He knew that if he could get his feet up he might float, but in his terror and panic his body wasn’t doing what he wanted it to do.
‘Help,’ he screamed, ‘help me!’ Then he was under again, and this time the water seemed even thicker with eels. The head of one probed his mouth and clamped its jaws on to his lip. He tore it away, and his anger gave him fresh strength. He forced his feet downwards, found a solid piece of ground, and then he was up out of the water again. All about him the surface of the lake was seething with frenzied eels.
‘Help, help… Please, somebody, help me…’ His mouth hurt and blood was dripping from where the eel had bitten his lip. He thrashed at the water, but nothing would scare the beasts away.
And then out of the corner of his eye he saw someone… a man running along the far shore. He waved crazily and yelled for help again. He didn’t care any more if it was an estate worker… anything was better than being trapped here with these terrible fish.
The man ran closer and dived into the loch.
No, the boy wanted to shout. Not in the water. Not in with the eels. But then he saw a head bob to the surface. He looked all right. It was all right. He was going to be rescued.
The man swam towards him with strong, crude strokes. Thank God. Thank God. He was going to be saved. For a while he almost forgot about the eels and just concentrated on the man’s steady progress towards him, but then a fresh surge knocked him off balance and he was once more in the snaking embrace of a hundred frenzied coils of cold flesh.
No. No, he would not let them beat him. He whirled his arms, kicked his legs and he was out again, gasping and spluttering for breath.
But where was the man? He had disappeared.
The boy looked round desperately. Had the eels got him?
It was quiet; the movement in the water seemed to have stopped, almost as if none of this had ever happened…
And then he saw him, under the water, a big, dark shape among the fish, and suddenly, with a great splash, he rose out of the loch and the boy screamed.
The last thing he saw before he sank back into the black depths of the water was the man’s face; only it wasn’t a man’s face… It was an eel’s face, a nightmare face; chinless, with smooth, grey, utterly hairless skin pulled tight across it, and fat, blubbery lips that stretched almost all the way back to where the ears should be. The front of the face was deformed, pushed forward, so that the nose was hideously flattened, with splayed nostrils, and the bulging eyes were forced so wide apart that they didn’t look in any way human.
The ghastly thick lips parted and a wet belching hiss erupted.
Then the waters closed over the boy and he knew nothing more.
Part One: ETON
1
The New Boy
The smell and noise and confusion of a hallway full of schoolboys can be quite awful at twenty past seven in the morning. The smell was the worst part – from this great disorderly mass rose the scent of sweat and sour breath and unwashed bodies, mixing with the two-hundred-year-old school odour of carbolic and floor polish.
Boys as a rule don’t notice bad smells, they’ve other things on their minds, but one boy did. He stood alone in the centre of all this chaos, while the torrent of excited youth barged past him, and wished he were somewhere else. He wasn’t used to these crowds, these numbers, this noise, this smell.
He was a new boy; tall for his age and slim, with pale, grey-blue eyes and black hair that he had tried to brush into a perfect, neat shape but, as usual, failed. One stray lock dropped down over his right eye like a black comma.
A moment ago the hallway had been empty, and the boy had been wondering where everyone was, but now it was alive with shouting pupils who streamed down the stairs and into the dining room.
‘You, boy!’ barked a voice and the boy looked round.
A man stood there glaring at him and, despite the fact that he was short, shorter even than some of the boys, he had an air of self-importance about him.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘What’s your name, boy?’
‘Bond, James Bond.’
‘James Bond – sir.’
‘Yes. Sorry, sir.’
The man peered at him. He was short and stick-thin, with pale skin, deep-set, blue-rimmed eyes, wiry grey hair and a very short, very black beard that covered nearly half his face. He reminded James a little of King George.
‘Do you know who I am, Mister Bond?’ he said coldly.
‘I’m afraid not, sir. I just arrived.’
‘I am Mister Codrose. Your housemaster. I am to be your father, your priest and your God for the duration of your stay at this school. I should have met you yesterday evening, but some damned fool boy walked into the path of an automobile on Long Walk and I spent half the night in the hospital. I trust you saw The Dame?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. Now you had best run along or you will be late for early school. I will see you for a chat before supper.’
‘Yes, sir.’ James turned to walk away.
‘Wait!’ Codrose stared at James with his cold fish eyes. ‘Welcome to Eton, Bond.’
James had arrived the day before at nearby Windsor station, peering up through clouds of steam at the great walls and towers of Windsor Castle. He had wondered if the King was in there somewhere; maybe he was even sitting at a window, looking down at the train?
He had followed a group of boys out of the station and into Windsor, where they crossed over the wide, grey waters of the River Thames that divided the town into two. On one side was the castle and on the other was Eton College. He was amazed at the size of the school; it took up nearly half the town, spreading out chaotically in all directions. Over a thousand boys studied here, all living in the numerous houses scattered haphazardly about the place.
He had asked for directions and eventually found himself wandering, lost, down a long footpath called Judy’s Passage, looking hopelessly at the tall, unmarked buildings on either side.
A slightly overweight Indian boy with a white turban had approached him.
