The Red Door (76 page)

In the early morning light the pale-green pencil-sharpener spun out its long, thin, orange-edged, fresh streamer into the motionless, beautifully clean wastepaper basket.

The floor was wooden bright and clean. The windows sparkled with comforting sunshine. Pencils quietly devoured white paper, as white as the bulbs that hung, still and detached, over the
varnished, gleaming, iron-shod desks.

Miss Helen Hope watched as the yellow-pigtailed, stripe-pinafored, buckle-shoed and spectacled Margaret sharpened her orange pencil standing over the wastepaper basket with a small frown of
concentration that slightly lined her brow.

Lazily she saw the long curved wood lengthen itself into an impossible tongue. And she thought: this is a good moment: this moment is good. She frowned however, slightly reflecting
Margaret’s frown.

‘Stop writing, children,’ she said, and they stopped writing at once. It was frightening. Margaret returned to her seat. Miss Helen Hope stood tall and fiftyish before the class. She
was as slim as a pencil in her dark skirt and jacket, white-brooched at the right breast. Her black shoes shone brightly. She felt completely assured and real inside her spruce contained blackness,
and knew what she would say, life sparkled in her eyes, her smooth hair sang about her head.

‘Give me,’ she said, ‘an example of a preposition, Mary.’

‘Please miss, “at” is an example of a preposition.’

She had taught them to answer in sentences. It was more secure.

Mary was thinking ‘at’ is thin and black like the point of a pencil.

‘Very good,’ said Miss Helen Hope. ‘Now Margaret, give me an example of a conjunction.’

She watched Margaret stand up quietly in a space of her own, her face slightly flushed with excitement.

‘Please miss, “and” is an example of a conjunction.’ Their eyes momentarily met and then jumped away with mutual embarrassment as if they had been burnt.

‘Who are you?’ thought Miss Helen Hope. Margaret thought: – ‘Now she will ask me for an adjective. I am glad to be able to answer her questions. It makes me feel happy
all over.’

Then just as she was preparing herself for the second question a knock came at the door, which after a decent interval was opened. The class stood up, mainly black-pinafored, as Miss Helen Hope
turned to the headmaster.

To his ‘Good-morning’ they sat down, turning again to their books. The headmaster was a small, waistcoated man who crossed the floor with mincing steps. They could
hear him talking: – ‘Now about the cards, Miss Hope, do you think we should . . . ?’

Miss Hope answered his questions quietly and clearly, her face slightly flushed, her eyes sparkling.

The headmaster thought approvingly, she is a good teacher, and she, knowing that he thought this, was pleased. She also knew that the children knew that he thought this. It was surprising how
much they knew.

He had not been a good teacher himself and he envied Miss Hope for her beautiful crystal control. It appealed to something in him that he could not name.

‘I am a child myself,’ Miss Helen Hope thought. ‘I love this quite, clean, sparkling room. I like to see good, clear-varnished desks. I like to see the sunlight on the early
morning floor.’ She bowed her head to the master and continued speechlessly: – ‘How glad I am to be able to please him.’ When the headmaster went out she turned again to the
class.

‘You give me an example of a proper noun, Margaret.’ Margaret again stood up flushed with pleasure and did as she was asked.

As Miss Hope was on the point of asking her a further question she checked herself abruptly, telling her that she could sit down. The class had grown used to this. Margaret was always asked more
than one question.

They felt uneasy about this but did not understand their uneasiness as they watched their classmate, spectacled and pleased, returning to their teacher the information she had given them. They
may have considered that Miss Hope thought Margaret was cleverer than themselves, but they knew that she was not.

Miss Hope herself didn’t know why she asked her more questions than the others: at least not till that moment when she checked herself.

Then she knew, and she knew because of what happened in her mind when she was about to ask the question. She had suddenly thought of her own room in her own flat.

