Wicked!

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ said Paris flatly.

  ‘You wait until you see the theatre and the library.’

  ‘Can Kylie come?’ asked Pearl.

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘Why us?’ muttered Feral. ‘We’re the school dregs.’

  ‘No you’re not,’ said Janna crossly. ‘I want to show Bagley what attractive, talented pupils Larks has and that, once and for all, our manners are just as good as theirs.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Feral, licking sweet and sour sauce off his knife and rolling his huge eyes at Janna, so everyone burst out laughing. From his basket, Partner wagged his gauze-wrapped tail.

  ‘I’d like to go,’ said Graffi. ‘I’d like to see Hengist again.’

  ‘He really liked your work, Graffi, and your poems,’ she added to Paris. ‘Please come.’

  ‘OK,’ said Paris, ‘but what’s in it for them?’

  ‘They want to break down conventional social barriers,’ said Janna hopefully.

  After they’d gone, Lily popped in with some lavender oil. ‘Put a few drops on your pillow and you’ll fall into a deep sleep. You look much better already.’

  Janna was floating on air. She had a bath and sprinkled lavender oil all round her room and on her pillow, then she took Partner out for a last pee and put him in his basket in the kitchen. ‘Stay there, love,’ she said firmly, then forgot everything because Hengist rang.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she babbled, ‘I just lose it when people attack Larks. I should never have said those awful things to Col Peters.’

  ‘You were suffering from toad rage,’ said Hengist.

  When she floated upstairs five minutes later, she found Partner out like a light, his ginger head on her lavender-scented pillow. Even his snores didn’t keep her awake.

  25

  Forgetting her own violent antipathy towards private education, Janna was taken aback by the fury produced by the proposed visit to Bagley. The matter was thrashed out at Monday’s after-school staff meeting by which time most of the participants had digested as deadly poison the Gazette piece with a headline: ‘Brett-Taylor confirms Bagley–Larks bonding’.

  The copy, which included flip remarks from Hengist about the need to get chewing gum and hooligans off the streets, was accompanied by a glamorous photograph of himself and Janna in front of a vestal virgin. Janna was smiling coyly. Hengist’s lazy look of lust was so angled as to be aimed straight down her cleavage.

  ‘Just as though they were playing Valmont and Madame de Merteuil in some amateur dramatics,’ spat Cara.

  The piece ended with a paragraph about Janna’s make-up being created by a Year Nine student, fourteen-year-old Pearl Smith.

  ‘“We like to encourage enterprise in Larks’s pupils,” joked Miss Curtis.’

  Pearl had borrowed a fiver off Wally and rushed out and bought ten copies and a cuttings book.

  As staff gathered in explosive mood, down below they could see Janna drifting round the playground chatting, laughing, bidding farewell to the children, adding a last handful of crumbs to the bird table, and praising the new litter prefects who were shoving junk into bin bags.

  As she came in Wally, who’d been making garage space for the new minibus, warned her the mood was ugly:

  ‘Don’t take any nonsense.’

  Already two minutes late, Janna was further delayed by a telephone call.

  ‘It’s Harriet from Harriet’s Boutique. We were so delighted to see you in today’s Gazette in one of our gowns.’

  ‘It was a present,’ stammered Janna, convinced now that Pearl had nicked the dress. Harriet’s was very pricey.

  ‘You looked so lovely,’ went on Harriet, ‘we wondered if as a great favour, we could blow up the photograph and put it in our window – it would be such a boost to our Christmas display.’

  Janna was still laughing as she went into the staffroom. The wind had whipped up her colour and ruffled her hair. She looked absurdly young.

  The subject for discussion had been going to be the creation of a Senior Management Team (SMT), or lack of it, because Janna was dragging her heels about appointing a second deputy head to succeed Phil Pierce. If she’d had a flicker of support from any of the heads of department besides Mags Gablecross and Maria Cambola, she might have made more effort.

  Now the staff had additional cause for outrage. Rain lashed the windows and relentlessly dripped into three buckets. The only cheery note was a blue vase of scarlet anemones which a grateful parent had given Janna, and which she had plonked in the middle of the staffroom table.

  On Janna’s right, Skunk Illingworth nearly gassed her with his goaty armpits. On her left, Mike Pitts crunched Polos to hide any drink fumes. Why in hell didn’t he kill two birds and drink crème de menthe?

