a little too insistent and her thoughts were wrapped up somewhere else.
For the past two weeks, ever since seeing Dominic, she had had the unfamiliar feeling of living on a knife’s edge. She kept expecting him to surface at any moment to pick his daughter up, or else to discuss something with her, and every second that she was on the school premises had been spent in an agony of dreaded expectation.
Of course, he hadn’t shown up, and it was only in the last few days that she could feel herself relaxing, although the relief which she should have felt at his non-appearance was not as immense as it should have been, and that in itself frightened her.
She looked down at her half-finished plate of pasta and tried to tune in to what David was telling her. Greg Thompson was going to be in line for assistant headmaster. She didn’t know Greg Thompson, though, so she mumbled something unhelpful, some soothing, nondescript remark which could have been used for any number of conversations.
Poor David, she thought. He was the maths teacher at one of the local comprehensives and he lacked that ambitious edge which would have helped him overcome his deep suspicion that he was somehow unable to control his unruly classes. It constantly nagged away at him.
She looked at his kind, unassuming face, with its carefully cut brown hair and anxious brown eyes, and for the first time in years felt a certain amount of irritation. If the departmental changes bothered him so much, why on earth didn’t he say something about it? But she knew better than to raise the issue with him. He was forever telling her that she had a cushy job, that teaching in a private school was leagues away from teaching in a state school.
‘No get up and go,’ her mother would have said. ‘A born victim, that boy.’ Her mother had been good at classifying people into categories. She used to tell her that she was one of life’s victims, that she was destined to walk on the sidelines, until the day that she rebelled and did something disastrous.
‘Cut in the same mould as your father,’ she would say, with the overlying edge of certainty which did not invite argument. ‘And look at what he did. I did everything for that man. I could have done better, but no, I stuck it out, married to a man who was never going to rise in life, and instead of being grateful, look at what he did—upped and left with a woman almost young enough to be his daughter.’
Was she a victim? She had fallen in love with a man who was too sophisticated for her, had put herself in a situation from which retreat had been painful and inevitable, and in so doing had condemned herself to a lifetime of wondering. What if things had been different? What if she had gone to London and had not been propelled for reasons that had been so complicated? What if she had stayed there? What if she had told him the truth? But no, that had never been an option. She had built their relationship on a personality which she had created, a convincing three-dimensional doll. No, the truth had never been an option, but what if…? What if…? She was here again, wrapped in the security of what she knew, but recently she could feel a disturbing restlessness in herself.
‘You’re not listening to a word I’m saying.’ David pushed his plate aside and looked at her with a certain amount of pique. ‘I’m boring you.’
‘No! I’m very interested in what’s going on at your school.’ She looked at him with affection and applied her mind to the conversation at hand. ‘Perhaps you should leave.’
‘Leave and do what?’ He sighed. ‘Teaching is all that I’m cut out to do. That’s like telling a fish to leave the water and try and make a life in a tree.’
Katherine grinned at him. ‘You can be so descriptive,’ she said. ‘You’re absolutely wasted teaching maths. You should give it all up and write a book.’
‘You’re mad,’ he said, laughing, ‘but maybe you’re right. There’s quite a lot to be said for getting out of school politics.’ He sighed, and she noticed all the tell-tale signs of a man showing his age, even though he was only twenty-nine, younger than she was, in fact. There were small wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, and a sprinkling of grey hair in between the fine brown.
In an attempt to steer him away from more maudlin self-analysis, she began chatting about books, and was relieved when he took the cue.
She didn’t feel that she could cope with David’s problems, or anyone else’s for that matter. She had enough of her own, and for once she decided that she would be selfish and not allow herself to become a never-ending sounding-board for other people. She had spent a lifetime listening to her mother and she had acquired a talent for listening, but the talent, she was discovering over the past few weeks, was not quite as accessible as it used to be. She couldn’t bring herself to discuss her own problems with anyone else, she was too private a person for that, but neither could she bring herself to be the helpful ear that she once was.
It had only struck her recently that friends and colleagues took her availability for granted, and they always had.
They always knew where to find her; they always knew that she would be around if they were at loose ends or else had something to discuss.
Should she be flattered at that? she wondered. Or was it a reflection of some essential lack in her own life?
She frowned, leaving David to hold forth on the pleasant daydream of giving up the orthodox life for something more adventurous, and only snapped back to reality when her eyes, aimlessly drifting around the room, flitted over a tall, dark man standing by the bar with a drink in his hand.
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