Out of My Depth (8 page)

‘Fine, thanks.’

‘Me too. I assume you had an A for music?’

‘Yes.’

‘Me too.’

‘What other subjects did you go for in the end?’

‘History and geography. You?’

‘English and French.’

‘Oooh, you’re mad! All those books to read. And French? Couldn’t you just stick to Debussy?’

Mrs Grey’s entrance sent Tamsin and Izzy scurrying to their own classroom. Mrs Spencer! Hairy Mary! Izzy still couldn’t believe her misfortune.

Tamsin looked at her and grimaced. ‘I don’t know how you deal with those misfits,’ she remarked, as they sat down together at the furthest table from Mrs Spencer’s desk.

‘Oh, MJ’s all right,’ Izzy said, mildly. ‘You just have to get used to her. She’s led a sheltered life and she doesn’t know how to talk to people.’ She thought about Mary-Jane in the wider world. ‘She’s probably a bit autistic or something.’

‘Your music lessons are going to be a laugh a minute.’

Izzy’s heart sank still further. ‘I know.’ She looked at Tamsin. ‘We still could leave, you know. It’s not too late. We haven’t started anything yet.’

‘Yeah. We could, but we won’t. We’ll stay here and hate it and get some A levels, and then we’ll run away from Cardiff and never look back.’

Mrs Spencer strode into the classroom. Tamsin and Izzy looked at one another. Mrs Spencer was the very queen of the misfits. She was as broad as she was tall, just about, and in years to come Izzy would be unable to differentiate her, mentally, from Anne Widdecombe. There was, however, something more sinister about her than about the future prisons minister. At least, later on, once Ms Widdecombe went blonde, Izzy came to regard her as a benign form of Mrs Spencer. Mrs Spencer had platinum blonde hair, which she wore in a Beatles cut. She wore two-piece suits with buttons that stretched over her saggy front, where breasts and stomach merged into one amorphous bulge. Her shoes bulged out, the leather taking the shapes of individual toes. None of this mattered, of course. Izzy would not have dreamed of thinking less of someone because they looked weird. It was just convenient that Mrs Spencer’s appearance provided a focus point for the girls’ hostility; because Mrs Spencer was malign and mean and unfair, and drunk on her own power. Isabelle had long loathed her. She started hating her one day in the fourth form, when she had taken her grade five clarinet exam. The exams were held in school, and girls missed lessons to go to them. Everyone knew that. Her exam happened to fall in a biology lesson. It went well, she was relieved, and when she slipped into the lesson, to catch the last fifteen minutes, she was smiling because it was over.

Mrs Spencer was in the middle of explaining osmosis, with the aid of a complex diagram on the blackboard. She broke off, mid-sentence, when she saw Izzy, and stared at her thunderously, sucking her breath in ominously past her teeth.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Izzy said, walking to her desk and sitting next to Suzii. ‘I had my clarinet exam.’

All eyes were on Mrs Spencer. Several of the girls had music exams that week, and Izzy’s behaviour was entirely normal and sanctioned. Yet Mrs Spencer had the evil glint in her eye.

‘You had a clarinet exam?’ she shrieked, suddenly and furiously. ‘Well, I HAD A BIOLOGY LESSON!’

‘Sorry,’ said Izzy, confused, and she started taking her books out of her bag.

‘DON’T YOU LOOK AWAY WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU, YOU IMPERTINENT GIRL! STAND UP!’

Izzy stood up and, for five minutes, Mrs Spencer yelled at her. A stream of unfocused rage ended with the demand to know, ‘WHY DID YOU NOT TELL ME YOU WERE GOING TO BE LATE?’

Izzy tried to stand up for herself. ‘Because you don’t have to with music exams. They’re part of school. Mrs Twiss specifically said we didn’t need to excuse ourselves from lessons because all teachers knew there were music—’

‘YOU ARE EXTRAORDINARILY RUDE! I HAVE OFTEN NOTICED THAT GIRLS WHO DO MUSIC ARE RUDER THAN GIRLS WHO DO NOT. STAND OUTSIDE THE DOOR AND COME AND APOLOGISE TO ME AT THE END OF THE LESSON.’

