Meet Me at the Pier Head (36 page)

‘You’re engaged,’ said the pianist partway through a bit of Chopin.

‘Yes, but separated until after Christmas when he moves north. We shall probably marry during the Easter holidays, in Kent.’

‘What does he do for a living?’

Lying was so easy, too easy. ‘He’s a doctor.’

Lydia Cosgrove smiled. ‘I see. Well, welcome aboard.

It’s a happy ship on the whole, and the children are well behaved for the most part.’

‘Colin Duckworth?’ Tia smiled.

‘There are always exceptions, Miss Bellamy. He’s very lovable and a mile ahead of most just lately. At last, he’s accepted the fact that school is compulsory.’ She
finished the piece with a flourish Frédéric Chopin would never have touched with a bargepole. ‘Will you and your husband-to-be continue living in Mr Quinn’s flat after the
wedding?’

‘I expect so, until we find somewhere to buy.’ Tia bit her lower lip. She was digging a pit out of which she might find it impossible to climb.

The first hour was fine, people talking in small groups, eating sausage rolls, sandwiches and little homemade cakes that were more or less edible, though rather dry. There was punch containing
very little alcohol, and soft drinks were provided for the dedicated teetotallers. Theo spent much of the hour with Mr Cross, teacher of Standard Four Juniors. Two satellites named Emily Garner and
Lydia Cosgrove orbited them, but the pair of males, clearly not interested in the plumage of their female counterparts, seemed thoroughly engrossed in negotiations of global importance.

Tia decided to be glad that there was to be no skiffling tonight. Had she and Theo sung together, Cosgrove and Garner might have exploded with envy. Cosgrove and Garner sounded like a building
firm or an estate agency or a chambers full of lawyers . . .

Theo kept the corner of an eye on two situations – the pair of prowling predators and men who gazed hungrily at Tia. Miss Bailey had told off her boyfriend twice, while Miss Adams was
admirable, since she ignored her fiancé’s wandering gaze.
I have to get used to this. Men will always covet her, and I shall follow Miss Adams’s example, I hope.

‘So what do you think?’ Paul Cross was asking.

Theo’s brain clicked into gear. ‘Montessori? Nonsense. We’re supposed to let kids swing from the light fittings instead of reading and writing? We’d have a riot on our
hands, and that would be organized by the parents. If our lot went home and did as they pleased, it would be our fault. Discipline matters, as long as it doesn’t involve corporal
punishment.’

Emily Garner homed in. ‘Mr Quinn? Sorry to interrupt, but how is Rosie?’

‘Ah, Emily. She’s very well and happy, thank you. She’ll be able to see her mother soon. I understand that she woke from her coma today, so all seems to be well. You know Mr
Cross, of course.’

‘Oh, that’s good news about Rosie’s mother.’ The young woman glanced over her shoulder. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked. ‘The one in purple, I
mean.’

‘Miss Bellamy,’ he replied.

‘Your new teacher? The one who lives in your upstairs flat?’

‘She’s there until she marries, yes.’

Relief shone in Emily’s eyes. ‘So she’s spoken for?’

‘Yes, she is definitely off the market. Ah, Miss Cosgrove wants me. It’s quiz time.’
Women, bloody women. I suppose they constitute fifty per cent of society, so they
can’t be avoided. But Portia is not for sale, I hope. And we might very well live somewhere else and let out the two apartments if or when it happens. Ah, Miss Garner seems to have taken a
liking to Paul Cross. He’s a widower, but he comes with baggage in the form of three children. Emily Garner doesn’t seem the maternal type, though you can never tell . . . Thank
goodness there were no skifflers available tonight. On top of all this, I couldn’t have coped with performing.

Miss Ellis was plucking names out of a hat. When the three teams were picked, Theo found himself parked at a table with Tia, Emily Garner and Miss Bailey’s other half, whose name was Joe.
Joe, almost salivating, sat opposite Tia, and Theo wondered whether to get him a knife, fork and condiments, since he looked just about ready to consume the vision of loveliness across the
table.

Things went from difficult to impossible when Tia dropped her pencil, bent to retrieve it, and lingered a moment to caress her head teacher’s shin. While the minx made love to his lower
leg, he plastered a fixed smile onto the lower half of his face and promised himself that he would deal with her later.

