The Learning Curve (23 page)

‘Then, just when you’ve worked me up to a crescendo, you throw me out of your flat –’

‘Right.’ She stood up. ‘I think –’

‘
Then
you get me round for dinner –’

‘You offered to help me –’

‘Spray on a tracksuit –’

‘Wha –?’

‘Try to get me drunk –’

‘I did not try to –’

‘And start a poor little girl “
Oh help me!
” act –’

He stopped and looked at her face. It was a picture. Unfortunately, it was a really angry picture.

‘Oh
shit
,’ he groaned as he collapsed back on the sofa.

‘That’s right, Rob,’ she said coolly. ‘My life is all about you getting your end away.’

‘Oh come on, Nix –’

‘Rob, answer me this. If the governors found out about us snogging, whose job would be on the line? Whose reputation would be tarnished and whose would be improved? How many governors are female and how many are male?’

‘What?’ cried Rob. ‘Don’t try and turn this into something political. That stuff went out with the ark.’

‘Bollocks!’

‘Haven’t you heard of post-feminism?’ He was shouting now.

‘Oh, is that what they’re calling it in
Nuts
this week?’ So was she.

‘I don’t read that crap, Nicky, and you know it.’

‘Really? Because you sounded just like a reader’s letter back then.’

There was a long pause.

‘Right,’ said Rob eventually. ‘I hear you loud and clear.
Let’s just never bring us up ever again.’

‘Right,’ Nicky took stock. It would probably not be a good idea to slap him. She still had to work with him. ‘Yep,’ she managed. ‘Let’s just try and forget any of it ever happened, and act like adults.’

‘Right,’ said Rob. ‘Adults.’ There was silence for a moment, before he said quietly, ‘So. It’s actually quite nice to know where we stand finally.’

‘Yes.’

‘We’re never going to have sex ever again.’

He felt the sudden tension in the air around him and made sure not to glance up at her. Genius. Absolute fucking genius.

‘Bye, Rob,’ she said quietly.

He got out, trying not to smile that she hadn’t answered his last point.

DURING HER DRIVE
into school on Monday morning, Nicky wondered how on earth she had got herself into this situation. Just last week everything had been completely normal. Now she was waiting for a complaint from the parent of her favourite pupil and she and Rob had finally admitted that their years of flirting were officially over. She could barely concentrate enough to apply her make-up, let alone make right turns.

But she kept finding that there was something more tenuous about her low mood. After much soul-seeking, she worked out that she had lost hope. Every morning since she’d seen Him at the fireworks display, she’d woken up to the sure knowledge that somewhere out there was a man who made her insides go fizz. Every single day was backlit by a golden ray of hope, and now that had vanished. That man didn’t exist. She was alone again.

Fortunately, Rob didn’t appear in the staffroom that morning. Unfortunately, Ally and Pete did.

‘Did Rob manage to help you out on Friday?’ asked Ally. They hadn’t shared their usual Sunday breakfast due to Ally’s college friend staying over.

Nicky glanced at Pete. He had an easy, open expression. She decided Rob hadn’t told him his version of Friday night. Yet.

‘Yeah, I think so,’ she said. She’d tell Ally what had happened later.

She found Rob, as she had suspected, already in Miss James’s office. He was sitting at her desk humming. Behind him, at the puzzle table, Ned was sitting staring miserably at a patchy Europe. He looked considerably worse than Rob, who looked fine. Absolutely fine. What had she expected? Had she expected him to be a broken man? Because he wasn’t.

She paused in the doorway and he glanced up. There was a fraction of a pause, then he gave her a quick raise of the eyebrows and a small but definite smile. Then he glanced away, just before saying hello. He would obviously have to work up to keeping eye contact and speaking to her at the same time. But at least he was trying.

Right, thought Nicky. He’d done his bit, now it was her turn. She came into the room and started saying something vague about her journey in. Luckily she was interrupted before she had to come to anything approaching a full or meaningful sentence.

‘Nativity Plays!’ came a wild exclamation from behind them. They turned to see Miss James’s entrance. ‘Can you
believe
it’s that time of year again?’ she said, as she paced past them both and sat down behind her desk.

A downhearted sigh came from behind them at the puzzle desk.

