Gifted and Talented

by Holden, Wendy

  Debs had been adamant not only that Shanna-Mae did the make-up for Diana’s big night out, but that her daughter’s services were free. Shanna-Mae took the money gratefully, but Diana saw doubt in the small hazel eyes ringed thickly with mascara. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  Shanna-Mae bit her lip. ‘I can’t not tell Mum,’ she confessed. ‘I tell her everything.’

  ‘You tell her then. I don’t think she’ll mind.’

  To go with her smart face, Diana had found a pair of black cigarette pants and a thick, cream silk fitted blouse: both relics from wealthier days, although never had they looked so good. Both were considerably looser than they had been. Walking miles every day round Branston’s gardens lugging buckets of weeds was succeeding where many a smart West London gym had, over the years, failed.

  Diana took a deep breath and watched her pale and powdered nostrils narrow. She twitched up the corners of her glossed and painted lips and noticed the hollows deepen under her cheekbones. She wondered what Richard would make of her look. He had only ever seen her with her hair everywhere and smudges of dirt on her face. But what did it matter, anyway, what he thought? He was only taking her out under duress.

  The hotel was near the centre of town, so Diana parked in the staff car park of Branston and walked the short distance. It was misty – one of those dense and weighty autumn fogs that occasionally present themselves as an alternative to the blaze and glow. Students muffled in scarves and woolly hats laboured past on bicycles or hurried in and out of college entrances. Across the road, the Georgian windows of the closed gift shops looked blankly back. Across the city, the age-old sound of bells rolled and drifted like ectoplasm.

  Couples were walking; groups were lurching. There was the occasional distant shout. College chapels were lit from within, presumably for some concert or practice. The effect was strange; stained glass glowed through the vapour like lights from an alien spaceship and the faint sound of singing could be heard.

  Lecturer was at the end of one of the mist-swirled main streets. It was a small and elegant Georgian red-brick manor with windows picked out in white and a fanlight over the portico entranceway. It looked comfortable and tasteful and so it was a shock for Diana to find, once over the broad stone steps of the threshold, that the restrained nineteenth century gave way abruptly to the contemporary at its most moronic. As the framed birch canes lining the walls and the receptionist in a mortar board attested, Lecturer was a hotel with an academic theme. She looked around, horrified. She had had no idea.

  Seized with panic – what would the caustic Richard make of all this? – Diana tried not to look, as an elderly waitress dressed as a schoolgirl crossed the wooden-panelled foyer.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the mortar-boarded receptionist asked, her hauteur undiminished by her headgear.

  ‘I’m meeting someone,’ Diana muttered. ‘Professor Richard Black. Is he here yet?’

  The mortar board clicked a mouse and peered over half-moon spectacles at the screen. ‘No,’ she said, as if she enjoyed it. ‘Would you like to wait in the bar?’

  She waved Diana towards a doorway above which was a small, framed blackboard with ‘Bar’ scribbled on it in chalk.

  Diana went hesitantly through. Perhaps Richard was late because he was cycling here. But would he? In this weather? He might be knocked off. He might not come at all.

  Inside, the floor was wooden and the bar tables were those small, old-fashioned desks with lifting lids and small holes for long-vanished inkwells. All were set at incongruously companionable angles, each with its inhospitably hard chair and a bar menu which looked like a maths exercise book. The walls were white and fixed to them were dark-wood frames displaying the periodic table, a British Empire-era world map and some handwriting exercises. There was a bookshelf with a number of battered old books and age-spotted paperbound collections of O-level papers from the nineteen-seventies and eighties.

  The bar, inevitably, was equipped with a chalk board on which the wine list was scribbled and, while there was no barman around, his recent presence was signalled by the mortar board lying on the bar top.

  ‘You’re late!’ someone suddenly snapped from behind. A male voice. Diana turned, heart in mouth. It didn’t sound like Richard, but who else would speak to her like that?

  It was a tall youth in an academic gown. ‘One hundred lines!’ he thundered at Diana. She stared at him, confused and not a little scared. Then his stern face melted into a professional smile. ‘But now you’re here, what can I get you?’ It was, she realised, flustered, the barman.

