Gifted and Talented

by Holden, Wendy

  Isabel was watching the boats. ‘It looks so romantic.’

  ‘It’s very romantic. Especially when water from the pole runs down your arm into your armpit.’

  As Isabel laughed, a voice Olly recognised, one with a distinctive Northern twang, floated up from below: ‘. . . known throughout the university as St Wino’s . . .’

  He looked down, horrified. A punt full of American tourists was being poled along by a chauffeur punter, a fellow ex-St Alwine’s student called Kevin Strangways. Kevin had been, Olly recalled, even more of a fish out of water among the Bullinger hoorays. Apart from the times they had dumped him in the college fountain, of course.

  Kevin was clearly eager to settle the score now: ‘. . . sexist, racist braying toffs from hell, basically.’

  His voice, amplified by the stonework, boomed up from beneath the bridge into Olly’s ears with what seemed to him unmissable volume.

  ‘They have window-smashing parties with strippers and dwarves. They tear money up in front of homeless people.’

  Olly felt panic rise. It was not difficult to work out what was being described.

  ‘You’re not serious?’ gasped one of his passengers. ‘You’re making this up, right?’

  Olly was almost running over the bridge, Isabel hurrying behind him. ‘What’s he saying?’ she asked, straining back to hear.

  ‘. . . bras and suspenders . . .’ boomed Kevin from under the bridge. Olly plunged on through the crowds with Isabel’s rucksack.

  As they continued up the road the rich college architecture gradually gave way to new-build offices, apartments and hotels.

  Eventually Branston’s rounded concrete dome hove into view with the covered walkways that projected from it like wires from a skull undergoing some revolutionary and subsequently discredited therapy. The scrunchy silver of the exposed heating and water pipes glittered in the sun.

  ‘Here we are,’ Olly said.

  They approached up a wide tarmac path flanked by yellowing rhododendron bushes. Age and weather, while it had mellowed the stone buildings of the town, had here done the concrete few favours. The front entrance had sliding doors, like an airport. Above it, a large rectangular clock with a red digital LED number display reinforced the effect. The doors meshed together by means of rubber edging which parted with a slight farting noise as people went in and out.

  But Isabel, Olly saw, was gazing at it all with delight. She turned and smiled at Olly. ‘Thanks so much for carrying my stuff.’

  ‘S’OK,’ he shrugged. ‘Pleasure.’

  Was that it then? Not so much as a cup of tea? But he could tell she was too distracted by arrival to consider niceties such as this. Her green eyes were swivelling everywhere, taking it all in.

  As slowly as was possible, he peeled the rucksack off his sweating back. ‘Perhaps,’ he suggested, feeling rather desperate, ‘I could take you for a drink later, once you’ve unpacked and everything.’

  ‘Or I could take you,’ Isabel suggested, remembering her manners. ‘I owe you a drink. I’m not sure whether there’s a bar here though.’ She looked vague.

  Olly hid a smile. Every college had a bar. They were the centre of student social life and some chose colleges entirely on the basis of them. But probably not at Branston, where the bar did not enjoy a good reputation.

  ‘The Turd,’ Olly said.

  She blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The bar. The bar at Branston. That’s what it’s called.’

  ‘Is it?’ Her eyes were round with wonder. ‘I don’t remember that in the prospectus.’

  He felt suddenly rather weak about the knees. There was something utterly adorable about her earnestness. ‘It’s not an official name.’ But, as he explained, given that Branston’s bar was concrete, subterranean, fatly tubular in shape and rounded at the ends, it was possibly an inevitable one.

  He could see her absorbing this. The coarseness of student humour seemed as much a revelation as the Turd itself.

  ‘Let’s go into town,’ Olly suggested. ‘I can show you where the good pubs are.’

  ‘I’ve got to unpack first.’

  ‘Here then?’ Olly pressed eagerly. ‘About seven?’

  She nodded, waved with her free hand and disappeared through the farting airport doors.

