning and end of term.
He would occupy the corner seat of a first-class carriage, making sure he had a clear view of the corridor. The moment the ticket collector entered the far end of the carriage, Sebastian would nip out and disappear into the nearest lavatory, not locking the door but leaving the vacant sign in place. Once the ticket collector had moved on to the next carriage, he would slip back into the first-class compartment for the rest of the journey. And as it was a non-stop service, the wheeze never failed. Well, it had nearly failed once, when a vigilant conductor had doubled back and caught him in the wrong carriage. He’d immediately burst into tears and apologized, explaining that his mother and father always travelled first class, and he didn’t even realize there was a third class. He had got away with it, but then he’d only been eleven at the time. Now he was seventeen, and it wouldn’t only be the ticket collector who didn’t believe him.
He dismissed any chance of a reprieve and, accepting that he wouldn’t be going up to Cambridge in September, Sebastian began to consider what he should do once the train pulled into Paddington.
The headmaster didn’t even glance at his speech as the train sped through the countryside towards the capital.
Should he go and look for the boy and demand an explanation? He knew Clifton’s housemaster had supplied him with a third-class single to Bristol, so what was he doing in a first-class carriage bound for London? Had he somehow got on the wrong train? No, that boy always knew in which direction he was going. He just hadn’t expected to be caught. In any case, he’d been smoking, despite having been explicitly told that school rules would apply until the last day of term. The boy hadn’t even waited an hour to defy him. There were no mitigating circumstances. Clifton had left him with no choice.
He would announce at assembly tomorrow morning that Clifton had been expelled. He would then phone the admissions tutor at Peterhouse, and then the boy’s father, to explain why his son would no