The Following Girls (26 page)

There was a muffled
drrring
from behind one of the doors and the school secretary, a knitted fifty-something woman who seldom surfaced, crept from her cell to say that Dr O’Brien was now free and that the head would be grateful if she could have a few preliminary words with Amanda before the meeting proper. Again? What could she say that she hadn’t said the previous afternoon? Bob Baker gave a sort of house-trained snarl as his daughter rose from the bench and followed the secretary’s moss-stitched backside into the headmistress’s lair. Standing up had made her see stars and she stumbled against the door frame as she entered the room. Three chairs were lined up on the headless side of the desk and Baker collapsed groggily into the middle one.

O’Brien replaced her telephone receiver then began tweaking at the pens and pencils aligned around her blotter. The papery blue and white skin of her hands was foxed unpleasantly with large brown freckles. She began making the familiar combing action with her fingers down the smocked folds of her bachelor’s gown – did French schoolmistresses have bachelors’ gowns? wondered Baker. Or were they spinsters’ gowns?

The original Fawcettians had been in two minds about academic dress. The blessed Mildred’s bluestocking band had rejoiced in their gownlessness, even after the less enlightened universities had caved in, but the sight of her own photograph in the illustrated papers had convinced the founder that subfusc was a sine qua non of academe. Tweeds alone and one looked like a minor lady novelist – not a happy thought.

Dr O’Brien’s gown normally resided on a quilted coat-hanger on the bentwood hat stand. She didn’t generally teach in it but it brought a dash of theatre to the morning assembly and it worked like a charm on the parents: intimidating the self-made sort and acting like a masonic handshake on the doctors and lawyers.

She looked back at Baker, expectant. Was she still waiting for a confession? marvelled Baker. An apology? She’d have a bloody long wait.

‘Now then. This morning’s staff meeting has voted unanimously in favour of immediate expulsion. They all feel – and I have to say they have a point – that you are
a flaw in the pattern
, Amanda, and that any leniency would set a very dangerous precedent.’

She leaned back in her chair and tested its swivel slightly.

‘In the terms of the Fawcett charter, I, as head, have veto over any vote cast, but it is also my duty to listen to the senior common room’s concerns. If this sort of behaviour is not a matter for expulsion then one would need to condone any number of lesser transgressions. As one member of staff rather pithily put it: are we waiting for grievous bodily harm?’

The laugh was obviously false but Baker did feel her own face brighten slightly at the thought of grievously harming somebody. Mrs Mostyn most probably, tarring and feathering her with the gummy white glue and the tray of new, improved Africas.

‘As I say, I, as head, have that right of veto, but without your full cooperation I will be disinclined to exercise it. Will you please remember, throughout the coming conversation, that I have it in my power to expel you at any moment.’

The head dabbed vaguely at the green button on her traffic light gadget, like a Bond villain launching a missile, and seconds later the Bakers peeped apologetically round the door. Spam’s trouser suit and shiny eye shadow trio looked far too trend-set for the self-consciously brainy room.

What does your decor say about you? O’Brien’s screamed ‘recovering academic’ with its vertical parquet of leather-bound volumes (books laid so tightly into their alphabetical mosaic that the spines tore away if you made the mistake of trying to tweeze one out and read it). Baker saw Spam squinting at the arty gloom of the head’s chosen prints, at the side table with its batch of uninteresting curiosities: an ammonite (acquired during the field trip that had given the Snog Monster her nickname), a flint arrowhead, a beetle-shaped thing carved from a hardstone pebble (sold to Mildred Fawcett as a scarab of the eighth dynasty) and a glass paperweight with a piece of coral trapped inside.

Her father recovered first. Slipping into his make-that-sale persona, he strode across the carpet, hand primed for shaking.

‘Dr O’Brien? Bob Baker. Howjadoo?’

O’Brien sized them both up with a look and stuck out a hand.

‘Mr Baker. Good of you to come so promptly. Mrs Baker? I don’t believe we’ve met. Do sit down.’

Baker hurriedly shoved one place on like the Hatter in
Alice
so that her father ended up sandwiched in the middle of the threesome.

O’Brien resumed her seat, placed her elbows on the blotter and paired off her wrinkly fingers to form a lobster pot of skin and bone.

