Laurels Are Poison

Chapter 8

SKIRLING AND GROANS

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The term went on for a week or two without incident except for what could be accounted for by the normal course of events. Deborah, who was now enjoying her life at Cartaret, began to wonder whether, after all, everything which had occurred at Athelstan since the evening of her arrival at the College had not been magnified, or even falsified, into bearing an interpretation which it did not warrant or deserve.

She argued that Mrs Bradley’s views on some subjects probably were determined — ‘warped’ was the word she first used — by her professional training as a psycho-analyst and by her past experiences as a criminologist.

This point she put to Miss Topas. It was the Monday of the week before School Practice, and Miss Topas, having done nothing all day except give one lecture and a couple of Demonstration lessons in English history, had spent the afternoon in Columba with her shoes off, her feet up, chain-smoking, and debating within herself (she told Deborah, who had been bidden to afternoon tea) which of two invitations she should accept for Christmas.

Deborah knelt on the hearthrug, removed ash from the fire, and began to toast the scones which were lying in a bag, a plate beside them, on the hearth.

‘Debating within oneself is an unprofitable pastime,’ she pronounced seriously. Miss Topas took her feet down and put slippers on them, hitched her chair closer to the fire, flung away the stub of her cigarette and observed:

‘We are all attention. Unveil your past. Is the choice to be made between Tom and Dick, or is it complicated by the introduction of Harry?’

‘You’re as bad as the students,’ said Deborah. ‘That’s the only way their minds work.’

‘Rebuke noted and digested. Go on. Tell me all. By the way, how are the Athelstan Horrors?’

‘That’s the point. We’ve had nothing since that hair-cutting business at Half-Term, and, you know, Cathleen, I still think Miss Vincent did that herself. You know what a light sleeper Mrs Bradley is.’

‘Is she?’

‘Yes, and she was sleeping in my sitting-room opposite the Guest Room where this girl lay, and yet she didn’t hear a sound.’

‘That does seem odd if she really is a light sleeper, unless the person climbed in through an open window, or knew the house very, very well. Even then… is Mrs Bradley certain Miss Vincent didn’t do it herself?’

‘She seemed perfectly certain, I thought, but these people get bees in their bonnets. Then, take the first affair — would you like to butter these as I do them? — that stupid rag. We didn’t find the student she dragged out of the circle, but it doesn’t seem to me that it’s necessarily the same girl each time. Of course, she did say herself that two different people were at work.’

‘I agree. Piling up the jerries and getting some young men to do a war-dance round them doesn’t tally with cutting off a sick person’s hair with the possible intention of frightening her into a fit. I think I’m with you both so far. Of course, we must remember that Mrs Bradley thinks there is a scheme to make Athelstan too hot to hold her, and, if that is the case, then the thing does hang together. But go on. And you might blacken one or two of those scones a bit more for me. I’m rather partial to charcoal.’

‘Well, how would you account for the snakes in that Demonstration lesson Miss Harbottle gave? Granted that they were intended to upset me and not her, I can’t see in that affair anything more than another rather stupid and malicious rag. Can you?’

‘Well, there, don’t you see,’ said Miss Topas. ‘I say, you’ve done enough, I should think. Come on. Let’s eat ’em while they’re hot. Can’t understand people who don’t take sugar. If I don’t get my three lumps per cup I become depressed — I was saying that that’s where Mrs Bradley scores, it seems to me. Stupid and malicious. Doesn’t fit students’ ragging, you know. I was at a big mixed Training College before I came here, but it was just the same. The men, particularly, ragged a good deal, but it was seldom stupid, and as for malicious — not a bit. As a matter of fact, girls, particularly, don’t like to hurt one’s feelings. And the misses like you quite a lot, you know. They wouldn’t want — but don’t let me interrupt you. Proceed with the evidence.’

‘Well, those tins of disinfectant. Wasn’t that malicious?’

‘Yes. Makes the argument even more sound. It simply was malicious, unless it was something Much Worse. You’ve read some morbid psychology, I suppose?’

‘Yes, of course. But isn’t it a boy’s or a man’s trick — that stabbing business?’

‘Yes, it is. Connects up with Jack the Ripper, of course. You could connect the hair-cutting in the same way, you know, and that coat-slashing, too.’

