Faintley Speaking mb-27

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Fun and games, in fact,’ commented Laura cheerfully. ‘All right, Miss Golightly. Fair enough. What a ghastly life kids lead, when one comes to think of it! Harried, chivvied, overruled and put upon! I’m glad I’m as old as I am. How do you feel about it?’

  Miss Golightly smiled sourly, but Laura, accustomed to Mrs Bradley’s leering, intimidating grins, was not impressed. Miss Golightly sensed this, and her smile altered and became amiable.

  ‘I entirely agree with you, Miss Menzies,’ she replied.

  ‘Grand! Now, touching a matter of some slight embarrassment to himself and me —’

  ‘I shall see Street,’ said the headmistress. ‘You need anticipate no difficulty there. You get his form once a week only. Out of school there will naturally be no contact.’

  ‘Unless the police case calls for it,’ said Laura. ‘That seems to sum things up,’ she added brightly. ‘And now, what about the botany syllabus?’

  Miss Golightly opened a drawer and handed over a typescript. Laura glanced at it.

  ‘Can do,’ she said. ‘How do you like it taught? – “How doth the little busy bee?” – or a list of natural orders, with appropriate information attached, all done out nice and proper in our little notebooks?’

  ‘You’ll soon see!’ snapped Miss Golightly, and, with this intensely human reaction, she gained a place in Laura’s affections which she was destined not to lose. ‘And it’s ten minutes to nine,’ she added. ‘Time you were in your little classroom! At break I will introduce you to the rest of the staff.’

  She conducted Laura to a room on the ground floor of the school, introduced her briefly to a mixed class of twelve-year-old children and left her. Laura was equal to the situation.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Who’s the form captain?’

  Two children, a boy and a girl, stood up amid comments from the rest of the class.

  ‘Right,’ said Laura. ‘After break I shall want to know who are the window monitors, the milk monitors, the dinner monitors, the door monitor, the cupboard monitors, the general scavengers, the fort-holder, the flower monitor, the blackboard monitor, the hymn-book monitor, the teacher’s yes-man, the teacher’s pest, the liaison monitor, and the person who wrote the words on the outside window-ledge of this classroom.’

  A girl put up her hand. Laura looked at her sourly.

  ‘Please, miss,’ said the girl, ‘what’s a fort-holder?’

  ‘Ah, that,’ said Laura. ‘I’m glad you asked me that. I gather that you are teacher’s yes-man, so that’s one problem solved. A fort-holder, as you ought to know, and probably do know, at your age, is the stooge who stands at the classroom door when teacher has gone out of the room, remains on guard during the consequent chaos, and sings out at the appropriate moment, “Shut up, you twerps! She’s coming!” And upon the strength of my personality,’ Laura concluded, ‘depends whether the twerps shut up or whether they don’t… a point which will soon be established. And now you can all get down to the hall for morning assembly, and heaven help the one who is out of line by the time that I get down there.’

  The allocation of text-books, stationery, pens, ink, blotting-paper, rulers, compasses, protractors, set-squares, and copies of the form time-table occupied the time pleasantly and noisily until break. Laura saw the class out and went in search of the staff-room. She was almost run into at one end of the corridor by a stout, florid, middle-aged man in a suit of shiny-seated navy-blue, who said:

  ‘Hah! The new recruit, eh? My name’s Tomalin. English master and so forth. Let me guide you towards the coffee and biscuits.’

  ‘My name is Menzies,’ Laura responded. ‘Thank you very much. But I thought,’ she added, as they walked along the corridor towards the staircase which led to the staff-room, ‘that somebody called Cardillon took English.’

  ‘Oh, well, actually, yes, of course, she does. That’s to say, we run a G.G.E. course here and so have to take on these young lady B.A.s. Unfortunately, in my opinion. They may have been to a university, and all that, but when it comes to a spot of honest spade-work, there’s nobody like the good old choked-in-the-chalk-dust practitioner to ram it home good and solid. Up here, and look out for boys rushing round corners and jumping down eight stairs at a time. They’re not supposed to, but they will do it. Miss Golightly’s too soft. Now, if I were a headmaster… as I should have been, years before this, if kissing didn’t go by favour, which, in this blasted job, it does, and always will do… well, here we are.’

