‘I’m from the Far West, actually,’ Bonnie said. ‘My family have been in Bristol from yonks. My great-grandfather settled there. See what I mean?’
Mrs Clements went red. ‘Oh, blast,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. Fair enough. But all the same, let me know if you have any problems. I’ll murder ’em!’
The girls were relaxing rapidly now, no longer sitting upright on the uncomfortable chairs, but sprawling a little, some with their legs stretched out, and Hattie, looking at them, felt better. She might have put her foot in it with the Chinese child, or whatever she had been before her great-grandfather reached Bristol, but in essence they had a rapport. It was like the old days when she’d come into a new ward of children and had to get their trust and attention on the first morning; she’d learned how to do it then without actually thinking about it, and the old skill was still there. And that was a comforting thought which made her relax too.
‘All right. Let’s get to know each other. I’ve got a list of names here but they mean nothing till I put faces to them. Sing out as I call each name and then we can see where we are …’
The rest of the morning moved smoothly. It had taken some time to get in to see Dr Roscoe to find out what she was supposed to be doing (only to be told charmingly but very firmly that here in school she was to address him as Headmaster at all times and never by name, a command she had difficulty remembering) and then the girls had to be collected from the various parts of the building to which, it appeared, they had scattered, and brought back to their form room, from which the boys were temporarily excluded, so that she could be given her first taste of what her job would be. Now, as she worked her way through the register and moved around the room shaking hands with each girl as she answered her name (‘Always touch children when you talk to them, nurse,’ her Sister Tutor had instructed her when she’d first gone on duty on a children’s ward. ‘it comforts them.’ It had then, and it still did, she discovered happily), she felt better. Her collision with the masters in the common room had almost persuaded her to see to it that this first day at the Foundation would double as her last; to hell with Judith and her nagging, to hell with the need for a job, she wouldn’t stay here to be insulted. But by twelve-thirty and lunchtime her opinion had been almost completely reversed.
She had been told that there was a staff dining room, but the thought of that removed all trace of appetite. Sometime, eventually, maybe she’d brave that, but the possibility of seeing the fat and horrible Dr Bevan again, and the unappetizing smells of heavily boiled cabbage and strongly fried onions that drifted through the hallways combined to send her out of the building in search of whatever refreshment she could find elsewhere.
She came out by a door that took her into the central quadrangle and stopped when she got there, staring round. It was beautiful; the old warm red brick and grey stone of which the buildings had been put together over the centuries glowed in the September sunshine above a lawn that someone clearly loved dearly. It was as green and striped as a 1930s advertisement for weedkiller, and against each of the four buildings that flanked its perfection were borders filled with glowingly flowering plants, chrysanthemums carefully tied up to stop them straggling and gaudy dahlias and drifts of Michaelmas daisies, blue and green and misty against those old stones.
She took a deep breath of sheer pleasure and lifted her face to the sun and stood for a little while with her eyes closed; it felt good and she felt good. And I didn’t think about Jessie and Sophie all morning, she thought then and opened her eyes sharply, filling up with a mixture of guilt and exhilaration. It was, surely, a major step forward to be so involved in what she was doing that she could manage not to think about her children. And she shook her head at her own confusion and hurried across the grass towards the main gate which led out into the street.
By the time she got there a man was standing at the edge of the path glowering at her, his hands folded threateningly over a high paunch, with the brass buttons of the uniform he was wearing glittering malevolently.
‘And ’oo do you think you are, walking on the grass like some — well, I won’t say the word what comes to mind. This place is out of bounds, lady, ’ooever you are, so don’t you come sneaking in here again, do you ’ear me? And then walking on the grass!’
His voice was high and thin but none the less truculent and she looked at him a little wearily. Another of these bloody men to deal with.
‘I am Mrs Clements, I am a member of the staff, I am here to look after the girls in the sixth form. I did not know the grass was sacrosanct, and I won’t walk on it again. Are you happy now?’ she said with considerable belligerence and he blinked at her.
