by Jilly Cooper
In the Bruces’ back garden he could see Boffin, his nose in his revision folder, and Alex smugly rereading a proof of his Guide to Red Tape. He must get on with Tom and Matt. Please God, prayed Hengist, make Paris do better than Boffin.
107
‘Before the GCSEs, you can expect panic attacks, moodiness, tears and temper tantrums,’ Janna sighed to Taggie, ‘and that’s just the parents.’
The staff weren’t behaving much better. Despite the outwardly convivial atmosphere, Pittsy was desperate his maths candidates should do much better than Skunk’s scientists. Basket wanted better grades than Sophy and Cambola. Even sweet, calm Mags and jaunty Lily got snappy with Emlyn and the Brigadier over hijacked marker pens. There was so much at stake.
Discounting art and Urdu, which Graffi and Aysha had already taken, exams started in earnest with business studies on the morning of 21 May. The evening before, Janna took refuge among the cow parsley on Smokers’, breathing in a heady mingling of wild garlic and balsam, watching the last scarlet streaks of the sunset jazzing up the black silhouette of the cathedral and listening to the exquisite singing of the nightingales in the laurels. Partner, who’d been rabbiting, was drinking out of the pond, avoiding the tadpoles the children had been too busy revising to collect in jam jars.
Like Orpheus visiting the underworld, Janna was still shaking from dropping off good-luck cards to houses in the Shakespeare Estate. If her children scraped just a few GCSEs, they could escape from that hell-hole. Johnnie, Rocky, Monster, Danny the Irish, whose father had just been arrested for punching a particularly irritating female social worker, were all light-fingered and, with no job prospects, would revert to crime and the streets.
Aysha would be beaten within an inch of her life if she didn’t get the Magic Five. Kylie was expecting a second child any minute and her voice would need to take off like Charlotte Church’s to support them both. Feral had the back-up of the Brigadier and Lily, but although he’d tried hard, she doubted if he’d get any grades except PE. At least Rocky was ensured a good D and T grade with his massive dog kennel.
Graffi worried her the most. Ever since his da Dafydd had been sacked for cheeking Stancombe at the rugby match, he’d been blacked by other firms and drunkenly out of work. Dafydd’s mood had not been improved by his dotty mother, known as Cardiff Nan, moving in with them. Graffi, stacking shelves all night in Tesco to make ends meet, was constantly hijacked during the day to mind both his little handicapped sister Caitlin and Cardiff Nan in their enclosed worlds.
Graffi was clever. He’d already got a starred A for art and could easily notch up the Magic Five if he could get some sleep and somewhere quiet to revise. Earlier, she had found him fallen asleep in reception, brush in his hand dripping black gloss on to the floor, in the middle of painting a lucky black cat ringed with gold horseshoes.
The sun and the nightingales had disappeared into the darkness. Going indoors, Janna checked the gym, where in the half-light, like a chessboard, each white square table a metre apart, awaited exam papers. Partner’s claws clattered on the floorboards as he sniffed around.
Going into her office, Janna jumped as her mobile rang. Emlyn? she thought ever hopefully, but the number was unfamiliar. The sinister, lisping stammering voice was not.
‘Pwepared for tomorrow, Janna? After all our effort, support and financial commitment, I hope you’re not going to let us down. Wemember how you hassled us to give your kids a chance to get some gwades? Now it’s your turn to deliver; the world is watching, you owe us spectacular wesults.’
‘You’ve got the wrong number, this is not Sadists Anonymous and I’m taping this conversation, so bugger off.’
Janna slammed down the receiver. How dare Ashton wind her up when she needed to be at her most calm and cheerful? She longed to unlock the safe and photocopy every paper. Not that it would help the children unless she wrote the answers for them. By the time Rocky, Feral and Danijela had struggled to the end of the business studies case histories and worked out what questions needed answering, time would be up. Oh God, had she pushed them beyond their capabilities?
If only she could call Emlyn, but since the rugby match their stand-off had continued. But whatever his sadness over Oriana, Emlyn had gallantly thrown himself into the Larks GCSEs, even to the unprecedented step of getting himself to the breakfast club most mornings and conducting question-and-answer sessions until the history candidates were date perfect. Often the Brigadier had joined him, performing a splendid double act.
