A Lesson in Dying (3 page)

When Patty Atkins got into the hall the meeting had already started. The members sat with blank unlistening faces as the secretary read the minutes of the last meeting. There was the smell of school dinners and floor polish. Patty was suddenly determined that her idea for the Hallowe’en party would be discussed. Even if nothing came of it at least the monotony of the gathering would be broken. The meetings were usually entirely predictable. There would be a discussion about the distribution of produce from the Harvest Festival and the desirability of school uniform. Then there would be the ritual, unspoken, heartfelt prayer for the early retirement or sudden death of Harold Medburn.

Patty took her seat, stumbling as she did so over Angela Brayshaw’s handbag, causing the secretary at the other end of the table to falter.

‘Sorry,’ Patty said, looking around at them all, grinning. It was impossible for her to be unobtrusive. She was too big, too clumsy, too interested in everyone. She had recently been for an unsatisfactory perm and her blonde hair was shaggy and difficult to manage. She was like a large and friendly dog.

The secretary glanced at Mr Medburn and continued reading nervously. The headmaster was a small, slight man with a head which seemed too big for his body, like a child’s glove puppet. He had a bald head surrounded by a semicircle of grey tufts. His cheeks were round and red and he seemed at first to have an almost Dickensian good humour. His appearance was deceptive and everyone in the room was frightened of him.

Paul Wilcox called for the treasurer’s report. Patty considered Paul with fascination and friendly amusement. He was so earnest and intense and his soft, southern voice always surprised her. He made her want to laugh. Yet the Wilcoxes represented a sophistication which she envied. They went to the theatre and their son had piano lessons. They lived in a big house and had a cleaning lady. She would like to know them better.

The treasurer began to read the accounts. Patty yawned and queried the expenditure of £10.14 for tea and coffee to relieve her boredom. The treasurer blushed indignantly and produced the receipts. The meeting droned on. The Harvest Festival was discussed. Parents congratulated the school on the quality of produce collected and asked if they might attend the celebration on the following year. The headmaster regretted that it was impossible but gave no excuse for his refusal. The other teachers were given no opportunity to comment.

Paul Wilcox stared unhappily at his agenda and asked if anyone had any other business for discussion. Patty looked up brightly from the scrap of paper where she was drawing a caricature of the headmaster.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we have a social evening for the parents? Lots of other schools do it. Let’s have a Hallowe’en party.’

The others looked at her with pity and admiration. They knew she only made these wild suggestions to shock. It had taken a special governors’ meeting to persuade the headmaster to let the children have a Christmas party. He would never agree to parents enjoying themselves on school premises. There was a silence in which everyone expected Mr Medburn to invent a reason why such an occasion was impossible, but he did not speak. The chairman rubbed his beard uncertainly, cleared his throat and blinked.

‘Well,’ he said bravely. ‘I must say that I’d be in favour of a social event. Anything that encourages parents to come into the school must be a good thing. What does anyone else think?’

The parents around the table avoided his eye. Was Mr Medburn’s silence some sort of trap? If they backed Patty’s proposal would he stare at them with his pebbly blue eyes and make them the object of his wrath and sarcasm?

‘I think it’s an excellent idea,’ said Miss Peters. She was a temporary supply teacher, filling in during illness. She had nothing to lose.

‘It does sound rather fun,’ said the treasurer anxiously and there were muttered noises of agreement. Only Angela Brayshaw was silent. She never contributed to the meetings and Patty wondered why she had volunteered for the Association at all.

Paul Wilcox blinked and took a deep breath.

‘What’s your opinion, Mr Medburn?’

The headmaster shrugged as if he were above such triviality.

‘Why not?’ he said, then paused and stared unkindly at Patty before continuing, ‘But I could only agree of course if Mrs Atkins is prepared to take responsibility for the organization. I couldn’t expect my staff to give up their time.’

Patty was notorious for her lack of organization, but could sense the committee members willing her to reply positively.

‘Of course,’ she said, her imagination suddenly fired by the plan. It would be a magnificent party, she thought. The night would go down for ever in Heppleburn history. ‘We’ll ask everyone to come in fancy dress. We’ll decorate the hall …’

‘I’d like to volunteer to help with that,’ Irene Hunt interrupted. ‘Despite what Mr Medburn said, I’m quite prepared to give up my time.’

