She was ill at ease walking into the staffroom, where everyone was already in conversation, pouring coffee, lighting cigarettes, at home among familiar colleagues. They were so much older. She remembered hanging about outside the staffroom of her own school waiting to hand something in and feeling that beyond the door, with its frosted-glass panel, lay another and forbidden world, as closed to her as her father’s Masonic meetings, which turned a mundane hotel conference room into the Devil’s den. ‘Olive – I’ve been wanting a word with you – we need to meet and go over all your classes. How are you finding your feet?’
Thea Pengelly. Taller than Olive. There was the reserve again, but part of it was a stillness about her which made her feel calm and more confident in her turn. The other woman’s eyes seemed to search her face for something.
‘I don’t suppose for a moment we have coinciding free periods this week, do we? Anyway, you look as if you’ve settled in very happily but if you have any problem at all, come to me. You know the departmental meeting is on Friday?’
‘No.’
She gestured. ‘That’s the noticeboard you need to look at. But the secretary will have put a note in your pigeonhole too.’
Olive had not realised that she had a pigeonhole.
Thea Pengelly was smiling. She touched Olive’s arm. ‘It takes time to learn the system. I’ve been here for nine years and I still get caught out, don’t worry. Half past four on Friday in the small meeting room.’
‘Miss Piper, may I ask you something please? It won’t take a minute.’
The rest of the lower fifth were on their way out of the door. Games. Library. Prep room. Tea. Home. Hilary Maidment hovered, book bag at her feet, textbook open. Olive remembered hovering in just such a way herself, usually after an impenetrable Maths lesson, trying to seem nonchalant while almost in tears.
‘Yes, of course, but I have a meeting in five minutes.’
‘It’s … this Hopkins poem. I just don’t understand it at all.’ She held out the open book.
Nor do I, she wanted to say, heaven help me, nor do I.
‘I know, Hilary – Hopkins isn’t straightforward. I will try and break down line by line any of the set poems people are finding difficult.’
The girl looked doubtful.
‘I have to go, I’m afraid.’
‘Yes, thank you. Thanks, Miss Piper. I’m sorry.’
‘No need to be … are there any of the poems you do understand and like?’
‘“Felix Randal”. I love that. It’s as if you get to know him, and maybe “The Windhover”. And …’ She was leafing through her book as they went into the corridor.
‘Hilary …’
‘Yes?’
The girl looked straight at her and there was something in her eyes that Olive found alarming. A look of … no. No, she didn’t know.
‘Thank you so much, Miss Piper. Thank you. I … I do love your lessons.’
She stood hopeless in the corridor as Olive sped away, got lost, doubled back. Hilary had gone.
There were six in the English department, and all of them in the room. One, Mrs Dyer, was part-time. She taught remedial English to those she referred to as ‘illiterate scientists’. The only one Olive had not met before was Miss Moss, retiring at the end of the term, after having been away for several months because of serious illness, which had culminated in an operation. She smiled, in a tired way, and looked like a revenant, small, frail, with paper-white skin and a detachment from the rest, which she seemed to emphasise by sitting a little apart, her chair pulled away from the desk.
She is dying, Olive thought. She has one foot across the line Death has drawn, and half a mind in another world.
She sat next to Miss Neale, who beamed at her and patted her hand, and said, ‘Now we’re all grown-ups in here and I am Sylvia and Olive is a very good name. I like Olive. You know the others … Pauline – Mrs Dyer – and here’s Thea.’
She patted Olive’s hand again and sat up, cleared her throat, looking at Miss Pengelly with an eagerness Olive found very appealing.
She felt that she had no right to be here, in a room full of grown-ups. That is what teachers were by definition, surely. When would it come, the ability to feel naturally at home among them, if it had not come by the age of twenty-three, with a degree and a son?
Sylvia Neale was asking to be relieved of teaching the second Shakespeare play on the A-level syllabus and to take on the Hardy novel instead. If she could only be relieved of Hopkins …
‘Would you care to take on Macbeth, my dear?’ Miss Neale smiled encouragingly. Olive did not know how to refuse, and in any case, Macbeth ought to be fun to teach.
‘Olive, if I may, don’t take on too much. That’s a meaty A-level course you have already – give up something in exchange.’
‘Oh. Yes. I see. Yes, of course …’
‘May I have the Hardy novel?’ Miss Neale’s face was bland and innocent and Olive’s own must have registered her immediate regret.
‘Of course. Please do.’
‘I’m not at all sure your heart is in that exchange,’ Thea Pengelly said. ‘And you don’t have to make it. I’ll take Macbeth – heaven knows I’ve taught it often enough. You keep your Hardy.’
The smile she gave at that moment was one Olive could not interpret, and which stayed with her. She remembered it. She thought about it. She was puzzled by it. Pleased. It had been conspiratorial. No. Amused? Friendly, anyway.
And something else. Something else.
What else?
They were discussing the final choice of school play for the following summer. She listened but did not hear. She heard but did not take in the meaning of the words. She felt as if something had happened but did not know what. Change. That was all. Some change.
