Caught!

by JL Merrow

  “So how come you told him I was just a friend?”

  I frowned. “I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, you did. You said, and I quote, I was your ‘friend’ here.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Here, at least, I was on firm ground. “I said you were my friend here.”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “No, it—oh. Um. Yes, I can see why you might think that. I was using friend euphemistically. There was absolutely no intent to deceive. Honestly. Fordy knew exactly what I meant. He could hardly not know, given how much I was droning on about you.”

  “You were droning on about me, were you?” There was a definite lessening of hostilities coming from Sean’s direction now. One might even go so far as to call it an armistice.

  “Incessantly,” I assured him. “Well, when I could get a word in edgewise. You know what Fordy’s like. Well, you don’t, but you will. If you want to,” I amended hurriedly. “I mean, a certain amount of him is probably going to be unavoidable, as his parents and mine are friends, but he’s very easily distractable if he starts becoming a bore.”

  Sean’s smile bloomed like a poppy upon Flanders Fields, only with far fewer sombre connotations. “So did you run up here after he’d gone, then?”

  “No, no. I came in Portia.” I beamed back at him, glad to find the subject was apparently closed.

  Sean’s mouth quirked. “You’ve got a Porsche?” He didn’t pronounce the final “e”. “Might have guessed.”

  “No, Portia. It’s her name. I forgot you hadn’t met her yet. Come on out and I’ll introduce you.”

  Sean looked down at his feet, which I noticed for the first time were clad in alarmingly large, furry slippers. With claws attached. I raised an eyebrow.

  “Present from Wills and Harry. Don’t even think about saying anything, yeah?”

  “My mind is a perfect blank,” I assured him.

  Sean gave me a teasing smile, then ducked out of sight, returning moments later in a pair of trainers. “Come on, then. Show me your girlfriend.”

  “Fiancée, actually. She’s an old-fashioned girl.”

  “Wouldn’t let you in her before you put a ring on it?” We rounded the hedge, and Sean laughed out loud. “You weren’t joking, were you? She’s beautiful. Nissan Figaro, right?”

  I nodded, smiling at Portia, pretty as a picture under the streetlamp with her retro sixties lines, pale aqua paint and retractable white top. “She was a twenty-first birthday present from my stepfather. It was love at first sight.”

  Sean shook his head. “Right, that’s it. I’m out of here. No way can I compete with a girl like that.”

  “Oh, I, er, think she might be persuaded to share her affections.” I was glad of the darkness; my face felt like it was on fire. I tried to push away all unfortunate thoughts of threesomes.

  “Yeah, but it’s your affections I’m worried about.”

  “You really don’t need to be,” I said softly. Sean looked at me, his face in shadow but his hair ablaze in the glow of the streetlamp, and for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me, right there in the street. In the middle of a council estate. My heart stood still while my thoughts raced—was it safe? was it even sane?—and then the moment passed. “You should come for a drive,” I blurted out.

  “Yeah, all right.” He laughed. “Although I feel a bit underdressed.”

  “You’re underdressed? Look at me, for heaven’s sake.” I gestured down at my running gear. Sean might only be in jeans and a sweatshirt, but he scored over me in not having mud splatters on his trainers, not to mention the cuffs of his trousers.

  “Don’t worry. I have been,” Sean said in a low voice that reverberated through my libido.

  I suddenly remembered just how little jogging bottoms tended to conceal. “Drive?” I said hurriedly, opening Portia’s passenger door for Sean. “Or do you need to tell your sister first?”

  “Nah, I’m a big boy. She won’t send the tracker dogs out. Least, not as long as you have me back in time for tea.” He hopped into the seat, and I rounded Portia and joined him. “So where are you taking me?” he asked as I buckled my seat belt.

  “Haven’t the foggiest,” I admitted. “Over towards the Ayots?” The Ayots were a cluster of small villages with a common name: Ayot St Peter, Ayot St Lawrence, and Ayot Green. The last was presumably not important enough to warrant a church of its own and therefore would more properly be known as a hamlet, not that anyone ever actually used the word these days. “I keep meaning to pop in on George Bernard Shaw’s house.”

