Maxwell’s House

by M. J. Trow

  Some kids covered up their work with their arms. Others showed him what they’d done, grinning stupidly. This was the top set, supposedly. God help the rest, Maxwell thought to himself. Still, the names were right. Tamsins rubbed shoulders with Imogens and Williams and Harrys. Later in the day, when he met his Set 3, he’d find the Sharons and Traceys and Waynes and Shanes. Why, he found himself wondering again, had two entire generations forever ruined a classic Western by christening their moronic offspring Shane?

  It was just as he was making his second circuit that he noticed them. Below the window. The boys in blue. Two uniformed constables, their diced headbands vivid under the painful glare of the September sky, threading their way through the bike sheds. There’d be smokers there in half an hour, the hardliners bent on lung cancer who’d cultivated that curious method of holding ciggies in the palms of their hands so the smoke didn’t show. But it wasn’t smokers the fuzz were after. They seemed to be checking bikes. Every now and again, one of them would stoop and say something to his colleague who’d write something down. Maxwell couldn’t make out a pattern in their search. It seemed random. What were they looking for?

  Then he was aware from the growing row that Set l’s first task of their History careers was over and he told them to pass their papers forward so that no one could see what they’d written. When the little pile was high enough on his desk, he unfolded them one by one and read them out.

  ‘A hundred,’ he said and got a laugh. The figures actually read fifty-five, but that was too close to be funny and Maxwell a great believer in licence. ‘Sixty-eight.’ A titter. Thirty-four.’

  A howl.

  ‘Who put that?’ he asked.

  Slowly, furtively, a lad’s hand climbed into the air.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Maxwell demanded.

  ‘Tom,’ the lad said, still junior school enough to think that surnames names didn’t matter.

  ‘Tom what?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Wood,’ the lad said.

  ‘Well, Tom Wood,’ Maxwell crossed to him, ‘you are a fine judge of men and will make a first-class historian.’ He held out his hand. ‘Allow me to shake you by the hand. You’ve made an old man very happy.’

  The others laughed. Then he read out their guesses. Four of them only were spot on. When he asked them, none of them knew why they’d carried out the exercise. Year by year, none of them ever did.

  ‘Time,’ Maxwell said. ‘The most difficult idea you’ll have to cope with in History. Most of you got my age wrong. You put me too old. There are two reasons for that. One, my hair is greying. Two, I’m a teacher. And all teachers are old, aren’t they? Like mums and dads. Ancient. Teachers don’t have lives of their own. They just climb into a cupboard at four o’clock and out again at nine. Somebody throws a switch and we start teaching. If I’d asked a class of five-year-olds how old I was, they’d have said two hundred, three hundred. Time is the most elusive thing to handle. It trickles through your fingers like sand on the beach. One casual misuse of it, one slip and it’s gone for ever.’

  The bell shattered the moment. No one moved. ‘That’s the signal for the end of the magic,’ he told the eager, anxious faces, ‘the breaking of the spell. You’ll go on now to some irrelevance like French or Maths and you’ll forget all about that sand, won’t you?’ He smiled. ‘Until the next time. And next time,’ he dismissed them with a wave of his arm, ‘we’ll discuss the conceptualization of Hegel’s dialectic. Good morning, boys and girls.’ And another generation had come to know Mad Max.

  Someone – and it was probably Roger Garrett, compiler of the calendar – had decreed that at the end of the first gruelling day of term there should be Department meetings.

  Paul Moss was sufficiently a man of the people to provide biccies. Tea was on Anthea Edwards, third in the History Department. And the milk was provided by Sally Greenhow, gazetted from Special Needs, on account of how they had a fridge in Special Needs.

  It had to be said that Matilda Ratcliffe didn’t like the History Department using the library. After all, they had rooms of their own. But Paul Moss liked the ambience, the open spaces. Mildly claustrophobic, he’d been trying for three years to get off the first floor to grab the Modern Languages annexe for himself. The Head of Modern Languages, a rather reptilian creature with liver problems, had fought him off on rather spurious educational grounds.

  They munched the Hob-nobs and sat around, loosely following Moss’s agenda.

  ‘Anthea,’ he said, ‘how did you find those new books?’

