Wicked!

by Jilly Cooper

  Janna brightened. ‘He did?’

  ‘You can hardly have failed to notice how Xav was expelled from Bagley. Such a public humiliation for both him and Rupert, who’s hardly bullied anyone since he left school. Poor Xav’s been so difficult since he went to Bagley, I feel terrible not realizing he was drinking and drugging.’

  ‘Tell me about this summer.’

  Feeling horribly disloyal, Taggie did so.

  ‘Marcus and Tabitha have done so well,’ she said finally, ‘and Bianca just floats through life. Xav feels so hopeless. I was the same, the really thick one, between a brilliant brother and sister. Alex Bruce always thought Xav was stupid and was waiting for an excuse to sack him.’

  ‘We have to prove him wrong then.’

  Taggie glanced up, not daring to hope. ‘D’you mean . . .?’

  ‘I certainly do. We’d love to have Xav. He was so kind to Paris on the geography field trip and he worked terribly hard during Romeo and Juliet. Aysha, who got on very well with him, is staying on at Larks, so he’ll have a buddy to look after him.’

  Taggie’s stammering ecstatic gratitude was cut short by the telephone. The call was equally short.

  ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger.’ Janna switched off the handset. ‘A cook I interviewed yesterday has decided not to take the job after all. Our wonderful Debbie has been poached by Ashton Douglas.’

  Taggie’s silver eyes widened like rain rings in a pond.

  ‘Not that horrible smoothie at the public meeting?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘What does the job involve?’ asked Taggie.

  ‘Well, basically, dinner every day for about forty. The staff and lots of the children will only be working a two- or three-day week and many of them just have baguettes or salads and rush off and play in the grounds. I’ve got a very good temp for September starting tomorrow, but after that . . .’ Janna splayed out her fingers in despair.

  ‘I know someone who might be able to help you,’ said Taggie, colour suffusing her pale face. ‘Before I married Rupert I used to cook for dinner parties. I could give it a try until you found someone.’

  Taggie had been so desperately low about herself both as a wife and mother that the sun really came out when Janna jumped to her feet in delight and pumped Taggie’s hand.

  ‘I can’t think of anything more wonderful for Larks’s street cred. The children will be so chuffed to have two Campbell-Blacks here.’

  ‘You don’t think it’ll embarrass Xav?’

  ‘Some mothers, yes, but not you. And I think, as he’ll have just come out of rehab, we’ll have to keep an eye on him.’

  Taggie loved the new kitchens, ‘much more modern than ours at Penscombe’.

  ‘I’d like to start a breakfast club,’ said Janna as she walked Taggie to the front door, ‘even if it’s only orange juice and a bacon sandwich. So many of our children face a wall of indifference and hostility beyond the school gates. Xav will find himself one of the very lucky ones. Some of them lead such deprived lives. This is one of the worst cases,’ she whispered as, on cue, bouncing his violet and yellow football along the corridor, came Feral. He had lost his sheen like a conker forgotten in a coat pocket. Poised for flight, he looked at Taggie warily as if awaiting blows.

  ‘Hello, Feral, I’m so sorry about the other evening,’ she stammered.

  ‘Xavier’s coming to Larks,’ said Janna.

  ‘Wicked,’ said Feral and skittered past them into the dusk.

  Back at Penscombe, Rupert was in a foul temper. Where in hell was Taggie? There was no sign of dinner. He’d taken advantage of her absence to have a look at one of his GCSE set books, which he’d found in the library next door: a first edition of Pride and Prejudice with the pages uncut, which he’d scribbled notes all over. He hadn’t been able to make head nor tail of Macbeth and even less of the Ted Hughes poem he’d tackled yesterday. Why had he ever let himself be bullied into taking this bloody exam? If by some miracle he passed, he wouldn’t give a penny to Alex Bruce’s science block after the way he’d treated Xav.

  Hearing a car and joyous barking as dogs bounded down the stairs and along from the kitchen, and old Bogotá looked up hopefully through his sightless eyes praying it might be Xavier, Rupert shoved Pride and Prejudice under a cushion. As Taggie ran in, eyes shining, colour back in her cheeks for the first time in days, he thought she’d never looked prettier. How enticingly that white T-shirt clung to her. Dinner could wait; he took her hand: ‘Let’s go to bed.’

  ‘Something wonderful happened,’ gasped Taggie, ‘I must just tell you.’

