‘Never mind,’ Gran snapped. ‘We’ll find him ourselves.’ And she thrust past the other woman pulling Matthew to keep pace with her.
Matthew heard a door snap behind him. ‘She’s gone,’ he whispered.
‘Of course. What else would she do?’ Assurance was catching and Matthew felt a shiver of excitement.
‘The principal’s door is the one at the end of the corridor,’ he told her in a low voice and was quite surprised that he no longer wanted to whisper.
‘Good. We’ll introduce ourselves.’
Gran knocked briskly and they entered a room which might have been a monk’s cell for all its bare, comfortless furnishings. No sun penetrated the little wooden hole and only the dimmest of outside light filtered through the small window two thirds of the way up the wall. The single pane of glass scratched and opaque with age had dark hairy little corners where spiders had long nested without disturbance. Ledgers lay on a wooden table and a couple of old wooden cupboards propped themselves against the wall. On a stiff wooden chair behind the table sat a short grey-haired man with a soft grey furry beard and rimless spectacles. He rose as they entered and placed the one other chair in the room on the opposite side of the table for Gran.
He looked at Matthew who was still standing, allowing his gaze to wander a moment uncomfortably around the room, and smiled a little shyly and helplessly as if there was a secret to share. Then he patted him on the head, lifted his shoulders in the barest shrug and returned to his seat.
‘Mr Werther, my grandson has been bullied by one of your teachers. I am here to make a formal complaint. He had no money for the “contribution”, I believe she calls it, to the war effort and she subjected him to both physical abuse and public humiliation. As a result he struck at her with one of her clasps and scratched her cheek. I consider this entirely self-defence.’
Mr Werther sighed. He had said nothing except ‘Good morning’ to them but his quietness held no antagonism. When he sighed Matthew raised his head from staring at the floor.
‘She is very loyal to the Empire,’ he said sadly. ‘A good woman but fanatical, yes?’
‘There is no such thing,’ Gran snapped. ‘Good people are rarely fanatical, particularly if their fanaticism hurts others.’
‘You think so?’ His words were non-committal but behind the grey beard Matthew sensed assent.
‘She has had a hard life—an only daughter ruled by an autocratic father. Nothing of her own. Some women—very difficult. Soured. I think, you know this place, the soul needs a little sunlight. Yes?’ The softly spoken words tiptoed around the room before they vanished into shadowy corners or floated upwards to disappear in the obscure recesses of the ceiling.
‘So she bullies children,’ said Gran, ‘the bullied becomes the bully. The world’s full of them. Mr Werther, you and I, we’re immigrants to this country, forced from our own to live in another. Bullies satiate their own unhappiness with the blood of others. I don’t bully and I believe you don’t, Mr Werther.’
‘No, but I do try to fit in. An immigrant should be loyal to his new home. Yes?’
‘Not to the bullies in it.’
‘No, not to the bullies.’ He paused, looked at the boy. ‘Do you like music, Matthew? In Germany every Friday night we played music—Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, so beautiful. My father played the violin, Mother the flute and I, I played the piccolo.’ He giggled, a little timid scale of nervous explosions that burst through his beard into the air. He caught a hand to his mouth to stop his laughter.
‘It would suit me, the piccolo, wouldn’t it? Such a little chap.’
Gran began to smile.
‘You can return to school, Matthew. Nothing will happen to you.’ Mr Werther rose. ‘I’ll stop the contribution system. Perhaps a little box in the corridor, all quite anonymous, for those who wish to give.’ He saw them out, smiled at Matthew and patted him on the head again.
‘I try to make school not too bad for them. I must try harder. Yes?’
‘Well,’ said Gran when they were out on the street, ‘that wasn’t difficult, was it?’
‘No.’ Matthew was uncertain. He couldn’t understand how his problem had been solved. Very little had been said about it at all.
Mother sewed her own clothes. Occasionally she made shirts and pants for Matthew but it was usually only after Gran reproached her about his appearance.
‘It’s bad enough for him to be poor, Margaret, but to be poor and look poor is to be the devil all over.’
‘You make him something then. Haven’t I enough to do?’
‘No more than I and usually not as much.’
At these times Margaret sulkily got out the small hand-operated Singer machine. Digging into her basket she would thrust aside first one piece of cloth then another. Sometimes a discarded fragment would slide over the edge of the basket and drop in a small shining heap on the green linoleum. These bright spots reminded Matthew of coloured seaweed—crimson, purple, lettuce-green spattered in rocky recesses in green pools. Colour to Matthew belonged out of doors.
On most days the light within the house was muted by blinds drawn two thirds of the way down the windows. When Gran had her way she pulled them up and light blazed in revealing mangy patches on the carpet, and chairs with shiny balding headrests. Margaret as quickly drew them again, fussing over the net curtains which required equal numbers of gathers on each side.
‘For goodness sake, Margaret, do we have to live in perpetual gloom? Let a little sun in.’
‘It’s vulgar to let the neighbours see into our rooms.’
‘What neighbours?’
‘From outside our house looks charming, quite charming; coloured sandstone,
