In the staff room at St Hilda’s, tempers were fraying. The Year Six SAT exams were less than a month away now, but the government had seen fit to choose this moment to dump an enormous amount of additional paperwork on its already overloaded state teachers. This morning’s staff meeting had been called to agree a consensus on whether or not Max Bingley should hire an additional administration person. Cuts would have to be made to pay for such a hire, so it was vital that all the departments be represented. The art department, as usual, was late.
‘We really can’t put this off any longer.’ Ella Bates, one of the two Year Six class teachers, voiced what the entire room was thinking. ‘If Dylan can’t be bothered to turn up for the vote, he doesn’t deserve a say in it.’
‘It’s not a matter of what he deserves,’ Max Bingley said calmly. ‘We need consensus, Ella.’
In Max’s long experience, all staff rooms were political snake pits, even in a tiny, tight-knit school like this one. It had been the same story at Gresham Manor, the private boys prep school in Hampshire where Max had spent most of his career, as head of History and, latterly, deputy head of the school.
Max Bingley had loved his job at Gresham Manor. He would never have taken the St Hilda’s headship had his beloved wife not died two years ago, plunging him into a deep depression. Susie Bingley had had a heart attack aged fifty-two, completely unexpectedly. She’d collapsed at the breakfast table one morning in front of Max’s eyes, keeled over like a skittle. By the time the ambulance arrived at Chichester Hospital she was already dead. Max had kept working. At only fifty-three – with a mortgage to pay, not to mention two daughters still at university – he didn’t have much choice. But without Susie, life had lost all meaning, all joy. He moved through his days at Gresham like a zombie, barely able to find the energy to get dressed in the mornings. The Fittlescombe headship offered a new start and a distraction. Max had taken it under pressure from his girls, but it had been the right decision.
Right, but not easy, either personally or professionally. When Max first arrived at St Hilda’s he’d been forced to cut back a lot of dead wood. Inevitably his decisions to fire certain people had angered some of the remaining staff. As had his hiring choices. The staff room was already divided into ‘Camp Hotham’, the old guard hired by his predecessor and championed by Ella Bates, a heavy-set mathematician in her late fifties with a whiskery moustache, brusque manner and penchant for pop socks that drew an unfortunate amount of attention to her wrinkly knees; and ‘Camp Bingley’, made up of the new teachers and those amongst the old who, like Dylan Pritchard Jones, approved of Max’s old-school teaching style and relentless focus on results. Even Camp Bingley, however, had been resentful of Max’s hiring of Tatiana Flint-Hamilton as an assistant teacher. The fact that Tati was unpaid did little to assuage the anger.
‘We don’t have time to waste training charity cases,’ was how Ella Bates had put it. ‘She’s a drain on resources.’
With the notable exception of Dylan, the other teachers all agreed. So far Max Bingley had held his ground: ‘If we do our jobs and train her properly she could be a vital addition to resources at a fractional cost,’ he argued. But, in truth, he too had doubts about the wisdom of bringing Tatiana on board, doubts made worse by the new administrative pressures they were under.
‘Sorry I’m late.’ Dylan breezed in, looking anything but sorry. Mrs Bates and the headmaster both gave him angry looks, but the rest of the (mostly female) staff swiftly melted beneath the warm glow of the famous Pritchard Jones smile.
‘Traffic,’ he grinned. ‘It was bumper to bumper on Mill Lane this morning.’
This was a joke. There was no traffic in Fittlescombe. Tatiana laughed loudly, then clapped a hand over her mouth when she realized that no one else was following suit. ‘Sorry.’
She’d made the mistake of inviting a girlfriend from her party days, Rita Babbington, down to Greystones for the night last night. Inevitably the two of them had begun reminiscing – Tati’s days and nights had been so unutterably boring recently, just talking about excitements past felt like a thrill – and Rita had demanded cocktails. Multiple home-made margaritas later – Tati might never have had to pay for a drink in her life, but she certainly knew how to make a world-class cocktail and after four lines of some truly spectacular cocaine that Rita had brought down with her ‘in case of emergency’, Tatiana had collapsed into bed with her heart and mind racing. She’d woken this morning with a dry mouth and a head that felt as if she’d spent the night with her skull wedged in a vice, tightened hourly by malevolent elves. It was a testament to her friendship with Dylan Pritchard Jones that he still had the capacity to make her laugh.