The Rye Man (6 page)

*

After giving the staff five minutes to clear up and grab a quick cup of coffee he entered the staffroom. Mrs Haslett had obviously made some comment about the circular arrangement of chairs and others were staring at them as if they represented some kind of threat. Miss Fulton stood cupping her coffee in her hands, obviously unsure of where to sit. He made a joke
about
how he was glad to see that everyone appeared to have survived. It interested him to see that Vance and Haslett sat together in the seats across from him. No one sat on the chairs on either side of him and he used them to stack his handouts.

As he ran through the new administrative arrangements, Miss McCreavey and Miss Fulton made notes in the back of their diaries. Vance sat quietly, his eyes fixed somewhere on the opposite wall, while Haslett stared at him in a way that said she was inspecting him rather than listening to what he was saying. His own eyes lingered briefly on her shoes - green patent leather with insets of white triangles and gold stitching. In a silent pause as he passed out the handouts, he could hear the clink of Eric's mop bucket as the mop head rattled the handle and then the slushy squeak as it slithered across the wet tiles.

He led them through the pages, outlining proposed changes demanded by the Education Reform Act, explaining the working parties he was setting up to evaluate their school curriculum. He tried to take a pragmatic course, expressing his own doubts about aspects of the changes – the usual lack of training and resourcing, the burden of assessment – but also tried to encourage them to be positive in their response.

He glanced up at the tight ring of faces and read their disquiet, their silent exasperation. Suddenly the physical distance which separated them from him seemed to stretch further, and he felt increasingly ill at ease and disjointed in his speech. He paused as his line of thought rushed blindly into a dead-end and through the breach caused by his hesitation flooded their incredulity and all the questions for which he had no easy answers.

What did you do with thirty other children when one was being assessed? When were they supposed to find time for all
the
paperwork? What would pages of ticks in boxes tell you about a child's ability?

Fiona Craig said things he agreed and sympathised with and it made him feel uncomfortable to be placed in the role of spokesman for the government, an apologist for policies devised by civil servants. In the face of her passion and frustration he knew he sounded mealy-mouthed and unconvincing, but he tried to steer his middle course, suggesting compromises and shortcuts, trying as always to talk from a teacher's perspective. He felt more and more defensive, under pressure.

Mrs Haslett, smelling blood, increasingly pushed in for her share, her eyes wide behind her glasses and her head nodding slightly as she took her bite. ‘I wonder what Mr Reynolds would have made of all these changes? Given them short shift I expect.'

‘I think Mr Reynolds took early retirement precisely because he knew there was no way these changes could be avoided.' He paused, his own frustration rising, and scanned the circle. ‘Whether we like it or not this is the face of the future, and so long as it's on the statute book we have to find some way to work it.'

He knew he was slipping towards the type of confrontation he had been determined to avoid. He was saved only by Haslett's insistent attempts to dominate the discussion and the silencing of those with more perceptive perspectives. Inevitably she defended the status quo, made trite little points based on anecdote and prejudice, delivering them as if they were profundities. He replied calmly to each of them, patronising her each time by the cheerful use of her first name, letting the shots bounce off him, smiling at times, sometimes directing them back with a gently barbed question. She was running out of steam, out of support.

Vance had said little, content to make a few disparaging
comments
about educational theorists, the transience of fashionable ideas when set beside the traditional solidity of what he described as ‘sound teaching'.

Then Miss Fulton said something optimistic, oblivious to the withering glance. He could have hugged her. Miss McCreavey, too, said something supportive, and the tight power of the circle was broken. He made a joke – only Vance and Haslett did not laugh.

He had made it. At one point as the rapids jutted jagged and large ahead of him it had been in the balance, but he had not panicked and had steered a course through. Now that he was in calmer waters and the end of the meeting in sight, he went on the offensive and brought up the question of the entrance hall.

‘Frankly, it depresses me. I'm sure together we could make it more inviting, use it to create a more positive impression of the school and the work that goes on in it.'

