The History Room (14 page)

Emily shrugged. ‘I was just walking through the hall when I heard her fall.’

Why? I wondered. What had brought Emily into the main house? She’d been given rooms in Gavin House. Perhaps she’d left something in one of the classrooms. And Olivia certainly
shouldn’t have been in here; the house was out of bounds to pupils outside school hours.

‘I’d left some books upstairs in the staffroom,’ Emily went on.

Olivia moaned and her muscles tensed up beneath the overcoat. I hadn’t realized that I still had my arms over her.

‘Lie still,’ I told her. ‘Wait for the ambulance men to check you over. Stay awake, Olivia.’

‘Arm,’ she said. ‘Arm hurts. That’s all. Want to sit up . . .’ She struggled slightly under my arm. Good. She was very much conscious now. I sat back.

‘Very slowly. Tell me if anything else hurts, especially your head and neck.’ I helped inch her up. She shivered and I pulled the coat around so that it covered her shoulders, taking
care to avoid touching her dangling right arm. ‘Put your head between your legs if you feel dizzy.’ I noticed a bruise on her right temple, already swollen, and a cut on the back of her
left wrist. She must have caught it on the banisters as she tumbled.

‘Could we have an ice pack?’ I called to my father.

‘I’ll go and get one and fetch Cathy over, too,’ he said. Even at this moment I felt myself stiffen at the mention of Cathy’s name. I told myself to be sensible; Cathy
certainly wouldn’t be accusing me of more pranks while a pupil lay badly hurt beside me on the cold marble.

‘The ambulance will be here soon,’ I told Olivia. The station was only in the next town. It would take less than ten minutes.

‘I don’t need one.’

‘You were unconscious. You need checking over and that wrist needs treatment.’

‘Her wrist?’ Emily was crouching next to us now, talking to Olivia in a low tone I hadn’t heard before. She sounded more anxious about the arm than the possible head
injury.

‘Hospitals scare me.’ Olivia was weeping now. Huddled in my father’s coat she looked much younger than she was, a pale waif, her eyes wide and scared, reminding me for just a
moment of my father’s own expression at my mother’s funeral, when he’d clung to Clara’s arm for a second as the coffin was being lowered into the ground. Reminding me, too,
of Hugh’s face when he’d woken up in the hospital in Birmingham and started screaming at me to run away from the dangers he still saw around him.

‘I’ll go with you.’ Emily squeezed in beside us and stroked her hair.

‘Will you?’ Olivia swallowed.

Normally it would have been my mother or Cathy who accompanied casualties to hospital, not a gap-year student. I heard Cathy’s high heels click over the marble and stood up. She held the
blue ice pack, wrapped in a dry tea towel. I moved back to let her apply it gently to the bruise. Blue lights bounced off the windows and I heard the crumple of ambulance wheels over the
gravel.

Cathy was talking to Emily. ‘How long was she out for?’

‘I don’t know.’ Emily’s voice shook.

My father was opening the front door to the crew, ushering them in. I took another step back, feeling suddenly awkward, in the way. Cathy put a hand on my arm. ‘You did well with the first
aid, Meredith.’

‘Never thought I’d have to use it.’ To date my ministrations had been limited to applying an ice pack to swollen ankles or knees following soccer mishaps. I thought of Hugh,
bleeding on the dusty road, his brother soldiers trying to stop the flow, radioing for help, knowing every second brought him closer to death. I realized I was shaking and started pacing the hall
in an attempt to disguise this from the others.

‘Meredith . . .’ I swallowed. ‘I hope you haven’t found this all too disturbing.’ Cathy’s voice was low, confiding.

I blinked. ‘No.’

‘You’ve had quite a time of it, haven’t you, dear? Don’t push yourself too hard.’

What did she think my options had been this evening? Leaving Olivia on the ground where she’d fallen?

I made a muffled noise of dissent. ‘Excuse me.’ I moved away.

One of the ambulance crew was talking to Olivia now while the other one stood with Emily and discussed what she’d seen of the fall. ‘Can I go with her?’ Emily asked.

‘I’m the member of staff who accompanies pupils,’ Cathy said. ‘I’ll follow in my car.’

‘But—’ Emily pinkened. ‘I’d just quite like to stay with her.’

