by Paula Byrne
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered to Freddie, ‘I did my best.’
Freddie ignored her, and walked out with tears in her eyes, and head bowed. Max stalked out, furious. Lisa could hear him yelling in the car park. I’m glad she got away from him, she thought. He’s a bully and a coward. He hadn’t shouted like that at Edward. He saved his wrath for his estranged wife. But her final thoughts were for Bertie, whom no one really wanted.
*
Lisa was sure that she would never have had an affair without the easy compliance of social media. She was using Twitter to communicate with her lover. But she was doing it for all the world to see. Except that she knew that only she and Sean would be aware of this. So it didn’t really matter. Did it?
They could have emailed, but Lisa didn’t like email, and Sean didn’t think it was safe. They texted. But somehow Twitter was their medium. It had brought them together. The obvious thing would have been to confine themselves to Direct Messages, but Lisa didn’t want this. Crazily, she wanted the world to know her secret, her guilt. Sean, cannier, and far more conscious of the professional cost of any false move, set up a secret Twitter account. In homage to Laurie Lee, and his Christmas present from Lisa, he chose the handle @AsIWalkedOut. In it, he poured out thoughts, memories and feelings in a stream of consciousness that made her think he was really speaking to himself.
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
Make me not want you so much. I can’t get any peace always thinking about you – I want to be able to live in peace again.
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
A young man was playing a fiddle on a Cornish beach. He looked up to see a glamorous woman gazing at him.
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
She had shoulder-length dark hair, red-painted lips & blue, blue eyes.
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
She spoke to him: ‘Boy, come and play for me.’
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
He was a writer called Laurie Lee. She was Lorna Garman, the youngest of the seven famously beautiful Garman sisters.
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
They began an intense love affair. She was married, but serially unfaithful. She gave birth to Lee’s daughter.
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
Later she became the lover of Lucien Freud.
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
One day, Lorna and Freud were walking down Piccadilly. They bumped into Laurie Lee at a bus stop and a fight broke out.
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
Freud won the fight, but Lorna went home with Lee.
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
Lee, knowing he would lose her, put a razor blade to his throat, but couldn’t go through with it.
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
Freud threatened to shoot her and shoot myself, but in the end he fired his gun into a cabbage patch.
REPLY TO @AsIWalkedOut
Lisa Blaize @Lisa_Blaize
Myself? HIMself. Freudian slip!
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
Lorna tired of both men and went home to her husband.
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
Freud never got over Lorna, and vowed ‘I will never love a woman more than she loves me.’
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
Lucien Freud and Laurie Lee married Lorna’s nieces. They never forgot her. She was a hard woman to get over.
*
Crikey, Lisa thought to herself. What a story. Could it be true that Laurie Lee and Lucien Freud got into a street brawl over a woman? She googled it. It was all true. Lorna Garman was Muse to both men, who became obsessed by her. Laurie Lee dedicated a book of poems to her. Freud painted her. Over and over again, Girl with Daffodil, Girl with a Tulip.
Lisa was surprised that this man of science was so romantic. He certainly wasn’t your typical doctor. Their meetings were innocent enough; coffee at the Bean, lunch in the café at the Blagsford Heritage Centre. His every little act made her feel happy. He would never let her buy her own coffee. If she arrived early, he would text her to go upstairs and he would bring her an extra hot double espresso. As a feminist, she was appalled by her own double standards. But she allowed him to do it. In every other romantic relationship, Lisa had always had the upper hand. She feared that, for once, this time she might not.
Sean’s best feature was his blond floppy hair. She wanted to kiss him on the mouth and run her hands through that hair. She also saw that he had a tiny black fleck in his right eye. She loved this little flaw, because she had always loved flawed things.
Sean was not especially handsome or distinguished looking, like Edward. He was becoming middle-aged, was developing a slight paunch and the lovely hair was thinning. Though his job was extraordinary, his appearance was not out of the ordinary. Her love for him crept up on her, stealthily, and then it hit her with the force of a train. She saw the boy in him. There was a vulnerability lurking behind the ‘good doctor’ persona. He told her that he had wanted to be a surgeon from the age of five, just as she had known at that age that she would be a writer. Sean was naughty, too. He told her stories of sexual encounters in linen cupboards on hospital wards that made her blush. He was deliciously indiscreet. And he made her laugh. Uncontrollably.
He teased her, calling her Lady C, a reference to Lady Chatterley. Lisa told him that she liked preppie men, not Mellors. Arthur Miller, not Jo DiMaggio. Mr Darcy, not Mr Wickham. ‘Ah, you just haven’t met the right Mellors,’ he said.
Later, he texted her:
Thanks for having coffee with me, Lady C. You were looking so beautiful. Lovely dress. I have a confession to make …
OK, doc, so make it …
When you leaned over to check your phone, I peeped at your cleavage: magnificent.
Please behave Dr O’Connor.
Mr. Not on your life.
*
Love makes you cruel. Lisa was lying on her blue chaise, listening to her vinyl, and reading her lover’s texts. She glimpsed Edward walking towards her.
‘You have a very beatific smile on your face.’
‘Do I? Maybe I’m pleased to see you.’
