Wicked! (22 page)

‘Jupiter would kill for caviar,’ said Hanna as her husband put two huge spoonfuls on his plate.

And much else, thought Janna. Not Cassius, she decided, he’s more Octavius Caesar to Hengist’s Mark Antony.

Janna wasn’t sure about the caviar. She drowned it in lemon juice and took huge slugs of vodka. Perhaps she should give hers to the emaciated man across the table, who had a tired, bony face and flopping very light red hair, and was already piling a second helping on to his blue glass plate.

‘Rufus Anderson, head of geography.’ Piers lowered his voice. ‘Head in the clouds, more likely, always leaving coursework on trains. Eats hugely at dinner parties because his wife, Sheena, doesn’t cook and whizzes up to London to a high-powered Fleet Street job, leaving Rufus to look after the kids. Note his sloping shoulders weighed down by baby slings.’

‘Then they should get an au pair,’ said Janna sharply. ‘Her career is just as important as his.’

‘Not at Bagley, it isn’t. Wives are expected to be helpmates. Sheena’s hopping that Emlyn on your left was offered a job as a housemaster last year and Rufus wasn’t. Rufus is miles cleverer than Emlyn or me. Sheena doesn’t appreciate she’s the only thing in the way of her husband’s advancement. That’s her down the table hanging like a vampire on Stancombe’s every word.’

As Mrs Walton was soft, passive and voluptuous, Sheena Anderson was rapacious and hard. She had sleek black jaw-length hair, a hawklike face only adorned by eyeliner and a lean, restless body. No jewellery softened her short sleeveless black dress.

‘I’d love to interview you for the
Guardian
,’ she was telling Randal Stancombe.

‘They always give me a rough time.’

‘Not if I wrote the piece. You could approve copy.’

Like Jack-the-lad-in-a-box, Stancombe kept texting, emailing, doing sums on his palm top, leaping out of his seat to telephone or receive calls, leaving his mountain of caviar untouched.

‘We could do it one evening over dinner,’ urged Sheena.

But Stancombe was checking his messages. ‘Bear with me a minute, Sheen,’ and he shot into the hall again. Through the doorway, he could be heard saying, ‘Sure, sure, great, great, call you later.’ Switching off his mobile, he punched the air. ‘Yeah!’

‘Good news?’ enquired Sally as he slid back into his seat.

‘Just secured a plot of land in Colorado, Sal, a ski resort to be exact.’

Janna caught Jupiter’s eye and just managed not to laugh.

Gillian Grimston, who’d been subjected to Stancombe’s back, was not used to being ignored. ‘Where is this resort?’ she asked.

‘I’m not at liberty to reveal as yet, Gilly.’ Stancombe flashed his teeth. ‘In fact, bear with me again, Sal and Henge, if I make another call,’ and he retreated again.

‘That’s how he keeps his figure,’ said Piers.

Sheena, much to Sally’s disapproval, had whipped out and was muttering into a tape recorder.

‘How did you get started?’ she asked when Stancombe returned.

‘As a barrow boy. One of my customer’s husbands gave me a job as an office boy in a property company. Kept my ear to the ground. Gave the CEO hot tips until he promoted me to head of the agency division. Two years later I took away all my contacts and started Randal Stancombe Properties. Rest is history. According to the Rich List, in Central London alone we own eight hundred buildings let to blue-chip companies.’

Everyone was listening.

‘Despite heavy borrowings at the last count the portfolio must be worth more than two billion.’

Mrs Walton was gazing across the table in wonder. That would sort out the school fees.

‘How many million times a million is that?’ hissed Janna. ‘He should be on the stage.’

‘Better on television,’ hissed back Piers. ‘You could turn him off.’

‘To what do you attribute your success?’ asked Sheena, who’d left the tape recorder running.

‘Hard work, seven days and seven nights a week.’

Stancombe checked his messages again. It was his thin line of moustache, Janna decided, like an upside-down child’s drawing of a bird in flight, which gave him a gigolo look.

‘Don’t you ever play?’ purred Mrs Walton.

‘According to Freud,’ said Janna idly, ‘work and love are the only things that matter.’

‘And children.’ Hanna smiled at Jupiter, thinking how she’d like to paint those white roses.

