“Yes?”
He hesitated. “You’ll see when you take the class,” he said, and stubbed out his cigarette.
I watched, puzzled, as he stood and shuffled from the room.
“Tomlinson, Wilkins—if you want to turn out for the school team on Wednesday, shut it now.”
Silence from the usually logorrhoeic double act. I stared around the class, challenging.
“Thank you. Now, get into your study groups and switch on the screens. If you recall…” I glanced at my notes, “last week we were examining the final scenes of Brighton Rock. I want you to watch the last fifteen minutes, then we’ll talk.”
I glanced around the room. “Claudine Hainault?”
The new girl was sitting alone at the back of the class, already tapping into her computer. She looked up when I called her name, tossed a strand of hair from her eyes, and smiled.
She was blonde and slim, almost impossibly pretty. She appeared older than her eighteen years, something about her poise and confidence giving her a sophistication possessed by none of her classmates.
I moved to her desk and knelt. “Claudine, I’ll run through what’s happened so far, then leave you to it.”
“It is okay, Mr. Morrow.” She spoke precisely, with a slight accent. “I know the film.”
Only then did I notice that she was not implanted.
I returned to my desk, sat down, and willed myself not to stare at the girl.
The lesson progressed. Once, when I sensed that she was not looking, I glanced over at Claudine Hainault. The skin of her right temple was smooth, without the square, raised outline of the implant device.
With five minutes to go before the bell, a boy looked up from the screen. He shook his head. “But Mr. Morrow… he died. And this was before… before the implants. How did people live without going mad?”
I felt a tightness in my throat. “It was only two years ago,” I said. “You’ll learn all about that in Cultural Studies.”
The class went silent. They were all staring at Claudine Hainault. To her credit, she affected an interest in the screen before her.
Then the bell shattered the silence and all was forgotten in the mad scramble to be the first to quit the classroom.
At four I followed the school bus as it crawled along the gritted lane between snow-drifted hedges. I lived in a converted farmhouse five miles from the school, and Claudine Hainault, I discovered with a pang of some emotion I could not quite define, was my neighbour—our houses separated by the grim, slate-grey expanse of the reservoir.
The bus braked and the girl climbed down and walked along the track towards an isolated farmhouse, a tiny figure in a cold and inhospitable landscape. I watched her until she disappeared from sight, then I restarted the engine and drove home.
I pulled into the driveway minutes later, unlocked the front door and stepped into a freezing house. The framed photographs of Caroline glimmered, indiscernible, in the twilight. I turned on the lights and the heating, microwaved an instant meal and ate in the lounge while listening to the radio news. I washed it down with a bottle of good claret—but even the wine made me think of the Hainault girl.
For a long time I sat and stared out through the picture window. The Onward Station was situated only a mile away, a breathtaking crystalline tower, scintillating in the moonlight like a confection of spun ice. Tonight it illuminated the landscape and my lounge, a monument to the immortality of humankind, a tragic epitaph to all those who had suffered and died before its erection.
The following Friday at first break, Miller approached me in the staff room. “So what do you make of the Hainault girl, Jeff?”
I shrugged. “She’s very able,” I said non-committally.
“I’m worried about her. She seems withdrawn… depressed. She doesn’t mix, you know. She has no friends.” He tapped the implant at his temple. “I was wondering… you’re good at drawing the kids out. Have a word with her, would you? See if anything’s troubling her.”
He was too absorbed in relighting his cigarette to notice my stare. Troubling her? I wanted to ask; the poor girl isn’t implanted—what do you think is troubling her?
I had spent the week doing my best not to think about Claudine Hainault, an effort that proved futile. I could not help but notice her every time I took year thirteen; how she always sat alone, absorbed in her work; how she never volunteered to answer questions, though I knew full well from the standard of her written work that she had the answers; how, from time to time, she would catch my eye and smile. Her smile, at these times, seemed at odds with her general air of sadness.
At lunchtime I was staring out of the staff room window when I noticed a knot of kids gathered in the corner of the schoolyard. There were about six of them, confronting a single girl.
I rushed out and crossed the tarmac. The group, mainly girls, was taunting Claudine. She faced them, cursing in French.
“That’s quite enough!” I called. “Okay, break it up.” I sent the ringleaders off to visit the head-teacher and told the others to scarper.
“But we were just telling Claudine that she’s going to die!” one of the girls said in parting.
When I turned to Claudine she had her back to me and was staring through the railings at the distant speck of the Onward Station. I wanted to touch her shoulder, but stopped myself.
“Are you alright?”
She nodded, not looking at me. Her long blonde hair fell to the small of her back, swept cleanly behind her ears. When she finally turned and smiled at me, her expression seemed carved from ice, imbued with fortitude.
That afternoon I remained at school an extra hour, catching up on some marking I had no desire to take home. It was dark when I set off, but at least I wasn’t trapped behind the school bus, and the lanes were free of traffic. A couple of miles from school, my headlights picked out a quick, striding figure, silhouetted against the snow. I slowed down and braked, reached over and opened the passenger door.
She bent her knees and peered in at me.
“Claudine,” I said. “What on earth are you doing walking home? Do you realise how far…?”
“Oh, Mr. Morrow,” she said. “I missed the bus.”
“Hop in. I’ll take you home.”
She climbed in and stared ahead, her small face red with cold, diadems of melting snow spangling her hair.
“Were you kept back?” I asked.
“I was using the bathroom.”
I didn’t believe her. She had missed the bus on purpose, to avoid her classmates.
We continued in silence for a while. I felt an almost desperate need to break the ice, establish contact and gain her confidence. I cleared my throat.
“What brought you to England?” I asked at last.
“My mother, she is English,” she said, as if that were answer enough.
“Does your father work here?”
She shook her head minimally, staring straight ahead.
I concentrated on the road, steering around the icy bends. “Couldn’t you have phoned your mother to come for you?” I said. “She does drive?” Private transport was a necessity this far out.
“My mother, she is an alcoholic, Mr. Morrow,” she said with candour. “She doesn’t do anything.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” I felt myself colouring. “Look,” I said, my mouth dry, “if you don’t want to catch the bus in future, I’ll drive you home, okay?”
She turned and smiled at me, a smile of complicity and gratitude.
I was aware of the pounding of my heart, as if I had taken the first irrevocable step towards founding a relationship I knew to be foolhardy but which I was powerless to prevent.
I looked forward to our short time together in the warmth of my car at the end of every school day. I probed Claudine about her life in France, wanting to know, of course, why she was not implanted. But with an adroitness unusual in one so young, she turned around my questions and interrogated me. I found myself, more often than not, talking about my own past.