Mission

by Philip Spires

  For many of those attending the conference, the time off was more important than the small talk, allowing them to avoid the evening rush hour for once. For Janet, who was walking distance from home, it was going to be a real Godsend, a precious few hours at home where she could work undisturbed.

  So, rather than stay with her peers for the informal after lunch chat, she set off to walk home. The July afternoon was preciously warm and sunny, and it had been purely by luck that this meeting had been scheduled in a large Islington college. The privilege of being able to walk rather than squash into an underground carriage was luxury indeed, despite the traffic noise and fumes of the Holloway Road.

  Two days before, having scanned the conference programme in the five minutes a normal school day might allow for such a reflective task, she had decided there and then not to attend that final session. There were too many ‘in words’, too many buzz words in the rubric. With a rueful smile of experience, she recalled the idiot of a Deputy Head at her school in the mid-1980s. Having been on a management training course and taken to heart the message of the sessions on ‘How to motivate your colleagues’, he had returned to school with received advice to instigate a buzzword, which the staff would associate with the concept of motivation and teamwork. Teachers were to be encouraged to whisper this word to one another as they passed in the corridor or drank their morning coffee. After concentrated hours of searching for the right word, the inspired Deputy Head came up with what he thought was the perfect candidate, ‘buzz’. He didn’t last long, thankfully. She got his job on an internal appointment.

  So, having decided not to attend that session, two days before she had brought a few files from work and stored them away in the roll-top desk in her study. She would have the luxury of being able to work on them in the peace and quiet of her own home. David had always disapproved of the idea of siting her study next to their master bedroom on the first floor, preferring to maintain a greater distance between himself and his work than was his wife’s practice. Janet was quite the opposite in her habits and even did ‘bits and pieces’ in bed at weekends, so having the study next door was perfect. When at work in there, the cocooning nature of the small room whose window looked along the toast-rack gap between their house and the next towards the back of the terrace opposite helped her to focus, allowed her to concentrate without fear of distraction, something which she found essential if she was to get anything useful done. This, of course, was the principal reason why she often brought work home, since the environment offered by a large secondary school rarely offered periods of undisturbed calm or quiet. Paradoxically, she also liked to keep things compartmentalised and in their place, under control and known, hence the roll-top desk. It was strange how something as mundane as a piece of furniture could physically mimic and thereby facilitate a psychological trait. No matter how hard or long she worked at home, when she decided she had done enough, she was capable of switching off. She never dithered about her work. She concentrated on the task, but when the time was right, she stopped, abruptly, and never fiddled her way back to it. When the slatted arc of the desk cover slid down, thereby hiding the contents of the desk top, it shut them off from her sight and, thus out of sight, they stayed out of mind.

  As she passed the queue of bus stops near Holloway Road station, she momentarily considered taking the bus. She turned to face north to check if a red box might be standing at the traffic lights at the Tollington Road junction. It was one of those tranquil moments when the traffic control systems had left the usually bustling road eerily empty, a time when the delivery vans could do their screeching u-turns without pushing their way across angry lanes of drivers. There were buses in sight, but she decided to walk anyway. Her work was not so urgent that an extra half hour would be critical, so she walked on, crossing over the end of Drayton Park to head south, musing on how she didn’t do this often enough, despite her habit of always taking a circuitous route across a small enclave of Clapham Common from the station on her way to work.

  She was reminded of her three years as a student at King’s College on The Strand, a thoroughfare now so supremely inappropriately named it was always worth a visit just to be confronted with the anomaly, a London street called thin but wide, bustling with life, yet famous for a failed cigarette advert she remembered from the early days of commercial television when the product inadvertently associated itself with loneliness. London was a city of allusion, never illusion, which is why she had always loved the place so dearly, and hated to be away from it. Unless, of course, the change was so complete that experience bore no relation to city life, for what other city on earth could bear comparison to the variety, the sheer complexity of this town? Paris and New York perhaps, but nowhere else. The great Asian cities were larger and, having visited many of them on her regular summer ‘jaunts’ with the family, she knew they could not compare. She loved this word, David’s habitual euphemism for travel, because it seemed to possess an internal requirement to have fun along the way. But none of those cities could claim the variety of London, though most of them had climates that were preferable. From the seething traffic and diesel fumes of Manila, where, over the years, they had visited the family of more than one Filipina maid in their employ, through Hanoi’s atmosphere of unburnt two-stroke, via, if that be the right word, the interminable traffic jams of early 1980s Bangkok, to the endlessness of Bombay, corrected now politically to Mumbai, of course, and on to Tokyo, vast and strangely unpredictable in its utterly controlled way, to the order and calm of Singapore, where a fart in the wrong place could be fined on the spot and the humid, cicada deafening sultriness of Beijing in August, where a street vendor offered to cook them ‘brief’. David had offered the correction ‘beef’, but retracted when the portion that appeared was microscopically small. He might appear staid, but her life with him had been anything but. And so to North America, where the cities didn’t seem to know quite what they were. “There’s no there there,” one American friend had said, and the phrase had proved so consistently apt that she retained the temptation to apply it to the whole pair of continents, despite their obvious difference. Nairobi had not really been a city when she lived in Kenya, and she had hardly spent more than a few days in the place. No, it was London that she loved, London that she lived and London where she had always wanted to be, even when she lived in Kenya, the experience of which, however, had always remained vivid, as if lived just the month before.

