The Travellers and Other Stories (10 page)

When it was too cold to swim anymore, I began to think about getting out, and looked up to settle on a route up across the rocks. I saw then that Mr. Persian was holding up the white jawbone of a sheep. He seemed to be explaining its intricacies to Needham, who sat with his white legs dangling over the lip of the rock and looked on, apparently fascinated. Mr. Persian must have found some joke to make about the sheep's teeth then, because the two of them laughed. In the warmth of the afternoon Mr. Persian's face had grown red and shining. A long piece of his hair had worked itself loose from his oiled scalp and flopped about like an ear of corn.

A scout is observant.

In the largest of the four tents, I slept next to Needham.

Every night, I saw him open his case and take out the little green hand towel I'd seen drooping over the side of his low yellow bathtub at home. I saw him shut the case, then lock it with a small flat key, just like the one I'd imagined he would have. There was something ceremonial about the way he did it. This grubby boy who looked as though he hardly ever washed seemed to make a point of coming along when any of us went down to the stream at the bottom of the field to wash last thing in the freezing water. It was almost boastful, the way he hung his green rag around his neck those nights. He was always the last back afterwards. I used to lie in the dark listening to the click of his key in the lock of his suitcase, the rustle of his clothes as he removed them, his soft gasp as he slid down inside his cold nylon sleeping bag. One of his hands reached then behind his back, pulling the edge of his blue sleeping bag higher up over his shoulders, but I could still see, in the dark, the gleam of his white skin. I could see that he slept naked.

I thought about all the things we were supposed to have in our bags, all the items of clothing we were supposed to possess and to bring with us from our homes—pyjamas and spare shorts and shirts and handkerchiefs and bathing trunks—all the things on the list that Mr. Persian had given to us, copied out in his square script from page seventy-two of the handbook. I thought of the afternoon I'd gone into the little flat with its fishpaste smell and how much Needham had wanted me not to be there; of the happy look on his face as he'd sat by the path with Mr. Persian, cramming bright raspberries into his mouth with his bread and butter. I thought of his shrunken granny in her pasty dressing gown with the man's tie.

It is all a long time ago now and these days I wonder if his grandmother knew he had taken her old red suitcase, if she even knew he was with us.

These days when I think of the list on page seventy-two of the handbook, I find it almost unbearably sad.

It was the rain, on the last day, that set things going.

Mr. Persian woke us early so that we could do our climb in good time to pack up ready for the coach to take us home. We made breakfast and Mr. Persian set off to walk to the phone box to telephone the coach company to confirm the time of our departure.

The sky was white and blank and there was no sun. A damp vapour had drifted down from the peaks during the night, stealing its way into our tents and in between our clothes and our skin. By seven the mist had thickened, collapsing slowly into a steady drizzle and everyone went back into the tents for more clothes.

Only Needham stayed outside, eating his bread slowly. After five minutes he was soaked through, water dripped from the hem of his shorts into the hollow pockets between his feet and his black plimsoles. His shaven scalp looked blue, almost translucent, like the membrane of an egg. I could see the stubborn m-shaped line of his skull.

The rain had worked through his thin mac, his funny shirt clung to his narrow back. I could see the bumps on his spine. He'd got his old look back, his old stare, sullen and challenging.

He said then, to no one in particular, that he'd lost the key to his case and all his stuff was locked inside.

Qualtrone laughed, and I said, ‘We believe you Needham.'

Then I went into the tent and brought out Needham's red case and set it down on the wet grass in front of everyone and slid the blade of my knife into the space between the metal catch and the lock. Needham looked very small and alone without Mr. Persian there to look after him. Still, I expected him to jump at me and make a grab for the knife, but he didn't speak or move, he stared at the ground, shivering in his sodden clothes. I wondered what he'd done with the key, if he'd thrown it in the fire, or into the stream at the bottom of the field. Under his shirt the hard point of his sternum stuck out like an apricot stone. He seemed frozen, and only stood there, a muscle beating very quick in his cheek.

The lid sprang open with a soft sigh.

