Gifted and Talented (29 page)

‘And also because time is running out,’ Alastair added, talking rapidly now. ‘The Bullinger’s having its big bash this weekend. “Bash” being the operative word, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Olly said feelingly.

‘The Bullinger Ball: I want you to infiltrate it. Get all the grisly details. Get me the front-page story that’ll launch us into the stratosphere.’ He leant forward, his smile now a hard and serious line. ‘In fact, you have to. We’re launching next week and at the moment we’ve got nothing.’

Olly sat frozen to his chair. A minute ago he had felt an utter failure but now he was being charged with the success of Alastair’s entire enterprise. ‘Nothing?’ he repeated, temporarily dazed at the crushing responsibility that had landed so unexpectedly on his shoulders.

Alastair’s shoulders rose and fell. He sighed. ‘I was hoping for drugs.’

Olly looked back at him doubtfully. He had heard that newspaper people often operated under the influence of illegal stimulants. But it was unexpected to hear it confirmed, and at their first meeting too.

Alastair gave a sudden roar of unexpectedly infectious laughter. ‘I don’t mean
me
, you muppet. I meant that I was hoping for a drugs
story
. There’s something going on, something big. Dealing in the colleges seems to have stepped up a gear. But all the avenues I’ve followed up haven’t delivered. Not yet, anyway. So it’s up to you, OK? Your mission, should you choose to accept it. Goes without saying, of course, that, if you pull it off, you get the job.’

Olly hesitated. But not out of doubt. He was savouring the unprecedented sensation of being at a turning point in his life and being absolutely, unmistakeably, aware of the fact. He smiled at Alastair. ‘I accept it.’

Isabel meant to arrive at Professor Green’s session early. She had missed so many supervisions now and was determined to make an effort for this one. But Jasper had dragged her back into bed and, in the end, there had been no time even to get her coat. Even though it was freezing outside. The weather had turned suddenly. From mild, sunny autumn it had become bitter winter.

As she hurried along, her phone buzzed in her bag. She dragged it out, breathless. Jasper? Ringing her so soon? Did he miss her already? Her nerves surged with an answering, golden rush of love.

‘Hello, stranger!’ Mum exclaimed affectionately.

‘Oh . . . hi.’ Isabel struggled not to sound disappointed.

‘What’s the matter?’ Mum asked immediately.

‘Oh . . . nothing . . . It’s all fine . . .’

‘You sound a bit distracted. Working hard?’

‘Ye-es . . . Um, what’s happening up there, Mum? Lochalan behaving itself?’ Isabel began to walk along rapidly.

Mum took a deep breath and began. Isabel hardly listened. Lochalan and Mum seemed strangely distant now. It seemed a long time since they had even crossed her mind.

‘You still there, love?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Thought you’d been cut off. You’re very quiet.’

Isabel was wondering about telling Mum about Jasper. But did she trust herself to drop him, now, casually into the conversation? Mum would detect from her voice that this was no run-of-the-mill acquaintance.

‘How’s your friend?’ Mum asked suddenly.

Shock rippled through Isabel. Had she mentioned Jasper without realising? Had Mum guessed? ‘My
friend
?’

‘That boy,’ Mum said easily. ‘He sounded lovely. What was his name again?’

‘Er . . .’

‘Olly, that was it.’

Isabel let out a slow sigh of relief. ‘Olly; oh, yes,’ she said casually. It felt like a name from a long time ago.

‘You haven’t talked about him lately. How’s he doing with his newspaper interviews?’

Isabel blinked. Olly? She struggled to recall a single thing about him. ‘I’m not sure,’ she demurred eventually.

‘I hope you haven’t fallen out with him,’ Mum said sternly. ‘I thought he sounded lovely. Really kind.’

Isabel rarely, if ever, got cross with Mum, but irritation rose within her now. She, Isabel, would choose her own friends, not have her mother – her adoptive mother, to boot – controlling her choices from afar.

On the other hand, there was something she needed to ask her. Something she had been intending to call about for some days, in fact. Isabel reined in her chagrin. ‘Mum,’ she said now, breaking into the stream of compliments about Olly, ‘is there . . .’ she took a deep breath, ‘any chance you could send me a bit more money?’

Her mother stopped with a gasp. ‘
Money
?’

‘Money, yes.’ Isabel fought the shamed mutter in which this threatened to come out. ‘Please. If you could,’ she added in as matter-of-fact a tone as she could manage.

‘You need more money already?’ Her mother’s voice mingled amazement with alarm. ‘But you worked it all out so carefully, how much you’d need every week . . .’ Mum stopped.

