Wicked!

by Jilly Cooper

  Afterwards Dame Hermione sang to the guests, and during ‘Where e’er you walk’ gazed directly at Ashton.

  Later, over a glass of Kummel, she told him:

  ‘My son is obsessed with citizenship, Mr Douglas. He’s taking it for AS level. He has such a feeling for his fellow citizens and the work of the Borough. It would be so wonderful’ – Hermione opened her big brown eyes – ‘if he could do a few days’ work experience in your fascinating office to learn about education.’

  ‘We’d be honoured, Dame Hermione,’ said Ashton warmly, who had no idea of Cosmo’s capacity for evil and thought he looked fetchingly like a Caravaggio catamite as, back home for the weekend, he sat quietly in the window seat engrossed in a book called Know Your Town Hall, which was actually a jacket wrapped round L’Histoire d’O.

  ‘Bingo,’ crowed Cosmo next day to Dora. ‘I’ll get access to Ashton’s offices and find out exactly what’s going on.’

  Fortunately, most of the Lower Sixth were out on work experience and Alex was too obsessed with the Queen’s visit to bother about Cosmo’s destination.

  ‘My interesting news is that my Aunt Lily and the Brigadier are planning to fight the development at Larks,’ Dora told Cosmo, ‘because the builders are endangering natterjack toads and loads of rare wild flowers, which aren’t out at the moment, but which the Brigadier, who is a keen bottomist, recognizes by the leaves.’

  ‘Ashton Douglas is also a keen bottomist,’ said Cosmo. ‘I’d better wear steel underpants. I might even write a musical called Kiddy Fiddler on the Roof.’

  125

  Paris was in despair, overwhelmed by the misfortune he’d brought on Bagley.

  ‘You’ve created even more havoc than the Paris who started the Trojan Wars,’ Boffin told him nastily as they came out of prep the following dank October evening. ‘First Theo, then Hengist chucked out; both their careers ruined; Hengist’s marriage wrecked. Artie, Biffo and your dear foster parents’ll be next for the chop. Alex doesn’t like fossils.’

  Somehow Paris managed not to throttle Boffin. He’d caused enough trouble already. Bagley had completely lost its charm. Back at the Old Coach House, Ian was not sleeping and his temper grew shorter as Alex delved into every aspect of the school’s finances. There was no Hengist or Emlyn for Paris to have fun with any more and every time he popped in to cheer up Sally, he found her unravelling with despair, and felt hideously responsible.

  He loathed Dora and Cosmo having secrets and whispering in corners together. He liked the charming and emollient Artie, but didn’t have the same bond with him that he had with Theo. Where the hell was Theo and how was his back and how was he getting on with Sophocles? And Paris had worries of his own. He’d be seventeen in January and if Patience and Ian didn’t want or could no longer afford to keep him, he’d be out of care and on to the scrap heap, no doubt joining the criminal classes and the homeless, like so many care leavers.

  Alone in the dusk, Paris punched the wall of the Mansion several times until his knuckles ran with blood, like Oedipus’s beard after he’d pierced his eyeballs again and again with the brooch pins of his hanged wife and mother, Jocasta. A passage Theo had translated with such terrifying vividness. Paris shuddered. There was still one trail he hadn’t followed up.

  On his way back to Ian and Patience’s for supper, having wrapped his hand in bog paper, he dropped in on Biffo to return a maths textbook. He found the old boy plastered in a thick fog of smoke, farts and drink fumes. The fire had gone out; Biffo was three-quarters down a bottle of red; another bottle lay in the waste-paper basket.

  ‘Are you OK, sir?’ Paris relit the fire, then played a sneaky trick. ‘We’re looking forward to you being deputy head.’

  Like an old walrus confronted by an eskimo’s harpoon, Biffo glowered at him. ‘Not getting it.’

  ‘Everyone thinks it’s a done deal.’

  ‘Huh, Alex says I’m not cutting it any more. Results not good enough.’

  ‘You got me through maths, you must be a bloody genius.’

  Paris waited for Biffo to nod off, then he grabbed his red leatherbound book filled with the addresses of old boys and other masters. Many entries had a diagonal through them and were marked RIP. There was only a handful of women’s names.

