by Penny Kline
‘Oh.’ Her fingers started stroking her lower lip. ‘I knew he had one but I’ve no idea where it is. He does private work, doesn’t he? I think that’s better, really. If you’re paying you don’t have to feel so grateful.’
‘Is that how you feel?’
‘No, not really. Well, in a way. What did he say — Jon? Did he tell you what a hopeless patient I was, how I never told him the things he wanted to know?’
I stood up and fixed the window catch. It had come adrift and I could feel cold air coming through the gap. ‘What happened, Imogen? Was it really that you didn’t like the way Jon works, or was there something else?’
She jumped. ‘What?’
‘It’s all right, calm down, you just seem very tensed up, almost as if there’s something you’re afraid to tell me.’
Her body sagged. ‘He told you? Oh, I wish he hadn’t. It was all my fault. No, not my fault. I mean, you can’t help it can you? No one can. It just sort of happens.’
‘Go on.’
She clasped her hands together, then pressed them against her mouth. Every few seconds she glanced up at me, willing me to guess what she was going to say. When she finally started talking I had to ask her to lower her voice, it was so loud they could have heard what she was saying at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Me and Jon. Jon and I. Oh, I know it’s all wrong and the last thing I want is to get him into trouble. Anyway he said we couldn’t possibly see each other, not if I was his patient. I mean, even I could see that. So I said I’d stop being a patient… ’
‘And then?’
‘Well, it’s like your doctor, isn’t it? A few months have to pass before you can see the person again, before you’re allowed. Do you know how long it is? I’ve been terribly careful, I haven’t phoned or written a letter. Honestly, it’s agony, you’ve no idea. Have you come across this kind of thing before? I’m sure you must have. Now you’ll be angry with me for coming to see you, only I didn’t just come because Jon said I couldn’t see him. I mean, it’s true about feeling faint in the seminars and everything. You do believe me?’
From the outside Bill Hazeldean’s school looked like the kind of place that persuades parents to move into the catchment area so their toddlers can be enrolled at the earliest possible moment. The buildings were single storey, painted white, with brightly coloured doors and window frames, and an adjoining playing field, surrounded by chestnut trees and a tall wooden fence.
It was four-thirty and the pupils had all gone home. When I phoned Bill to say I wanted a few words, about Ian, he had seemed far from enthusiastic, giving me an appointment time in much the same mildly exasperated voice he might have used with a troublesome parent. For a split second I had hesitated, wondering if I was doing the right thing in trying to find out more about the family while at the same time reassuring Grace that something was being done to help Bill as well as his son. And there was another reason I had been trying to find an opportunity to talk to him.
I pushed open the main door and found myself surrounded by empty pegs and shoe lockers. The faint, slightly sickly scent of poster paint, the kind that comes in big cardboard containers, combined with the familiar lingering smell of school dinners. On top of the lockers lay a large painting: scores of tiny red and white figures on an emerald green background and, just in case anyone was in doubt about the subject matter, a large banner with the words MAN UNITED. The school was for juniors, aged between eight and eleven. The infants’ school — I remembered passing it in the car — was on another site, further down the same road.
At first there seemed to be no one about, then I picked up the barely audible sound of a keyboard, which grew louder as I walked past the lockers towards a door at the end of the passage.
Behind the ribbed glass panelling a middle-aged woman sat at a desk, with a man leaning over her shoulder, pointing at something on the VDU. The woman had heard me and was looking in my direction. I tapped on the door and she sprang up and pulled it open.
‘Yes?’
‘I have an appointment with Mr Hazeldean.’
Bill stepped forward. ‘Oh, it’s you, can you wait a couple of minutes?’ He glanced at the woman, then back at me. ‘No, come on then. I shan’t be long, Marcia, if you don’t mind hanging on till a quarter-to.’
His room was across the other side of the corridor. It looked out on to the field which I could now see had been divided into a play space with a few seats and a couple of flowering shrubs, and another larger area that had been marked out as a small football pitch.
