by Anne Digby
Tish was racing on, like an express train, but the principal was no longer listening.
She was remembering all sorts of things. The drama of Elizabeth's dishonest behaviour, almost three years ago, exposed by young Tish Anderson! Rebecca Mason had helped, too, hadn't she? And then, this term, the awkward business of Margaret Exton having to leave, too. The bitter interview with the father. Most unpleasant. Not something the mind dwelled upon.
Although the principal couldn't recollect Miss Angel's face (had she even met her?) she never felt a moment's doubt.
'I'm sure you and your friends are right, Ishbel. Quite sure. It explains all.'
And she could already see in her mind's eye the kind of letter that Silver & Silver would be instructed to dispatch to Silent Eye Productions Ltd, after the weekend:
. . . should the film go ahead on the lines envisaged, both the media and the Independent Broadcasting Authority will be informed of your actions in sending a disgraced former pupil (who had been expelled for dishonesty) back to her old school under an assumed name, bent solely on an act of revenge . . .
'Will the film be stopped now, Miss Welbeck!' Tish was asking eagerly.
'Oh, yes, Ishbel,' the principal replied confidently. 'It will be stopped dead in its tracks.'
'Elizabeth always wanted to be a journalist, didn't she, Miss Welbeck? Do you think her father bought her the film company because that was the only way she could get into that sort of field?'
'I'm sure he did, Ishbel,' replied the principal.
'And then Margaret must have told her about the Mulberry Island business and she thought she'd found a really good story?'
'Presumably.' And the chance to get her revenge, thought Miss Welbeck. Her hands went slightly clammy. And she very nearly got away with it!
'Ishbel, you'll be late for your race meeting if you don't go,' she said kindly. 'You have been extremely bright. I'm very pleased with you.'
'No, it's Rebecca Mason who's been bright, Miss Welbeck!' insisted Tish. 'She knew what "angel" meant in slang. You know –the person who puts up the money, that's what it means!'
'So it does!'
Miss Welbeck replaced the receiver and laughed to herself in surprise. Well done, Rebecca! And how stupid of Elizabeth Exton, to turn her pseudonym into a little joke. That was her one fatal mistake, it seemed. Colonel Peters looked into the room.
'Hallo, Madeleine, you look more cheerful suddenly.'
'I feel it!' she replied, rising to her feet and walking across to him. 'But I'm afraid school as a whole will be very disappointed when they hear the sad news next week.'
'Oh?'
'There's to be no television film about Trebizon after all.'
FOURTEEN
A FAMOUS TERM
The word went round much sooner than that. It was one of the main talking points at the Commem Ball! The news had spread like wildfire.
Rebecca and her friends, and Robbie and the other boys, just couldn't keep quiet about it. It had all been so extraordinary. As they passed each other on the dance floor, they kept laughing and making jokes – 'Whoops, look out! There's a camera hidden behind the curtains!' – 'That man in the band looks a bit suspicious. I think he's in disguise!' – 'What's he holding a mike for? Look out, Rebecca! Be careful what you say to Robbie!'
They laughed until the tears ran down their cheeks, weak with relief that such an awful crisis had been averted so narrowly, and of course other people soon got wind of the story and kept rushing up to ask if it was all really true.
It was amazing, wasn't it!
At one stage during the evening a group of indignant Sixth Formers went off to try and find Margaret Exton, but of course she'd gone.
Miss Welbeck had let her go only too readily.
'No, I don't think I want to interview her, Barry,' she'd told the housemistress when asked, shortly after Tish's phone call. 'I don't know to what extent Margaret was a party to all this and really I'm past caring. Let her go. I've seen enough of the Exton family to last me a lifetime.'
Rebecca savoured every moment of that evening. After all the tension, the relief of the narrow escape heightened her enjoyment one–hundredfold.
