The Time of Their Lives Page 7

  The café was just closing. A grumpy waitress approached them to point this out, then took one look at Ella’s companion and offered a menu instead. ‘Better be quick. We’re supposed to have closed ten minutes ago.’

  Wenceslaus gave the woman a dazzling smile. ‘What would you recommend?’

  ‘I’d avoid the lobster and the steak tartare.’ She winked. ‘How about the bacon sarnie? It’s the chef’s special.’

  ‘That would be great,’ Ella replied on his behalf. ‘And one for me, and two teas. You’re going to have to learn to drink tea if you’re a builder.’

  An enormous black and white cat emerged from the passageway that ran back to the kitchen and made a beeline for Wenceslaus. Despite its huge bulk it managed to wrap itself sinuously round his legs, purring noisily.

  ‘I see old Benjy’s taken a fancy to you,’ commented the waitress as she brought their teas.

  ‘Animals like me.’ Wenceslaus shrugged, stroking the blissed-out Benjy.

  Ella and the waitress exchanged a speaking look.

  It took him so short a time to wolf down the sandwich that Ella gave him half hers.

  ‘I am very grateful. I will return money when I get job.’

  ‘There’s no need.’ She watched him demolish her half in record time.

  ‘So where were you chucked out of? By your girlfriend?’

  ‘Minka lives in High Street. Above hairdresser. I think she wishes I had stayed in Warsaw. She has new boyfriend. He owns hairdressing shop. I think he is not a very clever man.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He calls salon Split Endz.’

  ‘You may be right.’

  Outside the café Ella held out her hand to say goodbye.

  ‘Thank you so much again. You could have called police and I get criminal record. After that no job possible.’

  ‘That’s OK. But you’ll have to leave tomorrow. If one of the other allotment holders finds you, they certainly will call the police. Especially Bill. Big man in a woolly hat. Don’t let him see you. Goodbye and good luck.’

  As she walked back towards the tube Ella asked herself if she were completely mad. She’d been burgled only a few nights ago and here she was giving the OK to a complete stranger who’d taken possession of her friends’ shed. Maybe he would run off with the lawn mower, but she didn’t think so.

  And what’s more, she was pretty sure Laurence would have done exactly the same thing.

  CHAPTER 4

  Claudia finished her marking and inputted the results via the hideously complicated software they had to use to assess students’ progress. Bloody hell, she couldn’t help thinking, this takes twice as long as in the old days.

  Was she just being a whingeing dinosaur? She thought of Peter Dooley and how he loved to show off about how wonderful all this stuff was. Did she want to stay on and fight him? She thought for a moment of Thierry and those heady days in Paris. You wouldn’t approve of me throwing in the towel, would you, Thierry? She wondered for a moment what had become of him. She hoped he hadn’t become a banker.

  Claudia came to a decision. She wasn’t going to let Dooley win hands down. Already he’d insinuated himself into her year group. Next it would the French exchange. The next day, as soon as assembly was over, she sought out the deputy head.

  ‘Sonia, could I have a word?’

  ‘Claudia,’ the deputy head responded, ‘the very person I wanted to see. It’s about the French exchange. Mr Dooley has made some exciting suggestions.’

  Claudia bristled. ‘Our French exchange is the envy of all the schools in the area . . .’ she began, trying to keep her hostility under control.

  ‘Indeed it is,’ replied Sonia, with an air of indulging a difficult child. ‘Which is why Peter has come up with some ideas to make it even better. As I’m sure you’ll concede, it takes a while for the shyer pupils to get to know each other.’

  ‘It’s a lot better now they all have Facebook.’ Claudia was impressed with her savvy in knowing this, though it was actually Gaby who had told her. ‘They get into contact long before they go to France.’

  ‘And what about the teachers? Do you go on Facebook to talk to your equivalent at the Lycée?’

  ‘I’m not on Facebook.’

  ‘Well, no matter. Mr Dooley suggests pupils and teachers all get to know each other. Via Skype.’

  Claudia said nothing. She’d never Skyped or whatever the bloody verb was.

  ‘You do know what Skype is?’ Sonia asked kindly.

  ‘Yes, Sonia, I do know what Skype is.’