Over at Bagley, Alex Bruce tiptoed along the landing after lights out. Hearing murmuring coming from the junior dormitory, he drew closer, then smiled as he heard Boffin’s voice: ‘Please remember in your prayers that over the next four weeks I’ll be taking my GCSEs.’
It was nearly midnight at Penscombe, but still stiflingly hot. The shrill neigh of a horse trembled on the night. Earlier, Xav had bravely delivered a good-luck card to Aysha’s house and been sent packing.
Now he looked out on a tossing silver sea of cow parsley and ebony woods menacing as an approaching tidal wave on the horizon. Bogotá panted at his feet. Understanding Business, black with notes, lay open on his bed.
Xav had never more wanted a drink to take the edge off his nerves and his sadness. He had shouted at his poor mother for asking for the hundredth time if he were all right, and threatened to punch Bianca for pestering him for the millionth time not to forget to pass on Feral’s good-luck card, which she’d put in his school bag. There was a knock on the door.
‘Bugger off,’ hissed Xav.
It was Rupert, bearing a cup of cocoa.
‘Thought this might help you sleep. Know what you’re going through. I’m shit scared already and I’m doing only one subject; you’re doing loads.’
‘Thanks.’ Xav took the cup. ‘Not so much money on me. You’ve got to wipe that smug smirk off Stancombe’s face.’
The cup of cocoa, the first and last Rupert would ever make, was absolutely disgusting. The cocoa was still in powdery lumps, sugar hadn’t been added and, by not sieving the milk, Rupert had left a thickening layer of skin on the top. Xav was so touched by his father’s concern, he drank the lot, managing not to gag.
‘Those marketing ideas aren’t bad,’ admitted Rupert, ‘although I doubt if direct mailing the Shakespeare Estate would find us any new owners.’
To Xav’s amazement, the cocoa sent him to sleep.
‘“Nessun dorma!”’ sang Miss Cambola, but pianissimo so that it wouldn’t wake her fellow lodgers.
When she’d taken O levels, far too many years ago, her English had been so poor, she’d failed everything except music. Her set pieces had been Brandenburg Four, the Egmont Overture and the ‘Waldstein’; she could still remember every note. The last year had been such a joy; Cambola absolutely dreaded the future. Kylie had such an exquisite voice, but would she ever be able to use it?
Over at Wilmington, the Brigadier couldn’t sleep. All his unrelaxed bones were aching. Had he simplified the Great War enough? Would they ever remember the essentials? Feral had received a lot of good-luck cards – even one from his mother in rehab, whom he’d promised to ring after every exam. Business studies this morning, however, had been considered beyond him, so, getting up at five, the Brigadier left him to sleep.
Out in the deserted street, every car had a cat stretched out on the bonnet or underneath, like a union meeting. Lily’s cat, General, obviously the shop steward, lay in the middle of the road, and strolled off huffily as the Brigadier started up his car. Noticing ominous pewter-grey clouds over Larkminster, he prayed the forecast rain would hold off. As had been proved in elections, the working classes tended not to come out in bad weather. He and Emlyn would have to jump into Stancombe’s minibus and round up the defectors.
The cuckoo was singing in a nearby wood as he reached the next village. In the churchyard, the graves, like swimmers in a marathon, nearly disappeared in a white sea of cow parsley and wild garlic flowers. The yell
ow roses he’d put on his wife’s grave on Ascension Day were shedding their petals. He wondered if she’d rest in peace if she knew he was plucking up courage to propose to Lily.
The church door creaked as he went in, followed by another creak as Lily, kneeling in a front pew, struggled to her feet.
‘Don’t believe prayers work unless one kneels down,’ she confessed. ‘Couldn’t sleep, just popped down here to wish them luck.’
Without rouge and lipstick, Lily looked pale; pink moisturizer ringed her nostrils; her face was as rumpled as the bed in which she’d tossed and turned. There was a white hair on her upper lip and a big bunch of dark and light purple lilac, with stems bashed, on the pew beside her.
‘I so want them and Janna not to be humiliated.’
The Brigadier’s heart expanded with love.