Rob launched happily into his ideas for this year and Nicky watched, hardly noticing Ned’s increasingly loud sighs
from the puzzle table punctuating Rob’s soliloquy. As Rob eagerly discussed his pupils’ contribution to the Christmas play, she found his seeming indifference to their squabble last night rather attractive.

Which worried her greatly.

But what worried her more was Rob’s sudden revolutionary idea that, this year, Year 6 could start a new tradition of putting on an ironic, updated nativity play with their own script, including modern references, as a treat for being the top class of the entire school. After her initial shock, Nicky attempted to include Year 5 in it, but Rob said that would complicate timetable issues and prevent it from being a specific treat for having got to the top of the school. Was this revenge for Friday night? She wanted to kill him. Maybe it would have been simpler just to shag him.

After usual business, which included the resignation of the bursar, a row between two dinner ladies and a new timetable issue, Rob and Nicky were allowed to join Ned at the puzzle table. Half an hour later, the three of them walked down the corridor wordlessly. Nicky needed time before she broached the subject of a Year 6 ironic, newly scripted nativity play with Rob in private, otherwise the only words would be blasphemous ones, which seemed somehow inappropriate.

At lunch-time, she completed a hundred errands, but when she had finished them all, she found herself with a full fifteen minutes to herself. She texted Ally, but Ally was working with one of her pupils. So she decided to pop into the staffroom.

She found Rob and Amanda having a quiet tête-à-tête on the only two-seater, while Ned chatted on the phone to his wife about houmous with cream cheese. She decided to bite
the bullet and join Rob and Amanda, and after flicking on the kettle, wandered over. As she arrived by them, neither of them acknowledged her presence, but continued with their animated chat. She was surprised how hard it was to be furious with someone who was ignoring you. She pretended not to notice and sat beside them, already seeking only a greeting from Rob instead of a heartfelt apology. After a while, she picked up the trade paper on the table in front of them and flicked through it. As she did so, it dawned on her that this was what Amanda must have felt like every time the gang had ignored her. She promised herself that she’d be nicer to the girl in future, however much she detested her.

Then Amanda laughed loudly, told Rob that she had to get on with some photocopying, touched him lightly on the thigh, got up and walked away. Rob brazenly watched her bottom leave the room.

‘She’s always photocopying, that one,’ said Nicky, as soon as her bottom had left.

Rob didn’t answer.

‘Do you think she ever does any actual teaching?’ she tried again.

He looked at her as if he’d only just noticed she was sitting there.

‘Yes,’ he said before getting up and leaving the room.

Nicky sat mute for a moment, motionless apart from her chest which had to work extra hard to breathe, her fingernails which bore into her palms, and the two fine lines of steam escaping from her ears.

As the day wore on, the more she thought about Rob the more she wanted to race into his classroom and hurl a blackboard rubber at his face in front of all his kids. That was
just one of the many tragic losses that had come with the introduction of new technology in the classroom. Interactive whiteboard cloths just didn’t cause as much damage to the face as good old-fashioned blackboard rubbers. Maybe she could suggest Rob reintroduce them as part of his Progressive Yet Traditional ethos.

Such thoughts helped her get through the day.

At a quarter to three that afternoon, she still hadn’t been called to Miss James’s office to face a livid Mr Samuels brandishing a subpoena in her face. She was so relieved by this that at the end of the afternoon, she decided to give her kids a treat and ask them to talk about their weekend. Children always loved to talk about themselves and it gave a fantastic insight into their home lives.

She looked around the room as every single child fought to put their hands up higher than everyone else.

‘Matthew,’ she said to the boy sitting next to Oscar, causing all the other hands to go down. ‘What did you get up to?’

‘I went to Hampton Court and it was brilliant and they’ve got a maze there which I went in with my dad and my sister went with my mum and we won so I got to get a DVD on the way home and I got
Shrek 2
which is really funny have you seen it at Hampton Court I got a family tree map thing of all the kings and queens and I can bring it in there was one king who was younger than me I think he was called Edward . . .’

