02 Mister Teacher (20 page)

‘She looks good, doesn’t she?’ said Dan, proudly, as he gazed at Jo.

‘She certainly does,’ I replied, but my eyes were on Beth.

Jo was stretching out her left hand and Laura and Beth were examining her engagement ring.

‘It’s a diamond solitaire,’ said Dan. ‘Got it in Stonegate. Took her into the Minster gardens, got down on one knee and proposed. Felt a bit of a fool, but she said yes. She’s not stopped talking since.’

As we approached the table, Jo had just finished recounting the story and all three women laughed out loud.

‘What wonderful news, Jo,’ I said, and I held her hand and looked at her engagement ring. ‘It’s beautiful and I wish you both every happiness.’

Jo was simply glowing and she reached up and gave me a big hug. ‘I can’t wait to tell everyone back in school,’ she said. ‘Vera will be so excited.’

‘So when’s the big day?’ I asked.

Jo looked up at Dan and smiled.

‘We don’t want to wait long, so probably the start of the summer holidays,’ said Dan, as he slipped his arm round Jo’s waist and pulled her closer.

Under the lights of the ornate chandeliers we raised our champagne flutes and drank a toast.

‘To the happy couple,’ said Laura.

‘The happy couple,’ echoed Beth and I.

As we touched glasses, I looked at Beth and thought she had never looked more beautiful.

Right on cue, the band struck up a slow gentle waltz and Jo was immediately on her feet, dragging Dan onto the floor. She pressed her head contentedly into Dan’s chest and, for a big man, Dan moved lightly round the floor. They looked blissfully happy.

‘Young love,’ said Laura, sipping her champagne.

More couples walked onto the dance floor, so I took the plunge.

‘Laura, do you mind being on your own for a few minutes?’ I asked.

Laura just smiled.

‘Beth?’ I stood up and held out my hand.

She took it and we walked onto the dance floor together. Her hair was fragrant, she was in my arms and I couldn’t have been happier. I looked back at our table. Laura was sitting alone and watching us.

A few minutes later, I saw Jo and Dan return to our table. Dan asked Laura to dance and soon they were quickstepping round the floor at great speed. Laura looked full of life and Dan was panting when we all returned to our seats.

Eventually, the band took a break and a visiting disc jockey dimmed the lights and began to play Abba’s ‘Take a Chance on Me’. Dan took Jo’s hand and they were soon dancing again.

Laura suddenly stood up and looked at her sister. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked.

Beth seemed to understand and smiled in acknowledgement.

Laura grabbed my hand and together we walked onto the dance floor and began to dance. Her sense of rhythm was remarkable and her lithe movement exactly matched the beat of the music.

‘You’re a fantastic dancer,’ I said.

‘You could be too if you just loosen up a bit, Jack,’ she replied, and playfully pulled off my Buddy Holly spectacles. ‘Do you really need these?’ she teased, as the music came to an end.

When the second Abba song, ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’, began, Laura moved nearer. The lights dimmed further and suddenly Laura’s head was on my shoulder. For an instant she looked up at me and her green eyes looked amazing.

We danced again and I noticed Laura held me a little closer than before.

When we returned to the table, Beth looked curiously at Laura and I went to help Dan with the drinks. Standing at the bar, I looked back at them. Their heads were bowed together as they shared the secrets of sisters. I wondered what they might be.

It was a wonderful evening and I had spent it with Beth, even though she had been chaperoned by her sister. At midnight, we said goodnight to Jo and Dan, and Beth and Laura, who had come into York by taxi, climbed into my car.

As we drove through Ragley village, couples were walking home from the village hall dance. Outside
Nora’s
Coffee Shop, Dorothy Humpleby had her arm around Little Malcolm’s shoulder and they looked blissfully happy together. According to Dorothy’s reading of their star signs, it was a match made in heaven.

On impulse, I called to Laura in the back seat, ‘What’s your star sign, Laura?’

‘Sagittarius,’ said Laura. ‘My birthday is the first of December. Why do you ask?’

‘Just curious,’ I said.

Thirty minutes later, I parked at the end of Morton High Street, outside Beth’s neat little cottage. Beth set off up the path, searching in her handbag for her keys.

Laura paused. ‘Thanks for coming, Jack,’ she said. Then she stretched up and kissed me on the cheek and squeezed my arm just once in a parting gesture.

I followed her to the front door. Beth had opened it and switched on the hall light.