‘Go on, there ain’t never been no women on the staff here —’ He stopped then and shook his head. ‘Girls in the sixth! They got to be bleeding mad. Never ’eard of such a thing!’ and turned his back on her and went marching into the little cubbyhole beside the street gate and slammed the door behind him. And Hattie, feeling as childish as her behaviour, stuck her tongue out at his retreating back and went out of the gate and into Nollys Street and then on to Cable Street.
The contrast was startling and she needed it. Here were the squalid buildings she had known ever since she had first joined the nursing students at Old East all those years ago as a hopeful eighteen-year-old; here were the shabby streets she’d hurried through when they’d run the Home Care scheme for sick children and had so many severely ill children to look after on the district that they’d never had any off-duty time; here were the cheap shops that were almost more familiar to her than those around her home in Hampstead; here was the noise of the market at Watney Street, with its raucous yells and the eternal blare of pop music from the record seller’s cheap old record player; the stench of traffic; the shrieking of the gulls from the river; and the distant smell of water over all, and she took a deep breath, relishing it. Whatever happened at the Foundation with its artificial atmosphere of overwhelming maleness, this was real and comfortable and salutary. It was hard to feel sorry for herself or confused here.
She went for lunch at a doner kebab restaurant in Cable Street, not too far from Shadwell station, comforted by the familiarity of its smell, that queasy mixture of roasting lamb and armpitty cumin seed and newly baked pitta bread, and ate a salad with a bowl of hummus and a vast cup of coffee, and went through her register, which she’d brought with her, trying to fix the girls in her mind.
Most of them were run-of-the-mill enough, she thought, but there were some interesting ones: Dilly Langham, the tall girl with the untidy light-brown hair and the sulky expression, could turn out to be worthwhile, and she thought that she had come across people like her before, so determined to hang on to what they regarded as their individuality that they repelled everyone who came near them. It would be hard work to make a friend of Dilly but worth the effort. A challenge anyway.
Gillian Brownlow: nothing exceptional there, an ordinary type, really; fizzing with sexuality and not much on her mind apart from the demands of her own hormones. Pretty in an obvious way with all that bouncing yellow hair and her old-fashioned trick of peeping up at people — especially men — with her head tucked down to show the delicacy of her chin for all the world like a television advertisement for shampoo or whatever. Even Roscoe — Headmaster — had found her provocative. She’d need some watching.
Bonnie Ching: a nice girl but rather like a Jamaican girl Hattie had trained with, with a chip on her shoulder set there by other people’s behaviour to her. She’d need protecting rather than watching.
And Genevieve …
Hattie sighed and swallowed the last of her pitta and hummus and pulled her coffee closer. If she stuck it out at the Foundation it would be mostly because of Genevieve Barratt, she decided, as she sat with both hands cupping the hot coffee and her eyes staring sightlessly out into the hubbub of Cable Street. She was so typical it was almost a textbook case: the voluminous sweater, even on a day as warm as this, the full skirt gathere
d so beautifully over her hips, the fragile birdlike wrists and ankles and the faintly downy look of the narrow cheeks. Anorexia nervosa, all set to starve herself to death given half the chance. Hattie had spent the toughest year of her professional life as staff nurse in charge of a ward full of them and had sworn she’d never spend another moment with people as intransigent, as devious, as self-centred and as thoroughly miserable as they were. But she’d got hooked then because they were so … well, so interesting; and now she was halfway hooked again. At least she’d have to find out if anyone had realized that the girl was ill, whether anyone had done anything about getting help for her.
