‘I only taught in the mornings while my own were at school, but she’d come with me when I went to the shops or we’d go and have a cup of tea before she went back at the end of her lunch hour.’
‘Did she have many other friendships here?’
‘She was respected more than loved, Sergeant. People here respected her. It all came down to how you took her, and how she took you.’
‘You must have made an impression then, to be so regarded.’
‘Well I couldn’t tell you why, I never had to make any special effort with her. She must have found something reliable in me, was my best guess.’
‘So the question had occurred to you?’
‘Oh yes — Stella did nothing by accident.’
‘Tell us about your work.’
‘Well, I was in the Juniors, she the Seniors and Sixth Form: History and English, but mostly English. She got the best results in the county, sent several down to Oxford.’
‘When she started, what was her name?’
‘Oh, you mean her surname? Always Dunbar to me; ‘though now I think of it, I’d sensed there was a marriage.’
‘Wouldn’t a good friend, as you say she was, have shared such a fact?’
‘Not with Stella, no. Odd that, isn’t it? But that was just how she was. I couldn’t tell you one think about her life before I knew her, or much that happened to her outside of school once I did. Yet she had honesty about her, if she trusted you, if she thought you were good. I remember acts of kindness: a posy on my birthday once, or speaking up for me in a staff meeting. She could leave a real sense of warmth in you; and the rest was her business.’
‘A posy. Was that from her own garden? Only we don’t know where she lived when she was first here.’
‘Oh, she lived in the Alderman’s Cottages. They’re gone now, called a health hazard sadly. They became attached to the school in its early days, and were used as accommodation for unmarried masters,’ she chuckled.
‘When were they demolished?’
‘Long after Stella lived there.’
‘She lived there all the time you knew her?’
‘Yes, until her aunt left her that lovely flat.’
‘A single person’s rooms?’
She nodded.
‘But you sensed she’d been married before?’
‘Only vaguely at certain times; such as when I spoke about my own marriage, she seemed to understand. She wasn’t like some singletons, professional women who’d treat tales of married life with shock: “Oh, you’d never catch me getting up that early to cook a husband’s breakfast.”’ Miss Oven dissolved into laughter.
‘But with Stella it was different?’
‘I would talk about Christopher and me and the kids, and she would nod and smile sagely in that way she had, instantly letting you know what she understood you and… maybe I was reading too much into it, but I always thought that she must have once known something of that life herself.’
‘Go on,’ prompted Cori, sensing more.
‘And there was always the impression of something else in the background, maybe an impression formed from nothing as I say; but I thought she must have had a bad experience in the past to be so against romance now.’
‘So she didn’t have a romantic life?’
‘Not while I knew her, no; and she lived on site, so there wasn’t much that the staff wouldn’t have got to know.’
‘She lived in the Alderman’s Cottages, where there’d be single men?’
‘Well, of course the school was full of men, single and married! Stella was not an unattractive woman, Sergeant, and she received her share of attention, for all her aloofness. Some of the male staff just wanted their wicked way, of course; but not all of them: some were decent, honest, in want of a wife. “Why not?” I’d say. “You’ve got no ties. Why not find someone nice to settle down with?” but she turned them all down.’
‘Anyone in particular?’
‘No, there was never anything more serious than the usual workplace intrigue. Of course some of them would moon over her for years. You see, academics are not always practical men, they can be carried away — in love with love, as someone put it — and a woman like Stella was meat and drink to their fantasies. She could have a trickery about her, that one, though claimed not even to notice. Still, it’s a shame, she could have made a match with one or other of them, I’m sure.’
Listening to the warm, open Miss Oven talking of the closed, rebuffing Ms Dunbar, Grey couldn’t visualise two less-alike people to become friends.
Continued Cori, ‘And when she left the school?’
‘Ah.’
Something in the lady’s tone confirmed to Grey that this was where the bad stuff would start, remarks on her astringency becoming a definite feature of any conversation on the topic of Ms Dunbar. He was gaining the impression that Stella couldn’t have served a glass of wine without a claim by someone that it had been laced with strychnine.
‘Well, they do say endings should be sudden,’ continued Miss Oven, ‘and an ending is always a severance, however you dress it up.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Relations broke down with the Head, and Stella was asked to leave.’
‘But you said she was successful, got students to good colleges.’
‘Oh yes, she did. There’s no denying that.’
‘Then what was it down to?’
She lady considered, ‘Educational differences.’
‘In what way?’
‘A new Head had been appointed the year before. He was very popular, and a proponent of child-centred learning, which was an idea that had been around for a while by then, and which was meant to put the student first; whereas Stella held with fact and method being central, and the children somewhat incidental in the whole scheme.’
‘Could you break it down for us non-teachers?’
‘There were certain age-old ideas that the new Head dropped, and not before time: physical aspects of the classroom, such as the desks being lined up in rows facing a blackboard, and absolute silence being demanded as they worked; silence except for when the students had facts drilled into their heads by chanting them from the board by rote.
‘Meanwhile, new ideas emerged: such as contextual learning.’
‘If you could explain.’
‘Where a child would be encouraged to understand what it was like to be, say, a sailor in the Napoleonic Wars, rather than just having a list of dates of battles in their heads.’
‘The old ways were looked down upon?’
‘Yes, and Stella didn’t agree.’
Grey noticed Miss Oven was hardening as she spoke of those times, interrupting the women at last to ask,
‘I would have thought Tudor Oak would have been the last place to have fallen to trendy methods?’
‘ Trendy is not the word I’d use to describe them; though yes it was pretty much the last place. The old Head had been a stickler: a good man, but years behind the times; and as those trained in the new ideas rose up through the ranks, so even as great a bastion as the Tudor Oak Independent School would one day fall to common sense.’
‘So what prompted Stella’s crisis?’
‘There was a meeting between her and the new Head. She told me about it afterwards: she said he started
