The School Gate Survival Guide (21 page)

Clover seemed to love the company. Even though I had to stop myself telling her children off for swearing and bouncing on the furniture, my kids didn’t seem to irritate her at all. She’d started to teach Bronte how to ride and the sight of her straight-backed, heels down, on the little white pony made me want to stop the clock and stay here forever. As the kids played hide and seek, racing round and round the house, dodging each other by scooting up and down the servants’ staircases, screeching with laughter, I forced myself not to worry about what would happen when we had to go home. And we would have to go home, though for the moment I was earning my keep in elbow grease. Whenever we finished a room, Clover would dig a bottle of champagne out of the wine cellar and toast us like a couple of explorers back from Antarctica.

As I pulled into the drive, the screams and shouts got louder. I followed the noise to the back of the house. Clover was standing with a stopwatch and the kids were taking it in turns to complete an obstacle course – clambering over garden chairs, flying round the orchard on Orion’s bike, bouncing off the trampoline onto an old mattress and swinging themselves onto the monkey bars. I never saw her kids gawking at the telly in the same way mine would sit there, mouth open, deaf to every word until I blocked their view. When I got back from my shifts, there was still so much to do in my own home, I didn’t have the imagination or energy for playing. I suppose that’s where a trust fund helped out.

Clover saw me and beckoned me over. ‘Who wants Maia to have a turn?’

All the kids clamoured for me to join in. I was nervous about knocking my face but I didn’t want to mention it and remind them. Harley grabbed me by the feet and wheelbarrowed me down the slope to the orchard. ‘Go Mum, go Mum, go, go, go.’ I kept falling on my belly on the wet grass but Harley was determined to make me finish the course. It was years since I’d been on monkey bars but I was still strong – all that polishing must have been good for something. I was so smug as I swung to the end, though my hamstrings were killing me as I ran the last few yards, with Clover keeping a running commentary about how I might just beat Saffy if I put my back into it. I insisted that Clover had a turn, then everyone wanted to see if they could beat their first time and we all went round again, faces shining pink in the cold.

It was only when my whole body was shivering and I was gagging for the warmth of Clover’s Aga, that I realised that I needed to be at Harley’s parents’ evening in half an hour. I’d gone for the early slot so Clover could look after the children until I got back, then we could swap over. I ran inside, glorying in the fact that I had my own en-suite shower and didn’t have to stand trying to light the boiler for twenty minutes before I could thaw out.

I wrapped myself in a towel and studied my face in the mirror. My skin looked all outdoor healthy. The dark smudges under my eyes had gone. Country mansions obviously agreed with me. I didn’t wear a lot of make-up but I imagined that turfing up at school without even a lick of lipstick was a bit like going out in just a bra. I did a quick flick of mascara and eyeliner then spent ages covering the yellowing bruises on my cheek with thick concealer. The swelling had gone down and I’d been telling anyone who asked that I’d cut my face on a Velux window when I was cleaning someone’s attic. I threw on my one pair of decent black trousers and a green jumper and ran out of the house, stepping over a pile of children playing Twister in the hallway.

I was expecting the meetings to take place in the classrooms but an assistant waved me towards the hall where the teachers sat behind desks. Confident couples stood around chatting with other confident couples. I hovered inside the door, trying to spot Harley’s teacher, the bald-headed Mr Rickson. Venetia of the ‘OMG, you didn’t go to university’ horror came in, looking like she was about to audition for
Strictly Come Dancing
. ‘It’s Amayra, isn’t it?’ I nodded. She was never going to be my friend. ‘If you’re looking for Mr Rickson, he’s not here. His wife’s gone into labour. Mr Peters has stepped in to do his meetings.’

A minute ago I’d been shy. Now I was shaking. I had two minutes to collect myself. ‘Thanks. Are you seeing him now?’

‘No, we’re after you on the list. You’d better go first. We might be a while because I’ve got some issues with Theo’s maths achievements. I need to find out if I can get a Kumon maths tutor to come into the school at lunchtime because he has tutors for other things after school.’

Christ. I might not be out by Easter. ‘I’ll go now then. I shouldn’t be too long.’ What the hell was Kumon maths?

