Look to Your Wife

by Paula Byrne

  CHAPTER 2

  Lisa

  What Edward hadn’t expected was to fall in love. Not just with that vibrant, exciting city, with its stunning architecture (built on slave money, he noted to himself, appreciating the irony) and its warm, friendly people, but with Lisa. She was a textiles teacher at the school. He noticed her at once, at his first assembly, because she was the only one not listening. She was whispering to a colleague. She was also the most beautiful woman in the room. Arguably the only beautiful one. She had shoulder-length dark hair, which flicked up at the bottom, huge grey eyes with sooty lashes, and a friendly dimpled smile. But it was her bone structure that mesmerized him most. She’d give Kate Moss a run for her money in that department, he thought. You could slice cheese with those cheekbones.

  She annoyed him, though. He felt that he was being teased for something he hadn’t yet done. Later, when they were formally introduced, she thrust out her hand and gave his a firm, confident shake. But he couldn’t help noticing (with his devotion to Shakespeare) that her palm was slightly moist. So not that confident, he thought to himself. What did Iago have to say about sweaty palms and sexual desire? She could be trouble, he thought. Just as well he was happily married.

  ‘You’ve always liked your Donnas and your Lisas,’ his wife Moira joked.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ said Edward.

  ‘Well, you know. All those Felicities and Sophies in your previous school didn’t really do it for you. I mean from a teaching perspective, not a dating one. You love the idea of educating those working-class girls, but you’d never fancy them. I know I’m safe on that score. What did Oswald Mosley once say, “Vote Labour, sleep Tory”? That’s you through and through, Ed.’

  ‘Well, look what happened to Mosley. Are you trying to tell me that I married up?’ He laughed. ‘Well, I did. And I’m not ashamed to admit it. But I do agree that I love being around these feisty girls, rather than teaching dull, posh Lucindas, always flicking their long, glossy hair and cultivating a look of studied indifference. I’ve seen enough of them to last me a lifetime. Yes, I like the St Joseph’s girls, even though I only see them when they’re naughty. I miss the teaching sometimes. That’s the only downside of a leadership role. You don’t see enough of the children. And they make me laugh. They really do. And I miss you too, Moira. And the bloody cat. You’d love the city, if you gave it a chance.’

  Moira had not come north. She worked in publishing in London, and didn’t want to give up her job. They had agreed to commute, meeting every other weekend in term time. Edward would return home during the school holidays.

  ‘Well, I’ll think about it, darling. Do you know what my mother had the cheek to say to me the other day? “You should live in Liverpool, Moira. Men have their needs.” What a dinosaur! Well, I’m sorry that you raised a feminist, Mummy, I told her. Why should I pack up my great job, and leave our lovely little house in Surrey with its easy commute to London, when you probably won’t stay five minutes in ghastly Toxteth. I tried to explain to her that this job was just a stepping stone. You could never live permanently there, and nor could I.’

  ‘No, I think you’re right, I don’t think I could, much as I love the flat they found for me. But the commute is killing me. My hair is going grey. You’ve got to come north more often, Moira.’

  Edward had gone straight in with a plan for St Joseph’s, and it was working. On his first morning, an Inset day, he had walked slowly around the school grounds, taking in everything. He carried a small orange Post Office notebook. There were no markings in the playground for football or netball. The canteen stank of cabbage. The staffroom was painted corporation cream, with paper-thin brown carpet tiles, sticky underneath his handmade Italian shoes. The buildings were as tired as the staff. There was no sense of dignity or care, for either the teachers or the children.

  He called the governor who was in PR and arranged for painters and decorators to come in overnight. The Scousers loved a challenge, especially on double overtime. When the children arrived for the first day of term, a five-a-side AstroTurf football pitch had been laid down, and a basketball court was marked out on the playground. The staffroom was freshly painted with a Dulux imitation of Farrow and Ball Cornford White, and there was even a new carpet. On the classroom walls there were large framed posters of aspirational heroes: Shakespeare, Einstein, Emmeline Pankhurst, Nelson Mandela (this was a detail he had arranged in advance). God knows how they had performed the makeover in one night or how much it had cost, thought Edward – but he had charmed the governor into picking up the bill.

