She took the three stairs in two steps, a two and then a one with an associated little leap, and then paused. On her left was the open doorway to the dining room. The main part of the house was a single through room of significant proportions running alongside the hall. It had floor-to-ceiling folding doors, originals apparently, which David and she had patiently stripped with Nitromors, blowlamps and scrapers to reveal the greyish knotty pine that the Victorians had probably assumed would always be painted. Looking to her left, she glanced a check that Rosita had set the large round dining table with its high-backed chairs for seven, with an extra place left free for serving dishes and a space for administering to the children, which, as ever, would remain vacant.
Turning back into the hall, the pause having done no more than shortened her next step, she looked down to see the long Kashmiri runner reveal herringboned terracotta tiles at its edges abutting the now stripped skirts and Janet Smythe, née Rowlandson, felt a sudden an unexpected twinge of nerves, a slight tightening of the breath alongside the slightest tingle of the spine, the kind of shiver she thought she used to feel when her first boyfriend arrived at the family home to pick her up. Now more than thirty years beyond such nonsense, the unexpected nervous trill forced a pause, a mere shortening of the rhythm of her step, just as she passed the second door on her left, which looked into the front room, beyond the closed folding doors. There, presenting the back of his large head above the back of a voluminous easy chair that faced into the room, was David, her husband, precisely where she expected to find him, holding the double spread of his broadsheet high up to catch the brighter light of the hallway behind him, absorbed in a minor piece at the foot of page seven, his head gently nodding to the regularity of the Bach fugues that Janet could just hear scratching from within foam pads of his headphones.
“I’ll get it,” she said ritualistically, as she passed the open door, knowing full well he couldn’t hear. Thus she did not even check for a response which even at best would be a minor noise, not quite a grunt and definitely not a word, if, indeed, such a reference to the obvious might merit any recognition.
And so Janet reached the door, a large, wide and heavy hardwood structure, white within and black to the street, hinged on the right, solid panelled in the lower half, but admitting two decorative stained glass panels above, their uneven frosting not allowing any view of those waiting outside, who invariably presented only fuzzed silhouettes against the scattered back-light of the streetlamps. As she turned the latch, Janet’s memory momentarily recreated childhood, prompted by the beautiful symmetry of the diffused street lights and thus reminding her of those same shapes her infancy called ‘angels’ in the frosted glass door of her parents’ suburban semi. Swinging the door open, she smiled at the two priests waiting in the cold and dark of a November evening.
***
It had been a difficult day, but no more or less than most others, each of which generally presented in turn its own unique problems. This day, a Wednesday, had proved no exception and, as ever, her diary would give little clue as to what she actually had done with her time. Its listed appointments for that day caused her to laugh out loud as she automatically reviewed the page before closing the hard-cover A5 academic year planner. It indicated a site meeting at nine, in the real world a discussion of cleaning schedules, mal-functioning light bulbs and the need to re-edge the now sharply eroded path across to the science block. Next on the list, at eleven, there was another seemingly regular commitment, a consultation about school meals with the catering group, but this had been recently rendered more pressing by a requirement from on high to include, identify and monitor consumption of fresh ingredients in her schoolgirls’ diet. After lunch, at two, there was an interview panel, nothing major – or so she had thought – just a mandated executive group to rubber-stamp an internal appointment to a B allowance with responsibility for Classics. The fact that Janet’s school still taught a Classics curriculum, of course, spoke volumes about the kind of school it was, since most London secondary schools had not offered such options for more than a generation.
But even these seemingly routine encounters had each been complicated by unforeseen agendas. A relief school keeper, still only a stand-in for a trusted and established employee of St Mary’s who had suffered a heart attack last term, was currently using consumables at one third of the rate of his now infirm predecessor. One month’s freak figures might be explainable, but three months of consistently different consumption rates had to raise fingers of accusation, prompting the joint examination of three years of detailed accounts to clarify the suspicions. And now Janet Smythe, head teacher of St Mary’s, was sure that the previous higher rates of consumption represented pilfering for sale. She now felt a certain emptiness of indecision. How would she handle an eventual need to broach the subject with a colleague she had trusted for more than five years?
The school meals debate had dissolved into a time-consuming farce. All present at the meeting had scoffed in turn at their requirement, as a management group, to re-justify what they had effectively accomplished for years. And this was being demanded in response to an ill-informed and opportunistic statement by a politician of national standing that had since cascaded down the usually stagnant pools of administration to present already overworked educators with yet another time-consuming diversion from their desired prime function. “They will have us actually spoon-feeding them before long,” Angela Wright, the teacher representative on the committee had exclaimed. After all, St Mary’s girls were largely from middle class families – good Catholic families to boot – who could do without patronising advice about their diet from a politician with certainly questionable morals. Perhaps it was all her own fault, Janet thought, in that she still sometimes did not chair such meetings tightly enough, despite training in how to prompt communal agreement within time limits.