  ‘J-just a tap water, thanks,’ Diana stammered.

  ‘I can’t interest you in a glass of champagne?’ the barman said, baring his teeth and gesturing at the wine cooler on the bar. It contained several magnums of champagne, the unopened bottle tops bristling out like the spikes of a hedgehog.

  ‘No,’ Diana said firmly. She certainly couldn’t afford it herself and to order it would send out all the wrong messages to Richard.

  He rolled his eyes huffily and said, ‘Whatever, Madam,’ with such rudeness that, briefly, Diana had a good mind to retaliate, but decided to retain her dignity.

  He sloppily poured out a glass of water from a jug on the counter and shoved it sulkily towards her. ‘Economising tonight, are we, Madam?’

  Diana looked him in the eye. This was one step too far. ‘Is my drinking tap water a problem for you?’

  ‘Not at all, Madam.’ Acidly.

  Diana now did her best to ignore him and, such was the hostility in the atmosphere, she felt relieved when he crammed on his mortar board and flounced out.

  Registering his departure with relief, she hardly noticed someone else come in.

  ‘Hello,’ said Richard, rather stiffly.

  His physical presence, materialising so unexpectedly, sent a powerful jump of excitement through her. She stared at him, reddening and flustered and feeling somehow exposed, as if revealing a shameful secret.

  He was carrying a cycle helmet, which answered one question. But he looked less bedraggled than the conditions outside suggested. The faint sheen on his skin, the flush in his cheek, the sparkle in his eye was becoming. He looked alive. Fit. Vital.

  How had she not noticed before?

  His hair, close-cropped in the Caesar style, was dark but flecked with grey. His face was as long and lean as the rest of him and there was something of the wolf about the long nose and piercing greenish eyes set slightly aslant beneath dark eyebrows.

  He unzipped a smart short dark-blue raincoat – not a graceless cagoule – to reveal a crisp white shirt, new from the packet by the look of it. He had achieved what she would have imagined impossible – elegance, despite a bike ride, and a wet one at that. A cufflink flashed as, awkwardly, he held out a hand to grasp hers. Obviously a kiss would have been too forward, too intimate, but the very fact he hadn’t done it made her wonder what it would have been like. His hand was brief, firm, dry. ‘Diana. Good to see you.’ His manner was businesslike without a hint of interest.

  The barman now reappeared and aimed a loaded sneer-smile at Richard. ‘Would sir care to join madam in a glass of tap water? Or would sir prefer something else?’ His bony, reddened hands seemed to Diana to be wringing with suppressed violence.

  Richard, ordering two glasses of champagne, did not appear to notice this, which only seemed to annoy the waiter more. He flounced theatrically off.

  Richard looked around. ‘Weird place.’

  Diana’s heart sank. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have suggested it.’ Was the evening ruined already?

  The mortar-boarded barman was back, ferociously gripping two flutes of champagne. ‘Your table’s ready now,’ he said with an acid mock-playfulness. ‘Hurry and sit down if you don’t want six of the best.’

  Cheeks burning, Diana followed Richard to the dini
ng room. She was expecting the worst. Long communal forms, possibly, and a retro-horrid school food menu featuring deep-fried Spam and Manchester tart.

  Richard, for his part, was by now aware of the ‘Dead Man’s Leg’ and ‘Nun’s Toenails’ served in Branston College’s Incinerator. He had realised with a growing disbelief that a certain breed of Englishman strongly identified with bad institutional food. Presumably this place catered to just such types.

  They sat down in silence. The waiting staff, incredibly, were dressed like schoolchildren from the nineteen-fifties and had been picked without any apparent preference as to size and age. Or perhaps the university town, with its plethora of restaurants, offered a seller’s market to waiting staff, because those on show this evening seemed either too old or too wide – and sometimes both – for what they had to wear. That corpulent middle-aged sommelier, for instance, was probably having his human rights infringed in the tight shorts and straw boater he was required to affect.

  Richard met Diana’s glance. There was something very strange about her face. As if she were struggling with something. Boredom? He felt his insides, which had relaxed somewhat, shrink into themselves and his backbone stiffen.

