Gifted and Talented (11 page)

‘Yeah,’ Hero smirked. ‘Like you have, right? How’s the novel coming on?’

Olly regretted ever having mentioned this to Hero. It had been in a weak moment, probably immediately after the chilli had struck.

The laptop was open on Hero’s Twitter page, he saw. Her address was @GothGirl and the photo was of a pair of black lips up close. She had a smart laptop, Olly saw, and a scanner as well. Her parents had obviously tried, at one stage, to appease her with computers.

Hero had turned up Wanker again. ‘This one’s called “Arse to Everything”,’ she announced.

Olly decided to take the hint.

Dotty was still at the kitchen table when he came back downstairs with the Hoover. ‘That dog’s there again,’ she observed. Olly followed her eyes out of the kitchen window. The white poodle that had first turned up a week ago was staring in through the pane.

Olly had spotted it first. He had seen its nametag – silver, with ‘Coco’ engraved on it in swirling script – and attempted to make friends with it until a couple of vicious nips on the hand had curbed his enthusiasm. Dotty had wondered whether the jewels on the collar were real. They had given it food and water. It had left the chilli but responded eagerly to Hero’s somewhat unexpectedly giving it leftovers from her burgers. She was the only one of the inmates it hadn’t bitten, but perhaps it didn’t dare.

It was David who made them get rid of it. He was allergic to canines as well as everything else at the moment and insisted the creature was best off at the local dogs’ home. Dotty had taken it there some days ago, so the fact it had returned was unexpected. Olly eyed it apprehensively.

‘Still,’ Dotty sighed now, meeting Coco’s somewhat crazed black eyes through the glass, ‘it’s nice that someone seems to like me.’

‘I like you, Dotty,’ Olly said comfortingly. He did, too. She was, he felt, impressively cheerful in the face of her difficult family and he particularly liked her lowbrow streak, the way she loved nothing better than to have a bowl of pasta – or the dreaded chilli – on a tray in the sitting room with David and watch
Strictly Come Dancing.

He had found it hard to believe that Dotty, the passionate violinist and Royal College of Music graduate, could take anything but the most ironic interest in the likes of
X Factor
, but after sitting next to her on the battered sitting room sofa as she clenched her fists, shouted at the television and wept copiously as the fat lady who cleaned the council loos belted out a heart-stopping – or, as David wryly put it, Harpic-stopping – version of
I Will Always Love You
, Olly realised that her interest was genuine. He realised, too, that after a day spent teaching certain pupils of hers, and dealing with certain mothers, such undemanding downtime was essential for Dotty’s sanity.

A strange, grinding noise interrupted them: the doorbell, Olly realised. Dotty glanced fearfully at the clock. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘It’s the Lintles.’

Limited though his time in the Stringer house had been, Olly was already aware that Lorna Lintle was Dotty’s least favourite client. Most of the mothers whose offspring she taught sat outside the house listening to Radio Two in their cream-leather-lined four-wheel drives and ordering the weekly shop from Waitrose on their iPads as little Ottilie or Jasper scraped the catgut inside. But Lorna not only sat in on the entire lesson, but looked as if she grew her own vegetables and wove her own clothes out of hemp. She was a terrifying, grey-ponytailed harridan with an unrelentingly cultural focus and in this powerful and unflinching spotlight squirmed Alfie, her son. He was small, skinny, thickly bespectacled and being groomed to genius by every means to hand. He had two lessons a week and they always arrived outside Dotty’s house with something improving like
Peter and the Wolf
booming from Lorna’s battered, claret-coloured Volvo.

‘What instrument was playing, Alfie?’ Lorna would be shouting as she dragged him up the path.

‘Er . . . trombone?’

‘Alfie!’ his mother would explode. ‘It was a
bassoon.
Honestly, Mozart had written several operas and done a world tour by the time he got to your age.’