‘Who’s on the phone?’
‘Oh, I was just speaking to my mum.’
‘Send her my love.’
‘Will do.’
Though she was the author of a book called Lipstick and Lies, Lisa hated lying. Lying to anybody. She hadn’t lied to Freddie when telling her about what she could or couldn’t do for Bertie. And she had never, ever lied to Edward. She did not feel good.
Then something happened that convinced her she should call it all off.
One evening in February, when Edward was away at a meeting of the Headmasters’ Conference, Sean texted her to ask if they could meet for a cocktail. They had never been out together in the evening before. Lisa texted back to say that she could pop over for an hour. She hurriedly put on a chic black dress, black evening jacket, and twisted her hair into a messy bun.
‘You look pretty, Mummy,’ said Emma. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m just popping out to see a friend. Matron from School House is going to come over and keep an eye on you.’
‘It’s Ma, mummy, not Matron,’ said Emma.
Lisa raised her eyebrows. ‘I won’t be long. And children, don’t forget to put the chickens to bed.’
‘OK,’ said little George.
She loved those chickens, the five Cotswold Legbar hens and the handsome cockerel they’d christened Colin. She didn’t mind that they provoked some teasing. ‘Excuse me, Ms Blaize,’ a particularly handsome tousled lower-sixth boarder said to her one day (Edward had announced that out of respect for ‘her autonomy and her professional status’ his wife was always to be called Ms Blaize, not Mrs Chamberlain).
‘What is it?’ she said, kindly.
‘Is it true that you’re woken up very early every morning by the headmaster’s cock?’
She blushed.
He paused, then risked the unmentionable subject: ‘It’s a big one, isn’t it?’
She blushed more deeply, then got it. She smiled and waited.
‘The cockerel – we can hear it as far away as School House.’
She admired his spunk, and didn’t report him. Edward would not have seen the funny side.
*
It was raining. They were meeting in a deconsecrated church that was now a cocktail bar. Sean, who was an atheist, joked that it was the only church you would ever find him in. He had a present for her. It was a first edition of The Great Gatsby, which Lisa had told him was her favourite novel. Those shirts of Jay Gatsby’s, Daisy’s cool dresses. The hemlines of the Jazz Age.
That was why he had called her. He couldn’t wait to see her delight when he handed it over.
She didn’t know what to say. Tears pricked her eyes. The present moved her beyond words.
‘You do like it?’
She nodded.
When she got home, she hid the book in one of her shelves. She tucked George in, kissed his thick black curls, and then fell asleep on his bed next to him. In the early hours, she stole back into her own bed, and cuddled into Edward’s warm body. In the morning, he woke first, as always, and pulled back the curtains.
‘Christ Almighty!’
‘What, what?’
‘Shush, I don’t want George to see. The fox has killed the chickens. I can see three on the lawn. I need to bury the bodies before he wakes up.’
Lisa jumped up.
‘But where are the others? What about Colin?’
‘The bloody fox will have taken them. The school gardener said he saw a vixen and a cub at the bottom of the lawn. I forgot to warn you. So much on at the moment, you know.’
‘All of them. All six of them. Now I know the meaning of Macduff’s words: at one fell swoop.’
‘That’s what foxes do, Lisa. They do it for fun. Did you lock them in the coop last night?’
‘Emma and George did. But they mustn’t have locked the door tightly enough.’
Emma was a careful girl, and George loved those chickens. What had gone wrong? Lisa felt a stab of guilt. She should have put the hens away herself, not been out having a cocktail with a married man. But what if someone else had let them out? Had someone from the school seen her dashing out in the rain? She felt sick to her stomach. Between them, she and Sean had five children. This was a bad omen. A warning. It was time to call it off before anyone else got hurt.
CHAPTER 12
What’s Happening?
The compulsion was too great. Lisa could not stop herself tweeting. Their meetings were arranged by text, and there was the occasional intimate DM, but most of the time she kept in touch with Sean by posting tweets. Often about the most trivial things. When she had first discovered Twitter back in December she had been amused by the question that appeared in the box that popped up when you hit the Tweet button that was inscribed with a little icon of a quill (I must mention that Shakespearean quill to Edward some time, she said to herself).
Twitter: what’s happening?
She took this literally. Twitter was her way of telling Sean what was happening in her life. What was happening to her, day by day, minute by minute. It was their way of connecting. Physical presence didn’t seem to matter because every time she posted a tweet she knew that he would have read it on his phone within seconds, whenever he wasn’t in the operating theatre, and that the moment he read it she would be in his head. It was a connection of the most intimate kind, unique to them, secretive without being sleazy, because it was also entirely innocent – I have no secrets, I am confiding in the whole world. That was the meaning of Twitter.
Photos, too. She didn’t dare text them to Sean’s phone, in case someone saw them. But selfies posted on Twitter were another matter.
Lisa Blaize @Lisa_Blaize
Duty calls. Dinner for important parents tonight. Designer dress de rigeur. Will this one do?
DM from @MrOCon: Christ, you’re gorgeous girl.
