The Heart of the Dales (39 page)

‘Pink overall,' I repeated.

‘Yes, I thought it would be ideal.'

‘And it was one of the things that Mr Clamp brought to the class in his black bags?'

‘Yes – at least I think so,' replied Mrs Kipling, fingering a piece of the garishly coloured material. ‘Or was it already out of the black bag when I saw it? Yes! That's it. It was over the back of a chair.'

‘In the art room?' I asked.

‘Yes, over the back of a chair in the art room.'

‘And you cut it up?'

‘Yes, I cut it up and transformed it into my collage,' said the head teacher. ‘I can quite understand how it came to be thrown out. I mean, I can't imagine anyone wanting to wear such a hideous garment, can you?'

Oh dear, oh dear, I thought. It was Connie's pink overall, I was sure of it. I could imagine the mayhem when she discovered that her coveted pink nylon overall, her trademark uniform, had been vandalised and mounted.

When I saw the woman in question heading down the
corridor, I quickly picked up the creation and retreated back into the room. ‘I'd like to see it in a better light,' I told a rather surprised Mrs Kipling.

I waited until Connie was out of sight and then helped Mrs Kipling carry her creation out to her car.

‘I did wonder, you know,' she said as I negotiated ‘In the Pink' onto the back seat, ‘if I should offier to let Mr Clamp display it in the Staff Development Centre but then decided I wanted it back in school.'

‘A wise decision,' I murmured.

It was with a great sense of relief that I saw Mrs Kipling drive out of the car park.

Back in the Centre, Connie, hands on hips and minus overall, was surveying the art room. ‘Just look at this mess,' she complained. ‘Everywhere he goes he leaves a trail of debris and destruction, that Mr Clamp. There are bits of cloth and old clothes all over the place. It's like an explosion at a jumble sale in here.' I wondered what the state of the room would be like the following day when Sidney and the teachers had finished silkscreen printing. Connie shook her head. ‘I was hoping to get off a bit earlier this afternoon. It's my bingo night.'

‘Have you ever won at bingo, Connie?' I asked, changing the subject.

‘Not a lot,' she said. ‘A few pounds here and there, that's all. I'm always optimistic, mind. I've got my eye on the Christmas accumulator. It's the jackpot prize, and is over fifteen thousand pounds now. What I could do with that sort of money!'

‘How long have you being playing bingo for?' I asked.

‘Oooh, over twenty years,' she said.

‘And you've only won a few pounds? You would have been better putting it into a deposit account,' I told her.

She looked at me and pursed her lips. ‘If I want a financial adviser, Mr Phinn,' she told me, clearly nettled, ‘I'll find one in Fettlesham, thank you very much. Bingo might not be the cup of tea for you academical sorts, but it gets me out, I meet my friends and I enjoy it. Enough said.'

I changed the subject again. ‘Have you had any news of that young man who had the unfortunate accident in the Gents?' I asked.

‘Young Kevin? Oh, he's been out of hospital a while now, and has just gone back to work. I saw him in Fettlesham the other day. He's given up painting and decorating because he says he'll never be able to give up smoking. He's cleaning shop windows, now. And speaking of the incident in the gentleman's cloakroom,' she added, ‘you know who showed her face up here at the Centre the other week, testiculating all over the place? It was that Mrs Savage woman, Lady High and Mighty.'

‘What did she want?' I asked.

‘She comes in here like something off of a catwalkand starts telling me she's in charge of “Health and Safety' at County Hall, and she's here to lookinto the accident. Then she waves about these guidelines what she's written and warns me about the dangers in the workplace.'

‘Mrs Savage went on a one-day course last year and now thinks she's the expert,' I told Connie.