  He gave the partly-open door a push with his foot, and Laura found herself in a biggish, square room with a fireplace, a gas-oven, a large table and three small ones, a Dutch wardrobe, two bookcases, several armchairs and even more small chairs, a chaise-longue, a large waste-paper basket, a nest of lockers, and a photograph of the Roman Colosseum. Enamel trays covered most of the surface of the large table and, when Laura entered, the coffee was being poured out by two schoolgirls whilst a third carried round the filled cups.

  Mr Tomalin made no attempt to introduce Laura. He charged up to the table, collected a cup of coffee from the girl who was about to pass it to one of the mistresses, grabbed two biscuits from an open tin which stood beside one of the trays, planted one of them in his mouth and the other on his saucer, fished in his waistcoat pocket for a couple of saccharine tablets, dropped them in his cup and made for a vacant chair.

  A grey-haired, quiet-voiced man came forward from where he had been standing with his back against a radiator.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘May I introduce myself? I’m Rankin, senior assistant. Miss Golightly has a parent, so she asked me to do the honours.’

  The bedlam into which Laura had been ushered by Mr Tomalin had calmed down. Raised voices were lowered. Mr Rankin slightly raised his.

  ‘Miss Menzies,’ he said. ‘Mrs Moles, Miss Cardillon, Miss Franks, Miss Batt, Miss Ellersby, Miss Welling, Mr Taylor, Mr Roberts, Mr Tomalin, Mr Fennison, Mr Trench. I won’t bother with what we all teach. You’ll find out soon enough. Perhaps,’ he continued, in a lowered tone as the babble broke out afresh, ‘Miss Cardillon, you’d give Miss Menzies the low-down. Cissie, some coffee for Miss Menzies. That’s the style. Help yourself to the biscuits, Miss Menzies. If you take sugar I’m afraid you’ll have to provide it for yourself. We get a tea and a milk allowance, but that’s all.’ He raised his voice again. ‘By the way, we seem to be all here. Who’s on playground duty?’

  Miss Welling and Mr Taylor, who had hoped, on the first day of term, to escape this loathsome task, betook themselves to the open spaces, there, presumably, to make more difficult the art of mayhem and to cause litter to be cleared up, washbasins emptied and chains pulled. In the staff-room the flood tide of post-holiday conversation welled up once more. Miss Cardillon led Laura to a chair. She was a tall, fair-skinned, freckled woman in her thirty-second year, and Laura liked the look and sound of her as much as she had disliked the look and sound of the mediocre, disgruntled Mr Tomalin.

  ‘It’s a bigger staff than I should have thought,’ she said, in order to open the conversation.

  ‘Yes. Miss Golightly cuts a good deal of ice at the office, thank goodness, so we’re pretty well looked after. It makes a good deal of difference to the non-teaching time we get, and, with a subject like mine – six sets of essays a week, among other things – it’s rather useful to have a few periods off to do the marking.’

  The break, all too short, came to an end on these words, and Laura asked, as she went down the stairs with Miss Cardillon, ‘What about lunch, by the way? Are we all on duty?’

  ‘Oh, no, there’s a rota and you won’t be put on it yet. We always give the new ones a chance to get acclimatized before the extraneous duties begin. But you can have canteen lunch if you want it.’

  ‘I don’t, really,’ Laura confessed.

  ‘Good. Let’s do the local pub, then. It’s the only place in Kindleford where one can get a decent meal, and Miss Golightly doesn’t mind. She goes home to lunch herself, mos
t days, and leaves Rankin in charge. He’s a married man with kids, so he’s quite glad to get a free meal. If you’re on duty you don’t pay, you see. Well, here we part until twelve. Don’t forget to see your girls and Tomalin’s girls round the cloakroom. He looks after both sets of boys. And chivvy the little brutes, otherwise they’ll be all day, and the dinner hour is short enough as it is.’

  Laura went into her classroom to discover that the zealous ink-monitor had overfilled most of the inkwells, a feat which was greeted joyously by the boys and with shrill disgust by the girls. Ink pellets began to fly. There were tears over ink-spotted frocks. Laura went into action, clouted heads, cursed the ink-monitor and ruined the blackboard duster. She had restored order, however, just as Mr Tomalin, with the unctuous crocodile sympathy of one colleague for the disciplinary troubles of another, came into the room without knocking. He carried a cane.

