round the throat. The girls screamed in fear and enjoyment as the two boys rolled on the ground, punching and kicking. Radley hauled one off and slammed him back against the wall. Then he marched him to the back of the room and sat him down alone. The other boy, the mother-enjoyer, had a thin trickle of blood coming from the corner of his lip.
'You sit over there,' said Radley.
'Sir, I need to go and--'
'Do what you're told,' said Radley, his voice nearer to an eight than a four.
The boy went.
At the end of the lesson, Radley made them both stay behind.
'I don't want you doing that again,' he said.
'Mind your own fucking business.'
'Yeah, that's right. We know where you live.'
'I don't think so,' said Radley. 'And in any case, I wouldn't recommend it.'
There was something in his voice the boys responded to; the air went out of them.
'Anyway ...' said one.
They tried to find a surly way of leaving without losing face.
'Yeah, exactly. To be honest wiv you ... Anyway,' said the other.
They shambled off.
'Yes. Exactly,' said Radley, loudly, so they heard.
He felt a sense of power and determination. That Miranda tart, she'd disrespected Jason Dogg as well.
V
In Ferrers End, Ralph Tranter was busy knocking out a review for The Toad. It was of a book he'd already reviewed under his own name in Vista, a new monthly magazine, and he was keen to put the record straight for Toad readers, to sweep up any crumbs of comfort the author might have taken from his signed piece.
He enjoyed reviewing, and over the years had developed a facility for it. One of the secrets was to allow your view of the book to colour your account of it, so that rather than have a schoolboy precis bracketed by an evaluation in the first and final paragraphs, the whole thing was a compound of description and judgement. Sometimes, of course, you had to stand back to make your points more firmly; such, for instance, had been the case with A Winter Crossing by Alexander Sedley. The derision that Tranter felt then couldn't be contained within the usual framework. He felt obliged to draw the reader to one side to let him into the full horror of the con trick that was Sedley, A. He had given it both barrels, then sent out for another gun. 'Provincial, narrow Englishness ... garlanded with praise from all the usual suspects of the metropolitan snob brigade ... workaday psychological observations ... unintentionally hilarious juxtapositions ... embarrassing purple passages.'
Unfortunately, it hadn't worked. While one or two other reviewers agreed that it was disappointing that Sedley seemed to have made nothing up, most of them had enjoyed the book and looked forward to more from a 'promising first-timer'. Tranter wasn't surprised by this supine response; it merely goaded him into further action. His Toad piece a fortnight later went through the reviewers one by one and pointed out that they were all Sedley's old university chums (there was no need in an anonymous review to mention his own college connection to the editor of The Toad) and suggested that those Sedley hadn't actually bribed were members of a loose homosexual coterie. The fact that Sedley, so far from being gay, was married to a notably good-looking consultant oncologist and was the father of four meant nothing to Tranter, since Sedley's type were always on for some queer stuff; it was part of their education.
But nothing, it seemed, could stop the bandwagon. A few weeks later, the wretched book made it into the preliminary list of six for that year's Cafe Bravo first novel prize. This called for more intense guerrilla action, Tranter felt. From a listings magazine, he saw that Sedley would be reading from his 'highly acclaimed' novel at a bookshop in Hampstead at 5.30 on a Friday, and by 5.10 Tranter had placed himself on the end of a row of chairs in the centre of the aisle with a glass of free Rioja.
Sedley arrived late, looking flustered. The traffic had been terrible, he explained to the bookshop manager, as he quickly downed a glass of wine before facing the dauntingly full book-shop.
'Hello, Alexander,' said Tranter, sidling in to where the author stood preparing himself behind the travel section. 'How's things? You're a bit late.'
Sedley seemed to gasp and swallow. 'I ... er ... I didn't expect to see you here. You know ... A ... er, a fellow professional, as it were. It's normally