Read Online Maxwell’s House by M. J. Trow - Free Book Online

God! I heard them call
    To me for help and pity
    That could not help at all.’
    Diamond was confused. ‘I don’t see …’
    ‘Mackintosh is making the point that he was closer to that dead boy than his own father, because he was there when he died. He was his officer.’
    ‘What are you saying?’
    Maxwell looked with contempt at the man behind the desk. ‘I was Jenny’s officer,’ he said softly. ‘Her Year Head.’
    ‘But you hardly knew her, surely …’
    ‘Hardly,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘But what if,’ he was asking himself, really, ‘what if on the night she died she called to me? To anyone? Called for help and pity? There was no one to listen, was there? Well, I owe her that much. I’m listening now,’ he murmured, turning. ‘I was her officer.’
    ‘Mr Maxwell.’ Diamond was at his firmest as the man reached the office door. He paused. ‘You will not talk to the press again.’
    Maxwell turned to him, smiling. ‘I’ll see myself out, Headmaster.’
    Somebody – possibly a physics teacher, oddly enough – once analysed a teacher’s working day. Only a tiny portion of it was contact time, actually in a classroom with the kids. The rest was paperwork. It wasn’t only the police in the ’90s who were strangled in red tape. The world of the teacher was bureaucracy run mad. It wouldn’t be long before Roger Garrett would be pestering Maxwell for the necessary information for Form 7. How many girls under seventeen taking Maths and Science A level? How many boys? How many yellow socks? Who owned the zebra? Maxwell had long ago stopped asking why the Department of Education and Science should need all this stuff. And, come to think of it, why wasn’t it called the Department of Education and History? It was becoming a mad, mad world where everybody wore white coats.
    That morning, Maxwell got his contact time. The new intake, officially designated now Year 7, sat smiling in front of him, still crisp after two hours on the premises, bewildered, a little afraid. Eleven years old and already in the front line. He introduced himself, in the History room on the first floor that stood next to the library, and handed out small pieces of paper. Not for Mad Max the minutiae of the National Curriculum, that grey, flat concept in which each kid in the country would be doing the same lesson, from the same book, at the same pace.
    ‘I want you all’, he said, ‘to look very carefully at me.’
    They giggled.
    ‘This’, he turned to his left, ‘is my best side.’ Then to his right, ‘This is not quite so good.’ He turned his back on them. They were only first years, on their first day. He’d be all right. No knives in his back. He only got those in the staff room. ‘But this’, he showed them the back of his barbed-wire head, ‘is the best side of all.’
    The giggles grew into laughter. That’s it, Maxwell mused. Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry. Make ’em do History – especially when it came to option time and they had to choose between that and the waste of time that was Geography.
    ‘Now,’ he faced them again, ‘I want you to write down on that bit of paper how old you think I am.’
    There were guffaws.
    ‘Do it properly.’ He held up his hand. ‘Look carefully. And try to get it right. ‘I’m the only one who does the jokes here. No conferring.’ He put on his best Bamber Gascoigne for them, although none of them had the remotest idea who Bamber Gascoigne was. Probably, in his heart of hearts, not even Bamber Gascoigne.
    He wandered the lines of desks. Next lesson, he knew, Paul Moss, his Head of Department, would be in the room. He’d reorganize it, get the kids working in groups, playing with computers. Doing everything ’90s educationalists expected. Until then, Maxwell would keep the desks in rows, where he could launch himself at each kid. And his computer was a blackboard, his cursor a piece of chalk. This year for the first time he’d had to buy his own. The school office