The History Room (3 page)

‘Reborn dolls, that’s their name. I remember now.’ Deidre ran her fingers over the baby’s face.

‘Reborn?’ I asked.

‘There was an article about them. They’re designed to be as lifelike as possible. There have been cases of people calling the police because they’ve seen the dolls in cars and
been worried that they were real babies who might overheat.’ She must have seen incredulity on our faces. ‘People push them round in prams and buggies,’ she insisted.

‘Women, you mean.’ Jeremy Warner, head of PE, crossed his tracksuited arms as though he were trying to ward off the doll’s influence.

‘There have been some very sad cases where women have lost children through miscarriage or cot death,’ Deidre said, with acid in her tone. ‘They buy these dolls, sometimes even
commission them to look like their lost babies.’

She pulled out the knife. I found myself holding my breath, half expecting blood to flow from the cut. The blade had left a slit about half an inch long in the linen.

‘There, it looks better already, doesn’t it?’ My father gave an approving nod. Deidre examined the paperknife. ‘Nothing special. Not silver, anyway.’

Emily unwound her legs and recrossed them. I felt another pang of sympathy for her.

Deidre gave Jeremy a little smile with a challenge written into it. ‘Come on, Jeremy. You’re the family man. You pick it up and tell us whether it feels lifelike or not.’ On
his desk, along with his referee’s whistle and team sheets, Jeremy kept a photograph of his two small daughters, both in pink pinafores and sun hats.

He looked as though he wanted to sprint out of the room, but masculine pride propelled him out of his seat towards the doll on the table. He scooped it into his arms. Surprise flashed across his
face.

‘It’s like holding a real baby, even the way the head feels heavy. But it’s cold, not warm.’ He gazed down at the doll, and the desire to fling it across the room was
clear in his expression. Deidre held out her arms for it and he passed it over with evident relief. ‘Just weird.’

Her shoulders dropped as she cradled the doll. Deidre’s two boys were teenagers now, but her body obviously remembered how to cradle a newborn. There was something familiar about the
baby’s costume: the long ivory gown and lace cap; they pulled at my memory. I couldn’t recall where I’d seen them. The doll gazed at us with its blank but detailed features.

‘It feels too real.’ Deidre put it down on the table again, carefully, as though it were a real baby. ‘Apart from the coldness, as Jeremy said. Rather disturbing, in fact. I
wonder if this is more than just a prank.’

‘What do you mean?’ Dad peered at her.

She took her time in answering. ‘The women who use these dolls have psychological issues. According to what I read.’ She looked directly at my father. ‘And stabbing it with the
knife like that . . . We need to approach this very carefully.’

‘Do you think a girl here might have been . . . in trouble?’ Even my father flushed at the old-fashioned term. I could see him filing a note of his mistake for future reference.
‘I mean, she might be or have been pregnant?’

‘It’s a possibility.’ She shrugged. ‘One for Cathy, perhaps.’

Cathy Jordan was the school nurse.

‘I want you all to talk to your tutor groups or classes.’ Dad sounded as he might have done following a long academic year, but we were only weeks into the new term. The benefits of
the Greek holiday he and Mum had taken before her death had already been wiped out. ‘And the prefects. But above all, let’s try and keep this low-key. It’s just a silly joke gone
wrong.’ He seemed to push his weariness aside for a second to produce his calm and confident headmaster’s smile.

Most people nodded. Only Deidre looked uncertain. I knew she was thinking what I was: that the two activities Dad had prescribed were incompatible. If we talked to the pupils they’d know
that something was bothering us. They’d speculate. That was a polite way of putting it. And then the social messaging would start in earnest.

Jeremy seemed to recover his nerve and picked up the doll again. ‘Its head’s filled with something.’ He sounded disgusted. ‘That’s what makes it heavy, just like a
real baby’s head.’ He shoved it back on the table.

Simon shuddered visibly again.

‘I recognize the costume,’ Deidre said, fingering the ivory linen. ‘Isn’t it one from the play, Jenny?’

Of course,
The Crucible
. One of the girls in this term’s play carried a baby in her arms in a courtroom scene. But that was a traditional baby doll once belonging to my sister,
obviously plastic, with eyes that shut with a slight flap when you laid it down.