‘It won’t be necessary, thank you, dear.’ Cathy gave her brisk smile. ‘You could go and fetch my bag from my desk. And my mobile. Just in case we have a long wait at A
& E.’

Emily’s flush seemed to deepen to the colour of one of the dark-pink dahlias in the vase beside her, but she did as she was asked.

The crew were helping Olivia to her feet. They’d already strapped her broken arm. ‘Nothing else broken, as far as we can see, but they’ll check you over properly at A &
E,’ one of them told her. ‘You’ve been lucky. Falling onto this hard floor . . .’ he shook his head. I wondered whether we’d be forced to carpet the marble.

Emily’s shoulders drooped as she walked away. ‘Emily,’ I called after her, wanting to say something to comfort her, to reassure her, but she didn’t respond to her name. I
watched her trudge slowly back towards the accommodation block where her rooms were; a slight figure, bundled into an oversized cardigan.

My father was sitting on the stairs, a faraway expression on his face. He looked simultaneously older and also like a young boy, gazing down at the grown-ups below. I’d never seen him sit
on the stairs like this. ‘She looked so young lying there. So still.’

‘She is young,’ I said briskly. ‘Just thirteen.’

‘No, she’s—’ For a moment it seemed as though he might contradict me. ‘Sorry, yes, of course she’s thirteen.’ He put a hand to his throat, as though to
dislodge something stuck there. ‘I must have been confusing her with someone else.’

Charles

Confusion. Collins the disgraced bursar. The defaced mural. At the time it seemed just one of life’s ironies that the two events should occur together.

At first it was easy enough to imagine that it was simply Charles’s ineptitude with figures that was making him worry where no worry was necessary. Reserves, depreciation, writings-off;
all these conspired to draw a veil over what was really happening. And there always seemed to be perfectly good reasons for everything: an amount earmarked for one thing – music scholarships,
for instance – might dip a little, but at the same time another – special-need bursaries, say – would apparently increase.

‘Fewer musical children this year, Charles, and more good all-rounders whose parents are going through tough times.’ Collins’s eyes would be fixed on Charles’s as he said
this and Charles could feel his concern for the children and their parents.

Collins cared about these families, that was certain. He wasn’t just a bean counter. He’d sat with the widowed mother of a thirteen-year-old for an hour, reassuring her that her
son’s future at the school was certain, that financial help would be provided, that she shouldn’t worry about it. The woman left the bursar’s office with a smile on her tired
face. And all the while the new buildings – the gymnasium and swimming pool – were taking shape in the grounds and they were saving every pound they could on unnecessary expenditure.
For a time it really did seem as though Collins was a financial wizard.

The governors back then lacked any real financial acumen, too. Afterwards Charles could appreciate that Collins was moving money around so quickly for a reason: he wanted to make it hard for
them to keep tabs on how much there actually was. And the sums he withdrew himself were small: two or three hundred pounds here or there, occasionally a thousand, easily explicable as cash in hand
to pay for materials needed for the building work. ‘The builders can get a better deal on the tiles if they pay cash,’ he told Charles once.

The tenders received for the building work: how many of them were inflated to provide Collins with a payback? It would be hard to prove either way. And it wasn’t in the builders’
interests to admit to any kind of bribery.

At three most mornings Charles would wake and listen to the steady breathing of Susan beside him in the bed. Around him the old house sighed and relaxed. Letchford at night was a soothing place.
But not any more. Something wasn’t right. Someone needed to take a closer look. The governors were the first people to whom he should report his misgivings. But suppose he were mistaken?

He rolled over in bed and tried to will himself to sleep. But still the anxieties chased around his mind. Then he thought of an answer. John Andrews. He’d retired by now but was still
doing a bit of maths coaching for common entrance or GCSE. John had always been a figures man, not just one of those mathematicians who see numbers as beautifully theoretical. John had run a
black-market business with Charles’s father from a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Bohemia. They’d managed it with ruthless efficiency; mistakes could have meant a bullet through the
head. John Andrews had kept books, encoded so the Germans couldn’t understand them, and every last cigarette, every stale crust had been recorded. John was the man Charles needed here at
Letchford. And it would help him, too. His retirement was not a prosperous one.

