Dead Romantic

by Simon Brett

  As ever, by comparison, Madeleine felt herself privileged. She also felt something else, an emotion she did not choose to define, but which in her rare moments of introspection threatened to be identified as glee.

  As ever, when this cycle of thought started, it climaxed in pity for the fact that Aggie had never known real love, love that worked.

  At least Madeleine had had that.

  ‘Any dishy students in this new lot?’ asked the object of her pity, entering with the fruit-bowl.

  Madeleine tinkled a laugh. ‘Certainly not the Iranian with mumps. He has a five o’clock shadow the minute after he’s shaved. A distinctly prickly prospect.’

  ‘Others?’

  ‘There’s a rather sweet boy who’s just started with me. Got disastrous grades in his A-levels at Sixth Form College in the summer. Mother desperate for him to get to university – and, since his grades aren’t good enough for anywhere else, she’s set her sights on Oxford, of all places. Seems to think I can pull the famous trick yet again.’ Madeleine sighed at the extravagance of such expectations, yet there was no humility in the sigh.

  ‘And do you think you can?’

  ‘Have to see. He’s certainly not stupid. Whether he could carry off the interview, I don’t know. Very nervous. You know, that coltish jumpiness of adolescence.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Grigson. Paul Grigson.’

  ‘No doubt already got a crush on you.’

  Another tinkly laugh. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  But she did not deny the possibility. It didn’t seem important whether or not an eighteen-year-old dreamt of her. But there was something else in her life, something new, that could, perhaps, be very important.

  She damped down the thought, and let out a dramatic sigh. ‘It’s John’s birthday today.’

  Aggie looked properly solemn at the reference.

  ‘He would have been thirty-nine.’

  ‘So how long is it. . .?’

  ‘Nineteen years. Nineteen years and three weeks since he died.’

  Aggie was respectfully silent, as she always was when John Kaczmarek was mentioned. It was as if she knew that nothing she might say could compete with her sister’s memory, Madeleine’s experience of real love, of love that had worked. But for John’s premature death from leukemia, no doubt Madeleine too would be married, Madeleine too would have children of her own.

  The older sister looked up to see that Aggie was yawning.

  ‘Sorry, Maddy. It’s been terribly busy in the surgery this week. Some sort of virus going round. Everyone seems to have been in.’ Aggie worked part-time as a receptionist for a local group practice. The money was not good and, for someone as conscientious as Aggie, the hours tended to escalate.

  ‘Yes, I’ve had a busy week too,’ said Madeleine. ‘The trouble is, however much one tries not to, one does find oneself empathising with one’s students, going through it all with them. The Jean Brodie syndrome, I suppose.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Living through one’s students. Like Jean Brodie. As in The Prime of . . . Muriel Spark.’

  Aggie shook her head. Of course, she had never read much. And, since she had been married to Keith, hardly at all. Madeleine noticed again that there were no books to be seen in the small sitting-room.

  ‘Oh, never mind,’ she said.

  Just before she left, Madeleine went upstairs to the bathroom. Floating in the lavatory bowl, with a knot neatly tied in it, was a pink condom.

  She flushed it away before sitting down, and put it from her mind. Some things she preferred not to think about.

  Back in her Kemp Town house, Madeleine had a protracted bath. She washed her hair and lay back so that the long tendrils lay tickling on her shoulders. Their redness rippled with the water and she found herself thinking of the death of Ophelia. Gertrude’s report of the suicide from Hamlet came into her mind. The poetry, like the bath-water, gave her a warm feeling. She looked up at the stripped pine shelves from which a profusion of pot-plants dangled. As she half-closed her unlensed eyes, the plants looked satisfyingly like a willow growing aslant a brook.

  And the thought of death brought to life the other thought she had been nursing all day, the warm thought of a new love.

  The electric blanket had warmed her single bed and she slipped blissfully under the duvet. She drowsed, and the warm thought of love was still with her.

  Her hand slipped unconsciously to the greater warmth beneath her nightdress as she dreamed of the day when she would shed the pampered burden of her virginity.

  Chapter 3

  Bernard Hopkins was lucky to find a vacant meter a hundred yards away and he parked his five-year-old brown Austin Maxi there. The drive from his house in Henfield had not taken long; he was lucky to be able to come in after the rush-hour. Anyone who watched him getting out of the car would have seen a tall man with an air of privacy about him. His dark brown eyes looked thoughtful, even pained. His brown hair had given in to grey at the temples, but the effect was not unattractive.

  As he strode up the steep incline towards the school, he felt the stiff breeze from the sea behind him, but it was not cold. Definitely autumnal, but one of those glowing, hopeful autumnal days. He felt a little bubble of optimism rising in him. This time it was going to work. This time he could put past failures firmly behind him; this time it would be all right.

  The white portico of the school had been overpainted many times as the salt air flaked off successive layers, and now it had the thick, blurred outline of cake icing. The railings to either side had also been painted many times, but not recently enough; from their feet, through cracked black paint, rust bled its stains onto the stone. The large door, with impressive brass knocker and letter-box, had also been painted too long ago. The white paint was greyish and, since the door was left on the latch all day, there was a patch worn bare by a long trail of students pushing their uninterested way inside.