108
Over at Larks, from eight o’clock onwards, Partner, sporting a smart crimson bow tie, welcomed everyone with joyful barks. Across one whole wall of reception, defiantly defacing Ashton’s property, Graffi’s grinning black cat juggled gold horseshoes and lashed a tail at a lark ascending into gold clouds. In black letters, Graffi had also named each candidate and wished them all luck.
The heady smell of Sally and Lily’s flowers, however, couldn’t disguise a reek of cheap scent, sweat and terror. No one could face Taggie’s cornflakes and croissants; they could hardly keep down a cup of tea.
With their hair drawn back and twisted up into knots, their smocks with shoelace straps showing off bare shoulders, and their jeans flopping round their ankles, the girls looked like extras in a BBC Jane Austen ball scene above the waist, and the technicians making the film below it.
But their pale faces, seamed with strain and weariness, came straight out of a Dickens slum scene. Every so often, one of the girls would break into terrified sobs and trigger off the others.
‘Got the runs, miss.’ ‘Toilet’s blocked, miss.’ ‘Stink makes you frow up.’ ‘Fink I’ve come on.’ ‘Miss, I’m goin’ ’ome.’
‘No, you’re not,’ said Janna firmly.
After quick prayers in assembly – ‘May an angel ride on your shoulders’ – Cambola played them out with ‘Hark, Hark! the Lark’ on the trumpet.
Now at the far end of the gym, Mags Gablecross sat calmly smiling, ticking off candidates as she called out their names in alphabetical order.
Xav being Campbell-Black was one of the first in. Taggie gave him a huge hug.
‘Can I have a hug too?’ asked Rocky.
Danijela’s little teeth were chattering frantically.
‘Even my buttyflies have buttyflies.’
Danny the Irish, who’d only come in because she had, held her hand.
‘I’m so exhausted I can’t remember my candidate number,’ moaned Pearl.
‘Can I have a hug?’ Monster begged Taggie, his lower lip trembling like a little boy’s.
Inside the gym, the windows were too high to reveal anything except ever-darkening purple sky.
‘At least we can hang ourself on the ropes,’ sighed Kylie, whose bulge was so big she could hardly get at her desk.
‘That’s not a metre between your desks, Danny and Danijela,’ called out Mags as she checked everyone had written their names and numbers properly. ‘If you want to hold hands, do it after the exam.’
Aysha, a bruise darkening her cheek, cast down her eyes, terrified of looking at an anguished Xav.
As Janna watched the tail-enders forlornly filing to their doom, she wanted to ask if they’d packed their pencil boxes themselves.
‘Perhaps we should strip search you for mobiles,’ she joked.
‘Yes, please,’ giggled Kitten, ‘but only if Emlyn does it.’
‘Kitten Meadows, you’ve never worn a long skirt in your life, what have you got hidden?’ shouted Pearl.
‘Shut up, all of you,’ yelled Cambola.
Turning, Janna noticed Emlyn leaning against the wall watching her. He had just rounded up and brought in Johnnie Fowler. ‘Worse than getting a mustang into a lorry.’
‘I feel like Gérard Houllier,’ confessed Janna, watching through the door as Mags handed out the papers. ‘Once they’re on the field you can only pray, we can’t even substitute Boffin or Cosmo.’
‘Don’t expect too much, they’ve crammed a two-year course into one year, but it’s been such a fantastic year. It’ll stand them in good stead for ever,’ said Emlyn. As his big, warm hand gathered up hers and squeezed it, she let it lie there.
‘Everyone here?’ demanded Mags, consulting her list. ‘No Feral?’
‘He’s not taking business studies, miss.’
Mags looked round the room. ‘Graffi’s not here either.’
At that moment, a schoolmaster bringing back the birch, the rain lashed the window panes.
‘I’ll go and find him,’ said Emlyn, letting go of Janna’s hand.
Torrential rain scrabbled and clawed at his windscreen; rotting fruit, veg, fag ends and needles flowed into the cul-de-sacs of the Shakespeare Estate. Emlyn found Graffi wandering down Hamlet Street. It was hard to tell if his face was soaked by tears or rain; his black curls hung in rat’s tails.
‘Cardiff Nan’s fucked off.’
‘Hop in and leave her.’
‘Can’t, she’s left all her clothes at home.’
‘A Welsh undresser.’
