by Daisy Waugh
Macklan ignores him. ‘I’ll take over from here,’ he says, gently shunting Clive Adams aside. ‘You go home, Clive. Mr Guppy and I have a few things to talk about.’
Clive hesitates, glances nervously at Russell as if seeking permission. Russell nods.
‘Right you are, then,’ says Clive. ‘Goodbye.’
He sounds miserable. Macklan glances at him, briefly distracted by it. ‘You all right, Clive?’
‘Me? Fine! I’m fine. Never been better!’
Between them, in the darkness, they hear Russell Guppy laugh.
66
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.
Don’t know what they did up there
But now they’ve got a daughter.
Uncle Russell saw Robert White take Tracey up the hill, or at any rate follow her into the sports hut on the near side of the school playing field. That was twenty-one weeks ago, a good two months before Macklan appeared on the scene. Uncle Russell doesn’t know what they did in there either, but he saw Robert walking out of the hut not very long afterwards, doing up his flies, and looking mighty pleased with himself. So he has a pretty shrewd idea.
Then he found Tracey’s pregnancy test tucked under the mattress in her bedroom, stuffed back in its box, but obviously used, with the blue lines clearly showing. And Uncle Russell had nothing better to do. He put two and two together.
By the time Macklan gets Uncle Russell into the empty bungalow Uncle Russell is quite ready to tell him just about anything. Everything. If needs be, he’ll make something up. What does he care? He’s actually more than a little frightened. And quite rightly, too: Macklan, unbalanced by love, and with the door closed behind him, is a force not to be fooled with that night. Uncle Russell senses it.
Macklan Creasey looms down on him and the russet hair falls forward over his face, briefly shielding Uncle Russell from his wild green stare. He sweeps the hair away, places a hand on both arms of the wheelchair. ‘Mr Guppy—’ he begins.
‘OK, OK. She’s pregnant.’
He steps back as if he’s been slapped. ‘She’s – what?’
‘And has been,’ he adds quickly, ‘a good time before you came along…Satisfied now?’
Macklan is not. ‘How do you know?’ he says. Stupidly. Just words.
‘Pretty bloody obvious, isn’t it?’
‘But who—So who—Who’s the—’ Macklan stops. He’s not sure he wants to hear it. Not from Russell Guppy.
Russell Guppy grins. ‘Who’s the daddy? Is that what you’re asking me, rich-as-Creasey boy?’ He bends, begins to cough. He fumbles this way and that for his oxygen, finds it at last, presses it to his mouth, breathes in, breathes out, and in, and out. By the time he’s recovered, Macklan is nowhere to be seen.
‘And good riddance,’ he snarls to the empty room.
It gives him time to think.
What next? he asks himself, looking down at the precious green Brora sweater. What now? He’s tired. Very tired. It’s been a long, hard, exhilarating day…
Clive and Geraldine had offered to buy the sweater from him. He might have sold it, too, but they insulted him by only offering £150. And Russell Guppy had seen the look in Clive Adams’s eye when he’d turned them down: clocking the tubes going in and out of him, the crêpey yellow skin, the helpless knee stumps. Clive had been calculating the risks of simply snatching at the thing, taking the jersey and setting light to it there and then. Uncle Russell had smiled. ‘Macklan Creasey’s seen this sweater, Mr Adams. He knows where I’m gone even if he don’t know why…And the sweater’s not for sale. So you needn’t think no more about that.’
Russell Guppy smiles to himself. He can’t remember a more eventful evening. Not in sixty-three years. So…
What next then?
67
It was Monday, mid-February, a quarter past four on an icy afternoon and already beginning to grow dark. Small residues of the previous week’s snow lay in muddy patches over the empty playing field and Robert White was gazing out from the staff-room window, a pile of unmarked books behind him and a mug of blackcurrant Lemsip cupped between his wind-chapped hands. He was paid extra, back then, when Mrs Thomas was still in charge, to organise a Monday-night football club. Somehow he managed to arrange things so that it never actually took place. Each week he used to find a reason to cancel. Either it was raining or it was going to rain, or he was sick, or he was going to be sick. There was never a shortage of excuses, not for Robert, who always knew where to look. This week, of course, there were the patches of dirty snow.
