Past Praying For (4 page)

It
was hard, sometimes, to hold the thought that he’d played a mean and moody saxophone in his Oxford college jazz band, and had been sleek and dark and excitingly moody himself, or that she had been a Maenad who could dance for hours at a stretch and make her hair spin out in a dandelion clock as she grooved to their beat. He was going to be the most brilliant defence lawyer in criminal history, and she was going to write scintillating, incisive television drama. Funny what life did to you, really. Funny, if you thought that someone grinding a steel-edged heel in your face was funny. That was what life was like.

And
she would never know how she came to be a failure, and he came to be a stuffed shirt, and she didn’t know now, when he was being so amazingly reasonable, whether what he said was prompted by loving consideration of his wife’s well-being, or cool calculation of what would suit him best.

He
was certainly determined that she should rejoin the human race, and it didn’t seem to matter that forcing her to do it at a dinner party at the McEvoys was the equivalent of hoisting someone on to an unbroken stallion to get back their confidence after a fall from a horse.

Her
pride had come to her aid, and she had carried it off. But it made her feel schizophrenic; the slim, elegant, social Laura there at the dinner table laughing and chatting and making all the right noises, while the black voices of her fury raged on in her head. The effort of keeping the two parts separate had given her a genuine headache, and all she craved now was a couple of extra-strength paracetamols and peace to think her poisonous festering thoughts and swear and cry if she wanted to, without James’s calm voice saying maddeningly, ‘It won’t do any good, going on like that. It’s not the end of the world, after all.’

What
she really didn’t need was James to point out in that unbelievably annoying way that they were all healthy and solvent in a world where lots of people weren’t. Having it pointed out that she was unbalanced about it and behaving badly didn’t help one bit.

‘
You can’t reason yourself out of feeling something!’ she had hurled at James. ‘We’re not all cold-blooded lawyers, you know.’

And
when James had sighed and smoothed down his already immaculate hair and agreed and refused to be drawn into an argument, it all made everything worse, because an argument would have given her somewhere to direct her anger. His sympathy might be genuine enough, but the trouble was that there was no right thing anyone could say or do, except to decree that the facts weren’t the facts and it had all been a stupid mistake.

The
worst of it was that she had, for once in her life, allowed herself to feel truly confident. She had lived with a heady cocktail of excitement, elation and pride ever since last summer when, over a glass of sparkling wine to celebrate the conclusion of another successful year at Cranbourne Girls, Joan Lambton, the headmistress, had told Laura, her deputy and friend, that she was going to retire next year.

‘
I’m fifty-eight and I’m single. I’ve got my years in for my pension now, and it gets harder every year for me to leave my little house in Perigord for the “A” level results and those ridiculous league tables. So next year, I shan’t. I shall stay on when the tourists leave, and I shall sketch and read and enjoy the September weather, and get particular satisfaction out of thinking of you all, slaving away on the chalk face.’

‘
Oh Joan!’ Laura’s first reaction was dismay. ‘That’s all very well for you, but – ’

‘
My dear girl, this is your big chance! You’ve been an outstanding deputy, and I’ve told my governors they need look no further. They’ll advertise, of course, but I have no doubt that I’m looking at my successor. To the next Principal of Cranbourne Girls!’

She
raised her glass, and Laura, laughing and pink and protesting, had returned a toast to the present one.

Laura
hadn’t exactly told anyone herself, but she had hinted to Lizzie and Suzanne, because they were her closest friends, and Hayley Cutler had somehow found out, because she always did.

She
was proud of the way she had acquitted herself at the interview. It was only the third she had ever had, and previous ones had been a damp-palmed, twitching nightmare. But this time, she believed in herself; she was confident that she could do the job, and in any case, she knew most of the governors – Piers McEvoy was one of them, for goodness’ sake – and they were well aware that on occasions when she had had to deputize for Joan, she had done it well. She had made modest noises after the interview, of course – after all, there were three external candidates, and one might prove to be outstanding – but she had already begun making her plans, looking forward to the long chats with Joan about the future, and the congratulations, and the status she had never dared to hope would be hers.

She
would never have dreamed of applying for promotion elsewhere. They could have turned her down out of hand, and rejection mattered to her. Rejection really mattered. James might say it was simply a question of pride, but then James had never in his life had a visible problem about his sense of self-worth.

She
had known the day the decision was to be made, and when Joan Lambton’s voice greeted her on the phone first thing that morning, her heart had leapt.

It
had taken a moment or two to understand what she was hearing, not least because Joan herself was so upset. She had not been authorized to phone; Laura would learn by letter that the new Principal was to be, not Laura, not even one of the unknown and possibly exotic outsiders, but Elaine Siddons, the Head of History, a young woman of advanced ideas who had been a thorn in Joan’s flesh since her appointment two years ago. It was a slap in the face to Joan herself, and she was also riven with guilt at the damage her explicit raising of expectations in Laura might have done.

Automatically,
Laura said the right things, replaced the kitchen phone gently on its stand, and sat down at the round pine table in the corner of the room, looking at the Hokusai exhibition poster on the wall as if she had never seen it before.

She
would have to return to a staff-room where even those who liked her would be unable to resist
schadenfreude
and where everyone, without exception, would fawn nervously on the member of their own ranks who had been so suddenly elevated to power over them. Where she herself would have to mouth warm congratulations to her junior colleague.

She
had written six versions of her resignation letter, varying in tone from coldly dignified to vituperative, by the time James came home from the office.