  Beyond Mike was Cara Sharpe, who had ripped up the Gazette piece. Now, shivering with fury, she was marking essays on the sources of comedy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a red Pentel. Beyond her, Robbie Rushton was spitting blood and applying for a new driving licence. Opposite him presided a returning Mrs Chalford, whom Janna already disliked intensely.

  A self-important know-all, she had a smug oblong face and wore a brown trouser suit with a red Paisley scarf coiled round her neck like a python. Insisting on being called ‘Chally’, she looked as likely to have been suffering from stress as a Sherman tank.

  Next to her sat Miss Basket, the menopausal misfit, who had not forgiven Janna for refusing two invitations to supper. She was so red in the face Janna wanted to shove her outside to provide autumn colour.

  ‘Restore work/life balance’, ‘No one forgets a good teacher’, shouted posters on the wall. The younger staff were waiting expectantly for fireworks. Mags Gablecross looked up from the blue and purple striped scarf she was knitting for her future son-in-law and winked at Janna; Jason was reading The Stage, Gloria Hello!, Cambola the score of Beatrice and Benedict. Trevor Harry, head of PE, shook with righteous rage. How dare that shit Brett-Taylor suggest the only exercise Larks pupils got was running away from the police? Old Mr Mates, who taught science, was asleep.

  As a heavyweight and official spokesman, Mrs Chalford kicked off. ‘I wish to object in the strongest possible terms to learning future plans for our school from the pages of the local rag: future plans which are anathema to the majority of my colleagues who are opposed to any partnership with the private sector. To take only sixteen students is also totally against our caring ethos of equal opportunity for all.’

  ‘The idea has been around since the prospective-parents’ meeting,’ said Janna reasonably, ‘when Mr Brett-Taylor visited Larks.’

  ‘Such bonding is a flagrantly right-wing initiative,’ accused Mrs Chalford.

  ‘Not at all, it’s a New Labour initiative.’

  ‘I agree with Chally,’ butted in Robbie Rushton, who used every steering group or meeting to puncture the atmosphere. ‘It is a disgrace that schools charging parents twenty thousand pounds a year should be subsidized for bonding with their impoverished state-school neighbours. Any Labour Government worth its name should be working night and day to abolish the educational apartheid of the independents.’

  ‘Sin-dependents,’ murmured Janna.

  ‘As a socialist, I am amazed you’re committed to the project,’ added Sam Spink.

  ‘Think of the children,’ said Janna. ‘There is no playing field here where they can let off steam and build up team spirit. Every suggestion box is filled with pleas for more football, more games with other schools. Nor do I want our children to turn into grossly overweight couch potatoes.’

  ‘I object,’ said Trevor Harris.

  ‘Later, Trev.’ Janna raised her hand. ‘As S and C won’t help, we have to go elsewhere. If Bagley are prepared to share their facilities with us, we should be gracious enough to accept them for the sake of the children.’

  ‘How are we going to get there?’ snapped Mike Pitts.

  ‘Randal Stancombe has given us a minibus,
’ said Janna. ‘It’s arriving on Wednesday.’

  ‘That capitalist snake,’ hissed Robbie.

  ‘As someone from a desperately deprived background who has clambered out of the poverty trap, I think Randal should be applauded for giving others a chance in life,’ snapped Janna.

  ‘Why doesn’t he set a good example by sending his children to maintained schools?’ said Chally.

  ‘You’ll get a chance to ask him on Wednesday; we’re having a photo call at Bagley.’ Janna took a gulp of water. ‘The minibus arrives at midday. We’re going over to Bagley in the afternoon. I’d like volunteers to pioneer this first trip.’

  The dead silence that followed was only broken by the furious scratch of Cara’s pen.

  ‘Hopeless. 1/10’, she scrawled across an essay that looked suspiciously like Paris’s.

  ‘You amaze me,’ she said shrilly. ‘After the way you’ve constantly complained about the cost of supply staff, you’re now prepared to impose a further drain on the budget?’

  ‘It’ll only be Wednesday afternoons to begin with,’ said Janna. ‘Later we’re going to aim for Saturdays.’

  ‘You cannot expect dedicated, overworked professionals to squander valuable time on something of which they utterly disapprove,’ intoned Chally.

