Forbidden Lessons (6 page)

A fourth boy, good looking but slightly quieter, seemed to be the most attentive to Laura but her thoughts wandered. She tried very hard to feel interested in them all but she couldn’t stop comparing everyone to Mr Rydell. He was so much more mature and serious and worldly.

School dances were organised strictly by year, so there wasn’t much hope of meeting these boys again at the Lower School formal, but Susie was not daunted. She would always find a way if she felt strongly enough about something.

They all went for a walk around the church in the centre of town. There was only one reason to do this and it was to take advantage of the privacy that the ancient thick yew bushes afforded. Charlotte and Susie separated off with their respective boys, and Margery turned to go back to the museum. The swotty faced boy followed her, rather to her consternation. Laura couldn’t help feeling that he looked like a pudding.

That left her with the quieter boy. "Shall we?" he said, rather awkwardly. They found a dark and undisturbed spot in the yews on the north of the graveyard, and he went to kiss her. She closed her eyes and tried to enjoy it, tried to wind the clock back to last summer when this would have been the greatest thrill ever, but all she could think of was Mr Rydell.

* * *

Their conquests were the talk of the coach on the way back. Getting off with an Upper Sixth boy was a huge feat for the Lower School, let alone a prefect. Susie held court with all the salacious details, which truth be told weren’t many. But it was all in the telling.

Margery was at pains to point out that she had merely gone back to the Museum with her partner. "Margie, don’t be square," Charlotte hissed at her.

"Well I don’t think it’s very nice kissing a boy five minutes after you meet them," Margery said indignantly. She was secretly annoyed - even though she didn’t like to admit it even to herself - that her own partner hadn’t displayed the courage or inclination to do so. She had never kissed a boy before.

Laura looked out of the windows, thinking. As the coach rolled back into the school she looked across at the cottages in the distance.

"You’re looking very moony, Laura." Charlotte said. "Did you really like him?"

* * *

It was another hour until supper so Laura, tired of the endless boy talk, escaped with a book. She was tempted to go out of bounds just to get away from it all. She felt stifled.
 

The groundsman's cottages were drawing her with an invisible thread, so she deliberately found somewhere as far as possible in the opposite direction. This was a pavilion on the other side of the playing fields that was rarely used except in summer and was locked, but had two wooden benches outside. She sat on one of these.

She didn’t know how long she had been reading, but it was quite a few chapters, when she sensed that someone was there. She looked up. It was him. Mr Rydell.

"Reading again?" He sat down beside her. "I’m not disturbing your peace?"

"No, not at all." What was he doing here? Why didn’t he just greet her and walk on by?

"You weren’t at lunch again." So he’d been looking for her? She explained about the Museum trip, for which they’d been given packed lunches. "I thought there were quite a few faces missing." So it wasn’t just her, he had noticed others as well.

She wondered why he had stayed around for school lunch on Sunday. Most teachers went outside the school whenever they got the opportunity, if they weren’t on duty. But then he was living on the premises, so perhaps that was the reason.

"Is the Museum worth a trip?" he asked.

"If you’re Mr Tyrrell, yes. It’s not bad really but we’ve all been so many times. I suppose I prefer seeing the actual places more," she added, not wanting to sound ungrateful.

"Are there many historic sites around here?"

"There’s the remains of a Roman villa a bit further away. It has mosaics, exactly where they would have been all those thousands of years ago, where people actually walked on them."

"They don’t seem real, do they, until you see things like that?" He understood. The Romans seemed so dead when they read about them in class, they may as well have never existed, been nothing but stories. Until you were actually faced with the physical traces their armies and colonists had left behind.

Both sat there silently for a while, looking across the fields. Laura’s senses were heightened, she couldn’t relax properly with him so near to her.
 

She went to clutch the edge of the bench with her hands, and accidentally put her hand on his in doing so. She hadn’t realised it was there. "God, sorry!" She was mortified, withdrawing hers quickly. He must think she was trying to hold his hand.

