by Jilly Cooper
As Paris was moving to Bagley, it was felt the field trip would be a good way for him to bond with future form-mates. He was already enduring endless flak at Oaktree Court and at Larks for becoming a stuck-up snob, and as social services hadn’t yet confirmed Patience and Ian as his foster parents, it was a time of deep uncertainty.
Paris refused again to betray how gutted he was that Feral – and Graffi as well – had refused to join him on the field trip. Graffi’s father was off sick and heavily on the booze again; Feral’s domestic life was always shadowy; but both boys were needed at home. Both vowed, as a band of brothers, they would always be friends of Paris, but he knew it would never be the same.
Without the other two he also felt less sanguine about protecting himself against Cosmo and his bodyguards. The female remnants of the Wolf Pack were unlikely to provide support. Pearl would probably go off like a firecracker. Kylie had not only persuaded Chantal to look after Cameron while they were away, but, at the prospect of Kylie becoming the future Lady Waterlane, to also bankroll a snazzy new wardrobe. This included a glamorous dress because everyone had been told to bring something ‘eveningy’ for a mystery destination on the last night of the trip.
Paris, fretting about his lack of wardrobe, was extremely touched when Ian took him aside and gave him sixty pounds, gruffly bidding him not to spend it all at once. Carrying this out to the letter, Paris nicked some T-shirts and trainers and sauntered out of Gap in unpaid-for dark-grey jeans, which he promptly slashed across the knees and thighs to age them up.
On the morning of departure, Janna was drying her hair when Emlyn rang and said he was dreadfully sorry, he couldn’t make the trip. Whereupon Janna, mostly from disappointment and because Emlyn was the only person who could control this mob, lost her temper and bawled him out.
As she paused for breath, Emlyn repeated how sorry he was but that his father had died in the night, from lungs wrecked by a life down the mines, and he was on his way home to Wales to look after his mother and organize the funeral.
A mortified Janna was frantically apologizing when Emlyn displayed a flicker of his old self:
‘Now the even worse news. Biffo Rudge has been press-ganged into going in my place. He’ll be as anxious to chaperone his boys as Joan is. I’m sorry, lovely, I’ll buy you dinner when I get back.’
‘I’m the one who’s sorry,’ wailed Janna, ‘I know how you loved him.’
The weather was hot and jungly. The journey in three coaches seemed to take forever. Paris read Le Rouge et Le Noir; Rocky the Mirror with one finger; Cosmo read the score of Harold in Italy; Jade and Milly read each other’s palms; Boffin read A Brief History of Time and, as litter monitor, bawled out everyone for dropping sweet papers. Amber read text messages from admiring boyfriends; Kylie, who felt sick on buses, tried to look at the pictures in Hello! and had to stop near St Jimmy’s on the outskirts of Larkminster to throw up.
‘You don’t think she’s up the duff again?’ Pearl murmured to Paris.
Whereupon Rocky, realizing he’d left behind his Ritalin, leapt into the driver’s seat and drove the bus back to Larks to collect it. Everyone was too petrified of a Ritalinless Rocky to stop him. When the outraged bus driver took over on the second journey, it was noticed how many desirable residences Randal Stancombe was building within the catchment area of Rod Hyde’s school.
‘These are the sorts of houses you can afford if you don’t have to fork out for school fees,’ observed Cosmo nastily.
Before leaving, both schools had received individual pep talks on the importance of good behaviour and overcoming the traditional animosities which divide private and state schools.
Cosmo, cash rich from flogging exam papers, had listened in amusement. He liked Emlyn, but they would be much freer without him. Biffo couldn’t control an ant. Cosmo had packed a first-aid kit of vodka, brandy, cocaine, grass, Alka-Seltzer, a hundred condoms, the morning-after pill and amyl nitrate, and had had a bet with Anatole that he’d pull both Gloria and Vicky by the end of the trip.
He also fancied a threesome with Milly and Amber, was going to bully Xavier to a jelly and unsettle Paris, to whom he intended to give a rough ride next term, particularly as the Bagley Babes had just announced that, in the absence of Feral and Graffi, their target on the trip was to pull Paris.
As the coaches moved into open country, Cosmo proceeded to ring up Dora, ordering her at pain of death not to forget to water his marijuana plants – not that they would need it, as rain was now chucking itself like lover’s gravel against the bus window.
