by Paula Byrne
She smiled as she plumped the pillows and straightened out the bed linen. That was the thing about Edward. He always understood. And, though it could be annoying that he couldn’t stop sounding like a teacher even when they were talking in bed, he always had such comforting explanations for things.
But she had moments of perfect cruelty. Like Anna Karenina, who fucked Vronsky and then noticed her husband’s ugly ears, she suddenly saw Edward’s physical imperfections. His hair was going prematurely grey, and he was flat-footed. She’d never noticed this before. When she criticized his feet, he glared at her, and she thought for a moment that he was going to hit her. And yet he was still tender, loving. He held her in his arms. ‘Darling, in the long run, it’s a good thing to have your heart broken. It really is.’
PART THREE
Accusation
CHAPTER 17
Belinda Bullrush
Belinda Bullrush was something of a legend around Blagsford. A former ballerina, she lived in a houseboat on the Grand Union Canal with her cat, Matilda. Lisa met her at the only independent bookshop still standing, the Albion, which was run by a man called Dicky the Book Spiv. That wasn’t his real name, but everyone called him Dicky.
After the end of the affair, Lisa was determined to get out of the house and off social media. She wandered around Blagsford looking for an independent bookshop. She set herself very strict rules about not buying new books online. She was a bit of a bore about it. Frankly, the Albion was an unprepossessing place, set back from the main road; its grimy windows tattooed in scrawled writing. But inside, it was heaven. Books were laddered in piles head-high, and there was a faded painted armoire housing fabulous china: teacups and saucers. Lisa was a snob about mugs. She never ever drank her coffee from a mug, so Dicky’s paper-thin mismatched china was a revelation. With a practised eye, Lisa scanned the shelves. There was nothing sloppy about the bookseller’s taste: a superb poetry section, serious modern fiction. The second-hand shelves were thoughtful; Firbank, Waugh, and Maugham rubbed shoulders with Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark. She spotted a dusty pile of dated and unloved Iris Murdochs.
Dicky was notoriously grumpy. On principle, he refused to install Wi-Fi. There was no way that his establishment was going to be a free home for Blagsford’s crazy and needy. He’d heard the stories of students buying a cup of tea in the local café and staying all day to write up their essays, and go on Facebook. That was not going to happen in his cosy shop. He was not running a house for the homeless, for God’s sake. He wanted to sell proper books. Anyway, he was a ‘cash-only’ kind of man. He was often away from the shop on nefarious business (he claimed he was doing ‘walking tours’, but nobody believed him), so the shop was managed by an itinerant group of single ladies and retired teachers.
The thing that Dicky fully failed to grasp was just how adored he was. He had the sweetest smile. When he smiled, it went all the way up to his eyes. Kind eyes. And God, Dicky was funny. He was very good friends with Belinda. He rather worshipped her, though he’d die before admitting it.
Lisa chose a vintage teacup with faded painted roses and a cracked saucer and asked the beautiful girl with the black, shiny hair if she could have a Lady Jane Grey (Earl Grey was so common). Lisa tried to spark up a conversation, telling the girl that she’d never noticed the bookshop before, and had felt nervous about entering.
The Beautiful Girl smiled, ‘I felt the same thing. Dicky needs to do something about the front of shop. It doesn’t know what it is. But this place is the heart of Blagsford.’
Lisa warmed to her. She was so natural. So at ease with herself. She had dirty fingernails. Ahh, she’s a gardener, Lisa surmised. She must turn the conversation to gardens.
‘I’m Belinda. Belinda Bullrush. I help Dicky out. He’s very special. You have to pay cash. There’s a machine outside the Co-op if you need cash.’
Lisa fumbled in her purse and extracted a note. ‘I’ll buy some books, too. Keep the money.’
‘Thank you. I can see that you’re very kind. I like that.’
And that was the beginning of one of the most important friendships of Lisa’s life.