  ‘Are you out of your mind?’ asked Rupert two minutes later, in the soft bitchy voice that always made Taggie want to bolt like a hunted hare. ‘Xav is totally unstable, and you’re throwing him to the wolves: the flower of the Shakespeare Estate who’ll force-feed him glue, steroids and crack cocaine; brutes like Feral Jackson who whip out guns at public meetings, nick cars and beat up old ladies.’

  Rupert’s icy rage could halt global warming, but Taggie stood her ground.

  ‘Christian Woodford’s teaching there, and Lily. They love Feral. You liked Janna. You went out of your way to try and save Larks.’

  ‘For other people’s children. You’re committing Xav to a crap bunch of teachers and geriatrics, only clinging on because they can’t find work anywhere else.’

  ‘Most of them are your age.’ Taggie was appalled at her own bitchiness. ‘They’ve just led more stressful lives. Xav’s going; I’ve signed a form.’

  ‘Which you couldn’t even read,’ said Rupert brutally.

  ‘Janna read it to me. I’m going to give it a try.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you have involved Xav “in the decision-making process” as Mrs Bruce would say?’

  Taggie lost her temper. ‘You haven’t tried to find him anywhere. Why are you being so bloody negative?’

  ‘I’m going out.’ Rupert snatched up his car keys and stormed off, slamming the door.

  Returning at two in the morning, he couldn’t have insomnia in the spare room, because he’d given it over to Bianca, so he had to go and freeze in a musty deserted bedroom and let in all the dogs to keep him warm.

  ‘I miss him as much as you,’ he mumbled as he hoisted poor blind Bogotá up beside him.

  Bianca, next day, was angrier than Rupert.

  ‘I can’t tell people you’re going to be a cook like Mrs Axford. Who’s going to take me to school? You’ll have to drop me off at eight in the morning if you’re going to get Xav to Larks by eight-thirty. I might as well board, I’m not going to be a latchkey kid.’

  Running upstairs, Bianca threw herself down on the pink and lilac quilt and sobbed her heart out. She’d never believed anything could hurt so much. Only this afternoon, as one of the grooms was driving her home, she’d mistaken a rain-soaked trunk halfway down the chestnut avenue for Feral and, leaping out of the car, raced towards him.

  If her mother went to Larks, Feral would fall in love with her like everyone else did, she thought despairingly.

  What enraged Rupert was the ribbing from Jupiter and Hengist.

  ‘Why don’t you take your GCSE at Larks, and make it a full house?’ suggested Jupiter. ‘Estelle Morris is always ticking off ministers for not sending their children to maintained schools. Think of the brownie points if you sent yourself.’

  ‘Did Taggie say how Janna was?’ asked Hengist.

  ‘From that picture in the Gazette, she’s acquired an Eton crop and completely lost her looks,’ said Jupiter.

  Hengist missed Janna terribly. He felt so sad and so guilty about her, as if he’d plucked a bunch of wild flowers on a walk and found them dead in the porch three days later because he’d forgotten to put them in water.

  92

  It was arguable who was more terrified, Xav or Taggie, when they arrived at Larks in late September. Xav had just emerged from rehab, utterly mortified he had nearly killed Dicky and written off Rupert’s best horse.

&nb
sp; Learning his destination, he panicked: ‘I can’t go to Larks, they’d skin me alive. They’ll have read what I did to Dicky. They’ll think I’m some pervy Hooray. Have you seen the hulking brutes like Monster Norman and Johnnie Fowler?’

  ‘Give it a try,’ pleaded Taggie, ‘I so need your help to read recipes and tell me everyone’s names.’

  ‘You do?’ Xav looked dubious. ‘What’ll you do if the other guys slag me off?’

  ‘I’ll thump them,’ said Taggie.

  Xav smiled slightly.

  ‘And there’s a sweet girl called Aysha looking forward to seeing you.’

  Xav’s face brightened. ‘I thought she’d gone to Searston Abbey.’

  ‘Brigadier Woodford talked her father round.’

  Inside, Taggie was quailing. What if Xav hadn’t stopped drinking? She had been comforted by her father, Declan, who was passionately opposed to private education, particularly boarding schools. ‘Xav’ll get to know all the local children,’ he told Rupert.

  ‘Hardly, at thirty miles away,’ said Rupert sourly.

