Rage - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗
'To be blunt, Mr Courtney: Sean seems to have a vindictive and vicious streak in him. I am, of course, looking for an improvement in him. However, if that is not soon forthcoming, I will have to make a serious decision over Sean's future at Bishops." 'I had set my heart on him being head boy, as I was,' Shasa admitted, and the headmaster shook his head.
'Far from becoming head boy, Mr Courtney, unless Sean has pulled up his socks by the end of the year, I am, with the greatest reluctance, going to have to ask you to remove him from Bishops altogether." 'My God!" Shasa breathed. 'You don't really mean that?" 'I'm sorry to say that I do." It was quite remarkable that Clare East had ever been employed by the headmaster of Bishops. The explanation was that the appointment was a temporary one, a mere six-month contract, to fill in after the unexpected resignation of the previous art master on the grounds of ill-health. The salary offered was such that it had attracted only two other applications, both patently unsuitable.
Clare had come to the interview with the headmaster dressed in clothes she had not worn for six years, not since she was twenty-one years of age. She had exhumed them from a forgotten cabin trunk for the occasion, a high-buttoned dress in drab green that conformed closely to the head's own ideas of suitable apparel for a schoolmistress. Her long black hair she had plaited and twisted up severely behind her head, and the portfolio of her painting she had chosen to show him, was composed of landscapes and seascapes and still lifes, subjects which had interested her at about the same time as she had bought the chaste woollen dress. At Bishops, art was not one of the main-stream subjects, but merely a catch-all for the pupils who showed little aptitude for the sciences.
Once Clare had charge of the art school, which was situated far enough from the main buildings as to offer her a certain freedom of behaviour, she reverted to her usual style of dress: wide loose skirts in vivid colours and flamboyant patterns, worn with Mexican-style blouses like those that Jane Russell had worn in The Outlaw. She had seen the movie five times while she was attending the London School of Arts, and modelled herself on Jane Russell, though of course Clare knew her own breasts were better than Russell's, just as big but higher and more pointed.
Her long hair she wore in a different style every day, and when she was teaching she always kicked off her sandals and strode around the art room barefooted, smoking thin black Portuguese cigarettes which one of her lovers brought her in packs of a thousand.
Sean had absolutely no interest in art. He had filtered down to this class by a process of natural rejection. Physics and chemistry demanded too much effort, and geography, the next lowest subject, was an even greater bore than paint-brushes.
Sean fell in love with Clare East the very moment that she walked into the art room. The first time she had paused at his easel to inspect the mess of colour he had smeared on his sheet of art paper, he realized that she was an inch shorter than he was, and when she reached up to correct one of his shaky outlines, he saw that she had not shaved her armpit. That bush of dark coarse hair glistening with sweat, induced the hardest and most painful erection he had ever experienced.
He tried to impress her with manly strutting behaviour, and when that failed, he used an oath in her presence that he usually reserved for one of his polo ponies. Clare East sent him *o the head with a note and the head gave him four strokes of his heavy Malacca cane, accompanying the beating with a few words of counsel.
'You will have to learn, young man, WHACK, that I will not allow you to compound atrocious behaviour, WHACK, with foul language, WHACK, especially in the presence of a lady, WHACK." 'Thank you very much, Headmaster." It was traditional to express gratitude for these ministrations, and to refrain from rubbing the injured area in the great man's presence. When Sean returned to the art room, his ardour, far from being cooled by the Malacca cane, was rather inflamed to unbearable proportions, but he realized he had to change tactics.
He discussed it with his henchman, Snotty Arbuthnot, and was only mildly discouraged by Snotty's advice. 'Forget it, man. Every fellow in school is whacking away thinking about Marsh Mallows --' the nickname was a reference to Clare East's bosom, 'but Tug saw her at the movies with some chap at least thirty, with a mustache and his own car. They were smooching away like mad dogs in the back row. Why don't you go and see Poodle instead?" Poodle was a sixteen-year-old from Rustenberg Girls' School, just across the railway line from Bishops. She was a young lady with a mission in life, to see as many boys across the borders of manhood as she could fit into her busy afternoons. Though Sean had never spoken to her, she had been a spectator at every one of his recent cricket matches and she had sent a message to him through a mutual friend suggesting a meeting in the pine forest on Rondebosch Common.
'She looks like a poodle,' Sean dismissed the suggestion scornfully, and resigned himself to distant adoration of Clare East, until one day he was searching her desk for those black Portuguese cigarettes for which he had developed a taste. Love did not mean he could not steal from her. In a locked drawer which he picked with a paper clip, he came across a stiff cardboard folder tied with green ribbons. The folder contained over twenty pencil drawings of nude male models, all of them signed and dated by Clare East, and after the first jealous shock, Sean realized that each drawing was of a different subject with only one common feature. While the models' faces had been roughed in, their genitals had been depicted in minute and loving detail, and all of them were fully tumescent.
What Sean had discovered was Clare's collection of scalps, or an equivalent thereof. Clare East had strong tastes, but even more than garlic and red wine she needed men in her diet. This was so evident in the secret folder that all Sean's deflated hopes were once more revived, and that night he commissioned Michael, for the sum of five shillings, to paint a portrait of Clare East in Sean's art book.
Michael was in the junior art class and was able to make his studies for the portrait without the model's knowledge, and the completed work surpassed even Sean's expectations. He submitted the portrait and at the end of the following session Clare dismissed the class with a rider, ."Oh Sean, will you please remain behind?" When the art room was cleared, she opened his art book at the painting of herself.
'Did you do this, Sean?" she asked. 'It really is very good." The question was innocent enough, but the difference between the portrait and Sean's own murky compositions was so evident that even he saw the danger of claiming authorship.
'I was going to tell you I did it,' he admitted openly, 'but I can't lie to you, Miss East. I paid my brother to do it for me." 'Why, SeanT 'I suppose because I like you so much,' he mumbled, and to her surprise she saw that he was actually blushing. Clare was touched.
Up to that time she had actively disliked this boy. He was brash and cocky and a disruptive influence in her class. She was certain that it was he who was stealing her cigarettes.
This unsuspected sensitivity surprised her, and suddenly she realized that his bumptious behaviour had been to attract her attention. She relented towards him, and over the following days and weeks she showed Sean that she had forgiven him, by giving him small largesse - from a special smile to an extra few minutes of her time tidying up his creative efforts.
In return Sean began leaving gifts in her desk, thereby confirming her suspicion that he had been into it before. However, the theft of cigarettes stopped and she accepted the offerings of fruit and flowers without comment, just a smile and a nod as she passed his easel.
