A Fall from Grace Read online

  “’Ban, ’Ban, Ca-Caliban,

  Has a new master—Get a new man.”

  “Right, that’s fine,” said their teacher. “But let’s start getting it a bit more natural, a bit less disciplined. Don’t all look at the same part of the audience. Each of you choose someone to sing the song to, then change to someone else at some point as you go along. Right—from ‘Farewell, master.’ ”

  They began again, this time more of a rabble and less of an army, and as the song progressed some of the audience began to join in—Charlie noticed which ones. By the third repetition the whole class was joining in the song, belting it out with disciplined ferocity. Charlie was impressed by Buckworth’s quiet mastery of his talented class. What exactly had worried this teacher so much that he had talked to Chris Carlson about it?

  They had gone on to the next scene, Ferdinand carrying logs, observed by Miranda and, from a distance, Prospero. The boy playing Ferdinand did a convincingly sweaty job, but the girl playing Miranda was quite extraordinary. She glowed in her fresh, innocent appreciation of Ferdinand—her voice took to the verse as if it was her playground argot:

  “. . . I would not wish

  Any companion in the world but you,

  Nor can imagination form a shape,

  Besides yourself, to like of.”

  Charlie knew her, knew her at once. She was the leader of the little gang who were persecuting the Nortons, one of the older ones. And he knew something else: when she looked into the audience she looked at him, and she knew who he was. It didn’t put her off her stride one iota, but she knew he was a policeman, and that he lived in Slepton Edge.

  The rehearsal progressed smoothly to its end. The play was clearly halfway ready to be a really notable public production. When Harvey Buckworth called a halt to it there were still five minutes of class time left. He looked interrogatively toward Charlie, who made a swift decision. He had once toyed with the idea of trying to get into drama school. Performing was in his blood, though he knew if he’d taken a role in the rehearsal he had just witnessed he would have acquitted himself embarrassingly beside these talented teenagers. He knew that because he had experienced something like envy when he had watched them—young performers, one or two of whom could be poised to start a professional career in the theater. Still, he had stood up in front of school classes before, and he felt he could even say something to these drama specialists. He got up and went to the front of the class.

  “I enjoyed that. And I was impressed by it too,” he said, looking at them. He felt sure he could identify one or two of the younger children he had seen walking past his home. “I can see how exciting it is, being in a play, and how naturally you all take to it. But there’s one thing I don’t think some of you have learned yet.” And he let his eye range around the group, occasionally resting on faces that he recognized. “Acting is one thing, real life is another. Some actors will take hours before a performance to get into a part, so he or she feels they are the character in the play. But even he has to draw a line between being onstage and being off it. Because otherwise the wife of the man playing Othello would be in danger of getting strangled in a fit of jealousy. Or the man sleeping in the spare bedroom of the woman playing Lady Macbeth might be in danger of getting a dagger thrust into his heart. Do you understand what I’m saying? Some of you have been carrying over things you’ve been acting out here into your everyday lives. And if you were to take it much further than you already have, you might find yourselves in real trouble.

  “Thank you for letting me watch you today.”

  And joining up with Harvey Buckworth he went down the aisle between the desks and out the door. But before the door shut he heard a girl’s voice say, “What does he know? He’s just a thick black cop.”

  He and Buckworth looked at each other.

  “Want a chat?” the teacher asked.

  “I think so, yes,” said Charlie. “There are one or two things I don’t know.” As they walked toward an empty classroom he said, “They were pretty impressive.”

  “Thank you. They’re handpicked, of course, from the whole school, so I have would-be thespians of all ages.”

  “The girl was fabulous.”

  “She is. There was strong competition for the part, because Shakespeare never has enough women’s parts. Anne Michaels was the best of a very promising bunch.”

  “She’s one of the little group.”

  “I guessed that from looking at you.”

  “She’s the leader, I think.”

  They found a classroom and shut themselves in.

  “I’m sad about that,” said Buckworth, sitting at a desk. “But it’s probably just a phase: the usual hormonal problems of teenagers magnified in the case of would-be actors. They crave excitement, recognition, status among their peers—it’s perfectly natural.”

  “Maybe. Tell that to the Nortons when they’ve got seven or eight of them shouting and chanting outside their living room.”

  “What exactly have they been doing?”

  Charlie told him, ending up: “In other words, borderline stuff as far as the police are concerned, but unpleasant and well-organized.”

  “Well, at least your little talk should have stopped that,” said Harvey. Something in his tone caught Charlie’s attention.

  “There’s a ‘but’ in your voice.”

  “But it won’t have done anything to rein in the impulses that led to this particular outbreak of activity. They’ll find something else to do—either as individuals or as a group. Let’s hope those are things that are less unpleasant, less upsetting to the victims.”

  “Do there have to be victims?”

  “I think there are likely to be. They start seeing themselves as beings apart as soon as they get the drama bug. Ordinary people seem pathetic, contemptible and therefore good victims.”

  Charlie thought for a moment.

  “Not good for a school to have kids with attitudes like that. Tell me about the problem that you took to Chris Carlson.”