‘Now, how can I help you?’ Bill sat at his desk and gestured towards a couple of chairs. He seemed different from how I remembered him at the house in Henbury — it was probably the suit and tie — but there was something else. The bitter, cynical look in his eyes had been replaced by the business-like expression of a busy deputy head.
‘Nice school,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘Could be worse. Our head’s the type that gets invited on to every committee under the sun so I tend to get left with most of the day-to-day running of the place. If you watch the local news bulletin you’ll have seen her holding forth. Ms Shaw, she’s a big wheel in primary education.’
So he wasn’t too keen on the woman. Perhaps he had wanted the job himself although, come to think of it, I had a feeling his opinion of women in general wasn’t all that high.
‘This won’t take long,’ I said. ‘It’s about your wife. The week before she died she made an appointment to see me. I wondered if you knew what it was about.’
He looked at me in astonishment. ‘Maggie came to see you?’
‘No. She was going to but… ’
‘And she didn’t tell you why — when she made the appointment? No use asking me. I’m the last person she’d have confided in.’
‘Yes, well I just thought you might be able to help.’
‘Help?’ He spat out the word. ‘What difference does it make why she wanted to see you?’ Then he picked up a tray of papers and started sorting through, holding one up to the light then returning it to the bottom of the pile.
‘That’s not the only reason I wanted to see you,’ I said. ‘I know you’re busy and I’m sure it’s not deliberate, but whenever I visit the house you always seem to be out.’
‘I thought that was what you wanted.’ ‘You mean you’ve been staying out of the way on purpose?’
He ignored this. ‘Did Ian know you were coming here?’
‘Not precisely, but I’m pretty certain he’ll have no objection.’
‘Oh, you are, are you?’
Why was he being so hostile? Presumably he still saw me as an interfering busybody, foisted on to him and Ian by Grace Curtis. I could talk to Ian if that was what was expected these days, but for himself he wanted to be left well out of what was going on.
I hesitated. I could hardly tell him about Grace’s message about him on the answering machine. I’m worried about him. He looks so unwell. Did he look ill? Tired, a little strained, but in my experience most teachers started to go into a decline towards the end of term. At least they had fairly long holidays.
‘I just hoped you could fill me in a little,’ I said, ‘about the separation, events leading up to it, how Ian reacted.’
‘Hasn’t he told you that himself?’
‘Yes, but he seemed to think you’d be more objective.’
‘That was Ian’s choice of word?’
‘Yes.’
He laughed, and the tension between us eased a little. ‘Typical. He’ll make a good scientist. I mean he would have done. Lately he’s had some harebrained scheme to study modern languages.’
The sky had darkened but it was probably too cold to rain. Seagulls were gathering on the football pitch. Bill switched on a table lamp by his elbow and moved the shade so the pool of light pointed in my direction. Raised up high on his revolving chair he looked taller, less gnome-like. He had cut himself shaving and a single drop of dark blood had dried hard, close t
o his ear. He was a little pale but I wouldn’t have described him as looking unwell. Still, I had only met him after Maggie’s death. Clearly, from Grace’s point of view, there had been a dramatic change in his appearance.
‘Fire away, then,’ he said briskly, but with a more friendly tone to his voice. ‘What did you want to know? You ask the questions and I’ll answer them as best I can. How does Ian feel about living with me? Has he said anything? I’m not much good as a housekeeper, I’m afraid.’
‘I think he worries about you.’
‘Worries about me?’ He spun the revolving seat till he was almost facing the window.
