‘Now then, now then: to business.’ She put the duster and the surgical spirit bottle in a desk drawer, let her glasses fall from her face to hang like a tortoiseshell trapeze against her paisley bosom and turned to Baker with lips pulled into a wider line.
‘I have had a letter from your father this morning. I believe Mrs Mostyn had quite a heart-to-heart with him at the meeting on Monday but there were still a few points he wanted to raise with me.’
Baker looked at the letter in O’Brien’s hand and felt her intestine curdling into a plumbing emergency – a vile, sour, sore, horribly familiar feeling. After four years of double Biology, she could actually picture all those villi going into reverse, flooding her gut with squittering panic the way they always did when anyone at home mentioned school or anyone at school mentioned home. She tried so hard to keep it all separate. They were supposed to be separate: different buildings; different food; different languages; different shoes.
It was never going to be good news, was it, this letter he’d written? Never going to be a nice hand-written note saying how very well dear Amanda was doing and could she possibly begin clarinet lessons next term or have Friday afternoon off for an optician’s appointment?
‘He’s very worried about you.’ O’Brien fumbled the reading glasses back on to her densely powdered nose in order to remind herself of one of the more affecting passages. ‘Very worried.’
No he bloody wasn’t. He was very worried about him, about the mess he was making of Project Amanda, about his failure to meet targets, reach the bonus threshold.
Bob Baker usually got his wife to type up his letters to the school, but he had written this one himself in his spidery scrawl. Pam was losing interest. She’d started volunteering to stay late at work: a report to type; a leaving drinks to go to, ‘training’ – for what? She’d arrive home barely in time to get supper on the table, after which his skinny, gymslipped little madam of a daughter would idle away the rest of the evening playing darts with herself or lying in front of the telly, homework untouched, while he and his wife exchanged whispered screams of frustration over the washing up.
Once a month his mother-in-law – also called Pamela, funnily enough – would ring from the Falkland Islands and he could always tell from his wife’s wary replies whenever she was asking about the wicked stepdaughter: didn’t interfere, get involved, stick oars in – or give a twopenny damn? He did wonder sometimes.
She used to be interested (or pretend to be?). Early on, anyway. But then all of the women who ran across him after Patsy cleared out seemed keen to show what lovely stepmothers they’d make, made a point of buying presents for darling Amanda: pyjama cases; manicure sets; dressing table sets; wickerwork sewing baskets; hankies with As and roses on, but you could tell that the presents were for his benefit – might just as well have been a bottle of Scotch. Pam had been different. Pam took the young Amanda to museums, taught her an easy way to draw a horse, read to her at bedtime. The rot set in when she started reading from her old book of Bible stories. Little Amanda had told Grandma all about loaves and fishes and bloody Patsy had got wind of it. Managed to get Pam on the phone (reversing the charges) and gave her an earful about patriarchal mumbo jumbo and how bloody well dare she, and it hadn’t really been the same after that: ‘Your daughter’, ‘Bob’s daughter’ not ‘Amanda’ any more.
But it wasn’t Pam’s fault that Amanda had turned out like this. It was the school’s bloody fault at bottom. They took delivery of a nice enough, no-nonsense eleven-year-old: head of house, keen on games, six badges in the Brownies and they handed you back what? Amanda. If someone did that much damage to your car or your dry cleaning you’d demand compensation. Or a replacement (money refunded if not delighted).
Not that they ever admitted liability. Three times a year he’d be made to queue for hours in the ritual humiliation that was parents’ evening, being patronised by some blue-rinsed battle-axe with a voice like the Speaking Clock who said that your daughter paid no attention to her lessons and didn’t do any of the work set. Like it was nothing to do with them. They were the ones standing at the front of a classroom, term in, term out, boring for Britain on Boyle’s Law and then had the cheek to complain when no one took any notice.
He tried to imagine being taught by any of them and thought wistfully of his own schooldays: getting picked for the second eleven; oranges at half time; names engraved on cups or gilded onto scholarship walls or stitched onto cricket whites or stencilled onto tuck boxes. Kindly men in corduroy taking donnish delight in Grecian urns or Latin verse or Franco–Prussian wars (and their three main causes). All the things he had wanted for Jeremy (not Amanda). Mildred Fawcett was no comparison.
