I guess he’s been prepared for this because he’s quite cool.
‘Police work’s mainly slog. We’re still working on the forensic evidence, and on witness statements. We shan’t give up, but in the meantime we’ve got other serious cases to deal with.’
‘More serious than the death of a child?’ Eve asks.
I can’t let her bully him – only I am allowed to do that – so I step in. ‘It’s an odd thing, but I’ve found myself teaching Marina’s brother.’
‘The lovely Edmund?’ Eve asks. ‘He’s not at the college now, is he?’
So I tell the tale of my press-ganging by Marcus Bright and Norman Street. I’ve had quite a bit to drink so it loses nothing in the telling and everyone has a good laugh at my expense. Eve says, ‘Now I know the PTA has that money, I’ll tap them for some new display boards.’
Colin asks, ‘How does he seem – Edmund?’
‘All right. You mean after what happened to his sister? All right.’
I turn to David. ‘Did you talk to Edmund, during your investigation?’
‘I didn’t. One of my officers did. There was nothing he could tell us, as I recall. He was at school, and had been all week. I imagine as a boarder he’s a bit detached from the rest of the family.’
‘He’s close to his mother,’ I say. ‘I’ve seen them together. And he’s not even embarrassed about selling DVDs of her show.’ I tell the story of this morning’s encounter. ‘And I saw a whole stack of the DVDs out at Charter Hall when I was there. I wonder how many they’ve sold. I’d love to go back and have a look.’
‘The Carsons have moved back in,’ David warns sharply. ‘I wouldn’t advise trespassing.’
‘What puzzles me,’ I say, pouring some more brandy, ‘is why they’re all so devoted to Glenys – Hector, Edmund, Renée the cleaner – and even those two shits at the Aphra Behn changed their tune with me when they thought I was a friend of Glenys’s. From what I’ve heard, she seems a thoroughly selfish woman.’
Colin drains his glass and says, ‘I don’t think you can explain the power to inspire devotion, though in Glenys’s case I’m sure it’s connected with her power as an actress – charisma if you like. As for selfish, I’ve got patients who are selfless wives and devoted mothers and their families just make more and more demands on them till they buckle under the strain. Talking of which, I’ve early surgery tomorrow.’ He smiles at me. ‘Thank you, kind hostess. That was a lovely meal.’
I smile back, but I’m startled to see, when I look into his face, something in his eyes that is very like despair. I look across at Eve, who is smiling serenely as she comes across to kiss me goodnight. When I look again at Colin, he seems all right. The occasional twinge of angst is an occupational hazard of daily contact with human misery, I suppose.
When they’ve gone and I’m loading the dishwasher, I pin down the little niggle that’s running round my head. “Kind hostess,” Colin called me. Not such an odd phrase, but not commonplace either, is it?
“This diamond he greets your wife withal,
By the name of most kind hostess.”
That’s the message Banquo brings from King Duncan to Macbeth, who, together with his kind hostess of a wife, is plotting to murder him in his bed. And why use those words to me? Was he conscious of what he was saying? Why turn me into Lady Macbeth as though I’m plotting against him? Why quote from Macbeth at all?
I go to bed and dream of blood.
20
WEDNESDAY 17th NOVEMBER
I have not seen such a firago
We had an early snowfall yesterday. Snow in November! Everyone professes to be amazed and astonished although actually we had snow in November only a couple of years ago. As ever, it has brought the town – indeed the whole country – to a standstill. The media love it: it’s so much more fun than wars and the economy. Lovely snowy scenes adorn all the front pages and glitter from the television screen. Freda adores it and was out in the garden at eight o’clock this morning. My mother is under strict instructions to go nowhere. She doesn’t like instructions, strict or otherwise, and I am suspicious of the apparent meekness with which she acquiesces. Is she planning to go out as soon as my back’s turned, or does she really not feel very well? She has been here for six weeks now, and though she seems all right and is walking quite well, she hasn’t mentioned going home. I need to find out how she’s feeling, but asking my mother about her health is the most difficult thing in the world: she bamboozles me with medical terminology and speaks as though she was talking about someone else – a slightly irritating patient who happens to share her name; her defective alter ego. I must sit down with her and have a talk, but not today. Today my life is scheduled to be screwed up both by William Roper School and by Marlbury Abbey School, and now the snow is going to finish things off, because I daren’t ride my bike.
