And while all those around him drank the finest champagne and feasted on stuffed quail and smoked salmon, Mr Edgerton could be found sitting quietly in a corner, stroking some unruly hairs on his chest and munching contentedly on a single ripe banana.
ACTS OF CORPORAL CHARITY by Jane Haddam
Later, John Robert Mortimer would remember that it had all happened by accident, and because it had happened by accident, it couldn't possibly be his fault. God only knows that he hadn't intended to be in England, ever. When he was growing up, sitting by himself at a long table in the cafeteria at lunch, sitting in the back of one classroom or another so that no teacher would even think of calling on him, the only travelling he had ever imagined himself doing was to Florida or Los Angeles. He was a child of northern New England. Cold was his heritage. Sometimes he thought the only thing he could count on in life was snow.
This morning, standing on an unfamiliar street still mostly empty at the start of work-day traffic, he was not only cold but tired. Last night had been worse than hideous. Whatever had given him the idea that he could make a life teaching English to adolescents? Whatever had given him the idea that he could function on less than three hours' sleep? But no, he'd never had that idea. He'd known as soon as he'd seen the time on his bedside clock that he was going to have a horrible day. It wouldn't even matter that this was his one day 'off. There was no 'off, not really. To be 'off, he'd have to be home in New Hampshire, barricaded into his faculty apartment by books and a wall of noise, the 'Emperor' Concerto pumping through his headset, the ringers on all the phones made mute. Today he was not so much off as in hiding. He hated the idea of going back to the hotel.
'You'll have some time to yourself while you're there,' Mr Cadwallader had told him when he'd been assigned as a chaperone for the Senior trip. 'You'll have a day to yourself in the city. The only concern we have is that our students should be protected at all times.'
Protected, my ass, John Robert had thought at the time, and he hadn't changed his mind. He was more in need of being protected from his students than his students were in need of being protected from London. That's what happened when you had to deal with kids who had no concept of the value of money - or of the fact that it was limited, for most people. That was a problem he hadn't considered when he'd signed on to teach at Meredith Academy. He'd thought that between his college, which had been both famous and infamously expensive, and his childhood, which had taken place in one of the most excruciatingly 'normal' towns in all of the North-east, he'd perfected the song and dance a poor boy had to do to survive among people much richer than himself. He'd been wrong about that, too.
'Look,' Lisa Hardwick had said the night before, hanging on to the door to his room as if she intended to swing on it, 'we found this. We thought you'd like it.'
'Found it where?' he'd asked, taking the slip of paper from her hand without looking at it. He was trying not to look at Lisa herself, or at her friend Marianne, who followed her around like gum stuck to a shoe. They were dressed in this year's version of cool, as far as cool was permitted within the dress code. They both had stockings on, and skirts that fell modestly to their knees. The problem was that the skirts had slits in them, cut high on their legs to the very edges of their underwear, and they wore necklines that plunged towards their navels and hugged everything too tightly to be ignored. They weren't wearing bras, either. They never did. With all that skin on display, it didn't matter that Lisa was pug-nosed and thick waisted, or that Marianne had a line of pimples along her jaw that were rough and red from handling. Hormones were hormones. He wanted to reach out and pinch Lisa's nipples until they bled.
'We found it in a phone booth,' Lisa said. Then she looked at Marianne, and they both burst out laughing.
A moment later they were gone, trailing beer fumes he should have recognized as soon as they'd appeared in the hall. He could hear them in the stairwell, stumbling and giggling. He looked down at the scrap of paper. It had a fringe of phone numbers at the bottom. They'd taken down somebody's posted advertisement. Whoever it was would get no answer now. He turned the paper over and over in his hands. Are you a naughty boy? it said, in bright red letters. The rest of it was not so bright, and for a moment he didn't understand what he was seeing. Mistress Pamela knows what you are. You need discipline. Come up to my office and take your punishment – now.
He let the paper fall to the floor. Could they really have found that in a phone booth? He bent down and picked it up. The last thing he needed was for somebody to find it directly outside his door. He went back into his room and locked himself in. He sat down on the edge of the bed and wondered what Mistress Pamela looked like. To make it really work, she'd have to be a middle-aged woman who wore the kind of button-to-the-neck dress they sold at home in J. C. Penney's, and those shoes that nobody wore anymore, the thick ones with the ties. Better yet, she'd have to be really fat, the way his foster mother had been fat, enormous, so that she could only fit into shifts and knee-high stockings that were always rolling down. It was very close in this room, very hot. The hotel must have turned up the heat after they'd all complained. He had sweat on his forehead and on the palms of his hands. He was finding it very hard to breathe.
He went into the bathroom and turned on the shower as hard as he could make it. That wasn't very hard. There didn't seem to be any decent water pressure in the entire city of London. He put his head under the water and left it there until the wet seeped down his neck and chest and soaked through his white button-down shirt and ratty thin tie. He'd bought the tie in a knock-off place in Boston. He'd bought the shirt at Sears. His foster mother had ended up in a pool of blood at the bottom of the long driveway that led to her house, stabbed forty-six times by a man she thought she was going to sell cordwood to. He could still hear the sound of the knife going in and coming out, the thud and the suck, thud and suck, thud and suck, over and over again, like the metronome on the piano in the music room at school.
He went back into the bedroom and sat down on the bed again. It was cold instead of hot. His head hurt. He took Mistress Pamela's advertisement and set fire to it with his green Bic lighter. He let it curl into his hand until the last moment. Then he dropped it into the empty tin of Myntz he'd brought all the way from the airport in New York. Thud and suck was a sound lots of things made. It was the sound sex made. It was probably the sound Mistress Pamela made when she did whatever she did to the men who called her number. He found he couldn't imagine what she did without imagining other things, and the other things he was imagining were all wrong. He wondered if she let men reverse the roles if they paid her enough to do it.
'You'll have a day to yourself in the city,' Mr Cadwallader had said, and it was true. He had this day, the day before they were due to go home. He could walk around as much as he wanted. He had no obligations but to be back at the hotel first thing tomorrow morning, to help supervise the packing up and getting to the airport. Lisa and Marianne would sit together at the back of the plane and giggle all the way to New York. The other teachers would huddle together towards the front and try to pretend they didn't know what the students were getting up to. All in all, both England and American Airlines would be left with the impression that the students of Meredith Academy were spoiled brats with no consideration for anybody but themselves. It was true.