by Jill McGown
Judy smiled, and Treadwell left. Again, she found her thoughts turning to Lloyd, and was irritated with herself for being unable to divorce her personal life from her professional life. She had always been able to before.
The tea came, brought in by a youth who looked to Judy far older than most of the constables with whom she worked. She stood up and relieved him of the cup and saucer. He was slightly taller than she was, and somehow contrived to make his uniform look like what the fashionable man-about-town was wearing, with exactly the correct amount of cuff showing, and an air of elegance that Lloyd would have envied. Lloyd somehow never looked like that. Someone she knew did, though; he reminded her of someone. Not his features. His manner, his personality.
‘Matthew Cawston,’ he said smoothly. ‘Mr Treadwell said that you wanted to speak to me.’
Judy turned her mind once more to work, until at last she was leaving the school, and on her way home.
Two weeks since her promise. Two weeks of steeling herself, lecturing herself, loathing herself for being such a coward, had crystallised into two words. Tell him. Tell him at breakfast, before he goes to work. Tell him when he comes home from work. Tell him in the evening, when he’s settling down to watch television. Tell him before you go to bed, tell him at breakfast. It wasn’t as if it would come as all that much of a surprise to him; Michael had probably already guessed about her and Lloyd. But somehow none of that made it any easier. And it had only been a fortnight ago that she had made her mind up to leave him; she had to pick the right moment.
She drove home with the words beating in her mind like a pulse. It was a half-hour drive from the school, which contrived almost literally to be in the middle of nowhere, but which somehow came under the purview of Stansfield Constabulary. At last she saw the orange lights flanking the snow-lined dual carriageway into the new town, and now-familiar landmarks came into view. The industrial estate with its neat factory units looking like terraced houses, and the superstore looking like an enormous Swiss chalet, with its seemingly permanent covering of snow. The DIY store with swings and see-saws and slides; the adventure playground, with tyres and planks.
A left turn, and she would be in the village that had been there since Elizabethan times. The old Stansfield, where Lloyd lived.
Tell Lloyd that you still haven’t told Michael. I dare you.
She took the right turn.
Michael smiled when she came in. Don’t smile, why would you smile? Criticise me for something, God knows that’s what you usually do. Say that it’s high time we moved out of this town. Go on about how much we’d get for the house if we put it on the market. Tell me that you’ve got filing clerks earning more than I do, so it’s not as though my job’s that important, and you could get a job anywhere. Prove you don’t understand, don’t want to understand – don’t smile.
‘How did it go?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘Your first day back.’
‘Oh. Fine.’
‘Are they going to give you a medal or something?’
‘Good God, I hope not.’ She took off her coat and went out into the hallway to hang it up.
‘Why not?’ he called through. ‘You were hurt in the line of duty – you could have got killed.’
She went back. ‘Well, I wasn’t,’ she said.
‘No, thank God.’
Tell him. ‘Michael, I want to tell you—’
‘Shall I tell you something funny?’ he said, interrupting her.
She sat down with a sigh.
‘When I came home, and the house was in darkness – I forgot you were back at work. I was expecting you to be here.’
Oh, here we go, she thought. How nice it was to have her at home. So why didn’t she just give up her job and go with him to a nice middle-class town and have a baby before it was too late?
‘And for a moment . . .’ He laughed a little shyly. ‘For a moment, I thought you’d left me.’
She looked up at him. ‘Left you?’ she repeated dully.
‘It wasn’t such a strange thing to think,’ he said. ‘Was it? I mean – we’re not even . . . Well, I just thought you had. And then I realised you were just at work,’ he said. ‘But I thought . . . other men don’t think their wives have left them just because the light’s out. And I know things haven’t been too good since I got the promotion – but that’s just because we’re not used to being together all the time. We’ve drifted apart, that’s all.’
Judy couldn’t speak.
‘But we’ve stayed together ten years, and I don’t want to lose you, Judy.’ His eyes dropped away from hers. ‘I really thought you’d gone,’ he said. ‘And I felt exactly like I did when I was three years old and lost my mother in Woolworth’s. Total panic.’