‘I didn’t work it out very well. You know how bad my maths always was,’ Isabel forced herself to joke. Something was twisting inside her; she could hear her mother’s distress but she had to maintain the façade. Admitting to paying for every date she and Jasper had ever had would horrify Mum. She would never accept him after that.

There was a silence during which Mum was clearly wondering what questions to ask and whether to ask them at all in the face of the uninformative and expectant silence Isabel forced herself to maintain. She was horribly aware of how coldly demanding she must sound and how little Mum deserved it. And how little Mum had to spare, too. But what option was there?

Eventually Mum said, sounding more bewildered and hurt than angry, that she would see what she could do.

‘Thank you,’ Isabel said, her eyes pricking with gratitude and relief. And guilt. She ended the call quickly after that.

The English group were already assembled outside the dark wooden door of Professor Green’s room when Isabel panted up. Just in time, she saw with relief.

She realised her colleagues were all staring at her: Lorien and Paul with concern at her coatless state, Kate with more general annoyance. ‘Good of you to turn up,’ she said acidly.

Her hostility remained as complete as on the day it was formed, Isabel thought. As Ellie’s had. But so what? What did any of it matter now she had Jasper? Isabel raised her cold-reddened chin defensively, reminding herself that she had been living literature recently, rather than studying it. As Jasper was fond of saying, it all boiled down to sex in the end.

‘I haven’t missed
that
many supervisions,’ she retaliated. Not as many as Amber, say. The rumour that her neighbour would not be returning next term had reached even Isabel’s distracted ear. She was to be sent down – expelled, in other words.

‘Oh, no?’ Kate jeered. ‘There was the Brontë one, for a start.’

A faint echo of what might have been regret rippled through Isabel. Yes, she had missed that, Kate was right. And it had been a shame, because she loved the Brontës.

‘And Mrs Gaskell, last week.’

Isabel swallowed. She had prepared Mrs Gaskell for
this
session. Somehow she had got confused, or not read the timetable properly. So what were they doing this week? She had no idea. The subject of the next hour’s close study with one of the world’s leading literary brains was completely unknown to her.

Her heart began to gallop. She did not dare ask the others what it was. Even glancing at the books they held would give the game away. Kate’s scorn if she did was all too easy to picture and, anyway, it was far too late.

There was a sliding of handle mechanisms and creaking of wood as Professor Green opened her door. As usual, she wore her grey hair in a bun, an all-concealing purple paisley dress and a lofty, stately manner. She looked at Isabel from beneath beautifully shaped raised eyebrows.

‘Ah, Isabel,’ she said in her fruity vibrato. ‘Good of you to join us. If you’d missed another supervision, I’d have had to send out a Missing-Persons report on you.’

Isabel looked at the orange carpet and reddened. ‘I’m sorry, Professor Green.’

The group shuffled in. Isabel realised she had almost forgotten how pleasant Professor Green’s room was. The exposed brick walls were covered in framed RSC posters, a scented candle exuded warm lavender and the comfortable chairs and sofas were upholstered in bright, soft fabrics. Isabel felt suddenly glad to be here, eager to be part of this world once again.

‘Right,’ said Professor Green, smiling warmly round. ‘Edith Wharton. Who’s going to start us off?’ Isabel looked quickly at the carpet. Edith Wharton! Nineteenth-century American women writers! Her mind had gone completely blank.

‘Kate!’

As Kate began expounding, Isabel realised with rising panic how absolutely out of her depth she was. Never in the course of her whole life had she arrived at a lesson without preparing. To turn up, now, without having read
The Age Of Innocence
was a stupid mistake, albeit one Isabel endeavoured desperately to conceal as the others talked knowledgably on.

Being forced, through ignorance, to remain silent was a new and horrible experience for one, like her, accustomed to dominating through sheer knowledge and enthusiasm almost every session she had ever been in. That role now went to Kate. The looks of apprehension she had initially darted at Isabel – expecting her to interrupt, it seemed – now deepened to triumph as the tutorial progressed. She was clearly enjoying herself.

Isabel was even unable to answer a simple question about the heroine’s background. Professor Green’s glance, expectation turning to surprise, lingered on her. An agonising, apparently endless silence elapsed before Lorien provided the answer. Isabel hunched as she sat, turned down her mouth, tried to look ill, hoping that Professor Green would take that as the reason. But she was not surprised when, as the others filed out at the end of the session, the tutor signalled to her to remain behind.

As the door shut behind Paul, Isabel felt a leaden dread in her stomach. She knew that, unlike at the beginning of the term, she was not being detained for positive reasons.

‘I’ll get straight to the point,’ the don said, folding her large hands in her lap and leaning her paisley bust towards Isabel. ‘The English Faculty is concerned about you.’

