by JL Merrow
“Do you come to a lot of the local productions?” I asked Sean in the interval, after we’d picked up our drinks. We wandered over to one side of the hall, where there was a wall covered with black-and-white photographs of Shamwell in days gone by.
“Most of them, yeah. I just think if people are going to go to all that trouble to put something on locally, you should support that, right?” He shrugged. “Theatres in London, yeah, they’ve got the big-name actors and all the money behind them, but that’s not what it’s all about, is it? It’s like, stuff in a place like this is just as important as what happens in the city.”
“An admirable sentiment, although I’m not sure everyone would agree with you there,” I said, rather hoping he might convince me of it. Having banished Crispin more or less successfully from my mind, I couldn’t help thinking of Fordy. He’d been appalled to hear I was taking a job in a village primary school. He’d told me flat out I was flushing my career down the toilet.
Of course, he hadn’t known why I’d—no. I wasn’t going to think about that now. I studied a view of the village high street from 1904. It was remarkably similar to how it looked today, save that the photograph showed rather fewer cars (i.e., none) and rather more young lads loitering in flat caps (i.e., some). Perhaps Fordy had been right when he’d called the place “so sleepy it was practically bloody comatose”.
“Yeah, well. They can have their opinion. I’ll keep mine.” Sean sipped his wine. “So what brought you to Shamwell, anyhow? I mean, no offence, but I’d have thought you’d have gone for a job in a private school. Like the one you went to.”
“I… Well, I did. But I decided it wasn’t for me. Teaching older pupils, I mean.” My hands became uncomfortably clammy, and I took a restoring sip of wine.
Sean didn’t appear to notice my discomfort, for which I was grateful. “Yeah? I guess it’s got to be a lot different. You don’t miss it, then? Teaching your subject at high school level, I mean?”
I thought about it. “Not really. Nothing like as much as I thought I might.” I hadn’t actually realised how true that was, until now.
“Did you have to do a lot of retraining? I mean, it must be a bit like a hospital consultant deciding to go back into general practice.”
“Teaching A-Level maths is hardly brain surgery. But yes, in primary education you don’t just stick to your subject, as a rule. Which for me is good, because it means I can teach maths and music, which I couldn’t before. And there’s a lot more pastoral care involved. Of course, the hardest part was persuading the interview panel I was serious about it.” I smiled at him, although that wasn’t, in fact, strictly true. There had been a lot of reading involved, not to mention learning the National Curriculum upside down and backwards. “I signed up for a fortnight’s Return to Teaching course, which helped a lot. Although I got a few funny looks from the rest of the class. I think they thought I was a bit young to start teaching, let alone return to it.”
Sean laughed. “Yeah, I should think you’d stand out a bit among all the mums coming back after career breaks.”
“Not to mention the men in their fifties coming back after being made redundant from the better jobs they left teaching for in the first place.”
“You didn’t have to get any different qualifications, or anything, then?”
“No, fortunately. There’s been talk of introducing certification in teaching different age groups, but nothing’s come of it as yet.” A thought struck me. “How about you? Are there qualifications in pest control?” My mind frankly boggled at the thought of the practical exams. Did they arrange controlled invasions of the exam hall by cockroaches, or send the candidates into single combat with wasps’ nests?
“Oh yeah. There’s a shedload of Health and Safety stuff you have to know, of course, and everyone where I work has to get their BPCA—British Pest Control Association—level two.” He laughed suddenly. “There isn’t a level one. Never found anyone who knows why that is. And there’s always more stuff you can learn. Safe use of air weapons, that kind of thing. It’s all right sending someone out to take potshots at pigeons, but no one’s going to be impressed if they shoot the customer instead.”
I shuddered and finished my wine.
“Want another?” Sean asked.
“Thanks, but they must be about to start again. We’ve had over fifteen minutes already.”
“Yeah?” Sean raised his eyebrows and looked at his watch just as the bell rang and a loud voice asked us in jovial, reproduced tones to take our seats for the second half.
We trooped obediently back into the main hall. Just before we reached our row, someone jabbed me in the ribs. “Are you enjoying it, then?”
I turned to find Emily G’s granny’s wrinkly face looking up at me. “Oh yes, very much, thank you. And you?”
“It gets me out of the house.” Her sharp eyes narrowed as she turned to Sean. “Came to see your girlfriend, did you?”
“Ex-girlfriend,” he said easily.
“He told me,” I blurted out, awash with gratitude that Sean hadn’t left me in ignorance to be blindsided by Granny G’s no doubt well-meaning interference. Then I swallowed as both of them turned to look at me.
“Did he now?” Her expression didn’t soften. If anything, her eyes turned flintier. “I don’t hold with these menageries. In my day, you made your choice, and you stuck with it.”
Menageries? Did she think Sean and I and Eliza Doolittle were… Oh God, had she been around somewhere when I’d been ranting about threesomes?
I refused to even consider the possibility Granny G hadn’t, in fact, got the word wrong and was talking about bestiality.
“Good for you,” Sean said, seeming untroubled. “How’s Mr. G doing these days?”
