School for Love by Olivia Manning

it. Speeding with a furious scuffling noise, she seized the paw in her mouth, brought it back and dropped it at Felix’s feet. When he had thrown it three times, Miss Bohun gave a long-drawn, wavering call from the bottom of the stairs: ‘F-e-e-l-iks!’
    ‘Yes, Miss Bohun?’ He bent down over the stairs so that he could see her standing at the bottom.
    ‘Please don’t make that noise, there’s a good boy. Teaching, you know, calls for so much concentration. The least sound is distracting.’
    ‘I’m sorry, Miss Bohun.’
    ‘Shouldn’t you be at your studies?’
    ‘I’ve finished them.’
    ‘Well, try and be quiet until tea-time.’
    Standing in the passage, wondering what he could do next, he looked at the door of the front bedroom and saw the key was in the lock. Once or twice during his first weeks in the house he had tried the door and found it locked; now he tiptoed towards it, turned the key and entered. He felt a slight, immediate shock at the change in the light. His own bedroom was full of sunlight. This room, running the length of the house-front and having three windows, was filled with cold, blue shadow. It wasmuch longer than its width; in it stood a single bed, made up and covered with a white counterpane, a wooden chair and a little desk on which stood a bible. The room, narrow and chill, looked like a hospital ward. It touched Felix with a desolating sense of emptiness; he left it at once and locked it in on itself.
    Then, from sheer boredom, he decided to take a look in Miss Bohun’s bedroom. It was, he knew, as bare as his own had been on his arrival, but the time he had seen it – on his second day, when Miss Bohun had called him in and suggested in an undertone that it would be seemly were he to pay his rent in advance – he had noticed a fretwork book-shelf hanging on the wall. While Miss Bohun was talking he read the titles of the books:
The Golden Treasury, The Broken Halo, The Fountain, If Winter Comes, The Story of San Michele
and all the works of C. S. Lewis, also a large black book called
Control of the Flesh
.
    Felix had said: ‘I suppose you haven’t any books by Rider Haggard. I read one at the Shiptons’ and it was super.’
    ‘No. And I’m afraid
my
books are a bit above your head. Anyway, I never lend books on principle.’
    ‘My mother used to read C. S. Lewis.’
    ‘Indeed! I believe he’s quite widely
read
; whether he’s understood or not is another matter.’
    ‘Is he hard to understand?’
    ‘Now, Felix, I can’t discuss these deep matters with you,’ she had dismissed him – quite unlike his mother, who would put down anything she was doing, at any time, to discuss any matter, the deeper the better.
    Rapidly, alert to any sound outside, Felix now went tothe shelf and, taking down the C. S. Lewis books one after the other, moved his hand across the cover of each. He thought sadly of those evenings when he had sat with his mother in the
pension
garden and gazed towards the red, satin-surfaced Tigris, talking, talking, talking. As he took down the last book he heard steps on the stair and instantly, with the preternatural speed of guilt, he replaced it and got himself safely outside the door again. Then he realised the steps were not ascending but descending. Someone was coming down from the attic. Felix stood against the wall as Mr Jewel, in an old brown suit from which his body had shrunk away, crossed the passage and went on down to the sitting-room. He was too absorbed in his own progress to notice Felix.
    There was silence downstairs. Mr Liftshitz must have gone, but Miss Bohun was still there, for as soon as Mr Jewel got down Felix heard voices. He wondered if Mr Jewel were going out. If so, this would be a heaven-sent opportunity to satisfy his curiosity about the attic. He made no attempt to overhear the conversation below, but waited impatiently for it to stop. At last the door opened on to the garden and Mr Jewel came out to cross the lawn. Felix