Lisa didn’t care what anybody else might think. She didn’t have many followers, just a few fashion history nerds who had read her book, and a handful of acquaintances such as Bertie’s mum Freddie. Nobody would dwell on her words. It was such an ephemeral medium, with hundreds of messages scrolling across each user’s screen every minute, all mingled together so that nine out of ten posts would be missed. Except by Sean, who had @Lisa_Blaize permanently in his ‘Search Twitter’ box (the one with the little icon of a Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass). Besides, she was enjoying the freedom Twitter gave her to develop a persona that was the antithesis of the received image of a public-school headmaster’s wife. A mix of the literary and the ditzy, quoting lines of poetry in one post and making silly jokes in the next. She loved to laugh at her own expense, because she knew that Sean loved that too – and, though she didn’t like to admit it – because she also knew that Edward would disapprove. She made lots of references to designer clothes and beauty regimes. This, she thought, would help to establish her ‘brand’ as a fashion professional. But it would also put the image of her body, her curves, her skin, into Sean’s head.
Twitter: what’s happening?
Lisa Blaize @Lisa_Blaize
I’ve lost my reading glasses.
DM from @MrOCon: Try looking on your head.
Twitter: what’s happening?
Lisa Blaize @Lisa_Blaize
I’ve found my reading glasses. They were on my head.
*
To her surprise, her Twitter account started picking up more followers.
HokeyCokey @charlieboy
heyy @Lisa_Blaize I really like ur tweets.
Lisa Blaize @Lisa_Blaize
Hey @charlieboy Many thanks.
HokeyCokey @charlieboy
Can you follow me back @Lisa_Blaize.
Lisa Blaize @Lisa_Blaize
No problem. What you doing on here?
HokeyCokey @charlieboy
nothing really just bored cus off school.
*
Over the following weeks, @charlieboy, whoever he was (a pupil at the school?), kept making brief reappearances in her Twitter stream.
HokeyCokey @charlieboy
Heyy @Lisa_Blaize its me again u haven’t been active in a while.
HokeyCokey @charlieboy
@Lisa_Blaize U still haven’t followed me back.
HokeyCokey @charlieboy
@Lisa_Blaize well I’m transfixed by ur profile pics eyes.
HokeyCokey@charlieboy
@Lisa_Blaize what u wearing atm?
HokeyCokey @charlieboy
@Lisa_Blaize random question for u though what is your bra size lol.
Lisa Blaize @Lisa_Blaize
Who are you @charlieboy? Do your parents know you’re doing this?
HokeyCokey @charlieboy
@Lisa_Blaize that’s why i aint dumb enough to give u my name lol.
CHAPTER 13
Sandflies
There was an arms race between the independent schools. The famous ones – Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, Westminster, Radley – would always have the sharp-elbowed middle-classes jostling for places, bombarding admissions registrars, hiring tutors and interview coaches, pulling strings. But those outside the premier league, ‘minor public schools’ such as Blagsford, competed fiercely with each other. A rival school’s new AstroTurf all-weather hockey pitch would require a response in the form of an indoor tennis court, an Olympic-sized swimming pool would be trumped by an offer of flying lessons. None of this came cheap, so the fees went up and up each year, far ahead of inflation.
Filling the boarding places was the biggest challenge of all. The margin was greatest there, with the fee twice that of a day place. But to most British people, boarding was neither desirable nor affordable. What was the point of having children if you were going to pack them off to school? There were city types knowing the lifetime advantage bestowed by the contacts made at boarding school.
And the old county families determined that their offspring should endure the regime of loneliness and cold showers that they had endured themselves (and their parents before them), even if this meant taking out a second mortgage, driving an old banger, and taking holidays in Scotland instead of Tuscany. But for clientele of this kind, the second division was no use. It was one of the ‘great public schools’ or nothing.
In order to fill the boarding places, schools like Blagsford had to look further afield. In the Far East they could play on the historic reputation of British private education, pepping it up with hints of Hogwarts’ delights.
So it was that the headmaster was required to make an annual recruitment trip during the Easter holidays. Edward’s predecessor had gone to Hong Kong and Singapore in alternating years. A bachelor, he travelled alone, insisting on business class so that on arrival in the sweaty tropics he was fresh for his meetings with prospective new parents. ‘Did you find any boys?’ the admissions registrar would ask on his return. ‘I met some boys,’ he would habitually say, ‘but I don’t think we’ll be recruiting them.’ One of the reasons why Edward had got the job was that he had persuaded the governors he would be much more successful in this area. The bursar was pinning everything on his results.
Edward had a plan. Blagsford’s problem was that it was not a big enough hitter in Hong Kong and Singapore, where the top players in the independent school network were all fishing the pool. There just weren’t enough wealthy families to go around. Now it happened that Nick, his undergraduate contemporary from Oxford – an adventurer who had never settled in any part of the world for more than a few years – had become head of the prestigious (he claimed) Pasar Minggu Academy in Jakarta. Indonesia: that was a new market. There was plenty of oil money. Its version of Islam was liberal, so there would be no worries about the provision of religious education, no demand for the construction of a school mosque (which would have been very off-putting to the more traditional British parents). Nick had promised him some excellent prospects, and they could have a jolly while they were about it.