Gifted and Talented (27 page)

‘Precisely.’ He applied himself back to his steak in a satisfied fashion; the subject, it seemed, was closed.

Isabel took a steadying breath. ‘All the same,’ she said quietly, ‘I’ll check up on her when I get back. I feel a bit worried about her,’ she added, looking at him appealingly.

He was cross now, she saw. His gaze, as it met hers, was freezing. ‘She wouldn’t worry about
you
, believe me.’

Absolute panic now swept Isabel. ‘I know she wouldn’t,’ she agreed hastily.

This seemed sufficient capitulation to pacify him. He smiled and stroked her cheek and she shuddered with pleasure at his touch. Her neighbour’s far-from-tough, stumbling progress down the pathway faded from Isabel’s memory. Drowning in that golden-syrup gaze, now mercifully warm and approving again, she could think of nothing else and no one else.

Hard work, Dotty insisted, was the cure for heartbreak. She had, Olly felt, rather adopted him as a project, possibly to take her mind off her own problems. Her pupils were thinning out, unable to bear, Dotty said, the constant hypertension thump of thrash metal from Hero’s room as a background to their musical efforts.

Martin the management consultant had been the first to go and Olly rather missed him. He had always liked the way, in the narrow hallway after his lesson, Martin would put his cycle helmet back on with fumbling fingers, the same fingers that had played so skilfully just before. He seemed to radiate embarrassment, as if being caught having violin lessons was shamefully self-indulgent and not something a man in his fifties should be doing.

Less of a tragedy was that Lorna Lintle had left too, claiming that the noise from Hero’s room was compromising Alfie’s efforts to connect to his inner Menuhin. ‘Poor boy,’ Dotty tutted. ‘I do feel for him.’

And now she felt for Olly – unsurprisingly; it was to her, after all, that he had unburdened himself after the ill-fated shopping trip. He had vowed, stumbling back, not to show the pain he felt to anyone, to bear it stoically and secretly. But Dotty had been in the kitchen, rocking from foot to foot, eyes closed as she played something so sweet and melancholy on her violin that he had crumbled instantly. Over her kitchen table the whole tortured story had come spilling out.

‘She doesn’t want me, Dotty,’ he concluded, head now sunk hopelessly into his arms on the table. ‘But who would?’ he added, as self-pity tightened its grip on him.

‘Nonsense,’ Dotty had said, galvanisingly. ‘Lovely, charming, clever boy like you? Someone’ll snap you up. You’ll see.’

Olly raised his head and pushed back his hair. He felt a strange mixture of gratitude and resentment. Part of him wanted to slide beneath the surface, sink like a stone in the bog of his own misery and hopelessness. He swallowed, poised temptingly on the edge of the bog again. ‘I’m no use to you here,’ he told Dotty. ‘I’ll go home.’

‘Go
home
?’ Dotty’s small, fine arm came flying over the table and held his wrist in a surprisingly strong grip – the result of all that sawing at the catgut, he imagined.

‘You’re doing nothing of the sort,’ she instructed, with the same stern maternal solicitude she might have used on Hero, had Hero been remotely receptive to it. ‘You can’t go back there. You’re heartbroken and going back’s not going to help.’

Olly was struck by this. ‘
Am
I heartbroken?’ It seemed a dramatic description. He had hardly known Isabel, really. But was that the point? It was what he had built around that slender acquaintance that he was mourning.

There was a feeling in his chest so dreadful and heavy it was as if something was sitting there. How was he to endure the future – tonight, the whole of the next day and the next day after that?

But gradually, under Dotty’s sympathetic, cajoling, motherly influence – she seemed to be lavishing on him everything Hero rejected – he made an effort to re-engage with life.

He had to bring some money in, after all. Cleaning was all very well but Dotty and David needed more than elbow grease. Work, for David, was drying up.

Olly finally abandoned his novel – who was ever going to care about that? – and mechanically followed up every employment lead. Whatever it was. Anything. He was even thinking of joining Sam in the living-statue business. What difference did it make, really? He was going through the motions, that was all.

Then, out of the blue, he hooked a fish. Or some sort of animal, anyway. The crackling, practically inaudible message left on his mobile was something about a zoo and helping at a kid’s party. Someone had dropped out and could he step in? He had called back the number – after playing the shouted message four times to make it out – and replied in the affirmative to the Orange answerphone service. Although, to what, where and when, he was still not exactly sure.