‘You don’t think it could have been a man that Mrs Bradley pulled out of that dancing lot on the first night, when she said it was a girl? The rest were men, you know.’

‘No, I don’t. Besides, the voice. Although possibly that could be faked. But I should imagine that it was a woman all right. Mrs Bradley wouldn’t make that kind of mistake. I shouldn’t myself. The queer thing is — where did the wretched person get to?’

‘This Hall,’ said Deborah, laughing. ‘At least, Mrs Bradley says so.’

‘Does she, by Jove!’ Miss Topas put a buttered finger on the bell. ‘Elsie,’ she said to the maid, ‘bring me the Hall list from the Senior Common-Room notice-board. I’ll brood over the question,’ she went on, when the maid had gone, ‘and get out a selection of felons for Mrs Bradley to choose from. Of course, in a Hall like this, where all the students are well over the average age and so forth, an ill-disposed person could hide under the spotted, unless she was unlucky enough to run into somebody who already knew her.’

‘Yes, I can see what you mean. As a One-Year anybody could take up residence here. Do let me know what conclusions you come to.’

‘Not a word to the Warden, then. She’d have a fit if she thought I was snooping into the antecedents of the students here, poor wretches. Imagine having spent a blameless and patriotic existence as an Uncertificated Teacher for ten or fifteen years, and then being hounded by the authorities into getting your Certificate, complete with College training, in twelve miserable, uncomfortable, fish-out-of-water months! Because, they are fish out of water, many of the poor wretches here — except the Third-Years, of course. They’re bred and born in the briar patch, but t’others hate every minute of it, and those who live near enough to go home leave us most week-ends, even if it means going back to digs and the motherly bosoms of their landladies. My heart bleeds for them. It does, really.’

Deborah giggled unfeelingly at this soulful picture, and then licked butter off her thumb.

‘By the way,’ she said, ‘I’ve been notified that I’ll have to do School Practice supervising. “What exactly does that entail?’

‘Fancy reminding me of what exactly it entails!’ said Miss Topas with a hollow-sounding groan, ‘but, if you must know, I’ll tell you. Bend closer.’

‘ “Come on my right side, for this ear is deaf,” ’ said Deborah. ‘Shades of Laura Menzies,’ she added apologetically.

‘And before I tell you about School Prac. I would say one word of warning,’ Miss Topas continued. ‘Your Mrs Bradley has a nice choice in words. She didn’t say girl. She said woman. Therefore, presumably, she meant woman.’

‘Yes. Well, your students here — ’

‘All right. Let it go, please. Now, then: School Practice…’

She leaned forward and poured into Deborah’s terrified but receptive mind the hateful and exacting nature of the task which would confront her during the ensuing weeks.

‘And don’t forget,’ she added earnestly, ‘that you are not responsible for keeping order. If you go into the classroom of a student who’s obviously got the class completely round her neck, you take care it stays there. Don’t help her. I recollect the case of a lecturer at my old shop who went into a Craft lesson — she was a geographer, by the way, and ought to have known better than to interfere in a mystery which was outside her scope, but some of these people are apt to be conceited — and found the usual howling mob and an unfortunate student trying to give out scissors. Not only did she end up by bringing the headmistress into the room to quell the disturbance, but it was discovered that one child had cut two other children’s frock’s, that two others had cut each other’s hair, and that another had been sick after eating most of the paste prepared for the lesson.’

‘Golly!’ said Deborah, laughing. Miss Topas wagged her head.

‘I’m speaking for your own good,’ she admonished her. ‘Never rush in where angels fear to tread. And never let yourself in for critting a P.T. lesson. You’ll probably have to watch one or two, but that doesn’t matter. Step stately out of it, and leave it to Pettinsalt or Betsy. They can’t bear having the uninitiated initialling their students’ notebooks.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. Always something a bit inverted about these P.T. wallahs. I don’t know why it is, but they always get it up the nose, with a few exceptions I could quote you. There’s something horribly unnatural about physical training. Too much muscle warps the intelligence, I expect.’

As though this were her last word, she consumed the last piece of toast at a gulp, kicked off her slippers, put her feet up, lay back and closed her eyes. Deborah prodded her suddenly and painfully with the toasting fork.

‘Wake up, slacker, and continue your idiotic but, possibly, invaluable remarks,’ she said.

‘No, no. You tell me why you’ve turned down your young man,’ said Miss Topas firmly.

