CHAPTER
TEN
Miss Evans scanned the
class for a suitable victim, someone she hadn't already picked-on during the
lesson, and eventually her attention settled on the fair-haired boy in the
second row. "Parfitt,
let's have the present indicative of 'to ring'," she demanded.
Parfitt nervously began to intone: "Je sonne, tu
sonne, il
sonne, er, nous sonnons, vous
... sonnez, ils sonnent."
"Correct." She
cast about her for another victim. "Now you, Brady.
The present indicative of 'to smoke'."
Brady obligingly intoned: "Je fume,
tu fume, il fume, nous fumons, vous
fumez, ils fumment."
"Bon! And you Cartwright,
go through the verb 'to go out'."
"Je sors, tu
sors, il sort, nous sortons, vous
sortez, ils sortent," was Cartwright's correct response.
She was satisfied with their performance and quickly switched
to another exercise, this time one which involved the possessive
adjective. "Give the first-person
possessive adjective relative to Livre est
vert, Hardy."
"Mon,"
Hardy replied immediately.
"And you, Smith, provide the third-person singular for livre anglais
est bleu."
Smith scratched his head a moment, and then stuttered "S-S-Son."
Another correct answer. He was duly passed over without comment. "And, finally, the second-person
familiar plural to yeux sont gris. This time let's hear from you, Marsh."
"Tes," the shy boy in question answered after a
moment's thoughtful deliberation, during which time his face turned from pale
cream to bright red.
"Très bon!" cried Miss Evans, casting Marsh and the
class in general an approving glance.
They were in form today, which was more than could be said for the
previous class of the morning! She
turned over the pages of her textbook and decided to spring them a few adjectives. "The adjective for 'brief',
"And what about 'jealous', Hargreaves?"
continued Miss Evans.
"Jaloux!" Hargreaves
replied in no uncertain manner.
"And 'clever',
The redhead to her left scratched his curly-haired head, but
seemingly in vain. "Er, er ..."
"Tell him, Simpson!" she intervened, losing patience.
"Habile,
Miss,"
"Bon!" She was more relieved to have found a chink
in their collective armour at last than to have got the correct answer second
time round. "And finally Davidson, you
tell us the translation of 'reasonable'."
Davidson was ordinarily the laziest member of the class, and today was to prove no exception. For his version of Raisonnable was duly pronounced
raison-able.
"Not 'able' but 'arble'!"
Miss Evans objected, over-emphasizing the 'ar'
sound. "You still tend to pronounce
your French 'a's as though they were English 'a's. Make them more
like 'r' in future." She knew, from
bitter experience, that an approximation was the best that could be expected
where he was concerned. "D'accord?"
"Oui, mademoiselle," Davidson meekly promised, the silent 'd' of the pronoun duly being replaced by an audible
'r'.
She smiled in half-hearted approval and, putting aside her
textbook, turned to the volume of French poetry which had been reserved for
last, instructing her pupils to follow suit. "Aujourd'hui,
nous lirons un poème par Paul Verlaine," she
informed them, selecting La Lune Blanche. "Page Quarante-neuf." She began to read:-
"La lune blanche
Luit dans les bois,
De chaque branche
Part une voix
Sous la Ramée ...
O bien-aimée.
L'étang reflete,
Profound miroir,
La silhouette
De saule noir
Ou le vent pleure ..
Revons, c'est l'heure.
Un vaste et tendre
Apaisement
Semble descendre
Du firmament
que l'astre irise ...
C'est l'heure exquise."
The pupils nervously followed the lines in their books.
"Now then, where does the white moon shine,
Sinclair?" she asked the tall, thin, dark-haired boy in the back row.
"In the wood, Miss," came
his correct answer.
"And where does a voice come from, Crabb?"
she asked, turning to Sinclair's plump neighbour.
Crabb looked blank.
"From each branch," a boy to his right whispered.
"I didn't ask you, Ryan," countered Miss Evans,
casting the offender a disapproving glance.
There was a tiny snigger from someone a few desks back from the
front row.
"Perhaps you could tell us what the pond reflects then, Crabb?" she suggested, changing tack.
"Er, the pond reflects ...” An
uneasy silence supervened while he endeavoured to find the right line.
"Second verse," Miss Evans charitably informed him.
"Ah! the silhouette of ... the
black ... willow."
"In which,
"In which the wind ...” It was obvious he was stuck.
"Tell him, Ryan!" she commanded, losing patience as
before.
"Cries, Miss," the whisperer obliged.
"Bon! You must try to wake up,
"Good." She
smiled her approval and then asked Davidson to tell them what the firmament
itself was made iridescent by.
Surprisingly, the member of the class who was ordinarily the
laziest confidently replied: "The star."
"Which is pronounced?"
He was on the point of giving the 'a' of l'astre an English
pronunciation when he suddenly checked himself and said: "L'arstre, Miss," to general amusement around the
class.
