Chapter One
Purple skirt no. Gray suit yes but it was in a crumpled ball from an unfortunate attack of dry cleaner phobia. Black, definitely not. Ditto that Gaviscon-pink frilly coat jacket thing she’d panic-bought for a wedding and couldn’t throw away because it had cost too much, but every time she came across it in her wardrobe it made her shiver and question the kind of person she was.
Job interviews. Torture from the pits of hell. Especially job interviews four hundred miles away which require clothing that will both look fantastic and stand up to seven hours in Stan’s Fiat Panda, with its light coating of crisps. Oh, and that would do the job both for chilly Scotland and the warm English riviera. God, it sucked not being able to take time off sometimes.
Maggie Adair looked at herself critically in the mirror and decided to drive to Cornwall in her pajamas.
FLISS WAS HAVING a lie-in—among the last, she thought, of her entire life.
I can’t believe they’re making me do this, she thought. I can’t believe they’re sending me away. And if they think they’re fooling me with their jolly hockey-sticks utter bloody bollocks they can think again. Of course Hattie loves it, she bloody loves anything that requires the brain of a flea, a tennis racket, a boys’ school on the hill, and eyelash curlers.
Well, I’m not going to bloody love it. I’ll sit it out till they realize how shit it is and they’ll let me go to Guildford Academy like everyone else, not some nobs’ bloody hole two hundred miles away. Why should I care about being sent so far from London just as everyone else is getting to go to Wembley concerts and on the tube on their own? I’m nearly fourteen, for God’s sake. I’m a teenager. And now I’m going to be buried alive in bloody Cornwall. Nobody ever thinks about me.
I’ll show them. I’ll be home after a month.
Breakfast the next morning was even worse. Fliss pushed her All-Bran round her plate. No way was she eating this muck. She’d pass it on to Ranald (the beagle) but she didn’t think he would eat it either. She patted his wet nose, and felt comforted.
“And I don’t know for sure,” Hattie was saying, “but I think they’re going to make me prefect! One of the youngest ever!”
“That’s wonderful, sweetie,” their mother was saying. “And you can keep an eye out for Fliss.”
Fliss rolled her eyes. “Great. Let everyone know the big swotty prefect is my sister. NO thank you.”
Hattie bit her lip. Even though she was eighteen months older, Fliss could still hurt her. And she wasn’t that big.
“Behave yourself,” said their father. “I don’t want to hear you speaking like that.”
“Fine,” said Fliss, slipping down from the table. “You don’t have to hear me speaking at all. That’s why you’re sending me away, remember?” And she made sure the conservatory doors banged properly behind her as she mounted the stairs.
“Is she really only thirteen?” said her mother. “Do we really have to put up with this for another six years?”
“Hmm?” said her father, buried under the Financial Times. Selective hearing, he reckoned. That’s all you needed. Though he couldn’t help contrasting his sweet placid elder daughter with this little firecracker. Boarding school was going to be just what she needed, sort her out.
DR. VERONICA DEVERAL couldn’t believe they were still interviewing for staff three weeks before the beginning of term. It showed a lack of professionalism she just couldn’t bear. She glanced in the mirror, then reached out a finger to smooth the deep furrow between her eyes. Normally she was without a hint of vanity, but the start of the new school year brought anxieties all of its own, even after thirty years, and Mrs. Ferrers waiting for the very last minute to jump ship to Godolphin was one of them.
So now she was short of an English teacher, and with eighty new girls soon turning up—some scared, some weepy, some excited, some defiant, and all of them needing a good confident hand. She put on her reading glasses and turned back to the pile of CVs. She missed the days when she didn’t need CVs, with their gussied-up management language, and fancy euphemisms about child-centered learning, instead of simple common sense. A nicely typed letter without spelling mistakes and a quick once-over to see if they were the right stuff—that used to be all she needed.
Still, she mused, gazing out of the high window of her office, over the smooth lawns—quiet and empty, at least for a few more weeks—and up to the rocky promontory above the sea, which started just beyond the bounds of the school, it wasn’t all bad. These ghastly “inclusiveness” courses the board had suggested she attend—no one would ever instruct Veronica to do anything—had been quite interesting in terms of expanding the range of people the girls could work with.