Judy listened to the little speech with a dismay which she felt must show on her face, but he didn’t seem to notice.
He metaphorically picked himself up and dusted himself off. ‘Well, now I’ve said it. What were you going to tell me?’
‘Oh,’ she said, looking away from him as she told a rare lie. ‘Nothing. I don’t remember.’
‘Can’t have been anything important, then,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Would you like a drink?’
*
Matthew Cawston looked up at the windows of Palmerston House, checking that all the lights were out. His fellow-prefects would go from room to room, opening the doors; Matthew thought that a waste of energy. Tonight, something was going on in the junior dorm which interested him. And they hadn’t all arrived yet.
He stepped out of the shadow of the building, and walked to the end of the lane, where he lit an illicit cigarette. He shook the match out and buttoned his jacket against the chill. He was glad to be back at school, and away from all the rowing at home. He had caused it, of course, by refusing to be put into some sort of pigeon-hole by his father. His mother had taken his side, as she always did, so before long it was his mother and father who were shouting at one another.
School was infinitely preferable to that. Here, they only wanted him to shine for them, and he could do that without trying. He drew deeply on the cigarette, watching stars begin to appear as the clouds drifted off, and the temperature fell once more.
‘What are you intending doing with your life?’ his father had demanded to know during one of the interminable sessions.
Matthew didn’t know, but he couldn’t explain that to his father. He was sixteen. Why should he start mapping his life out? He didn’t know if what interested him now would still interest him at twenty-six, or forty-six. He wasn’t sure what did interest him now, anyway. He was good at most things; studying came easily to him, and passing exams was taken for granted. His father expected him to go on and get a double first at Oxford, but that didn’t interest Matthew. There was no challenge in that.
The only subject in which he had any real interest was English. English wasn’t like other subjects, where everything was cut and dried, right or wrong. He enjoyed the books that the others moaned about having to read; he liked discussing them, dissecting them, criticising them. He’d seen the new English teacher limping about with Mrs Knight, and wondered what he’d be like. He must be good, for them to have kept his job open for such a long time.
The tip of the cigarette glowed red in the darkness, and Matthew moved back into the lane, in case some over-zealous fellow-prefect spotted it. The housemaster was at the Hamlyns’ do, so no fear of his creeping up behind him. All in all, it wasn’t a bad school. It had rules and regulations, like all schools, and Matthew enjoyed that; it gave him the chance to break them without getting caught. His expertise was evidenced by the fact of his having been made head boy, an honour which Treadwell had solemnly conferred upon him while Matthew kept a straight face.
Footsteps came along the road from the staff block; Matthew dropped the cigarette and stood on it, strolling out into the light again.
‘Good evening, Mrs Knight,’ he said.
‘Hello, Matthew. Is th
ere something wrong?’
‘No, not at all. I just felt like a breath of air.’
‘How did you get on with the policewoman?’ she asked.
‘Very well, thank you. She said that it was really crime prevention at this stage – a case of advising everyone to lock desks and rooms, and so on. She said we should report to Mr Treadwell if we saw anyone hanging round the lockers or anything like that.’
She nodded. ‘I don’t suppose there’s much the police can do about it, really,’ she said.
‘No.’ Matthew let her get a couple of steps away. ‘Oh – Mrs Knight. I was pleased to hear about Mr Hamlyn.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ she said, smiling.
Matthew watched her go. He had been pleased to hear about Hamlyn’s promotion; he liked him, liked his absent-minded professor air, which was entirely genuine. Hamlyn knew what he wanted to do with his life, and he was doing it, to the exclusion of all else. He wanted to immerse himself in maths and logic and solve complicated puzzles. It wouldn’t do for Matthew, but he admired Hamlyn’s single-mindedness, his courage. Because it took courage to do what you wanted to do, and to hell with what people thought. And that even included his choice of wife. Matthew smiled as he thought of Mrs Hamlyn, as unlike her husband as it was possible to get, and still be of the same species.