Robbie was wearing a dinner suit! He'd bought it secondhand in the Save the Children Fund shop in the town, an old-fashioned one made by a tailor, with rounded-off satin lapels, silk-lined jacket and waistcoat – but a perfect fit. He'd found it four weeks earlier and picked up a black bow tie and white dress shirt to go with it, from the Oxfam shop. 'The whole lot came to less than fifteen pounds!' he told Rebecca. As they took the floor together for the first dance, she thought he'd never looked more handsome.
He told her ruefully that another boy had won the tennis cup at Garth this year. 'I'm completely out of practice,' he confessed.
He'd been studying so hard; he was taking this Oxbridge business very seriously.
He thought Rebecca was wearing a new outfit, too, and admired it. She wasn't! It was the one she'd worn last year: the lovely shimmering blue dress with fringes that Mara's Aunty Papademas had bought her, the one that had caused a lot of trouble at the time. But now she'd discarded the matching blue stole and saved up to buy a dramatic black one layered with white fringes that matched the fringes on the dress. 'You're not very observant, Robbie!' she teased him.
Mara looked lovely, of course. And so did Susan. Really lovely! Like Joss, she'd be sixteen in September. She hadn't wanted to borrow a dress after all, just settling for the one she usually wore when she played at concerts. Rebecca reflected that apart from having an enviable figure, Sue had a new-found poise tonight, making that dress look much more special than it really was, making heads turn whenever she and Justin took to the dance floor.
They all ate supper together, outside in the quadrangle gardens. Standing out there with Robbie and her friends, as dusk fell, Rebecca suddenly felt almost overwhelmed by the sight of the lights flickering on in the buildings all around them while at just the same time the delicate sweetness of the night-scented stocks began to pervade the air. She loved Trebizon! She loved these gardens!
To complete her happiness, Angela Hessel's car arrived back just as the Ball had ended. They were all drifting outside to see the boys on to their coach, when the Nissan pulled up right beside the coach and Tish tumbled out.
She'd had a wonderful race!
Against older and much more experienced distance runners she'd come in fifth!
'A remarkable triumph!' Angela Hessel explained to them, in delight. 'She's done wonders!'
'That's not the only way she's done wonders!' exclaimed Laura Wilkins, breaking away from Mike Brown to join the headlong rush towards Tish. Like almost everyone else, Laura knew the whole story by now. 'Thank goodness you recognized Elizabeth Exton, Tish. Brilliant!'
Everybody wanted to shake her hand and pat her on the back. But at last Robbie and Rebecca pulled her clear and managed to get her to themselves.
'Congratulations, Tish,' said Rebecca.
'Clever girl,' added Robbie.
They both kissed her on the cheek.
'I'm starving,' said Tish. 'Is there any food left?'
They laughed as Robbie produced some sausage rolls from the pocket of his dinner jacket saying, 'I'd saved these for the coach. Here, you have them!' and Tish responded, 'Oh, is the coach hungry then?'
Sue and Justin had been amongst the very first to congratulate Tish, but there was no sign of them now.
And when Mr Slade started counting the boys on to the coach, Justin was still missing. 'We'll find him, sir!' said Robbie.
The threesome walked through to quadrangle gardens at the back, then halted.
At the far end of the terrace, Justin and Sue stood face to face, just gazing at one another wordlessly, with enraptured expressions. They appeared to have lost any sense of time.
'Oh, doesn't Sue look lovely?' whispered Rebecca. 'She looks so happy now!'
'So does Justy,' added Robbie, feeling pleased.
Tish just g
rinned and said to them, wryly:
'I suppose it was all worth it?'
Rebecca hesitated for a moment, then raised a smile.
'Oh, Tish, don't be so unromantic. Of course it was worth it.'
Robbie put three fingers to his lips and let forth a piercing whistle. The pair at the other end of the terrace gave a little start, as though roused from a dream. And then Robbie cupped his hands round his mouth and shouted:
'Coach, Justy!'
He then took Rebecca's hand in his and they started to make their way back. 'Come and see me off, Rebeck.' Tish broke away from them, hands in the pockets of her track top.
