Mr Tomalin made no attempt to introduce Laura. He charged up to the table, collected a cup of coffee from the girl who was about to pass it to one of the mistresses, grabbed two biscuits from an open tin which stood beside one of the trays, planted one of them in his mouth and the other on his saucer, fished in his waistcoat pocket for a couple of saccharine tablets, dropped them in his cup and made for a vacant chair.
A grey-haired, quiet-voiced man came forward from where he had been standing with his back against a radiator.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘May I introduce myself? I’m Rankin, senior assistant. Miss Golightly has a parent, so she asked me to do the honours.’
The bedlam into which Laura had been ushered by Mr Tomalin had calmed down. Raised voices were lowered. Mr Rankin slightly raised his.
‘Miss Menzies,’ he said. ‘Mrs Moles, Miss Cardillon, Miss Franks, Miss Batt, Miss Ellersby, Miss Welling, Mr Taylor, Mr Roberts, Mr Tomalin, Mr Fennison, Mr Trench. I won’t bother with what we all teach. You’ll find out soon enough. Perhaps,’ he continued, in a lowered tone as the babble broke out afresh, ‘Miss Cardillon, you’d give Miss Menzies the low-down. Cissie, some coffee for Miss Menzies. That’s the style. Help yourself to the biscuits, Miss Menzies. If you take sugar I’m afraid you’ll have to provide it for yourself. We get a tea and a milk allowance, but that’s all.’ He raised his voice again. ‘By the way, we seem to be all here. Who’s on playground duty?’
Miss Welling and Mr Taylor, who had hoped, on the first day of term, to escape this loathsome task, betook themselves to the open spaces, there, presumably, to make more difficult the art of mayhem and to cause litter to be cleared up, washbasins emptied and chains pulled. In the staff-room the flood tide of post-holiday conversation welled up once more. Miss Cardillon led Laura to a chair. She was a tall, fair-skinned, freckled woman in her thirty-second year, and Laura liked the look and sound of her as much as she had disliked the look and sound of the mediocre, disgruntled Mr Tomalin.
‘It’s a bigger staff than I should have thought,’ she said, in order to open the conversation.
‘Yes. Miss Golightly cuts a good deal of ice at the office, thank goodness, so we’re pretty well looked after. It makes a good deal of difference to the non-teaching time we get, and, with a subject like mine – six sets of essays a week, among other things – it’s rather useful to have a few periods off to do the marking.’
The break, all too short, came to an end on these words, and Laura asked, as she went down the stairs with Miss Cardillon, ‘What about lunch, by the way? Are we all on duty?’
‘Oh, no, there’s a rota and you won’t be put on it yet. We always give the new ones a chance to get acclimatized before the extraneous duties begin. But you can have canteen lunch if you want it.’
‘I don’t, really,’ Laura confessed.
‘Good. Let’s do the local pub, then. It’s the only place in Kindleford where one can get a decent meal, and Miss Golightly doesn’t mind. She goes home to lunch herself, most days, and leaves Rankin in charge. He’s a married man with kids, so he’s quite glad to get a free meal. If you’re on duty you don’t pay, you see. Well, here we part until twelve. Don’t forget to see your girls and Tomalin’s girls round the cloakroom. He looks after both sets of boys. And chivvy the little brutes, otherwise they’ll be all day, and the dinner hour is short enough as it is.’
Laura went into her classroom to discover that the zealous ink-monitor had overfilled most of the inkwells, a feat which was greeted joyously by the boys and with shrill disgust by the girls. Ink pellets began to fly. There were tears over ink-spotted frocks. Laura went into action, clouted heads, cursed the ink-monitor and ruined the blackboard duster. She had restored order, however, just as Mr Tomalin, with the unctuous crocodile sympathy of one colleague for the disciplinary troubles of another, came into the room without knocking. He carried a cane.
‘I thought I heard a noise,’ he remarked to the unnaturally silent class.
‘Yes, you did,’ said Laura, loudly and clearly. ‘I am sorry if we disturbed you. I am not an advocate of free discipline, but I am opposed’ – she eyed the cane sternly – ‘to a show of weakness masquerading as strength.’
‘Oh, well, I’m a believer in corporal punishment,’ said Mr Tomalin, taken aback by her tone as much as by her words. Laura glanced at her tingling palm and then at several unnaturally red left ears in the front row on the boys’ side of the class, and suddenly laughed.
‘I can’t stand that man Tomalin next door to me,’ she said to Miss Cardillon when they met to go out to lunch.
‘Think yourself lucky you’re not me,’ retorted Miss Cardillon with unprofessional frankness. ‘I have to share my subject with him, and by the time I get his classes the kids are fed up and sick to their little bellies of composition, grammar, and Eng. lit. I’d throw up my job except that I’ve had a hot tip that I’m to be short-listed for the next headship. So don’t talk about Tomalin to me!’
This set Laura’s thoughts in the direction of her real duty in the school.
‘That reminds me,’ she said. ‘Do we refer to the others just by surnames? I mean, do the men talk of you as Cardillon, Miss Cardillon, a nickname, or how?’
‘They call me Liz, behind my back. So do most of the boys.’
‘Liz?’
‘Short for Skinny Lizzie,’ explained Miss Cardillon cheerfully. ‘On the other hand, if I were ringing up the school to explain that I couldn’t come, or if I were out on a school visit and had some reason to ring up, I should inevitably say, Cardillon speaking. It’s considered rather Fauntleroy to call yourself Miss Cardillon on a mixed staff.’ Miss Ellersby and Miss Franks, who were joining them to make up a table for four, concurred in this opinion.
‘It doesn’t do to call too much attention to the blessed state of spinsterhood in this school,’ Miss Ellersby, an anaemic, sardonic-eyed woman of forty, added. ‘Although we only get four-fifths of the men’s money and work three times as hard as most of them, we’re looked upon as bloated plutocrats. What I say is, you can’t have a wife and still expect to have holidays in sunny Italy. Selfish brutes! They ought to try our lives for a bit! Digs and landladies, or else a flat and your own shopping and chores! If it weren’t for the holidays, I should go crackers, for one!’
‘I don’t know,’ said Miss Golightly, coming into Laura’s, first ‘nature’ lesson, ‘whether you would care to call for the next parcel of school stock? It is just as you like, of course. Elbows, Frances! Handkerchief, Evans!’
The two children looked so much astonished at being thus addressed that Laura guessed that these injunctions were not Miss Golightly’s usual line of country. The head, she thought, was embarrassed, an uncommon state of affairs and one which indicated clearly that, a conscientious and intelligent woman, she fully realized that to offer Laura the task which possibly had brought Miss Faintley to her death was to take advantage of the possession of authority, a thing she never knowingly did. She added, very quickly:
‘I can easily make other arrangements, but, as I know quite well why you are here, I thought perhaps it would offer facilities if—’
‘I’d like it very much,’ said Laura warmly. ‘When would you wish me to go?’
‘It could be to-morrow morning, I think. I have been looking at the time-table. You have only one nature lesson. It is with 1B. They can draw instead, and Mr Tomalin, who is free then, can sit with them while he marks his books. You have your own form for the rest of the time. They can have an extra arithmetic lesson and then do silent reading. You might set them a chapter which they can prepare for an essay. That is only a suggestion, of course, but it is as well to set before them some definite objective, otherwise they only waste their time. How are things going? Quite well?’