Dangerous Things

by Claire Rayner

  She found that most of the girls had gone, seeking out their parents to show them round and to encourage them to spend money at the stalls (‘It’s an important charity thing, Mum, for heaven’s sake spend a bit more than that. Don’t show me up. It’s for Kurdish refugees and all that …’), except for Dilly, who was sitting on a chair behind one of the urns, reading. The chair was tipped back precariously as she sat with her feet up on the table and as Hattie came up to her she scowled and then, ungraciously, took her feet off the table and let the chair down with a little thud but kept her head down over her book.

  ‘Your parents not coming, Dilly?’ Hattie said as casually as she could. It was difficult not knowing the family backgrounds; there was always the risk of saying the wrong thing and as she saw the colour creep into the back of Dilly’s neck she knew she’d done just that. And decided to deal with her tactlessness head on. It was the only way.

  ‘If you don’t have parents and you want to tell me to mind my own business, fair enough,’ she said as lightly as she could. ‘I really shouldn’t have asked.’

  Dilly still kept her head down, but she closed her book. ‘Natural enough, I suppose,’ she muttered.

  ‘But rude,’ Hattie said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Not really.’ Dilly looked up at her and seemed more relaxed. ‘It’s what teachers always do. They ask about parents the way parents ask about teachers. It’s like we don’t exist in the middle, you know what I mean? We’re just there to give you all something to do.’

  Hattie laughed. ‘I do know what you mean,’ she said, and perched on the edge of the table, pushing back some of the cakes to make room for her bottom. ‘I turn up at my children’s school as much to be seen by their teachers to prove I’m a good caring mum as to see the children’s work. That’s important, of course it is. But I do have this ridiculous thing about wanting to please the teacher. At my age!’

  Dilly smiled suddenly and Hattie felt a warmth move into her. She was really quite good at this job she’d found herself pitched into.

  ‘You do try hard, don’t you?’ Dilly said. ‘Wanting to be a real mate to us, are you? You can’t, you know. Not when you’re one of the staff and we’re not. It can’t be done.’

  The warmth vanished immediately and Hattie stared at her, nonplussed, and Dilly smiled more widely than ever. Clearly she felt better.

  ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ Dilly said. ‘Don’t look like that. It’s just a —’ She shrugged. ‘I never wanted to come to this bloody school and now I’m here I still don’t like it much. But I’ve got no choice but to be here.’

  ‘Well, give me some credit for something useful,’ Hattie said. ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Here we go!’ Dilly was derisive. ‘Let me welfare you …’

  ‘It’s up to you. I put my foot in it to start with, and I don’t want to go on doing it. Talk if you like. Don’t if you’d rather not. It’s really up to you.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Dilly said after a moment and then got up and went over to the entrance of the tent to peer out. ‘I shouldn’t take it out on you, really. Not your fault. It’s all his —’

  Hattie said nothing. She’d learned that much at least.

  ‘And even that isn’t really true.’ Dilly came back to her chair and flopped into it. ‘Poor bugger. Does his best, I suppose. It’s just that he’s so stupid and gets it all wrong all the time.’

  Still Hattie said nothing and Dilly shot a glance at her. ‘You’re good at this, aren’t you? Oh, well, what the hell?’

  ‘What am I supposed to say to that?’ Hattie ventured after a long pause, and Dilly shrugged.

  ‘Nothing. Look, it’s nothing all that special. My mother went off with someone else. Left me with my dad. We used to live in Liverpool, Mum and me, but after she went I had to come here to live with him. He can’t work anywhere other than London, he says. Film director.’

  ‘Sounds interesting,’ Hattie said as Dilly stopped and again seemed to have dried up.

  ‘Mmm? Oh, not really. He thinks it’s madly glamorous, of course. But it’s just a lot of tatty ads and second-rate TV things. Nothing all that good. It’s like this place. You’d think it was something special, the way the Head and the masters go on, but it’s only special because they think it is. It’s a dreary dump really, but they think it’s great, so to them it is. Freddy’s the same. He thinks he has this madly exciting life, so he does. To me it’s a load of crappy rubbish, but what can I do? I can’t do what I want yet.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘Go back to Liverpool. Get my A levels there. Go to university there.’ Dilly made it sound as though she were talking about Shangri La. ‘Liverpool’s great. It’s really great. I’d do anything to stay there but’ — she seemed to flatten as some of the excitement that had lifted her ebbed away — ‘it can’t be done.’

  ‘Really can’t? A pity,’ Hattie said cautiously and then added, ‘Isn’t there anyone you can stay with while you do your A levels? A friend’s family, maybe?’

  ‘What with? Peanuts?’ Dilly said roughly. ‘Someone’s got to pay my bloody board and lodging, haven’t they? And Freddy can’t — and yes, I know about the fees here, but he doesn’t pay them. My grandmother does and she won’t let me go back to the ’Pool so I’m bloody stuck here, aren’t I? And he’s out there somewhere showing off to them all because he was a boy here way back in the olden days when life was really worth living, oh, but the sixties were wonderful, and all that shit. And he needn’t think I’m going out to look for him. Because I’m not.’

