The History Room (10 page)

She turned towards me very slowly. ‘It’s only if you touch the paintwork that you get a sense there’s something else there underneath her.’ To illustrate the point she
ran her fingers over my mother’s image. Her fingernails were bitten, I saw. ‘Did someone vandalize it, Meredith?’

I might have retorted that a polite notice on the wall beside the mural asked people not to touch; it was bad for the paint, but the expression in Emily’s pale eyes stopped me.

‘It had to be restored. Some of the surface was damaged.’ If it had been anyone else I might have said more. Very few people knew that the mural had been damaged twenty years ago and
how it had happened. Dad had repaired it so quickly. Emily could not know what was underneath the paint. I said nothing. Some shame, decades old, kept me from admitting to Emily my role in the
damaging of the painting.

‘Your father was quite a talented painter, wasn’t he?’ she went on, her blue eyes on my face. ‘Art school in Prague, wasn’t it? Then he stopped painting.’

‘School took up more and more of his time.’ I didn’t say that I suspected he’d lost his passion for art even before then.

‘He stopped,’ she repeated. Then her attention switched to me. ‘What about you? Do you paint, Meredith? Are you artistic?’

It seemed a strange conversation to be having so early in the school morning as around us pupils dawdled and chatted on their way to classes, but there was something about her intent expression
that gripped me.

‘I used to dabble with watercolours, but I haven’t lifted a brush or a pencil since . . .’ I gulped. Hugh and I. Hugh, asleep on the sofa after a mess night: mouth open. Me,
drawing him in all his dishevelment in pencil on the back of an old envelope. His intake of breath the next morning when he found the unflattering sketch, the cushion he flung at me, the cushion I
threw back, the laughter, the dog jumping round and barking at us both. I pulled a mental screen round the image. ‘My sister used to be quite keen,’ I continued. ‘She was supposed
to be talented at sculpture, too.’ People had been excited by Clara’s A level work. She’d won some kind of award for one of her pieces. I couldn’t remember what it was now:
not a sculpture but an embroidered work with appliqué tulips, blood-red against an electric-blue sky. Even I had been able to drop my usual sibling resentment to tell her that I liked it.
Dad had taken the tulips to an expensive picture framer in Oxford.

‘Is she an artist now?’ Emily asked. From anyone else the question might have sounded like polite interest.

I smiled. ‘She works for a corporate law firm. She specializes in employment law.’ Clara regarded art as a hobby, something unworthy of studying any further after school because it
didn’t bring in a regular monthly income and a large annual partnership payout. Though her children’s daubings were lovingly framed and displayed around the house in Clapham.

‘Oh.’ Emily didn’t smile. ‘I love textiles and design technology.’ I remembered seeing her in the art rooms helping some of the younger ones with screen-printing
and batik. She’d certainly seemed in her element. ‘Some of the children are very talented indeed.’ She gave the impression that she wanted me to ask who they were. But the bell
rang before I could put the question. ‘Better go,’ I said. ‘See you later, Emily.’

She raised a hand in farewell, a formal and somehow final gesture, given that I’d probably see her in the staffroom at morning break, just hours later. As she did her face seemed graver
than that of such a young woman. She was only about nineteen. Perhaps she’d had a hard life in New Zealand before coming out here and had acquired more maturity than most girls her age. I
stepped into my classroom and promptly forgot all about Emily as the lesson started. I felt as though I was a ping-pong ball bouncing above waves of noise and movement, swept along, despite myself,
by the energy of the children and the demands of the timetable.

At breaktime my father came into the staffroom as he sometimes did. He didn’t like to appear too often, saying his appearance would stop people letting off steam if they needed to.