‘There’d be some maths teaching,’ Charles told him when he went to visit him in Abingdon. ‘Fairly straightforward stuff: just the younger children, first- and
second-years.’ Even now he couldn’t bring himself to admit to suspicions.

John nodded.

‘They’re generally interesting and bright children,’ Charles went on. ‘We try and give out as many places as we can to boys and girls from poorer backgrounds, and
fortunately the fund has stood up well.’

‘But?’ He sat back in his shabby armchair, his eyes sharp. ‘Maths teachers are two a penny. You don’t need me for your teaching staff. What’s up?’

‘Something’s not right,’ he blurted out.

John gave him that shrewd look of his. ‘Tell me, Charlie.’

‘It’s the building work.’

‘I thought that was going well.’

‘It is. To plan.’

‘But not to budget?’

‘The books seem in order.’

John nodded. He moved forward in the armchair. ‘Tell me about your bursar.’

‘The bursar came with excellent references.’

‘Family?’

‘Wife’s just had their second child.’ A boy. Susan had lent them an old linen christening robe.

‘Is he having an affair?’

Charles shrugged. ‘I’d be surprised. He seems quite the devoted father.’

‘Big fancy house? BMW or something similar in the drive?’

‘A smallish semi, as far as I know. And an old Ford.’

John had promised to ring soon and let him know when he could come to Letchford.

John Andrews was ill for much of the early part of the New Year; that damp cottage on the Thames played havoc with his bronchitis, and so it wasn’t until February that he joined the
Letchford staff.

During the day John taught a few lessons and at night Charles sat with him in his office with the books. It was almost like the old days, John said: he and Charles’s father sitting in the
dark, whispering about their black-market transactions, an ear open for the guard. He’d sounded nostalgic. Perhaps he’d been lonely in that house by the Thames. He had no family,
Charles knew. Just a much younger sister, a brother-in-law and small nephew he rarely saw.

In those days the bursary was in what became Simon’s history room. Collins had his desk beside the big oak cupboard on the wall. Charles and John would unlock the oak cupboard and take out
the lever arch files housed above the pile of old papers and books referring to Letchford house that lived, for want of anywhere better, in the bottom of the cupboard. Charles would try not to look
at Collins’s neat desk, with the blotter and silver paperknife and calculator lined up ready for the next day’s work. Whenever John removed anything from the oak cupboard he put it back
exactly as he had found it. Files were replaced to the exact millimetre. John read their contents without comment.

A few mornings later a letter arrived from the bank, an apologetic note informing Charles that the school overdraft limit had been extended for the last time. If the school wanted to borrow any
more money it would have to be in the form of a loan guaranteed by a mortgage or some other kind of security. The bank manager looked forward to discussing the matter with Charles at his
convenience and sent his best wishes to Susan and the girls.

He’d known nothing about the overdraft. He passed the letter to John and his sharp eyes scanned it in a few seconds. He didn’t look surprised. ‘Noel is on the
fiddle.’

Charles winced. This was Collins, after all; Collins who was good with grieving widows.

‘We have to confront him,’ John said. It was unseasonably warm and the casement window was open. A group of youngsters was meandering across the lawn. One of them said something and
the others responded with guffaws. ‘No time like the present,’ John added.

Noel looked up from his desk as they walked in. The quick smile that spread across his face fell away. ‘I’m so sorry,’ Charles started.

He stood. ‘It’s all right.’ He looked at John and his expression darkened. ‘Come to look at the books again?’

Charles felt his cheeks redden.

‘I know you’ve been looking.’ He put the lid on his fountain pen. ‘You’re right, of course, Charles. I’ve been taking money.’

Charles willed him to take back the words, to say it hadn’t been him, that it was all a mistake.

‘I’ll pay you back,’ he said. ‘Obviously if you don’t press charges I can do it more speedily, as I’ll be able to get another job. But that would mean
you’d have to give me a reference.’ He spread his fingers out in front of him on the desk and gave a short laugh. ‘I’m not being realistic, am I? You’ll probably need
to call in the police.’ The fingers curled and he gripped the edge of his desk.

‘Why?’ Charles asked. ‘You, of all people . . .’ Noel Collins, with his open face and his sympathy for the unfortunate.