  Though she had been raised in beyond-south London suburbia, where Surrey poked unwilling gloved fingers into the urban environment, the affinity she felt for this city was real. As a student, all she needed to do to get home was cross Waterloo Bridge to the waiting train on the other side, but after college she would often take a diversion and tramp through the West End, noting the details, the minor changes, the continuities that create the fabric of city life. Over the years, she had met many people who had claimed to hate London and only visited out of necessity expressed as duress. But Janet loved the place. She loved its diversity, its ability to surprise and reassure at the same time. It was ever changing, but it was always there. It was always different, but you could rely on its constancy. And for her the city created its image in those who loved it. When she met someone who shared this love, expressed as an affinity with the place, itself, she always felt an immediate ease, a comfort of familiarity, as if you already knew the person at the core, the rest mere details that would find their own places.

  Still only half way between Drayton Park and Highbury Corner, her thoughts drifted back again to her student days. She had banked with the NatWest, or possibly, as a student, they had banked with her, eventually to their advantage, via the Long Acre branch. The walk from King’s to withdraw the ten pounds that would see her through a week had been a regular joy, even though the drizzle and mist always seemed to come down the minute she set off to walk. She wore a fleece in those days, fashionable at the time in an alternative way, a long sheepskin, white
inside with a high collar into which she could nuzzle her face against the rain. It didn’t reach the ground and wasn’t particularly waterproof, so it got heavier as it dampened, but rain still dripped from the hem. In afternoon lectures it smelled a little on the ever vacant seat beside her in the lecture hall, reminding her of an era when institutions of higher learning were generally and comfortably under-populated. There it would lie until it was time to leave, having done part of the job of keeping her dry, a task completed by her habit of folding her jeans around her slender calves and zipping them inside her trusty and thoroughly water-proof boots.

  She remembered Covent Garden as it then was, before the fruit and vegetables migrated to Vauxhall. You could hardly pass along the roads, the lorries delivering their goods already too large to negotiate the tiny streets with their right-angled junctions. The armies of blue-aproned porters with their two-wheeled trolleys would block any remaining space with their queues, waiting for the sacks of onions, potatoes, cabbages, turnips, swedes and greens that would always overload their squeaking, rattling, metal-wheeled carts. She could remember the wooden handles of these vehicles, hardwood handles worn shiny and thin by years of manoeuvring along pavements and in and out of merchants’ shops, probably passed down from father to son in the families that kept these desired jobs to themselves. By mid-morning, when she would wander these streets with less purpose than her timetable demanded, most of the work was done, and clutches of porters hung around the sarnie bars, with cups of tea and bacon sandwiches perfuming their cigarette smoke.

  Clutches of porters, she thought on this July day, repeating the phrase she had just imagined. How appropriate. As students they had spent too many happy hours in the sandwich bar next to the college sharing the collective nouns they had discovered or invented. It had been a phase, a trivial pastime that had stuck, never to be dislodged from her memory. If governors form a board, witches a coven, monks an abomination, nuns a superfluity, angels a chorus, cardinals a radiance, professors a pomposity and crows a murder, then what might head teachers be? A confusion? A terror? A babble? A babble of heads?

  By the time she returned home from her two years in Kenya, Covent Garden was no more the hive of commerce and activity it had been. Almost all of the merchants had moved. There were no more porters and most of the sarnie bars had closed. The bank was still there and she continued to use it throughout the creeping dereliction that infected the area before it mutated into the tourist trap it became.

  She was in a world of her own when the noisy traffic of Highbury Corner demanded attention. She always felt that it was miles up the Balls Pond Road to the crossing, so she decided to cross three roads rather than one, availing herself of the pinging green man on Holloway Road, by Highbury and Islington station. After crossing Upper Street, she decided to take the long way round and walk the length of Compton Terrace, rather than going straight onto Canonbury Road. Though she lived nearby, she rarely travelled north from home, even rarer on foot, and could not recollect the last time she passed by the place where she had met the arsehole called Pete, thirty years ago. Whether it was the unusual space created by an afternoon off, the familiar yet rarely visited surroundings, or merely fatigue after a day and a half of hot air, she did not know, but, for whatever reason, she found herself in reflective mood, keen to reminisce.

  Redolent with the energy and motivation to change the world that only a returned volunteer, a jolly volly, perhaps, could imagine, she had thrown herself at every opportunity she could invent to promote Third World issues, alleviate poverty in Africa, raise money for her old school or educate for development. In this jargon jungle, she had worked with a group based in this very terrace to publicise the need for clean water, a group that employed Pete Collins, himself a returned volunteer, but of the Central American persuasion, a species which proved quite different from the Africa set. She had started in St Mary’s school only a month after returning to London and she was till there, now headmistress, some thirty years on.