Olly felt powerfully sorry for Alfie because he had Lorna as a mother, and powerfully sorry for Dotty because she had Hero as a daughter. He had not expected merely renting a room to give such insight into the complexity of family relationships. He wasn’t sure he wanted this insight; life at the moment was tricky enough. As the bell rang again, louder and more insistently, Olly beat a hasty retreat back upstairs.

As he did so, he could hear the poodle barking outside.

It was all his own fault, Richard knew. He should never have got involved. He should not have taken any notice when Allegra Trott rang up and told him that, if sending her a list with six-pound mugs on it was the best Branston could do, she was going to blow her bonus on shoes, handbags and a part-share in a racehorse.

He should certainly not have considered this alongside the presence of the ghastly Amber Piggott and concluded that the college was going the wrong way about raising money. And, even if he had reached such a conclusion, he should have left it at that. He should certainly not have gone along to Flora Thynne and told her that Branston needed a bigger idea, a bolder vision and the courage to carry it out. But he had; he had done all this and now he was sitting in the meeting that Flora had called with the college high command in order to tackle what she called his ‘issues’.

The Bursar was there, looking furtive and flustered, plus a couple of people whose names he couldn’t remember, and Gillian Green. The chair opposite his was occupied by Flora Thynne. To her left sat an extraordinary creature.

He was male, mid-twenties, plump and his powerfully sweet-smelling aftershave overwhelmed Richard, seated several feet across the table. He wore glasses in exuberantly thick black retro frames and had spiky, gelled-up hair. He had been slightly late to the meeting and, as he had entered, Richard had been afforded a view of his trousers. These, while skintight round his plump thighs and solid calves, bagged off his generous bottom in a manner reminiscent of a full nappy, and exposed most of his underwear. The effect was completed by a heavy silver chain belt.

Flora did the introductions. The apparition, Richard learnt, was called Clyde Bracegirdle and was a freelance public relations expert. He had formerly headed a local firm called Gobstopper PR whose clients included a manufacturer of llama ice cream. Richard tried not to groan as, emitting gusts of violently scented aftershave, Clyde invited ideas from round the table for ‘a mega-brainstorm to chuck ideas around for re-engaging the client in the Branston story.’

Richard felt he might scream soon in frustration. ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that
you
were supposed to be the one with ideas. That’s what we’re paying you for, isn’t it?’

Clyde acknowledged that he was and it was. ‘OK; let me level with you. Let me introduce you to . . .’ he paused, theatrically, before adding, extravagantly, ‘the Big Branston Ring-Round!’

In the absence of a reaction from anyone else, Flora coughed politely.

The basic idea, Richard gathered, was that groups of current Branston students were corralled to ring up alumni and chat to them in a jolly, informal fashion about what life in the college was currently like. In theory, the person rung up would be seized by nostalgia and would subsequently seize their credit card, eager that this idyllic way of life and learning could be perpetuated.

Richard stifled a yawn and passed a weary hand over his eyes. None of this was new to him. He’d heard it before, many times. American universities had been doing it for years. Probably lots of British ones had too, although the way Clyde was looking triumphantly around the table he was evidently expecting to be credited with the invention of it.

‘Just running it up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes,’ Clyde beamed.

Richard drummed his fingers on the table. ‘Fine by me.’ He glanced at Flora, who looked terrified. ‘Think you can get some students together?’

There was a spasm in her thin throat as she swallowed. She nodded.

How difficult, Richard thought irritably, could it be? He’d seen it done a dozen times. All she need do was produce a poster saying, ‘Your College Needs You!’ offering free booze and tack it up on the student noticeboards alongside the ones about safe sex, jazz concerts, internet grooming, services in the egg chapel and auditions for
Huis Clos
. His mouth opened to say as much, but then he closed it again. He was not here to micromanage Flora Thynne. He was here to work at his research, and that was where he was going now.

‘Good,’ Richard said, rising abruptly to his feet. He had done his bit – more than his bit. He would now retire from the whole fundraising business and leave it to the experts.

