Another Mother's Son (14 page)

I smile.

The door is constantly opening and shutting as people walk in from Victoria Street. The radio is tuned to Kiss FM and the stylists, who are never the same from one visit to the next, stand over their clients with flickering scissors. They wear black close-fitting dancers' clothes and cut to the offbeat. Cordless trimmers buzz. Blasts of hairdryer air blow like crosswinds. Clumps of my hair fall to the floor. My face, more and more exposed, appears – there is no escaping from it – tired and aged, both in repose and when I move my lips in reply to Dahlia. I keep my head rock still.

I no longer wish for a continuing relationship with my hairdresser, of the sort I once had with Greg in Verve of Palmers Green who cut the boys' hair and Randal's too and knew all our names. He had a soft Dublin voice. Greg would never have supposed that I would spend the weekend with my feet up, as he knew all too well, from my fruitless attempts to stop my sons from darting about the salon and fighting each other and from Randal's interminable accounts of sporting activities designed to use up surplus boy energy, that we rarely sat down. At a later stage, when the boys were older and slunk in unaccompanied, he understood that our difficulties were by no means over.

I am aware that, having failed to provide verbal evidence of a man with whom I shall go clubbing or out for a nice meal, Dahlia has me down for a sad middle-aged singleton, perhaps with a cat. I cannot complain, having opted out of an ongoing hairdressing association by coming to a salon that is the hair equivalent of fast food. I stopped going to Greg without warning and occasionally wonder if
he
wonders what happened to us, five people – two adults, three children – who, after several years of cheerful interconnection, between one month and the next disappeared from the face of the earth without saying goodbye.

GINNY CALLS ME
on Thursday morning and asks to meet up. She sounds tearful. I offer to travel to somewhere near her place of work, if she can suggest a suitable venue, but she insists that she comes to me, so we settle on The Albert, on Victoria Street, at six-thirty p.m. No one there will know us.

We arrive at the same time and head for an unoccupied corner on the far side of the bar, where Richard Watson and I often sit when we meet for a drink. The clientele is a mix of tourists and local office workers. The two groups tolerate each other but have no connection. The one soaks up the atmosphere created by the mahogany bar counter, the decorative etched-glass windows and the portraits of British prime ministers that line the walls, the other sloughs off the day's troubles.

We extricate ourselves from our coats and stow bags and wet umbrellas – a procedure that takes longer than when I was young. Ginny settles herself on a Windsor chair and I go to the bar to buy drinks.

‘Oh, Lorna, I should have done it myself,' she says, the second I return. She takes a large gulp of red wine. I have never seen her so agitated.

‘Done what, Ginny?' I ask.

‘Initiated the complaints procedure. You know what Deborah is like. The head …' She wafts her free hand.

‘Is incompetent. Out of his depth. He's a windbag. All that golden-thread consolidation bollocks. Who writes that terrible stuff? The building manager? The latest email was a shocker.'

‘Oh, Lorna. We should have gone more gently. You were right.'

I am dazzled by the unexpected endorsement but hate to see Ginny distressed. In her neat, girlish clothes and with a fringe as straight as a high-tensile fence, she does not suit anguish. I tell her she mustn't blame herself.

Ginny clasps her hands together. ‘I'm so used to Deborah, I forget the impact she has. If you are feeling crushed … And not just poor Mr Child. She has this authority, so in order to assert himself, the head becomes, well, I probably shouldn't say this – but cruel. He has it in him to be cruel. He probably leant on poor Mr Child very hard.'

‘She is also a bit of a comedy act, Deborah. You wouldn't necessarily take her seriously.'

‘But what could be more serious than this?'

I nod. ‘No. Nothing.' I rip the top off the packet of dry-roasted peanuts with my teeth and pass it to Ginny. She dips in and puts a few nuts in her mouth, chasing them down with a swig of wine as though swallowing aspirin. ‘He lived with his parents. In Romford. Such a difficult commute. Sometimes he borrowed his mother's car. Mostly he cycled. All that way.' She pauses. I wait. Ginny dips into the peanuts and repeats the prophylactic swig. ‘He stopped going to the staffroom at lunch-time. A group of teachers were very unkind to him. Nesta Robartes should have kept her mouth shut.' Ginny presses her lips into a line, as if enacting how Miss Robartes should have behaved. ‘You know who I'm talking about?'

