The Following Girls (15 page)

After six miserable months freelancing for a plastics factory the memory of the classroom faded, and fifteen weeks’ holiday, a near-decent salary and a guaranteed pension looked a lot less unattractive. Perhaps if he taught at a prep school? Or tried girls? Girls would be a lot easier, surely? Biddable, underlined neatly, copied nicely, didn’t spill things – or set fire to anything.

The short stint in plastics made his CV look scrappy but his mother had been unwell and her three-month decline could be twitched back and forth like a skimpy fitting room curtain to cover the awkward gap in his professional life story. The Mildred Fawcett interview panel appeared impressed by his filial devotion and cooed awkwardly like doves in tight shoes when the cancer was mentioned, although the O’Brien woman (no fool) did wonder why he hadn’t asked his old school for a sabbatical of some kind . . .? Derek Mars managed not to stammer over the reply which had been copied out in neat in his memory: how he hadn’t wanted to leave St Christopher’s in the lurch (how considerate) and how he very much wanted a new challenge (if Dr O’Brien had had a pound for every deadbeat job-switcher who’d dredged that one up she could have bought herself an electron microscope). He learned afterwards that they wouldn’t have cared too much what he said, given that the bulk of middle school chemistry was being taught by a physics teacher keeping one chapter ahead.

His appointment had alarmed the existing staff but his first few days gave no cause for complaint. He didn’t grumble about his chair or the size of his locker and he didn’t smoke a pipe or monopolise the coin operated phone ringing up his paramours or his bookmaker. Dr O’Brien relaxed: he’d do (just about). At barely twenty-five you might have expected a bit of horseplay with the younger mistresses but he didn’t seem the type and in any case his oddly elderly, mother’s boy wardrobe of turned-up trousers and Terylene ties had beta minus allure, had he but known it.

‘Stinker’ had been ragged rather about his new job by the chaps at the bridge club, who assured him that anything in trousers (turned up or otherwise) would be of interest to this closed order of bluestockings and he was almost looking forward to a smattering of feminine attention.

The chairs in the staff common room were newish and cheap: bony arms, little padding and generally uninviting – very much like their occupants. He’d chuckled inwardly at this happy comparison (one to remember for the chaps). The Fawcett SCR spent most of its free time marking homework, carping about the girls or toiling over the
Daily Telegraph
crossword – very much a joint effort (although from the few conversations he’d had he wouldn’t put money on any one of them being able to complete a puzzle single-handed:
Some insane roman (4)
– ‘Oh of
course
, Edith, how clever of you!’).

When he arrived for work on his second day he had been part gratified, part terrified to note that one or more of them had taken to wearing large amounts of very strong scent – or so he thought until he spotted a can of air freshener on the windowsill by his armchair. His allotted chair had originally been chummily close to another group but had been moved and now sat in surly splendour in the far corner of the room. Peculiar creatures. Perhaps it would be more prudent not to ask about this applause business.

The clapping in the chemistry lab had continued for well over a minute but they’d stopped at last and he took his place at the front bench. The blackboard behind him was entirely taken up by a hastily drawn diagram showing the procedure for making distilled water with ‘please leave’ implausibly scrawled in the bottom corner in girlish roundhand. No sign of a board rubber . . .

‘So. How was life on Mars?’ asked Queenie, who had joined the three chemists in the cloakroom after her domestic science lesson.

‘Absolute Stinker,’ said Bunty.

‘In every sense,’ snarled Stott. ‘A whole class given double prep over a missing board rubber? Bit extreme. I mean what has he got in reserve? What’s his nuclear option if we all set fire to the fume cabinet again?’

‘
“The following girls will report to the staff room for the shag-ging they so richly deserve,
”
’ said Queenie in her Mostyn voice.

‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ said Bunty. ‘Imagine that lying on top of you: even his eyebrows have dandruff.’

‘Married?’

‘Leave off. Did you see his shirt when he took off his jacket to wipe the board? Only irons collar and cuffs and front. Wives wouldn’t get away with that.’

