The Home Corner

by Ruth Thomas

  ‘Go with Mrs Baxter to wash your hands,’ I added bossily – I have become bossy, I thought – ‘and then come and sit down quietly.’ Sitting down quietly was, of course, something else adults didn’t always do. As was hand-washing and eating healthily. ‘It’s important to eat healthily, children,’ I’d heard Mrs Baxter announce once as the children sat dutifully eating their oatcakes and grapes. And a couple of hours later, in the staffroom, I’d seen her tucking into a sausage roll and a can of Pepsi.

  ‘They’re really sitting nicely these days, aren’t they?’ Mrs Baxter observed fondly as we stood, arms folded, watching the children eat. ‘They’re gaining quite nice wee table manners.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  But I couldn’t help thinking that, while gaining in some ways, they might be losing in others. For a start, they were all kitted out these days like tiny business people, in their stiff grey skirts and trousers and inflexible white shirts. Some school-uniform manufacturers, I’d heard, put Teflon in the skirts and trousers, to make them harder wearing. Teflon! The stuff they put in saucepans! Also, I felt sure they’d once had more enquiring minds. For instance, they’d used to ask a lot of questions about God. Who is God? What is God? Where does God live? But they’d lost that, ever since Mrs Crieff had started inviting Reverend Johnston into assemblies.

  ‘Mrs Baxter . . .’ I began.

  ‘Hang on a minute, Luisa,’ Mrs Baxter replied, running to mop up some spilled orange juice.

  *

  Mrs Crieff made an appearance shortly before eleven that morning. I was sitting at one of the little tables stringing beads onto a shoelace with Solly and Zac when I heard her voice.

  ‘Just poking my head round,’ she said, and my ears twitched, the way I’d once described to Stella Muir.

  ‘Hi, Mrs Crieff,’ I heard Mrs Baxter reply blandly, and I turned my head and there she was, standing in the doorway, looking resolute. She didn’t look at me.

  ‘Just poking my head round,’ she said again, ‘to see if we’re all set to . . . head across in a minute.’

  I clutched the little plastic beads I was using. I couldn’t quite meet her eye, either, because if I did I knew that both our heads would fill with the vision of me standing on her doorstep the evening before, quoting the Desiderata; of what I’d told her, and of what she’d replied.

  ‘Are you not all meant to be tidying up now, Mrs Baxter? And heading across to Room C?’ Mrs Crieff asked across the heads of the children.

  Mrs Baxter, who had been gathering up abandoned toast crusts, frowned slightly.

  ‘What time d’you make it, then, Mrs Crieff?’ she asked.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Crieff said, still avoiding me, the peculiar, inappropriate, underachieving Miss McKenzie surrounded by beads. ‘Well, I make it gone quarter to.’

  And she turned in the doorway, positioning herself at a curiously oblique angle, so I could no longer see her face, and squinted up at the clock. I am the fly in the ointment, I thought. I am the spanner in the works. I did not represent one of her stepping stones – or maybe I did, in the sense that I was about to be stepped on.

  ‘Is it gone quarter to? Really?’ Mrs Baxter said mildly, and she glanced at the little gold watch on her wrist. Then she looked briefly over at me. ‘I make it quarter to by my watch, don’t you, Miss McKenzie?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, not bothering to look at my watch.

  ‘Well maybe my watch is a bit slow, then,’ Mrs Baxter conceded. ‘Sorry to hold up proceedings, Mrs Crieff. We’ll be with you in two ticks.’

  ‘Super,’ Mrs Crieff said, as if she’d just reluctantly remembered the Golden Rule: We are patient. ‘No immediate rush,’ she added. ‘Take your time.’

  And she turned to leave. She was wearing olive-green again that morning: that blameless colour that I knew I would always associate with her now, just as I’d always associate sea urchins with glass display cabinets and the music of Steeleye Span.

  ‘Oh, and who’s got a hat to wear?’ she said, just as she was heading into the corridor. Because the previous week she’d suggested the P1 children might like to decorate some paper hats, in which to attend the jamboree. It was one of those odd ideas she had sometimes. We might, she’d said, all like to cut some cartridge paper into hat shapes, and to glue sequins and streamers onto them. ‘Well, that’s an idea, Mrs Crieff,’ Mrs Baxter had said, tight-lipped, looking as if impromptu millinery was the last thing she wanted to spend her morning doing.