She went back to the school the long way round, going to Watney Street market first; she had time, and it had always been a fun place. It still was, with its hubbub of stalls filled with vegetables, from the most homely of potatoes and onions to the most exotic of eddoes and yams, and the rails filled with cheap cotton shirts in vivid colours and jeans which, at the price being asked, had to have escaped from the backs of various lorries. And above all there were the people who argued and shrieked, laughed and talked and ate non-stop, people of such a mixture of colours and eye-shapes and languages that it felt like being in the middle of a whole world in miniature. Just walking through the market made her feel good, just as it had in the old days before she’d ever met Oliver, before she’d ever been the mother of two small daughters, the days when she’d been free and hopeful and —
She moved south then, heading back to the school, and came back to Nollys Street and the high stone walls with their ornate iron gates and looked around at the other houses that faced it: the elegant eighteenth-century and perhaps earlier façades sadly crumbled and battered now, but surviving not just the Luftwaffe’s 1940s Blitz but the property developers’ 1970s one; and sighed. It was a ridiculous anomaly, this school, not just physically in its building, but in itself. A boys-only school admitting girls for the first time in four hundred years; a staffroom seeing its first woman ever — it was dismal and she was being absurd herself being here. But it was interesting too; and she thought of Genevieve and her bright — too bright — eyes and fragile bones, carrying her self-inflicted disease on her face to those who knew what to look for; of the luscious Gillian asking with the look on her face to get herself into complicated sexual disarray in this hotbed of male hormones as clamorous as her own; of the sulky Dilly and the watchful Bonnie with her smooth oval face and handsome slanted eyes; and sighed again. Just one day here and she felt as much a part of the place as if she’d been here for months. Ridiculous.
She stopped on the corner waiting to cross, holding back for a rumbling lorry to pass and then saw them, at the other end of the street, walking together with their heads down and very close together, and she paused. The taller and older of the figures was unmistakable; there couldn’t be many men who went about in tightly belted blue calico catsuits. The other figure was slight and somehow tremulous, even at this distance, and she stood in the shadow of the wall watching them come towards the gate that stood between herself and them, not quite sure why she was watching, or why she found it best to hold herself against the wall in the shadow of one of the buttresses that lifted itself there. But she did and was glad she had when the man looked up and round swiftly and then bent and kissed the boy on the mouth so hard that he seemed to stumble backwards, and then Tully smacked him lightly on the rump and turned and broke into a jogging run which took him away from the gate back towards the river end of Nollys Street. The boy stood for a long moment with his head down, then shuffled his feet and walked quietly into the school through the big gates.
The bell started producing the shrieking clamour that she now knew punctuated all the affairs of the Foundation, and she shook her head slightly and made for the gate herself. It wasn’t surprising, surely, that in a school like this there should be liaisons between male and male; a little worrying they should exist between master and pupil, but even then, the master couldn’t be much older than thirty-five or so and the pupil wasn’t wearing uniform so he had to be a sixth-former — sixteen then, at least. Pretty grown up.
None of your business, Hattie, she told herself as she made her way back to the sixth-form room, carefully skirting the grass and using the cindered paths. None of your business. Even though you are supposed to be the school welfare officer. But all the same, she thought as she made her way up the green and cream painted staircase, all the same I’m going to watch out. I wonder who the boy is? And whether he’s happy? It would be interesting to find out.
Six
‘A what?’ Hattie said, and looked at the poster Edward Wilton was pinning to the cluttered board in the common room. ‘You can’t mean it!’
‘Can’t mean what?’ Wilton said uneasily, and peered at the poster. ‘I thought I’d got it right — the Autumne Charity Fayre. Friday 27th at 2 p.m., two weeks tomorrow, stalls and —’
‘It’s the spelling,’ Hattie said. ‘Fayre — ye Gods, I thought only little old ladies with whiskers who organized church bazaars ever called ’em that.’
‘Well, you have to make it attractive …’ Wilton said and again gazed unhappily at his poster. ‘We have one every September and we’ve always spelled it that way; it adds a sort of charm, don’t you think?’
‘No,’ Hattie said firmly, and turned away to find an armchair that wasn’t cluttered with other people’s things, so that she could put her own on it. ‘I can think of nothing I’d more gladly stay away from than an Autumne Fayre.’ And she deliberately enunciated the superfluous letters. ‘Putting an “e” on the end of autumn, no — honestly, Edward! And you a member of the English department!’
