Wicked! Read online

  The artist was poised to bolt when Janna called out:

  ‘I don’t know how many penises you’ve seen in your short life, Graffi Williams, but normally the glans is longer. Those testicles, in my experience, are too big, although the wrinkling of the scrotal sac is masterly.’

  As Graffi’s jaw and his spray can crashed to the ground, Janna went on:

  ‘I’ve got a spare wall in my lounge at my new cottage. I’ve been wondering how to decorate it. Would you have a moment to pop over at the weekend and give me some ideas for a mural? I’ll pay you, but I’d rather you didn’t do cocks. There are enough of them crowing in the farm across the fields. Bring Paris, if you like. I’ll clear it with the children’s home.’

  7

  After the dark, frenzied intensity of her day, Janna was astonished by the tranquil beauty of the evening. Beyond the hedgerows, slate-blue with sloes and festooned with scarlet skeins of bryony, newly harvested fields rose in platinum-blond sweeps to woods so lush and glossy from endless rain that they appeared to have spent the summer in some expensive greenhouse.

  Janna was trying to decide if the orange-gold sheen on the trees was the first fires of autumn or gilding by the setting sun when she plunged like a train into one of Larkshire’s dark tunnels: hawthorn, hazel, blackthorn and elder, rising thickly from high banks and impenetrably intertwined overhead by traveller’s joy. Down and down she went, until she emerged blinking into the village of Wilmington, passing the duck pond and the village green bordered with pale gold cottages, swerving to avoid a mallard and his wife ambling down the High Street in the direction of the Dog and Duck.

  Jubilee Cottage was the last house on the right. As she parked her new pea-green Polo in the street, because the garage was still filled with unpacked boxes, Janna thought she had never been so tired. She’d survived, but the prospect of tomorrow terrified her. Getting out, she caught sight of her neighbour deadheading roses in the mothy dusk, who called out:

  ‘How did you get on? I’ve been reading about you in the Gazette. Come and have a drink, if you’re not too tired. I’d have asked you earlier, but I’ve been away. My name’s Lily Hamilton.’

  Lily must be well into her seventies, thought Janna, but she was still very beautiful, with gentian-blue eyes, luxuriant grey hair drawn into a bun and a poker-straight back.

  ‘What a lovely garden,’ sighed Janna, admiring white geraniums, phlox and roses luminous in the dusk. ‘Mine’s a tip.’

  ‘You’ve been far too busy. I always think one tackles gardens the second year. I’m afraid it’s like the Harrods’ depository,’ she went on, leading Janna into a drawing room crammed with furniture, suggesting departure from a much larger house. Pictures covered every inch of wall. Over the fireplace hung a very explicit nude, with far more rings and studs piercing her voluptuous body than Pearl Smith. Dominating the room was a lovely pale pink and green silk striped sofa, whose arms had been ripped to shreds. The culprit, a vast fluffy black and white cat whom Lily introduced as the General, was stretched out unrepentantly in one corner. In the other lay an even larger stuffed badger. Seeing Janna’s frown of disapproval, Lily explained the badger was already stuffed when she acquired him.

  ‘He was in an auction, looking so sad and unloved, I got him for fifteen shillings.’

  Wondering if Lily was a bit dotty, Janna waved Hengist’s bottle of champagne. ‘Why don’t we drink this?’

  ‘Tepid champagne is a crime against nature,’ observed Lily. ‘Let’s cool it in the deep freeze and first drink this stuff, which is much less nice.’ She filled Janna’s glass with white.

  Parked between cat and badger, Janna admitted the day had been rough.

  ‘The older staff are so antagonistic, and they’re not giving any lead to the younger teachers.’

  Then she explained who’d sent her the champagne, which deteriorated into a rant against independent schools and ‘fascist bastards’ like Hengist Brett-Taylor in particular.

  ‘All those facilities wasted on a few spoilt kids, whose rich parents are too selfish to look after them and just pack them off into the upper-class care of a boarding school.’

  ‘I don’t think children in care jet home to Moscow or New York at the weekend,’ said Lily. ‘Or race up to London. And I promise you, Hengist is a charmer. I’m sure you’d like him if you met him. He doesn’t take himself at all seriously, he’s awfully good-looking, and he’s worked wonders with Bagley. They were a pack of tearaways five years ago. Now they’re near the top of the league tables.’