Oh, piss off you sad, power-crazed bitch. Izzy didn’t say it. She took herself out into the corridor, tears pricking her eyes. There were still ten minutes of the lesson left. She stood outside the door for a while, then sat down and took some homework out of her bag. She couldn’t focus on it. She had never been sent out of a lesson before and Mrs Spencer’s fury seemed so random and yet so personal that she was stunned. Izzy avoided trouble. She had never been someone who could laugh off verbal assaults. She hated the woman, hated her. She comforted herself with the rumours. Mrs Spencer was said never to have been married, but to have changed her Miss into a Mrs to quell suspicion. She was said to be living in a flat in the Cathedral Road with a sixth former from a couple of years ago; a girl Izzy vividly remembered as the only ‘out’ lesbian the school had contained within anyone’s memory. They had all been fascinated by Heather, with her short hair and her manly clothes. She would turn up in a man’s suit, right down to the waistcoat and tie. It was, Izzy admitted, highly unlikely that she was actually living in domestic bliss with Mrs Spencer, but it was an excellent rumour. ‘It’s true!’ Janie had said the other day. ‘My sister’s friend saw them buying a bed in Habitat!’

And, Izzy told herself, biting back her pain, and she is a sad woman who counts for nothing in the real world. She just gets a kick out of humiliating people, and probably most of all out of humiliating people like me who aren’t used to trouble.

As she heard the chairs scraping back, she jumped to her feet and prepared her apology It stuck in her throat, but Mrs Spencer hardly seemed to care. She gave her a detention, almost as an afterthought. When Izzy complained to Mrs Twiss in the music school, the head of music said nothing. She just rolled her eyes and gave Izzy a conspiratorial glance, accompanied by an expressive shrug. Tamsin, Suzii and Amanda all agreed that Mrs S must fancy Izzy. The thought made her gag.

Now Izzy sat as far away from the woman as she could, and she avoided looking at her. The vivid recognition that that’s not fair was still burning in her, two years after the humiliation. She had kept quiet in biology classes for the rest of the GCSE course, had flinched if the woman so much as looked at her, and had put her head down and done the work as averagely as she could, so she wouldn’t stand out. One of her chief joys on the completion of GCSEs had been the knowledge that she would never again have to sit in the same classroom as that bitch. And now, here she was, on her very first day in the sixth form, fiddling with her pens and notebooks and, once again, trying to be invisible.

Mrs Spencer sat on a table, her feet on two different chairs, and none of her charges dared to giggle. She looked around with her funny pointed smile, and said, ‘Hi there! Welcome to the sixth form, ladies.’

‘Hi!’ said a couple of the more conformist members of the form.

‘Right, well, first of all, things are going to be very different now from the way they were for you all last year. Bobs, nice try, but no chance.’ She inclined her head and Bobs meekly headed out of the room to wash off her make-up. ‘Oh, and welcome to the new girls.’ She bestowed a malevolent grimace on two girls who were sitting at the front. They both looked nonplussed.

‘Hello,’ they said, in unison, uncertainly.

‘Which of you is . . .’ she consulted a list. ‘Which of you is Joy Wong?’

‘I am,’ said one girl.

Tamsin giggled. ‘No shit,’ she whispered.

‘So you,’ said Mrs Spencer, ‘must be Rose.’

‘Yes,’ said the other new girl. ‘I’m normally called Rosie, though.’

‘Rosie it is! Everyone got that? Joy and Rosie, our new girls. I’m sure your time with us will be a joy and the future will be extremely rosy.’ There was a wave of dutiful laughter.

Izzy found the whole thing excruciating. Worse still was the way Mrs S sauntered over to her and Tamsin afterwards and perched on the edge of their table.

‘Always pay close attention to the girls at the back,’ she said, with a cackle. ‘That’s what every teacher learns over the years. How are you two?’

‘Fine,’ Izzy muttered.

‘Not bad, thanks, Mrs S,’ Tamsin said, brightly. ‘How are you?’

‘Very well, thank you, Tamsin. Thank you for asking. Now, let’s all get off to assembly, shall we?’

Izzy knew it was her punishment for abandoning her principles. In a way, it was funny.

Les Landes, France

August 2005, Friday

As I was walking out of the door, the phone started to ring. Our telephone had a habit of ringing at the least convenient moment, so this was, in many ways, entirely expected.

