Wicked! (99 page)

‘I’m protective towards my mother and I mistakenly thought you were after Dad. Will you keep an eye on her and on Emlyn? I really do care for him and I bungled the whole thing. Charlie sends her best. We hope to see you when we’re next in England.’

Janna felt oddly comforted.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked Emlyn when he finally sobered up.

‘I’ve been screwed by the Brett-Taylors.’ Emlyn gazed moodily into a cup of black coffee. ‘Until Charlie rolled up, they had no real desire for me to marry Oriana. To that lot, being working class is worse than being lesbian. Fucking upper classes, fucking independent schools.’

He rubbed his stubble reflectively. ‘I might go back to the maintained system; I might go and work for the Welsh Rugby Union. I dropped in on them when I was home at Christmas. They said there was always a job going. I’d like to be part of building up a team to bury England at Twickenham. But for the next two terms, I’d like to help you out at Larks, if you’ll have me?’

Janna gazed at him, eyes and mouth opening wider and wider. ‘
Have
you?’ She frantically wiped her eyes. ‘It’s the best news ever. Are you sure? God, we need you. They love the Brig and Pittsy and tolerate Skunk and Mates, but they worship you. The Brigadier’s awesome on Nazi Germany, but he’s rusty on the Russian Revolution and it’d be wonderful to have someone to referee fights and see off Ashton Douglas and just have you around.’

Hengist, by contrast, was devastated. He’d lost a marvellous master, a soulmate and a favoured heir apparent. He tried to persuade Emlyn to reconsider.

‘We could always claim Poppet provoked you. None of your class has completed its coursework. Their parents are going to be livid. You can’t let them down. Look at the way Janna stood by her no-hopers. What the hell are you going to do?’

‘Go to Larks to help out Janna,’ which didn’t please Hengist one bit.

‘Well, don’t break her heart then. And what about our rugger teams?’

‘Denzil will have to get up in the afternoon for a change.’

‘Where are you going to live?’

‘I’ve got temporary digs in Wilmington High Street, opposite Brigadier Woodford,’ which pleased Hengist even less.

The pupils were equally enraged at Emlyn’s departure. Posters and graffiti everywhere demanded his return. Alex was shouted down and booed in chapel and he wrongly blamed Theo when someone painted ‘Ite domum’ on the roof of his house.

Nor did having Boffin caringly applying rump steak to one’s black eye compensate for being called ‘Alex Bruise’. Alex festered as he corrected the proofs of his
Guide to Red Tape
, which was due out in June.

Poppet, on the other hand, was nauseatingly forgiving. ‘Emlyn was hurting,’ she told everyone, ‘it came out as anger.’

Artie and Theo walked to chapel past the lake, on whose banks, as a result of the gales, twigs, branches and even ivy-mantled trees were strewn like an antler factory. The wind of change blowing out dead wood, thought Theo, with a shiver.

‘How’s Emlyn?’ he asked.

‘Resigned,’ replied Artie sadly.

‘Is that a verb or an adjective?’

‘Both.’

‘We have lost our Hector,’ said Theo mournfully.

Dora leaked the story to the papers, who all came roaring back to Bagley: ‘Top rugby school loses star coach’.

99

The despair of Bagley at losing their star coach was only equalled by Larks’s joy at inheriting him. By blacking one of the detested Mr Fussy’s eyes, Emlyn had achieved cult status and it rocketed morale to have such an attractive man round the place. Even though it was winter, the gap suddenly increased between jeans and crop tops, skirts climbed, Rowan’s dark bob was highlighted for the first time, even Miss Basket, sparked up by snogging Skunk at the Christmas party, drenched herself in lavender water.

‘Lovely for the boys to have a role model,’ said Mags.

‘I’m a roly-poly model,’ sighed Sophy, who’d put on seven pounds over Christmas and now joined the netball team in the lunch hour.