  ‘We’re going to put our hats on later this afternoon,’ Mrs Baxter said now. ‘At home-time.’

  ‘Super!’ Mrs Crieff said again. And she looked up at the staff coat hooks on the corridor wall, where Miss Ford’s coat must once have hung. Then she looked momentarily at me. It was the briefest of glances. Then she turned on her shiny heel and walked away.

  I watched as she hurried past the Portakabin window, across the tarmacked playground, past the wooden boat and the tree and the monkey bars. Past the Golden Rules. She hurried on. I wasn’t sure where she was going, but she was making swift progress towards it. All the children lining up at the door watched her too. After a moment she started to run.

  *

  We had to walk, of course.

  We all walked through the assembly hall to get to Room C, where Magic Bob was going to be, that morning.

  ‘Walk in a straight line, children. No stopping,’ Mrs Baxter instructed everyone, but it was impossible not to slow down a little to gawp at all the stalls that had been put up since we were last in the hall. There were a lot of them: dozens of trestle tables to negotiate and bric-a-brac to contend with. Stacked high on the tables were piles of old cast-offs – toys from the 70s and 80s – and home-grown herbs in plastic pots and cardboard boxes full of paperbacks. There were old boxes of Lego and Meccano and Stickle Bricks, and stacking cups, and Barbies with busts, and Tiny Tears dolls that would cry if you squeezed them. The trestle tables were the kind I remembered from my days in the Brownies: the kind that looked flimsy but were virtually indestructible; makeshift tables that would just go on and on across the decades, supporting fairy cakes and old books and tombola gifts in school halls up and down the country. And standing behind those tables there would always be the volunteer mums. The members of the Parent-Teacher Association, selling tray bakes. Kind people, like my mum and Mrs Ellis. Mum-ish people, Mummy Woman people, who knew what to say and how to be. And I would never join them.

  Standing behind the table nearest my little group was Mrs Legg. She was wearing a yellow dress and a very white cardigan with a pattern of pretend diamonds scattered across the front, in a fountain-like spray. In her hands she had a Crawford’s biscuit tin marked Petty Cash.

  ‘Hi, Mrs Legg,’ I said.

  ‘I’m manning the bric-a-brac, for my sins,’ she replied.

  ‘Are you?’ I said, because I couldn’t think what else to say; about bric-a-brac, or sins. I looked down at Mrs Legg’s table, wondering if there was anything I could say about that, instead. It bore an assortment of silken-haired pink horses and elderly plastic gonks. A battered, boxed bath-gel set had been plonked beside a set of fern-scented Morny soaps, one of which was missing from its container. And it all made me think, suddenly, of the contents of my own bedroom. Of all the stuff I’d hung onto. There was a tin with the initial ‘L’ on it, a tiny rose-patterned teapot, a set of cork coasters and a melamine tray depicting a smiling Labrador. There was also a 1970s edition of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I picked it up and peered at the picture of the seagull on the front.

  ‘There’s always copies of that at the school fete,’ Mrs Legg observed, the biscuit tin tipping slightly in her hands so that all the coins in it slipped noisily from one side to the other.

  ‘What’s it about?’ I asked.

  ‘A seagull, I presume,’ Mrs Legg retorted.

  ‘Unless it’s a metaphor,’ I said.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A metaphor for something else,’ I said. ‘Something that’s lik
e a seagull.’

  And I put the book back down again. My sentences had begun to sound quite strange, even to me.

  ‘What’s like a seagull?’ Mrs Legg said crossly, ‘apart from a seagull?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘OK: let’s go,’ I added, addressing my little group of children, and we moved on towards Room C, past the temptations of other people’s old junk. It was in fact quite hard to move particularly fast, because there were an awful lot of people in the hall, now: a couple of hundred, it seemed to me. A multitude of goodness and kindness. At the stall next to Mrs Legg’s there was a big group of people buying and selling tombola tickets and offering each other small, crumbling cakes in zip-up plastic food bags. There were chocolate cherry cakes and millionaire shortbread slices and cream-filled ginger snaps and, yes, there were my mother’s gingerbread men! – I could tell because of the piped buttons and ties – and I felt a strange kind of affection for them, a kind of longing. I felt an odd desire to scoop them all up and rescue them, like little evacuees.

