The History Room (15 page)

He shrugged. ‘I could try and explain but there’s no point in trying to excuse myself.’

‘I wish you would explain.’

‘What’s the point?’ He pulled his jacket off the back of his chair. ‘It probably sounds strange to say this, but everything else is in perfect order.’ Charles held
out the bank letter. ‘Ah, yes. Well, cash flow will start to become positive again almost immediately, now that I’ve . . .’ He shook his head and bent down to pick up his
briefcase. He scooped up the possessions on his desk, the photograph of his baby son dressed in the linen gown and cap, and the little daughter whose name Charles had probably been told but had
forgotten. A shaft of sunlight glinted on his silver paperknife as he placed it in the case.

‘Why?’ he asked again.

Collins shook his head. ‘Family business. It doesn’t matter now.’ He looked down. ‘Not if you don’t remember. No excuse, though. I’m so sorry,
Charles.’

He watched him leave the office. John Andrews hadn’t said a word while Collins was in the room. As soon as he’d shut the door carefully behind him, he turned to Charles.

‘You’ll have to get the police involved.’

‘I don’t know if I can do that.’

‘You have a responsibility to the governors.’

Charles shook his head, coldness settling on his stomach. Family business. He thought about the conversations he’d had with Collins over the last month or so. He couldn’t remember
mention of financial woes. Collins’s wife was working now, too, wasn’t she? He thought of the photo of the little girl and boy. There had been something, something about the baby. He
wasn’t well. That was all he was able to remember. Damn the minutiae of detail about bricks and double-glazing that had saturated his memory.

One of the daughter’s paintings had been pinned on the wall for a while. A Christmas tree, with presents around the base. Collins had been good with Charles’s own girls, too. Once or
twice he’d come into the room to find them eating chocolate digestives and drawing on sheets from Collins’s notepad.

‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that.’

But a day or so later John had worn him down with arguments as to what he owed to the school and to the board of governors, and to the pupils themselves, who’d been robbed of funds that
would buy them textbooks and equipment. Charles had agreed to call the police. By then it was too late; Collins and his wife and children had left the country.

‘He must have been ready for this,’ John told him. ‘Possibly planned his escape some time ago. Guessed you’d wait a bit before you did anything.’ His face was
inscrutable. ‘You should feel angrier than you do, Charlie.’

‘I feel disappointed more than anything. I missed something important.’

‘You’re still thinking of him as your friend.’

‘He was my friend.’ The police corroborated John’s guess when they telephoned the school one Saturday morning. They told Charles that Collins couldn’t be traced beyond
Amsterdam.

That was the same morning Meredith and Clara stripped the paint from the mural. It didn’t seem coincidental. The smooth, managed surface of the life they’d built at Letchford was
being cut open: exposed for all the world to see.

‘Who was that woman underneath the painting of me?’ Of course Susan wanted to know. ‘Why was she on the wall?’

‘She was just someone I used to know.’

‘Someone you used to know very well, it would seem, if you remembered her in such detail.’

‘Someone I haven’t seen for twelve years. Someone I have never even had a letter from.’

‘But someone so dangerous you had to cover her up.’

They came down harshly on Merry. She’d been the scapegoat. Clara seemed to escape with less blame because it was hard to believe that she would have been the instigator of this mischief.
Things were said to Merry that were too harsh. Even for Merry, who seemed to bob serenely through life. Her small face had been white after he’d finished telling her off. ‘I’m
really sorry, Daddy,’ she’d whispered. His heart had throbbed. She’d only been doing what any inquisitive ten-year-old would do.

But he was busy. Busy and shocked at what had happened with Collins, mourning him, really. And full of annoyance with himself. Some of the anger that should have applied itself to Collins, and
to himself for his lack of care with the school’s finances, had fallen on Merry’s slender shoulders.

He should have spent more time with his younger daughter. Just as he ought to have spent more time with Collins. Asking about the sick infant. Now he thought about it, Collins had mentioned some
operation for the little boy. But he’d been too busy to take in the details.

First Collins and now Merry. For all her lack of interest in art, Merry was always the child of his heart.

She still was.

Meredith

Olivia and Cathy returned at around midnight. Fortunately, my father told me when I bumped into him on the way to lessons, A & E had been quiet on a weekday night.

