A Lesson in Dying

Chapter One

At one time you could see fifteen working mines from Heppleburn churchyard. Now the nearest pit was miles away to the north beyond the horizon and only the chimneys of Blyth power station spoilt the impression of rural beauty. To the east farmland sloped down to the sea, the clean sweep of ploughed fields broken by the wooded valley which followed the burn to the coast and the houses of Heppleburn village. The sea was blue, almost purple, the tower of the old St Mary’s Island lighthouse was clear and white in the sunshine. Jack Robson put a bunch of chrysanthemums on his wife’s grave. He had come with flowers every week since she had died two years before.

The school and the church stood together on the hill, and as he straightened he heard children singing ‘We plough the fields and scatter’. The Northumberland voices shortened the consonants and lightened the vowels. Jack Robson had sung the same hymn in exactly the same way more than fifty years before in Heppleburn school. He thought he had wasted his time there. It seemed to him now that he had been a dull and unimaginative boy. There had been no dreams, no ambition. It had never occurred to him that he might move away from south-east Northumberland, and during National Service he thought of nothing but coming home. People said that the mind grew slower as it got older, but he thought his brain was sharper now than it had ever been. With his retirement from the pit he had begun to read voraciously as some children do, and became immersed especially in history and biography. He found he could understand what he read, that he even occasionally had the courage to disagree with the opinions expressed.

The new confidence was noticed by other people. He had been a habitual member of the local Labour Party for years – his father had been a great activist and it was expected.

More recently he had been asked to stand for the local council, and now as Councillor Robson he represented Heppleburn on Hepple Valley District Council. He was especially respected by his younger colleagues, for his openmindedness and his willingness to accept innovation, but he spoke in meetings of the old morality, the old principles, in a way that stirred them all.

‘Why do you bother with the job at the school?’ one of the younger men asked, implying, despite his politics, that manual labour was something to be ashamed of.

Robson shrugged. He could have said that he needed the money, which was true enough, but there was more to it than that. He liked the children and feeling part of a team. He was a school governor but he had more contact with the children through his work. Besides, what else could he do?

He looked at his watch and began to walk through the churchyard towards the school. In the distance a tractor was ploughing a newly harvested field with immaculate furrows, followed by a cloud of white gulls. The children had stopped singing. The school bell rang and as he reached the gate the pupils began to run into the playground on their way home. He waited to wave to his grandchildren then went in. He was the school caretaker. It was a job that suited him, despite the headmaster. He knew there would a Parents’ Association meeting that evening and began to set out tables and chairs in the hall. Lily, the cleaner, arrived on her bicycle and they shared a joke and a gossip while they worked. At five o’clock he left and walked down the hill to the red-brick council house where he had lived since he was first married.

The Parents’Association meeting took place on the Friday before the Blackberry Week half term. Jack Robson’s daughter was there and the Hallowe’en party discussed by the meeting was her idea. Like all her ideas it was formed on the spur of the moment and ill thought through.

‘You’re mad,’ her husband said later that evening when she got home and told him about it.

‘I thought you were fed up with the Parents’ Association and now you’ve landed yourself a job like this.’

‘It might be fun,’ Patty said, still excited because her idea had been agreed by the headmaster, her head still full of plans.

‘I’m surprised Medburn agreed.’

‘So am I,’ she said.

‘You only took it on because you’re bored,’ Jim said. ‘You should get a job.’

He was right. With the children both at school she had been restless for months. She had even nagged her husband about moving somewhere a bit more stylish – perhaps to Morpeth or on the coast, but Jim knew she would never leave Heppleburn. Besides, he said, how could they afford to move on a teacher’s salary? If she wanted a change she could go back to work. His mother would mind the bairns when they came out of school. Patty recognized the sense of his suggestion but knew she would not be satisfied with working as a clerk at the Gas Board again and realized she was qualified for nothing else. At eighteen she had left home to go to a teacher training college in Reading, but after a fortnight she was ill with homesickness and came home to her mam and dad in Heppleburn. The experience had made her glad then of the job in the accounts office, the security and the company of the other girls. Now she knew she would hate it. If only I had qualifications! she thought, and wondered hopelessly about the Open University, but she realized she would never have the application to complete a degree.