Weatherwise, Emlyn’s first morning was unpromising, with lowering skies and a bitter east wind sending leaves scuttling like mice across the playground. Inside, all was warmth. Graffi had designed a banner for reception showing a red dragon being greeted by a lot of larks. Pupils wandered in and out of a staffroom thick with cigarette smoke when they wanted to talk to a teacher. The purple and cyclamen-pink ball dresses worn by Pittsy and Skunk as Ugly Sisters in the staff pantomime still hung on a rail with everyone’s coats. The noticeboard was thick with cuttings about Larks and a mocks timetable with a red line through it. Thought for the week was: ‘Chewing gum: we’re gumming down.’

Sophy had brought in her daughter, Dulcie, who was playing with Kylie Rose’s Cameron and being monitored by several pupils taking GCSE child care.

Miss Cambola rushed up and kissed Emlyn on both cheeks.

‘At last, we have a baritone. We aim to sing the German Requiem in the cathedral.’

At break, Taggie Campbell-Black brought in a rainbow cake she was trying out for coursework and gave Emlyn the biggest slice.

After break he gave his first lesson on the Russian Revolution: a great success, particularly when Rocky retreated once more to the cupboard at the back of the room and kept the class in fits of laughter.

Emlyn told them about the first general strike in Moscow when there was no electricity and Tsar Nicholas, in his amber room, had to read and write his letters by candlelight.

‘What was he experiencing for a first time?’ asked Emlyn.

‘People power,’ boomed the voice from the cupboard.

‘Excellent, Rocky. Well done.’

Knowing their attention span was short, Emlyn moved on to the Monk with the burning eyes who had such a hold on Queen Alexandra.

‘Can anyone tell me his name?’

‘Omar Sharif,’ intoned the cupboard.

Rocky, who liked talking to adults, wandered into the staffroom during the lunch hour.

‘Get out before I kill you,’ bellowed the Brigadier in mock fury as Rocky helped himself to Lily’s last cheroot.

Both Brigadier and Lily, Emlyn noticed, were in fine fettle, the Brigadier arranging his teaching days to coincide with Lily’s so he could give her a lift in and out.

In the afternoon, Janna went through the children’s mocks papers with the Brigadier and Emlyn, expressing doubts whether any of them would manage a decent grade in history.

‘If they’d been marked down as ruthlessly as they’re supposed to be, they’d have been in minus figures,’ she added dolefully.

‘If it’s any comfort’ – the Brigadier patted her hand – ‘Rupert Campbell-Black asked me to mark his English lit. mocks papers for him. I’m afraid I had to fail him too. In an exam, one really cannot say: “Sylvia Plath’s the most fucking awful woman I’ve ever come across,” or, “Mrs Bennet’s exactly like Anthea Belvedon.”’

Emlyn grinned.‘He got that bit right.’

Emlyn was keen to improve Larks’s history marks but, filled with underlying rage against the whole arrogant, elitist public-school system, his ambition was to thrash them at the game at which they considered themselves invincible: rugby football. The boys at Larks were already fired up by the World Cup, so Emlyn had no difficulty in forming a rugby team, who grew markedly less enthusiastic when they had to run through the frozen water meadows before sunrise and train after school in the dark evenings. Admittedly, Emlyn jogged with them and shed twenty pounds and his gut. With his soft Welsh lilt becoming a sergeant major’s roar, he had no difficulty keeping the roughest, toughest boys in order, particularly when he dropped them from the team if they didn’t shape up.

Johnnie Fowler was kicked out for two weeks because he rolled up in a dirty shirt.

‘You’re meant to be covered in mud at the end of a game, not the beginning.’

‘The washing machine’s broke.’

‘Go to the launderette.’

‘Haven’t got no money.’

‘Wash it by bloody hand then.’

Emlyn’s genius was to draw the most out of players, so they achieved way beyond their own and everyone else’s dreams. He knew which boys, like Johnnie and Monster, to slap down and which, like Xav and Rocky, to build up. He was an expert at pinpointing a player’s weakness and finding a solution, adapting teaching to the individual. Rugby, above all, taught boys teamwork and to keep their temper. As a result, flare-ups and loutish behaviour within the school dramatically decreased.

Emlyn increasingly appreciated the difficulties in getting these children through GCSE. Not that they were thick, but they were flowers planted in stony, dry, infertile soil, buffeted by winds.

‘Try and speak French with your family at home,’ he heard Lily urging, ‘
c’est très bon
.’