  ‘Unfortunately, the Lycée still needs a bit of persuasion. Rather set in their ways, the French. So Mr Dooley is going to Paris this weekend with two of the pupils to set the whole thing up. You know what a techno-whizz he is. Then on Monday morning teachers and pupils can talk to each other face to face. Isn’t it exciting?’

  ‘But Sonia,’ Claudia asked in a suitably puzzled tone, ‘I thought the whole point of Skype was that it saved you the trouble and expense of actually meeting the people you were making contact with?’

  The deputy head shuffled her papers. ‘Yes, well, I’m sure this is a one-off. Can you be in my office at nine on Monday?’

  The rest of the week whizzed by as it always seemed to after half-term. Claudia even got Gaby to give her a demo of how to use Skype so that she didn’t make a complete idiot of herself.

  On Monday morning, Claudia was amazed to find not just the deputy head, but also Stephen the head teacher and a number of other heads of department gathered to see the famous demo. Tim Miller, Head of Physics, and one of Claudia’s mates, caught her eye. ‘Ready to witness the future of teaching, are you, Claudia?’ he asked in a low voice. He disliked Drooly Dooley as much as she did. ‘Soon we won’t have to turn up at all.’

  With her usual officiousness Sonia decided that she would make contact with Peter Dooley rather than leave it to Claudia.

  She clicked on the screen. ‘Hello,’ she spoke slowly and loudly, just like an old person, thought Claudia with amusement, ‘or rather, should I say, Bonjour? How are things your end?’

  To the surprise of the assembled teachers it wasn’t Peter Dooley but one of the pupils who appeared on the screen. ‘Hello, Miss Robertson? It’s Emma Wilson from Year 13. Not so good, I’m afraid. Mr Dooley’s not here.’

  ‘Not there?’ the deputy head almost screeched. ‘Then where the hell, I mean where on earth, is he?’

  Muffled giggles greeted the question. ‘He went out all night with the teachers from the Lycée. He says he ate a bad oyster.’ More giggles in the background. ‘But Ben from Mrs Warren’s set says you shouldn’t mix beer and red wine.’

  ‘Thank you, Emma,’ cut in the deputy head. ‘Ask him to call me when he’s feeling better.’

  Emma’s face disappeared from the screen.

  ‘Well, that was successful,’ commented Tim Miller, catching Claudia’s eye. ‘I might take my year group to Skype from the Large Hadron Collider.’

  When she got home that night, eager to share the description of Drooly Dooley’s disgrace, Don was nowhere to be seen. Only the sound of blues music playing on the kitchen radio told her he was home.

  A movement from upstairs alerted her that he must be using the computer in Gaby’s room. How strange. He normally used his laptop at the kitchen table. She poured them both a glass of wine and took his up as a peace offering.

  He jumped when she came into the room.

  ‘I brought you a glass of wine. To say sorry for being so snappish earlier. What’s that you’re looking at?’

  Don was attempting to turn off the computer before she could get a look at what was on the screen. There was a kind of angry defensiveness in the gesture which was unusual for him. Don was usually a sunny-natured dreamer, blessed with a natural, if sometimes infuriating, optimism. Hopeless, her mother would occasionally comment. He’ll never get anywhere because he’s completely without ambition. Your father was the same.

  At which
point Claudia, irritated herself, would find herself 100 per cent behind her husband.

  ‘What on earth are you looking at?’ she asked, surprised. He certainly wasn’t the type to conceal things from his wife. Oh God, not Internet porn! She suddenly panicked. One of the teachers at school had a husband who stayed up all night watching Italian housewives impaling themselves on everything from the plumber to a photogenic Alsatian. It wasn’t a joke, the woman had insisted tearfully, in fact, it was wrecking their marriage.

  ‘Nothing,’ Don insisted, looking guilty as hell. ‘Just checking a work document.’

  Claudia knew her husband well enough to tell at once that he was lying.

  ‘No you weren’t. You only look at work stuff on your laptop.’ His uncomfortable expression endorsed this. If Don was going to start lying he needed to go to evening classes in how to carry it off. ‘What was it you were looking at?’

