Free The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis Page A

looked more like a Victorian police station than I had really bargained for. Flanked by spindly terraced houses, cordoned off with mauve railings, the building crouched inset from the road, its sooty bricks having nothing to do with the available sunshine. I sidled down the path to the rear basement entrance. The door was open.
    No one seemed to be about, apart from the directress. Mrs Tauber was in her office drinking cups of coffee and smoking cigarettes, about three of each. She was surprised but on the whole delighted to see me.
    We said good morning, and, after an eery silence, I asked whether I might perhaps be 'a bit early', a real misgiving since the place was empty and it was possible I had got the times wrong.
    'Certainly not,' she said, gesturing to the electric clock behind her. It was nine thirty-five. 'Can't you see the time ?' She seemed genuinely to want an answer.
    This dislocated me. The one strictly logical reply was: 'I'm awfully sorry - I do beg your pardon - but ... this is the Tauber Lunatic Asylum, isn't it ?' Instead I asked where everyone else was.
    She said, exasperatedly, 'They're late.'
    I slapped my thigh and shook my head.
    'Ah. Um, is there anywhere I can go until "things get started"?'
    At this point her previous geniality returned, and I was led with paraded bustle to the 'library', a dirty boxroom furnished by three chairs, a split blackboard, and at least a dozen raddled textbooks forming a knee-high stack in the far corner. It was into this arena of liberal scholarship that my colleagues wandered over the next hour and a half; there were four of them, two girls, one not bad, though twice my height.
    By the middle of the week Tauber Tutors held no surprises for me. The school turned out to have a second floor, the upper one consisting of a large hall/gym/cafeteria/classroom plus two small offices. The school turned out also to be a nursery school, or mostly that. There were just the five of us in the O-Level-and-after age group, and getting on for ten times that many in the Eleven-Plus-and-Common-Entrance-and-before age group. Not that age was a helpful grouping criterion, the elder lot ranging as they did from fifteen (a delinquent ghoul studying for RSAs) to nineteen (myself), and the younger lot ranging from sphincter-free toddlers to the occasional pillow-faced, taller-than-me mongol, who could have been anything from eight to thirty-eight. A high proportion of the children were obviously insane.
    My time was (theoretically) to be split up between brief morning sessions in the offices with the two on-campus teachers (Maths and Latin), evening sessions with an English master in St John's Wood, and 'general study' in the spacious hall.
    In practice ?
    Arrive ten to ten thirty. Twenty-minute Maths lesson with Mr Greenchurch. Vacuum-chamber office redolent of dead man's feet; hairless, cysty-eared octogenarian sucking noisily and ceaselessly on his greying false teeth (I thought at first he had a mouthful of boiled sweets; on the Wednesday he allows the coltish dentures to spew out half-way down his chin before drinking them back into place); mind like a broken cuckoo-clock, often forgets you're there. Ten minutes in the hall, talking to Sarah, the less ugly girl. Eleven thirty to noon with Mrs Marigold Tregear, the enormous though well-proportioned Latin widow, up whose stockingless adamantine legs it was my constant endeavour to peer; expedients included: rolling pencils off the end of the table at which we sit side by side and going round to pick them up; crouching opposite her on entry to the room and double-bowing my shoelaces; loitering beneath the iron staircase, on the off-chance: Mrs Tregear was over thirty, and I suppose very unattractive, yet she wore quite short skirts.
    Another five minutes with Sarah. Brisk walk home. Light lunch and an attempted chat with whoever was there - Jenny, or Norman, sometimes neither, never both. Perhaps half an hour in the hall, cooling my three