  ‘Perhaps he could give me a few tips,’ said Janna sarcastically. ‘Although it can’t be difficult with all that money and tiny classes and vast playing fields for the kids to let off steam. How d’you know him?’

  ‘My nephew Dicky’s a pupil, Dora his twin sister starts this term and Rupert Campbell-Black’s children go there as well.’

  Which sent Janna into more shivering shock-horror:

  ‘Rupert Campbell-Black’s the most arrogant, spoilt, fox-hunting, right-wing bastard.’

  ‘But again, decidedly attractive,’ laughed Lily, topping up Janna’s glass. ‘He does have – even more than Hengist – alarming charm.’

  The General heaved himself on to Janna’s knee, purring and kneading.

  ‘I must get a cat,’ sighed Janna, rubbing him behind his pink ears.

  ‘Do,’ said Lily, ‘then we can catsit for each other. Why did you take on Larks?’

  After a second glass on an empty stomach, Janna found herself telling Lily all about Stew.

  ‘He swore he was going to leave Beth, his wife, and marry me. He just had to see his son graduate, then it was his daughter’s wedding, then Beth’s hysterectomy, then it was going to be the moment Redfords came out of special measures.

  ‘But the afternoon we found out, he immediately rang up Beth: “Darling, we’ve done it, put a bottle of bubbly on ice,” and booked a table at the Box Tree. They went out to celebrate with the deputy head and his wife. I realized then he’d never leave her.’

  ‘You poor child.’ Lily patted her hand. ‘For many married people, particularly men, adultery is merely an amusing hobby.’

  ‘He really was a bastard,’ mused Janna.

  ‘But a left-wing one this time,’ observed Lily.

  Janna burst out laughing:

  ‘I was so desperate to get away from the situation, and so longing to be a head, it rather blinded me to Larks’s imperfections. Shall we tackle that bottle of bubbly now? And you can tell me why Hengist Brett-Taylor is so attractive and also about Wilmington.’

  ‘Very much “Miss Marple” territory,’ said Lily.

  ‘Who’s the handsome old gentleman who lives five doors down?’

  ‘That’s the Brigadier, Brigadier Christian Woodford. He always salutes my General’ – Lily nodded at the cat on Janna’s knee – ‘when they meet in the street. His wife died recently; nearly bankrupted himself paying her medical bills. She needed twenty-four-hour nursing at home. I don’t know if he’ll be able to afford to stay.

  ‘He had a terrific war. He’s very well read and knows a huge amount about natural history, particularly wild flowers.’

  ‘Like you do,’ said Janna, looking at the autumn squills and meadow cranesbill in a vase on top of the bookshelf and the wild-flower books in the shelves. Glancing up at a watercolour of meadowsweet and willowherb, she added, ‘I recognize that artist.’

  ‘Hanna Belvedon, married to my nephew Jupiter.’ Then at Janna’s raised eyebrows, ‘Our local MP.’

  ‘Your nephew? But he’s another sneering—’

  ‘Right-wing bastard. Here I entirely agree with you,’ smiled Lily and then confided that it was Jupiter who had chucked her out of her lovely house in Limesbridge when Raymond, his father and Lily’s brother, had died last year. ‘He needed the rent money to boost his political campaign.’

  ‘I told you he was a bastard,’ said Janna indignantly.

  ‘I shouldn’t have sneaked,’ sig
hed Lily, ‘but I do think you should have lunch with Hengist. He’s got an awfully nice wife and a daughter about your age. You must meet some young people. We’re rather a geriatric bunch in Wilmington.’

  ‘I love Wilmington,’ protested Janna. ‘It’s the sweetest village in the world.’

  ‘What fun you’ve come to live here. Are you desperately tired or shall we have some scrambled eggs?’

  Dew soaked Janna’s legs. The planets Saturn and, appropriately, Jupiter were rising, glowing green and contained by mist like lights from the angels’ electric toothbrushes, as she tottered home after midnight.

  What a darling Lily was. After the death of her sweet mother, Janna had plunged into work, and never properly mourned her loss. How wonderful if Lily could become a friend.