They looked at him impassively.

‘I'm going to ask Eric to put up some display boards and I thought it would be a good start if we could all have our classes make a display for Hallowe'en – perhaps fireworks, autumn leaves, that sort of thing.'

‘All
classes?' asked Vance.

‘Yes, all classes. We don't want anyone to feel left out.'

‘P7 are very busy, as I'm sure you realise, with preparations for the Transfer Test.'

‘I appreciate that, but a change of activity would be good for them.'

‘Don't forget, Mr Cameron,' said Mrs Haslett, ‘that since the Troubles fireworks have been banned and many of our children won't ever have seen any.' Her head quivered almost imperceptibly. It was clear she thought she had found an
Achilles'
heel but he saw it only as a final, rather pathetic throw.

‘Think of it, Muriel, as an exercise in imagination,' he said, smiling at her.

Before she could think of a response he thanked them for their time and attention, and as she attempted finally to say something her words were lost in the scraping of chairs and the opening of locker doors.

The corridors smelled of disinfectant and were still wet as he locked his office door. Hugging the side of the wall, he stepped as lightly as he could, but when he reached the general office he turned round to see his footsteps following him, grey prints of grime. He feigned a grimace to Mrs Patterson as she put on her coat. It had been a long day and he was glad to be going home.

As he took the ten minute drive down country lanes he felt strangely empty. The softening strands of light dulled the ragged blossoms of the hedgerows into a smear of sameness. Behind them, ridged backs of ploughed fields smacked into each other at awkward angles. A half-hearted attempt at a scarecrow lolled sideways, its stick arms bereft of clothes. As he drove on automatic pilot he saw a glimpse of the future – an arbiter of petty feuds, a dealer of small cards, an apologist for things he did not believe in. What should have felt like a beginning suddenly felt like the end of something.

On the skyline a tractor snail-trailed a line of shimmering sod. He slowed the car to take a corner. A gate into a field was half open and behind the metal bars was a child's face. It was the girl with the blonde hair. He waved his hand instinctively, but she dropped her eyes behind a bar, her knuckles clenching tightly. He looked back in his mirror, but saw only a flock of gulls falling like snow into an open field.

As
he turned into the driveway of the house they had bought three months earlier, he had to brake hard to stop running into an emerging cyclist. Tom Quinn was a local handyman-cum-gardener who had done some work for them – a bit of re-plastering and pointing, replacing cracked roof tiles. They had also called him in on several occasions when their purchase of the former rectory had seemed like an act of reckless romanticism, rather than a sound financial investment. He got off his creaking bike and leaned in at the driver's window. He was in his late fifties with a tight cap of wiry grey hair and blue eyes light against the dark creases of his weathered face. His broad stubby fingers rested on the ledge as he shook his head slowly from side to side in a wordless expression of bewilderment.

‘The septic tank again, Tom?'

‘Aye, Mr Cameron, your wife called me this afternoon. I still can't fathom where it's coming from.' He drummed his fingers on the ledge. There were neat curves of cement under his fingernails.

They had noticed the smell several weeks after they had moved in – it seemed to seep slowly into the bathroom, barely noticeable at first, a faint scent of sewer, then gradually it inflated the whole room until it was stretched taut with a septic stink. They closed the door. There was a trace of it in the kitchen. Sometimes they imagined it in other parts of the house and went about sniffing like people with heavy colds, never sure if they themselves carried the smell into new rooms. Then, as suddenly as it came, it would disappear. They made jokes about the Amityville Horror house but the joke was beginning to wear thin.

‘There's obviously something wrong with the tank, Tom. The system's not working somewhere.'

The heavy fingers rose and fell as if playing notes on a
piano.
‘I don't understand it. I've had the manhole covers up and I can't see a blockage anywhere. Mrs Cameron flushed paper down and I watched it shoot through clean as a whistle. I put two new traps in the bathroom last week and sealed them, so I just can't see how the smell's getting back in.'

