the Headmaster’s waiting room (pp. 526–527)

Under the dithering open cross-section lives the second Tavis, and the boys know exactly when he surfaces: the instant "the integrity or smooth function of the Academy or his unquestioned place at the E.T.A. tiller is God forbid threatened." Then the wordy hand-wringer goes quiet and still, and — in the scene's most Claudius sentence — "he seems, perspectivally, to grow. He seems, sitting there, to rush in at you, dopplering in at a whisper," a cornered bureaucrat with a cornered rat's danger in him. The self-abnegating openness is the peacetime face; the man defending his usurped tiller is not to be fucked with. This is the iron the succession runs on, ordinarily hidden inside all that arms-waving vulnerability — the reason the family enterprise, for all Tavis's buffoonish surface, holds.