The Following Girls (16 page)

Cold water poured out in an unceasing stream from Miss Batty’s unpainted lips. It wasn’t steady work. Even good actresses could spend a lot of time unemployed – ‘resting’ they called it (she smiled at this point, as if she had just made a joke). Only the
very best
became really famous. Which couldn’t conceivably be you, ob-viously. Not
you
. Someone else.

‘I didn’t know you even
liked
acting, Amanda. You weren’t in the school play – the drama schools would almost certainly expect that.’

As if anyone who enjoyed acting would have wanted to be in the school play, thought Miss Batty:
King John
(were they out of their minds?). And the whole production dominated by the Remove prefects and the elocution mafia.

‘I suppose I could try to get some leaflets from Rada . . . or maybe Lamda would be better . . .’ Miss Batty gazed disconsolately at the bulging A–K drawer, wondering if it would really be worth the bother of yet another pink folder. No one had ever asked about Bookbinding again . . .

‘You asked me what I wanted to do. That’s what I want to do.’ Baker was quite pleased with her chosen career. Saying ‘Nursing’ would have made it too easy. Nice to make ’em sweat. What would Miss Batty know about drama?

The mistress looked sidelong at Baker as her fingers trod across the files in the top drawer, noting the greasy dark blonde rats’ tails, the skinny shape under the ridiculous gym slip, the complete want of grace in that Stanley Spencer slouch. Actress? Talk about aiming high.

Miss Batty thought of the actresses she sometimes spotted in the reasonable little restaurants wallpapered with signed photographs where she and a theatre-going chum would eat rigatoni and discuss whatever play they’d been to, marking performances out of ten (
could do better; this is not what you were asked to do
). Sometimes an actress one had just seen in costume looking enraged, seductive, murderous, tormented, would be at a nearby table in a smart silk shirt, snapping tiny bites from bread sticks with her capped white teeth while smarming waiters brought undrinkable complimentary liqueurs smelling of bath essence.

Had those actresses ever had one of these careers chats? And if they had, had the part-time careers mistress fired back with a yes, gosh yes, definitely Cicely, Dulcie, Maggie, of
course
you should act. I will never forgive you if you don’t go for that audition. Change your name, dye your hair, straighten your nose, cap your teeth, sleep with whoever you must but don’t, don’t I
beg
you, deny the stage your genius. Was that what they said? Of course it wasn’t. They said ‘Take a typing course’ just as Miss Batty was about to do.

If they were really determined on a stage career no amount of discouragement would put them off but was it really just about confidence, about only the strong surviving? Did talent count for nothing? And Miss Batty wondered how many art mistresses and elocution teachers were just the bruised remains of women who wanted to be something else. She never played the piano any more. Not properly.

Chapter 10

Most of the Upper Shell had slept badly on Wednesday night because most of them had stayed up till the small hours belatedly revising for Thursday’s mocks, but Baker’s sleepless night had been spent dreading her meeting with Julia Smith.

Baker had been packed off to bed after the
Ten O’Clock News
, but a broken thermostat on her bedroom radiator made the room unsleepably hot and she was still awake at midnight, listening to the noises of the house. Spam was already cold creamed and hot water bottled in the master bedroom and Baker could hear the master himself brushing his teeth in that angry haphazard way that left white specks all over the bathroom mirror, followed by a long gargle that echoed hideously in the tiny tiled room. Ablutions completed – his word – he locked and bolted the front door and she heard his slippered feet climbing back up the carpeted stairs, like the sound effects in a radio murder mystery.

Nothing had been said during dinner about her morning’s detention so no one could have rung Dad with the glad tidings and Baker began to think the Drumlin had had a change of heart about reporting her to O’Brien – until she arrived at Registration next morning.

‘Amanda!’ Form mistress Mrs Lorimer, assertive for a change, delivered the news that Baker was wanted in the head’s office PDQ. She felt her shoulders going into spasm. Was this just Drumlin’s little shoe fetish again or had Julia told about the fag on the train?

