My Policeman (5 page)

As I’d been arranging and decorating my desk, the noise of children playing in the yard had been steadily increasing. It was now loud enough, it seemed to me, to threaten to swamp the whole school. A girl standing by herself in the corner of the yard, one plait hanging lower than the other, caught my eye, and immediately I stepped back from the window. I cursed myself for my timidity. I was the teacher. It was she who should move away from my gaze.

Then a man in a grey overcoat and horn-rimmed spectacles stepped into the yard and a miracle occurred. The noise ceased completely even before the man blew his whistle. After that, children who’d been screaming with excitement in some game, or sulking under the tree by the school gate, ran and took part in the formation of orderly lines. There was a moment’s pause, and in that moment I heard the footsteps of other teachers along the corridor, the confident clack of other classroom doors opening and closing, and even a woman laughing and saying, ‘Only an hour and a half until coffee time!’ before a door slammed shut.

I stood and faced my own classroom door. It seemed a long way from me, and as the marching children came closer, I took in the scene carefully, hoping to keep this sense of distance uppermost in my mind during the forthcoming minutes. The wave of voices began, gradually, to rise again, but was soon stemmed by a man bellowing ‘Silence!’ There followed the opening of doors and the swish and scrape of boots on wood as children were allowed to enter their classrooms.

It would be wrong, I think, to call what I felt
panic
. I was not sweating or feeling nauseous, as I had been in the corridor with Julia. Instead, an utter blankness came over me. I could not propel myself forward to open the door for the children, nor could I move behind the desk. Again I thought about my voice, and wondered where exactly it was situated in my body, where I might find it if I were to go looking. I might as well have been dreaming, and I think I did close my eyes for a minute, hoping that when I opened them again it would all become clear to me; my voice would come back and my body would be able to move in the right direction.

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a boy’s cheek pressed against the glass panel in the door. But still my limbs would not move, so it was a relief when the door opened and the boot-mark boy asked again, with the hint of a smirk, ‘Can we come in now?’

‘You may,’ I said, turning to the blackboard so I wouldn’t have to watch them appear. All those tiny bodies looking to me for sense, and justice, and instruction! Can you imagine it, Patrick? In a museum, you never face your audience, do you? In a classroom, you face them every day.

As they were filing in, whispering, giggling, scraping chairs, I took up the chalk and wrote, as I’d been taught at college,
the
day’s date in the left-hand corner of the board. And then, for some strange reason, it struck me that I could write Tom’s name instead of mine. I was so used to writing his name every night in my black book – sometimes a column of Toms would form, and become a wall of Toms, or a spire of Toms – that to do the same so boldly in this public place suddenly seemed entirely possible, and perhaps even sensible. That would shock the little bleeders. My hand hovered over the board and – I couldn’t help it, Patrick – a laugh escaped me. Silence fell on the class as I stifled my guffaw.

A moment passed as I gathered myself, then the chalk touched the slate and began to form letters; there was that lovely, echoey sound – so delicate and yet so definite – as I wrote, in capitals:

MISS TAYLOR.

I stood back and looked at what my hand had written. The letters climbed towards the right-hand side of the board as if they, too, wanted to escape the room.

MISS TAYLOR

—my name from now on, then.

I hadn’t meant to look directly at the rows of faces. I’d meant to fix my eyes on the Virgin above the door. But there they all were, impossible to avoid, twenty-six pairs of eyes turned towards me, each pair utterly different but equally intense. A couple stood out: the boy with the boot-mark hair was sitting on the end of the second row, grinning; in the centre of the front row was a girl with an enormous number of black curls and a face so pale and thin that it took me a second to look away from her; and in the back row was a girl with a dirty-looking bow in the side of her hair, whose arms were crossed tightly and whose mouth was bracketed by deep lines. When I caught her eye she did not – unlike
the
others – look away from me. I considered ordering her to uncross her arms straight away, but thought the better of it. There’d be plenty of time to tackle such girls, I thought. How wrong I was. Even now I wish I hadn’t let Alice Rumbold get away with it on that first day.

SOMETHING STRANGE IS
happening as I write. I keep telling myself that what I am writing is an account explaining my relationship with Tom, and everything else that goes with it. Of course, the
everything else
– which is actually the point of writing at all – is going to become much more difficult to write about very soon. But I find, unexpectedly, that I’m enjoying myself immensely. My days have the kind of purpose they haven’t had since I retired from the school. I’m including all sorts of things, too, which may not be of interest to you, Patrick. But I don’t care. I want to remember it all, for myself, as well as for you.

And as I write, I wonder if I will ever have the courage to actually read this to you. That has always been my plan, but the closer I get to the
everything else
, the more unlikely this seems.

You were particularly trying this morning, refusing to look at the television, even though I’d switched it from
This Morning
, which we both hate, to a rerun of
As Time Goes By
on BBC2. Don’t you like Dame Judi Dench? I thought everyone liked Dame Judi. I thought her combination of classical actressiness and cuddly accessibility (that ‘i’ in her name says so much, doesn’t it?) made her irresistible. And then there was that incident with the liquidised cornflakes,
the
tipping-over of the bowl, which made Tom exhale a hefty
tut
. I knew you weren’t quite up to sitting at the table for breakfast, even with your special cutlery and all the cushions I’d provided to stabilise you, as Nurse Pamela suggested. I must say I find it difficult to concentrate on what Pamela says, so intrigued am I by the long spikes protruding from her eyelids. I know it’s not particularly unusual for plump blondes in their late twenties to wear false eyelashes, but it’s a very strange combination – Pamela’s brisk white uniform, her matter-of-fact manner, and her partygoing eyes. She repeatedly informs me that she comes every morning and evening for an hour so I can have what she calls ‘time out’. I don’t take time out, though, Patrick: I use the time to write this. Anyway, it was Pamela who told me to get you out of bed as often as possible, suggesting that you could join the ‘family table’ for meals. But I could see your hand was utterly wild as you brought the spoon up to your face this morning, and I wanted to stop you, to reach out and steady your wrist, but you looked at me just before it reached your lips, and your eyes were so alight with something unreadable – at the time I thought it was anger, but now I wonder if it wasn’t a plea of some kind – that I was distracted. And so: wham! Over it went, milky slop dribbling into your lap and dripping on Tom’s shoes.

