My Policeman

by Bethan Roberts

  I looked at Miss Monkton. ‘They’re right behind me,’ I announced.

  WHEN I LOOK over the fields to the sea, on these autumn days when the grass moves in the wind and the waves sound like excited breath, I remember that I once felt intense and secret things, just like you, Patrick. I hope you will understand that, and I hope you can forgive it.

  Spring 1957. Having finished his National Service, Tom was still away, training to become a policeman. I often thought with excitement of him joining the force. It seemed such a brave, grown-up thing to do. I didn’t know anyone else who’d do such a thing. At home, the police were rather suspect – not the enemy, exactly, but an unknown quantity. I knew that as a policeman Tom would have a different life to our parents, one that was more daring, more powerful.

  I was attending teacher training college in Chichester but still saw Sylvie quite a bit, even though she was becoming more involved with Roy. Once she asked me to go with her to the roller rink, but when I got there she turned up with Roy and another boy called Tony, who worked with Roy at the garage. Tony didn’t seem to be able to speak much. Not to me, anyway. Occasionally he’d shout a comment to Roy as we skated round, but Roy didn’t always look back. That was because his eyes were caught up with Sylvie’s. It was like they couldn’t look anywhere else, not even where they were going. Tony didn’t hold my arm as we skated round, and I managed to get ahead of him several times. As I skated I thought of the smile Tom had given me the day he’d announced he was joining the Catering Corps, how his top lip had disappeared above his teeth and his eyes had slanted. When we stopped for a Coke, Tony didn’t smile at me. He asked me when I was leaving school, and I said, ‘Never – I’m going to be a teacher,’ and he looked at the door like he wanted to skate right through it.

  One sunny afternoon not long after that, Sylvie and I went to Preston Park and sat on the bench beneath the elms, which were lovely and rustly, and she announced her engagement to Roy. ‘We’re very happy,’ she declared, with a secretive little smile. I asked her if Roy had taken advantage of her, but she shook her head and there was that smile again.

  For a long time we just watched the people going by with their dogs and their children in the sunshine. Some of them had cones from the Rotunda. Neither Sylvie nor I had money for ice cream and Sylvie was still silent, so I asked her: ‘How far have you gone, then?’

  Sylvie looked over the park, swinging her right leg back and forth impatiently. ‘I told you,’ she said.

  ‘No. You didn’t.’

  ‘I’m in love with him,’ she stated, stretching out her arms and closing her eyes. ‘Really in love.’

  This I found hard to believe. Roy wasn’t bad looking, but he talked too much about absolutely nothing. He was also slight. His shoulders didn’t look as though they could bear any weight at all.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ Sylvie said, blinking at me. ‘I love Roy and we’re going to be married.’

  I gazed at the grass beneath my feet. Of course I couldn’t say to Sylvie, ‘I know exactly what it’s like. I’m in love with your brother.’ I know that I would’ve ridiculed anyone who was in love with one of my brothers, and why should Sylvie have been any different?

  ‘I mean,’ she said, looking straight at me, ‘I know you’ve got a crush on Tom. But it’s not the same.’

  Blood crawled up my neck and around my ears.

  ‘Tom’s not like that, Marion,’ said Sylvie.

  For a moment I thought of standing up and walking away. But my legs were shaking, and my mouth had frozen in a smile.

  Sylvie nodded towards a lad passing by with a large cornet in his hand. ‘Wish I had one of those,’ she said, loudly. The boy twisted his head and gave her a quick glance, but she turned to me and gently pinched my lower arm. ‘You don’t mind that I said that, do you?’ she asked.

  I couldn’t reply. I think I managed to nod. Humiliated and confused, all I wanted was to get home and think properly about what Sylvie had said. My emotions must have shown on my face, though, because after a while Sylvie whispered in my ear, ‘I’ll tell you about Roy.’

  Still I couldn’t respond, but she continued, ‘I did let him touch me.’

  My eyes shifted towards her. She licked her lips and looked to the sky. ‘It was strange,’ she said. ‘I didn’t feel much, except scared.’

  I fixed her with a stare. ‘Where?’ I asked.