Poor little Dora, being ordered around by a pig like Cosmo, thought an indignant Pearl, who was sitting across the gangway. Pearl was utterly miserable; her little stepbrother was teething and her mother had discovered fifteen pounds missing from her bag, which Pearl had nicked to pay for a long-sleeved olive-green T-shirt from New Look. This had meant her mother’s toyboy couldn’t go to the pub, whereupon her mother had hit Pearl and screamed that ‘she could bleedin’ leave home if there was any more trouble’.
The long sleeves had been needed to cover Pearl’s arms, which she’d attacked with a razor and which now throbbed unbearably. Cosmo smiled evilly across at her. He was vile but dead sexy, with his night-dark eyes and his satanic pirate’s smile.
Down the bus, Biffo Rudge, noisily crunching an apple as sulphuric farts ruffled his long khaki shorts, was sharing a seat with a pile of Lower Fifth reports.
Cosmo proceeded to convulse pupils from both schools by holding up behind Biffo’s seat the air freshener from the lavatory. As the bus crossed over into Herefordshire, plunging into thick forest with glimpses of silver rivers gleaming in the valleys below, Biffo fell asleep. Whereupon Cosmo seized the pile of reports, found his own and wrote ‘towering genius’ and ‘undeniably brilliant’ all over it. Buoyed up by the mounting mirth of his audience, Cosmo dug out Boffin’s report and scribbled ‘deeply irritating’, ‘unimaginative’ and ‘stupid twat’ all over it, before crying, ‘You dropped this, sir,’ as Biffo woke up.
At the back of the coach, Vicky had palled up very pointedly with Gloria: ‘Such a relief to have someone fun and my age on the trip.’
Now they whispered and played silly games: ‘In ten seconds – who would you rather go to bed with, Biffo or Skunk?’ followed by squeals of laughter.
Occasionally they cast covetous eyes at Rufus, head of geography, but he was too busy calling his wife and mother, who was looking after the children, even to notice them.
As Cambola was in another coach, Janna was forced to sit with Joan who, despite taking up most of the seat, insisted on clamping a beefy thigh against Janna’s.
‘All my Lower Fifth students have opted for triple science,’ she announced, adding that she was off to a conference in Atlanta at the end of term. ‘I’m giving a paper on the Place of the Runner Bean in Teaching Genetics,’ she boomed. ‘The runner bean is the perfect plant to illustrate multiple pregnancies.’
‘Why not Kylie Rose?’ murmured Amber to Milly. ‘Did you know, Joan rejected seventeen possible gardeners provided by the bursar this week because none of them was ugly enough for us not to jump on him?’
Despite a desire to get off with the opposite sex, Janna noticed a look of relief on the Larks girls’ faces when, after an interminable drive, they discovered they would be sleeping in one youth hostel near a river on the edge of a wood, while the boys would be housed four miles away in another.
‘Thank goodness,’ said Primrose Duddon, ‘boys always gobble up all the food.’
In fact the food was awful, spag bol full of gristle, vegetables boiled into abdication and great blocks of jam roly-poly.
‘Talk about Calorie Towers,’ grumbled Amber.
After supper, if you could call it that, the rain stopped so they dried off the benches outside and Joan brought out her guitar and, led by Cambola, they sang round a dispirited camp fire.
‘To think I got myself sacked from the Brownies to end up here,’ mutt
ered Amber. ‘I need a drink.’
‘You’ll get cocoa at ten o’clock,’ said Joan tartly.
At ten-fifteen, she went round with a basket confiscating mobiles. ‘You’ve all got a long day tomorrow.’
So the Bagley Babes unearthed their second mobiles and rang their boyfriends.
‘If anyone tries to escape,’ boomed Joan as she marched up and down the rows of beds, ‘there’ll be trouble.’
‘I don’t know why we came on this jaunt,’ moaned Milly. ‘Tomorrow we’ll start digging a tunnel.’
As the lights were turned off and everyone stretched out on their hard beds, Kylie, who’d thought by now she’d be curled up with the Hon. Jack, started to cry that she was missing Cameron and Chantal.
‘I miss my dog and my horse more than my parents or even my boyfriend,’ said Amber, which made Kylie cry even louder, so Jade pelted her with pillows.