Laura lifted up the hem of her dress and stepped inside. She didn’t look back. Beth took my hand and walked back down the path to the gate.

‘It’s been a lovely evening, Jack,’ said Beth. She leaned up and kissed me softly on the lips, but with a new intensity.

I looked down at her and shook my head.

‘What?’ said Beth.

‘I don’t understand women.’

Beth smiled and walked back to her front door. ‘Don’t worry, Jack. You’re not meant to.’

As I drove out of Morton and then down Ragley High Street, I noticed Dorothy and Little Malcolm were still braving the cold in the entrance to Nora’s Coffee Shop.

From the look of them, Aquarius and Gemini were definitely compatible star signs.

Chapter Thirteen

Mr Dibble and the Rubik Cube

Mr N. Dibble visited school today to inspect our provision for Religious Education
.

Extract from the Ragley School Logbook:
Wednesday, 7 March 1979

‘IT’S A PUZZLE,’
said Jo Maddison.

‘But did you actually see him do it?’ asked Anne.

‘See who do what?’ asked Vera, looking up from an article on Prince Philip in her
Daily Telegraph
.

‘Heathcliffe did the Rubik Cube,’ said Jo.

‘Oh,’ said Vera and returned to the fascinating news that, after his inspection of the equestrian facilities in Moscow for the forthcoming Olympics, Prince Philip had made a recommendation for the more efficient disposal of horse dung.

It was Wednesday, 7 March, and the new month had roared in like a lion. Nature was announcing a new
season
and the bitter winds of a pale spring had arrived. Six-year-old Heathcliffe Earnshaw’s new-found skill in solving the Rubik Cube had surprised everyone and brightened up a bleak morning.

‘So what’s a Rubik Cube?’ asked Sally.

‘It’s this,’ said Jo. She passed over a plastic multicoloured cube.

Sally held it in the palm of her hand. ‘So what do you do with it?’ she asked.

‘Well …’ said Jo. ‘Each side is made up of nine smaller cubes and, at the moment, each face of the large cube is the same colour.’

‘Yes,’ said Sally. ‘I think I’m following.’ She looked at the six faces. Their colours were red, orange, purple, green, yellow and white.

‘Well, each section of nine connecting small cubes rotates in a different direction,’ said Jo, going into her familiar science teacher mode. ‘So, if I turn them to mix up the colours on each side, the problem is to get back to square one with each face made up of one single colour.’

‘Is that all?’ said Sally.

By the time the bell rang for the beginning of the school day, Sally was still spinning the cubes round and round, but each face was more multi-coloured than when she started. ‘Oh, damn and blast!’ she said, in frustration. ‘You have a go, Jack.’

She tossed it over and, after studying it for a moment, I made a quick decision. ‘I’ll have a go later,’ I said defensively.

Then I walked through to the office and left it on my desk.

After the attendance and dinner registers had been completed and returned to Vera in the school office, the children in my class picked up their chairs and we filed into the hall for morning assembly.

Anne carefully cleaned the vinyl surface of a long-playing record with her anti-static cloth and put it on the turntable of our music centre, which was, in fact, a Contiboard trolley on castors. She set the dial to 33 revolutions per minute and gradually Grieg’s ‘Morning’, from the ‘Peer Gynt Suite’, drowned out the sound of the wind battering against the windows and appeared to have a calming influence on the children as they walked in.

This was one of my favourite times of the school day. It was as if we were one large family. My class sat on chairs at the back of the hall; Sally’s class sat on benches in front, and then Jo’s class sat cross-legged on the floor, playing with their loose teeth and rubbing sleep out of their eyes. Last of all, Anne’s class trooped in and sat at the front of the hall in a neat single line. They always seemed so small and looked round to wave to their big brothers and sisters sitting behind them. The more adventurous among them would play with my shoelaces.

‘Good morning, boys and girls,’ I said.

‘Good morning, Mr Sheffield. Good morning, everybody,’ they recited in unison.

I introduced the first hymn, the children stood up
and
Anne sat at the piano and opened her teacher’s copy of our collection of hymns entitled
Morning Has Broken
. Anne played the opening bars of hymn number 44, ‘When a Knight Won His Spurs’. Sally gathered her recorder group round their music stands and, with the intensity of Last Night of the Proms, she raised her arms
à la
Sir Malcolm Sargent and conducted the opening notes. Right on cue, we all began to sing and, as we did so, Vera unexpectedly stepped quietly into the hall, followed by a small and serious-looking man carrying a black briefcase.