The ghost of Athelstan commenced operations on the following Friday night — a well-chosen time, Mrs Bradley was compelled to admit, taking into consideration both day and hour.

It had been an exasperating Friday. Deborah had had a very full time-table, and to add to it and to her troubles, she had been compelled to deputize at six-thirty for the Senior English lecturer, who had contracted another of what Deborah called, unjustly, to Miss Topas, one of her ‘useful colds.’

This lecture, which was the third and last of a series on King Lear, lasted until twenty-past seven, and left Deborah exactly ten minutes in which to get back to Athelstan, wash, change and arrive in the dining-room. She was, of course, late. Mrs Bradley looked sympathetic and ordered her to avoid the cottage pie and to concentrate on soup and fish. Deborah, determined to be contrary, asked for cottage pie, did not care for it, left more than half, and got up from table hungry and irritable.

At half past nine she went to bed; not because she wanted to, but because there was no alternative except to sit up and correct English essays, which she was determined not to do.

She went to sleep remarkably quickly, and was awakened by the ghost at precisely two-fifteen in the morning.

She did not realize, at first, what sound it was that she had heard. All she knew was that she had been dreaming about pigs, and that one must have been killed. She started up, sweating with the horrible heaviness of nightmare, and, to her extreme horror, heard the sound again. To her credit, terrified though she was, she leapt out of bed, switched on the light, and, opening the door, called out: ‘What’s the matter? What’s going on?’

Mrs Bradley’s voice replied in comforting accents, and the head of the house appeared, electric torch in hand, just as more than half the students came crowding on to the landings, asking, as they huddled together, what was the matter, what had happened, who was it, and making other and similar useless and irritating inquiries. Even as they were asking the questions, the horrible sounds came again.

‘Disconcerting,’ remarked Mrs Bradley. At this inadequate comment Deborah began to protest, but her observations were terminated by a banshee wail which put all the previous disturbances in the shade. Deborah unashamedly clutched Mrs Bradley’s dragon-strewn dressing-gown, and there were excited and frightened exclamations from the students.

Mrs Bradley, alone among those present, seemed entirely unimpressed by the manifestations.

‘Put on coats or dressing-gowns, and come down to the Common Room,’ she said. ‘If there are any students still asleep, please wake them and bring them with you.’

There was some laughter at this, and the students came trooping down. Mrs Bradley called the House Roll when the assembly was complete, found that there were no absentees from the muster, and then gave instructions that no one was to go out of the room on any pretext until she herself had returned and granted permission.

Deborah followed her to the door, but Mrs Bradley whispered to her that one of them had better remain in the Common Room. Leaving Deborah, she descended alone to the basement. Outside the servants’ rooms she stood and called the maids by name.

‘We’re all here, madam,’ said the cook, opening one of the doors and appearing in curlers in the doorway. ‘The girls didn’t like the sounds, so we all collected ourselves in here. Did you wish to speak to anyone, madam?’

Her tone was not definitely impudent, but it was not, on the other hand, that of the trusty domestic, whether alarmed or otherwise. Mrs Bradley was interested.

‘I should like to speak to you alone, Cook,’ she said loudly, knowing that Cook was rather deaf. ‘Come out here, please. Shut the door. Now, are the maids alarmed?’

‘We was all frightened out of our seven senses.’

‘Where did the noise seem to come from?’

‘Right outside these very doors. You’ll get my notice in the morning. I’m not stopping on in an ’aunted ’ouse. There was none of these goings-on when poor Miss Murchan was here.’

Nothing more was heard of the ghost that night. By the following midday, however, the story was all over College, and ‘the ghost of Athelstan’ was freely discussed. Various explanations were offered by students from the other Halls, but each, as it was presented to the Athelstan students, was rejected by them as being out of conformation with the facts.

‘You ought to have heard it! I thought I should have fainted!’ was the burden of the Athelstan chorus. The talk during the day-light hours was amused, speculative and ribald, but when dinner was over in Hall and the sun was beginning to set, there was a marked disinclination among the students to go about the house, or to remain alone in study-bedrooms. The group which assembled in Miss Mathers’ room was typical of others on both floors. It consisted of the senior student herself, two or three of her year, three First-Years, and even the ostracized Miss Giggs, the mild Miss Morris and the ticket-of-leave Miss Cartwright.