"It’s ok." He actually laughed, defusing the tension.
 

And then his face became serious again and they both looked at one another. It was longer than it should have been, unmistakably. Her stomach was flipping over again, but she couldn’t dig her nails into her thumbs this time. She bit her lower lip instead, nervously.

Abruptly he stood up. "The bell will go soon, we should both make our way back."

* * *

"You’re so dreamy Laura! Did you really like him that much?"

Laura started, then realised that Charlotte was talking about the St Duncan’s boy. "He was very nice, but that’s not what I was thinking about."

"Well what is it then? You’ve been on another planet all evening."

Across the room Susie was looking at her intently but didn’t say anything. But at the first opportunity, when Margery and Charlotte had left the dorm, she slipped over to Laura’s bed.

"It’s another guy, isn’t it?"

Laura said nothing. How could she?

"It’s another guy, and for some reason you can’t tell them. But if you need to talk, when you’re ready, you can tell me. I won’t judge."
 

Instinctively Laura knew that she wouldn’t. Margery and Charlotte would have been agape and aghast, disapproving, disbelieving. She wasn’t ready to talk to anyone yet - except her diary - but when she was, she realised it would be Susie whom she could confide in.

"Dear Diary, I don’t think it’s just in my head any more. But I’m not sure what I want or what I should do. I’m terrified, and miserable, and so, so happy."

Susie Clarke sent Mr Peters into utter raptures from the first time he laid eyes on her. She was his ideal: young, very pretty, dark-eyed and dark-haired and extremely spirited. He discovered her full name was Susanna, and insisted on calling her it, drawing out the final two syllables in an affected way that he fancied sounded Italianate.

For her part, Susie could barely stop laughing at him. She picked him for a dirty old coot the moment she laid eyes on him. He wasn’t the first man, nor would he be the last man, to letch over her like this.

Mr Peters had to contrive a way to get her inside his flat. It became his goal, his obsession. It never crossed his mind that his seduction attempts might fail. He started by offering Susie "catch up lessons" as she had missed so much of the previous year’s syllabus, having studied quite different texts at her previous school.
 

This was rebuffed immediately. Susie knew she was bright and couldn’t care less whether she passed her exams well or not. Even if she had wanted to excel at English, it wouldn’t be by spending hours in a creepy teacher’s stuffy flat.
 

Miss Wingrove had also been made aware of the Head of Department’s proclivities and was keeping her eyes open as Mrs Grayson had hoped. She had actually frustrated a couple of Mr Peters’ attempts to single Susie out of her own classes. He had appeared at the door, and asked if she "could possibly spare Susanna Clarke for a moment."

"Is it very urgent, Mr Peters?"

"It’s merely that I have the list of reading she needs to catch up on," he explained in a silken tone.

"In that case I’ll make sure we finish on time, and Susie can join you immediately break starts."
 

Susie then showed up shoulder to shoulder with Laura and Charlotte as bodyguards, and Mr Peters was forced to hand the list over without paying her any further personal attentions.

He tried once more with a similar excuse, but was again foiled by Miss Wingrove. "Given the amount of syllabus Susie has missed, I think it would be helpful for her to have her full attendance in my class, Mr Peters."

No further attempts were made. He needed a new strategy.

* * *

German was becoming simultaneously a dread and a desperate joy for Laura. She dreaded it in case Mr Rydell didn’t look at her or didn’t speak to her, and was filled with wild joy when he did. Every lesson was an ordeal, the tension she felt in his presence wound up by the exhilaration.

Something, at some point, had to give. She knew that, she just didn’t know what or when.

At times he seemed almost cold and indifferent to her, and her heart crashed in a thousand shards every time, then surged when he did address her directly.

No one else was aware that anything was going on, not even Margery despite her earlier observations. Had Susie been in their German class it might have been different. She was very astute about this kind of thing. Laura had wavered over confiding in her several times but always held back. She feared it would break the spell to actually put it into words, to confess it.