‘Our family don’t even speak in English,’ said Johnnie. ‘They just throw fings at each other.’

But as the weeks went by, the children gradually mastered the basics of volcanoes, earthquakes, heredity, the rise of Hitler, the Cuban missile crisis, the effect of tourism on world debt, the splitting of the atom, the circulation of the blood, the reflexes of the eye, electricity, dissecting sheep’s hearts and learnt how to book a ticket in French or to go shopping in Spanish.

They had fun with geography coursework, deciding where to locate a factory.

‘In Miss Miserden’s front garden,’ said Pearl.

‘That won’t mean a lot to the examiner,’ said Basket.

‘Well, Baldie Hyde’s back garden then.’

In his coursework, Graffi wrote eloquently about how roadworks in Shakespeare Lane, which ran into the Shakespeare Estate, inconvenienced people. ‘Makes me late for school. Mum can’t get to Tesco’s. Dad can’t get to the pub. Cavendish Plaza can’t get to their hairdressers. Randal Stancombe takes a helicopter, so the rich get inconvenienced less than the poor.’

Emlyn found the teaching much tougher than Bagley; it was like having to crank up an old Ford for the shortest journey when one had been driving a Lamborghini, but the rewards were greater, seeing understanding dawning on children’s faces. Increasingly too he admired Janna, how she exhausted herself worrying about Wally’s son in Iraq, Mags’s premature grandchild, Mr Mates’s arthritis.

She was outwardly cheerful, but he realized how near cracking up she was when, one late February morning, she wandered wailing into his history class.

‘Look, look, Sally Brett-Taylor gave me these hyacinth bulbs back in October, I put them in a black dustbin bag at the back of the stockroom and forgot about them.’

Thus imprisoned in darkness, the white leaves and stems, from which sprouted tiny, colourless, misshapen flowers, had struggled to a hopelessly etiolated twenty-four inches, hanging pathetically down over the edge of their blue china bowl. Their whiskery roots had completely clogged the bulb fibre.

‘They were so desperate to reach the light and flower like the children in the Shakespeare Estate,’ she sobbed. ‘I left them in the dark; I failed to give them water and light.’

Jerking his head towards the door to tell Feral and Co to scarper, Emlyn put the bowl on his desk and took Janna in his arms.

‘It’s all right, lovely, it’s all right.’

‘I killed them.’

‘You didn’t – it’s only this year’s hyacinths. The bulbs themselves are fine, they’ll flower again next year. Look, already the leaves are turning green in the light, like your kids’ll blossom because you’ve given them love and hope.’

To cheer her up, he took her to the new James Bond film that evening and she slept right through it.

The children at Larks had been so furious when horrible Rod Hyde won a Teaching Award in October that when a small ad appeared in the
Gazette
asking for nominations for next autumn’s awards, they decided to enter Janna.

‘Miss is such a good filler-in of forms, but we can’t expect her to fill in her own,’ said Kylie. ‘Let’s ask Emlyn.’

Gradually Janna became calmer and happier. It was so great to have someone to kick ass so she could concentrate on cherishing.

Emlyn was still gutted about Oriana; he missed Artie and Theo and the pupils at Bagley, but he loved the Brigadier and Wally and even grew fond of Skunk, Pittsy and Mr Mates – and they of him, because he treated them as equals, even regarding them as young enough to be roped into refereeing.

Gradually, as the almond scattered its pink blossom, crocuses purpled the emerald-green spring grass and the days grew longer, Xav’s remaining fat turned to hard muscle, Monster, Johnnie and Rocky formed an impenetrable back row, Graffi, talking Welsh to Emlyn to annoy the others, and Danny, a Belfast boy, known as ‘Danny the Irish’, grew fleet as forwards. Feral, to crown it, was a natural, with the wisdom, the speed, the ability to pass, kick and dodge of a potential international. Like a feral cat, his eyes swivelled the whole time, assessing danger, checking where everyone else was on the field and where they were going to be in five seconds’ time.

Emlyn longed to keep him for rugby, but he had made a Faustian bargain. If Feral gave him one term and a sporting chance of beating Bagley, he would put Feral on to the football map. At heart, he hoped Feral might become sufficiently enamoured of rugby to convert.