Frankly, it could be almost anyone. He had filled in so many online job application forms that they fused together in his mind when he thought about them. A children’s party sounded harmless enough, though.

‘Someone for you,’ Dotty now shouted up from downstairs. Olly descended to find her standing, looking concerned, in the hallway. ‘They say they’re from the Petting Zoo,’ she hissed.

A penny dropped in Olly’s mind. Petting Zoo had been one of the party entertainer businesses he had applied to in one of his weaker moments. He brightened. After the miserable time he’d had recently, watching children and little animals would be some fun, at least.

‘See you later,’ he said brightly to Dotty. She gave him a look in return. It seemed to Olly a peculiarly doubtful look, and now he realised why.

Two men stood at the other side of the open door. One had dreadlocks, flesh tunnels and tattoos on his neck. The other was of a corpse-like paleness.

Olly reminded himself that he needed the money. He reminded himself that the rusting white Escort van beyond would contain only bunnies and mice. It was a children’s party zoo, you didn’t need to be David Attenborough.

Only after they had set off did Olly discover that the Petting Zoo dealt in reptiles and large exotic insects.

‘What?’ he yelped. Olly hated snakes and had a horror of large insects. One of the few benefits of his current lodgings was that the dampness discouraged spiders.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Tattoos said impassively. His name was Bill. ‘Snakes are the new thing. And scorpions. We do all the posh parties round here.’

Olly had heard of children’s party peer pressure. He had read many newspapers recently and this phenomenon frequently cropped up in the features pages. Rich parents spent vast amounts on stretch limos, designer party bags, pop stars and theatre companies to entertain their children. But killer snakes was a new one.

The party venue, in a gated road in the city’s wealthy suburbs, was huge and carpeted throughout in zebra-skin-patterned carpet. It had purple walls, silver banisters and a security system that, Olly imagined, left the White House trailing in its wake. The drive was crowded with top-of-the-range four-wheel-drives, all polished to a dazzle and boasting incomprehensible personalised number plates.

The hostess, the party girl’s mother, was a much-maquillaged brunette whose loud, forced laugh could be heard at frequent intervals. The party girl – ‘Tallulah’, according to the vast castle-shaped birthday cake – was a pudding-faced eight-year-old. She had elaborate ringlets and, as Olly passed with his plastic boxes of lethal invertebrates, he noticed that her once-pristine white gauze party dress was already spattered with the contents of the chocolate fountain in the hallway.

As things got underway, Olly tried to control his panic. Bill had told him the animals were safe. ‘It’s all right, mate. Bin taken out, all the venom sacs ’ave.’ But Olly was increasingly wondering whether this was true. How exactly did one remove venom sacs? Bill made it sound as easy as taking out a battery.

Pressing heavily on his mind was the fact he had seen no safety certificates, either concerning the snakes or the people. Did Bill and his sidekick, Rich, look trained?

He glanced across. At the other side of the great beige sitting room, Bill, with his brick-red face and long, matted hair, appeared positively diabolical with serpent’s heads writhing around his meaty shoulders and forming living bracelets round his illustrated arms. While Rich, corpse-pale, skinny, his hair gleaming stickily with gel, appeared sociopathically unmoved as he passed pythons to toddlers.

Still, at least Olly hadn’t had to handle the snakes himself. He had been told by Bill to watch the scorpion. The whole reason he had been recruited, Olly now knew, was because the scorpion’s usual handler was struck down with flu.

Really flu? Olly now wondered fearfully. Or a killer bite?

What would he do if the scorpion went berserk? He had been told to drop a plastic box over it immediately if it showed signs of agitation. But what if he missed? What if the scorpion made a break for it?

Olly looked about him. The birthday girl’s father was talking loudly about business start-ups to a couple of fathers impervious to the fact their children were covered in slithering pythons. Tallulah’s mother, meanwhile, was swigging champagne and screeching with laughter as a tarantula, hairy legs almost buried in the striped carpet, ambled past, inches from her bare and painted toes.

‘Say cheese, Ottilie,’ another mother was instructing as she held up her iPhone.

The picture might come in useful at the inquest, Olly thought. He was certain he was staring death in the face. Oh, please, no. His existence was far from perfect, but he realised that, contrary to his recent assumptions, he wanted to hang on to it. He didn’t want to die. Not here. Not now.

He reached for a plastic box and dropped it, clattering, over the scorpion. The horrible thing skittered around in its polythene prison, furious at the curtailment of its freedom. It even
sounded
venomous, Olly thought.