‘Well, there's nothing she can tell
me
about health and safety. It's like telling your grandmother how to poach eggs. She drives into the Centre car parklike a cat out of hell in that red car of hers, blocks my entrance, clatters up the steps in her stilettos, clutching this clipboard to that expensive bosom of hers, and then she has the brass neck to quiz me like one of those interyregulators. My goodness, she's got an attitude, that woman, and does she know how to use it! “I've got to has certain what happened,' she says, all snooty-like. I said to her, I said, “You can has certain all you want to, I've got work to do.' I told her it was all in the report what I sent in to County Hall. “Did you undertake a risk assessment?' she asks me. I told her straight, I said, “Riskassessment – of a toilet?' I mean there's not a lot of risk sitting on a toilet, is there, apart from picking up something nasty from the toilet seat and that wouldn't happen here because I bleach them down regular. I told her, “You're not likely to fall down the toilet and it's not every day
that half a pint of turpentine substitute is put down the bowl and then somebody is daft enough to light up afterwards and post the cigarette between their legs and set themselves alight.' Flaming cheek of the woman. Pardon my pun. Anyway, off she goes to examine the cubicle. She comes back with paint all over her fancy blackoutfit. You should have seen her face!'

‘But surely the paint would have been dry by the time she went to carry out her inspection,' I said.

‘Course it was, but I had been doing a bit of touching up of the paintwork that morning. There were scorch marks on the wall after the incident, and you know what I'm like with marks on my walls.'

‘And you didn't think to tell her?'

‘No, I didn't,' Connie said with a smug expression on her florid face. ‘Since she's so good at has certaining, I thought, she could has certain where the wet paint is.'

‘Connie,' I said, shaking my head, ‘you're incorrigible.' ‘I don't know what that means, Mr Phinn, but I'm sure I'm not,' she told me.

‘I hear from Mr Pritchard that Willingforth School is taking part in the mathematics display at Dr Gore's conference at Manston Hall next month,' I said, changing the subject. ‘Are your grandchildren involved, Connie?'

She smiled. ‘Our Lucy is,' she told me. ‘She's a real whiz when it comes to sums. Can add up like nobody's business. Miss Pilkington's been having them doing mental arithmetic every morning for the past few weeks.'

‘It's an excellent school, Willingforth,' I said. ‘Mr Pritchard told me that overall it achieves the best mathematics results in the county.'

‘Oh,' said Connie suddenly, and casting her eyes around, ‘speaking of overalls, you haven't seen mine, have you?'

I arrived at Fettlesham Little Theatre during the interval. It appeared, judging by the number thronging the noisy bar area, that the play was going well so far. The doorman told me that it was almost a full house, and the audience had been responding
enthusiastically. The worst scenario, and one which Raymond had predicted in one of his blackest moods, was that the audience would vote with its feet if the play didn't come up to scratch before the interval and we would play the second half to an almost empty auditorium.

‘And that frightful Marcia McCrudden, theatre critic of the
Fettlesham Gazette
, will be there,' he had moaned, ‘sitting like an evil presence in the front row, scribbling invective in her little blacknotebook. I shudder at the very sight of the woman and can just imagine what her review will be like when it appears in the paper the following Friday. She said my production of
Cabaret
was “unimaginative' and after all the time and effort I put into
The Sound of Music
, she wrote that it “lacked vitality and verve'. I dread to think what she will say about this play. It could well be the end of my career in the amateur theatre.'

‘Raymond!' Mrs Cleaver-Canning had told him. ‘Pull yourself together, for goodness sake. It will be fine. Everything will fall into place as it always does. Marcia McCrudden is but one person and her opinion counts for very little in my book.'

It seemed, however, that since no one was making for the door when I arrived that Raymond's prognosis was unfounded, that Mrs Cleaver-Canning's reassurance was being proved right and that the first half of the play had gone without a hitch. I was soon to learn differently.

I went backstage where I came upon Percy, the Stage Manager, a rotund little man with a flushed complexion. His substantial stomach bulged beneath an old brown sweater and above a pair of grubby trousers. I noticed he was without socks but was wearing a pair of carpet slippers with ‘Mr Grumpy' embroidered on the tops. He was squatting on a small stool by the fire exit, beneath a large sign that stated in bold red letters: ‘STRICTLY NO SMOKING'. He held a smouldering cigarette in one hand and a bottle of brown ale in the other; a second bottle lay on the floor near the stool.

‘I see the cavalry's arrived,' he said, as he caught sight of me trying to negotiate the narrow door, squeezing through with
my holdall containing cap, Sam Browne belt and boots, my uniform over my arm. He made no effort to give me a hand but took a swig from the bottle of beer and then puffed away on his cigarette, blowing out clouds of smoke and wheezing loudly in the process.

