And Penny suddenly found herself telling the most embarrassing story ever. With her friend Deborah Watts in her bedroom back in the old house. She was ten. Debs had said, ‘You don’t even know how to snog.’ And Penny went, ‘Yeah, I do. Course I do.’ Deborah’s speculative eye roved Penny’s room and lighted on her Girl’s World. A ghastly life-sized plastic bust of a Barbie doll with all this hair you were meant to do up in styles of your choice and a face for scrawling make-up on. Deborah went, ‘Go on. Snog your Girl’s World.’ Penny had done so, and this is what she told the class. The others sniggered appreciatively and a little uneasily, but Mr Northspoon had been delighted. That was the note he had ended their first lesson on. But before they went he gave them each a soft-back copy of A Room with a View, which he said was the most wonderful book ever about somebody’s first snog.
Somehow Penny had found out that his name was Vincent and that he was generally called Vince. It was the kind of fact that slipped into one ear and simply stayed there. She thought it was an old-fashioned name, like something out of the fifties.
On her way to his class that morning she dropped her tutor group’s register off at the secretary’s office as asked. She bumped into him down there, slipping blithely through the dark corridors, through the press of small bodies. He was in a purple jacket today, rubbing shoulders with everyone, giving genial shoves when necessary, heading in her direction. He’s more like one of us, Penny thought as they walked straight up to the secretary’s door together. He grinned and gave a little ‘after you’ nod, clutching his Room with a View to his chest.
Penny knocked briskly and led the way into the typing pool. Before she knew it, she was asking him, ‘How did you get to be called Vince?’
The secretary was scowling at them. She was wearing ski pants and always looked as if she was trying really hard not to pee.
‘It’s my dad,’ Vince said. ‘He’s a teddy boy. He thought it was a teddy-boy name. He still is one.’
‘This town’s still in the fifties,’ Penny said.
Then her teacher was talking to the secretary, asking after redirected post. The secretary was still scowling, but less when she talked to him. Penny left the register on the desk and went.
Throughout that lesson, as they talked through the Florence chapters of the novel and Vince tried to explain what Mr Emerson was getting at when he took Lucy aside by the Giotto frescoes and gave her a good talking-to, Penny was still mulling things over. She was surprised Vince had gone telling her about his father. Another barrier had gone down: he was just another bloke in a typical Aycliffe house. Penny knew he lived just by the school. One night last week she had left school by the wrong exit, following him. She went to the shop for fags and saw Vince duck through the crowds of kids, looking not much different to the other sixth-formers, and hurry across the grass, through the garages, and up a back gulley into the yard of a terraced house. He lived in the old part of town. Penny saw.
For him breaktimes were murder. The others sat round tables and grumbled and smoked and drank foul coffee. The staff room was across from the sixth-form room and their music shook through the walls: the Smiths. He felt reincarnated, somehow having got it wrong, snapping his Kit-Kat with a twinge of spite. Shreds of chocolate fell on his immaculate white trousers. Looking up, he saw Mrs Bell at the coffee machine, stressed, jabbing all the buttons. Snatching up her cup, she actually muttered ‘Thank you’ to the machine. She came over and plonked herself down by him.
The others were caught up in a discussion about admin.
He was off in a doze, thinking about Mr Emerson by the Giotto frescoes. It was Denholm Elliot he saw, as in the film. Gently the old man set his voice booming in the cavernous spaces and told Lucy plainly that the things of the universe just don’t fit together. That their awkwardness causes world-sorrow, and that all you can do is unpack your sorrows from your old kit bag and… what was it he suggested? Lay them out in the sunshine. Oddly the sun was coming through the clouds at that point, tepid and yellow. The music through the thin walls was ‘This Charming Man’: Morrissey on about how he’d go out tonight if he had a stitch to wear.
The geography teacher handed round pictures of his new baby. He was the thinnest person Vince had ever seen. He wondered vaguely how he could have the strength to squeeze anything life-producing from himself. Beside him and looking burlier than ever in a red tracksuit, the PE teacher was scowling. When Vince had been working his way up through the years here, ten or more years ago, that bastard had made his life a misery. Since the beginning of this term they hadn’t exchanged a word. It would come. Vince realised the PE teacher was actually scowling at Mrs Bell. She was lighting her second cigarette of the mid-morning break.
In solidarity he lit his own, reaching into his bag and pulling out the black Sobranies, just for effect.
That Penny was a bit forward, asking him things all the time. Still, it showed that he wasn’t coming across as standoffish. The business about Aycliffe being stuck in the fifties was sharp of her, too. He could remember his own moment of realising that an abnormal number
