Children of the Master. Andrew Marr

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ And she put them away too.

      It was several days later, while playing table tennis, that Caro first noticed Pep. Pep was very tall, very thin, freckled, with intense dark eyes and cascades of black hair. And yes, there was some acne. The thinness was not unusual at Queen Eleanor’s – even the teachers joked that each year was divided into A and B streams, anorexia or bulimia. But the intensity of Pep’s stare was extraordinary. The moment their eyes met, Pep looked away again, but Caro felt an instant, completely unfamiliar shudder.

      The two girls soon struck up a friendship based on reading, cheerfully incompetent hockey and music. They hung around together. In year four, Caroline put an arm around Pep’s bony back. In year five, Pep returned her kiss; her mouth smelled of peppermint, and their tongues touched. By then they were leaders in the school Christian Union, and were an admired, deferred-to couple. At Queen Eleanor’s this was hardly exceptional. The school had a long-established Sapphic reputation, and at a time in British history when lesbianism was going mainstream, this caused barely a ripple among the parents. To have a gay daughter was, for a dull executive on the London commute, chic.

      As for the staff, they had plenty of other things to worry about. Caroline and Pep were among the girls who had developed to a fine art the communal destruction of teachers. One of them might begin to hum, in a high tone, in the middle of a lesson. Another would pick up the hum, and it would spread around the class. As soon as the teacher pounced in one direction, the noise billowed up from another. Group punishments had no effect. There is nothing half as frightening and destructive as a group of middle-class English girls intent on mischief, and Queen Eleanor’s was not alone in being unable to cope.

      The high mistress, the chief uncoper, was a large-bosomed, horse-faced woman whose greatest talent was her inability to see what was going on in front of her nose. Everything about the school was marvellous. Her girls were marvellous. She was lucky in her marvellous staff. She had surrendered long ago. She walked the corridors with a glassy, painted grin, in a bubble of invincible optimism. It so chanced that idiot opti-mism, an inability to see looming disaster on every side, was a considerable skill in the Britain of her time. She could have run anything – a lousy, malodorous hospital; a violent, drug-infested prison; a tax-squandering, inept government department. In each case her smile would have been as bright, her self-confidence as intact, and her calmness hugely reassuring to all who worked for her. Everything would have been splendid.

      So there was, as far as the high mistress was concerned, no ‘mucking around’ at Queen Eleanor’s. Once, and once only, she had been persuaded by a newspaper article of the need to give the girls a lecture. But all her glossy circumlocutions had made this entirely pointless: the younger girls had no idea what she meant by ‘skulking in dark corners’, and the older ones had simply tittered. Anyway, the teaching staff were almost unanimous that the alternative – insanitary, dangerous and occasionally life-wrecking ‘messing about’ with boys – was worse. As the deputy head once remarked, ‘I’m so old I can remember when the girls who kneeled were the pious ones.’

      By the time they were in the upper sixth, of course, Caro and Pep had fallen out, and were barely speaking. Caroline’s charisma meant that she was constantly surrounded by admirers – sporty girls, musical girls, oddball girls. Pep, meanwhile, embracing her frizzy, black-eyed eccentricity, had plunged into darker places, cutting and ‘restricting’ and reading far too deeply.

      The day came when Caroline’s parents were called in for the ‘What next?’ conversation with the headmistress.

      ‘Caroline is exceptionally talented. She will do exceedingly well. She has done marvellously here and we have done marvellously with her. But we cannot quite decide, just at this moment, at what, exactly, dear Caroline will excel.’

      Her mother asked what sort of careers Queen Eleanor’s girls tended to pursue.

      ‘In the old days, it was all public service – the Foreign Office, the army, and so on. But …’ Her voice faded away. This was a hard one. In the Queen Eleanor’s Chronicle she had become a past headmistress of the art of euphemism. Patti Vidal, undoubtedly the stupidest girl the school had ever known, had become a glamour model, largely famous for her hindquarters. Few of Patti’s films could be referred to by name, never mind seen, by decent people. ‘Actress’, the headmistress had written firmly. ‘Royal Shakespeare Company, etc.’ Amy Brewer and Madelyn Strindberg, from the following year, were currently serving time in a Singaporean prison after a few exciting months as drugs mules. ‘Working in international pharmaceuticals’ appeared against their names. Lorraine Gatto, who had been a senior prefect, had apparently now opened a dungeon off Sloane Square, complete with whipping bench, nipple clamps, a suspendable cage and other useful gadgets. The headmistress had thought long and hard about Lorraine – such an obliging girl – before writing the single word ‘Rehabilitation’.

      But, faced with these transparently pleasant and intelligent parents, she hesitated. ‘Many of our girls these days go into entertainment – film, television, music, that kind of thing – and others do charity work. But Caroline is especially gifted. Everybody wants to be her friend, you see. She sings like a bullfrog and dances like a cow, but she lights up a room.’

      ‘You’re not suggesting she just waits around to find some chap to marry, I hope,’ her mother said.

      ‘Absolutely not. With the spread of pre-nups and so forth, we no longer recommend marriage. No. The extraordinary thing about Caroline is that people believe her. I think she needs to do something quite big, perhaps something in public life.’

      ‘Politics? She says she’d like to read politics at Edinburgh.’

      ‘You know, I was thinking more of banking. I think she’s too nice, too straightforward, for politics,’ said the headmistress.

      She had rarely ever said anything as nice about any girl to her parents; but on this occasion she was dead wrong. Caroline was perfect for politics.

      Pep’s parents, who had adopted her as a young child, never actually turned up to see the headmistress. There was no need. Their girl was utterly determined on a religious vocation. Her mum and dad joked that she’d become a nun. They were spared that. Angela studied theology at Sheffield, and after a year travelling in South America, she returned determined for ordination as a priest in the Church of England. Since they had left Queen Eleanor’s, Caroline and Angela had completely lost touch.

       A Terrible Story

       They think we are cynics. But if you don’t come into politics to make the world a better place, you’ll quickly find it a desolate trade.

      The Master

      There was literally nobody in Glaikit who David Petrie would have considered less likely to recruit him into a real political career than Tony Moretti. They’d known one another since school. Tony had been a couple of years ahead of Davie, and he was the same stoop-shouldered, lank-haired malcontent now that he had been back then. He’d been a Yesser, of course. The son of the local chip-shop owner, he was now a journalist – what else? – working for the Scottish Socialist newsletter, which at least kept him virtuously poor. He’d regularly denounced Davie’s father and the Labour clique in the council, which rather put him up in Davie’s estimation. Years of serving in a fog of cooking fat had given him a red, slightly pockmarked face, and his politics were appropriately rancorous; he seemed somewhere to the left of Galloway and Sheridan. So when Davie opened his door one evening to see Tony sternly staring back at him through his thick glasses, he had been unwelcoming – polite, but unwelcoming.

      ‘Weel, СКАЧАТЬ