  All these excited teenagers, Diana thought. Arriving for the new term, full of hurry and excitement. They seemed to flow like a vital river in and out of the lacy buildings. Their youthful shouts and laughter wove like ribbons round the older sound of bells.

  It should, she felt, have cheered her, but her spirits remained flat. If only she was starting this new job – this new life – at a time of year other than autumn. Spring, perhaps, with its new growth. Or among the glossy grass, daisied fields and blossom-weighted bushes of early summer. In the sparkling wastes of winter, maybe.

  But the end of her marriage, the loss of her home: there seemed parallels to it all in the October bonfires in the college gardens. The sad, slow blue spirals of smoke, the rotting sweetness in the air.

  Feeling the familiar pricking behind her eyeballs, Diana blinked hard. Tears were out of the question, at least until she was alone. She had to keep cheerful, for Rosie’s sake.

  And here was something cheerful. Diana stopped at a zebra crossing for a beautiful, smiling girl with red hair that rippled like a flag. Panting after her was a young man in a suit – an amusingly shiny suit. It was with some difficulty that he raised a creased sleeve to acknowledge Diana, staggering as he was under the weight of an enormous rucksack. He was carrying it for the girl, quite obviously.

  Young love, Diana thought, half envious, half despairing.

  ‘Mum?’ Rosie piped up from the back. ‘Your face looks all red. I can see it in the mirror.’

  ‘I’m hot,’ Diana muttered, although the mellow October sun was not as warm as all that and their ancient car had no heating. As Rosie was probably about to point out. She missed nothing. Diana could see, in the reflection, the vivid little face of her nine-year-old daughter in its frame of wavy brown hair.

  On the grass outside a gilded college gate a thick carpet of brilliant yellow leaves lay in a circle below a naked maple. It was a quietly spectacular sight, the thick pool of gold surrounded by emerald grass. Every leaf seemed to have dropped at once, in a blaze of glory. ‘Look at that!’ Diana said.

  ‘It looks as if its dress has fallen off,’ remarked Rosie. ‘It looks cold.’

  Following its grand autumn gesture, the denuded tree looked thin and vulnerable. But it would survive, Diana knew. Even now, beneath the earth, things were stirring for next year. The cycle would start again: new buds would form on the cold brown branches; she and Rosie would drive down this road next spring and see the trees shimmering with vivid new green.

  If they were still here, of course. But they had to be. She could not afford for anything else to go wrong.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ she said firmly, to her daughter, but really to herself.

  Rosie nodded and returned her attention to Matilda. She could read anywhere. In a car, in a train, in – as had often been the case recently – the foyer of a solicitors’ office.

  The divorce had been horribly painful. Lots of people got divorced, of course, but she had never imagined it happening to her. Her disappointment and sense of failure were crushing.

  The familiar questions pressed in. How could she not have known? Or even suspected? Not just the affair, which was bad enough, but the money? The split had exposed how much higher on the hog they had been living than Simon could afford. He had never talked money with her, and now she could see why. The villa in Provence, the first-class travel, the expensive cars. They had been able to afford none of them.

  Rosie’s nanny and expensive private school, it turned out, had been similarly beyond his
pocket. Ditto her oboe lessons with the LSO and Saturday classes at the Globe. That last now seemed especially ironic; that Rosie had gone for acting classes, given the show her own father was putting on.

  All on credit. Their entire lives had been an illusion so that Simon could keep up appearances. He had always been aspirational; lately, imperceptibly, it had gone up a gear. She had been too busy doing nothing to notice.

  But doing nothing had been exhaustingly busy. The hair appointments, the lymphatic drainage facials, the lunches, the personal trainers, the clothes. Simon had wanted her to look a certain way: that glossy, yummy-mummy way. She had gone along with it; Simon was not the kind of person you said no to. He was vital, energetic, a showman. She had always been much more retiring.

