The Good Girl (15 page)

‘Some people might think you’re behaving like the bloody Taliban. Why don’t you dig a hole on the sports pitch and bury me in it up to my neck and get some people to throw stones at me?’

‘Because the ground’s too hard, and health and safety regs don’t allow boulders in the school grounds. Otherwise I would.’

Matt looked down at the ground and swept a few hailstones away with the side of his foot. His shoulders shook with anger. Ailsa began to construct further barbs in her head, wondering where this would end. He was a
great teacher and her first recruit. She recognized enough of herself in him to know that he was in the job for all the right reasons. He loved his subject, cared about his students and took pleasure in their achievements. She was lucky to have persuaded him away from London. It wouldn’t look good if he left after a term. Her judgement would be questioned. She waited for him to fire off another volley. Instead he laughed.

‘You’re so funny. You don’t mean to be. But you are,’ he said. ‘Like the way you talk to your car as if it was a friend.’

This was not what Ailsa expected. She was relieved that somehow they had managed to pull back from the brink, but his reaction wrong-footed her. At least now he might reconsider before offering his resignation. Good Biology teachers were an endangered species and here was one who had not only offered to initiate an after-school David Attenborough club but also promised to shoot his own rabbits for students to get experience with dissection.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be harsh. I love my sister. But I wish she wouldn’t shit on my doorstep.’

‘My intentions are honourable,’ he said, doing a small bow. ‘Rach is great. She’s a right swipe come good.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Right swipe. Tinder. I met her through Tinder. She came to your office when I was there so that we didn’t have to explain how we met.’

He stood upright and finally liberated himself from his hood. The top of his thick dark hair had been
flattened. He shook his head and a few hailstones tumbled around his face.

‘That wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about. But I’m glad we’ve cleared the air.’

‘There’s more?’ asked Ailsa.

‘Something came up with one of your kids. I was in two minds whether to say anything but I think you should know.’

‘How long will it take?’ Ailsa asked, knowing that everything to do with Luke took time.

‘We could freeze to death out here or I could tell you over a beer in the local lap-dancing club,’ he suggested, going round to open the passenger door before she could respond. His confidence was both reassuring and unsettling.

The pub was practically empty. This was a place for out-of-towners. Not enough people in Luckmore had twenty pounds to spend on dinner during the week. The barman was sitting on a stool engrossed in a book. Ailsa smiled as he dragged himself back to reality. She recognized that feeling.

‘Think we need to warm up. Both literally and metaphorically,’ said Matt, heading towards a table beside the huge open fire. A couple with a toddler sat the other side of the hearth. The father was aimlessly scrolling up and down messages on his BlackBerry, trying to ignore his daughter’s grizzling.

Ailsa sat down with her back to the window on a
bench that was so deep that if she leaned back her legs wouldn’t reach the ground. So she perched on the edge. Matt volunteered to buy drinks. He put his bag abruptly on the table. The salt and pepper toppled over. Ailsa righted them and requested a half of cider.

‘Whatever they’ve got. Organic preferably. Or French. Or the weakest one they have. If there’s an organic French pear cider I’ll take it over an inorganic English one made from apples. The French use fewer sulphates.’

He held up his hand. ‘Remember, the male brain finds it difficult to hold on to more than one instruction at a time,’ he said, mimicking something she had said about teenage boys in the meeting. She grimaced at his teasing tone and then felt irritated that he made her want to pull rank. His informality was unnerving. She focused on the couple with the child on the other side of the fireplace.

‘We need to get on with it,’ said the mother. ‘Otherwise the gap will be too big.’

‘We should have gone away on our own,’ said the man without looking up. Ailsa recognized the symptoms. A row was brewing.

Her thoughts turned to Luke. Whatever Matt wanted to tell her, it wouldn’t be good, because it never was. She closed her eyes for a moment. Two terms. Luke had roughly five months to turn things round, to conjure up some reasonable exam grades and fix on a university course. Hopefully find a nice girlfriend to steady him.
The first two problems might be resolved by the third. Though his high rate of preliminary success with girls didn’t seem to translate into anything more enduring than one-night stands.

