Wicked!

by Jilly Cooper

  Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto rippled through speakers as though Marcus Campbell-Black and the BBC Symphony Orchestra were actually in the room.

  ‘Whatever my feelings for his toffee-nosed father, I cannot get enough of Marcus,’ announced Stancombe as, like Venus hot from some exciting, foaming jacuzzi, he welcomed her. His hair was damp and curling on his strong, suntanned neck. He was wearing just a dark blue, crew-necked cashmere sweater and white chinos, which clung to his sleek, still damp body. He smelt of toothpaste and Lynx, his favourite aftershave, as he padded round in beautifully pedicured bare feet.

  Janna was flattered he’d glammed up for her, even if he was probably going out later.

  ‘What a gorgeous apartment.’

  Stancombe smiled. ‘I used to think books and CDs ruined the look, but I’ve mellowed.’

  On a glass side table in an art deco frame was a beautiful photograph of Jade, taken by Lichfield.

  ‘How pretty she is,’ sighed Janna.

  ‘Takes after her dad,’ joked Stancombe, handing Janna a long, slim glass of champagne; then, suddenly serious: ‘She’s a bit lost actually. Bloody Cosmo Rannaldini’s messed her about.’

  Ushering Janna on to a pale brown leather sofa, so vast Janna’s little feet only just reached the edge, he sat down beside her.

  ‘Hard being first-generation public school. You pick up the posh accent and the clothes, even the education, but not the roots. People laugh at me because I’m flash and vulgar. They laugh at Jade when she doesn’t know things or people or pronounces them wrong. It makes her flare up, easily on the defensive.’

  ‘Like me,’ sighed Janna. ‘If only I could keep my temper and learn some tact.’

  Stancombe clinked his glass against hers. ‘To the flash and the vulgar, may we inherit the earth. Problem with education, you’ve only got one chance. I often think Jade would have been happier at a state school. Nice if she could have been taught by you. You’d have understood her.’

  Janna had never felt so flattered or warm inside, particularly when he refilled her glass.

  ‘People like Rupert, Hengist and Jupiter take your money, even ask you to their homes,’ he went on bitterly, ‘but they never really accept you and they laugh at us behind our backs – even Sally.’

  ‘They were wonderful at the meeting,’ protested Janna. ‘They came out on a vile night to save me.’

  ‘With respect, they saw it as a chance to rattle the other parties.’

  ‘Oh,’ wailed Janna, ‘Emlyn said the same thing.’

  ‘Emlyn’s one of us.’

  ‘You truly don’t think I can save Larks?’

  Stancombe shook his head.

  Wriggling off the edge of the sofa, which was like falling off the edge of the world, overwhelmed with despair, Janna was tempted to walk straight through the big glass window and splatter on Casey Andrews’s sculpture in the forecourt miles below.

  On a side table was a Telegraph colour magazine open at an interview with Stancombe, photographed in this same flat with Mrs Walton.

  ‘Lovely picture,’ she said dully.

  ‘Even with Ruth,’ she realized Stancombe was saying a minute later, ‘I have to watch myself. She gives me a lot of advice. I thought “mangy” was pronounced like “man”.’

  ‘Isn’t it? She’s so beautiful.’

  ‘Works hard enough at it.’

  ‘And succeeds.’

  ‘She’d get an A star in leisure and tourism. She’s in Rome with Milly as we speak.’

  Janna could see La Perdrix d’Or, where she and Hengist had had their first lunch, and Larks, appearing at a distance innocent and unscathed with the green blur of spring on its trees – as if for a last time.

  ‘I like a woman who works,’ said Stancombe joining her, then, glancing sideways: ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘For Larks.’ A great shuddering breath racked Janna’s small frame. ‘If I can’t save it, would you help me to save Year Ten? Only about forty of them. Imagine if your Jade had to leave halfway through her GCSE course. Rod Hyde loathes my children; he’d bully them into the ground. Rutminster Comp’s a jungle; they’d just give up.

