on his table when he returned from the staff room. Mandy, something of a raconteur in her primitive way, told dirty jokes to anyone in the class who would listen, which was most of them.
As the weeks passed, Sian hitched her skirt higher and higher. She and Mandy fell into the habit of sitting at a table near the front of the class. They would pull their chairs out and sit facing the front with their legs apart, forcing Eddie to glimpse their underwear, some of which was most unsuitable for schoolgirls, or indeed for any woman who wasn’t the next best thing to a prostitute. One day, early in July, Mandy sat in a pose which revealed beyond any possible doubt that she was wearing no knickers at all.
The crisis arrived late on a Friday afternoon. Eddie’s guard was down because he thought the children had gone; he was alone in his classroom, sitting at his table, trying to plan the next week’s lessons and feeling relieved that the teaching week was over.
Mandy, Sian and three other girls strolled nonchalantly into the room. Mandy and Sian came to stand beside him, one on each side. A third girl lingered by the door, keeping watch; the other two constituted an audience.
‘Wouldn’t you like to fuck me, sir?’ whispered Mandy on the left. She put a hand on the back of his chair and leaned over him.
‘No – me.’ Sian undid the top two buttons of her shirt. ‘I can give you a much better time. Honest, sir. Why don’t I suck your cock?’
Eddie tried to push back his chair, but it wouldn’t move because Mandy now had her foot behind one of the rear legs as well as her hand on the back.
The other girls were sniggering, and one of them said in a loud whisper: ‘Look – he’s getting a hard-on.’
Mandy was now unbuttoning her shirt too. ‘Go on, sir. Lick my titties. They taste nicer than hers.’
Eddie found his voice at last. ‘Stop this.’ His voice rose. ‘Stop this at once. Stop it. Stop it.’
‘You don’t mean that, sir. You like it. Go on, admit it.’
‘Stop it. Stop it. I shall report you to –’
‘If you report us we’ll say you were interfering with us.’
‘Mr Grace is a bloody pervert,’ said Sian. ‘We got witnesses to prove it.’
The latter’s shirt was now entirely unbuttoned. She pushed up her breasts, encased in a formidable black bra, and poked them hard into his face. The lace was rough against his nose. There was a smell of stale sweat.
‘Fuck me, darling,’ she murmured.
Eddie leapt up, knocking over his chair. Mandy shrieked and groped at his crotch. Abandoning his briefcase, he ran for the door. Their hands clutched at him. He collided with the sentry in the doorway, pushing her against the wall. The girls’ laughter pursued him down the corridor. As he ran across the school car park, scattering a knot of teenagers, the laughter drifted after him through the open windows. In a way it was a relief that the final humiliation had come at last. Failure had its compensations.
The following Monday morning Eddie phoned the school secretary and, having pleaded illness too often in the past, desperately invented a dying grandmother. The same day, he saw his GP, who listened to him for five minutes and gave him a prescription for tranquillizers. On Tuesday he wrote a letter of resignation to the head teacher.
‘I’m not surprised,’ Stanley said when Eddie told him the news. ‘I saw that coming from the start. I told you, didn’t I?’
‘You don’t understand. I’ve decided that I don’t approve of the philosophy behind modern education.’
His father raised his eyebrows, miming the disbelief he did not need openly to express. ‘What now? You’ve probably missed the boat with the Paladin, but if you like, I –’
‘No.’ Stuff the Paladin. ‘I don’t want to work there.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
At the time Eddie could not answer the question, but over the years an answer had evolved as if by its own volition. First he had made a half-hearted attempt to see whether he could retrain as a primary-school teacher. But he could not whip up much enthusiasm even for teaching younger children. In any case, he guessed that the head teacher at Dale Grove would give him an unsatisfactory reference. Quite apart from the discipline problem, there was also the possibility that Mandy and Sian had circulated rumours of sexual harassment, with Eddie in the role of predator rather than victim.
Worse was to come that summer – the unpleasant business at Charleston Street swimming baths. As a schoolboy, Eddie had learned to swim there, though not very well. It was an old building, full of echoes, with an ineradicable smell of chlorine and unwashed feet. In the first few months after he left Dale Grove, Eddie paid several visits to Charleston Street, partly to give himself a reason to get out of the house and away from his father, now a semi-invalid.
He disliked the male changing room, where youths who reminded him of the pupils at Dale Grove indulged in loud horseplay. The pool, too, was often too crowded for his taste. Nor did he like taking off his clothes in front of strangers. He was very conscious of the soft flab which clung to his waist and the top of his thighs, of his lack of bodily hair, and of his small stature. But he enjoyed cooling down in the water and watching the younger children.
He clung to the side and watched girls swimming races and mothers teaching their children to swim. Some young children appeared to have no adults watching over them, even from the balcony overlooking the swimming pool. Latchkey children, Eddie supposed, abandoned by mothers going out to work. He felt sorry for them – his own mother had always been at home when he came back from school and during the holidays – and tried to keep a friendly eye on them.
Sometimes he became quite friendly with those deserted children and would play games with them. His favourite was throwing them up in the air above the water, catching them as they descended, and then tickling them until they squealed with laughter.
On one occasion Eddie was playing this game with a little girl called Josie. She was in the care of her older brother, a ten-year-old who for most of the time horsed about with his friends in the deep end. Eddie felt quite indignant on Josie’s behalf: the little girl was so vulnerable – what could the mother be thinking of?
‘You funny man,’ she said. ‘Your name’s Mr Funny.’
He came back the following day to find Josie there.
‘Hello, Mr Funny,’ she called out.
They played together for a few minutes. As Eddie was preparing to throw Josie into the air for the fourth time, he noticed surprise spreading over her face. An instant later he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned. Beside him, standing on the edge of the pool, was one of the lifeguards, accompanied by a thickset, older man in a tracksuit.
The latter said, ‘All right. You’re getting out now. Put the kid down.’
Eddie looked from one hostile face to the other. Another lifeguard was walking towards them with Josie’s brother. It was unfair but Eddie did not argue, partly because he knew there was no point and partly because he was scared of the man in the tracksuit.
He climbed up the ladder. Eddie was conscious that other people were looking at him – the other two lifeguards on duty,