For the staff, Janna noted nervously that there were a double and three single rooms.
Joan looked warmly at Vicky. ‘I’m happy to share.’
‘No, no. You deserve the privilege of a room of your own,’ Vicky simpered. ‘Gloria and I don’t at all mind bunking up.’
Janna, who had watched the girls’ faces during that dismal dinner, prayed things would improve tomorrow. Hearing sobs, she went into the dormitory and sitting down on Kylie’s bed, patted her heaving shoulder.
‘Shall I tell you a story?’
‘Please, miss.’
‘“O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west, Through all the wide Border his steed was the best”,’ began Janna in her sweet, soft voice, which in the dark sounded like that of a young girl.
She can’t be more than early thirties, thought Amber. It was such a good story, she managed to stay awake to the very end.
51
Things did get better.
‘The students have bonded so well that the teachers are redundant,’ Skunk Illingworth announced the following evening, froth gathering on his moustache like snow on a blackthorn hedge as he downed a pint of real ale.
He, Biffo and Rufus had sloped off to the local pub, leaving the pupils happy to write up their field notes because, thanks to Bagley’s head of geography, they had discovered geography could be really interesting. Rufus, red-blond hair flopping, bony freckled face alight, had charged round Herefordshire, a piece of rock in one hand, a hammer in the other, book open in the grass, explaining the mysteries of the natural world to his enraptured listeners.
Earlier in the day, one group, including Paris, Boffin and Kylie, had carried out a tourist survey in a neighbouring forest. Unfortunately, on a dripping Wednesday morning, there was only a handful of tourists, who got fed up being repeatedly asked the same question. Kylie had even disturbed a couple in flagrante in the maturing bracken.
‘When I asked Mr and Mrs Brown from Scunthorpe whether they had travelled here by train, coach or bicycle,’ she was now writing in her round, careful hand, ‘they told me to f— off.’
Everyone had then piled into the coaches and moved on to the next location, the source of the Fleet, which here was an eight-foot-wide brook, but which swelled into a great river as it passed Bagley, curled round Larkminster and Larks, then flowed on into Rutshire, past Cosmo’s mother’s house, through Lando France-Lynch’s father’s land, then skirting Xav’s father’s land in Gloucestershire.
If I could only climb into a boat and row home, thought Xav, who, that morning, had been punched very hard by Lubemir.
‘Each group was allocated a section of the river,’ wrote Primrose Duddon in a red and mauve striped notebook. ‘We had to test our hypothesis on a “meander”, which means the river bending several times, and on a “riffle”, which is a fast-flowing, straight section. We rolled up a piece of tin foil, then checked how fast it floated down river.’
Pearl had kicked off her shoes and watched the ball of foil. It was snagged by tawny rushes, then floated on through the brown peaty water. Then she had collapsed on the warm wet grass, waiting for a teacher to tell her to get up. She was about to turn on her stopwatch and see how fast another ball of foil was floating down the far bank, when she felt a hand, as warm as the sun, on her bare legs.
‘This is a “riffle”,’ murmured Cosmo as he ran his hand slowly up her bare legs, roving over her bottom, gently exploring in and out of her shorts. ‘And this is definitely a “meander”.’
He then lay down beside her on the bank, wickedly squinting sideways at her, stroking her rainbow hair, kissing her forehead, burying his tongue in her ear, murmuring endearments in Italian, his night-dark eyes blotting out the sun. As she turned her head towards him, he kissed her, slowly sucking each lip, then dividing them with his tongue.
A roar of rage interrupted Pearl’s moment of bliss.
‘Cosmo Rannaldini. Stop that at once.’ Then the roar diminished as Joan realized Cosmo was only molesting a Larks student. ‘But stop it all the same. You’re supposed to be testing the velocity of the river, not the speed of your seduction technique.’
Pearl couldn’t wait to tell Kylie.
‘Cosmo snogged me. He is so brilliant, my knees gave way and I was lying down.’
The Chinless Wanderers, who weren’t remotely interested in riffles and who regarded rivers as places in which you caught salmon or retrieved polo balls, were smoking and listening to the test match. Further down the bank Paris read Le Rouge et Le Noir, totally engrossed in Julien Sorel’s seduction of the beautiful, much older Madame de Renal leading to passionate mutual love – maybe Janna wasn’t such an impossibility.