As he pushed back his chair, he glanced out of the meeting room window into the garden. He felt something like a grim relief that it looked as bad as ever. That woman gardener had either not yet penetrated these drearier areas, or, with any luck, might already have packed in the job. From what the Bursar had said about her wages, he would not blame her.

A movement caught his attention; someone was working at the far side of the scabby lawn. The gardener? She had been camouflaged before; her soft brown hair and faded green jacket just smudges in the general autumn picture. There was something about her which drew the eye. He watched as she pulled up dandelions and tossed them into a bucket. She had wide eyes and a wide mouth stretched in a dreamy smile.

Richard felt something thud into his chest, as if someone had hit him. He recognised her; it was the woman from the car – the woman he had almost collided with on his bike. But more than that, he recognised her smile. She smiled just as Amy had. To see her, smiling like that, whilst working in a garden . . .

He looked away hurriedly, heart crashing in his chest. Heat and chill surged after each other through his body. He wanted to leave, get out and get away, but his feet would not move. It was as if something was compelling him to stay.

For a time after Amy’s death, hard-nosed scientist even though he was, he had read messages from her in the appearances of various birds, in sightings of butterflies, in the pictures formed by clouds. It had taken time, a long and miserable time, to accept that none of this meant anything, that she really had gone, that he would never see her again in any form. So, to see someone so similar, now, in the last place on earth he had expected it, was a horrible shock. To have to face, presumably daily, something so painful in the place he had hand-picked in order to avoid such pain . . .

Someone, he realised, was talking to him. The voice was coming from what seemed a long way away. Gradually, he recognised the fruity tones of the Bursar.

‘Master? Do you feel quite well? You look pale. Permit me to help you back to the Lodge . . .’

Richard cast him a wild look before crashing his way out of the room. Go back to that concrete hellhole? He wanted to get out of Branston, reach the sanctuary of the labs and never have to look at that woman again.

Unaware of the sensation she had caused, Diana, in the garden, was feeling almost cheerful. She was heaping leaves from a barrow into a wire cage at the back of the college. It was satisfying work: the smell of the mulch, the drier leaves exploding beneath her wellingtons like pistol shots. A robin, hanging around her in the hope of worms, skittered back at the alarming sound.

Things were working out unimaginably well. Rosie’s positive first day at school had been followed by a second, and a third. Days had now turned to weeks and still she seemed fine, doing well even, despite the fact that every day seemed to bring a new supply teacher with it. For all her good intentions, Diana could not help wondering if discipline was affected.

‘Oh, no, Mum; it’s very disciplined,’ Rosie assured her breezily. ‘The teachers spend the whole time trying to get people to behave.’

As for the Campion Estate, Debs and Mitch had been as good as their word about the TV noise. The levels had remained within the bounds of bearability ever since.
And
Mitch had fixed the car door, resplendent in a T-shirt that said, ‘Single Man, Double Vodka’ on it.

Diana had been able to do little in return apart from pay in kind and put a few flowers and plants into Debs’ garden, as well as some clematis montana.

‘Thanks,’ Debs had said gratefully. ‘I like a bit of colour. Nothing like a nice-smelling clitoris round the door.’

Diana had bought the plants from a local market. Debs had told her about it. It was a revelation. It looked a cheerless enough place from the outside, a great prefab hall built of stained concrete in an unglamorous part of town.

On her first visit, Diana had felt rather vulnerable – intimidated, even – but the prices soon helped her to relax. Written in thick black marker on thick white card, they had seemed to Diana almost incredibly low. You could get half a sack of carrots for a pound, a great shovelful of mince for two. The butchers stood behind bleeding mountains of steak, buttressed by foothills of liver and chicken. They looked out at the crowd, amused, bantering. ‘All right, duchess?’ they called to Diana. It was hard not to laugh, and Diana had not resisted.