The chairman sensed the possibility of argument between the teachers. He was worried that they might lose the headmaster’s limited approval.

‘So you agree in principle, Mr Medburn,’ he said quickly. ‘As Mrs Atkins has said she’ll organize the event? And you will come yourself?’

‘Oh yes,’ the headmaster said unpleasantly. ‘As it’s to be arranged by these two admirable and competent women, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

They ignored his sarcasm and discussed catering, hiring a bar and printing tickets until it was dark.

Jack Robson had come back to the school to lock up, and Patty waited for a quarter of an hour with him while he stacked the chairs ready for assembly the following day. Then they walked together down the hill towards the village.

It was a clear evening and they could see the lights of the ships at the mouth of the Tyne and the strings of neon on the front at Whitley Bay. At the end of the lane, hidden from the main road and the cars that passed by the hawthorn hedge, a man and a woman were locked in embrace. Even from a distance and in the distorting light from the street it was clear that these were not teenagers. They were obviously shocked by the sound of footsteps as Patty and Jack approached, and they separated, ran into the road and disappeared in opposite directions. Patty looked at her father.

‘Wasn’t that Angela Brayshaw and Harold Medburn?’ she said.

‘It could have been,’ he said noncommitally.

‘But he’s married,’ she blurted out. ‘He’s been married for years.’

‘Don’t you go gossiping,’ Jack said. ‘You don’t know for certain it was Medburn.’

I know, she thought, remembering other meetings, the hand too long on her shoulder even when his words were most sarcastic, the way he looked at all the women there.

‘I was at school with him, you know,’ Jack said before he turned into his gate. ‘There’s more to that man then meets the eye.’

They strung fairy lights along the outside of the school, so it looked from the village like a ship, stranded in a sea of brown fields. There was a full moon which rose behind the square tower of the church and made the playground as light almost as day, so they could see the printed squares for hopscotch on the concrete and the football posts in the field beyond. The yard was full of cars. The committee had sold more tickets than they ever expected. The village saw the party as a victory of the parents over Harold Medburn, and the women especially wanted to see him in defeat. They came dressed as witches with crepe-paper shirts and gaudy hats bought at the co-op in the village, harridans set to gloat over him. The men were embarrassed and soberly dressed and headed straight for the bar. They would rather have been in the club.

A small, unofficial sub-committee had been at the school for most of the day. It was a Saturday. There was Paul Wilcox, impractical and rather in the way, Angela Brayshaw who had surprised the committee by volunteering to supervise the catering for the event, and Jim and Patty Atkins. Patty had persuaded Jim to run the bar, but he was grumbling and ungracious because Newcastle United were playing at home. Patty was annoying the others with her arrogant assumption that she was in charge and the morning was chaotic and bad-tempered. When Miss Hunt arrived the mood changed.

Patty was prepared to relinquish control to her. They had been surprised when the teacher had volunteered to help decorate the hall – she was so dignified and stately, and Patty was unsure whether she would approve of the occasion. Yet she walked in at lunch-time, strange and unfamiliar in casual clothes, so they hardly recognized her, and she worked with them all afternoon.

They were amazed by her skill. She transformed the hall, not into a witch’s cavern but a haunted house. In a rare moment of communication about her past she said that she had once had ambitions to be a theatre designer. She stuck ghosts and skeletons and a frieze of ravens on the walls and hung strings of paper bats from the ceiling. Most of the work was the children’s, she said when they congratulated her on the effect. Witches had become rather clichéd and turnip lanterns would be impossible. Think of the fire risk, she said, and the smell of burning turnip always reminded her, for some reason, of scorching flesh.

In the afternoon Matthew Carpenter wandered in quite unexpectedly. He had taken no part until then in the arrangements. He seemed in desperate, almost hysterical good spirits and Patty suspected that he had been drinking. By then most of the work had been completed and there was little for him to do. The parents did not know how to talk to him. He was too young to receive the respect with which they approached the other teachers and yet they could hardly use the amused bantering tone in which they spoke to their older sons or nephews.