  ‘I thought I heard a noise,’ he remarked to the unnaturally silent class.

  ‘Yes, you did,’ said Laura, loudly and clearly. ‘I am sorry if we disturbed you. I am not an advocate of free discipline, but I am opposed’ – she eyed the cane sternly – ‘to a show of weakness masquerading as strength.’

  ‘Oh, well, I’m a believer in corporal punishment,’ said Mr Tomalin, taken aback by her tone as much as by her words. Laura glanced at her tingling palm and then at several unnaturally red left ears in the front row on the boys’ side of the class, and suddenly laughed.

  ‘I can’t stand that man Tomalin next door to me,’ she said to Miss Cardillon when they met to go out to lunch.

  ‘Think yourself lucky you’re not me,’ retorted Miss Cardillon with unprofessional frankness. ‘I have to share my subject with him, and by the time I get his classes the kids are fed up and sick to their little bellies of composition, grammar, and Eng. lit. I’d throw up my job except that I’ve had a hot tip that I’m to be short-listed for the next headship. So don’t talk about Tomalin to me!’

  This set Laura’s thoughts in the direction of her real duty in the school.

  ‘That reminds me,’ she said. ‘Do we refer to the others just by surnames? I mean, do the men talk of you as Cardillon, Miss Cardillon, a nickname, or how?’

  ‘They call me Liz, behind my back. So do most of the boys.’

  ‘Liz?’

  ‘Short for Skinny Lizzie,’ explained Miss Cardillon cheerfully. ‘On the other hand, if I were ringing up the school to explain that I couldn’t come, or if I were out on a school visit and had some reason to ring up, I should inevitably say, Cardillon speaking. It’s considered rather Fauntleroy to call yourself Miss Cardillon on a mixed staff.’ Miss Ellersby and Miss Franks, who were joining them to make up a table for four, concurred in this opinion.

  ‘It doesn’t do to call too much attention to the blessed state of spinsterhood in this school,’ Miss Ellersby, an anaemic, sardonic-eyed woman of forty, added. ‘Although we only get four-fifths of the men’s money and work three times as hard as most of them, we’re looked upon as bloated plutocrats. What I say is, you can’t have a wife and still expect to have holidays in sunny Italy. Selfish brutes! They ought to try our lives for a bit! Digs and landladies, or else a flat and your own shopping and chores! If it weren’t for the holidays, I should go crackers, for one!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Miss Golightly, coming into Laura’s, first ‘nature’ lesson, ‘whether you would care to call for the next parcel of school stock? It is just as you like, of course. Elbows, Frances! Handkerchief, Evans!’

  The two children looked so much astonished at being thus addressed that Laura guessed that these injunctions were not Miss Golightly’s usual line of country. The head, she thought, was embarrassed, an uncommon state of affairs and one which indicated clearly that, a conscientious and intelligent woman, she fully realized that to offer Laura the task which possibly had brought Miss Faintley to her death was to take advantage of the possession of authority, a thing she never knowingly did. She added, very quickly:

  ‘I can easily make other arrangements, but, as I know quite well why you are here, I thought perhaps it would offer facilities if—’

  ‘I’d like it very much,’ said Laura warmly. ‘When would you wish me to go?’

  ‘It could be to-morrow morning, I think. I have been looking at the time-table. You have only one nature lesson. It is with 1B. They can draw instead, and Mr Tomalin, who is free then, can sit with them while he marks his books. You have your own form for the rest of the time. They can have an extra arithmetic lesson and then do silent reading. You might set them a chapter which they can prepare for an essay. That is only a suggestion, of course, but it is as well to set before them some definite objective, otherwise they only waste their time. How are things going? Quite well?’

  ‘More or less, thank you. Getting hold of all their names is the worst part.’

  ‘Get the children to make out nameplates which they can leave out on the desk until you get to know them. Very well, then. To-morrow, as soon as you have called the register and sent the class down to morning assembly, knock on my door and I will give you the invoices. But you will be careful, won’t you? I should be dreadfully sorry if you did anything rash, as it appears poor Miss Faintley must have done.’