They both shrugged grimly at the unsolved mystery and then, as Quinn wheeled his bike out through the gate, he drove up to the house, the loosely-gravelled driveway scrunching and squirming under his wheels. Emma was standing in the doorway of one of the outbuildings, her T-shirt and cut-off jeans splashed with paint. She had pinned her hair up but a blonde wisp trailed forward like a question mark. She had sounded up in her phone call, but he could tell from his first glance that the mood had evaporated. As he walked towards her he was about to make some joke about flushing toilet paper but thought better of it. When she gave him her cheek to kiss he noticed the stipples of paint on her eyelids, and then without asking him about his day, she went in and gestured round the room with the paint roller. Two of the walls were now white but they looked rough and uneven and in need of more coats of paint.

‘I wanted to get it finished today to have it done for you coming home, but by this afternoon the smell was back, as bad as ever. I asked Mr Quinn to come over. He's very nice but I don't think he knows what to do. I've spent half my day flushing yellow toilet paper down the loo and shouting out of the bathroom window but I don't think he's any the wiser.'

‘I know, I spoke to him at the gate.' He looked round the half-painted room. ‘It'll be good when it's finished,' he said, trying to cheer her up, but the words sounded trite and unconvincing.

The couple of outhouses were one of the features which had attracted her to the house. She wanted to turn one into a
studio
for her art work and he had encouraged her, encouraged anything which would keep her busy and positive. During the summer they had installed new windows, opening it up to good natural light, and fitted some electrical heating so she would be able to work in the winter. But now she slumped on to a wooden chair and watched as the roller she was holding dripped gently on the newspaper-covered floor. For a few seconds he felt resentful of her, begrudging the time and energy he would have to invest in restoring her to better spirits. It should have been his day for special attention, some gentle pampering to ease away the stresses of a new job, but she was slipping further into herself, and for the few moments it took to fight off his disappointment the only sound was the steady splat of paint on to newsprint.

As more months went by, sometimes he could not help thinking her selfish. She was so self-absorbed, preoccupied with her own pain that it left no room for an acknowledgement of his, an unspoken assumption that the loss was entirely hers. It had been a boy. She had carried him for four months, losing him without warning in one of those moments that convinced all those without the comfort of faith that fate chose often to be both personal and malevolent. They had tried for a child for a long time with no apparent reason for earlier failure. Perhaps it was always this way whatever the circumstances. He preferred to shut it away in that part of himself which was hidden, just as he had packed away all the clothes and objects which were to have been for the child in an old suitcase, and lodged it in the darkest corner of the roof-space. He had placed them in the cheap brown case they had bought for their honeymoon, and stored it out of sight the night before she had come home from hospital. Jumpers his mother had knitted in the neutrality of lemon and white, their neat rows of tiny stitches small enough for some child's doll. A musical
mobile
with prancing circus horses. The goofy soft toy she had bought the day the doctor told her she was pregnant. Other bits and pieces they had gathered or been given by friends who no longer needed them. A memorial to something that had never existed except in the future images they had conjured and painted in the privacy of their imaginations. Alone in the house he had felt only a sense of numbness as he searched vainly for some emotion that was recognisable, or even appropriate, but there was only that clinging sense of coldness clasping him tightly, like the way the early morning mists layered the sleeping fields. He had tried to cry, tried to get drunk, but it felt too much as though he was acting out a part in some cheap film, smacked too much of self pity. Perhaps it would have been better if she had seen him cry, maybe then she could have shared her own pain more openly, rather than hugging it tightly to her like a phantom child. But he knew he could not have cried in front of her because to do so would have altered the way he thought about their relationship. She was the fragile one, he the stronger, and the evidence of his love for her was the responsibility he assumed for her well-being. She was like one of his children, entrusted into his care forever through a ceremony and the exchange of rings.