Meeting Lydia

by Linda MacDonald

  Marianne was shocked into silence for the rest of the lesson, even feeling sorry for Timothy as he tried to quell the tears. And ever after, the class were wary and guarded; Glanville and Lanigan keeping their feet under control and even Barnaby Sproat resisting his sotto voce jibes at lower-ranked pupils.

  “Each cigarette cuts fourteen minutes off a person’s life,” said Wally during one registration session, fulfilling his pastoral role as form teacher with a little health education.

  Marianne was disturbed by this piece of propaganda. Too young to question its validity, and with two parents who smoked, she began a series of complex mathematical calculations, firstly estimating the age at which her parents might die without having smoked, and then calculating the number of minutes she would have to subtract. It was a complicated process full of divisions by sixty, then twenty-four, then seven, then four, then twelve. Time and again she lost track and had to go back to the beginning. Much later she wondered if Mr Wallis knew the impact of such information on someone so young and impressionable. If it was designed to stop her from smoking, the thought had never crossed her mind. All it did was to create an anxiety that lasted for years.

  Yes, Mr Wallis was unforgettable and unforgivable, and it is in some ways surprising that Edward and Marianne learned so much in such a climate. But although lacking in compassion, Wally was good at imparting knowledge.

  Edward and Marianne were at an age when information percolated effortlessly into their brains like rain on rocks made of limestone. They vied for the top position both in Latin and in the form as a whole. The first term that they were together, the form prize went to Marianne. She was top in Latin, French and maths and second in English and scripture. Her teachers wrote glowing comments on her report which was vastly improved on those for the previous year when she had been embarrassed into underperforming by the relentless taunts every time she did well. She was once again showing the promise of her first two years with Mrs Swift; again enjoying her work and the healthy competition of being tested.

  The position was repeated the following term, but by the end of term three, perhaps inevitably, Edward took the glory and although Marianne was disappointed for herself, she felt it was deserved. And after that he never looked back. Here was a young chap going somewhere, and in years to come she would ever be proud that she had held her own in his company and that they had spurred each other on to greater things during what was undoubtedly a crucial time in their intellectual development.

  Marianne thought she might have had a crush on Edward Harvey. It was very innocent and born out of respect for his mind and the fact that he never treated her unkindly.

  7

  Marianne

  Marianne was a Sun sign Capricorn with an Aries Ascendant and a Libran Moon. Astrology guru Linda Goodman said there are two sorts of Capricorn: the tethered goat content to nibble around a stake in the ground, and the wild mountain goat leaping from rock to rock and scaling the heights. Marianne was the first of these, but had dreams of breaking the chain and leaping up the hill.

  Brocklebank Hall was the chain; a chain thus far too thick for her to crack.

  Marianne remembered Holly’s observation about the photograph of Edward Harvey, then realised she was smiling and went all hot again.

  Pierce Brosnan indeed!

  This heat business was getting her down. There was definitely something amiss. The thought of being pregnant made her scream inside. A long, empty howling noise, like wolves in the moonlight; an assault on the ears; a cry of desperate pain.

  If it was the other business … the M word … Well, she wasn’t ready for that yet. Wasn’t expecting it until she was nearer fifty. It was the slippery slope of decay. In the animal world, only human females lived significantly beyond their reproductive years. They never used to. The price to pay was bits dropping off. Not yet, please. Now was far too soon.

  I will have to start wearing layers … Wearing cardigans! Oh God!

  She was home alone again, cooling off after playing a game of tennis in the park with her friend Taryn. She could have asked Taryn back for supper, but Taryn, as flighty as ever, was going out with some man.

  In the back garden, under the fruit trees heavy with ripening apples, she sat on a wooden seat with her journal. Sometimes she bit on the end of her pencil and sometimes she drummed her fingers on her cheek.

  I wonder what Edward Harvey’s like now. I wonder if he’s doing great things … What happened to my great things?

  She began to write.

  “She went to a boys’ prep school, you know.”

  “Did she now! That tells us a thing or two. Gives us some insight; throws some light.”

  “She lived on the outside of the action until she was ten. They said she was the only girl in the class for a year and that she was bullied.”

  “Poor kid … Prep school has been known to fuck up the best, never mind a girl in a world of boys.”

  “She was deeply affected, or so they said, but she hid it well. If you met her in later years, you’d never have known. She didn’t even know it herself until she was almost forty-six.”

  “But she didn’t continue in the private sector, did she?”

  “After the prep school, she went to the local Grammar. They called her a posh bird at first – or some such – but eventually she had friends and boyfriends. She survived.”

  “It must’ve been like a holiday camp after what she’d been through.”

  “By the time she went to Sheffield she was just like the rest. Not a trace of lah-di-dah.”

  “Blah,” said Marianne out loud. “She read psychology, yeah? Psychology, the seventies pseudo-subject for posers and the mad …”

  “That’s a trifle unkind.”

  “… And the do-gooding fraternity. We mustn’t forget them.”

  “You’re not overly fond of psychologists then?”

