Wicked! (15 page)

Ten days ago, Janna would have agreed with him, but he was irritating her so much, she said she liked children expressing themselves.

‘And you should cut down that wisteria, which seems the accepted escape route for most of your hooligans.’

‘That wisteria’s older than me or even you, and much more beautiful.’

‘Dear Janna’ – Rod pursed his red lips – ‘you’re not helping yourself. Caring Cara Sharpe also tells me’ – he turned back to his clipboard – ‘you’ve been working here until eleven at night. Terribly unfair to Wally, who has to lock up after you. He does have a life.’

‘Wally’s never complained,’ stammered Janna.

‘He’s too nice,’ said Rod pompously. ‘Start thinking of other people. You wouldn’t have to work so late if you organized your day better. Now stop sulking and turn on that coffee machine.’

Somehow, Janna managed not to rip him from navel to chaps with her paper knife, but she cried herself to sleep that night. Were the children and staff really acting up and demoralized because she was such a bitch?

For his next visit, Rod called a breakfast meeting at 8.00 a.m.

‘You provide the croissants. I’ll provide the pearls of wisdom.’

He’d been jogging and dripped with sweat when he arrived. Janna had to watch him getting butter, marmalade and crumbs all over his red beard as he poured scorn on Larks’s place in the league tables.

‘It’d help if you and Searston Abbey didn’t cream off all the best pupils,’ snarled Janna. ‘Think how disadvantaged our kids are. Most of them have no quiet room at home to do their homework and no one able to help them. Unemployment’s at an all-time high on the Shakespeare Estate, so the kids, as well as helping out with the shopping, have to take evening and weekend jobs to make ends meet. Poor little Graffi fell asleep at his desk this morning.’

‘Probably been doing drugs all night,’ said Rod dismissively. ‘You must get your parents on side. Ours were in school all weekend, installing benches in the playground – that’s one reason our results are spectacular. We’ll be catching up with Bagley Hall in a year or two and then Hengist B-T will have to look to his laurels. No parent will want to fork out twenty-odd thousand a year only to get thrashed by a maintained school.’

‘What’s Hengist like?’ Janna was annoyed to find herself asking.

‘Terminally frivolous and arrogant,’ snapped Rod. ‘Typical public-school Hooray Henry, far too big for his green wellies.’

As Janna bent down to retrieve a pen, Rod suppressed an urge to pull down her panties and smack her freckled bottom. Sheila, his ‘superb wife’ of twenty-seven years, an ex-nurse, who called him ‘head teacher’ in bed, didn’t excite him quite enough. One day Janna Curtis would express gratitude for the way he’d imposed discipline on her and her school.

‘I shall be spending one to one and a half days a week with you from now on,’ he announced.

‘How d’you find the time?’ asked Janna sulkily.

‘I delegate. Ask a busy person.’

On the following day, Rod rolled up in a big black hat, which he left in Janna’s office. Later in the morning, passing Year Nine E’s history lesson, he found Paris wearing it and doing a dazzling imitation of Rod addressing the troops:

‘“As part of our caring and supportive ethos . . .”’

Rod was outraged and snatched back his hat.

‘Others make allowances for you, Paris Alvaston, because of your unfortunate circumstances, and you abuse it,’ he shouted. ‘I shall speak with Mr Blenchley.’

‘Mr Blenchley’ll make Paris’s life hell,’ protested Janna.

The Wolf Pack, who also thought Rod’s remarks were below the belt, started pelting him with textbooks and pencil boxes and banging their desk lids when he tried to shut them up.

Nor was Rod’s impression of Larks improved later in the day, when Graffi caught him whispering to Cara Sharpe just inside the huge stationery cupboard and locked them both in.

Only after an hour did Rowan hear banging and let them out.

Rod had gone maroon with fury. ‘How dare you?’ he bellowed at Graffi, who was now wearing the hat.

‘You and Mrs Sharpe was saying horrible things about Miss,’ said Graffi and, jumping out of the window, slithered down the wisteria and ran laughing down the drive.

‘This school deserves to be closed down,’ exploded Rod.

