You remember the Sally I mentioned, one of the women who ended up in a frilly dress waving a feather duster at the gawping crowds from a blazing float? She was another one who failed, by-accident-on-purpose to do her best for Natalie. That is to say, she really believed she was doing her best for her unfortunate sister, but her own state of mind got in the way. Since you can never tell what your motives are if you’re unhappy, you’d better interfere as little as you can as you go about the world. Or at least do your victims the honour of not trying to justify your actions, once you’ve done what you’ve done.
Sally Bains works up at the office of Coombe Barrow School, where the fees are £1,250 a term, in advance, which for Ben and Alice means £2,500 a term, and all of that owing, and more. Sally’s married to Valentine. Sally and Val were research scientists until the unit where they both worked closed down for lack of government funding. Val was a world expert in ergot-related diseases of wheat, and Sally knew everything there was to know about fungal diseases in bats. But who cares about either, these days? The money came out of fungi and went into the development of defence mechanisms in outer space – Star Wars to you and me. Too late for Val and Sally to change their disciplines: they were in their forties, with bright young twenty-year-olds who never even stopped to read the newspaper treading hot on their heels. So Sally and Val took their redundancy money, sold their house, and bought a cottage in the West Country, putting what was left into High Risk Commodity shares, which a broker told Val were wrongly named. Low risk to the shrewd, he said, high risk only to the incompetent. First the cottage had to have a new roof – that was two thousand, one hundred pounds – and then eight thousand pounds of Val’s money disappeared overnight into some great vat of coffee beans, if you put your hand in which you might pull out a fortune, or more likely lose your hand altogether. Which Val did, so to speak. The day he heard the money had gone, Val stooped to pick up a handkerchief – why didn’t he use a tissue like anyone else? Then it would never have happened – and slipped a disc. He was tense, you see. Rest and manipulation failed; an operation exacerbated rather than soothed the trouble, and now Val lay in bed, depressed, and whether he was in pain or merely thought he was in pain, who could tell, and what difference did it make anyway? Meanwhile Sally worked as a secretary at Coombe Barrow, and thought herself lucky.
The trouble with men who suffer from mild clinical depression – that is to say, not quite as bad as the drugged zombies you meet in here – is that they do tend to drink too much and hit their wives in their frustration, and the more their wives try to help the more they are insulted and berated for their pains. Everything’s wrong and miserable and awful, and whose fault can it be but the wife’s? And since wives tend to take their husband’s view of them, they get confused and wretched themselves, not to mention hit, and feel it’s their fault their husband’s job/back/talent/life has failed, because he keeps saying it is. ‘Look how I’m drinking!’ he raves. ‘Your fault!’ ‘Who, me?’ the startled spouse responds. ‘When I’ve done everything for you all these years! Really me? I suppose it must be, darling, if you say so. How I wish I were nearer what you want, that my breasts were bigger (smaller), my brain was better (worse), that I wasn’t so argumentative (acquiescent), then this would never have happened. I can see how it’s terrible for you, how my failure has driven you to infidelity. Oh, I am so sorry! Weren’t we once happy? What? No? Never? Oh, oh, oh!’ She weeps and wails and laments and he lowers through the once happy home, aggrieved and self-righteous. Well, that’s how I, Sonia, see it: I put it to the shrink and he agreed, but asked why I couldn’t keep my mind on my own problems, which run to the manic rather than the depressive.
As I say, the morning Natalie came up to Sally Bains in the school office Sally herself was distressed and confused. She’d left Val a hump in the bed, with a thermos of coffee beside him for when he woke, and she kissed the top of his head fondly – it was all she could see – and he’d said something and she’d said:
‘What did you say, darling?’ and he’d said:
‘Don’t kiss the top of my head. You know you don’t mean it,’ and she’d said:
‘Oh,’ feeling as if she’d been slapped, and he’d opened an eye and said:
‘Christ. Don’t you know better than to put coffee in a thermos? Couldn’t you at least give it to me in a cup, like other people?’
And since she was late for work – the making of the coffee had made her late, and the ringing of the doctor for a repeat prescription of painkillers for his back, and the phone had been engaged and engaged and engaged, as it always was in the early morning, she just left. And what’s more, he’d had the drawer by the bed open, in which he kept the photograph of the girl he had ditched in order to marry Sally twenty years back. She knew she ought to have stayed and taken away the thermos and made fresh coffee and left that (in a cup and saucer: he didn’t like mugs either) by the bed, but somehow that morning she just had to get out. And now she was at the office she was beginning to feel better, only the feeling better was not somehow the true state, was it? It was a kind of frivolity. Other people lived in a cheerful, trivial world which Val did not allow her to inhabit. And Val was right. She knew well enough that coffee never tastes its best after being in a thermos an hour or so; she should have remembered that, instead of how the thermos would let him sleep on, escape from the pain in his back, and still have something hot and reviving to drink when he woke up. She’d got it wrong, as usual.
‘Can I ask you something, Mrs Bains?’
‘Ask away.’ Sally smiled brightly. Sally knew that Harry Harris had run off with Marion Hopfoot the beauty queen. Everyone did. Some cared more than others. Most just thought it a good story.
