If My Father Loved Me

‘Don’t you want to hear our estimate first of what it’s going to cost?’

I was trying to signal to her to go easy, but Colin was grandly insisting that cost didn’t matter to him. His money was as good as anyone else’s. The phone rang and as I was nearest I picked it up. A voice I half recalled asked for Mrs Bailey.

‘Speaking.’ At the same time I was frowning because although Jack and Lola went under Tony’s name, after the divorce I had deliberately reverted to my own. To Ted’s, that is. I had been happy to accept Tony’s when we married, but once I had rejected him I didn’t deserve the shelter of his name, did I? I went back to being just Sadie Thompson again.

‘This is Paul Rainbird, at the school.’

I remembered now that I had spoken to him when I called to say that Jack would be away on the day of the funeral. He was Jack’s head of year.

‘Is something wrong?’ Penny and Colin dwindled, their voices obliterated by the rush of blood in my ears.

‘No, nothing at all. I wanted to ask how Jack is.’

‘Why?’

‘We haven’t seen him for three days. Is he ill?’

‘He’s been at school all week,’ I said stupidly.

‘No, I’m afraid he hasn’t.’

The lack of protest in the mornings, the dirtiness and exhaustion and his appetite in the evenings fell belatedly into place. Wherever he had been going for the last three days, it hadn’t been to school. Dismay at my own obtuseness and sharp anxiety for Jack overtook the usual nagging concern. ‘I’d better come in and see you.’

Mr Rainbird said he would be at school until six that evening. I looked at my watch. Ten to four. Colin was reluctantly shuffling out of the door.

I untied my apron and hung it up, turned off the heating element in the Pragnant and closed the open drawers of type. ‘Jack’s been bunking off,’ I told Penny. ‘I’ve got to go in and see his teacher.’

The school wasn’t far from our house, so it didn’t take me long to drive there. As I parked the car there were streams of children coming out of the gates. I pushed my way in against the current, assaulted by the noise and the display of attitude. Children came in so many shapes, sizes and colours. Some of them stared, most didn’t bother. There were so many different statements being made within the elastic confines of school uniform, so much yelling and kicking and threatening and ganging up. Survival was the prize of the fittest – and you could see which kids were the natural survivors. They were the cool ones and the disciples of the cool ones, and the others who hung around on the fringes and took their cues from them. The rest straggled on in ones and twos, keeping out of the way, trying not to attract too much attention.

Lola had been the coolest of cool. She had achieved this by breaking every school rule and defying me daily about her clothes and her hair, and her attitudes and the hours and the company she kept. But even so, even when she was at her most grungy and rebellious, on some deeper level we had still been allies. When we weren’t fighting, she told me secrets. Not hers, that would have been too incriminating, but her friends’.

‘Isn’t fourteen a bit young?’

‘Mum, you mustn’t breathe a word.’

I took this as her way of alerting me to what she was doing or about to do herself, and no doubt her friends’ mothers did likewise. Lola and I were both women and for all our differences we had the comfort of being the same.

In my mind’s eye now I saw Jack, and he was smaller and paler than all these children, and different. Different even from the wary singles. He was churned around by the alarming tide as it swept him along. I clenched my fists into tight balls in the pockets of my coat, wanting to defend him.

I found my way to the Year Seven office at the end of a green corridor lined with metal lockers.

‘Sit down, Mrs Bailey,’ the teacher said, having stood up to shake my hand. There was just about room in the cubicle for a second chair.

‘Thompson,’ I murmured. ‘I’m divorced from Jack’s father.’

Briefly my eyes met the teacher’s. Mr Rainbird was wearing a blue shirt and slightly shiny black trousers, and his colourless hair was almost long enough to touch his collar. He looked tired. If, without knowing him, I had been forced to guess his occupation I would have said English teacher in a large comprehensive school. We faced each other across the desk piled with exercise books and mark sheets and he nodded, registering my statement, before we both looked away again.

‘Is Jack being bullied?’ I asked.

‘Has he said so?’

‘He hasn’t said anything. I know he’s not happy at school, not the way my daughter Lola was, but I didn’t know it was as bad as this.’

‘I remember Lola.’ Mr Rainbird nodded appreciatively. ‘Although I never taught her. How’s she getting on?’

‘Fine.’

There was some shouting and crashing outside the door, and several sets of feet pelted down the corridor. The teacher seemed not to hear it. I thought he was used to concentrating in the face of many distractions.

‘I don’t think he’s being bullied. Jack doesn’t stand out enough, either in a bad way or a good way. He’s a loner, but that seems to be out of choice. He’s very quiet, very serious. He doesn’t say much in lessons, but he listens. His work is adequate, as you know, although he doesn’t try very hard. He gives the impression of absence. But mostly only mental absence, at least until this week. Has anything changed for him lately, at home?’

‘His grandfather died, at the very end of last term.’

The teacher looked at me. He had a sympathetic, creased, battle-worn face. I thought he must be somewhere in his late forties. How many years of teaching Shakespeare did that mean he had notched up? Twenty-five, probably.

‘Yes, I remember now. Does Jack miss him badly?’

I tried to answer as accurately as I could. ‘Not in the everyday sense, because … well, he didn’t live nearby. But now that he’s gone, yes, I think so. It’s another absence in Jack’s life.’

I realised that I had dashed here in the hope that Mr Rainbird would be able to offer me explanations for the way Jack behaved and a suggestion for how to deal with him. But this was what he was looking for from me. I was his mother and he was only his teacher.

Mr Rainbird was tapping his mouth with the side of his thumb. ‘What about his dad?’

‘Tony remarried and had two more children. They live the other side of London. He sees Jack and Lola as often as he can, but he does have another family and a lot of calls on his time. Jack lacks a male role model.’

It was stuffy in the little room with the door shut and I felt hot.

Mr Rainbird half smiled. ‘Some people would say that’s no bad thing.’

I knew he said it not as a teacher and head of Year Seven, but as himself. I wondered if he was married and whether his wife was the sort who thinks all men are monsters.

I smiled back. ‘In Jack’s case, a father figure would be helpful.’

The root of Jack’s problem was with me, but the root of that problem went back much further. Back beyond Stanley, even Tony. I could do relationships with women, I reckoned, but I got it wrong with men. From Ted onwards. The smile suddenly dried on my mouth. I blinked, afraid of another surge of irrational tears.

‘So, what should we do?’ Mr Rainbird asked. He was looking down at his hands and I knew it was to give me a chance to recompose myself. ‘He can’t afford to go on missing lessons.’

I stared hard at the pile of exercise books until I had my face under control. ‘I’ll go home and talk to him. I’ll try and get to the root of this. And I’ll make sure he comes to school on Monday.’

‘I’ll talk to him too,’ he said. ‘Maybe between us we can work out what the problem is. What do you think he’s doing instead of being at school?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think he’s doing anything. I think he’s … just killing time.’ He was waiting for this to be over, dreaming of when he would be old enough to change something for himself. I remembered how that was.

We both stood up and Mr Rainbird edged round his desk to open the door for me. In the confined space he had to reach past me and his shirtsleeve brushed against my shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Yes, thanks.’ I wondered how distraught I actually looked.

‘We’ll speak again, then.’ He didn’t attempt any empty reassurances and he didn’t make authoritarian demands. I liked him. We shook hands a second time and I retraced my path down the corridor and out to the gates. The school was quiet and empty now, the tide reaching its low ebb.