  ‘Round the back of the Regent …’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Where did he touch you?’

  She studied my face for a moment and, seeing that I wasn’t joking, said: ‘You know. He put his hand there.’ She gave a quick glance down to my lap. ‘But I’ve told him the rest will have to wait until we’re married.’ She stretched back on the seat. ‘I wouldn’t mind going the whole way, but then he won’t marry me, will he?’

  That night, before sleep, I thought for a long time about what Sylvie said. I re-imagined the scene again and again, the two of us sitting on the bench, Sylvie kicking her skinny legs out and sighing as she said, ‘I did let him touch me.’ I tried to hear her words again. To hear them clearly, distinctly. I tried to find the right meaning in what she’d said about Tom. But whichever way I formed the words, they made little sense to me. As I lay on my bed in the dark, listening to my mother’s coughing and my father’s silence, I breathed into the sheet I’d pulled up to my nose and thought, she doesn’t know him like I do. I know what he’s like.

  MY LIFE AS a teacher at St Luke’s began. I’d done my best to put Sylvie’s comment out of my mind and had got myself through training college by imagining Tom’s pride in me on hearing I’d successfully become a teacher. I had no grounds for thinking he would be proud of me, but that didn’t stop me picturing him arriving home from his police training, walking up the Burgess family’s front path, his jacket slung carelessly over one shoulder, whistling. He’d pick Sylvie up and swing her round (in my fantasy, brother and sister were best of friends), then he’d go in the house and peck Mrs Burgess on the cheek and hand her the gift he’d carefully selected (Coty’s Attar of Roses, perhaps, or – more racily – Shalimar), and Mr Burgess would stand in the living room and shake his son’s hand, making Tom blush with pleasure. Only then would he sit at the table, a pot of tea and a Madeira cake set in front of him, and ask if anyone knew how I was getting on. Sylvie would reply, ‘She’s a schoolteacher now – honestly, Tom, you’d hardly recognise her.’ And Tom would smile a secret smile and nod, and he’d swallow his tea with a shake of his head and say, ‘I always knew she was capable of something good.’

  I had this fantasy in my mind as I walked up Queen’s Park Road on the first morning of my new job. Although my blood fluttered around my limbs, and my legs felt as though they might buckle at any moment, I walked as slowly as I could in an effort to keep from sweating too much. I’d convinced myself that as soon as term began it would turn cold and possibly wet, so I’d worn a woollen vest and carried a thick Fair Isle cardigan in my hand. In fact, the morning was unnervingly bright. The sun shone on the school’s high bell tower and lit up the red bricks with a fierce glow, and every windowpane glared at me as I walked through the gate.

  I’d arrived very early, so there were no children in the yard. The school had been shut for weeks over the summer, but, even so, as I went into the long empty corridor I was immediately assailed by the smell of sweet milk and chalk dust, mixed with children’s sweat, which has a special, soiled aroma all of its own. Every day from then on, I’d come home with this smell in my hair and on my clothes. When I moved my head on the pillow at night, the taint of the classroom shifted around me. I never fully accepted that smell. I learned to tolerate it, but I never ceased to notice it. It was the same with the smell of the station on Tom. As soon as he got back to the house, he’d take off his shirt and have a good wash. I always liked that about him. Though it occurs to me now that he may have left his shirt on for you, Patrick. That you might have liked the bleach and blood stench of the station. />
  That morning, trembling in the corridor, I looked up at the large tapestry of St Luke on the wall; he stood with an ox behind him and a donkey in front. With his mild face and neatly clipped beard, he meant nothing to me. I thought of Tom, of course, of how he would have stood with his chin set in a determined pose, the way he would have rolled up his sleeves to show his muscled forearms, and I also thought about running home. As I walked along the corridor, my pace gradually increasing, I saw that every door was marked with a teacher’s name, and none of them sounded like a name I knew, or a name I could imagine ever inhabiting. Mr R.A. Coppard MA (Oxon) on one. Mrs T.R. Peacocke on another.

  Then: footsteps behind me, and a voice: ‘Hi there – can I help? Are you the new blood?’