‘Maybe he’s looking for
lurve
. Can’t have Miss Drumlin, she’s married to Middlesex lacrosse. The Gleet might suit, smarten him up a bit anyway. Bet the Gleet irons sleeves. She’d soon put a crease in his underpants.’

‘As the actress said to the bishop.’

‘Yeah, but at a price. The Gleet’s neurotic, Mummy says. Do better just having a bit on the side with Mrs Chiffley, fatten him up at least.’

‘Only if he likes rollmop herrings,’ said Queenie who was humming ‘Born Free’ as she scraped her fish down the loo. ‘I’m releasing them back into the wild.’

‘Where is Rollmop?’ wondered Bunty.

‘Sweden somewhere. Just outside Britvik.’

Everyone laughed and Bunty grinned. Anyone else would want the punchline but Bunty just wanted more jokes to be told.

Chapter 9

Baker had arrived early for her careers appointment and was sitting outside the sick bay, trying to think of something that would really get up the Batty woman’s nose (Mountain Rescue? Merchant Banking? Minesweeping?), when her eye was caught by an unfamiliar movement at the far end of the dark narrow corridor. Julia Smith, entirely alone in the lobby outside the staff room, was turning cartwheels. Over and over and over, so fast and smooth that the rubbish didn’t even fall from her pockets – centrifugal? -petal? She came to a halt outside the headmistress’s office and Baker held her breath, waiting for the knock on the door, but Julia merely tossed back her shiny auburn hair, straightened her pervy little skirt and jogged back up the stairs without a glance.

Miss Batty herself was still finishing up after her last music lesson. The Lower Fourth had evacuated the Music Room at top speed, leaving her to tidy away thirty-two copies of ‘Summer is Icumen In’ and making her late for her session in the Careers cupboard. She was in no hurry, methodically refolding the sheet music and stowing it all neatly in the correct folder in the glazed cabinet by the piano.

Miss Batty had been at Mildred Fawcett ever since she got her B.Ed.
Fionula Batty MA Oxon: Music and Careers
said the prospectus. The ad in the
TES
had only said ‘Music Teacher’, but her predecessor (hired by La Fawcett herself to teach pianoforte and deportment) had drawn the short straw when the need for careers advice became ever more pressing and it had been decreed that the twinning of the roles should continue. Deportment lived on as a badge awarded to anyone with a clean blouse and unladdered tights but the encyclopaedia-balancing days were long gone.

Miss Batty’s immaculate assumption from Lady Margaret Hall to Fawcett Upper meant that she knew almost nothing about the job market so they sent her on a course: two days of lectures and slides in Leicester somewhere at the height of the Proms season. It was largely common sense and most of the work was done for you by the trusty old ‘Careers Archive’ which consisted of the leaflets contained in three drawers of a four-drawer filing cabinet (the bottom drawer having been requisitioned by Miss Drumlin for the sick bay log, a bottle of Lucozade and half a pint of nail varnish remover).

Miss Batty had also inherited a long shelf of books called things like
A Career for Your Daughte
r
;
Challenging Careers in the Library World
;
Working With Animals
;
Rosemary Takes to Teaching
;
Pauline Becomes a Hairdresser
and
A Career for Women in Industry?
(the question mark said it all).

Miss Batty locked the Music Room’s Steinway and sped along the dingy admin corridor to where Baker was waiting. She saw the silhouetted student take something from her mouth and stick it under the seat of the bench. A rebuke was in order but Miss Batty hadn’t the heart. You couldn’t see the beastly stuff, after all, and fifteen minutes flew by quickly enough as it was.

‘Amanda Baker? Go on in. It isn’t locked.’

The room was hardly wider than a corridor and was almost filled by a narrow steel bedstead made up with knitted cotton blankets and a foam pillow pessimistically draped with blue paper towels in readiness for another projectile nosebleed. There was a canvas chair and one of the rickety folding desks used for public exams wedged between the bed and the wall, under the window, but Miss Batty preferred not to use the diagnostic end of the room –
How long have you had this urge to be an articled clerk?
– and made do with a clipboard and a pair of tip-up chairs just inside the door.