Janna, meanwhile, was working on her Larks Ascending project for her prospective-parents’ evening.

‘We need to put everything about larks, how high up they sing, how they nest on the ground, how because of modern farming, they’re getting fewer and fewer.’

‘Like Larks’s pupils,’ said Feral.

Janna and Paris raided the dictionary of quotations for poems about larks. Cambola searched for music. Graffi did a wonderful drawing of Rod Hyde as Edward Lear’s Old Man with bird droppings on his head and with owls, larks, hens and wrens nesting in his beard. Graffi also helped Janna cover the corridor walls with pictures by the children and torn-out paintings by Old Masters. They tried not to laugh when Mike Pitts wandered in after a lunchtime session at the Ghost and Castle and remarked:

‘That Modigliani’s not a bad painter. What class is he in?’

Janna knew she ought to sack Mike for drinking, but who would back her up? She ought to sack him for perfidy too. When she came back unexpectedly from a meeting, she found him whispering into her telephone. Seeing her, he flushed even redder and hung up.

Janna had immediately pressed redial, and an answering voice had said, ‘Ashton Douglas.’

Janna was so thrown, she revealed who she was and instantly received a bollocking for her treatment of Rod Hyde.

‘As part of his caring, supportive ethos, Wod gives of his valuable time and you put up disgusting paintings of him on the wall and treat him with twuculence and disrespect.’

‘He’s a bloody clipboard junkie who upsets the kids.’

‘Your school is spiralling out of control,’ said Ashton coldly.

‘Ashton to Ashton, dust to dust,’ screamed Janna, slamming down the telephone. When it rang again, she was, for once, able to snatch it up before a suspicious Rowan.

‘Janna Curtis,’ she snapped.

‘This is Hengist Brett-Taylor.’ The deep lazy voice was laced with laughter. ‘I wonder if you’d like to have lunch this week.’

Janna was about to refuse when she saw Monster Norman’s mother charging up the corridor, and abandoning her open-door policy, kicked it shut and leant against it.

‘Yes, please.’

‘How about Wednesday?’

She had a finance meeting at four-thirty, so she could escape early.

‘That’s OK.’

‘I thought we’d go to La Perdrix d’Or in Cathedral Street. Shall I pick you up?’

‘No, I’ll meet you there.’

‘At one o’clock, then. I really look forward to it.’

13

Janna looked forward to lunch with Hengist less and less. She had her prospective-parents’ evening the following day and shouldn’t be skiving. Nor should she be fraternizing with the enemy with Rowan clocking her every move, particularly when Janna came in in her rose-festooned pink suit, with her newly washed russet curls bouncing around her shoulders.

But, by the time a German teacher and a lab assistant had given in their notice, the boys’ lavatories had blocked yet again and Satan Simmons had been carted off to hospital after an encounter with a broken bottle, Janna was ready for a large drink.

Only when she had driven past the Ghost and Castle did she pull in to tart up, not helped by her trembling hands zigzagging her eyeliner, spilling base on her pink satin camisole top and drenching her in so much of Stew’s Chanel No 5, big-headed bloody Brett-Taylor would be bound to construe it as a come-on. In an attempt to look school-marmish, she groped furiously for a hairband in the glove compartment, and scraped back as many of her curls as possible. Then she jumped as, in the driving mirror, she caught sight of Rowan, Gloria the gymnast and perfidious Jason Fenton sloping off for an early lunch, no doubt to bitch about her. It was debatable who blushed most when they recognized her car storming off.

Janna grew increasingly flustered because she was late and Cathedral Street long, punctuated with cherry trees and composed of seemingly identical eighteenth-century shopfronts and she’d forgotten the French name of the restaurant – something like Pederast’s Door. She was scuttling up and down, when Hengist, who’d been looking out, pulled her in from the street.

‘You are absolutely sweet to make it.’

