by Noël Cades
If only Susie had chosen German: but as a new girl she obviously hadn’t been forewarned of the Geography teacher’s bad temper.
Then of course there were the pranks. Since the foul-smelling curtains rumours of other ones had reached Mrs Grayson’s ears. Did the Geography teacher suspect Susie Clarke was behind them?
"I’ll keep an eye on things. And have a quiet word with Pat at the right moment," she promised Grace Grant.
* * *
Friday, the eve of Susie’s birthday, was bitterly cold. November frost had frozen the grounds and there were biting winds all day with rain setting in after supper. The thought of creeping out of a warm dorm in the middle of such a night to the unheated pavilion had minimal appeal.
"The cold will keep us alert. Besides we can hardly not show up with a carload of Dunks boys arriving," Susie said.
"A carload?"
"I don’t know, Darius said they’d bring some people over. He didn’t say the number, just as many would fit."
"He’d better be driving a mini then," Charlotte said.
They had already scoped out the pavilion and stashed some provisions there. It was padlocked but there was a window with a faulty latch around the back. There was also no light and no heating.
"We can’t use light anyway, it’ll have to be something dim like torches or candles. And not many. We don’t want to light the place up like a beacon."
"What would someone do if they saw?" Laura asked. "Would they come and investigate or just call the police?"
"Investigate I should think. They wouldn’t want the scandal if the police showed up." Charlotte said.
Susie allowed herself a moment’s fantasy of Mrs Ayers showing up in a nightgown and overcoat, screeching loud enough to wake the entire school. The instant expulsion would be worth it just to experience that sight. But she had the others to think of. Besides, Whitsun House had no view to the pavilion so unless the Axe was out taking a midnight stroll she would be among the least likely teachers to discover them.
* * *
They had gone to bed in jeans and warm clothing but it was still an ordeal leaving warm blankets for the freezing night air as they crept down the fire escape.
The night had cleared and there was a bright moon. It made the grounds look vast and it raised their spirits. Having successfully escaped Michaelmas House it seemed like the worst hurdle was over. The remoteness of the pavilion was reassuring: they certainly wouldn’t be overheard.
Breathless from the cold they clambered through the window into the dark building. Charlotte lit a candle.
"Make sure you put it in a jar, we don’t want to burn the place down. Oh I can see them coming," Susie said.
"How many?"
"Five it seems. I don’t recognise the others."
To Laura’s relief the other three boys didn’t include Jonathan. They were three more St Duncan’s rugby players, very much in the mould of Julian and Darius, and had hauled an impressive amount of beer with them. They already seemed fairly drunk.
The discussion soon got onto gambling as Susie’s win over the previous exeat had become the stuff of legend. There were jibes over whether it was luck or cheating and demands for the chance to win it back.
The noise level was increasing with the alcohol. Susie was the only one of the three girls really enjoying herself. Laura and Charlotte were still too on edge. Laura constantly thought she heard footsteps outside.
"It’s just an owl or something," Julian said.
Darius had brought playing cards with him and by the dim candlelight the five St Duncan’s boys started a game with Susie. As the other two didn’t know how to play they sat and watched.
It was the poker game that saved all their skins.
Conversation lulled to near silence as the players focused on the hands, both Darius and Julian determined to win back their pride and Susie resolute in repeating her success.
"Anybody in there?"
There was a loud rattle at the door. In the stillness of the night it was like gunshot.
It was Jenkins, the school handyman.
Oh God.
Sheer, raw panic.
Everyone froze.
Darius snuffed the candle. Charlotte gripped Laura’s hand in terror.
"Hello? Who’s in there?"
Jenkins obviously hadn’t got the key to the padlock. The front windows which looked across the fields were shuttered so he couldn’t see in from that side at least. They heard him walk around the building to the back windows.
The stillness. The terror.
Eight of them stuck in the freezing darkness of the wooden building facing exposure at any moment.
The broken window wasn’t shuttered but it was closed, and it was a smaller window than the front ones. The moon was also shining on the front ones rather than the back. If they remained in the shadows, completely still, and Jenkins couldn’t see in clearly then perhaps, perhaps he wouldn’t see them.
Except the smoke. The damn cigarette smoke. It must reek in the night air, Laura thought. Would he have a torch with him?
She closed her eyes; it was actually hard to breathe properly. The fear in the room was sobering. They had felt invincible but the reality was instant expulsion if they were discovered: catastrophic for the St Duncan’s Sixth formers who were mid-way through university applications.
The eight of them waited for several minutes. Jenkins had gone past the window and round to the front again, rattling the door one more time.
"If there’s anyone in there I’m calling the police."
Then there was silence.
Cat-like, Susie made her way to the front windows and managed to peer through a tiny chink where the wooden shutter had warped.
"He’s gone. He’s half way back to the gate."
Laura felt like crying. There were plenty of oaths under people’s breath.
"We’ll have to get out quickly, he might come back with reinforcements," Julian said.