Luke had always been like tumbleweed, blowing back and forth wherever the wind took him. She smiled as she remembered the way he used to tear off his nappy at baby massage. As a small child, he made a friend who loved football. For a couple of months he played non-stop. Ailsa bought all the kit for him to play for a local team. Then he fell into a different crowd who hated football but loved World of Warcraft. He gave up football and took up gaming. Soon afterwards he met a girl who played the guitar and he insisted he wanted lessons. For eight months he thought he was Bob Dylan. Then he got into electronic music.

Luke was a chameleon. He could adapt to any environment. He always had a revolving door of friends. Ailsa had tried to convince Harry this could be a virtue, but where she saw freedom of spirit and curiosity, he saw lack of direction. The truth was that Luke had always been more her child than Romy and Ben. She imagined him in his forties, seeing a therapist, trying to unpick his relationship with his parents and the therapist finding fault with her overindulgence. Would he realize that Ailsa had to love him more because Harry loved him less?

She remembered something Luke had said last year, just before she had finally decided to accept the job in Norfolk, when she was at her lowest ebb. He was sitting
at the kitchen table, allowing Romy to style his shoulder-length hair. They were talking but Ailsa could hear nothing except the voice in her head on a loop. Stick or twist. Stay or go. She would have liked to present all the information to a statistician, who could have worked out the probability of where they would be least unhappy. Because now it was all about damage limitation. Harry would do whatever she wanted. He always said this with an affectionate arm around her shoulder but it just added to the weight of her decision. He would give up his job for her. He would take time out to write his book and take care of the children.

‘Mum’s having a gap year from parenting,’ she heard Luke say to Romy. It was meant to be a joke but the truth stung. ‘She’s trying to find herself.’

‘It must be challenging teaching at a school where your children are students,’ said Matt, interrupting her thoughts. He was holding drinks and carrying a packet of crisps under each arm.
When did pupils become students?
Ailsa wondered. How long was it before she turned into a service provider? He tore open the crisps, apologized for spilling them, and used the side of his hand to corral them into a neat pile in the centre of the table. Grateful for something to do with her hands, Ailsa picked at them.

‘I want no more to do with them than they want to do with me.’ She took a couple of gulps of cider and enjoyed the way it warmed her stomach. ‘It’s a good incentive to stay away from trouble.’

True. But not reflective of the last year in London, when Luke had become a chronic problem. The head teacher had only kept him on because she couldn’t afford to lose her deputy.

‘My mum used to teach at my school,’ Matt explained. ‘She was an English teacher.’

‘And how was that?’

‘Fine, until she left my dad for the History teacher.’ He licked a finger and used it to soak up stray fragments of crisps. ‘That’s why I ended up doing science A levels. They offered the possibility of a more rational existence.’ Her eyes must have narrowed.

‘I know what you’re thinking.’

‘I wasn’t going to say anything.’

‘No, but you were thinking it,’ he said. ‘Your face is very expressive.’

‘Is it?’ asked Ailsa, trying not to arch her eyebrows in surprise.

‘But in response to your thought, I’ve never gone out with anyone older than me before. The relationship between my mum and the History teacher lasted less than a year and then she moved back in with us as if nothing had happened.’ His eye line moved from the crisps she was holding in the palm of her hand, up her arm to her shoulder and finally to her face.

‘How was that?’ asked Ailsa.

‘The house became tidy again.’ He shrugged, his mouth full of crisps. ‘They were nicer to each other. Because they’d almost lost each other, I guess. Mum’s
knowledge of history had improved but they never watched any war movies together again. My younger sisters took longer than me to forgive her. Order was restored.’ He leaned towards her and rested his arms on the table, palms flat on the surface, fingers splayed. She was surprised by the dark hair on his forearms, even though it perfectly matched his thick head of hair. His left leg was now anchored to the inside of Ailsa’s right knee. He gulped down his beer.

‘Everything leaves a trace though, doesn’t it? Even though you can’t ever measure the imprint with absolute accuracy,’ she said.

‘End of therapy session, Ailsa.’ He leaned back but his leg stayed in the same position. ‘I’m over it.’

She shifted position. She was talking about her childhood not his, but he didn’t realize.