Jenny Hall, head of drama, came closer and fingered the ivory robe. ‘Looks like our costume, all right. We’ve had them all out in the drama department. I haven’t missed it but
we haven’t got far in sorting out costumes and props yet.’ She grimaced at the cut the knife had made in the linen. ‘Hope this will be easy to mend.’

‘I can fix that for you.’ It was the first thing Emily had said this evening.

‘Thanks.’ Jenny looked surprised at the offer but relieved.

‘I’ll make the mend invisible,’ Emily went on. ‘Nobody’ll ever know.’ There was still a quiver in her voice. I smiled at her, trying to convey
encouragement.

‘If that’s all.’ Jeremy tugged down his tracksuit top. ‘It’s lower school basketball club in ten minutes. I need to set up the hall.’ A few of us rose as
well. It was my turn to supervise prep in Gavin House, across the lawn. I needed to liberate the sixth-former left to keep the kids quiet, and answer queries about geometry and French verbs taking
être
in the perfect.

My father glanced at his watch. Checking I wouldn’t be late. Only a few days ago I’d found a printout of my own timetable sitting on top of his desk. He’d taken a risk, giving
me the English job here. And there’d been that week, that bad week, that week we didn’t talk about. Once again I felt myself look round the room for Mum. If she was here this evening
she’d be packing up her sewing things now, chatting as she wound threads round bobbins and folded fabric.

She was always making curtains and cushion covers, had quite a talent for it. The long William Morris curtains in the hall and at each landing casement were ones she’d sewn, and the
striking brick-red paint on the drawing-room walls, which most people would have shied away from, had been her choice. The colour always drew compliments from parents when they visited. Over the
summer she’d re-covered the staffroom window-seat cushions in bold geometric prints. Anyone else would have worried that they’d be too overpowering for an Elizabethan room. But even an
ageing classics teacher had been spotted stroking them as though they were kittens. Mum’s brain haemorrhage had struck just hours after she’d sewn the last zip into those cushion
covers. She’d had the headaches for a few weeks before then but had attributed them to too much time at the sewing machine during the hot weather.

The evening air was only now turning cool. The summer didn’t want to die this year and low golden rays bathed the lawn. I walked across to Gavin. Dad had built four boarding houses in the
late eighties. He’d never intended Letchford to become a boarding school proper, just as he’d never intended to become a teacher at all. He’d agreed to take boarders with some
reluctance, accepting that changing work patterns meant that parents were working late.

‘It’s better for children to be brought up by their parents than by other adults, no matter how well-intentioned and qualifed,’ he’d always said. ‘The family should
be the child’s best refuge.’ The premature rupture of his own family life had perhaps reinforced this belief. Dad had come to England in 1968 as a boy the same age as the sixth-form
boys loafing around on the lawn as they waited for the late buses home.

Twenty years of weathering had softened Gavin House’s bricks so that they were now the muted red of a Cox’s apple. I let myself slow down. I was retracing steps I’d been taking
for decades. Any moment now I might meet myself as an eight-year-old, riding my bike while my mother deadheaded the late roses. I might come across myself playing croquet with Hugh on an August
weekend while he was on leave. I might hear the clop-clop of tennis balls from the courts where my sister had practised her strokes with meticulous accuracy. This evening the ghosts were hanging
all around the fringes and if I turned my head quickly enough I’d glimpse them. The reborn doll had set my nerves on edge.

I went inside Gavin and brushed my sleeves as though to remove the shreds of memory. The reassuring scent of damp pupils and freshly made toast met me. No ghosts here. I opened the door of the
room where the younger pupils were doing their prep. They dipped their heads like cranes towards their books as I came in. The perpetrator of this afternoon’s prank might be in this room now.
He or she could have slipped the box into the cupboard while Simon was fiddling with his whiteboard, back to the class.

The sixth-former supervising was so caught up in his laptop screen he didn’t hear me approach. He closed the lid but not before I’d seen what he was reading. There on his Facebook
page I read the words
OMG, Dead Baby at Letchford!!!
He turned puce.

‘You’d better delete that and tell your friends to do the same. It’s just a doll.’ He looked doubtful. ‘I saw it myself.’ He shrugged. ‘You
wouldn’t want to look as though you’d fallen for a kid’s joke, would you?’

