Wicked!

by Jilly Cooper

‘Sorry, man. I’m uptight about the trial, didn’t sleep last night.’

  They did a high five. Feral glanced at Xav’s Rolex; there was still time to buy Janna some flowers.

  ‘She’s always been there for me.’

  Just as he was paying for a bunch of red carnations, he felt a faint scratch on his back. Swinging round, he saw a corpse – almost a skeleton – with a white scabby face, thinning hair, unseeing bloodshot eyes: a nightmare life in death against the technicoloured riot of the flower stall.

  She had bruises and cuts all over her arms, was wrapped in stinking rags and trembled uncontrollably in what Feral instantly recognized as an advanced state of heroin withdrawal.

  ‘Have you got a pound for a cup of tea?’ she mumbled.

  ‘Mum,’ whispered Feral in horror.

  Xav took Feral firmly by the arm.

  ‘You’ve got a trial, it’s your big chance. You’ve got to walk away from her.’

  ‘Fifty pence for a cup of tea,’ whined Feral’s swaying mother.

  Xav gave her a fiver and frogmarched Feral towards the football ground. They could see the flags and the stands ahead, but as they reached the High Street, Feral turned and bolted back, disappearing into the crowd. Janna’s red carnations fell from his hand and were trampled underfoot.

  Xav searched for Feral everywhere, but fruitlessly. By the time he turned up at the match, play had been going on for half an hour and everyone had washed their hands of him.

  Pete Wainwright, who’d set the whole thing up, was apoplectic with rage. ‘Made me look a complete prat. It’s obvious the lad’s got no commitment.’

  Lily, Janna and Taggie in the stands were devastated; the Brigadier and Emlyn hopping mad with fury. How could Feral have bottled out of the thing he wanted most in the world?

  ‘It isn’t as though any of the trial players are a quarter as good as him. He’d have walked it,’ exploded the Brigadier.

  Rupert who, not trusting Taggie with flash football managers, had at the last moment rolled up as well, said the whole thing was ‘absolutely typical’.

  Seeing Xav, they all charged down the stands.

  ‘What the hell’s happened?’

  As Xav finished explaining, Rupert launched into blistering invective. ‘It’s not worth investing a bloody penny in him.’

  ‘It was his mother, for Christ’s sake,’ shouted back Xav. ‘You wouldn’t leave someone like that.’

  ‘I’ll come and help you look for him,’ said Janna.

  ‘So will I,’ said Emlyn.

  Having combed the market and the main streets, they tried the Shakespeare Estate. Janna ran up the path past the burnt-out car and the stinking dustbins. A pretty black girl, reeking of sex and booze, her great body shown off by tight orange vest and rucked-up yellow mini, answered the door.

  ‘We’re looking for Feral,’ begged Janna, then flinched as the girl was joined by a leering Uncle Harley, clearly off his face and zipping up his trousers.

  ‘Nice to see you, Miss Curtis.’

  ‘Have you seen Feral?’

  ‘He’s not here. He in trouble again?’

  ‘Feral obviously daren’t go home,’ Janna told Emlyn as she jumped back into his car.

  A distraught Xav didn’t get back till late evening. There had been no sign of Feral or his mother, so Emlyn had called the police.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Xav told Rupert defiantly, ‘but I admire Feral more than anyone I’ve ever met.’

  Next day the police found Feral hiding out under the railway bridge. His mother beside him, drifting in and out of consciousness, was rushed to hospital. The police had been searching for her anyway on three drug-related offences. The following day, she just avoided a prison sentence by promising to go into rehab and was admitted to a local drying-out clinic.

  ‘I’m jolly well going to pay for six weeks of it,’ said Taggie.

  ‘Don’t be bloody stupid,’ snapped Rupert, particularly when Taggie threatened to sell her diamonds.

  Feral, suicidally aware he’d let everyone down, ashamed that he’d been too frightened of her getting arrested to take his mother to hospital, was amazed that the Brigadier allowed him back. Lily was there when, head drooping, a picture of dejection, he walked through the door.

  ‘Come and sit down.’ Lily patted the sofa.

  Collapsing beside her, Feral broke into the most piteous sobs.

  ‘So sorry, Lily, so sorry, man.’

  It broke the Brigadier’s heart.