‘Olive? You have a say too, you know … are you happy with that?’
She looked at Thea Pengelly for a long moment. Happy. Happy with that. Happy with …
She could not stop looking at her face.
Happy?
‘Oh … yes, yes of course. I’m perfectly happy with it.’
The play chosen was The Crucible.
23
BECAUSE THE TEACHING days still tired her, she ignored a feeling of being both physically and mentally drained from the moment she got up one morning in November. She drank three cups of tea but did not want to eat. Her body ached and she began to shiver during the first lesson. By lunch an axe seemed to be splitting her head in two repeatedly and on her way to the staffroom she had to hold on to the wall for fear of falling.
‘Home,’ the nurse said. She felt too weak to argue. Thea Pengelly drove her back and usually, even at the end of a full day, Olive ran up the three flights of stairs to her flat, but now, she had to pause every other step, while Thea held her arm and murmured encouragement until she reached the top.
Her temperature had been 102 when the nurse took it.
‘And coming up these stairs will have made that worse. Do you have any aspirin?’
No.
Yes.
Did she?
‘Right, you get into bed. I’m going to the chemist but I’ll get you a jug of water first. You need to drink plenty. I’ll leave the door on the latch. When you’ve had the aspirin you need to sleep and I’ll call back after school to check on you.’
‘But … I’m … I’ll be …’
‘No,’ Thea said, ‘you will not be fine.’
Olive remembered little about the following week. At some point a doctor was sitting beside her bed. At some point, her mother was too, or so it seemed. She was in a vortex of nightmares and waking delirium, unable to distinguish between the real and the hallucinatory. The room was dark and then light. The curtains were half open or closed. Sometimes she was alone, at others Thea Pengelley was in the room, sitting beside her or giving her sips of water, helping her to the bathroom, remaking her bed. She could not understand why the Head of Department was looking after her but she felt too ill to
ask questions. She slept for most of the days and tried, but failed, to eat soup or bread and butter which Thea brought to her. Mornings merged into evenings, darkness became light, her life seemed to be on a perpetual loop and her head ached so that she could not think for long about anything. Her chest hurt. She had a relentless cough which pulled at her muscles and left her gasping and exhausted after each bout.
And then, she woke one morning to the sun touching the opposite wall and a sense that she was beginning to emerge from a tunnel, still confused, still too weak to get out of bed without help, but with a feeling of being in clear water. Her headache had gone, leaving only a fogginess in her brain, and her cough was easier.
She turned her head. She saw a pale sky. Her dressing gown on the chair. A jug of water with slices of lemon floating. A card propped up on the tumbler.
‘I will be back at 1.15. T.’
She struggled to grasp who, what, when.
T.
She felt limp but, at the same time, rinsed clean. She was sure she had no temperature.
She would go to the bathroom and brush her teeth, wash herself with a flannel. Perhaps she would feel strong enough to have a bath tomorrow. But when she put her feet on the floor and then stood upright, the room lurched, the light spun round and she could not get her breath. She flopped back onto her bed but the effort of pulling the covers over herself was quite beyond her. She slept, face down on the pillow. Sleep blotted everything out.
That evening, if it was the evening, she woke to find that she was propped up on her pillows, the lamp switched on beside her bed, and Thea sitting in the chair, marking a pile of books.
‘Oh …’
Thea smiled, putting down her pen.
‘What time is it?’
‘Just after seven o’clock. You look better.’
‘I think … I feel better. How long have I been like this?’
‘Ill? Nine days.’
It made no sense. Perhaps two – three at the most. Not nine days.
‘When did you come?’
‘I’ve been here on and off all the time. I went into school most days and then Sylvia Neale came in my place. I don’t think you were ever aware of her, were you? She thought not.’
Olive tried to think but her brain would not process the information.
‘Would you like a drink or something to eat?’
Would she?
Without warning, Olive burst into tears, tears that bubbled up out of weakness and illness, and something like shame.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry.’
Thea dropped her books, and came and put her arms round her, and held her.
24
SO IT HAD not only been Thea who had looked after her. Olive barely remembered. She was simply aware of a lift of the heart when she saw Thea. She was puzzled by it, but only knew that in Thea’s presence she felt safe.
One evening, when she was recovering steadily, she sat in the window with The Mayor of Casterbridge open beside her. Her brain still felt fragile, as if it would crack open like an egg if she concentrated too hard for too long, so she read slowly and paused every few pages, realising that her mind and memory were still intact and only needed strengthening, like the muscles of her body.
‘You’ve got some colour in your cheeks – how good to see that!’ Thea held a small box of oranges.
‘Why have you been doing all this for me?’
Thea glanced away, took the fruit into the kitchen and did not come out again for several minutes. Olive heard the sound of the kettle being filled, the chink of the china teapot. She heard cutting sounds. Then the smell of freshly squeezed oranges came through the door.
Why?
Thea brought in a glass of juice, and handed it to her, fussed about with the tea things. She seemed ill at ease.
‘Why?’
