Claustrophobia (6 page)

Smugness, some might call it. That Kathleen Nancarrow could sail blithely on after ravaging a life like Derrick's all those years ago … no consequences, not even a hiccup, apparently, in her professional life. That she could go on disrupting Pen's happiness, without even knowing it, by her
mere existence. It was not Derrick's fault, after all.

The woman could do with a good shake-up.

4

Jean Sargent was wearing those little felt Christmas earrings with gold trim that usually started to appear on shop counters around November. But it was only July. She must have saved them from last year. They bobbed absurdly as she waved. Pen's heart sank as she saw name cards already placed on the restaurant table – they had separated her and Derrick.

‘Otherwise people tend to stay in their comfort zone,' Jean smiled, ‘and never make an effort to talk to each other.'

‘I thought Christmas was about comfort,' Pen said, but Derrick squeezed her hand, and she shrugged. He pulled the chair out for her, kissed her, and went over to his allocated seat. The table was long, running from one end of the restaurant to the other, where there was a drinks area with eggnog and gently steaming mulled wine you could help yourself to.

Pen was wedged between Jean and a sports master, Kerry Pollard, whose breath was heavy with wine. The small talk on that side, she knew, would run out quickly.

Mr Pollard is a sadist … Mr Pollard watches us under the showers …
Pen had heard it from the boys, like Cliff, who didn't like doing phys. ed. She'd been shocked that there were no doors or even proper cubicles in the gym showers.

‘Sadist in what way, Cliff?'

Cliff had lowered his eyes. ‘He just pushes us harder than he should, you know. Till it hurts. He enjoys making us suffer.'

‘If it's nothing more specific than that,' Derrick had said later to a worried Pen, ‘there's nowhere you can go with it. Really speaking.'

‘You don't think I should follow it up?'

‘No,' he'd barked. ‘I don't.'

Pen was surprised, but left it there. After all, she reasoned, Derrick had strong feelings from his own schooldays.

Derrick was better placed than Pen at the dinner table, sitting between two English teachers he already knew well. Both were women, which might have annoyed some wives, and did slightly bother Pen. But Pen was practised at quelling those sorts of worries, and more preoccupied these days with the ones that weren't right under her nose. The past, she thought – the past was the problem. In the here and now you had more control …

Anyway, she'd checked out those particular two long ago, and knew that neither held any vivid interest for Derrick, though all the women teachers were certainly fond of him.
Derrick was good at polite conversation even when bored. It was performance; it came naturally to teachers, who were on a kind of stage all day long.

This evening was itself a kind of stage, a rejigging of the season, an excuse to eat a heavy traditional meal you couldn't get away with in sweltering December, though some families still tried. Except for those who were migrants from Britain or mainland Europe, it wasn't even nostalgia, since Christmas had never been like this. Log fires and hot stodge.

Pen's mother, before her father left, had done the turkey and ham thing, but always served cold with salads, and followed by ice-cream. A tense meal, both parents putting on an act for their daughter's sake; then her father flaking out in an armchair from drink and heat, virtually unconscious for the rest of the day. Later, no longer there. Scaled-down Christmases, in keeping with a single-parent's budget.

‘So how's this renovation coming along?' Jean said, once they had come to pudding and custard. After her initial surprise, Pen made a little mental readjustment: there must be many occasions when Derrick told these people personal things in her absence, things about their private life, at meetings and afternoon teas. That was quite reasonable.

‘Slowly,' Pen said. ‘There's been a lot of clearing up to do first, and I've been doing some study as well. Just recreational.'

‘Lovely,' Jean said. She didn't ask what the study was. ‘I envy you all that spare time – I know I could do with some. But then I've got kids …'

Pen winced inwardly.

‘What sort of renovations are they?' put in Kerry, to her right.

Another man opposite chuckled. That was Leon Masters, cynical head of the science department. Pen liked him better than the others because he talked less, and more to the point. Weathered and bearded, he was near retirement, and the women generally found him sarcastic when he did speak.

‘Stick with the study,' he said. ‘Renovations are for the birds. People moving rooms around because they're bored.'

