Weep a While Longer

by Penny Freedman

  Weep a While Longer

  Penny Freedman

  Copyright © 2014 Penny Freedman

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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  or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

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  concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.Matador®

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  ISBN 978 1784626 983

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Foreword and Dedication

  About the Author

  Title Piece

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  Foreword and Dedication

  Acorns day nursery is an invented place, inhabited by invented people, but I would like to dedicate this book to the children, parents and staff of The Oaks from 1973 to 1983.

  Other places and people in this book are also, of course, entirely fictional.

  About the Author

  Penny Freedman studied Classics at Oxford before teaching English in schools and universities. She is also an actress and director. She has a PhD in Shakespeare Studies and lives with her husband in Stratford-upon-Avon. She has two grown-up daughters.

  Her previous books featuring Gina Gray and DCI Scott are This is a Dreadful Sentence (2010), All the Daughters (2012) and One May Smile (2013).

  Title Piece

  Lady Beatrice, have you wept all this while?

  Yea, and I will weep a while longer.

  Much Ado About Nothing 4.1

  1

  Tuesday 17th July

  Veiled Remarks

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Jamilleh says, ‘why the shops’ people are saying me always, Your right.’

  ‘Your right?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. The shops’ workers, they say always this.’

  ‘Are they saying us You are right?’ asks Farah.

  ‘No, is a question,’ chips in Juanita. ‘It goes like, Your right?’

  Light dawns. I laugh. ‘Athene,’ I ask, ‘do you know what they mean?’

  Athene turns stormy dark eyes on me and gives a little huff of impatience. ‘It’s like, Are you all right?’ she says through barely parted lips. ‘Always everybody is asking this in England.’ She yawns. She is bored, as she has a right to be: her English is much better than the others’ and she doesn’t get much out of these classes. Also, she doesn’t like the Iranians: the Greeks’ view of themselves as Europe’s bastion against the Islamic world doesn’t really encourage mutual tolerance and understanding. And then there’s the current meltdown of the Greek economy: since her husband is here doing a government-funded MBA, I guess she’s wondering how much longer they’re going to be here.

  Farah and Jamilleh stare at her, affronted – as they so often are – by the treachery of the English language; Juanita smiles in dawning comprehension and Ning Wu, the fifth student in the group, has decided to conform to stereotype and look inscrutable. I write on the board:

  Are you all right?

  You all right?

  Yorright?

  ‘It gets squished up,’ I say, ‘because people say it so often.’

  ‘So they are asking me am I all right?’ Farah asks.

  ‘Well, no. They actually mean, Hello, can I help you?’

  Her face brightens. ‘In the book,’ she says, ‘this is how they say.’

  ‘The book?’

  ‘The book we were study with Mrs Jenny. Emma Goes Shopping. In this book the shops’ people say, Good morning. Can I help you?’

  ‘Yeees,’ I say, ‘that’s what shop assistants say in books, but very rarely in real life. Except perhaps in posh shops.’

  They laugh. Posh is a recent addition to their vocabulary and they like the alliteration of posh shops, and the way I say it.

  This is not, in general, an easy course to teach: popularly referred to as The Wives’ Course, it was given an official pc makeover to The Spouses’ Course a couple of years ago and then became uber-pc last autumn, when a young Brazilian woman, taking an MA in Women’s Studies, demanded that her boyfriend be allowed to attend. So it is now The Partners’ Course, though Rio, the partner in question, swiftly lost interest and found himself a job in one of the campus food outlets, where his English is, no doubt, improving by leaps and bounds. Everyone in the current class is, in fact, a wife. The numbers are always small and the course never pays for itself, but it is a kind of pastoral care for overseas students at Marlbury University, founded on the premise that men who have brought their families with them will study better if their wives are happy and, rather more tenuously, that happiness and speaking English are coextensive. There’s a flawed syllogism in there somewhere:

  Students are happier if they are better integrated

  Speaking English helps people to integrate

  Ergo, learning English makes students happy

  Anyway, the Student Union gives us a grant to run it and it’s a dogsbody course, usually taught by the newest recruit to the English Language department, and as head of department I wouldn’t normally be anywhere near it, except that I could see Jenny Marsh was really struggling with this particular group back in the autumn. Athene, Juanita and Rio, the Brazilian guy, were ganging up on Farah and Jamilleh, who spoke very little English at that point. They were suffering from severe culture shock and reacted fiercely to any perceived slur on their religion or culture. Ning Wu, from Shanghai, got caught in the crossfire and came to me to complain, so I swapped a nice quiet Cambridge First Certificate listening class with Jenny and took them on myself. It’s been hard work, and as I look at them even now Ning Wu is still sitting in the middle between Farah and Jamilleh to my left and Juanita and Athene to my right, like a one-woman UN peacekeeping force. We’ve found common ground, though: Acorns, for a start, the university day nursery, where my students all send their children and where I am frequently to be found dropping or collecting Freda, my four-year-old granddaughter. We rub along; I keep it light; we have a laugh.