Her voice took on that chant-y tone she used for Bible readings. The school, she purred, had a dilemma. While they undeniably had a duty of care to any student in difficulties, they also had a duty to students who weren’t – and to their parents. It was a matter of balance – her fingers parted and did a stupid hand-jivey thing like a pair of wonky scales. They wanted to help, she said, but yesterday’s incident was a very serious matter, a matter which, in the opinion of many colleagues, ought to be taken further. Strictly speaking it was a criminal offence, after all.

Baker heard her father catch his breath and then the whimper of his chair as he sighed deeper into it.

‘And?’ It was Spam who spoke. O’Brien gave her The Look over her glasses, but Baker saw her stepmother stare right back. She had assumed a no-nonsense, professional, further-to-my-letter demeanour that Baker had never seen, that
Bob
Baker had never seen (not much call for it at home).

‘And?’ frowned O’Brien.

‘
Have
you decided to involve the police? If it’s your duty and all that.’

‘The police?’ O’Brien smoothed her tweeds. When she spoke again it was like an invisible conductor had stopped the proceedings and started again from the top in an entirely different time signature.

‘Cigarette smoking is something we take very seriously at Fawcett.’

At no point had she referred to the content of Baker’s roll-up and her manner now was strange and she spoke in a peculiar, very deliberate way as if she had just winked at them or as if the room were wired for sound.

‘
Have
the police been called?’ persisted Spam, craning her neck and giving a theatrical look over her shoulder like she was wondering when the rozzers would arrive. ‘If that’s what your staff room want . . .’

O’Brien began to back-pedal and admitted that no, the SCR had opted to deal with the matter in-house – up to a point. The teaching body had long been of the opinion that Amanda was – a tiny pause –
disturbed
. Dad’s breathing made it plain how badly he took this:
disturbed
. Out of the corner of her eye Baker could see Spam shrivelling in sympathy for her husband as the headmistress pressed on with her proposal. Dr O’Brien explained that she had only had time for one, relatively brief meeting with senior colleagues, but it had been decided that, whatever the eventual verdict, professional help and advice should be sought without delay – for Amanda’s sake.

Her plan, designed to keep the staff room sweet without involving the authorities, was that Baker would be assessed by Delia Carson. Miss Carson had a great deal of relevant experience and was always a huge help in cases of this kind. Always? Bob Baker had recovered enough to ask just how Dr O’Brien came to be so clued up on all this exactly: did the school get a lot of this sort of thing?

Dr O’Brien didn’t actually say ‘Don’t take that tone with me’ but her voice grew steelier as she spelled out the terms of the deal.

‘Remind me, what is it you
do
, Mr Baker?’

She didn’t really need reminding. The file was on her blotter and she had the speech ready before he’d uttered his reply.

‘So you’ll understand that we need to get the professionals to take a few measurements before we blunder in.’

She was speaking far more quickly than usual – as if to imply that valuable time was being wasted and to render further interruption almost impossible. She delivered her ultimatum in a series of tetchy telegrams. Extremely serious matter. Very important not to act precipitately, but there was no time to be lost. These things could easily drag on for weeks, even months, but, given the seriousness of the case, Miss Carson had persuaded Gerald Sexton – she’d paused here the way she did in assembly when she expected laughter or applause, as if the name must surely be known to all fathers of delinquent teenagers –
Doctor
Gerald Sexton, to squeeze Amanda in for a preliminary assessment that very afternoon, then Delia would take over the reins on Friday morning. She did the tweaky thing with the desk furniture again, then looked up in a ‘You still here?’ sort of way.

‘Six sessions ought to give some indication of how the land lies.’

Bob Baker’s unhappiness was now complete and he sat crumpled in his chair, mentally kicking himself for not switching schools while he still had the chance.

‘Couldn’t you . . . ? Is it really . . . ?’ He could barely speak for shame. ‘I mean . . .
psychiatrists
?’

Dr O’Brien was quick to correct him: Miss Carson was a
psychologist
. Baker’s daily sessions were to start the very next morning at 8.30. Probably best if she didn’t return to school for the rest of the week and she should be denied all use of the telephone.