There was no mirror and no ruched pocket, but the lining was shiny and red as I'd imagined it. The little green towel lay slumped all by itself in the middle, like a small square of thin wrinkled turf.

I told you, I'd never liked Needham. I'd never liked him at all.

HOMECOMING, 1909

SHE WAS THE
first woman I saw when we came into port and I knew at once that I was lost.

For a long time all I could do was stare, gripping the rail and wondering if, after all we'd heard, she could possibly be a dream. Some kind of wicked mirage.

She was tall, a large crimson hat slantwise on her head.

But it wasn't that—it wasn't her being tall, and it wasn't the hat. It was the rest of her, the rest of her in her leaf-green dress, looking like nothing I'd ever seen before. Such a comfortable, unrestrained softness in the look of her body, such a loose, easy look—it turned my tongue fat and dry in my mouth, my knees to water.

I thought of Cass, waiting for me in the narrow doorway of our house, the children all clustered around her. Becky, with her sweet smile, reaching up with her little hands and asking me, what presents have I brought?

A cream sash clasped the woman just beneath her breasts; from there the green cloth flowed down in a slender waterfall, a few supple folds; pooled in a narrow circle around her feet, and when she began to stroll along the quayside on the arm of the smart straw-boatered gentleman who accompanied her, I could see the slow, comfortable sway of her waist. I could see the gentle curve of her long back; the softly rounded flare of her hips. I groaned aloud. I bit my lip and began to moan and beat the rail with my fists.

Behind me the crew had begun to gather with their sunburned faces and raggy beards, with their foul breath and their rotting teeth still loose in their spongy gums. Jostling to get a look at the woman in the leaf-green dress and at all the others like her—because there were more, lots more, walking past our poor worn-out vessel on their way to meet the passenger steamer. A whole sea of them, in reds and blues and greys and yellows. All with that same free, easy look.

Next to me, Mr. Mingus, the third mate, pressed a grimy kerchief to his broken lips. Two of the boatsteerers sank down onto the deck. The rest continued to look, spellbound and speechless. Poor goggle-eyed buggers. A whole crowd of Rip Van Winkles, gaping at the world to which we had returned. The women different, not the way we'd left them. Not the way we'd banked on them being when we came back.

Thirteen months of ice and wind and narrow frozen hammocks since we last saw them. Thirteen months of hard bread and salt meat and oatmeal since we saw them as they used to be.

In the hold, our precious cargo. Chased and harpooned and hauled up out of the icy waters. What we wanted, hacked out from inside the giant mouth, separated from the greasy blubbery flesh. Scraped and cleaned and dried. Over and over. A year's work. Eighteen thousand pounds of whalebone. £25,000 at last year's prices.

Now this. The nightmare rumours from the other ships—all true.

Not one single woman in a corset.

De-boned, all of them.

‘Mr. Mingus,' I said, turning away from the rail and laying my hand upon his shoulder.

‘We are lost.'

HISTORIA CALAMITATUM MEARUM

MY NAME IS
Patricia Singleton and I am the Latin teacher. By tomorrow,
I will have been
the Latin teacher. After that, it will be a case of
I was
the Latin teacher. Lately, I have come to think of my pathway to the scrapheap, my losing battle against Peter Tracey, as a series of inevitably changing verbs.
Ego sum. Ego fuero. Ego eram
. I am. I will have been. I was. There was a time when I had ten sets of twenty-five girls each, but this year there is only Jenny, and after Jenny, there will be no one.

I am packing.

I have packed all of Catullus, all of Livy, my complete
De Bello Gallico
. I have packed the photograph taken on our last trip to Rome. There I am in front of the Coliseum, third from the left, in the floppy straw hat and striped shirt-waist dress. It was taken in the spring of '96 (the year Peter Tracey arrived here) since when the trips have ceased to be viable, and our little group (five girls, and me) is testimony to my complete failure to maintain the popularity of Latin in this school, to convince the girls, and the governors, and the senior management, that the continuing study of a dead and ancient language is of some value.