‘Children often worry about their parents,’ I said, ‘particularly if there’s a divorce.’ ‘Separation. Maggie and I hadn’t got as far as a divorce, although I expect it would have come later. So what you really want is for me to tell you about Maggie. I’m not sure where to begin. Why not ask Grace Curtis? Grace and Terry probably understood her better than I did.’ He paused, his lips moving but no sound coming out, then he started talking as if he was repeating a story he had told many times before. ‘Maggie was pregnant when we got married. She wanted the baby, we both did, there was never any question of an abortion, but of course it meant the end of any kind of proper career. She could’ve farmed it out, I suppose, but we had no relatives living nearby and she didn’t want it left with a stranger five days a week.’ ‘No, I can understand that,’ I said. It was strange hearing Ian referred to as ‘it’, but perhaps he was thinking of the time before the baby was born.
‘She loved Ian,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t have harmed him for the world. The separation — it’s not like splitting up when the child’s still very young. Of course current research says the parents should stay together, even though they’re at loggerheads. It’s better for the children, I mean, although I thought the findings sounded highly dubious. Ask children what they think, or adults for that matter, they give you the answers they think you want to hear.’
A car door banged and the seagulls rose into the air, then settled again further up the pitch. It was warm inside the building, too warm, but outside the wind was moving the branches of the trees. I wondered if the kids were allowed to collect up the conkers, whether they got told off for throwing sticks at them before they were ready.
‘Ian and Maggie,’ said Bill, ‘they were so close I doubt the separation affected their relationship that much. After all he’ll be grown up in a couple of years’ time. Then he can visit his mother just like any other grown-up child.’ He broke off, clenching his jaw. ‘I mean, he could have done if some bastard hadn’t… You haven’t heard anything, have you? No, why would you? I warned Maggie, you know, warned her she was heading for trouble.’
‘What kind of trouble?’
His head jerked up. ‘Oh, it was ages ago, when she was doing her first degree. I suppose she felt she had to make up for lost time. A mature student who was more student-like than a school-leaver. Mature! That’s a misnomer if ever there was one. Wearing herself out, into every good cause, every pressure group, taking part in rag day dressed in a ridiculous… Everything about her — she was like a convert to a new religion. God, it was totally impossible. I thought I was going… ’ He pulled himself up short and glared at me, annoyed with himself for giving away his true feelings when he had tried so hard to put up an immovable barrier between the two of us. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last. ‘You don’t want to hear all this rubbish. Ancient history, nothing to do with poor old Ian.’
‘But that was when the two of you started to drift apart, when Maggie became a student?’
I had taken a risk, invited an angry reaction, but he didn’t seem to have heard.
‘Education,’ he said. ‘The leading, the bringing out. Is that how you felt about your education, or was it more like a mixture of brainwashing and regurgitating other people’s books?’
He smiled. There was a china mug on his desk, filled with pencils and felt-tipped pens. Selecting the pencil with the sharpest point he started writing on a sheet of paper tom from a pad. While I waited I thought about Janice and Trev’s son, and wondered how Bill would have handled his disruptive behaviour. Was Brad’s teacher really too inexperienced to keep control? Was it true that some of the kids had to leam English when they arrived at school for the first time? Did lots of the children play up or was Brad a particular problem?
‘There.’ Bill pushed the paper towards me. ‘A selection of papers published in education journals during the last six months. What do you think?’
I skimmed the list. ‘Yes, I get the message. What you’re saying is that much academic research has very little relevance to classroom teaching. Maggie’s was important though, wasn’t it? Not for a school like this perhaps, but in some of the inner city comprehensives I imagine discipline’s the major problem.’
‘You’ve been talking to Terry,’ he said, crumpling the paper into a ball and tossing it into a drawer. ‘Terry’s in favour of teaching parents how to train their children like performing seals.’ He stood up and opened the door. ‘Can’t spare any more time, I’m afraid, my secretary’s waiting for me in the office. Incidentally, I’m not sure what Ian’s told you about me. The night of the fire… No, that’s hardly your problem. Your job’s helping Ian get over his mother’s death. Right?’
Chapter Eleven
I had Janice Baker’s address on a slip of paper: 204 Cardigan Street, Bristol 5. There was no such place. A Cardigan Road near Westbury-on-Trym but I knew that couldn’t be it. They lived in Easton — Trev had mentioned how he took Bradley to Eastville Park most weekends, for a kickabout — and I remembered how Janice had said, since they couldn’t afford a car, it was lucky my office wasn’t too far away.
