The Learning Curve (2 page)

Morning! R U up yet?

She texted back that she was already in the car park and got another text immediately.

Swot. Put the kettle on.

She tutted.

A quick glance in the rear-view mirror, a final flick of mascara, and she was ready. (It was always worth giving the final version a once-over before handing it in, as she often told her pupils.) She allowed herself the faintest glimmer of a smile when she saw Rob’s car in the nearest space to the school building. She tidied her boudoir, picked up her briefcase, and climbed out, shutting the door behind her. And then, silence.

She smiled at the long, wide, gently curved path leading up to the school. Beneath her elegant, yet comfortable high heels, the softened tarmac yielded pleasingly, as if helping her on her way. On the right-hand side of the path stood the younger children’s classes, bordered with conifers, which, if there had been rain the night before, smelt like heaven. On the left of the path stretched the playing fields, and on the ground, in faded rainbow colours, ran the numbers 1 to 10 beside corresponding numbers of brightly coloured insects, followed by the alphabet beside corresponding animals. It doubled as the reception year’s playground. She couldn’t remember who had dubbed the path ‘the learning curve’ – probably Ally or Pete – but it was perfect. At the end of it, you came to the school itself; an imposing, red-brick building, with tall, rounded windows and a large, welcoming front door. Nicky always slowed her pace as it came into view. The building seemed to pulse with potential at her across the empty playground. She walked slowly across the
main playground, so as to put off the moment when detail would take over emotion. As she did so, she realised this was A Moment. Nicky Hobbs liked Moments.

For here she was, a young teacher for Year 6 (the ten- and eleven-year-olds), only just turned thirty, on the career path of her choice, on her way to a fresh new academic year with a class who were by all accounts fantastically enthusiastic learners. She loved her job and knew she was good at it. She still had the energy of youth combined with an increasingly confident air of expertise. She had good friends, good health and owned her own home. Not only that, but she’d lost three pounds in the summer and could fit into her favourite skirt. Life was good. She allowed herself a childish grin – the kind of grin her pupils never saw till Christmas. She Had It All.

Whoops.

Crash bang wallop. The Moment was over. Her teeth unconsciously sought out her lower lip and gave it a small but satisfying chew. OK, maybe not everything, she told herself, but there were many worse off than her. She pushed the sudden image of her sister out of her mind.

Opening the school door, she came face to face with Rob Pattison, teacher to Year 5. They grinned at each other.

‘Nix!’ he exclaimed.

‘Prattison!’ she exclaimed.

Term had begun.

‘Anyone else in?’ she asked as they walked past the empty, glass-fronted administration office towards the staffroom. The school was absolutely silent, as it always was before the children started arriving, and Nicky always found the silence uncomfortably eery. All it took was one child to race in and
the place would come to life. Before then, everything felt wrong somehow, as if she was trespassing in a forbidden dream. But usually, within minutes of the first arrival, the noise levels slowly rose; children’s spontaneous laughter echoed out from behind closed classroom doors, as did their lusty singing from the music room, their exhilarated shrieks and shouts from the PE fields and their wild running from the corridors wallpapered with
WALK, DON’T RUN!
notices. All these noises combined to make the unique noise of school, probably because adults had forgotten how to make them years ago.

Nicky looked straight ahead as she and Rob proceeded down the corridor together, only turning her head to glance into any open doorways. She did not turn her eyes towards him once, even though she knew he was looking at her every time he spoke. She’d long since stopped questioning her need to play these games with him after all these years. It was simply girlish pride and she was allowed her little foibles.

‘’Course no one’s in,’ said Rob, as they passed the photocopier outside the bursar’s office. ‘Lazy slackers.’ He was smiling down at her.

‘Not even Amanda?’ Her eyes finally rose to his and she gave him a knowing smile. She saw his lips twitch.

‘Not even Amanda,’ he said. No more.

She opened the staffroom door and tried to ignore the plummet in her stomach this always caused. ‘I must get some posters,’ she murmured to herself.