During this period of restlessness she had paid for evening classes and attended a few sessions, but never finished the course. She had taken up aerobics, dressmaking and archery and launched into each new interest with the conviction that it would meet all her needs. The conviction soon passed. She had been for wild nights out to the clubs in Whitley Bay with friends from her old job, but only woke up with a hangover and the same feeling of dissatisfaction. She had considered having a baby, even, in moments of deep depression when the day was empty except for cleaning windows and weeding Jim’s beloved garden, she had considered finding a lover, but she knew herself well enough to know that her enthusiasm for these projects would end long before the resulting complications.

‘Well,’ she said, looking at Jim through the untidy fringe which irritated him so much, ‘ it’ll keep me busy for a few weeks.’

She had conceived the plan for the Hallowe’en party on the way to the meeting. The church and the school were apart from the village, reached by a steep footpath between hawthorn hedges. The haws were forming and the leaves were beginning to change colour. Although she was late Patty stood for a moment in the playground. She came to school every day to bring her children, but she had a sudden memory of her own childhood there, never previously recalled. It was a freezing winter’s day, grey and overcast, with flurries of snow, the flakes as small and painful as hail. Her knees and hands had been blue in the bitter wind which came uninterrupted from the North Sea. Miss Hunt had let them into the classroom early and they stood around the big, evil-smelling boiler in the corner until their flesh tingled with the unaccustomed warmth. Miss Hunt had been her first teacher and Patty had loved her passionately. Now she taught Patty’s daughter Jennifer and soon she would retire.

The school had been smaller in Patty’s day and so had the village. Its heart had been the main street of solid grey houses, with the post office and the Northumberland Arms. There had been the small council estate where her father still lived and she had been brought up, and the row of miners’ welfare cottages where old men coughed and spluttered and smoked themselves to death. The children had fitted easily into two classrooms – the infants in one and the juniors in another. In recent years the village had grown. Builders had bought the low land near the burn and turned it into the estate where she and Jim lived. It was similar to other estates surrounding other villages all over the country. Most of the homes now had swings in the back garden and a bike in the garage and the school had expanded into a series of mobile and new classrooms.

I was happy in this school, Patty thought, longing for the contentment of childhood. But she knew that even then she had been unruly, a fidget, a delinquent. She had never been able to concentrate on school work but had stared out of the window towards the sea, dreaming of adventure.

She had volunteered for the Parents’ Association with a rush of enthusiasm when her second child had joined the school, and was already regretting it. The meetings were formal and boring and the Association had none of the power she had imagined. It had been a rush to make a meal for Jim and the children and get to the school in time. Six o’clock was a most inconvenient time for a committee meeting, but Mr Medburn had insisted that it was the only time when he and his staff could attend. The committee knew that his object was to be as inconvenient as possible and had suggested that Mr Medburn’s presence was hardly necessary. He, after all, had shown no enthusiasm for the formation of the Association. But he had stated that it would be impossible for them to use school premises without him, and the time had been agreed. As Patty entered the hall her depression deepened and she prepared to be bored.

Paul Wilcox was washing up and listening at the same time for the sound of his wife’s car. From the living room came the voice of the television and occasionally the children’s voices raised in argument. He supposed he should go into them and put an end to the quarrel. He should switch off the television and persuade them to play something constructive, but he was grateful to be on his own for a while.

They lived in a big house, converted from an old water mill, with a garden and a paddock by the stream. He had never expected to live in a house like that and it would have been impossible if he and not Hannah had been working. He loved the house, but it shamed him. It was a reflection of his incompetence. The kitchen, where he was hiding from the children, had a gloomy unfinished quality. It had a red quarry tile floor and a large dresser they had bought at an auction before the children were born, but some of the units were still without doors and it needed more light. Hannah thought that as he was home all day he should be able to turn the house into the dream property they had imagined it could be, but it was not that easy. He had worked as a nurse. He had never been a practical man. Besides he did not have Hannah’s energy, her vitality, her ability to do three things at once and still do them all well.

