The Good Girl (26 page)

‘Garlic chicken,’ said Ailsa and Adam simultaneously. Everyone laughed.

‘Did you find my passport, Ailsa?’ Adam asked. ‘Because I’ll need it when I go on my trip.’

‘I’ve got it in here, Dad,’ said Ailsa, patting her handbag. When she got home the first thing she would do was hide the passport. She remembered the cowboys and Indians kit. ‘Here, I thought you might like this, Ben.’ He whooped with joy as he tipped it on the table. ‘Now I’m a true Lakota,’ he said.

Some time over pudding, Romy pulled out a scrunched-up newspaper article from the back pocket of her jeans. She tried to smooth out the wrinkles and ended up smearing black ink on the back of her hand.

‘I
found something in the paper today that might interest you, Dad,’ she said.

‘I thought you were meant to be helping Mum, not reading the paper,’ Harry teased Romy in a mock-recriminatory tone, because of course he was delighted that she showed an interest in the news and flattered that she had thought of him as she read it.

‘It’s a science story,’ said Romy.

‘Geek alert,’ teased Luke.

‘It’s about the discovery of a new part of the brain called the lateral frontal pole.’

‘I think I read something about that in
Neuron
,’ said Harry.

‘What’s
Neuron
?’ asked Adam, who had drifted back into the conversation.

‘It’s some dodgy magazine,’ said Luke. ‘Read by people with a nerve-cell fetish. Kinky stuff. For the truly obsessed.’

‘That’s me,’ admitted Harry.

‘What’s it about?’ asked Ailsa.

‘It’s about how scientists have found the human conscience,’ said Romy, looking straight at Harry. ‘They say it’s the size and consistency of a Brussel sprout.’ She put out her hand and gently pressed a point just above Harry’s left eyebrow. ‘There’s one here and one behind your eyebrow.’

‘There are big hopes that it will help us study psychiatric disease,’ said Harry, closing his eyes in contentment as Romy pressed the tip of her finger into the fleshy cleft above his eyebrow.

‘So
what does it do?’ asked Luke.

‘It makes you wonder if you’ve done something wrong and what choices you might have taken,’ said Romy. ‘How good the choices are that we don’t take.’

‘God, you think way too deeply about this stuff,’ said Luke. ‘You show me up in a shit light, Romy. Can’t you go out and do something bad for a change?’

‘What’s conscience?’ replied Ben.

‘It’s when you get that uncomfortable feeling that you’ve done something wrong,’ said Ailsa. ‘Like when you took down the fence to get into the Fairports’ garden.’

‘That was a good thing to do,’ said Ben. ‘It helped us to get to know them better, and I can reach the sweat lodge faster.’

‘It’s about the brain’s connection to morality,’ explained Harry, warming to the theme.

‘Where does that leave religion?’ mused Ailsa.

‘Where does that leave Dad?’ asked Romy.

‘Is there something I’m missing here?’ asked Luke. He was the only one to notice the hint of menace in Romy’s tone.

‘Probably with another idea for a chapter for his book,’ said Ailsa.

‘As the great H. L. Mencken once said, conscience is the inner voice that warns us someone may be looking. There’s a good lesson for you all. Never do anything that you wouldn’t want someone else to see you doing,’ said Harry.

‘Anything?’ asked Luke, raising an eyebrow.

‘I
suspect it’s not something that is well formed in the teenage brain,’ said Harry. ‘But who needs a lateral frontal pole when you’ve got Mum looking out for you?’ he added, putting his arm around Ailsa.

‘If Mum looks out for us, then who looks out for Mum?’ asked Ben.

‘Me,’ said Romy, putting her arm protectively over Ailsa’s other shoulder. ‘I’ll always take care of you, Mum.’

‘That’s such a lovely thing to say, Romy,’ said Ailsa. ‘Remember to save the newspaper piece. It might be a good one to bring up during interviews.’

School started again the following day with its familiar tension between surprise and routine. A few days later, Ailsa delivered an assembly on the amount of money that had been diverted from the sports fund to replace vandalized equipment and paint over graffiti. She even managed to raise a smile with a joke about how Banksy was unlikely to feel threatened by its quality. When she got back to her office she planned two more assemblies. One on the importance of timekeeping and the other on pupil behaviour in corridors. Then she wrote to a local company asking them to sponsor the newly formed girls’ netball club and drafted a letter about a curriculum information evening for Year 11 parents.

