THE CLIMBING FRAME

by MARY HOCKING

  Surely, the Recorder said crisply, the education office could do better than that? When, for one reason or another, the relationship between parent and Head had broken down, wasn’t this the time for the education office staff to mediate? Miss Cathcart was a woman alone, and in a particularly vulnerable position. She needed help. No one, it seemed, was prepared to give it. How many other people, perhaps less articulate than Miss Cathcart, were treated in this way? The education office staff were there to render a service to the public. Let them remember this!

  The Recorder would not, at this stage, comment on the mother’s account of what took place at the school. The story was a disturbing one and needed to be very carefully investigated. It was to be hoped that the investigation which the Chairman of the Education Committee had promised would now be carried out.

  It had been an uneventful week, and the Recorder devoted a fair amount of space to Miss Cathcart’s case.

  Major Rudderham read the Recorder at breakfast and cancelled his round of golf. He spent a very unpleasant five minutes trying to decide what to do first, to complain to the editor of the Recorder or to see Chatterton. Wicks telephoned at half past nine and resolved the problem by suggesting that they should see Chatterton together. ‘But perhaps we could have a little chat beforehand? It’s annoying, because I had planned to have a day with my family . . .’

  In the background Rudderham could hear a baby screaming, a cry like rending calico.

  ‘Don’t want to spoil your pleasure,’ he said.

  ‘My wife will understand.’

  Wicks’s wife was completely absorbed in her children and she scarcely registered her husband’s change of plan.

  Rudderham was not sure that he wanted Wicks’s company at the present time; but, on the other hand, it was comforting to realize that he was not in collusion with Chatterton.

  ‘Now how does this kind of thing happen?’ Wicks asked when he called at Rudderham’s house a quarter of an hour later.

  ‘Damned if I know! Of course, I did see that fellow Meakin from the Recorder . . .’ He gave Wicks a watered-down version of the encounter.

  ‘Yes, yes . . .’ Wicks dismissed the incident. ‘But it should never have got as far as you. What are our officers about?’

  ‘I saw the woman, too.’ Rudderham, at this stage, was primarily concerned with absolution for himself, and it seemed that Wicks was the man to give it to him. ‘Now what else could I have done?’ he demanded when he had finished recounting his interview with Miss Cathcart. ‘Got to trust your officers to deal with a case like this.’

  Wicks was reading the copy letter to Miss Cathcart which Rudderham had produced from a file in his desk. He shook his head sorrowfully.

  ‘Not one word of apology for keeping the woman waiting an hour. It’s such bad public relations.’

  ‘That was the thing that bothered me in the first place,’ Rudderham said. ‘Woman complained that she went to the education office and no one would see her. I can’t say I really got much satisfaction out of Chatterton about that. He was at a meeting and Ellis was at a meeting, the usual excuse. What can you say?’

  ‘I think we have to say rather a lot,’ Wicks murmured. ‘I telephoned yesterday with a query on the Further Education agenda which was quite urgent, and it was the same thing. None of the senior people were there, and I ended up speaking to one of the administrative assistants.’ He read the other letter through. ‘Doesn’t say which teacher was concerned in the incident, does he? But I assume he told you this when he talked it over with you.’

  ‘We haven’t talked it over again,’ Rudderham said shortly.

  ‘No?’ Wicks looked surprised. ‘Surely he made a personal report to you?’

  ‘Nothing but that letter.’

  ‘I don’t think that is good enough, do you?’

  ‘I can’t follow everything up,’ Rudderham said testily. ‘If I had to do that I’d be working all day and all night, and the really important things wouldn’t get done at all. Got to trust your officers to deal with some things.’

  ‘Doesn’t look as though one can, though, does it?’ Wicks said softly. He handed the letter back to Rudderham. ‘You told Miss Kane, of course.’

  ‘No.’ It had not entered Rudderham’s head to do this, but he added, ‘Chatterton may have done.’

  ‘My goodness!’ Wicks laughed gleefully. ‘She’ll be mad if no one has told her. She takes her chairmanship of the Primary School Managing Body very seriously does our Jean!’ He went on chuckling for some time while Rudderham, who was not amused, filed the letters away again.

  ‘I suppose I had better telephone the office,’ Rudderham said.

  ‘Why? You’ve a perfect right to go down there any time you choose without giving notice. Let’s see what goes on this morning.’

  Rudderham agreed without enthusiasm. He resented having to give up his morning’s golf and did not want to find that he had done it for nothing.

  In fact, Chatterton was in his office.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve had time to read the local rag,’ Wicks said, when they had settled down.

  Chatterton looked at him over the rim of his glasses. ‘Oh yes. Miss Deane is a very efficient reader; her eagle eye never misses anything of interest.’

  ‘What do you make of it?’ Wicks asked.

  ‘Bit short on news, I suppose,’ Chatterton said ruefully.

  Wicks closed his eyes and Rudderham snapped, ‘It will have to be answered.’

  ‘Yes,’ Chatterton agreed. ‘I imagine Drew will want it answered!’

  ‘He has an answer?’ Wicks inquired softly.

