Also by Claire Rayner
FOURTH ATTEMPT
THE MEDDLERS
A TIME TO HEAL
MADDIE
CLINICAL JUDGEMENTS
POSTSCRIPTS
CLAIRE RAYNER
DANGEROUS THINGS
ebook ISBN: 978-1-84982-047-9
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Copyright © Claire Rayner 1993, 2010
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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e-ISBN 978 1 84982 043 1
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The quotation on page 128 from ‘This Be the Verse’, from Wintering Out by Philip Larkin, is reproduced by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
For Susan Watt
Guide, Philosopher, Friend
and
Ideal Editor
A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
An Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope
One
Hattie pinned her list to the fridge door with a blob of Blu-Tack and then, to make sure, added a green and red wooden pig with a magnet in its bottom. Then she stood and glowered at it. She’d been through it three times already this evening: why drive herself mad? But all the same she started again. Just to make sure, she told herself, to make assurance doubly sure — Jessica’s swimming gear. Check. Sophie’s gym gear. Check. Spare pants for Sophie in a plastic bag; she didn’t often have accidents nowadays, but she felt safer having her just-in-cases in the pocket of her school bag, so, check. Digestive biscuits for break for both. Check…
This time when she’d finished she made herself sit down at the kitchen table to drink her tea, even though it was half cold now. There was nothing more she could do to be ready for the morning. Yes, it would be a panic to get the girls up and breakfasted and dressed ready to be collected by Inge from Judith’s next door at half past seven, so that Peter could drive them to school together with their Jenny and Petra on his way to the hospital, but she could manage that. Their clothes were laid out ready and she’d checked their school bags three times, for God’s sake. What more could she do? Put tomorrow’s supper ready by the microwave so that she could put it straight in when she came home herself?
She almost got to her feet to take the prepared dishes from the fridge and then made herself sit down again. Ridiculous. Leave food at room temperature for almost twenty-four hours — where was the sense? That way they’d get gastroenteritis, and then what would she do? Bad enough they had a working mother, poor little scraps, without having one who poisoned them with bad food. And she contemplated both her children getting horrendous symptoms, dying and being buried while all the neighbours, teachers and hospital staff stood around staring accusingly at her, and then shook her head at her own silliness. She really had to stop this. So she was taking a job! Lots of mothers had jobs and didn’t flap the way she was. It would do the girls no harm at all to have her out and earning; do them good, in fact. Judith had pointed that out kindly, but without pulling any punches, warning her that she was getting a bit obsessive about the children.
‘It’s too much for them, Hatt,’ she’d said. ‘No kids ought to have a mother who frets over them the way you do. Too many of your emotional eggs in their baskets, ducky. Heavy for ’em. Time you got out and about a bit more. It’s been a year since Oliver died, and if you don’t try soon you’ll turn into Queen Victoria and much good that’ll do you or the kids. Come to supper on Friday. I’ve got a few characters coming you might like. Doesn’t matter if you don’t. It’s getting out that matters. So I’ll see you at half past seven and lend me that big silver platter of yours. I need it for the starter. Crudités, I thought…’
Thank God for Judith, Hattie thought, staring into the depths of her chilly tea. I’d have gone off my trolley without her. A year since Oliver died. It didn’t seem possible. It was only a few days. It was a lifetime. It was both. And she drew a deep breath and made herself think about how it had been, exploring her memory gingerly in the way she’d use her tongue tip to explore an aching tooth. There had once been a time when there had been an Oliver full of energy and plans and ambition, but that she couldn’t remember. She didn’t want to remember. It made what came after so much worse. So she thought of Oliver ill, of the way he had sat curled up in his chair staring out of the window and doing nothing. The business had fallen to pieces around them, for how could a book-designing consultancy operate when the book designer stopped work? The doctors had told him he should go on working, told him the lousy way the drugs made him feel could be overcome if he put his mind to it, but he’d not believed them, and had just got worse and worse and then almost pettishly, she had thought at the time, died.
Oh, but she’d been angry! How dare he do that to her, leave her with the girls still little more than babies, with Sophie just five and Jessica a clingy seven? How could he have cared so little for her that there’d been so little money, so little concern for what it would be like to be a widow at thirty-five?
Her eyes filled with tears, and she put down the beaker of cold tea and sniffed hard. It still hurt. It ought to be better by now, surely? People said a year, once the first year and its anniversaries was over, it’d be all right. ‘You’re still young,’ they said to her, as though that helped. ‘You’ll find someone else, of course you will.’ And she wanted to hit them, because how could there ever be another Oliver? The one before the sick one she’d almost learned to hate, the one who’d left her alone and angry. To find such another wasn’t possible; she wanted to shriek that at the well-meaning idiots who bleated at her. And one day she had shrieked just because she had to and not because of what someone had just said, and thank God it had been Judith she’d shrieked at. Judith had listened calmly and let it roll over her and then just hugged her and fed her hot soup, and chattered on about nothing much in the way she did usually, thank God, because if she hadn’t Hattie would have got up and gone. Left the girls, left the house, left the misery, left it all.