  We are laughing now at posh shops when Farah’s and Jamilleh’s faces freeze before my eyes and their smiles stretch into masks of panic. At the same time I’m aware of a noise to my right and I spin round to see a young man coming into the room. I run at him, flapping wildly. ‘Out! Out! Out!’ I scream like a demented farmer’s wife seeing her hens threatened by a fox.

  He stares at me. ‘I was just trying to f—’ he says.

  ‘Ouut!’ I scream again and push him bodily from the room, slamming the door b
ehind him.

  I turn with my back against the door to find Farah and Jamilleh frantically bundling themselves into their jilbabs and khimars.

  Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. We were doing so well. About six weeks ago, you see, there was what can only be called an epiphany. It was early June and the first really warm weather of the year. Juanita and Athene were flashing brown shoulders in sleeveless T-shirts and they looked with pity at the Iranian women and asked if they had to wear those hijabs even at home. ‘Of course not,’ came the answer. ‘At home we wear whatever we like. At home,’ Farah told us, smiling, ‘we are beautiful for our husbands.’ And then it was Jamilleh, I think, who looked around, said, ‘Well, we are all women here,’ and started to pull off her headscarf. In a couple of minutes, they had both divested themselves of what I then, in my ignorance, would have called their hijabs and their long grey coats. The rest of us gazed in astonishment as they emerged, vivid, from their grey cocoons, two entirely Western-style young women with tight-fitting jeans, sleeveless tops, chunky jewellery and salon-improved hair – Farah’s lowlighted a rich red, Jamilleh’s highlighted in dark gold.

  ‘And now,’ Farah told us, flushed with her own courage, ‘we teach you this is not hijab.’ And so we were instructed. We learned that hijab simply means modest dress, though it can also refer to the headscarf, which is more properly called the khimar, as it is in the Qur’an, apparently. So the long, buttoned coat that Jamilleh had just taken off is not a hijab, nor is it a chador: the chador, we should understand, is the black cloak worn largely by peasant women. Farah and Jamilleh, smart young women from Tehran, wear the jilbab or, at the expensive, designer end of the market, the manteau, as in the French for overcoat. I was rather delighted to discover that there is fashion snobbery even in Islamic dress. I’m not sure how much the other students took in of all this but I lapped it up; always a glutton for new linguistic information, I’ve tucked it away and I’m waiting for an opportunity to show it off.

  Since that occasion, as soon as we’ve all gathered and the door has been closed, they have shrugged themselves out of their outerwear as casually as anyone else takes off a coat and the dynamic of the class has felt subtly changed. It seems like a gesture of trust and I feel privileged, in an odd sort of way, to be trusted. Until today. Until three minutes ago when a wretched, rash, intruding fool blundered in and wrecked it. Because they’re not going to take the risk again, are they?

  I apologise and soothe my fluttered chicks as best I can, and then, since there is no point in trying to go back to the listening exercise we were doing, and from which we had diverged anyway, I ask whether they’re all going to the end-of-term tea party at Acorns this afternoon.

  ‘Our sons will sing,’ Farah tells me solemnly.

  ‘Oh yes. I’ve heard. We’re getting an entertainment.’

  ‘Just the big childrens.’

  ‘Children.’

  ‘Children. The children who will start school soon.’

  This includes Freda, and if there’s any performing going on, she likes to be right in there. I am commanded to attend since Nico, her baby brother, has earache and is keeping her mother at home.

  ‘Do you know what they’re singing?’ I ask.

  ‘Of course! They are practising all the time. The Veals on the Bars.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I ask, startled.

  Farah looks at Jamilleh and they start a rotating, pumping movement with their arms and sing:

  The wheels on the bus go round and round,

  Round and round, round and round.

  The wheels on the bus go round and round,

  All day long.

  Juanita laughs.

  ‘The wipers on the bus go swish, swish, swish,’ she sings, and the others join in, hands flapping – except Athene who, when they move on to the horn on the bus goes beep, beep, beep, gives a tragic groan and bangs her forehead on her desk. Laughing, the others carry on, through the driver on the bus, the baby, the mummy, the granny and several other verses.

  I suppose the staff of Acorns know what a powerful role they play in the spread of British culture. I could wish, though, that they’d chosen something more authentic. This sounds ersatz, invented for Playschool presenters, I suspect, whereas I like those old, slightly strange rhymes with echoes of plague and religious persecution – something with a bit of grit. This little rhyme has done its job, though, and we depart cheerfully.