‘She’ll catch her death.’
‘I’ll find her after I’ve dropped you at Larks.’
‘Can’t do the exam now, it’s too late. My hands are frozen.’ Graffi was shaking uncontrollably. ‘I can’t write.’
‘You can have a go.’
Five minutes later, having swapped his drenched T-shirt for Emlyn’s jersey, which reached his knees, Graffi slid into the gym to giggles and cheers from his supporters.
‘I’ve got the shakes, I can’t do this.’ He picked up the paper and read: ‘Greenstreet PLC are planning to build their fifth supermarket on the edge of an ancient and much-loved country town. Question one: How should they set about winning local acceptance and planning permission?’
Familiar territory, Mr Randal Greenstreet, thought Graffi.
‘Well, maybe I can.’ He picked up his pen.
The silence of the exams was interrupted only by occasional expletives, rain grapeshotting the windows, sweet papers rustling, tummies rumbling, the click of Mags’s knitting needles and the pacing of Cambola, the invigilator, up and down the rows, to be replaced after thirty minutes by the clattering of Gloria’s high heels.
Gloria, dreaming of PC Cuthbert, didn’t notice Kitten’s denim skirt falling open to reveal useful business terms and formulas written on her succulent thighs. Distracted by the sight, Monster lost his train of thought. Pearl opened her KitKat, turning it over thoughtfully. On the back, with a compass, she had also scratched terms and formulas.
Sweating when they came in, the bare-shouldered girls were now shivering.
I’m three-quarters through. I can do it, thought Xav joyfully. Looking across, he met Aysha’s eyes. He wanted to kiss her purple bruise better.
Even Rocky, vast in his tiny desk, like Bultitude Senior in Vice Versa, was writing slowly but steadily.
‘Got my period,’ announced Pearl. ‘Got to go to the toilet.’
Out she went, returning in a spitting rage.
‘Who removed Understanding Business out of the toilet cistern?’
Over at Bagley, Stancombe’s Science Emporium was being built for the Queen’s visit in the first week in November and the builders continued to make an unconscionable din: bang, bang, drill, drill, setting the children’s teeth on edge, so the GCSE exams were being taken in the newish sports hall.
Well into business studies, Primrose was writing steadily. Paris was thinking, then scribbling frantically, wishing he could instead write a short story about the idealistic young couple in Question Three, who were trying to make their garden centre break even by taking in another director.
Amber
was writing to her boyfriend at Harrow. Boffin was filling pages and pages, between smirking and cracking his knuckles. Cosmo had polished off his paper in half an hour and was writing to Mrs Walton. He did hope Milly wouldn’t want to come home and veg for a week at half-term.
Plugged into Jade Stancombe’s ear, and hidden by a curtain of tortoiseshell hair, was a little mobile, the latest technical device from the Philippines, which as she tapped in the number, gave her the answers to each question as slowly or as fast as she chose. For this relief, she had almost forgiven Daddy for shacking up with Anthea Belvedon, particularly as he’d promised her a thousand pounds for every A grade.
Gloria had been replaced as invigilator by Basket, whose spangled flip-flops, daringly acquired in Skunk’s honour, flapped as she padded up and down, doing everyone’s heads in.
‘Turn down the fucking volume,’ snarled Monster.
The rain was easing, the windows framing grey clouds topped with white rather than purple.
Mags put down the shawl she was knitting for Kylie’s baby.
‘You’ve got five minutes left.’
Danijela burst into tears, gazing helplessly at her hardly touched pages. Others scribbled final answers or tried to reach into the depths of their memories, as one might rootle in a bag for a taxi fare, and find nothing.
‘Put down your pens, please.’
Dazed, like miners coming up into the light, they spilt out into the drizzle. They had an hour and three-quarters to eat and drink something before PE theory that afternoon. Feral, bouncing his football, had just arrived; Partner, barking round his feet, hoped for a game.
‘Howdya do?’ Feral asked Xav.
‘Not bad, once I got going. I’ve got a card for you.’
Pearl the drama queen was making her usual fuss.
‘I’ve failed, I’ve failed. Couldn’t do any of it. We wasn’t taught the syllabus.’
‘Yes we was,’ said Kitten. ‘I thought it were easy.’
