Gifted and Talented (6 page)

Olly, waiting in the gathering cold and dark outside Branston, had imagined at first that Isabel was simply late. Any moment she would emerge, smiling and full of apologies, from amongst the knots of students and their parents coming in and out of the farty-sounding doors. But the minutes went by, and with it the file of shambling youth with plastic bags of teabags and milk cartons – the latter, Olly knew, destined to sit outside on the windowsills of their rooms until they curdled or fell off. And still Isabel did not appear.

He occupied himself in studying Branston’s architecture. It was possible that he had judged it unfairly, inasmuch as he had ever thought about it at all. It was not by Wren, admittedly, but Christopher Wren had been a modern builder himself once, and the builder of Branston might well be the Wren of the future. Although, as Olly’s eye ran along Branston’s boxy front, where the pale grey concrete was streaked black and green with age and weather, he rather doubted it.

After half an hour had gone by on the large red digital clock above the main entrance, Olly could no longer discount the possibility that Isabel was not coming. He struggled to believe it. She had not seemed the flaky sort – anything but, in fact. Had she not tried to help the old lady on the train? A good-hearted act, if ever there was one. And there was an innocence about her, a wide-eyed capacity for surprise and delight that seemed somehow at the heart of her charm.

He had thought she liked him, too.

He wondered if the pale concrete of the college building, oddly visible despite the darkness, was actually luminous. It was, he thought, just the kind of trick some crazy sixties Swedish architect might pull. What had been his name again?

His own T-shirt was luminous, Olly noticed with mild interest. He had gone casual for the date and, while this T-shirt wasn’t ideal, it was the only clean thing he had and better than the shiny suit. At least, unlike the suit, it was intended to be a joke. He’d bought it at a festival the preceding summer; it had accurately captured the view his then girlfriend’s father had of him. Olly had not realised until now that, if he stood in a completely dark corner, the words ‘I Am The Antichrist’ would appear to hang in midair.

Claudia, the girlfriend, a North London princess and brilliantly clever, was clearly intended for greater things than a failed student actor entertaining dim hopes of local journalism. They had parted amicably enough and Olly wondered what she was doing now. Not standing outside Branston College in the intensifying cold and shifting from foot to foot, that was for sure. He decided he might as well go.

But not without venturing into the college interior first and inquiring after her. A great Muscle Mary of a porter flatly refused to let him in and seemed to take particular pleasure in confirming that no, no message had been left.

In a violent spasm of embarrassment and self-disgust, Olly retreated. Isabel was not interested – no doubt thought him a pretty pathetic specimen. In a nasty suit. She was the Antichrist, not him. She was rude and ungrateful. How could he have been so mistaken? He was losing the ability to judge people along with the rest of his faculties. He resolved to dismiss her from his thoughts, but she bounced back immediately, with her long smile and brilliant red hair.

The path back to the road was through shaggy rhododendron bushes, lit by futuristic, triffid-shaped streetlamps that were presumably part of the
Gesamtkunstwerk
. They didn’t seem to Olly to work all that well; it was oddly hard to see.

He walked slowly, musing on the immediate future. He would return to the small terraced house where he had rented a room all summer. It was a hideous room, cold and draughty, and with some other student upstairs who banged his huge feet on the floor in time to the start of
EastEnders
. Leaving it would not be a wrench. But leaving town altogether would.

There had been more riding on Isabel than she could ever have imagined, than he himself had realised, perhaps. The thought of their date, of perhaps striking up a relationship, was all that remained to tether Olly to the town where he had spent the last three years. He had no money. There was no prospect of a job. The lease on his room was at an end. All that lay before him was the train back home. It was a ghastly thought, made all the ghastlier by the suspicion that his parents were dreading his return every bit as much as he.

Mooching along, staring at the ground, his hands plunged into his jeans, Olly now cannoned straight into someone else not looking where they were going either. It was a thin man with a wispy beard and a baggy hound’s-tooth jacket that had clearly seen better days.

‘Ooof!’ exclaimed Dr David Stringer, deputy head of the Branston English department, as his books and papers exploded all around him. To his incalculable relief Stringer saw that the person he had collided with was a student and not, as he had feared, the terrifying Professor Green, his boss.