Feeling someone next to him, he looked up. A small boy stood before him, a vast python writhing evilly round his shoulders.

‘Excuse me,’ the boy said in a trembling voice. ‘I don’t like this snake. Can you get it off?’

‘Sure,’ Olly said, full of his new confidence. Nonetheless, sweat began to break out on his forehead. The boy’s snake was, it had to be said,
absolutely
huge. He swallowed; his bowels felt loose. Desperately, he fought the urge to run away.

But he couldn’t. A small and helpless boy needed him. He clenched his fists, set his teeth and approached the reptile on shaking legs.

The snake looked more terrifying than ever. Its yellow eyes bored mockingly into his.
Come on, then
, it seemed to be saying.
Come and get me.

Olly slowly reached out his arms towards the writhing, glistening body. He shut his eyes hard as his fingertips made contact with the scales. The snake, to Olly’s amazement, came quietly. From somewhere beyond the terrified thunder in his ears, he now heard the boy’s piping voice thanking him.

‘It’s nothing,’ he muttered, looking down at the reptile in his hands.

Then, he ran.

Olly had never moved so fast in his life. He felt he had a mere matter of seconds before the snake thought better of its docility and became a thrashing, rearing instrument of death. He almost flew to the side of the room and the unsteady stack of big polythene boxes the animals had arrived in. Removing a lid with one hand whilst holding the reptile with the other, Olly coaxed its head into the box and then summarily bundled in the rest of it. He shut the lid and grasped the windowsill, breathing hard and deep.

Around him, Olly realised, children were leaving. The party was over. Across the room, Bill was packing up the tarantulas. Olly stared at the champagne shagpile carpet and wondered if things could get any worse.

The chaffinches were chasing each other behind the bushes, their unmistakeable chittering trill bubbling from their coral-feathered throats. It rang piercingly in the still autumn air, extraordinarily loudly given the birds’ tiny size.

Diana sat back on her heels and watched them hopping about, tapping at tree-bases, rustling in piles of dry leaves, all the time watching her with their tiny, bright black eyes. Usually, she loved to look at them; they seemed so joyous, these little creatures, and yet they had so little – just grubs and worms, and they were vulnerable to the coming winter weather. They were, she knew, a lesson to her: cheer up; seize the day. But she could not.

It was the Monday after the dreadful Saturday. Something had happened to the weather. It was as if the unusually long, mild, bright autumn had suddenly realised it had overstayed its welcome and should long since have given way to winter.

From a bright start, the day had turned dull. It was approaching lunchtime almost as if it dreaded the encounter. Grey clouds sat like a lid on the sky and the atmosphere was heavy.

Diana felt heavier even than the weather.

Saturday night had been a dream that had turned suddenly into a nightmare. The intimate warmth of the dinner had been horribly interrupted by the cold blast of shock. Relations with Debs were shattered; her old neighbour had destroyed the friendship with her new one. But at least Sara had gone back to London. On Sunday morning, Diana had been thankful to note, both the car and the case had disappeared.

Diana now got to her feet, put her hands on her hips and looked about her. Odd that there had been no sign of Richard. Mindful of her vow to see him at the first opportunity and explain her difficult past, she had called him repeatedly on Sunday. But the telephone did not seem to be working. She had tried to text, too, but there had been no reply. And so she had counted on the appearance, this Monday morning, of a familiar tall, dark, preoccupied figure coming to find her. But no such figure had yet appeared.

She had considered, endlessly, simply marching up to the Master’s Lodge and knocking on the door. But she might be seen; the ever-vigilant Sally, for instance, might get wind of it and the news would travel like wildfire through the college staff. Diana hated the thought of being gossiped about. On the other hand, once they had appeared together at the dinner Richard had asked her to, all bets would be off. Everyone would know.

The thought of the dinner invitation cheered her. It seemed to guarantee that Richard would come to her as soon as he could. He was busy, that was all; his was the sort of research that took sudden, unexpected strides forward and she knew how he hated interruptions. Even from her.

On the other side of town, Richard was in the labs, bent over the small illuminated boxes containing his research worms. But, for once, he was not thinking of them. His celebrated capacity for investigation was bent on one train of inquiry only, and that was not in the least scientific.

Had Diana really taken him in? For all his initial wariness, his wealth of bitter experience, his vow that he would never become involved in a relationship again, had he been deceived?