Her face was turned away but the light caught one side of her hair, her forehead and cheekbone and mouth, and Olive realised that, just as when she had been at school considering her own teachers, she had assumed Thea to be much older than she could now see that she was. Teachers had all been over fifty, some of them over sixty, other than the young games staff, older beyond imagining. Thea was probably in her early forties, no more. She had dark hair, rather unruly, kept back with a comb on either side. Her bones were fine, nose small, cheekbones high.
She looked away.
Silence. A long silence. A stillness in the room. A charged stillness. She did not understand it.
Something would happen. Something might be said, and if so, it might take a long time but that would not matter. It would be said.
‘You feel it too,’ Thea said at last. ‘Or am I wrong about this? Because if I am please say so now … in the next thirty seconds …’
Olive said nothing. But without warning, her mind sprang forwards, to Christmas.
‘Christmas,’ she said.
She supposed that she would be expected to go to her father but even the thought of moving anywhere made her head hurt and spending a ritual few days in the bright box apartment would test all her reserves.
But she should go.
‘What will you do?’
She supposed that Thea had parents and siblings, an extended family of some kind, but she had no idea at all. She did not even know where she lived. And who with, if anyone.
There was silence again. But not tense this time, or awkward, silence like a pillow that could be rested upon. Stillness.
Then, into the silence and the stillness she had an urge to place something – almost like a gift. It was not a confession nor the telling of any secret, it was like an object, a fact which had substance and great power.
Thea seemed scarcely to be breathing.
She reached out her hand and put it on top of Olive’s own hand and they sat in silence, until Olive said, ‘Two years ago, my son was born. His name was James but perhaps it isn’t now. They may have given him another name. The people who adopted him. Yes, they probably have.’
After the terrible day at St Jude’s when she had found him gone from the nursery, she wondered if she had ever really cried for him out of a full heart or had merely pushed down most of her tears and covered them with a lid of steel, for fear of losing control altogether. She had cried, she had been sad, and shocked by his abrupt disappearance, she had regretted everything but she had never submerged herself almost to drowning, stripping her mind of every other thought, herself of every other feeling.
She did so now and Thea knelt beside her and held her and said nothing at all.
When she eventually surfaced, she felt scoured and raw, and the room was dark, and she knew that whatever this was now, it was all she had, and it was right. She did not grasp her own feelings fully or recognise Thea’s, she was simply content to accept them, whatever their nature, and be still.
‘Spend Christmas here. With me,’ Olive said.
There was a silence and then Thea got up. ‘Or shall we just leave all of that for now? You’re exhausted enough without having to think about Christmas. I’ll make a few very small and delicious sandwiches to tempt you, and then you should go back to bed.’
‘I’m so sorry – I’m really not hungry.’
‘You will be when you see the smallness of these … one bite each. Go on. I’ll bring your tray.’
She ate three of the minute sandwiches and then Thea left, and after she had gone, Olive lay awake, asking questions.
What was this? She was not so ignorant or naive as to be completely unaware – remembering the women her mother had referred to obliquely, those with shingled hair and men’s evening suits. But they were in the past. This was different. Different.
So, what was this? While she had been half asleep, half absent, in illness, what had happened?
She slept then, and dreamed of the nursery at St Jude’s. She walked into it and round it and there were many cots, dozens of cots, and every cot was empty.
The next morning she got up, wash
ed and dressed, and then collapsed into her chair and read The Mayor of Casterbridge and for the first time managed to concentrate on it for over an hour.
She came out of the novel in a panic. She was alone but soon might not be and she felt troubled and bewildered. Whatever it was, she decided she wanted none of it, and wrote her father a note saying that she would love to join them for Christmas, that she had been ill and would value some quiet time spent in their apartment.
The idea of going downstairs and along the street to the letter box was daunting but she put on her coat and scarf. She wanted to smell the outside air. She opened the door and stepped out and her head swam, her legs gave way under her. Thea, just arriving, caught her the second before she fell.
25
THE JOURNEY TIRED her so much that when she reached the flat she went straight to bed and slept until mid-morning on Christmas Eve.
‘You’ve lost so much weight, Livi, and you were never fat. You need sea air and good food.’
He touched her arm. He was pleased that she had come, she could tell, and Peggy had welcomed her more warmly than before. She had had no chance to shop for presents and felt conscious of arriving empty-handed but they both brushed her apologies aside. There was a small artificial tree in the corner, with one or two of the old decorations on it that she remembered from childhood, as well as new ones, and she was touched that when so much had been cleared from the old house, these had been kept.
‘I have booked us Christmas Day lunch at the de Vere, Livi. I don’t want Peggy working away in the kitchen all morning and there isn’t much room in there for me to help her. I’m afraid I have become rather lazy where cooking is concerned and we eat out quite a bit.’
Her mother had cooked a large Christmas dinner to which they had sat down at two o’clock, and the effort of preparing for it and providing it and insisting that every detail was correct had always put her into a bad mood, slamming pots down, breaking china, refusing to speak at the table. It had been a miserable occasion and Olive had dreaded it and dreamed of the future when she had her own house and kitchen. And family, she supposed.