“Tofu,” said Miss Harmony. “Ulysses is a very fine name.”
Tofu said nothing.
“Yes,” said Miss Harmony. “And we don’t laugh at the names of others, do we, Tofu? Especially . . .” She hesitated. It was so tempting, impossible to resist, in fact. “Especially if we are called Tofu ourselves.”
“Tofu’s a stupid name,” volunteered Olive. “It’s that horrid white stuff that cranky people eat. It’s a stupid name. I’d far rather be called Ulysses than Tofu, any day of the week. And anyway, Tofu, it’s nice to hear that Miss Harmony thinks your name is stupid too.”
“That is not what I said, Olive,” said Miss Harmony quickly.
“And let’s move on, boys and girls. We are all very pleased, I’m sure, to hear about Bertie’s new baby brother and we look forward to meeting him some day soon. I’m sure that Bertie is very proud of him and will bring him to the school to introduce us all. But in the meantime, boys and girls, we are going to start today with sums, just to see whether we’ve remembered what we learned last term!”
Much had been forgotten, and the rest of the morning was devoted to the reinstallation of vanished knowledge. Bertie worked quietly, but he noticed Olive looking at him from time to time and the observation made him feel uneasy. Bertie was
wary of Olive on several counts, but principally because she laboured under the delusion that she was his girlfriend. And at the end of the day, his doubts proved to be well-founded.
“I’m really looking forward to seeing your new baby brother,”
said Olive, as they left the classroom. “I’m coming to see him soon.”
Bertie frowned. “Who said?” he asked.
“My mother has spoken to your mother,” Olive answered.
“And your mother says that I can come to play at your house once a week if I like. So I will.”
“But I didn’t ask you,” said Bertie.
“No,” said Olive. “But that makes no difference. Your mummy did – and that’s what counts.” She paused. “And we’re going to play house.”
Much of her anger focused on the fact that she had not responded adequately to his unpleasant story of his London experiences; didn’t-kiss-and-still-told was in her mind every bit as bad as kiss-and-tell. There was so much she could have said which would have indicated her disgust over his insensitive behaviour, so much, but, as was so often the case, the really pithy comments, 68
And then she wondered whether anything could ever deflate Bruce, such was the sheer Zeppelin-scale volume of his self-satisfaction. At least their brief meeting had convinced her – if conviction were needed – that she disliked him intensely, and yet, and yet . . . when he had perched on her desk, uninvited, she found herself unable to ignore the brute fact of his extreme attractiveness. Bruce was, quite simply, devastatingly good-looking, an Adonis sent down to live among us. And the fact that she even noticed this worried her. She had already had a narrow escape with Wolf, who had similarly dazzled her, and here she was looking at Bruce again in that way. Am I, she wondered, one of those people who fall for the physically desir-able, irrespective of what they are like as people? In a moment of brutal honesty, she realised that the answer was probably: yes, I am. It was a bleak conclusion.
She thought of Matthew, solid, dependable, predictable Matthew. These three epithets said it all, but they were words which had no excitement in them, no thrill. And yet when one compared Matthew with Bruce, Matthew’s merits were over-whelming. But then again, there was the distressed-oatmeal, the crushed-strawberry factor . . .
The door of the gallery opened and Pat turned round. A man had entered the gallery, a largish man of rather elegant bearing, wearing grey slacks and a blazer, no tie, but a red silk bandanna tied around his neck. He sported a jaunty mustache. He smiled at Pat and gestured in the direction of the paintings. “Do you mind? May I ?”
“Of course. Please.”
He nodded to her in a friendly way and made his way across the gallery to stand in front of one of Matthew’s recently acquired MacTaggart seascapes. Pat watched him from her desk. Some people who came into the gallery were merely passing the time, with no intention of buying anything; this man, though, with his urbane manner, had a different air about him.
He moved closer to one of the MacTaggarts and peered at a section of the large canvas. Two children were sitting on the edge of a wide, windswept beach. The children were windswept too, their hair ruffled. They were playing with the sand, which streamed away from their hands, caught in the breeze, in thin lines of gold.
The man turned round and addressed Pat across the floor.
“Can you tell me anything about this?”
Pat rose from her desk and walked across to join him. “It’s a MacTaggart,” she said. “Do you know about him?”
“Not much,” said the man. “But I do know a little. I like his work. There’s a strange air about it. Something rather wind-blown, don’t you think?”
Pat agreed. “It reminds me of places like Tantallon,” she said.
“Or Gullane beach, perhaps. That could be Fife on the other side of the water. Just there. There’s some land, you see.”