  ‘I only need a hundred and twenty thousand for some teachers and a new building or to rebuild Appletree. Would you lend me it? You can have my house as security.’

  ‘How much did you pay for it?’

  ‘One hundred and seventy-five thousand; three-quarters of that mortgage. I could sell it.’ She wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

  ‘How would you pay your staff?’

  ‘That’s why I need a hundred and twenty. Please, please help me.’

  Stancombe retreated to get the bottle.

  Janna put her hand over her glass. ‘I’m driving.’

  ‘A very hard bargain. I need time to think. I’ll do all I can. I’ll lean on Ashton to keep the school open a bit longer.’

  Janna was overwhelmed with weariness. ‘I think it’d be too difficult to rebuild now. So many teachers and children have left.’

  ‘If I get you the money . . .’ Stretching out a hand, Stancombe caressed the back of her neck . . . ‘you’ve got to promise to sleep with me.’

  Janna opened her mouth and shut it again, feeling herself growing very hot and wet as if she were fantasizing about something of which she was ashamed.

  Stancombe laughed. ‘OK, you need time to think, like me.’

  ‘I must go.’ As she jumped away, his hand closed on the scruff of her twinset.

  ‘Why must you?’

  ‘I just ought.’

  ‘The first time I saw you, through this telescope on your first day, you were so bonny with your flaming red hair, like a beacon waiting to light up the town. Next time at Hengist and Sally’s, you were so upset, because you’d found that little dog blown up, I still thought you were very tasty, but I’d just met Ruth – the road not taken.’

  ‘I love that poem,’ said Janna in surprise.

  ‘Now you’re patronizing me and my yob culture, too busy scrabbling his way to the top to read poetry. Then I saw you at the public meeting, I thought how tired and diminished you looked and how cheap your clothes were.’

  Janna longed to protest that the dress was pure silk and from Hengist.

  ‘And I wanted to take you under my wing and make your life happier and easier.’ Stancombe dropped a kiss on the top of her head and let a leisurely hand move down over her bottom, exciting her unbearably.

  ‘I must go, I’ve got the same little dog in the car,’ she stammered. ‘Thank you for seeing me.’

  ‘It’s good to talk,’ said Stancombe, almost spoiling things.

  As she ran to the lift in utter confusion, he caught up with her and pressed the button.

  ‘D’you know the sexiest thing in the world?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Courage – and you’ve got it in spades. I’d like to help with your school and I’d like you to help me with Jade, she’s so unhappy. Ruth’s not the ideal prospective stepmother.’

  As he drew her towards him, she felt his wonderfully fit body burning through the blue cashmere, his rock-hard cock practically raping her belly button. So much taller, he had to bend his head to kiss her. Janna gasped and resisted, then her mouth melted beneath his mouth as he sucked and his tongue caressed her lips with such tenderness and delicacy. He was so sexy.

  ‘I want you to look bonny and happy again,’ he whispered. ‘I want to take those dark circles away and put them back for a different reason, “the lineaments of gratified desire”.’

  Recognizing the quote, Janna thought: This is ridiculous, he’s appealing to my intellectual snobbery.

  As the lift opened directly into the flat, she leapt into it.

  ‘That was lovely, thanks ever so much.’

  All the way down, she expected him to press a button from above and imprison her deep down in the hellish bowels of the building, for treating with the devil of whom Hengist, Mags and Emlyn so disapproved and yet who had just be
en so disturbingly adorable.

  ‘One, two, three, four, five, once I caught a big fish alive,’ sang Janna to Partner all the way home.

  80

  ‘One of the privileges of the great’, wrote Giraudoux, ‘is to witness catastrophes from a terrace’, or, in Randal Stancombe’s case, from the air. Flying off to the Far East, he never got back in touch, leaving Janna to her fate. Nor, after their Titanic support at the public meeting, did Hengist, Jupiter or Rupert return to fight her corner.

  The war in Iraq, therefore, ended much less decisively than Larkminster Comprehensive when in the middle of May, the School’s Organization Committee voted unanimously and conclusively to close it down.