‘Simon Petridis mentioned her. I've never come across her.'

‘She's a science teacher, new this year. From South Africa. Very pretty. She is one of those girls with translucent skin – almost blue under the surface. Grey eyes. Her hair is curly, the colour of wheat. She seems to be half-asleep. She
looks
half-asleep. She plays a
wot
.'

‘Sorry?'

‘Pan pipes. She learned in Laos. Mr Child asked her out for a drink. I think a lot of the male teachers have made a move on her. She went along. As I said, she's in a daze. It turned out Mr Child intended a drink in the country. This involved a long drive. Not what she had expected. I suppose he had a vision of a secluded country pub but he didn't know where he was going. He
was
hopeless, you know. They went along the Great North Road in his mother's Toyota, getting further and further from town. He told her about himself – his experiences at uni and his first impressions of Lloyd-Barron Academy, his disillusion with the place. I suppose he was nervous. He just kept talking. Nesta woke up. She felt kidnapped. She said she wanted to go back. He promised to stop at the next place – a decision that brought an almost instant pay-off because round the next bend was a motel with an enormous empty car park. He swerved in. She refused to get out of the car. That's when it happened.' Ginny is animated and quietly desperate as she tells the story. She holds her glass tightly by the stem. ‘He told her how lovely she was – or something like that. Whatever it is they say. Then he picked up her hand from her lap and did this.' Ginny puts her glass down. Keeping her eyes fixed on me, she takes her left hand in her right, raises it to her mouth and runs the tip of her tongue along it from wrist to fingertip.

‘Oh, no.'

‘To be fair, it probably wasn't as blatant as that. But she felt his tongue.' Ginny shuddered. ‘He caught a group of colleagues acting out what Nesta Robartes claimed he had done to her in private. They were wetting themselves with hilarity.'

‘Until they saw him.'

Ginny nods. She puts on an expression of gleeful shock and erases it in an instant.

‘I'll go and get some more drinks.' I stand up.

Ginny protests that it is her turn and begins to scrabble in her bag with the hand that a moment before crossed a threshold between one life and another, like a puppet. I had not expected so much drama from her. I gesture to her to put her purse away and walk over to the bar. The story – whatever kind of story it was – formed and set too quickly. I can't bear it.

There are several people queuing at the bar. I fail to push forward. Upturned glasses glint in the vast dresser behind the counter; a piece of polished Victoriana that is part domestic, part monumental and incorporates a large clock that looms above, marking the time. The orderliness of the backdrop contrasts with the haphazard movement around me, as people shift and jostle for position. Snatches of conversation make no sense. I am conscious of big fleshy hands that reach over the bar counter, jiggle in a pocket, or proffer a tenner. They bear some relation to Ginny's small hand, or Nesta's, or the multiplicity of hands that mocked Alan Child.

‘This lady's next,' I hear a voice say.

A man in a navy blazer is speaking about me.

‘Thank you,' I say.

He sports an artfully crinkled handkerchief in his top pocket and what appear to be medals on a lapel. I order two large glasses of house Merlot and a packet of dry-roasted peanuts.

‘In a dream, were we?'

‘Yes, must have been.'

He laughs and the laugh goes on too long; in and out, like wheezy bellows. I pay the barman, shove my bag up onto my shoulder and grasp the glasses.

‘Need a hand?'

‘No, thanks.'

‘Chinese, is she, your friend? I was in Shanghai soon after—' I hear him say, as I retreat.

I do not know Ginny well. There are people who go back a long way; the connection through our children. I am perplexed to see her, sitting neatly in the corner of the saloon bar of The Albert, waiting for my return. Dreams insinuate our familiars in odd places – and reality is the same.

‘You found an admirer. Would you like me to leave?' Ginny says, as I put the glasses down.

‘I think it's you he's interested in. He asked about you.'

‘Your hair looks nice, Lorna.'

‘Thanks. I let it get too long.'

‘It's not true that we become invisible. There's always some disgusting old creep who recognises our beauty.'

