She felt utterly mortified by her outburst. Her instinct was to run away and never come back, but Tony had been so calm and non-judgemental. A lot of people would have sent her away with a flea in her ear, she thought, but he seemed to take it in his stride, as if he was used to unhinged young women hurling accusations at him.
It was such a shame, she thought, that he wasn’t her father. The house he and Wendy shared had such a calm and inviting feel to it. It was somewhere she would have loved to take refuge every now and again – long, sunny weekends by the sea to break up the monotony of working in London. Her job was such a treadmill, increasingly pressurised, and although of course she could book weekends away, it involved too much effort and forward planning. But knowing she could slip down to Pennfleet for a much-deserved rest any time she liked would have been perfect . . .
She and Dan. She felt sure Tony would like Dan.
She told herself to stop fantasising. It wasn’t going to happen. She was going to have to go back to the drawing board. Tony might not be her father, she mused, but he had been her mother’s teacher, all those years ago. He might be able to provide her with a clue.
‘There you go, Emma.’ He put a large mug of tea in front of her, and reached for the biscuit tin.
‘Actually,’ Laura admitted sheepishly, ‘my name’s not Emma. I gave you a false name. Emma Stubbs is my best friend. My name’s Laura Starling.’ She leant forward with urgency. ‘My mother was Marina. Marina Starling. Are you sure you don’t remember her?’
Tony screwed up his face. ‘I’ve got a vague recollection . . . it’s an unusual name. But you have to make allowances.’ He gave a self-deprecating grin. ‘I am getting old, after all. Sometime I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast this morning.’
‘But you did do this drawing of her,’ Laura persisted. ‘It must have been you – it’s got your signature on it.’
He shrugged.
‘She probably did some modelling. Things were different in those days. And if we had a life-drawing class, of course I would draw the model as well. To show the students how it should be done.’ Another self-deprecating grin. ‘In theory.’
Laura looked down at the picture.
‘I wonder why she kept it, then?’
Tony shrugged. ‘Girls of that age love to keep things, don’t they? They’re magpies.’
‘Maybe she had a crush on you?’ Laura’s eyes were wide with the possible scandal.
‘I doubt it. I had a bit more hair in those days, but I wasn’t exactly a heart-throb.’ He pushed the tin of shortbread over to her. ‘There you go. I always find a bit of sugar helps after an emotional outburst.’
‘Oh God. I’m so sorry. You must think I’m a complete lunatic.’ Laura laughed despite herself.
‘Hey. No problem.’ Tony took a sip of his tea. ‘I’m rather flattered I was the chief suspect. It makes me feel more interesting than I really am.’
‘And you don’t remember anything about her class? It must have been your A-level class. You don’t remember anything about who she hung out with? Anyone who might be able to give me a clue . . .?’ Laura couldn’t resist pressing him for more information.
Tony shook his head. ‘It was a big school. I was only there a couple of terms. I didn’t really get to know who was in and who was out.’
Disappointed, and feeling no further on with her investigation, Laura drank her tea as quickly as she could.
‘Shall we go and finish your painting?’ Tony asked her as she put down her cup.
‘I think it’s better if I just go,’ she said.
‘Are you sure? You were doing so well.’
Laura hesitated.
‘Come on. No hard feelings,’ Tony tried to persuade her. ‘I don’t want you to waste your money. And Wendy will think it strange if you disappear.’
‘No. I’m going to go back to the hotel. My boyfriend will be back soon. We haven’t been away like this before. I want to make the most of the upgrade . . .’
She blushed, realising how this sounded.
‘Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.’
‘And I’m sorry about . . . bursting in here with wild accusations.’
Tony managed a laugh. ‘Listen – it made a change from the usual middle-aged empty-nesters I get.’
Laura picked up her bag.
‘Thank you. Again. Maybe you should tell your wife I was taken ill. Migraine. I get a lot of migraines. Especially when I’m stressed. And actually, I am feeling a bit headachey, so it wouldn’t be a total lie.’ Laura realised she was babbling.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Tony. ‘I’ll think of something.’
Laura slid off the stool and stood up to go. On impulse, she went over to hug him. He’d been so sweet. Part of her did want to stay and finish her painting, but she’d rather be alone with her thoughts. She realised now that she had pinned all her hopes on him being her father. The disappointment was gutting.
Her father was out there somewhere. He had to be. She was just going to have to dig deeper into the past.
Or tie her mother up and put a gun to her head.
‘Goodbye,’ she said to Tony, who looked rather relieved that she was going. He must think she was completely bonkers. And maybe she was. How could she ever have thought that tiny little drawing was going to provide her with the answer she needed?
As soon as Laura had gone, Tony turned and went swiftly upstairs into his studio. He shut the door and crossed to the window, watching Laura as she walked back down the road until she finally disappeared around the corner and out of sight.
Then he bent double over the sill with his head in his hands.
A daughter. He had a daughter.
Of course she was his. As soon as she had revealed the true reason for her visit, the years had rolled away, bringing back every second of that insane, tempestuous, wonderful, terrible time. It had taken every ounce of his willpower, a strength he didn’t know he had, to bring it all to an end. It was the only way. He’d had no choice.
