The Rye Man Page 6

  ‘Mr Reynolds wouldn’t have done such a thing.’ Her tone suggested that he had just accused her former headmaster of the grossest impropriety.

  ‘I think, Mrs Haslett, we’ll have to find some sort of compromise. You appreciate better than I do how limited space is.’

  ‘Could Miss McCreavey not use her classroom?’

  It was possible the conversation would stretch into infinity. He had better things to do – an assembly to prepare for a start. ‘I’ll tell you what, Muriel, leave it with me and I’ll let you know by the end of school what’s happening.’

  Like a dog with its teeth in a bone, she seemed unwilling to let the matter go, but he’d had enough and, standing up from behind his desk, began to look through his filing cabinet. He did not turn round until he heard the door close behind her.

  It was a poor start to the day and it set the tone of what was to follow. A clatter of post had subsided across his desk by the time assembly was over: two circulars from the Board; an update from the Curriculum Council; book publishers’ catalogues; a brochure from a school travel company; a miscellaneous mess of advertising material; letters from parents. His whole morning seemed to be consumed by bitty fragments of administration that prevented him doing any of the things he had intended. He telephoned again about the hole in the roof and was told the matter was now in hand, but was given no assurance as to the date of completion. He had a difficult fifteen minutes with Mrs Craig when he broke the news about her classroom assistant, but promised that when financial delegation passed into the school’s hands, he would make it a priority. She was unimpressed and he could not really blame her. She also pointed out that the mother who helped in that capacity might not find it financially worthwhile to continue in the job. She was paid little enough as it was.

  A parent telephoned to enquire where she could purchase transfer tests for her eight-year-old daughter. Another, on the strength of a couple of lessons, queried the way Miss Fulton was teaching maths, pointing out that her methodologies seemed to be different from her predecessor. Some salesman wasted twenty minutes of his time trying to get him to agree to a demonstration of a colour photocopier which he knew he could not afford. Unannounced and without any coherent explanation, two men arrived from the Board’s architects’ department and proceeded to measure the school then ask technical questions about the building for which he did not have the answers. There was a query from someone in the pay branch about what hours Eric had worked during the six-week summer scheme. He felt increasingly frustrated, pushed from one petty task to the next. The only saving grace of the day was P7 history. It was his main subject and while Vance took Miss Fulton’s class for music he would take P7 for their year’s history. He had instructed Mrs Patterson that he was not to be disturbed during the lesson except in an absolute emergency, and as he entered the classroom as a teacher this time he felt as though he was finally pitching on home ground, back where he belonged.

  He had planned to follow a unit of work springing from local history and centred on the Celts. It had struck him, too, that it was a project which would easily become part of the EMU scheme, proposed by Liam Hennessy, with the two schools going on joint field trips to visit local sites. After showing the class slides of the Book of Kells he got them to decorate the covers of their history notebooks as ornately as they could. Emma had cut out stencils for him, including decorative lettering, so that even the weaker children were able to produce something that was pleasing to the eye. He got them to move their desks and work in groups of four. They used tinfoil and the insides of chocolate wrappers to create the impression of silver and gold leaf. They worked well for him, enjoying the novelty of the degree of freedom he offered, not bold enough yet to talk openly but whispering conspiratorially and looking at him guiltily to see if they had infringed some rule. And though he felt the urge to do something to free the children from the tight parameters which bound them, he knew he could not undermine Vance’s relationship with his class, so he held himself in check, restricting himself to encouragement and a smile.

  The smile faded as he walked to the back of the room. In his excitement and pleasure he had not noticed that the blonde-haired girl had joined no group but sat crouched over her desk, her arm curled round her book, hiding it from view. As he came down beside her the arm tightened round it, her head dropping lower. Playfully and gently he pulled at one of her locks but at his first touch she dropped her face into the book so that her cheek rested on the cover and her eyes stared away from him. He drew back his hand, startled and confused by a reaction he had not anticipated and struggled to interpret. Its suddenness, its defensiveness, shocked him, and for a few seconds he found himself unsure of what to do.

