‘And this is where you teach?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you tell your students that story? The Stranger?’
‘No. Holland isn’t on the curriculum. It’s still all Of Mice and Men and Remains of the Day. I used to run a creative writing group for the GCSE students and sometimes I read them The Stranger.’
‘Must have given them nightmares.’
‘No, they loved it. Teenagers always love ghost stories.’
‘I do too.’ He grins at me, showing two gold teeth. ‘There’s a funny feeling about this place. I bet it’s haunted.’
‘There are a few stories. A woman was meant to have fallen from the top floor. Some people say it was Holland’s wife. Or his daughter. I’ve had students say that they’ve seen a woman in a white nightdress floating down the stairs. Or sometimes you can see a falling figure out of the corner of your eye. Apparently the bloodstain is still visible; it’s outside the head teacher’s study.’
‘Very appropriate.’
‘Oh, he’s the young and trendy type. Not Dickensian at all.’
‘That’s a shame.’
Ted dunks his biscuit but it’s the wrong sort and half of it falls into his tea. ‘What’s the topic this morning?’ he says. ‘I left my timetable in the room yesterday.’
‘Creating memorable characters,’ I say. ‘Time and place in the afternoon. Then home. Excuse me, I’d better go and prepare.’
I go up to the classroom to make sure everything is in place for the day but, when I get there, I just sit at the desk with my head in my hands. How the hell am I going to get through this day?
I first met Ella when we interviewed for jobs at Talgarth High five years ago. We were greeted by Rick, who was trying to pretend that a third of the English department hadn’t resigned at the end of the Easter term, leaving him with a few short months to find two experienced English teachers. A little while ago I looked in my diary to find my first impressions of Rick but they were disappointingly banal. Tall, thin, rumpled-looking. Rick is the sort of person whose charms — such as they are — dawn on you gradually.
‘It’s a really vibrant department,’ he told us as he gave us the tour. ‘And the school’s great, very diverse, lots of energy.’
By then we had worked out that there were two posts available and that we weren’t in competition. We exchanged a look. We both knew what ‘vibrant’ meant. The school was on the edge of anarchy. It had just received a ‘Requires Improvement’ rating from its latest inspection. The old head, Megan Williams, was still clinging on, but she was ousted two years later by Tony Sweetman, who had been helicoptered in from another school with only ten years’ teaching experience. The school is rated Good now.
Afterwards Ella and I compared notes in the staffroom, a cheerless place in the New Building with passive-aggressive Post-its on the appliances — ’Please help empty the dishwasher. It can’t always be my turn!!’ We’d been left alone with coffee and a plate of biscuits while ‘the panel’ made their decision. We both knew that we’d be offered jobs. The prospect was made a lot less bleak by the woman sitting opposite me: long blonde hair, bony nose, not beautiful but extremely attractive. I learned later that Ella, a Jane Austen enthusiast, identified with Elizabeth Bennet. But, to me, she was always Emma.
‘Why do you want to come here?’ Ella had asked, stirring her tea with a pen.
‘I’ve just got divorced,’ I said. ‘I want to move out of London. I’ve got a ten-year-old daughter. I thought it might be nice for her to live in the countryside. And be near the sea.’
The school was in West Sussex. Shoreham-by-sea was only fifteen minutes away, Chichester half an hour on a good day. Both Rick and Tony had made a lot of this. I was trying to focus on the drive through the lush countryside and not the art rooms with the broken windows and the cheerless quad where the plants had all been killed by the salt winds.
‘I’m escaping too,’ Ella had said. ‘I was teaching in Wales but I had an affair with my head of department. Not a good idea.’
I remember being touched, and slightly shocked, that she had confided in me so early in our acquaintance.
‘I can’t imagine having an affair with that Rick,’ I said. ‘He looks like a scarecrow.’
‘If I only had a brain,’ Ella sang in a surprisingly good imitation of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.
But she had a brain, and a good one, which is why she should have known about Rick. She should have listened to me.
Too late for that now.
In the morning, I talk to the students about The Stranger.
‘You often get archetypal characters in ghost stories,’ I say. ‘The innocent young man, the helper, the hinderer, the loathly lady.’
‘I know a few of those,’ says Ted with a slightly uncouth guffaw.
‘I don’t know what that means,’ says Una. ‘What is a loathly lady?’ I recognise her as the type who makes heavy work of these things.
‘She’s a common character in gothic ghost stories,’ I say. ‘Think of The Woman in Black or Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre. She descends from legends like the one in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, where a beautiful woman becomes a hideous hag, or vice versa.’
‘I’ve definitely met her,’ says Ted.
I’m not going to be diverted. We have enough about Ted’s love life over the last two days. ‘Of course,’ I say, ‘you have legends like the one in Keats’ Lamia where a snake actually turns into a woman.’
‘But there’s no snake woman in The Stranger,’ says Una.
‘No,’ I say. ‘R.M. Holland tends to avoid women in his fiction altogether.’
‘But you said that his wife haunts this house,’ says Ted and I curse myself for our jolly chat over the biscuits.
‘Tell us,’ say several people. The more sensitive types shiver pleasurably but, with the autumn sun streaming in through the windows, it’s hard to believe in ghosts.
‘R.M. Holland married a woman called Alice Avery,’ I say. ‘They lived here, in this house, and Alice died, possibly from a fall down the stairs. Her ghost is meant to walk the place. You see her gliding along the corridors on the first floor or even floating down the stairs. Some people say that if you see her, it’s a sign that a death is imminent.’
‘Have you ever seen her?’ asks someone.
‘No,’ I say, turning to the whiteboard. ‘Now let’s do an exercise on creating characters. Imagine that you’re at a train station . . .’
I glance surreptitiously at my watch. Only six hours to go.
The day seems to go on for ever, for centuries, for millennia. But, at last, I’m saying goodbye to the students and promising to look out for their books in the Sunday Times culture section. I collect my papers and lock the classroom. Then I’m almost sprinting across the gravel towards my car. It’s five o’clock but it feels like midnight. There are only a few lights left on in the school and the wind is blowing through the trees. I can’t wait to get home, to have a glass of wine, to think about Ella and, most of all, to see Herbert.