  ‘Are you OK, Miss McKenzie?’ Mrs Baxter asked as I pushed on with the children, past the cake stall. ‘Anything wrong? You look quite . . . pale.’

  ‘Do I?’ I asked, alarmed that my anxiety had begun to show on my face. It was just that all around me there seemed to be a converging kind of sea. Half the city was there that morning, it seemed to me, and the sound of voices had completely drowned out everything else. It was the sound of goodness, the noise of niceness: everyone at St Luke’s was so nice! And standing above it all on the stage at the back was nice Mrs Crieff, one of the best heads in town, smiling and laughing and parrying questions. There she was, raising funds, meeting targets, stepping across the stepping stones. There she was, veritas et fidelis personified.

  ‘Miss McKenzie, will there still be some cakes left after the magic show?’ a small girl asked me.

  ‘I –’ I began.

  ‘Ah! The all-important question!’ Mrs Baxter interjected, in the kindly sarcastic voice she reserved for such occasions. I can’t even do that voice, I thought. I could do kind or sarcastic, but I couldn’t do both. Not at the same time. And I watched Mrs Baxter sailing on.

  *

  A thin, middle-aged man was standing in the doorway of Room C when the children and I eventually surfaced from the waves. He was holding a holographic clipboard and wearing a top hat and a rotating bow tie with flashing lights. His waistcoat had stars on it. Evidently this was Magic Bob.

  ‘Good morning, kiddiewinks,’ he said to the children, and my heart sank. Behind the hat and the bow tie and the waistcoat, Magic Bob looked quite truculent and bored. He had a sallow complexion, as if he’d spent far too much of his life in school halls and community centres, the curtains drawn against the sunlight. His mouth was set into a thin, bitter-looking line.

  ‘Ding, ding,’ he said, suddenly reaching out towards Emily Ellis, who was standing beside me, and pulling one of her plaits. Emily looked up at him with astonishment. We both did.

  ‘Sorry. Was that rude of me? Was that de trop?’ Magic Bob asked, letting go of her hair and turning his attention to me. ‘Hello, what have we got here?’ he added. ‘A flamingo?’ His eyes were a very flat, unsmiling blue. ‘What’s with the pink hair, love? Fell out with someone at the salon? I think I’ll have to call you Miss Flamingo! Is this Miss Flamingo?’ he asked the children clustering around me in the doorway.

  They all looked at him, uncomprehending. He was a very peculiar man – that was all there was to it – and now he started whistling the tune of some song I’d heard on the radio occasionally, a quite nice song about pretty flamingos that didn’t suit him.

  ‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t pull the children’s hair,’ I said. And the song you’re whistling doesn’t suit you, I felt like adding, it’s too nice for you. Magic Bob stopped whistling and gave a brief, theatrical sigh.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Slapped wrist for Magic Bob!’

  I did not reply.

  ‘Come in, then, if you’re coming,’ Magic Bob continued. ‘The show’s in here. On with the show, that’s what I say. Are you with the bride or the groom?’ he asked me.

  What? What was he talking about?

  ‘Sorry?’ I said.

  ‘Joke, love. Maybe I’ve just done too many weddings recently.’

  I looked at Mrs Baxter, who was still on the hall side of the door. She looked utterly blank.

  ‘Now: important question. Is there going to be some party food later?’ Magic Bob asked Emily, bending down slightly and lowering his voice. ‘Personally I always like the savoury food best at parties, do you, sweetheart?’

  Emily frowned slightly. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I like all the savoury food. I like all the cakes and jellies and biscuits.’

  And Magic Bob straightened up. ‘Well, clearly I’m speaking in tongues today, aren’t I?’ he snapped. And a few of the children, pushing their way through the doorway, gazed up at him again. They looked as if they were trying to work out the discrepancy between the magic of their dreams and the Magic Bob of reality, and for the first time since I’d worked at St Luke’s I felt like putting my arms around them all, Mother Hen-like, to shield them from harm.

  ‘We’re certainly not going to get into the room four abreast are we?’ Magic Bob snapped. ‘If you’ll pardon the expression!’

  ‘Sorry?’

  He regarded me, a faint, combative smile on his lips. Then he took a pen from his pocket and ticked a piece of paper on his clipboard. For the briefest of moments, I thought it might be one of Mrs Crieff’s staff-appraisal forms.