And Janna gasped because he was a good foot taller than she was and undeniably gorgeous-looking, with thick springy dark hair, unflecked by grey, brushed back and curling over the collar. In addition, he had heavy-lidded, amused eyes, the very dark green of rain-soaked cedars, an unlined face still brown from the summer, a nose with several dents in it, a square jaw with a cleft chin and a wonderfully smooth smiling mouth, framing even white teeth, most of them capped after the bashing they had received on the rugger field.

He was conventionally dressed in a longish tweed jacket, dark-yellow cords, an olive-green shirt and an MCC tie, but as his lemon aftershave mingled amorously with Chanel No 5 on the warm windless autumn air, he seemed utterly in the heroic mould. Casting Hector or Horatius who kept the bridge for a Hollywood epic, you would look no further. Beneath the languid amiability, he exuded huge energy, and after the Hydes and Skunks, who’d been her fare for the last month, he seemed like a god.

Janna bristled instinctively:

‘I’ve got a finance meeting; I haven’t got long.’

‘Then the sooner you have a large drink the better.’

Hengist ordered her (without asking) a glass of champagne and, picking up his glass of red and the biography of Cardinal Mazarin that he’d left on the bar, he led her through a packed restaurant to what was clearly the best table, overlooking the water meadows and the river.

‘The view’s breathtaking, but you must sit with your back to it, because it’s so good for my street cred to be seen with you and it means that all the fat cats lunching here will think: how pretty she is, and pour money into your school.’

‘I wish,’ sighed Janna.

‘I’ve brought you a present,’ said Hengist.

In a blue box tied with crimson ribbon was a long silver spoon.

‘I know you feel you’re supping or lunching with the devil,’ he said, laughing at her. ‘I’ve read all about your views in the
TES
and the
Guardian
– “upper-class care” indeed – but I promise I won’t bite except my food, which is excellent here. Thank you, Freddie.’ He smiled at the spiky-haired young waiter who’d brought over Janna’s champagne and the menu.

‘Now get that inside you,’ he went on. ‘You’ll need it to endure the appalling Russell Lambert and the even more appalling Crispin and Ashton. What a coven of fairies you’ve surrounded yourself with.’

‘I don’t want to discuss my governors,’ said Janna primly and untruthfully.

‘I’ve cracked the governor problem,’ confided Hengist. ‘We have two meetings a year. One over dinner at Boodle’s, my club in London, which they all adore. Then, in early November, they all come down to Bagley for dinner and the night. Sally, my wife, is a fantastic cook. Wonderful smells drift into the boardroom throughout the meeting, so they’re desperate to get through it and on to pre-dinner drinks. Then they push off first thing in the morning.

‘But my pièce de résistance has been to get the most ravishing mother on to the board, a divorcee called Mrs Walton, so we always get full attendance and all the governors are so busy looking at her boobs, they OK everything.’

Janna tried and failed to look disapproving.

‘Sally and I call her the governing body, but she’d be wasted on Ashton or Crispin,’ said Hengist idly. ‘You’d do better with Brad Pitt.’

‘Or Jason Fenton,’ snapped Janna.

‘Oh dear, I’d forgotten him.’

‘Self-satisfied little narcissist. I passed him bunking off with two other teachers today when they thought I’d left for lunch. He’d have been admiring himself in the shop windows if they weren’t all boarded up round Larks. I’m over the moon you’ve taken him off my hands.’

‘At least I’ve done something right.’

Hengist looked so delighted, Janna burst out laughing.

La Perdrix d’Or itself seemed to be celebrating both golden partridge and the guns who killed them. Paintings of partridge or sporting prints of shooting parties in autumn, with birds and yellow leaves cascading out of the sky, adorned the dark-red walls. There were silver partridges and vases of red Michaelmas daisies on the white tablecloths and, like Sally B-T’s governors’ dinners, the most delicious smells of wine, herbs and garlic were drifting up from the kitchen.

The menu was in French, always Janna’s Achilles heel, but Freddie the waiter charmingly translated for her.

‘The goat’s cheese fritters are out of this world,’ said Hengist, ‘although they might give you even worse nightmares if you fall asleep during your finance meeting.’

‘And the Dover sole’s fresh in today,’ said Freddie.

‘I’ll have that,’ said Janna with a sigh of relief.