The picture Sara Oopvard had painted of Diana as fraudster, as confidence trickster, as a woman knowingly living way above her means, had astonished and appalled him. As he had dithered about whether or not to believe in it, he had counted on hearing from Diana herself. She would surely ring and then the record could be put straight. But, incriminatingly it seemed, she had not been in touch. According to Sara, she was retrenching. Planning her next sly move.

His eventual decision to call Diana had been thwarted by general telephonic meltdown. First his mobile seemed to have disappeared. Then all the phones in the Master’s Lodge developed a fault simultaneously.

Richard looked up from his work and raked both hands through his hair. He didn’t understand any of it. He should have stuck with his worms and kept away from women. He had never intended to go near them again in the first place, of course. But somehow Diana had got through his defences.

The phone on his desk now rang. Richard was irritated by the interruption. ‘Yes?’

It was the student welfare officer, a colourless woman Richard had always felt ill-suited to her job. But then, who at Branston wasn’t?

‘Sorry to bother you at the labs,’ she said, apprehensively. ‘But it’s important.’

‘My research is pretty important,’ Richard said tersely. He hoped this was not about that straggle-bearded English don and his inappropriate internet representation again. Or yet another Branston student missing tutorials. What else could he do about it? He had agreed only this morning with a clearly exasperated Gillian Green that Amber Piggott would not be returning after the Christmas break.

That particular effort to raise Branston’s profile had, Richard reflected bitterly, been a catastrophic failure. As, no doubt, the forthcoming alumni dinner would be. To which, as things stood, Diana was still coming.

‘Master, I’m afraid it’s rather bad news. The police have been in touch. They suspect that someone at Branston is dealing.’

The words, rather than the dreary delivery, made Richard wake up. ‘
Dealing
? Drugs, you mean?’ He closed his eyes tight shut, willing it not to be true. A college head’s worst nightmare. As if he didn’t have enough on his plate.

‘I’m afraid so, Master.’

Was it his fault, Richard asked himself. Had he not been sufficiently vigilant? But Branston students, Amber Piggott and a few other bad apples excepted, had always seemed serious and hardworking. Amber again excepted, there were no rich dilettantes. They hadn’t seemed the drugs type, whatever that type was. Of course, it could be any type.

‘Are they sure?’

‘They’re still trying to build the full picture, I gather. There’s not enough evidence at this stage to justify a full search of the place, although that might come.’

‘Something to look forward to then,’ Richard said with heavy irony. But, even as he put the phone down, he felt guilty. It wasn’t the poor woman’s fault. She was only the messenger.

All the same, he had not spoken so snappily for some time. But he had not needed this, not after the Diana business. He felt heavy and weary. And cold, suddenly. The old disenchantment with life had seeped back, like a chill, into his bones.

He found himself wondering, as of old, what exactly he was doing here at Branston. Meetings with recalcitrant students, fundraising dinners, drug dealing. None of it was what he had signed up for. It had seemed so different when he had talked about it to Diana – almost fun, that immersion in college life. She, for her part, had talked eagerly about the students. He had, sucker that he was, even had a glimmer of her as the Master’s wife. Walking, therefore, straight into the trap Sara Oopvard claimed had been set.

He had escaped it, anyway. Dodged the bullet. Hadn’t he?

He pushed to the back of his mind the spark that had leapt between Diana and himself. It had been a moment of madness, some stray synapse; it meant nothing. He would avoid all women from now on, although there was that damned dinner with Diana, of course. How was he to get through that?

He could hear, once again, Sara Oopvard’s sibilant voice. Her tones adhered to his brain-folds like Velcro. Part of him – the scientist in him – wondered whether, under laboratory conditions, it might be visible:

‘Diana said to me, “Sara, he’s a sitting duck. Got my name all over him. A world-renowned academic, Master of a college and, would you believe it, a widower!”’

Richard put his head in his hands and groaned.

Sara was not one to let the grass grow under her feet. She hated grass. In the old days, when she employed the same gardeners as the Queen, she had them yanking out handfuls of the horrid encroaching green stuff.

She had penetrated the Master’s portals, and that was no mean feat. She had quickly decided that it needed a makeover: a few uplighters and sofas. A few clicks on Ralph Lauren Home and all would be well. They’d also need new phones.

Unplugging them all from the wall, she had deplored their being nasty, bog-standard grey BT ones, not the witty, zebra striped, retro trimphone ones she had introduced at home. Former home, she reminded herself, savagely. Richard’s mobile, which she had confiscated without his knowledge, needed upgrading too. It wasn’t even an iPhone.