  ‘See you later,’ I say and they, as they have been taught, carol it back.

  *

  I have plenty of time for tea parties this week, since term is over, our regular students have scattered to the globe’s corners and the new students for the summer vacation courses don’t arrive for a couple of weeks. In fact, my five wives are probably the only students on the entire campus being taught this week; Juanita is going home to see her family at some point but the others are staying through the vacation, so the show goes on. Actually, even if I were busy I’d make the effort to go to an Acorns party, just to wonder at the brilliance of the women who work there: their calm, their resilience and their boundless good humour in the face of the egocentricity, irrationality and general stickiness of small children never fail to humble me.

  So here I am, sitting on a plastic chair in the garden at Acorns, being force-fed fairy cakes and jellies made by the children this morning.

  ‘We did plenty of hand washing,’ Caroline, who runs the place, reassured us as we sat down to our feast, so I’ve decided to stop wondering how much snot I am likely to consume.

  There are about twenty of us here, mainly the mothers of the self-styled ‘Big Ones’ who are going to entertain us later, and the children take their hosting role very seriously, pressing food upon us. I sit with Jamilleh and Farah and a couple of their friends for a bit but I get irritated by the suspicious way they are looking at their uneaten fairy cakes. We have been through this. I couldn’t swear that the gelatine in the jellies wasn’t pig-related, I conceded, but fairy cakes, I told them, were quite safe: flour, butter, sugar, egg – no chance of pig products getting anywhere near them. So why are they sitting there looking as though they’ve been given unexploded bombs to hold? I get up and go to join Juanita, who is feeding orange jelly with tinned satsumas in it to her two-year-old. ‘I love tinned satsumas,’ I say. ‘Don’t you?’

  Juanita, whose husband is doing an MSc in Sustainable Agriculture, says, ‘I prefer them right off the tree.’

  ‘I suppose,’ I say. ‘But tinned satsumas are a thing all of their own – a different fruit almost.’

  She looks sceptically at the spoonful she is holding. ‘I suppose,’ she says.

  A small boy appears at my side, proffering a brilliantly green jelly with grapes in it. I hesitate as I have already overdosed on fairy cakes, but when he says, ‘I maked it myself,’ there is no possibility of refusing it. I’m not a pushover for small children but I do love listening to them, hearing them juggle the language, contemplating the extraordinary thing that’s going on in the brain of a three or four-year-old. Parents want to urge them on – to tidy up and correct, to turn speaking into performance. What they don’t appreciate is that even the slowest child’s brain is performing probably the most remarkable feat it will ever undertake. And getting things wrong is actually evidence of how well they’re doing, because they’re not just parroting. This little boy who ‘maked’ my jelly – Liam, he’s called, he tells me – has never heard anyone say ‘maked’, but his brain has picked up the pattern of English verbs adding ‘ed’ for the simple past tense and it’s sticking with that for the moment in spite of any empirical evidence to the contrary. Later, of course, the patterning will become more sophisticated and irregular verbs will find their place but for now it’s the patterning that enables him to be creative.

  I take a spoonful of jelly while Liam watches me anxiously. ‘Delicious,’ I say.

  ‘I choosed green,’ he says, ‘because green is my favourite colour.’

  ‘Well my fav
ourite colour is blue,’ I say, ‘but you can’t get blue jelly.’

  ‘No.’ He contemplates me solemnly for a minute. ‘That’s sad for you,’ he says and gives my arm a pat before running off to continue his catering duties.

  Soon after I’ve downed my last grape we are called inside for the entertainment. Two rows of chairs have been arranged in a semicircle round the performance area, with a gangway down the middle. This seems to have produced a mini-apartheid and I decide to join Farah and Jamilleh in the front row on the ethnically more interesting side of the audience. Particularly interesting to the Iranians is a woman sitting behind us in full Islamic gear – black from head to toe, dark eyes just visible between headscarf and face veil. Farah and Jamilleh twist round to get a better look at her and then have a rapid, muttered conversation in Farsi..

  ‘Do you know her?’ I ask, sotto voce. ‘The woman in the burqa?’

  ‘Not burqa,’ Farah says.

  ‘Not?’ I glance over my shoulder again.

  ‘Niqab,’ Jamilleh says. ‘Burqa is top to bottom. One thing.’ She makes a sweeping two-handed gesture from her head downwards.

  I am embarrassed, convinced that the woman must know that we’re talking about her, but Jamilleh is oblivious, consumed by the need to educate me. ‘Niqab is veil for face,’ she says. ‘Separate. Headscarf, veil, dress. All separate.’