Isabel sat bolt upright, eagerly. ‘I’ll work harder. I suppose I’ve been a bit . . . distracted.’

Professor Green nodded and gave a faint smile. ‘Isabel, you need to tell me if there are any special circumstances. Any trouble at home?’

Isabel shook her head, perhaps too vehemently because her supervisor’s eyes now kindled sympathetically. ‘I can imagine,’ she added gently, ‘that as an only child of a single parent you are under a certain amount of pressure. Not least from yourself. It is possible that may get too much sometimes.’

Isabel was surprised at the depth of her supervisor’s perception. She shook her head, however. ‘I’m fine, honestly,’ she assured the professor.

Gillian Green sat back. ‘In that case, are there any other issues affecting you?’

Was Jasper an issue affecting her? That was one way of putting it, certainly. Partly from nerves, Isabel felt the sudden urge to laugh, but fought desperately to keep her face still.

Obviously she did not entirely succeed. ‘I can see you think it’s none of my business,’ Professor Green said dryly. ‘But I have to tell you that what is very much my business is the quality of your work. You came to this university with an excellent reputation and we all had very high hopes for you. But on present form, you’ll be lucky to scrape a third.’

Isabel stared at her in shock. She felt as if she had been punched in the stomach. Then she hung her head, her heart racing as she stared at her jeans. She was, she noticed vaguely, much thinner than she used to be. But you couldn’t be too rich or too thin, wasn’t that right? Funny, they were the only kind of quotes she could remember these days. Her concentration seemed completely shot.

‘I’ll try harder, Professor Green,’ she said, noticing, now, that the other woman had stopped speaking.

‘You’ll need to,’ was the acid reply.

Dismissed, Isabel rushed out of the faculty building and into the leafy road. She was ashamed and embarrassed and wanted to run away from the feeling. She must reach Jasper. Once she was in his arms, everything would be all right.

There was, Richard felt, nowhere to run. Sara and Milo had completely taken over his home. She seemed somehow to be everywhere at once: half-dressed in his bathroom; lounging in low-cut dresses over his sofas; clacking across the Lodge’s concrete floors in leather trousers and stilettos; seemingly forever on his (much lower) heels.

‘Do I look nice in this?’ she endlessly asked him, twirling in some flimsy, figure-hugging scrap that seemed to him indistinguishable from any other of her flimsy, figure-hugging scraps. They were all, he felt, unsuitable for someone her age and the idea of her wearing them in public at the alumni dinner made his toes curl. Yet this was the purpose of the fashion show. She was, Sara claimed, trying to hit on the exact right outfit. While in most respects he dreaded it, Richard also longed for the weekend to come, for the dinner to be over. Then, as he sought to remind her at every opportunity, she would leave.

His desperation for her to do so redoubled after finding her in his bed. She had, she claimed, mistaken his door for hers. As Richard had stood there, pondering this unlikely excuse, she had lain below him, naked and pouting, arms above her head and writhing energetically against his sheets. While insisting, with what voice he could summon, that she return to her room, he had done his best to avert his eyes firmly from her erect, cone-shaped breasts and the strange sparkle about her magenta-dyed and heart-shaped pubic region. But the image had haunted him in his dreams: in a fur coat of a violent rose-colour, he had run through a storage depot of vast pink ballistic missiles, searching for the way out.

So unruffled by the incident did Sara seem afterwards that he wondered whether he really had dreamt the whole thing. This possibility seemed almost more worrying even than if it had been real.

He started to avoid her, to keep away from rooms she was in. He had realised fairly early on that the kitchen was not Sara’s favourite place. She seemed unfamiliar – more so even than him – with the various objects it contained; he had to show her how to switch on the electric kettle.

It was in the kitchen that Richard was, hastily, eating a piece of Marmite toast, when Sara unexpectedly entered. He doubled his haste immediately, his jaws crashing so hard on the toast that he could barely hear her speak.

‘What?’ he asked, having swallowed.

‘I need to talk to you,’ Sara gasped.

Richard glared from under his brows. He hoped it wasn’t about dinner parties again. Much of her conversation was a stream-of-consciousness about her former life in London, which she was labouring under the illusion would interest him. She seemed especially keen to emphasise her abilities as a hostess, her experience of dinner parties for influential people. As if he cared!

‘It’s about Milo.’

Milo. The very name made Richard frown. Whenever he entered the sitting room it was to find the ghastly child and his violent video games scattered over the floor.

Richard cleared his throat. ‘I’m glad you’ve brought the subject up.’

