Meeting Lydia

by Linda MacDonald

  “D’you want it?” he taunted, waving it at her, calling her name, that name, and shaking his thick brown fringe with a flick of his head.

  “Yes,” she said, falling into the trap.

  “Come and get it then,” he held it out to her, then when she was just within reach, he snatched it away, smirked and put it carefully into his desk.

  Marianne went back to her seat, her brain racing with a mixture of hatred and anxiety. When Mr Jenks came in, she was the only one without a text book. “I’ve left it at home,” she lied when questioned.

  “It’s no use there, is it,” said Jenky, kindly. “Remember it tomorrow.”

  She breathed a sigh of relief.

  Marianne was younger than everyone else. Not just a little bit, but a whole year younger than most of the class. This was a place where the brightest were fast-tracked through the system, which was fine during lessons, but didn’t take account of social skills. Or lack of them. No wonder she was lost. She still had no idea how to get on with boys and with no friend to talk to, she watched instead.

  That’s how she came to notice so much about Edward Harvey.

  Edward Benjamin Harvey, with his slight build and glasses, and newly arrived from a Lakeland village, was not like the rest. Apart from having an intellect substantially more impressive than anyone else she had come across in school to date and that she knew she respected even at age nine, he never called her by her degrading nickname – in fact he never called her anything in the whole time they were at school; never stole her satchel or her Bible or maths equipment. Indeed as far as Marianne could see, Edward Harvey never did anything that most of the other boys did at least some of the time.

  She watched him sitting quietly, reading, ignored by the others in the class and wondered if, somewhere out in the playground or late in the evening when the boarders were enjoying some free time before they went to bed, he was bullied too.

  Once she was sitting in the brown leather armchair in the hall, waiting to be taken home by the school taxi service – a minibus known affectionately as The Tank – and Mrs Russell was showing Edward Harvey’s parents out of the building. Voices were concerned, and hushed, but that made Marianne listen all the harder. She heard words like “nightmares” and “sleepwalking”, surmised that they were talking about Edward, and next time she saw him sitting reading on his own in the classroom, she thought perhaps he had a tortured soul like her.

  Did he suffer as she did? Certainly he seemed lost in those first few months in the third form. If only they could talk and share the burdens of their plights. But that could never be. At least she had an ally of a sort, albeit a silent one, and with his academic performance way ahead of most of the rest, here was someone with whom to compete in tests and exams. The cries of ‘swot’ no longer hurt so much for she didn’t feel so different any more.

  Years later it would always be ‘me and Edward Harvey’ when she told the tales of the Latin lessons and the demonic teacher Mr Wallis. But she never thought their paths would cross again and his name was confined to a memory store along with other mythical beings.

  5

  Memories

  Marianne was scurrying around the kitchen putting together a packed lunch to take to her first day back to work at the college. Late afternoon summer sunshine glanced through the trees in the garden and cast lemon-drop patterns on the draining board. The pungent smell of tinned salmon drifted in the air.

  “When will Dad be back?” asked Holly, absently drying dishes. She was wearing her hair in two plaits tied with blue ribbons and looked girlish in a short denim skirt, pink vest and trainers.

  “Later this evening, he said. He’s stopping off on The Isle of Purbeck.”

  “Why there?”

  “One of the best places for fossils. Don’t you remember? We went there for a holiday when you were eight. Stayed in a farmhouse near Worth Matravers.”

  “Oh yeah … And Dad said we were going to find a dinosaur! I believed him too!”

  Marianne smiled, remembering happy days watching Holly running along the cliff paths or scraping about in the shingle below. Without a brother or sister, they always tried extra hard to entertain her, to keep her from being lonely.

  What if I am pregnant? What if the brother or sister is within me now?

  She swallowed as panic and nausea gripped her stomach.

  “Mum? You’re not going to get divorced, are you?”

  “Heavens no!” She was shocked at the very mention of the word. Surely not.