  Anthea rolled her eyes upwards. ‘Is it me,’ she asked, ‘or are the junior schools sending us thicker kids every year? Did you have a hand in the setting, Paul?’

  ‘A rather furtive one, yes.’ Her Head of Department grinned. He was mid-thirties, ambitious, with a boyish look and a mop of fair hair. ‘But you know how it is. The English Department rules OK.’

  ‘Ah, you’ve been listening to Mr Smith again,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘The English Department does nothing OK.’

  ‘I thought Geoffrey Smith was a friend of yours,’ Anthea said. Ever the literal one, she’d never really mastered the ancient art of cynicism. It would keep her third in a department for ever.

  ‘Oh, he is,’ Maxwell humoured her. ‘I’d go through the shredder for that man. But trust him to set the kids accurately? Or drive anywhere with him? I’d rather he set my broken arm.’

  ‘What were the police doing here this morning?’ Sally asked. They all looked at her. Sally Greenhow looked like a tall kid.

  She still had the frizzy hair, round face and dimpled cheeks of a little girl – a sort of ten-year-old on stilts. Only the cigarette, endlessly twitching between her fingers, betrayed an adult’s neuroses.

  ‘They seemed to be checking the bike shed,’ Anthea said.

  ‘Why?’ Moss asked.

  ‘Don’t tell me we’ve had a theft already?’ Anthea poured herself a second cup of tea. It was quite stewed at the bottom by now.

  ‘No, it’s Jenny Hyde,’ Sally said as though the walls had ears. Matilda Ratcliffe had, and they pricked up now as she busied herself filing behind her counter.

  ‘What?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Well, they’re looking for the bike.’ Sally thought it was obvious.

  ‘What bike?’

  ‘They saw a bike parked outside the Red House on the day she … you know.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Maxwell’s Hobnob plummeted into his tea, the victim of over-dunking.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Sally dragged deeply on her cigarette. ‘Somebody told me.’

  ‘I don’t know how you tell one bike from another,’ Moss shrugged.

  ‘They were looking for cars, too.’

  All eyes turned to the voice from beyond. Matilda Ratcliffe was still filing, her face downcast, but the words had definitely come from her.

  ‘Did somebody come in?’ Maxwell looked at his fellow historians.

  ‘Oh?’ Moss thought he ought to try to coax the librarian back to life. ‘Were they?’

  ‘I went out to get my packed lunch,’ she told them, avoiding their gaze and suddenly hating the spotlight in which she found herself. ‘They were noting down registration numbers.’

  ‘Were they now?’ Maxwell muttered.

  ‘I thought it was the height of cheek, those reporters pestering kids this morning,’ Anthea said. ‘Did anybody see them go?’

  ‘I think the rain drove them away,’ Moss said. ‘Certainly they’d gone by the time I went out for my lunch.’

  ‘I’m afraid I talked to them,’ Anthea confessed, pausing in mid-nibble.

  ‘Really?’ Maxwell beamed. ‘I hope the Headmaster doesn’t get to hear of this, Mrs Edwards.’

  He watched her neck mottle and her lips miss the crumbs.

  ‘You’re such an arsehole, Max,’ Sally scolded him. ‘The rumour is they’re only here because you shot your mouth off to the Advertiser anyway.’ Here was one young, female member of staff who had n
o fear whatever of Mad Max Maxwell.

  Maxwell sucked in his breath, and smacked his left wrist. ‘Well, hush my puppies,’ he said. So it was all-girls-together-week, he realized as he saw the fire in Sally’s eyes. Twenty years ago, he’d have pulled her pigtails. Still, the rumour was correct. The old Leighford grapevine was working, well as ever.

  ‘What did you say?’ Moss wanted to know.

  ‘Nothing.’ Anthea was quick to defend herself. ‘Nothing much. I only taught her in Year 9. I just said she was bright, conscientious.’

  Maxwell inhaled sharply again. ‘Well, that’s it then,’ he said. ‘That’ll be banner headlines in the Sun tomorrow. And I don’t want to think what the Daily Sport will do with it.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Max!’ Sally hissed. ‘This isn’t easy for any of us, you know. It was bad enough when Jenny went missing.’