Baker sat down on one of them and stared blankly at the ancient WAAF recruitment posters hung either side of the filing cabinet. The uniformed smiles did little to lighten the sickly mood established by the green gloss paint and the small temperature chart with its panicky notes in Biro (Normal, Feverish, Summon Assistance). The walls at the bed end were otherwise bare, apart from a large map of the world placed at eye level to distract first and second formers while the creepy little man from the health authority took their hands and made them squeeze his thin old thigh while he gave the German Measles and BCG injections (even the proles knew what
that
was about). It was a map of the wrong world, mind you, West Africa was still a big green blob.

‘What are the red pins for?’ Baker’s question interrupted Miss Batty’s recitation on the importance of keeping options open.

‘What? Oh that: old girls who have worked overseas.’

There were three pins.

‘Had you thought of working abroad? Perhaps in the services?’

Golly, this was depressing, thought Miss Batty. Always the same jobs. A few girls each year would set their hearts on wireless operation or dental nursing or speech therapy (there was quite a vogue for this among Miss Kopje’s ‘ragged rocks’ contingent). One, sometimes two girls per year settled on a career in medicine (or thereabouts), two or three would plump for teaching. The air hostesses tended to come in pairs, dreaming of staff discounts and poolside pina coladas. Miss Batty’s fiancé had suggested she run a book in the staff room, the distribution of girlish wishes was so predictable, but you’d still need to keep a weather eye on the trends. Fashion Buyer had fallen from favour – it was really only one up from ‘Can I help you, madam?’ the fifth form had decided – but working in an office (surely the dullest life imaginable) was always popular, particularly since the advent of the ‘personal assistant’ and the bi-lingual secretary. Miss Batty occasionally helped out with the French conversation mocks and the idea of one of those tongue-tied eskervoos querying an invoice or a ship’s manifest always made her laugh.

Received Careers wisdom had it that every subject dropped, every examination flunked, meant another option sealed off. And yet one did meet (or read about) lawyers who hadn’t studied Latin, photographers who had given up Chemistry. The idea that one needed the periodic table to make sense of a dark room had always been one of her predecessor’s trump cards, but no one ever called her on it: did David Bailey have a Chemistry O level? Of course he didn’t. Silly sausage. But Miss Batty was still trotting out the same speech about ‘doors closing’, complete with cautionary tales of old girls whose dreams had been blighted when potential employers spotted their ignorance of South American exports or trigonometry.
Woolworth’s
would be whispered, as if the future were not Mildred Fawcett’s ‘rosy path of golden possibilities’ but a hostile terrain strung with tripwires.

Ask the pre-preps in Fawcett Under what they wanted to be when they grew up and their horizons were limitless: film star, lady astronaut, princess, Lassie . . . but it was a career mistress’s duty to rein in such ambitions. Vet? Try kennel maid. Restaurateur? Try catering supervisor. Floristry? Now you’re talking. It was like pick-a-card-any-card. They thought it was random, thought they’d got fifty-two to choose from, but they still took the one they were supposed to take.

Miss Batty had once thumbed through a copy of
Careers for Boys
in Smith’s. Such a lot of careers – airline pilot, stonemason, stockbroker – far more than would have fitted into her filing system. Was there a
Careers for Dogs
? Plenty to choose from: police work, mountain rescue, modelling, drug squad not to mention any number of openings in pharmaceuticals . . .

Baker’s surprise announcement put an end to Miss Batty’s rueful reverie.

An
actress
? Was the girl mad?

‘Should be under A,’ said Baker in her only-does-it-to-annoy voice, but Miss Batty was still too taken aback to even register her rudeness and besides it very definitely
wasn’t
under A. Animals (care of), Army, Air Force, Air Hostess, Au Pair: yes. Astrophysicist, Astronaut, Arms dealer,
Artiste
: no. Not even Accountant (although Accounts was there). And definitely not Actress. Stupid girl.