  Holly continued: “He’s always somewhere else … off walking … or at the pub … even in bed? I’ve hardly seen him this summer.”

  Perhaps she wants reassurance before she goes away?

  “He’ll be fine when he starts work again.” Marianne tried to sound upbeat, but in truth, she wasn’t convinced.

  “You will say if things get worse, won’t you? You won’t suddenly tell me when it’s a fait accompli – like Jodie’s Mum did?” Knives and spoons jingled as Holly flung them one after the other into the drawer.

  “All couples have arguments,” said Marianne.

  “You should go out with him, Mum.”

  “I haven’t time.”

  “Of course you have. You’ve time to surf Friends Reunited.” “That’s your fault! You started me on that!” “Who are you looking for anyway?”

  Marianne wondered what Holly was thinking. “Oh, no-one in particular.”

  “C’mon Ma …I’ve seen you searching and searching. Tell me! Old boyfriends?”

  She felt herself going hot again, but she wasn’t sure whether she was blushing. She had looked in the mirror a few such times, but had seen no tinges of pink to give the game away.

  Please be the lesser of the evils …

  “I do wish you wouldn’t put the fish slice in with the cutlery. I can never find it when you’ve been drying.”

  “Mum,” persisted Holly. “Who? You’ve been on that site every night. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

  “Just alleviating the boredom when you’re with your friends and your father’s out. And it was you who said what an ‘extra’ thing it was to do.”

  “So who, then?”

  “Oh, someone I knew at Brocklebank Hall. Edward Harvey.” It was safer to mention him than ex-boyfriend Nick.

  “Is he in those old photos?” “Probably.” Marianne knew that he was in two of them and possibly three.

  “Show me.”

  Marianne finished wrapping her salmon sandwiches, complete with bones for added calcium, and went rummaging about in a drawer in the living room.

  It was an elongated black and white photograph which she extracted from a tight roll. It persisted in returning to shape and resisted any attempts to flatten it.

  Holly looked on, expectantly, tea-towel over her shoulder.

  “Here, you hold this end,” said Marianne.

  Between them, they unravelled the roll and laid it down on the table by the window. Holly anchored her end with a fruit bowl and scanned the black and white rows of uniformed schoolchildren lined up against the backdrop of the rhododendron bushes on the Brocklebank drive. There were fixed expressions on most of the faces – some smiling nervously, others stony-faced as if resigned to their fate. Some were neat and tidy with hair slicked down and blazers buttoned. One or two were a little dishevelled with ties awry and collars crumpled.

  “Oh, there you are! Bless! You don’t look very happy. How old were you?”

  “About ten.” Marianne stared at the rows of pupils, mostly boys, and her throat tightened as she remembered.

  “Which one is Edward then?”

  “The intellectual-looking one.”

  “There?” Holly spotted him immediately. “Oh my … Harry Potter! He could’ve made a fortune in the films. And he’s better looking than – what’s-his-name.”

  “D’you think so?” Marianne smiled.

  “Yeah. Finer features. Did you fancy him?”

  “Ho
lly!”

  Holly grinned and made a whooping noise, removing the bowl from the photo which sprang back into a roll against Marianne’s fingers.

  “Wonder what he’s like now. Pierce Brosnan with glasses!”

  “Don’t be daft.” Marianne felt the heat again.

  “He could be.”

  “Or he could be bald and have a rampant beer-gut.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It shouldn’t matter.”

  “But does it?”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, this is all hypothetical as he’s not on the site and there’s virtually no chance of us ever seeing each other again. And we were very young. Hardly ever spoke to each other.”

  “So why him? Why are you looking for him? What about the others?”

  Marianne paused and wondered that very question. “Because I thought he had hidden depths. I thought we would have had things to say. I wanted to talk to him, but I never did.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was never the right time. Then we went our separate ways and it was too late.”

  “But if you never spoke, why did you think you would have got on?”

