Mortal Taste (3 page)

There was a click and a large, confident voice said, ‘Steve, good morning to you. Hope I haven't got you out of bed too early.' A booming laugh at his own little joke.

Steve looked at his watch. It was still only twenty past eight but he said, ‘I was just on my way out. I can be at the works within ten minutes from here.' He wondered why this man could still make him defensive, when he had his own business and was not accountable to anyone. The seventy-year-old Archie Weatherly was now a non-executive director of a national firm of building contractors, the one which had built the Gloucester link-up with the M5 which had eased congestion in this area.

Weatherly laughed at Steve's apologetic reaction; he was well used to it within his own hierarchy, and relished it when he met it outside the firm. He said, ‘It's about the governors' meeting at Greenwood Comp. last night.'

Steve had known it would be. They never spoke about anything else. And yet Weatherly had specified Greenwood Comprehensive as if he needed to differentiate it from half a dozen other schools where he was a governor. Probably that came naturally to him; probably he was used to speaking in those terms about any enterprise in which he involved himself. Steve felt that he knew what was coming, but he said cautiously, ‘It seemed to me to go quite well.'

‘Well enough, I suppose. School's doing a good job, as far as I can tell.' His short laugh indicated that he could tell quite far. ‘Surprisingly good, considering what those buggers are paid. I notice you didn't say anything last night.'

‘There didn't seem to be much to say. The Head reported clearly enough on the present state of progress and answered the various queries without any hedging. I don't believe in speaking just for the sake of it.' That sounded a little barbed, as though he was getting at Weatherly, who had asked a couple of questions. Steve hadn't intended that effect, but he was suddenly quite pleased with himself.

‘He's doing well, young Logan. We need to keep a tight rein on the bugger, though. We can't leave it to the old farts from the Council.'

Steve Fenton grinned. Archie Weatherly was speaking of local worthies who were perhaps five years younger than him. In terms of energy, though, he was probably right. ‘I thought the meeting went well enough, as you said. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'

‘I've made a living by fixing things. I think you should take the chair again, Fenton.'

Steve wondered why he should find the use of his surname so irritating. It was probably no more than Weatherly's public school habit from long ago. He thrust aside the consideration of whether a man from such a background should be now attempting to control the future of a state school. ‘I'm afraid I don't feel I can reverse my decision. Two years as Chairman was enough. My own business is expanding and I really haven't the time.' He wondered if that sounded as unconvincing to Weatherly as it did to him. ‘In any case we couldn't just reverse things like that. The new Chair has certainly done nothing wrong, and—'

‘There's no problem with that, Fenton. Just say the word and you'll be back in the chair at the next meeting.' As if he realized that sounded brutal, Weatherly added, ‘You're the best man for the job, everyone knows that. You should never have stood down when you did.'

‘I'm sorry. My decision is irreversible, I'm afraid.'

‘You shouldn't say that.' Weatherly sounded piqued: he was not a man who was used to refusals. ‘Just say you'll think about it and that will do for the moment.'

Having refused to concede the main point, Steve had enough of the shrewd businessman in his own make-up to refuse the compromise as well. ‘I'm afraid I can't do that. As I explained at the time, I have two boys in the school myself. They'll be coming up to GCSEs in due course. I'm happy to be a parent-governor of the school, but being Chairman could put me in an embarrassing position if a conflict of interests arose.'

He was glad he had remembered that argument, however belatedly. As he had suspected, Weatherly did not really know enough about the state system and school governing bodies to argue the point in detail. The industrialist rumbled on for a few more sentences, but recognized that he could not dictate action to someone who was not on his pay-list. He eventually accepted failure with ill grace and rang off swiftly.

Steve Fenton glanced at his watch and left half his cup of tea behind. The bloody man had made him late for work, now. He might be the boss, but he liked to set the right example: it was a small-firm ethic which would have been completely foreign to Archie Weatherly.

But at least he hadn't given any hint of the real reason why he could no longer be Chairman of the Governors of Greenwood Comprehensive.

Peter Logan, the man Archie Weatherly was so anxious to control, was getting on with the business of running a large and busy school.

Weatherly remained an autocrat at heart, and delegation was not one of his several virtues. But Logan was very good at delegation. It was the only way to run a busy school efficiently: you put the right people in place, and then you allocated the right jobs to them, swiftly and automatically. When two members of staff called in sick, the problem of covering their classes was passed automatically to the Senior Mistress, who dealt with timetabling and all its attendant problems. The School Secretary did not even have to refer the matter to the Head. And when the teachers who had lost their ‘free' periods to cover their absent colleagues grumbled ritually in the staff room, it was not the Head who was the subject of their complaints.

Peter Logan dealt swiftly with the most urgent of the morning post and made a series of phone calls to follow up the decisions of last night's governors' meeting. There was no point in letting grass grow under your feet when jobs had to be done. He found his briskness and eagerness to despatch the problems of the day met a pleasing response in those around him, another sign that the school was running smoothly and productively.

By ten o'clock, he was sufficiently clear of the daily administrative trivia to walk around his school and take the pulse of its activities. He remembered one of his teaching colleagues in his first job saying of their head teacher, ‘That bugger knows everything that goes on in this place!', his mock-frustration masking a real respect. Peter had always remembered that, had always tried to emulate the feat as a head. You couldn't know everything that was going on in a school of this size, but if you gave both the staff and the pupils the impression that you did, that could only improve the efficiency of the institution.

To those who might think he pried unnecessarily, he quoted one of his favourite maxims: ‘Slack practice anywhere leads to slack teaching in the end!' he said sternly.