‘Covering a German lesson for the upper sixth.’ He straightened his tie as he told me. He prided himself on still teaching German. I wondered how many of the sixth-formers even knew
that he’d spoken German as a boy. ‘We always spoke Czech in public but my mother had been brought up speaking German and she spoke it to me,’ he’d told me. He never spoke
German or Czech to us, though. Even Clara and I usually managed to take his perfect tweed jackets and Lobb shoes at face value. It came as a shock when he said something that reminded us that
English wasn’t his native language. For these minor slips he would condemn himself to shakings of his head and apologies. He was so keen to be seen as entirely belonging to England. Perhaps
it was no surprise that he’d become headmaster of a country boarding school. What could be more archetypically English? When occasionally he spoke German, or even more rarely, Czech, I caught
a glimpse of another person, a man with a hinterland unknown to us, with thoughts perhaps untranslatable into English. For all his success in integrating, there must surely be a part of my father
that belonged to a different culture.

‘Have you ever thought of teaching art again?’ I asked him when I found us both standing alone at the open window, everyone else clustered around a box of doughnuts a parent had
brought in for the staff.

He gave me a sharp look. ‘We have excellent teachers. I’d just be in the way.’

I nodded, unsurprised by the response but disappointed all the same. A tradesman’s van was pulling up outside the front door. I craned my neck to see who it was.

‘Ah, the glazier,’ my father said.

‘Which window this time?’

‘Gavin House. Ground floor.’

‘Football?’

‘Yes.’

‘I hope you’re going to make them pay towards the new pane.’ He was silent. ‘Dad?’

‘It was just a small first-year. James Perry.’ He looked sheepish. ‘A misjudged kick. He’ll never play by a window again.’

‘You’re too soft.’

‘Everyone deserves a second chance.’

After break I went into a third-year class and we talked about the first act of
Romeo and Juliet
and they all leant forward on their desks, thrusting their hands up to answer questions,
desperate to read parts. I felt their energy fill me. I laughed and debated with them. Perhaps there would be more of these mornings when my job absorbed me totally, even though it was drizzling
outside now, a fine grey English mizzle that soaked despite its tiny droplets. The pupils who passed me in the corridors smelled of damp uniform, but the bad dream of last night slipped from my
memory. I didn’t exactly whistle on my way to the dining room but my lips were almost remembering how to do it when my father came downstairs towards me, holding a sheet of paper in his
hand.

‘Meredith, a word in my office, please.’ His eyes failed to make more than a second’s contact with me. My stomach contracted. Bad news. Please God, don’t let it be Hugh.
Some severe setback. Perhaps another infection in the stump of the injured leg. But Dad’s rigid back seemed to speak more of anger than sorrow. What had I done? Someone must have complained
about my teaching. Or about me. Or the dog. Samson must have jumped over the garden wall again and chased a visiting parent’s car. Dogs were banned from school grounds.

‘He’ll always treat you more strictly than anyone else,’ Clara had warned when I’d first announced my intention of returning here. ‘You do know that, Merry,
don’t you? He’ll take anyone’s side against you, just to show he’s being impartial. For all his talk about justice.’

She’d been right. For a moment as I followed him I was that little girl who’d scrubbed at the precious mural, almost ruining it for ever.

It wasn’t until we were in his office that he turned and waved the white sheet at me. ‘I’d like an explanation for this, please.’

I took it from him. An order form from a company called Delicious Confections. My name and email address in the
From
field. It was an order: an order for a reborn doll, dated two weeks
ago.

‘I didn’t send this.’ I stared at the black print but the name of Meredith Cordingley and my email address were still there on the sheet. As was an order for
an Alexander Reborn Doll for £195 plus delivery. A boy, I noted.

He said nothing.

‘Why would I?’

Still nothing.

‘Dad?’

‘Shall we?’ He nodded at the leather sofa. I was to be treated like a naughty fifth-year. But he didn’t sit himself down at his desk. We perched on the sofa, slightly turned to
each other, like interviewer and candidate. Except that I was not in the mood for an interrogation. The best form of defence was attack.

‘Who gave you this?’ I waved the sheet at him.

‘I found it on my desk just now.’ He looked down at his folded hands. ‘Obviously if you tell me it’s a forgery I will accept that completely.’