Gillian Green was in a state of panic at the moment and lashing out at all her subordinates. The arrival of the new Master had spread terror like a contagion throughout the college. And yet Richard Black seemed to David to be at pains to avoid his colleagues, rather than launch inquiries into their departments as Gillian seemed to fear. She was, he knew, about to haul him over the coals for ‘inappropriate internet representation’, but that was largely her fault. It had been she who insisted, when the American Master was first mooted, that David get himself a Facebook page in an effort to seem more ‘with it’. And now someone – he had no idea who – had put neon devil horns on all the photos of him and there were hairy bottoms on his personal wall.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Olly said, guiltily peeling close-typed sheets of A4 from the dirty tarmac. ‘These are all muddy now.’

‘They were muddy anyway,’ David said scathingly. ‘In terms of argument,’ he added. He had gathered the papers up and stood looking regretfully down at the muddied knees of his cords and the scuff marks on the front of his suede desert boots. Professor Green, he knew, would not be impressed.

Would she sack him? Gillian had made it known already that she wanted someone younger, sexier and above all better known to do the appearances on
In Our Time
that David had come to regard over the years as his own. As his mirror confirmed on a daily basis, he had a good face for radio. And he had always got along well with Melvyn Bragg.

He looked speculatively at the youth before him. He was clean, fair and pleasant looking, but seemed anxious. He wore a T-shirt that said, ‘I Am The Antichrist’. The anarchic spirit of this appealed immediately to David, who felt that too many of today’s students were hopelessly conservative. ‘How very interesting; I’ve always wanted to meet you,’ he said, feeling skittish despite everything.

Olly was nonplussed. ‘Sorry?’

‘The T-shirt,’ David explained, smiling. ‘I’ve read about you in a variety of texts, of course:
Paradise Lost
and so on. But it’s fascinating to meet the devil in the flesh.’

Olly felt as if he were going mad. After everything that had happened – and everything that had not – a surreal conversation with an obviously deranged don felt like yet another last straw. ‘I’m not the Antichrist,’ he said between gritted teeth. ‘I bought this T-shirt as a joke. I know it’s not very funny. I’m actually a failed-actor-failed-writer-failed-journalist former student who’s just been stood up and I’m going to have to go back home now.’ He stopped, feeling suddenly, mortifyingly, as if he might burst into tears.

‘What’s so bad about home?’ asked David, wondering at the note of suppressed despair. Student accommodation now was a lot better than in his day.

‘I mean
home
home. Parents. Old bedroom. Harry Potter books. Dinosaur posters.’ Olly groaned. ‘I can’t afford to do anything else.’

‘Oh dear,’ said David. ‘I see what you mean. Ignominious return of the prodigy and all that.’

‘You don’t know of a job?’ Olly asked, encouraged by the sympathy. ‘I’ll do anything.’

David knitted his brows and looked hard at Olly. He had enough experience of students to be able to tell wheat from chaff at a glance. He sensed that this youth had a kind heart; he had helped him with the papers, after all. He also had an open, trustworthy face and looked – T-shirt notwithstanding – reasonably respectable.

‘I even tried to get work cleaning, but . . .’ Olly’s voice trailed away as he remembered the fierce Zambian lady and her scathing opinion of writers.

Cleaning. The word had set the cogs in David’s brain whirring. Actually, he did need a cleaner, rather badly. Neither he nor his wife, Dotty, were any good at housework, which was compromising the plan of letting out their attic room for money. David had, some weeks ago, been to see a contract cleaner: a terrifying African lady who had almost laughed in his face when he said what he could pay for her services. The cost, David worked out, would more than absorb any extra income the room might generate in the first place.

‘Cleaner,’ he repeated, thoughtfully. He and Dotty had then tried Plan B, which was to get their teenage daughter on mop-and-bucket duty. But Hero could hardly be prevailed upon to get dressed in the morning, let alone shoulder the housework burden. ‘Well, we do need one, as it happens,’ David said slowly. ‘But it’s rather a big house, one of those old Victorian places down by the station, you know. And it hasn’t been cleaned for some time.’

