the school. She saw the headmaster at nine o’clock.
‘I’m very angry about this, Mr Briggs,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind anyone chastising my boy if he deserves it. But there’s a right way and a wrong way.’
A ruffled hen laying a complaint and making a song about it.
Mr Briggs listened carefully. He was a judicious little man, not long promoted. His brother had recently married a widow on the town council. He was perfectly happy signing the janitor’s requisitions and sending instructions round his staff in civil-service English and a neat hand. Other clerical activities were used to keep him from working and allow him to claim he had a lot to do every day. He liked talking to parents because that too occupied his time to the exclusion of less sedentary duties.
Mrs Provan ended her aria on a high note of horror.
‘But to slap a boy across the face for nothing! That’s something I won’t have. No!’
‘Ah now come, it couldn’t have been for nothing, surely it must have been for something.’
The tenor responded to the soprano, and continued piano.
‘I don’t mean I condone striking a pupil. Oh no, on the contrary. But on the other hand, I can’t believe a man walked up to a boy and suddenly hit him for nothing right out of the blue. I mean to say, it doesn’t sound a very likely story. Now does it, Mrs Provan?’
His forearms on the desk, his stainless fingers laced, he leaned forward on his magisterial swivelchair as if he was the Solomon of David’s royal blood who had to decide how far maternal affection could influence veracity.
‘Surely the boy must have given some provocation,’ he coaxed her.
‘No, none, I assure you,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘I have Gerald’s word for it. And Gerald never tells lies. He’s a good boy.’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ said Mr Briggs.
‘And even if he did that’s not the point,’ said Mrs Provan.
‘Even if he did?’ Mr Briggs looked at her in shocked reproach. ‘Did tell lies?’
‘Give provocation,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘A teacher’s not supposed to lift his hand to a boy. And to call him a rat, well! As a matter of fact it was worse than that.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Mr Briggs.
‘He used a bad word. He called Gerald a so-and-so rat, not just a rat. Poor Gerald wouldn’t even repeat the word. But you and me can guess what he said. I ask you! What kind of language is that for a man supposed to be educated?’
‘The question is, what did he say exactly?’ said Mr Briggs.
Always discreet he used initials only.
‘Did he say a bee rat or an effing rat?’
‘An effing rat,’ Mrs Provan sent word down from remote control.
‘I find it hard to believe,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘Still, if that’s what you say. Leave it with me and I’ll speak to the teacher.’
‘No, I want to see him myself,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘I want an apology.’
Mr Briggs tried a weak inoculation of sarcasm.
‘In writing?’
It was a mistake. It didn’t take.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘But I insist on seeing him for myself.’
‘I’m afraid you can’t,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘I think it would only make things worse. You’re too much upset for me to let you see anybody.’
‘Of course I’m upset,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘So would you be upset in my place. I’ve had to take the morning off my work to come here. It’s costing me half a day’s wages. Just because of a big bully that’s not fit for to be a teacher.’
‘You mustn’t say things like that,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘It could land you in trouble. He’s fully qualified and very experienced.’
‘Aye, so’s ma granny,’ said Mrs Provan.
Mr Briggs unlaced his fingers and leaned back. He saw no use discussing Mrs Provan’s grandmother.
‘It broke my heart to come to Tordoch at all,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘But I couldn’t get a house anywhere else. Everybody knows it’s the lowest dregs of the city lives down there. But don’t you go thinking I’m from a slum like the rest of them because I’m not.’
‘Nobody ever said you were,’ said Mr Briggs.
He was tired of hearing parents tell him they weren’t like the rest of the folk in Tordoch. He was tired of Tordoch and all its inhabitants. Once it was a lovers’ walk on the rural margin of the city. Then it became a waste land of bracken and nettles surrounded by a chemical factory, gasworks, a railway workshop and slaghills. At that point the town council took it over for a slum- clearance scheme. They built a barrack of tenements with the best of plumbing and all mod cons and expected a new and higher form of civilisation to flare up by spontaneous combustion.
But the concentration of former slum-tenants in such a bleak site led in a few years to the reappearance of the slum they had left. The first native generation grew up indistinguishable from the first settlers and produced their likeness in large numbers. The fathers had no trade or profession. The mothers were bad managers, and worn out by childbearing they looked fifty when they were barely thirty. The untended children lived a life of petty feuding and thieving, nourished by free milk and free dinners at school when they weren’t truanting.
There was a constant shift of population. But there too Gresham’s Law operated. The scheme became a pool where sediment settled.
Further out, on the country road, there were half a dozen big houses owned by professional and retired men, and between them and Tordoch proper there were some streets of tidy new villas. Since they had never been part of any housing-scheme these people objected if anyone accused them of living in Tordoch. Regretting the present, they turned to the past. A local historian claimed to have found the name Tordoch in a twelfth-century register of bishopric rents. An amateur etymologist said the name came from the Gaelic torran, a hill or knoll, and dubh or dugh, signifying dark or gloomy, implicitly ascribing a touch of the Gaelic second-sight to those who had first named the place. For now indeed it was a black spot. The police knew it as a nexus of thieves and resettlers.
Mrs Provan wasn’t bothered about these matters. She had her own grievance.
‘It’s the way that man treats Gerald,’ she said. ‘Like he was dirt. He’s got the boy frightened for him, so he has.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Mr Briggs.
‘I come from a good family,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘And I rear a good family. And that’s without a husband at my back. I’m a hardworking widow I am. Not one of your Tordoch types, neither work nor want.’
‘Oh no, I can see that,’ said Mr Briggs.
‘I’m very angry about this,’ said Mrs Provan.
Duet da capo.
He got rid of her after the third time round without letting her see Mr Alfred. He never let a parent see a teacher. He knew it would only end in a slanging match. No teacher could soothe angry mothers the way he could.
By that time it was morning break. His secretary brought in coffee and a biscuit.
‘My goodness, Miss Ancill, is it that time already?’ he greeted her.
Over his frugal refreshment, for he never stopped working, he told Miss Ancill what Mrs Provan had said to him and what he had said to Mrs Provan, and while he spoke and drank and nibbled he sorted an accumulation of forms intended for transmission to the Director. Amongst them he saw an application signed A. Ramsay for free meals for his family, six girls and four boys.