The post-graduate students’ work-room was deserted that afternoon, and it made eminent good sense to stay and drive on with the assignment. I didn’t have to rush – Friday was the due date – but every day spent on it was a day away from the all-important dissertation. So I promised myself that if I finished it today I’d treat myself to something expensive and luxurious.
It was coming together so well that I decided to grab a snack from the refectory and work on into the evening. It was quiet but not creepy: most of the courses run in this building were for part-time students, many of whom found it more convenient to come to evening classes like the one I had to go to on Thursdays. And I found the peace helpful: by nine I knew I’d done as well as I could. Knew? Still anxious – after all, writing assignments is a far cry from setting and marking them for other people – I homed in on the print icon.
And when it ticked busily from the ink-jet printer, blow me if it didn’t look just as good on paper as on screen. But I’d always been a woman for second thoughts. What if … No, I resolutely gathered it up and slipped it into the plastic folder I’d bought. Not the cheap three-sided ones my students favour – they’re difficult to remove the paper from and impossible to get the paper back into after marking. My colleagues and I refer to them without affection as literary condoms. No, mine was a pukka affair, folded A3 with a removable plastic spine for easy reading. The equivalent of an apple for teacher. There. It looked really good now.
I’d deliver it straight away – push it under Carla’s door.
I squatted, supporting myself with a hand against the door. In mid-crouch, the door flew open. Just like that. On my hands and knees, scrabbling for a remnant of dignity, I saw only darkness. Carla had got as far as switching off the lights, but hadn’t locked the door. Not even shut it properly. Even at William Murdock we were more security-conscious than that. Here, however, as if on cue, came security in the form of a solidly built guard. He regarded me, as well he might, with suspicion, an emotion that looked as if it had permanently shaped his middle-aged features.
Still on my knees, I explained. He raised an overgrown eyebrow, but switched on the light. ‘You can put it on her desk,’ he said. It was quite clear he would stand and watch.
My name caught my eye as I put my assignment in Carla’s in-tray. In her out-tray was what I presumed was the test results print-out, with ‘SOPHY RIVERS’ scrawled on the top.
‘This is for me,’ I said, reaching for it. One day I’d gently remind her about the spelling. ‘She promised she’d leave it in my pigeonhole.’
‘But it isn’t in your pigeonhole, is it?’
That was unanswerable.
‘You can see it’s meant for me.’ I dug for my ID card. ‘Here. And here’s my name on this essay.’ Except it wasn’t. All that work and I’d forgotten my name!
He acknowledged the ID with a curt nod, but didn’t rise to a smile when I explained about the essay.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll have to take this away and re-do the front page. But this time I’ll try not to fall flat on my face when I deliver it.’
‘I’m locking up now,’ he said. ‘So it looks as if you’ll have to wait till tomorrow.’
I was torn: to do the job properly or simply scribble my name? I scribbled.
He locked up behind me, ostentatiously bored, heaving weary, indeed exasperated sighs. I tried the Hallowe’en lantern smile, but it singularly failed to lighten his darkness.
Back home, I treated myself to something extravagant. Two things, actually. A fresh bottle of wine and a phone call to Mike. We talked several expensive and satisfying minutes, during which the tactics of the England captain and the successes and failures of the rest of the England team did not feature prominently. He was quite happy to toddle off to the university and promised the reference list and anything else he could photocopy. But it might not be for a couple of days.
‘We’re got these morale-building sessions, you see.’
I could quite understand why the rest of the team should need them, but Mike was after all scoring consistently and, moreover, holding his catches. Still, it would no doubt reduce team morale to the pits if he declined to join in – and Mike wasn’t that sort of man, anyway.
‘What you must do is to tell everyone the secret of your success,’ I suggested. Suggestively.
He laughed, the warm, lazy laugh that we shared in bed. ‘What? And have the entire squad trying to score with you?’ We’d joked about knights and battles and their ladies’ favours. But I wasn’t quite prepared to believe it was simply our relationship that drove him to such heights. Maybe there was a lot of hard work and an enormous amount of skill involved too.
The conversation degenerated into tender bawdy, to which Ivo listened with embarrassing attention. And, although they can presumably close them against sand when they’re burrowing, gerbils have remarkably alert-looking ears for their size.
I awoke – late – to the sound of driving rain, and in no haste to go into UWM, all things considered. Not after my exertions of the evening before, my call to Mike, and the night spent tossing and turning over whether I’d done the right thing to hand my assignment in without a beautifully printed name on the front cover. Clearly I’d have to print another front cover, complete with name, and ask Carla to substitute it for the first. And clearly I was going off my head, if I really thought such things mattered. All those years of marking the scruffy offerings of others – I’d be lucky to get an essay at all from most students – and now I lost sleep over a mere title page.
I’d stay at home long enough to pick up my post. And that would mean the rush-hour jams had dissolved. Parking might be a pig, however. Hmm. In the end I settled for an early lunch at home before setting out.
I was not the only late arrival. Tom Bowen was locking his car and flapped a hand – his arms were occupied by sheaves of paper. It looked horribly like marking to me. I caught up with him.
‘Tom, I wonder if I could have five more minutes in your kitchen before I make the final arrangements next week.’
He looked surprised but said nothing.
‘The cooker,’ I said. ‘I need to know how it works. There was one dreadful occasion, you see, when I was using the host’s oven, only to find that it had stuck on the timer programme and no one had the least idea how to unstick it.’
‘If I know the make and have a manual and guarantee it’s not in timer mode, then there’s no need for another visit?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Better see what I can find. I’m disappearing under this lot at the moment. Time’s at a bit of a premium.’
