Mr Alfred, MA Page 8

  But Gerald and his friends were in high spirits. At the school dinner they chucked spuds across the room when the teacher on duty had his back to them. They skited peas on the floor at the server’s feet when she passed with a loaded tray against her big bosom. They poured salt ad lib on the sweets of the diners across the table. They rattled their cutlery with a cha-cha, cha-cha-cha accompaniment. Smudge and Poggy importuned the perambulating teacher.

  ‘Please sir he spat on ma dinner.’

  ‘Please sir A never. He done it on mines first.’

  ‘Please sir he’s telling lies. It was him.’

  Accuser and counter-accuser waited to see what the teacher would do. He looked down on one and then the other, turned neutrally away, and went on perambulating.

  They tried him again next time round.

  ‘Please sir he put salt on m’ice cream.’

  ‘Please sir he pinched mines.’

  ‘Please sir kin we have mair ice-cream?’

  The teacher plodded silently on.

  After four o’clock they went to Ianello’s for a celebration. Gerald ordered three cokes.

  ‘And three lucies,’ he added.

  When Enrico served him he pretended he hadn’t any money, fumbled tediously in all his pockets. Enrico had to be patient. He had always to be patient with the boys from Collinsburn. Gerald put the money out at last in slow instalments of small change. He picked up the three loose cigarettes and handed them round. Fag in mouth, lifting their coke with a straw in the bottle, they all turned from the counter and surveyed the premises.

  Gerald strolled to his favourite table, drawing his satellites round him. They were bigshots with a reservation in a posh restaurant sitting down to a drink before they called a waiter and ordered a meal. They talked loud and long. But they missed an audience.

  ‘Hey, Nello!’ Gerald shouted. ‘Is there nae dames come here noo?’

  Enrico served a little girl with an iced lolly and ignored him.

  ‘Whaur’s Martha Weipers these days?’ Poggy bawled.

  He scraped his foot on the floor like a restive stallion and lolled his tongue lasciviously.

  ‘Ach, her!’ said Smudge. ‘I bet she’s been screwed by yon toffee-nose.’

  Enrico said nothing.

  Gerald grinned.

  Wilma and Jennifer came in, pushing each other on their way over the threshold. They giggled. They were chewing bubblegum, and a pink hemisphere was protruded and retracted irregularly from their lips. They joined the boys. Gerald was pleased. He welcomed Wilma and Poggy took care of Jennifer. Smudge entertained them with song and story. He was the court jester.

  Enrico watched them. They could have been worse.

  Apart from pocketing a couple of ashtrays, scratching their initials on the paintwork, and lifting a handful of tubular- packed sweets on their way out, they gave him no bother. Enrico saw them steal the sweets. But he knew it was his own fault for leaving the display-box so accessible. When they were crossing the door he called after them.

  ‘Tough guys, eh? Fly men! Don’t want you back here!’

  Gerald stopped, turned round.

  ‘I saw you,’ said Enrico. ‘Next time I call the police. I warn you.’

  Gerald raised his right hand, the palm in, and jerked two fingers forked at Enrico. Repeated the gesture, grinning.

  He had only a month to go before he left school.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Tired of living unloved unloving Mr Alfred fell in love. She was only a child, five feet one, seven stone two. But you can’t measure the depth of a man’s love by the height and weight of its object.

  It happened when he was meditating hatred rather than love. For the first time in his life he was given a class of girls. Three periods a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. The last forty minutes of morning school. He complained.

  ‘Somebody’s got to take them,’ said Mr Brown.

  ‘Why me?’ said Mr Alfred. ‘You’ve cut my free time.’

  ‘I’ve cut everybody’s free time,’ said Mr Brown.

  ‘There’s a shortage of staff. Or didn’t you know?’

  ‘Girls!’ said Mr Alfred. He was disgusted. A gloomy man glumly niggling. ‘What am I supposed to do with them?’

  ‘Poetry Monday,’ said Mr Brown. ‘Oral composition Wednesday. Debates, speech training, anything like that. Use the tape recorder. Spot of written work on Friday. Kind of diary of the week, say. Call it creative writing. Encourage them to say what they think. Self-expression. It’s only three periods. You can waffle your way through.’