He gave Mrs Knight time to get upstairs to the Hamlyns’ living-quarters, then walked quickly across the road, down the side-road to the car park, and along to the junior dorm’s fire-escape. The light went on in the Hamlyns’ bedroom as it had with each new arrival, and went off again after a moment.
Mrs Knight’s late arrival had made it more of a challenge than it might have been; people might even be thinking of leaving soon. But, then, again, people were innately polite, and wouldn’t go as soon as someone had arrived. He would give himself three minutes, he thought, glancing at his watch in the dim, almost nonexistent car park lighting.
A glance over his shoulder, before he ascended the metal steps; there was no one else about on this cold night.
On the balcony, it was simplicity itself. Interior décor was not something for which the school was renowned, and the curtains, made for a quite different window, left a gap down the side through which he could see the darkened room. It was easy to step from the balcony to the window-ledge, after he had knocked away the frozen snow. The window didn’t close properly; Matthew had already established that. It pivoted open, and he put his arm through, pushing down the handle of the balcony door.
Slowly, carefully, he opened it; to his surprise and horror, it made a deafening squeak, but it couldn’t have been that loud inside the house. He waited a second or two before going in, and noiselessly crossed to the light-switch. He smiled at the heap of coats on the bed, and began going through the pockets. He didn’t care what he found; if he found nothing, he would take the travelling alarm-clock that sat on the bedside table. But he would prefer it to be something out of a coat, or a jacket.
It had been accidental, to start with. The very first thing he had taken had made them all decide it had to have been Mrs Knight; now, he shadowed her, taking things when the opportunity presented itself. It was fun. And this morning he had struck gold in the ladies’ loo, waiting until she had left it empty, then slipping in unseen. He could hardly believe his luck when he saw the ring.
He moved to the side of the bed, standing still as the door blew shut again, with another loud squeak. Then he picked up the sheepskin jacket affected by Newby, the English teacher, and his hand closed over a packet of cigarettes, followed by a box of matches. They went into his pocket, joining his own; a further search of the coats produced a lady’s comb and a pound coin.
At first, he didn’t recognise the sound; by the time he realised that it was the tap of Newby’s stick on the corridor, it was too late. He thought he would have time to make it back out before Newby got to the room, but Newby moved faster than he’d suspected; desperate, Matthew slipped behind the curtains, drawing his feet up on to the window-sill as the door opened. He couldn’t get out without pushing open the balcony door, and he couldn’t do that without attracting attention. So he just had to stay there.
Through the gap in the curtains, Matthew watched as Newby pulled coats aside to reach his jacket. He was feeling in the pockets, frowning, when Mrs Hamlyn appeared, standing in the doorway.
‘Not leaving us, are you, Philip?’
‘Just came to get my cigarettes,’ Newby said. ‘But I must have left them at the flat.’
‘Is that why you left?’ she asked. ‘Or is it because Caroline’s arrived?’
Newby looked down at his feet for a moment. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.
‘Yes, you do. But she’s much too complicated for you, Philip. Take my advice – don’t get involved.’
‘I don’t even know her, Mrs Hamlyn. I only met her this morning.’
‘I’m very uncomplicated,’ she went on. ‘You’d be much better off with me.’
Matthew held his breath.
‘Mrs Hamlyn, I—’
‘She’s never got over Andrew,’ Mrs Hamlyn went on.
‘That’s hardly any of my business,’ said Newby.
‘It’s everyone’s business,’ said Mrs Hamlyn. ‘She’s making it everyone’s business – if your cigarettes have gone, that’s probably because Caroline’s just been up here.’
‘What?’ said Newby.
Mrs Hamlyn gave a slight shrug.
‘You’re not suggesting that Caroline—?’
Matthew so far forgot his unenviable position to permit himself a smile.
‘She can’t help it,’ said Mrs Hamlyn. ‘I’m just warning you.’
‘I’ve probably left my cigarettes in the flat,’ Newby said again, his tone growing angry. ‘And I hardly think they merit warnings being issued.’