  Well, she had been well and truly punished for her passivity now. After years of sleepwalking, she had been rudely awakened. Simon was bankrupt, the London house sold and Rosie withdrawn with dizzying speed from her expensive private school. In what seemed no time at all, Diana was what she had never imagined being: a penniless single mother.

  Simon had disappeared to Australia with his mistress, leaving Diana with Rosie. And thank God for Rosie. Thank Him, too, for the gardening course. Diana had started it initially as something to do that wasn’t shopping. All her neighbours had employed contract gardeners to maintain the patch that sat behind each tall, stuccoed slice of town house and connected to the private garden square beyond.

  The gardeners were a focus of intense competition, one neighbour losing no opportunity to remind everyone else that her particular horticulturalists also did Buckingham Palace. And that the Queen’s acres were inferior in various ways. Diana, despite all this and probably because of it, wanted to do her own planting and weeding. Simon had tried to talk her out of it but on this one point she had been adamant. And found, to her surprise, not only that she enjoyed it, but that she was good at it. She had passed her first few exams with flying colours.

  Before events had got in the way, she had planned to take her studies even further, way out into the upper reaches of garden design, into water features, even building. She had had no definite ideas about actually working as a gardener then, but events had got in the way and it was while flicking through a gardening magazine in the dentist’s – her last ever visit to the smart private one, but her teeth, if nothing else, would be ready to face whatever lay ahead – that Diana had seen the modest advertisement: GARDENER WANTED. BRANSTON COLLEGE.

  The judder of excitement she felt cut through even the fear of the approaching filling. She had, in happier days, visited the ancient university town and remembered the glossy college gardens strung along the shining river like jewels on a necklace. Gardeners would be fighting to work there, but perhaps this was only a junior position and she might have a chance. An ability to garden was, anyway, her only saleable skill. She had to throw her cap – and gardening gloves – into the ring.

  A university town had obvious benefits too. Renting a house there would be cheaper and safer than amid the unknown dangers of London’s unloved fringes. There would also, presumably, be good schools. And, after what had happened, it would not be hard to say goodbye to the capital.

  Diana went immediately to the local library and booked a slot on one of the computers. She was surprised to find that Branston College, which she had imagined all mellow stone and herbaceous borders, was one of the modern ones. It looked, in fact, like a multi-storey car park. And it was hard to get an idea of the garden, as pictures of it were so few.

  Nothing daunted and, determined to land the job through sheer enthusiasm if nothing else, Diana thought hard about which flowers could lift and soften concrete walls. The contrast could even be dramatic. She assembled an entire folder of drawings and sent them off. The day the letter arrived inviting her for interview had been her happiest in months.

  Arriving for her interview, she had marvelled anew at the grand college entrances with their coats of arms and heraldic beasts, the stained-glass chapel windows, the towers with their gilded pennants.

  At Branston, which looked nothing like that, she had marvelled at the fact that the garden itself was so much worse than she had imagined. It was a wilderness of scrubby, unloved, Action-Man landscaping, done originally, Diana guessed, by bulldozer. There were entire areas of arid aggregate or mouldy patios of cracked concrete slabs. The weeds were rampant, great glossy dandelions and ground elder as far as the eye could see.

  There had been a gardener of many years’ standing, apparently. Although perhaps ‘sitting’ was a better way of putting it. ‘What did he actually do?’ Diana asked, looking round in amazement.

  ‘Sit on the bench, mostly,’ sighed the fat official showing her round: the deputy head of the college, the Bursar. A new Master had been appointed but was yet to arrive, Diana learnt.

  The money offered made Diana gasp – and not in a good way. ‘Branston’s not one of the rich colleges,’ the Bursar said.

  ‘Shit!’ Diana now exclaimed, slamming on her brakes and twisting her wheel violently to the side. They were proceeding along the road at the back of Branston, to the staff entrance. Diana had been about to turn into it when something shot out and hurled itself at her.

  ‘Mummy!’ Rosie rebuked from behind. ‘You swore!’