‘We now have a difficult situation,’ Dad went on. ‘Olivia should really be sent home for a few days. She banged her head quite badly. Cathy spent the night in her room, waking
her up every three hours to make sure she wasn’t slipping into unconsciousness, but Cathy doesn’t work full time.’

I silently thanked my lucky stars.

‘And Olivia’s housemistress can’t really be responsible for her in this condition.’ My father paused. ‘There was something else. That cut on her wrist. Cathy says
it’s probably not accidental. They asked questions at the hospital.’

‘Someone cut her?’

‘Or she cut herself.’

Our eyes met. We knew about self-harming; how could we not, with a schoolful of teenagers? I couldn’t remember a case here since I’d arrived. But youngsters this age were notoriously
secretive. All the same, I reminded myself, they had to get changed for swimming lessons or PE. Usually someone would notice cuts. Unless the girls were exercising their monthly right to have time
off games. I knew my father was thinking the same thing as I was: that this was an area that would have previously been part of my mother’s ambit, that we were lost without her calm, quiet
ability to sort out these situations.

‘So she’ll have to go home for a few days.’ I spoke automatically, then realized that it wouldn’t be as simple as that, not for Olivia Fenton.

‘I think that’s best. I’m going to try and ring her family now. There’s lots to discuss.’ I found myself following him upstairs and into the apartment, as though I
were a little girl again and the first-floor rooms were still my home. I had a few minutes before my first class started. 3b were on assembly duty this week, putting away chairs and benches, which
meant it would take them longer to make their way to their first lesson. Dad logged on to the laptop and entered a password to get into the pupil database. ‘Samantha’s taken on the
management of the database but she’s on a training course this morning. I don’t really know how it works.’ He frowned as he read the screen. ‘Olivia doesn’t really
seem to have a settled home. Her aunt is her guardian and she lives at her place of work. There’s a mobile number.’

He dialled it on the office telephone. He shook his head. ‘Voicemail,’ he whispered. ‘This is Charles Statton calling from Letchford School. I’d be grateful if you could
call me back as soon as possible.’ He explained what had happened.

He hung up and turned back to the computer screen. ‘Usually pupils have an emergency contact number for someone else but it’s blank on Olivia’s record.’

‘Isn’t there anyone else?’

‘There’s only an email address.’ I let my eyes move towards the screen. Normally I was very careful not to let myself see anything I shouldn’t when I was with my father
in his office. Teachers at my level didn’t have access to the full database. I caught sight of the address and noted that it was a village near Wokingham. The boxes for other emergency
contacts were blank.

The waif Olivia, who had nobody else but the absent aunt.

‘I expect we can organize some kind of rota for Olivia. She’s in her house at the moment; Tracey’s sending over some breakfast.’ He stood up. ‘Let’s go down,
shall we?’

As we reached the ground floor Emily appeared from the kitchen carrying a tray. ‘I said I’d take it over to Olivia.’ She paused. ‘Tracey’s really busy. I
don’t have much on this morning. I could sit with Olivia if it helped.’ She watched my father as she suggested this.

‘Where are you supposed to be?’ my father asked.

‘Putting out cones for Jeremy for fourth-year hockey. It’s not exactly essential work.’ Something in her tone made me look closely at her. ‘I’d like to look after
Olivia.’

My father contemplated her. ‘There may be other things you could be doing that are more useful for you than sitting with Olivia.’ It was said gently but firmly. ‘This year is
supposed to be about expanding your knowledge of teaching in a school.’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘You need to spend your time with the teachers,’ he went on. ‘Even if it is just putting out cones. It gives you an opportunity to observe. Take the tray over but come straight
back.’

Emily seemed about to debate the point. The bell rang. A crowd of teenagers moved across the hall, drifting round us as though we were rocks in a fast-moving stream. One or two turned curious
eyes towards us. ‘You’ll need to hurry, Emily,’ my father told her. ‘Jeremy will be expecting you at the hockey pitch.’

There was something approaching a glint of dislike in her eyes now but she nodded.

‘I don’t get it,’ I said as she disappeared with the tray of breakfast. ‘What’s this obsession with Olivia?’

My father turned to watch Emily as she walked away. ‘Perhaps she just feels concerned because she was the first one on the scene last night,’ he said, sounding so confident that I
could almost believe this was all there was to the case, until I remembered the cut on Olivia’s arm.