He scraped remnants from Elizabeth’s plastic plate into an already overflowing wastebin and wondered when he would have the courage to admit to Hannah that the experiment of role reversal had been a mistake. It had been his idea.

‘You have a far greater earning potential than me,’ he had said. She was a graduate, a mathematician. ‘I’ll enjoy being home with the children. It’ll be exciting.’

Hannah had been unsure. She took motherhood seriously. She read books about it. Then an old colleague from the computer firm where she worked came to see her. He was considering setting up on his own, he said. A computer consultancy. There was a gap in the market in the north-east. Was she interested in joining him? For the first six months Paul worked nights while she struggled to make a go of it. She worked from home in the small terraced house where they lived. Elizabeth was a tiny baby and Joe a serious three-year-old. Then she started making money and to celebrate they moved to the old mill in Heppleburn and there was no longer any need for him to continue working.

At first it had been fine. It had been a joy to escape the routine of work. Joe was at nursery school and Elizabeth slept a lot. He planned the things he would do with his new free time. He would read, perhaps join a band again, decorate the mill, plant the garden. Then Elizabeth changed, almost overnight, into a kicking, screaming, demanding monster who drew in wax crayon on his books, broke the strings of his guitar and washed her hair in wallpaper paste. Their friends, said she was a normal toddler. Joe, they said, had been exceptionally good. They couldn’t expect to have the same luck twice. For Paul the shock was enormous.

It would have been easier perhaps if they had family who lived locally, but they were both southerners and had no one to support them. Paul loved Heppleburn. It fitted in with all his romantic notions of the north. He liked the seamen’s mission on the coast, the miners’ welfare hall, the leek shows and the racing pigeons. He liked to talk to shop assistants and to old ladies in bus queues to show that he was friendly too. He and Hannah often told their friends from Kent about the day Hannah took Joe out in his pram as a new baby and the pram came back jingling with coins – the lucky money given by people in the street to celebrate his birth. But despite all that they had no real friends in the area. There was no one he could talk to.

As Hannah’s business succeeded she came home later and stayed away more often. She was running courses, attending conferences, selling her skills. Some weeks Paul hardly saw her and at the weekends she was exhausted, kept awake only by nervous energy and her desire to have time with the children.

He joined the Parents’ Association because it seemed the right thing to do. Some of his ideals about being the perfect parent still remained. He wanted to prove his commitment to Hannah but thought that she hardly noticed. He seemed to be losing her. She was slipping away from the family and he felt inadequate to take her place. Thousands of wives must feel like this, he thought as he looked at his watch again. He was so tight, so full of resentment, that he felt he should cry out to relieve the pressure. Perhaps then, magically, the self-pity would leave him like air from a balloon. It’s my only night out this week and she’s late.

Then he heard her car on the drive and the clang of the garage door and she was in the kitchen, her hands full of papers and files and a bulging briefcase. She was wearing a long, gaberdine mac which was crumpled because she had been sitting too long in the car. Her face was drawn and her eyes were grey and tired.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said, dropping everything in a heap on the kitchen table. ‘It’s those bloody road works on the A1. I’m so glad to be home.’

‘Sit down,’ he said, because it was impossible to be angry with her when she looked so small and ill. ‘I’ll make some tea.’

But as he filled the kettle he still wanted to cry or to scream as she started telling him about an awkward customer who had purposely misread the contract. He wanted to say that he had had a bad day too. He wanted to tell her about Lizzie wetting herself in the supermarket trolley and pulling the washing from the line into the mud, but he said nothing and pretended to be listening. Thousands of wives must feel like this, he thought again, but it was no real comfort.

‘I’ll have to go out now,’ he said at last. She turned to him with a hurt bruised expression, so he realized he must have interrupted her.

‘It’s the Parents’ Association,’ he said defensively. ‘ I’m chairman. I’ll have to go.’ He would have liked to say something more to her, something intimate, fun even, telling her to be ready for him when he came home, but he knew she would not want to make love to him. She was too tired and would fall asleep as soon as they were in bed.

Outside the house he composed himself. He was determined to maintain the illusion that their life together was a success, that he enjoyed his role as a parent. Harold Medburn’s remarks about his inability to support his family would not be allowed to hurt him this evening. He hurried up the lane towards the school and was the first one to arrive. When the others came into the hall he was already sitting in his place at the head of the table, studious, bespectacled and calm.