*
Belinda was not a gardener. Her fingernails were grubby because the only source of hot water on her boat was a woodburner, and she was forever lighting twigs and kindling. She didn’t believe in firelighters: those were for wimps. Bee had strong, capable, workman-like hands. They were slightly at odds with the rest of her person, which was elegant and understated. Bee wore large, floppy hats. She was trying to disguise her loveliness, because she had a difficult relationship with beauty. She told Lisa that she bought her clothes from the local second-hand shop. For Lisa, with her snobbish attitude to clothes, Bee looked sensational. She wore cute, sexy tea dresses with ankle socks and brogues, and pulled it off. How does she do it, she wondered.
To her surprise, on only their second meeting, Lisa started crying.
‘What’s wrong? Please tell me, but only if you want to.’
‘Belinda. I don’t know you, and maybe that helps. I’m in love with someone who is not my husband. The affair is over, but I’m still in love with him.’
‘OK. You’re speaking to the right woman. I won’t judge you. I have an extremely fluid attitude towards love and the intimate workings of the human heart. But I want to say one thing to you.’
‘Please do.’
‘Don’t be sitting in the seat I’m in. I can tell you to follow your heart, but I’m not going to do that. I’m alone, and you’re not. You’ve got to think about that.’
‘I don’t feel lucky. I feel wretched.’
‘Well, if you need to unburden your grief, I’m here to listen. I’m not sure I’m ever going to give you advice, Lisa, I don’t do that. Besides, I’m not sure you’d listen.’
‘Yes, I would listen, but I wouldn’t necessarily follow it.’
So they talked, and they talked. And they drank tea: lots of it. Every so often, Belinda would spot a customer and bully them into buying a book or a hot drink. She was fierce about protecting Dicky’s interests. There was not much browsing when Belinda was in charge. She called it ‘keeping a vigilant eye’. Every now and then Belinda would break into a pirouette. Her knee injury had put an end to a promising career as a ballerina, but she had retrained as a yoga and Pilates teacher. She was pencil-slim, with a waist like a wand, and small, pert breasts. Lisa thought she looked a cross between Virginia Woolf and Olive Oyl. She seemed to be from another space and time.
The floodgates opened, Lisa told Belinda about Sean and Emma, and how they were somehow intricately linked in her heart. As Lisa explained, she didn’t need a psychotherapist to tell her that she fell in love with a doctor because she wanted a saviour for her daughter and for herself. Belinda seemed to understand completely. She was so very kind. And Lisa was badly in need of kindness.
*
Edward was in shock for the first few days after the revelation of Lisa’s affair. He felt numb. Could think of nothing else. It was how he imagined a bereavement would be – the closest he had ever come to that was the time his daughter had nearly died. He had never known his father, and his old mum was still going strong down in London, always complaining about her arthritis, but basking daily in the extraordinary rise of her son from his humble origins to the great school and then Oxford, and now his prestigious position as a headmaster.
‘Do you want me to move out?’ Lisa asked.
‘Do you want to move out?’
She was infuriated by his way of answering a question with a question.
‘No, I don’t. Where would I go, and what about the children?’
‘I thought you might like to go away for a while – maybe back to Liverpool – to sort yourself out, work out what you want to do.’
‘I’m not the type to run away, Edward. You know that.’
They relapsed into stony silence. Lisa was the one to break it.
‘Keep buggering on. And let’s not take it out on the
children.’
He couldn’t resist a dig: ‘How very good of you to think of them, as I’m sure you were when you were planning your dirty weekend in Amsterdam.’
Lisa blazed back: ‘Just like you always put the children first. Never the school, the students, the teachers, the governors, the bloody Headmasters’ Conference, the Chamberlain brand.’
She could see it was going to be a difficult summer.
*
Lisa knew that it was over. She was heartbroken and relieved at the same time. The butterflies in the stomach – those of love and those of guilt – vanished overnight. She lay awake, thinking of Sean lying awake beside his wife, who knew nothing. Did he kiss his wife’s eyelids, as he had hers? How strange it was that she had wept in the arms of her husband, as he comforted her because her heart had been broken by the loss of another man with whom she was still crazily in love.