I really wanted to nip to the loos and check for spinach, or rather Bourbon biscuit, in my teeth but I didn’t feel I could hold up the juggernaut of Venetia’s ambition shuddering along behind me. I walked over to Mr Peters’ desk, managed a hello, then sat down and blushed until it wasn’t possible to go any redder.

‘Ms Etxeleku, how are you?’ His eyes fixed on my bruises.

‘Fine, thank you,’ I said, conscious that Venetia and her husband were waiting a few yards behind us, no doubt equipped with special bugging devices to make sure Theo wasn’t lagging behind Harley in anything other than near-expulsions.

‘Your face is looking better,’ he said, in a whisper. Then more loudly, ‘So, let’s take a look at Harley’s marks. He’s doing extremely well.’

I was only a tiny bit tempted to look round and say, ‘See!’ to Venetia.

He opened a big book and started reading down the columns. Little images of those lovely hands stroking my face were distracting me from the results of Harley’s spelling tests. Considering the only reason I was at Stirling Hall at all was to get a better education for the kids, it seemed a bit off that I couldn’t concentrate on whether or not they had made any progress. I think the basic gist was that Harley had a natural gift for languages – ‘He’s a very good mimic’ – and was still struggling in maths but everything else was ‘going great guns with a tremendous aptitude for drama’.

I almost wished he was telling me that the whole experiment had been a royal balls-up because I still needed to broach the subject of Harley and Bronte leaving Stirling Hall. I’d decided that I couldn’t possibly send the letter without telling Mr Peters first. When he finished with, ‘I know Harley has had a few tricky times here, but what he’s achieved in such a short space of time is outstanding,’ I didn’t feel I could piss on his parade at that particular moment, especially as I was feeling under pressure to relinquish the hot seat to Venetia. Any minute now she was going to topple off her chair with the effort of trying to overhear. I was about to get up when he scribbled something on a piece of paper and pushed it towards me. I read, ‘I’ve thought about you an awful lot.’ I stared down to make sure it didn’t mean something different I was too thick to get. When I looked up, his eyes were teasing me.

‘I’m interested to hear that.’ I hadn’t flirted in a million years and my witty one-liners were a little rusty, along with my voice, which suddenly sounded as though I’d been working down the mines for thirty years.

I heard Venetia fidgeting behind me, tap, tap, tap on the arm of her chair. I’d probably had far more than the ten minutes allowed. I was trying to signal to Mr Peters with my eyes that she was listening to every word. Luckily, he was slightly more evolved than Colin who would have been going, ‘What? Why are you looking at me funny?’

‘Okay, I’ll just make a note of these marks, so you can read over them at your leisure.’ He quickly scribbled, ‘Leave now before I’m tempted to kiss you again.’ I picked up the piece of paper and pretended to look closely at it.

‘That’s wonderful. Thank you very much for your time.’ I had to concentrate on making my legs stand me up. When he shook my hand, every nerve in my body paid attention. There was a dangerous moment when it would have been easy to forget that there were other people in the room. Mr Peters let go.

‘Nice to see you, Ms Etxeleku.’ I think he meant it.

As I walked back past Venetia, she said, ‘Did you talk to him about Kumon maths?’

‘Yeah. He thinks the kids are better off watching
The Simpsons
.’

As soon as I got back, Clover swanned out the door, complete with the lace elbow-length gloves we’d discovered at the back of her wardrobe during one of our mammoth tidying sessions. She looked as though she was trying out for a part in
Moulin Rouge
. I got going on bedtime for five children, which was hard work in Clover’s household. Orion, Saffy and Sorrel didn’t really understand bedtime, which was having a knock-on effect for my two, especially Bronte who needed her sleep and was getting lippier by the day. At home I bundled them off to bed well before nine but Clover’s three were still paddling about at ten o’clock, roasting marshmallows in the Aga and making chocolate milkshakes, usually with Clover saying, ‘Well, you’ve only got RE and Art first thing tomorrow. No one ever died because they couldn’t draw a tree.’

Trying to force them up the stairs a bit earlier was not without the risk of being told to fuck off back to my own house. There was a lot to be said for one house, one staircase. Keeping an eye on where each child was, plus teeth cleaning and uniforms for the morning, was like trying to gather up a field of rabbits.