Left the girls. Guilt filled her as the thought came into her mind. She couldn’t have felt worse if she’d actually done it. They’d suffered so much, those two; they’d adored Oliver when they’d been very small and he’d been good with them, playing a lot, talking to them a lot, reading to them a lot. But then the leukaemia had sucked all that out of him and he’d sat and stared out of the window and pushed them away when they’d come to him; and they’d been bewildered and hurt and had gone away, to her, and that had made her hate him too. Oh, they’d been bad days, dreadful days, and she had actually thought of making it worse for them, taking herself away from them as well as their father.
She got to her feet abruptly and took her beaker to the sink to wash it and put it away, and then started to set the table for breakfast. She wasn’t going to leave the children, not ever. She was theirs as long as they wanted her, and tha
t was that. Tomorrow she’d phone Hilary Roscoe and tell him she’d changed her mind. She wouldn’t be starting work with him, because small children shouldn’t have working mothers, and —
She stopped, the muesli bowls in her hand, and stared blankly at the list pinned to the fridge. She’d been through all this before, ad nauseam. It would do the girls no harm at all if she had a job. It would do them good. Keep remembering that as long as she planned it right, made sure her support system was strong and intact, nothing but good all round could accrue. Peter and Judith had said so, her own commonsense told her so and Hilary Roscoe had made it possible for it to be so. She had to do it.
Hilary Roscoe. She thought more about him, and her lips curved a little. How Oliver would have laughed at him! So very urbane, so very good-looking, with his silvery hair and his deceptively young-looking tanned face and his so perfectly cut suits; just the sort of smoothie Oliver had always found most ridiculous. He called them slickers and had told her that publishers’ offices were full of them, standing out like proverbial sore thumbs against the earnest young women in ethnic clothes and the rather battered young men in crumpled jeans who always looked as though they were about to burst into tears of anxiety. When Judith had introduced them with her usual garbled nutshell sketches (‘Darling, this is Dr Hilary Roscoe, madly important, Headmaster of the Foundation, you know, down in Wapping, always on the telly talking about education and frantic most of the time about money and all the rest of it, you’ll get on terribly well; Hilary, this is my darling friend Hattie who’s a widow and used to be a Sister at Old East, you know, the hospital down the road from your place, and is about to go back to work now her children are off her hands at school. Now you two be cosy together while I go and look at the lamb. I daren’t trust Inge not to overcook it —’) she had remembered Oliver, and that made it difficult to warm to Roscoe.
But they had got on surprisingly well. He talked to her in the sort of concentrated way she liked, not constantly peering over her shoulder to see who was there who might be more interesting and not trying to overhear other conversations around them. She found him easy to talk to, and blushed when she realized she’d poured it all out: how Oliver had been such a splendid book designer for the sort of packagers who do those expensive coffee-table art books, and how he’d not bothered much with insurance except for the mortgage on the house, fortunately, so life was difficult though not impossible, but as for even thinking about where she should send the girls to school when they were eleven plus, well, forget it. It would have to be an ordinary comprehensive and that was that. There was certainly no money for school fees. Not, she said then, that she’d be able to send them to Dr Roscoe’s school even if she could afford it, since it was a boys’ school.
‘Not entirely,’ he said, and smiled at her and his face creased most charmingly, so that he looked, paradoxically, younger than ever. ‘Not any more. I’m taking girls into the sixth form next term. It’s an extraordinary thing for a school like mine to do, though I know many others do. But we’re the Foundation! But there it is. It’s fashionable, and I can’t deny I’ll be glad to get them, because it’s getting harder and harder to make the budget balance. We get little enough choice when the cold winds of recession blow and they’re blowing very hard right now, aren’t they? So, girls in my sixth form next term!’ And he shook his head in a sort of mock amazement and laughed, a pleasant, even musical, sound, and she liked him even more.
‘It should be interesting for the school,’ she said. ‘Letting females into that monastic atmosphere.’
‘A little too interesting, perhaps.’ He looked less amused. ‘Time will tell. I’d as soon not do it, of course. But how can I do otherwise? I’m competing with the likes of the City of London and St Paul’s and Westminster, all of them in much more salubrious areas than we are. Taking girls was frankly the only option I had left.’
They were sitting at the dinner table by now, herded there by Judith who yapped at them in true sheepdog fashion, and he looked round the table with the amused expression back in position on his face. ‘I must say that I’m amazed that we’ve found parents willing to give us a try. What they think their precious lambs will get from being with my boys I can’t imagine. They’re a formidable lot, my sixth form. I can see these more delicate blossoms wilting in their shadows. It’s gratifying they want to take the risk, don’t you think? Stupid but gratifying.’