  ‘We’ll need refills of the sandwiches once the crowds are let in here,’ Hattie said after a long pause. ‘I left enough stuff in the kitchens to make a new batch. We could just as easily start them now as later.’

  Dilly looked up at her and pushed her hair off her face with both hands and slowly grinned.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Yeah, we could, couldn’t we?’

  ‘If anyone comes asking I’ll tell ’em you’re busy, shall I?’

  ‘You do that.’ Dilly got to her feet and made for the back entrance of the tent, the one that led back towards the school buildings. She stopped as she reached it and looked back over her shoulder. ‘You’re all right, you know,’ she said. ‘Sorry if I was a bitch.’

  ‘You weren’t,’ Hattie said, and smiled at her. ‘No more than generality.’

  Dilly made a face and escaped, and Hattie sighed softly and made for the other entrance. She’d round up the girls and open the flaps of the tent to invite would-be tea-drinkers in. Her own children would be arriving at about four and she’d like to be free by then to give them some attention. Starting serving teas as early as two-thirty would help speed things up a little, even if it did reduce the attention paid to the stalls — which would irritate Edward Wilton considerably. But she’d risk that.

  Outside the light seemed painfully bright and she squinted through the crowds, trying to find the girls, and in consequence almost butted into the official party. The Headmaster put out a restraining hand and she blinked up at him, startled.

  ‘Ah, Madam Mayor, may I present my newest member of staff? Mrs Clements, looks after our sixth-form girls, you know. Organizing teas this afternoon, a most vital job. And Mr Akenshield, Mrs Rusting, Miss Greenlees …’ He murmured his way through the whole party, faultlessly recalling every name, and Hattie stood and nodded and grinned awkwardly at them, feeling like a first-form child and wanting to escape, but they were murmuring at her, asking her about the girls: Was it working well, having girls in just the sixth form and didn’t she think the school would be more normal if there were girls all through? And she nodded and smiled and managed to produce inane answers that said nothing very much, painfully aware of the Headmaster’s eyes on her, and he seemed pleased enough and at last shooed his party onwards and she took a deep breath and then turned to continue her search for the girls. But again someone was in the way.

  ‘You handled that rather well,’ Sam Chanter
said. ‘Kept the Headmster happy and almost convinced those oiks you were saying something useful.’

  ‘Why oiks?’ Hattie was angry suddenly. ‘Just because they’re Council people? And, shock horror, Labour Council at that?’

  ‘I joined the Party twenty years ago,’ Sam said mildly. ‘The fact I work here hasn’t got a thing to do with my private or political feelings, you know. I called ’em oiks because that’s what they are. Look at them, for heaven’s sake! The most boring farts this side of the river.’

  She followed the jerk of his head and looked again at the Headmaster’s cluster of people and found herself smiling against her will. They were really very dreary-looking, all five of them; the women drab because they didn’t know how to be anything else, rather than because they were making any sort of feminist statement, and the men self-satisfied, oily, dull.

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said and then looked at him again. ‘Did you say you were a member of the Labour Party?’

  ‘Lapsed. I joined after I left the C.P.’

  She laughed at that. ‘You weren’t really a Communist!’

  ‘At twenty you’re a fool if you’re anything else. Isn’t that what they say?’

  ‘No. What they say is that if you’re not a socialist when you’re twenty you’ve got no heart, and if you’re not a Conservative when you’re forty you’ve got no head. Or something like it.’

  ‘Right. Well, I had my share of heart when I was twenty. Now I’ve got no heart left. And not much head. So I work here and take life easy.’

  She looked at him curiously. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you that sort. Lazy, I mean.’

  He grinned widely. ‘I’m not. I’m working on a book. It fits in better with working here than in a State school. So I’m using the capitalists to suit my own socialist ends. How’s that?’

  ‘I like it,’ she said. ‘It’s got class.’

  ‘I might just as well ask what you’re doing working here when you’re obviously more in sympathy with the Council people than you are with the Headmaster.’

  ‘It’s a convenient job,’ she said, ‘for a widow with young children. I’m not entirely comfortable about it, and I won’t pretend I am. But a job’s a job — and this one gives me school holidays.’

  ‘I knew all that. Wilton told me.’

  She shook her head. ‘That man seems to know everything about everybody.’

  ‘Not everything. Have dinner with me sometime and I’ll tell you what he hasn’t told you. And you can fill in the gaps in what he told me about you.’