Eve and I have arranged to go into the Aphra Behn first thing this morning, to pick up the Twelfth Night costumes. The production isn’t on for another three weeks but having the costumes to rehearse in is a real bonus. You may ask yourself how I wrung this concession out of the delightful Mr Driver and I have to tell you that it was not my doing but Renée Deakin’s. I bumped into her in town one day, as she was on her way to the theatre to pick up some costumes for Marlbury Operatic, weeks ahead of their production of The King and I. I moaned that we were only getting ours for a week, she said she would have a word, and bingo! Alex Driver, Renée said, was “quite a sweetie” when you got to know him. I wonder how long that takes. Anyway, I’m grateful to her, of course, but a bit of me is also unnerved by her palliness with the man who is still, in my mind, a possible killer.
I don my big winter coat, which I can’t cycle in and which only comes out for snow; I wrap a hefty scarf round my neck and I put on a pair of flowered wellingtons, which I thought were charming when I bought them but now see are ridiculous on a woman of my age. I walk down to Eve’s house, taking ages as I stumble and slither on the crunchy snow, and I’m frozen when I get there, despite coat and scarf.
‘Ooh my ears,’ I cry as Eve opens the door. ‘I’ve got frozen ears.’
‘You need a hat,’ she says. ‘Pick one off the hat stand.’
She has an old-fashioned curved beech hat stand in her hall, which has always carried an assortment of headgear that I thought purely decorative. Most of the hats are not actually much help in alleviating snowy ear syndrome, but I do find a splendid Russian-looking one – the sort that British politicians used to wear when visiting the Soviet Union. It is huge and furry and comes well down over my ears, threatening to cover my eyes as well. I look in the mirror, hoping I’ll look like Liv Tyler in Eugene Onegin but finding I look more like a transsexual guardsman.
‘Oh, that’s Colin’s,’ Eve says. ‘He bought it years ago, when we had a really bad winter, but he thought it encouraged his patients’ fears about his ‘red’ tendencies. Wear it. It’ll save your ears.’
Eve manoeuvres her car the short distance to the theatre and we go in through the stage door. We have an appointment but I’m unsurprised to find that Alex Driver is not waiting to receive us. The harassed ASM with the frizzy hair says she’s not sure if he’s in. She takes us to his office and looks inside but finds it empty. She suggests we go down to the costume store while she sees if she can track him down.
To give him his due, Alex Driver has left all our costumes hanging on a rail with a label on it reading Gray. Eve hasn’t seen the boys’ jackets before so while she’s appraising them, I mumble something about just checking we’ve got the right fat suit and speed off to where I saw the boxes of DVDs before. They are not there. I look around but there is no sign of them. Thwarted, I rejoin Eve and we’re debating how long we’re prepared to wait when the little ASM comes in and says, breathlessly, ‘Sorry, Alex has just rung. He can’t get in from Upper Shepton. They haven’t gritted the roads out there. He says take the costumes and sign this.’
She hands me a form, which I sign, the
reby undertaking to return the costumes undamaged in one month’s time, and Eve and I start gathering up armfuls to take out to the car. As we’re returning for a second load, I say, ‘You go on down, Eve. I’m just going to find a loo.’
And this is where my behaviour becomes difficult to excuse if we’re following standards of strict propriety. I open the door of Alex Driver’s office and I slip inside because, you see, when I glanced in over the ASM’s shoulder earlier, I thought I saw a large cardboard box very like the one I saw before, down below the stage, and if there’s no longer one down there, then it’s very likely to be up here. I really need to find out whether this one’s got DVDs of Amy in it and, if so, what numbers they’ve got on their backs, because I can’t make any sense of this number thing, and it’s really bugging me.