‘Are you the new chap, by any chance?’ he had asked.
‘I suppose I might be,’ said James.
‘You are James Bond?’
‘Yes.’
The boy smiled and shook his hand.
‘Pritpal Nandra,’ he said. ‘I have been looking out for you.’
He led James into a nearby ramshackle building.
‘I have the room next to yours,’ Pritpal said. ‘I shall be messing with you.’
‘Messing?’
‘We will cook our tea together,’ Pritpal explained. ‘And take turns to eat in each other’s rooms. You, me and a third boy. We were wondering what you would be like.’
‘Will I do?’
Pritpal smiled again. ‘I think so.’
James followed Pritpal into the dim interior of the house, through the hallway and up three flights of ancient stairs, before arriving at a long, winding corridor.
‘Here we are,’ said the Indian boy as he pushed open a creaky door, thick with layers of dark-blue paint, and James got the first sight of his room.
It was tiny, with a sloping roof reaching almost to the floor in one corner and a great black beam cutting the ceiling in two. James was relieved to see that his trunk had arrived safely. It was a small reminder of his life before school.
‘Your new home,’ said Pritpal. ‘Not much to look at now, is it? But you can fix it up. There’s your burry.’
‘My what?’
‘Your burry.’ Pritpal pointed to a battered piece of furniture that consisted of a chest of drawers with a desk on top supporting a small bookcase. It was scratched with the names of previous owners, and one enthusiastic boy had even burnt his name into it with a hot poker.
James looked around; as well as the burry there was a small table, a washstand, a Windsor chair and a thin, faded rug that lay on the floor next to the fireplace. James frowned. There was something missing.
‘Where will I sleep?’ he asked.
Pritpal laughed.
‘Your bed’s behind here,’ he said, indicating a curtain that hung over a bulky object on one wall. ‘Our boys’ maid will fold it down for you just before evening prayers. There is quite a lot to get used to here, but you will soon learn. First thing you must do is get some more pieces for your room. You shall need an ottoman, an armchair, boot box, brush box, some pictures from Blundell’s…’
‘Hold on,’ said James, slumping into the chair. ‘Not so fast.’
‘Sorry, old chap,’ said Pritpal. ‘But it is important that you make yourself comfortable in here. You will spend half your life in this room.’
Half his life? James tried to take that in. This was all so strange for him. For the past couple of years he had been educated at home by an aunt. To be suddenly plunged into this new world, with its ancient traditions, its crowds of strangers and its own strange language, was quite unsettling.
‘Come along,’ said Pritpal, pulling James up out of his chair. ‘No shilly-shallying, there is a great deal to be done. Let’s go and see who you’re up to.’
‘Up to?’
‘Who’s going to be teaching you. Follow me, we have to go to School Yard.’
Pritpal led James out of Codrose’s and back down Judy’s Passage to Long Walk, where he stopped, nodding towards an ornate lamppost, decorated with elaborate floral ironwork, that stood on an island in the middle of the road.
‘That is the Burning Bush,’ he said. ‘It is a famous Eton landmark and a very useful meeting point. Are you getting your bearings all right, old chap?’
Before James could answer, Pritpal dragged him across the road and through a large doorway set into the side of a long, square building.
‘This is Upper School,’ said Pritpal as they passed through the gloom and out into a busy red-brick courtyard on the other side. ‘The heart of Eton. The statue in the middle is the school founder, King Henry VI. And that’s Lupton’s Tower behind him. That clock will rule your life! Now, let us see what your fate is.’
They squeezed through the pack of boys crowding round the noticeboards, and Pritpal talked James through the complicated tangle of lessons and teachers. James tried to follow it all, but could hardly keep up. All he could gather was that some teachers, or ‘beaks’ as Pritpal called them, were good and some bad, and some were demons from the very lowest level of hell.
He did learn, though, that his classical tutor, the man in charge of most of his education, was to be a Mr Merriot, which was apparently a good thing.
After studying the noticeboards they walked down the high street to buy some Latin grammar books, though not before Pritpal had explained that as lower boys they must only ever walk on the east side of the road.
‘Even if you’re coming out of W. V. Brown’s and going to Spottiswoode’s, which is only ten yards further on, you have to cross the street and then recross it when you’re opposite Spottiswoode’s.’
‘But why?’ said James.
‘Ours is not to reason why, and all that,’ said Pritpal.
‘But there must be a reason, it’s ridiculous.’
‘You will soon learn that there are a lot of traditions here at Eton whose meaning has long since been lost. Nobody knows why we do most of the things we do. We just do.’
James hadn’t slept well. His room was freezing and the springs in his bed had dug into him through the thin mattress. He had been troubled by dreams about his parents and had woken in the middle of the night, not knowing where he was. He had eventually managed to get back to sleep, only to be roused again at a quarter to seven by his boys’ maid, Janet, a red-faced old woman with swollen ankles. She had clattered a pan of hot water outside his door and shouted for him to be up, even though it seemed as if he’d only just nodded off.
James had crawled out of bed, fetched the water, poured it into the basin on his washstand and washed his hands and face. Then he took a deep breath and steeled himself for the hardest task of the morning – putting on his school uniform for the first time.