We laugh. I trust her. We have more in common than I would have guessed. Ginny and I both understand that we can't keep pounding away at the topic of Alan Child and keep any vestige of decorum. If she had been Liz Savaris, or Randal, in his day, I would have gone for a battery of questions. Ginny and I move on to more practical matters. We carry on drinking so nothing is really clear and when it is time to go – which we decide at the same moment as we remember Grace and Ross – we get unsteadily to our feet and hold onto each other's arms, either Ginny supporting me, or I her – she a good deal shorter than me and probably less inured to alcohol – as we make our way to the exit.

DURING MY LUNCH
break the following day, I receive a call from Tony Goode. He says something serious has happened: Ross has been removed from his classes as a disciplinary measure. He wants me to go to school as soon as possible but by four o'clock at the latest. He and Mr Milner will see me and a police officer might be present. I ask if Ross is all right. He repeats that it is a disciplinary matter and nothing is wrong with the physical health of the boy.

I tell him that I will set off immediately. In daylight, at one-thirty, I am aware of retracing my steps in a way that I am unconscious of at my normal time of leaving. Take the Tube at St James's Park station, change at Victoria, on to Finsbury Park; the homeward journey comes to life.

I emerge at Finsbury Park overground station with its multiple platforms. Trains hurtle through at high speed or chug to a stop. One is a streak of blended colour, the other naive in its visibility, like a child's painting. The two types of locomotion, so disturbingly different that they cannot be resolved, create a peculiar loneliness. A simple up-and-down line does not produce this desolation, nor the chaotic order of a terminus. I stand on this station every evening. Crosswinds whip the platforms and solitary people stand, not waiting but enduring.

I board an almost empty train. I sit very still, like a propped-up corpse, and wonder what ordeal is in store. The familiar stations on the line are a series of potential stopping-off points and have an allure, almost a black romance, as if I were travelling from, say, Derry to Coleraine; a journey I once went on with Randal in order to attend his grandfather's funeral. Although there is no River Foyle to be glimpsed from the window, the places outside, Hornsey or Bowes Park, possess worth that I previously failed to register and are inhabited by real people who go about their lives obliviously, or, like myself, in a state of acute anxiety. I have missed the opportunity to see these places in a right frame of mind; to look at the tin tabernacle at Bowes Park, or the old public wash house in Hornsey High Street, both of which are derelict and could fall down at any time. I shall never wander round these districts aimlessly unless the current crisis is resolved quickly and happily which seems unlikely, just as I have never explored the Mussenden Temple, County Londonderry, that was built as a library and modelled on the Temple of Vesta in Tivoli. It sits on a cliff. The train passes through a tunnel directly underneath and unless you get out at Castlerock, which we were unable to do because of Kenneth Doig's funeral, you have the tantalising knowledge that it is directly above your head but invisible. Randal insisted that I go with him which surprised me as we had not been together long. It was only when I got to know him better that I gathered that Randal would do anything to escape travelling with his parents and his brother, Michael, as a family group, and that what he dreaded above all was making an entrance with them. Aged twenty-five, I took a romantic view of his insistence and of the funeral, never having been to one, and was unprepared for the intense curiosity of his wider family. They put me down as quiet, I later discovered; a reputation that I was unable to shift since, by some fluke, we attended two more Doig funerals in the space of eighteen months: that of Randal's Uncle Frank, and of his grandmother, though Frank's was in Bootle. Being young and in love, I was unable to express the varied range of my personality at a Roman Catholic requiem mass followed by compulsory carbohydrate and alcohol intake accompanied by harp. I came across as less than animated though I was astonished to see the very same harpist in Bootle as had played in Coleraine; a red-haired woman who slightly resembled the novelist Edna O'Brien. I can only imagine that, years later, hearing the news of Randal's divorce and remarriage, his relatives – those still alive – were unsurprised. Ambitious young Randal should never have married a mouse.

At Palmers Green station there is no sign of a taxi. I consider phoning for a minicab but recall the smell of stale tobacco, the dangly toys and the sometimes deeply disturbing conversation with the driver. I dismiss the idea. I need to be in robust health to tolerate minicabs, gaiety intact. Instead, I catch a bus from Green Lanes and get off at the roundabout. I could then wait for the single-decker that serves a loopy route through suburban streets but I walk the last half-mile. I am glad of fresh air.