  “We managed without them for hundreds of years …”

  “After the degree, she became a teacher. Went down to the London Institute and trained in Secondary English.”

  “Why would a school phobic want to go back to the classroom?”

  “One of the treatments for phobias is ‘flooding’, so I understand. Maybe she was subconsciously looking for the cure.”

  “Or maybe she’s a masochist.”

  “Of course, her family didn’t approve. They had her all lined up for a career in the law like her brother.”

  “I didn’t know she had a brother.”

  “Louis is seven years older. He went to Brocklebank too, but left as she arrived.”

  “Louis and Marianne …”

  “Their maternal grandmother was French.”

  “So why didn’t she go into law?”

  “Rumour said it was lack of confidence.”

  “When I met her at the college in 1999 she seemed perfectly confident.”

  “It was all a veneer.”

  “Miss Efficiency, I would have called her.”

  “On the surface, yes, but a bundle of neuroses within. I think deep down, she was frightened of criticism; frightened of failure.”

  “Focused and organised, they said. Stones were never left unturned by Marianne.”

  “But you have to agree, she wasn’t ambitious.”

  “I have to agree.”

  “So she started out teaching English in a school in Chislehurst and later in an FE college in Bromley.”

  “During which time Holly was born and she worked part-time, gradually picking up the psychology teaching as her hours increased.”

  “And then in 1998 she began working as a full-time teacher of psychology at North Kent Sixth Form College in Beckenham.”

  Then Marianne thought who is this ‘she’? Is she me or my alter ego? She put down her pencil and closed the journal. She was aware of birds twittering and of one of her tabby cats in pouncing pose beneath a rose bush.

  The journal was something she started when her world began to unravel earlier in th
e year. Journals are dangerous things, but how else can one hold the thoughts of a moment; thoughts that float like soap-bubbles and evaporate into nothing if they’re not written down? She had always liked to write; to scribble her musings for future reference. Sometimes she wrote short stories and sometimes poems. When she was young, she wrote diaries, but she threw them away when she was thirty because she didn’t want anyone to see her childish ramblings after she was gone.

  She would really like to write a book: a novel about bullying inspired by Brocklebank Hall. But she didn’t know where to start. She had no plot. All she could do for now was jot down odd disjointed thoughts and dialogue when the inspiration struck. One day, she hoped, the mists would clear and she would put it all together. In the meantime there was a new term starting and her mind kept flitting to teaching, lesson planning and the avoidance of negative residuals.

  Negative residuals happened when results were less than those predicted by students’ previous exam success. They were the new buzzwords at work along with differentiation, baseline grades, targets setting, and benchmarks. If you really wanted to impress, you would reel them all off in the same sentence. They were what Ofsted inspectors fussed about and Principals agonised over, herding their Heads of Department toward a common belief that failure was no longer just an unclassified grade, but a negative residual as well. Of course it was all of questionable validity, but senior management teams throughout the land were now being driven by statistics and this message cascaded down to the teachers, the classroom and the students.

  Marianne went back inside the house. Still no sign of husband or daughter; still no text messages or phone calls. What a pity Taryn was otherwise engaged.

  She fixed herself some pasta with a pancetta, onion, and tomato sauce. Soon the smell of garlic and oregano drifted appetisingly in the air. Tagliatelle Cavalli was christened after a friend who gave her the recipe. She added the pasta to the sauce, tipped the result into a shallow bowl, grated some Parmesan cheese on top and took it out into the garden with a novel that she kept behind one of the cushions on her chair in the living room. She sat with fork in one hand and book in the other.

  This particular novel, she read only in times of solitude. Her husband didn’t approve of any fiction unless it was worthy of critical acclaim. He was a reader of Dickens and Tolstoy; of Louis de Bernières and Iris Murdoch. He told Marianne that anything less than the erudite or memorable was not worth the time and effort. Consequently a string of classics and Booker Prize winners graced her bedside table, while she became a closet reader of blockbusters, hidden in various locations around the house. If she heard his key in the lock while she was immersed in some fantasy romp, she would deposit it under the sofa and grab a copy of The Times.

  Her husband would have been surprised at her deception. Even more so if he discovered that this was only one of several things he didn’t know about his wife.

  8

  The Worst and the Best of Times

  On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons throughout the winter months in the third form, Marianne is usually dressed in a navy blue divided skirt, pale blue Aertex shirt and red socks – the Osprays house colours. Carrying her boots and shin pads, she makes her way from the upstairs changing room in the main building, down the central staircase and to the back door. She is with two other girls, Abi and Janice.

  Abi Ross is a new girl, with copper-coloured hair. She is a year older than Marianne and in Form Four. She is funny and clever and Marianne and she have quickly become friends. For the first time since arriving in the school aged five, Marianne has a friend she would have chosen if she had ever had the choice; no longer making do with whoever happened to be there. Now she feels less out of synchrony with her peers.

  All three girls carry hockey sticks. Outside the door, they sit on the step and put on their boots and pads, glancing at the sky to see if rain might curtail their games. Then they hobble on the path past the tennis court and through the hedge that leads to the playing-fields. The older girls look relaxed as they part company with Marianne and head off towards the larger of the two sports fields on the hill overlooking the town of Derwentbridge.