  Don shifted unhappily. He wasn’t a natural deceiver. In fact, Claudia had often thought, if he was having an affair, she wouldn’t need lipstick on his collar or tell-tale Amex statements to find out; he’d probably own up after the first furtive grope.

  ‘If you must know, I was looking at houses. In Surrey.’ He turned the screen back on and clicked on the file he’d saved. It was of an idyllic country scene, the kind that could promote Olde Englande anywhere in the globe. ‘Minsley Wood. Delightful little place, shop and pub, village green, ten minutes from Minsley station which has a long-stay car park, on the main line into Victoria.’

  Claudia was stunned. It was always she who took the practical initiative in their marriage. She made the decisions and Don, smiling vaguely, stepped into line. She wasn’t at all sure about this new dynamic Don, especially since he knew her feelings perfectly well. ‘My, you have been busy.’

  ‘There’s a Victorian cottage for sale, four beds, room for grandchildren, if we ever get any, four hundred and fifty grand. We could sell this place for nine-fifty, according to the agent . . .’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Claudia couldn’t believe her ears, ‘what the hell do you mean, according to the agent? Are you telling me you’ve actually had an agent round without telling me?’ This was getting out of hand.

  Don looked mutinous, as if he were dealing with a class that had gone too far this time and he was about to put the whole bloody lot of them in detention. ‘Don’t give me that look. I’ve hardly sold the place under your feet.’

  ‘Fortunately, you can’t, since we own it jointly, but clearly you’d quite like to.’

  ‘I just wanted to know what it was worth, that was all.’

  ‘And he said nine hundred and fifty thousand?’ Despite her irritation Claudia was amazed, though she wasn’t going to let Don see it. They’d only paid £45,000 for the house when they’d moved here as young marrieds. Admittedly, that was more years ago than she cared to remember. £950,000! No wonder the younger generation couldn’t afford to get a foot on the housing ladder.

  Claudia glanced round at the home they’d shared all these years. It was nothing special. She loved it, of course, but it was a perfectly ordinary Victorian terraced house with a tiled open fireplace, double sitting room (it had been front room and parlour when they moved in but, like all middle-class families, they’d knocked it into what agents loved to call ‘a through lounge’), basement kitchen, four bedrooms (they’d turned a box room into the mandatory en-suite bathroom) and a long narrow garden at the back. It was like countless other London houses, all of which had suddenly rendered their owners millionaires simply due to the lack of suitable housing stock and the city’s sudden global desirability.

  ‘There is one small fly in the ointment of your Surrey fantasy,’ Claudia pointed out acidly. ‘As I told you, I don’t happen to want to live there!’

  It was at that moment, of all moments, that the phone rang. Since it was the landline, neither rushed to answer it. It was probably an irritating call saying they’d won something in a contest they hadn’t entered. The phone rang five times then switched to the answering machine.

  Her mother’s voice, an edge of distress sharpening its already cut-glass pronunciation, rang out through the sitting room. ‘Claudia, dear, please call as soon as you can. It’s your father. He’s had an accident.’

  Sal, still stunned by her new condition of unemployment, decided to splurge out on a cappuccino and a croissant in the café at the end of her road. She had a notebook with her and had set her phone to calculator. It was time to face some hard facts.

  The figures of her outgoings were so large she had to add them up twice. Rent, lighting and heating seemed ludicrously expensive, especially as she was hardly ever in. People might call things like that the basics but to her the basics were a monthly cut and colour, with nails if possible, wine rather than milk in the fridge, mood-altering handbags, the occasional taxi, a few fashion purchases each season, and going out with her girlfriends. Listening to them drone on about how a child cost you a quarter of a million, she’d always been rather relieved that she didn’t have any.

  Sitting outside the café, with no job to go to and no prospect of one, Sal felt more than the chill wind of autumn. She felt scared. Actually scared. It was such an unfamiliar emotion that she didn’t recognize it at first and thought that maybe she was sickening for something. Then she realized. It was fear that was making her shiver. Fear of not having the strength to go on fighting in the workplace, battling for jobs against women half her age, pretending to be young when actually she felt like admitting her bones ached sometimes, her neck looked like a turkey’s and she had started fantasizing about going to bed early.

  The truth was she was getting old.

