Hazard Night by Laura Vaughan
Cleeve College is not for everyone...When Eve's husband is appointed housemaster at his old boarding school, Cleeve College, she gives up her life in London to join him. But the isolation and loss of autonomy threaten both her happiness and her marriage.The arrival of Fen, an enigmatic artist and wife of the new Classics teacher, is a welcome distraction.
Fen doesn't play by the rules, and she and Eve enter into a game of escalating dares, disrupting the delicate balance of school life. Then, the morning after Hazard Night, a tradition that allows the students to run wild and play pranks for one day, a body is found. Someone has been murdered. And it seems everyone has something to hide...
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Context: Eve describes Peter’s past and connections to Cleeve college
Long before Eve came to Cleeve, she knew it intimately.
The Lake. The Lawn. The Hall. Simple words, as from a child’s storybook. The Avenue. The Chapel. The Clock Tower. Words that assumed the unshakeable authority of an archetype.
These words and the landscape they possessed (all three hundred acres of it!) had been the backdrop to the best years of Peter’s life. He’d said this to Eve not in a burst of nostalgia, but as an admission of pain. As the only child of a depressive alcoholic and his explosively volatile wife, school had been Peter’s only escape.
A lost boy, he had found sanctuary at Cleeve. There had been a kindly housemaster, to whom he still wrote regularly; a cricket coach who helped him channel his rage into sportsmanship. He had been uplifted by the friendships and anchored by the old-fashioned value system. ‘Cleeve saved me,’ he said simply. ‘It protected me. Sheltered me. It believed in my best self.’
Peter knew his privilege. He knew that in a different setting the bewildered child he’d been would have grown up to be an irredeemably broken, perhaps dangerous, adult. That’s why he spent the early years of his teaching career in schools where many of his students came from homes blighted by poverty and chaos, or worse. He sincerely believed that the ideals of the public school system – the honour code, the respect for authority, the veneration of fair play – could raise both the standards and spirits of schools without any of the resources of a place like Cleeve.
But Peter, with his earnest face and guileless smile, his soft RP tones, was easy prey. In the classroom, he was faced with indifference or rebellion – and indifference was the more relentless of the two. In the staff-room, he was met with weary tolerance. A naive idealist of a conservative bent was, at best, a curiosity. At worst, he was a Tory stooge. Either way, Peter’s colleagues were not prepared to waste their near-exhausted energy on coaching him in survival tactics. Night after night, he’d come home to the cramped Kentish Town flat he shared with Eve and his face would be grey with exhaustion, his shoulders slumped with defeat.
The irony is, she was the one who pushed him to go private.
‘The world’s full of unhappy kids from broken homes – in all sections of society. You know that better than anyone. If you want to make a difference it shouldn’t matter where you do it.
And then an old school pal passed on the news that Wyatt’s was looking for a housemaster and sealed both their fates.
Laura Vaughan grew up in rural Wales. She got her first book deal aged twenty-two and spent several years working in publishing, followed by a behind-the-scenes role at English National Ballet. She lives in South London with her husband and two children. Hazard Night is her third novel for adults.
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