As Matthew continued his breathless monologue, Nicky fought the urge to interrupt him. It was, she supposed, incorrect to speak as if punctuation didn’t exist, but it added so much to the charm of his subject. If only adults talked like this, the staffroom would be a far more endearing place, she
thought. When Matthew finally ran out of breath and information, she picked two more children and discovered that last weekend a new baby sister had been born and a new football had been bought, both of which were given exactly the same amount of detail.

Before she knew it, it was time to go home. As the children began to pack up, she wandered round the classroom to the windows where she leant on the window-sill and looked out across the playground. The reds and oranges of the last few leaves on the trees never failed to stun her. Her gaze wandered idly to the left, settling on the road which came to a gentle bend just outside the school entrance. Then her attention was arrested by movement at the gate. Nicky glanced over and involuntarily gasped. There, against the wrought-iron school gates, leant Mr Samuels, staring intently at the school.

This was it. Her career. Over.

She knew it had been too good to last. He must have made his complaint and was now waiting for Oscar to come out of school. Or maybe he was waiting to make the complaint with Oscar. She stared at her accuser, the man who was about to threaten her dreams of headship for ever. God, she thought, his legs were good. He wore faded denims and the same deep blue fleece jumper he’d been wearing when she’d first seen him at the fireworks display. Had he taken a whole day off work just to make this complaint? When had he fixed the appointment? Had Miss James known this morning? Yesterday morning?

Then suddenly he stared straight up at her. She stepped back
from the window and turned her attention back to her class. She watched Oscar race out and forced herself away from the window. She didn’t need to see the father-and-son reunion.

Mark continued to stare up at the window, even after she’d gone. It was only when thirty children charged towards him from the front door that his attention was drawn elsewhere. A tentative smile came to his lips as he spotted the top of Oscar’s head. He watched as Oscar chatted animatedly to his companion – a boy he’d never seen before, but who looked like a good friend – with the intensity of an old man discussing politics over a malt whisky. Mark got a flash of the man inside the boy and felt a lunge of love. He felt an impatience for the future and longing for the past at the same time. Then Oscar spotted him, grinned and raced over. They hugged a loose-limbed boyish hug and then Oscar moved away – too soon, it was always too soon – discarded his schoolbag into his dad’s arms, and fell into step beside him down the road. Mark felt a swell of pride.

Nicky sat in the empty classroom. She turned on her phone and checked it. No texts from Ally. She’d phone her tonight. She needed Ally’s take on Rob’s behaviour today. Was she imagining it, or had he declared a silent war? Then she slowly tidied her briefcase. She closed the door behind her and refused to glance into Rob’s room. She descended the stairs and, bracing herself, walked along to Miss James’s office.

‘Hi, Janet,’ she said to Miss James’s secretary. ‘Is she in?’

Janet looked up at her over her glasses.

‘Who? The cat’s mother?’

Nicky sighed. ‘Miss James.’

‘No. Miss James is not in. She has not been in all afternoon. She is at the latest assessment strategies meeting.’

Nicky frowned. ‘She’s been out all afternoon?’

‘Yes. You will note that that is why I specifically used the phrase “all afternoon”.’

‘She hasn’t had
any
meetings –
at all –
this afternoon?’

Janet gave an impatient sigh. ‘Not unless they were about the latest strategies meeting and at another school in the borough.’

‘Right, thanks,’ said Nicky.

‘Oh,’ muttered Janet, getting back to her work, ‘
de nada
.’

It was only on her way home that Nicky realised two things: one, that Miss James would be presenting the hours of work she had been delegated to do on the subject of individual teacher’s assessments; and two, she wished she’d been invited to attend.

‘So,’ continued Oscar, beside his dad, ‘I played my king and it was checkmate.’

‘That’s great, Osc –’

‘We find out what parts we’ve got tomorrow!’

‘What for?’

‘
The Celebrity X-Factor Nativity Play
. Miss Hobbs said she’s decided after watching us in drama. I want to be Ali G singing “Away in da Manger”.’

‘Do you?’ Mark laughed. ‘Brilliant! I didn’t know you liked performing.’

Oscar shrugged. ‘It’ll be fun. Miss Hobbs is directing.’ He turned to his dad and spoke as Ali G. ‘Is it ’cos I is de Son of God?’ he asked, in a perfect accent, and when his dad laughed, continued until they got home.