‘What do you think the Warden will do if it happens again?’ asked Miss Morris.

‘I can tell you one thing she’s done already. Sacked Cook,’ volunteered Miss Cartwright. Like a great many of the more adventurous spirits, she was extremely popular in the servants’ hall, and so was in receipt of this bit of, so far, exclusive information.

‘Sacked Cook? But who cooked dinner?’ demanded Miss Morris.

‘The ghost,’ Miss Cartwright answered frivolously. ‘No, as a matter of fact, Mrs Croc. has promoted Bella. She “knows the apparatus,” as Mrs Croc. puts it.’

‘She made a very good job of the dinner,’ said Miss Mathers critically. ‘And now, if it’s all the same, I’ve got to get out some notes of lessons for next week.’

The guests departed unwillingly, keeping close together. Miss Giggs came back.

‘I wish you’d let me sit in here until supper,’ she said abruptly. Miss Mathers got out her notebooks and then looked up.

‘All right,’ she said. ’To be perfectly truthful, I’m not over and above anxious to be left alone, any more than you are.’

‘What do you think it was?’ asked Miss Giggs, lowering her voice and speaking hoarsely.

‘An owl caught up in one of the chimneys, or something of that sort, I fancy.’

‘Has the Warden said anything more?’

‘No, but I happen to know she thinks it was some of the Wattsdown men playing the fool. I heard her telling Miss Cloud so.’

‘What did Miss Cloud say?’

‘Oh, I think she agreed.’

‘It would be a good thing if it could be proved, though, wouldn’t it? Did she think Cook was bribed to open the door or something?’

‘Yes. Cook was rude to her this morning.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought anyone would dare.’

‘Yes. She told Mrs Bradley that there had been none of these disturbances until Miss Murchan’s illness.’

‘Where is Miss Murchan? Is she at her own home?’

‘I think she must be, but she is forbidden to have letters, Mrs Bradley said, so it isn’t any use our writing, and Mrs Bradley won’t give the address.’

In the study-bedroom apportioned to Kitty, the Three Musketeers were seated on the bed.

‘So you can’t take it, young Alice?’ said Kitty. ‘And, to tell you the truth, Dog,’ she added, before Alice could reply to this derogatory estimate of her powers of endurance, ‘I don’t blame her. Where’s the sense, anyway, of losing our beauty sleep? Suppose it is some of those silly goops from Wattsdown playing the fool, ten to one they won’t risk it again tonight, or ever any more, come to that. They might not get away with it another time.’

‘I didn’t sleep a wink last night,’ said Alice.

‘Don’t see how you could, with three of us trying to share your bed,’ said Laura. ‘So don’t make that an excuse. Now I’ve got my hockey stick, you’ve got a cricket-stump each, and if we can’t manage, between us, to knock any ghost for six, I shall be surprised.’

‘Don’t you believe in ghosts, Laura?’ Alice inquired. Laura grinned.

‘I don’t, but my Highland blood believes with its every drop,’ she confessed. ‘Nevertheless, reason still holds sway.’

‘Yes, until it gets round about midnight,’ said Kitty pointedly. ‘What I say is, I’m going to bed and to sleep, and you’ll see there’ll be no disturbance.’

She proved to be perfectly right, and by the following Sunday night the fears engendered by the ghost had given place to the less nebulous and more reasonable fears of School Practice.

Unlike some training colleges, Cartaret believed in getting School Practice over for all the students at the same time of year so far as this was possible, and for the last fortnight of the Christmas Term each student was assigned to a school.

Laura and Alice had been assigned to an establishment named immediately by the former the Village Institute.

It was an old-fashioned Church School, consisting of one main building with an annexe. The main building had been divided into classrooms by the expedient of putting partitions, mostly of glass, at intervals across the width. Thus the original three east and two west windows still lighted the whole of the building. The annexe consisted of a brick-built classroom and a cloakroom. Physical training, when the weather was too bad for it to be taken out of doors, took place in the Church Hall, on the opposite side of the playground.