They had such hermetic upbringings, so many of them. Country house, London house, nannies, and the best schools. Oh, there was divorce and absent parenting, and all the rest, but they still existed in a world in which everyone had help; no one had to worry about money or even getting a job. Now, wasn’t there an application somewhere from a woman teaching in a Glasgow housing estate? Perhaps she should have another glass of mint tea and look at it again.
“LA DEE DAH.”
“Shut it,” Simone said.
“La dee dah.”
“Mum! He’s doing it again!”
“Joel!”
“I’m not doing anyfink.”
Simone tried to ignore him and concentrate on an early spell of packing, which was hard when he wouldn’t get out of her tiny bedroom. And, even more irritating, she could kind of see his point. Even she’d winced at the straw boater and the winter gloves on the uniform list, though at first she’d been so excited. Such a change from the ugly burgundy sweatshirt and optional (i.e., everyone wore them if you didn’t want to get called a “slut”) gray trousers and black shoes at St. Cat’s.
She tried to ignore her annoying younger brother, and bask once again in the memory of the day they’d got the letter. Not the months and months of long study that had gone on before it. Not the remarks from her classmates, which had got even more unpleasant the more she’d stayed behind and begged the teachers for extra work and more coaching—most of the third years were of the firm conviction that she’d had sex with every single teacher in the school, male and female, in return for the highest predicted GCSE grades the school had ever seen, not that there’d been much to beat.
She’d tried her best to keep her head high, even when she was being tripped in the corridor; when she couldn’t open any door without glances and whispers in her direction; when she’d spent every break-time and lunchtime hiding in a corner of the library (normally forbidden, but she’d got special permission).
No, she was going back to the day the letter came. In a heavy, thick white envelope. “Dear Mr. & Mrs. Pribetich . . . we are pleased to inform you that your daughter Simone . . . full scholarship . . . enclosed, clothing suppliers . . .”
Her father hadn’t said very much; he’d had to go out of the room for a minute. Half delighted—he’d never dreamed when he’d arrived in Britain that one day his daughter would be attending a private school—he was also annoyed that, even though it was a great opportunity for Simone, he wasn’t paying for it himself. And he worried too for his sensitive daughter. She’d nearly worked herself ill for the entrance exams. Would she be able to keep up?
Simone’s mum however had no such reservations. She flung her arms around Simone, screaming in excitement.
“She just wants to tell everyone,” said Joel. But Simone hadn’t cared. She’d been too busy taking it all in. No more St. Cat’s. No more burgundy sweatshirts. No more Joel! No more being paraded in front of Mamma’s friends (“No, not pretty, no. But so clever! You wouldn’t believe how clever!”). Her life started now.
IT HAD TO be around here somewhere. Just as she was ferreting with one hand for the last of the Maltesers in the bottom of her bag, Maggie crested the hill in the car. And there it was.
The school most resembled a castle, perched by the sea. It had four towers—four houses, Maggie firmly told herself, trying to remember. Named after English royal houses, that was right. Wessex; Plantagenet; York, and Tudor. No Stuart, she noted ruefully. Maggie mentally contrasted the imposing buildings with the wet, gray single-story seventies build she’d left behind her up in Scotland.
Uh oh, she thought. What was it Stan had said? “The second you get in there you’ll get a chip on your shoulder the size of Govan. All those spoiled mimsies running about. You’ll hate it.”
Mind you, it wasn’t like Stan was exactly keen for her to broaden her horizons. He’d been in the same distribution job since he left school. Spreading his wings wasn’t really in his vocabulary. But maybe it would be different for her. Let’s face it, there had to be more out there than teaching in the same school she grew up in and having Sunday lunch round her mum’s. She had to at least see.
VERONICA DEVERAL RUBBED her eyes. Only her third candidate, and she felt weary already.
“So,” she asked the wide-eyed young woman sitting in front of her. “How would you cope with a difficult child . . . say, for example, one who doesn’t think she should be here?”
The woman, who was wearing pale blue eyeliner that matched both her suit and her tights, and didn’t blink as often as she should, leaned forward to show enthusiasm.
“Well,” she said, in refined tones that didn’t quite ring true—junior acting classes, thought Veronica—“I’d try and establish a paradigm matrix of acceptable integral behaviors, and follow that up with universal quality monitoring and touch/face time. I think non-goal-orientated seeking should be minimized wherever appropriate.”