She knew all the answers, of course. When Joe-At-The-Other-Side-Of-The-Table heard her ‘mouthful of plums’ accent, he reddened and lowered his eyes as if in the presence of royalty.
Theo’s grin was no longer false. He was proud of her. She was lively and uninhibited in company. If he could just climb over his stumbling block and get a vasectomy . . . He swallowed. The
idea of surgery terrified him still. Being sewn up and dragged about after the attack by those freaks in Georgia had left scars on his mind as well as on his skin.

Joe spoke to Theo. ‘Is there anything Miss Bellamy doesn’t know?’

Theo shrugged. ‘Her Russian isn’t good, but she’s OK with scrambled eggs.’

‘Stop talking about me as if I’m not here,’ Tia snapped.

‘Good manners, too,’ Theo announced. ‘Roedean and Oxford, yet she chooses our little school. We are blessed. Ouch.’ She had kicked him.

‘What’s the problem?’ Tia asked sweetly.

‘It’s just an old injury from way back. Baseball.’

‘You must take care, Mr Quinn. These things have a tendency to catch up with us in later life, rather like stiletto heels.’ Tia awarded Joe a dazzling smile. ‘I like quizzes.
They usually contain the sort of nonsense I collect.’

Theo glanced at the next table; Miss Bailey was glowering. There would be trouble for Joe and for Tia later this evening.

Emily Garner, too, was staring at Tia. There was something about the girl’s attitude to Theo that seemed rather comfortable and almost disrespectful. It was probably because they shared a
building . . . And Miss Bellamy was wearing a huge engagement ring which, according to Lydia Cosgrove, was from a fiancé in the south.

‘Question twenty – this is the last one.’ Miss Ellis’s voice, which had remained strangely young and clear, travelled across the hall. ‘Who killed Abraham
Lincoln?’

‘It wasn’t me,’ Tia called out. While people laughed, she watched Theo as he wrote
John Wilkes Booth
on their answer sheet. ‘I knew that,’ she said.

‘What was Booth’s job?’ Theo asked.

‘Actor,’ she replied. ‘Do we get extra points?’

‘No.’ She would get extra marks – black ones. He wrote a short note on his pad. YOU ARE DEAD.

‘So is Abraham Lincoln,’ she whispered.

Emily Garner’s lips tightened into a straight line. These two were more than just friends or neighbours. If they were dancing the light fantastic in Allerton, perhaps Rosie should be
elsewhere. Miss Know-it-All in the purple dress was almost as bad as the child’s mother.

Theo’s table won, of course. Their prize was a packet of lollipops, three yellow plastic ducks for a bathroom, a box of coloured chalks and half a pound of dolly mixtures. These spoils
were divided more or less equally between team members, though there was some infantile squabbling when it came to the pretty red chalk.

Everyone but Miss Bailey and her boyfriend stayed behind to clear up. Joe was pushed out by his girl like a man being frogmarched towards a firing squad. Theo looked through a window and watched
while Anne Bailey read the Riot Act to her captive audience of one.

Jack Peake, caretaker, noticed Theo’s tense expression. ‘Go,’ he said.

‘But there’s all this stuff to be moved—’

‘I’ve six weeks to shift it, Mr Quinn.’

Theo shook his head in despair. ‘Are you sure you’re fit for work?’

‘You saw the doctor’s letter. Go home and look after Rosie and her nan.’

Theo stood still for a moment with a man who had become a close friend and occasional drinking partner in recent years. ‘I’ve had an accident, Jack. A fall, you might call
it.’

‘I know,’ came the quiet reply. ‘You’ve been floating on a cloud for over a week, daft lad.’

‘It shows?’

Jack nodded. ‘And it’s two-way traffic. She’s fallen, too. It’s not going to be easy for either of you come September.’

‘I told her to behave herself tonight.’

‘Yes, but you didn’t tell yourself, did you? I watched you ignoring her deliberate, like, and I saw your face when she ended up in your team for the quiz. See, she attracts attention
from everybody, male and female. Just slow down a bit; it’s early days.’

‘I’m stupid.’

Jack grinned. ‘If you’re stupid, God help the rest of us, Theo. I wouldn’t mind being your kind of stupid, all them letters behind your name. Go home. Go on, bugger
off.’

‘She’s driving me crazy, Jack, and it’s not a long journey because I was halfway there. From the first time I saw her—’

‘I know, lad. We’ve all been there. Take her home.’

Theo drifted to a corner where Tia was stacking chairs. ‘Wait for me in the car,’ he muttered.

‘But I’m—’

‘Now.’