My outside-work world had shrunk to the simply furnished rooms of my apartment. I liked to think of it as minimalist, though I was probably too untidy ever to fall into that
school. I made another mental note to myself to sort out the pile of bills and admin awaiting my attention.

A year or so ago my mother had converted the old stable block into a retirement home for her and my father, in case it were ever needed. They’d probably never dreamed that their
twenty-nine-year-old daughter would drag herself back to fill it. I appreciated its winter-white walls and restored wooden floors and beams. One of these days I’d even get round to putting up
some of the paintings I’d brought with me from Wiltshire, still stowed in the loft above. I could pull out the rugs Hugh’d brought me back from Middle Eastern bazaars and display them.
But I wasn’t sure I was ready to live with their jewel-coloured patterns. Sometimes I’d even longed to pull down the blinds to block the view of the green sweep of Downs to the south.
As autumn progressed and the slopes turned to muted khaki I found the sight more bearable.

My dog met me as I opened the door and it took a few moments to disentangle myself from his greeting. Samson was a leggy mixture of retriever and spaniel plus a few other breeds thrown in for
interest. It was only recently I’d started thinking of him as my dog instead of Hugh’s dog or
our
dog. He was quietening now he’d reached the age of two, just as Hugh had
predicted.

A quick morning turn through the woods behind the school, followed by a longer walk at lunchtime or in the evening, kept Samson happy. At weekends I took him up to the Ridgeway on top of the
Downs for a good run. I knew that if I sat down now my muscles would refuse to propel me out of the apartment again so I pulled on my wellingtons and found the lead. A very brisk walk in what my
mother had always called the gloaming would shake out the tensions of the afternoon.

The dog carved long circles round me, tail up, ears back. I threw his ball for him and watched him shoot after it. I wondered whether he missed Hugh now or even still remembered him. If Hugh
reappeared, would Samson tear towards him in ecstasy or consider him with pricked ears and cocked head?

I walked faster through the increasing dark. My brain gave up its efforts to think about Hugh or about the stabbed doll in Simon’s classroom. The history room, we called it. It had once
been a bedroom housing a four-poster with velvet hangings. Nobody had slept in it since the sixties. Before Simon’s time it had been the bursar’s office. The bursary was now housed in
its own purpose-built premises at the rear of the house. In the large oak cupboard in the history room resided not only Simon’s teaching materials but also photograph albums and documents
relating to the house’s past. During the school holidays Simon was putting together a history of Letchford.

I turned back. I had marking to do. Not much, though. On an evening like this I could have done with a big stack of exercise books. Long essays on
Macbeth
. Grammar exercises. A trayful of
stodgy comprehensions. I was in serious danger of having to sort out my mail if I didn’t think of some other distraction.

I needed company. Thank God for Simon, who was single, roughly my age and always made me laugh, regardless of my mood. I thought of ringing him to offer a glass of wine. Or two. Surely
he’d want to mull over the discovery of the doll. But he’d already admitted to having a pile of lesson-planning to tackle tonight, something he’d failed to do over the summer.

‘I like to get the feel of my classes first,’ he’d told me. ‘A sense of their personalities and chemistry. Then I tailor what I have accordingly.’ He’d
responded to my searching look with a burst of laughter. ‘Nah, you’re right. I’m awful at planning. I’ll wing it, though.’ And he would, too. No, leave Simon to his
work this evening. I’d ring Hugh’s mother, perhaps. It was her birthday tomorrow. I’d sent a card but it would be good to speak to her, to cling to the fragile thread tying me to
my husband. Perhaps I also wanted to cling to her because I’d lost my own mother.

Back in the apartment’s kitchen Samson flopped at my feet, tongue hanging out like a small red handkerchief. I boiled water for rice and forced myself to chop peppers, chillies, onions,
sweet potato and the beans I’d harvested from my mother’s vegetable garden, unable to bear the thought of them unpicked. Hugh had been the cook in our marriage. My skills with knives
and pans were limited. When he’d been away on active service I’d subsisted on toasted sandwiches and fruit. Mum had promised to teach me some basic recipes. But now I was on my own.