The staffroom at Heatheringdown Primary School, London N10, was a TV makeover producer’s wet dream. Government funding never quite stretched to the staffroom because, technically, it was still standing. It was small and
square, yet could never be called cosy because the ceiling was so high it could have comfortably housed a mezzanine level. Around the edges of the room squatted old, low chairs which made anyone who sat in them look as if their diaphragm had been sucked out through their back. In the centre of the room lay a multicoloured carpet that was so faded not one colour was discernable; on one wall was propped a kitchenette, which looked as if it was taking a tea break on its way to the junkyard; on another wall stood a bank of small, padlocked lockers. The room was basically a skip with a roof.

Nicky glanced up at the clock. 7.30 a.m. She had half an hour to pop up to her classroom and reacquaint herself with her interactive whiteboard before the Head’s first morning meeting of the year. She didn’t want to miss a moment of that meeting. Exciting things were afoot: right at the end of last year, the Deputy Head, Miss Fotheringham, who had also been the Reception class teacher for the four- and five-year-olds, had suddenly announced her retirement. She had spent an amazing thirty years in the same job, and almost twenty-five of them in the same skirt. After she’d made her shock announcement, there had only been one more full day of the year left, so Miss James told her staff that she would sort out a replacement as soon as they were back at work next year. But they were to forget this and enjoy their holidays, as there was nothing anyone could do about it now. This was uniformly accepted as typical of her ‘team-spirit’ attitude. It meant that six teachers were able to enjoy their holiday with an extra spring in their step at the thought of possible promotion next year, without having to deal with competition or interviews during the summer.

So not only would there be a new Reception class teacher to welcome to Heatheringdown this term, but there would be a bit of politics to add a touch of excitement to the proceedings. Nicky wondered if the teacher might be male. They could do with some more men in the staffroom.

By the time she had returned there after playing with her interactive whiteboard, the entire staff of Heatheringdown Primary had arrived. Which meant seven teachers and five assistants were fighting over the kettle, folding themselves into chairs, and, with their knees now somewhere near their eyes, describing their holidays and making the same jokes about how glad they were to be back at school. And one new – female – Reception teacher was pretending it was fun.

Nicky looked round the room. Her older sister, Claire, had once told her that ninety per cent of marriages started as office romances. Whenever she thought of this statistic, Nicky wondered where the other ten per cent met their match. Wherever it was, she would have to start going there soon. Out of the seven full-time teachers here, only three were men. One was Ned and the other two were Pete and Rob.

Pete was great, of course, but he was not what you could call boyfriend material. His frame was slight, bordering on petite, at little over five foot six, and in some trousers it looked as if he had no bottom at all. Ally and Nicky often wondered if it hurt him to sit down. His features seemed to have been painted on with the thinnest of paintbrushes. Delicate eyelashes framed soft blue eyes, the finest of lips curved around small, even teeth. Were he a woman, every man he ever met would have wanted to protect him. As a man he was invisible. He was Rob’s best mate, right-hand man and all-round good laugh.

Rob, though, was something else altogether. Everyone knew that Rob Pattison, teacher of Year 5, the nine- and ten-year-olds, was the best-looking guy in the whole school. It was one of those things that just went without saying. It mostly went without saying because the other thing that went without saying was that Rob Pattison knew he was the best-looking guy in the school. In fairness to him, it would have been hard for him not to know. Apart from the way women reacted to him, there were always mirrors. Rob was tall, dark, broad and handsome.

To anyone who did not know Rob and Nicky’s history, which meant everyone except Ally and Pete, it appeared that Nicky was the only woman in the school who had been given a Rob Pattison vaccine. (‘One short sharp prick and then it was all over’ had been a favourite staffroom joke during their first year at the school.) And she was also the only attractive woman who escaped the Rob Radar; that is, he refused to treat her as a potential notch on his bedpost, but rather as a close and respected friend and confidante.

To anyone who did know their history, such as Ally and Pete, it sometimes appeared that Nicky and Rob were simply taking a sabbatical from a relationship that had begun – and ended all too precipitously – seven years ago, and they would one day slip back into it as comfortably as if they were slipping on an old sock.