  “Ah yes.” Buckworth’s reluctance was palpable. He shifted in his seat, took a deep breath, then began. “We don’t do just one project in our classes. In fact, most of the rehearsals for The Tempest take place outside school hours. In regular classes we do movement, dance, elocution—and of course other plays. One of the things the drama stream has been doing has been a radio play. It’s by Giles Cooper, and it’s called Unman, Wittering and Zigo.”

  “Come again?”

  “It’s the last three names on a class register—odd, rather unnerving names, aren’t they? My class lists always end with names like Walker, Wilson and Young. But you can see why I thought it a good piece to do, can’t you? It’s set in a school, with lots of scenes in a classroom, and it’s a radio play, so we could concentrate on voice, enunciation, using the voice to create character and atmosphere.”

  “So what was the problem?”

  “The play is what you might call modern Grand Guignol: very creepy, menacing. The class’s new teacher gradually realizes that the boys have killed the previous master, and are now thinking of killing him too. Splendid stuff, of course . . .”

  “But?”

  “It was so close to their own lives, in setting and activities. It was all much more exciting, of course, but yet easily related to everyday life here in school.”

  “So what happened? Did they pick on you?”

  “No, too easy. I’d have realized at once where it was coming from. They picked on another teacher, the one who took some of them for English. Still fairly young and nervous. Impressionable.”

  “What did they do?”

  “Harped on the violent death of a teacher. In essays, stories, on the blackboard when he came into class. Pictures of bodies lying in pools of their own blood, bodies with a dagger protruding from the heart, people backed into a corner surrounded by a gang of schoolchildren with knives in their hands. And so on. Not subtle at all, but who wants children to be subtle? He’s a young
man, married, with a young daughter. He got the wind up.”

  “I’m not surprised. Did he come to you?”

  “Not at once. Not for a long time, in fact. He didn’t realize where the idea was coming from. But he kept hearing the names chanted: Unman, Wittering and Zigo. Didn’t mean anything to him. Eventually it dawned on him that these had to be literary names, not names they had invented. Not the brightest sparkler in the fireworks box, our Mr. Warburton. He realized there was someone else doing literary texts, and he came along and talked to me.”

  “So what did you advise?”

  “That he make a mild joke of it. I’d talked it over with Chris, and that was his advice. Call the children by the names in the play. Even make a joke about their murder plans, so long as he could do it without making a big thing out of it. It seems to have worked. That’s what I was talking about in the pub the other night.”

  Charlie tried not to look too skeptical. He didn’t doubt that Harvey Buckworth was telling the truth, so far as it went. But his worried expression in the Black Heiffer suggested he was already concerned that the children would go on to something else. Perhaps he had known already about Anne Michaels’s little gang, but had kept quiet about it to Chris and to him. He didn’t give the impression of being a man who would risk his beloved drama stream for a mere matter of principle.

  “Yes. Except that the children have gone on to something else.”

  “Not necessarily the same kids, of course.”

  “Maybe not. The same impulses, though. You’ve more or less said the same thing yourself.”

  Buckworth shot him a glance, not altogether friendly.

  “I’m anxious not to let any impression get around that the specialization on drama and show business we have in the school releases all sorts of undesirable emotions and impulses better damped down. There are plenty of teachers in the school who would like us to restrict ourselves to the three Rs. In fact, they’re jealous of our success—we have put the school on the map.”

  “And you want to keep it there?”

  “Of course I do. OK, I confess it: every time I see one of our kids on Emmerdale or wherever, I get a glow of pride, a kick. It makes the whole caboodle worthwhile.”

  He didn’t add that teaching drama was a hell of a lot more exciting and fulfilling than teaching spelling and punctuation to 2C. That never got anyone into the papers.

  “Then you’d better get busy, hadn’t you?” Charlie said, with a touch of brutality in his tone. “Put a stop to all the extracurricular activities that the drama course has led to. It’s up to you now, isn’t it?”

  Harvey looked at him, apparently bewildered.

  “But I don’t understand. What can I do? What they do in their own time isn’t something I can control.”

  “You seem to have given good advice to Mr. Warburton. I should have thought a strong, clear message that these outside offshoots of their drama classes here are putting the very existence of the course in danger would have some effect. The children obviously love being in the drama stream.”

  “Of course they do. It’s their favorite period of the day, by miles.”

  “Naturally it is. It appeals to the exhibitionist in them. That’s why reality TV is so popular: it’s any exhibitionist’s dream. Well, your problem is, you’ve got to harness the dramatic urge in the classroom, and stamp it out when the school day finishes. I’m sure your courses have been wonderfully successful. But the danger is that they’ve been too successful, and have taken over their lives. That’s the problem you’ve got to deal with, Mr. Buckworth.”

  And Charlie turned on his heels and left him. Uneasily, but he didn’t see what else he could do. Buckworth was the only person who had regular contact with the children. He had the ultimate carrot to dangle in front of them—the continuance of the course they loved, and the dream of parts onstage or in TV productions in the future. Charlie did not see that he could do anything, officially or unofficially, beyond what he had already done.