"C'est meilleur," Miss
Evans commented half-jokingly, though, in truth, she would have preferred
something in-between and was slightly afraid that he might become a bad
influence on some of the others. But she
had no time to tone down his 'r' a little, for, at that moment,
the mid-morning bell rang, obliging her to terminate the lesson. Altogether, she was satisfied with their
performance and dismissed them without further ado.
Yet at the back of her mind she became conscious, once more, of
the dissatisfaction she was feeling with herself or, more specifically, with
herself in relation to Matthew Pearce.
As she headed along the noisy corridor towards the staff room for a cup
of tea, she couldn't help thinking about this dissatisfaction again and
wondering whether the affair with the artist had indeed come to an end, as
events during the past few days had induced her to suppose. Not that he had categorically stated that he
didn't want to see her anymore. Yet there
was definitely something reserved and even unfriendly about his attitude
towards her off late, which suggested as much.
Then, too, the letter she had received from her father, the previous
week, inquiring into her whereabouts and activities on the afternoon of
Wednesday 26th August, made her feel distinctly uneasy, not to say bewildered,
especially as he had never written such a letter before and usually preferred
to keep himself out of her business. No
explanation, other than a brief word about wanting to check-up on something her
mother had said concerning her doings at the time. It was all very strange, notwithstanding the
fact that she couldn't quite remember exactly what she had been doing then. Still, she was pretty certain she had been
alone and not in company, as the letter from her father seemed to imply. Yet even though she wrote back to him with,
to the best of her recollection, a resumé of that day's
activities and asked what it was all about, why he had to contact her like this
and request a written response, she still hadn't received a reply, and was now
even more baffled by it than previously.
The fact that it probably had something to do with Matthew seemed the
most credible explanation for her father's strange behaviour, though she
couldn't quite see how that could be linked to his own changed attitude towards
her recently. But perhaps she would find
out in due course?
Resignedly, she pushed her way through the swing doors of the
large, crowded staff room and proceeded towards the tea urn at the far
end. A number of colleagues were queuing
to have their cups filled by a small black charwoman in a green overall and, as
she slipped in behind them, one of them turned round and greeted her in a warmly
polite manner. It was Mark Taber, her
former admirer, and, as she reciprocated, she felt herself blushing slightly,
though she had known him long enough by now not to be embarrassed by his
friendly attitude towards her. However,
the blush must have intrigued him a little.
For, having received his tea, he stood aside to await her as she duly
approached the urn. That was something
he hadn't done in ages!
With cup filled, she turned towards him. They stood a moment undecided what to do, and
then Taber, realizing they were in the way of those at the rear of the queue,
gently drew her away in the direction of a less crowded and quieter part of the
smoke-filled room. The air stank rather
of pipe and cigarette tobacco, which was always an inconvenience to those who,
like them, were resolutely non-smokers.
So they went across to the proximity of one of the open windows and
stood within the radius of its fresh-air ambience. Taber especially loathed the acrid stench of
stale smoke!
"I haven't seen you that much recently," he averred,
looking down at his fellow teacher from a seven-inch advantage over her.
"No, I guess not," she conceded, casting him a brief
but intentionally apologetic smile.
"I've been rather busy."
She knew that such a lame excuse for having generally avoided the staff
room since their return from summer recess wasn't likely to convince him. But, all the same, she considered it the most
expedient thing to say.
"And busy outside school as well?" he asked,
responding to her smile with one of his own - in the circumstances rather more
quizzical.
"For the most part," she replied.
The hubbub around them gave him the confidence to be more
explicit. "So you're still seeing
this Matthew chap, then?" he deduced.
She lowered her gaze and took a couple of deep sips from the
steaming tea in her hand. "To some
extent," she at length admitted, not looking up.
"You don't sound very confident," he observed.
"Maybe that's because I'm not," she confessed.
"You haven't yet come to a parting of the ways,
then?"
"No, though I dare say we shall before long. At least, we seem to have become somewhat
estranged from each other all of a sudden, as though the affair had petered out
or lost whatever meaning it may once have possessed. He seems to be disappointed with me and,
quite frankly, I feel less than enthusiastic about him."
"Oh, on what grounds?" Taber
was keen to ask.
At first Gwen appeared reluctant to specify, but then she
relented and said: "Oh, largely as regards his artistic and philosophical
predilections, which I can't subscribe to.
But also in regard to our sexual relations."
"Really?" Taber exclaimed,
patently intrigued. "Isn't he
particularly virile, then?"
Gwen blushed anew, this time more deeply, and took momentary
refuge in her still-steaming tea.
"Not particularly," she admitted. "At least he doesn't appear to be as far
as I'm concerned, whether because he doesn't find me particularly stimulating
or because he just lacks the drive, I'm not absolutely sure. Possibly a combination of
both."
