the noisy confusion of landings and overspilling cloakrooms was more than I could bear.
I made a note in the margin of my Shakespeare and closed it wearily. I enjoy the history plays and try to dramatise them when I teach, but today my effort with Richard III and his machinations seemed flat and stale. Hardly surprising after a short night, an early start, and an unexpected summons to the Headmistress’s study in the lunch hour. After that, I could hardly expect to be my shining best, but I still felt disappointed.
I stretched my aching shoulders, rubbed ineffectually at the pain in my neck, and reminded myself that it was Friday. The noise from below was always worse on a Friday afternoon, but it came to an end much more quickly than other days. Soon, silence would flow back into the empty classrooms and I might be able to think again.
I looked around the room where I taught most of my A-level classes. Once a servant’s bedroom in this tall, Edwardian house, the confined space was now the last resting place of objects with no immediate purpose. Ancient textbooks, music for long-forgotten concerts, programmes for school plays and old examination papers were piled into the tall bookcases which stood against two of the walls. Another tide of objects had drifted into the dim corners furthest from the single dusty window: a globe with the British Empire in fading red blotches; a bulging leather suitcase labelled ‘Drama’; a box inscribed ‘Bird’s Eggs’; a broken easel; and a firescreen embroidered with a faded peacock.
There were photographs too, framed and unframed, spotted with age. Serried ranks of girls in severe pinafores, accompanied by formidable ladies with bosoms and hats, the mothers and grandmothers of the girls who now poured out of the adjoining houses which made up Queen’s Crescent Grammar School.
I wondered yet again why the things of the past are so often neglected, left to lie around unsorted, neither cleared away nor brought properly into the present, to be valued for use or beauty. I thought of my own small collection of old photographs, a mere handful that had somehow survived my mother’s rigorous throwing out: Granny and Grandad Hughes standing in front of the forge with my mother; my father in overalls, with his first car, parked outside the garage where he worked in Ballymena; and a studio portrait of my grandmother, Ellen Erwin, clear-eyed, long-haired and wistful, when she was only sixteen. That picture was one of my most precious possessions.
My husband, Colin, says I’m sentimental and he finds it very endearing. But I don’t think it’s like that at all. I think your life starts long before you’re born, with people you may never even know, people who shape and mould the world into which you come. If I were ever to write the story of my life, it would have to begin well before the date on my birth certificate and I couldn’t do it without the fragments that most people neglect or throw away, like these faded prints at Queen’s Crescent.
The throb in my head had eased slightly as the noise level dropped from the fierce crescendo around four o’clock to the random outbursts of five minutes past. Another few minutes and I really would be able to get to my feet and collect my scattered wits.
I stared out through the dusty window at the house opposite. In the room the mirror image of mine, there were filing cabinets; a young man in shirt sleeves bent over a drawingboard under bright fluorescent tubes. On the floors below, each window framed a picture. Girls in smart dresses sat on designer furniture, in newly decorated offices with shiny green pot plants. They answered telephones, made photocopies and poured out cups of Cona coffee, disappearing with them to the front of the house, to their bosses who occupied the still elegant rooms that looked out upon the wide pavements of the next salubrious crescent.
Colin would be having tea by now. Outside the large conference room in the thickly carpeted lobby, waitresses in crisp dresses would pour from silver teapots and hand tiny sandwiches to men who dropped their briefcases on their chairs and greeted each other with warm handshakes. Beyond the air-conditioned rooms of the beflagged hotel, I saw the busy London streets, the traffic whirling ceaselessly round islands of green in squares where you could still hear a blackbird sing.
Daddy would probably be in the garden. He might be talking to the tame blackbird that follows his slight figure up and down the rosebeds as he weeds, working steadily and methodically, as if he could continue all day and never get tired. ‘Pace yourself, Jenny,’ he’d say, as he taught me how to loosen the weeds and open the soil. ‘No use going at it like a bull at a gate. Give it the time it needs. Don’t rush it.’
He was right, of course. He usually was. A mere two hours since I’d been summoned to Miss Braidwood’s study and here I was, so agitated by what she’d said that I’d gone and given myself a headache when I had the whole weekend to work things out.
I glanced at my watch and thought of all the things I ought to be doing. But I still made no move. My mind kept going back to that lunchtime meeting. I looked round the room again. This was where I worked, where I spent my solitary lunch hours, a place where I was free to think, or to sit and dream. It wasn’t a question of whether I liked it or not, it was what it meant to me that mattered.
Up here, I could even see the hard edge of the Antrim Hills lifting themselves above the city, indifferent to the housing estates which spattered their flanks and the roads which snaked and looped up and out of the broad lowland at the head of the lough.
At the thought of the hills, invisible from where I sat, I was overcome with longing. Oh, to be driving out of the city. I closed my eyes and saw the road stretch out before me, winding between hedgerows thick with summer green, the buttercups gleaming in the strong light. Daddy and I, setting off to see some elderly relative in her small cottage by the sea or tucked away in one of the nine Glens of Antrim, whose names I could recite like a poem. The fresh wind from the sea tempering the summer heat, the sky a dazzle of blue, we move through meadow and moorland towards the rough slopes of a great granite outcrop.
‘Well, here we are, Jenny. Slemish. Keeping sheep here must’ve been fairly draughty. Pretty grim in winter even for a saint. Can we climb it, d’ye think?’
‘Oh yes, please. We’ll be able to see far more from the top.’
Bracken catching at my ankles, the mournful bleat of sheep, the sun hot on my shoulders as we circle upwards between huge boulders. A hawthorn tree still in bloom, though it is nearly midsummer, shelters a spring bubbling up among the rocks. We stop and drink from cupped hands. There isn’t another soul on the mountain and no other car parked beside us on the rough edge of the lane below. As we climb, the whole province of Ulster unrolls before us, until at last we stand in the wind, between the coast of Scotland on one far horizon and the mountains of Donegal, blue and misted, away to the west.
‘Isn’t that the Mull of Kintyre, Daddy?’
‘Yes, dear. That’s the Mull of Kintyre,’ he replied, as if his thoughts were as far away as the bright outline beyond the shimmering sea.
Reluctantly, I got to my feet. Daydreaming, my mother would call it, but the tone of her voice would make the weakness into a crime should she catch me at it.
‘Jennifer, you have got to get to that bookshop,’ I said to myself severely. There was shopping as well and whatever else happened I had to be at Rathmore Drive by 5.30 p.m.
The staffroom door was ajar. Gratefully, I pushed it wide open with my elbow, dropped the exercise books on the nearest surface and breathed a sigh of relief. No one sat on the benches beside the long plastic-covered tables. There was no one by the handsome marble fireplace, peering at the timetables and duty lists pinned to the tattered green noticeboard perched on the mantelpiece. Best of all, no one crouched by the corner cupboard, where a single broad shelf was labelled ‘J. McKinstry – English’.
I winced as the light from naked fluorescent