‘Good evening, Percy,' I said, putting down my heavy load on a table.

‘Is it?' he replied.

‘So, how's the play going?' I asked brightly.

‘How's it going?' he repeated. He gave a hollow little laugh. ‘How's it going? You don't want to know, squire.'

‘Oh dear,' I sighed, ‘as bad as that. The people in the bar seem happy enough.'

‘It's worse than bad,' Percy said. He finished the bottle of brown ale noisily, burped, dropped the stub of his cigarette and ground it into the floor with his slipper. ‘Raymond, our creative director and revered producer, has buggered off.'

‘He's what?' I exclaimed.

‘He's done a runner, scarpered, deserted, gone to ground. He had one of his paddies at the end of the first half, stormed off and nobody's seen him since. Mind you, he's not missed. It's always the same on the opening night. He gets into this state, flapping about like a constipated bat, getting himself all wound up and winding everyone else up in the process.'

‘He doesn't seem to have wound you up, Percy,' I observed.

‘No, that's because I won't let him. I just let it all flow over me. I turn off like a wireless when he has one of his tantrums.'

‘It's his artistic temperament,' I said. ‘You have to make allowances.'

‘He's like a big daft girl, the way he goes on. Actually, it was a big daft girl that got him wound up in the first place.'

‘So what's upset him?' I asked, shaking out the uniform, and hanging it up on a hook.

‘Well,' said Percy, lighting another cigarette, ‘Sharon, you know, the lass playing Cecile, the Dame's maid, she arrives all dolled up to the nines, wearing enough make-up to sink a bloody battleship and wrapped up in a great cloak-thing like
what a pantomime magician would wear. Shortly before the performance started, she takes off the cloak, and all she's got on underneath…' Percy paused, and chortled at the memory of what the girl had been wearing but he unwisely took another drag on his cigarette at the same time and his laugh turned into a coughing spasm. When he had got himself under control, he continued: ‘She were wearing just a strip of a skirt, black fishnet stockings and a blouse that revealed more than a liberty bodice. Ray had a fit, as you can imagine. “You're not going on stage in that get-up,' he says. “You're supposed to be the Dame's maid during wartime, not a common back-street tart.' Well, Sharon storms off and when she does walk on stage in the proper costume, what does she do?'

‘What
does
she do?' I asked.

‘She puts on that daft French accent Ray told her not to do when she came out with it at the rehearsal. Did it just to be awkward. She can be a right madam, can that Sharon. I remember her when she was playing a nun in
The Sound of Music
. The words “modesty', “chastity' and “obedience' don't readily some to mind when it comes to that young woman. What went on backstage with that spotty beanpole of a youth playing Rolf is nobody's business. They were at it like nine-pins behind that curtain. I've never seen such carryings on. Talk about “Climb Every Mountain', he was all over her.'

Perhaps he shouldn't have been so interested in what was going on behind the curtain, I thought to myself, but said nothing.

‘
Anyway,' Percy continued, ‘Ray went ballistic when she comes off stage, just as George Furnival brings in the coffin.'

‘What coffin?'

‘The coffin for the last act.'

‘There isn't a coffin in the last act,' I told him.

‘I know that,' said Percy, ‘but George thought it would be a good idea if he used one of his spare coffins in the last act. He told Raymond it would be more dramatic if the young German soldier, Wilhelm Muller, him who gets blown up by the mine at the end, were brought on stage in a coffin. He'd
got this lovely black affair with brass handles. Course, George never misses a trick when it comes to advertising his business and he'd put down the side of the casket: “Furnivals for the Finest in Funerals. coffins to die for.' Well, I won't repeat where Raymond told him to stick his coffin. George didn't take it too kindly and stormed on stage with a face like thunder. Then Lady Hatchet –'

‘Who?'

‘That Mrs Cleaver,' said Percy. ‘I wouldn't like to take her on in a wrestling ring if her hands were tied behind her back and she was blindfolded. By heck, she's got a gob on her. She could have won the war single-handed, that one. Well, she starts adding to her lines, upstaging everyone, and Ray just cracked. “I can't stand any more,' he says and buggers off.'