  ‘Poor fellow, poor fellow,’ he said, patting Feral’s heaving shoulders. ‘So pleased you’re home. Missed you around the place very much. Tried my hand at cooking corn beef hash for tonight, but have a dry Martini first.’

  106

  All round Larks, as the summer term began, Wally had nailed up signs saying: ‘Get your finger out and your coursework in. All your hard work will be worthless unless you write tidily.’

  The teachers stood over the children, reading, redrafting, adding, criticizing handwriting, improving spelling and grammar and finally marking each piece of coursework.

  Staff teaching the same subject, like Skunk and Mates, or Janna and Sophy, would then read coursework by each other’s pupils, to see if they felt the grades given were fair.

  ‘I do feel this mark’s a little too generous for Feral,’ sighed Janna.

  ‘A little,’ agreed Sophy, ‘but marking him up seemed the only way of helping him get a grade.’

  There was a drama over the food technology coursework, which included lunch for the hospitality boxes at Larkminster Rovers. The chicken and vegetable jalousie, which consisted of chicken legs wrapped in ham with pepper and tomato sauce, smelt so delicious that Rocky wandered in and scoffed four of the entries. As the external examiner was due in an hour, Taggie felt justified in remaking them herself, just in time.

  Other members of staff felt it was like Christmas all over again, as they packed up coursework and despatched it to the examining board. They needed a pantechnicon to accommodate the contribution from design and technology, which included Danijela the Bosnian girl’s beautiful blue and green embroidered wedding dress and Rocky’s six-foot dog kennel. On the side he had written in pokerwork: ‘Dog house I will live in if you do not pass me’.

  Other packages included geography projects on traffic-calming and the shaping of industrial development and RE dissertations on death and dying, which seemed a welcome option to the exams ahead, which began on 14 May with Urdu listening.

  In Xav’s view, Aysha had been listening to a great deal too much Urdu claptrap from her bullying father.

  He and Aysha had revised together in the Larks garden, she helping him with science, he her with Spanish and French, occasionally getting electric shocks when their hands touched.

  ‘You must get an A star in Urdu to beat my vile ex-housemaster’s wife,’ said Xav. ‘She and her awful daughter Charisma are taking the subject to show off.’

  ‘How’s your dad getting on with English lit.?’ asked Aysha. Her little diamond nose stud glinted in the sunlight. Her face and hands were the soft brown of Penscombe Peterkin’s glossy coat. As she raised big, brown, almond-shaped eyes to him, Xav’s heart shook his body like an overloaded washing machine.

  ‘My dad is very short-fused and not concentrating enough on the yard,’ he replied gloomily. ‘Hasn’t had as many winners as last year. I tried to give him a few tips I’d learnt in business studies, but he told me to get stuffed. Got a good horse called Fast running on the twenty-eighth.’

  ‘“Do not adultery commit; Advantage rarely came of it”,’ intoned Rupert.

  What a ridiculous syllabus! Of all the sins teenagers committed, adultery must be bottom of the list. Half the poems on the other hand seem to be cooing over new babies, the last thing one wanted to encourage in the young. A poem by some woman called Pilkington (who’d only lived thirty-eight years, so God had struck her down) claimed the only way to get on in politics was to tell lies, which didn’t dispose R
upert to join Jupiter and Hengist in their proposed coup.

  The whole anthology was deeply silly.

  Fed up with poetry, Rupert slotted Pride and Prejudice into his Walkman. Not a bad book, quite funny, and he completely identified with Darcy: sound fellow, looked after his friends and his tenants, ran his estate well, couldn’t be bothered with riff-raff like Mrs Bennet.

  Rupert was still spitting because he’d received a letter from Aysha’s father, Raschid Khan, who owned a curry house in Larkminster, asking him to stop Xav pestering Aysha. Damned cheek. Both children were black. Xav was clearly desperately in love. Rupert’s daughter, Tabitha, had been besotted by a tractor driver called Ashley and got over him, thank God, but he hated to see Xav so unhappy about Aysha’s arranged marriage.

  As soon as the summer term began, the press, nudged by Dora, had started ringing Bagley for reports on Larks’s Golden Boy, only to be told by Hengist that he was confident that not only Paris, but all the school’s candidates, would excel in their forthcoming exams. They were all working extremely hard.