Kitty’s lot was both more and less enviable. She had been assigned to the Council School from which children were brought to College for the Demonstration lessons. What she gained upon the roundabouts was lost upon the swings, for the Church School came under the heading, in Supervisors’ notebooks, of Special Difficulty, whereas the Dem. School, as the students called it, was given a mark of Alpha, and those unfortunates who were allotted to it for School Practice were expected, in the words of Miss Cartwright, to make good or bust. She herself had busted, she told an apprehensive and interested audience, on the Sunday night before The Terror (Laura’s name for School Practice) began.

When Monday dawned, students in various degrees of anxiety and nervousness arose (many of them before the rising bell had rung in the various Halls) and began to put ready the impedimenta (Laura’s carefully-chosen collective noun, much appreciated by Mrs Bradley when she heard it) for the day.

Of the Three Musketeers, Alice was the most nervous, Kitty the most ill-prepared. The latter set out at a quarter-past eight armed with her School Practice notebook, her time-table, a roll of large-scale paintings of various kinds of embroidery stitches, a stuffed fox (borrowed from the gardener’s drawing-room for a Nature lesson) and a twig of poplar. This last was in case the fox gave out on her half-way, she confided to the grinning Laura and the apprehensive Alice. She knew she couldn’t keep a lesson going for three-quarters of an hour, she concluded.

‘Old Kitty will break her own record if she keeps it going ten minutes,’ said Laura philosophically, as she and Alice walked to the bus stop, half a mile down the moorland road. In this estimate of Kitty’s powers of entertainment she did her friend grievous wrong, however, for Kitty’s first lesson, delivered with that aplomb and explosive energy which only the last stage of desperate fright can produce, went particularly well.

‘And just my luck,’ said Kitty, detailing the pleasures of the day when she encountered the others before tea, ’not a Supervisor on the horizon. I bet I fluff next time, and someone is sure to walk in.’

‘We had the Deb.,’ said Alice, smiling happily. ‘She just walked into my Arithmetic lesson and said: “Cheer up, Miss Boorman. I’m twice as frightened as you are.” And then she marked me — look!’

A red star, mark of extreme approbation, blazed, albeit smudgily (for Alice had wept over it in secret joy during the major part of the dinner hour), on the front page of Alice’s notes.

‘She told me off,’ said Laura. ‘Reminded me the teacher is the stage-manager, not the chief actor. Devastating, I call it. Besides, she’s a perfectly rotten teacher herself.’

Her friends giggled unfeelingly, and neither they nor the recipient of Deborah’s uncharitable advice allowed it to interfere in the slightest with their tea.

Between tea and dinner there were no lectures during School Practice. Some of the students commenced their preparation for the next day’s work; Alice was one of them. Laura took Kitty apart, and they walked up and down the gravel path between Athelstan and Beowulf deep in conversation.

‘But I’d be scared stiff, Dog,’ Kitty protested, at the end of ten minutes’ earnest monologue by Laura. ‘Besides, there’s Alice. We can’t leave her on her own. And then, I’ve got P.T. tomorrow. I must swot a beastly drill table. What comes after Group Four?’

‘Lateral,’ Laura replied. ‘But you’d better mug it up, in case I’m wrong. And don’t let ’em do Forward Punching. They only edge up and hit one another in the back.’

‘We’ve got a whale of a P.T. specialist in our school,’ continued Kitty. ‘One of those hags from Rule Britannia’s. She must be at least thirty, but she’s marvellous. Name of Cornflake. I suppose she’s Uncertif. and has come for a year to get the doings.’

‘Name of what?’

‘Cornflake.’

‘Rot.’

‘But I’ve seen it written down.’

Then it can’t be pronounced as it’s written. You couldn’t be called Cornflake.’

‘I don’t see why not. Look at your name.’

‘Less about my name. I’d have you know, you wretched Anglo-Saxon, that the Clan Menzies was out in the Forty-Five, and on the right side, too!’

‘I’m not a wretched Anglo-Saxon,’ said Kitty, wounded. ‘The Trevelyans are a very old Cornish family, as anybody but a halfwit would know.’

‘All the more reason why you should live up to your family traditions and assist me in my ghost-hunt. Don’t tell me a Trevelyan ever turned his back and neglected to march breast-forward.’

‘Oh, all right, but I shall be a rag tomorrow, I warn you. And I have got this wretched P.T.’

‘All right, don’t fret, then. I’ll hunt alone.’

‘No, you won’t. But I think we shall have to tell Alice.’