Mrs Hamlyn smiled. ‘I’m not warning you to keep an eye on your cigarettes,’ she said. ‘I’m warning you not to get involved with Caroline. She’s supposed to be seeing a psychiatrist or something, but she doesn’t.’
‘I can’t imagine what you mean, “get involved”.’
‘Oh, come on, Philip. I saw the way you looked at her.’
There was an uncomfortable silence, during which Matthew didn’t dare breathe, and Newby grew red and sullen, like one of the first-years caught reading a girlie magazine.
Mrs Hamlyn glanced down at Newby’s leg. ‘Does it give you much trouble?’ she asked, nodding at it as she spoke.
‘Not really,’ said Newby, recovering some composure now that the subject had been changed.
‘I mean – it would be a frightful bore if it interfered with your normal activities.’ She lifted her eyes to his again. ‘I do hope it doesn’t,’ she said.
It sounded like an innocent remark, but its implication was not lost on Matthew, or Newby.
‘Hardly at all,’ he said. ‘I’d better be getting back.’ Newby went towards the door in the sudden way he had of moving. He didn’t look awkward with the stick; it was as if it was just a part of him. ‘If you’ll excuse me, Mrs Hamlyn,’ he said.
She didn’t move.
‘Could you excuse me?’ he asked again.
‘I’m sure you could squeeze past,’ she said, not moving.
Matthew’s eyes widened. He’d heard the stories about Diana Hamlyn, but he had always assumed they were exaggerated.
‘Mrs Hamlyn, I—’
‘How formal. Do call me Diana.’
‘Mrs Hamlyn,’ he said firmly. ‘I think I should get back.’
She smiled. ‘I’d be more fun than a cigarette,’ she said. ‘And much better for you.’
Newby gave a brief smile. ‘If you could just move, please,’ he said.
She came in, then, closing the door, and leaning on it. ‘I’ve moved,’ she said.
A mixture of fear and fascination warred within Matthew as, open-mouthed, he watched her turn the key and remove it from the lock. Fascination won; he forgot his o
wn predicament as he watched Newby deal with his.
‘I presume this is your idea of a joke,’ Newby said.
‘It is quite amusing.’ She came up close to Newby, and smiled.
‘We met exactly an hour ago, Mrs Hamlyn,’ said Newby. ‘I hardly know you.’
‘We could remedy that,’ she said, lightly touching his chest.
Newby moved away from her, and sat down, his hands crossed over the top of his walking-stick. ‘If the positions were reversed,’ he said, ‘you could slap my face – even shout for help. As it is, I’ll just have to wait for you to get bored.’
‘You were a friend of Andrew Knight’s, weren’t you?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’ Newby sounded guarded.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t. Not like that, anyway. He had no time for me – he was too much in love with Caroline.’ She sighed. ‘I’ve a dreadful suspicion that so are you,’ she said, and smiled, throwing him the key.
He didn’t try to catch it; it clattered to the ground, perilously close to the window, and Matthew closed his eyes. He opened them as Newby addressed himself to the problem; he saw the pain on his face as he leaned as much of his weight as he could on the stick, and scooped up the key. For a moment, as Newby straightened up, it was as if he were looking directly at Matthew, but he wasn’t. He was waiting for the pain to go before he turned to face Mrs Hamlyn.
‘Thank you,’ he said, going to the door, unlocking it.
‘Making sheep’s eyes at Caroline won’t get you anywhere,’ Mrs Hamlyn said. ‘Sam’s been trying for months.’
Newby coloured a little. His stick tapped quickly down the corridor, and Mrs Hamlyn smiled to herself, putting out the light as she left.
Matthew let out a long sigh of relief, and waited until it was safe before pushing open the treacherous balcony-door and making his exit. Outside, he repeated the exercise in reverse; his arm through the window, he pulled the door shut. He closed the window as much as it ever closed, checked that he still had everything he had taken, and almost strolled back down the fire-escape steps, back to Palmerston House.