There was a jab in this for Jean, who was fond of rearranging her office.

‘Oh, come on, Leon,' Jean said, ‘everyone's doing it these days.'

‘Or watching it vicariously on the telly.' Leon peered over the top of his half-moon glasses at Pen. ‘Truth be had, I reckon it's the last gasp before divorce. All that hammering and sanding, keeping your hands busy when you feel like throttling each other.'

Jean tried to laugh, but no one was sure what to say. Everyone knew Leon was divorced, and any repartee would point this out, which was unseemly. Then he himself said, half-aside, ‘And no, I didn't throttle my wife. Ex-wife. She's doing quite nicely, thank you.'

Jean, quick to shift gears, said, ‘That reminds me – about our next event. I'm thinking maybe a murder-mystery train. My sister-in-law went on one with her workmates and she said it was great fun.'

‘You mean like role-play?' Kerry said. ‘Dress-ups and all that Agatha Christie stuff? Not my cup of tea.'

Leon laughed, and Pen looked at the floor.

‘What about you, Mrs Barber?' He was being mock-formal. ‘Partial to a bit of
noir
?' he said, rounding his vowels pompously, and Pen had to laugh too.

She was grateful for anything that took Jean's attention off her. At least her clothes passed muster these days. Pen cringed to remember Jean's comments on what she'd worn to work in the early days.

‘White heels, white jacket, white handbag.' Jean had grinned. ‘Classic! All you need now is the poodle perm. What's your middle name – Debbie?'

Pen had had to ask Derrick what she meant. But Derrick had shrugged and avoided her gaze, saying it must be some female fashion thing. But Pen knew it was nastiness in another guise.
Oh, I was only joking …

Eventually, watching and learning, Pen had toned herself down. There was the odd slip, over the years, mainly in words, though her vocabulary was as large as anyone's. Once on a staff concert outing she'd made excited observations on a particular tenor's timbre. Jean had tittered and looked around at the others.

‘This isn't
Timber
top, my girl. I'd have thought you of all people would know how to pronounce it.'

Pen was furious. At home she'd checked in the dictionary, and Jean was right. But it wasn't Pen's error. Where she came from, everyone said it ‘timber', not ‘tamber'.

‘She means well,' Derrick had said.

‘No, she doesn't,' Pen had growled. ‘She's a snob. She's always trying to expose … where I come from. She can't stand the fact that a nobody like me is married to a somebody like you.'

‘Who cares what Jean thinks?' Derrick had sighed. But Pen noticed he didn't deny Jean thought it.
Now Jean coughed and banged her fork three times to get the whole group's attention. Pen made a face at Derrick, down the other end, to plead home time. Derrick made a face that agreed. With a few nods, gestures, and quick pats on the back to say goodbye, they slipped out of the restaurant before the brandy was brought in.

All the way home Pen was quiet, watching the clouded stars, leaning her head back as she had done in her parents' car as a child.

‘What are you thinking?' Derrick said.

‘Nothing,' Pen said. She no longer felt obliged to share what was on her mind; in fact, she felt newly protective of it. She was thinking about murder mysteries, Agatha Christie, the binge reading she'd done from the public library when she was young. After a while it was like crossword puzzles, or as if you were reading formulas, maths problems.

Her dad had been proud of her in those days.

‘Pen takes after me,' he'd say to whoever was visiting. ‘I love a good crime story.'

And she would cringe and try to point out that Christie was nothing like the true crime her father devoured – no seedy detail, blood and guts, forensic shudders. It was all about detection. And it hadn't
really
happened. That was a huge difference.

But it was as if he couldn't hear her. He said the same thing to everyone.

She was next door, eleven or twelve, pushing Sally Fearn on the swing.

Sally was an only child but had a whole gym set, rings and swings and slide. They'd taken turns hanging from the trapeze until the blood ran to their heads and they had to drop groggily to the sand beneath. Sometimes they got sand in their hair or teeth.

‘Harder! I want to go higher.'

Pen shoved so hard that Sally flew forward, face into the ground. Blood welled from the centre of her lower lip as if she were blowing dark bubblegum.

