was a short silence downstairs. Jane could feel herself blushing. ‘I wish—’ she said.
‘Oh, I’m sure she’s not, not really,’ Anne’s mum called. ‘There’s squash and biscuits. Shall I bring them up?’
But the idea of going down Broomhill the next afternoon had been agreed on. The next day they had geography last thing; Anne had volunteered the pair of them to put away the Plasticine contour map of Yorkshire the class was making, and the labelled cut-away of the strata of rock underneath a coal-mine. The task had been occupying them for weeks – it was supposed to be ready for Christmas Parents’ Day and they were all sick of it and Miss Barker’s shrill exhortations: ‘I don’t care whether it’s done or not, you’re only showing yourselves up.’ For weeks, as if it were tainting them with the nightmarish horror of its incompletion, there had been a rush to the door as the bell rang. But this evening Anne lingered, tugging at Jane’s skirt as she, like the rest, got up, slinging her bag over her shoulder. Miss Barker had been about to collar someone at random as usual, but, with a mistaken glitter in her eye, she alighted on Jane and Anne, fingered them as dawdlers for the punishment of putting the stuff away. Anne and Jane, they weren’t good girls – they’d already been done for giggling five minutes into one of her lecture-reminiscences, and would have been done worse if Miss Barker had known that Jane had giggled at Anne saying, ‘It’s her wants a lover,’ meaning Miss Barker. So she couldn’t have known that Anne’s dawdling was in aid of volunteering for the task, or at any rate – you wouldn’t want to show Miss Barker that much willing – allowing herself and Jane to be landed with it. Jane thought she might have been consulted – ‘There’s good girls,’ Miss Barker said when they were done, which was enough to make you puke – but she saw the point when they’d finished folding the plans, scraping the mess of the afternoon’s Plasticine off the tables, put the whole almond-smelling bright geologies back into 4B’s geography cupboard, and gone out, fifteen unhurried minutes after the end of school. It was as empty as a weekend glimpse; everyone had gone, swept off in the fifty-one bus. She and Anne shouldered their bags and turned in the other direction, of Broomhill, without having to explain to anyone, and that was a good thing.
All the schools were turning out: the big boys and girls from the George V in their standard black blazers, and the snooty ones, the girls in purple from St Benet’s, where you paid to go, like Sophy next door to Anne, where she claimed you got to learn Russian and, like drippy, bleating Sophy, to produce the horrible sheep-like noise of the oboe too. They were all heading in the same direction, the opposite one to Jane and Anne. Jane felt like a truant, the two of them in their ordinary clothes.
‘Do you think Barker cares?’ Anne said.
‘Cares about what?’ Jane said.
‘About Parents’ Day,’ Anne said. ‘She goes on about it enough.’
‘I reckon she’ll get the sack if it’s not ready,’ Jane said, ‘if it’s not perfect, that geology thing.’
‘I hope she does,’ Anne said. ‘We might get someone who doesn’t—’
‘“When I was in Africa,”’ Jane quoted, a favourite conversational opening of Miss Barker’s, liable to lead to any subject, and they laughed immoderately, clutching their stomachs and saying it three or four times.
‘She made me eat cabbage once,’ Anne said, ‘when she was sitting in the teacher’s place on our table at dinner. I hate cabbage.’
‘She’ll have had to eat worse in Africa,’ Jane said. ‘She’ll not have sympathy for you, being fussy over a plate of cabbage, when you think what she’s had to force down.’
‘Missionaries from a pot,’ Anne said. ‘I dare say.’
‘Worms and grubs,’ Jane said. ‘Toasted over an open fire.’
‘Only like marshmallow,’ Anne said.
‘Not much like,’ Jane said.
‘But cabbage, it’s horrible,’ Anne said. ‘She made me eat it, she said it didn’t taste of much. I think it tastes right horrible.’ Jane agreed, and they went on.
‘“When I was in Africa,”’ Anne quoted again, but she hadn’t thought of how it could go on after that and fell silent. Missionaries, cannibals, and that right funny film in Geography with a black man in a wig like a lawyer’s where they’d laughed and Miss Barker’d turned the lights up to talk in low serious tones about (one of) her disappointments.
There was the Hallam Towers on the left, and on the right, the gloomy ericaceous drive that led up to the blind school – there were dozens of blind children up there: you never saw them. And then the library, and then they were in Broomhill. It was a journey you took with your mum and dad, perhaps; it wasn’t a schoolday journey. So they were a little bit solemn as they turned the corner into Broomhill proper, with its parade of shops, marking not what they passed but what they were heading towards.
Jane suddenly thought how unwise this idea had been, to turn up without warning her mother. What if – her novelist’s imagination creaked into gear and saw, clear as anything, her mother and a young lover, a David Cassidy perhaps, embracing and kissing in a bower of flowers in the shop window. But it could not be helped now. For some unspoken reason, they did not cross the road. Over there, the flower shop’s awning, pink and domed, the only one sheltering the Broomhill street, like a flushed, guilty, cross and bad forehead, and, inside, a figure, two figures, moved, gathering, circling, busy.
They stood opposite, watching. Jane clutched her bag. ‘Let’s—’ she said feebly, but it was too late. They had been seen. The figures had paused as if surprised, then one came to the broad window, resolving its dark outline into her mother, not bearing the surprised, suspicious expression Jane had envisaged, but a flash of uncustomary delight as the other figure came up behind her. Jane raised her arm to wave, but was arrested by an insight as she took in the worried face beside her mother.
It was Anne’s insight, too. ‘But he’s old,’ she said. ‘I thought—’
‘What did you think?’ Jane said, snapping a little. She already felt defensive about this man.
‘He doesn’t look like anyone’s lover,’ Anne said.
‘I never said he was,’ Jane said irrationally. She didn’t need to come closer: she somehow knew what this man was like, better than her mother could, and she could surely see that what animation he possessed was a matter of sparks thrown off by a chill and flinty interior. She was right: Nick had aspects of fire, could briefly blaze, but they were mere sparks, giving little light and no heat, capable only of a short spectacle, of the casual infliction of harsh smarts on anyone standing by, foolishly admiring.
As for Nick: he ran that shop for another ten years. But whenever he looked out of the shop window and saw someone, two people, on the opposite side of the road, inspecting his façade, he always felt that same sudden way. He always felt the same as he did that first afternoon. And then, they were only two schoolgirls.
‘It’s my daughter,’ Katherine said. ‘And her friend. They never said.’
‘Ask them in,’ Nick said.
It had been eighteen months or so before when Nick and Jimmy had had the idea. They’d been in Jimmy’s new house in Fulham. Jimmy said Chelsea, though it was really Fulham. Miranda, Jimmy’s wife, certainly said Chelsea. She was as decisive about that as she was about the fact