She turned and looked at him. His eyes were glacial. ‘Yes, Sir,’ she said softly before stalking out of the hall.
I shouldn’t have touched his leg. I shouldn’t have
batted my eyelashes at Miss Bailey’s other half. I shouldn’t have smiled so saccharine sweetly at the welfare woman. I shouldn’t have come to the damned party. Oh, someone help
me, here he is.

He climbed into the passenger seat, angry with her, angry with himself, worried about Rosie and Maggie, worried about Kent.

‘Aren’t you speaking to me?’ she asked.

‘I’m not talking to either of us.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘To some place we’re not known. Shut up.’

The some place they weren’t known was the seafront in Southport. It wasn’t so much seafront as sand-front, as the tide was so far out that it was a thin, silver ribbon across the far
horizon. Because of the run of local waters, Southport was stealing Blackpool’s sand, with the result that Blackpool had the more spectacular tides.

He parked the car and sat in silence, staring at the desert spread before him. To hell with writing it all down and giving the essay to her in Kent; he would tell her now, and be done with it.
So where were the words? Was he, like Tom Quirke, hidden beneath a thousand printed chapters? Was he a coward?

‘It was a social situation,’ she said finally after a silence that had lasted for some twelve miles. ‘We were supposed to have fun, though I should be suing the person who
baked those concrete fairy cakes.’

He glanced at her. Why did she have to be so wonderfully pretty? ‘Having an affair with my right leg was wrong.’

She shrugged. ‘Right or left, or right or wrong, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’

Theo sighed heavily. ‘The next time you walk into my school, you come as the teacher of innocents, little five-year-olds entrusted to you. Can’t you control yourself?’

‘It’s difficult near you.’

He shook his head almost imperceptibly. ‘It’s not just you. I go to the other extreme by trying to ignore you. Now, because Emily Garner has designs on me, we could lose
Rosie.’

‘No. Oh, God, no.’

‘Oh yes, Portia.’

She stared at him with tears in those huge, violet eyes. ‘We can’t lose her, Teddy.’ After pulling herself together, she asked, ‘How many women are there in your
queue?’

‘Hundreds. I don’t want Maggie to lose Rosie because of our stupidity.’

‘Then perhaps we should go along with Ma’s plan. She has real faith in us, even after so short a time. I’ve told you, Ma has arranged it all. She really is magic, you know, and
she’s used her charm to talk to officials in Canterbury. I’m so sorry if I’ve put Rosie and Maggie in danger.’

‘The fight ain’t over yet, baby. I’m still in the corner putting my gloves on.’

‘Good for you. I’ll be your second.’

Theo sat stock still for several minutes before plunging into territory he hated to visit. ‘Have you been to London lately?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mean the smart areas or
the slums – just ordinary London where bed and breakfast is affordable.’

She shook her head. ‘I usually stay with Aunt Rachel, Ma’s sister.’

‘There are notices in guesthouse windows or doorways, usually in capital letters and often spelt wrongly; they say
No coloureds, no Irish, no dogs
. You’ve never seen those?
Still, at least they have the courage of their twisted convictions, I suppose.’

‘No, I haven’t seen them, but I’ve heard about them.’

He stared through the windscreen at mackerel clouds illuminated by the setting sun. So beautiful. ‘My father is an Irishman who emigrated first to Liverpool, then to America. He met and
fell in love with my mother, who was a quadroon. She was one quarter black, and her skin was dark, darker than mine. She had tight curly hair, too.’

Tia regarded him quizzically. ‘So what does this mean? Is it your so-called genetic problem?’

‘I am an octoroon, one eighth black,’ was his reply.

‘OK.’

‘An octoroon married to a Caucasian can father or give birth to a child who is completely black.’

Her jaw dropped slightly. ‘And this is your genetic fault? This is what you fear?’

He laughed, though the sound he produced was grim. ‘It’s the attitude I fear, Portia. It’s the notices in windows, the unequal opportunities, the sheer bloody snobbery of
pale-skinned people.’

‘Oh, fuck them,’ she spat.

‘Language, Miss Bellamy.’

‘Sorry, Teddy.’

He waited until she had calmed down. ‘Be quiet,’ he advised. ‘This isn’t easy for me.’

‘Right,’ she whispered. ‘Go on, spit it all out.’

‘The hieroglyphics on my back were executed by the Klan, who wanted me marked as unclean. I am the product of a mixed marriage. Even in the hospital, I was treated as less than human, so
somebody there was a member or a supporter of the Ku Klux evil scum. I don’t look coloured, yet they knew I was.’

Tia remained silent while he searched for words.