  ‘Hear, hear,’ agreed most of the room.

  ‘Quite frankly, if I left my post for half a day to commit to this project, which I don’t believe in anyway,’ said Mike Pitts, ‘I’d return to worse problems.’

  ‘I’m sure we’d all like an afternoon off and a chance to see the Burne-Jones windows, but I, for one, thought we were trying to restore work-life balance, not jeopardize it,’ pronounced Chally.

  ‘What’s in it for Lord Bountiful?’ sneered Robbie.

  ‘If you mean Mr Brett-Taylor,’ said Janna icily, ‘he genuinely wants to help.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ hissed Cara. ‘He’s only interested in his charitable status. Caring conservatism is a classic oxymoron.’

  Janna’s fingers drummed in counterpoint to the rain dripping into the buckets.

  ‘She’s about to lose it,’ murmured Jason to Gloria.

  ‘You cannot expect instant decisions without adequate consultation,’ reproved Chally.

  Mags Gablecross got another ball of mauve wool out of her bag:

  ‘I’d like to go,’ she said. ‘I’m off on Wednesdays so it won’t disrupt the timetable.’

  ‘I’d like to go too,’ said Miss Cambola, who was now orchestrating ‘Ding, Dong, Merrily’ for the Christmas concert. ‘I gather the acoustics for the new music hall are stupendous. I’d like some of our young musicians to join the Bagley orchestra. Cosmo, son of my late countryman, Roberto Rannaldini, is their conductor. His mother, Dame Hermione Harefield, has the most beautiful voice of her generation.’

  ‘Oh, thank you both.’ Janna tried to control her shaking. ‘We need one more.’

  ‘I’d like to go too,’ drawled Jason. He’d score brownie points if he were seen to be giving support to Hengist’s pet scheme.

  ‘You’ve already gone over to Rome,’ hissed Cara.

  ‘Thank you, Master Fenton,’ sighed Janna.

  ‘I’d like to go as well,’ piped up Gloria to Robbie’s rage. ‘Chance of a lifetime to see their facilities, pick up good practice, must be open-minded, I had an aunt who went to public school.’ She smiled adoringly at Jason. ‘I’d like to see Bagley.’

  ‘So would I,’ sighed Lydia, and was bleached pale by a laser beam of venom from Cara, who then turned on Jason, hissing, ‘Who’s going to cover for you, Jason?’

  ‘I will,’ said Lydia.

  She turned even paler when Cara added viciously, ‘You know it’s Year Nine E.’

  ‘Not quite as challenging as it sounds.’ Janna smiled at Lydia. ‘The Wolf Pack are coming to Bagley.’

  ‘The Wolf Pack?’ Cara’s mad escalating laugh made everyone jump. The grey-green roots of her lank black hair gave an impression of poison welling out of her skull. Her red mouth was slack and twitching; her mad malevolent eyes rolled in every direction. Selecting an anemone from the blue vase and ripping off its petals with scarlet talons, she hissed, ‘The Wolf Pack? D’you want Larks to be even more of a joke?’

  ‘I’ve chosen kids who don’t normally get recognition and whom I trust,’ said Janna simply.

  ‘Just because they’ve been enjoying cosy weekend tea parties at your cottage. They’ll trash the place.’

  ‘Other kids are going: several from Year Ten, plus Aysha, Rocky and Johnnie Fowler.’

  ‘Johnnie Fowler!’ said Skunk incredulously.

  ‘Johnnie hasn’t been in trouble since he chucked a chair at me on my second day. He’s a marvellous cricketer.’

  ‘Who’s going to control them?’ mocked Cara, selecting another anemone.

  ‘They’re very fond of Hengist and have huge respect for Wally who’s going to drive the bus.’

  ‘Wally as well?’ snapped Mike. ‘Without a by-your-leave you hijack our site manager. What happens if there’s a fire or a fight?’

  ‘Fend for yourself for a change,’ snapped back Janna. ‘Use the fire extinguisher on both.’

  ‘I wish to register a protest against our students being exposed to snobbish and reactionary peer pressure,’ said Robbie pompously.

  ‘Have you got parental permission?’ accused Chally.