Until the early nineties, it was compulsory here up until the third form. Since then, the girls have been voting with their feet, deserting the subject in droves. It hasn't helped matters that we are now what is called a
Technology College
, which brings with it from the government the indispensable sum of £100,000 a year, the
quid pro quo
being that every girl must now spend two hours a week doing technology with Peter Tracey.

God knows I've tried.

I have argued myself hoarse in front of the Head and the board of governors, my throat is raw from pleading with them to keep Latin as an option. I have practically killed myself (literally, in the case of the toga episode) over the last few years in my efforts to make the subject
fun
and
relevant.

I have done everything I can think of to entice the girls back. I have held lunch-time sessions on Roman sex, after school Roman cookery clubs. I have told them about Elagabalus, the Emperor who had a secret life as a transvestite hooker, I have told them about the stripper Theodora, who did unspeakable things with geese in public places. I have given them recipes for dormice rolled in honey, for rose hip and calf brain custard, tips on the preparation of peacock and crane. We have cooked and eaten in the dining hall an authentic dish of sole with eggs.

With Siberian winds blowing in under every door, I have worn a toga with no tights in February, only a pair of thin-heeled flip flops between my bare feet and the freezing school lino, leaving me with the mother of all colds until well into April.

We have done Latin shopping lists, Latin letters to Father Christmas.

I have even stooped to a sort of parlour game where I invite the girls to throw at me any word or phrase in English that comes into their heads for me to translate into Latin. For example:

Gag me with a spoon.
Fac me cocleario vomere.

My Jacuzzi is filled with Perrier.
Meum balineum calidum verticosum cum aqua scintillante fontana Gallica impletum est.

Of all the ruses I've tried, this last one has been the most popular, but it is the one that leaves me feeling most upset, most depressed. I end up feeling like a performing monkey, a dancing bear.

One day after one such session, Jenny came up to me at the end. Bless her, I think she finds it quite painful to see me scraping the barrel in this way.

‘
Summergimurne
, Miss Singleton?' she asked. Are we sinking?

‘
Ita vero, summergimur
,' I said. Yes, we are sinking.

None of it has done any good, and this last year, as I've said, there has been only Jenny, and next year, there will be no one.

I have begun to think, Perhaps I am wrong? Perhaps it
is
more important to know how to make a flashing LED nightlight than to read Manilius on the Vault of Heaven, or to discover that Salmacis and Hermaphroditus are each one half of a seamless whole. Perhaps it is more deeply satisfying to shape and file a piece of blue acrylic into a name plate for one's desk than it is to unpick the ending from the beginning of a single word and unravel its meaning. Perhaps I have clung on too long to the wreckage. Perhaps they are right and I am wrong, perhaps it is a useless, impractical language and there are no circumstances left in which you would ever need it.

Perhaps.

Three weeks ago, I bumped into Peter Tracey outside the staff room.

I was standing close to the wall in the small space between the staffroom door and the mineral water dispensing machine.

‘Patricia,' he said.

I jumped when he spoke my name, the shock struck me like a physical blow. It is so long since the two of us have exchanged even one word. We have settled over the years, while his star has risen and mine has fallen, into what most people here think of as a kind of silent truce.

Peter Tracey is tall and handsome, he wears quite good shirts in a range of pastel colours. He has brown curly hair and a strong prominent nose (which I can only describe as Roman). I would guess he is roughly half my age. He is generally adored, he is thought to be a very fun teacher.

‘Patricia,' he said, touching his mouth with one of his large, practical hands, as people do when they are about to deliver some unpleasant news, and informed me that he'd been told by the Head that his department would be taking over the last remaining Latin room (my room, where I have been teaching Jenny) from the following Monday, and that I would be given the use of the vacant storeroom in the art block for my few remaining classes.

I tried to accept this piece of news with dignity, but I am no Marie Antoinette, and I found it impossible to withstand this final death blow, inevitable as it was, without bursting into tears.

Tracey blushed slightly and looked at his feet. Perhaps men like Peter Tracey are too young to carry a handkerchief. Anyway, he didn't offer me one, he just sort of sauntered off and away through the double doors at the end of the corridor.