But he’d needed me to tell him that I wasn’t responsible for the order; he hadn’t drawn the obvious conclusion himself. For God’s sake, I was his daughter. He
couldn’t seriously think that I was so mucked-up that I needed to stick a paperknife into a toy doll to make some kind of point. I’d had one bad week, just one, when it had all become
too much for me. It didn’t mean I’d flipped and become some kind of nutcase. My father was supposed to be the great hater of injustice. At Letchford he’d set up a disciplinary
system that presumed innocence above guilt, something he said he didn’t believe was taken for granted in all schools. He never made accusations without solid proof. Unless it was me. Clara
had been right to warn me off coming back here. It had always been like this, ever since I’d been a child.

But already my anger was passing, replaced by a burning need to work out who had done this. My brain was whirring, scanning an imaginary list of staff and students, trying to extract a name.
Almost certainly a student. A
pupil
, we’d have called them once. We’d stopped doing that at some stage, turning them into our equals, removing the distance that had once existed
between teacher and taught, transmitter and receiver, that allowed ideas to grow.

‘You’ve no idea who put this on your desk?’ I waved the sheet.

He shook his head.

‘May I take it with me?’ I stood up. ‘I’d like to check my email. Someone must have hacked into my account or something.’

‘I suppose they could have.’ His face seemed to brighten. I’d forgotten how clueless he was about technology. Most of the first year would have more understanding of what was
possible on a computer than he would. Samantha, his secretary, sent his emails for him. Mum had built up the school databases, taking herself off to evening classes to master the programs. Samantha
was learning how to do it now. He stood up too.

I waved the sheet. ‘I’ll let you know what I find out about this.’

He reached out and took my free hand. ‘Oh, Meredith. All we want is for you to be happy.’

I stared at our joined hands. ‘You still think it’s me, don’t you? You still think I’m . . . disturbed?’ I closed my eyes for a second. ‘You keep thinking
I’m going to have another breakdown.’

‘I just want you to be happy,’ he repeated. ‘Ever since you were a little girl, that’s what we wanted. And you were such a sunny little thing.’ On the fireplace
still stood the silver-framed photograph of me on a tricycle out on the tennis courts, Clara standing behind me, an arm draped round my shoulders: the protective elder sister. We’d never have
been allowed to ride our trikes on the courts in term time. The photograph must have been taken during the summer holidays when Letchford belonged to the family again. There was a big grin on my
freckled face. Merry, they’d called me as a child. Still did on occasions. Not so often these days. I wondered if I could find my way back to this sunny person I’d once been.

My email folders showed no signs of an order placed for reborn dolls. I could find no confirmation messages, no delivery alerts. There was nothing in the deleted emails folder either. When I
started to type the Internet address into the search engine it showed no signs of predicting the site. I checked the Internet history for sites I’d visited over the last month or so. Nothing
matched the Delicious Confections address. Nor did any of the sites I’d actually visited have any connections with reborn dolls. So I hadn’t actually ordered the doll in some kind of
depressive trance as my father had implied.

He’d been thinking of that week after Mum’s death. It had all fallen to bits then, my life. Dad had gone to Clara’s for a change of scene. I’d stayed here, in this flat.
I hadn’t left it for five days, not even to walk Samson. I’d simply opened the door to let him out three times a day. If I’d moved from my bed it was only to sit on the sofa with
the television turned on. Eventually I’d come down the stairs into the courtyard because Samson hadn’t come in after one of his outings. I hadn’t realized that Clara and Dad had
returned to Letchford. Lucky for me that they had. Weak from not eating, I’d fainted out in the courtyard and banged my head. Lost consciousness briefly. They’d heard the dog barking
and found me lying there on the ground beside the pot plants. I brushed this memory away.

Of course it would be possible for someone to use another computer and order the reborn baby in my name. The doll. I had to keep reminding myself that it really was just a doll, made of painted
vinyl with metal filings in its head. But how lifelike it was, with its mottled newborn skin, expressionless eyes and curled-up wrist. My father still kept the thing out in his office. No wonder it
was haunting him.

If anyone had accessed my account to print off the order confirmation they’d have needed my password. My password was Hugh’s service number plus the first letter of his name. Nobody
else would be able to guess the combination and it wasn’t written down anywhere. I kept meaning to change the password as urged by the school IT department, but it seemed too final a step to
take, as though I were accepting that my husband would never again be part of my life.