‘The magic of theatre, my love.’ Eve gets up. ‘I’d better go and see how Colin’s doing. And remember, Ellie, it’s up to you and me to look after our little Marina. We’ll see she’s all right.’
2
WEDNESDAY 22nd SEPTEMBER
‘He was a bachelor then.’
We banned any further school talk last evening and with good food and another couple of glasses of wine I watched Ellie’s tight little knot of anxiety untwist itself under Colin and Eve’s benign influence, but as we walked home I could feel the weight of William Roper descend on her again and she started to agitate anew about Marina Carson. ‘I’m her form tutor,’ she fretted. ‘I ought to know what’s happened to her. I ought to understand. What Eve told us helps but it doesn’t explain the underachieving. Who can I ask about that? Who would know?’
‘Well I don’t’, I said, ‘but I know a woman who might.’
And so, when we’d got home and settled Freda, and I’d sent Ellie off to a relaxing bath, I e-mailed my friend, Hannah. Like Eve, she is a good woman. I choose them as my friends to compensate for my own shortcomings. Hannah is a paediatrician, specialising in trauma. She works for Médecins sans Frontières and I never know quite where she is, but she is able, surprisingly often, to answer e-mails, so I fired one off, summarising the Marina Carson case and asking for a diagnosis. ‘Why would a child’s VRQ and reading scores go backwards?’ I asked. ‘Enlighten us, please’. Then I went to bed.
This morning I am amazed to find, when I log onto my emails at work, that I have a reply. Does the woman never sleep?
From: “Hannah Walton” [email protected]
To: “Virginia Gray” [email protected]
Sent: 22nd September 2010 09.05
Subject: re a mystery
Dear Miss Marple (see – I can do literary references too)
I’m sending this to your work e-mail because I’m assuming that’s where you are and I know your impatience of old. These are my first thoughts about your mystery girl. I’ll let you know if anything else occurs to me.
She may have had a serious illness or trauma of some kind. Severe meningitis, for instance, could have that effect, or epilepsy, or a brain injury from a car accident or something of that sort. From what you say, she hasn’t made rapid progress since starting at Ellie’s school, so it does look like some permanent damage has been done.
An emotional trauma could have set her back too, but you would expect her to make up lost ground eventually (unless the trauma is on-going, of course).
We don’t know what kind if life she was leading while she was in Switzerland. If she was away from her parents for some reason and not speaking or hearing any English, then I imagine she could have begun to lose her English and that would affect a VRQ test as well as a reading age test. But again you would expect her to make up ground rapidly once she was back in an English-speaking environment. (Do you know if she speaks French or German, by the way?)
Does she have any siblings? It might help to find out how they’re doing.
I do remember Glenys Summers, mainly in musicals. She was the new Julie Andrews for a while and then faded away. You got me intrigued so I googled her – web page www.glensfans.com. It looks as though her daughter wasn’t the only one who went backwards for a while. This is the official fans’ website and pretty sanitised, I imagine. We need back copies of Hello!
Happy sleuthing. Love to Annie, Ellie and Freda.
Yours truly,
Dr Watson
I sit and look at this for a while. I can’t spend long as I have to teach, so I don’t click onto the web page, but I text Ellie, reckoning it ought to be break time at WR about now.
R u free 4 lunch?
Walk ‘n’ sarnies?
Have some ideas
from dr hannah
re marina. How’s
yr day so far?
Xx ma
I get a reply just as I’m walking downstairs to give a class on the stylistic possibilities of relative clauses. You know the kind of thing. My opening example for this morning is, “The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who has a multi-million-pound inherited fortune, said in Parliament that we must all be prepared to tighten our belts”. I read Ellie’s message:
Lunch ace.
Crap day. Run in with
Doug Fraser who
is A TURD. C u
1ish
Xx El
I get on my bike after my class, buy two superior sandwiches, two cartons of tropical juice and a bar of fruit and nut chocolate at M&S Food and cycle on to William Roper.
