by M. J. Trow
‘That’s a barefaced lie,’ the thermometer was out again, ‘I damaged my quadriceps femoris and …’ But Sylvia had rammed it back.
‘The message from Anthea is “not to worry. She’s got Alice Goode to go on the trip for you”.’
His strangled cry let her know all was not well, but this time she was holding the thing in place and Maxwell had to behave himself. He let her take it out when she was good and ready.
‘I was about to say,’ he grunted, ‘before that act of actual bodily harm, that I didn’t lose a day over that pulled muscle – agony though it was – and I’m not losing one now, either.’
‘Oh, yes you are, Max.’ Sylvia could be as defiant as a Boulton-Paul when the mood took her. ‘Your temperature is nearly 102. Either you stay right here in bed or I’m calling an ambulance for you.’
‘Don’t be daft, Sylv,’ he muttered, ‘we both know how stretched the NHS is. If you rang this instant, the damn thing wouldn’t be here until the second Friday in Septuagesima.’
‘I’ve still got a few oppos at Leighford General,’ she assured him, ‘One or two close buddies who still believe the best cure for influenza is a blanket bath and an enema, though not necessarily in that order.’
His dark eyes said it all. He looked at her like a rabbit in headlights. ‘You wouldn’t,’ he said slowly.
She closed to him, staring him straight in the face. ‘I don’t think you’d want to put it to the test,’ she said. ‘You stay here. And that’s an order.’
‘Yes, Nursie,’ he said.
For a moment, her heart leapt. She looked at the great, suffering thing shivering slightly under the covers. For a moment, he was a little boy, lost in the whirling wheels of his own fever. For a moment she wanted to hold him to her, kiss him, never let him go. But she was Sylvia Matthews, the school nurse. And he? Well, he was Mad Max and all that that meant. The moment was gone.
‘Anyway,’ she turned her back on him abruptly, putting away her bits and pieces, ‘what’s wrong with Alice Goode?’
‘Alice?’ he peered at her over the duvet. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. Except that she’s a twentieth-century teacher who sounds as though she ought to be a seventeenth-century witch. That, and she looks about six.’
‘She may be a bit inexperienced, Max,’ Sylvia conceded, ‘and they all look about six to you. Besides, Anthea’s there. They’re only going to London, for God’s sake.’
‘Ah, my dear,’ he growled, ‘Satan’s city. “The sins of London are old, the lure of gold. The sorrow of London is this – there is no one there to kiss.”’
‘John Betjeman?’ she asked.
‘Peter Maxwell,’ he told her, ‘and if I was feeling stronger, I’d throw a pillow at you.’
‘Got any lemons, Max?’
‘Lemons?’
‘Yes,’ she was patience itself. ‘You know, those yellow things drunks put in their G and Ts and other people sprinkle on their pancakes.’
‘They’d be in the kitchen,’ his lightning deductive brain told her, ‘if I’ve got any.’
‘Right. I’m making you a delicious lemon and honey drink. I’m giving you two aspirin. I’m feeding Metternich. Then I’m going home and you’re going to sleep. And if you leave this bed before Thursday, I’ll come back and cut your bum off!’
It rained that night. And most of the next day, the day that Ben Horton, the Head of Science, had had to cancel his Science SATs because of Peter Maxwell. That day, fifty chattering, squealing, excited children had boarded one of Hamilton’s luxury fifty-three seaters and had soared North via the A3(M) to the dubious accompaniment of Blur and Take That. The driver was the long-suffering sort, with a home-rolled ciggie behind one ear and a mind like an A to Z.
‘Moving Image, love? Yeah, no problem.’
It was still raining when Maxwell’s doorbell rang. And it was late. Nearly midnight. At the witching hour, the laid-up, feeling-sorry-for-himself Head of Sixth Form shuffled down the two flights of stairs that linked the bedroom of his town house to the front door. Something in an anorak stood shivering and crying, the rain indistinguishable from her tears.
‘Anthea?’ Maxwell took her soaking, trembling hand. ‘Anthea, what is it? What’s the matter?’
‘Max …’ he helped her inside ‘oh, Max. It’s Alice. She’s … disappeared.’