Teachers always respected you if you brought everything back to what happened in the classroom, to what was offered at what he still called ‘the chalk-face', though chalk was rarely seen now in his school. If all the petty restrictions with which successive governments had surrounded and impeded his teachers resulted in more efficient teaching, then that was their only necessary justification, the yardstick against which everything should be measured. Peter believed that passionately, and his passion carried him through, even with those teachers who were irritated by his personality.

Logan slipped into a classroom to check on the progress of one of his probationary teachers, trying to allay her understandable nervousness by a reassuring smile from the back of the room. He made a note or two to give her later in the day: she would be fine, once she gathered a little more experience.

He caught one of the old hands in the geography department enjoying a quiet and highly illicit smoke in the maps room, and allowed himself a secret smile only when he was well out of the discomfited man's vision. He reminded a PE teacher that the less able among his classes needed at least as much of his attention as the gifted gymnasts, especially now, when research about overweight and unfit children was dominating the media.

There was scope here for a press article about the attention his school was giving to this problem; he made a note to put his newly appointed media liaison officer – an enthusiastic young English teacher who saw himself as a journalist manqué – in touch with the PE department, to prepare a release for the local paper.

The representatives of the local press, radio and television could be useful allies. Most of his head teacher colleagues in other schools gave them nothing other than a tight-lipped ‘No comment' and thus got only negative publicity. Yet these people could be helpful enough, if you handled them right: you needed to give them a ready-made story. Give them easy copy and they wouldn't ask you embarrassing questions. Serve them up a good story about the school's PE policy and a few quotes from slim, bright-eyed children and they'd produce a positive article about the way the school was tackling a national problem. Refuse to co-operate and you'd find them photographing fat kids at the gates and getting negative quotes to turn into headlines.

Peter had a cup of coffee in the crowded staff-room during morning break and managed brief exchanges with three of his heads of subject departments. Once this was done, he even had time to chat about the opening of the soccer season, and the erratic early progress of Cheltenham United in the second division of the Football League.

Yet not all was sweetness and light in this progressive school. A troubled young teacher took him to one side to report on two incidences of bullying in the third year. He had insisted that he wanted to know immediately about bullying, whether physical or mental. It was inevitable with over a thousand children in the school that they would have instances of this modern evil, but he wanted them investigated thoroughly and eliminated at source. A happy child is a learning child, and vice versa: it was a Logan maxim that had been elevated into a cliché over the years, but none the less true for that.

It was not until the bells rang for the end of morning school that Peter was prepared to indulge a more private pleasure. A man with a passion to make his school the best is not immune from other, more selfish and individual emotions. A man has his needs, and Logan found that his sexual drive was heightened by his professional successes. And so was the response he enjoyed: he hadn't really argued when his wife had suggested that power was the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Most of his staff were happy to seize the precious relaxation time afforded by the lunch hour to get away from their classrooms. The wide corridors of the modern school building were filled for a few minutes with the noise of newly released children. Then their teachers proceeded more soberly after them to their own recreation.

When Peter Logan stole softly into one of the science labs, it was deserted and silent. But the storeroom behind it was not. This little cell was small, almost claustrophobic, with a single high, square window, which let in a little light and revealed a tiny patch of grey, autumnal sky. But this was a private place, and privacy was what these two needed now.

She had taken off the white lab coat, as if discarding her working role for the lunch hour. Her face was glowing with a smile as he came into the little room. It lightened his heart to see it, and all the petty cares of the school day vanished in an instant. He was a young man again, almost as young as she was, when he saw that smile.

‘I knew you'd come,' was all she said. Then they were in each other's arms.

P
eter Logan didn't really know everything that went on in Greenwood Comprehensive. It was a convenient fiction to put about, one which helped a headmaster to direct his staff and control his pupils more effectively. Logan knew that. And some of the people around him realized that the Headmaster could not possibly know everything. Some people, in fact, could even demonstrate that, if they chose to.

At the beginning of the new academic year in September, the school had a sixth form of over two hundred for the first time. That fact and its implications had been well documented in the local press. It meant more people preparing to go into higher education after school, more people striving to realize their full educational potential.

It also meant that there were more young people available as a market for those who were not interested in education at all.

Mark Lindsay was slightly surprised to be in the sixth form at all. His GCSE results were, he grudgingly admitted, a tribute to the teaching methods in the school. He didn't concede that at home, of course. He claimed there that his passes were entirely due to his own unremitting endeavour, and a fond mother – his father had departed with a younger model to North Yorkshire some years previously – believed him and looked forward to further triumphs of character.

Mark had not been expecting to make the sixth form. He had hesitated over whether he should take up the opportunity when it came. There wasn't much money at home, with his mother still working in the supermarket and his younger sister at Greenwood Comp. Still only twelve. But no congenial employment had been on offer and his mother had been anxious for him to go on for A levels. In the end he had drifted into the sixth form.

But there were disadvantages to this new intellectual status. He had expected to have an income by now, to be swaggering home with a pay packet on Fridays. A lad of his age needed money. Other people knew that even more clearly than Mark did, and were prepared to do something about the situation.

To be precise, they were ready to exploit it.

Mark had taken to visiting Shakers club near the centre of Cheltenham on Friday nights. There were plenty of people he knew there: a few of his fellow sixth-formers among them, but also girls who had left the school in the summer and were now working in local factories or offices. They were now in that wide world outside school which people like Mark affected to know but in fact knew not at all. Most of the girls smoked a little, observing the dancing through small grey clouds of sophistication, affecting a slightly scornful sympathy for those still imprisoned within the world of school.