“Doing?” She snorted. Perhaps it was a village thing. “Catch him doing.”
Somebody shushed us loudly, and chastened, we scurried to our seats.
The curtain opened, and the broad comedy of the first half gave way to the more painful jibes of the second. Professor Higgins likened Eliza to a squashed cabbage; she threw his slippers at him. For a moment, I thought I was back at school with class 2E.
After the curtain had come down for the final time, and the last of the applause died away, Sean turned to me. “Mind if we hang around and say hi to Heather?”
“Not at all,” I lied politely.
We lingered in the hall as the rest of the audience filed out, elderly voices chattering cheerfully. At length the actors started to emerge from a corridor by the side of the stage. Heather was still in costume, and she smiled when she saw Sean. “You all right? I thought I saw you at the back, there.” She hitched her bag up on her shoulder and came to kiss him on the cheek. “What did you think, then?”
“You were great. Really rocked it. Hev, this is Robert.” He stepped back from her embrace and turned to where I was shifting uneasily in my brogues. “He’s the twins’ new teacher.”
“Yeah? You poor sod.” Her natural accent was a lot closer to Eliza’s original cockney than to the way she spoke at the end of the play, after she’d been thoroughly Higgins’d. Having acknowledged me, she turned back to Sean. “How’s Debs doing? She still having the chemo?”
“Nah, she’s finished now. She’s gotta go back in for tests next week, see if it worked.”
“Yeah? Fingers crossed for her, then. Work going okay?”
They chatted for another minute or two about people I didn’t know, while I became intimately familiar with the information on the village notice board. I discovered that, should I need to consult a policeman, there would be one available from two until four on a Tuesday afternoon. Hopefully the village criminals would take note and time their activities accordingly. Library services, by contrast, were available four days a week and until eight p.m. on a Thursday.
I was just perusing the list of Zumba classes at the
hall, for which there seemed to be such an extraordinary demand I was starting to contemplate going along to one to see what all the fuss was about, when Sean took my arm. “Sorry about that,” he murmured in my ear. “I forgot how much she goes on sometimes. Are we going to go back to yours for a drink? Think we’re a bit late for the pub, now.”
“Oh—well, I wouldn’t want to keep you out…” Damn it. Why did I say that? Did I want him to think I wasn’t interested?
“Nah, that’s okay. I’m not working tomorrow.”
“Oh. Good.” Bother. Was I now sounding as if I intended to monopolise his company for the entirety of the next twenty-four hours, whether he wanted me to or not?
We stepped out into the darkness, the air a frigid shock after the hall, which had been heated to almost uncomfortable levels by the number of warm bodies inside. I shivered. Perhaps I should have worn a coat after all.
Then again, perhaps not, I decided, as a leather-clad arm slung itself around my shoulders and pulled me close. “Getting a bit nippy, innit,” Sean murmured in my ear.
“Innit just,” I replied. “Um. Did that sound like I was making fun of you?”
“Little bit. Don’t worry, I can take it.” The eerie shadows cast by the streetlamps lent his smile a devilish cast that sent black-winged butterflies flitting around my insides.
“I wasn’t mocking you,” I said. “Honestly.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He squeezed my shoulders. “I like a bloke with a sense of humour.”
“Hmm. The last man who said that to me then went on to say, ‘Which clearly you’ve got, given by the way you dress.’”
“Heh. Take it that relationship didn’t go too well.”
“Not particularly.” It had been Crispin.
There was almost no one else around, the majority of the audience having dispersed while we were with Miss Doolittle, and the cast having, to a man, jumped into cars to drive home. In the darkness that surrounded us, I even dared to slip my arm under Sean’s jacket and around his waist. Hard muscle flexed under my hand as he walked, and stubble rasped my cheek as Sean pressed close to me, but didn’t kiss me.
Which was good, obviously. After all, we were still in public. Technically speaking.
“It’s rather startling to think how much things have changed, isn’t it?” I said to break the suddenly charged silence. “All the things people could or couldn’t do, back in Victorian times, depending on their social class.”
“Yeah, not to mention the people they couldn’t do.” Sean laughed quietly, more a breath than anything. “You wouldn’t have been here with me, that’s for sure.”
“Not unless we wanted to join Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol,” I said drily.
“Not what I meant, and you know it.”
“Weren’t your family landowners in Victorian times?” I countered. “Perhaps you wouldn’t have been here with me.”
Sean kicked a stray conker, unaccountably missed by village children, along the pavement. It bounced and rolled merrily into the gutter. “Social mobility, you gotta love it.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I just think it makes things even more of a minefield.”
As we reached the more brightly lit, central portion of the village, I regretfully let my arm fall from Sean’s waist. He took the hint, and we walked on no longer touching. Here, there were still one or two people about, although the corner by the church was bare of teenage gangs. I shivered once more, bereft of Sean’s warmth.
Sean spoke again. “So do you reckon they’d have ended up together? Higgins and Eliza?”
“Well, Shaw was adamant that they wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, but what did he know? He was only the bloke who wrote it. Forget about him—what do you reckon?”