Dr O’Brien was on the telephone but Baker got the green light straight away and was signalled into a chair but remained standing, scanning the decor. O’Brien had overhauled the study the first week she took over as head, covering her predecessor’s green emulsion with a smart silver stripe and replacing the Japanese woodcuts with a selection of really pervy prints:
The Wreck of the Medusa
, Judith beheading Holofernes and an oleograph of St Agatha holding a silver tray and absently caressing one of her plump white breasts, like a pornographic pastrycook. They were all on the wall facing the headmistress’s chair (where visiting parents tended not to spot them).

Pride of place on the left wall (which they could see) was given to a pair of schoolgirl still lives. One was a photo-realistic trio of school badges: ‘Squash’, ‘Vice’ and ‘Racquets’ – had she been taking the piss? The other featured two lemons on a blue and white Cornishware plate. It was actually rather good: bold purplish shadows under the fruit and a real sense of the glaze on the china. The rubbishy Art Room paper had bubbled badly against the mount and a fine dust of yellow powder had trickled along the inside edge of the frame. Fine art; cheap paint. The typed label said
Dora Hardcastle
(who else?)
1965
. It wouldn’t last another ten years.

Dr O’Brien had finished her call and was disinfecting the receiver with a cloth soaked in surgical spirit, a now-have-a-rinse smell that did nothing to ease Baker’s nerves. Nor did the head’s plummy, chummy manner.

‘Sit down. Sit down.’ Why did grown-ups always think it was jollier when you said things twice?

‘See you’re admiring Dora’s lovely lemons.’ Dr O’Brien turned her head towards the wall on which they were hanging and peered blindly at the yellow blur through heavy duty reading glasses worn on a chain round her neck.

‘
Such
a talent.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘
Happened
?’ The head looked perplexed: a fatal stabbing? a premium bond win she hadn’t been told about? ‘Oh I see, yes, yes, I see:
career-wise
. Very happy, I believe. Twin boys. He’s a chartered accountant, or so she writes. Pity in a way. She’d have made an excellent art teacher.’ Those who can
and
those who can’t? Bit greedy.

‘Now then, now then: to business.’ She put the duster and the surgical spirit bottle in a desk drawer, let her glasses fall from her face to hang like a tortoiseshell trapeze against her paisley bosom and turned to Baker with lips pulled into a wider line.

‘I have had a letter from your father this morning. I believe Mrs Mostyn had quite a heart-to-heart with him at the meeting on Monday but there were still a few points he wanted to raise with me.’

Baker looked at the letter in O’Brien’s hand and felt her intestine curdling into a plumbing emergency – a vile, sour, sore, horribly familiar feeling. After four years of double Biology, she could actually picture all those villi going into reverse, flooding her gut with squittering panic the way they always did when anyone at home mentioned school or anyone at school mentioned home. She tried so hard to keep it all separate. They were
supposed
to be separate: different buildings; different food; different languages; different shoes.

It was never going to be good news, was it, this letter he’d written? Never going to be a nice hand-written note saying how very well dear Amanda was doing and could she possibly begin clarinet lessons next term or have Friday afternoon off for an optician’s appointment?

‘He’s very worried about you.’ O’Brien fumbled the reading glasses back on to her densely powdered nose in order to remind herself of one of the more affecting passages. ‘Very worried.’

No he bloody wasn’t. He was very worried about
him
, about the mess he was making of Project Amanda, about his failure to meet targets, reach the bonus threshold.

Bob Baker usually got his wife to type up his letters to the school, but he had written this one himself in his spidery scrawl. Pam was losing interest. She’d started volunteering to stay late at work: a report to type; a leaving drinks to go to, ‘training’ – for what? She’d arrive home barely in time to get supper on the table, after which his skinny, gymslipped little madam of a daughter would idle away the rest of the evening playing darts with herself or lying in front of the telly, homework untouched, while he and his wife exchanged whispered screams of frustration over the washing up.