During the course of the afternoon he changed and became subdued and so preoccupied that he hardly seemed to notice them. He sat on the edge of a trestle table set up to form the bar and swung his legs like a moody teenager.

Harold Medburn’s arrival late that afternoon was an anticlimax. They had been prepared for it, frightened that he would demolish their efforts with his words, but there was nothing, after all, to be worried about. He arrived, like visiting royalty, with smiles and congratulations. It was true that he seemed a little disappointed to learn that Angela Brayshaw had already gone home and when Paul Wilcox asked nervously if he might have a word in private, the headmaster said imperiously that he was far too busy, but that was only in character. When Medburn made his tour of inspection, Matthew Carpenter left the school with an abruptness that was obvious and rude. But the remaining committee members felt that the headmaster seemed pleased to have provoked such a reaction. He left after half an hour, jovial and beaming, promising to see them all later.

They all went then to eat and change and prepare for the evening.

Jack Robson spent the evening in the small room which was hardly more than a cupboard where the cleaner kept her mops and buckets. It was his retreat. He had a kettle in there and a spare packet of Number Six in case he ran out, and a book. Although he had come to books late in life he needed them now as much as he needed cigarettes. He hoped the party would be a success for Patty’s sake. She hadn’t seemed settled since the bairns had started at school, and he found it hard to understand her recent aimlessness. He wished she were happier. When she was younger they had had their differences. She had been wilful and opinionated, and he had expected the same unquestioning respect which he had given his own father. Since his wife’s death he and Patty had become very close. His friends had pitied his lack of sons, but he was pleased with his two daughters. He would have found it hard to express his love to boys. Susan, his eldest daughter, was clever and rarely came home. She worked as a secretary for an international company in Geneva. He admired her independence and was proud of her, but Patty was different. He was close to Patty. She was very like her mother.

Patty brought him a can of beer early in the evening. She wanted to thank him for his help and show off her costume. She saw him through cigarette smoke, a small grey man with big boots, squatting on a kitchen stool, buried in a biography of a First World War general. He wore baggy trousers which were too long for him and a hand-knitted jersey – the same sort of clothes his father had worn in the thirties. She bought him other clothes as presents but even when he put them on he always looked the same.

‘It’s a canny outfit,’ he said, as if he had noticed her costume for himself and had not needed her to swing around to show him the long skirt and cloak. ‘Is it a good evening?’

‘It seems to be,’ she said. She looked straight at her father. ‘Medburn’s not here yet. He promised he’d come.’

‘He’ll come if he said he would,’ Jack said. ‘He’ll be late. He’ll keep you all guessing.’

‘It’ll be a disaster if he doesn’t come,’ she said. ‘ Everyone’s expecting him.’

‘Away!’ he said. ‘ By now everyone’s enjoying themselves so much that they’ll not notice.’

‘I want him there,’ she cried. She had been drinking wine and was excitable, showing off for him. ‘I want him to see how well it’s going. Otherwise he’ll never admit I made it a success.’

‘He’ll be there,’ Jack promised. He winked at her. ‘I’ll make sure he’s there.’

Medburn owes me that much, Jack thought. He owes me enough to put in an appearance tonight to make my daughter happy. Jack was a year older than Medburn, but they had been to school together, to the school where Medburn was now headmaster. They had sat in different rows of the same classroom. Harry had been a fat, stodgy child, son of a clerk in the shipping office in Blyth, better off than most of them. He had been easily bullied but vicious when provoked to retaliation. No one had particularly liked him even then. And Jack had been at school with Kitty, Medburn’s wife. He had loved Kitty Richardson with a passion which had astounded him as a young man and continued to catch him unawares. She had been a slight, small girl with the colouring of a red tabby cat and narrow green eyes. Perhaps Kitty had been a nickname, suggested by her appearance, though he could never remember her called anything else. He had a sudden picture of her in the school playground, ginger plaits dancing as she skipped with concentrated intensity, small red tongue gripped between her teeth. Jack was not sure how Harold Medburn had persuaded Kitty to marry him. He had been away on National Service; Harry for some forgotten reason had been exempted. But Jack was sure it was a kind of theft.