  “You’d be better off doing that while it’s open, then. Most of these National Trust properties close at dusk.”

  “You’ve been there? To Shaw’s Corner?”

  “Yeah, back in the summer. They had one of these activity days for the kids, and I took Wills and Harry along.” He grinned. “They had a go at hoop-rolling. Don’t think they were too impressed with the nineteenth-century alternative to the Xbox.”

  “No, I don’t suppose many modern children would be. Actually, that’s unfair; I very much doubt I’d have been too excited about hoops at that age either.”

  “God, I can just imagine you as a kid. I bet you dressed like something out of the nineteen fifties, in shorts and a sleeveless sweater. And never, ever swore.”

  “I refuse to answer on the grounds I may incriminate myself. Anyway, are you telling me you didn’t wear shorts as a boy?”

  “Two words: freckly knees.”

  “Ah. Yes, I can see that would be something of a disincentive. But what about nowadays?” I gave him a sidelong look. “Do you go to the beach in a burkini?”

  “Nowadays, I’ve discovered sunblock, thank you very much.”

  There was a short silence while I negotiated a particularly narrow part of the lane, having to stop a couple of times to allow other vehicles to pass.

  “So this Fordy bloke, he’s a good mate of yours?” Sean asked when we’d reached a wider stretch, his tone mild and curious rather than condemnatory, thank the Lord.

  “Absolutely. We’ve been friends since the term I started at Loriners’.” I hesitated. “It was midway through the year, which didn’t help, and some of the other boys were a little…disparaging about the fact that I only had a place at the school due to Mother’s job there. Fordy never cared a jot about that.”

  “Bad, was it?”

  I darted a glance at Sean and was unnerved to find a deep frown on his face. I shrugged. “These things happen,” I said vaguely. The last thing I wanted to do right now was to go into a detailed list of all the many ways certain of my schoolmates had done their level best to make my life a living hell. “And once we were friends, the worst of it stopped—well, you saw Fordy. He’s filled out a little since he was thirteen, but only a very little. And he was always good at rugger, which helped immensely, of course.”

  “That was before your mum got married again, right? The other lads looking down on you, I mean.”

  “Before and after, really. Mother stopped working when she married Peter, but it was a bit too late to matter by then. They met at Loriners’, by the way,” I added, glad to get onto a more cheerful topic.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mm. On Speech Day. Peter’s eldest grandson had just started there, you see, and he won the prize for physics the year I won the prize for maths. They got talking over sherry afterwards, widower to widow, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

  Sean nodded. “What about your mate Fordy? Did he win the prize for anything?”

  “Trampling the opposition into the dirt on the rugby field, mostly.”

  “Yeah, I can imagine that. You ever play rugby? ’Cause I’ve gotta say, I can’t picture it.”

  I shuddered. “Everybody played rugby at Loriners’. But cricket was more my game. I was in the first eleven, my final year,” I a
dded with some pride. I hadn’t thought I stood a chance of getting in, but Fordy had badgered me to try out for it. Then got me hideously drunk on illicit gin after I’d been selected, but the less remembered about that, the better.

  “You’ve got to get onto the village team, then. I could come and watch you play in the summer, bring a picnic, that sort of stuff.”

  “Sounds good.” It sounded idyllic, actually. Even as I pictured sunny days together, my heart clenched at the thought of Sean so casually planning so far ahead. Would we still be together then? I’d be an idiot to build my hopes up. Once bitten, as they say… I was being an idiot. It was just one of those things people said. It didn’t mean anything. I needed to remember the literal definition of Utopia was nowhere.

  “I’d better get you back to your sister’s,” I said. A weight seemed to have descended upon me.