  ‘Right,’ he said, walking into the classroom, putting the clipboard down on a desk and clapping his hands together. ‘What’s going to happen now is: you, Miss Flamingo, and you, Mrs Teacher, and all the little folk have to file up the left-hand side of the room.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because all the P2 lot have to go up the right side in a minute, see? So we can fit everyone in. I have to do the show for the P1s and the P2s together, yes?’

  It was beginning to feel like a sort of military ordeal. The only time I’d ever been to a magic show was when I was thirteen and had been a Girl Guide. There’d been something called a Circus Skills Weekend, which had taken place in a grey pebble-dashed church hall on the edge of a town I could no longer remember the name of. All I could remember was a lot of green teacups and someone named Geraldine, who had worn mauve lycra leggings and spun a lot of plates.

  ‘So, keep to the right, kiddiewinks,’ Magic Bob barked to some P2 children who’d begun to ramble, confused, through the doorway. ‘Jesus, it’s like herding cats,’ he muttered. ‘And you’re supposed to be leading them, Miss Flamingo, aren’t you?’ he added, in a louder voice, grabbing hold of my arm and pushing me through the doorway.

  ‘OK, Mrs Teacher?’ I heard him say to Mrs Baxter behind me.

  ‘Fine, thank you, Magic Bob,’ Mrs Baxter replied with icy dignity.

  And then I heard John Singer piping up. John Singer, as bold as brass.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he asked, ‘are you supposed to be the wizard?’

  There was a moment of total silence. I looked over my shoulder and saw the last vestige of jollity fall from Magic Bob’s face. It was a distinct sort of falling away. ‘Am I supposed to be the wizard?’ he barked. ‘Supposed to be? Well, I don’t see anyone else round here with a box of tricks, do you, young man?’

  And resuming his smile, he ruffled John Singer’s hair.

  *

  Room C looked quite different that morning. Someone appeared to have gone into it overnight and decorated it. Maybe Mrs Regan or the janitor or the lollipop man, or some people on the PTA board. Maybe even Mrs Crieff. The whole room was draped with bunting now – yards of starry triangles strung up beneath the swinging rectangular lights. Paper stars had also been stuck to the walls beside the Golden Rules. We are honest! We are kind! We are patient! We are fair! Three white sheets, stapled together and hung up agai
nst the whiteboard, had the words Welcome to the Magic Show! written on them in blue paint.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Baxter said in a flat voice, ‘someone’s made an effort.’

  I walked further into the room and stood beside the teacher’s desk. There was a large black, fabric-covered box sitting on it that had Property of Magic Bob: This Side Up inscribed on it in marker pen – and I wondered what it might contain. Some wands, perhaps, or silk scarves or trick flowers or loaded dice. Beside the box stood a Tupperware tub full of yet more flapjacks, and a plastic cake stand bearing six small meringue nests. They appeared to have escaped from the hall.

  ‘Wow,’ said a child, looking up at the bunting and the stars and the stapled sheets.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Baxter said, drily, ‘indeed. But I think everyone needs to sit down now, though. Magic Bob has told us he wants us all to sit down.’

  Although Magic Bob himself was, I suddenly realised, nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Sit down, everyone,’ Mrs Baxter commanded in his absence, raising her voice. ‘I want everyone to find a space and sit down on their bottoms.’

  And almost instantly, everyone did. The children formed an instinctive little semi-circle on the carpet. I pulled out one of the plastic chairs from a small, leaning stack and went to sit near the door. Mrs Baxter sat a few chairs away from me, closer to the window. She seemed rather quiet suddenly. ‘Where is he?’ I whispered across to her after a moment. ‘Where’s Bob?’ Because he was still nowhere to be seen.

  Mrs Baxter sighed and leaned forward in her seat.

  ‘I’d love to tell you’, she said in a low drawl, ‘that Magic Bob has disappeared in a big puff of smoke. But he’s actually in the stationery cupboard, Luisa.’

  ‘The stationery cupboard?’

  ‘Yes. I think he’s waiting to leap out or something.’

  ‘Is that what he normally does?’ I asked.

  ‘Apparently.’ Mrs Baxter moved back again in her seat. ‘He’s preparing his act in there.’

  *