  ‘Of course he has! You don’t believe this nonsense?’

  There was enough anger in Chatterton’s eyes, if not in his voice, for Wicks to feel the need to retaliate.

  ‘I’d be happier if someone would tell me what to believe. And so might the mother. The information which has been given to her so far seems to me to fall short of a complete answer.’

  ‘It is sometimes unwise to give a complete answer.’ Chatterton was on his mettle. ‘Miss Cathcart is a neurotic woman who is liable to twist anything that is said to her. My experience of dealing with this kind of person is that the less that is said to them in writing, the better. Hence my suggestion that she should talk to Drew. He is used to dealing with her and seems to have managed very well until this incident occurred.’

  ‘On whose evidence do we have it that she is neurotic?’ Wicks murmured.

  ‘That of the Head and most of his staff who have had dealings with her. Also, she was seen by a member of my staff . . .’

  ‘A teenager . . .’

  ‘A young woman of twenty-four who is on the administrative grade and who has been singularly successful in the past in dealing with difficult parents. I wish I had half her patience.’

  ‘And this young woman is so important that the mother had to wait an hour before seeing her?’

  ‘The mother had to wait an hour because she started by refusing to believe that I was at a meeting and insisting that she would see me and no one else.’

  ‘I’m sure that the whole thing has been vastly exaggerated,’ Wicks said. ‘But we must look into it. We can’t have this kind of allegation going unrefuted.’

  ‘It may be difficult to refute,’ Chatterton said wearily. ‘I think that a general denial may be better.’

  ‘But if we have nothing to hide . . .’

  ‘We are at a disadvantage, as always. Miss Cathcart can, say what she likes, this kind of parent always can, and the press will always lend a willing ear. But we should lose all sympathy if we responded in kind. The whole thing hangs upon the fact that Miss Cathcart is a neurotic woman with a child who might well be in a special school if only she would allow him to be examined by the child guidance people. We can’t make a public statement to that effect, now can we?’

  ‘I think we shall find that there is some information which can be given,’ Wicks said. ‘But before we go any further, I
think we ought to bring Miss Kane into this. As Chairman of the Managing Body she would certainly want to be present when we see Drew.’

  ‘Are you proposing that we should all see Drew?’ Chatterton raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I agree that we shouldn’t normally intervene in a case of this kind,’ Wicks said smoothly. ‘But the Chairman has been put in a rather difficult position, I feel. The headline unfortunately suggests that County Council members are getting out of touch with the electorate, and in the body of the report it is stated that the Chairman was not prepared to make a statement.’

  ‘I wasn’t directly asked to make a statement,’ Rudderham said angrily, not much moved by Wicks’s solicitude.

  ‘Of course, we know that. But the readers of the Recorder won’t know it,’ Wicks pointed out. ‘I think it needs to be demonstrated that you have taken a personal interest in this. A case of justice not only being done, but being seen to be done, if you follow my meaning?’

  ‘I think it might also seem to some members of your teaching staff to show a lack of confidence in them,’ Chatterton said. ‘If every parent who goes to a newspaper with a complaint can hope to initiate an inquiry of this kind, things will go hard for teachers. They have little enough support as it is.’ He softened this comment by adding, ‘from the general public, I mean.’

  Wicks said, ‘I’m sorry about how the teachers feel. But we have a duty to parents, too. And none of this would have happened if Drew had seen the woman in the first place, would it?’

  ‘Better make it clear that we want to support him,’ Rudderham said. He did not in the least trust Drew; but he was aware that Chatterton had been talking sense, teachers did feel that they got very little support when dealing with problems of this kind. It was a damned awkward situation. As far as he could see, he was likely to be the loser all along the line. As a result of being seen to take a personal interest in the matter he would lose the confidence of the electorate if the inquiry went against Miss Cathcart, and of the teachers if the findings were in her favour. There was a lot to be said for Chatterton’s suggestion that they should play it down. He wished that Wicks had kept out of it.

  ‘Very well,’ Chatterton said. ‘We’ll get in touch with Miss Kane. You wish me to be present at this meeting with Drew?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  Later Wicks would complain because Chatterton had failed to give sufficient information in the report which he was preparing on reorganization; but he would not link this with the fact that the climbing frame affair had taken up much valuable time.

  Miss Kane said that she had been proposing to talk the press report over with Drew, and she did not conceal the fact that she thought the matter should be left in her hands. Finally, she said with a bad grace, ‘Well, it will have to be three o’clock this afternoon. I’ve got meetings all the rest of the day.’

  But Drew himself proved in the event to be the decisive factor in so far as the arrangements for the meeting were concerned. His school was closed for one of its occasional holidays and a call to his home failed to raise him.

  ‘Perhaps we could start by seeing Miss Hester?’ Wicks suggested. But Miss Hester was also on leave that day.

  Mylor Drew and Maggie Hester were, in fact, the only two people concerned who were quite unaware of the Recorder’s report. Mylor had taken Jemima into Herne Bay to visit an old school friend; the children were being looked after by a neighbour. ‘You two women will want to talk together,’ he had said when this was first suggested. ‘I’ll take myself out for the day and pick you up in the evening.’ So he had a whole day to spend with Maggie, their first day together.