  He went round to the other side of the desk and squatted on his haunches until his eyes were only about a foot away from hers. They were blue, bright, translucent, and in the corner of one was a tiny blear of mucus. She stared into his and did not blink. A blue pen mark ran across the paleness of her cheek like a varicose vein.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he whispered, as if playing a game.

  The eye closest to the desk blinked twice, a nervous involuntary pulse, but she did not speak. He did a funny smile at her but got nothing in return and then her lips moved almost imperceptibly and she was saying her name, so faintly he had to strain to catch it.

  ‘Jacqueline.’

  The three syllables came out as if they were only loosely connected and he heard the final two and guessed the first.

  ‘Jacqueline.’ Still on his knees, he repeated the name slowly.

  Her tongue quickly touched her top lip before disappearing again. Standing up slowly, he asked her in the same whispering tone if she would show him her work. There was no response. He said please and then lightly moved her arm from its protective curve. It was stiff under his touch and in it he could feel the full weight of her reluctance. On the cover of her history book were a few scribbled attempts at decoration in yellow crayon and a faltering, slanted set of her initials. He was conscious that some heads were turned towards them and he sent them back to their work with a gesture of his hand. Only one face still stared.

  ‘Sir, Jacqueline doesn’t do the same work as us.’

  ‘Thank you, Luke, now concentrate on getting your cover finished, please.’

  He waited until the boy had returned to his work then pulled a chair alongside the girl’s desk. There was a faint smell of urine. He coaxed her head off the desk and, taking the stub of pencil she had been using, turned her single-lined initials into two block capitals, then stencilled some decorative motifs into the four corners of the page. She still had said nothing other than her name, but he talked to her all the time, quietly, positively. He made her choose the colour of crayon she wanted to use for her initials and, seemingly without moving her eyes, she pointed to purple. Breaking the crayon in two, he gave her half and started to colour the J, motioning her to start the M. M for McQuarrie. He saw her name and address printed in an adult’s hand on the inside of her plastic pencil case. He did not know the family but she lived on a road only five minutes’ drive away from his own, and then he remembered having seen her at a gate on his journey home. She sat now, tongue pushing out her cheek and one leg swinging nervously. Sometimes she swung it too hard and it hit the leg of the desk and then she would glance furtively up at him to see if she had done something wrong. She coloured in the M, only occasionally slipping outside the lines, but shaded in different directions so that when she had finished it was an irregular patchwork. But he commended her and suggested some colours she could use for the stencilled decorations, then patted her gently on the shoulders and left her to work at it on her own.

  Most of the class were putting the final touches to their work and he could see that they were pleased with the results. He conveyed his own pleasure to them and wound up the lesson early enough to leave time for packing up and returning the desks to their original positions. After the bell had rung he met Vance in the corrid
or. He was carrying sheet music and a metronome and looked surprised when his polite nod was returned with a request to step into his office.

  ‘Jacqueline McQuarrie?’ Vance flushed slightly. One of the copies of sheet music slipped forward in his hand but when he spoke his voice was matter-of-fact, almost disinterested. ‘So you’ve met Jacqueline, then. Not a very satisfactory situation, I’m sure you’ll agree.’

  At that moment he did not feel like agreeing with anything Vance had to say. ‘What exactly is the situation?’

  ‘Jacqueline McQuarrie is . . . well, in the old days they would have described her as Educationally Subnormal. She has a reading age of about five or six and can only handle very basic number work. There’s very few class activities she can join in with and really I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to do with her. The only consolation is that her parents have opted her out of the transfer tests.’