'See you back at Court, Rebecca,' she said. 'I'll put the kettle on.' Over her shoulder, she gave Justin and Sue a final glance. They still seemed very, very reluctant to make a move. 'If Justy hangs about much longer,' she said, with another grin, 'he'll find the coach has turned back into a pumpkin, won't he?'
The surmise that Freddie Exton now owned Silent Eye Productions Ltd had been correct. It wasn't public knowledge because he'd bought it through a holding company, the previous summer. He'd made staff changes, put Elizabeth on the board and given her a key role there, with the chance to try her hand at making films. With her lack of qualifications and bad school record, it was the only way he could get her started in the kind of work she wanted to do.
Again, a correct surmise.
Elizabeth, known these days more racily as Libby, had had some crackpot ideas for films which had come to nothing, so that her father had been losing patience with her. But Margaret's account of what Tish Anderson had got away with at Trebizon, at the beginning of the term (which she'd mentioned to the family rather bitterly at half-term), had given Elizabeth the idea of the Trebizon film.
She'd always sworn to get her revenge on Tish if ever the chance presented itself, and now the time had come. Even better, at the same time she could get her revenge on Trebizon in general. Margaret was leaving anyway! She would settle her own score and settle the score for Margaret at the same time.
The idea was suggested to a television company in much more demure terms, of course, under the working title Trebizon Observed – and had immediately been accepted.
So both Tish and Miss Welbeck had been correct in all the things they'd surmised, with one exception.
Miss Welbeck had averred that there could be no television film about Trebizon now.
She was wrong.
'You ninny!' Freddie Exton had raged at his daughter, the day after the letter from Silver & Silver arrived. 'Letting yourself be recognized! Why didn't you keep out of the way? I warned you to be careful! The company's been losing money for six months now and we could have recouped it all with this film! We'd made a sale to TV. It was going to be networked!'
'I think we can still make a sale, sir!' butted in Nik Coster, the film's producer. 'In fact I'm sure we can.'
He could see that Freddie Exton was in a dangerous mood: a mood to wind up the company. It had been a lucky break for Nik, meeting Elizabeth at her twenty-first birthday party and landing this job. He wasn't going to see his career wrecked without putting up a fight. And besides . . .
He'd been looking at the rushes of the film and having a long discussion with the videotape editor.
'We could cut out all the scandal and still have a great film!' he insisted, before anyone could stop him. 'We've got some marvellous sequences. Beautiful colour effects! There's this black girl – she's a brilliant surfer . . . We've got a great chunk of the founder's day service. Mark took it just to use up the rest of the film, but it's rather lovely. Very English. Best of all, sir, there's this tennis match. Two gorgeous girls, brilliant tennis, what more could TV want? The school would pass a film like that. They couldn't possibly object . . .'
'You rat, Nik!' hissed Libby Exton, finding her voice at last.
But Freddie Exton was looking extremely interested. He was a businessman and a hard-headed one. He didn't like losing money. He hated it. He didn't like any of his companies to fail . . .
'You let them make a nice film about Trebizon and I resign, Daddy!'
He didn't like being told what to do, either.
'You'd better resign then,' he said to his daughter, a cold little glitter in his eye. Then, turning straight to his film producer: 'Okay, Nik. Go ahead. Get the film together. Show it to the school solicitors and get their agreement in writing. And make it good.'
'Leave it to me, sir,' said Nik Coster, mopping his brow in relief.
Freddie Exton hurried from the building, into his chauffeur driven car and on to the next company meeting, feeling in a much better mood now.
It looked as though Silent Eye might be moving up into profit at last.
So that was how the Trebizon film appeared on television after all. The controversial items were completely expunged. The interview with Mrs Tarkus, in its entirety, ended up on the cutting room floor. She was deeply disappointed.
The reviewers thought it was a stunning film and everyone agreed that the tennis sequences, showing in full the last four games between Rebecca and Joss in the final of the county closed, made a brilliant climax.
It became a famous match, in the literal sense of the word.
It had been a famous term!
In the week that followed Commem, all sorts of important things happened.