  He was half an hour late back at the Coach House. His steak pie had dried in the oven; Dulcie, expecting a goodnight kiss, had refused to go to bed. Ian and Patience were in their coats, waiting to go out.

  ‘What’s the point of a tagging system if you bloody well ignore it?’ yelled Ian. ‘Alex has been on, demanding where you are. It’s Patience and I who get it in the neck. Have you no consideration? What the hell have you been doing?’

  ‘Looking for my real parents,’ shouted Paris, running upstairs and slamming the door.

  The following evening, Cosmo rang Dora in triumph. He had had a brilliant first day at S and C.

  ‘I found several references to BC at the Green Dragon and other places. It must be some kind of club. The one on the twenty-seventh of August seems to be definitely celebrating Randal finally buying Larks. They had another get-together the day Hengist was arrested. They’ve obviously been trying to get their hands on the Larks land for ages. There was an email from Ashton to Rod Hyde way back in November 2002 saying – listen to this: “Despite all our efforts, Janna Curtis is not failing as expected. We must also watch our step, as she is accusing us of rigging figures and results and changing boundaries and bus stops.”’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Have you heard a word I said, Dora?’

  Dora, who’d been holding her breath like a baby, gave an almighty bellow.

  ‘What in hell’s the matter?’

  ‘Paris has run away. He left an envelope with twenty-five pounds in to pay Ian back for not getting history. Then he said he was sorry for all the misery he’d caused and not to try and find him. And worst of all, there was no Hengist to give him a can of Coke and some sandwiches for the journey.’ Dora bawled even louder.

  ‘What an applause junky. Can’t bear to be out of the limelight for a second,’ sighed Cosmo, then, in a kinder voice: ‘He’ll come back when he’s cold and hungry.’

  Alex immediately alerted the police and the social services and, while blaming the whole experiment on Hengist, was desperate for Paris’s return. The last thing he’d wanted was a crisis distracting either the governors when they met next week, or the media when they should be concentrating on the Queen’s visit.

  The police were very reassuring. Lads often ran away after a family row. At least he’d left a note; he’d probably be home in the morning.

  But Paris did not come home. As the days crawled by, Ian and Patience sank into blacker despair. Patience wouldn’t leave the house in case he returned. Dora kept bunking off classes and at night, combing the woods with Northcliffe and Cadbury.

  ‘Where’s Pawis?’ cried Dulcie over and over again.

  Ian couldn’t concentrate on anything. How could he have shouted at Paris on that last evening? Taking a wireless into the bursar’s office, he listened to every bulletin until Alex grew very sharp with him.

  ‘It’s only a foster child, after all.’

  Pleading for help, Dora rang all her media contacts, who wanted to know if Paris was having woman trouble.

  ‘Are you his girlfriend, Dora?’

  ‘No, but I’d like to be. He’s so beautiful, I’m sure he’s been kidnapped.’

  ‘We just want him home and safe,’ Ian and Patience told the press.

  ‘He might go to Feral or Emlyn,’ suggested Dora. ‘If he’d known where Theo was, he’d have gone to him.’

  ‘We’ve checked Theo Graham,’ said Chief Inspector Gablecross, ‘but there’s no sign.’

  ‘And he can’t go to Hengist,’ sobbed Dora, ‘because he’s in prison.’

  Sally felt desperately guilty. She never should have slept with Paris. They hadn’t again, but he’d been so adorable, popping in most days, holding h
er in his arms and sending her praise postcards. Calling on the Old Coach House, Sally found Patience mucking out the horses, her mobile in the breast pocket of her tweed coat. Her face was utterly devastated by tears, her eyes huge purple craters.

  ‘Oh Sally, we tried so hard not to crowd him; now we realize how desperately we love him. It’s all our fault. Paris’s last words to us were that he was going to find his real parents. Ian thought he was just trying to hurt us. We should have stayed in, but Poppet was holding some awful parenting workshop, and we felt we should go to gain brownie points.’

  Patience collapsed sobbing on a hay bale.