She must obey the rules. No texts. Twilence.
But she could not forbear to look at @AsIWalkedOut. There were two last tweets, written within minutes of her coded Graham Greene message.
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
She drove him to the brink of madness.
LoveLaurieLee @AsIWalkedOut
When the affair ended, Laurie typed her name over and over again. Night, night Lisa. Lisa Blaize. Lisa Blaize. Lisa, Lisa, Lisa.
*
The following night, unable to sleep, she went downstairs at the blue hour of four in the morning. When she tried to go to @AsIWalkedOut, she discovered that the account no longer existed.
CHAPTER 18
An Unexpected Letter
‘Lisa, I’ve got something to tell you.’ Edward was speaking with a tremor.
‘Oh God, not again.’ Last time it had been I’ve got something to ask you. She felt sick. How much more could she take? Was it Sean’s wife? Someone who had seen them together? Sean himself?
‘Lisa, I’ve had a letter. Would you be minded to be Lady Chamberlain?’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘You’re not going to believe this. But this is a letter from Number 10.’
‘Spit it out, Edward.’
‘It says that the Prime Minister intends to recommend to the Queen that I should be knighted for services to Education, but before doing so, she wants to know whether I would be minded to accept.’
‘Oh Edward, darling, I am so happy for you. It’s well deserved. Such a reward for all you did at St Joseph’s. Your mother will be so proud of you. I would be very, very minded to accept being Lady Chamberlain.’
He proudly showed her the citation: ‘Edward Linford Chamberlain, for services to Education.’
‘Darling, you mustn’t tell a soul. It’s top secret until the publication of the Birthday Honours List in mid-June. You must be discreet, darling.’
She sent a text:
S, you’ll never guess … please may we meet for coffee? You will laugh so much when I tell you.
No reply.
Another text:
Well, if you’re not going to reply I shall just tell you. I really AM going to be Lady C.
*
It was the best possible end to their first academic year at Blagsford and, for Lisa, a welcome distraction from heartbreak. They arranged a party, ostensibly to celebrate the end of the exam season and the news of a major boost to the school’s finances as a result of the confirmed acceptances from a dozen Indonesian boys. Lisa specified on the invitation that the dress code was to be ‘Gatsbyesque’. She knew this would aggravate the more boring members of the staffroom, with their ragged tweed and dowdy greys.
The Honours List was published on the morning of the party.
*
The less welcome letter came exactly a week later.
… I don’t know how much attention you pay to Lisa’s Twitter account, but if you have a look at her tweets over the past five or six months you will get a sense of what people are concerned about and why Lisa has become an object of ridicule, not just at Blagsford, but across the public school network more widely. You will be able to see that she comes across as almost pathologically vain and egotistical.
And on it went:
There is something not quite right about someone (unless they happen to be Jordan, aka Katie Price, writing for Heat magazine) who thinks it will be of interest to others to know that she always turns long-haul flights into a ‘spa opportunity’, and who even posts pictures of the lotions that she will be using to make her ‘skin feel fab’. One of her tweets, an entirely typical one, reads, ‘My dressmaker has just left (Yes, I did just say that!) and says he loves my 36, 24, 34 measurements. Yay.’ It has become a standing joke in the Common Room and even among the pupils.
Lisa’s tweets about her sparkly, high-heeled shoes, her bikini from the Elizabeth Hurley range (God help us), her designer dresses, her hair, her waterproof mascara, etc. etc. etc., ad nauseam, are absolutely relentless, and it’s all pretty sad as far as the pupils are concerned (and indeed as far as most of us are concerned) because this is a woman in her forties who wishes to be taken seriously as a writer, and who in some sense represents our school.
The close-up picture Lisa posted of her face and her upper body in her new bikini (entitled ‘my new bikini’) would have been better kept private. It’s not a flattering picture (face very lined and drawn, breasts flaccid and saggy, underarm stubble, etc., let’s be honest). She is every inch the spoilt young child wanting to show off all the time, with tweets along the lines of ‘Off to the theatre wearing my designer dress and sapphires and waterproof mascara, yay!’
