Mortal Taste

by J M Gregson

There was one exception, however. The man who had watched the videos from the corner of the room was articulate enough, when he chose to be. But that was in contexts other than this. He was a good conversationalist in these other settings. In the rest of his life, he liked to think of himself as completely normal: doing the conventional thing was becoming more and more important to him in that other, public section of his existence. It was almost as if he could compensate for his membership of this group by being excessively normal in other areas.

  He was an intelligent man, so he did not disguise from himself that this dark interest of his was – well, illegal. At one time, he might have said sinful, but he had long since forsaken the concept of sin.

  He bought copies of two of the video cassettes to take away with him. And he left the house as soon as he could, once he had got what he wanted. Later, in the privacy of his own room, he would feel the now-familiar disgust with himself and what he was about. For the moment, his distaste extended only to the excited men around him. In truth, he found his fellows at this gathering a sorry crew and was happy enough to leave their company quickly.

  He looked carefully to left and right from the darkened drive of the house before he went swiftly to his car. You couldn’t be too careful, with video cassettes like these in your briefcase. And he felt he had more to lose than the rest of the men he had left behind him.

  When a schoolteacher was a paedophile, he had to be very careful indeed.

  ‘How did the governors’ meeting go?’

  Jane Logan threw him the question as soon as he came into the sitting room. Might as well get it over with.

  Her husband did not treat it as a conventional enquiry. ‘Well enough. They were interested to hear about the numbers going to university and our plans for the future. They’ll support me in the scheme for the new library and information centre, I think. Mind you, I haven’t told them how much it’s going to cost yet!’ That small, unconscious grin came to Peter Logan’s lips, the one he had when he anticipated a challenge. The one she had once found so attractive.

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘Yes. I sent out for a pizza from the shop near the school.’

  She might have ribbed him once about fast food and the example he set to his pupils. Instead, she said, ‘I’ll get us a drink, then,’ and went into the kitchen. She was shocked by her own feelings. She hadn’t seen Peter for fourteen hours, yet already she wanted to be away from him.

  She knew he was studying her over the top of his paper when she took the tray with its teapot and cups back into the room. ‘You’ve kept your looks, Jane,’ he said, as if he was noticing it for the first time. He sounded slightly surprised, and rather spoiled the effect of the compliment by following up with the observation: ‘They say that’s especially difficult for blonde, blue-eyed types like you, but my wife seems to have managed it.’

  ‘Whereas you have just got yourself more and more important jobs. Working on the theory that power is the great aphrodisiac, I suppose.’

  ‘Haven’t noticed it working that way recently. Not where you’re concerned, that is.’ He was behind the pages of the Guardian, studiously avoiding any eye contact, trying to cloak a serious observation as a throwaway remark. He had always done that; she realized now that she hated it.

  ‘Perhaps you should pay a little more attention to your wife and a little less attention to the job.’ She said it tartly, more bitchily than she intended, and answered his retreat behind the paper by returning to the book she had been reading when he arrived. He had turned off the Schubert CD she had been listening to and put on the television. It flickered inconsequentially in the corner of the room, with neither of them watching or listening to it.

  To her surprise, he took her comment seriously. ‘You’re right, darling, I have been neglecting you. Now that I’m in the job I wanted, you deserve much more attention.’ She noted his priorities with a wry smile, but didn’t speak. She had never used the term ‘darling’ to him; it seemed to drop falsely from his lips now, where once she had accepted it.

  He waited for the reaction which did not come from her, and then said, ‘It’s always busy at the beginning of a new school year, but I must find time for you now that everything is under way. Perhaps we should book a weekend away. A long weekend, at half-term, perhaps?’

  That was the very last thing she wanted. She felt her heart thumping as she said, ‘There’s no need for that, really. I quite understand that you’re very busy at school.’

  It came out as though delivered by an understanding stranger, but he did not seem to notice. ‘No, I’ve been neglecting you. I must do something about that, or someone else will step in. Pretty women like you shouldn’t be neglected!’ He grinned at her over his teacup, then raised it in a mock toast to her beauty. She looked steadily back at him, putting on the poker face she had cultivated over these past few weeks, concealing what she really felt about him, forcing herself eventually into a small, answering smile.

  He was easily enough deceived, but that had its consequences. Twenty minutes later, as she undressed, he ran his fingers down her spine, took her roughly into his arms, insisted on making love to her.

  The familiar hands in the familiar bed were like a stranger’s upon her, but without the excitement that strangeness should have brought. He was rough in his love-making, and she tried to give him enough response to allay any suspicions he might have had. As he came noisily, she arched her back and simulated an orgasm of her own, her low moans lost in the ecstasy of his pleasure.

  It worked well enough, apparently, for when he fell back, Peter Logan breathed the words, ‘That was good, Jane,’ into her ear. And she felt the shame of her deception surge through her body, still rigid as her husband’s went suddenly limp. He stroked the back of her neck a couple of times, the gesture he had always used to suggest that affection went beyond sex, and then fell heavily asleep.

  Jane Logan lay awake on her back for a long time, staring at the invisible ceiling. She could not go on like this. She would have to do something about Peter, and quickly.