‘I have other plans for that jolly old nurse of ninety years. She’s got to check up on the personnel of the students, to make certain it’s nobody in Athelstan playing silly tricks.’

‘We know it isn’t. Mrs Croc. called the roll.’

‘Like hell she did! After giving plenty of time for everybody to assemble in the Common Room, no matter where they’d been. I know for a fact that Cartwright was having a surreptitious bath in the maids’ bathroom below stairs when the siren sounded.’

‘Was she?’

‘Of course she was. She said that from where she was it sounded like seventy devils whistling the “Soldiers’ Chorus”.’

‘Was she scared?’

‘Not a bit. Said she thought some fool was pulling a stunt. She just wrapped herself in her bathgown and toddled upstairs, prepared with explanations if asked for; which they weren’t. Now do you see what I mean?’

‘What did she have on her feet?’

‘I don’t know. What’s it matter?’

‘Mrs Croc. is a detective, don’t forget.’

‘I’m not forgetting. Even Sherlock Holmes could slip up. She probably wore her rubber shoes, and put them out on the window-ledge to dry. That’s what I should have done.’

‘I don’t believe you could get away with it without Mrs Croc. knowing, all the same. What’s the odds she knew all about Cartwright and her bath, anyway? Maybe she even gave her time to get to the Common Room in time for Roll-Call. Think that out.’

‘I have. Ad delirium tremens. So what?’

‘Well, she knows it was nothing to do with Cartwright, and she wasn’t going to let her get mixed up in any subsequent inquiry.’

‘Golly,’ said Laura, respectfully. ‘Your own idea?’

‘You’re not the only person who can add up two and two,’ said Kitty, with the sunny good temper which characterized her. ‘Anyway, if she was wise to Cartright she’ll be wise to us if we go poking about down there. That’s my point.’

‘And, granted your premises, not a bad one,’ said Laura thoughtfully. ‘Look here, then, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll give the ghost another chance, and if we hear that whistling row again we’ll go into action, young Alice and all. She’s game, all right, although her teeth are apt to chatter. How does that strike you?’

‘Alice wouldn’t tackle a ghost.’

‘Ghost your old goloshes. Have you seen young Alice play net-ball? If she can’t jump on a ghost from behind and bite pieces out of its neck, I’m a cow’s grandmother.’

‘That’s still in the future,’ said Kitty, with happy inspiration.

On the following morning, Tuesday, Miss Topas put on her coat and turned the collar up. Then she checked the contents of her attaché-case, added an extra fountain-pen, glanced regretfully at the neat files of her lecture notes on their shelves in the warm, cheerful room, and then looked out of the window. Students in groups were walking across the grounds. There was a thick autumn mist which might turn to fine weather later in the day, or might, Miss Topas gloomily concluded, turn to rain. At any rate, she did not want to go out into it

Her assignments for that morning were to supervise three history lessons; one by Miss Holt, a brilliant student in the Second-Year, a resident of Bede Hall; the second by Miss Pinkley, a doubtful stayer, also in her second year, and the third by a First-Year student from Athelstan, Miss Priest.

Sandwiched between the second and third of these lessons came a physical training lesson by — for Kitty had read and pronounced the name aright — Miss Cornflake, a One-Year student from her own Hall, Columba.

Like many of the lecturers, Miss Topas, as she had already indicated to Deborah, objected strongly to supervising lessons in physical training. She knew nothing about the subject, she protested — nothing at all.

‘You used to play hockey for the County,’ said Miss Rosewell.

‘And since when has hockey-playing become a qualification for judging neck rest and arms upward stretch?’ Miss Topas demanded. Gently supplied with a copy of the Board’s syllabus, she refused to look at it.

‘If she keeps the little brutes on the move and cuts out Country Dancing she’ll be all right, so far as I’m concerned,’ she said.

‘If the students can take P.T. they can take anything,’ said the drawling voice of Miss Pettinsalt, throwing in a bone of contention at which she knew all the Common Room would snap.

Miss Topas, picking up her traps preparatory to departure into the misty morning, went over points in the debate that had followed. Deborah, she remembered, had made one contribution only.

‘I never know why, with some of these students, the children don’t break their necks,’ Deborah had observed.

‘They probably do,’ Miss Topas herself had answered, ‘but it isn’t found out until later.’