  She made another strange noise, into a napkin this time. He thought for a fearful moment she was having a seizure and then, with a rush of relief, realised she was trying to control hysterical giggles. He glanced around, saw the shorts and boater and felt something rising within him: a strange sensation, one he had not felt for a long time – had almost forgotten, in fact. After a few puzzled seconds he realised that it was laughter.

  That evening, Jasper was not outside his college when Isabel arrived. She waited restlessly in the mist, uncomfortably aware of a pair of St Alwine’s college porters hovering at the entrance in their purple-banded gowns, watchful that no undesirables or undeserving got through the hallowed portals.

  ‘Isabel!’ It was a male voice, hailing her from behind, but not Jasper’s light, low drawl. Almost reeling with disappointment, she turned – to see the smiling faces of Paul and Lorien in whose eyes a certain shy pride flickered. They had just started being a couple and were, they now explained, going to a Star Wars all-nighter at the Arts Cinema.

  ‘What are you up to?’ Lorien asked with a smile. ‘Lurking outside Bullinger Central in the mist!’

  ‘Meeting a friend,’ Isabel replied, to their obvious amazement. As they said goodbye and hurried off, she looked down and tapped her foot. They could think what they liked; Jasper was not the usual St Alwine’s – St Wino’s, whatever – boor. And what business was it of theirs anyway?

  She wished they had not mentioned the Bullinger, even so. Why was everyone so fixated on it? Whatever it was, she didn’t believe the half of it, personally – despite what Olly had said this afternoon. Although she hadn’t consciously listened at the time, Isabel could hear him now and was finding it hard to shut out his anxious face, his pleading voice. She wanted to forget that whole hideous episode in the High Street. She had ignored every text he had subsequently sent, left his calls unanswered. How dare Olly say what he had said? He had made Jasper sound like a monster. ‘Go easy on him; he’s only jealous,’ Jasper had said. ‘And who wouldn’t be?’ he had added lightly, bending to kiss her nose.

  To distract herself, she stared into the misty college court and the ancient bulk of the college chapel, gargoyles à-gogo, its dark, east window split with mullions. The lights were on; someone was practising. The sound of an organ added to the Gothic atmosphere.

  Isabel imagined how the chapel would look inside. There would be a soft smell of wood, of chill, of age. Gold would gleam on the altar, and memorials of various sizes and shapes would hang heavily on the walls. There would be ragged flags, presumably from some long-ago battle. Now Isabel imagined smoke, yells, the boom of cannon fire, men screaming.

  The stained glass of the east window looked Victorian; its central figure was Jesus, flanked by saints. One was John the Baptist. In line with church convention, he looked short-tempered and scruffy with messy hair. He contrasted with a nearby St Sebastian who had smooth, shiny salon-fresh locks and looked, again as convention dictated, completely unmoved despite being chock-full of arrows. St Andrew looked surprisingly cheerful, despite standing there holding the cross to which he would shortly be nailed.

  Only Jesus broke the usual mould. He was extraordinarily buff, with simply enormous muscles and a rippling chest. Had he not been the son of God, Isabel thought, he could easily have had a career as a bodybuilder. The thought made her smile and lifted her spirits, but these plunged downwards again once she heard the college clock – its lacy gold face invisible in the gloom – strike seven fifteen.

  Either Jasper was not coming, or he was, for some reason, late. Had Amber held him up? Physically? Suspicion ripped through Isabel, not for the first time. Jealousy was as completely new to her as infatuation and just as powerful, she had discovered. Whatever else happened this evening, she was determined to find out the truth about Jasper and Amber. What exactly was their relationship?

  She had been meaning to ask him this afternoon, but then had come the scene with Olly. Amber, meanwhile, had been evasive all week. The sum total of Isabel’s contact with her over the past few days was the appearance of some indecipherable scribbled notes about various parties, which had been shoved under Isabel’s door when she was out. From which, presumably, she was expected to concoct a publishable piece.