Stancombe glanced down at his abandoned coal heap of caviar, realizing everyone had finished.

‘I’ve had sufficient. I OD’d on beluga in St Petersburg last week.’

‘Christ, what a waste,’ exploded Jupiter.

‘Did you buy a resortski?’ enquired Janna.

Sheena was well named, she decided; she had a sheen of desirability about her but was very opinionated. As conversation became general and moved on to the war, she kept regurgitating whole paragraphs from a piece she had written on American imperialism earlier in the week.

‘Hell, isn’t she?’ muttered Piers.

As he moved on to William Morris on October: ‘How can I ever have enough of life and love?’ Janna had noticed a sweet little girl gathering up the blue glass plates. Then she realized it was Dora Belvedon, Jupiter’s stepsister, who’d emerged from the weeping willow by the lake with Bianca Campbell-Black, the day Hengist had shown her over Bagley.

Now she was bringing sliced roast beef in a rich red wine sauce round on a silver salver.

‘Hello, Dora, you’d better tell me what fork to use.’

Dora’s mouth lifted at the corner.

‘It’s very good, I tried some in the kitchen. I hear you met my brother Dicky earlier. I do hope that poor dog recovers.’

Dora loved waiting for Hengist and Sally. If she lurked and kept quiet, guests often forgot she was there, and revealed lots of saleable gossip.

Stancombe for a start was utterly gross, but good copy, and there’d been a lot about Janna Curtis in the press recently. She didn’t look pretty tonight with that schoolmarmish hair and shapeless white smock. Mrs Walton, on the other hand, was gorgeous. Stancombe clearly thought so, which might make a story: Dora bustled back to the kitchen, and taking a pad out of her coat pocket wrote ‘Randy Randal’ and vowed to ring the papers tomorrow.

20

The beef and the creamy swede purée were so utterly delicious, Janna, Sheena and Mrs Walton all simultaneously vowed to take more trouble.

‘Thomas Hood’s also brilliant on autumn,’ Piers was saying.

‘You mustn’t monopolize Janna,’ Sally called down the table.

‘He wasn’t, we’ve had a smashing time comparing notes,’ protested Janna, who had deliberately concentrated on Piers because the man on her other side was shy-makingly attractive. Outwardly unruffled as a great lion dozing in the afternoon sun, he had a spellbinding voice: deep, lilting and very Welsh, a square, ruddy face, thick blond curly hair, and lazy navy-blue eyes which turned down at the corners.

‘Welcome to Larkshire,’ said Emlyn Davies as she turned towards him. ‘How are you enjoying being a head?’

‘Not as much as I’d hoped,’ confessed Janna. ‘I keep looking back wistfully to the times when my biggest worry was getting a class through GCSE.’

Encouraged by his genuine interest, she was soon telling him all about Larks.

‘I made Paris and Feral mentors,’ she said finally. ‘I thought giving them some responsibility might make them more responsible. You know Feral?’

‘Everyone knows Feral.’

‘He and Paris are so gorgeous. All the girls are dying to be mentored by them, but Feral’s never in school and Paris has his nose in a book and tells them to eff off.’

‘Can you buttle, Emlyn?’ asked Sally a shade imperiously, ‘No one’s got a drink at your end.’

‘Feral’s a dazzling footballer,’ continued Janna when Emlyn returned. ‘If this bonding between us and Bagley takes off, would you keep an eye on him?’

‘I teach rugby.’

‘Feral could adjust, he’s so fast and can do anything with a ball. If he felt he was achieving, he might come in more often. If Feral stays away, half the school does too and we’ll never rise in the league tables.’

Emlyn put a huge hand over hers. ‘League tables are shit, so many heads fiddle them. Schools like St Jimmy’s and Searston Abbey don’t improve: they just reject low achievers. Why should anyone want difficult children if they push you to the bottom?

‘When you think of the disadvantages with which your kids from the Shakespeare Estate start, it’s as much a miracle to get five per cent of them through as it is for us and St Jimmy’s and Gillian to clock up ninety per cent. League tables are about humiliation, delving into laundry baskets and washing dirty linen in public.’

Janna was delighted by the rage in his voice.

‘How does an independent teacher understand these things?’