It was obviously another book salesman. I had begun to believe they were turned out on a conveyor belt. Vera gave me what I took to be an apologetic look. It wasn’t like her to bring a visitor into assembly without an introduction.

‘… and the knights are no more and the dragons are dead,’ we sang with enthusiasm.

Our anti-dragon policy appeared to stir the strange visitor into action and he began to write vigorously in his black notebook. At his feet, the leather flap of his black briefcase was embossed with his initials and a gold crest that reflected the glare of the fluorescent lights.

Class 2 were the featured class this morning and Jo had hastily selected a few children to read their writing and show some of their paintings. However, since Jo’s engagement to Police Constable Dan Hunter, her evenings were no longer spent correcting her children’s writing books with the frequency of her pre-Dan existence. Yesterday had been such an evening.

The Revd Joseph Evans had recently visited Jo’s class and told them a Bible story about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Little Jimmy Poole, the ginger-haired boy with the delightful lisp, stood up, opened his uncorrected book and announced that ‘Jethuth raithed Platyputh from the dead’. A few members of my class giggled, which seemed to prompt our stony-faced visitor to open his notebook once again and scribble furiously. Fortunately, seven-year-old Sarah Louise Tait, easily the best writer in Miss Maddison’s class, read a wonderful description of how her daddy had made a magnificent rabbit hutch from a plan in his
Reader’s Digest Do-It-Yourself Manual
and this seemed to rescue the situation.

Finally, Jo, her face slightly flushed, stood up at the end of our assembly and read the School Prayer:

Dear Lord
,

This is our school, let peace dwell here
,

Let the room be full of contentment, let love abide here
–

Love of one another, love of life itself
,

And love of God
.

Amen
.

As soon as the children began to file back to their classrooms, Vera reappeared and stood alongside our un-welcome visitor.

‘Mr Sheffield,’ she began.

‘Good morning,’ I interrupted, and stared hard at the little man with the large briefcase. ‘Please don’t be
offended
, but this isn’t a good time to discuss new books and our capitation is already spoken for.’

‘Yes, but Mr Sheffield—’ said Vera, a little anxiously.

‘That’s all right, Vera,’ I said abruptly. ‘I’m sure this gentleman has other schools to visit.’

‘Mr Sheffield—’ continued Vera, in despair.

‘You may not be aware,’ I said, determined to drive home the point, ‘but I’m a teaching head and my class is waiting for me, so, with apologies, I suggest you make an appointment next time and I’ll do my best to see you then.’

The little man was looking slightly bored by now and had begun to tap the gold block letters on his briefcase. I glanced down. The letters were ‘ND’ underneath a crest of York Minster. I didn’t know a bookseller known as ‘ND’.

‘ND,’ I said, a little bewildered.

‘That’s what I was trying to say, Mr Sheffield,’ persisted Vera. ‘It’s Mr Nicholas Dibble, from the Diocesan Board of Education.’

‘The Diocesan Board of Education?’ I repeated.

‘Yes,’ said the unflinching Mr Dibble.

‘Oh!’

‘Exactly, Mr Sheffield,’ said Mr Dibble.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I spluttered. ‘I had no idea, and we’ve been besieged with book salesmen, just like you.’

‘Really, Mr Sheffield?’ he said.

‘Well, obviously not quite like you,’ I explained. The hole I was digging was getting deeper.

‘Would you like a coffee, Mr Dibble?’ said Vera, with true professionalism.

‘Thank you, Miss Evans, I would.’

He looked up at me with a slightly unnerving stare that I was beginning to realize was an essential part of his persona. ‘I’m here until tomorrow lunchtime, Mr Sheffield,’ said the unblinking Mr Dibble. ‘During this time, I shall inspect the religious education taught in all four classes, talk to all your staff and make an assessment of your RE policy.’

‘Of course, Mr Dibble,’ I said. ‘And I do apologize. I’ve been teaching for over ten years and I’ve never met a member of the Diocesan Board before.’

‘Exactly, Mr Sheffield,’ said Mr Dibble.

I returned to my classroom, while Vera made Mr Dibble a coffee and cleared my desk in the school office for him to use. Then she ran round all the classes to inform Anne, Jo and Sally of our surprise visitor and, finally, she relocated to the staff-room.