"Poor you," Taber sympathized, instinctively lowering
his voice. "You seem not to have
found the greatest satisfaction, after all." This was said with a little chuckle, as
though something to relish.
"No, although when I consider the nature of his spiritual
ambitions and their repercussions on his art, I can't be at all
surprised," she rejoined. "I
ought to have known better in the first place, but I didn't realize, at the
time, what kind of an artist he was. I
mean, I had no idea that he'd be so spiritually earnest, so set against the
sensual. Even if I had seen his works in
advance, his sculptured doves and paintings of ultimate reality, as he calls
them, I wouldn't necessarily have equated them with a kind of sexual inadequacy
on his part. I wouldn't have thought
that because his work was transcendentalist, he would be a poor or, at any
rate, perfunctory lover. I'd simply have
taken the art as one thing and the man as quite another! But now I know better, having come to realize
that his art and his life are inseparable, and that the one tends to influence
and reflect the other. So if he was
unable to satisfy me in bed, it's probably because he's less sensuous than
myself and not therefore committed to the senses to anything like the same
extent. A woman who was less sensuous or
more spiritual than me probably wouldn't find him so inadequate - assuming he
could find himself such a woman, that is!"
Across the crowded room Linda Daniels could be seen talking
with a couple of elderly colleagues, and it was at her that Gwen cast a faintly
derisory glance, as she sipped some more tea and savoured the aura of intense
curiosity which Taber's towering presence had already come to signify. Mindful of Linda, she wondered whether
Matthew might not be better served by someone like her, despite the fact that
she was hardly the most spiritual of women, and wondered, too, whether the
apparent change which had come over him recently might not be ascribed to
Linda's influence in some way. After all,
she wasn't unaware of the fact that Matthew had taken a distinct liking to her
colleague on the first occasion that they had met, a couple of weeks before, at
her flat in
But would that mean that she would then be
reduced to the occasional visit from Pete Daniels, or was there some
alternative, a possibility of more frequent satisfaction from someone already known to her? She glanced inquiringly at Mark Taber, who
appeared to be stunned by her revelation of the minute before. He was still interested in her, she could see
that, and no less handsome now than he had been prior to Matthew's unexpected
intrusion into her life. True, he wasn't
the most interesting conversationalist, and his teaching of history made him
somewhat conservative in his politics.
But at least he was a good lover and more on her social wavelength.
Indeed, she hadn't quite realized just how good
until the affair with Matthew brought it home to her, until contact with a more
spiritual being brought home to her the extent of her dependence on men like
Taber who, for all their intellectual limitations and shortcomings, were more
sensuously attuned to herself. In that
respect, the experience with the artist may well have been a blessing in
disguise, if only on the grounds that it made her appreciative of what she used
to have with Mark, and consequently gave her new insight into her own spiritual
limitations. After all, she was essentially
conservative in her political outlook too, the product of a strict middle-class
upbringing, and not attuned to such views or attitudes as professed to by
Matthew Pearce. She was essentially
traditionalist too, and if the artist had done anything for her, it had been to
bring this fact home to her in no uncertain terms! The affair with him had been less of a
mistake than an eye-opener. And now that
she could see herself more clearly, it did indeed seem that the only sensible
thing to do was to sever connections with him and, hopefully, return to her own
level again - assuming circumstances would permit. She had, at any rate, received a push in the
right direction from Pete Daniels, a push she could hardly fail to appreciate,
especially with his wife standing no more than five yards away, still busily
engaged in lightweight conversation with the two elderly colleagues.
Yet if Linda was five yards away, Taber was right beside her
and duly reminding her of this fact as, all too soon, the bell sounded again and
she heard him asking, in a slightly nervous tone-of-voice, whether she wouldn't
care to have dinner with him that evening, since he had no specific
commitments. "I mean, it would be
better to discuss such matters in private, wouldn't it?" he added, glancing
around the still-crowded and smoke-filled staff room. "Unless, however, you
have prior arrangements to honour?"
Gwen thought of Peter a moment, but the
arrangements he had made with her were for another night, and therefore nothing
that need interfere with today.
"None I can think of," she assured him, smiling deferentially.
"Well?" he pressed.
"Yeah, that sounds a very good idea," she agreed,
extending a grateful hand to his nearest arm.
"I'd love to!"
"Good!" sighed Taber with
considerable relief. "In that case
we needn't talk any more about your, er, sexual
problems until then, need we?"
She gulped back the rest of her, by now, lukewarm tea and
returned the empty cup to a nearby tray.
It was just like old times, except that this time, thanks to the artist,
there was an additional man in her life, and he was the husband of the woman in
tight black slacks, who didn't in the least suspect that Peter was having an
affair of his own with her best friend while she was so busily having one with
that very friend's former lover, Matthew Pearce. Well, what else were friends for but to use
and deceive in the interests of lovers?
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