Irene Hunt unpinned the frieze of vegetables, flowers and fruit which the children had prepared for the Harvest Festival and threw it into the bin. It seemed ridiculous now that she had once had the ambition to be a student at the Royal School of Art. There was little sense of creativity in the visual arts form. After half term the bare space on the wall would be filled with the silhouettes of witches, cats and pumpkin lanterns. She did not entirely approve of Hallowe’en. It was, she thought, an American invention, but the children liked painting witches and it provided a focus for the craft work between Harvest and Bonfire Night. For forty years her life had been ruled by this calendar of childhood excitements and soon it would be over. At Christmas she would retire. For the last time she would teach her reception class to sing ‘Away in a Manger’, to perform the nativity play, to stick cotton wool onto black card in the shape of a snowman. It would be a relief to go. She had been forced into teaching by circumstance and though her disappointment had burned out long ago, she had never been fulfilled by it. It seemed to her that for the first time in her life she would have the opportunity to grow up, to become truly adult. She stood in front of the blackboard, a tall gaunt woman, and thought with pleasure that this would be the last parents’ meeting she would have to attend.

The classroom door opened and Matthew Carpenter stood uncertainly on the threshold. When he had arrived as a new teacher at the school he had been full of enthusiasm and fun. There was little indication of that now.

‘Come in,’ she said. She was sorry for him and angry because of what Harold Medburn had done to him, but she was irritated too by his lack of fight and confidence in himself. Perhaps it was because she recognized something of herself in Matthew. She felt responsible for him. She should have had the confidence to stand up to Medburn years before. Well, she thought, soon she would be retired and there would be no need then for secrecy.

The arrival of Matthew Carpenter had marked the one major defeat Harold Medburn had suffered in his relations with the school governors. When a vacancy arose in the school he had wanted to appoint a middle-aged women, one of the congregation of St Cuthbert’s Church where he was church warden. The governors decided that Mr Medburn’s influence on the school was already too strong. It needed someone younger, with fresh ideas, someone more cooperative, more willing to involve the parents. Matthew Carpenter had been appointed straight from college knowing nothing of the problems he would face. From the moment of his arrival Harold Medburn set out to make his position there untenable. He criticized and contradicted the young teacher, so Matthew became confused and unhappy. His class recognized his increasing nervousness and grew unruly and noisy. Mr Medburn was exultant and some of the parents who had expected most from Matthew were beginning to complain about the lack of discipline.

‘I don’t want to disturb you,’ Matthew said, but he went in and sat on one of the desks while she finished putting library books into piles for the next day. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do when you leave.’

She looked at him. He seemed hardly more than a boy to her. He was long and thin with limbs that seemed to be jointed like a puppet’s, a thin face and long bony fingers. His hair was curly and impossible to tidy, but he tried his best to please Medburn by being respectably, even soberly dressed.

I don’t know what you’ll do either, she thought. Some days she wondered if he would have some sort of breakdown. On those days Medburn would never leave him alone. The headmaster would pick at him like a bully with a weak and miserable child, using calculated jibes and warped sarcasm. At other times she thought Matthew would simply resign.

‘You’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘Just see out your probationary year. Then you can apply for something else. Besides, Mr Medburn won’t be here for ever.’

‘I’d leave,’ he said suddenly, ‘but my mother was proud when I became a teacher. It would upset her.’

It would upset me too, Irene Hunt thought. It would be a wicked, wicked waste.

Angela Brayshaw had the house to herself. She had taken her daughter to the home for elderly residents where her mother was proprietor and matron. She had not waited to speak to her mother – the place depressed her and she was feeling low enough already. Angela’s house was tiny, one of the new terraces on the estate where Patty Atkins lived. She stood in the middle of the living room and felt trapped. Like a bird, she thought with an uncharacteristic flash of imagination, in a brick cage.

‘I hate this place,’ she said aloud. It was spotless, gleaming, but so poky, so unimpressive, so ordinary. She too was spotless and gleaming. Her blond hair shone silver. It was straight and beautifully cut. Her make-up was immaculate. She was small, wrapped in a big, black coat.