  Tripping over a boot rack, Janna fell on top of a large bunch of pink and orange lilies wilting in the porch.

  ‘Good luck,’ said the card, ‘missing you terribly, all love, Stew’.

  8

  Janna was woken by raging hangover and torrential rain and things went from bad to worse. She found Wally sweeping up more glass from two broken windows. Two door handles had been broken off in the lavatories. The walls in reception had been attacked with a hammer and rain poured in through the roof into the main hall and several classrooms.

  Adele, who taught geography and had two children and no husband, rang in sick, so there was no one to take her classes. Another teacher, who hadn’t turned up yesterday, wrote saying she’d taken a job in Canada. Ten of the children, believed to be truanting, had evidently gone elsewhere. This hardly put Janna in carnival mood to welcome the new intake of Year Seven: eleven-year-olds fresh from their primary schools.

  Leaving Mags Gablecross, who had a free period, to show them round and explain their timetables, Janna took refuge in an empty classroom to fine-tune what she was going to say to their parents. The cleaners had piled the chairs on the tables to show they had swept the floor. Next moment, a tall, handsome hellraiser from Year Nine, known to be a staunch BNP supporter, staggered in with glazed eyes.

  ‘Good morning, Johnnie Fowler,’ called out Janna, proud she’d remembered his name.

  Johnnie immediately grabbed a chair and hurled it at her. Just missing her head, it crashed into the whiteboard.

  Radio mike forgotten, Janna fled into the corridor, slap into Phil Pierce. She collapsed against his dark blue shirt.

  ‘Help,’ she yelped.

  For a moment his arms closed around her and she snuggled into him, heart hammering, breath coming in great gasps, then they both pulled away.

  ‘Johnnie Fowler hurled a chair at me.’

  Phil went straight into the classroom, slowly calming Johnnie and sending him back to his own classroom.

  ‘He was coming down from crack.’

  ‘He ought to be excluded or at least suspended,’ raged Janna.

  ‘If he goes home, it won’t do any good. He’ll be out on the street thieving. He mugged an old lady last term. Mother’s on her own and can’t control him, poor woman.’

  Janna felt ashamed. Phil was such a good guy, who had a true empathy with the kids. She was horrified how much she’d enjoyed having his arms round her.

  Janna then addressed the new Year Seven parents, who were touched, assuming her frightful shakes were due to nerves at meeting them rather than hangover or Johnnie Fowler.

  ‘Your children will always have a special place in my heart,’ she told them, ‘because I’m starting at Larks at the same time as they are. We’ll go up the school together, and I will learn as much from them as I hope they will from me. I will do everything to make them really enjoy learning. Any problems, please come to me and I hope to welcome you all at parents’ meetings.’

  She smiled round. The Year Seven parents smiled back. Most of them had been disasters at school and had been phobic about crossing the threshold. Largely from the Shakespeare Estate, they looked like children themselves. If they’d had these kids in their early teens, they need only be in their mid twenties now, which made Janna feel dreadfully old.

  As she finished speaking, Mags Gablecross brought in a little girl with huge slanting dark eyes and straight black hair. She was adorable, but sobbing. Mags explained that she came from Paris Alvaston’s children’s home and had just arrived from Kosovo. Her mother had died in a shootout. Her father was missing, believed killed, in the war. She didn’t speak any English and was called Kata.

  ‘Now, which of you is grown-up and kind enough to look after Kata?’ Janna asked the children.

  Every hand went up.

  Afterwards, having just managed to keep down two Alka-Seltzer and feeling incapable of tackling not one, but now two buckling in-trays, Janna informed Rowan Merton she was going to sit in on some classes. Armed with her radio mike, Janna went on to the corridors, fantasizing she was June in The Bill or, more likely, a sapper moving from minefield to minefield. She was aware of children roaring past her, swearing, fighting, chatting on their mobiles, drifting in late.

  Out of a window, she noticed rabble-rousing Robbie Rushton and Gloria the gymnast creeping in through a side door. They should have been taking geography and PE. No wonder the kids were running wild.

  A nice change, however, was Miss Uglow’s RE class. ‘Ugly’, who refused to teach anything but the Bible, was held in equal proportions of terror, respect and love by her pupils.