  The younger members of the school are gathering on the nearer, smaller field and with a final glance at her friends, Marianne joins them. It is grey and misty and the ground is like a swamp from the November rains. Every step sinks in with a squelching noise and splatters muddy droplets up her legs. The field slopes slightly towards one of the goalposts and a pool of water is beginning to accumulate. Marianne is pleased she is playing in a wing position where she can stay out of the way of the wet.

  Jeremy Lanigan and Pete Glanville are practising bullying-off using a fir cone that has fallen from one of the pines at the edge of the field. Lanigan swipes his stick in the direction of Glanville’s ankles, missing the fir cone deliberately. Other boys run about shouting and playing chase. Barnaby Sproat and Willie Colquhoun are limbering up by racing each other between the goalpost and the field boundary. Both excel at sport and take games lessons seriously. Cries of “Well done Bas,” will soon be heard echoing across the field in the damp, wintry air. Marianne thinks it is so unfair that excellence in sport is revered by peers while academic success is scorned. She lurks by the sidelines, hoping not to be noticed, but soon she is spotted by Lanigan who looks at Glanville and nods in her direction.

  A furtive glance down the track towards the school to see if Mr Wallis is approaching and then they swagger up to Marianne, each hooking a hockey stick around one of her ankles and pulling in opposite directions until she sits down in the mud.

  It hurts a bit, but more than that she feels humiliated. The boys saunter off laughing and waving their sticks, glancing across the pitch to check that their action has been noted by King Cockerel Sproat, then looking at her over their shoulders and spitting on the grass.

  Marianne looks down and sighs. She is angry but feels helpless. Whenever this happens – and it happens nearly every hockey session, twice a week – she wants to lash out, but fears the consequences. Who would come to her rescue if they attacked her?

  Such incidents and others like them were to fester in the depths of Marianne’s consciousness throughout the rest of her schooldays, her college days and her working life. Prep school has a culture where bullying is accepted as the norm and laughed about in later years as something that is ‘character building’. What about the muffled tears under bedclothes in the dormitories; the nightmares, the bedwetting, the degradation and humiliation? What sort of character does that build?

  When she was older, Marianne questioned the wisdom of her parents at sending her there.

  “Your grandmother’s decision,” said her mother in a clipped tone that suggested she had little say in the matter. This was her paternal grandmother, and not the one who lived in France. “Your grandmother thought the state option would be too rough for you.”

  How ironic.

  Sometimes Marianne wished she had spoken up; made more of a fuss, but there were good things she would have missed if she had been elsewhere. And elsewhere might have been just as bad or worse. If she had gone elsewhere, she wouldn’t have known Abi or had the experience of a teacher like Mr Jenks.

  Mr Jenks – or ‘Jenky’ as he was affectionately called – taught French, art and English and was always dreaming up some entertaining lessons that promoted creativity and imbued knowledge almost without the children realising. He was a tall man with large feet and curly hair. Marianne remembered his brown leather shoes and green socks and the way he said “Attagirl” to her and no one else. She didn’t know what it meant exactly, but knew it was a sign of praise and encouragement. Lessons with Jenky always passed quickly and were sometimes quite extraordinary.

  In the winter in the art lessons, he organised the class into painting murals on the top halves of the zig-zag partitions in the Hut. On one side, half the group created a night time harbour scene with blue-black skies and boats. On the other side, rolling hills and a
green landscape with dry-stone walls and sheep. Jenky, who was clearly a talented artist, sketched the outline and later added the details while the children daubed larger blocks of colour into the background.

  Marianne and Edward were each assigned areas of sky at the top of the harbour mural. This required standing on desks and balancing precariously to fill their brushes with paint, trying not to shower the rest of the team who were working on various bits below. On the other side of the room, Barnaby Sproat and his gang attacked their landscape with gusto and it wasn’t long before paint was being flicked and faces were freckled with green. A sharp word from Jenky was needed to calm them down.

  In spring, Mr Jenks breezed into the classroom in his sports jacket, heavy dark-framed glasses on his nose and looked excitedly at the children as if he was up to something.

  “Good morning, everybody.”

  It was an English lesson, but without any further word, he drew what looked like an outline map on the blackboard. He turned to the class who were now sitting expectantly, some a little red-faced and short of breath from the game of tag that had been going on around the desks just minutes before. They were used to surprises from Jenky.

  “This is the as yet undiscovered island of Wynlandia. It consists of two parts.” He turned back to the map and drew an irregular line down the middle. “On the left is the territory of Brockleland, and on the right is Banquaroon … You, my friends,” he continued, with a wide sweep of his arm, “are the Brockleonians, and the fourth formers next door are the Banquese.”

  The class were smiling broadly, wondering what was coming next.

  Mr Jenks continued: “We need to add some detail to the map.” He took some coloured chalk and began expertly drawing in a mountain range and a lake from which rivers flowed in all directions to the sea. Around the coastline he shaded blue, and then placed a large white cross offshore to the east.