  At the side of the door a brass plate, giving an old-fashioned, dependable image like that of a country solicitor, bore the legend: ‘GARRETTWAY SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES. Principal: J.P.G. GARRETT, M.A.’

  Eschewing the worn patch on the door, Bernard Hopkins put his hand on the brass door-handle and walked inside.

  The hall had once been magnificent, but now its proportions were destroyed by the new walls which cut randomly through the fine cornices and bosses of the ceiling. The walls were painted institutional grey, marginally relieved by the darker grey on the flat boarded doors which fire regulations had demanded.

  The balance of the fine staircase up to the first floor had been upset by encroaching partitions and the one feature left untouched by ‘improvement’, the floor of black and white tiles, looked sadly diminished in this setting, like a monochrome television test-card.

  A couple of chipboard notice-boards by the front door were dotted with cards offering accommodation, coloured sheets advertising discotheques, plays, Indian takeaways and minicabs. But there were not many. Nor was there any evidence of students, except for one abandoned file lying on a table. It was one of the school’s slack periods; the busy time would come in the summer.

  In each of the fire-officer-approved doors was an eye-level window of wired glass, but through only one of the four did light shine. Bernard could not resist moving along the wall to peer into the classroom.

  The room was what the Garrettway brochure described as ‘one of our ultra-modern language laboratories, equipped with all of the latest electronic technology’. But Bernard did not see the person he hoped for behind the tutorial desk. Instead, there sat a grubby young man of about thirty, a member of the staff to whom Bernard had not yet been introduced. The young man was engaged in an exhaustive picking of his nose, eyes fixed on some abstract point in the ceiling. Three desks in the front row were occupied by sad Japanese businessmen who wore earphones and occasionally mouthed in tentative bewilderment.

  Bernard went upstairs.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Frank
lin,’ he said to the fifty-five- year-old trouser-suit behind the large manual typewriter in the outer office.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Hopkins. Not so cold this morning.’

  ‘No. We’re lucky. Bit of an Indian summer.’

  ‘Yes.’ She composed her face into an expression of concern. ‘And how’s Shirley today?’

  Stella Franklin always made a point of finding out the details of people’s families and asking after them. She thought of this as solicitude; others had described it as nosiness.

  ‘Much the same,’ Bernard replied.

  ‘Change in the weather doesn’t make any difference to her?’

  ‘Not really, no. I don’t know what does make any difference, I’m afraid. Some days she’s a lot better – it seems to be arrested – they do get these remissions, you know. Then, other days. . .’ He let the sentence trail away in a shrug.

  ‘Still, she keeps cheerful,’ said Mrs Franklin in a way that was more of a statement than a question.

  ‘Does her best. Not much alternative.’ Bernard seemed happy to leave the subject there. ‘Is Mr Garrett in?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘May I. . .?’

  ‘Just go through. Liberty Hall here, Mr Hopkins. No one stands on ceremony. All open doors. No one bothers to knock.’

  In spite of this licence, Bernard did tap at the door and waited for an answering ‘Yeah’ before going into Julian Garrett’s office.

  Mrs Franklin watched him go. Nice man, she thought. Very shy and correct, but his eyes were kind. Nice brown eyes. Sort of defensive, though, as if he were afraid of being hurt. Probably had been hurt, thought Mrs Franklin, who (particularly since she had been widowed) prided herself on her knowledge of human psychology and enjoyed supplying imaginative backgrounds for everyone she met. Bernard was probably a passionate man, she hazarded – yes, a passionate man who was afraid of the strength of his own feelings. Couldn’t be easy for him, anyway, having a wife so ill. Mrs Franklin had read about multiple sclerosis. Must make a married life very difficult. Particularly for someone of his age. Must be around forty-five . . . still very much a man, anyway. And, however much he loved his wife, it couldn’t be easy. Men have needs, Mrs Franklin knew (not so much from the evidence supplied by the late Mr Franklin as from magazines she had read which were very insistent on the subject). No, probably best thing would be if Mrs Hopkins were to suffer a sudden deterioration, go downhill very quickly and die. Then Mr Hopkins would have plenty of time to get over his bereavement and find someone else. It would give him another chance. Yes, that would be the most satisfactory thing to happen.

  Having sorted out Mr Hopkins’ life to her own satisfaction, Mrs Franklin continued folding the mail-shots that were to be sent out to the selection of schools in Germany which had in previous years proved such ready sources of students for the Garrettway School of Languages.

  ‘There’s really just this Turk,’ said Julian Garrett languidly. His swivel-chair was tipped back, and his highly- polished black brogues rested on the edge of his paper-strewn desk. The chair and the desk were both some fifty years old, props perhaps from a thirties movie set in a newspaper office. Like the brass plate downstairs, they gave an impression of solidity, of a history stretching back longer than the school’s actual five years.

  The appearance of the school’s principal reinforced this image of solidity. A television casting director, into whose office Julian Garrett walked, would immediately have put his name up for parts of upper-class professional men of great charm and reliability, the sort who had been to the right schools and university, and whose honour and integrity need never be questioned. The image, maintained by Julian’s Savile Row suit with its discreet chalk-stripe, always put at ease those – particularly foreigners – who consulted him about their own or their children’s enrolment in his school.