  He felt a sudden urge to swear, to grasp the metronome out of Vance’s hands and bend it into a shape that would never beat time again. ‘What is she doing here? She shouldn’t be in this school. The child should be in a special school, or even a school with a special unit where there’s staff trained to work with children like her, to give her the education she’s entitled to.’ He felt angry, as though he had just discovered something sick under his own roof.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, Mr Cameron, but I don’t think the blame lies with us. Her parents were advised by Mr Reynolds that she would be better off elsewhere but they chose to ignore it and insisted she came here. I wasn’t privy to the discussion but they were quite adamant.’

  In the middle of his anger there was still time to be irritated by the persistence with which Vance called him Mr Cameron, when he had been invited on several occasions to use his first name. His tone of voice was impersonal, his vocabulary formal. It was as though he had something stiff and unbending at his core, like a layer of permafrost – an absence of spontaneity, an unwillingness to reveal or share anything of his self.

  ‘Mr Reynolds had no right to accommodate anything that was not in the best interests of the child and sticking her down at the back of the classroom could certainly not be described as promoting Jacqueline McQuarrie’s welfare.’

  ‘Perhaps there were other factors involved that you’re not aware of.’ His voice was distant now. ‘You’ll excuse me, my class are unsupervised at present.’

  He waited a few seconds until Vance had left the office then smashed his fist down on top of the filing cabinet, indenting a hollow bruise in the metal. Pulling out the top drawer he searched through what passed for a record system. Under the girl’s name he found a white card with her full name, address, date of birth and date of entry into the school. In a manilla file were copies of her last three reports but a cursory glance was enough to absorb the extent and nature of the information. Bare, perfunctory statements that the child experienced severe difficulties in all her subjects with no reference to personal and social development or any proposed course of remedial action. He sat down at his desk and turned the miserable, meagre information over and over.

  His thoughts were disturbed by a now-recognisable knock on his door and the entry of Haslett. In her wake trailed a red-faced boy. It was obviously a hanging job and her expression clearly indicated that a guilty verdict had already been reached and that he was required to play the role of executioner. She stood with her arms folded across her bosom like a plumped pillow, while the boy’s eyes flitted nervously round the office. He felt as if he should open the drawer of his desk and put on a black cap.

  ‘Mr Cameron, this is getting out of hand and I think it’s about time we let parents know it’s not acceptable.’ She looked curiously like an owl when she was angry, a spasmodic twitch pushing her glasses further up her nose, enlarging her eyes, her face pulled tight and white like a knot, the words bursting out bitterly in a rush of air. ‘I don’t know what parents are thinking of to allow it. Well, they’ve got another think coming if they think I’m going to allow it in my class.’

  Drawing phalluses on his jotter, bullying, spitting gobs of phlegm, cursing – the options were limitless. Looking at the accused he couldn’t decide the crime. It had to be serious, though.

  ‘Take off your jumper, Mr McBriar, and show Mr Cameron what you propose to do P.E. in.’

  The boy obeyed but nervousness made his hands clumsy and for a few seconds his head struggled to emerge from the blue sweat-shirt, making it look as though he’d already been beheaded. She tutted in exasperation and for a few seconds he thought she was going to yank it off, but at last the boy wriggled his way free, his hair standing up like stubble. Across his chest was a familiar face and the large message, ‘My name’s Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?’ She quivered with new outrage. He struggled to suppress a smile. ‘Leave this to me, Mrs Haslett. I’ll deal with it.’

  He ushered her back to her class and closed the door behind her.

  The boy stood still, one arm of his sweat-shirt trailing the floor like a prehensile tail.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Neil McBriar.’

  ‘Well, Neil, your T-shirt certainly seems to have upset Mrs Haslett. Bart Simpson is a bit too rude for this school, perhaps you shouldn’t wear it at school again.’ Matter closed. The boy flattened his crown of stubble with an unconscious flap of his hand that looked like a salute. Down the corridor he heard Haslett’s door close. ‘Put your sweat-shirt on and keep it on, please, till you’re home.’

  Bart Simpson’s flaming exclamation of yellow hair extinguished in the dark folds of the sweat-shirt. The boy fidgeted, unsure of whether he was supposed to go or stay.