"And the key."
One by one they clambered out of the window as quickly and quietly as they could. Darius and Julian passed the remainders of the feast through, mainly empty bottles and crisps.
"Hold on," said Susie. "Someone has to piss in there."
"What?" Charlotte looked at her as though she was mad.
"Jenkins knows there was someone in here. They’ll be over this place with a toothcomb first thing tomorrow, probably with the police too. We need to make them think it’s a tramp."
She grabbed an old rug from the pavilion that they’d been sitting on, and trampled it into the mud below the window. Then she poured some beer dregs on it and tossed it back into the room. "That’s his bed. Now throw in a couple of fag ends and one - no two - empty bottles. Now one of you boys go in and do the business."
At a nod from Julian one of the three rugby players went back in. They all waited for him.
"In the corner and a bit on the blanket. Let’s hope that does it," he reported on exit.
"Short of throwing a battered old hat and a spotted kerchief on a stick to completely over-egg the pudding, I should think we’re done," Darius said.
Laura was simply horrified by the whole situation. It was bad enough to sneak out but to foul the place up was unbearably wrong.
She wasn’t even aware, nor did she really care, how the boys got back to the gate. She, Charlotte and Susie hurried off back to Michaelmas House trying to keep to the shadows as far as possible. They took their shoes off at the bottom of the fire escape to climb up with minimum noise. They crept into the dorm where Margery was gently snoring and slid into their beds, fully clothed.
Everything was flashing in Laura’s mind when she tried to sleep. She kept imagining the worst scenarios. And what was Mr Rydell going to say if she got expelled? She hadn’t been able to tell him about the party as they hadn’t spoken alone since half term
How she wished she could be with him now: safe, holding her, soothing away the fear.
24. Coveri
ng tracks
They were disarmed the next morning by a surprisingly sincere apology from Susie. "I should never have dragged you guys into it, it was totally unfair. I know you didn’t really like the idea. I thought I had it all sorted and I didn’t. Actually that’s not quite true, I knew it was a huge risk which was part of the fun, but it was totally unfair to put that on you."
"It’s ok, we agreed to come and it was your birthday. You don’t owe us an apology," Charlotte said.
"I do. And the tramp thing, it’s foul to have done that on school property. I never meant that to happen but I was running out of ideas."
Laura had woken up that morning feel less revulsed and more relieved by Susie’s strategy. "I think it was smart, actually. Otherwise they would start sniffing around and the pressure might get too much."
They all knew she meant Margery. Not that Margery would tell directly, but she might give the game away by her reaction to any questioning.
"Who ended up winning by the way?" Charlotte asked.
"I was ahead by a mile, more’s the pity. The boys will be toasting old Jenkins for years to come."
"We'll look on this one day and laugh," Laura said. "Happy birthday by the way."
"Thanks. It will be a happy one if we continue to get away with this," Susie said.
Charlotte looked at Laura anxiously. "Will you tell Mr Rydell?"
It was something Laura had been uncertain about. She had had so little time to speak with him since half term and Susie's plan had been so last minute.
"I'll probably mention it, but not every detail."
"He won't tell will he? He might feel obligated." Charlotte was worried.
"Of course he won't tell. If he felt some overwhelming moral duty to report misbehaviour he'd start with himself. Keeping quiet about an illicit party pales in comparison to screwing one of your pupils, doesn't it?" Susie said.
Laura felt conflicted. She realised that it could compromise him to tell him certain things. He still had his duties as a teacher and it was dangerous enough for him to be in a relationship with her. She couldn't make him complicit in their rule-breaking as well.
"You know thinking about it I don't think I'll say anything. Not now anyway. Maybe ages later in the future when it really doesn't matter anymore," she said.
After all, he must have secrets he didn't tell her. He must hear things about her friends from other teachers, or know things that he didn't burden her with. Ultimately it was Susie's secret: her birthday, her idea, and she who had done her best to save them all from disaster.
* * *
Susie was in two minds about attending detention that day. It was her birthday after all, and spending valuable leisure hours cooped up yet again did not seem appealing or fair. She knew that the flawless work in her Geography exercise book was a growing gun.
The end of term exams were also going to be interesting. She would easily top the class by a mile if Mrs Ayers marked her fairly. Susie was certain however she would not. But a wrongly marked exam paper would be in a very different league from a spiteful C on a homework essay.
Susie wondered what Mrs Ayers' defence would be if that happened. Would they just let her get away with it? Put it down to an unfortunate error of judgement? She was aware how little weight she carried against a teacher of many years - decades - who must have some value to Francis Hall if she had lasted so long with such a malevolent personality.
To Susie’s delight Teresa Hubert was also in detention that week. Teresa had been caught copying answers in Maths. Which wasn't stupid in itself, everyone did it from time to time, but it was immensely stupid when the person she copied from, Andrea, had even more miserable mathematical abilities than Teresa's. Identical wrong answers were an obvious giveaway. Of course if Teresa was less stupid, Susie thought, she would have copied them from Mary Rudge or someone who was good at Maths.