  The fact that his appearance invited theatrical comparisons was no coincidence. Julian Garrett, who had been to the right schools and university (more or less), and whose honour and integrity had never been questioned (at least not in a court of law), had started his career as an actor and been cast in just those roles which his looks demanded. So long as the work was there, acting had suited him, not least because of the ready supply of young actresses on whom his charms could be exercised. But, after a few years in the business, the parts had, for no readily identifiable reason, gotten fewer. This lull in his career, happily coinciding with his mother’s death and bequest to him of a considerable estate, including the house in Brighton, had pushed him towards a profession which promised to provide a more stable income than the stage. His appetite for young actresses was smoothly replaced by an appetite for young foreign students, whose two-week courses in Brighton paralleled very comfortably the short encounters of touring and provincial rep.

  The school itself had been a success. After initial hiccups, it had quickly found its regular sources of students. Since very few of these had come to England and Brighton primarily for the attractions of the language course, and most of them had an exceptionally lively social life during their stays, they tended (frequently to alleviate guilt) to report back favourably to their parents on the academic standards of the Garrettway School, and so Julian did not suffer that annoyance of being judged by results which bedevils so many educational institutions.

  The same lack of follow-up favoured the other side of the business, the ‘cramming’ of English students for resitting A-levels. Failure in the retaken examinations only confirmed for most parents what the first disappointment had gloomily prefigured, and few of them felt confident enough to make any complaint against the school.

  Besides, there were successes, which could be quoted proudly in initial interviews. Some students had given themselves such a shock by their failure that they approached resitting their exams with a new application. Some benefited from working in smaller groups or one-to-one tutorials. And, amongst the shifting ragbag of staff whom Julian Garrett employed, there were occasionally teachers with genuine gifts, who could communicate knowledge and enthusiasm to their charges.

  As well as the A-level work, the Garrettway offered to prepare students for Oxbridge entrance examinations, and this side of the business had netted for the school the perfectly respectable tally of one Exhibition and a place at Oxford, and two places at Cambridge. These achievements had been spread over the five years of Garrettway’s life, but Julian, not wishing to confuse potential customers with chronology, tended (without actually lying) to imply to parents that they represented only one year’s crop.

  He now felt confident of the business, and lulls, like the current one, no longer caused him anxiety. Bookings for the summer courses were already up on previous years and so it was a matter of little consequence to him that he only had one Turk to offer his newest recruit to the teaching staff.

  ‘A Turk?’ Bernard Hopkins echoed.

  ‘Yes. Been sent over here on some business course. Trouble is, as he hasn’t got much language, it’s all being rather lost on him at the moment.’

  ‘So he needs an intensive course in English?’

  Julian Garrett gave a wince. ‘Needn’t be intensive. Only asked for “conversational English”. Just a matter of going to talk to the poor sod. Don’t make a big deal of it – his company’s paying.’

  Detecting a slight recoil from his employee at this, Julian intensified the charm as he continued. ‘I’m sorry, Bernard, if I sound cynical, but I am running a business here, not a charity. Of course, we care a lot about all our students, we want to do the best for them, but we do have to be careful.’ He gave a sad, once-bitten-twice-shy shake of the head. ‘I’m afraid I’ve had unpleasant experiences in the past. What you must do in this case is what is asked for. Give him conversational English. . . Then, if it turns out that his grasp of the language is not even up to that, you will have to recommend an intensive course, and the necessary arrangements will be made. I’m sure the company can afford it.’ There was a moment’s pause. ‘From wha
t I hear of the man, I think it’s quite likely that he will need a further course.’

  ‘Right.’ Bernard nodded, very much the dutiful employee in his new job. ‘Has a time been arranged for him to come here?’

  ‘Ah, that’s one of the points. He won’t be coming here. This business course he’s on is pretty intensive, so I’ve made arrangements that our tutor will go to his hotel. He’s at the Metropole. Name’s Nassiri. Nine o’clock each evening, for the next fortnight. That be OK with you?’ Bernard nodded. Julian did not see that there was anything to be gained by telling him how much extra the Turk’s company would be paying for this inconvenient personal service.

  ‘Does happen from time to time,’ he continued smoothly.

  ‘Odd hours. Have to fit in with the students, though. After all, as educators, we must make them our primary concern.’

  ‘Of course,’ Bernard agreed.

  ‘Hope that doesn’t raise problems. The evenings?’ Bernard looked blank.

  ‘With your wife. I gather she’s not well.’

  ‘Oh. No. That won’t be a problem. She understands, you know, the pressures of work.’

  ‘Good.’ The principal favoured his tutor with an earnest smile. ‘I do hope you’re enjoying it here, finding the job OK, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I’m enjoying it a lot. Only thing is, I don’t feel really stretched at the moment. There doesn’t seem to be that much work to do.’

  ‘Time of year. Seasonal business, this. Come the summer, you just won’t know how to fit all the sessions in.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ Bernard gave a little smile, as he worked round to his subject. ‘Rest of the staff fairly slack too, are they?’