Largely thanks to Susie’s prominent presence, the others remarked less on Laura’s changed character. She was much quieter these days and much more absorbed in her own thoughts. But she couldn’t concentrate on things in the same way she had previously.
 

Every time she went to read somewhere she hoped he might show up, but he never did. He occasionally nodded to her if he saw her outside the German class, such as at meal times, but beyond that she feared he was avoiding her.

And yet there were still moments in class where they caught one another’s eye, just a fraction of a second too long.

* * *

Charlotte had her own problems. She faced a venomous fight to hold onto her coveted position as right wing in the hockey team. Though Charlotte was by far the best candidate, Teresa Hubert had been sucking up to Miss Partridge all term and playing as dirty as she could to spoil Charlotte’s game whenever she could get away with it.
 

Why Miss Partridge would be taken in by Teresa remained a mystery to Charlotte, unless she fancied her or something. It was generally accepted that any games mistress must be a lesbian, and they had always suspected Miss Partridge of having a particularly close friendship with Miss Vine. No one really minded though, because they all liked Miss Vine, or rather felt slightly sorry for her.

"This place really seethes with sex and intrigue, doesn’t it?" Charlotte remarked one day to Susie.

"Naturally it does. What else would you expect with several hundred girls on the cusp of womanhood, and a load of hopeless old sticks suppressing their urges for decade after decade?"

Susie’s take on everything was quite different to theirs. They had been particularly shocked - and fascinated - to discover that Susie wasn’t a virgin. It was highly unusual for anyone in the Lower School to have "gone all the way". Some of the Sixth Form girls came back after each summer break on the Pill, claiming their doctor had prescribed it for acne, but everyone knew better.
 

The three others had grilled Susie endlessly about what sex was like and she had been quite frank and descriptive, but there was a basic gulf between her experiences and theirs that made certain things hard to translate. Margery in particular was very shockable about such matters which restricted discussion.

Laura had never thought much about losing her virginity before, she had assumed it would probably all happen at university. But now Mr Rydell was in her thoughts she found herself wondering what it would be like with him. Masterful, she thought, not fumbling like a St Duncan’s boy.
 

The boy she’d kissed on the Latin trip had written to her a couple of times, and she had sent polite but essentially platonic notes back. It was enough to just officially have a boyfriend, you didn’t actually have to see them or do anything with them. Simply that they existed at all and wrote to you was sufficient for social cachet.

* * *

A couple of times a term the school had an exeat, when pupils were allowed to go home for the weekend. If your parents lived too far away you were usually assigned a guardian in the town. This was the situation for Laura, who was officially the term-time ward of a nice couple in their early sixties who acted as guardian for several Francis Hall girls. She actually rarely saw them as she usually went to stay with Margery instead.

Susie had an aunt and uncle who lived near enough to act as guardians as her parents lived further away and frequently travelled overseas. Margery had offered to invite her along with Laura, but Susie had other plans.

"I’m going to spend the weekend at St Duncan’s," she said. "It’s all planned. I’ll kip in Julian and Darius’s dorm, no funny business, just for a lark. If a master comes by they’ll hide me in the cupboard. Apparently it’s very spacious inside."

This shocking news led to a flurry of questioning as to how Susie planned to get there and slip inside without anyone noticing. But this had all been carefully thought out as well. They were as impressed as they were anxious for her.

"You would definitely, definitely get expelled for that," Margery warned. "The boys too."

"I’d better not get caught then!" Susie laughed. It was amazing how she truly didn’t care, she felt absolutely none of the fears that constrained the other three on a daily basis.

"But what if you do? It’s not just about you, it’s their A-level year, it would ruin everything."

"Julian is St Duncan’s rugby captain. Darius’s father is as rich as Croesus. Trust me, they won’t be expelled. I’d be surprised if they were even gated for more than a week."

Margery remained upset, but Susie was undaunted.

I wonder how Susie would handle Mr Rydell if she were me, Laura thought. Would she simply go up to him and make the first move like she did with the St Duncan’s boys?