  This, although expected, came as a devastating death blow. On the steps of County Hall, a stunned Janna defiantly announced that even if the guillotine had fallen, she would still battle on to save her school. Inside, she knew this was impossible. There was no more money in the kitty.

  The following morning, however, she was sitting in the kitchen drinking very strong tea and wondering how to stagger mortally wounded through the rest of her life, when she heard Partner barking at his very good friend the postman. Next moment he had rushed in carrying a blue envelope in his mouth, leaping on to Janna’s knee to deliver it. The letter inside was on plain blue paper.

  ‘Dear Janna,’ she read, ‘I’m sorry about your school. I thought you might need this in your battle to save Year Ten. A banker’s draft for £120,000 should now be in your account. Best of luck.’

  Janna gave a gasp of disbelief; it must be some cruel joke. There was no address, no signature, only a Royal Mail postmark; nothing to identify who’d given it her. But when she rang her bank in Larkminster, the manager, markedly more friendly and deferential, confirmed the money was indeed in her account, but that the donor had insisted on remaining anonymous.

  It couldn’t be Hengist, thought Janna, nor Rupert, nor Jupiter, unless Emlyn had told them of her desperate concerns about Year Ten. So she rang Stancombe, gibbering her thanks. After several moments of evasion, there was such a long pause that she thought he had hung up, then he said ruefully:

  ‘I wanted it to be a secret.’

  ‘I cannot believe such kindness. I’ll pay you back somehow, I promise.’

  ‘No, no, it’s a gift. Lovely ladies deserve a leg-up.’ Stancombe laughed softly. ‘Just remember our bargain.’

  And again Janna felt the warm quiver between her legs.

  ‘I’m off to the States with Ruth on Monday,’ Stancombe went on. ‘I’ll be back in June and we’ll find you a building to accommodate your tearaways and get some decent funding from Ashton.’

  ‘I won’t accept a penny from him.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. You’ll need his help. See you in June.’

  ‘He hasn’t failed me, he hasn’t failed me.’ Gathering up Partner, Janna waltzed him round the room. ‘You’ll have another year with your friends, darling.’

  Then she collapsed back on her chair, unable to comprehend such golden benison after the darkness of yesterday, reeling at the prospect of how much battling would still be needed to get the project off the ground. After she’d worked out the figures, she also realized she would need a lot more money to pay salaries, feed the children and heat and light the building, not to mention exam fees.

  Janna remembered very little of the remaining summer term. As dogs moult in hot weather, Larks shed teachers and pupils. Many of the latter returned tearfully from their new schools: ‘They called us Larks scum, miss, and put chewing gum in our hair.’

  Ashton showed no desire to help Janna find a home for Year Ten. Instead, in early June, he offered her a headship turning round a failing Larkshire school.

  ‘It’s a challenge, Janna, restore your sense of self-worth.’

  Janna refused; she’d no desire to kill off another school. She continued to refuse jobs and endured the humiliation of all the other schools in the area descending like vultures and slapping different coloured stickers on desks, books, computers and laboratory equipment, which they would collect after Larks finally closed down on 12 July. Enid, who’d built up the library over six years, was in perpetual floods. The choir school was the greediest and earmarked the most.

  ‘The nearer the pulpit, the further from God,’ observed Cambola sourly.

  Janna felt particularly guilty about teachers like Sophy Belvedon, who’d refused to abandon ship and so heroically carried on helping Year Eleven through their GCSEs that Janna was amazed the vultures didn’t slap a coloured sticker on them as well.

  Jupiter and Rupert returned to the attack and continued to hassle S and C and the county council, not just on the dodgy ethics of ‘closing down’ Larks, but also accusing them of diverting the education budget to other areas. Who, for example, had paid for Ashton’s Hockney?

  S and C and the county council denied everything, but they were rattled, particularly when, after Russell Lambert’s resignation as chairman of Larks governors, Brigadier Woodford took over as temporary chairman and asked for the minutes of meetings over the past five years.