When I get there, I go in through the side entrance out of old habit but find there are no bike blocks there any more – too low-tech for this shiny new academy, I suppose – so I wheel my bike round to the front and pause to admire the impressive glass and chrome façade, the bold “WR” logo in red and black and the completely undefaced sign declaring this to be The William Roper Academy Pursuing Excellence. I padlock my bike to a bench which sits beside a glossy shrub to the right of the entrance and go to push my way in through one of the logo-enhanced glass doors. The door, however, won’t budge, and as I put my shoulder to it to give it a shove a startling electronic voice addresses me from a shiny box on the wall: ‘This is a security door. Do not attempt to open it until you have swiped your card’. I scan the wall, locate the card-swipe affair and gaze at it in wild surmise. Is this a test? What kind of card am I supposed to use? Surely not my credit card? I could, at this point, give up and go and sit on the bench with my bike to wait for Ellie, but I don’t see why I should, so I press my face to the glass door and gesticulate at a woman I can see sitting behind a reception desk. I open my arms and raise my shoulders in a What the hell am I supposed to do? gesture and she reciprocates with a poking gesture of her index finger which seems to me to be just rude. Eventually, though, the speaking box addresses me again. ‘If you are a visitor, please press the intercom button’. Intercom button. Yes, I suppose I should have noticed that but I’m not in the right mindset; this is just a school door for God’s sake.
I press and a different voice (the receptionist’s, actually – I can see her lips moving) asks me if I have an appointment.
‘Yes,’ I say firmly.
‘And you are?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘it’s a bit early in the day for existential questions. Who am I? That’s a question most of us struggle to answer, isn’t it?’
There is a silence. Then, ‘Your name?’ the voice enquires icily.
There is threat in her tone and I’m afraid she may call security. There was no such thing here in my day – any trouble and you called the biggest available member of the PE department to deal with it – but there will be security now, I’m sure; burly men in uniforms, possibly with truncheons. I cave in.
‘My name is Gina Gray,’ I say crisply. ‘I’m a former member of staff here and my daughter is on the staff now. I have an arrangement to meet her for lunch.’
There is an electronic buzz and the door swings open before me. The receptionist regards me balefully and says nothing. I retreat to the Welcome Area, a corner of soft chairs and a coffee table bearing a potted plant and lifestyle magazines. A girl in William Roper uniform is leaning against one of the chairs but she stands up guiltily as I sit down.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ I say. ‘I shan’t be here long. I’m meeting my daughter. We’re going out for lunch.’
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘that’s nice.’ She is tall and skinny but flat-chested, a pre-adolescent with a pale, freckled, unformed child’s face and colourless fair hair cut in a rather old-fashioned bob.
She sounds so wistful when she says “That’s nice” that I think she may have misunderstood and imagined a fellow pupil being whisked off for a treat in the middle of a school day. ‘She’s not a pupil,’ I explain. ‘She’s a teacher. Miss Gray.’
Her face brightens. ‘She’s my D
rama teacher,’ she says, sitting down on the arm of a chair. ‘She’s really nice.’
‘Good.’ My heart gives a warm little flutter of maternal pride.
‘She’s my form tutor too,’ she adds, and I can really claim no credit for acuity when I tell you that now, of course, I know who she is. It’s not just that she’s in the remedial class but doesn’t have what Ellie calls “the nobody at home look”, but that her accent entirely lacks the pungent, nasal Estuarine force that has always been the William Roper style. She speaks barely above a whisper and with precision, like a child who has had old-fashioned elocution lessons. I’m not going to spook her by telling her I know who she is and there is a silence until she says, ‘Actually, I’m waiting for her too. I need to see her about something really important.’
I take it that “really important” is by way of an apology for delaying our lunch date but I say nothing to let her off the hook because actually Ellie needs her lunch break. ‘Shouldn’t you be in class?’ I ask.
She flushes. ‘I couldn’t do games. Someone’s taken my PE kit.’
‘That’s bad luck.’