‘You’d better be careful,’ Ally warned Nicky once, after an entire lunch-break of raucous flirting. ‘People will talk.’

‘Oh don’t be ridiculous!’ laughed Nicky lightly. ‘It’s just friendly banter. He’s like a brother.’

‘If I looked at my brother like that,’ muttered Ally, eyeing her gravely, ‘my parents would call social services.’

The plain, and sometimes uncomfortable, truth was that Nicky and Rob did have a colourful history – and not an ancient Greek sort of history; more a post-Blair-to-present-day sort of history – which gave their friendship that special glow. Unfortunately, the other plain fact was that it had been Rob who had ended it.

And the problem with that was (as Nicky often reminded Ally) that when you weren’t the one to finish a relationship, the general assumption made by everyone was always that, given the choice, you would still be in it. But plain facts don’t always tell the whole story. Yes, technically, Rob had been the one to finish their six-month-long affair, just two weeks after Nicky’s twenty-third birthday, all those years ago. Yes, at the time she had thought her life might as well end. Yes, at the time she had thought she would never find love again and might as well give up her dreams of ever getting married and having a family.

But that was a long, long time ago. Seven years! A lifetime! And she was a very different person now. In fact, as a happy thirty-year-old career woman, she now sometimes wondered gratefully if she had subconsciously, all those years ago, pushed him into finishing what she knew, deep down, was fundamentally a terminally flawed relationship.

After all, at only twenty-three, there she’d been, telling the college Romeo whom she adored (and who had fallen so dramatically in love with her that he’d chased her for a whole year and then stayed faithful for the longest period of his entire life) that if he couldn’t promise to marry her this side of twenty-five and provide her with the babies she so desperately yearned for, there was frankly no future for them. How could she have known that instead of dropping
to his knees and proposing, he would spend a week ignoring her calls and then chuck her? Fickle, fickle boy! After all those wonderfully worded declarations of adoration! After such exquisite nights and mornings of love-making! After swapping favourite books (with his grave assurances not to break the spine) and pencilling secret notes in the margins! What girl could possibly have predicted such an outcome?

Yet here again, the facts do not reveal the whole story, because he ended their relationship so beautifully that she almost believed that his heart was breaking more than hers. Almost. He broke down and wept. He told her that she deserved more. He confessed that he wasn’t the man for her because he never, ever wanted to marry or have children. His own parents’ doomed relationship had put paid to that. He told her that it was because he loved her so much that he couldn’t let her waste the best years of her life with a man who ultimately could not give her what she wanted. He told her that he had loved her more than any other woman in his life. (And he’d had a gap year, so was talking from experience.) He told her he would never forget her. And he made her promise that they must always remain friends. It was a chucking that left her shell-shocked and traumatised, but not ashamed. She lost no respect in its recounting.

Even more amazingly, they did manage to remain friends. So successfully, in fact, that when four years later, both of them fully trained teachers with some experience behind them, Rob heard about two jobs coming available at the same school, he gave Nicky all the details, they both applied, and were thrilled to start work together at the same time. And so, three years ago, they joined Heatheringdown as
bosom buddies, and soon her friendship with Ally and his with Pete formed a tight-knit foursome.

Over the years since their relationship had ended, Nicky couldn’t help noticing that while Rob had had many flings and one-night stands, he had never started another relationship. She herself had made a couple of attempts, but they didn’t last long. During these, Rob had always maintained a keen interest in their outcome, but he never seemed too alarmed. However, it was always during these relationships that his gentle teasing began. He would drop into conversation how his mind was slowly changing over the issue of children; did she catch that programme last night about adoption? Wasn’t that little girl cute – she almost made him want to be a dad! He wondered what kind of children she’d have – adorable ones with ringlets and dimples, etc. etc.

In fact, due to unhelpful comments like these and the easy, good-natured fun of their post-relationship friendship, if Nicky was really deeply honest with herself – and it usually took the imbibing of a certain amount of wine for that to happen – she could not answer one simple question. A simple, yet worrying question: If Rob asked her out again, would she say ‘No’ or ‘Yes’?