‘Do you think Emily knows about the self-harming?’

He gave me a sharp look. ‘If she does, she needs to speak to Cathy Jordan immediately.’

‘There’s something about her I can’t make out.’ I’d watched her walk along a corridor, encountering a group of sixth-form girls, standing against the wall to let
them pass when they ought to have stood aside, according to the Letchford unwritten code on good manners.

‘Thanks,’ one of them had said, over her shoulder. The others didn’t appear even to have noticed Emily. I’d wanted to remonstrate with the girls. But something in
Emily’s cool gaze prevented me. I sensed she’d hold it against me if I said anything. And yet I felt the resentment in her. And understood it. Some of the pupils here had a sense of
entitlement that sometimes made me yearn for the less poised pupils at the state school I’d left.

My father was still staring at me intently. ‘Sometimes you look at a pupil and something about them perplexes you. Then you realize they remind you of someone you once knew, years and
years ago.’ He blinked, looking surprised at what he’d just said.

The bell rang before I could ask him which pupil’s features had been preying on his mind. I looked at my watch. I needed to sprint; if running inside any part of Letchford hadn’t
been forbidden. Another of the rules Dad had had to bring in as the school grew larger. ‘I used to think that people ought to be allowed to move around at any pace they felt fit, as long as
they didn’t endanger anyone else,’ he’d told me once. ‘But these days we’re told nobody must run.’ And his face had become set and I’d known he was
thinking of the principles so dear to him: of freedom of choice and anti-authoritarianism, all ideas rejected by the state in his home country. He’d wanted this school to be so different, but
little by little it had absorbed values he’d originally rejected: conformity, conservatism, risk-aversion.

‘I’ll take Olivia’s tray over at lunchtime and check up on her,’ I called to him over my shoulder.

‘Would you?’ He sounded grateful. ‘I’ve asked Cathy to have a word with her about that . . . other business.’

When I reached the house at 12.30 p.m. Olivia was sitting in the lounge at Gavin watching an Australian soap. ‘I brought your lunch over.’ The smell of the lasagne
made me feel hungry. Which was good. Hunger and I hadn’t seen much of one another in recent months.

‘Thanks, Mrs Cordingley.’ She gave a little smile. ‘I’ll come through to the kitchen, we’re not allowed to eat in here.’ She led me through to the kitchen,
appearing steady on her feet. A slight tint of colour had returned to her cheeks. The housemistress wasn’t in the kitchen so I put the plate of lasagne into the microwave myself to heat it,
wondering whether some health-and-safety directive prohibited untrained personnel using a school microwave.

She ate the meal with a good appetite. ‘They have gluten-free pasta for me.’ She sounded proud of this. As she forked her lasagne her sleeve fell back. The cut on her arm looked less
red today.

‘So you’re feeling better?’ I asked.

She nodded, mouth full of pasta. ‘Should be back in class tomorrow,’ she said when she’d swallowed.

‘We’ve called your aunt.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘Yes.’

‘Really, you should be at home.’

‘She’s working.’

‘You must miss her.’

She shrugged. ‘She usually manages to take some time off when it’s the holidays. Then we go away. Or else she arranges activity camps for me. Tennis or crafts or something.
That’s probably what will happen at half-term.’ She sounded resigned but unenthusiastic.

Poor kid: weeks away at boarding school and then shoved into a camp during the holidays. I couldn’t imagine Olivia enjoying holiday camps: she looked more like the kind of girl who’d
prefer to curl up with a good book. I hoped my pity didn’t show on my face. ‘She lives near Wokingham, doesn’t she?’

Olivia nodded. ‘A small village.’

‘Is it nice?’

Something passed over her face. ‘It’s all right.’ She forked a piece of frisée lettuce. ‘Not like this, though.’ She stared through the kitchen window and
across the lawn, over which long shadows fell from the oaks. Sunlight bounced back onto the stone of the old house, making it look as though someone had painted it with liquid gold. ‘They
said this place was wonderful but I had no idea before I came here.’ She spoke with quiet intensity. I’d never heard a pupil in raptures about the beauty of Letchford before. In fact it
had been one of the things I’d found most irritating about them in my younger days, their blindness to what was all around them. Once, aged seventeen, I’d come across a boy of about
thirteen digging the point of a compass into the low limestone wall on the terrace.