Faintley Speaking

Somewhere in the class a languid hand wagged feebly. Startled, Laura came to herself, to discover that while her conscious mind had been occupied with other, and, she felt, graver matters, her subconscious mind had been presenting the class with a resume of social life in the early eighteenth century, the botany lesson, rather oddly, having hitched itself on to this subject.

‘Well?’ she said, scowling at the hand. Its owner dropped it, rose to her feet and inquired:

‘Did you say copy or coffee?’

‘I said idiot,’ replied Laura. ‘Sit down and attend properly.’ She looked at the clock. ‘Five minutes to put down in your jotting-books a summary of the lesson. Shortest effort has to be read aloud by whoever passes it in.’

The shortest effort ran as follows:

‘The pea and bean are dicotyledons and are often eaten. Queen Anne’s favourite drink was coffee. She built many houses to contain it and these were taken over by George I. He blew a South Sea Bubble and Lloyd’s was floated. It afterwards became a bank. The bank clerks were called underwriters. The top writers sank ships and the underwriters had to pay. They said how much they could afford, and a Lenten bell was rung.’

The author of this essay was asked to remain behind, as she had refused to read it aloud. She confided to Laura that she was shy. She added that she was sorry, but she had to fetch her little brother from the infants’ school. He was not allowed to cross the High Street alone. She spoke reasonably, without impertinence, and finished tearfully, ‘I couldn’t read it out to them boys!’

‘Quite right, too,’ agreed Laura. ‘All right then. Cut along. After all, why should you suffer because I give a rotten lesson?’

‘Hullo, hullo!’ said Mr Tomalin, appearing in Laura’s doorway as the girl hurried out after the others. ‘Been having trouble with Susan Hopkins? She’s an impudent little baggage. You don’t want to put up with any nonsense.’

‘I don’t intend to,’ replied Laura, who considered that it was high time to settle Mr Tomalin’s hash. ‘And if you don’t mind my saying so, will you kindly leave me to manage my own affairs? I am far more capable of dealing with adolescent girls than you are!’

‘Here, here, I say!’ protested Mr Tomalin, indicating the cupboard monitors.

‘Go and say it somewhere else,’ retorted Laura. She turned and began to put her books into her desk. She had behaved with impropriety, she knew; if she had not known, stifled giggles and whispers from the cupboard would have told her. ‘I shall never make a teacher,’ she told Mrs Bradley that evening in the Stone House, to which she had driven as soon as school was over. Mrs Bradley, however, was well satisfied. Laura had established one important point and had made a valuable contact. It seemed almost certain that Miss Faintley’s correspondent on the telephone had been a member of the school staff, and Laura was already in a position to test for herself, in circumstances which could scarcely arouse suspicion, the relationship, if there was one, between the school parcels and those of less orthodox character which Miss Faintley had collected from Hagford Junction.

Mrs Bradley did not agree with Laura that anything would have been gained if the schoolchildren could be questioned about Miss Faintley.

‘All you would acquire,’ she said, with her crocodile grin, ‘would be a scurrilous suggestion from the boys that Miss Faintley was a victim of “maiden virtue rudely strumpeted” and from the girls the equally romantic theory that her boyfriend killed her in a fit of jealousy. All these children read such Sunday papers as specialize in these matters.’

‘Yes, I suppose they do. Incidentally, I’m by way of making an enemy on the staff. That man Tomalin. I bit his head off to-day for not minding his own business. He’s had the impudence to try to keep order for me and to impress upon me not to stand cheek from the kids.’

‘Misdirected chivalry, don’t you think?’

‘No, I don’t! I know it isn’t. It’s just sheer showing off and nosey-parkering. He’s a washout himself and his only way of trying to prove that he isn’t is this attitude of pretending that other people are even more inefficient than he is! He gets under my skin!’

‘A waste of nervous energy on your part, dear child. Besides, a sense of inferiority and a disappointing professional life are not calculated to bring out the best in any man.’

‘That’s all very well!’ retorted Laura, looking in the mirror at her own flushed face and beginning to laugh. ‘You don’t have to put up with him! I do!’

‘What are the rest of the staff like?’

‘Pretty mixed. I don’t know an awful lot about them yet, and I’m as far off as ever from finding out which of the men was in with Miss Faintley over that business of the parcels.’

‘It’s early days yet to begin worrying about that. Later on, the police may be able to prise the information out of that (I am certain) villainous shopkeeper. And how go the biology lessons?’

‘Nature study – so-called. We don’t go in for biology. I think Miss Golightly feels it’s out of place in a mixed school, and I’m not at all sure she isn’t right. Sex-education, which is all that biology seems to add up to in modern schools, is the expense of embarrassment in a waste of muddled idealism, to my way of thinking. With which unpardonable bowdlerizing of the Bard I will break off in order to ask what’s for dinner to-night, a subject of considerably greater importance to me at the moment than any academic discussion of What Shall We Teach and How Shall We Teach it. Don’t you think so yourself? — or aren’t you hungry?’

Chapter Nine

MR BANNISTER

‘A Venus’ imp thou hast brought forth, so steadfast and so sage.’

nicholas orimald – A True Love

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