So it wasn’t until I plonked down into the leather armchair in the drawing room to watch the
BBC News at Ten
that I started to wonder where Clover was. She’d had the latest appointment at parents’ evening which was nine o’clock, but given that I regularly saw her shouting, ‘Tell Mrs Harper that the horses ate your homework’ or ‘Say that Daddy put your maths in the shredder by mistake’, I guessed she’d be in and out of there fairly sharpish.

I wasn’t used to being in big houses late at night. I didn’t miss my life with Colin at all but I missed the noises of it: the rumble of buses, the sound of people going home from the pub, the foxes rootling through the bins in the back alleyway and Denim and Gypsy clumping up and down the stairs next door. As for Colin himself, I hadn’t even spoken to him, simply passed the phone straight over to Bronte when I saw his name flash up. Even she pulled a face if he was interrupting her games with the twins.

I closed the curtains against the black and the silence, peering down the drive looking for headlights. Something was scratching against the window at the other end of the drawing room. I got my phone out of my pocket and switched all the lights off. As my eyes began to focus in the darkness, I prepared myself for some wild-eyed madman to have his nose pressed up against the window. I saw something moving about and forced myself closer. Just when I thought Clover might come back to find a SOCO team studying spurts of blood, I realised that my enemy was the wisteria, banging on the window pane in the wind.

I snapped the lights back on, furious with myself. I picked up
The Guardian
, which Clover insisted she needed to keep reading to stop herself becoming too right wing as she got older, turned the telly up and told myself to stop being such a wuss. I was still happy to hear the scratch of wheels on the gravel and the muffled sound of the kitchen door. Clover must have come in round the back. I stopped myself from scurrying out to her on the grounds that no one likes an ambush in their own home. When Mum was alive, I hated it when she used to greet me at the door, giving me every last detail of how she’d made me some special soup before I had time to take my coat off. Of course, now I’d love the chance to get pissed off about her exact method of sweating the garlic and onions.

So I sat there rustling the paper, flicking through the channels and trying to look to the manor born. I heard her go upstairs and smiled. Clover might appear laid back but she obviously couldn’t wait to tell Orion what his teachers had said about him. He was very popular despite the ‘rabbit scoffed my homework’ stories. He must still have been awake, as I could hear quite a lot of clodding about. Wooden floorboards carried the noise, especially at night. My crappy 1970s carpets back home weren’t so bad after all. I couldn’t hear any talking. Maybe she’d gone straight to bed, but it seemed odd that she hadn’t bothered to come and speak to me. I immediately started stressing that she couldn’t wait to be shot of us all.

I crept out of the drawing room and listened at the bottom of the stairs. Someone was definitely moving about. I reassured myself that Weirdo would have barked if it wasn’t Clover. Then I had the very unreassuring thought that the stupid mutt would do anything for a custard cream. I was debating whether to go outside and check whether Clover’s Land Rover was back when I heard the familiar squeak of her bedroom door, then footsteps on the stairs. I pretended to be walking to the kitchen rather than have Clover catch me skulking about like a loony. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shape that wasn’t Clover, and when I snapped my head round, it was a man with a beard in a black Al Capone hat, black raincoat and a bin bag in his hand. The gangsters had come to town and the only thing I had to protect myself and five children was the wooden carving of a tall giraffe, which stood in the hallway. I’d always expected that I would shit myself and flee for the hills in that sort of situation but I surprised myself. I picked the giraffe up by its neck and jabbed the legs at him. In terms of a weapon, it was looking a little spindly but anger had made a Rottweiler out of me. The loudness of my voice surprised me. ‘Put the bag down. Put it down now. Get your hands on the banister before I call the police.’

‘For fuck’s sake, I bloody live here. Who the hell are you?’

I gasped. A Mancunian accent. ‘Lawrence! Oh my God. I am so sorry. You must think I am a complete madwoman. I thought you were a burglar. Shit. I didn’t recognise you. The beard’s new, isn’t it?’ I rallied slightly. ‘You might have come in and told me you were here.’ I turned away and lowered my giraffe battering ram back onto its hooves. He was more dishevelled than I remembered. His hair was curling out from under that bloody Mafia hat and he looked like he’d been sleeping in his clothes.

‘And you are?’