‘Roman!’ I yelled. I yelled it even though I knew he wasn’t there. I knew he wasn’t there because I had sent him out myself, fuelled by paranoia and anxiety, to buy toys for the children. He had laughed, had told me that, firstly, children came with their own toys and, secondly, they ought to be able to improvise, considering that we had a large garden with climbable trees and a swimming pool. He had humoured me and gone anyway, and now I wished he hadn’t. I was leaving for the airport, and the phone was ringing.

I wanted to let the answerphone get it, but I couldn’t stop myself. I ran back into the house, and snatched it up. I even forgot to answer it in my French voice.

It was a man. ‘Susanna,’ he said. I couldn’t place him. Very few people called me Susanna, least of all because it wasn’t actually my name, but an upmarket variation of my name that I had assumed for work purposes.

‘Yes?’ I said, cautiously.

‘Neil Barron.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I sat down. ‘Hello.’

‘You sound nervous,’ he said.

‘Not nervous,’ I said, hoping my voice was steady. I kicked off my beaded flip-flops and rested the soles of my feet on the cool tiles. ‘Actually, I was just walking out of the door. I’ve got some friends I haven’t seen for years coming for the weekend.’ I pulled the strap of my dress up. My dress was white and pale green, calf-length and clingy, and I hoped it looked as good as it felt.

'Apologies,’ he said. ‘I won’t keep you.’ He was waiting for me to say something.

‘I’ve got ten minutes.’ I had an hour, but not for him.

‘Then I’ll spare you the formalities. You’ve spoken to my wife.’

I was hesitant. ‘I’ve spoken to Sarah Saunders. Who says she isn’t your wife, in fact.’

He laughed, too loudly. ‘It’s too embarrassing for words, isn’t it? I mean, ludicrous. He says. She says.’

‘Yes, it is. Confusing. And I don’t think it’s something I need to be involved in, if that’s all right with you.’ I shook my head. Had I really just said ‘If that’s all right with you? I was glad Roman hadn’t heard that.

‘I quite agree. For what it’s worth, my wife — Sarah Barron, née Saunders — has been suffering with something akin to a nervous breakdown. And she’s extremely angry with me. She had a right to be cross, but not to drag you into it, and I can only apologise again.’

He was too glib. ‘Can I speak to her?’

‘She’s not here. She doesn’t know I’m calling you. It’s a little, well, delicate.’

‘So you’re telling me to forget all about it?’

‘I’m suggesting you should.’

I sighed. ‘I wish I could. But I need to speak to her first. Can she call me tomorrow or something? You do understand?’

‘What, that for all you know, I might be the murderous art commissioner?’ He chuckled. ‘Yes, quite. Speak to her in the morning.

‘And then I’ll be done with it.’

‘Which is for the best. For all of us.’

I was uneasy as I started the car. I wanted to believe him. She hadn’t sounded mad. Both of them were plausible. He was charming, as he had been when I’d spoken to him previously. I pulled my little Mercedes out of the drive, and turned left at the end of the road, taking the cross-country route towards Pau. It was hard to appreciate that one of them was a liar, and that the liar was telling outrageous lies to my face, or at least to my ear. I desperately hoped it was her.

My old friends were arriving. I was worn out with preparations and tired of stressing about children’s bedlinen and every other mundane detail imaginable. Buying the food and planning menus had been the easy part. Getting the house ready for four adults and three children had been more complicated than I had expected. Normally, with guests, I just made up the spare bed and put some towels out. This time I had bought three sets of garish duvet covers, featuring Barbie, Action Man and the Teletubbies respectively, and I had brought in two metal bedsteads from a shed (left behind by the previous owner with specific kind instructions that we must use them when we had our own children). Izzy’s boy was having to sleep on my chaise longue, because I had been too proud to accept Izzy’s offer to bring a ‘sleepover bed’ which was apparently inflatable and bore a picture of Spiderman. There had been a rickety old wooden bed left behind in the shed, and I had earmarked this for Sam. Roman, however, had other ideas.

‘He’s not sleeping on this piece of shit,’ he announced, when we went to fetch it.

I laughed. ‘Roman! He’s three years old! He doesn’t care if it’s a bit manky.’

‘Obviously,’ he said, rolling his eyes at me, ‘I don’t give a fuck what the child makes of it. If he’s happy to sleep in the shed then he’s most welcome. I’m talking about this woodworm. What have we spent on termite treatments?’