  He had been told that on the last day of term, the children smashed the fire alarm. It was a ritual. This interested him. He thought long and hard about why they did this. And then he got his answer. They wanted to make a mark. To end their schooldays with a statement and go out with a bang. So he came up with an idea. They would end their schooldays with a prom. There would be a survivors’ breakfast. Suits for the boys, and prom gowns for the girls.

  He instigated other rules too. Report cards. If you failed, you would be sent down a year. A strict dress code. The girls now wore below-the-knee checked kilts, with long socks. Black or brown shoes, or you were sent home. Boys’ hair had to be no more than a number four cut. Ties were not to be tucked into shirts. Everyone must walk down the central aisle in silence into assembly. Students (no longer ‘pupils’) would stand when a teacher entered the room.

  To create a sense of belonging, he instigated houses: Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr. The school was rebranded as SJA (St Joseph’s Academy). The initials appeared everywhere.

  ‘They deserve the same standards’, was Edward’s mantra. He brooked no dissent. ‘You are free to enrol your child elsewhere,’ he would tell the odd disaffected parent. But they never did. They all wanted their children to be part of a success story. He insisted that if ever he had children of his own, they would attend the school. He had no intention of having children, but this was a good way of putting pressure on the staff to set an example and do likewise with their own offspring.

  One of Edward’s best interventions was securing funding for a Literacy Support Dog called Waffles. The kids from Starr house were a bit dim, and he figured it would be a novel way of improving their reading skills. The students would take it in turns to read to Waffles, who lay patiently in his basket. When they had finished reading their two pages loudly and clearly to Waffles, he would raise his head in expectation of his doggy treat (his favourites were Arden Grange crunchy bites). It was another huge success of Edward’s.

  The GCSE results soared, as if by magic. When SJA won an award for Most Improved Academy in the North West, he organized cupcakes for the entire school and gave permission for lessons to be abandoned for the day. Again and again he emphasized that grades mattered.

  The children, also, proved a doddle. From that first week when they returned to school after the summer holidays to find the playground marked out with football and basketball lines, they knew he was all right.

  The staff were the problem. They were lazy, disaffected, gossipy, complacent. They loathed Oxbridge, and they probably loathed him, even though they were nice to his face. Januses. Except for Lisa. It was not so much that she disliked him; she just didn’t notice him. Towards the end of his first year, he decided to throw a party for the staff. He tried to pretend that it was to improve staff morale, to show that he was, after all, one of the guys: that he cared about his staff as much as he cared about his students. But he knew none of this was true. He wanted to see Lisa. He wanted to take her in his arms.

  *

  ‘Will you come to the party?’

  ‘Yes, of course darling. May I bring Tabitha?’

  ‘Well as long as she doesn’t pee all over the flat. Or sleep on the bed.’

  ‘Fantastic. I’ll take the train. Tabitha prefers it that way. Can’t wait to see you, Ed. Guildford feels cold without you.’

  *

  ‘Will you come t
o the party?’

  ‘Is it OK to bring my husband?’

  ‘Oh – do you know, I wasn’t aware that you were married. You’ve kept that quiet! But yes, of course it is. I’d love to meet him.’

  ‘Then I’ll come.’

  CHAPTER 3

  After the Party

  The invitation asked everyone not to wear stiletto heels. This puzzled Lisa. What a curious detail. What on earth did the headmaster and his wife have against high-heeled shoes? It was only when she arrived and saw the beautifully polished wooden floors that she understood. The pinprick of heels would not be a good look in such an immaculate flat, although, personally, she preferred a shabby chic look. She once shocked her husband when she took out a hammer and violently pummelled a brand-new butcher’s block that had been delivered that morning from Ikea: ‘It needs to look old,’ Lisa explained, ‘as if it’s been around for centuries.’ Later, she rubbed oil into the indentations. She liked to press her fingers into the holes that she had made. She loved the feel of wood.