  She blinked. She’d hardly spoken to the man before this; he’d just been part of the common room, like the rest of them, one of the pleasanter sort; certainly he’d shown no interest of this kind in her before today and she almost shrank physically from him as she contemplated the enormity of his suggestion. Go out to dinner with a man? She couldn’t. There was Sophie and Jessica and Oliver and —

  She shook her head sharply. ‘It’s really very kind, but the children, you know, and babysitters and —’

  ‘Not an insuperable problem, I imagine?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure — really. I can’t — well, it’s kind of you but …’

  He stood and looked at her as the crowds pushed past and the smell of crushed grass and popcorn from one of the stalls washed over them and after a moment he smiled. ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘Just thought I’d ask. Another time maybe.’ And he nodded at her and turned and vanished into the crowd, leaving her feeling a great deal more irritated than she would have thought possible.

  Eight

  The children’s appearance at the fair was every bit as successful as Hattie had hoped it would be. The girls fell on them with coos of delight and the children were equally enchanted with them and showed off outrageously while contriving to eat a great many more of the garish iced cakes than Hattie felt was good for them. But she let it happen, content to see the children having so much fun, and also because she was so busy; it was amazing just how much effort was needed to serve tea and sandwiches and cakes to large numbers of well-behaved people on a hot afternoon. They pushed and shoved, grabbed and nagged, and she shovelled food on to paper plates and money into the old wooden cigar box that did duty as their till until she was sweating.

  But she still managed to be aware of what was going on around her, and absorbed information about who was talking to whom and how they reacted to each other in a way that quite surprised her. She had forgotten just how well trained she had been in her nursing days in the art of unobtrusive observation.

  To start with she was very aware of Judith, who had brought her own two children, Jenny and Petra, as well as Sophie and Jessica (and both of them were having as much fun as Hattie’s pair) and then gone on to spend the afternoon giggling and flirting with any of the men she could get to listen to her. It was ridiculous to feel, as Hattie did, slightly shocked. There was no harm at all in Judith and undoubtedly she adored her Peter, but she still enjoyed measuring her femininity against every man who came into range. First of course the Headmaster, who let her dimple at him and pat his arm in a proprietorial fashion for at least five minutes before he offloaded her — a congé she accepted cheerfully enough — on to Richard Shuttle and George Manson with whom she began to chatter in rapid and very ungrammatica French as soon as she discovered that was the subject they taught Hattie watched her from the corner of her eye and almost caugh herself sniffing in disapproval. And then made herself stop watching, because it was so silly to pay any attention to something so very unimportant. Her efforts succeeded and she managed to transfer her interest to other people; first a stocky man in tigh and obviously expensive jeans and an open-necked white shirt — so open-necked that it displayed sparse chest hair in which a rather old-fashioned-looking gold medallion nestled — who was holding noisy court in one corner of the tent. Several of the boys clustered round him, clearly fascinated by what he was saying and Hattie managed to listen above the hubbub that surrounded her.

  ‘David Lean always told me that …’ came floating through first, and then, ‘… no use at all for the Michael Winners of this world, damage the industry for all of us, self-indulgent garbage …’ And she looked at him with sharpened interest. Dilly’s father? Perhaps; and then Dilly herself came pushing in through the back entrance to the tent bearing another pile of sandwiches caught sight of him and scowled; and Hattie applauded herself for her successful identification. And watched him some more.

  He was very relaxed, laughing a good deal rather loudly, throwing back his head boyishly to display very white teeth (Crowned? Hattie wondered. Probably) and looking into the boys’ eyes as they talked to him. He was clearly one of the world’s touchers; he slapped their backs and punched their shoulders American-style when one of them said something he liked, and left one arm draped negligently around the shoulders of the boy who was nearest to him and she thought, Is he like Tully? And then shook her head at her stereotypical thinking. There was, after all, Dilly. And even if that meant he was, as one of the cruder surgeons for whom she had once worked had been given to saying when they had a patient of doubtful sexual identity, someone who didn’t know if he were Arthur or Martha, what was it to do with her? She’d been at the Foundation only a matter of weeks and already she was obsessed with male attachments. Ridiculous, she told herself, as she dragged her attention away. It’s not as though he were even part of the school. Just a pupil’s father.

  Dilly tried to ignore him, attempting to slip out of the tent again, but he saw her and waved eagerly at her, and unwillingly she put down her tray and went towards him with a lumpish sulky gait that told the world how little she wanted his company. But he seemed quite oblivious and beamed at her delightedly and hugged her unresponsive shoulders and chattered at her and the surrounding boys — who now looked uneasy and tried to back away — in a way that even Hattie found embarrassing. How Dilly must be feeling she could well imagine. He was clearly a deeply shaming parent to have, so over-the-top
and so anxious to please that he resembled nothing so much as an over-eager outsize puppy.

  She slid her eyes away, looking for others to spy on; and then let her lips quirk. The word had come into her mind of its own volition and she should be ashamed of it, really, but she wasn’t. She was spying on people and where better to do it than in the middle of a busy tea tent? It was like the old cliché about hiding things in the most obvious position you could. Here was a good place to spy and she enjoyed it, and why not? Anyway, she told herself as she went on piling sandwiches on plates and watching the people around her, it’s part of my job. How can I understand what’s going on here if I don’t keep my eyes well open?