‘I’ll do it for a room,’ Olly burst in excitably. ‘And if you don’t have a room, a cupboard would do,’ he added. ‘Under the stairs, if you like. If it’s good enough for Harry Potter, it’s good enough for me.’

A weak light was shining into the worried interior of David’s head. It would be useful to have a resident cleaner. Some of the more difficult mothers whose children Dotty taught violin to remarked on the mess from time to time and, given the way things were with the faculty, he couldn’t risk any of his students taking similar complaints to Professor Green. A cleaner would help, definitely. It would actually be an investment.

He stared at Olly. ‘You’d really rather live in a cupboard in my freezing hovel of a house than go back home?’ Then, as Olly nodded, he asked, ‘Just how bad
is
your home?’

Olly managed a smile. ‘It’s not bad. It’s like you said – the going back. I’d feel like a failure.’

David nodded. He knew all about feeling like a failure. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’s a deal. You can move in as soon as you like.’

‘The name’s Allegra Trott,’ barked the voice on the other end of the phone. ‘I’m a City director and I’ve just been given an enormous bonus.’

Richard tsked under his breath. It was Monday morning, he had briefly stopped in his office on the way to a meeting and he had no intention of being held up by this obviously misrouted call. ‘Congratulations,’ he said sardonically. ‘But—’

‘So,’ Allegra cut in, in a commanding tone Richard could well believe brought boardrooms to their knees, ‘I thought I’d ring up the old pickle factory and ask if there was anything I could do.’

She paused meaningfully. The appropriate neuron now leapt over the synapse and the connection in Richard’s brain was made. She was offering money. Fine. He now knew to route the call to the development office. Fundraising was their business. He was not here to drum up money for Branston.

That was the job of Flora Thynne, development head. Richard had met her during his first few days in his new post. Tall, as thin as her name and with a long, mournful face devoid of make-up and wispy dark hair caught up at the back, she had made no attempt to disguise how enormous, even hopeless, was the task heaped on her frail and slightly sloping shoulders.

Whatever principles and influences its architect had in mind when designing Branston, it seemed that the British climate was not among them. Over the years since, the freezing cold of winter had cracked the concrete. The frequent and plentiful rain all year round had collected on the flat roofs and caused damp patches to spread in the rooms beneath. Simply keeping the college standing soaked up money, Richard learnt, and that was before any of the grandiose plans for new library wings, extended bursary schemes and academic chairs were gone into. There was the entire roof to replace, too.

Well, now here was Allegra, who might just do it.

Putting the call through, Richard reflected tersely that Flora should arrange to have ‘The Allegra Trott Memorial Roof’ spelt out on it in tiles so it would be visible to passing aircraft. The American institutions he had worked in would have done it without hesitation. Their tiles would, moreover, have glowed in the dark.

Shortly afterwards, Richard left his office for the meeting with the college council. Hurrying down to the college’s front entrance, he almost collided with Flora Thynne, emerging from the development office. ‘Did you,’ he asked her, ‘talk to that Trott woman?’

Flora trained a pair of sunken, hopeless eyes on him. ‘She asked me,’ she said in her dreary voice, ‘to put something in the post.’

‘And have you?’ Richard was half-annoyed with himself for even being interested. It was not his business. He may be the Master, but first and foremost he was a scientist. It was up to Flora to grasp any opportunities she was presented with, and Allegra Trott was obviously an open goal.

‘I’m on my way to the porter’s lodge with this now.’ Flora raised up her right hand, which held a small sheet. Richard read it in disbelief. It was for the list of Branston merchandise available at the office in the main entrance: Mugs, £5.99. Tea towels, £3.50. Postcards, 25p each or 80p for a set of four.

Burying the urge to ask her whether this really was the best she could do, Richard went on his way. He was not going to get involved. No more than he was going to get involved in the forthcoming college council meeting.

The thought of it was irritating, nonetheless. While he had been assured he need make only the most cursory appearances at official gatherings, just for the sake of the minutes, he had cursorily appeared at enough recently to know that nothing could safeguard him against the inevitable tedium.

