An Expert Teacher

Her mother had been shocked and disgusted on the only occasion she had visited her daughter in her small north Manchester flat, Gemma remembered. She had hated the narrow mean street, and the towering blocks of council flats; she had done everything she could to persuade Gemma to get another job, to come home and allow her father to use his influence to find her something more suitable, more acceptable to their friends, perhaps teaching small children at the local village school. Her father’s company had a contract to build an extension on the local comprehensive and they had also given generously to the appeal to raise money for a swimming pool for the school, she was sure that …

Gemma had cut her off there. She didn’t want to change her job, but trying to explain that, and to explain why, to her mother, had just been impossible.

‘David and Sophy have gone round to the house. It really is lovely, Gemma. You must go and see it. Your father had it built for them as a wedding present. It’s just a nice size for a young couple: four bedrooms and a pretty nursery suite. I do hope they won’t wait too long before starting a family …’

Gemma let her mother chatter on as she tried to suppress her own growing feeling of alienation and tiredness.

‘Of course your father had to invite him, but I was hoping that he wouldn’t accept the invitation. He’s not really one of our set, and if it wasn’t for the fact that he and your father do business together, I wouldn’t invite him here at all. It’s amazing that he’s done so well, when you think how he started, but I must confess that I never feel comfortable with him. The problem is that since he isn’t married, where are we going to seat him?

‘Businesswise, his company is now much bigger than your father’s, and your father won’t want to offend him, but he’s hardly the sort of man one could put on the same table as the Lord Lieutenant, is he?’

Gemma frowned. ‘I’m sorry, Mum, I missed half of that. Who are we talking about?’

‘Oh, Gemma! Luke O’Rourke, of course.’

Luke O’Rourke. Gemma felt the room sway crazily round her, and she gripped hold of the chair back in front of her while her mother carried on, oblivious of her shock.

‘Good heavens, you haven’t met him yet, have you? I’d forgotten that. He was away at Christmas—I think he went to the Caribbean or somewhere on business—but you must have heard me mention him? He owns O’Rourke Construction—they practically built most of the latest stretch of motorway network round here. I’m not really quite sure how he and your father met, but over the last couple of years they’ve worked on several ventures together—those apartments your father’s building in Spain, and the extension to the school. Luke is based in Chester.’

Gemma let her mother rattle on. Luke O’Rourke. It couldn’t be the same man, surely? It had been stupid of her to be so shaken just because of the familiarity of the name. Luke O’Rourke. She closed her eyes unsteadily and then opened them again. It had all been so long ago. Over ten years ago now. She had been what … fourteen, almost fifteen? She shook her head, trying to dispel the images crowding her mind while her mother busily sought a way of dealing with the problem of where to seat Luke O’Rourke.

She could always seat him with Gemma, of course. Although she hated admitting it even to herself, Susan Parish found her daughter disturbing. Why on earth couldn’t Gemma be more like the daughters of her friends, content to marry a nice young man and settle down to be a wife and mother? And if she had to work, to teach, why did she have to work in that awful school with those dreadful children, half of whom couldn’t even speak English? Whenever Gemma was around she was always on tenterhooks, terrified that she would upset her father, or make one of her dreadful sarcastic remarks. She wouldn’t put it past Gemma to say something upsetting or controversial to the Lord Lieutenant, and she had been racking her brains for a way to avoid having the two of them together on the top table. As Sophy’s closest male relative it was of course quite acceptable for him to be there, and even though Gemma had refused to be a bridesmaid, it would still have looked odd to have excluded her from the intimate family group. Now, though, she had the perfect excuse. Luke O’Rourke was definitely not ‘family’ but, as a ‘close friend and her husband’s business partner’, it would be perfectly acceptable to pair him with Gemma, especially since she was not participating in the wedding as a bridesmaid. Breathing a tiny sigh of relief, Susan Parish went back to her mental arrangements, leaving Gemma totally unaware of what was going through her mind.

In the hall the grandfather clock chimed the hour. ‘Oh, my goodness, I promised the vicar I’d see him this afternoon to discuss the final arrangements. Would you like to come with me, darling, or will you be all right here?’

The last thing Gemma felt like doing was joining her mother. Summoning a diplomatic smile, she shook her head.

‘I’m afraid I’m feeling rather tired. Would you mind if I stayed here?’

Relieved, Susan Parish patted her hand. ‘Of course not, darling. You are on holiday, after all. Oh, by the way, did I tell you that Daddy is bringing some people back for dinner tonight? Wear something pretty, won’t you? You know how much Daddy likes to show off his pretty little girl.’

Only by the strongest effort of will was Gemma able to prevent herself from saying that she was neither pretty nor little. She didn’t want to upset her mother, who would quite genuinely not have known why she had been angry.

She hadn’t been lying when she claimed that she was tired. Coming home and living with her parents was always exhausting. There were so many things she wanted to say to them that she couldn’t.