It was a beautiful room. She had a picture of a big greenish armchair sunk deep into a greenish rug, of a white-faced calm clock ticking away on a greenish mantelpiece, of a bookcase filled with
paper-backed books, of papers stacked neatly on a varnished table, of silver pans humming with Sunday comfort over a cooker whose small red eye winked out at her.

She didn’t know why the picture came into her mind at that moment – at least not at first – or why she thought of the tongued letter-box at the end of the hall. Then her mind
reared up and reared away again.

It was because . . . She looked again at Margaret sitting there in her gleaming spectacles looking at her across these feet of sunlit wood as if she knew. She imagined herself at the same desk
and Margaret with her composed glasses raising a pointer towards a shining wall atlas.

‘Now children, this is England and this is 30 Silver Street.’

Her yellow pigtails sang seductively in the crisp early morning air.

She imagined herself sitting snugly at the desk and being asked: – ‘What is an adjective?’

She stood up: – ‘Please, miss, “green” is an adjective.’

Margaret and the headmaster nodded approvingly.

‘Yes, yes, that is right.’

‘Now children,’ she said briskly in her real self, ‘we will do some geography on the wall atlas. Margaret, point out London on the map.’

Margaret came out again with the same subtle smile and did correctly what she was asked.

She looked again at Margaret standing there proud and academic. Fractionally a picture of her own flat again entered her mind. This time it was the clock suspended as it were in green air and
ticking away quietly for ever.

‘Yes, that is good, Margaret. Now point out Alexandria.’

She knew when she said this that they hadn’t done the Middle East. She felt the class looking at her with an air of polite surprise as if she had done something bad-mannered like entering
a room without knocking.

Margaret didn’t look at her, but hesitated for a long time. She studied the huge shining map, with its beautiful clear reds and yellows, suspended rectangularly from its single silver
nail.

Miss Hope noticed how her left hand clutched momentarily at her dress and how her left shoe dug into the floor. She made as if to point to a place on the map, decided against it, and turned
away.

‘Please, miss, I don’t know.’

Miss Hope realised how into her voice had crept a hint of anger, the very slightest shade of rebellion, as if she was searching for a reason for her discomfiture and not being able to find one
as yet was releasing her puzzlement in her angry tone.

‘Thank you, Margaret,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t matter.’

But she knew it did matter. It was the beginning of a strange road.

Why had she done it? As she watched the figure returning to its desk another picture came into her mind. This time it was of another class, a class of boys. It was a cold day in a bitterly cold
classroom. She had been working steadily at some marks, she remembered it quite clearly.

For some reason one of the marks in the column had been in red while the others were in normal blue. She couldn’t understand this. The class was quite small, in fact there weren’t
more than twenty. She herself was about thirty years old then.

She remembered also that the previous night she had been attending a church meeting. The hall had been cold and draughty.

Suddenly as she looked up nakedly into the classroom out of aching eyes she saw what she had never seen before and what she hoped she would never see again, but of course she would see it again
and again.

Sitting in the very front of the class was a very small boy who wore thick foggy glasses. They were like the bottoms of bottles. In his breast pocket was stuck an orange pencil, blatantly, like
a lance, too aggressive for the dull pose of the body. Around him was an aura of dirtiness, a vagueness of mediocrity.

At that moment she had seen quite clearly what would happen to him, she saw the sort of house in which he would live, the sort of wife he would marry, the sort of children he would breed, mice
with glasses.

She remembered repeating to herself in anguish of the spirit: Pray God that I am wrong. Perhaps he had some gift, some unexpected knowledge, some grace which can save him. She imagined perhaps a
love of violins, a dream of oceans.

And she remembered unrolling a wall atlas, not quite the same as the one she had in that room (it seemed, in recollection, duller, the lettering was smaller, less shiny), and asking him on
impulse: ‘George, could you point to Chicago on the map?’

She didn’t know why she had chosen Chicago. Perhaps it was, in the end, to give him some sort of chance. She imagined that he might be interested in gangsters, guns. He had gone out to the
board.