‘Yes. I got a detention.’
‘That’s not very fair, if someone stole it.’
‘Yes,’ she says casually, as though it’s a triviality. ‘Well, you’re supposed to have your name embroidered on your stuff so no-one can take it, but mine hasn’t…’ She trails off. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter.’
We sit in silence while I contemplate the consequences of having a mother who can’t or won’t embroider names on a PE kit. Then she says, ‘I need to see Miss Gray because I have to go home.’
‘Aren’t you feeling very well?’ I ask, looking again at her pallor and weediness. She is like a plant that has been grown in a cupboard.
‘Oh no, I’m all right. It’s my mother who isn’t well. I have to go home to be with her.’
‘Poor you. Is she very poorly?’
‘Well, no. It’s just – ‘ she stops and looks away from me for a long moment, then turns earnest eyes back to me. ‘People don’t understand but I’m sort of tuned in to her. If she’s not all right I always know.’
‘Oh, mothers and daughters,’ I say cheerily. ‘And she always knows when you’re not all right, I expect.’
I don’t get an answering smile. She gives a little frown of puzzlement, then lifts her head and sticks out her chin. ‘Oh, I’m always all right,’ she says.
I’m at a loss for an answer to this but I don’t need one as the shriek of an electronic bell interrupts us and I feel the building around us erupt into life. Feet pound, a thousand voices rend the air and the doors to the interior of the school fly open to admit a stream of children, who charge past us towards the dining hall, flattening me to the back of my chair by their centrifugal force. I can’t believe that I lived with this daily for years and thought nothing of it. Gone soft, Gina I tell myself as I cower in my seat.
Eventually Ellie appears. She looks startled to see the two of us together and shoots me an anxious, questioning look.
‘By coincidence,’ I say blandly, ‘we found that we were both waiting for you. This young lady has something she needs to talk to you about, so I’ll go on up to the park and see you there.’
Ellie looks around at the streaming hordes and says, ‘We’d better go outside to talk, Marina.’ She ushers her out and I follow.
As I turn out of the front gates I look back to glance at Ellie and Marina sitting on the bench to which I’ve padlocked my bike. Marina is talking, quietly and intensely, fixing Ellie with those earnest eyes. Ellie is uncomfortable, I can tell: she’s biting a thumbnail, twisting a lock of hair. She looks terribly young.
“The park” is a little green patch just down the road from the school, in my day a favourite hang-out for truants and smokers. I find a reasonably salubrious bench and sit quietly, waiting for Ellie, turning my face up to the September sunshine.
‘So that was Marina Carson,’ I say when she arrives.
‘It was.’
‘And I gather she wants to go home.’
‘Her and me both,’ she says, plonking herself down beside me. ‘Did you bring some lunch? I’m starving.’
I hand her a sandwich and as she’s fighting with its plastic casing she says, ‘You shouldn’t have left your bike outside school. There’s an epidemic of thieving going on.’
‘It’s insured,’ I say, ‘and I could do with a new one.’
We munch for a bit and then I say, ‘I remember Doug Fraser. He was always a bastard. What happened?’
‘Ohhh,’ she groans. ‘That was about Marina too. I’m getting so much grief about her today.’ She starts in on the second half of her sandwich before she carries on. ‘I was barely in the door this morning and there he was looming over me in that really threatening way – wanted to know why “the Carson girl” wasn’t in class yesterday afternoon. Well I didn’t know she wasn’t in class so he had me completely wrong-footed. He’d checked my register, he said, and it wasn’t marked yesterday afternoon. Why was that? And then I remembered I had a rehearsal of Twelfth Night yesterday lunchtime and was late back for registration, so most of them had gone off to class already. And then he was so horrible, so sarcastic. I said I thought Marina seemed a reliable girl and there must be a good reason and he just sneered at me, “And that’s speaking from your vast experience of children is it, Miss Gray? Well, let me give you a tip about that young lady. She’s quite the little actress – runs in the family.” Dickhead.’