Rachel emailed to say that shooting was about to begin on her zombie film and that she might be out of circulation for a while.
Were you ever really in circulation?
Ailsa teased. After a moment’s thought she added a
couple of kisses because she had given up on her sister weeks ago and it was easier to feel benevolent when you had zero expectations.

You always handled Dad better than me
, Rachel emailed back. She asked when their father was moving into the flat in Cromer and offered to come up to help move him. She followed that up with a question about how Harry’s book was going, which was Rachel’s way of apologizing for her outburst when she was staying. Ailsa wrote back and said she was missing her.

During a prickly staff meeting after school Ailsa was informed that Stuart Tovey was responsible for the hijacked Facebook page. Matt Harvey explained exactly how he had done it, using lots of acronyms that Ailsa didn’t understand. Stuart’s technical expertise was terrifying. After much discussion with Mrs Arnold, it was decided he should be suspended from school for a week. Ailsa wanted to postpone the punishment until after exams were finished. Mrs Arnold wanted to implement it with immediate effect, which meant that Stuart would miss his mocks.

The parents of the boy who had been bullied were emailing every day, said Mrs Arnold. The school needed to show that it had reacted quickly and decisively to send a message out to other students that there was zero tolerance of cyber-bullying. He should be suspended with immediate effect. Ailsa overruled her. The best thing that could happen to Stuart would be to get the grades he needed to study Biochemistry at university. She
proposed a new ruling on mobile phone use at school. Anyone caught using a phone outside break times would have it confiscated for twenty-four hours. There was unanimous agreement.

‘That includes teachers,’ she joked. Matt’s phone rang and they all laughed, apart from Mrs Arnold.

Ailsa switched to the next point on the agenda. Without mentioning any names she informed staff that seven teachers had taken over three weeks to mark homework and that this would no longer be tolerated. Then she swiftly turned to a date and venue for the staff party.

Ailsa remained in her office for an hour after the staff meeting so that teachers could speak privately to her about anything that was bothering them. She checked her messages and saw one from Romy asking when she was coming home. Ailsa texted back to say it depended on how many teachers came to her with problems and how big the problems were.
The unknown unknowns
, Romy texted back, deliberately mimicking her.
Precisely
, Ailsa texted back, adding a smiley emoticon. She looked out of her window and saw two teachers waiting outside. The first was the head of Drama, who wanted to see whether Ailsa could secure a proper theatre in Norwich to perform the end-of-year play. It took Lucy Drummond at least twenty minutes to explain her idea.

‘Brilliant idea,’ Ailsa responded within seconds. She suggested a couple of companies in the city who might agree to sponsor programmes.

The second teacher, who marked books as he waited,
was Matt Harvey. He came into the room holding out his hand ready for Ailsa to shake and at the last minute opted for a less formal wave, which left Ailsa’s arm floundering in mid-air.

‘How’s everything going?’ Ailsa asked, trying to be as informal as possible while retaining professional distance. She could remember her first year as a teacher and knew how important it was that younger members of staff felt they could express their worries. She wanted to tell him how impressed she was, with not just his qualities as a teacher, but the way he ran Year 12. He was seen as someone approachable and fair without being a walkover. She had almost stopped being annoyed with him over Rachel, even suggesting to her sister that he should come over the next time she was in Norfolk.

‘I’ve been doing a very interesting project with my Biology A-level students,’ he said, pulling his chair towards her before she had even asked him to sit down. He cracked the knuckles on his left hand one by one. Ailsa winced. ‘Sorry,’ he said. Moments later the bone-crunching started up again.

She distracted herself from the noise by glancing at the final floor plan for the first ever careers fair to be held at the school in the last week of term. It was meant to be choreographed so that the twenty-six companies which Ailsa had personally persuaded to participate sat alphabetically in the assembly hall.

She suddenly noticed that Brewin Dolphin had been
located after Goldfinch Chambers and while no one else might notice this mistake it would bother her.

