receive Mr Ronsonby in her sanctum. It was as different from his own austere and business-like office as can be imagined. True, it boasted a large desk and a swivel chair, filing cabinets and a timetable which, like his own, covered a considerable part of one wall, but the floor was expensively carpeted in place of the parquet flooring and one solitary rug to which he was accustomed. There were two deep armchairs and there were vases of flowers, the early spring flowers, on a small table and on Miss Edmunds’s vast desk.
The really incongruous addition to the room and the one which, in Mr Ronsonby’s opinion, detracted from its charm, was a screen rather obviously made by covering an old-fashioned wooden clothes-horse with brown paper. On to the brown paper had been pasted cut-outs of childish art in the form of large, unidentifiable flowers and equally mythological birds. All this futuristic decor was presided over by a couple of angels with hideous faces, flaring nostrils and eyes set so high in their foreheads as almost to meet their hair.
Miss Edmunds saw Mr Ronsonby looking at the screen. She laughed and said, ‘Yes, isn’t it? But it was a Christmas gift from 2C, so I must keep it until half-term. Then the cleaners will have orders to lose it. Do sit down. To what do I owe the honour? Don’t tell me you are trying to enlist support for this tinpot idea the county have put up to us to introduce a non-failure public exam for all the lazy little wretches who could get CSE if they worked instead of fooling around and making nuisances of themselves. I’ve no patience with soft options and I’ve told the county so.’
‘Nothing like that. I haven’t come on school business, exactly, but to ask for your help. The fact is that I am short of my senior geography master and I have reason to think that he may be ill in this town and is being cared for by some Greek friends of his. Have you time to hear the whole story? It has some interesting and slightly mysterious features.’
Miss Edmunds rang a bell and told the secretary who answered it that she was not to be disturbed until she rang again.
‘Chase off any parents, publishers’ travellers, staff and children who want to see me,’ she said. ‘I am about to have my blood curdled and I want to enjoy the sensation without having it broken into by school business.’ She turned to Ronsonby. ‘Do go on,’ she said. So he told her all. She listened without interrupting him. At the end she said, ‘So you think this Pythias has absconded and is lying low in this town with these Greek friends of his.’
‘Oh, no, no. I have every confidence in his probity. But, having obtained this lead to his possible whereabouts, I feel I must trace the man and find out how he is. Things may look bad in a way, but I refuse to abandon all faith in him.’
‘Hm!’ said Miss Edmunds. ‘Well, my practice is always to believe the worst of everybody. It almost always turns out to be the truth about them.’
‘You terrify me!’
‘Yes, so I do most of the children and three-quarters of the staff, thank goodness,’ said Miss Edmunds complacently. ‘Well, where do you want me to begin? I can tell you one thing straight away. I have no children of Greek extraction on my registers.’
‘It would have been too much to hope that you had. I wondered, though, whether any of your staff or your pupils knew of any Greeks or other foreigners living in or around Springdale.’
‘We can soon find out, ‘ She rang the bell and asked the secretary to take a message round the school. ‘At break I want to see any child who knows of a foreign family living in the town or on one of the new estates.’
At break the queue outside her door numbered some forty children. They were marshalled by the secretary, who admitted them four at a time. Nothing which came out of the interviews was of any help at all to Mr Ronsonby.
‘There’s the MacKenzies down our road, miss. They talk kind of funny.’
‘Thank you, Walter. The MacKenzies are Scots and Scottish people are not foreigners.’
‘There’s a couple of infants goes to St Martin’s name of Llanwyn, miss.’
‘Thank you, Maisie. The Llanwyns are Welsh. Queen Elizabeth the First was the granddaughter of a Welsh prince. The Welsh are not foreigners.’
‘No, miss, but they jabber among theirselves in a foreign language.’
‘
‘Yes, miss.’
‘Well, then, you know all about the Irish language, don’t you?’
So on and so forth, but nothing came up about Greeks or anything else which could lead Mr Ronsonby forward in his tracking down of Mr Pythias.
‘I’m afraid I’ve wasted an awful lot of your time,’ he said remorsefully.
‘Not at all. Now we’ll have a cup of coffee and a biscuit to restore our wasted tissues and at twelve you can treat me to lunch at the Majestic, where we shall see the chairman of the education committee entertaining his latest girlfriend. He and his wife are separated, so he always has some young thing in tow. I shall greet him effusively and make him squirm, because he knows I know that the floozie he will introduce to us as his niece is nothing of the sort.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Mr Ronsonby, stirred to gallantry, ‘that you are a very naughty woman.’ He wagged a finger at her.
‘
Looking back at the immense building over which she reigned, Mr Ronsonby, as he left by way of the wide-open gates, after he had given her lunch, reflected that she had probably selected a wise motto for the furtherance of her career. She had certainly been audacious. He knew two of the men who had been shortlisted for the headship of this very desirable post and he had shared their surprise, although not their disappointment and discomfiture, when Miss Edmunds had received preferment. He was fully satisfied with his own job and, although all the additions which had been made to the original plans for the new Sir George Etherege school would still not make his buildings as large as hers, or his numbers as great, he had never wanted to be head of a mixed school, let alone to have a staff on which women figured as well as men. As for having a woman deputy head in place of the tried and trusted