‘No one’s ever objected before,’ Edward said huffily and went to get some coffee from the tray. Hattie grinned at his back, and settled down in the chair she’d freed for herself by the usual means of putting the things that had been left there on to the floor. It was too easy to torment Edward and be rude to him the way the other men were; he’d been kind enough to her, after all, and she mustn’t let herself be infected by the common room’s usual sardonic tone. The fact that the rest of them — with of course the exception of Dr Bevan — were getting used to her and being friendly mustn’t be allowed to dull her sensitivity or encourage her to play up to them.
So she said kindly, ‘Oh, I dare say it’s just my prejudice. It’s like those tea places that call themselves Ye Olde Tea Shoppe; I won’t go into them on principle, however thirsty or in dire need of cream cakes I am. Ignore my nagging and tell me all about it. Do we all have to go?’
‘Don’t have to, but I’d be grateful if you would,’ he said, immediately beaming at her. ‘I mean, it’s such a hell of a thing to organize but we have to do it. Headmaster likes it, you see, it pleases the Council people, they always come swooping around the way they do every chance they get, and we have to make sure we’ve got stalls for African Famine and Equal Opportunities and so forth as well as for our own fund-raising. Can I put you down for a stall?’
‘Not a stall,’ Hattie said hastily. ‘I wouldn’t have time for that.’ Indeed she wouldn’t, not if they were like the ones that she had had to look after at Old East’s charity events, when they so effortfully raised money to buy essential equipment for the Baby Units or the Geriatric Wing. ‘I’ll help with things on the day — teas and that perhaps?’
He brightened visibly. ‘Oh, yes please, that’d be great, really great. We’ve had the boys do it other years but to tell the truth they ate more than they sold and people always complained at what they did sell. Perhaps you can get some of the girls to help you, hmm? Then I know it’ll be run properly and we might make a few bob on it.’
She nodded and sipped the coffee he’d brought her and marvelled a little that she was so at home here now. That first uneasy day seemed an eternity away now, and she stared back over the term, a little amused. She’d thought at first she wouldn’t have enough to do, but it was amazing how busy she had become. The word had gone round among
the boys very fast that they could talk to Mrs Clements just as the girls did, if they wanted to, and, in the little room she’d been allotted, near the Headmaster’s office but not too close to it, she had set up some simple first-aid gear and had got into the practice of being there each morning when school started and during the lunch hour, because so many of the pupils came to her then.
There were grazed knees and torn fingers to dress, and sometimes wrenched ankles or knees, especially on Thursdays and Fridays when the sports people were at their most active, but the boys came for other reasons too. Those with spots — and there were a very large number of them — soon learned the value of the supply of skin-peeling creams and lotions she had bought out of the small float she had managed to extract from the Headmaster’s secretary, and they would sit enthralled as she reassured them that it wasn’t their fault they had acne, that they hadn’t brought it on themselves by eating chocolate or hamburgers and chips, but had it like hordes of others because they had healthily active hormones, and then relax visibly.
Poor little devils, she would think as yet another went away with an obviously lighter step, what was it like in the past for them, with no one here to help them? And now and then, if the boy looked approachable and sensible, she would talk lightly and very elliptically about other things, trying to imply without putting it into as many words that they needn’t think they had their spots because they masturbated either; that every boy who ever was did that and it was nothing to worry about, indeed, a necessary part of growing up. But she soon stopped doing that. The ones she had tried to talk to had shown at once by the crimsoning of their necks that they knew perfectly well what she was on about, and made it equally clear by their rapid departure from her little room that they had no intention of talking about it, not ever, and certainly not to her; and she had sighed and packed away her lotions and creams ready for the next time and was glad she had daughters. So much easier to deal with, daughters.
Dangerous Things Page 6
