I make, they give it marks.’
‘If you make me any mouldy tea,’ Alistair said, ‘I’ll pour it down the sink.’
‘I have these mark sheets,’ she went on. ‘You have to say what my tea is, Excellent, Very Good, or Good.’
‘What if it’s witches’ piss?’ Alistair enquired.
‘I wish you’d leave the table, Alistair, if you’re going to talk like that.’
‘I’m not at the table, am I? I’m just stood here, watching you lot eating like pigs.’
‘Oh, let him starve,’ Karen said. ‘He’s stunted, that’s what he is. He’s probably got rickets or sumfin.’
‘He certainly has not got rickets,’ Sylvia said.
‘Well, he’s so titchy. That’s why he’s such a rotten little bully. We done it in psychology.’
‘Perhaps he’s a pygmy,’ Claire said. ‘He can’t help it.’
Alistair tore off a piece of kitchen roll, and blew his nose into it with great violence. He wadded it up in his palms and tossed it at Karen. It fell short, and lay on the cork tiles.
‘Just watch it,’ Sylvia said. ‘Lizzie’s not spending her time and my money cleaning up after you lot.’
‘I don’t want her cleaning up after me,’ Alistair said. ‘You make sure you don’t let her in my room.’
‘She can’t get in, can she? You’ve always got the door locked.’
‘What do you do in there?’ Colin asked.
‘Black magic,’ Karen said. ‘Him and Austin. Austin nicks vestments and stuff from his dad, and they have Black Masses.’
‘I’d do a spell to give you spots,’ Alistair said. ‘Only you haven’t got room for any more.’
‘So is that what you’re going to do today? Lock yourself in and have a Black Mass?’
‘Yeah,’ Alistair said. ‘And miss all the lovely sunshine.’ He slouched out of the room. Sylvia’s eyes followed him.
‘I do worry,’ she said.
Colin flapped over a page of the newspaper. ‘It’s better than him joining the Young Conservatives,’ he said.
‘You never take things seriously.’
‘Oh, I do.’ He glanced up from the news of the inferno. ‘I know a lot of kids. So I don’t get alarmed.’
‘Yes, but Alistair’s your own.’
‘Now that does alarm me. At times.’ But he knew a hundred children as bad as Alistair, a hundred worse; antisocial truants from broken homes. Theirs was not broken; only creaking a bit under the strain. The kids passed through his office every day, en route from brief rebellion to a lifetime’s acceptance of their lot. They had silly hairstyles; beneath them, dull conformist little brains.
‘I wish you’d keep them in school till the end of term,’ Sylvia said. ‘I wish he weren’t leaving.’
‘What would he do if he stayed on? Take Oxbridge by storm with his two CSEs?’
‘Off again,’ said Sylvia, stirring her muesli. She was training herself to eat slowly, putting down her spoon between mouthfuls, and the action gave her words a quite spurious consequence. ‘Off again with your little schoolmaster’s sarcasms.’
‘Does it make you cross?’
‘It makes me bored.’
‘We’ve nothing else for protection, now the LEA have abolished flogging.’
‘I don’t think you really value education, Colin. You had too much of it.’
‘I had enough,’ he conceded.
‘Alistair used to be so bright.’
‘That’s what all the parents say.’
Sylvia stood up and began carrying dishes to the sink. Her orange peel lay abandoned on the tabletop, a long strip dropped neatly from practised dieter’s fingers. Colin looked at it with interest. You can do divination with orange peel, he thought. The future was there, in homely things, for anyone who wanted to know it; door keys, tea leaves. There are letters in orange peel, which tell you who will be important in your life. He could make out quite clearly a capital T.
At once, a certain thought came into his mind. He examined it, and found it unwelcome. He would not entertain it; he kicked it out. His pulse rate rose a fraction; he dropped his eyes, put down his coffee cup. The thought rolled back, in a leisurely way, and closed around his attention like a loop of string. For a few months in his long marriage, he had been unfaithful to Sylvia. His affair with Isabel Field had been finished for years – it was years since he’d seen her – but the body has its own set of memories, and the mind hangs on to nagging superstitions. An initial leaps out from the table; horoscopes are read. A retreating stranger stops the heart on a station platform.
That part of life was over, of course. Isabel had been young and intense, full of devouring schemes. She’d been a social worker, full of tutored emotions; always nagging away about the inner meaning of things. He remembered, when he thought about her now, her gloom, her scruples, the problems she’d had with her clients; and the shock of contact, skin against skin, mouth against mouth, her quickening breath in the darkness of a parked car. He’d had nothing to offer her; only what she could have got from any man, and in greater comfort too. Sylvia hadn’t known about it. She hadn’t noticed, he thought, the struggle that was going on inside him.
Just as well. Her ignorant body had done the battling for her. Christmas Day, 1974, she’d told him she was pregnant again. He’d given up Isabel so that Claire could be born, and grow up plump and cheeky, and get Brownie badges.
That had been a bad year; the guilt, the deception, the hopeless months that follow the end of an affair. Lately, and unwillingly, he’d begun to think about Isabel again. Change was in the air, an undercurrent of disturbance. He couldn’t account for it.
‘You’re miles away,’ Sylvia said, clattering at the sink. She crossed to the table and scooped the orange peel into her palm, and dropped it in the bin. ‘You’ll be late if you sit about any longer.’
Colin looked at his watch. ‘Good God, twenty past eight.’ He threw the paper down. ‘Have a look at it, about the Minster. It’s awful.’ He snatched up his jacket, made for the door. ‘Come on, you kids. Take care, see you about six.’
What I should do, Isabel thought; what I should do is, I should start writing it down. I’d like to write down everything that worries me, about my life ten years ago. I’d like to write it. But I can’t find a pen.
Isabel’s brain moves slowly these days. She’s only thirty-four. She shouldn’t find thinking such an effort, and she shouldn’t look such a wreck. Perhaps a sense of foreboding dogs her. That must be it.
If she had any paper, she wouldn’t have a