She went upstairs slowly. Her bedroom had been redecorated along with the rest of the house and she had to admit that the coral and grey colour scheme was very attractive. The white furniture with its gilt trim had been a fourteenth birthday present. It was too fussy and frilly for her own taste, and even now she could remember how disappointed her mother had been at her lack of pleasure in the gift.

She looked at herself wryly in the full-length mirror. It was plainly obvious, surely, that she wasn’t the frilly type. As a little girl, her mother had dressed her in frilly pastel dresses and matching pants, tying her strong, dark, remorselessly straight hair into soft bunches.

These days she dressed differently, in comfortable structured clothes that suited her tall narrow frame. She wore her dark hair in a curved bob, and no longer felt awkward or unfeminine because of her height.

At five nine she wasn’t really that tall any more anyway, and she had learned at university that there were just as many men who liked tall slim girls as there were those who preferred small cuddly blondes.

The feeling of inferiority that not being the pretty little blonde daughter her mother had wanted had bred in her had disappeared completely while she was at university, and in its place she had developed a coolly amused distancing technique that held those men who wanted to get closer to her at an acceptable distance. She hadn’t wanted any romantic involvements; marriage wasn’t on her list of priorities. She had seen too much of what it could do to her sex in her own parents’ marriage.

Even so, she hadn’t been short of admirers; there were plenty of young men all too willing to date a girl who made it plain that marriage wasn’t her sole purpose in life. Her mother often bemoaned the fact that she was, in her words, ‘unfeminine’, but there had been many men who had been drawn, rather than repulsed, by her cool indifference. So why, at twenty-five, was she still an inexperienced virgin?

It had been so long since she had given any thought at all to her virgin state that the fact that she should do so now shocked her. She walked from her bed to the window and stared blindly out of it. It had been the sound of the name Luke O’Rourke that had brought on this introspective mood, and she didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell her why.

It had, after all, been Luke O’Rourke who had shattered her childish dreams and shown her the reality of sexual need and desire.

And it had also been Luke O’Rourke who had shown her what she wanted to do with her life, she reminded herself. How ironic it was, then, that she should hear his name mentioned now, when she was once again in a way at a crossroads in her life.

She was going to lose her job. Oh, it wasn’t official yet, but she knew it anyway. The conversation she had had with the head just before the school closed down for the long summer recess had been plain enough. They needed to shed staff; the part-timers wouldn’t be coming back after the holiday, but that wasn’t enough. Government cuts meant that the school still needed to lose one full-time teacher, and, as the head had uncomfortably but quite rightly pointed out, she was in the fortunate position of having parents who were financially both able and willing to support her.

Looking at the position from the head’s point of view, she couldn’t blame him. He was quite right in what he said, after all; if she stayed on at the school now, she would have to do so knowing that she was keeping a job from someone who badly needed the income that teaching brought. She moved restlessly round her room picking things up and then putting them down again. She hated the thought of giving up her job, but what alternative did she really have? It would be morally wrong of her to stay, knowing that in doing so she was depriving someone else of their living.

It was a similar dilemma to the one she had experienced in a much milder form when she first started teaching, and she had long ago decided that, when it came to her own background, her father’s wealth and her mother’s snobbery, she must just accept that these were things she could not change and must go on to live her own life, by her own rules.

She knew why Angus MacPherson had sent for her and talked to her as he had. He was counting on her doing the right thing, on her handing in her notice, and discreetly solving his over-staffing and financial problems for him, and she knew as well that she would. But knowing that she would be doing the right thing didn’t ease the pain of knowing how much she would lose. She would have a period of notice to work—that was written into her contract—but it wouldn’t be more than a month. The man who would take over her classes, would he sense the same burning desire to learn that she had seen beneath Johnny Bate’s truculence? Would he see behind the wide blue eyes of Laura Holmes, with her already almost too-developed body, to the sharply incisive mind that Gemma had seen? There was no reason why he shouldn’t, but so many of her colleagues had been ground down by their own problems and by the depressing poverty of the area they lived and worked in that they often no longer saw their pupils as individuals.

Unlike the majority of them, Gemma was single. She had the time to devote to her class outside the schoolroom. It wasn’t just a job to her, and yet to use the word ‘vocation,’ even if only to herself, made her feel acutely uncomfortable.

Even so, she knew that it gave her a tremendous thrill to be able to impart knowledge to another mind, to witness its awakening and growth, and she had Luke O’Rourke to thank for that.

Luke O’Rourke. Of course it couldn’t be the same man. The coincidence of the Luke O’Rourke she had known and her father’s new business acquiantance both being in the construction industry was no more than just that. The Luke she had known had been nothing more than a labourer working as part of a gang of itinerants. She moved slowly round her bedroom, drifting back to her bed and sitting down on it, letting her mind take her back. Her fingers absently touched the bedspread that was now shiny and tailored in deep coral, but had once been soft baby pink, frilled and flounced.