"What are you in for?" she asked Teresa, knowing full well what the answer was.
"A misunderstanding," Teresa said.
"A little misunderstanding in Maths?" Susie asked with a falsely polite smile. Teresa scowled at her.
"Why are you here?" As Teresa did German and not Geography, she knew nothing of Susie's feud with Mrs Ayers.
"Sheer pleasure," Susie said.
It turned out to be closer to Her Majesty's Pleasure that afternoon, since detention was taken by Mrs Grayson. Although the Headmistress was liked and respected, unlike teachers such as Mrs Ayers and Miss Quayle, no one dared breathe out of line when she presided over an event. Susie's racy novel would have to stay out of sight today.
Mrs Grayson's patience had already been tried that morning by Jenkins and his absurd and alarming account of a tramp invading the pavilion. The police had been round to investigate but found nothing much. It seemed a window had been forced.
"Stinking mess it was too, not as I like to say it out loud but he'd used it as a facility so to speak," Jenkins had said.
Jenkins had been instructed to clean the room and fix the window as well as check various other windows and locks around the school as a priority, but Mrs Grayson remained troubled. A vagrant breaking into a girls' school might have more sinister motives than shelter for the night. She needed to put the school on higher caution without creating alarm. Schoolgirls were prone to drama and she didn't want to make mountain out of a molehill and trigger a slew of false alerts and mass panic.
Yet she was troubled. Something seemed wrong with the school that term but she hadn't been able to pinpoint what it was. There was the disruption from Miss Vine's plan with the school play of course. Yet nothing untoward had arisen from that so far beyond a few friendships developing between pupils of the two schools. Mrs Grayson was of the mind that these things would happen anyway among young people - just look at Romeo and Juliet - so it wasn't a major concern. Better, all things said and done, to know what was going on. She didn't want another Lucy Martin on her hands.
She looked at the dark head of the new pupil on the back row, seemingly intent on her work. Of course Susie Clarke wasn't the only new pupil that term, there was an entire intake of new girls in the youngest class. But she was the only new girl in her year.
She remembered what Grace Grant had said to her about Susie's endless detentions. Looking at her now the phrase "butter wouldn't melt" came to mind but Mrs Grayson had been a schoolmistress far too long to take anything at face value.
Going over to Susie's desk to see what she was working on the Headmistress noticed a birthday badge pinned on her jersey. Badges weren't strictly allowed but an exception was usually made for birthdays.
"Is it your birthday today, Susie?" Susie said it was. "A very happy birthday then. I should have thought you would have taken more care to stay out of detention to celebrate your day."
Susie saw Teresa Hubert smirking but was unfazed. "Yes, is it unfortunate," she told the Headmistress.
It wasn't the response she would have expected from most girls but looking at Susie, cool and composed, Mrs Grayson felt some of the reservations that Grace Grant had had. It was to be expected, perhaps, that given Susie's near-expulsions from other schools she wouldn't be the most ordinary or most easy girl. But whereas defiance or disobedience might have been anticipated from such a case, this was something else.
It needed some careful thought. The Headmistress determined to speak with Grace Grant again, and meanwhile make her own observations of Susie.
* * *
Mr Poynter had asked some of his history class to volunteer to help mend old books in the library on Saturday afternoon. He used Mars Bars as a bribe but those that signed up to help actually did so because they liked him. The weather was awful anyway and there were no other activities planned that weekend.
Susie of course had detention, Charlotte had hockey and Margery wanted to do some homework so Laura was the only one of the four to volunteer.
Mr Poynter started referring to it as the Bookbinding Club and Laura hoped with a heavy heart that it wou
ldn't become a too-frequent event. As school societies went it would rank below even the prayer circle and the knitting group in terms of social cachet.
Feeling fairly ambivalent but with nothing better to do she made her way to the library. She walked by herself as the other girls taking part were from different houses.
As she crossed into the main school buildings Mr Rydell came up beside her. "Heading anywhere interesting?" he asked. He was still wearing his work clothes. Teachers rarely ever wore casual clothes around the school even if they were off duty.
It was thrilling to get a brief moment with him alone. "Only the library," she said. "Mr Poynter wants us to help him mend some old books. He bribed us with chocolate and a future school excursion."
"That's where I'm going too. Though Charles - Mr Poynter - roped me in with the promise of some beer."
As she walked next to him - this tall, athletic, good looking man - Laura wished the whole world could know that she was with him, that he was hers. They passed Miss Quayle and Miss Vine in the courtyard and she wondered what they would think if they knew. They were his colleagues, on the same level as him, and she was just a pupil. Yet she was the one closest to him, with the most intimate knowledge of him. It gave her a strange pride when she thought about it.
They had reached the library steps and he ushered her in first.
"It's not quite what I would plan for a date but if it gets me an afternoon with you, Mr Poynter has my every thanks," he said.