She left her door open for Carrie to clear away breakfast, and descended the front steps of Columba to cross the grounds in the direction of the garages. The school she was bound for was two and a half miles from College, and it was her practice to pick up two or three of the students in her car, for, although there was a bus service, it was infrequent, and those who caught the bus arrived either much too early or (as was already becoming the rule by which Kitty conducted her life during this trying period) slightly late. The headmistress had remonstrated with her on the point, but Kitty had remained firm.
‘I suffer from asthmatic wheezing,’ she explained, ‘and the school is too cold for me at twenty-past eight. By five-past nine it is much safer.’
‘I don’t know how you dare be late on School Prac.,’ Alice had remonstrated.
‘Well, the sooner I’m chucked out, the sooner I can begin hair-dressing,’ argued Kitty. With the cussedness usually displayed by Fate, however, she was not chucked out, but was permitted, instead, to continue in her outrageous line of conduct.
Miss Topas, who, beneath a flippant attitude, concealed a strong sense of duty and responsibility, was always at the school of her assignment in very good time. Sometimes she talked to the headmistress; sometimes she asked permission to see the ‘stock list’ of history textbooks in use at the school; sometimes she inspected such things as the surface of the playground and, from the outside, the homes of the children.
On this particular morning, however, she did none of these things, because she was held up by the police, and was forced to make a long detour to reach her destination. Her usual road ran south-east from the College, downhill and through the woods, until it met a major road at which Miss Topas turned almost due west for a hundred yards or so, and then south-west until the road crossed the canal. Once across, another hundred yards brought her to another main road, and this, turning north-east, ran alongside the river from which the canal had been cut.
It was as she was driving, at a respectable twenty-eight miles an hour, along this pleasant bit of riverside road, that Miss Topas was held up.
She prepared to show her driving licence, but the sergeant merely said politely: ‘Afraid you’ll have a good way to back, miss. Nobody allowed this way this morning.’
‘Oh, something wrong with the road?’
‘Be all right by lunch-time, miss. I should sound your horn as you go. The mist’s a bit tricky along here.’
It was very thick alongside the river. Not more than a couple of yards of the silvery water could be seen from the edge of the bank. The haze of mist hung over the rest like teased wool. There was twenty yards’ visibility on the road. Miss Topas put the car in reverse, and, thankful that she had come, comparatively speaking, so short a distance off the main thoroughfare, backed carefully, sounding her horn.
It seemed as though, on such a morning, most of the students had preferred to take the bus rather than to walk, for she passed nobody going her way, and arrived at the school at twenty-five to ten, for the first lesson, that to be given by Miss Holt.
She allowed Miss Holt five minutes to get going, and then went in. Good notes, good illustrations, pleasant voice, attentive class — Miss Topas gave a very high mark, wrote a couple of lines of criticism, stayed in for the next quarter of an hour, and then drifted out.
Miss Pinkley, in the crude but apt vernacular of the profession, had got the class round her neck. Miss Topas, who invariably rushed in where she had forbidden Deborah to tread, came a little nearer the front desk and began to ‘collect eyes’. The miserable and terrified student so far had not noticed her, but the gradual silencing of her tormentors gave her the clue, and she turned round, blinking nervously.
‘Carry on, Miss Pinkley,’ said Miss Topas. ‘Don’t mind me. You’re the important person.’
She remained with Miss Pinkley for the next eight minutes, sighed inaudibly, initialled Miss Pinkley’s notebook but added no comment, wrote a brief report, and then went into the next classroom. Here was Kitty, initiating such as permitted the process into the mysteries of decimal fractions.
‘So you see,’ said Kitty, ‘all you do — hey, you, in the back row, stop pulling that girl’s hair! No, dash it, you weren’t doing up her slide. You were pulling her hair; I saw you. Oh, don’t argue You listen to me. Oh, hullo, Miss Topas. Take a seat, won’t you… Now, you perishers — that is children — look here, this is the point No, not the decimal point, haddock! The point of my remarks. In other words, what I’m saying, Oh, all right, if you won’t listen, you won’t. Sit up, and we’ll do some Pence Table. Don’t know it? Don’t know Pence Table? How does your father make out his betting slips, then? Come on, all of you. Twelve pence are one shilling. Eighteen pence are half a dollar. No, I’m wrong, at that.’
She got the class laughing. Then she rolled her eyes at Miss Topas, and went back to multiplying decimals. Miss Topas gave her an average mark, prayed inaudibly for her soul, and passed out, highly appreciative, but, she feared, wrong-headedly so, of Kitty’s capabilities as an instructor.
At half past ten a bell rang to denote that it was time for the mid-morning break. This break lasted for a quarter of an hour. The younger and the more frivolous supervisors (the terms were not necessarily synonymous) divided the Practice Schools into those that made coffee in the morning break and those that did not. Sometimes a school would make afternoon tea instead. One or two schools made hot drinks both morning and afternoon.
Kitty’s school happened to have a headmistress who liked coffee and tea, so that there was always a good chance of being invited into the staff-room and of being provided with coffee and even, possibly, a biscuit. The students were not invited in. Miss Topas could see them in the end classroom when she glanced through the glass top of the door.
The headmistress also came into the staff-room for the coffee. She was what Miss Topas, who had her own system of classification for the various professional types, called the White Knight sort of headmistress. She was elderly, kindly, and laid down minute rules and regulations with regard to duties and to the methods of teaching the various subjects, marking the books, punishing misdemeanours, keeping registers and records and dealing with consumable stock, and she always wore a black alpaca apron in school, and was festooned with little ornamental and useful gadgets of all descriptions.
She fussed round Miss Topas who had supervised students at this school once before, and, applying the technique of doing and saying absolutely nothing, Miss Topas contrived to get the fussing over and done with in the minimum of time, got rid of her, and was able to hear a thrilling account of what had been happening down by the river from one of the teachers who had had it from a bus conductor, who had had it from the policeman who lived next door to him.
‘A woman found in the river — dead. Murdered, they think, although I don’t know how they knew. More likely to be suicide or accident, I should think, in a neighbourhood like this.’
Lively discussion of this view was interrupted by the bell which indicated that the break was at an end. Miss Topas went out into the playground. The school, except for the class which was to have physical training, led into the building. In charge of the class left outside was a lank-haired student in glasses. Her blue serge skirt hung badly, and dipped lower at the back than at the front. She had changed into rubber-soled shoes, but had made no other difference in her dress. She gave Miss Topas a sickly smile, and then took off her glasses and put them on a window ledge. She gave an order to the class and got the children running, then she took off her skirt, displaying well-cut shorts not of the College pattern. Then she gave one of the most interesting and remarkable physical training lessons that Miss Topas ever expected to supervise.