2
Anthea Edwards was probably thirty. She’d been at Leighford High for five years, woman and girl, and she’d won her spurs on 10R3, better known to all and sundry as the dirty two dozen. But that night, as she huddled, cradling her knees in front of Maxwell’s empty fireplace, she looked for all the world like a little girl again. He’d prised off her soaking coat and given her a towel for her hair, but she wouldn’t take his Southern Comfort and she couldn’t stop shaking. They sniffed together in the still of the morning, the cat Metternich curled up on his usual chair, watchful that his master remained a gentleman with a lady in the house.
‘From the beginning, Anthea,’ Maxwell said softly, ‘and take your time.’
She did. It was nearly two thirty before the exhausted girl lay back on Maxwell’s sofa and he draped his dressing gown over her. He turned down the dimmer switch and shuffled past the cat on his way to the stairs. He saw the ear twitch, the whisker curl and he put a warning finger to his lips. ‘Not a word out of you, you sanctimonious old bastard,’ he whispered. ‘Miss Edwards and I are just good colleagues, that’s all.’
The kids had a wonderful time at MOMI – even that sly little nerd with the spaniel haircut who constantly seemed on a different planet from everybody else. They’d been a little embarrassed by the fresh-faced young man in the fur coat who’d been telling them about the studios of Mack Sennett and the thrill of working with Chaplin. Acting out period roles was something they did very well at MOMI, but some kids couldn’t handle it. By the time they got to be interviewed by Barry Norman, however, they were lost in the magic of it all. Nearly half the group had acted out a shootout in a broken-down saloon on the Paramount lot, and if ‘Mother of God, is this the end of Ricco?’ sounded a little flat from a thirteen-year-old girl from Sussex, well, what the hell – you should have heard Edward G. Robinson before the voice training!
Tamsin lay on the sloping surface and spread her arms. The others giggled as she appeared on the huge screen overhead, soaring and gliding like an albatross, following the line of old Father Thames with the skill of a navigator. Rory was the first to climb inside a Dalek and give the line that had thrilled his father’s generation – ‘Exterminate! Exterminate!’
And all their streetwise cool fell away as the spell wove itself around them too. And the generations blended and blurred as they laughed, the kids and the adults, at Stan and Ollie and Wallace and Gromit.
That wasn’t how Anthea had told it, but Maxwell knew his MOMI. And he knew his kids. He could see the brightness in their eyes as she sniffed out the story to him in the lamplight of his lounge. He hauled off his dressing gown and lay back on his pillows. She had last seen Alice in the early years of the Moving Image, in the gloom of Phantasmagoric, where nameless shapes coiled and writhed to the astonishment of their plaster audiences in eighteenth-century curls and tails. The teachers had taken two sixth formers with them – Maxwell’s Own as their Year Head sometimes called them. Leila Roberts, fat, ginger, helpful, had gone through at the head of the chattering column with Anthea. The foot-slogging rear had been brought up by Ronnie Parsons with Alice. It was a sane and sensible order of march. Maxwell had patted Anthea’s hand and approved. That wasn’t bullshit. He approved still in the silence of his room. It was what he’d have done – had he been there. And his blood ran colder, if that was possible, because he should have been there, ought to have been there. If only … but his deductive mind clicked in. Time enough for recriminations later. He’d have plenty of those tomorrow, because at death’s door or not, he was going back tomorrow, had to go back tomorrow.
‘See you at the end,’ was the last thing Ant
hea had heard Alice say, as the Wheel of Life whirled and threw dancing shadows across her face. Anthea had turned to look for her at the Agit-prop train, where an ardent young Bolshevik told her charges how Comrade Lenin’s great and glorious revolution was spreading by railway and by degrees all over Mother Russia. But Alice wasn’t there. Ronnie was, that face of his as blank and expressionless as ever over his shapeless granddad shirt. Alice must have doubled back to hurry the stragglers along. Then Anthea was swept forward into the carriage as thick-necked women toiled in the soil of the Ukraine and smiled awkwardly for the Bolshevik cameramen who were telling them such lies.