  To please Jasper, she had managed it, cobbled together the detail from what existed in online newspaper gossip columns, whose representatives had been at the parties too. It had been a lengthy and irritating process and, throughout it, the question of Jasper and Amber had pressed upon her ever more heavily. Were they a couple? Was he just asking her, Isabel, out as a sop, to guarantee her cooperation with his girlfriend?

  Her mobile shrilled suddenly into these seething thoughts. Jasper? She positively snatched it from her coat pocket.

  ‘It’s just that you’ve been a bit hard to reach, lately.’ Her mother’s voice was strained, and not only, Isabel guessed, because it was coming from several hundred miles to the north.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about, honestly,’ she said, trying to suppress a note of irritation. Jasper, after all, might be trying to get through. This very moment.

  ‘Everything’s fine? You’re having fun?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ She could be honest about this, at least. ‘Lots of fun.’

  ‘Working hard as well, I hope?’ There was a nervous note to her mother’s voice.

  ‘Er, yes. Actually, Mum,’ Isabel’s gaze lingered longingly on St Alwine’s escutcheoned gateway. ‘I have to go. Ring you later. Bye!’

  She switched the phone off. Mum might call back and she didn’t want to risk being interrupted during the precious time with Jasper – time ticking away, even as she stood there. Had he forgotten? It was as bad a thought as his being with Amber.

  Not knowing was unbearable. If he wasn’t coming out, she was going in. She approached the door of the St Alwine’s porter’s lodge and stopped, surprised. The scene through the age-swirled panes of Georgian glass was one of another time. The small office, lined with dark wood and boasting a grate with a small but roaring fire, contained two porters. One was cradling a large tea mug and the other was reading a newspaper spread on the polished oak counter. Both wore dark waistcoats and bowler hats and had similar fleshy puce faces with bushy moustaches. As she opened the door, they looked her coldly up and down.

  ‘I’m looking for Jasper De Borchy,’ Isabel nervously told the porter with the paper.

  There was something knowingly horrible about the smile he gave her. ‘Mr Farthingale,’ he said, addressing his colleague in tones reminiscent of a music hall comedy act. ‘This young lady here is looking for the Honourable Mr Jasper.’

  The porter with the tea looked up and seemed to str
aighten, as if in anticipation of amusement. ‘Is that so, Mr Scavenger?’ he replied in a similar ‘I say, I say, I say’ voice. ‘The Honourable Mr Jasper, eh?’

  ‘The very same, Mr Farthingale. High-spirited young man, our Mr Jasper. Mind you, so was his brother, the Honourable Mr Caspar.’

  ‘And his father, Mr Scavenger. Don’t forget his father.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The Honourable Mr Jasper’s father, Lord Edmund. Had to fish him out of the fountain a few times, I can tell you, Mr Farthingale.’

  Isabel wondered how old they were, in that case. It was difficult to tell. Time inside this porter’s lodge had apparently stopped somewhere around 1912. Mounted above the fireplace was a circular Bakelite clock with thick black hands; that it seemed to be going forward was almost a surprise.

  She folded her arms. ‘Is he in, anyway?’

  ‘All in good time, my dear lady,’ Farthingale chided. He slid himself along the counter to consult a board on the wall. It was of the same dark polished wood as everything else and contained a list of names carefully hand-painted in a beautiful white italic hand. At the end of each name was the word, ‘Out’ or, ‘In’ with a small black-painted wooden slide covering whichever didn’t apply.

  ‘In,’ Farthingale said.

  Isabel didn’t like the porters, but felt grateful for this information. Farthingale lifted up the polished oak flap and loomed pucely before her. ‘I’ll escort you to Mr Jasper.’

  ‘If you just tell me where—’ Isabel began, before the other porter cut in.

  ‘We don’t allow unescorted females to enter the college,’ he said meaningfully. She felt him appraising the backs of her legs as she went out, hurrying after Farthingale as he disappeared into the swirling mists of the Tudor courtyard. The cobbles pressed painfully up into her thin soles, but the beauty of the place was evident even in the foggy darkness. Like a building in a mediaeval manuscript illustration, she thought – airy towers, oriel windows, carved beasts and shields. They stopped before a small arched corner doorway.