  ‘I was on the phone first thing this morning,’ said Janna triumphantly, ‘and didn’t get a single refusal. Even Aysha’s mother agreed. Parental consent forms have gone home with the kids this evening.’

  ‘How long will you be at Bagley?’ demanded Sam Spink, who’d been making copious notes.

  ‘We’ll arrive after lunch, at about one-fifteen, and be home about half-five.’

  ‘That could be two and a half extra hours. I’ll have to consult the branch secretary. Unfortunately I’m away on Wednesday.’

  ‘What takes you away this time?’ said Janna irritably.

  ‘A course on self-assertiveness.’

  ‘Whatever for?’ Jason grinned. ‘You’re far too bossy as it is.’

  ‘How dare you?’ spluttered Sam.

  Janna decided she was rather going to miss Jason when he moved to Bagley.

  Chally looked at her watch. ‘It’s nearly five o’clock, which leaves no time to discuss the lack of a Senior Management Team. We must have more democratic rule and the opportunity to make informed decisions.’

  Her scarf looks set as fast as Hengist’s sealing wax, thought Janna. I’m going to see him the day after tomorrow. She fell into a daydream.

  ‘Sorry to railroad you,’ she piped up two minutes later as Chally paused for breath, ‘but I’m convinced it will boost the children’s morale. We’re planning a joint play next term.’

  Cara gave such a howl of rage, teachers on either side shrank away. ‘As head of drama and English I should be consulted on every development.’

  ‘Loosen up, Cara,’ drawled Jason, ‘it’s a great idea.’ Then, smiling round the room: ‘Means I won’t lose touch with you when I move to Bagley.’

  ‘Shall we call it a day?’ asked Mike Pitts, who needed a drink.

  ‘Have the rest of Nine E been given the option of going or just your Hell’s Angels?’ asked Robbie.

  Janna gathered up her files. ‘That’s uncalled for.’

  ‘I’m sure Simon Simmons and Martin Norman would love to go,’ said Cara ominously.

  ‘They wouldn’t,’ replied Janna sweetly. ‘Both Mrs Norman and Mrs Simmons told me categorically Monster and Satan don’t do detentions on Wednesdays, so I hardly think they’d be available to go to Bagley.’

  Then she regretted it, instinctively crossing herself as Cara shot her a look of pure loathing. Ripped anemone petals lay like drops of blood on the table. She wants to kill me, thought Janna.

  26

  Hengist, who, unlike Chally, regarded debate as the enemy of progress and had no desire to discuss anything with his (dreadful word) co
lleagues, often used chapel to issue orders to subordinates who couldn’t answer back.

  It was thus on Tuesday morning that he broke the news of the Larks invasion. He softened the blow by asking Primrose Duddon, form prefect of the Lower Fifth, to read a specially selected lesson from St Luke’s Gospel.

  Primrose Duddon was clever, earnest, noble-browed and already ample-breasted, which ensured normally inattentive schoolboys listened as she read about the Lord throwing a party and, when all his smart friends refused, dispatching his servants into the lanes to invite ‘hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt and the blind’.

  ‘Like some ghastly soup kitchen,’ observed Dora Belvedon.

  Primrose, reflected Dora, who was sitting in the choir stalls, didn’t need the exquisite silver lectern decorated with oak leaves framing the Bagley emblem of a lion sheltering a fawn; she could have rested the Bible on her boobs.

  Dora loved chapel. She loved the carved angels in the niches, the flickering lights attached to the dark polished choir stalls, the soaring voices echoing off the wooden vaulted ceiling and the luminous glowing windows, particularly the one opposite, full of birds and animals inhabiting the Tree of Life.

  ‘“For all the saints who from their labours rest,”’ sang Dora.

  Because she could sight-read and sing in tune, she had been picked for the choir and could thus observe the feuds and blossoming romances of both staff and pupils. Opposite sat her favourite master, Emlyn Davies, far too big and broad-shouldered for his choir stall. Black under the eyes from worry about his darling Oriana who was reporting from Afghanistan, he was surreptitiously selecting the rugby teams for a needle match against Fleetley on Saturday.

  Next door were his friends, the elegant, charming head of modern languages, Artie Deverell, who was reading the Spectator, and Theo Graham, head of classics, who was bald, wrinkled and sarcastic but revered by his pupils because his lessons were so entertaining.