Sara threw back her hair and beamed hugely. ‘He’s simply desperate to be a neurotic— I mean, neurologist. He’d love to come with you to the labs again.’

Richard summoned up what little remained of his patience. Of all the week’s enervating events, worst of all, worse even than the bed episode, was Milo’s visit to the labs.

It had been as unscheduled and unsanctioned as Sara’s own first appearance at his place of work. That seemed to be the Oopvard way. And, contrary to his mother’s assurances, Milo was not the least bit interested in neurology. Richard’s attempts to explain how he was training his worms to recognise colour and smell met with the usual unsettling blank stare. This, and the fact the boy spent most of the time playing on his iPad, seemed to belie Sara’s claims concerning her son’s intelligence. ‘Top of his class at school and off the scale at Mensa; they’d never seen results like his,’ she had invented wildly. Richard could well believe the latter.

He was about to say as much when Sara jerked her cleavage meaningfully in his direction. ‘After all,’ she trilled, ‘you do rather owe me one, after I saved you from Diana’s evil clutches!’

He was about to object, but the breasts rose in his face again and she got there first.

‘Milo just adored it last time.’

‘He had a funny way of showing it,’ Richard confined himself to remarking. ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ he added as discouragingly as possible, and escaped to the labs with all speed after that.

He had only just started work when the phone on his desk shrilled.

‘Is that you, Master?’

Richard suppressed a groan. The Bursar again. His colleague seemed to have been reduced to a state of near-paralysis by the looming prospect of the alumni dinner and, in particular, the looming prospect of the wealthy guests of honour, the Snodgrasses.

‘What’s a thread count?’ the Bursar asked.

‘No idea,’ Richard said shortly, one eye on his worms. ‘Why?’

‘Mrs Snodgrass can’t cope with less than nine hundred.’

Richard was sufficiently distracted as to enter the worms’ direction in the colour box into the wrong row of figures. Now all his calculations were confused. He cursed under his breath.

The Bursar, meanwhile, was getting into his complaining stride. ‘And Mr Snodgrass only drinks filtered tap water. At room temperature, not a degree above or below.’

By the time Richard had put the phone down he had had enough. These people were mad. He was mad, for staying here. What for, anyway? Nothing had worked out for him here. He was in the wrong place, in England. Why didn’t he just go back to America?

Nothing was what it had seemed, from Diana to the job as Master. The college had assured him he would be left alone to work, but his time was continually taken up with absentee students, drugs, alumni dinners. And this winter was shaping up to be an absolute bum; he had not realised how hard it was to cycle on icy roads. You had to progress down other people’s grooves and the risk of falling over was ever-present. Richard wasn’t a literary man but he could recognise a metaphor when he saw it.

And Christmas was coming, with all that meant. Excited children. Carol services. Other people’s happiness. Amy had always loved Christmas; apart from spring, it had been her favourite time of year. He still felt his wife all around him, more than ever just at the moment. What would Christmas be like here, that season of cheerful excess, among the bleak sixties futuristic architecture? Unbearable, frankly. Who would he spend it with? Most probably his worms. Perhaps he’d light them up in green and red for the festive season. He felt a miserable loneliness, a feeling of being hopelessly adrift. He wanted to run away.

Diana was picking Rosie up from a friend’s house. Not Shanna-Mae’s, obviously. Just as Debs would not speak to Diana, Shanna-Mae had since ignored Rosie.

‘She’s got a bunk bed,’ Rosie was saying eagerly about her friend. ‘Can I have a bunk bed, Mum? Handy for when people come to stay,’ she added, without irony, it seemed.

‘Mmm,’ Diana said, not really listening. She was unable to concentrate on anything at the moment. Her thoughts ricocheted between a murderous loathing of Sara, anguish about Debs and a combination of anguish and loathing when it came to Richard. He was taking Sara to the dinner instead of her! How could he? How had it happened?

It was not a real question, of course. Diana had no doubt, now, why Richard had not been in touch. Sara had poisoned him against her as she had earlier poisoned Debs. And now Sara had moved in to the Master’s Lodge and was no doubt sizing Richard up as a replacement for Henrik.

Diana could see it all now, horribly clearly – almost as if she had been Sara herself. She had been the victim of a plot. Sara had money after the divorce, but no importance. Richard was a widower and Master of a prestigious university college. It was all so obvious.

Obviously, too, Diana would now have to go. Christmas approaching or not, there was no question of remaining at Branston after Sara became – as Diana did not doubt she would – the Master’s wife. In one fell swoop, over one catastrophic weekend, Sara had destroyed her closest new friendship, her burgeoning romance and her job prospects.