  Sixty-three was the kind of age your grandma had always seemed to be, though she had probably been twenty years younger. The kind of age young people couldn’t even imagine. And all her icons were even older. Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Mick Jagger were all still singing for their suppers in their seventies, and lovely Leonard Cohen could probably give them almost a decade, and no one was laughing at them. A thought struck Sal forcibly.

  They were all men.

  In the past when she’d found herself suddenly unemployed, and in her long career that had happened more than once, she had simply got on the phone and told everyone useful that she was available. It had been her mantra that for every ten calls you made, one might lead to something useful. But at her stage – and let’s face it, age – to do that might shriek of desperation.

  The answer was a bit of selective targeting. She sent an email to the twenty or so people she knew well enough to approach without losing face and decided to concentrate on them. Over the next few days one or two came back to say that they’d bear her in mind, but from most there was a yawning – and in her view extremely ill-mannered – silence.

  One contact had heard of a job in Public Relations she might like to follow up on. The trouble was, Sal had always loathed publicists. Still, sixty-year-old beggars couldn’t be choosers. The job, it turned out, was with a luxury holiday company.

  Sal smiled. If there was one topic dear to her heart it was luxury holidays, though she had to admit most of the holidays she’d been on were five-star freebies provided by the very kind of company that wanted a PR. Still, surely that would make her doubly suitable? With that in mind she called Oakmore Holidays and Resorts and asked to speak to HR.

  The young woman who answered sounded slightly surprised to hear from her and said that the application was being made online.

  ‘Right.’ Sal thanked her, realizing how long it had been since she’d actually applied for a job. Certainly before it was done online.

  Never mind. She downloaded the application form at once. Bugger, it was one of those box-ticking, multiple-answer efforts which gave you no opportunity to bullshit – sorry, sell yourself – positively.

  Sal found she was actually dreading the box marked date of birth. But of course the anti-discrimination law meant they couldn’t ask you that any more. Phew.


  Hang on, now it was asking the dates of her education! Surely that was a sneaky way of finding out how old she was?

  Strengths and weaknesses? Oh, bloody hell, this was the kind of thing she was used to asking other people, not having to answer herself. Why Do You Want This Job? Because I’ve got bills to pay and I’m desperate!

  Why us? I’d like to give something back for all those wonderful freebies you’ve given me.

  If you were stranded on a desert island what two things would you want to take? Oh, for God’s sake, that’s obvious, my sarong and Ray-Bans. Obviously.

  And here it was, in the very last section, pretending to be for monitoring purposes only, they were asking her age!

  Surely they couldn’t ask that? She was going to have to find out if she had to fill that in. Claudia! Claudia would help, Claudia still had at least one foot in the workplace.

  But Claudia sounded deeply stressed and not at all Claudia-like when she answered Sal’s call.

  ‘What a nuisance about the job and I’d love to help, but I can’t. I’ve got to go to Surrey. My dad has fallen downstairs and probably fractured his hip. Don is delighted.’

  ‘Why would Don be delighted?’ Sal was mystified by this strange assertion about Claudia’s nice but dull husband. ‘He’s such a sweet man.’

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? He turns out to be more devious than Machiavelli. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you.’ And then, through gritted teeth, ‘I’m hoping not to be long. Unless Don has his way. Mafia bosses aren’t called Don for nothing, let me tell you.’

  Sal listened, flummoxed. What was Claudia on about?

  ‘Sorry, got to rush. I need to get to the hospital. Tell you what, try Ella. Employment was her speciality when she was a lawyer.’

  Actually, that was a brilliant idea. Ella was always so modest about her achievements, unlike Sal herself, that you forgot what a powerhouse she’d been.

  She would call her straight away.

  Ella sat bolt upright in bed, every nerve suddenly alert. What was that noise? Often there would be the strange other-worldly sound, halfway between a howl and a bark, of foxes fighting, a cry so strange that one guest came to ask if it could be a werewolf. There were also occasional owls calling to each other in the cemetery of Old Moulsford church a quarter of a mile away. But this wasn’t a natural sound, more of a crash, like a window breaking. Then she remembered the alarm. If it had been the window, the alarm would have gone off. With another flash of terror she realized that the security lights had gone on in the garden under the huge cedar tree.