‘I want more than this,’ she cried to herself. ‘ I’d do anything to get away from here.’

Her husband had got away from it. Exhausted in the end by her ambition, her desire for the most expensive furniture, the newest car, the smartest clothes, he had left her. To Angela’s incomprehension he had moved in with a plain, dowdy woman older than herself, who had two children and lived in a rundown cottage miles from anywhere. The role of deserted, injured wife had pleased Angela for a couple of months. The men in the neighbourhood helped do her garden and mended her car. Then she realized how poor she would be with only the maintenance and the supplementary benefit to live on, and she was angry and bitter. Before she had always had dreams to sustain her. David, her husband, would be promoted, he would earn more money, then they could move and she would have the sort of house she saw in soap powder advertisements on the television. There would be a kitchen big enough to dance in and a bathroom so grand that she would long for all her visitors to ask to use the lavatory. Now even Angela realized that in her present circumstances her dreams were unrealistic.

Well, she thought, and her face became stubborn and hard. Well, we’ll just have to change the circumstances. She pulled her coat around her, shut the door and set out towards the school.

In the dining room in the school house Harold and Kitty Medburn had tea together. Kitty noticed how pleased he seemed with himself.

‘I don’t think young Carpenter will last much longer,’ he said. ‘He’ll leave before Christmas. I knew he would never make a teacher. Perhaps now the governors will trust my judgement.’

‘He’d probably do well enough,’ she said, ‘ if you’d leave him alone.’

They seemed to argue all the time. In the beginning it had been a marriage of convenience. No one understood why she had married him. He had never been popular in the village, but he had suited her. She had fancied being a teacher’s wife and knew he would never ask too much of her – to be available in bed of course, she had expected that – but not the closeness, the pretence of love, the cloying intimacy she saw in other couples and which would have been impossible for her. She wondered sometimes if there was something wrong with her. Perhaps it was unnatural to be so detached. If there had been children it might have been different, she would surely have felt something for her own offspring. But children had never come and she and Harold would live in the school house, having contact only when they argued and ate together, until he retired. It was the life she had chosen and she did not regret it.

‘Are you working tonight?’ he asked.

‘Not till later,’ she said. She was a district nurse and there were some old ladies to visit and settle for the night.

‘I’ll take a key then,’ he said. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back. You know how these meetings go on.’

When Patty Atkins got into the hall the meeting had already started. The members sat with blank unlistening faces as the secretary read the minutes of the last meeting. There was the smell of school dinners and floor polish. Patty was suddenly determined that her idea for the Hallowe’en party would be discussed. Even if nothing came of it at least the monotony of the gathering would be broken. The meetings were usually entirely predictable. There would be a discussion about the distribution of produce from the Harvest Festival and the desirability of school uniform. Then there would be the ritual, unspoken, heartfelt prayer for the early retirement or sudden death of Harold Medburn.

Patty took her seat, stumbling as she did so over Angela Brayshaw’s handbag, causing the secretary at the other end of the table to falter.

‘Sorry,’ Patty said, looking around at them all, grinning. It was impossible for her to be unobtrusive. She was too big, too clumsy, too interested in everyone. She had recently been for an unsatisfactory perm and her blonde hair was shaggy and difficult to manage. She was like a large and friendly dog.

The secretary glanced at Mr Medburn and continued reading nervously. The headmaster was a small, slight man with a head which seemed too big for his body, like a child’s glove puppet. He had a bald head surrounded by a semicircle of grey tufts. His cheeks were round and red and he seemed at first to have an almost Dickensian good humour. His appearance was deceptive and everyone in the room was frightened of him.

Paul Wilcox called for the treasurer’s report. Patty considered Paul with fascination and friendly amusement. He was so earnest and intense and his soft, southern voice always surprised her. He made her want to laugh. Yet the Wilcoxes represented a sophistication which she envied. They went to the theatre and their son had piano lessons. They lived in a big house and had a cleaning lady. She would like to know them better.

