“I suppose not. Nor does it sound as if the person who lives in such a place needs to cart a box of old books to sell in Beverley. What happened to this husband?”
“He died. Drowned, I believe. A swimming accident. I’m afraid I don’t know all the details. She never said any more than that and, well, it wasn’t something one pried into, disturbing old feelings and all, probing old wounds.”
“Drowning, you say? An accident?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Hmm. How long ago did it happen?”
“I’m not sure. Seven or eight years, or thereabouts. Before she came to Linford Hall, at any rate.”
“Did Miss Scott come from around here?”
“As far as I know, they’d always lived in the same house she’s in now, at least since they were married. I don’t know where Miss Scott lived before then. I think she taught in Hull for a while before she came here, though.”
“I assume she didn’t need to work.”
“I suppose not. But one thing I will say about Marguerite is that she’s an excellent teacher. She loved her job. She wasn’t the type to hang about the house all day and... well, do whatever people do when they hang around the house all day.”
“I read quite a bit, watch old films, do a little gardening, go for—”
Alice laughed. “I don’t mean you. You’re retired, and even though you’re entitled to be as lazy as you want, I’m sure you use your time most productively. Marguerite was a hard worker. I think she needed her job. Maybe not for the money, but because it meant something to her.”
“Yet the school let her go. She never remarried?”
“Not that I know of. And I think I would have known. After all, she was with us for four years. A wedding would have been hard to overlook.”
“And the story behind her abrupt departure from Linford?”
“Aha,” said Alice. Thereby hangs a tale. And she put her finger to her lips as Andrea delivered their meals.
I have to confess that I had been expecting some titillating story of lesbianism in a girls’ boarding school, or perhaps a confirmation of my Lady Chatterley’s Lover theory, a sexual liaison between posh Miss Scott and the school groundskeeper or gardener. After all, what else could a teacher do that was terrible enough to lose him or her the job? It turned out that Linford School was a law unto itself in that respect.
Crushes happened often enough, Alice told me, and in most cases they could nipped in the bud before they progressed to a serious level. Students had even had crushes on her, she admitted. Sexual assault, unwanted fondling and the like were much rarer, though a games mistress had been fired three years ago for squeezing a student’s breast.
“Did a troublesome student have a crush on Marguerite Scott?” I asked.
Alice shook her head. “No. Nothing like that. Unless it was an extremely well-kept secret.”
“Which you think is unlikely?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. It would be difficult to keep that sort of secret around Linford.”
It turned out that Marguerite Scott’s sins had been of a very different order: persistent absenteeism and a fondness for the bottle being the chief among them, which perhaps helped explain Alice Langham’s reluctance to sample a glass of Chablis at lunchtime. The principal was a strict teetotaler, she told me, which hadn’t helped. Finally, Miss Scott had taken one day off too many and was discovered to be drunk in class after an extended lunch with an old friend. Had she played truant that time, rather than return to school in her inebriated state, her punishment might have been less severe. But not only had she returned to Linford Hall late that afternoon, she had driven her car there and parked it sloppily, scuffing the side of the biology teacher’s Toyota as she did so. The students in the one class she attempted to teach that afternoon complained that she was repeating herself, giggling and bumping into her desk, and that her writing on the blackboard was an illegible scrawl. One of them said that when she stood up to leave, Miss Scott pushed her back into her chair roughly.
There was no breathalyzer except the principal herself, who deemed Marguerite Scott unfit to carry out her responsibilities, and as this wasn’t her first warning, she was to leave immediately. According to Alice, nobody seemed to have bothered to ask Miss Scott why she had acted in such a manner calculated to result in her dismissal, and it remained a mystery to this day.
“How long had she been behaving that way: drinking, absenteeism?”
“Only since after we got back from the summer holidays. Previous terms she’d been perfectly well behaved, if a little aloof and cool in her manner.”
“Not warm and fuzzy, then?”
“Not in the least.”
“What happened next?”
“Nothing. That was it. She left without a fuss. In fact, I happened to be quite near Gwyneth’s office at the time — that’s our principal, Gwyneth Morwyn — and you wouldn’t believe the language that came out of Marguerite Scott’s mouth. Well, perhaps you would, having been at Cambridge and all, but it was quite shocking to me at the time, and I’m no prude. So whether she had any chance at all of keeping her job when she went in for her little chat with Gwyneth, she certainly had ruined any possibility of forgiveness when she emerged.”
“And none of you kept in touch with her?”
“No. She wasn’t... I mean, she didn’t really mix with the rest of the teaching staff. She was polite enough, but like I said, she always remained rather aloof. She made no effort to fit in. She never talked to us about her life, never shared experiences, asked advice or anything.”
“The other teachers disliked her?”
“I wouldn’t say disliked. Not actively, at any rate. But she certainly wasn’t well liked. She had no close friends at Linford. There was no strong connection, no sense of her belonging to the community. That time she pointed out her house, it was about all she said during the entire journey.”
“And the drinking?”
“Fairly recent, too. Definitely after we returned from the summer holidays. I mean, she wouldn’t have lasted as long as she did — which is about four years — if she’d been at the bottle the whole time. You can’t hide a thing like that in a closed community like a girls’ boarding school. It’s hard to keep secrets. I’m not saying she might not have been a secret drinker, at home, though I doubt even that.”
“She had other secrets?”
“Well, we all have secrets, Mr. Aitcheson.”
“Donald, please.”
“Donald, then. Perhaps she did, but they remain secrets. And I’m not only talking about shameful secrets and the like. She didn’t even participate in the normal day to day conversations in the staff room. Whether one fancies a particular actor, or actress, what kind of books, films, and music one likes, what one thinks of Brexit or the latest terrorist incident. Marguerite never joined in any of those sorts of discussions, let alone complained about her life, or a love affair, or anything. We didn’t even know if she had love affairs. She was a dark horse.”
“And her behavior turned self-destructive only in the last few weeks of her tenure, as far as you know?”
“Yes. The drinking, being even more anti-social, taking days off whenever she felt like it and not even bothering to report in sick. Of course, we didn’t know at the time, but it was probably because of hangovers.” She shook her head slowly.