  The textures of natural materials; beauty. These were things that mattered to Lisa. She was a working-class girl from Bootle. But she had a love of beautiful clothes. It came from her father. He had been a postman, and he had a gambling habit. When he won on the ‘gee-gees’ he would bring her and her sisters posh clothes from George Henry Lee. The next day her mother would return them. Lisa never forgot the quality and cut of the garments. She bought her first beautiful dress with the first instalment of her student grant. It was black silk, cut on the bias, with embroidered dull-gold roses. It was the first time she truly understood how beautiful clothes bestowed confidence.

  Lisa had been educated at an all-girls’ convent school, run by the Sacred Heart Sisters. Sister Agnes, unintentionally, used to crack them up: ‘Girls, please remember, do not eat your sandwiches up St Anthony’s back passage.’

  Lisa loved the school chapel, with its smell of polished wood and incense. The other girls were a nightmare, though. The height of their ambition was to get pregnant, so they could bag a council flat. But she also knew that these girls wanted a baby to love. She was sure about that. Sadly, the men they went for were such losers. She knew, with absolute clarity, that once she left, she would never go back.

  On leaving school, she applied for a foundation course in textiles at the London School of Fashion. The long-term plan was Textiles in Practice, BA (Hons), at the Manchester School of Art, but first she had to complete a foundation course, and London was the natural choice. She adored London. It was her city, and always would be. She still remembered how naïve she had been when she first arrived. She blushed at the memory of seeing posters around the city saying ‘Bill Stickers will be prosecuted’. Who was this man Bill Stickers? Why hadn’t anyone caught him. Her new sophisticated southern friends cried with laughter when she asked them.

  But she made it to Manchester, and after the BA came an MA for which she wrote a dissertation called Lipstick and Lies: Reassessing Feminism and Fashion. It was about third-wave feminism. How it was OK to embrace your femininity and still be a feminist. She traced the connection between fashion and female politics from 1781 to the present day. She began with the mother of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, arguing that her ideas about dress and women’s liberation were paradoxically close to those of Marie Antoinette, a fashion icon from the other end of the political spectrum. She ended with Alexander McQueen by way of Coco Chanel. She had always worshipped McQueen. She appreciated the wit and style of his final act of defiance: hanging himself with his best belt in a closet full of beautiful clothes.

  She was passionate about her work. It was her solace, her consolation and her joy. But jobs teaching the history of fashion were as rare as hen’s teeth, and before she stood any chance of getting one she would have to spend three years working on a PhD thesis, earning no money. Things had also gone a bit pear-shaped in the boyfriend department, so she had returned home to Bootle. The next thing she knew, she had a job teaching textiles at St Joseph’s Academy, and a husband from New Brighton – a man who was never going to set the world alight, but who was dependable, and, it had to be said, incredibly handsome: he could have got a job as a Tom Cruise lookalike.

  Lisa was just twenty-three, straight out of her MA, when she got the job. She was taken aside by a wise old teacher, Will Butler, who told her to go in hard. ‘Be firm, don’t give an inch. Show them who’s boss, and you will never have to discipline them again.’

  Lisa took the advice to heart. She strode in, wearing a red jacket, and took no nonsense. Within hours, the gossip around the school was that Miss Blaize was ‘dead strict’. From then on, it was plain sailing. She had a laugh with the pupils, but with just one look she could command complete attention.

  She learned another valuable lesson, early on, about schoolchildren and loyalty. It was towards the end of the school day, and she was tired. A boy called Michael Turner was giving her cheek. He was a redhead, and a clown, and he was trying to show off. ‘Miss, I can’t do it. Miss, I don’t understand. Miss, Tim’s kicking me under the table.’

  Finally she snapped and slapped him across the face. Total silence. Utter horror. What had she done? Everyone looked at her. Then the bell rang.

  ‘Off you go. You’re dismissed.’

  That night she told Pete, her husband, what she had done. He was shocked. ‘Lisa, you’ll lose your job. He’ll go straight home and tell his parents. You will have to resign. What on earth were you thinking?’