I don’t allow myself the luxury of looking round. Alex Driver may be safely snowed in, but the ASM might put her frizzy head in any time, so I make straight for the box, discover it is half full of DVDs, take one out, find a number five on its back and slip it into my coat pocket. Now that is the really inexcusable bit and I don’t quite know why I do it, except that I’m more and more convinced that there’s some sort of mystery about these DVDs and I’m going to have to watch one. (You may remember that Edmund Carson promised to get me one, but he hasn’t yet delivered.) Anyway, however I spin it, this is theft; I am a thief, and I shall be punished for it, you’ll be glad to hear.
When everything is in the car, Eve drives off to school and I walk round to Marlbury Abbey for my usual Wednesday morning stint. The central quadrangle of the school looks like a Victorian Christmas card. Boys in mufflers with rosy cheeks are sliding round it, tossing snowballs at each other and the ancient stone walls ring with their childish laughter. Or something like that. I could call it Dickensian, except school is never jolly in Dickens’ world, is it? My hat elicits a certain amount of laughter as I make my way round to my classroom (I skip the coffee these days) but they are civilised enough not to throw snowballs at me.
My class arrives, affecting a languid disregard for the snow, and we get down to negatives and question tags. We take it for granted, I point out, that the negative tags, “isn’t it?” and “doesn’t it?” on the end of a question invite the answer “yes”, while the positive tags, “is it?” and “does it?” invite “no”, but that’s actually quite counter-intuitive to a learner of English. We also explore the difficulties of negatives cancelling each other out in English (unless you live within the sound of Bow bells) and the time passes agreeably enough.
Edmund hangs around at the end of the lesson, as he often does, and watches me as I’m getting back into my wellies. ‘Interesting stuff about negatives,’ he says. ‘I’m quite getting into this.’
‘Enough to go to Nepal?’ I ask, as I wrestle my feet into my boots.
‘I don’t think the parents would care for that,’ he says. ‘They tend to want me to be close at hand these days.’
‘Oh yes,’ I mumble, feeling I’ve been crass, ‘yes, of course.’
‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to get you that DVD,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a problem with supply at the moment.’
‘Not to worry,’ I say cheerfully, hardly thinking about what I’m saying as I button up my coat and wind my scarf around, ‘I’ve got one.’
He lets out something between a shout and a laugh. ‘You’ve got one?’
‘Yes.’ I reach into my pocket and produce it. ‘Voilà.’
‘Where did you get it?’ The tone is casual but he’s watching me intently. And what am I to say? Stupid woman! Try thinking before you open your mouth, I berate myself silently.
Aloud, I say, ‘Oh, I – stumbled across it.’
‘And what did you think of it?’ He’s still watching me, his eyes locked on mine.
‘I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet – I just got it this morning.’ I’m just about to put it back in my pocket when he reaches out a hand.
‘Do you mind if I have a look at it?’ he asks. He takes it and turns it over – possibly to look at the number on the back, I surmise. ‘I thought so,’ he says. ‘This’ll be a pirate version. Very poor quality. Why don’t I keep this and get you a decent one?’
It’s about to go into his pocket but I shoot out a hand for it. ‘No!’ I say rather more loudly that I mean to. ‘I’m sure this’ll be fine. If it’s not, I’ll let you know.’ There’s almost a tussle for a moment, then he lets go and I tuck it back, deep into my coat pocket.
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘I’ll see you later at this Question Time thing. Looking forward to it.’ And he’s gone.
I should explain about the Question Time thing: it’s another of Marcus’s brainwaves – a team of local worthies will answer questions on the state of the world put to them by members of an audience of sixth formers. It will take place at seven-thirty this evening and, as it’s out of working hours, I shall get paid £100 for doing it, which will come in handy what with Christmas approaching and my having increasing numbers of mouths to feed. The other members of the panel are a cleric from the abbey, the editor of The Marlbury Herald and Neil Cunningham, director of the Aphra Behn Theatre. You may wonder what I am doing among these stalwarts of the Marlbury establishment and I did ask Marcus that very question. ‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll hold your own,’ was all he said.
