‘Well, six then. But that’s still very little. Perhaps the gossip in the school will be punishment enough? Isn’t Cara Parker’s mum a parent governor? And Cara herself is very popular. If she takes against the little girl, well, it could be very unfortunate. Damaging. I know how these things tend to go. I’ve been here a long time.’ She gave a self-deprecating chuckle.
Miss Brett’s eyes briefly met Claire’s before her glance skittered away to the treetops, the clouds, her fingernails. ‘I take stealing seriously, Miss Penny.’
‘Well, so do I, but—’
‘Do you? Lorna Bell might be some kind of special case to you, but there’s dozens of children in this school who have the same background, the same barriers to learning. And I’d be doing them a disservice if I treated any one student differently from the others.’
I bet you’d treat Cara Parker differently, if she were in your class, thought Claire. ‘Well, all right. I just wanted to say my piece. She’s so—’
‘Little. Yeah. You said.’ Miss Brett drew herself up from her insolent slump and strode back to her smelly little classroom, every inch the formidable teacher, and Claire felt, suddenly, immensely tired. They were tiring, these people. She thought of poor Lorna, still being grilled in the head teacher’s office, her small frame lost in the big swivel chair, her feet not even reaching the floor. Claire thought, I’ll be extra nice to her. They can’t stop me. It’s one, small good thing I could do.
But now, sitting in her car at the end of the day, she thought dismally that talking to Miss Brett had been a huge mistake.
* * *
It had started to rain. The crisp leaves were pinned, sad and sodden to the ground and Claire, sitting in her car in the deserted car park, started the engine but didn’t go anywhere. Miss Brett had asked for the parents to be brought in, and the whole school had seen Lorna’s passive, rabbit-like mother, only a girl herself – what would she be? twenty-four at most? – appearing at the office, bunching her stubby red fingers in the cold and yanking down the hem of her too-short jacket. Every noise made her jump, pull down her nervous, twitching top lip over her teeth, and smile painfully, waiting for the axe to drop. Claire, in and out of the library now with her own class, caught glimpses of her through the double doors. She struggled to see something of Lorna in her – this pinched face primed to absorb distress – but it was hard. Lorna smiled a lot. But then, maybe her mother had, once upon a time. No father with her. Of course not.
Every now and then, when the office door opened to let someone in or out, Claire saw Lorna, hunched and wide-eyed, still in the swivel chair, clutching a long streamer of snotty toilet roll. Poor thing. And now it was Mum’s turn, they’d brought in a chair – impossibly tiny – for her to sit on. Why not get Lorna to sit in that and her mother to sit in the swivel chair? It was as if James wanted them both to be as uncomfortable as possible.
She’d thought, I’ll say something. I’ll tell them how Lorna didn’t really know what she’d done wrong, that publicity was punishment enough. But then, as she did so often nowadays, she faltered in the face of those younger, more sure of themselves. She kept walking, didn’t turn round, even when she heard through the door the querulous voice of Lorna’s mother, inarticulate and tearful.
4
Claire led an ordered existence. She owned a monkish flat above a florist’s and spent every Friday evening and most of the weekends with Mother. There had been a friendship – ‘a close call’ as Mother called it – with a divinity student named Barry, who rode a scooter and was keen on hiking and Victorian follies. A widowed colleague of Mother’s had paid half-hearted court once. But really, there was nobody and nothing to take her away from the inevitability of teaching. Straight after college, she started working as a reception teacher in this neglected inner-city primary school, and had been there ever since. She was, largely, satisfied with that.
In her rattling car Claire put on the radio, tuned to a classical music station. The theme was ‘Moments of Happiness’ – all Rossini, Verdi, Puccini. She took deep breaths, clenching and relaxing her hands on the steering wheel until ‘The Thieving Magpie’ put some strength into her bones and allowed her to drive off. She passed a few children lingering outside the corner shop at the bottom of the hill leading to town, and others trailing behind their grim-faced childminder. A row of previously handsome Victorian houses had had their windows smashed. They’d been empty, almost derelict, for a long time, but still. It was a shame; it was depressing. A moment of violent release, of drunken rage, and something beautiful is debased, the darkness advances. Claire remembered these houses from her childhood; the mMayor had lived in one of them, she remembered. Once this area had been desirable.
She didn’t see Lorna on the street. She thought about her red cheek, her dumb, animal pain – her absolute lack of shock. But then, she probably got hit a lot at home. Claire shuddered.