I shrugged. “Well… To be honest, I can’t see her ending up with either the professor or Freddy. Higgins would have been impossible to live with, but after him, settling for Freddy would seem like, well, settling. I’d have thought she could do a lot better.”
“What, a girl from the streets with no money and no family? Even if her dad had gone up in the world, there’d be plenty who’d still look down on her once they found out where she came from.” Sean paused. “Anyway, I thought Freddy was all right. Bit naive, but his heart was in the right place. It wasn’t his fault he’d been brought up to think the world owed him a living.”
We’d reached the Old Hatter’s Cottage. “Will you come in?” I asked, my stomach filling with butterflies once more. Or moths, perhaps, seeing as all good butterflies would be tucked up in bed by now. Possibly with other butterflies, and would that be the way this evening was going…? I held my breath as the internal insect swarms threatened to get out of hand.
“All right,” Sean said. “Wouldn’t mind a coffee before I get back on my bike.”
Oh. That meant he definitely wouldn’t be staying. Or did he just not want to presume? “Have you got much on tomorrow?” I asked, opening the front door and ushering him in.
“Promised the twins I’d take them down to the London Dungeon, so yeah, it’ll have to be an early start.”
“Ah. I have a feeling that’ll be right up their street. Lots of blood and gore, from what I’ve heard.” I frowned as we walked through into the kitchen. “It’s an odd phrase, that, when you think about it, isn’t it? Gore being a synonym for blood. It rather fails to add anything to the meaning.”
“Yeah, I s’pose not, now you mention it. Like hale and hearty.”
“Fine and dandy.” I filled the kettle and switched it on.
“Be all and end all,” Sean suggested.
I got out two mugs. “Belt and braces… No, wait, that one doesn’t fit, does it?”
He smiled. “You know, I was surprised to see you’re a belt man. I’d have put money on you wearing braces.”
“Not recommended when you’re a teacher, I’m afraid. Children do so love to snap them.” Coffee, coffee, where did I keep the coffee? Oh yes—in the cupboard above the kettle.
“They’re not the only ones.” Sean leaned in close, one eyebrow slightly raised. “So if you’ve got some hiding in your wardrobe… Braces, that is, not kids.”
I swallowed. “S-several pairs. Um. You remember how we decided this was a date?”
“Yeah?” Sean murmured, his face very close to mine.
“Well, I, er…” Thinking to hell with it, I closed the remaining gap and kissed him.
It was delicious. His lips were firm and yielding in just the right combination, and he tasted of red wine and devilry. His arms slid around my hips, pulling me close to him, and I realised too late I was still holding the mugs in one hand and a jar of coffee in the other. Cursing inwardly, I wrapped my arms around him as best I could, hoping the loud clinking noise that ensued didn’t mean I’d just broken something.
Sean pulled back from the kiss, laughing. “You want to maybe put some stuff down?”
“Possibly,” I conceded, and gave the mugs a quick once-over as I put them on the counter. “I’ll have the chipped one,” I said ruefully.
“Whatever. I’m not bothered,” he said, pulling me close again. This time I was able to reciprocate in kind. I let my hands roam over Sean’s shoulders, their form frustratingly masked by the leather jacket he still wore. His mouth found mine, and this time, his tongue entered my mouth, questing and challenging. I hardened embarrassingly quickly, but was reassured when, on shifting my hips, I felt an answering hard ridge in Sean’s jeans. Our kisses grew hungrier, fiercer. I wanted to touch him all over and was rapidly coming to loathe the leather jacket I’d so admired earlier. His hands clenched on my hips with a force that was almost bruising, the heat of them palpable even through my trousers.
The kettle boiled noisily and we broke apart, both of us breathing rather quickly. “Um. Coffee?” I said, my voice shaky.
“Uh, ye
ah. Wow.”
“Wow?”
“Definitely wow. Talk about your hidden depths.”
I gave him a sidelong look. “Not that hidden, surely?”
“Depends. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like the way you dress—it’s different and fun and all that—but yeah, it’s not exactly in-your-face sexy, is it?” He gave my rear a gentle squeeze. “Course, when I saw you in your running gear, with your hair all messed up and that… I mean, most of the time you’re so put together, you know? It was like… Shit, this is a bad analogy, ’cos I liked you before, anyway, but it was like that really corny moment in films when the girl in the lab coat takes off her glasses and shakes out her hair, and suddenly she’s gorgeous.”
I frowned. “I don’t wear glasses. And my hair’s too short to shake out. Plus, and I really feel I should emphasise this point to avoid any possible misunderstandings, I’m not a girl.”
Sean laughed. “I told you it was a shit analogy.” He brought one hand up to stroke my face, and I fought the urge to nuzzle into it as his other hand slid farther around my waist. “But you are gorgeous.”
Delight and embarrassment warred. Embarrassment, as usual, won. “I think I’d better make you that coffee now. The wine tonight obviously had quite an effect on you.”
“Yeah, two thimblefuls and I’m anybody’s.”
“Anybody’s?”
“Nah, not really. I’ve got pretty high standards.” His fingers brushed my throat, and I swallowed.
“Um. You’d probably better let go of me. So I can make the coffee,” I reminded him.