  The next day, arriving home dead on his feet after a twelve-hour shift, he heard from a distance the sound of the Caliban song. He got the idea that it came from a new direction, not from the Hatton Homes estate, as before, but roughly from the direction of Forsythia Avenue where Rupert Coggenhoe lived. But he was fit for nothing, he forgot the impression, and he shut himself into his home with Felicity and Carola, otherwise dead to the world.

  CHAPTER 5

  Dad

  Charlie’s work on the case of the wounded Leeds policeman kept him busy throughout the next weekend, but then began to tail off. Someone was in custody—the right man, Charlie was convinced—and the putting-together of a case was something of a nine-to-five job. After the days of stacked-up overtime, he had the weekend entirely free, and he and Felicity planned to do something with Carola, perhaps go to one of the pre-Christmas events in the Piece Hall, that glorious survival from Halifax’s days at the center of the wool trade. But before that, something had to be done, Felicity had decided: he found when he got home on Friday afternoon that she had steeled herself to do what she had always known she was going to have to do.

  “I’m going to ring Mrs. Easton tonight,” she announced over coffee. “I’m ready at last.”

  “Good. About time,” said Charlie.

  “Will you take Carola out somewhere, so I can have the house to myself?”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows, mystified.

  “Why? What’s the point? She’s usually pretty good if we’re on the phone.”

  “I want both of you out. Particularly you. I don’t want to be self-conscious. I don’t want you listening in and saying I handled it badly.”

  “Would I?”

  “You might be thinking it. And I’d probably think you were thinking it.”

  “Hmmm,” said Charlie, draining his cup. “The return of your father into our lives is not working out well. Soon you’ll be back to the poor little girl without confidence you were when we met in Micklewike.”

  “Oh don’t,” said Felicity, her tone heartfelt.

  It was easy, in the early evening, to persuade Carola to come for a walk up to Chris and Alison’s. She liked the couple, she liked the apparatus of painting, she liked giving her opinion about the results, she liked Chris’s computer, Internet and websites. Above all she liked the fact that Alison was pregnant like her mother, and the pair of babies that would result could be the subjects of infinite speculation.

  “Will the babies be twins?” she asked. It was obviously a question she had been preparing on the way there, and it was accompanied by a gentle poke at Alison’s belly.

  “No, they won’t, Carola,” said Alison, though she had a suspicion that Carola knew the answer to her question perfectly well. “Twins always have the same mummy. Our baby will probably look a bit like me or Chris, or perhaps some of its grandparents, and your mummy’s baby will look either like her or your daddy, or perhaps a grandparent.”

  This was a new idea to Carola, who pondered.

  “Well, if he looks like Grandad I’m not having anything to do with him,” she declared. Charlie’s parentage was undetermined on the male side, so there was no doubt whom she was talking about. Rupert Coggenhoe was not a hit with his only grandchild. She didn’t take kindly to being ignored.

  Charlie was in conversation with Chris over by the computer. One of Chris’s time-killing amusements was to send idiotic questions to The Times’ Questions Answered columns, then wait for idiotic or ignorant replies. That day he was delighted because one of his questions had got into the morning’s papers.

  “It’s the only way I waste time on the Internet, and it serves as a reminder how easy it is to waste hour after hour on it.”

  “You’re being unusually defensive,” said Charlie. “So what was the question today, then?”

  “Who was Tom the piper’s son, and why did he run away with a pig?”

  Charlie considered.

  “Do you know, that’s something I’ve never
felt the need to give a lot of thought to.”

  “All the better. We’ll get a lot of answers from people who never have either, but who think up stupid answers on the spur of the moment.”

  “Couldn’t you go to a book about nursery rhymes?”

  “If you really wanted an answer you could. If there was an answer at all.”

  “I don’t see why you want to associate yourself with those idiots who do spend hour upon hour on this sort of nonsense.”

  “It reminds me that at some stage I’m going to want to do a really useful job again. And that I should soon start to think about what it is likely to be.”

  Charlie nodded.

  “They say doctors do pretty useful work,” he said.

  * * *

  “Mrs. Easton?”

  “Ye-e-es.”

  “This is Felicity Peace.” Puzzled silence at the other end. “Rupert Coggenhoe’s daughter.”

  There was an audible intake of breath.

  “Oh yes. I remember now. And your husband is Charlie, isn’t he? I couldn’t remember when I sent your father’s . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. Unable to mention vests and underpants? Felicity wondered. Or a different kind of embarrassment? There was something odd about the response: the words seemed friendly enough, but not the tone. Or was it simply uncertain?

  “It was kind of you to send them,” she said. “But I was a little bit worried about your letter. I didn’t want to take it up with you, but in the end I couldn’t think of anything else I could do.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t my intention to worry you.”

  “But perhaps it was your intention to warn me?”

  There was silence for a moment. Mrs. Easton’s voice had sounded flustered, and now Felicity’s remark seemed to have touched a chord.

  “Well, maybe, yes. I don’t think people should be haunted forever and ever for just one mistake—don’t think that. But if it can happen down here, it can happen up there too, because your father’s the same man . . . I didn’t want to go into details.”