Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen

“Nice lake,” had declared Willy, grinning like a dog, “for water sports. Jolly surroundings, scenery, Nature, so on. Far from the madding crowd.” Though in the throes of a jealousy aggravated by chronic mistrust of Constantine, Willy was not unscrupulous —boys, he would not have signed over like this for a single instant; but in a mixed school could Kenneth get up to much? The mixedness of the school was the whole idea. Kenneth, combining vision with bashful hedging, went into the matter with Willy at large and at length. “Co-education could have averted so many … tragedies.”
    “You were not co-educated, I take it?”
    “Alas,” sighed Kenneth, nonetheless looking wonderfully complacent, as well he might.
    “Don’t think me dense,” said Willy, “but where do you plan to get these various kids from?”
    “There will be only too little difficulty about that .”
    “Aha. And from families who’ll pay up? I’m not going to carry this thing, you know.”
    “But naturally not!” cried Kenneth. “What an idea!”
    “Ken,” Constantine said to Willy, “knows half the world—you don’t seem to grasp.”
    “One hopes,” confessed Kenneth, “to cast one’s net fairly wide. Not have distinctions of class—”
    “—And then who’ll pay up?”
    “ Or of race—
    “—Go to the British Council.”
    “Sometimes,” Constantine said to Willy, “you make me sick.”
    “Why?” asked Willy, whitening. “I’m sending Eva.”
    So the girl went. Her goodbye to her father was stoic, as no doubt was Jepthah’s daughter’s. For the first time, she was to be exposed to her own kind: juveniles—a species known to her so far only in parks in the distance or hotels fleetingly. At the castle, inevitably, she did not shine. At fourteen Eva was showing no signs of puberty, which discouraged the matron or house mother, a Hungarian lady; and her negative emotional history made her unlikely material for Kenneth. Her companions supplied in abundance what Eva lacked; they were wealthly little delinquents who knew everything. One and all they’d sized Kenneth up at a glance and were matey in their manner to him accordingly. Exactly how he proposed to run this racket, it was going to interest them to see. Should he give trouble, they were prepared to blackmail him. Boys and girls alike, these children were veterans, some having run out on, others been run out by, a succession of optimistic schools. Bribed into coming here by distracted parents, they might stay on if that were made worthwhile.
    A wish to have such children kept off one’s hands and deterred from out-and-out criminality, with few questions asked and at almost any price, had been noted by Kenneth, with sympathy, in the course of his travels, and been had in mind when he visualised his school. This seemed the least he could do for so many people who had been wonderful to him —abroad, chiefly. Set though the sun might on the Union Jack, it remained under contract to golden islands, coasts, lakesides and terraced mountains re-empired by Ken’s abounding friends, whose dominion extended from palm to pine. Only one shadow fell: parental dementia. Could a well-wisher not put things right? As for the children, here was where genius came in! With the young, he was almost psychically understanding—he’d been told so. He could do anything with them. Genuinely, he was certain he had a mission.
    The castle turned out, after all, to be just the thing. Better than Surrey—Surrey might not have done. Here, one was virtually in outer space: in these woods, no one but poachers minding their own business and couples abed in the bracken. Live and let live. “You were so right ,” he wrote, in his generous way, to Willy. To be absolutely frank, one did not miss Constantine. Everyone here adored one, which was dizzying. There were dramas, naturally.
    The school opened its doors one blazing September. Kenneth’s haul of children were coloured only by having