  ‘We’re to roll up after assembly around ten o’clock so it won’t be too public,’ Taggie reassured Xav. ‘And you don’t have to bother with uniform, although you’ve lost so much weight, we’d better go and buy you some jeans.’

  ‘They’ll look too new,’ grumbled Xav.

  There was a row as they were leaving. How could they possibly abandon Bogotá? He’d get so confused.

  ‘He’ll have all the other dogs and the stable lads,’ begged Taggie.

  ‘But he’s used to having you or me.’ Xav was nearly hysterical, particularly when Bogotá tried to jump into the car, missed, fell and, tail drooping, unseeing eyes bewildered, was lifted back into the house.

  ‘Poor old boy,’ said Rupert, who’d been deliberately keeping his distance, ‘abandoned like everyone else.’

  More frightened of his father’s icy disapproval, Xav shot into the car. God he could use a drink, or a line. How could he possibly slide unobtrusively into Larks with Taggie in tow, looking utterly gorgeous in a pale pink polo shirt and black jeans?

  Dora, who had not forgiven Xav, had also been at work and they arrived to find the school gates swarming with press and television cameras.

  Xav grabbed the door handle. ‘I’m going home.’

  ‘We can’t let Janna down.’

  A blond woman thrust her tape recorder through the window. ‘Why are you sending Xav to Larks?’

  ‘I’ve heard wonderful things about it,’ stammered Taggie.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said a repulsively familiar toad face with olive-green teeth: Col Peters had turned up in person. ‘Larks has just been closed down.’

  ‘Janna Curtis has very kindly offered Xav a place. He’s into his second year’s GSE’ – mumbled Taggie, who could never master initials. ‘GECS course. Xav knows a lot of the children and the staff.’

  ‘After the way Xav nearly totalled Dicky Belvedon, he won’t have any difficulty holding his own,’ sneered Col.

  ‘Is Rupert going to take his GCSE at Larks?’ asked a man from the BBC.

  ‘Find his own intellectual level if he did,’ quipped Col.

  ‘And Rupert knows all about bullying, doesn’t he, Taggie?’ The crowd of press were making it impossible for Taggie to push through. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Wally and PC Cuthbert belting down the drive, but Xav was too quick for them. Leaping out of the car, he grabbed Col’s lapels.

  ‘You’re one to talk when it comes to bullying,’ he yelled. ‘Leave my mother alone, you great asshole.’

  To his amazement, he was then given a round of applause by the rest of the press.

  Next moment, PC Cuthbert had moved in:

  ‘That’s enough. Morning, Mrs Campbell-Black, morning, Xav.’ He directed them to the car park, then on to reception, where a huge banner said: ‘Welcome to Larks High, Taggie and Xavier’.

  Cambola played ‘The Campbell-Blacks are coming, hurrah, hurrah’ on her trumpet, and Kylie stepped forward and presented a bunch of orange freesias to Taggie to a chorus of wolf whistles. No one seemed to be at lessons. Janna came out and hugged them both.

  ‘That your sister, Xav?’ shouted Johnnie.

  ‘We’re doing media studies, Xav,’ giggled Kitten, ‘and we just sit round reading the tabloids and about you and your farver all day.’

  ‘Thank goodness you’re here, Taggie, we’re starving,’ shouted Graffi. ‘And who’s going to win the big race this afternoon, Xavier?’

  ‘Probably Hellespont,’ muttered Xav, and a score of mobiles were switched on.

  The warmth of his and Taggie’s reception was due first to their novelty factor in arriving a fortnight after the beginning of term on a beautiful day, and secondly because Janna’s no-hopers were having the time of their lives. In small classes of half a dozen, they were really blossoming, and the teachers who’d stayed on, her ‘Golden Oldies’ (except for Sophy, Gloria and Rowan) as Janna called them, were regaining their skills, their confidence, and at last having time to teach and prepare their lessons.

  After initial doubts about the Brigadier – ‘He looks old enough to have been in the First World War,’ grumbled Johnnie Fowler – both sexes had been utterly captivated by his lessons, playing war games all over the park, moving pepper pots round polished tables.

  An additional advantage was an excellent press, except from the Gazette, on Xavier’s first day, with several references to his challenging Col Peters for cheeking his mother. His street cred rose even higher when Hellespont won by five lengths.