  Sean glanced at his watch. “Shit, yeah. Listen, I’d ask you in to have tea with us, but I don’t reckon it’d go down all that well. Debs won’t have cooked enough for five. And I’m going to be out with some mates later—it’s Chris’s birthday, so I don’t like to cancel, you know?”

  “Chris?” I queried, my voice coming out more sharply than I’d intended. “Another ex?”

  “Just ’cos I’m bi, it doesn’t mean I go out with everyone I meet, you know.” Sean’s tone was mild, but I could sense an underlying exasperation. “We’re capable of making friends, you know. Just like normal people really.”

  I winced. “I was only asking. Sorry.”

  “’S okay. I’m used to it. And no, he’s not an ex. He’s a bit of a lager lout, Chris is, which you may have noticed isn’t really my type.”

  “Definitely not,” I agreed with a smile, my heart significantly lighter.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Things settled down after that.

  Sean and I spent most of our weekends together, which meant my weekday evenings were largely taken up with marking and lesson planning, sometimes in Rose’s company and sometimes not. I got to see a lot more of the local countryside, quite a bit of it from the pillion of Sean’s motorbike.

  Rose treated my conversion to enthusiastic biker with hilarity, particularly when she challenged me to tell her what model Sean rode and I had to confess I hadn’t even noticed what make it was. It was a Honda, I informed her stiffly the next time I saw her, and had to endure her cackles once again.

  Remembrance Sunday came and went, with its solemn procession through the village of all the local guides, scouts, Cubs and Brownies, and a surprising number of village elderly wearing medals, their backs for once straight and proud. Towards the end of November there was the grand turning on of the village Christmas lights, an evening event with carol singing and fairground rides for the smallest of the children. As I sipped my mulled wine, I realised I was beginning to finally feel part of village life.

  There was still the nagging fear over what Fordy had told me—but if any students had asked Mother for my address, they hadn’t made any noticeable use of it. Which argued strongly in favour of it not having been Oliver who’d asked, I thought. I did broach the subject on the telephone with Mother, but she was able to tell me frustratingly little. Her description of a half-remembered young man could have fitted Oliver but equally could have applied to around two-thirds of the boys I’d taught. He hadn’t, she said, impressed her as particularly good-looking, but then Mother and I had always had very different opinions about men.

  With the arrival of Advent came the arrival of the St Saviour’s School Christmas tree. This was a monstrous thing, sourced by old Arfur Minnit from who knew where—certainly, most of the staff seemed to agree it was better not to ask. I had visions of him chopping down some ancient sentry to one of the grand homes in the more well-to-do part of the area and hauling it away cackling. “Like a Krampus,” I mused aloud, as we waited for the other classes to finish filing into the hall for Whole School Assembly.

  “What’s a Grampuss?” Destinee demanded. She’d taken to shadowing me closely this half term, and her behaviour had improved markedly as a result, apart from the odd initial scuffle with Charlie. Eventually they’d seemed to come to a tacit agreement that while he was, and always would be, my right-hand man, she was now very definitely my left-hand young lady. I had an uneasy suspicion that following the altercation at the school gates, Mrs. Nunn had charged her daughter with acting as a sort of protection detail.

  “The Krampus, young Destinee, is a sort of Alpine anti-Santa. You know how your mother warned you if you didn’t behave yourself, you’d only get coal in your stocking at Christmas?”

  “No,” she said scornfully. “I’m getting a new phone for Christmas. And a TV in my room.”

  “I’m getting some fairy wings!” Charlie put in excitedly. Then his little face fell. “But I’m not s’posed to tell anyone.”

  “Never fear,” I said soothingly. “Your secret is safe with us—isn’t it, Destinee?”

  “S’pose,” she muttered with a huff and a pout. Then she turned on Charlie with a mercenary glint in her eye. “If you let me play with them.”

  Charlie nodded enthusiastically, bless him.