  Over at Wilmington, Janna had been equally devastated, not least by Hengist’s arrest. Jubilee Cottage was on the market, the ‘For Sale’ sign creaking desolate in the east wind. As a hair shirt and to pay the mortgage, she was filling in for a head of English on maternity leave in the next county, which meant an hour’s drive there and back every day, leaving poor bewildered Partner alone in the house, ripping up carpets, scrabbling at doors and biting the ankles of estate agents, who showed fewer and fewer people over the house.

  Patience had called to tell her Paris had bolted.

  ‘He so admired you, Janna. He might easily turn up.’

  ‘Oh God, I probably won’t be here, I’m working miles away and such long hours.’

  ‘Poor Paris was devastated about Theo and Hengist. Alex is being such a brute turfing Sally out in November. She’s just been here. Paris found out Ian and Artie were under threat too, poor boy. He must have felt all his security crumbling.’

  As Janna switched off the telephone, she wondered if she ought to stay home, just in case Paris did turn up.

  He loved me once, Atthis, long ago.

  In need of comfort and the comfort of comforting, Janna rang Sally and thought she’d got the wrong number when the call was answered by a deep, lilting, utterly unforgettable voice that set her heart crashing.

  ‘Emlyn. I must have misdialled. I wanted Sally.’

  ‘I’ve just driven down to see her.’

  There was an interminable pause.

  Oh Christ, she’d craved the sound of that voice for the longest four months of her life, now she couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘How’s the Welsh Rugby Union?’

  ‘Fine.’

  There was another long pause.

  ‘Emlyn, I wrote to Sally about Hengist. How is she?’

  ‘Not great.’

  He was making no effort. He was still angry with her.

  ‘Sally didn’t write back and she’s usually so punctilious. Is she OK?’ Janna was so frantic to see Emlyn, she added, ‘Shall I pop round?’

  ‘I wouldn’t. That bastard Randal told her Hengist was having an affaire with Ruth.’

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Randal was trying to pull Sally; then he told her about Hengist and you. Paris, caught off guard, confirmed it.’

  Janna gave a wail of anguish.

  ‘I can’t bear it, poor Sally. Oh my God, I’m sorry. But it was over months ago.’

  ‘Was it?’ said Emlyn bleakly.

  ‘Truly, truly, when I found out about him and Ruth, when you marked my stupid suicide note. Oh, please tell Sally she’s the only person he’s ever loved.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll find it a great comfort,’ said Emlyn acidly. ‘I’ve gotta go.’

  ‘Please, please don’t.’

  But he’d hung up.

  Sobbing wildly, Janna drove over to Bagley and parked in the hedgerow at the bottom of the drive.

  After an hour, listening to the screech owls and watching the moon rise through the mist, she heard the familiar racket of Emlyn’s Renault, careering and bumping down the drive. She prayed he’d turn left towards Wilmington, but she only caught a glimpse of his thick blond hair before, with a screech of tyres, he hurtled right towards Wales.

  Patience and Ian sank deeper and deeper into despair. They had never known there were a hundred hours between each tick of the clock, and no sleep in the night, as a day became a week. There was no trace anywhere of Paris.

  The police, by the increasing gravity of their demeanour, clearly felt something must have happened to him and suggested Ian and Patience appealed to the public for information at a press conference. This was absolutely packed out – the Arctic Prince being an on-going story.

  The Cartwrights tried to be very stiff-upper-lipped, but they looked dreadful, hollow-eyed, trembling, their clothes falling off them and when Patience had to speak, she broke down.

  ‘Honking away like a red-nosed reindeer,’ shuddered Cosmo who was watching with Painswick and Jessica on the portable in the general office. ‘Not much incentive to return.’

  ‘We love him so much,’ brayed Patience, her blotched face collapsing. ‘We just want him to come home and know he’s safe.’

  ‘For God’s sake, pull yourself together, woman,’ hissed Ian.

  ‘We were fostering him, but we wanted to adopt him,’ struggled on Patience, ‘if he’d have liked it, that is, but we never told him, we were so frightened of being pushy. We all miss him, particularly our little granddaughter Dulcie and Northcliffe our dog, who just sit waiting by the front door. Paris is such a super chap.’

  ‘Cringe-making,’ drawled Cosmo.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Jessica and Painswick, who were both in tears.

  After Ian and Patience, Nadine was interviewed and very indiscreetly confessed that she blamed herself: ‘The placement was too middle class and Mr and Mrs Cartwright were too elderly to foster a teenage boy.’