So the footballers, like everyone else, had been sent home at a quarter past three and the school was deserted. Only Robert remained. That Monday his Fiat Panda was being serviced and he was waiting for a lift home. Girlfriend Julie, who worked in the environmental health department at Lamsbury Council, wasn’t free to pick him up until six.
Julie. Is still the only woman Robert ever dared to call his girlfriend. Julie was thirty-nine years old, and no beauty. Julie wanted to start a family. She desperately wanted to start a family, and at that stage she would have done anything for Robert, as long as he offered her hope. Robert did that. He allowed her to dream. Because she was (though he always knew he could do better) what he called ‘a super girl’, helpful to him in lots of little ways. She cooked for him, shopped for him, ironed his shirts.
Sometimes she said ‘Thank you’ when he screwed her, which he found disgusting. But she was a super girl on the whole. Just not quite super enough for him.
No, the girl he had his eye on – not to marry, of course (Robert would never marry someone like Tracey) – was young and shy and innocent and sweet; and just then making her way across the playground towards him.
Tracey liked him, so Robert believed. She blushed when he dropped in on her at the pub. Which he had taken to doing a lot recently. He liked to lean nonchalantly against the bar where she was working when she wasn’t cleaning the school, buy himself a drink and then ask her, ‘Can I get one for yourself, Tracey?’
Tracey would take the money and plop it in the tip glass by the till. ‘I’ll drink it later,’ she always said. ‘When it’s not so busy…’ Robert believed her. He dreamt of being there with her one day. When it wasn’t so busy.
And now he was. There were just the two of them, all alone and not so busy. He was meant to be marking books, and she was meant to be cleaning. But not so busy. Her top half, he noticed, was bundled up in a thick, hooded anorak which rubbed unattractively at her cheeks, made her look like an Eskimo. Horrible. But the bottom half told him a different story. She was wearing the tartan woollen mini-skirt he knew so well, and the calf-length black suede pixie boots. And between them – nothing. Her smooth young legs were mottled with cold, and naked.
Naked. Robert tapped distractedly at his Lemsip. Mrs Thomas kept a bottle of wine in the staff-room cupboard for emergencies – exactly such as this. And there were plastic cups somewhere. Perhaps they could crack open a bottle of wine together? Perhaps they could do that. On this cold February afternoon. Why the hell not?
Tracey must have felt his presence because she glanced across at the window. He waved at her. Very cheery. She couldn’t have guessed, he thought, that while his eye had lingered on the exposed flesh, young, smooth and cold, his mind had travelled further, to where the flesh was warmer, to where the flesh was always warm. She couldn’t have guessed that beneath the cheery wave, the steaming mug of blackcurrant Lemsip, Robert’s erection was prodding rapaciously against the staff-room window sill.
Tracey hadn’t been especially pleased when she saw him at the window, but she smiled anyway; a quick noncommittal smile. She didn’t like him much. For the first term that she worked at the school he had barely deigned to learn her name. But then she did something – she didn’t know or much care what; cut her hair, flashed a bit of cleavage – she did something, anyway, which made him notice her, and since then he’d not left her alone.
He was always on
his own when he came to the pub. No one ever spoke to him, except her – when she had to; when she was taking the tip money and plopping it into the glass by the till. She didn’t think he had any friends, and she couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.
Which was why, when he popped his straw-coloured head out of the staff-room door, tiptoed up behind her, grasped her softly by either hip, and whispered ‘BOO!’ she didn’t push him away, as she wanted to. She forced herself to smile.
‘Hello, Robert,’ she said, twisting subtly away from him. ‘You’re working late today.’
She felt sorry for him. That was her only mistake.
‘I’ve got a little surprise for you,’ he said, still with his hands on her hips. ‘Got a bottle of vino in there. And a couple of glasses. What do you say? Fancy having a drink with me, Tracey?’
‘Not really. Thanks, Robert. I’m in a bit of a rush today.’
She smiled at him kindly, saw his face drop, felt his hands drop. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Just a quick one?’ he said. ‘Won’t take a minute. I’ve laid it all out ready…It’d be nice…just to have a little chat.’ He smiled – a lonely, pathetic smile, she thought. ‘I feel like I hardly know you, Tracey. Here we are, working together. It seems ridiculous. I’d love to get to know you a little better.’