Marina Starling. He could still see her face, as clearly as anything.
Thirteen
When Tony Weston had first got the job at St Benedict’s, his friends had ribbed him mercilessly. It was the stuff of every male fantasy – head of art at a girls’ school? He took the teasing good-naturedly on the surface, but actually it annoyed him. It made him feel as if he wasn’t being taken seriously. As if they thought he was a dirty old man, even though he was only thirty-two. As if they didn’t think he respected his wife, which he did. Wendy was his world. His rock. His soulmate. And the rise in salary that came with the post meant that when she got pregnant, she would be able to give up her job to look after their children. Wendy had no desire to be a working mother. It didn’t make sense to her. If you could afford not to, why would you put yourself and your children through it? No, she would have her kiln in the garden, and when the children were old enough, she could spend any spare time doing her ceramics, and sell them.
So moving to Reading had been the perfect plan for the Westons. And although they weren’t keen on the town itself, they found a big Victorian house in an area that wasn’t too rundown, which they were going to do up gradually. Wendy found a job as a teaching assistant in a junior school and stopped taking the pill. They were totally on track.
But Tony hadn’t accounted for Marina Starling.
He heard the name often enough, even before he met her. She was the subject of several staff meetings before term started. She was one of those tricky students who could go either way. Bright, but unmotivated. It was anyone’s guess whether she would pull it out of the bag and leave with a decent clutch of qualifications, or be a spectacular failure and drift off into the world. The general consensus was that there was nothing you could do with a girl like that. She would choose her own destiny no matter who tried to intervene.
There was also a theory amongst the men in the staff room that it wouldn’t matter if Marina left unqualified. A gi
rl who looked like that would always go far. Tony had been sickened by their casually sexist judgement, but he could tell, by the way the women bristled, that what they said was true.
The day Marina walked into his art class, a canvas rucksack covered in badges slung over her shoulder, he thought his heart was going to stop.
She had raven-black hair teased into a wild nest that fell past her shoulders. Pale skin as smoothly perfect as the inside of a Wedgwood teacup. Kitten-round eyes ringed darkly with kohl. Her school jumper clung obscenely to her breasts; her legs were long and skinny beneath her skirt, clad in black tights and non-regulation Doc Martens with the laces undone.
He couldn’t keep his eyes off her all the way through the lesson, though he tried desperately not to make it obvious. She was shrewd, and interested, which surprised him. She asked bold and insightful questions. When he did look at her she didn’t blush, but smiled, a deep dimple appearing by her mouth.
‘Don’t you think,’ she asked him in their first lesson, ‘that Gaugin was actually a bit of a wanker?’
He was determined not to be fazed.
‘He pleased himself, certainly,’ he replied. ‘Whether that makes him true to himself, or, as you so eloquently put it, a wanker, is for you to decide. Though he certainly got his comeuppance. Syphilis is not a pretty way to go.’
Touché, he thought. His reply seemed to please her.
For weeks they sparred in class. She challenged him constantly, and he retaliated. He didn’t much care if the rest of the class noticed the spark between them. And he remembered only too clearly the day he walked into the life-drawing class and found her reclining in place of the usual lumpen model.
‘Gretchen couldn’t make it,’ she told him. ‘So I thought I’d sit in for her. It seems a shame to cancel the lesson.’
He should have protested. He should have sent her away to get dressed immediately. But doing so would have shown he was rattled. He knew that was what she intended. She spent every lesson playfully trying to provoke or shock him.
‘Great idea,’ he said, barely giving her a second glance, then sat down to sketch her. Once he was behind his easel, he could feast his eyes on her body. It was so exquisite that it made his throat ache. He knew it was wrong, but he would have to be superhuman not to want to look. He defied any man on earth not to take a prurient interest. Of course, he thought, these days a life-drawing situation like that would never be allowed, but things had been different then. Things had been possible. And, he told himself, she was seventeen. He knew, because he’d checked on her school record.
And why had he checked? he asked himself. Because he was bewitched, and it made him feel better to know she was well over the age of consent. Thoughts of her haunted him, day and night. Thoughts he tried desperately to keep at bay, because they were so dangerous, so wrong. He was being a bloody fool. Playing with Marina was playing with fire, because one day someone who mattered would notice and would say something.
One day he found her crying in the corner of the art room. She refused to tell him what was the matter, but continued to weep bitter tears. Even though a voice inside his head warned him not to, he stepped closer to her. He could smell her cheap, sugary, teenage girl scent and it made his stomach turn over, not with revulsion but an overwhelming compulsion, a compulsion to touch her. He put a tentative arm around her, a gesture that could, just about, be construed as one designed to bring comfort. As soon as he made contact, she twisted round and pressed herself against him.
‘Hold me,’ she said.
Anything else, he could have resisted. If she’d asked him to fuck her, or kiss her, he would have pushed her away. But it was such a heartfelt plea. She was so tiny, so frail, but so ripe. As he pulled her in to him, he could feel the softness of her breasts against his chest, in sharp contrast to the bony shoulder blades he caressed with his hands.