  I didn’t turn around. I was still staring at R.A. Coppard and wondering how long it would take me to run the length of the corridor back to the main entrance and out on to the street.

  But the voice was persistent. ‘I say – are you Miss Taylor?’

  A woman whom I judged to be in her late twenties was standing before me, smiling. She was tall, like me, and her hair was strikingly black and absolutely straight. It seemed to have been cut by someone who’d traced the outline of an upturned bowl around her head, just as my father used to do to my brothers. She was wearing very bright red lipstick. Placing a hand on my shoulder, she announced: ‘I’m Julia Harcourt. Class Five.’ When I didn’t respond, she smiled and added: ‘You are Miss Taylor, aren’t you?’

  I nodded. She smiled again, her short nose wrinkling. Her skin was tanned, and despite being dressed in a rather outmoded green frock with no waist to speak of and sporting a pair of brown leather lace-ups, there was something rather jaunty about her. Perhaps it was her bright face and even brighter lips; unlike most of the other teachers at St Luke’s, Julia never wore spectacles. I sometimes wondered if the ones who did so wore them mostly for effect, enabling themselves to look over the rims in a fierce way, for example, or take them off and jab them in a wrongdoer’s direction. I’ll admit to you now, Patrick, that during my first year in the school I thought briefly of investing in a pair of glasses myself.

  ‘The infant school is in another part of the building,’ she said. ‘That’s why you can’t find your name on any of these doors.’ Still holding my shoulder, she added, ‘First day’s always frightful. I was a mess when I started. But you do survive.’ When I didn’t respond, she let her hand drop from my shoulder and said, ‘It’s this way. I’ll show you.’ After a moment spent standing there, watching Julia walk away, swinging her arms by her sides as though she were hiking over the South Downs, I followed her.

  Patrick, did you feel like this on your first day at the museum? Like they had meant to employ someone else but due to some administrative error the letter of appointment had been sent to your address? I somehow doubt it. But that’s how I felt. And I was also sure I was about to vomit. I wondered how Miss Julia Harcourt would deal with that, with a grown woman suddenly turning pale and sweaty and throwing up her breakfast all over the polished corridor tiles, splashing the toes of her neat lace-ups.

  I didn’t vomit, however. Instead I followed Miss Harcourt out of the junior school and into the infants’, which had its own separate entrance at the back of the building.

  The classroom she led me to was bright, and even on that first day I could see this quality was underused. The long windows were half disguised by flowered curtains. I couldn’t see the dust on those curtains at once, but I could smell it. The floor was wooden and not as gleaming as the corridor had been. At the head of the room was the blackboard, on which I could still see the ghost of another teacher’s handwriting – ‘July 1957’ was just visible on the top left-hand side, written in curling capitals. Before the board were a large desk and a chair, next to which was a boiler, encased by wire. At all the rows of low children’s desks there were chipped wooden seats. It seemed depressingly usual, in other words, except for the light trying to get through those curtains.

  It wasn’t until I stepped inside (waved on by Miss Harcourt) that I saw the special area of my new classroom. In the corner, behind the door, tucked between the back of the stationery cupboard and the window, were a rug and some cushions. None of the classrooms I’d entered on my training sessions had had this feature, and I daresay I took a step back at the sight of soft furnishings in a school context.

  ‘Ah yes,’ murmured Miss Harcourt. ‘I believe the woman who was here before you – Miss Lynch – used this area for story time.’

  I stared at the red and yellow rug and its matching cushions, which were plump and tassled, and I imagined Miss Lynch surrounded by her adoring brood as she recited Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from memory.

  ‘Miss Lynch was unorthodox. Rather wonderfully so, I thought. Although there were those that didn’t agree. Perhaps you’d rather it was removed?’ She smiled. ‘We can have the caretaker get rid of it. There’s a lot to be said for sitting at desks, after all.’

  I swallowed and finally found enough breath to speak. ‘I’ll keep it,’ I said. My voice sounded very small in the empty classroom. I suddenly realised that all I had to fill this entire space were my words, my voice; and it was a voice over which – I was convinced at that moment – I had very little control.