He
had turned pale at the notion of anything so extreme. ‘Extreme’ was James’s ultimate word of condemnation, and he had persuaded her not to send any of them, for the moment at least. She would want to apply for another job, and it wouldn’t look good to be unemployed when she did it.

It
was practical advice. It went without saying that James’s advice would be practical, but she wasn’t sure she could bring herself to apply for another job. She wasn’t sure that she was ever going to be able to put herself back together again in a convincing enough pattern to get one.

And
besides, she didn’t want to be sensible any more. She wanted to be irrational, and violent, and to punish the world for what the governors of Cranbourne Girls, may they rot in hell, had done to her.

And
Piers McEvoy was the worst. She wasn’t sure why Piers was the hub of their social group, because nobody really liked him. He was physically unappealing – short and squat – as well as being boorish and overbearing and far too often drunk.

He
was a man with something to prove, of course. It was his father, a plain-spoken Northerner, who had built the haulage business up from two second-hand lorries bought when he was demobbed; all that Piers had ever done was sell out after his father’s death to an international company for who knew how many millions and a seat on the board. A credible rumour suggested that otherwise it would have been two lorries to two lorries in two generations. Not very bright, Piers.

But
somehow, it was hard to refuse the constant invitations to the Lodge. It was such an exquisite house; it seduced you, really, against your better judgement, with decor by one of the London interior decorators and furniture you might read about in collectors’ magazines which you pick up but feel are too expensive to buy. It was flattering to be part of the inner circle, and Lizzie’s superb cuisine and the quality of the champagne didn’t do any harm either.

Money
talked, there was no doubt about that. You could buy friendship, influence, anything you liked with that sort of money. Including a place on the board of Cranbourne Girls – a place meantime, until he could get himself made chairman.

His
Paula went there, along with the Ferrars girls and Martha Cutler, and he had homed in on the governing body as an interesting toy. His opinion might count for nothing in the London boardroom of Trucking Worldwide, but it was clear he was carving up the Cranbourne Girls’ governing body like the conjuror with a lady and an electric saw.

You
could, she thought bitterly, carve them up with a butter-knife.

She
should have been able to count on his support for her application – they were nominally close friends, after all – or at the very least he could have warned her about the way things were going and cushioned the blow.

But
she knew now, as if she had been privy to the governors’ discussions, that he had gone against her. She knew by the way he had looked at her tonight, knew he was getting some sick, sadistic pleasure out of watching her, noticing the dark circles from lack of sleep and the bitten nails with the knowledge that he had got in to inflict this injury on her mind. It was a sort of mental rape.

If
he had said anything about it, anything at all, she was not sure that the social Laura could have remained in control.

But
nothing had been said. In this village, nothing ever was said to rock the social boat, except with doors closed and shutters bolted, or under the seal of confessional coffee at the kitchen table to another woman.

They
walked home through the village, hearing the sound of the organ from the church as they passed. James took her elbow solicitously as they reached the front door, and having unlocked it, put his arm round her to usher her in ahead.

He
’s treating me as if I were ill or deranged, she thought. Perhaps I am.

She
knew she must pull herself together somehow. She was becoming unbalanced, obsessional; she wasn’t eating properly, and she felt light-headed and strange. And now she was afraid – she was very much afraid – that she was beginning to do things, weird things, without realizing she had done them. Like placing a bunch of dead flowers bound suggestively in black thread on the middle of her desk.

She
had stared at it when she came down yesterday morning, and the rest of the family had looked at her oddly and denied all knowledge, and she found that she could not quite dismiss the notion that she might have done it herself. Which was a nasty thought, but not as alarming as the thought that if she hadn’t, someone else had got into the house and left this cruel suggestion of a wreath for the funeral of her hopes.

***

Outside, the midnight, far from being clear, was damp and unpromising. The electric light in the church had been switched on, streaming through the open doorway in a golden rectangle.

Margaret,
her wide embroidered vestment making her look squarer than ever, took up her usual stance by the ancient yew to the left of the south door. There was a little worn hollow in the stone just there, and she liked to feel that here she stood in the footsteps of her predecessors in office – however shocked some of them might have been by such blatant disregard for the views so trenchantly expressed by St Paul.

‘
Happy Christmas, Margaret – lovely service!’

‘
Thank you
so
much, Miss Moon. Good-night. Oh Caroline! Happy Christmas!’ Mwah, mwah. ‘Drinks tomorrow, remember, twelve o’clock.’

‘
Not much chance of a white Christmas this year.’ Someone made the inevitable comment, and a woman somewhere behind shuddered.

‘
Don’t even mention it! I hate snow.’

‘
Nice for the children, though.’

Like
a stream in spate, irrepressibly, the flow of polite banalities poured out, lapping the congregation in a flood of well-intentioned insincerity as its constituent parts filed through the doorway and fanned out on to the flagstone path.

Margaret
scanned them all shrewdly as she processed them: smile, murmur a greeting, shake hands with just the slightest sideways impetus to move them along, smile, murmur, shake hands again.

She
had, she reflected, heard only one genuine, heartfelt remark (‘Has anyone got an onion they can spare me? Please? I used my last one in the stuffing and forgot all about the bread sauce.’) and that was not excluding the embrace and, ‘Dear Margaret! May Our Lord’s birthday shower you with the
fullest
blessings!’ from the oppressively evangelical Mrs Cartwright. Perhaps, Margaret allowed guiltily, the woman really meant it, but she would be surprised to see her at early communion tomorrow morning.