‘Fair enough. Only I’d hate to give you raw pork. I suppose I could always do a mega stir-fry, but that’s not quite your traditional French meal.’
‘How’s your assignment going?’
‘Gone. Wrapped it up last night.’
His eyebrows shot up. ‘But it’s de rigueur for mature students to demand extensions for everything – even though they rarely get them.’
‘And younger students, believe me. It’s just that with Mike in Australia, I have fewer diversions than usual.’
‘Mike? Ah, your partner? Will he be away long?’
Awarding him another brownie point for the right terminology – I might well have to deduce that he was much nicer than I’d first thought – I smiled. I didn’t want to go into all the ins and outs of his possible selection for the One Day series, so I just said, ‘It’s not definite yet.’
‘So you’re all on your ownio!’
The unpleasant experiences of the last few years must have left their mark. ‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a friend staying with me.’ I didn’t even cross my fingers behind my back. Ivo and I were – surely – friends? We whiffled noses at each other whenever we chanced to meet. ‘Ivo,’ I added.
‘Good. It always worries me, in these violent days, to hear of a woman living on her own, unprotected. And you’ve got a burglar alarm and use it?’
Considering his cavalier attitude with his own! I grinned. ‘Of course.’ A state-of-the-art system, in fact. ‘But it shouldn’t be “do as I say”, Tom. You locked your house beautifully the other day but didn’t set the alarm.’
‘Didn’t you hear the noises off? I’ve got this hyperactive cat, and haven’t quite learnt how to set the alarm’s protection zones. I’ve got a manual thicker than the one for the cooker, but if you’re over twelve you can’t understand it. Makes your average video pensioner’s play.’
I cackled: so did he. No, he wasn’t was bad as I’d thought. But we didn’t dawdle any longer. The rain was heavier now, and by the look of the sky it was setting in for the duration.
When I went to drop by the new title page for my assignment Carla’s door was still locked, so I slid the work under her door.
This time I stood up to find Lola’s shadow over me. ‘Tutorial room?’ she said.
I nodded, following.
‘It is not as we hoped,’ she said, as soon as I’d shut the door. ‘The food our colleague eats is not past its sell-by date.’
Lola was not the sort of woman to make mistakes about things like that. I flung my hands in the air. ‘But what can we do? Other than trail her to M&S and grab her ourselves before the store detective does?’
‘You could talk to her.’
‘Me? I’m only a student, like the rest of you. I’m not really on the staff here—’
‘You are a visiting teacher and this woman’s tutor.’
‘I’m not convinced that with adult students the pastoral function extends to accusing them of shoplifting.’
‘It must surely extend to preventing them committing a crime which could result in their losing their visa.’ Head teacher to raw recruit, that was her manner.
I bristled. ‘And how do you suggest I go about this? Given that the English of most of my group isn’t up to asking more than the time of day, let alone responding to such sensitive questions. If she can even understand the questions.’
Lola reached for the door handle. ‘I expected more kindness from you, Sophie.’
‘You can have all the kindness you want. It’s the practicalities I can’t manage. Like who I’m supposed to be talking to. And how I’m to communicate with her. And what I’m to say – let’s not forget that.’ What had happened to turn Sophie, the people’s friend, into this defensive, uncooperative woman? It wasn’t as if what Lola wanted me to do involved any risks. Just a certain amount of trouble. ‘Do you know anyone who could translate?’ I asked at last.
It occurred to me later, however, that there was more than one way of skinning a cat. Why not change the order of English lessons set out in the syllabus and get my group to talk about shopping and food when we met the next day? Then I could talk obliquely about the perils of shoplifting, the need to buy cheap and nutritious food and the hazards of overloading credit cards. Lola thought the idea good, but perhaps oversubtle, as we discussed it in the women’s loo.
‘I like subtlety,’ I said. ‘And I always encourage students with problems to stay back afterwards. So perhaps that will elicit a response from her. Better than going at the whole thing bull-headed, anyway.’
‘Bull-headed?’
Lola did not look as if she liked the implicit criticism. She was about to press me when Kathryn came in, pointing, as soon as she saw me, an accusing finger.
‘Those absence reporting forms I gave you,’ she said.
Lola raised her eyes heavenwards. ‘In the schools in which I’ve taught we do not have to report absences,’ she said grandly.
‘Oh, do you have those clever computer terminals all connected to a main office system?’ Kathryn asked.
‘We don’t have absences.’ Lola left the small space with a big flourish.
‘What would you expect from the daughter of a cabinet minister?’ Kathryn asked.
I blinked.
‘I’m getting everyone’s details up-dated on the computer,’ she said blithely. ‘Which is why, Sophie, I need your returns. Yesterday.’
‘Might as well be back at William Murdock,’ I grumbled.
‘Always assuming there’s a William Murdock to go back to,’ she said, heading for a cubicle.
Dredging my memory for a quotation from a Latin A level set book about many-headed rumour – it was certainly active at the moment – I trailed sadly back to the work-room. The room was abuzz with chatter this afternoon, and I was hard put to stop myself remarking out loud that it would make more sense to apply one’s efforts to the assignment than to sit there belly-aching about doing it.
The last thing I wanted to do was show any lack of comradely angst, however. I couldn’t imagine that the news that I’d finished and delivered mine would be greeted with universal congratulations. So I gathered up my registers and Kathryn’s vivid forms and headed for the quiet of a tutorial room. Just for the record, I decided to do something about correlating the entrance grades of my students with their current achievement: Kathryn would soon be asking for those statistics, too, no doubt. I was right. This time my pigeonhole contained not just a large sheaf of forms but also a computer print-out of all international students’ entrance test results. I took my own advice and got stuck in. At least I had Schubert and Brahms to look forward to.