She left her door open for Carrie to clear away breakfast, and descended the front steps of Columba to cross the grounds in the direction of the garages. The school she was bound for was two and a half miles from College, and it was her practice to pick up two or three of the students in her car, for, although there was a bus service, it was infrequent, and those who caught the bus arrived either much too early or (as was already becoming the rule by which Kitty conducted her life during this trying period) slightly late. The headmistress had remonstrated with her on the point, but Kitty had remained firm.

‘I suffer from asthmatic wheezing,’ she explained, ‘and the school is too cold for me at twenty-past eight. By five-past nine it is much safer.’

‘I don’t know how you dare be late on School Prac.,’ Alice had remonstrated.

‘Well, the sooner I’m chucked out, the sooner I can begin hair-dressing,’ argued Kitty. With the cussedness usually displayed by Fate, however, she was not chucked out, but was permitted, instead, to continue in her outrageous line of conduct.

Miss Topas, who, beneath a flippant attitude, concealed a strong sense of duty and responsibility, was always at the school of her assignment in very good time. Sometimes she talked to the headmistress; sometimes she asked permission to see the ‘stock list’ of history textbooks in use at the school; sometimes she inspected such things as the surface of the playground and, from the outside, the homes of the children.

On this particular morning, however, she did none of these things, because she was held up by the police, and was forced to make a long detour to reach her destination. Her usual road ran south-east from the College, downhill and through the woods, until it met a major road at which Miss Topas turned almost due west for a hundred yards or so, and then south-west until the road crossed the canal. Once across, another hundred yards brought her to another main road, and this, turning north-east, ran alongside the river from which the canal had been cut.

It was as she was driving, at a respectable twenty-eight miles an hour, along this pleasant bit of riverside road, that Miss Topas was held up.

She prepared to show her driving licence, but the sergeant merely said politely: ‘Afraid you’ll have a good way to back, miss. Nobody allowed this way this morning.’

‘Oh, something wrong with the road?’

‘Be all right by lunch-time, miss. I should sound your horn as you go. The mist’s a bit tricky along here.’

It was very thick alongside the river. Not more than a couple of yards of the silvery water could be seen from the edge of the bank. The haze of mist hung over the rest like teased wool. There was twenty yards’ visibility on the road. Miss Topas put the car in reverse, and, thankful that she had come, comparatively speaking, so short a distance off the main thoroughfare, backed carefully, sounding her horn.

It seemed as though, on such a morning, most of the students had preferred to take the bus rather than to walk, for she passed nobody going her way, and arrived at the school at twenty-five to ten, for the first lesson, that to be given by Miss Holt.

She allowed Miss Holt five minutes to get going, and then went in. Good notes, good illustrations, pleasant voice, attentive class — Miss Topas gave a very high mark, wrote a couple of lines of criticism, stayed in for the next quarter of an hour, and then drifted out.

Miss Pinkley, in the crude but apt vernacular of the profession, had got the class round her neck. Miss Topas, who invariably rushed in where she had forbidden Deborah to tread, came a little nearer the front desk and began to ‘collect eyes’. The miserable and terrified student so far had not noticed her, but the gradual silencing of her tormentors gave her the clue, and she turned round, blinking nervously.

‘Carry on, Miss Pinkley,’ said Miss Topas. ‘Don’t mind me. You’re the important person.’

She remained with Miss Pinkley for the next eight minutes, sighed inaudibly, initialled Miss Pinkley’s notebook but added no comment, wrote a brief report, and then went into the next classroom. Here was Kitty, initiating such as permitted the process into the mysteries of decimal fractions.

‘So you see,’ said Kitty, ‘all you do — hey, you, in the back row, stop pulling that girl’s hair! No, dash it, you weren’t doing up her slide. You were pulling her hair; I saw you. Oh, don’t argue You listen to me. Oh, hullo, Miss Topas. Take a seat, won’t you… Now, you perishers — that is children — look here, this is the point No, not the decimal point, haddock! The point of my remarks. In other words, what I’m saying, Oh, all right, if you won’t listen, you won’t. Sit up, and we’ll do some Pence Table. Don’t know it? Don’t know Pence Table? How does your father make out his betting slips, then? Come on, all of you. Twelve pence are one shilling. Eighteen pence are half a dollar. No, I’m wrong, at that.’