And then there was the ‘routine’ internal appointment, which ought to have taken an hour at most and had run to more than two. Ellen Price, a loyal servant of St Mary’s for over eight years and the effective occupant of the post in question for a year during the absence through illness of the incumbent, ought to have been the automatic appointee. Sue DeVere, the young, attractive and, as yet, hopelessly inexperienced lass whom Janet had persuaded to apply just for the experience of the interview, had performed like a pro, while Ellen, in complete contrast, had been so racked by nerves that she had hardly been able to assemble coherent words in response to the calculatedly gentle questions. Even a reduced governors’ selection panel had been difficult to sway. Janet’s chair, not the furniture she sat on, but the man, who was not allowed to be called one, was, as ever, dependable and utterly supportive of what he had correctly judged to have been her wishes. But the vice-chair, who took the word ‘vice’ in her title as a kind of brief, had flicked and re-flicked her pink and purple-tinted locks from her face as she had argued with apparently ever-increasing vehemence that an old subject like Classics needed a younger, fresher approach in compensation and that Ms DeVere, being closer to the age of her students, would provide this. An equally liberated parent governor, meek, mild, middle-class and usually silent, but keen to appear more liberal than her staid upbringing had moulded her, sided with her vice-chair and had rendered the panel impotent at two votes to two, thus leaving Janet to rue the absence of Father O’Kane, uncharacteristically absent as a result of parish duties, but who always voted her way. She had not offered to resign if it went against her – there are limits! – but she had staked her professional judgment and reputation on Ellen Price’s fitness for the post and eventually had a unanimous appointment, albeit after the panel had generated heat, argument and voluminous hyperbole. In retrospect Janet would take solace and satisfaction from having observed ‘due process’.
But these were only the scheduled tasks, and even these had not gone quite to plan. Absent from the day’s recorded running order, however, were the incessant phone calls from parents, adm
inistrators, the local press, suppliers and goodness knows who. An hour had been devoted to dealing again with a problem girl from Year Nine who had verbally abused her physical education teacher for the second time in a week. A talented girl she might be, with a flair for mathematics that often left her case-hardened teacher speechless with surprise, and an ability to play jazz piano to professional performer standards that angered the music staff to a person, since it had clearly not been born of their department’s conservative curriculum; yes, a talented girl she might be, but her prime disability was a mother who seemed determined to be younger than her daughter. Full of street language, internet nerd speak and pop-star gossip, she would only ever reinforce what her daughter expressed, criticism or correction never being admitted to the heady brew. And when the daughter grew a little quickly, prompting her friends to tease her with references to ‘lanky’ or ‘stringy’, she developed a neurosis about exposing her legs and always took the trousers option from the uniform rules. During PE and games, however, her old-style teacher demanded regulation kit for team sports and tracksuit bottoms were not allowed, hence the eruptions.
And then there was a long and difficult heart-to-heart with John Vorster, a forty-ish South African émigré of just a decade or so who was again suffering. He had been a teacher for just two years, after retraining on a government scheme, initially as a linguist, primarily as a German specialist, since, emanating originally from Windhoek, he was effectively tri-lingual in English, Afrikaans and German. But perhaps painfully he soon realised that knowing a language was not the same as teaching it and he had changed his main subject to art as a way of using some of the skills he had gained in a London design studio before, that is, he was made redundant. St Mary’s had been his first appointment and he had made a blunder of stupendous proportions early on. A multi-cultural class of students – this is London, for heaven’s sake, all classes in all schools are multi-cultural! – had gone uncharacteristically silent when he announced – thinking he was helping his position - that he had grown up alongside ‘Africans’ and, of course, he said it in that defining and impossible to disguisable clipped vowel sonority of South African English. He learned, a few minutes later, just how many of his students understood the word only as an insult, synonymous with ‘backward’, ‘stupid’, ‘illiterate’ and, even worse, ‘poor’. Then, after a class wag and search engine nerd had Googled his name to reveal that he was actually a former prime minister of the apartheid state and distributed printed pages from Wikipedia to prove it, things went from bad to worse. Poor John found himself at the bottom of a pit that he had dug, but which had just collapsed into an abyss that would forever imprison him. He had never recovered the ground he had lost with that one misplaced word, but colleagues had been sympathetic and supportive since he couldn’t be blamed for using his own name. If anything, however, his position grew steadily worse as weeks became months and months terms. Now, after almost six terms of undiluted professional hell when classes regularly ran riot, individuals confronted him with abuse, pushed and shoved him as he tried to negotiate the corridors and even spat on his back as he passed by, he was reduced to a despairing shell, having lost all self-respect and even energy, save for that he reserved for compensatory verbal aggression towards his students. He clearly was never going to pass his deferred probation and had also taken the last month off on the strength of a single visit to a doctor who had used the term ‘nervous breakdown’, a word that John had greedily adopted as a label for his condition. Janet had spent more than an hour with him, accompanied by a deputy head, in a potentially frank discussion of his future. Unfortunately, the result had been fraught and inconclusive, since it seemed that John had developed an ambition to prolong his sick leave, whereas Janet and her deputy were encouraging him to apply for posts elsewhere, suggesting their willingness to provide a reasonable reference if he accepted the need to make a fresh start. Long-term illness had to be avoided at all costs, because that would entail filling his effectively vacant post on perhaps a day-to-day basis with whatever supply cover was available. Thus the conflict of interests had endured and the three of them had made no progress towards resolution. This had prompted Janet to allude to a possibility of termination, a development that John initially greeted with silence, but then acted out a feigned surprise, a reaction that suggested he would go to any length to retain the post he clearly no longer wanted. “He’ll fight,” Janet’s deputy had announced after he left the office without saying goodbye.