Tracey, only nineteen, and not especially used to alcohol, very quickly became drunk. Robert refilled her glass at twice the speed he filled his own. By a quarter past five that afternoon the bottle was finished, most of it by Tracey. They were sitting side by side in the staff room in almost total darkness. Tracey had been chattering away, giggling, and Robert had been watching her, watching the moonlight on her bare white thighs, murmuring little encouragements, not listening to a word. She had asked him a question and at some point he became aware of silence, aware of her expectation. He leant over as if to kiss her. She froze, horrified, but then his head dipped and his lips fell not on her mouth but there, where the skirt ended and the pale flesh of her legs began, where the legs were pressed together. And he didn’t kiss. He licked.
Tracey leapt to her feet. Managed not to scream. Because even after that, she felt she couldn’t be rude. She felt she oughtn’t to hurt his feelings. She stood in front of him and he watched her straightening her skirt. When she fumbled and finally flicked on the light he was still watching, eyes slightly glazed. He was smiling at her.
‘Right then,’ she said busily. But standing up had made her realise how drunk she was. ‘I’d better get on. Thanks…thanks very much for the drink.’ She lost her balance, stumbled against the door frame as she made her way back out into the hall.
She headed outside, not wanting to stay alone with him in the empty building. She thought the icy cold air might clear her head. She staggered out on to the playing field. Light from the school building flooded over it, but it was freezing out there without her anorak, and she felt exposed. She didn’t want Robert to see her, to feel he could come out and join her, which was when her eyes fell upon the sports hut and she hurried towards it. If she could hide away in there for a moment or two, try to stay warm, gather her thoughts…
‘Tracey?’ A little tap on the sports-hut door. ‘Are you OK in there?’
She jumped. ‘Fine. I’m fine, thank you.’
In the darkness she heard the door creak open, and saw Robert’s silhouette framed by the light from the school.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You don’t sound fine.’ He moved slightly, took a step into the small hut and the light fell on her: her enormous, terrified eyes; her breasts rising and falling beneath the too-tight T-shirt. It had ‘You Couldn’t Afford Me!’ written in crazy letters across the chest. But of course he could.
She’s frightened, poor little thing. She’s terrified.
And he found he can’t resist.
68
He’s been the rector of Fiddleford and chair of governors at the village school for over twenty-five years, but never has the Reverend Hodge had to witness squabbles in his own parish being broadcast on the public airwaves before. When he saw Mrs Guppy’s emotional outburst on the local news his heart bled, not only for her and Dane but for the whole of Fiddleford.
He tucked himself into bed last night feeling heavy with sadness, and the sense of personal failure. Reverend Hodge loves Fiddleford; more than he had realised, perhaps. It is his village, his home, and as its rector he feels responsible, at least in part, for its harmony. Now the airwaves are buzzing with acrimony and all the vultures are looming. The governors are at loggerheads, the Diocesan Council’s chief communications officer is hinting that he should consider retirement and the LEA is overtly threatening to close the school. Reverend Hodge feels he has let everybody down.
He lies awake all night trying to think of a solution. As the morning light begins to creep through his bedroom curtains, he still hasn’t found one. But he has prayed for guidance. And he has decided to call the governors back together again this evening and beg them to help him in his search.
This meeting, he decides, is to be held not at eight at the Old Rectory, where they had all (he thinks in retrospect) been so distracted by the hour, the alcohol and the luxuriant surroundings, but at six o’clock in the village hall. With tea.
He sets about telephoning his fellow governors immediately after breakfast. He calls the school first. Fanny is taking assembly so he speaks to Robert. ‘Sounds like a very good idea, vicar,’ Robert says, blowing his nose. ‘As a matter of fact, there was something else I’ve been wanting to bring up with the governors for some time now. Perhaps we can take a moment—’
‘Certainly, Robert. I’m sure we can,’ Reverend Hodge sounds distracted. ‘And you shan’t forget to mention it to Fanny?’
