The Sleeping and the Dead

She grinned. ‘He couldn’t stand me either. He hated teaching. I mean, he didn’t mind fiddling round with the theatre club but standing in front of a class all day was a nightmare. Food’s always been his real passion. You wouldn’t recognize him in the kitchen. When his mum died she left him a house and a bit of money. It gave him enough to set up this place. It’s been an exciting project for us both.’

Rosie had been watching the conversation with interest. Perhaps she was wondering what it would be like to get involved with a teacher much older than her. A bit close to home.

‘Why did you call him spooky?’ It wasn’t a tactful contribution, but again Sally didn’t take offence.

‘It was his way of appearing beside you without warning. Apparently out of thin air. When you least needed it. Like when you’d just lit a fag behind the changing rooms. Or you were planning to mitch off early before his lesson.’ She grinned again at Rosie. ‘Not that your mother ever did anything like that. Hannah Meek was the biggest swat in the school.’

Hannah didn’t say that she remembered things rather differently. They’d called Roger spooky because of the way he looked at them. At the hems of their skirts which were still very short at the time, at the shirts bursting at the buttons over newly formed chests. There were stories that he’d been caught staring through the gym window at third-form gymnasts, at the girls in their knickers and airtex vests doing straddle jumps on the box and cartwheels on the beam.

Sally didn’t go with them to the school for the reunion. She said she’d meet them there. She had to nip back to town. It was work. The editor was away and there was a press conference she needed to cover. Again Hannah felt she was making her work sound grander than it was.

Still, she was pleased to go in on her own, with only Rosie to keep her company. Sally would have rushed round introducing her to everyone, and she wanted a moment of anonymity. She wanted to stand just inside the door and look for Michael. She had dreamt that he would be there. If she was honest with herself, that was what the trip had been all about from the start. Michael was what had kept her away from the town for all those years and now it was Michael who had brought her back. When Roger dropped them off at the school – it seemed that he was too busy to attend the party – the futility of the venture hit her. She was embarrassed that she had allowed her fantasy to develop this far.

Michael Grey had come to the school when Hannah was in the lower sixth. He was a year older than the rest of them but for some reason had been placed in their year. She remembered having been given a number of reasons for that – he had been living abroad, had been ill, there had been a family problem. Still she didn’t know which, if any, of them had been true. Certainly he hadn’t been asked to retake the year because he was thick. He was quick and conscientious and the teachers loved him. He was doing art, English and biology, but art was his thing. He noticed the way things and people looked. She remembered the big, battered portfolio he used to cart around, the way he always had a smear of paint on his face.

So she collected her name badge, stood just inside the door and looked around. He wasn’t in the room. She saw that immediately. Even after nearly thirty years she would have recognized him. She didn’t think that was self-delusion. She would have stood there longer, but Rosie gave her a shove in the back.

‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Do the business.’

It turned out to be easier than Hannah had expected. Sally still hadn’t arrived but Hannah was greeted by people who knew her, who were pleasant enough to say that she’d hardly changed. The name badges were in sufficiently large print to allow the possibility that this was a kind fiction, that they remembered the face only after reading her name, but soon she felt less nervous.

This hall was newly built when she was at school. Previously the dining hall had been used for everything. For the first time the students had somewhere for assembly and drama that didn’t smell of school dinners. She recalled her first speech day there. Some sixth-form boys always ran a book on the length of the headmaster’s lecture. Parents were invited and when Hannah won a prize for English her mother had turned up. Her husband had just died and people were still talking about it so it was a brave thing for her to do, but she was the only woman to be wearing a hat and Hannah wished that she’d stayed away.