More Than Love Letters (19 page)

We watched Bill Forsyth’s gentle, aching comedy together, and I explained to you how everyone mistakenly thinks that it is Dee Hepburn who is Gregory’s girl, whereas in fact it is Clare Grogan. You were sitting on the floor, leaning back against the settee beside me, so that I could look at the cascading curls of your hair, and the tender stretch of white skin where the slope of your neck disappeared into the collar of your shirt, as often as at the screen, or oftener. And when Gregory lay on his back in the park next to Clare Grogan at last, and taught her to dance lying down, I wanted to be lying next to you, and learning the first slow cadences of our own dance together.

Of course, I cannot send you this letter, Margaret. It is going straight in the government issue shredder. But I think I am falling in love with you.

Richard.

42 Gledhill Street
Ipswich

 

15 June 2005

Dear Gran,

How have you been this week? It was great to see you last weekend. I’m just sorry it couldn’t have been for longer. I hope you are doing your exercises – maybe Kirsty would help you with them, if you asked her?

Last weekend I went to London again, to carry on trying to trace Nasreen, like I told you. Richard spent all day Saturday, and half of Sunday, helping me put up the posters. It’s so frustrating to think that now, thanks to the change to the asylum rules, she would be safe to come back to Ipswich, to the hostel, and not be sent back home, but she doesn’t know, and we have no way of getting hold of her to tell her. I do hope that wherever she is, Gran, she is safe, and has found friends she can rely on. On Saturday night I stayed at Richard’s flat. He cooked us a lovely vegetarian supper, and we watched an old video, some 1980s thing. It seemed a bit dated to me to be honest, and a lot of it was about football, so not really my thing, as you know. But it was set in a school, so some of the jokes about the staff and kids had me laughing with recognition. And it did have a rather quirky, sweet ending – which surprised me, because I wouldn’t have had Richard down as an old romantic at all!

Today he came into school to meet my class. Of course it was very nice of him to take the time, and setting it up won me some serious Brownie points with the head. It fitted in well as part of their Citizenship programme (which is not at all what you would imagine, Gran; it’s mostly about picking up litter and going to the dentist regularly). I was a bit taken aback when a photographer from the
Town Crier
turned up as well, but to be fair Richard seemed embarrassed about it, too. In fact he apologised to me about it at least fifteen times, until I started to feel sorry for the photographer. Anyway, he’s promised me some prints for the display boards, so it was quite useful that he came.

I have a feeling that Richard is not very used to children. He opened with a few words about his job, which he delivered as though reading a prepared ministerial statement. Then Chloë Watson asked him if he had met the Queen, and he said no, at which juncture half of the girls lost interest. Josh Cayley asked him in a slightly belligerent tone what it is he actually does, and Richard replied that he helps to make laws. Simon Aldridge said, ‘Like a sheriff?’ and Josh drawled ‘I am the law’ like in a western, so then all the boys started giggling and Richard began to look slightly panicky. Then there was an unfortunate
faux pas
concerning our blind kid, Jack Caulfield. It happened to be Jack who asked whether MPs have to dress up smartly for work, and Richard laughingly gave what he hoped was the disarmingly self-deprecating reply, ‘What does it look like?’ Richard winced when I explained the reason for the general merriment which greeted this, but soldiered gamely on. Abby Bentham said that her dad says all the government do is take his money in taxes, so Richard started to explain how they use the money to provide schools and hospitals, and Nicky Stefanopoulos said, ‘Oh, are you a doctor, then?’ and he said, ‘Er, no,’ and looked hugely relieved when I said that was all there was time for and thank you for coming. By then I was wishing I’d had the foresight to plant a couple of sensible questions beforehand. I’m sure Bryony Cooke would have asked him about the woolsack with every semblance of breathless fascination, if I’d promised her she could sit on the end in assembly for a week. Even when he was leaving Richard was far from comfortable – it’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say ‘thank you for your time’ to a bunch of eight year olds! I really thought he might shake them each individually by the hand, or give them all his card. But later, when the photographer had gone and I was in the classroom clearing up, I looked out into the playground and saw him in goal, while Josh and Nicky took shots at him, and he seemed to be doing OK.

I took Richard out for a thank you meal later (though in the end he insisted on paying half, which rather defeated the object). I suggested a little Italian place in the town centre, because he seems keen on pasta – in fact I’d just got back when I began this letter. I don’t know if it was talking to the kids earlier that made him think of it, or what, but he came over all reminiscent about his childhood. It was rather touching, I thought.

Last night I was round at the hostel sitting with Helen again. She didn’t want to talk, but she has an old Scrabble board from when she was a kid, and she suggested we have a game. I stayed until gone 1 a.m.; we must have played about ten games, sitting together on her bed, and it seemed to really take her mind off things. She says that when she is very depressed she cannot concentrate enough to read a book, it’s just too demanding, and her own troubles keep intruding and squeezing out the story. But TV or the radio don’t absorb her enough to take up her thoughts and drive out the pain. Scrabble seems to be perfect – it requires exactly the right amount of mechanical concentration to keep her brain occupied and leave no room for the bad feelings. Or at least not on the surface, for that short while.