Pamela says that hearing is the last of the senses to go in a stroke patient. Even though you have no speech, you have excellent hearing, she says. It must be like being a toddler again, able to comprehend others’ words but unable to make your mouth form the shapes necessary to communicate fully. I wonder how long you’ll be able to stand it. No one has said anything about this. The phrase ‘no one can say’ has become detestable to me. How long until he’s on his feet, Doctor?
No
one can say
. How long until he’ll be able to speak again?
No one can say
. Will he have another stroke?
No one can say
. Will he ever recover fully?
No one can say
. The doctors and nurses all talk of the next steps – physiotherapy, speech therapy, counselling, even, for the depression we’ve been warned can set in – but no one is prepared to forecast the likelihood of any of it actually working.

My own feeling is that your greatest hope of recovery lies in just being here, under this roof.

Late September 1957. Early morning at the school gates, and the sky still more yellow than blue. Clouds were splitting above the bell tower, wood pigeons were purring their terrible song of longing.
Oh-oooh-ooh-oh-oh
. And there Tom was, standing by the wall, returned to me.

By then I’d been teaching for a few weeks and had grown more accustomed to facing the school day, so my legs were a little sturdier, my breath more controlled. But the sight of Tom made my voice disappear completely.

‘Marion?’

I’d imagined his sturdy face, his moon-white smile, the solidity of his naked forearm, so many times, and now here he was, on Queen’s Park Terrace, standing before me, looking smaller than I’d remembered, but more refined; after almost three years’ absence his face had thinned and he stood straighter.

‘I wondered if I’d bump into you. Sylvie told me you’d started teaching here.’

Alice Rumbold pushed past us singing, ‘Good morning, Miss Taylor,’ and I tried to pull myself together.

‘Don’t run, Alice.’ I kept my gaze on her shoulders as I asked Tom, ‘What are you doing up here?’

He gave me a flicker of a smile. ‘I was just … taking a walk around Queen’s Park, and thought I’d look at the old school.’

Even at the time, I didn’t quite believe this statement. Had he actually come up here just to see me? Had he sought me out? The thought made me catch my breath. We were both silent for a moment, then I managed to say, ‘You’re a bobby now, aren’t you?’

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Police Constable Burgess at your service.’ He laughed, but I could tell he was proud. ‘’Course, I’m still on probation,’ he added.

He looked me up and down then, quite brazenly, taking his time over it. My hands tightened around my basket of books while I waited to read the verdict on his face. But when his eyes met mine again, his expression remained the same: steady, slightly closed.

‘It’s been a long time. Things have changed,’ I said, hoping to draw a compliment, no matter how insincere.

‘Have they?’ After a pause he added, ‘You certainly have.’ Then, briskly, before I could blush too hard: ‘Well. I’d better let you get on.’ I’m remembering now that he looked at his watch, but that may not be true.

I had a choice, Patrick. I could say a quick goodbye and spend the rest of the day wishing we’d had more time together. Or. Or, I could take a risk. I could say something interesting to him. He’d returned, and was standing before me in the flesh, and I could take my chance. I was older now, I told myself; I was twenty years of age, a redhead whose hair was set in brushed curls. I was wearing lipstick (light pink, but lipstick nevertheless), and a blue frock with a trapeze skirt. It was a warm September day, a gift of a day when the light was soft and the sun still glowing as though it were summer.
Ooh-oooh-ooh-oh-oh
went the wood pigeons. I could well afford to take a risk.

So I said: ‘When are you going to give me that swimming lesson?’

He gave a big Tom laugh. It drowned out everything around us – the children’s shouts in the schoolyard, the pigeons’ calls. And he slapped me on the back, twice. On the first slap, I almost fell forwards on to him – the air around me became very warm and I smelled Vitalis – but on the second I steadied myself and laughed back.

‘I’d forgotten that,’ he said. ‘You still can’t swim?’

‘I’ve been waiting for you to teach me.’

He gave a last, rather uncertain, laugh. ‘I bet
you’re
a good teacher.’

‘Yes. And I need to be able to swim. I have to supervise the children, in the pool.’

This was an out-and-out lie, and I was careful to look Tom fully in the face as I uttered it.

He slapped me on the back again, lightly this time. This was something he did often in the early days, and at the time I was thrilled by the warmth of his hand between my shoulder blades, but now I wonder if it wasn’t Tom’s way of keeping me at arm’s length.

‘You’re serious.’

‘Yes.’

He put a hand to his hair – shorter now, less full, more controlled after the army, but still with that wave that threatened to break free at any moment – and looked down the road, as if searching for a response.

‘Do you mind starting in the sea? It’s not really advised for beginners, but it’s so warm at the moment, it would be a shame not to; the salt, it aids buoyancy …’

‘The sea it is. When?’

He looked me up and down again, and this time I did not blush.

‘Eight on Saturday morning all right? I’ll meet you between the piers. Outside the milk bar.’

I nodded.

He gave another laugh. ‘Bring your costume,’ he said, starting off down the road.