So, I’m to be there for my nuisance value – who better? I’m to be the grit in the oyster, the balance on the team. I’m the only left-wing feminist Marcus knows and for once I’m actually being invited to be stroppy. The trouble is, I’m so stroppy that I’m tempted to thwart Marcus by not being stroppy. I could play the little woman for the evening: I could smile, be self-deprecating and agree with everything the men say, couldn’t I? Couldn’t I? Well, actually, no.
I’m not thinking about this, though, as I trudge across town to the college with the snow getting in over the tops of my boots. I’m thinking about the DVD in my pocket and Edmund’s reluctance to let me keep it; I’m thinking about one lot with fours on the back, one lot with fives and one lot with sixes; I’m thinking about the frustrating fact that I won’t get a chance to look at this one till I get home late this evening, because we have a staff meeting at five (rescheduled because of my morning engagement at Marlbury Abbey) and then I’ve promised myself a pizza at Pizza Express before the Question Time thing (I was invited to have dinner with my fellow-performers but there is only so much a woman can take, so I declined).
Perhaps it’s my wet socks, but I feel increasingly pissed off as the afternoon goes on. I’m snappy with my colleagues at the meeting and the walk in the biting wind afterwards puts me in a foul temper. Pizza Express, which has had the temerity to establish itself in a half-timbered building on the abbey’s doorstep, feels empty and cheerless, and even a glass of wine with my pizza doesn’t cheer me up. I eat the pizza too fast, order a cappuccino but then leave half of it because it’s weedily weak and I stomp round to the abbey gateway, through the precincts, round by the cloisters and into the school quad.
My team-mates are drinking after-dinner coffee with Marcus in the common room when I arrive looking slightly demented, I imagine, in my outsize hat and flowery wellies. Once I have divested myself of these, I am introduced by Marcus as “our linguistics expert.” Neil Cunningham appears not to recognise me; the others smile enthusiastically. We have a bit of nervous conversation about possible questions and all lament the fact that we haven’t paid more attention to the news over the past week, though I suspect we’ve all been boning up like mad, and then Marcus ushers us out once more and we climb some steps to the school hall.
It’s no surprise to find that the hall bears no resemblance to school halls I have known and every resemblance to an Oxford college hall, down to stained glass windows and portraits of benefactors – pale, male and stale – on the walls. The boys, and a scattering of girls, are already gathered and applaud politely as we file in, and seat ourselves on a high platform beneath an assortment of coats of ar
ms. They applaud again as we are introduced.
Things kick off fairly sluggishly with a question about funding for the arts – is it less important than funding scientific research? My colleagues speak passionately of the benefits to humanity of artistic endeavour, though they fail to tackle the question of how these benefits can be calibrated against those of scientific endeavour, or whether all scientific research is of equal value, and I point this out, but only half-heartedly.
Then a portly boy in a gown stands up. He is one of those sixteen-year-olds who is already forty-two. He asks, in his plummy professor’s voice, ‘Does the team think that political correctness has gone mad?’
I’m called first on this one. I say, rather prosaically, that I think “political correctness” has become a catch-all term for a number of different areas in which government, local government, the police and other authorities are trying to manage changing attitudes in society – areas where attitudes that were once acceptable aren’t any more – and shouldn’t be. As far as the words people use are concerned – the names they call people or the epithets they use – I think of PC as standing for “polite” and “civilised”.
‘There’s no excuse,’ I say, ‘for calling people by a name they don’t like. We wouldn’t do it to our friends and colleagues and we shouldn’t do it to other people. We’ve no business using terms that people find demeaning, or making jokes about people’s sexuality or skin colour or nationality or height – or hair colour, actually. Ginger-related insults still seem to be allowed.’ I get a laugh and I go on, ‘Personally, I don’t see any harm in making jokes about people’s religion. Those other things – race, gender, sexuality, physical appearance – are things people can’t help – they don’t choose them. We choose our religious beliefs and we should be prepared to defend them and to take criticism of them. I don’t think saying, “You can’t say that because it offends me” works in this context.’
All the Daughters Page 18