  ‘That was the problem. I wasn’t thinking. Well it’s too late now. There’s nothing I can do.’

  All night she agonized over the slap. What had she been thinking? She planned on going to the head first thing in the morning and fessing up. Hold up your hand, mea culpa …

  As it happened, she bumped into Turner in the playground. ‘Aright miss, see you later!’ He gave her a wide grin.

  He never said a word. Nor did the other children. Loyalty. Children always have the ability to surprise teachers. He never gave her cheek again. But she still had nightmares about the slap.

  Then there was Jordan. He was fourteen and the most handsome boy she had ever seen. He had huge hands, like Michelangelo’s statute of the boy/man David. She would catch Jordan’s eye in the classroom and he would respond with an intense stare. God, the boy was so bloody sexy. He disconcerted her. Made her feel that he was undressing her with his eyes. Then she would feel wracked with shame for having such thoughts about a schoolboy. Now I know how Humbert Humbert felt when he confessed that it was Lolita who seduced him, she said to herself. These were thoughts that she could never have voiced to anyone. Especially not to Pete, for whom the phrase ‘jealous guy’ might have been coined.

  One day, Jordan stayed late in the textile room to help her tidy. She was stacking scissors into metal containers. Jordan was picking up tiny dressmaking pins with his oversized fingers. They were working in silence, but he suddenly broke down and told her that his parents were divorcing. She hugged him and kissed his forehead softly. And that was it. Just a chaste, butterfly-wing kiss. But she felt worse about that kiss than she had about slapping Turner. God, if anyone found out. Perhaps she wasn’t cut out for teaching.

  She wanted to keep her options open. She was already thinking that she might not be cut out for marriage either. Pete had the most gorgeous body, but never said anything interesting.

  She was a grafter, and always had been. At fourteen, she’d sold records in Woolworth’s. During her foundation year in London, she had worked nights as a hospital cleaner. While an undergraduate in Manchester, she had been a barmaid. So when she came home in the evenings, tired as she was from the noise of the school and the strain of being a new teacher, she sat at her computer and worked Lipstick and Lies up into a book. A small publisher took it on, and there were a few enthusiastic reviews in some little-known magazines and periodicals. It was even shortlisted for a prize so obscure that there couldn’t have been many competitors. She began thinking about a s
ubject for a second book; one that might get her out of teaching.

  *

  She had to admit that she was rather attracted to the new head, and just a little excited about the party. She had pretended not to listen to his address in that first assembly back in the autumn; in reality, she had been mesmerized by his quiet but charismatic basso profundo voice, and the way that he spoke in perfectly formed sentences. His words had been like silk, his soft phrases a drug, a charm, a conjuration.

  The day before the party, she found herself alone in the staffroom with Chuck Steadman, who had also applied for the headship. He had quickly overcome his disappointment and was making himself indispensable to the new man.

  ‘What do you really think of him?’ Lisa asked, fixing Chuck with her blue-grey eyes and twisting her hair around her index finger. Men always listened when she did that.

  ‘Edward is an only child,’ Chuck replied, ‘that says a lot about him. He told me he was once destined for the church. Don’t you think he would have made a good bishop?’

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean: Scott Fitzgerald’s “spoiled priest”. Yes, I see exactly what you mean. He speaks in a very reverential way. He’s shy underneath all that intellect and brilliance. But he’s certainly tough. He’s made a great start in turning this place around. Not an easy feat.’

  ‘Aha, you gotta hand it to him. He’s Mr God round here. Did you ever meet Mrs God?’

  ‘Not yet. She doesn’t come here very often, does she? I’m hoping she’ll be at the party tomorrow. I’ve heard she’s very posh, what do they say, very Edinburgh. She’s Scottish, isn’t she? I overheard one of my indiscreet sixth-formers saying that one Sunday night he’d been passing that old block of flats where the head lives, and he’d seen him stuffing a busty blonde holding a cat basket into a car. That must have been her. Not what I’d imagined he’d go for.’

  ‘Well, as a red-blooded Southerner, I approve of the Baywatch type. Why, look at my Milly!’