All that was the easy part. And she had done the hard part too, or most of it.

To have turned the chaos of the evening to her advantage, as she had, was possibly her finest hour. The mental effort it had involved was exhausting. And yet Sara had slept badly that night on the Master’s lumpy spare mattress. Her disquiet was born of ambition; she had a long way to go yet and had lain awake scheming into the early hours, bent on consolidating the victory.

Her opportunity had not been long in coming. She had, once Richard had left for the labs, lost no time in plugging the telephones back in. Should Diana call, Sara would be immediately able to inform her that she had been replaced in Richard’s affections. Indeed, she was anticipating doing so with pleasure.

A call from a woman duly came, but it was not Diana. It was someone called Flora, and about a dinner she was organising in the college. Flora was writing out place cards and wished to check the spelling of the name of the Master’s guest. ‘Oh,’ she said, when Sara told her. ‘It’s changed.’

‘Indeed it has,’ Sara agreed, a satisfied smile curving her gleaming, blood-coloured lips.

‘Upward, you say? As in onward and—?’

Sara put her right and then, smiling, replaced the receiver. She paced about for a while, savouring her triumph, and then decided it was about time she went to visit the labs. Now she was to share his life – and there was no question that she was – she must share Richard’s interests. It was certain to raise her in his estimation.

Some half hour later she swung her large white four-wheel drive into the small, tree-fringed car park before the elegant thirties façade of the neurology department. The car park was full apart from one empty slot, marked with a wheelchair.

‘You’re parking in a disabled space,’ a youth clutching armfuls of folders pointed out as she eased herself from the car in her tight jeans and stilettos.

Sara gave him a withering look. ‘So?’ she flung back. ‘There’s no one disabled using it. Is there?’

Tossing her hair, she stalked towards the laboratory entrance. She felt supremely confident. She clacked up the wide stone steps into the laboratory’s Art Deco foyer. The security guard behind the desk looked up from texting on his mobile phone. ‘I’m here to see Professor Black,’ she informed him loudly.

She spoke with such authority that the security guard, who was young and new, assumed that this was the eminent female neurologist down on the visitor list that morning. One of his colleagues, noticing her name, had made an approving remark about long hair and trendy clothes. The guard picked up the telephone. As always, it took a while to track Black down.

Sara tsked, shifted from teetering foot to teetering foot and rippled her nails along her folded arms.

Eventually the guard got through. ‘Professor Black? Lady to see you.’

Richard, annoyed at another interruption, glanced in irritation at the clock. He had a visitor later that day, but was not expecting anyone now.

Then the thought that it might be Diana hit him like a lightning strike. She’d come to explain everything! All his doubts fell away and he felt flooded with a happy relief. Full of hope, he rushed out of the room, tapped his feet impatiently before the lift and then, once it had juddered with agonising slowness to the ground level, pushed open the heavy brass doors into the foyer.

‘Richard!’ Sara exclaimed, clacking forward over the marble. ‘Darling!’

The professor, casting a glance of absolute astoundment at the guard, who shrugged and held up his hands, now found himself dragged into Sara’s arms and soundly air-kissed on both sides. It was just at that moment that a pair of Richard’s students entered the foyer, stared in amazement and nudged each other.

‘Way to go, Prof,’ said the more daring of them.

Richard felt Sara taking his arm. ‘Now. We need to talk diaries.’

‘Talk what?’

She fixed him with a glassy beam. ‘Someone called Flora just called. About a dinner.’

Richard stared at her. A feeling of dread was squeezing him from within and not entirely because of the impending alumni event.

‘I told her that I’d be delighted to come with you. It’s on Saturday, of course.’ She made an insinuating gurgling sound in her throat. ‘But I’ll be happy to stay on until then, to help out.’

‘Er . . .’ Richard said. He felt behind in some way, an unusual and unpleasant feeling for him. He was normally the one ahead of the field.

But Sara had turned on her heel, was pushing at the inner double doors leading to the labs. ‘You must show me round your place of work! I absolutely insist!’ she was exclaiming. ‘I want to know everything about you! Now that I’m staying!’

Diana’s trowel lay desultorily at the side of her. She had been digging fitfully for some time but now abandoned all pretence of work. The tight feeling inside her had twister tighter in the course of the past hour. Now she felt so constrained she could hardly breathe and there was, she knew, only one way to relax it. She must see Richard face to face.