  Xav arrived a scarred, angry, screwed-up ex-junkie, terrified he was going to be beaten up for being posh, thick and black. Instead, he found he was brighter and further ahead in most subjects, particularly in Spanish.

  Gradually, as the acceptance of the other children won him over, he began, as Janna had predicted, to appreciate the horror of so many of their lives.

  It was Taggie who, because people talked to her, learnt that Johnnie Fowler supported the BNP because his mother had been nearly beaten to death by a black lover and that Monster’s dad had arrived last weekend after an absence of five years and left again after a blazing drunken row. Feral’s mother had also vanished like smoke, but any moment she and Uncle Harley might roll up and ruin everything. Feral was getting on all right with the Brigadier. His brother and sisters were thriving with the foster parents, but kept escaping to the amusement arcades in Larkminster. Feral had bought the two eldest mobiles, so he could keep track of them, but they kept running up bills. All this Taggie explained to Xav.

  Rocky, who was madly in love with Taggie, was building a dog kennel for Bogotá in D and T.

  Fearful fights still broke out, particularly between the boys who were so in need of a father figure. Christian Woodford was much admired but a bit old, as were Skunk, Pittsy and Mr Mates. Janna thought longingly of Emlyn, who instantly diffused rows whenever he appeared.

  For the first time, Xav found himself looking forward to PE with the glamorous Gloria. He could now get into size 32 trousers; his spots had gone; his hawk-like South American-Indian features were emerging, and suddenly he discovered he was attractive to girls. Pearl and Kitten were both giving him the eye, but Xav still only had eyes for Aysha. Sad, beautiful and timid as the deer that sometimes invaded his father’s woods, she was working on her first science module, which had to be finished by Christmas.

  ‘Ask her out,’ urged Feral.

  ‘Her dad wouldn’t let me near her,’ sighed Xav.

  Feral knew the feeling. Bianca was boarding at Bagley now and it crucified him to think of her at the mercy of Cosmo, Anatole and the predators of the lower and upper sixths.

  During Ramadan, on top of all her school work and helping out at home, Aysha was expected to fast from sunrise to sunset. One afternoon she fainted in the corridor. Xav, who found her, was demented. As he loosened her headscarf and her top button, he couldn’t resist kissing her pale lips. Aysha ha
d fluttered open her lashes, smiled as if she’d gone to Mecca, then realized this was earth, cried out in terror, staggered to her feet and fled.

  Another of Xav’s momentous encounters was with Mike Pitts. Returning to Mike’s classroom to collect some forgotten maths homework, Xav found Mike about to take a slug of whisky from a bottle. He had had a gruelling afternoon, with Monster and Johnnie refusing to understand quadratic equations. Xav took a deep breath.

  ‘If you’re anything like me, sir, you don’t really want to drink that.’

  Mike had nearly jumped through the roof, but he lowered the bottle.

  ‘Shall I take it, sir?’ Xav felt an awful prig as he emptied it out of the window. ‘I’m desperate for a drink whenever I get stressed,’ he confessed, ‘but if I can somehow get over the moment . . .’

  ‘Thank you.’ Mike wanted to beg Xav not to tell anyone. ‘Shall we make a pact? If you feel like having a drink, you call me.’

  ‘And if you feel like it,’ said Xav, ‘you call me – any hour of the night,’ he added gravely.

  He could feel the dampness of Mike’s hand as they shook on it. Xav told no one, but was gratified that he and Mike exchanged three or four calls a week.

  Xav was almost proudest that Taggie’s cooking had encouraged all the children to switch to school dinners and of how Taggie enslaved them with her gentleness and sweetness when she started helping them with their food technology GCSE. Part of the coursework was to provide a menu and food for Larkminster Rovers Football Club. Taggie was determined to put in a good word for Feral.

  As the weather grew colder, more and more children started rolling up to her breakfast club to eat bacon and eggs or croissants with apple jelly from the Penscombe orchard. In addition they joined an after-school club where they could do their homework, undisturbed by yelling families.

  The children also saw Xav with his arm round Taggie’s shoulders as he deciphered memos and recipes for her, and told him how lucky he was.

  ‘Christ, I wish I was adopted,’ sighed Graffi. ‘Paris’s foster muvver looks like a horse. Yours is like a gazelle, she’s beautiful.’ Graffi had done some lovely drawings of Taggie, which Xav would have shown to his father if Rupert had been in a better mood.