  ‘Jesus clothed the naked, fed the hungry, and educated the ignorant,’ she was telling an enraptured Year Eight, ‘which is what I’m doing now.’

  Janna smiled and moved on. Rounding the corner, she went slap into Mike Pitts. Obviously tipped off by beady Rowan, he was spluttering to Miss Basket, the menopausal misfit who taught geography.

  ‘As a dedicated professional for twenty-five years, I’m not having some chit of a young woman sitting in on my lessons.’ Catching sight of Janna, he turned an even deeper shade of magenta.

  Miss Basket melted into the Ladies. Janna followed Mike into his office.

  ‘Could we have a word?’

  Mike glanced at the clock. ‘I’m teaching in five minutes.’

  Clearly a bit of a handsome dandy, judging by past cartoons of him as a cricketer and footballer on the walls, Mike looked dreadful now: his puffy face as bloodshot as his eyes; snowfalls of scurf on the shoulders of his blazer. Joss sticks glowed on his desk. His hands shook as he fussily shoved papers into a blue folder.

  Poor man, thought Janna, I usurped him.

  ‘We ought to try and get to know each other,’ she stammered. Then, on wild impulse: ‘Would you like to come to supper on Sunday?’

  ‘My wife and I prefer to forget school at the weekend.’

  Janna flushed. ‘Well, perhaps a drink during the week?’

  ‘Quite frankly, I’m too drained. I find if one has fulfilled one’s professional commitments, socializing at the end of a working day is not on the agenda. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’

  Bastard, thought Janna. Feeling the parched earth of a drooping jasmine on the window ledge, she instinctively picked up the green watering can beside it.

  ‘Don’t,’ yelled Mike, adding hastily, ‘I like to look after my own plants. Women overwater.’

  That’s gin in that watering can, thought Janna, catching a whiff.

  Mike glared at her, daring her to confront him.

  ‘We have to work together . . .’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘I must go.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ insisted Janna.

  In his classroom, they found a sweet-faced Indian girl in a pale blue sari: a teaching assistant who helped the slower pupils, particularly the foreign ones with poor English, by explaining questions to them and showing them how to write the answers. She was now laying out worksheets and consulting an algebra textbook, and told Janna she had been at Larks for four terms. She loved the job because it was so rewarding seeing understanding dawning on the children’s faces and how the slow ones blossomed if you took time t
o explain things.

  ‘I’d like to start an after-school maths club.’

  ‘Wonderful idea. Come and see me.’

  ‘We must get on,’ interrupted Mike, ‘the students will be here in a minute.’ Tetchily, he handed the Indian girl a page of squares and triangles. ‘Can you get me some marker pens and photostat this?’

  ‘She’s great,’ said Janna as the girl left the room. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  And Janna flipped. ‘This is disgraceful. She’s the only black teacher in the school, she’s been here a year and you don’t know her name.’

  ‘She’s only a teaching assistant.’

  ‘Working her butt off for you and the kids. You ought to know everyone in your department and what they’re up to, and in the school, you’re deputy head, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I will not be spoken to like that.’

  Both jumped at a knock on the door. It was Rowan Merton, dying to find out what was going on.

  ‘Phone for you, Janna.’

  ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘It’s Russell Lambert, our chair of governors. Says its urgent.’

  Bitterly regretting her outburst of temper and aware she had made an even more implacable enemy, Janna ran back to her office.

  Russell, whom Janna could still only think of as Babar, king of the elephants, head of the Tusk Force, was at his most portentous.

  ‘Good morning, Janna, bad news I’m afraid. Harry Fitzgerald, head of a school in the north of the county, has had a coronary. Ashton Douglas, head of S and C, has just phoned. They want Phil Pierce to take over as head immediately.’

  ‘Can’t they take Mike Pitts and his joss sticks?’ wailed Janna unguardedly.

  ‘You’ll need your deputy head,’ reproved Russell. ‘You’d be very weak on the maths front if Mike goes.’

  ‘I’ll never survive without you,’ Janna moaned later to Phil, who had the grace to look sheepish.

  ‘I’m sorry, Janna, I hate to let you down, but I can’t resist the chance to be a head.’