And so a conspiracy of the scheduled and the unscheduled had made her late for an appointment she always tried to attend. ‘Tried’ was apposite here, since her presence was neither requested nor expected, but this initiative of her religious education teacher had been such a success that she had made a point of attending the monthly sessions to show support, solidarity, and appreciation, and to endow the event status in the eyes of the pupils. The fact that she also enjoyed them was a real bonus. To address several rather nebulous objectives of the National Curriculum and to enliven a compulsory subject which lacked the kudos of a public examination, the religious education teachers, at the suggestion of Mo Thomas, the head of department, had organised a programme of visits and talks by people who had made contributions of different kinds to society, the arts, science – whatever – through the application of their religious faith, or even their opposition to it. Today’s talk was of particular interest to Janet, since she found the subject matter highly unusual. A lifelong and practising Roman Catholic, Janet had never known that there were priests, fully ordained and subject to all the vows, who kept their religious association secret from their acquaintances and from most people they encountered so that they could occupy ordinary jobs, usually low paid and low status, to build solidarity amongst their co-workers. She had assumed, when she first heard the subject of the talk, that there would be a covert evangelical motive somewhere, but the religious education teacher, who knew today’s speaker personally, had explained that this was not the case. The priests concerned did it merely to live a life of poverty in an attempt to emulate the reality of Christ’s human existence on earth. Whether they privately thought that, by creating the right conditions, they might facilitate a second coming, was a possibility, but, as Mo Thomas observed, when she and Janet had discussed the invitation in principle, her acquaintance had never, in the years she had known him, ever referred to any such ulterior motive. The priest concerned, she had explained, had done exactly what his order required and occupied a low paid job as a council employee for more than twenty years.
But Janet had already missed the first ten minutes of the scheduled session by the time her hand reached for the push-bar handle of the door to the canteen, which, in her school, was always the easiest place to reorganise when seating for a whole year group was needed. As the bar clanked down and the door opened, a hundred and fifty pairs of female eyes glanced her way and then in an instant of recognition pointedly returned to the task of watching the speaker, their speed of action powered by the fear that their headmistress might note their inattention. Janet saw several emery boards, which a moment before had been filing nails near the back of the room, disappear under the cuffs of the school’s long-sleeved white blouse uniform, or beneath the sleeve of the tight-knit blue sweater in the case of those girls who still claimed to be cold in the tropical temperatures the school’s heating generated. As Janet continued to watch these attempts to hide miscreance – she was convinced that she saw a pair of white ear-plug headphones being stuffed into a bag - she quietly found a seat near the side at the back, her instinctive choice of a position that would be noted, but would not dominate. Throughout her preparations, during which, as ever, she concentrated on the behaviour and deportment of her students, rather than the subject or object of the occasion, she could hear a girl stumbling through a long and convoluted question to the speaker and, now settled, she transferred her attention from the girls and looked to the front of the room, several seconds after her entran
ce.
And she almost fainted. And then she stood up, knocking her chair, rattling a clatter through the wooden floor. Again the female eyes all turned her way and the room went quite silent. When Mrs. Smythe called for attention, her school listened, immediately and intently, but she was not prone to interruption, being too polite and considerate, always too measured and in control to cause such a crass intervention, so surely this untimely signal she had just sent meant that there was some very serious message to hear. Surely there was some painful, guilty announcement to be made, which would render the following days more exacting, perhaps more penitential, as a result of some general misdemeanour, the responsibility for which must be communally borne by the whole school.
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