By the time the kids had done the gift shop at the end of the magical movie tour, Anthea was getting annoyed. Leila was all right – in fact, for a seventeen-year-old she was quite good company, if a little over-zealous with the kids. ‘Don’t touch that!’ she screamed at the Most Inoffensive Girl in the School, who for a horrible moment looked about to disintegrate into tears. Anthea had appeared, smiling and reassuring at their elbows and squeezed them both – as much as a teacher dare squeeze a child in the politically-correct, litigation-mad nineties. Situation defused. Problem sorted. But where was Alice? And come to think of it, where was Ronnie? Anthea checked her watch. The coach would be waiting. A few minutes’ delay could make all the difference. If they didn’t get across the river before five, even the kids would die of old age before they got home in nose-to-tail pollution that was Roehampton.
‘Keep them there,’ Anthea told Leila above the din of an infant school in the departure area. ‘No one goes out until I get back, OK?’
She needn’t have worried. Her single backward glance as she turned to the steel barrier gave her the sight of Gauleiter Roberts marshalling her troops. It was quite scary. What was the younger generation coming to?
But Alice wasn’t lingering in the television section. Ronnie wasn’t pretending to be a Dalek. There were none of her kids behind her at all. There were kids everywhere, laughing, chattering, pulling each other to see this, gawp at that. But not one of them came from Leighford High. And slowly, as she retraced her steps, her annoyance turned to panic. She didn’t hear the scream as Fay Wray collapsed into the huge hairy hand of King Kong in the cinema section, and she didn’t hear the calm, affable tones of Barry Norman talking to her, as she rounded every corner, checked every glass case. Alice wasn’t looking at the faded photos of the Lumiere brothers; Ronnie wasn’t drooling over the skin-flicks of Raquel Welch, old enough to be his grandmother though she was. And then, Anthea was at the entrance and the last of the school parties was being admitted, its teachers together, its numbers intact. She was aware of somebody gesturing beyond the glass doors. She focused, trying to shut out the rising fear in her heart, the dread in her head. It was their driver, from Hamilton’s, tapping the glass at her and pointing at his watch.
She nodded frantically, waving back and raising her thumbs. Then she dashed back through the museum in one last vain search before she rounded everybody up for the journey home.
The museum staff had been the model of helpfulness. Could the teacher have doubled back to find recalcitrant or confused children? Could she be in the toilets, unwell? What about the National Film Theatre next door? After all, their gift shops abutted. She’d probably be in there.
Except that she wasn’t in there. And neither was Ronnie. It was time to call security. And security asked the same questions, time after time, as though they thought Anthea was imagining it, as though she’d dreamed up Alice Goode and Ronnie Parsons and was keeping fifty increasingly restless children milling around in the entrance lobby for the good of her health. She wanted to scream, except that she couldn’t; to knock their stupid heads together, except that she knew they were just being reasonable and doing their job. And that made her want to scream even more. On her insistence, they called the police.
The Hamilton’s driver was patience itself. He rang in, to let his people know of the delay. Anthea rang Leighford High.
‘But I can’t find them,’ she heard herself shouting at Bernard Ryan. She might just as well have talked to the school cat, if Leighford had had a school cat. ‘I don’t know, Bernard. I have looked. Everywhere. No. No. Yes, I realize that. No, I can’t ring all the parents to tell them we’ll be late. That’s why I’m ringing you. There’s a copy in the staffroom. Yes. All their phone numbers, yes. Well, there are a couple not on the bloody phone, yes. What am I supposed to do about that? Yes. Yes.’ She could see the end of her tether well and truly in sight. ‘Of course. Yes. Right. I don’t know. What time is it now?’ she checked her watch. ‘Oh, I don’t know, about eight, I suppose. Look, I’ll ring back, when we’re about to leave. Oh, right. Well, I can’t do more. Look, I’ll have to go. Yes. Yes. All right.’
And the expressionless face of a Metropolitan bobby loomed at her through the glass of the call-box.
‘Got somebody missing, then?’ he asked her. It was marginally better than ‘’Ello, ’ello, ’ello’.
That face was still in Anthea’s mind when she woke up, the silver of his helmet badge, the monotone of his voice. He’d taken everything down in long hand in his notebook and he snapped it shut again for the umpteenth time in those long, long seconds of the dream time, between sleep and waking. She focused on the face in front of her, the dark, deep eyes, the barbed wire hair, the broad smile. And she felt like crying all over again.