‘I taught in comprehensives for nearly nine years.’

‘How could you have switched over?’ cried Janna in outrage.

‘A number of reasons. I like teaching history and the national curriculum’s so prohibitive. Nor do I like being bossed around by the Council of Europe. I also like teaching rugby. Bagley was unbeaten last season. Gives you a buzz. I like the salary I get. I adore Hengist and I’m very idle. Here, I get plenty of time to play golf and fool around – “displacement activity” our deputy head Alex Bruce calls it.’ He smiled lazily down at her.

‘Most Welshmen are small, dark and handsome,’ he added, patting his beer gut. ‘I’m fair, fat and funny.’

Not handsome, decided Janna, but decidedly attractive.

She hoped he’d ask her out. As if reading her thoughts, he said, ‘You must come out with us one evening. We drink at the Rat and Groom. If you’re going to be coming to Bagley a lot, someone ought to give you a minibus.’

‘I’m not very good at getting sponsorship,’ sighed Janna, remembering Mr Tyler who’d looked like a parsnip. ‘I get bogged down by administration.’ She took a slug of red. ‘I’m even wearing my admini skirt.’

Then she noticed the red and white hairs on the black wool, gave a sob, and told Emlyn all about the poor little dog.

‘I’m going to call in on the way home. Oh dear.’ As she wiped her eyes, smudging Sally’s mascara, her elbow slid off the table.

‘I’ll drive you, I haven’t drunk much,’ said Emlyn, adding, with a slight edge to his voice, ‘Don’t want to screw up in front of the boss and his wife.’

‘How
kind
of you,’ cried Janna, hoping Emlyn might stop her thinking so much of Hengist.

‘Can I come too and see this dog?’ asked Dora, who was hovering with second helpings. ‘Have some more potatoes, Mr Davies, keep up your strength. We had a Labrador called Visitor,’ she told Janna, ‘who adored fireworks, saw them as coloured shooting. He used to sit barking at them, encouraging them on.’

‘Get on, Dora,’ ordered Hengist, ‘and you move on too, Emlyn, I want to sit next to Janna.’

All the men moved on two places, which meant Randal ended up on Janna’s right and, to his delight, on Mrs Walton’s left.

Hengist was shocked how wan Janna looked. He didn’t tell her about the uproar there had been from Bagley parents reluctant to have Larks tearaways let loose among their darlings.

‘How are your hands?’

‘Numbed by booze and painkillers. I’m having a lovely time tonight, sorry I snapped at you earlier.’

‘It was fear biting.’

‘Everything’s been getting on top of me.’

Except a good man, thought Hengist. Then he said, ‘There’s a dinner at the Winter Gardens – tomorrow week – to plan Larkminster’s Jubilee celebrations. All the local bigwigs’ll be there. Sally can’t make it. Come with me; I’ve got to speak so I can officially announce the twinning of Larks and Bagley.’

‘How lovely. Sure I won’t lower the tone?’

‘Don’t be silly. That’s a date then. How did you like Emlyn?’

‘Wonderful.’

‘He is. We didn’t lose a match on the South African tour; the boys had a ball but never overstepped the mark. They call him Attila the Hunk. A lot of people raised eyebrows when I tried to make him a housemaster, but the boys adore him and so do the parents. Sadly he refused – said the rugger teams give him enough hassle. You know he played rugger for Wales?’

‘Goodness,’ said Janna.

‘He used to be very chippy, but with success the chips go.’

‘Am I chippy?’

‘Very, that’s why I want to ensure you’re wildly successful.’ And he smiled with such affection, Janna had to smile back.

‘Oh dear, dear,’ Piers muttered to Sheena. ‘Little Miss Curtis is going to get hurt.’

‘What d’you think of Stancombe?’ Hengist had lowered his voice.

‘Challenging,’ said Janna.

‘And deeply silly. Parents have to kill to get into one’s school; once in, men like Stancombe compete to build science blocks, sports pavilions.’

‘And an indoor riding school,’ said Dora, putting out pudding plates.

Hengist laughed and patted her arm. ‘Dora keeps me young.’

Stancombe had moved on to art. ‘I’m a big art person, Ruth. I frequently make large donations to the Tate; they’re talking of naming a staircase after me.’