He entered the meeting room abruptly and sat down immediately, so swiftly that the others were still struggling respectfully to their feet while he opened his notebook and clicked his pen expectantly. They sank down again and there was a clearing of throats and a flutter of paper. The Bursar smiled round in avuncular fashion. ‘Shall we begin?’

Outside in the gardens Diana was trying to stave off her worries about Rosie’s first day at school. Her stomach was rumbling with a mixture of tension and hunger. Her own breakfast had been scrappy, so intent had she been on making sure Rosie finished her cereal and ate her banana. Her nervousness about her own ‘proper’ first day had been subsumed in worry about her daughter’s, but Rosie had maintained her savoir-faire. ‘Of course it’s a much bigger school than my old one, Mum,’ she had said cheerfully to Diana’s tentative efforts to inure her to prospective shocks. ‘But more children means more people to make friends with, doesn’t it?’

The rather dull, grey, heavy quality of the day pressed on Diana’s spirits. It was cold and rather sulky weather, the flipside of autumn’s dazzling copper-tinted face, the sort that might dissolve into heavy, relentless rain. Diana took a plastic bag from her pocket and spread it out on the path for a kneeler, wishing she had plastic to cover the whole of the rest of her too. Finances did not yet allow the purchase of the heavy-duty waterproofs she would surely need soon.

She began pulling up some dandelions and thinking that, had she started a month or two later, the worst would have been over, weather as well as weeds. The dry winter frosts would have killed them off and in places it would have been as simple as turning over a spade. Now, of course, just after the fierce growth of summer, the weeds were at their most rampant. Settling on her knees, Diana tried to concentrate instead on the rewards of weeding – the clean dark soil, the piercing pleasure of feeling a well-anchored dandelion root finally give and slide out.

And, of course, once the weeds were gone, she could really start on the ideas she had. Diana glanced over to the small circle of stagnant water, which might be a pond if it were cleared out and planted round the edge, the scabby, bald patches beneath the trees, which could be transformed with bluebells and cyclamen.

The neglect of Branston’s gardens had its benign aspects; beneath the weeds and the crisp packets were the tiny, glowing petals of many an ancient species. She was surprised to see, this late in the year, a few scattered red and yellow bird’s foot trefoils, and even a couple of yellow tormentil, and that little purple one, the little circular flower head with turreted purple petals, called ‘self-heal’.

She had already decided to create a wild-flower garden at Branston. Diana loved wild flowers, the names especially: viper’s bugloss, bats-in-the-belfry, priest-in-the-pulpit, hairy tare, frogbit, water soldier, policeman’s helmet. Lady’s bedstraw, once used as a mattress stuffing. Rest harrow, which is what grew if one rested one’s harrow, presumably. Periwinkle, or ‘joy-of-the-ground’, because it bound itself to the earth with nodes from the trailing stems. There was some in Branston’s garden and Diana crouched by it now, marvelling at the history of the dark purple flowers. In Italy it was known as ‘
fiore di morte
’, flowers of death, because heretics had been led to the stake wearing garlands of it. Periwinkle was planted on graves in the belief it protected against evil. Uprooting it was said to cause nightmares and haunting.

Diana tackled a buttercup root. Buttercups were so deceptive, that delicate yellow enamelled flower belying the tough and vicious root system beneath. You had to get all your fingers underneath, difficult to do properly in gloves. Apart from really freezing weather, or when picking up litter, Diana never wore them. She preferred to handle nature directly; nature returned the compliment by ruining her nails and ageing her hands.

About to pull up another plant, she paused. A delphinium, it looked like: weedy, yellowish, the plant dying off, but those fringed leaves were unmistakeable. It gave her a wonderful idea. She imagined the stained concrete walls which so abounded at Branston transformed by row upon row of great blue floral rockets ranging from deepest violet blue to palest forget-me-not. What a sight it would be: a jump of blue joy that would hit anyone entering the garden right in the eye and in the heart.

Her thoughts swung back to Rosie and she felt apprehensive once again. How was her daughter getting on? How was she finding the school? How was she coping with going from one extreme to the other, from the private and exclusive with education individually tailored to the child and delivered by committed professionals, to . . .