‘Good morning, Anthea,’ Maxwell said. ‘How’d you sleep?’
‘Badly,’ she told him, struggling out of the dressing gown cover. ‘God, I must look like shit.’
‘Don’t do yourself down. Look, it’s seven thirty. How do you feel about school today?’
‘Christ, Max, I’ve got to be there.’ She struggled upright, smoothing out the wrinkles in her skirt as best she could. “There was no time to do anything last night. Oh, God, it’s all true, isn’t it? I thought perhaps …’
He smiled at her. ‘That it wasn’t real? Yes, I have mornings like that.’
‘It’s Bernard I can’t face,’ she said. ‘He’s such a bastard.’
‘Bernard?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘A pussycat, that man – oh, begging your pardon, Metternich;
But the poor emasculated animal had already taken umbrage and wandered off to the kitchen for the bits of indescribable fishy things his master referred to as breakfast.
‘Breakfast?’ Maxwell asked his still bedraggled guest.
Her face said it all, ‘No, thanks, Max. Oh, perhaps some coffee? Oh, shit!’
‘What?’
‘The Parsons. I meant to ring them.’
‘You told me you left a message on their answerphone.’
‘Well, yes, but … Max, I lost their child. You don’t just leave a message on an answerphone, as if you’re ordering a hundredweight of bricks. You don’t …’ And she felt the hysteria welling up again, like the tightening of a spring, like a coil round her heart. She felt his hands holding her shoulders, squeezing her gently, like her father’s hands. And she heard his voice, like her father’s voice.
‘You did all you could,’ he told her. ‘Ronnie Parsons is eighteen – an adult – and a big bugger with it. I’d be very surprised if this was the first time he’d stayed out all night. It’s my guess he’s home right now. Now, come on. The bathroom’s up one floor and turn left. Make yourself even more beautiful while I roast a few arabica beans over my campfire. Then you can have the pleasure of driving me to work.’
The ’60s goldfish bowl that was Leighford High looked greyer than ever that morning. It looked grey to the two hundred and thirty-eight Year Nines who were to troop into the hall to take their Science SAT. And it certainly looked grey to Anthea Edwards, fumbling with her car keys. She was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, the clothes she’d slept in. And the only makeup she’d been able to muster was that rather awful lipstick Jerry had bought her for her birthday. She thought as she put it on in front of Maxwell’s bathroom mirror how the lipstick was all she had left of that re
lationship. All that was left of nearly three years of her life. Because of that, when the bottom suddenly fell out of her world yesterday, it wasn’t Jerry she’d turned to, with the recriminations and the back-biting. It was Max, mad as a March hare, but strong and solid and wise.
Together, they parted the Red Sea of children draped on the main steps.
‘You’re a fire hazard, Jason,’ Maxwell trilled. ‘If the alarm bell goes now, you’ll be killed in the rush. Do move, there’s a good argonaut.’
Jason didn’t know what an argonaut was. He didn’t know what a fire hazard was, either. He wasn’t even sure about the alarm bell. But he knew Mad Max, and if he said move, even ever so politely, you moved.
Some pimply Newly Qualified Teacher was on duty in the foyer, picking up the first of the morning’s chewing-gum wrappers already. He grinned inanely at Maxwell who swept past him like a galleon in full sail, doffing his shapeless hat at the 1984 Curriculum Award in the lopsided frame on the wall. ‘Nice picture of Mrs Shepherd there,’ he smiled at Anthea, ‘brighten the place up no end to have the Secretary of State for Education watching over us all. Jenkins, you ungrateful pig, you owe me an essay’
‘Ah, yes.’ The ungrateful pig had timed that badly. Three seconds more and he’d have made it to the unholy hell that passed for a sixth-form common room at Leighford High. Now he’d have to write the damn thing in his free period. ‘On your desk by this afternoon, Mr Maxwell,’ he promised.
‘Make that twelve and we’ll draw a veil over your woeful inadequacies.’
‘Done!’ Jenkins grinned and he knew he had been.
The office of the Second Deputy was round the corner, up the stairs to the mezzanine floor and turn right. It was actually one of the nicest offices in the school, overlooking the central quad and the lily pond where empty crisp packets and the odd sandwich floated like pastoral poetry.