  ‘Sorry, darling,’ Diana said, heart hammering at the near miss. It had been someone on a bicycle. Why did these people never look where they were going?

  A dark shape in a cycle helmet now loomed at her side window. As the sun behind was too brilliant to see him properly and the window of her battered car had long since lost the ability to lower automatically, Diana had to open the door to squint up at him. She forced herself to smile, expecting an apology and determined, despite the shock, to be gracious about it.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded in a grating American accent. He was looking at her piercingly; Diana was suddenly conscious of her hat, a charity shop affair in purple fleece which looked, if anything, even cheaper than the 50p it had cost.

  ‘You were going too fast,’ she objected.

  ‘You could seriously injure people, driving like that,’ he went on, angrily.

  Diana felt Rosie’s sharp little chin pressing into her hair as the child leant excitedly forward to listen. However unfair the circumstances, Diana knew she could not argue with another adult under the surveillance of those small, bright brown eyes. She had been fiercely protective of her daughter over the divorce, refusing to fight with Simon in front of her or – and this had been a struggle at times – say anything nasty about him within Rosie’s hearing. She had no intention now of undoing all that good work by rowing with a stranger.

  ‘You were the one going too fast,’ she repeated, screwing her eyes up against the drilling rays of the sun. That he was tall was all she could see. The helmet obscured his hair and face.

  ‘I think this jalopy speaks for itself, don’t you?’ the cyclist sneered at her car.

  Diana knew that. Her current vehicle, an ancient estate, looked most disreputable. She had bought it second hand, its gear stick lacked a knob, there was no functioning lock and it had dents in both front wings. The boot would not shut properly and needed to be tied on for days like today when the rear was full of plants. It was a moot point as to whether the car looked better dirty or with the dirt cleaned off showing the scratched blue paintwork beneath. But while certainly not a car to impress people, it was perfectly serviceable for a gardener, and it was as a gardener – a poor one at that – that Diana had bought it.

  Her aggressor was walking briskly away now. Diana, red faced and feeling, despite everything, unpleasantly bested, stared at the concrete college walls as he picked up his bicycle and cycled away.

  ‘Who was that?’ Rosie wondered with interest, watching as he disappeared down the tree-lined road.

  ‘Just a silly man, dar
ling.’ Diana drove crossly into Branston’s back yard.

  ‘He was American,’ Rosie remarked, evidently awed.

  Diana smiled at her daughter. ‘You get people from all over the world coming here to study.’ She hoped, even so, that the aggressive cyclist wasn’t typical of the town’s international population. Still less that he was one of her new colleagues.

  Diana got out of the car. Rosie, released into the wild, ran ahead into the garden. Her mother trudged after her, over the bald and soggy lawn, the sodden black soil scattered with worm casts, pine needles, straggly weeds, bits of rubbish that would have to be picked up.

  Rosie was whirling round on one of the lawn’s few lush patches, a few yards of intense sunlit green, which Diana had already identified as moss. Head flung back, soaked in light, Rosie seemed, not a child in an old pink sweatshirt and too-short tracksuit bottoms, but a mysterious, triumphant, celebrating spirit. Looking at her, Diana felt, despite her gloom, a sudden, piercing conviction that everything would be all right. After all, if Rosie was happy, what else could possibly matter? She crossed to the little spinning figure and gave her a hug.

  Professor Richard Black cycled impatiently on, annoyed by the near collision with the woman in the car. Part of his agitation arose from the fact that, in his heart of hearts, he knew himself to be the guilty one. He was, as Amy had always laughingly pointed out, far crosser about things when he sensed himself partly to blame.

  Stopping at a crossroads, he watched a family carrying what looked like most of the contents of a house – chairs, a TV, a bookcase – and Richard wondered briefly what it would be like to have a child starting university. That his and Amy’s marriage had been childless had been her only source of unhappiness in an existence in which everything else seemed a delight. But of course, if they had had a child, he would be bringing it up himself now, alone. And what would that be like?