  The moment she was gone there was a buzz all over the classroom, for, although both teachers had talked very quietly, the elastic-eared young had followed most of the conversation.

  ‘Now what?’ asked Laura, who had been giving a good lesson until the entrance of the headmistress. The buzz ceased, but one or two hissing whispers went the rounds, and then a voice from the back row said threateningly:

  ‘Go on, Maisie Dukes! I dare you! You said you would. Now you go on and do it!’

  ‘What is all this?’ asked Laura, mentally prepared to deal with impudence. A girl in the second row got up, flushed and inclined to giggle. Laura deduced that she was scared.

  ‘Please, Miss Menzies,’ she said half-hysterically, ‘some of them think you’re a policewoman!’

  ‘Well, you can assure them that I am not!’ said Laura, grinning. ‘But don’t bank too steeply on that!’

  ‘Did you read about Miss Faintley in the papers?’ asked a bright-eyed girl from a front desk. ‘We thought anybody what took her place must be a policewoman trying to find out things. That’s what Too Pretty for Prison was about.’

  ‘Was it? Why don’t you read something decent?’

  Howls of protest from the girls and of derision (equally divided between Laura and the girls) from the boys greeted this question. Laura became terse and authoritative, and the lesson continued. But she had broken the thread of it, and her mind was occupied with other matters. She wondered how much the children knew about Miss Faintley. Probably a good deal more than the staff did, since they would have regarded her more dispassionately, less sympathetically (most likely) and were keener observers and more accomplished critics. A pity that she could not talk to them freely. There might be something extremely important to be gained. They might even know which member of the staff was the most likely to have been Miss Faintley’s friend of the telephone-box arrangements. A pity one couldn’t very well ask them!

  Another aspect occurred to her. She remembered, from her own schooldays, the capacity of adolescents for imaginative speculation. If these children were inclined to the belief that she was connected with the police it was only a matter of time before they found out that their guess was not so very far from the truth, and once that was established her value to Mrs Bradley as a spy in the school camp would be questionable if not actually non-existent.

  Somewhere in the class a languid hand wagged feebly. Startled, Laura came to herself, to discover that while her conscious mind had been occupied with other, and, she felt, graver matters, her subconscious mind had been presenting the class with a résumé of social life in the early eighteenth century, the botany lesson, rather oddly, having hitched itself on to this subject.

  ‘Well?’ she said, scowling at t
he hand. Its owner dropped it, rose to her feet and inquired:

  ‘Did you say copy or coffee?’

  ‘I said idiot,’ replied Laura. ‘Sit down and attend properly.’ She looked at the clock. ‘Five minutes to put down in your jotting-books a summary of the lesson. Shortest effort has to be read aloud by whoever passes it in.’

  The shortest effort ran as follows:

  ‘The pea and bean are dicotyledons and are often eaten. Queen Anne’s favourite drink was coffee. She built many houses to contain it and these were taken over by George I. He blew a South Sea Bubble and Lloyd’s was floated. It afterwards became a bank. The bank clerks were called underwriters. The top writers sank ships and the underwriters had to pay. They said how much they could afford, and a Lenten bell was rung.’

  The author of this essay was asked to remain behind, as she had refused to read it aloud. She confided to Laura that she was shy. She added that she was sorry, but she had to fetch her little brother from the infants’ school. He was not allowed to cross the High Street alone. She spoke reasonably, without impertinence, and finished tearfully, ‘I couldn’t read it out to them boys!’

  ‘Quite right, too,’ agreed Laura. ‘All right then. Cut along. After all, why should you suffer because I give a rotten lesson?’

  ‘Hullo, hullo!’ said Mr Tomalin, appearing in Laura’s doorway as the girl hurried out after the others. ‘Been having trouble with Susan Hopkins? She’s an impudent little baggage. You don’t want to put up with any nonsense.’

  ‘I don’t intend to,’ replied Laura, who considered that it was high time to settle Mr Tomalin’s hash. ‘And if you don’t mind my saying so, will you kindly leave me to manage my own affairs? I am far more capable of dealing with adolescent girls than you are!’

  ‘Here, here, I say!’ protested Mr Tomalin, indicating the cupboard monitors.