‘I appreciate that as you are
both
out at work,’ (weird the way full-time teachers – even married ones – always had it in for mothers who ‘went out to work’), ‘a traditional suspension would create difficulties.’

Baker would be allowed back in to school after her Monday morning appointment, but only under strict supervision.

‘Miss Bonetti has kindly agreed that Amanda can spend the day doing private study at the back of her Mathematics class. If you could supply a packed lunch?’ She nodded bossily at Spam. ‘Breaks and mealtimes to be spent in the sick bay and no contact with classmates until further notice. A return to normal lessons is out of the question until Dr Sexton and Miss Carson have made their reports and the staff have had the chance to review the case. I suggest we all meet again on Friday afternoon next week? My secretary can arrange a convenient time.’

Bob Baker had driven off to work, leaving his wife to chaperone Amanda to the clinic where the psychiatrist had his Thursday surgeries. Spam settled down in the waiting room with a lapful of
Country Lives
, but had hardly chosen her first dream house (paddocks, trout stream, all mod cons £32,000) before Amanda reappeared.

‘That was quick.’

‘Famous for it.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Not much. Was I depressed and did I have any anxieties, and take this lot three times a day.’ Baker brandished her prescription. ‘Not even “call me in the morning”.’

They went home via the chemist’s in the high street. Baker wandered around the aisles, painting random stripes of varnish on the stubs of her nails while Spam played at reading the contents on a box of cough lozenges and the man in the white coat wrote the dosage instructions on the three brown bottles. Spam was mortified: he must think she was mental, all those pills. ‘It’s not for me!’ she felt like screaming as he bagged up the drugs, but he would already know that because she had ticked the ‘Under 16’ box on the back of the prescription. ‘She’s my stepdaughter,’ she blurted. But that only made it worse. A broken home? Poor mite.

Dad phoned to say that he was working late to make up for his wasted morning, so Spam made a lazy supper for herself and Baker.

‘Brown or white?’

‘Hovis?’

‘Can do.’

When Bob Baker finally got home his solitary supper had been grilled sirloin and mashed potatoes and, as always, his wife had watched him slice the meat clean in two with his teak-handled steak knife before tilting a cut side into view, to check that it was done to his liking and complain (or demand further grilling) if it wasn’t. It was perfect (but he didn’t say so).

The dining room table was slippery with prospectuses. Spam said they should wait and see how it went with the psychiatry lady, next week but Dad said they should have Plan B in place in case. Spam said Baker should maybe help choose and he harumphed so hard that he squirted whisky and soda out of his nose.

Baker spent the rest of the night in her room crying, not even surfacing for
Top of the Pops
. She broke Spam’s sandwiches into bird food for her window sill and fed the beaker of chocolate milk to her spider plant. Spam stood over her while she swallowed her Mandrax, but after she’d gone back downstairs Baker went to her stepmother’s bedside drawer and sneaked another three sleeping tablets from the bottle at the back, next to a sunglasses case with foil packets of contraceptive pills hidden inside. Four Mandies.

She fell asleep almost at once and immediately tuned in to eight hours of demented dreams, like an all-night Marx Brothers screening. Lady Henry had been made headmistress and was conducting a whole school pencil case inspection and suspending any girl who didn’t have a speculum. And there were to be new portraits of past headmistresses all done by Dora Hardcastle and showing them as Salome and Judith and St Agatha. Julia and Baker were discovered by Mrs Mostyn in the organ loft again, but this time Julia stepped away from Baker and Mrs Mostyn gave her a white pin and when Baker reached out for it she fell through the thin plaster floor, down into the assembly hall where Lady Henry was handing out chocolate biscuits dipped in golden syrup. Bob Baker had finally been asked to redecorate the school: William Morris, shag pile, white piano: the works. The fluffy new carpet caught on the crepe soles of the Upper Thirds’ indoor shoes and was already peppered with ink stains and pencil shavings. Then the dream camera dollied into the refectory kitchen where Spam was making hundreds and hundreds of butterfly cakes on the rotisserie and lots and lots and lots of plates of party sandwiches with flags telling you what was inside: palm fibre, bauxite, yam, Spam. And then Miss Gatsby put a winner’s medal round Baker’s neck and gave her a big fragrant hug.