  Three

  Steve Fenton dressed rapidly. At least there was no problem getting into the bathroom these days, but the house still felt curiously empty without Josie and the boys.

  He didn’t miss his wife and the rows they used to have: the silence was a blessed relief from the blazing arguments over trivialities which had dominated the last two years of their marriage. But he still missed the boys; he stared glumly at the empty table as he came into the kitchen and wondered what they were doing at this minute.

  He told himself he was avoiding the most tiresome aspects of adolescence, that he still had a good relationship with them, but he no longer attempted to disguise from himself that he missed them, for all the teenage shrapnel which had occasionally flashed around his ears. Perhaps he even missed that: he had enjoyed fighting the war that was never a real war with his sons, being gracious in his occasional victories, regrouping after his small defeats.

  He looked out down the narrow, trim rear garden as he sat at the table with his bowl of cereals. At least he hadn’t let things go since the divorce, either at home or at work. The house was clean and tidy and the garden was still full of colour even at the end of September. It was in better condition than ever, now that the boys and their ball games had gone, he thought sadly. The busy Lizzies and dahlias might have been looking a little blousy and jaded at the end of the season, as if the first frost, which would cut them down, might be something of a release, but given a mild autumn, he’d be able to cut the odd perfectly shaped rose almost up to Christmas.

  He grinned at himself: get yourself a life, Stephen Fenton. But he had always enjoyed making things grow, even when he’d been the age his own boys were now. And anyway, his own life was looking up, thank you. Things had taken a decided turn for the better since he’d got himself involved with—

  The phone shrilled sharply, no more than three feet to his right, shattering his morning reverie wi
th its insistence. A secretary’s voice: ‘Mr Fenton, I have Mr Weatherly for you. One moment, please.’

  There was a click and a large, confident voice said, ‘Steve, good morning to you. Hope I haven’t got you out of bed too early.’ A booming laugh at his own little joke.

  Steve looked at his watch. It was still only twenty past eight but he said, ‘I was just on my way out. I can be at the works within ten minutes from here.’ He wondered why this man could still make him defensive, when he had his own business and was not accountable to anyone. The seventy-year-old Archie Weatherly was now a non-executive director of a national firm of building contractors, the one which had built the Gloucester link-up with the M5 which had eased congestion in this area.

  Weatherly laughed at Steve’s apologetic reaction; he was well used to it within his own hierarchy, and relished it when he met it outside the firm. He said, ‘It’s about the governors’ meeting at Greenwood Comp. last night.’

  Steve had known it would be. They never spoke about anything else. And yet Weatherly had specified Greenwood Comprehensive as if he needed to differentiate it from half a dozen other schools where he was a governor. Probably that came naturally to him; probably he was used to speaking in those terms about any enterprise in which he involved himself. Steve felt that he knew what was coming, but he said cautiously, ‘It seemed to me to go quite well.’

  ‘Well enough, I suppose. School’s doing a good job, as far as I can tell.’ His short laugh indicated that he could tell quite far. ‘Surprisingly good, considering what those buggers are paid. I notice you didn’t say anything last night.’

  ‘There didn’t seem to be much to say. The Head reported clearly enough on the present state of progress and answered the various queries without any hedging. I don’t believe in speaking just for the sake of it.’ That sounded a little barbed, as though he was getting at Weatherly, who had asked a couple of questions. Steve hadn’t intended that effect, but he was suddenly quite pleased with himself.

  ‘He’s doing well, young Logan. We need to keep a tight rein on the bugger, though. We can’t leave it to the old farts from the Council.’

  Steve Fenton grinned. Archie Weatherly was speaking of local worthies who were perhaps five years younger than him. In terms of energy, though, he was probably right. ‘I thought the meeting went well enough, as you said. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

  ‘I’ve made a living by fixing things. I think you should take the chair again, Fenton.’

  Steve wondered why he should find the use of his surname so irritating. It was probably no more than Weatherly’s public school habit from long ago. He thrust aside the consideration of whether a man from such a background should be now attempting to control the future of a state school. ‘I’m afraid I don’t feel I can reverse my decision. Two years as Chairman was enough. My own business is expanding and I really haven’t the time.’ He wondered if that sounded as unconvincing to Weatherly as it did to him. ‘In any case we couldn’t just reverse things like that. The new Chair has certainly done nothing wrong, and—’

  ‘There’s no problem with that, Fenton. Just say the word and you’ll be back in the chair at the next meeting.’ As if he realized that sounded brutal, Weatherly added, ‘You’re the best man for the job, everyone knows that. You should never have stood down when you did.’

  ‘I’m sorry. My decision is irreversible, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You shouldn’t say that.’ Weatherly sounded piqued: he was not a man who was used to refusals. ‘Just say you’ll think about it and that will do for the moment.’

  Having refused to concede the main point, Steve had enough of the shrewd businessman in his own make-up to refuse the compromise as well. ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that. As I explained at the time, I have two boys in the school myself. They’ll be coming up to GCSEs in due course. I’m happy to be a parent-governor of the school, but being Chairman could put me in an embarrassing position if a conflict of interests arose.’