Suddenly Hattie didn’t like him so much, seeing his charming attention to her as patronizing, and his concentration on her conversation as the behaviour of the trained diplomat rather than the spontaneous generosity of the sort of man she’d hoped he was. And because by now she’d had one of Judith’s generous gins and tonics and was halfway through her first glass of wine, she was reckless and launched herself into an impassioned defence of girls of sixteen. She told him sharply that they were far from likely to be in the shadow of his boys, since there was a good deal of research that showed girls were just as academically capable as boys and often more so, and pointed out with considerable heat that they were likely to have a distinctly civilizing effect on what were no doubt the usual crowd of hobbledehoys that were boys of that age.
And he laughed — actually laughed — and apologized. ‘I bow to the superior knowledge of the mother of daughters,’ he said and raised his glass at her and she glared back at him, nonplussed. He was still being patronizing, she was sure, and yet he looked so open and friendly and genuinely free of any rancour; and she lifted her own glass in response, almost without realizing she’d done it, and subsided.
But after dinner, when they were scattered around Judith’s big comfortable drawing room with their coffee, he’d come to sit beside her and apologized again. And that time she blushed and told him she was sorry if she’d been rude; it was just that so often girls were put down when in fact they were —
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I got the message, loud and clear. Look, I rather think you could be the solution to a problem for me. My establishment is, as you pointed out, monastic. Staff as well as pupils. The only women around the place are cooks and cleaners and so forth and they don’t count —’
She found herself responding with irritation again, but he’d seen it coming as she opened her mouth, and held up both hands in mock surrender.
‘I don’t mean they don’t count as people, of course they do. It’s simply that they aren’t part of the teaching staff. So, I’ll have a gaggle of schoolgirls in the place and not a woman anywhere to care for their problems as and when they arise. I can just see one of my masters trying to deal with a patch of pre-menstrual temper or —’
‘It doesn’t happen to everyone,’ she said a little waspishly. ‘Most times when women get angry it’s for a good reason and has nothing to do with their hormones.’
‘You see?’ he said and set his head to one side almost winsomely. ‘I can’t know that. Nor can any of my staff. I’m going to need someone who can spot the real McCoy and help with it, and who can make sure any wrongs are put right and that the girls are generally mothered and so forth. One wouldn’t want them to be unhappy at school.’ He laughed again then. ‘And to tell you the truth I have to keep their parents sweet. Imagine if one of them asked me what happened if her daughter got ill, and I had no satisfactory answer! So there you have it. You’re the only person to solve my knotty little problem.’
She squinted up at him, a little confused. Not with the effects of the gin and the wine — which had already subsided, leaving her feeling sombre — but because she’d lost the thread of what he was saying.
‘I am? How?’
‘Why, by being my female member of staff! I’ve been looking for someone suitable, but even in these hard times suitable staff are hard to find. You seem to be properly qualified — some teaching of health and hygiene matters to the girls, and some first aid too. You can help the boys when they get battered at rugger and so forth — there’ll be lots to keep you busy —’
‘But what about the
person who does the job now?’ she’d protested. ‘Won’t it cause problems if I —’
‘I told you, there isn’t anyone.’
‘So who bandaged the boys when they got battered at rugger last term?’
‘Oh, mostly no one. We’re quite a stoical lot, you know. Don’t make heavy weather about a few grazes and bruises. And the physical education staff all have first-aid qualifications, of course. They can set a sprained ankle or whatever it is you do to such a joint at the side of the field and then go on to win the match.’
‘Very commendable,’ she murmured, but he ignored her irony.
‘Won’t you do it? This is really so fortuitous, meeting you tonight. I’ve tried so many agencies and to no purpose at all. They charge the earth and one never knows what sort of rag tag and bobtail’ll turn up from them.’
‘Perhaps I’m rag tag,’ she said, and lifted her brows at him.
‘Lawks-a-mussy me, it’s a lidy if I never saw one.’ His mock cockney grated a little. ‘No, my dear girl, you’re perfect. Any friend of old Peter and Judith —’
‘You’ve known them a long time?’
‘Ever since he took my appendix out a few years ago. Splendid chap. So, tell me you’re interested.’
‘I have two small children! I can’t possibly —’
‘You’re not listening, my dear girl,’ he said reprovingly. ‘I am offering you a job in a school. School hours, school holidays and half-terms and all the rest of it. I know you use the State schools but I do assure you the holidays match! When they have holidays, so does the Foundation. Ideal, I would have thought —’
‘Of course it is!’ Judith crowed from behind Hattie’s shoulder. ‘Best idea in the world. She’ll take it —’
‘Here, hang on, Judith!’ Hattie was alarmed, feeling the safe ground tremble beneath her feet. ‘You really can’t —’
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