  ‘Up to you,’ chirped Julia, turning on her heel. ‘Good luck. See you at break.’ She gave a salute as she closed the door, the tips of her fingers brushing the blunt line of her fringe.

  Children’s voices were beginning to sound outside. I considered closing all the windows to keep the sound out, but the sweat I could taste on my top lip prevented me from doing so on such a warm day. I put my bag on top of the desk. Then I changed my mind and put it on the floor. I cracked my knuckles, looked at my watch. A quarter to nine. I paced the length of the room, looking at the distempered bricks, my mind trying to focus on some piece of advice from the training college. Learn their names early on and use them frequently, was all that would come to me. I stopped at the door and peered at the framed reproduction of Leonardo’s The Annunciation hanging above it. What, I wondered, would six-year-old children make of that? Most likely they would admire the muscular wings of the Angel Gabriel, and puzzle over the wispiness of the lily, as I did. And, like me, they probably had very little comprehension of what the Virgin was about to go through.

  Beneath the Virgin, the door opened and a little boy with a black fringe that looked like a boot mark stamped on his forehead appeared. ‘Can I come in?’ he asked.

  My first instinct was to win his love by saying Yes, oh yes, please do, but I checked myself. Would Miss Harcourt let the boy straight in before the bell went? Wasn’t it insolent for him to address me in this manner? I looked him up and down, trying to guess his intentions. The black boot-mark hair didn’t bode well, but his eyes were light and he kept his feet on the other side of the door jamb.

  ‘You’ll have to wait,’ I answered, ‘until the bell goes.’

  He looked at the floor, and for an awful moment I thought he might give a sob, but then he slammed the door shut and I heard his boots clattering in the corridor. I knew I should haul him back for that; I should shout for him to stop running at once and come back here to receive a punishment. But instead I walked to my desk and tried to calm myself. I had to be ready. I took up the blackboard rubber and cleaned the remains of ‘July 1957’ from the corner of the board. I pulled open the desk drawer and took some paper from it. I might need that, later. Then I decided I should check my fountain pen. Shaking it over the paper, I managed to scatter the desk with black shiny dots. When I rubbed at these, my fingers became black. Then my palms went black as I tried to wipe the ink from my fingers. I walked to the window, hoping to dry the ink in the sunlight.

  As I’d been arranging and decorating my desk, the noise of children playing in the yard had been steadily increasing. It was now loud enough, it seemed to me, to threaten to swamp the whole school. A girl standing by herself in the corner of the yard, o
ne plait hanging lower than the other, caught my eye, and immediately I stepped back from the window. I cursed myself for my timidity. I was the teacher. It was she who should move away from my gaze.

  Then a man in a grey overcoat and horn-rimmed spectacles stepped into the yard and a miracle occurred. The noise ceased completely even before the man blew his whistle. After that, children who’d been screaming with excitement in some game, or sulking under the tree by the school gate, ran and took part in the formation of orderly lines. There was a moment’s pause, and in that moment I heard the footsteps of other teachers along the corridor, the confident clack of other classroom doors opening and closing, and even a woman laughing and saying, ‘Only an hour and a half until coffee time!’ before a door slammed shut.

  I stood and faced my own classroom door. It seemed a long way from me, and as the marching children came closer, I took in the scene carefully, hoping to keep this sense of distance uppermost in my mind during the forthcoming minutes. The wave of voices began, gradually, to rise again, but was soon stemmed by a man bellowing ‘Silence!’ There followed the opening of doors and the swish and scrape of boots on wood as children were allowed to enter their classrooms.

  It would be wrong, I think, to call what I felt panic. I was not sweating or feeling nauseous, as I had been in the corridor with Julia. Instead, an utter blankness came over me. I could not propel myself forward to open the door for the children, nor could I move behind the desk. Again I thought about my voice, and wondered where exactly it was situated in my body, where I might find it if I were to go looking. I might as well have been dreaming, and I think I did close my eyes for a minute, hoping that when I opened them again it would all become clear to me; my voice would come back and my body would be able to move in the right direction.