Perhaps I had written it down wrong but it seemed unlikely. It was true I had left the office in a hurry. I should have made a note of their phone number, that way I could have rung up and checked the address. Janice’s call, cancelling their appointment, had been accompanied by a fair amount of background noise. Bradley playing up, refusing to go to school? But it hadn’t sounded like a child, more like an adult, crying. Pulling up by the next phone box I rang Heather and asked her to check the Bakers’ number. They weren’t on the phone.
‘All right then, let me read you their address. I must have copied it down wrong. Two hundred and four Cardigan Street. Is that right or — ’
‘That’s what’s on the card, Anna. What’s the problem?’
‘I’ve checked the street map and there’s no Cardigan Street in this area or anywhere else this side of the city. I thought it was just off Whitehall Road. Look, don’t worry, I’ll ask around, see if anyone knows the Bakers.’
‘You’ll be lucky.’
‘Yes, well, at least I’ll have tried.’
The search was hopeless. Where to begin? I stopped at what seemed to be the only corner shop left in the neighbourhood, but neither the proprietor nor any of the customers knew of a family called Baker. A woman with a knitted hat pulled down over her eyebrows remembered an old man called Billy Baker who had lived in Freemantle Road during the war and lost a leg in an air raid. ‘You know the one I mean, Win. Short and dumpy, had a son who joined the navy.’ Any minute now I was going to find myself listening to reminiscences going back sixty years or more.
‘The people I’m looking for have a little boy,’ I said quickly. ‘Bradley. He’s seven.’
The woman behind the counter shook her head. ‘There’s a Bradley lives in number eighty-one but he’s only ten months. Funny name, Bradley. Like the name of a place. Chelsea, Chester. Never come across one called Eastville. Clifton, now there’s one that’ll be coming into fashion.’
The shop looked as if it was struggling to survive. There were empty spaces on the shelves and the fruit and veg looked distinctly past their sell-by dates: bananas with blackened skins, a box of carrots that had started to grow whiskers. I bought a newspaper and a bar of plain chocolate and left, tearing the paper off the chocol
ate and eating two squares, then two more.
My car was parked near a school. It was mid-morning and the kids were out in the playground. Boys one end, girls the other, although the segregation was obviously by choice. The place was about as different from Bill Hazeldean’s school as it was possible to imagine. A tall Victorian building with bars on the top-floor windows and brickwork that needed repointing. The main door to the building was closed and a man in grey overalls was up a ladder in front of it, fixing some wires, while at the same time trying to converse with a group of boys who looked too large to be still at primary school.
Some of the younger children had attached themselves to a teacher, who was walking round making sure no one was being bullied. Part of her face was hidden by a thick blue scarf but what could be seen of her looked frozen. Miss! Miss! How did teachers stand it? Sticky hands pulling at their clothes, endless demands for attention — and jokes, the kind eight-year-old kids seem to find hysterically funny. What did the man say when his clock fell out of the window?… How time flies! Get it, Miss?
I could ask the teacher if she knew a boy called Bradley Baker but she would want to know who I was. Recently there had been a spate of reports in Bristol: a woman posing as a health visitor who had turned up at people’s houses unannounced and asked to inspect the baby. If I hung about by the school gates for too long it could lead to all kinds of trouble. In any case if Janice and Trev had decided they no longer wanted to see me that was their business; however concerned about them I might feel it wasn’t my job to put pressure on them to return.
I tried to remember Janice’s phone call in detail. Some of the background noise could have been passing traffic, but there were other sounds. Scrabbling feet, Trev trying to stop her making the call? But why would he want to do that?
A small girl with straggly fair hair and four or five gold studs in her ears approached the spot where I was standing, calling to her friend to accompany her.
‘You brought Stacey’s swimming costume?’