Rebecca's summer ranking came through from the LTA – she'd moved up to 40th place in her age group! And because of the results she'd had since the deadline for the computer, her true position was obviously higher still.
The day after her ranking arrived, she sent in her application form for the British Junior Grasscourt Championships at Eastbourne and crossed her fingers.
Oddly enough, Robbie's Oxford Entrance Form went off on the very same day, with the colleges listed in order of preference – the one he'd been to the weekend of Tish's birthday at the top. And so he crossed his fingers, too.
Sue forgot to do her violin practice three afternoons running, quite unheard of, because she was meeting Justin down town for coffee after school.
Tish received an invitation to run in the 1500 metres at an athletics meeting in Birmingham at the end of August.
And summer exams began.
Rebecca regarded them almost as an intrusion upon her life now.
With the dream of getting to Eastbourne this year about to become a reality, she was out on the grass courts early morning, lunch time and late into the evenings, practising her strokes with anybody and everybody willing to spare the time. Joss turned out a great deal and Robbie came over from Garth College at least twice. The staff helped, too, especially Miss Darling. ('The Dread's being a darling,' as Tish put it.) And at other times, when the whole world seemed to be swotting, Rebecca was swatting the tennis ball instead – creeping out and swatting it against the end wall of Norris House, where she couldn't disturb anyone and there weren't any windows to break.
So Rebecca, languages and English literature apart, did badly in her end of year exams. She failed to reach the pass mark in maths and the science subjects. Even in history she only just scraped through, having spent no time revising the period on which they were being tested.
And when her parents arrived at the end of term and went to meet Miss Welbeck for the long awaited discussion about her future, Rebecca felt distinctly nervous.
She preferred not to think about what might be taking place at that interview and tried to enjoy the little end-of-term party that Fiona Freeman and Jenny Brook-Hayes had organized at Court House, instead.
To her surprise, when her parents emerged from their lengthy session with the principal, they seemed to be in a good mood. They didn't volunteer any information and they didn't seem to want Rebecca to question them, but they seemed perfectly happy. Slightly jubilant, even, in a secretive sort of way!
Rebecca just gave a huge sigh of relief.
'Everything all right?' asked the others anxiously, before breaking up time and the parting of the ways.
'Your parents happy?' queried Tish.
'Happy as larks, as far as I can see,' smiled Rebecca.
Even so, travelling back to London by car with them next morning, Rebecca was slightly mystified to note that the air of quiet jubilation still seemed to linger on.
'Well, it's been a good year, hasn't it?' said her father.
'You're coming along nicely at Trebizon, aren't you, Becky?' agreed her mother.
'Is – is Miss Welbeck really pleased with me then?' asked Rebecca, unable to hide her curiosity any longer. 'I mean, she's quite thrilled about Eastbourne, then?'
'Eastbourne?' Her father frowned for a moment, concentrating on the road. He was keeping a lookout for the motor-way signs. 'Oh, yes. She's pleased about that, too, of course.'
Rebecca wondered what else the principal could possibly be pleased about. She could hardly be pleased about her exam results. And as Rebecca certainly didn't want to draw attention to those unnecessarily she decided to say no more. Instead, she snuggled back comfortably in the speeding car and watched the hedges rush by.
'Maybe it's because of the film business?' she thought. 'Who cares! Mum and Dad are happy!'
And so was she.
In two days' time it would be her fifteenth birthday and for once she'd be spending it at home with her parents. They were taking her on a shopping spree as a birthday present this year, to the big London stores!
The long summer holidays stretched ahead, full of promise. Her year in the Fourth at Trebizon lay behind her now. It had been an important year for some of them, in one way or another, with the prospect of even bigger things to come.
And next term they'd all be moving up.
For 'the six', that meant literally moving up – to the top floor of Court House. It was good up there. You were given your own cubicle with bed and desk, with space on the partition walls for pictures and posters of your choice and each cubicle had its own little window. You could see right across to main school from those dormer windows and if you were lucky, according to Moyra Milton, you'd get birds nesting up there in the eaves, just above.
Moving up! thought Rebecca, with pleasure.