  ‘Neil, do you know Jacqueline McQuarrie in P7?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘And what do you know about her?’

  The boy hesitated, unsure of whether he was about to be accused of further crimes. ‘I don’t do it, but people in her class say she’s stupid, backward. Nobody plays with her and she doesn’t bother with anybody.’

  ‘Do people tease her?’

  ‘Sometimes people call her names.’ He hesitated, caught between a desire to be absolved of blame for the T-shirt and an unwillingness to seem like a squealer.

  ‘What do they call her, Neil?’

  ‘Well, sometimes – I don’t do it, Sir – Smelly Gyp or Betty Poo. Things like that.’ He screwed his face up in a pretence of pretending. ‘Sometimes they call her Dumbo. Most people don’t bother with her, though, because once her Da came up and scared some boys who were calling her names.

  ‘Does she have any friends?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but she doesn’t want any friends because she never bothers with anybody, even when they try to be friends with her.’ The boy stood staring at the floor, increasingly uneasy as he realised that he was having a conversation with the headmaster.

  He let the boy go, realising that he himself was late for Miss Fulton’s class. He had promised to help listen to pupils read and organise them into ability groups.

  When he arrived she had already started, the children sitting in circles, books held proudly like prizes, but even in the presence of her newness, her naïve enthusiasm, he felt a sour taste in his mouth which deadened the enjoyment of the children and made it difficult to concentrate on their reading. The singsong voice of the girl beside him seemed to mock him, her dramatised, exaggerated pronunciation rubbing against his growing feeling of flatness.

  He had a sudden fear that there might be more skeletons locked in cupboards and at any moment one might spring out at him. He had inherited something that still belonged to Reynolds. It had his handprints everywhere, the way his mind worked, the way he saw the world, and it would take time and energy before he made it his own. For the first time he wondered if he could ever fully shake it loose from the fossilised firmness of that grasp. It was a brief doubt. It was just like the house they had bought – at least there they had the benefit of a surveyor’s report and knew beforehand the exten
t of the inadequacies – which window frame was rotten, which wall needed re-pointing. Tins of paint, windows open to let light and air in, the furniture you were familiar with, the precious objects and memories you brought, and soon you claimed it, made it part of you. So it would be with the school. He had been foolish to think that it would happen so quickly or easily. He would have to work harder at it, give it a little more of himself.

  Glancing towards where Miss Fulton was showing her circle a picture in a book, their eyes met and she smiled at him. He felt warmed into new optimism, conscious of the voices of the children reading, and remembered his own first public steps: the graded readers which Mrs Preston had doled out, forcing himself to ration the pages because finishing too quickly would mean a long wait before he was given a new one. Standing at the front of his class and reading from a book – he could not remember which one – and Mrs Preston, the woman who no one had a good word for, giving him sixpence as a reward for his proficiency. The girl’s head opposite him pecked at the words like a little bird, one of her legs folded underneath her. He concentrated now totally on everything around him and only the children’s shifted focus told him someone had entered the room.

  He followed Mrs Patterson down the corridor. It was the Reverend Houston on the telephone, but it seemed to be nothing more urgent than a desire to confirm dates for the Board of Governors’ meetings and when he would come to school to take assembly. There was an exchange of small talk and then he felt the tone of the conversation change.

  ‘I believe, John, you told Mrs Rooney that the Girl Guides could have the school hall for their display.’

  He sensed some kind of problem, but could not anticipate what it was. ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Well, John, it’s just that really those sort of decisions have to be made by the governors.’

  ‘She said they’d used the hall last year. I assumed it was OK.’

  ‘They did use it last year after the governors approved it. You understand that we get a lot of requests to use the school premises and we have to be careful just who we let it out to. In a small community like this it’s very easy to cause offence by a refusal and it makes it worse if they can come back to you and say, “Well, so-and-so got it, why can’t we?” ’