‘Enjoy the view, creep?’ I snapped at him, and the man – tall, around thirty-five, with furtive eyes and a Magnum moustache – retreated hastily behind the balustrade. The boys on the staircase gave me a look of mingled surprise and grudging respect. I recognized two of the boys from Four Upper S that morning; Persimmon and another boy, a rather mousy boy with a fringe and with glasses taped at one corner.
Seeing them gave me an idea. I stopped and addressed the two boys.
‘Persimmon,’ I said.
‘Yes, Miss?’
‘What’s the name of your class Prefect?’
‘We don’t have one, Miss,’ he said. ‘Prefects are all Sixth Form and Upper School.’
‘So – you didn’t see a boy wearing a Prefect’s badge in the lesson today?’
His eyes widened. ‘No, Miss. Don’t think so.’
I nodded; in a way, relieved. ‘All right. Thank you, Persimmon. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘See you, Miss.’
When I got home, I found Dominic on the phone in the living room. He rang off as soon as I came in, but it gave me the excuse I needed. I ran upstairs and quickly changed my work clothes for jeans and a pullover – I didn’t want to have to explain to Dom why I’d taken off my shirt at school. I took it from my attaché case, hoping to put it in the wash before Dominic saw those rust-red stains, and bumped into him coming up the stairs.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘How was your first day?’
‘Fine.’ I smiled and kissed him, keeping the shirt from his line of sight. ‘Who was on the phone just now?’
‘Only my sister Victoria. She sends her love.’ He looked down. ‘What’s that?’
‘Just laundry.’
He frowned. ‘That’s dry-clean only, isn’t it? Here, let me look.’ He took the shirt, and turned it to look at the label. Numbly, I thought of the terrible scarlet spray from the plughole. I struggled to find a convenient lie – an accident, a fight between boys, a fall, a bloody nose. Anything but the voice from the drain, and the boy who looked like my brother.
‘We should invite her over some time,’ I said, with forced enthusiasm. In fact, I was rather nervous of meeting Dominic’s sisters – we’d been briefly introduced at a New Year’s party in Malbry, where I’d been shy and uncomfortable, and had not made a good impression.
Dominic ignored me. ‘What’s this?’
I felt my mouth go dry.
Dominic looked more closely at the label on the shirt. ‘No, it says here that you can hand wash it in cold water.’ He passed it back to me. ‘It should be fine, as long as you don’t use the biological powder. Use the hand-wash stuff under the sink.’
I took the shirt, still feeling numb, and took it into the laundry room. There, I inspected it, front and back, inside and out. I stood there with the shirt in my hands for a full five minutes, unable to understand what I saw. There was no sign of a stain on the silk. No blood, no rust, no residue – not even a watermark. Apart from a little creasing, the shirt I’d been wearing was spotless.
11
King Henry’s Grammar School for Boys, April 19th, 1989
Over the following week I came to know everyone in the Department. There was Sinclair, polite and remote; Scoones, of course, and two younger men called Higgs and Lenormand. Higgs was the man with the Magnum moustache who had peered down my cleavage from the Upper Corridor stairwell; Lenormand was French, with an accent, which caused great hilarity among the boys. None of them were particularly friendly – I sensed that Higgs might have said something about my outburst on the stairs – and so I avoided the Languages room, preferring the Masters’ Common Room, where all Masters assembled in the mornings to read the newspapers and drink coffee before Headmaster’s Briefing.
It was there that I made my first friend – my only friend – at King Henry’s. That was Carolyn Macleod, who had been Conrad’s Drama teacher; a redhead with a smoker’s laugh and a strong scent of patchouli. Twenty years on, she no longer looked quite as much like Diana Rigg, but she still had the kind of defiant look that spoke of karate and combat boots. She introduced herself to me as I grabbed a coffee before class. ‘I heard you had a run-in with Scoones,’ she said. ‘I hope you gave him what for.’
I looked around uncertainly. The Masters’ Common Room was an imposing space, dark wood and ceiling mouldings stained with a hundred years of smoke. Masters lounged on worn velvet chairs, reading, drinking, talking. An ornate clock hung over the door like the Sword of Damocles. I felt as alien here as I had sneaking into the boys’ toilets.
Miss Macleod saw my face. ‘You didn’t?’ she said. ‘Well, that’s a shame. You have to stand up for yourself here. When I got here in ’62, they’d never had a woman teacher before. They kept thinking I was the School Secretary. I had to fight tooth and nail every day, just to keep from going down. You’ll have to do it too, love. Nothing much has changed since then.’
‘I can imagine,’ I said, looking round. I could see two other women there; both grey-haired, in their fifties or sixties. Otherwise it could have been a nineteenth-century gentlemen’s club; smelling of leather and coffee and smoke. ‘I mean, how did you manage?’
She grinned. ‘Oh, I was a piece of work then. Fresh out of Girton, and stagy as hell. Incense, patchouli and long, loose hair. There was no Drama Department at the time, just a Head of English with the Complete Works of Shakespeare. I took the job from necessity, expecting my big break at any time, and here I am, thirty years on. Ten shows a week. No curtain call.’
I gave a reluctant grin. ‘Yes, there is an element of performance, isn’t there?’
Miss Macleod gave her raucous laugh. She sounded like a parakeet among a flock of pigeons. ‘Oh sweetheart. It’s all performance, both in and out of the classroom. You’re always on show – to the boys, to the staff, and most of all, to the parents. The parents were my angels. They wanted a Drama Department. That’s why I’m still here, raising hell at every opportunity.’
I grinned again. ‘Thank God,’ I said. ‘The French Department hasn’t exactly made me feel welcome so far.’
She shrugged. ‘Oh, Scoones is all hot air,’ she said. ‘And Sinclair may look stiff as a board, but he’s not as bad as he looks. Lenormand’s a softie. Higgs is a snitch. Watch what you say when he’s around. But most of all, stand up for yourself. Don’t let Eric Scoones bully you. And if you need a listening ear, come to me. I’m always around.’ She held out a hand. I’m Miss Macleod. You can call me Carrie.’
‘Thanks.’ Suddenly I found myself almost tearful with gratitude. I took her hand, which was dry and thin and covered in chunky silver rings. ‘I’m Becky. Pleased to meet you.’
‘My pleasure, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’
I spent the rest of the school day feeling rather more hopeful. In spite of our unfortunate start, the boys of Four Upper S proved surprisingly co-operative, and I even got to know some of their names. There was Persimmon, the class clown, and Spode, his sidekick; then there was Orange, who stuttered, and Fenelly, whose mother was French, and who spoke it like a native, though his spelling was atrocious. There was Akindele, who was Nigerian, and Sato, who was Japanese, and Birdman, who had asthma, and Andrews, whose father had hired a French au pair, who seemed to take pleasure in teaching his son as many unsuitable terms as possible. The unfortunate nickname that Persimmon had given me was hard to suppress: it appeared on the cover of several exercise books as well as on the classroom door, and I had to threaten reprisals, but the organized misbehaviour of that first lesson was not repeated. A small step towards acceptance, I know – and yet it was a start.