The treasurer began to read the accounts. Patty yawned and queried the expenditure of £10.14 for tea and coffee to relieve her boredom. The treasurer blushed indignantly and produced the receipts. The meeting droned on. The Harvest Festival was discussed. Parents congratulated the school on the quality of produce collected and asked if they might attend the celebration on the following year. The headmaster regretted that it was impossible but gave no excuse for his refusal. The other teachers were given no opportunity to comment.

Paul Wilcox stared unhappily at his agenda and asked if anyone had any other business for discussion. Patty looked up brightly from the scrap of paper where she was drawing a caricature of the headmaster.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we have a social evening for the parents? Lots of other schools do it. Let’s have a Hallowe’en party.’

The others looked at her with pity and admiration. They knew she only made these wild suggestions to shock. It had taken a special governors’ meeting to persuade the headmaster to let the children have a Christmas party. He would never agree to parents enjoying themselves on school premises. There was a silence in which everyone expected Mr Medburn to invent a reason why such an occasion was impossible, but he did not speak. The chairman rubbed his beard uncertainly, cleared his throat and blinked.

‘Well,’ he said bravely. ‘I must say that I’d be in favour of a social event. Anything that encourages parents to come into the school must be a good thing. What does anyone else think?’

The parents around the table avoided his eye. Was Mr Medburn’s silence some sort of trap? If they backed Patty’s proposal would he stare at them with his pebbly blue eyes and make them the object of his wrath and sarcasm?

‘I think it’s an excellent idea,’ said Miss Peters. She was a temporary supply teacher, filling in during illness. She had nothing to lose.

‘It does sound rather fun,’ said the treasurer anxiously and there were muttered noises of agreement. Only Angela Brayshaw was silent. She never contributed to the meetings and Patty wondered why she had volunteered for the Association at all.

Paul Wilcox blinked and took a deep breath.

‘What’s your opinion, Mr Medburn?’

The headmaster shrugged as if he were above such triviality.

‘Why not?’ he said, then paused and stared unkindly at Patty before continuing, ‘But I could only agree of course if Mrs Atkins is prepared to take responsibility for the organization. I couldn’t expect my staff to give up their time.’

Patty was notorious for her lack of organization, but could sense the committee members willing her to reply positively.

‘Of course,’ she said, her imagination suddenly fired by the plan. It would be a magnificent party, she thought. The night would go down for ever in Heppleburn history. ‘We’ll ask everyone to come in fancy dress. We’ll decorate the hall…’

‘I’d like to volunteer to help with that,’ Irene Hunt interrupted. ‘Despite what Mr Medburn said, I’m quite prepared to give up my time.’

The chairman sensed the possibility of argument between the teachers. He was worried that they might lose the headmaster’s limited approval.

‘So you agree in principle, Mr Medburn,’ he said quickly. ‘As Mrs Atkins has said she’ll organize the event? And you will come yourself?’

‘Oh yes,’ the headmaster said unpleasantly. ‘As it’s to be arranged by these two admirable and competent women, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

They ignored his sarcasm and discussed catering, hiring a bar and printing tickets until it was dark.

Jack Robson had come back to the school to lock up, and Patty waited for a quarter of an hour with him while he stacked the chairs ready for assembly the following day. Then they walked together down the hill towards the village.

It was a clear evening and they could see the lights of the ships at the mouth of the Tyne and the strings of neon on the front at Whitley Bay. At the end of the lane, hidden from the main road and the cars that passed by the hawthorn hedge, a man and a woman were locked in embrace. Even from a distance and in the distorting light from the street it was clear that these were not teenagers. They were obviously shocked by the sound of footsteps as Patty and Jack approached, and they separated, ran into the road and disappeared in opposite directions. Patty looked at her father.

‘Wasn’t that Angela Brayshaw and Harold Medburn?’ she said.

‘It could have been,’ he said noncommitally.

‘But he’s married,’ she blurted out. ‘He’s been married for years.’

‘Don’t you go gossiping,’ Jack said. ‘You don’t know for certain it was Medburn.’

I know, she thought, remembering other meetings, the hand too long on her shoulder even when his words were most sarcastic, the way he looked at all the women there.

‘I was at school with him, you know,’ Jack said before he turned into his gate. ‘There’s more to that man then meets the eye.’