‘It’s an impressive achievement,’ Matt said, ‘getting all these companies to agree to come. You must be very persuasive.’ He was tilting his chair like Luke at the breakfast table, and she had to quell the urge to shove the legs back to the ground.

‘Thanks. It’s about creating aspirations,’ she said. ‘And forging links with local employers. I’m hoping that some might agree to provide work experience and a few might even end up sponsoring students through university.’

He crunched the last knuckle on his right hand and Ailsa knew from previous experience in meetings that he would now stop.

‘It’s amazing how much you get done when you have three children and all the complications of family life to sort out.’

Ailsa frowned, wondering whether Rachel had said something to him. Honesty ranked higher than loyalty for her sister.

‘They say that if you want something done you should give it to a busy person,’ she said breezily. He was being kind but she wanted him to get to the point. ‘I’m impressed with the dynamism that you’ve introduced into the Biology Department. Your reputation must have spread because we’ve got more students than ever before signing up for your A-level course. Romy speaks very highly of you. She’s really taking her research project seriously.’

‘That’s
what I wanted to talk to you about,’ he said, sounding relieved that Ailsa had provided a conversational opening.

‘Harry has given her some help. He pulled out a few papers for her on adolescence and addiction; I hope they’re not distracting too much from her coursework.’

Matt looked puzzled and his chair finally came to a halt.

‘Our project is related to the genetics component of the coursework. I’ve been doing some extension work on blood groups with students in the top set. It’s got nothing to do with teenagers and addiction.’

‘So why is Romy doing this project?’ asked Ailsa.

‘I’ve really got no idea. It’s not work that I’ve set. Maybe she has a personal interest in the subject? I chose blood groups because they’re a brilliant example of discontinuous variation, which is one of the topics on the A-level Biology syllabus. It’s part of the genetics component. One of the companies coming to the career fair specializes in that area, and I thought they’d be impressed if the kids had some off-curriculum knowledge. Did Romy do the pinprick test on your finger?’

He picked up a pen from her desk and started twiddling it between his thumb and index finger so that it rotated like the arms of a windmill. Ailsa leaned over to remove it from his hand.

‘I’d forgotten about it,’ said Ailsa apologetically. ‘It was a while ago.’

‘Well, it takes a while to get the results back,’ he said. ‘And some of them took a while to get it all done. Sorry.’

‘I
wasn’t questioning your efficiency,’ said Ailsa. She put down the pen and he immediately picked it up again and began drawing a Venn diagram.

He outlined the three main blood groups, A, B and O. Blood types are inherited, he explained. A and B are dominant and O is recessive. Ailsa began to drift off as he muttered about genotypes and phenotypes, although she enjoyed the sound of all the unfamiliar words and his enthusiasm for the subject.

She knew from managerial courses that she had attended that it was important to hear people out. Listening was hugely undervalued in a culture where it was all about who shouted loudest. She wondered whether there was a part of the brain responsible for narcissism and whether social media encouraged it. She would ask Harry. She nodded as Matt explained how all the children had been given pinprick kits to take home so that they could test different members of their family. These were sent off and the results had just come back. She was getting used to the way that he liked to paint the background of an issue, like a miniaturist. His tone, however, struck her as odd because it was somewhere between defensive and apologetic.

‘So if the parents belong to blood groups A and AB it is impossible for their children to be O,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve checked and double-checked.’

‘So how is this relevant?’ asked Ailsa, wondering if she had missed something. ‘I’m not sure that I completely understand your dilemma. Remember I’m not a scientist.’

‘I
have a family where the blood types don’t add up.’

‘Sorry, I don’t understand.’

‘The mother is AB, the father is A but one of the children is O.’

‘So what does this mean?’

‘The child’s blood group should be A, B or AB. It’s impossible for it to be O.’

‘I’m not sure where this is going,’ said Ailsa.

‘There’s a paternity issue.’ He paused again. ‘I now realize this was a pretty stupid idea. I was just trying to encourage the kids to see how scientific theory can be applied to everyday life. At least half the class have step-siblings or half-brothers and -sisters and a couple are adopted so the results have been fascinating in highlighting the whole issue of genetic inheritance. But I hadn’t really thought through the consequences of the results. I want to make sure that I don’t create a problem for anyone. Perhaps this is something that is already known to the family concerned.’