  Jemima was very parsimonious with time; she believed, with Kipling, that one must fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run. It was a continual source of amazement to her that Mylor, who had such tremendous energy, who could pursue his objectives with such single-minded determination,’ should be so aimless, so prodigal of time. Jemima planned week-end outings so that not one precious minute should be wasted; they must choose the ideal spot for a picnic and the arrival time must be carefully calculated in order to catch the sun at just the right angle so that the view would be seen at its best; there must be a sheltering hedge to keep off the wind, a tree suitably placed to shield the party from the sun, and good cover for penny-spending; they must leave at just the right time in order to miss the peak traffic periods. If all these requirements were not met, the day was ruined; she was sick from petrol fumes of other cars, Clare had a cold from the wind and Daniel a headache from the sun. Mylor’s habit of wandering off he knew not where never ceased to amaze her. ‘Where are you going to eat?’ she would say. ‘You can’t walk all day without food.’ He would not let her give him food because she was never content with providing a packet of sandwiches; at the least, there would be various delicacies in plastic containers, serviettes, a tube of mustard, a twist of paper containing salt, a cheese or fruit knife, and a thermos flask. Sometimes he stopped at a pub and had bread and cheese, when there was no convenient pub he went without. ‘It must be sheer misery,’ she protested. ‘If only you’d decided . . .’ But he did not want to decide in advance. More and more he found himself the slave of the timetable, the area in which he could move freely was gradually diminishing; it seemed that he had ceased to be master in any sphere of his life and at times he felt that he no longer knew himself. He had to get away. He had thought that he had to get away alone where no one could ask him the time and say ‘shouldn’t we be moving now?’ or ‘I’m sure that path doesn’t lead anywhere’ or ‘. . . but it’s a pebble beach.’

  ‘I like a pebble beach,’ Maggie said. ‘I like the sound of the sea on a pebble beach.’

  The beach was deserted except for the two of them. It was a weekday and the few elderly people with time to spare did not venture to this wind-scoured piece of coast with its shelving pebble beach. Visually, it offered few distractions, no menacing rocks or soaring cliffs, no green swell of hill crested by swaying pines; nothing but sea and sky, the long line of dunes and the spark of sunlight on pebbles. A landscape which demanded nothing of man, no awe or sense of foreboding, no ecstasy or wonder; it did not make him feel small and insignificant, menaced, rejected or delightfully pagan. It was a landscape from which all inessentials had been eliminated.

  ‘. . . and uncluttered,’ Mylor said. ‘I hate clutter. Sometimes I feel that if I was taken ill at school they would find that my whole system was clogged with Form 7, staffing returns, attendance records . . .’

  ‘You could always complete them,’ Maggie pointed out. He was notorious for returning forms late.

  ‘If you can’t beat them, join them, you mean? That would be the ultimate defeat. No, I shall continue to be the scourge of the form-devisers; with my last lingering breath I will maintain that no one sent me a copy of Form 7.’

  A few boats were anchored along the beach. Maggie and Mylor sat by a rowing boat, shoulders resting against the hull. It was a brilliant day, the sky a deep blue flecked with tiny wind-hooked streaks of cirrus. The tide was on the turn and the wind was getting stronger; it seemed to take Maggie’s breath away and she turned her face against Mylor’s shoulder.

  ‘Are you cold?’ he asked.

  ‘No. It’s just that I can’t breathe into this wind.’

  He drew her down into the shadow of the boat and leant over her, shielding her from the wind.

  ‘Can you breathe, now?’

  They were very close. He laid his hand between her breasts to find the answer.

  They had come here slowly and without knowing where they were going; they were together and very little else mattered. At the back of the sand-dunes, between the marsh and the sea, was one of those superior shanty towns created by the need of the rich to escape from modern civilization; a square mile of exotic chalets and bungalows bordered to seaward by a small promenade lined with rambling buildings of pre-war construction which had once been hotels but were now converted into
flats for rent during the summer. In early June, few of these places were occupied; some people came down at week-ends, but on a week-day the place was like a ghost town. Mylor and Maggie came to it from the path across the marsh. Her long hair was matted with salt spray, her skin burnt brown with a ruddy flush across the cheeks where the wind had whipped her face. She wore a faded blue shirt dress, finger-tip length and no protection against the wind, and a pair of rope-soled sandals which had been equally ineffective against sand and dust. Her appearance would have confirmed Rudderham’s idea of the kind of woman with whom a dago like Drew would get himself involved. ‘Not much better than gypsies, either of them,’ would have been his comment had he seen them strolling between Mediterranean-style bungalows and chalets which looked like a small edition of something designed for Sunset Boulevard.

  ‘There are no shops,’ Maggie said. ‘How on earth do they manage?’

  ‘They bring food down from Fortnum’s in a hamper,’ he answered. ‘What a vulgar creature you are! You don’t imagine that the owner of this little shack goes down to the corner shop for a pound of sugar and a gossip with Sid Perks?’