  But in those first few years she devoted all of her free time to her charitable endeavours, constantly updating the clean drinking water exhibition she mounted on self-assembly boards she bought with her own money and driving it from church hall to community centre to teachers’ conference to school visit at every opportunity. And it had been Pete’s work, the big-talking but penniless programme he managed, which benefited from the funds and awareness she raised.

  It took only three months for their shared interest in clean water to extend to sex, an activity she had always been taught to associate with guilt, but which always seemed to envelop her in its own momentum whenever it came near. And so it proved with Pete, as it had done with John before that, and…. But Pete had proved capricious in the extreme. She could never pin him down, never extract that ounce of commitment that might persuade her to trust him. They could do their project work, ‘his’ project work, her interest, she corrected herself, and they could sleep together, but that seemed to be the extent of their shared experience. Her faith, his atheism; her constancy, his caprice; her responsibility, his recklessness; her guilt, his abandon; all of these traits were in conflict. He was totally with her one moment and then nowhere in sight the next. He surprised her with his affection and then angered her with his absence. But despite her claims of relative responsibility and maturity, she was the one that got pregnant.

  She knew what her reasons had been, but they seemed now to be selfish more than honest. In a resurgence of a deeply felt need to conform with the letter of her religion’s teaching, perhaps a desire to expunge private guilt with penance, she had shunned all forms of birth control except that advised by the powers that be, but had never since been able to reconcile herself with what hindsight labelled merely crass stupidity. And so into this confusion there grew a foetus, a child born of her need to reinvent the fundamental purity of her faith, a groping for the solace of an honest confession and, in the end, a conception which demanded of her the greatest sin imaginable, a sin for which she knew she could never atone, no matter how devoutly she might devote the rest of her life to serving others.

  It was in a small office now to her left where over twenty-eight years ago, a month after she came out of hospital, that Pete announced he was returning to Central America. He didn’t invite her either to accompany or to follow, but neither did he demand he would go alone. Like all the so-called decisions he made, it was cast in a vacuum of his own needs, without reference to anything that might have occupied the same space. With her career developing by then, for it had changed from being a mere job, since she had already taken extra responsibility at school, she could not simply up and go. He seemed to say that the choice was hers, but he never used those words, or thought the thought, because it would have admitted her into a universe that was populated only by himself. She let him go and thankfully he disappeared from her life.

  She turned left at the lights at the end of the terrace into Canonbury Lane and Square to join the main road, her mind still sifting memories so vivid they might have happened that week. Pete’s departure, his rejection, if she were honest, prompted complete immersion in her work. She had been an average teacher for a couple of years, but with new responsibility on her shoulders she strived to become the complete professional. Another promotion came quickly and then a head of department’s job became vacant on the retirement of a colleague. Again on an internal appointment, she became a deputy head with the unmourned departure of an ineffectual male. Then, after the school’s growing success had made its mark through improved exam results and recognition by inspectors, the headship became vacant, again through retirement, and the post she had been groomed for by the incumbent for some years became hers. And that is where she still was, now almost ten years into her tenure of the post in the only school in which she had ever worked. Her only school, of course, if Migwani was ignored, which it never was, though for her colleagues it did not count.

  It was not even a ye
ar after Pete left, not even a year after she emerged lighter from hospital, that she met David again. Her mother’s health had deteriorated quickly and kind, charitable neighbours regularly called in to check on her. By then, Janet had already bought her first flat on a giant mortgage for the time, with payments she could only just afford, even with an occasional drift into the red some months. It was a lovely place though, and her fondness for those couple of large rooms, one overlooking Nightingale Lane near her school would prove a permanent memory. But it was not an easy journey to see her mother from there. She had chosen the location, after all, with proximity to work as her priority.

  The Smythes had always lived near her parents, at least as far as Janet could remember, just a little further into the cul-de-sac and across the road, their inter-war semi a double mirror image of the one she still called home. She had always thought of him as a bit of a goofy, podgy bore. Recollections of her pranks still had a vivid clarity. What on earth must he have thought of her? As a seven year old she could remember calling him Billy Bunter and running off when he chased her, slowly. At seven she was highly precocious. At seventeen – could she now imagine that? – he was not, and to her he still seemed a young boy, despite his being half way through ‘A’ levels by then. Perhaps he had never given serious chase. He never came near to catching her and certainly never laid a finger on her. Perhaps he too was playing a game and had merely sauntered towards her determinedly enough to give playful fright. She thought he looked silly in that grey school uniform he wore even at weekends, his v-neck trimmed with yellow and black, prompting her to call him ‘bumble’. She would scurry to the safety of front garden to hide behind the privet and stick her tongue out as he crossed the road.