  They were also fed up to the back teeth with Janna ringing every day demanding a building for Year Ten. Who would rid them of this turbulent priestess? Despite falling S and C shares, even if it would mean a year’s delay before getting the big money from the sale of Larks, they decided it might be prudent, and in the end cheaper, to allow Janna to remain on site.

  ‘We must snatch the moral high ground from the Tories,’ insisted Cindy Payne. ‘Let’s go and look at Larks.’

  There had been a hosepipe ban and all the little saplings planted by Wally in the autumn had died in the drought. Leaves were falling out of the trees, even though it was only June, as Ashton and Cindy arrived. Janna utterly jolted them by taking them first over the main building. Like an elephant left to die in the jungle, all the flesh had fallen off its bones. Apart from the damp and the boarded-up windows, not a ceiling or a roof tile was in place. Doors had been ripped from their hinges, plugs and lavatory chains torn out, every classroom trashed. Wally had lost heart.

  ‘I wouldn’t educate a dog in here,’ said Ashton faintly. ‘How could this have happened?’

  ‘The children did it. They were so hurt and angry you closed their school.’

  Through gritted teeth and because the main building was beyond redemption, Ashton and Cindy agreed two weeks later to rebuild the annexe, Appletree. They then revealed to Janna that Randal had very, very generously offered to do the job at cost. After all, he was donating a science block to Bagley and a so-called vocational studies unit to St Jimmy’s. Appletree would be another example of his wonderful philanthropy.

  In the first week in July, therefore, S and C and the county council called a press conference.

  ‘In view of the closure of Larks Compwehensive,’ Ashton, in a new mauve striped shirt, told his large audience, ‘it has been decided not to diswupt Year Ten in the middle of their GCSE course. S and C Services have therefore decided to pwovide a building in which they can be taught and to put funds towards their education for a further year, until June 2004.’

  These funds were of course hugely bolstered by the £120,000 Randal had given to Janna – but he wished this donation to remain anonymous. Ashton, however, did go on to say the rebuilding of Appletree would be supervised by Janna Curtis and carried out, on very generous terms, by Randal Stancombe Properties. Janna was to be given an extended contract until the end of August 2004, to close the school down finally.

  ‘Mercy has a human face,’ announced the Gazette, alongside a soppy picture of Ashton, which everyone graffitied.

  Stormin’ Norman appeared on television punching the air instead of anyone else and shouting ‘Yes’ when the news broke.

  ‘Why isn’t Janna Curtis more grateful?’ grumbled Cindy Payne.

  This was because saving Year Ten was small comfort compared with the anguish of saying goodbye to the other years.

  ‘Why didn’t you s
ave us as well?’ sobbed the little ones.

  ‘Why didn’t you march for us on Drowning Street?’

  It was like working in a slaughterhouse, or a vivisection clinic, making their last moments as comfortable as possible. Janna tried heroically to remain cheerful, but on the last day, when the media poured in to photograph the death of a school, she lost it and screamed at them all to booger off.

  ‘Why couldn’t I have saved them?’ she sobbed to Mags and Cambola as her children set off on their last journey down the drive to St Jimmy’s or Searston Abbey or pupil referral units or to uncertain futures and no likelihood of a decent job, unless, in Year Eleven’s case, they had notched up a few GCSEs.

  Janna felt more and more grateful to Stancombe who was planning to extend Appletree to include a dining room, a big hall, a gym and new labs.

  ‘I’d like to rename it Stancombe House,’ she told him when he dropped in with a bottle of champagne after the first day of work.

  Stancombe shook his head. ‘That’ll tell everyone who funded it. It was a gift, remember?’

  Although they were alone in the roofless, windowless building and could see a new moon scything its way through the soft blue twilight, Stancombe made no attempt to extract payment. At first Janna thought he was sensitively appreciating her mood of utter desolation, then he shyly confided that he and Ruth were off to Italy and that he was thinking very seriously of asking her to marry him.

  When Janna hugged him in delight and urged him to go for it, he assured her that Teddy Murray, his foreman, would keep an eye on everything and told her to ring him on his mobile if she needed help.