I’ll pack up some more books to post to you at the weekend, to replace the ones I brought home with me this time. I’m only paying back the tiniest sliver of a vast debt, Gran. This week I’ve been reading
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
to my class, and it reminded me of when you read it to me, at bedtimes, that week I came to stay when I was seven. Mum had had her hysterectomy, and Dad was between curates. There’s something about C. S. Lewis’s prose that still gets me every time, just like it did that first time. Not just the old familiar hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck thing, but actually a physical vibration in my stomach muscles, a thrumming, like the resonanace of recognising something loved but half forgotten, or like the beginnings of laughter. Is it just getting older, or why is it that the books I encounter as an adult never have the power to do that to me?

Oh, and don’t forget those exercises, will you?

Lots of love,

Margaret xx

 

 

From:
Richard Slater [[email protected]]
Sent:
16/6/05 15:12
To:
Michael Carragan [[email protected]]

 

Michael, I am a madman, a dolt, an addle-pate, a bedlamite – and growing worse by the day. Not only did I yesterday brave the scornful ravages of an entire classful of eight-year-old inquisitors for the sake of one of Margaret’s smiles (and why on earth didn’t she warn me that one of them was blind?), but then, having allowed her to take me out for dinner, I began prattling to her about guinea pigs. I don’t know how it came upon me, Mike, I honestly don’t. She was so relaxed and confident with that ruthless mob of small hatchet-wielders, and yet once we were alone in the restaurant she was suddenly watchful, and filled with quick tension, so that I found myself speaking softly and making no abrupt movements, as though in the presence of some nervous woodland creature. Maybe it was this mental image which set me off thinking about Napoleon, even though I swear I had forgotten all about him for years. But whatever the reason, there was no excuse for blabbering about him to another adult human being.

Even the name is embarrassing enough! Other children called their pets Toffee or Smudge, but I had to name a tortoiseshell guinea pig after a French military dictator – evidently even at the age of seven I felt stirrings towards power and statesmanship. Anyway, before I knew it I was pouring out to Margaret the entirety of Napoleon’s less than imperial history. How he was fed almost exclusively on a diet of beet sugar, for example. It was one of the side-effects of growing up in Ipswich in the shadow of the sugar works. We lived close to a low railway bridge, under which the beet lorries had to pass on their way to the factory. They always approached the bridge piled high with beet in a jauntily bouffant manner, and emerged trimmed to a short back and sides, leaving piles of spilled sugar-beet at the foot of the bridge for me to collect in my bicycle saddlebags. I can see Napoleon now, looking up at me in cavian ecstasy, with the syrupy juice dribbling down his bearded chin. However, this seductively unsuitable diet quickly cost him both his waistline and all his teeth, and for four years, having lost the ability to do other than suck his food, he lived exclusively on Readybrek and well-boiled vegetable peelings. Until I went to stay with my Aunty Sylvia, who would have no truck with rodents with special dietary requirements. Napoleon was packed off in a cardboard box to live at the house of my friend Leon, where he was dead within the month.

Margaret, not unnaturally, greeted this whole sorry tale with a look in those beautiful, untamable eyes which can only be described as pitying. Her relief was manifest when the time came to argue about the bill.

The restorative effect of beer and your steadying conversation is urgently required.

Richard.

 

Richard Slater (Labour)

Member of Parliament for Ipswich

 

 

WITCH

Women of Ipswich Together Combating Homelessness

 

Extract from minutes of meeting
at Persephone’s house, 16

June 2005, 8 p.m.

 

We were delighted to welcome Della Robertson from number 27, as a new member of the collective. Pat T. and Emily will redraft the evening/weekend cover rota, and the rota for sitting with Helen, to include Della’s name. Alison agreed to go with Della on any emergency call-outs for her first few times.

 

Helen has had a difficult week, even with the members of the collective continuing to come in in the evenings. She has cut up twice during the night, on one occasion needing to go to A&E for stitching. Helen feels that if things go on as they are, she may need to seek a full-time hospital admission, rather than just weekend respite admissions as at present.

Carole is greatly enjoying her job at the medical laboratory. Alison said that her supervisor reported that the test tubes have never been cleaner.

 

Pat and Pat announced that they will be having a civil partnership ceremony on 21 December, the first day that the new legislation comes into force. Everyone is invited to attend. They had brought along a bottle of asti spumante to celebrate their announcement.

From:
Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]
Sent:
22/6/05 23:57
To:
Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]

 

Dear Becs,

My evening has been a typical mixture of tragedy and farce. St Edith’s is holding its annual jamboree to mark Suffolk Book Day on Friday. Without the least hint of irony, literacy hour has been cancelled in favour of the mass painting of scenes from Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm. And the kids and staff all have to dress up as a favourite literary character for charity. Of course I was going to go as Minerva McGonagall – after all she was the heroine and role model for three-quarters of the girls on the B.Ed. at college. All I would have needed is some round glasses and that academic gown that Gran insisted on buying me for graduation. (Everyone else just got them from Moss Bros, but I think Gran had this idea that it would somehow come in useful in a primary school. Can’t think when, unless it’s when we’re doing clay.) But the deputy head made such a fuss about how everyone came as characters from Harry Potter last year, and we mustn’t feed the head’s already worrying Albus Dumbledore delusions. And there was this video I watched at Richard’s –
Gregory’s Girl
, it was called, an ’80s thing – and there’s a little recurrent motif in it where a kid is wandering the corridors of his school in a huge penguin outfit. For some reason this stuck with me, and I thought, why don’t I go for something a bit more challenging, do the thing properly? I mean, what is being a primary school teacher all about? This term I’ve been reading
The Twits
to my class, so I thought, I know, I’ll go as the Roly-Poly Bird!