He got into each new item with mounting discomfort: the long, black, itchy trousers, the white shirt with its wide, stiff collar: the waistcoat: the fiddly little black tie that was little more than a scrap of stiff paper: his bum-freezer Eton jacket and, most ridiculous of all, a tall top hat. To a boy like James who was used to wearing simple, comfortable clothes it was torture. He felt awkward and self-conscious, as if he were at some dreadful fancy dress party. They weren’t his clothes and they were one more unreal element in this whole unreal situation. As he tied the laces on his heavy black boots, he cursed. He hated laces.
Once dressed, he had hurried downstairs, expecting to find the hallway crowded with boys, but it was empty and the house was deathly silent. He looked nervously at the clock – it was ten past seven. He had been told that early school started at half past seven, so where was everybody?
He checked the dining room – empty. Perhaps they’d been teasing him, playing a trick on the new boy. He had certainly been horrified to learn that he would have his first lesson before breakfast.
He had looked out into the passage; there was nobody else about.
Then he’d gone back inside and watched the long minutes tick by on the clock. Quarter past… Twenty past… He had been just about to go upstairs and look for Pritpal when there had been a noise like an avalanche, and a horde of boys had crashed down the stairs and pushed past him into the dining room, where they had quickly stuffed their faces with stale buns and cocoa before stampeding out of the building.
Now here he was, pushing an unruly lock of hair out of his face and trying not to say the wrong thing to Mr Codrose.
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ said the cold-eyed little man, rubbing his beard with a noise like sandpaper. ‘Hurry along or you will be late for early school.’ Codrose strode off and a group of boys parted to let him pass.
‘Yes, sir, thank you, sir,’ James called after him.
The torrent of boys surged outside into the alleyway and James followed, though he had no clear idea of exactly where he was meant to be going. He was trying to keep up, but he felt like he was in a dream with its own mysterious set of rules. He hurried along, praying that he was heading in the right direction, and with a great feeling of relief he spied Pritpal and ran to catch up with him.
‘You have just learnt your first lesson at Eton, James,’ said the Indian boy, panting loudly. ‘Never get up before a quarter past seven.’
James laughed. ‘Will I ever get the hang of all this?’
‘Oh, yes. Don’t worry too much. Now, come along, I’ll show you to your school room.’
‘Thanks.’
‘So, what was your last place like?’ Pritpal asked. ‘A lot smaller than this, I should imagine.’
‘Yes,’ said James. ‘A lot smaller,’ and he explained about being educated at home by his aunt.
‘That sounds like excellent fun.’
‘It was certainly very different from all this.’
Pritpal laughed. ‘Imagine how it was for me, coming from India,’ he said. ‘It’s so cold in England and the sun is so dull… and the food! My God! You English are a barbarous race. Look out… !’
‘What?’
But James was too late; as he raced round a corner he collided with a pair of older boys.
‘Watch where you’re going, new-tit,’ sneered one of them – a large boy with a big, square head, bristly hair and a gap between his front teeth.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry’s not good enough,’ said the second boy, who was probably a couple of years senior to James. ‘You can’t go charging into people like a maniac.’
‘Leave him alone, Sedgepole,’ said Pritpal. ‘He said he was sorry, we’ll be late for early school.’
‘Well, you’d better get your skates on, Nandra,’ said Sedgepole. ‘You don’t want to get into any trouble, do you?’
‘No,’ Pritpal mut
tered, then looked apologetically at James and ran off. As he went he passed another boy, who let fly a slap at his head that he just managed to dodge.
The third boy walked over to join them.
‘What’s all this, then?’ he asked in a casual drawl.
‘It’s nothing,’ said James. ‘There was an accident, I bumped into someone.’
‘Did you, now?’ said the newcomer, prodding James in the chest. ‘I don’t think I know you.’ He was a tall, handsome, blond-haired boy of about fifteen and he spoke with an American accent.
‘My name’s James Bond, this is my first term…’
The three boys laughed at him. ‘Term?’ said the American boy. ‘Term? What’s a term? Do you know what a “term” is, Sedgepole?’
‘I think he means “half”,’ said Sedgepole.
‘Yes, I forgot,’ said James. ‘You call them “halves” here, don’t you?’ He kept his voice even and looked away, not wanting to start a fight on his first day.
‘Well, James Bond,’ said the American boy. ‘I don’t like the idea of you barging into my friends.’
‘I didn’t barge into anyone,’ said James. ‘I’m late…’
‘And you’re going to make us late,’ said the American. ‘Which wouldn’t do at all.’
James was very aware of the three larger boys huddling round him threateningly, and he began to get scared. Scared of what they might do, scared of what would happen if he were late, scared of the unknown.
‘Actually, we had better go,’ said Sedgepole, and the American nodded slowly.
‘There’s no time to deal with you now, Bond,’ he said. ‘We’ll see to you later.’
The first two boys strolled off, but the American hung back and stared at James, daring him to stare back.
‘You’ve got a look about you, Bond, that I don’t like. I’ll remember you. And think on this.’ He leant closer and James studied him.