‘How do I go about taking the children out of school? We are just a little financially pushed, and what with the back fees and so forth…’
As she spoke Natalie stopped smiling brightly herself, turned quite pale and sat down. She could not quite grasp what she was saying, let alone the sense or otherwise of saying it. One part of her brain was trying to talk to the other, but couldn’t get through. It kept ringing engaged. It was a horrible feeling. But look now, rationally, using the brain that was attempting to ring through, even if Harry did eventually get in touch, did repent or whatever, did come home, did send a cheque, and it all turned out to be some kind of mistake, she could not rely upon it happening. It was just not sensible to have the children in private schools when there were free ones available. Somehow they had started with the schools and worked back.
‘There has to be a full term’s notice,’ said Sally. ‘You’re liable for fees for the next five months. That’s going to take what’s owing up to about seven thousand. Look, don’t worry. It’s happening all the time. People go bankrupt, husbands run off, someone falls ill, dies. Children are forever being taken out of these schools. There’s nothing permanent about privilege. That’s its point, isn’t it? It’s the battle to stay on top. All tooth and claw and you’re forever fighting to keep on your perch.’
‘I hadn’t thought about it like that,’ said Natalie. It seemed to her that whenever she asked a simple question she got a reproach in return.
‘Now’s your chance,’ said Sally Bains. ‘The comprehensives round here aren’t bad. Of course they’re on strike a lot of the time. The Government means to privatize all schools, in due course, but you might just get a couple of years free schooling before the state system collapses altogether from lack of funding.’
‘I see,’ said Natalie, unsure whether Sally Bains approved or disapproved of free schools. Sally, of course, had little emotional energy left over from her marriage to approve or disapprove of anything. She spoke out of the memory of herself as a political being, young and vigorous, not as wife of Val Bains, unemployed back-sufferer and depressive.
‘Ring up the headmaster of Quartermante. Don’t let them go to St John’s. No one’s got an O level out of there for five years, and now it’s GCSEs I don’t think they’re even bothering to enter anyone: it’s too expensive. Still, it’s a sort of free child minding service, I suppose, even if it’s not an education.’
What Sally could have told Natalie, as she had told many another embarrassed parent in the past, was that all kinds of charities existed which would have been prepared, properly approached, to pay Ben and Alice’s fees – the rich look after their own – and that representation to the board of governors might well have resulted in the waiving of the money owing. But she did not tell her; Natalie was too neat and too pretty and her husband had run off, and Sally could not help wishing, from time to time, that Val’s back would improve sufficiently for him to be able to do what he kept threatening to do; look up the girl he had ditched in order to marry Sally and run off – with her. What Sally felt for Natalie, amazingly, was envy. But that’s what being married to a depressive can do for a woman. How do I, Sonia, know all this? My husband Stephen, thank God, couldn’t claim to be a depressive; he was an anal retentive paranoic, which is bad enough. And personally I border on the manic (out and out it pours, doesn’t it, never stopping), but I reckon about two thirds of the women in the estate, all of us on the dole, were married to depressives at one time or another, or had our illegitimate children by them. And though we all started out as healthy, cheerful, female children, the male disease of depression is catching. Quite simply, the men pass it on to their womenfolk and, to use a dirty word, it’s as fatal as AIDS. We drudge down to the post office to cash our drafts: we can’t even get it together to have them paid direct into a bank.
My shrink – sorry, psychiatrist – says this is nonsense: women are depressives too, sit in hospital corridors, speechless and motionless, staring into space, just like men; unmarried ones too – but I reckon they caught it from their fathers.
Be that as it may, Sally failed to give Natalie proper sisterly help at a time when she needed it. Okay?
In the meantime, Jax was restless at the end of his lead. He was hungry.
Natalie took the telephone number of the recommended school from Sally, and then its address. A phone call would cost ten pence and, if she was left waiting at the end of the line, possibly more. She would do better to call round in person. That would be free. Or would it? Perhaps the free schools, like the museums, would now charge her admission? A fee to see the headmaster?
Neatly dressed, clear-eyed little children with self-satisfied faces ran about the corridors as she left. That’s what £1,250 a term can do for the young, here in the heart of the country.
Angus, driving past the school in the Audi Quattro, saw Natalie and Jax pass out through the school gates and pulled up beside them, with an enviable squealing of brakes, the kind that betokens a person of instant decision at the wheel. Natalie got in beside Angus. Jax, as if sensing the urgency of the situation, jumped into the back seat without demur. And on they all went towards Glastonbury.
‘You again!’ he said. ‘Surprise, surprise!’ He’d been up and down the road four times, waiting for her.
‘I hope you don’t mind dogs,’ said Natalie. ‘I hope he doesn’t leave hairs on your nice new seats.’
‘My wife will hoover them up,’ said Angus. He was lying. ‘And I don’t mind anything so long as it’s to do with you.’
He was getting fonder and fonder of Natalie by the minute. Female distress and incompetence, mixed with a soupçon of resistance, can do that to a man. Natalie wasn’t looking her best that morning. She had forgotten her make-up, the walk to school had flattened her hair and she had holes in her tights. It reassured him: she looked altogether approachable.
‘The truth of the matter is,’ she said, ‘I think my husband’s left home.’ She had to say it to someone. And so, at last, it became true.
She wouldn’t go with Angus for a coffee. She said she had too much to do. He went all the way back to Waley and Rightly, estate agents, of which he was a director. Their offices nestled at the foot of Gurney Castle.