‘So did you ask Marina about it?’
‘Yes.’ She breaks off a couple of squares of chocolate, puts them in her mouth, and then says indistinctly, ‘She was worried about her mother.’
‘Oh yes, she told me.’
‘What?’ She looks accusing, as though I’ve been caught trespassing.
‘She said she always knows when something’s wrong with her mother – she’s “tuned in” she told me.’’
‘Well, I think she probably is. It’s happened a couple of times recently. She’s gone home knowing something was wrong and she’s found her mother “in a state” as she calls it. I don’t know what she means exactly, and I didn’t think I should probe too much.’
‘But surely Hector Carson must work at home, doesn’t he? Where’s he in all this? Did you ask her?’
‘He works in a sort of summer house, apparently, somewhere in the garden. “He’s a creative person,” Marina says. “He doesn’t always know what’s going on. He likes us all to be happy.” They don’t like to worry him, I gather.’
I start in on the chocolate. ‘Great,’ I say. ‘A mother who’s not actually off the bottle, I would say, and a father who’s in cloud cuckoo land. Poor child.’
‘That was the weird thing, when I was talking to her. She said her mother was frightened and then she said something like, “I don’t want her to be frightened. It’s horrible being frightened and being all on your own.” It sounded so strange – like she was the parent and her mother was the child.’
‘It sounds like she knows about being frightened, too. And where was her mother, I wonder, the times when Marina was frightened and all alone? You know, I asked Marina if her mother always knew if there was something wrong with her too, and she just said, “Oh I’m always all right” as though that just didn’t come into the equation.’ I dig my straw into my carton of apple and passion fruit juice and take a slurp. ‘Have you thought that she might be being bullied?’ I ask.
She lets out a weary breath. ‘I have. I don’t think she’s being beaten up or anything, but her stuff keeps going missing and there’s been graffiti on some of her books. I’ve talked to the year head and it happened last year as well, apparently, but Marina won’t talk about it – says it’s not a problem.’
‘Has anyone talked to her parents?’
‘They’ve tried, but they didn’t get anywhere. They don’t even turn up to parents’ evenings.’
I drain my juice carton. ‘I e-mailed Hannah
about the regression in her scores and she thinks Marina could be suffering from emotional trauma – possibly ongoing. I’ll show you her e-mail tonight.’
‘What kind of trauma?’
‘I don’t know. Abuse, I suppose, is one possibility.’
‘But who?’
‘I don’t know.’
We’re silent for a bit, each coping with our own mental images. Then I say, ‘So, was her mother in a state when she bunked off yesterday?’
‘She’d fallen downstairs and broken her ankle.’
‘Blimey! Does that mean she can’t do her show?’
‘The understudy’s doing it. That’s the point. She’d normally be doing a matinee today, but she’s at home.’
‘I suppose they’re all busy denying that she’s drinking again?’
‘She claims someone had spread grease on the stairs, apparently. She says someone’s trying to kill her.’
‘Oh please! She’s suffering from alcoholic paranoia, more like.’
‘Well, nobody’s saying that. Hector Carson says the grease on the stairs was probably some butter from her breakfast tray and she’ll see things more calmly when she gets over the shock, but Marina says she’s afraid of being left alone.’
‘And I suppose there are no neighbours out at Charter Hall?’
‘Apparently not. I did ask if there are friends who could call in, but she said her mother only knew theatre people really – as if it was understood that you couldn’t expect them to do anything useful.’
‘So what did you tell her?’
‘About going home? I said she could go. What would you have said?’
‘That her mother is a grown up woman and not her responsibility.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’ Ellie stands up and brushes the sandwich crumbs off her skirt. ‘You talk tough, but you’re as soft as anything when it comes to your students, you know you are.’
I get up too. ‘That,’ I say, ‘is a terrible slander. But I can see that Marina’s hard to say no to. If ever there was a child you just want put your arms round, it’s her. Fragile and brave at the same time. It’s enough to break your heart.’
All the Daughters Page 2