‘Sorry,’ said Ailsa. ‘I’m trying to delay talking about Luke.’

‘Luke?’

‘Legal highs. I presume it was him.’

‘I don’t teach Luke. That was Stuart Tovey. He was going on about his brother taking Ritalin and how he’d been using it to stay awake longer to revise for exams. He was telling Marnie that it had a similar chemical structure to cocaine. I looked it up on the Internet. He’s right. It’s a stimulant. Like Adderall. We should probably all be taking it.’

It was a joke but Ailsa didn’t react so he continued. ‘I had a word with him. Talked about delayed gratification.
Told him that if he wanted to screw up his life he should at least put it off until he’d done his A levels.’

‘Sounds as good advice as any. Nothing else has worked with him.’ She picked up the cider again and took a few more sips.

‘Stuart is trouble. Not in a malicious way. In a risk-taking adolescent kind of way. Teenagers can be reckless.’

‘So can adults,’ Ailsa said.

‘Really?’ he said. ‘What’s the most reckless thing you’ve done? Apart from coming to the pub with me.’

His mobile phone rang. He looked at the screen. Years in a classroom meant Ailsa was expert at reading upside down and she could see it was Rachel calling. He quickly answered and leaned back in his chair.

‘I’m in the middle of something,’ he said. ‘Can I call you later?’

Seconds later Ailsa’s phone rang. She knew without looking that it would be Rachel. She caught his eye and let the call go to voicemail.

‘It was Romy I wanted to talk about.’

This was unexpected. No one ever complained about Romy.

‘She seemed a bit unsettled in class so I kept her back at the end of the lesson. After a bit of meandering she told me that my relationship with your sister means that Rachel isn’t pulling her weight with your father. Thinks it’s causing you a lot of stress. She asked me to get Rach to help out more.’

‘Well, that’s not what I was anticipating,’ said Ailsa in
the even tone that she had perfected over the years when she was uncertain how to react to a situation.

‘I’m telling you this as a friend, rather than a colleague,’ he quickly added. ‘That’s why I didn’t want to talk about it on school grounds. Didn’t want to muddy the waters. But I thought you should know. And I also wanted to say that I won’t add to your problems. I’ll encourage Rachel to help out.’

‘Thank you,’ she replied, because what else could she say?

Later she would stew over the detail. But Ailsa grasped that in a matter of seconds the balance of power in their relationship had subtly shifted so that somehow she was now beholden to Matt. He had crossed the boundary into her personal life. She couldn’t dismiss Romy’s worries because the essence of what she was saying rang true and the content wasn’t particularly contentious.

She stared into her cider so that he couldn’t read her expression. What puzzled her was why Romy had confided in him. Of course she argued with Harry about Adam. It didn’t require huge amounts of insight to imagine her father’s presence generating pressure. But this was the regular
Sturm und Drang
of family life. It wasn’t sufficiently calamitous for Romy to need to share it with one of her teachers.

‘She seemed worried that you might move from Luckmore if this isn’t resolved,’ said Matt.

‘Why would she worry about that? She hates living here,’ said Ailsa.

He
shrugged. ‘That’s not the impression she gave me. Another round?’

Ailsa looked at her watch. It was ten o’clock. Ben would already be in bed.

‘Sure. But make it a half, please.’

Ailsa parked the car just beyond the house so she could slip inside unnoticed. She had given Matt a lift back to school to collect his bike and it was almost eleven o’clock by the time she got home. She shut the door behind her and leaned against it for a moment, pleased to be back, noting that this was the first time she had thought of Luckmore as home. She was growing to like this house. She liked the futuristic-looking toilets with their hidden cisterns and toilet bowls that appeared to float against the wall; she liked the way the wooden floor didn’t reveal any history, the brand-new oil tank and the hatch where you could pass food from the larder to the kitchen. She was glad to be living far from her friends with their anxious questions about how things were going. It was a good house to keep secrets. She didn’t turn on the light, and found herself drawn to the big window that overlooked the Fairports. There was a crowd of people sitting around their kitchen table. It was littered with empty wine bottles. They were in the midst of yet another party. Where did they find the stamina?