She collected Betty from Mrs Haste and later in the evening, when she was watching television, the telephone rang. The young man said:
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lacy, I didn’t mean to bring up that thing about your nationality. It’s not your fault, Mrs Lacy, and please forget I mentioned it. I’m sorry.’
‘Please don’t telephone me again. That’s all I ask. I’ve given you the only answer I can.’
‘I know you have, Mrs Lacy. You’ve been kind to listen to me, and I know you’re concerned for Norma, don’t think I’m not aware of that. I love Norma, Mrs Lacy, which has made me a little unprofessional in my conversations with you, but I promise we’ll neither of us bother you again. It was just that she felt she’d made a terrible mistake and all the poor thing wanted was to rectify it. But as my work so often shows me, Mrs Lacy, that is hardly ever possible. Are you there, Mrs Lacy?’
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘I’ll never stop loving Norma, Mrs Lacy. I promise you that also. No matter what happens to her now.’
She sat alone in her living-room watching the ten o’clock news, and when she heard Miss Custle in the hall she didn’t offer her a cup of tea. Instead of Betty’s rattling feet on the stairs there would be Miss Custle’s aged panting as she propelled her bulk to her upstairs room. Instead of Betty’s wondering questions there would be Miss Custle’s gloom as still she mourned her long departed lover.
The television news came to an end, an advertisement for Australian margarine began. Soon after that the programmes ceased altogether, but Bridget continued to sit in her living-room, weeping without making a noise. Several times she went upstairs and stood with the light on by Betty’s bed, gazing at the child, not wiping away her tears. For Betty’s well-being, and for Norma’s too, in all humanity the law would be reversed. No longer would she search the faces of Father Gogarty and Mrs Winnard and Miss Custle for the signs of what they really believed. They would put that into words by saying she was good and had courage.
In the countryside of long ago her failure in marriage and motherhood might be easier to bear, but she would be a stranger there now. She belonged among her accumulated odds and ends, as Betty belonged with her mother, and Liam with the woman he loved. She would look after Miss Custle when Miss Custle retired from the Underground, as fate dictated.
He had, romantically, a bad reputation. He had a wife and several children. His carry-on with Sarah Spence was a legend among a generation of girls, and the story was that none of it had stopped with Sarah Spence. His old red Ford Escort had been reported drawn up in quiet lay-bys; often he spent weekends away from home; Annie Green had come across him going somewhere on a train once, alone and morose in the buffet car. Nobody’s parents were aware of the facts about him, nor were the other staff, nor even the boys at the school. His carry-on with Sarah Spence, and coming across him or his car, made a little tapestry of secrets that suddenly was yours when you became fifteen and a senior, a member of 2A. For the rest of your time at Foxton Comprehensive – for the rest of your life, preferably – you didn’t breathe a word to people whose business it wasn’t.
It was understandable when you looked at him that parents and staff didn’t guess. It was also understandable that his activities were protected by the senior girls. He was forty years old. He had dark hair with a little grey in it, and a face that was boyish – like a French boy’s, someone had once said, and the description had stuck, often to be repeated. There was a kind of ragamuffin innocence about his eyes. The cast of his lips suggested a melancholy nature and his smile, when it came, had sadness in it too. His name was Mr Tennyson. His subject was English.
Jenny, arriving one September in 2A, learnt all about him. She remembered Sarah Spence, a girl at the top of the school when she had been at the bottom, tall and beautiful. He carried on because he was unhappily married, she was informed. Consider where he lived even: trapped in a tiny gate-lodge on the Ilminster road because he couldn’t afford anything better, trapped with a wife and children when he deserved freedom. Would he one day publish poetry as profound as his famous namesake’s, though of course more up-to-date? Or was his talent lost for ever? One way or the other he was made for love.
It seemed to Jenny that the girls of 2A eyed one another, wondering which among them would become a successor to Sarah Spence. They eyed the older girls, of Class 1, 1A and 1B, wondering which of them was already her successor, discreetly taking her place in the red Ford Escort on dusky afternoons. He would never be coarse, you couldn’t imagine coarseness in him. He’d never try anything unpleasant, he’d never in a million years fumble at you. He’d just be there, being himself, smelling faintly of fresh tobacco, the fingers of a hand perhaps brushing your arm by accident.
‘Within the play,’ he suggested in his soft voice, almost a whisper, ‘order is represented by the royal house of Scotland. We must try and remember Shakespeare’s point of view, how Shakespeare saw these things.’
They were studying
‘On Duncan’s death,’ he said, ‘should the natural order continue, his son Malcolm would become king. Already Duncan has indicated – by making Malcolm Prince of Cumberland – that he considers him capable of ruling.’
Jenny had pale fair hair, the colour of ripened wheat. It fell from a divide at the centre of her head, two straight lines on either side of a thin face. Her eyes were large and of a faded blue. She was lanky, with legs she considered to be too long but which her mother said she’d be thankful for one day.
‘Disruption is everywhere, remember,’ he said. ‘Disruption in nature as well as in the royal house. Shakespeare insinuates a comparison between what is happening in human terms and in terms of nature. On the night of Duncan’s death there is a sudden storm in which chimneys are blown off and houses shaken. Mysterious screams are heard. Horses go wild. A falcon is killed by a mousing owl.’
Listening to him, it seemed to Jenny that she could listen for ever, no matter what he said. At night, lying in bed with her eyes closed, she delighted in leisurely fantasies, of having breakfast with him and ironing his clothes, of walking beside him on a seashore or sitting beside him in his old Ford Escort. There was a particular story she repeated to herself: that she was on the promenade at Lyme Regis and that he came up to her and asked her if she’d like to go for a walk. They walked up to the cliffs and then along the cliff-path, and everything was different from Foxton Comprehensive because they were alone together. His wife and he had been divorced, he told her, having agreed between themselves that they were incompatible. He was leaving Foxton Comprehensive because a play he’d written was going to be done on the radio and another one on the London stage. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, daring to say it. ‘Oh, Jenny,’ he said.
Terms and holidays went by. Once, just before the Easter of that year, she met him with his wife, shopping in the International Stores in Ilminster. They had two of their four children with them, little boys with freckles. His wife had freckles also. She was a woman like a sack of something, Jenny considered, with thick, unhealthy-looking