By noon he’s received confirmation from Fanny but still hasn’t managed to track down Geraldine: no answer at work or at home, and the mobile isn’t taking messages. Maurice Morrison can’t make it. Ditto, of course, the LEA’s Councillor Trumpton, who lives in Exeter. And ditto Grey McShane, who has a very full restaurant tonight, and no Messy, who’s taken the baby Jason to stay with her parents. But the General is available, and so is Kitty.
Kitty is reclining naked on her bed when the vicar calls, being sketched by Louis, goofy with spliff. She tells Reverend Hodge she’s heard not a squeak from Geraldine for a couple of days. ‘However,’ she says, because there is something very erotic about talking to a Reverend under the circumstances, and it puts her in mind to be friendly, ‘I, on the other hand, would be delighted to attend your meeting this evening, Reverend.’ She winks at Louis. ‘I’m positively looking forward to it!’
‘Excellent,’ says the Reverend, somewhat taken aback. ‘And I shall see you on Saturday, no doubt, at Mr Creasey’s darts and croquet.’
‘Oh, goodie, are you coming?’ cries Kitty. ‘What fun! It’s going to be the Event of the Summer, I think. Don’t you think?’
Which leaves him with only one more call. To the host of that Event, no less. Reverend Hodge tracks down his final governor en route to a convention at the Tate in St Ives. ‘Ah, Mr Creasey. Reverend Hodge here. School governors’ meeting this evening. Six o’clock. Can you make it?’
Solomon’s heart lifts. He’s not sure why, but he feels it. ‘Certainly!’ he says. ‘Oh, bugger! Six o’clock? You can’t make it any later?’
‘I fear not,’ says the Reverend smartly. Though he, like Kitty – like most of the village – anticipates enjoying himself enormously at Mr Creasey’s darts and croquet event this Saturday (Reverend Hodge is quite a killer on the croquet lawn), it doesn’t alter the fact that he can’t quite bring himself to like the man. He is, in fact, with all the best will in the world, offended and bewildered by almost every aspect of him, from the smell of his aftershave to the rumble of his vulgar cars as they purr up and down the village street; from the glamorous, silent girlfriends to the bellowing, boisterous laugh; to the wholly unapologetic, inappropr
iate unEnglishness of him. ‘What a shame,’ the Reverend says. ‘Never mind. I shall see you on Saturday, no doubt. At the party. I must admit, I’m looking forward to it, Mr Creasey. Very much indeed.’
69
So. No Solomon, no Grey, no Tracey, no Geraldine, and no one from the LEA; for the first half-hour not even Fanny Flynn. It’s a diminished collection of governors in the village hall that evening: only the Reverend, Robert White, Kitty Mozely and the General. They sit in a crooked circle on four ancient metal chairs and listen with varying degrees of politeness while Reverend Hodge describes his dismay at the recent publicity, and his determination that they should work towards a peaceful and private resolution.
‘As I say I’ve had very strong, not to say overt intimations from the LEA that they’re simply not willing to underwrite the cost of a protracted legal dispute. Or of any legal dispute at all, if they can help it. On the contrary. I received the clear impression that, with the tragic fire adding further to their irritation, they are really itching for a pretext to surrender altogether; to close our little school down for good.’ He glances around the group. ‘And it occurs to me that this dreadful dispute is playing right into their hands.’ A gentle, bewildered sigh. ‘Which is why the four of us – and Fanny, if she’s ever good enough to appear – must find a way to sort this out…’
He had taken the precaution of arriving at the hall ten minutes earlier than everyone else in order to set out the teacups and, because he always suffers from the cold, to light the enormous Calor heater which now hisses soporifically beside him, and makes the whole drab room stink of gas. By half past six, with the sun still beating down on the corrugated roof above them and all the windows nailed closed, everyone but the vicar is sweltering.
Kitty wriggles in her chair, furious to find herself sitting in it at all; how, she keeps asking herself, had the bloody vicar cajoled her into attending this ridiculous meeting in the first place? And where the fuck was Fanny? FUCK, of course, being the operative word, since Louis, who’d pretended he had a job to go to, was obviously with her…now…undressing her…caressing her, brushing his glorious lips against her firm, pert, youthful—