  Maxwell’s cup hit the saucer unexpectedly hard. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘I said …’ Sally enunciated slowly. Obviously the march of time had caught up with one geriatric Head of Sixth Form.

  ‘That Jenny went missing. Yes, I heard that. When? Where?’

  ‘Where,’ she leaned back in her chair, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. When, at the end of last term … But surely you knew that?’

  ‘No.’ Maxwell felt the ground vanish beneath him, an alienation perhaps everybody starts to feel when they’re fifty-two. ‘No, I didn’t know that. How do you know it?’

  ‘Special Needs,’ Paul beamed. ‘They always pick up the scandal down there.’

  Sally laughed. ‘Usually, yes. But not this time. No, it was Janet Foster, Jenny’s form tutor. Apparently Jenny wasn’t in during the last week of term. Janet followed it up.’

  ‘Of course she did.’ Maxwell was nodding, frowning at the same time. ‘She would. She would. Damned good form tutor is Janet. Wonder why she didn’t tell me.’

  Sally shrugged. ‘Slipped her mind, I suppose. You know what the last week of term’s like. That quiet time when Years 11 and 13 have gone and we all have so many free periods.’

  ‘That quiet time,’ Moss took up the irony, ‘when the timetable for September doesn’t work even though three blokes and an entire computer network have been working on it all year?’

  ‘Anyway, weren’t you off yourself?’ Anthea remembered.

  ‘Er … from the Monday to Thursday, yes. My knee was playing me up. I had those physio appointments.’

  ‘Well there you are,’ Sally said, ever willing to defend the feminist right. ‘I expect Janet saw Alison about it.’

  ‘Alison?’

  The Special Needs teacher leaned forward, as though coping with one of her most special charges. ‘Alison Miller, your deputy. Are you all right, Max? Been a bit of a strain, has it, today?’

  ‘All right.’ Moss actually clapped his hands. ‘Let’s get back to some departmental business, shall we? Coursework for Year 10.’

  And they all let out the inevitable, universal groan.

  Bill Foster had left Janet nearly ten years ago. There wasn’t another woman or anything like that. They’d just been incompatible from the start. She was a sculptress of talent, had exhibitions from time to time. He was a couch potato in an engineering firm. God knew what had brought them together in the first place, but time had driven them apart. He’d gone off with the stereo, half the furniture and no regrets. She’d got the house, which she’d converted into an enormous studio overlooking the sea, and a geriatric dog and the other half of the furniture. Regrets? She had a few. The nights were cold in the winter and the plumbing, in the rambling Victorian house, was a bitch.

  ‘Max?’ Janet looked quite deathly without her make-up. Her mousy hair was wrapped in a pink towel that made her look vaguely like Hogarth.

  ‘I’m sorry, Janet.’ He swept off his shapeless hat. ‘I know it’s late.’

  She fiddled with the chain. ‘No, no,’ she flustered, closing the top of her housecoat, ‘not at all. It’s just that … Have you ever been here before?’

  ‘Er … once, I think,’ he told her, edging past into the hall. ‘It was old Whatsisface’s retirement. I’d had a few and Bill brought me here to dry out. Remember?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she laughed. ‘Can I get you a drink now?’

  ‘You can get me a cocoa,’ he smiled. Then he saw the dog waddling lamely over to him. ‘Hello, Dick.’

  ‘Dirk,’ she corrected him.

  ‘Dirk.’ He took the outstretched paw. ‘Yes, of course. Charmed. How old is he now?’

  ‘Nearly eighteen.’ She padded into the kitchen. ‘That’s over a hundred and twenty in human terms.’

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell mused, ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to shake anybody’s hand when I’m over a hundred and twenty.’

  ‘What’s the matter, Max?’ She had her back to him, filling the kettle.

  ‘Jenny Hyde,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ She reached into the fridge for the milk. ‘I thought it would be.’

  ‘Did you?’ He perched himself on one of her high stools at the breakfast bar. Beyond his reflection in the window he saw the lights twinkle on the sea and he knew the wind sighed in the dunes.

  ‘You didn’t mention her in assembly this morning.’

  ‘It didn’t seem the moment,’ he said.