He had bonded least of the Larks contingent. He was sick of Bagley chat about gap years in Argentina and their parents’ splitting up. There was also something sickening about the country, he thought, or the evils man imposed on it. Last year, he’d been haunted by the funeral pyres burning innocent sheep and cattle.
This year it was the rabbits lying in the footpath dying from myxomatosis, desperately trying to crawl away as their bulging eyes were pecked out by huge killer gulls. The girls screamed in horror; Paris turned away retching; Jack Waterlane picked up a log and put one rabbit out of its misery, then another, then another, shouting at the gulls before returning to put a comforting arm round a sobbing Kylie.
Jack wasn’t quite such a prat as he seemed, decided Paris.
The gulls were a symbol of the way Cosmo pecked away at Xavier and himself, if given a chance.
Before supper that evening, Paris wandered off from the hostel into the wood to read in peace. Hearing raised voices, he was about to sidle to the right, when he clocked Lubemir’s very distinctive accent: ‘Fetch eet, black sheet.’
Edging forward through the green curtain of a willow, Paris found a clearing in which Cosmo and Lubemir were playing football. To the left, like an enemy ambush, lurked a huge bed of nettles, giving off a rank, bitter smell as the still hot evening sun burnt off the rain. Beside them stood Xav, fat, hunched, terrified, as Cosmo powered the ball into the nettles.
‘Pick it up, black shit.’
Desperate to avoid a beating, wincing from the stings, Xav plunged in and picked up the ball, only for Lubemir to boot it back again. ‘Fetch eet, you fat creep.’
For a moment defiance flared: ‘Why should I?’
‘Because your black skin’s too rhinoceros-like to feel stings. Pick it up,’ demanded Cosmo.
Paris strolled into the clearing. ‘Get it your fucking self.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that, yob,’ said Lubemir insolently.
Paris dropped Le Rouge et Le Noir. A second later, his right hook had sent Lubemir flying into the nettles.
Bellowing at the pain, Lubemir yelled, ‘Get heem,’ to Cosmo.
Cosmo, however, who believed guards should guard themselves, was examining his nails.
Turning on Cosmo, Paris grabbed him by his bright blue Ralph Lauren shirt.
‘Want to make the same journey?’ he hissed, yanking Cosmo towards the nettles. ‘I thought not.
Well, fucking lay off Xav.’
Picking up Le Rouge et Le Noir, he stalked back to the hostel, with Xav panting to keep up.
‘Thanks very, very much.’
‘’S OK. Cosmo’s a wimp if you face up to him.’
Xav didn’t believe him, but he felt a little better.
‘Dear Mum,’ wrote Kylie, another twenty-four hours later:
We’re having a brilliant time. We’ve been clay-pigeon shooting, rock climbing and we cycled to a museum. We’ve also been to an art gallery, which Graffi would have loved. Everyone friendly – Bagley really nice, Jack gorgeous. We write up our notes in the evening when the teachers go to the pub, so we can get out the booze and the weed. Today some kids went riding. Cosmo raced his horse up behind Paris’s and made it bolt. Paris fell off.
Paris hadn’t any parents to write to. He’d started a card of a red dragon’s tongue, symbol of the Welsh language, to Patience and Ian, then, not knowing how to address them on the envelope and deciding it was counting chickens, had torn it up. His head ached after his fall; if only he was with Janna in the pub.
Janna enjoyed these pub sessions, discussing the children, comparing state and private school practice.
‘We work much harder in the independent sector,’ moaned one of Rufus’s young geography teachers. ‘At least you lot can work at home. We’re on call twenty-four hours a day and most weekends.’
‘You have loads longer holidays and we’ve got so many teachers off with stress,’ said Gloria, returning with another bottle. ‘The ones who aren’t work ten times as hard.’
‘Hengist doesn’t believe in stress or “generalized anxiety” as it’s now known.’ Rufus shook his head. ‘He expects people to come in every day.’
‘Except for himself,’ grumbled Biffo.
‘You won’t be able to run to your union when you join us next term,’ Joan teased an increasingly alarmed Vicky.
‘Hengist is a despot,’ complained Biffo. ‘When Emlyn had to pull out, he virtually ordered me to take his place.’