She got the class laughing. Then she rolled her eyes at Miss Topas, and went back to multiplying decimals. Miss Topas gave her an average mark, prayed inaudibly for her soul, and passed out, highly appreciative, but, she feared, wrong-headedly so, of Kitty’s capabilities as an instructor.

At half past ten a bell rang to denote that it was time for the mid-morning break. This break lasted for a quarter of an hour. The younger and the more frivolous supervisors (the terms were not necessarily synonymous) divided the Practice Schools into those that made coffee in the morning break and those that did not. Sometimes a school would make afternoon tea instead. One or two schools made hot drinks both morning and afternoon.

Kitty’s school happened to have a headmistress who liked coffee and tea, so that there was always a good chance of being invited into the staff-room and of being provided with coffee and even, possibly, a biscuit. The students were not invited in. Miss Topas could see them in the end classroom when she glanced through the glass top of the door.

The headmistress also came into the staff-room for the coffee. She was what Miss Topas, who had her own system of classification for the various professional types, called the White Knight sort of headmistress. She was elderly, kindly, and laid down minute rules and regulations with regard to duties and to the methods of teaching the various subjects, marking the books, punishing misdemeanours, keeping registers and records and dealing with consumable stock, and she always wore a black alpaca apron in school, and was festooned with little ornamental and useful gadgets of all descriptions.

She fussed round Miss Topas who had supervised students at this school once before, and, applying the technique of doing and saying absolutely nothing, Miss Topas contrived to get the fussing over and done with in the minimum of time, got rid of her, and was able to hear a thrilling account of what had been happening down by the river from one of the teachers who had had it from a bus conductor, who had had it from the policeman who lived next door to him.

‘A woman found in the river — dead. Murdered, they think, although I don’t know how they knew. More likely to be suicide or accident, I should think, in a neighbourhood like this.’

Lively discussion of this view was interrupted by the bell which indicated that the break was at an end. Miss Topas went out into the playground. The school, except for the class which was to have physical training, led into the building. In charge of the class left outside was a lank-haired student in glasses. Her blue serge skirt hung badly, and dipped lower at the back than at the front. She had changed into rubber-soled shoes, but had made no other difference in her dress. She gave Miss Topas a sickly smile, and then took off her glasses and put them on a window ledge. She gave an order to the class and got the children running, then she took off her skirt, displaying well-cut shorts not of the College pattern. Then she gave one of the most interesting and remarkable physical training lessons that Miss Topas ever expected to supervise.

‘Why, Miss Cornflake, I had no idea you were such an expert! May I have your notebook, please?’

Miss Cornflake, putting on her skirt, her glasses and then a heavy coat, handed over her notebook.

‘Don’t star it, whatever you do,’ she said. ‘It was, actually, rather dud. Didn’t you notice…’

She proceeded with technicalities until Miss Topas, glancing at her watch, decided that she would never get in to Miss Priest’s history lesson. She was feeling slightly irritated with Miss Cornflake. She sat in on Miss Priest’s lesson on the Conversion of the English to Christianity and wrote a slightly acid and decidedly unfair report of it. Then she crossed that out and wrote a snappy comment in Miss Priest’s own notebook, advising her to remember that a class does not consist only of the middle of the front row. Then she crossed that out, too, and gave Miss Priest a better mark than she deserved — or, at least, than the lesson warranted — to compensate herself for her evil feelings.

‘I shan’t come back this afternoon,’ she said, at the end of the morning. ‘You can tell the other three.’

‘Four, Miss Topas,’ said Miss Priest

‘Yes, four,’ said Miss Topas.

‘I wish I could have you for that wretched Nature lesson tomorrow, instead of Miss Mount,’ continued the student, gazing raptly at the mark upon her notebook.

‘Well, you can’t,’ said Miss Topas. ‘I don’t know a single natural order — except fools,’ she added irritably. Miss Priest looked slightly taken aback. ‘And you must remember that you’ve got a class of forty, not a class of six. You talk to nobody but the middle of the front row, you know.’

‘Oh, do I? Oh, thanks, Miss Topas. Now that I remember, I do do that, and you’re quite right. It’s a jolly good tip. Thanks ever so!’

‘Go and have your lunch,’ said Miss Topas, ‘and for God’s sake don’t bolt it.’ She went out to her car and raced back to College, determined to suborn Deborah and make her spend the afternoon in the car on the moorland roads.