Once a month his mother-in-law – also called Pamela, funnily enough – would ring from the Falkland Islands and he could always tell from his wife’s wary replies whenever she was asking about the wicked stepdaughter: didn’t interfere, get involved, stick oars in – or give a twopenny damn? He did wonder sometimes.

She used to be interested (or pretend to be?). Early on, anyway. But then all of the women who ran across him after Patsy cleared out seemed keen to show what lovely stepmothers they’d make, made a point of buying presents for darling Amanda: pyjama cases; manicure sets; dressing table sets; wickerwork sewing baskets; hankies with As and roses on, but you could tell that the presents were for his benefit – might just as well have been a bottle of Scotch. Pam had been different. Pam took the young Amanda to museums, taught her an easy way to draw a horse, read to her at bedtime. The rot set in when she started reading from her old book of Bible stories. Little Amanda had told Grandma all about loaves and fishes and bloody Patsy had got wind of it. Managed to get Pam on the phone (reversing the charges) and gave her an earful about patriarchal mumbo jumbo and how bloody well dare she, and it hadn’t really been the same after that: ‘
Your
daughter’, ‘Bob’s daughter’ not ‘Amanda’ any more.

But it wasn’t Pam’s fault that Amanda had turned out like this. It was the school’s bloody fault at bottom. They took delivery of a nice enough, no-nonsense eleven-year-old: head of house, keen on games, six badges in the Brownies and they handed you back what?
Amanda
. If someone did that much damage to your car or your dry cleaning you’d demand compensation. Or a replacement (
money refunded if not delighte
d
).

Not that they ever admitted liability. Three times a year he’d be made to queue for hours in the ritual humiliation that was parents’ evening, being patronised by some blue-rinsed battle-axe with a voice like the Speaking Clock who said that your daughter paid no attention to her lessons and didn’t do any of the work set. Like it was nothing to do with them. They were the ones standing at the front of a classroom, term in, term out, boring for Britain on Boyle’s Law and then had the cheek to complain when no one took any notice.

He tried to imagine being taught by any of them and thought wistfully of his own schooldays: getting picked for the second eleven; oranges at half time; names engraved on cups or gilded onto scholarship walls or stitched onto cricket whites or stencilled onto tuck boxes. Kindly men in corduroy taking donnish delight in Grecian urns or Latin verse or Franco–Prussian wars (and their three main causes). All the things he had wanted for Jeremy (not Amanda). Mildred Fawcett was no comparison.

Hence the letter. No sense just waiting for yet another parents’ evening. Monday night had definitely been an all time low. He had almost enjoyed the one before last – no thanks to Amanda, mind. Once in a bright blue moon, Miss Peters the Biology mistress had the pleasure of teaching a model pupil, one who had copied every diagram and taken every note so faithfully that Miss Peters simply hadn’t the heart to part with her exercise book –
Excellent! This is exactly what you were asked to do
. A moment’s work on the staples with a butter knife and a virgin yellow cover from one of the current batch of stationery, plus some deft dabbing at any tell-tale dates with her miniature bottle of ink eradicator and June Torrance was immortalised as a model pupil –
for any year
.

This handwritten vintage textbook was invariably left open on the front desk to be slobbered over by passing parents who would flick shamefacedly through its pages, silently comparing its copperplate perfection with their own daughters’ efforts. The narrow feint’s faint brownish tinge scarcely noticed beneath the fluorescent strip-lighting required for evening meetings. For nearly ten years Miss Peters had been wheeling out this reproachful paradigm until Bob Baker went and spoiled it all.

‘A half crown?’

He had leafed through to one of the back pages of the Torrance testament where young June had drawn an exceptionally fine diagram of a sheep’s heart, delicately shaded, scrupulously labelled (‘always use a ruler’) and in the bottom right hand corner, just below ‘parietal pericardium’, an unusually fine scale drawing of an obsolete silver coin.