Hence the letter. No sense just waiting for yet another parents’ evening. Monday night had definitely been an all time low. He had almost enjoyed the one before last – no thanks to Amanda, mind. Once in a bright blue moon, Miss Peters the Biology mistress had the pleasure of teaching a model pupil, one who had copied every diagram and taken every note so faithfully that Miss Peters simply hadn’t the heart to part with her exercise book – Excellent! This is exactly what you were asked to do. A moment’s work on the staples with a butter knife and a virgin yellow cover from one of the current batch of stationery, plus some deft dabbing at any tell-tale dates with her miniature bottle of ink eradicator and June Torrance was immortalised as a model pupil – for any year.
This handwritten vintage textbook was invariably left open on the front desk to be slobbered over by passing parents who would flick shamefacedly through its pages, silently comparing its copperplate perfection with their own daughters’ efforts. The narrow feint’s faint brownish tinge scarcely noticed beneath the fluorescent strip-lighting required for evening meetings. For nearly ten years Miss Peters had been wheeling out this reproachful paradigm until Bob Baker went and spoiled it all.
‘A half crown?’
He had leafed through to one of the back pages of the Torrance testament where young June had drawn an exceptionally fine diagram of a sheep’s heart, delicately shaded, scrupulously labelled (‘always use a ruler’) and in the bottom right hand corner, just below ‘parietal pericardium’, an unusually fine scale drawing of an obsolete silver coin.
‘Amanda has a 50p piece on hers. All the others have 50p pieces.’ Amanda’s heart also had ‘Volvo’ and ‘escape hatch’ written very, very small where ‘valve’ and ‘ventricle’ ought to be but her labelling lines had been drawn with a ruler and Miss Peters had not registered the words themselves.
Miss Peters barely missed a beat: ‘June is a numismatist.’ The look on her face betrayed her. Oik, it said. He won’t know what it means. But Bob Baker, who had always worn his public schooling very lightly (a safer bet on the building site), was one too many for her. ‘I don’t care three groats what she does with her leisure time. The half crown was demonetised in 1970. I think you’ve been rumbled, Miss Peters.’ He’d arrived home much chirpier than usual that time.
He hadn’t mentioned any of this in his note to Dr O. The letter, written in a miserable rage after his Monday night nightmare, was as brisk as a site report, expressing general disappointment at the school’s failure to motivate Amanda and floating the idea that she might be happier ‘elsewhere’. Any number of staff meetings had floated the exact same idea, of course, sighed Dr O’Brien as she re-read the sheet in her hand. A great many people would be a great deal happier if Amanda Baker were elsewhere but £1,200 a year was not to be sneezed at and besides, Dr O’Brien’s stubborn streak was aroused by this talk of Elsewhere. What did Elsewhere have that Mildred Fawcett didn’t? She was determined to use this meeting to see off all this defeatist talk. She settled back in her chair and beamed mildly in the girl’s direction (Judith hacking away at Holofernes could be a huge help at such moments).
‘Have you been happy here, Amanda?’ (She’d toyed with ‘Are you happy?’ but the past tense kept up the tension, kept up that sense of axes about to fall.)
> ‘All my friends are here.’
‘Ah. Yes. Friends. Amanda Bunter-Byng? The older Stott girl?’ the head topped up her smile with a refreshing glance at Moreau’s Salome. ‘Are you sure that you are all a good influence on each other? Amanda Stott could lose her scholarship if her grades were to slip. Have you thought about that? Would you want that on your conscience?’ It sounded almost, well, like a threat.
Baker’s shoulders curled forward and her attention strayed to the window behind the head’s head, to the steel ash tray tucked almost out of sight on the sill outside. O’Brien watched as the girl’s pupils shrivelled in the morning sunlight and two discs of almost yellowish green turned to face her, but Baker still didn’t reply. Dr O’Brien looked down at her desk, pretending to gain inspiration from the papers on her blotter. ‘Miss Gleet is very pleased with your novel. Snapdragon something? Promise? Summer?’
‘Harvest.’