  “I saw him with others. I heard what he had to say in the lessons. I felt he understood—” She stopped abruptly, on the verge of saying more than she intended. “He was clever, and even though we weren’t friends, he was never horrible to me.”

  “So it wasn’t just because he looked cute?”

  “At the time I didn’t think he was particularly cute. Not standard cute, anyway. I admired his mind!”

  “And you were ten?”

  “Nine, ten, eleven.”

  “He sounds nice.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “So you’ll keep on looking?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Will you mail him, if you find him?”

  “I’d like to know what happened to him, that’s all. I’d like to know if he’s doing wonderful things – fulfilling the promise – unlike me. If he writes some notes by his name, that will tell me all I need to know.”

  That night when Holly was out with friends and her husband had still not returned from his mini-break, she went back to the Brocklebank photograph and gazed again at the young Edward Harvey, touching his hair and feeling it clean and boyishly soft. Then she trawled again through the pages of faceless names on Friends Reunited.

  Memories were strange things: paper fragments, some black with jagged edges and some softly curving and brightly coloured. Edward Harvey was one of the latter. Edward Harvey was nice at a time when boys were anything but.

  When she closed down the computer, she took out her journal with its plum cover and gold stitching. She went downstairs, slipped off her sandals, collapsed on the sofa and began to write.

  Still no sign of Edward Harvey on FR. He’s probably not the FR type. But now I’ve started, I really want to know what’s become of him. Showed Holly the old photo of us. It was so long ago, but that frightened girl is still within me. I hearing her crying sometimes; I feel her pain when they call her names.

  And her mind drifted back to the Latin lessons in the third form …

  6

  Tacite Patiuntur

  It is half past eight in the morning and having left her coat in the main schoolhouse, Marianne climbs the steps into the Hut. Her breathing is fast and shallow and her eyes are anxious. This week it is her turn on the sweeping rota. She is partnered with Edward Harvey and together they are responsible for cleaning the classroom floor. She is relieved not to be paired with one of the bullies, but even so, since the beginning of term she has dreaded this week, fearing that the task will be left up to her, or that Edward will be embarrassed, or that he may start treating her like the others do.

  Yesterday in maths they were cutting out shapes from graph paper for an activity on symmetry. At the end of the lesson, Mr Russell commented on the state of the floor, now covered with clippings.

  “Who’s sweeping this week?” he said, marching over to the rota that was pinned on the notice board. “Hayward and Harvey …” He had looked at Marianne and Edward. “Can we do something about this before school tomorrow?”

  Marianne spent a restless night worrying about where the cleaning equipment was kept and whom she should ask.

  But today she can hear the sounds of furniture being moved and when she enters the classroom, she sees Edward wielding a brush. She hovers uncertainly. He will think she is completely useless.

  “What shall I do?” asks Marianne, dropping her satchel by the partition.

  “Put the chairs on the desks,” he instructs, looking up momentarily before continuing brushing. It is the first time he has spoken directly to her since arriving in the school.

  Marianne follows him round the room, lifting chairs on and off desks as indicated while Edward brushes beneath. He is fully focused on the task in hand, paying particular attention to the corners of the room.

  “Dustpan,” he says, gesturing towards an old metal object on the teacher’s desk. Marianne dutifully holds it on the floor while he sweeps the debris into it. The process is repeated two or three times until all the dust and fragments of paper are gathered and emptied into the waste bin. The job is completed in no time.

  “Thank you,” says Edward before disappearing with the equipment to the main building.

  Marianne is relieved and all her anxieties drain away. She should have known better; should have had more faith in him. Only Edward would have taken so calmly the fact that he had to complete the task with a girl.

  Among other things, Edward Harvey was very good at Latin, and so was Marianne. Edward and she tussled with the more difficult parts of the translations in their orange-backed reader Civis Romanus, while their peers sat back in their chairs.