  ‘Waffling’s more your line,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘Suppose they have nothing to express?’

  ‘Self-expression, I like that,’ said the eavesdropping Mr Dale. ‘Makes it sound good, eh? Dumb weans. Self-expression my arse.’

  ‘I’m paying you a compliment,’ said Mr Brown. ‘These are first year girls. I wouldn’t give them to a man at all if I could help it. They can be such little bitches. I certainly can’t give them to any of the younger men. I’m relying on you to keep them in order. Maybe even teach them something. A man of your experience and may I say sobriety.’

  ‘I think your last word’s a bit—’ said Mr Alfred.

  His head was high, his voice was cold. He saw an innuendo about his private life. He thought his aposiopesis more dignified than any word.

  ‘I mean in class,’ said Mr Brown. ‘You have what the Romans called gravitas. There’s no danger of you joking with them. I’ve always found it a mistake to make a joke with a class of girls. You lose them for good. It’s different with boys. You can make a joke with them and then all right – joke over! That’s it. But girls want to keep it up. They won’t stop giggling. The young men coming in now, flippant types, they’re no use with girls’ classes. But you have that special air about you. Like one of Shakespeare’s grave and reverend signiors.’

  ‘Butter,’ Mr Dale chanted.

  ‘Othello,’ said Mr Alfred.

  Mr Brown was quite sincere. He was sure Mr Alfred was so humourless the girls would see no use trying to lead him on. There was plainly no fun to be had from him. He was such a sourpuss they would never think he was smashing or fab or terrific or out of this world or whatever their current word was for any male who excited their silly little minds. They would regard him as a dead loss, a square, a nutter, an oldie. They would settle down and perhaps do some work. If his guess was wrong he had nothing to lose. If a first year class of dim wenches were too slippery for Mr Alfred to control he could tell the headmaster the man had trouble with girls as well as boys. Then he could renew his plea to have him shifted.

  The human need to find a silver lining through the dark clouds shining made Mr Alfred look for a ray of light on the Stygian session ahead of him. He tightened his jaws till his decadent molars ached the first morning he stood at his desk and watched this strange new class flood into his room. They were all a-giggle, untidy and sweating after forty minutes in the gym, waddling, mincing, slouching, shuffling, hen-toed, splay-footed, unkempt, unclean, black-nailed, piano-legged, pin-legged, long and short, round and square, fat and thin, bananas and pears, big- breasted and flat-chested, chimps and apes, weeds and flowers, a dazzling tide of miscellaneous mesdemoiselles, twelve to thirteen years of age. Some wore nylons, some wore socks, some wore white hose to the knees, some had long hair, some had short, some had their hair styled, some wore it as it grew, some had washed their face that morning, some it seemed hadn’t ever.

  The ray he found was Rose Weipers. She sat down quietly on the front seat beside Senga Provan. They were conspicuously chums. But Gerald was gone. It was a new session. And Mr Alfred never believed in visiting the sins of the brother on the sister, far less on the sister’s friend. When he was a political-minded young man he disliked the totalitarian countries where they proved guilt by association. He would take Senga as he found her, a person in her own right. He found her rather unattractive. Her scared strabismic face, her freckles and her ginger hai
r somehow embarrassed him. He avoided looking at her.

  But Rose was different. She was clean and tidy. She looked human, even intelligent. Before the week was out he was thinking she looked pretty as well.

  He flicked through the progress-cards to find her iq. It wasn’t very high, just comfortably over the hundred. Senga’s was higher. That irked him a little. He had prepared the comment that her very name showed she was backward. The rest, like the horses in the same race as Eclipse, were nowhere. He saw he had been given a giggle of the less academic girls just as last session he had been given a huddle of the less academic boys.

  His only interest was Rose. He had a teacher’s snobbery about iqs, a teacher’s predilection for a welldressed child, a male weakness for a pretty face. When Rose came to him as a graceful trinity of good intelligence, good clothes and good looks, he had no choice. He made her his routine messenger. Whenever he had to pass on a circular from Mr Briggs it was always Rose Weipers he sent next door with the ‘please initial’ document.