‘Harvest? I’d no idea snapdragons were grown on that kind of scale.’ She gave a slight shake of the head to stop the thought from landing there. ‘Miss Gleet wants me to take a look at it. Very original style, she says.’
Original? Moron. Called herself an English graduate?
‘And she was most encouraging about your plot summary: “A haunting tale of love and loss” she tells me. I very much look forward to reading the finished draft.’
Was that the answer? frowned O’Brien to herself. Legend had it that if you stumbled on something that one of your girls was good at, be it chess or the cello, it unlocked their confidence and other successes would follow. Worked every time for Enid Blyton. Perhaps the Baker girl’s scribbling would keep her out of mischief. If that failed, she’d have to suspend her – she’d have a staff room coup on her hands otherwise.
‘Mrs Horst tells me that you were reading this during her lesson.’
O’Brien produced the confiscated copy of Ads and Admen from an in-tray to the right of her telephone. It fell open at the spread on ‘The Four Faces of Adman’s Eve’ (housewife; icon; instructress and something known as ‘the self-touching nude’). O’Brien’s glance batted between the bubble-bathing beauty savouring the softness of her own scented shoulder (patchouli, bergamot and wild jasmine open up a world of sensuous secrets) and St Agatha, stroking the proud curve of her disembodied breast. Plus ça change.
‘Three Wishes . . .?’ The head’s face had the same troubled, faraway, quiz contestant look that Bunty’s had worn – as if there were a right answer and she had forgotten it. What would Salome’s other two wishes have been? She dragged her thoughts back to the matter in hand.
‘Have you perhaps been thinking of a career in Sales? Jennifer Osborne, Head of Stanhope, 1972 I think it was, is with some sort of market research outfit. Housewives, butter, margarine, washes whiter, that sort of thing. Very enjoyable apparently.’
‘All the margarine you can eat? No, that wasn’t why I was reading it.’ Baker straightened slightly. ‘More a case of knowing your enemy.’
‘Ah. Sisterhood.’ A pitying smile. ‘Strange isn’t it how women conspire in their own enslavement.’ She glanced back at the magazine: a radiant, lovelier you – just a few petrochemicals in the bathwater. ‘When I was a girl, the chemist’s shop in Battle High Street sold two kinds of bath salts: cheap bath salts and expensive bath salts. In the war we used lavender.’
Baker felt confused by the sudden change of subject, the confiding tone. Whose side was she on?
‘Rather an unusual letter.’ O’Brien too had spotted that their little chat was heading off-syllabus ‘He’s clearly very angry, but there’s a strange third person quality about it. Like a lawyer’s letter, as if he wasn’t personally involved. And he uses the past tense at times. Rather revealing. As if it were already over and done with. As if you . . .’
She stopped short at the look on Baker’s face and pulled another smile.
‘I am taking trouble with you, Amanda,’ she continued, ‘because you are worth trouble and because your mind appeals to me. I want you to get the results we all know you are capable of, and we are all here to help you in any way we can. I know you find discipline frustrating, but I hope you’re going to knuckle down and produce some decent results in this week’s exams.’
Knuckling down. Everyone to dress the same, wear the same ponytail, draw the identical diagram, sing the same notes, want the same jobs, buy the same bubble bath, eat the same cheese.
‘Get some good grades under your belt and Sixth Form will all feel very different. Fresh challenges. Far more freedom.’
The freedom to wear grey instead of blue.
Chapter 11
Thursday’s first exam was being held in the assembly hall. All four Mandies bundled their bags into a corner under the grand piano and, while they were waiting, Queenie (the canasta player’s daughter) reached down the pack of hymn numbers and shuffled them expertly, the cards fluttering within her hands like a trapped bird. She then replaced them neatly on the corner of the hymn number frame. ‘Plough the fields and sca-tter,’ hummed Stottie.
The Geography mock had been co-written by Combe and Mostyn and was an oil-and-water mix of urban planning and palm fibre. One third of it was missing-words-and-labelling, one third short essay questions, and the rest was multiple choice (Which of the following is NOT a type of irrigation: a. Archimedes screw; b. noria, c. sakia or d. silage?). Mrs Mostyn had been left in charge of producing the final result and the pages were, as always, run off on the school’s ancient Banda apparatus. ‘Bandered copies’, Mrs Mostyn called them but it couldn’t really be made to work as an English verb – or so Stottie said. Italian no problem: bando (I run off countless purple copies), bandiamo (let us run off countless purple copies).