‘I'm telling on you!' Sally never cried, but she could get angry.
Throwing a maddie
, they called it.

‘It was an accident. I didn't mean to.'

‘Yes, you did. You're sick,' Sally yelled, stomping up to the house.

‘I am not,' Pen said, running after her.

‘Yes, you are. Just like your dad. My dad says your dad is sick. Sicko.'

‘He does not.'

‘Sicko.' Sally slammed the back door.

Pen sighed, and turned for home.

Years later, in their teens, she'd asked Sally what she meant about her dad. Sally just said, ‘Forget it. They were both sickos.'

Now she wondered whether she was really that different from her father after all.

She still hated true crime: in bookshops, she would cross the room to avoid that section. The lurid cover photos, the distinctive chill of the titles. Dad had been obsessed with them.

But working out a whodunit – wasn't that just the reverse side of the same coin, the same obsession felt by the one who plotted it? And wasn't the plotter somehow just like the actual criminal, trying to make things watertight, leave nothing to chance?

It struck Pen suddenly that her head was a huge repository of deftly imagined crime, however much she had always avoided real grisly news items. She'd spent her adolescence stocking up on these things without even realising it: undetectable poisons, obtainable weapons, clever disposal of bodies, wiping of fingerprints, concealing motives, rationalisations … She was almost an expert.

But these things were fictional, she thought, and out of date too – nothing you could rely on. Not in tune with the way life was these days, with DNA testing and CCTV, things you'd have to factor in if you were plotting now.

And yet … she thought, as it said in the old song:
the fundamental things apply.
It was still only a matter of covering your tracks. Leaving no evidence. Despite all those advances, many cases still went unsolved. People still literally got away with murder.

‘I don't want to go on that murder train thing,' she said to Derrick suddenly. ‘It's just sick. Sicko.'

Derrick grinned. ‘No argument from me! I think we've done our bit now, anyway. Jean can stop hounding us for a while.'

The lecture course was to run for eight weeks, and for Pen they were eight weeks of the same sheer paralysis, as if she were a tongue-tied girl again, unable to act for herself. She absorbed, but did not contribute.

She'd taken the precaution of enrolling under her maiden name of Stone, though it was tempting for a moment to wonder if Kathleen would ever have connected her married name with the Derrick Barber of so long ago. In any case, there were enough students that Kathleen might not really register their names, particularly as there was no assessment, no rollcall.

By the fifth week Pen had been for coffee a couple of times with some of the other class members, so as not to draw too much attention to herself by always going it alone. Despite her initial reservations, they were not a bad lot. And like most students of whatever age, they were stupidly keen to discuss their teacher, which, Pen figured, might let her glean more information.

Just what she would use this information for, she wasn't sure. But everyone said knowledge was power, and she felt, little by little, she was gaining some of that power in this deadlocked situation, even if on the outside she seemed placid to the point of numbness.

Each time, Pen simply sat in the group of seven or eight at two tables pulled together, and sipped her strong flat white. The café they chose was large and utilitarian, and a blast of cold air ran through each time the glass doors leapt open, so Pen huddled toward the wall, nursing the cup to warm her hands and give her a focus. It felt as if there were a glass pane between her and the others. She kept her own input to a minimum, and that seemed to suffice. They had plenty of talk among themselves.

Frank, an older male student, was avid for details of Kathleen's private life. The ladies shook their heads but tossed in whatever crumbs they had.

‘She had a big break-up a couple of years ago,' said Delys, who was a part-time something in the healing professions, something a bit alternative. The sort of woman hard-headed Pen usually couldn't stand.

Delys had taken several other courses with Kathleen Nancarrow since, as she said, they were ‘guaranteed first-rate'.

‘What do you mean, a big break-up?' Frank said. Pen averted her face but burned to know.

‘Oh, I wouldn't say more,' Delys said, scraping the remnant foam from her cappuccino cup, ‘out of respect for her privacy, you know.' Pen, spotting the smoothness of the lie now that she herself had entered that domain, realised Delys
knew
nothing more.