  It didn’t take him long to make her an errand girl at lunchtime too. He sent her out for a morning paper, pretending he hadn’t time to get one on his way in. In fact he never bothered much about seeing a morning- paper. But it gave him an excuse to have her come back to him when the class was gone. Then he stopped going to the school dinners. He sent Rose to the local shops for rolls and cheese, rolls and gammon, a couple of hot mutton pies, anything he could take with a cup of tea in the staffroom. He didn’t care what. He was never interested in food.

  At first it was only when he had her in his class at the end of morning school that he sent her on an errand. But within the month she was coming along uninvited on other days to ask if there was anything he wanted. He always thought of something, because when she came back it meant he had her alone for a few minutes.

  Halfway through the term they had got into the habit of meeting every day at lunchtime. He would wait in his classroom. When she came to him he didn’t touch her. He told the critic at the back of his mind he wasn’t getting the girl to come to his empty room so that he could cuddle her. It was her simple presence, with no one watching, gave him pleasure. Just to be alone with her. That’s what he thought.

  Coming back after her first voluntary shopping for him she knocked some test-papers off his desk. She was parking a poke with two rolls and gammon and counting out his change. The papers glided under the poke and slipped to the floor.

  ‘That’s a good start,’ she said.

  She picked up the papers, tutting at herself but not flustered. He noticed the way she stooped, a girl’s way, bending the knees to keep her thighs from being exposed, not straddled and straightlegged like a boy. There was a certain elegant modesty about the movement that pleased him. And he loved the way she said ‘start’. As if they were beginning a new life together. He believed they were.

  She had a talent for making conversation. She would talk to him the way she would talk to a friend her own age. But not always. She puzzled him. She was as unpredictable as the grown women he had tried to love when he was young. One day she was chatty, the next day she hadn’t a word to say for herself. It was her confiding moods made him fall in love, as when she told him about her aunt.

  ‘I cried myself to sleep last night,’ she said, alone with him at his desk.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘What happened?’

  He bent to listen. He forgot he had said he would never touch her. He was only trying to show sympathy. He put an arm round her shoulder as he inclined an ear. She moved in close, telling him.

  Her Aunt Beth had been staying with them for three months and left yesterday to go to Corby and get married.

  ‘I’ll miss her,’ said Rose. ‘She was so good to me. I was awful fond of her.’

  He was no Alfred Lord Tennyson to object to her ‘awful’. He squeezed her shoulder.

  ‘But you’ll see her again,’ he said. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’

  His hand wandered down her shoulder and stroked her arm.

  He was sure she had an affectionate nature. Her talk was always about people she was fond of.

  ‘My dad’s been promising for weeks to take me to The Sound of Music,’ she said. ‘We were to go last night. But I didn’t get.’

  ‘You’ll learn that’s how life is,’ he said, instructing her in banalities by occupational habit. ‘You look forward to something and then it doesn’t come off. I hope you weren’t too disappointed.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I was more concerned about my dad. He wasn’t well. That’s why. He was sent home from his work. He’s in bed. My mum got the doctor in.’

  He liked the solemn way she said ‘concerned’. He liked the word itself since it came from her young lips. He thought the sick man was lucky to have Rose concerned about him.

  She told him of Martha’s high marks in exams. She was proud of her big sister.

  ‘Martha’s clever,’ she said. ‘Not like me.’

  He didn’t know Martha, didn’t want to. It was enough knowing Rose. He would have preferred her to be without a family, existing only for him. To think of her having a sister diminished her uniqueness.

  Her innocent conversation made him think she liked him. He was a happy man. He teased her sometimes.

  ‘That’s a fine face you’ve got today! What’s the matter with you? You look fed up.’

  ‘I’m fed up,’ she said, fed up. She gave him his poke and his change. ‘This weather. Put years on an elephant, so it would.’

  Nonstop rain and low graphite skies for a fortnight. A damp dismal world they lived in.

  ‘Season of mists,’ he said.