And then suddenly they were tangled up in each other. Fingers and mouths and tongues entwined. Buttons came undone and clothes melted away. Not a word was spoken; their breath was synchronised. It was urgent but measured. Almost perfectly choreographed. He lifted her on to one of the wooden workbenches. She tilted her head back; he kissed the whiteness of her throat with tender savagery.
When it was over, she slid down him, on to the floor, stood in front of him with her head bowed, her breathing shallow.
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ she said, ‘since the day I first saw you.’
He brushed his fingertips slowly down her spine, touching her in wonder. This was the moment he would take to his grave. This was the most momentous thing that had ever happened to him. Jesus, he thought. He was a thirty-two-year-old teacher and he’d just screwed a pupil. A seventeen-year-old pupil.
And then he realised he didn’t care. If he was hung, drawn and quartered for it, flayed alive, put in front of a firing squad, it would have been worth every glorious second. It had been like dying and being reborn in the same moment.
Their affair was passionate, intense, urgent, abandoned. He had to lay down some rules, because otherwise it would have spiralled out of control. No contact at school. No phone calls to his house. Nothing in writing, ever. They met in the lunch hour at her house, because her parents were never in. The neighbours wouldn’t notice, she assured him. Sometimes he managed to get there at weekends, on the pretence of going to the DIY store, or the gym, or the library, then calling her from a phone box.
He knew it was irresponsible. He knew it was wrong. But their passion – not love; love didn’t begin to express what they had between them – was more powerful than any moral sense either of them had. His should have been more developed than hers – he was the adult; he was the teacher, for heaven’s sake – but every time he began to express a concern, she shushed him.
‘People wait a lifetime for this,’ she told him, ‘and never experience it. We should be grateful for it while it lasts.’
It wasn’t just sex. She intrigued him. Excited him. Stimulated him. Infuriated him. Surprised him – constantly. She was as skittish as a kitten but deeper than the stillest waters. She made him laugh.
And once, when they were having closer-than-close, desperate sex, she made him cry.
Of course, it had to come to an end. He’d known that all along.
On a school art trip to Paris, when half a dozen students got food poisoning from some dodgy coq au vin, they had both feigned illness too and stayed behind in the hotel, sacrificing the trip to Versailles. She had come to his room and they had spent the day in bed, losing themselves in each other, and Tony had looked up at her above him, her dark hair tousled and damp with sweat, and knew it had to stop.
‘Wendy’s pregnant,’ he told her.
She rolled off him and on to the bed beside him, staring up at the ceiling.
‘That’s it, then,’ she said.
‘I’ll always love you,’ he told her, ‘but we’re having a baby. I have to put that first.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know you do.’
She gave him a look, and he suddenly understood the reason for her wordless anger, the anger he knew was there even though she wasn’t expressing it.
‘I never said I didn’t have sex with her. I didn’t want her to be suspicious. I couldn’t just stop. You knew we wanted a family.’ He defended himself as best he could.
Her green eyes were opaque with tears. She looked like the child she still was. She curled herself up into a tiny ball. She didn’t say anything. It was worse than if she had ranted and railed at him. And when he tried to curl himself round her, she punched him, hard, in the stomach.
He bent double, gasping, winded, shocked by her strength.
She pulled on her tights, laddering them in her haste, tugged on her paisley tea dress and her green baggy jumper.
‘Marina . . .’
‘Don’t say anything,’ she implored him through gritted teeth. ‘I get it. I understand. Don’t worry.’
‘I’ll always love you.’
He scarcely saw her for the rest of the trip, just glimpses of her wild nest of hair amongst the rest of the students as they visited the Louvre, the Jeu de Paume, the Musée d’Orsay. He felt bereft. He’d wanted to look at all the paintings with her, see her reaction, tell her his interpretations. He wanted to share everything with her for the rest of his life. But he couldn’t.
The crossing back to England was wild. Tony spent the entire journey throwing up, not sure if it was mal de mer or maladie d’amour making him ill. Each wave tossed him nearer to Wendy.
When he got back, to his loyal and faithful wife with her tiny little bump, he realised something else. He couldn’t stay on in Reading knowing that Marina was breathing the same air as him, knowing that he might bump into her at any time of the day or night, in the supermarket, or the post office, or a car park. He had to move himself away from the temptation. He had to put as many miles between them as possible. And so he applied for a job with an advertising agency in London, which, to his immense surprise, he got. He broke the terms of his contract with the school by not giving them a term’s notice, but he made it clear to the head that for personal reasons he couldn’t stay.
‘It’s very . . . delicate,’ he told her. She was delicate, Marina, a fragile construction of blood and bone and breath.
The head recoiled slightly. No head of school wanted a teacher besmirched by personal problems. Delicate was a euphemism for messy scandal. She read the subtext.
‘It’s a tragedy that we’re losing you,’ she told him. ‘You’ve been an inspiration to so many of our girls.’
And they left it at that.
When he phoned the school later that summer to ask what grades his pupils had got for their A-levels, Marina’s name wasn’t mentioned.
‘What about Marina Starling?’ he asked. ‘I had her down for an A.’
The Long Weekend Page 23