  This was not strictly true. Boffin and Primrose Duddon had been working steadily all their school careers. Paris had worked hard since he’d been at Bagley. The rest of the year had been cramming knowledge into their heads, aided by caffeine and speed, but only for three weeks. Even the promise of an oil well and his own six-bedroom dacha hadn’t motivated Anatole. Even the promise of a Ferrari if he achieved straight As had not halted Cosmo’s nightly visits to Mrs Walton, whom he had installed in a cottage on the far side of Bagley village.

  Disapproving of all work and no play, Poppet urged her RE students to keep up their voluntary work and ‘enrichment activities’, which enraged Lubemir, Anatole and Cosmo. How could they enrich themselves by flogging exam papers, when Alex Bruce had once more changed the combination on the school safe? Why should generations of Bagley pupils profit from their enterprise and not they?

  Primrose Duddon was overwhelmed how popular she’d suddenly become, enjoying heady weekends staying with the Lloyd-Foxes, helping Amber and Junior with English revision, and at Robinsgrove where, with his dark, sleek head resting on her splendid breasts, she had initiated Lando France-Lynch into the mysteries of the double helix and the circulation of the blood.

  Paris’s first exam was Latin on the afternoon of 18 May. The night before, Hengist, just off a plane after a big speech in Washington, summoned Paris to his study in the Mansion to check things were all right.

  Still in crumpled off-white trousers and a purple shirt, Hengist had hung his jacket and tie over Darwin, the ancient stuffed gorilla, which Alex and Joan had recently sacked from the biology lab on the grounds that he would be too scruffy for Randal’s Science Emporium. In an excess of Bruce-baiting, Hengist had rescued Darwin from the skip, placing him beside the stuffed bear and topping him with his own mortar board. Elaine, enchanted to have her master home, was following Hengist round, nudging him in friendship, sweeping off with her long tail the pile of faxes, emails and letters Hengist couldn’t be bothered to look at.

  Switching off his telephone, Hengist hung a ‘Do Not Disturb’ notice on the door, tore the gold paper off a bottle of Moët and prepared to give Paris his full attention.

  It was a perfect evening. Cricket games were in their last overs. Cow parsley foamed along the rough meadow between pitches and golf course; buttercups streaked the fields beyond. An overpoweringly sweet scent of lilac drifted in through the big open windows.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Hengist murmured fondly as Elaine jumped then trembled as the champagne cork flew out. ‘You’ve heard enough of those in your time.’

  Perched on the dark red Paisley window seat, Paris could just see the lake. Here Artie Deverell lounged in a panama hat and a deckchair, with several bottles of Sancerre cooling in the water among the forget-me-nots, reading his favourite poems in his gentle bell-like voice to his favourite GCSE candidates.

  ‘I bet he’s chosen Lamartine’s “Lake” or Baudelaire’s “Voyage to Cythera”.’ Hengist handed Paris an excitingly large glass. ‘Poetry that no longer appears on any exam syllabus. Great literature, as William Rees-Mogg was saying recently in The Times, teaches us to understand human nature. People still sulk like Achilles, get mad with jealousy like Othello, loathe their stepfather like Hamlet, have happy marriages like Hector and Andromache.’ For a second Hengist’s finger caressed Sally’s sweet face in the photograph on his desk. ‘Literature, Rees-Mogg rightly claims, is the road to the general understanding of the heart and the head. History’s the same. If you study William’s conquest of England in ten sixty-six, you can appreciate how the Iraqis feel today.’

  ‘Mr Bruce doesn’t feel like that.’ Paris rose to his feet, gazing at Hengist’s books with a longing most boys would reserve for Sienna Miller. ‘He’s hell-bent on chucking out the classical library and Theo’s archives.’

  ‘Not while I’m running this joint. This bloody Government is already destroying public libraries. Wants them to replenish their entire stock in five years, in the name of multiculturism and vibrancy. Jesus! I can accommodate Darwin’ – he patted the gorilla on the shoulder – ‘not sure there’s room in here for the archives.’

  ‘You will protect Theo. He’s such a cool teacher,’ Paris stammered and blushed. ‘He read us Plato’s description of the death of Socrates the other evening, tears pouring down his cheeks the whole time. It was awesome, but I think he’s very near the edge.’

  ‘I’ll make a note of it,’ said Hengist gravely, noting how exhausted Paris looked. His bloodshot eyes glowed like rubies in the intense white face.