Staff, pupils, parents, and especially Old Blaggers like to think of our alma mater as a distinguished academic institution, a jewel in the crown of our great English public school system. Anyone looking at Lisa’s Twitter account would find that difficult to believe.
There are rumours in the staffroom that she takes bribes from wealthy parents wanting a place for their children. Who, for instance, bought her the Indonesian sapphires? It wouldn’t have anything to do with the admission to Blagsford of a boy named Widjuju, by any chance, would it? There were indiscretions made about the knighthood, which, as we all know, was supposed to be kept top secret until the announcement.
Sorry I missed the party, but, Ed, I’m sure you had enough of your cronies to flatter and flutter around you. I’m sure Lisa was wearing one of her tight-fitting dresses, revealing her ample breasts. Her vanity is astounding. She even tweeted holiday pictures of her insect bites saying that ‘even the sandflies find her irresistible’.
I realize that this letter has taken on a bitter tone. It’s because I was one of your staunchest supporters when you arrived here. I do feel so very disappointed, Edward. You and Lisa need to take your responsibilities as representatives of the school much more seriously.
I am writing this letter for your own good. Be warned. You have become known as the Tony and Cherie Blair of Blagsford – the man on the make and the gobby Scouser. Is this really how you want to be regarded? If you do not silence your vain and vulgar wife, it is you who will feel the consequences when the governors of the school are made aware of how she is disgracing the venerable name of Blagsford.
Anon (I’m too much of a coward to say who I am, but I represent the views of a large number of people in Blagsford, across the Headmasters’ Conference, and, for that matter, in your old stamping ground Oop North)
*
‘Lisa, I’ve had a poisonous letter. It’s unbelievably cruel. And very funny. It claims to be from a member of staff. It’s a vicious attack on you. Of course, I don’t believe a word of it. These idiots know nothing about you.’
‘Why do you say “about you”, and not “about us”? Is the letter aiming to hurt you or me? Is it about who you are and where you’ve come from?’
‘Probably me. First there was Airfaregate and now this. You’re my Achilles’ heel. They know that.’
‘Does it mention Sean?’
‘No. Would you like to s
ee it?’
‘No, Edward, certainly not. I make it a rule not to read anonymous letters. People who write things like that are rarely “well” people. And I don’t want spiteful things sticking in my head. In fact, I’m surprised that you read it, knowing that it was unsigned. The person who did this wants to sow a seed of doubt in you. Please don’t read it again. Throw it away and forget about it. In fact, just give it to me.’
‘But they seem to know so much about you. I’m curious. It reads to me like a bitchy gay, you know the type who hates women. Well, there are lots of them in the world of teaching, so no clue there. Critical of your tweets, your grammar, your body. Digs at your Liverpool background. It even implies that I wrote your book for you.’
‘Ah, Sir Edward Chamberlain, that purveyor of feminist fashion history. The man I met a year after my book was published. But I hate to see you so upset. Don’t let them get to you. It doesn’t bother me one bit. Is it someone jealous of the knighthood? How petty and unkind. Anyway, I’m not ashamed of being a Scouser and not having had a posh education.’
‘Darling, perhaps you had better stop tweeting for a bit. Just let the dust settle.’
CHAPTER 19
Flattered and Followed
Father John Misty, who had once received a very unpleasant and completely unfounded anonymous letter himself, was not at all surprised by the turn of events. He asked to be filled in on every detail. Lisa told him that she hadn’t read it and wasn’t going to. But she repeated what Edward had told her.
DM from @FrJohnMisty: Blaize, I’ve been thinking some more about that letter!
DM from @Lisa_Blaize: Oh have you, now, Sherlock. Do you think the bursar is in love with Edward? Or am I in love with the school gardener and his wife?
DM from @FrJohnMisty: You said that the person mentioned the word ‘folk’ in relation to your Gatsby Party. Well who would do that? Surely it’s a very American expression. Or a Scottish one. So do you have an American or a Scottish teacher in the school?