Mrs Mostyn arrived a minute before kick-off to explain apologetically to Miss Combe (who was invigilating) that the extreme right-hand edge of the hand-written master had not quite copied as it ought. She then proceeded to delay the start, clocking up ten minutes in injury time while she made sure that each page was properly corrected. Miss Combe (whose own papers were always flawlessly typewritten) gave a small, superior smirk at the methanol-scented sheets.
Miss Combe relished invigilating and paced the room Colditz-style, occasionally ratcheting up the tension with the inevitable ‘Thirty minutes have gone, you have sixty minutes left’ lark.
Swivelling squeakily on her high-gloss crepe-soled brogues every time she was called from her station to dispense more paper, she would look obsessively over her shoulder, convinced their requests were merely a blind to allow notes to be passed, or for mad, map-related mimes to be enacted while her back was turned – like they were all playing a huge game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. As she patrolled the rows she pulled aside blotters and parted the lips of pencil cases with bony, ink-stained fingers. Like a medical. Yuk.
The Mrs Mostyn half of the paper was all Ordnance Survey symbols, typical homes in Malawi and a map of Africa to label. Miss Combe was obviously responsible for the rest: rift valleys, pebble formation and (a special favourite) Brasilia. Bunty hated Brasilia, convinced that Miss Combe and all the little Combes back at headquarters had personally invented this paradise of plate glass and toy trees purely as a means of tormenting fifth form Geography students.
‘Why would anyone want a new capital? I mean,’ persisted Bunty after their first lesson on it, ‘if someone tried to sell you the idea of ditching London and building a new one at astronomical expense in the middle of North Ants or somewhere, you’d have them sectioned.’
‘It’s all made up,’ Queenie had drawled in reply. ‘D’you think anyone really uses an Archimedes screw, for heaven’s sake? Or that daft buckets-on-wheels thingy? You’d have a hose or a syphon or a watering can or something, like a normal person. It’s all bollocks.’
Today’s Geography questions were either far too easy or completely bloody unfathomable: Account for the limited population of either the highlands of Scotland or those of Wales. Give a geographical account of the
African savannah. Not even a ‘please’. Queenie, who kept a copy of Mad magazine inside her Geography textbook, was more familiar with her own virgin body than the continent of Africa and had little chance of passing the latest exam but the clean sheets of folio and the unnatural silence of the exam hall triggered a surreal flight of fancy when she got to the missing words section.
During the Cretaceous Period, Africa’s coastal areas were almost completely covered by custard and glacially derived lemon curd. These formed superficial deposits of Marmite which in places are so thick as to eradicate all visual clues as to the nature of the underlying toast. Much of the Arctic roll melted causing large amounts of jam to be released forming important puddings in the coastal areas. Today, Ovaltine and Tizer drilling is conducted both on land and offshore on the sideboard. The continent’s considerable geological age has allowed more than enough time for widespread despair yielding soils leached of marmalade.
The Mostyn’s late start meant that there was hardly time for Bunty to wedge in a Mars bar before three of the Mandies were back in the hall for their Chemistry exam (Queenie was over in the annexe for her Domestic Science practical, making a pig’s ear of a lamb’s liver).
Miss Gray, invigilating, was quite a young woman but her suspicions gave her a tight-lipped, thwarted look, as though she were utterly certain that crimes were taking place and was only prevented by pettifogging notions of Fair Play and the rules of evidence from disqualifying the whole miserable lot of them. She was absolutely right of course: everybody cheated.
Baker’s furry pencil case was a mess of chewed, unsharpened HBs and the lids of long-forgotten felt tips each of which contained the miniature crib-sheets she had made the previous evening – French irregular verbs, Boyle’s Law, noble gases – each printed in tiny, exquisite lettering like doll’s house shopping lists. At junior school there had been a girl, Wendy Somethington, who used to amuse herself by writing the Lord’s Prayer on the back of fourpenny postage stamps with a very sharp pencil. Angels on the heads of pins would have been a piece of fucking cake in comparison.
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