  ‘I know how hard you’ve been working, but this time in a month, you won’t remember a single equation or date you’ve forced into your tired brain.’

  ‘I have to say, sir’ – Paris took a gulp of champagne, and moved to sit down on what was left of the sofa by a stretched-out Elaine – ‘I was gutted when Mr Davies left, but your classes are wicked, just as interesting as Mr Graham’s. I can relate now to Lenin, Khrushchev, the Tsar, even to Hitler and Stalin. You don’t make us take sides. Emlyn was always pushing for the underdog, the peasants, the Jews or the communists, but you show us tyrants don’t start off wrong, they’re often convinced they were doing right. Like in Euripides. I suddenly find I’m right behind Medea. You’re like Euripides, sir.’

  ‘Why, thank you, Paris. I’ve been called a lot of things. Which English set book did you like best?’

  ‘Macbeth. Wish I’d been able to take it in the exam, rather than just as coursework.’

  ‘Rupert Campbell-Black has very strong views on Macbeth.’ Hengist shook his head. ‘I so hope he’s going to pass. I toned down some of his ideas in which he described Malcolm as a “heartless shit” for being so bracing with Macduff just after his wife and children had been butchered. The Prince of Wales would have handled it far more sympathetically, according to Rupert.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Paris.

  Down below, he could see Dora scouring the ground with her eyes one moment, looking round for him the next, with Cadbury bounding after her. He’d had a disturbing dream last night: Dora had rescued him from a particularly horrible children’s home, and held him safe and kissed him. It had been lovely, but Dora was only a child, sexually light years behind Bianca. He must stamp on any feelings.

  ‘Dora’s been great,’ he added to Hengist. ‘She’s helped me to revise, testing me on everything. Pity she’s not taking her GCSEs. She knows the textbooks backwards.’

  ‘I’m devoted to Dora,’ said Hengist. ‘I’ll never forget inviting her in for a glass of champagne on her birthday her first term and asking her with what adjective would she best like her friends to describe her. She said, “There.” I said, “That’s not an adjective.” And Dora said, “I’d like my friends to say I was there for them.”’

  ‘And she is,’ said Paris.

  ‘How are you getting on with Ian and Patience?’ he asked.

  ‘OK. Patien
ce took me to Macbeth. Brilliant production, except the weird sisters were sleek, young and glamorous, which is garbage: Shakespeare categorically states they had beards and were ugly. And they can’t have been in Macbeth’s imagination, because Banquo saw them too.’

  ‘Rupert explained it as Macbeth and Banquo being off their faces with drugs,’ volunteered Hengist, ‘like the entire US Army in Iraq.’

  ‘Magic mushrooms, perhaps,’ suggested Paris.

  ‘“The instruments of darkness tell us truths”,’ murmured Hengist, then, regretfully: ‘I must go and change. We’re dining with the Lord Lieutenant – such a sweet, boring man, I’ll never stay awake. Look, you’ll walk these exams. Try and write legibly and read through if you’ve got time. Examiners are awfully keen on inessentials like punctuation and spelling. Easy to ignore if you’re writing at the gallop.’

  Paris finished his glass of champagne. If he hadn’t been a bit drunk, he would never have tried on Hengist’s mortar board. With it tipped over his long nose, and shielding his red eyes, his blond hair floating, he looked so ravishing, Hengist caught his breath.

  ‘Certainly suits you better than Darwin. You must go to my old college, and get the first Matthew Arnold and I, upsetting our fathers so dreadfully, didn’t get.’

  As Hengist showered, watching the black hairs flowing down in deltas over his strong muscular chest and thighs, he was gripped with excitement. What a transformation in two years! Paris was able to relax, joke, put forward opinions, even exchange compliments. Hengist imagined his first book of poems, dedicated to ‘Hengist Brett-Taylor, without whom . . .’

  Ian, Patience and Theo, too, must be doing a good job. All the same, the boy would have fared even better with him and Sally. If he took the job at Fleetley, could he take Paris with him? If he went into politics, a beautiful adopted son would be great for his image. Christ, he mustn’t think like that. He missed Oriana so much. Even in Washington he hadn’t rung her. Not a word had been exchanged. Was Sally speaking to her secretly?

  Wrapped in a big red towel, wandering to the window, Hengist saw Paris sprinting down to the lake to join Artie and his friends.