The second time, a Saturday, she had brought Rosie. The child had loved the place instantly, fascinated by the bustle, noise, irreverence and air of unquenchable life. She loved in particular the CD stall at the entrance that played mournful country and western at great volume. She loved The King of Bling, a shop selling cheap and very sparkly jewellery, and found the funeral flower shop fascinating with its morbidly theatrical arrangements on frames spelling letters and words: ‘World’s Best Nan’. Naturally she loved the sweet stalls with their mountains of chocolate and humbugs, liquorice allsorts and midget gems in great heaps. She would also pause for ages at the clothes stalls, examining gaudy sequinned dresses and Justin Bieber T-shirts while Diana dived in and out for serviceable tops and plain tracksuit bottoms that were much better made than the equivalent in the supermarket.

There was more. There were bakers’ stalls where, for next to nothing, bagsful of broken biscuits – perfect for cheesecake bases – and great flat breadcakes could be bought in vast quantities. There were soft furnishing stalls selling very cheap cushions and fleece throws that, while not designer cutting-edge, were at least plain and therefore tasteful. Diana bought as many as she could afford to brighten up the Fourth Avenue sitting room. Another stall sold cheap white crockery at bargain basement prices. There was also a hardware stall that occasionally sold gardening equipment; Diana had picked up a zip-up mini plastic greenhouse at a fraction of what she would have paid at B&Q. It was here, too, that she bought the clematis, bought great sackfuls of narcissus bulbs for Branston’s gardens too. It was, Diana felt, scarcely believable that she had, in the past, spent more on scented candles than the people in the market would earn in a year.

She finished the leaves, and went on to the next job, planting the pheasant’s-eye narcissus. Considering the effect they would have when they came up, a shimmering row of scented, crisp whiteness, she felt quietly happy.

Clearing the ground for the bulbs, Diana now smelt something. A strong, clear, almost medicinal fragrance was wafting up from the soil. She realised, with excitement, that the plants she was pulling up were scented. She stopped, lowered her nose: curry plant, cicely, sweet sage and rosemary. Diana sat back on her heels, delighted. Who would have thought it? It seemed that once upon a thyme, as it were, Branston had had its own herb garden.

Or had it belonged to something earlier? Such an old-fashioned thing as a herb patch seemed unlikely, given the foundation’s forward-looking principles. Perhaps the plants, some clearly long established, with leggy, woody roots, belonged to whatever garden had stood here before the college. All gardens, after all, were palimpsests, the earth had been written on many times . . .

‘You look miles away!’ she heard someone exclaim.

Diana glanced up in shock to see a young blonde woman in an apron smiling down at her.

‘I’m Sally,’ she said. ‘I’m the college head housekeeper.’

‘Oh. Yes . . . Hello . . .’ Diana recognised her now. She had seen this cheerful, rosy face beaming out from the staff handbook.

‘We’re all taking morning break in there,’ Sally jerked her ponytail towards the concrete walls of Branston. ‘Come in for a cup of coffee.’

Diana was sorely tempted. Sore because she had been working hard and tempted by a shot of caffeine. Possibly a biscuit, too. She started to rise.

‘We’re dying to know more about you,’ Sally added cheerfully. ‘What brings you here and so on.’

Diana sank slowly back on her heels. That was the price, of course. Coffee and friendliness would need paying for with information about her background. And it was all such a mess, it was all so sensitive, and so awkward too, not just about the way she had lived in such a wealthy place and now lived on an estate, but also about Simon leaving her and the financial skulduggery of it all. It was all so embarrassing and it reflected so badly on her. Who would believe she was unaware they couldn’t afford any of it, when she could not, even now, believe it herself?

She looked up ruefully at Sally. She was obviously a good woman, and friendly, and perhaps one day Diana would tell her all about it. But not just now.

She glanced at her watch, surprised at what a good actress she was. On the other hand, she had acted many times in recent months, usually with Simon in front of Rosie, maintaining the illusion she could stand the sight of him.