  “Anyway,” I continued. “Back to the Krampus. When I was your age, coal was customarily threatened if I wasn’t a good boy. But children in the Alps—that’s Austria, Switzerland and southern Germany, mainly—are warned about the Krampus. He’s a rather hairy sort of chap, with horns and hooves like a goat, and if you’re a bad little boy or girl, he’ll take you away in his sack.”

  Destinee’s little eyes narrowed. “Why don’t they get the police on him? That’s illegal, and they put you on a register.”

  “Is that like our class register?” Charlie frowned, clearly puzzled.

  “No, stu—” Destinee caught my eye and amended what she’d been about to say. “It’s a special register for bad men and pee-dohs.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d found the extent of Destinee’s knowledge and vocabulary somewhat alarming. “Has your mother explained what a, ah, pee-doh is?” I asked cautiously.

  She nodded confidently. “They offer you sweeties in the park and ask you if you want to see their kittens, but they haven’t really got any. You have to shout NO! really loud, and if they don’t go away, you have to kick them in the balls and run back home.”

  Charlie’s eyes were like saucers, and he edged towards Destinee as if for protection. “Is that true?” he whispered.

  “It’s a, ah, reasonable summation,” I said. “Although I’d prefer to emphasise the running-home solution rather than escalating to violence.” Perhaps I should check the school’s current teaching on Stranger Danger and suggest some reinforcement. “Now, shush, assembly’s about to start.”

  Assembly, led by the Head, consisted of announcements, a brief and pointed prayer about remembering people less well-off at Christmas, and the singing of a couple of traditional English carols such as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “When Santa Got Stuck up the Chimney”. As I’d only just begun teaching them to the little darlings, neither was exactly a bravura performance. I found my piano playing becoming louder and louder as the piping voices faltered and faded. Thank God there were still a couple of weeks to go until the carol service.

  One announcement which was particularly well received was the apparently traditional invitation to each child to bring a Christmas-tree ornament from home to bedeck our magnificent Christmas tree—here, the children were invited to applaud Mr. Minnit’s efforts in supplying such a specimen, and he bowed graciously.

  Less well received—by me, at least—was the news that all ornaments should be given to Mr. Emeny, who, as the tallest person on staff, would be responsible for hanging them up. The fact that the wretched tree was at least twice as tall as I was, and decorating it would therefore involve a stepladder no matter who did it, didn’t appear to register.

  I’d
hoped to have at least a day to prepare myself for the task, but straight after assembly, the Head confronted me with an emphatic hope that the children’s singing would improve in the coming weeks. While I was still on the defensive from that, she directed me to go to Mrs. Ormley’s office after dismissing my class for the day, where, apparently, I would find tinsel, lights and the ornament for the top of the tree. Lucky me.

  Mr. Minnit, helpful as ever, offered to “gerra ladder” for me. There was, it seemed, no escape.

  It wasn’t, I thought half an hour later as I gingerly scaled the promised stepladder, that I had a particular problem with heights. Flying held no terrors for me; neither did cliff tops or tall buildings. I’d even been known to scale a tree or two in my time. It was just something about ladders, specifically, that unnerved me. Perhaps I’d watched too many black-and-white comedy films with Peter, which often featured the wretched things collapsing under their hapless users. Or maybe it was just a balance thing. Whatever the reason, I was not enjoying my ascension to the dizzying heights of the school hall, burdened with an angel that had frankly seen better days. Not that anyone would be able to see, once it was in position, just how tarnished his (or possibly her; the figure was defiantly androgynous) halo was, nor that various limbs had been snapped off and inexpertly glued back on.

  I stood staring at the top of the tree, and wondering how on earth I was supposed to get the angel to stay there. From the state of the thing, I suspected this dilemma was not a new one.

  “Ooh, look, Evie.” I heard Rose’s voice from far, far below. “Our tree’s got a fairy on top.”

  I glared down at her, then wished I hadn’t as vertigo assailed me and my intended retort dried up in my throat.

  “No, miss,” the girl with her said seriously. “It’s an angel. You can tell ’cos they wear longer dresses. And they got haloes instead of wands.”