There was a silence.
“Well, er, thank you very much for coming in, Miss . . .”
“Oh, I just like the kids to call me Candice. Promotes teacher–pupil sensitivity awareness,” said Candice sincerely.
Veronica smiled without using her lips and decided against pouring them both another cup of tea.
GETTING CHANGED IN a Fiat Panda isn’t as much fun as it looks. Maggie tried to imagine doing this in the car park of Holy Cross without getting a penknife in the bahookie, and couldn’t manage it. But here, hidden out of sight on the gray gravel drive, it was at least possible, if lacking in the elegance stakes.
She put her makeup on using the car mirror. Pink cheeks, windswept from having the windows open for the last hundred miles, air-con not quite having reached Stan’s mighty machine. Her dark, thickly waving hair—which, when properly brushed out by a hairdresser was really rather lovely but the rest of the time required lion taming—was a bit frizzed, but she might be able to get away with it by pulling it into a tight bun. In fact, frizzy hair in tight buns was exactly what she’d expect a boarding school teacher to wear, so she might be right at home. She smoothed down her skirt, took a deep breath, and left the car. Straight ahead of her, the sun glistened off the choppy sea. She could probably swim here in the mornings, lose the half stone caused by huddling in the staffroom ever since she’d left college two years before, mainlining caramel wafers in an attempt to forget the horror that was year three.
Maggie stepped out onto the gravel drive. Up close, the building was even more impressive; an elaborate Victorian confection, built in 1880 as an adjunct to the much older boys’ school at the other end of the cove, the imposing building giving off an air of seriousness and calm.
She wondered what it would be like full of pupils. Or perhaps they were serious and calm too. At the very least they were unlikely to have police records. Already she’d been impressed by the amount of graffiti on the old walls of the school: none. Nothing about who was going to get screwed, about who was going to get knifed . . . nothing at all.
No. She wasn’t going to think about what it would be like to work here. This was just an experiment, just to see what else was out there before she went back to her mum and dad’s, and Stan, in Govan. Where she belonged. She thought of Stan from weeks earlier, when she’d talked about applying.
“‘Teacher required for single-sex boarding school,’” she read out. “‘Beautiful location. On-site living provided. English, with some sports.’”
Stan sniffed.
“Well, that’s you out then. What sports are you going to teach? Running to the newsagents, to get an Aero?”
“I’m trained in PT, thank you!” said Maggie sniffily.
“It’ll be funny posh sports anyway, like polo, and lacrosse.” He snorted to himself.
“What?”
“Just picturing you playing polo.”
Maggie breathed heavily through her nose.
“Why?”
“You’re frightened of horses, for one. And you’d probably crush one if you keep on eating bacon sandwiches like that.”
“Shut up!” said Maggie. “Do you think being Scottish counts as being an ethnic minority? It says they’re trying to encourage entries from everywhere. Apply in writing in the first instance to Miss Prenderghast . . .”
“A girls’ school with free accommodation?” said Stan. “Where do I sign up?” He thought she was only doing this to annoy him, even when the interview invitation arrived.
“Dear Ms. Adair,” he’d read out in an absurdly overexaggerated accent. “Please do us the most gracious honor of joining us for tea and crumpet with myself, the queen and . . .”
“Give that back,” she’d said, swiping the letter, which had come on heavy cream vellum paper, with a little sketch of the Downey school printed on it in raised blue ink. It simply requested her presence for a meeting with the headmistress, but reading it had made her heart pound a bit. It did feel a little like being summoned.
“I don’t know why you’re wasting your time,” Stan had said, as she’d worried over whether or not to take the purple skirt. “A bunch of bloody poncey southern snobs, they’re never going to look at you anyway.”
“I know,” said Maggie, crossly folding up her good bra.
“And even if they did, you’re not going to move to Cornwall, are you?”
“I’m sure I’m not. It’s good interview experience, that’s all.”
“There you go then. Stop messing about.”
But as they lay in bed in the evening, Stan snoring happily away, pizza crumbs still round his mouth, Maggie lay there imagining. Imagining a world of beautiful halls; ...
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