‘But she’s young, Max, and flighty! Come on. You know what I’m getting at here. Her lifestyle … Girls her age, they like to party. They drink, they dabble in drugs, they take their eye off the ball. You can’t tell me you haven’t noticed how exhausted Tatiana’s been looking in the staff room lately?’
Max had noticed. He’d put it down to her heavy workload, combined with the stress of contesting her late father’s will. The entire village was abuzz with gossip about the looming David and Goliath court case between Tatiana Flint-Hamilton and Brett Cranley.
‘Dylan, I must ask you outright. Do you have any concrete reason to believe that Miss Flint-Hamilton has been using drugs whilst working at this school?’
Dylan flushed. ‘I don’t have any proof, if that’s what you mean.’
Max shook his head. ‘Then if you’re not making a complaint, the matter is closed.’
Dylan stood up. Clearly coming to Bingley had been a mistake.
Panicked after Tati had rebuffed him last weekend, he’d taken the last three days off school with ‘flu’ while he tried to figure out what to do. There was bound to be tension between him and Tati at school, and other staff were bound to pick up on it. This was how rumours got started, and in a small village like this one, with a very pregnant, very paranoid wife at home, Dylan could not afford to come off looking like some sort of sexual predator. He had to take control of the situation, to hit back first. A few days at home, buttering up Maisie, followed by a man-to-man chat with Max Bingley had seemed like the best strategy. But from the moment he had sat down in Bingley’s office, the old man had made him look and feel like a fool.
‘I just hope you don’t look back at this conversation in a few months’ time, headmaster, and wish you’d taken me seriously,’ he said pompously. ‘I’m thinking of the good of the school.’
Like hell you are, thought Max. He didn’t know what had gone on, but he didn’t trust Pritchard Jones an inch.
‘She’s not even interested in teaching,’ Dylan scoffed. ‘She’s only doing this to pay for her legal fees, you know.’
‘I believe Tatiana is interested in teaching,’ Max said stiffly. ‘What’s more, I believe she has a natural gift for it. Like you. Just look at the impact she’s made on the remedial readers. Look at Logan Cranley. She deserves our encouragement, Dylan. So whatever issue you have with her, I suggest you sort it out between yourselves.’
Dylan left, and Max pushed their awkward encounter out of his mind. Today was the parent–teacher meeeting at St Hilda’s. He had better things to do than referee some squabble between his art teacher and Tatiana Flint-Hamilton.
‘Yeah, but I don’t geddit.’ A vastly overweight mother fixed the Year Two teacher, Sarah Yeardye, with a hostile glare. ‘If I tell Kai to go and buy a packet of crisps, he can go and buy a packet of crisps.’
Sitting on a wooden classroom chair that looked as if it might collapse at any moment, rolls of legging-encased fat spilling over the chair’s edge like excess pastry flopping over a pie dish, Kai Wilmott’s mother did not accept Miss Yeardye’s assessment of her son’s mathematics ability as being ‘well below average.’
‘With the greatest respect, Mrs Wilmott, I don’t quite see how being able to buy a packet of crisps is relevant.’
‘Course it’s relevant. Packet o’ crisps is sixty p or whatever, right?’
Miss Yeardye nodded wearily.
‘So my Kai knows he should give ’em a pound coin and get the change, like. That’s maths, innit?’
‘Well, yes, it is. But—’
‘There you go then. ’E’s fine.’
It took a lot to make Tatiana to feel sorry for Sarah Yeardye. The Year Two teacher had gone out of her way to dismiss Tati’s contributions at St Hilda’s and had rarely missed an opportunity to be bitchy and mean-spirited in the staff room. But Tati wouldn’t wish Karen Wilmott on anybody.
The entire parents’ meeting had been a real eye-opener. Some of these mothers were monsters! Half of them, like Mrs Wilmott, were insistent that their little darlings were Einstein and utterly blind to any/all evidence to the contrary; and the other half displayed a dispiriting lack of interest in the whole proceedings. Carefully prepared folders of work were skimmed through half-heartedly or not at all. Watches were glanced at repeatedly and questions asked again and again about how long ‘all this’ was going to take because they really needed to get back to work/gardening/watching TV, picking their toenails.