  ‘Bit corny of Diamond, wasn’t it?’ she asked him. ‘That ghastly one minute’s silence. Anybody’d think he was a real Headmaster. Did you know he was going to do that?’

  ‘If it’s anything to do with the sixth form,’ Maxwell told her, ‘you can bet I’m the last to know.’

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘Two, please,’ he said.

  ‘I thought you were dieting?’

  ‘I am,’ he told her. ‘Two sugars is the diet.’

  She laughed and shook her head. ‘I went to the funeral, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thanks for doing that.’

  She looked at him. I don’t need thanks, Max,’ she said. ‘I liked Jenny. Everybody did.’

  ‘Somebody didn’t,’ Maxwell reminded her.

  Her face was suddenly older, sadder. ‘No,’ she murmured. ‘Somebody didn’t.’

  ‘Who was there?’ he asked her. ‘At the funeral, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, her family. Mum, dad. Others I didn’t know. There were quite a few of the sixth form. Tim, of course. Tim Grey. They were going together, weren’t they?’

  Maxwell shrugged. ‘What am I?’ he asked. ‘The Leighford High Lonely Hearts Club? I can’t keep tabs on all these pubescent gropings.’

  ‘Well, he was there, anyway.’

  ‘I heard something today. Oh, thanks.’ He took the proffered cup.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I heard Jenny ran away from home. Is that right?’

  She looked warily at him. ‘Who told you?’ she asked.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Did she?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘I was told not to.’

  ‘Oh?’ His eyebrows and hackles rose simultaneously.

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘Mrs Hyde.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m not sure you do. I’ve told the police already.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Max, you weren’t here,’ she explained.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m beginning to feel like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, as though a whole chunk of my life is missing.’

  ‘A whole chunk of Jenny’s is,’ she said, solemnly.

  ‘I want to know,’ he told her.

  ‘I told Inspector Hall I wouldn’t talk to anyone else,’ she said.

  ‘Janet,’ he held her shoulder, ‘I liked Jenny, too,’ he said.

  And she looked at him.

  And she told him.

  5

  There was no doubt about it, Janet Foster made a mean cup of cocoa. Maxwell blew the froth from the top until he realized that Janet was looking at him. Some days, when he felt at his
most self-reflective, he began to make mental lists of the odd habits that bachelorhood had imposed upon him. Blowing on his cocoa was only the tip of the iceberg. He smiled at Janet, knowing he was sparing her from his bathtime rendering of the Everley Brothers’ Greatest Hits.

  ‘So what was it all about, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Jenny wasn’t the confiding sort,’ Janet said. ‘She had that rather enigmatic smile, didn’t she? A sort of Leighford Giaconda. God knows what sort of turmoil went on behind that placid smile.’

  ‘But you had an inkling?’

  Janet propped one leg up on Maxwell’s foot-rung, balancing that by resting her towelled head on her elbow. ‘Yes. Yes, I did. I don’t suppose an old chauvinist like you believes in intuition, do you?’

  ‘Is the Pope multi-lingual?’ he asked her. This wasn’t Anthea Edwards. He knew she wouldn’t say yes.

  ‘Three days, your writ says,’ she murmured.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Three days’ absence, then we have to send out a note to parents asking why their darlings have been away.’

  ‘Diamond’s writ,’ Maxwell told her, ‘not mine.’

  ‘Well, anyway. It didn’t come to that because I saw Mrs on the Wednesday night.’

  ‘Mrs Hyde?’

  ‘Yes. You know I run an evening class at the Tech?’

  Maxwell didn’t. There was a lot, he was beginning to realize, he didn’t know.

  ‘Just basic sculpture.’ She offered him a cigarette. ‘Oh, you don’t, do you? Always surprises me, that. You may look dissolute …’

  ‘Thanks!’ He punched her gently in the shoulder.

  ‘Oh, Max,’ she laughed. ‘You’re a grand old man; you know you are. No, I think it’s sexual.’

  ‘What? Me not smoking?’

  ‘No, the people at the pottery class. They like the feel of wet clay oozing through their fingers …’ Her voice died away. For all Janet Foster was the one who’d introduced life drawing classes for the A level course, she had a rudimentary prudery somewhere.