  Mr Wallis was a teacher of the old-school type. Reptilian, humourless and strict, there was something almost extraterrestrial about him. His hair was greasy, sparse and black in colour and he wore the same expression almost all the time, neither smiling nor frowning, but blandly self-satisfied behind wire-rimmed glasses. He looked rather like a gecko as he stealthily paced the floorboards of the Hut with Bible, history book or Latin text, firing questions directly at particular individuals and not letting them get away with silence.

  When he approached Marianne’s space and leaned across to pass judgement on her work, she noticed the damp pallor of his skin and the whiteness of his knuckles as he gripped his red pen with fingers and thumb circling close to the point, ready to score the page with a tick or scathing ‘rubbish’. There was a faintly sour smell about him and his proximity made her shiver.

  One winter’s morning, he was in a particularly bad mood and refused to help them with a piece of Latin to English translation.

  “Yes, Marianne,” he said, nodding at her in his supercilious way, expectant of an answer. She tried and failed.

  “Any thoughts, Harvey?” he looked at Edward, usually so reliable, but his effort was also dismissed. Mr Wallis scanned the rest of the class without much hope and one or two answers were attempted and shot down with a disdainful shake of his head.

  The bell went and the children began to shift in their seats and gather up their books and pens.

  “We’re not going,” said Mr Wallis in a calm but menacing voice. “Not until we’ve finished this paragraph.” He seemed to be taking some sadistic pleasure in their discomfort.

  Even then Marianne sensed the injustice of it. They hadn’t misbehaved. They’d done their homework and tried their best.

  All through the break Edward and Marianne tried and tried to find the answer with no help from Wally, and the rest waiting helplessly.

  Marianne felt Pete Glanville’s foot kicking the underside of her chair. She daren’t turn round.

  Barnaby Sproat hissed through his teeth, “C’mon Harvey,” and scowled as if it was Edward’s fault that the class were being punished.

  Marianne couldn’t understand where they were going wrong. They had tr
ied every option. Why wouldn’t Mr Wallis help them?

  They were brought back at lunchtime as well, but still they couldn’t get it right. It crossed Marianne’s mind that they might be coming back for days, stuck on this same sentence among the orange covers of Civis Romanus, along with Romulus and Remus, Tarquinius Superbus and the Trojan Horse. Minutes dragged by, playtime lost, and gradually Edward and Marianne became silent as all their efforts failed. Still Wally refused to back down, insisting they return to the Hut after games at the end of the day.

  Tired from running about on the hockey field, the class gathered once more. The skies were darkening and Marianne was worried about missing her lift home in The Tank. There seemed no hope of achieving the desired result, and none of the children spoke despite Mr Wallis’s attempts to extract an answer. In desperation, he had no choice but to help them and the class breathed a sigh of relief.

  But Marianne was puzzled. It seemed that the correct answer was one they had already tried – tried more than once. But no one would ever dare to question Wally, and the class dispersed.

  It wasn’t the only time that Mr Wallis had shown a streak of cruelty.

  An incident with one of the boys was permanently branded on her mind. It was an unremarkable day in many ways when Timothy Hopkins did something, or said something, undetectable to the rest of the class, that sent Mr Wallis into a rage the like of which Marianne had never seen. First there was a loud bark of: “You boy!” An explosion that made the children jump in their seats and look with disbelief at the scene unfolding in front of them. Mr Wallis sprang like a hare from his position in front of the blackboard and over to Timothy’s desk. There were growls and unintelligible mumblings and curses coming from between his clenched teeth while he lashed out at Timothy, boxing his ears relentlessly. The punishment seemed to go on for ages while the other children looked on in mute horror, and Timothy became redder and redder in the face and started to cry.

  When at last the beating stopped, Mr Wallis stood up straight, lowered his shoulders, picked up the text book from which he had been reading, turned his back on Timothy and calmly resumed the lesson as if nothing had happened.