  126

  When Hengist resigned so suddenly, Jupiter Belvedon, as chairman, had telephoned the rest of the governors and suggested they invite David Hawkley to attend the next meeting, to advise them on steadying the ship. This was agreed to be an excellent idea, particularly since Lord Hawkley was leaving Fleetley, and as he’d been touring schools with the Great and the Good looking for a Head of the Year for the Teaching Awards, he would have many fresh ideas.

  It was also agreed that as the Queen’s visit was so imminent, it would be better to have a holding meeting beforehand to discuss logistics and mull over possible candidates to take over as head, then schedule a second meeting shortly after Her Majesty’s visit, when they could have a jolly post-mortem and probably confirm a shortlist for the new head.

  The only person deeply displeased by this development was Alex, who wanted the matter sewn up. Gathering allies, he suggested that a previous winner of Head of the Year at the Teaching Awards, Rod Hyde of St Jimmy’s, should be invited to join the meeting as an impartial adviser, as well as Joan Johnson, the favoured candidate for deputy head; also that to discuss arrangements for the Queen’s visit Randal should be brought in at half-time.

  As none of these three would be able to vote for anything, Jupiter and the board agreed.

  The governors had all loved Hengist and were very upset by his departure. Meetings in his day had been held in London over an excellent dinner at Boodle’s, or at Bagley after a luscious lunch laid on by Sally with plenty to drink. Alex intended to scrap both these procedures. They were expensive, and people couldn’t think straight if they were drunk.

  Poppet, however, didn’t want her hospitality to compare unfavourably with Sally’s, and before the meeting, which was held at three o’clock on the fourth Friday in October, laid on a light buffet and soft drinks.

  As a result, General Broadstairs, the Lord Lieutenant, who’d been up since five cub hunting and was absolutely starving, helped himself to most of Poppet’s quiche, imagining it was a first course, which left cheese and cress sandwiches, plain yoghurts and figs for everyone else.

  Jupiter retreated to a corner with David Hawkley:

  ‘Any more thoughts on joining us on Education?’

  ‘I’m sixty-five,’ said David firmly, ‘much too old for politics and about to retire.’

  ‘Can you resist a chance to play God with the education of this country’s chi
ldren? Greek and Latin in every primary school?’

  They were distracted by Poppet, bringing in and insisting on breastfeeding nineteen-month-old Gandhi.

  ‘At least the lucky little sod’s got a drink,’ grumbled Jupiter as, hungry, resentful and very sober, the governors filed into the boardroom next door.

  Here they were further distressed to find a less faded square on the magenta damask walls, between the portraits of General Bagley and Sabine Bottomley. This, at the last meeting, had been inhabited by Jonathan Belvedon’s lovely, smiling portrait of Hengist, with his hand on Elaine’s head and Sally’s photograph on the bookshelf behind him.

  ‘Beautiful picture. Hope it’s been given to Sally,’ chuntered the Lord Lieutenant.

  Alex smiled thinly. Having learnt Jonathan’s portraits went for over two hundred thousand pounds on the open market, a discreet sale could buy a lot more IT equipment.

  Outside in the park, leaves were drifting downwards in free-fall. Jupiter sat at one end of the long polished table, with David Hawkley on his left and the Bishop on his right. Alex sat at the other end flanked by Joan and Rod Hyde, rigid with disapproval to be among the governing body of an independent school.

  Miss Painswick, a box of Kleenex beside her, was taking the minutes and tearfully assuring Ruth Walton there was no news yet of Paris.

  The Bishop kicked off with prayers, including one for Paris’s safe return, then, when everyone was seated, added: ‘I’d like to express the governors’ universal regret at the departure of Hengist Brett-Taylor. We’ve all enjoyed Hengist’s friendship and marvellous hospitality and felt privileged to be part of an exciting adventure in turning Bagley into a great school. The lapse that toppled him was regrettable, but understandable.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said everyone but Alex and Rod and Joan.

  The first item on the agenda was the appointment of a new head.

  ‘I’d like to stick my neck out,’ said Joan bravely, ‘and say that Alex has been virtually running the school for the past three years.’