  He was glad he had remembered that argument, however belatedly. As he had suspected, Weatherly did not really know enough about the state system and school governing bodies to argue the point in detail. The industrialist rumbled on for a few more sentences, but recognized that he could not dictate action to someone who was not on his pay-list. He eventually accepted failure with ill grace and rang off swiftly.

  Steve Fenton glanced at his watch and left half his cup of tea behind. The bloody man had made him late for work, now. He might be the boss, but he liked to set the right example: it was a small-firm ethic which would have been completely foreign to Archie Weatherly.

  But at least he hadn’t given any hint of the real reason why he could no longer be Chairman of the Governors of Greenwood Comprehensive.

  Peter Logan, the man Archie Weatherly was so anxious to control, was getting on with the business of running a large and busy school.

  Weatherly remained an autocrat at heart, and delegation was not one of his several virtues. But Logan was very good at delegation. It was the only way to run a busy school efficiently: you put the right people in place, and then you allocated the right jobs to them, swiftly and automatically. When two members of staff called in sick, the problem of covering their classes was passed automatically to the Senior Mistress, who dealt with timetabling and all its attendant problems. The School Secretary did not even have to refer the matter to the Head. And when the teachers who had lost their ‘free’ periods to cover their absent colleagues grumbled ritually in the staff room, it was not the Head who was the subject of their complaints.

  Peter Logan dealt swiftly with the most urgent of the morning post and made a series of phone calls to follow up the decisions of last night’s governors’ meeting. There was no point in letting grass grow under your feet when jobs had to be done. He found his briskness and eagerness to despatch the problems of the day met a pleasing response in those around him, another sign that the school was running smoothly and productively.

  By ten o’clock, he was sufficiently clear of the daily administrative trivia to walk around his school and take the pulse of its activities. He remembered one of his teaching colleagues in his first job saying of their head teacher, ‘That bugger knows everything that goes on in this place!’, his mock-frustration masking a real respect. Peter had always remembered that, had always tried to emulate the feat as a head. You couldn’t know everything that was going on in a school of this size, but if you gave both the staff and the pupils the impression that you did, that could only improve the efficiency of the institution.

  To those who might think he pried unnecessarily, he quoted one of his favourite maxims: ‘Slack practice anywhere leads to slack teaching in the end!’ he said sternly.

  Teachers always respected you if you brought everything back to what happened in the classroom, to what was offered at what he still called ‘the chalk-face’, though chalk was rarely seen now in his school. If all the petty restrictions with which successive governments had surrounded and impeded his teachers resulted in more efficient teaching, then that was their only necessary justification, the yardstick against which everything should be measured. Peter believed that passionately, and his passion carried him through, even with those teachers who were irritated by his personality.

  Logan slipped into a classroom to check on the progress of one of his probationary teachers, trying to allay her understandable nervousness by a reassuring smile from the back of the room. He made a note or two to give her later in the day: she would be fine, once she gathered a little more experience.

  He caught one of the old hands in the geography department enjoying a quiet and highly illicit smoke in the maps room, and allowed himself a secret smile only when he was well out of the discomfited man’s vision. He reminded a PE teacher that the less able among his classes needed at least as much of his attention as the gifted gymnasts, especially now, when research about overweight and unfit children was dominating the media.

  There
was scope here for a press article about the attention his school was giving to this problem; he made a note to put his newly appointed media liaison officer – an enthusiastic young English teacher who saw himself as a journalist manqué – in touch with the PE department, to prepare a release for the local paper.

  The representatives of the local press, radio and television could be useful allies. Most of his head teacher colleagues in other schools gave them nothing other than a tight-lipped ‘No comment’ and thus got only negative publicity. Yet these people could be helpful enough, if you handled them right: you needed to give them a ready-made story. Give them easy copy and they wouldn’t ask you embarrassing questions. Serve them up a good story about the school’s PE policy and a few quotes from slim, bright-eyed children and they’d produce a positive article about the way the school was tackling a national problem. Refuse to co-operate and you’d find them photographing fat kids at the gates and getting negative quotes to turn into headlines.

  Peter had a cup of coffee in the crowded staff-room during morning break and managed brief exchanges with three of his heads of subject departments. Once this was done, he even had time to chat about the opening of the soccer season, and the erratic early progress of Cheltenham United in the second division of the Football League.

  Yet not all was sweetness and light in this progressive school. A troubled young teacher took him to one side to report on two incidences of bullying in the third year. He had insisted that he wanted to know immediately about bullying, whether physical or mental. It was inevitable with over a thousand children in the school that they would have instances of this modern evil, but he wanted them investigated thoroughly and eliminated at source. A happy child is a learning child, and vice versa: it was a Logan maxim that had been elevated into a cliché over the years, but none the less true for that.

  It was not until the bells rang for the end of morning school that Peter was prepared to indulge a more private pleasure. A man with a passion to make his school the best is not immune from other, more selfish and individual emotions. A man has his needs, and Logan found that his sexual drive was heightened by his professional successes. And so was the response he enjoyed: he hadn’t really argued when his wife had suggested that power was the ultimate aphrodisiac.