  Rose sniffed, not hearing or not caring.

  ‘I’ve got a cold,’ she said.

  ‘You stay in your bed tomorrow,’ he said. It gave him a warm feeling of intimacy to mention bed to her, to think of her there.

  ‘Dear me, look at your hair!’ he cried. ‘It doesn’t know which way it’s going.’

  Emolliated with affection he stroked her hair from crown to nape, smoothed it back from her ear. Fingertip on an auricle. So tender.

  ‘Can’t do a thing with it,’ she said. ‘Washed it last night.’

  She slanted her head away. He felt his hand rejected.

  Then she made him jealous. He was waiting at his classroom door for her return from the shops. The sight of her coming along always made him love her. She looked so young, so remote from the world’s slow stain, so trim and brave, so lonely and devoted, coming back to him and him alone, he was soothed to tenderness, his vanity gratified. She always seemed so much smaller outside the classroom, more of a child, he felt quite paternal.

  He saw her meet the gym-teacher in the corridor. Cantering along, lightfooted in plimsolls, the gym-teacher grabbed her by the arm, birled her. Mr Simmons. A eupeptic, bigchested, broadshouldered young man.

  ‘Hiya, Rose!’ he greeted her.

  He plunged his hand into her thick brown hair and ruffled it. Rose stopped, head down, accommodating the exploring hand, laughed. Mr Simmons weaved, boxing at her, clipped her lightly on the chin.

  ‘I’ll bang you,’ said Rose.

  She raised a miniature fist. She was pink and delighted.

  Mr Simmons danced round her on his toes. Rose shaped up to him, leading with her right but handicapped by holding in it the poke with Mr Alfred’s lunch. They made a palaestra of the deserted corridor. Still sparring even as they parted they both seemed pleased with the brief encounter.

  ‘You don’t get Mr Simmons for PT, do you?’ said Mr Alfred dourly. He took the poke and change. He had a grudge against her for being so pretty that another man liked her. ‘How does he know you?’

  ‘Everybody knows me,’ said Rose.

  ‘Indeed?’ he said, still sulky.

  ‘I get him sometimes,’ Rose explained. ‘He takes the netball team for practice after four when Miss Avis can’t stay.’

  ‘But you’re not in the netball team,’ he challenged
her. Very suspicious he was. ‘At your age.’

  ‘Not the school team, that’s sixth year,’ she said. She clicked her tongue at his absurd quizzing. ‘The class team I mean, for the class league.’

  He didn’t know anything about class teams and a class league. She was helpless at his huff and left at once. So he got no conversation that day. It troubled him. He had been afraid he was in love. Now he was sure. Given the choice, he would rather have an hour with Rose than a night with Stella.

  He couldn’t stop thinking of Mr Simmons wrestling with Rose in the corridor. It was so natural, so harmless. Nobody could say there was anything improper in it. Rose had taken it laughing. Obviously she liked Mr Simmons. Her threat to bang him was an example of the free and easy relations between a modern pupil and a modern teacher. She would never have said it to him. But then he could never have done what Mr Simmons did. He wished he could.

  He knew the trouble lay in his own bad mind. He wanted to fondle Rose. But his bad mind inhibited him. He was afraid if anyone saw him he would get the name of a lecherous old man. Even if nobody saw him Rose might be offended or frightened. She might know what evil creatures men could be. But she could let Simmons ruffle her hair and wrestle with her because she trusted Simmons. Of course Simmons was a married man with two little girls. Simmons was a man used to showing affection. Simmons had the right touch.

  His bad mind kept annoying him. There was no use saying he could no more assault Rose than fly in the air, it would be against the gravity of his nature. He could imagine many things he would never do. He could imagine himself committing suicide though he knew he never would. He had come near it the day he knew his poems would never be published, and given up the idea for good. It wasn’t in his nature. He could imagine himself attacking Rose to feel her breasts and lift her skirt. He knew he never would. But he knew such things were done by men his age to girls her age. His fear was that by some misconstrued telepathy Rose might suppose he intended the enormities he sadly knew were practised if he tried to play with her the way Simmons had done.