Diana pulled herself back from sliding into wholehearted panic. Well? she demanded of herself, To
what
? Who was to say that the education at Campion Primary wasn’t delivered by committed professionals? She hadn’t given them a chance yet.

She had weeded so fast and frantically her bucket was full. Standing up to get another, Diana spotted a small coil of brown dog poo under a nearby bush. Her nose wrinkled in disgust. One of the few advantages of Branston’s garden was that it seemed relatively free of animal faeces. Certainly there was nothing akin to the horror stories she had heard about London’s prestigious garden squares, whose gardeners could encounter anything from aggressive tramps to Coke bottles filled with taxi drivers’ pee, tossed out of the cabs as they drove by.

The poo looked new, Diana thought, rummaging for a plastic bag with which to remove it. But she had seen no dogs at Branston. They weren’t, or so she understood, allowed.

The session with the council, at a table of Arthurian roundness in one of Branston’s peculiar circular concrete meeting rooms, was proving even longer and drearier than Richard had feared. So far he had thought mostly about his ongoing experiment, tuning in only occasionally. The first time he did this the Bursar was being congratulated for employing such a cheap new gardener, at a salary half of that enjoyed by her predecessor.

‘A gardener?’ Richard put in, suspiciously. Any effort at improving the grounds was a sinister development, in his view. He had hoped the college would not find one; who in their right mind, after all, would wish to tackle such a wilderness? Who could?

He felt slightly relieved to hear the person chosen was a recent graduate of horticultural college, and a woman. He pictured someone very young and slight, someone whose impact on the wholesale wreck of the Branston gardens would surely be minimal. With any luck, she’d resign after a week. ‘And a single parent,’ the Bursar had added, shaking his head. ‘A sign of the times, I suppose.’

At this, all Richard’s liberal neurons sparked at once and, for a second, the temptation flared to demand what exactly the Bursar meant by that. He desisted, however; the college officials were quite curious enough about his personal circumstances as it was and he had no intention of positively inviting their attention. He dismissed the college gardener from his thoughts. But instantly, perhaps inevitably given the topic, they routed to Amy and a huge, hopeless wave of longing swept over him.

He lowered his eyes; such private thoughts in a public place were doubly difficult. He tried to remain scientific and detached and examine this fascinating close personal evidence of how mere patterns in the brain folds could produce such intense physical misery. But the scientist, as always, was instantly overwhelmed by the man, and mental images of cortices were replaced by pictures of her soft brown hair in the sun, the scent of her skin, how happy they had been together.

‘. . . look to alternative sources of funding and ways of raising the college’s profile . . .’ the Bursar was intoning in his fruity voice.

Richard, now drowning in memories, realised the agenda had moved on. He battled his way back to the surface. This could not continue. He must find a permanent way to cope.

Last night a bottle of cough medicine spotted in the bathroom cabinet had reminded him how drinking the whole lot would produce a neuronal blockade detaching sensory information from meaning. But he knew also that the effect would be short term and it would eventually become reattached. Harder drugs like heroin, mimicking as it did the chemicals produced by the brain to alleviate suffering, was another potential source of comfort. But he would hardly be solving his problems by becoming a drug addict.

He forced himself to think of the labs, of work, and felt the coiled spring within him give a little. Amy was gone, he was far from home, but at least he had his research. If he could ever get to it. The temptation to kick his legs against this ridiculous round table was almost irresistible. Would this meeting ever end? Looking at the agenda, he couldn’t work out where they were. There was an item called ‘Amber Piggott’ – was that a person?

The college admissions tutor, a combative-looking woman with claret hair and purple glasses, was expressing her hope that one of the new students might attract some of ‘the right sort of attention’ to Branston.

They were discussing this Amber Piggott, Richard realised. She seemed to be a person. She was very rich and, for some reason, famous.

‘An “it girl”?’ he echoed, puzzled.

The Bursar leant over. ‘Goes to lots of glamorous society parties.’

This made no sense to Richard. ‘What sort of societies?’ His frame of reference was firmly academic and none of the societies he could think of was remotely glittering.

‘Oh, you know,’ the Bursar said vaguely. ‘Nightclubs with Prince Harry, that sort of thing. She’s always in the gossip pages.’