It had been a hot dry summer that year, and she had been bored and restless, impatient of and embarrassed by her mother’s petty snobbishness, and resentful of her father’s masculine condescension. She had come home from school with high marks in all her classes, only to be told rather reprovingly by her father that girls didn’t need to be clever and that they should certainly never be competitive, this last rebuke having been earned because she had done much better at school than her brother.

At fourteen she had sensed that she wasn’t the daughter her parents wanted, although then she hadn’t really known why. All she had known was that she felt constrained and uncomfortable in the persona they were tailoring for her. Her mother made her feel embarrassed when she went out shopping with her. Gemma didn’t like the way she talked to the people in the shops who served her. Manchester was their nearest city, but her mother didn’t shop there. She preferred Chester, but when Gemma asked her why, when it was so much smaller, all she would say was that it was much more ‘our sort of place’. Occasionally her mother shopped in London and came back with dark green bags from Harrods. Gemma already knew that she had a privileged life; her father was fond of pointing out to her that not many daddies could afford to spoil their daughters the way he spoiled her, but Gemma was always left with the feeling that his gifts weren’t given freely and that they had to be paid for. She also knew that somehow she disappointed him.

With the onset of puberty she was growing tall. Gangly was how her mother had described her. Her skin was smooth and faintly olive, her eyes a deeply serious grey. She often looked in the mirror and was puzzled that she didn’t look more like her pretty blue-eyed and blonde-haired mother.

Her father was very dark and she knew that people thought her parents made a very attractive couple. Mrs Moreton, their daily, was always saying so.

David, two years older than her, had been sent away for the summer on a special adventure training course in the Welsh mountains. She would dearly have loved to go with him, but her father had frowned and told her that it wasn’t suitable for girls.

‘Oh, no, darling, it isn’t at all ladylike,’ her mother had told her when she pleaded to be allowed to go. There were very few children locally for her to play with and so she had been reduced to spending long hours alone riding her pony, Bess.

It was while on one of these sojourns that she had first met Luke …

The Cheshire countryside, surrounding the village was pretty and criss-crossed with public footpaths and walks. In July the fields were heavy with their crops, a blue haze clouding the far distant Welsh hills to the west, and the Derbyshire peaks to the south east.

It was a hot afternoon, and Gemma was content to let fat little Bess amble along at her own pace. While she quite enjoyed riding, she was not strongly obsessed by it.

It had been her mother’s idea that she learn to ride. Mrs Parish had seen it as the right sort of hobby for her daughter, expecting that it would lead to Gemma’s inclusion amongst the rather stand-offish local county set, whose sons and daughters all learned to ride almost before they could walk, but these children were all taught at home, not at the exclusive riding establishment to which Gemma’s parents sent her, and once she realised that the only people they were likely to meet through Gemma’s riding were in much the same position as themselves she had soon lost interest in the whole idea.

Bess had been a tenth birthday present, and although her mother often now complained that the pony was an unnecessary expense, Gemma had insisted on keeping her. She was sturdily enough built to support Gemma’s slim frame, even if her ever-growing legs did dangle rather dangerously either side of Bess’s plump little body. The pony spent most of the year greedily enjoying the luxury of her comfortable paddock adjoining the house, good-naturedly ambling along the country lanes with Gemma on her back when she was at home at a pace not much faster than her rider could have walked.

Her destination on this occasion was a small wood where, the previous summer, she had seen a family of otters at play on the banks of the river that flowed through it. She found the clearing by the river easily enough, dismounting to tie Bess’s reins to a handy tree trunk. Here the ground smelled hot and moist, the sun shading eerily through the umbrella of leaves overhead. Pine needles and other vegetation covered the ground, giving it a stringy texture. Although she couldn’t see it, Gemma could hear the sound of the river. She felt in her pocket for the sandwiches she had brought with her, and the book. She could have read quite easily in the garden at home, but somehow she felt over-exposed and uncomfortable there, and if her mother came back early and caught her slopping around in her old shorts and T-shirt, she would complain.

Neither of her parents approved of Gemma wearing shorts or jeans; they both liked her to wear dresses, preferably with fluffily gathered skirts. Gemma hated them. She felt they looked ridiculous on her. All those frills with her arms and legs sticking out like thin sticks.

Although she was fourteen she had practically no figure at all yet. Not like some of the girls in her class. Well, she did have some figure. Her breasts had started to develop and she was wearing a bra, but she knew that her mother had been shocked to see how tall she had grown this last term.

She found a comfortable place to sit down not far from the river, her back supported by the trunk of an ancient oak. She felt in her pocket for her sandwiches, before spreading her jacket on the ground. They were doing Lawrence at school next term, and she had bought some paperbacks with her pocket money. English Lit. was one of her favourite subjects.

Within minutes she was so deeply engrossed that she was only aware of the intruder when she felt the cold drops of moisture from his skin fall on to her arm.