She had tried to salvage the situation with Debs. Only this morning they had walked down their respective garden paths at exactly the same time and Diana, swallowing her fear, had tried to rekindle some spark of friendship. But Debs had stonewalled her completely. She had not betrayed by as much as a glance that she was aware of Diana’s presence.

‘And she’s having a
Strictly Come Dancing
disco birthday party,’ Rosie added as Diana turned into the Campion Estate. ‘Could I have one of those, Mum?’

Diana closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She must not get annoyed. None of it was Rosie’s fault. She was blameless; indeed, she had made more than the best of her new situation. Whereas she herself . . .

‘Of course you can,’ she forced herself to say through the hard ball suddenly rolling up her throat.

‘Oooh, great! . . . What’s the matter, Mum?’ Rosie’s elation gave way to concern. ‘Are you crying?’

Diana shook her head hard. ‘No . . .’ But it came out as a gulp.

‘You
are
crying, Mum! What’s the matter?’

Diana pulled in. The car behind, which had been following too close, with over-bright headlights, zoomed past with a rude admonitory parp. It added to her crushing sense of failure.

She had tried to make a go of it, to work hard, remain cheerful, adapt uncomplainingly to her new circumstances. She had imagined she was building something solid. But it had taken only one short visit from Sara Oopvard for everything to collapse. What had been the point of it all?

Light fingers were pressing her hand. ‘Mum!’

Diana sniffed, and with the mightiest of efforts pulled herself back from the brink of hysterical sobs. She could not cry in front of Rosie.

‘Come on, Mum!’ Rosie was urging.

Diana’s head, which had been bent, now slowly raised itself back up.

‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered dully, rummaging for a hanky and feeling that roles had somehow been reversed. Rosie had become the mother, all resolve and encouragement, and she the defeated small daughter.

The impression intensified as Rosie produced a scrunched-up tissue from her school cardigan pocket. ‘Here.’

Diana took it, and dabbed fitfully at her eyes. A sense of shame gathered within. What was the matter with her? Not only had she allowed Sara Oopvard to ruin her life, she was showing less spirit than a nine-year-old. Had she, Diana asked herself fiercely, learnt nothing from what had happened to her?

Rosie’s voice went on, patient and encouraging as before, but now unmistakeably desperate too. ‘You
can’t
just give up because of horrible Sara Oopvard. And even more horrible Milo. You
can’t
let them win.’

Her daughter was right, Diana realised. She mustn’t let Sara defeat her. Not just for her own sake, but for Rosie’s.

Like a smouldering log suddenly bursting into flames, a violent rage leapt within her, of an intensity that vaporised the misery she had felt. Flamelike, it scorched up and down her nerves. She clenched her fists; the pain as her nails dug into her palms was almost welcome.

‘I won’t let them beat us,’ she muttered.

‘You go girl!’ cheered Rosie. ‘You go get ’em!’

This unaccustomed phrase – from her daughter, anyway – stopped Diana in her tracks sufficiently to allow doubt to catch up again. Because what could she do about any of it? Wouldn’t appearing at the dinner be just a horrible humiliation? Wasn’t what was done, done?

Doubt now held a blanket over the flames of fury just felt. Doubt was about to drop this blanket and extinguish them. It was all very well when you were nine, Diana thought. Things were simple. Her daughter had no idea of the million and one reasons why she could not just ‘go get ’em’, as suggested – Sara or Richard. There was also the mess next door, with Debs and Shanna-Mae.

‘I’ll try not to let them beat us,’ she amended her earlier assertion, shrinking inside at the disappointed look her daughter turned on her.

‘Come on, Mum,’ Rosie began urging again. ‘You go and sort it out. And if you don’t,’ she added boldly, ‘I will.’

‘
You
will?’ Diana regarded her daughter with a sort of amused hopelessness. ‘What could you do?’

Rosie crossed small but capable forearms. ‘I’ve sorted out next door, haven’t I?’

‘Have you?’ Diana gasped.

‘Didn’t I say? Yeah, I saw Shanna-Mae at school today and we had a good talk in the sixth-form area. I told her that you didn’t know about what Dad did and you were upset because Sara stole your boyfriend . . .’

‘You said
what
?’ burst in Diana.
Boyfriend!

Rosie carried on regardless. ‘And so I said Debs had to go easy on you. Shanna-Mae promised to speak to her mum. She says Debs feels awful, anyway, about all the things she said to you. So it’ll be fine, Mum, honestly,’ Rosie finished, breathless and cheerful. ‘It will, honestly.’

And perhaps it would. For, at the sight of her daughter’s brave little face, her resolute little eyes, Diana felt a new strength radiate from her heart and travel with a slow, steady warmth along her veins and nerves.