“It died of old age,” Derrick insisted. But there were two small marks on the back of its neck which looked suspiciously like airgun pellets.
Derrick became defiant and articulate. As the girls shrank away, he pushed the pigeon towards him, so it sat in the middle of the long table, almost living as its flesh-coloured feathers slowly settled, beautifully soft, from pink to pearl, a thing of wonder in its intricate detail. Vanessa started to imagine an odour, a sort of sweet-savoury, menstrual smell, but it could equally well have come from the girls. Her classes were usually a moil of hormones. Derrick had a loud, rather toneless voice, which allowed him to dominate the room, though this time he had a lot of competition. “Salvador Dali threw a cow from a plane. You probably don’t even know who Dali is. If that was art, tell me why my pigeon isn’t?”
Soon everybody was shouting at once and Vanessa had to bang the green marker on the whiteboard, but before they fell silent, she heard Derrick demand, “You tell me what is interesting about your fat pussy?” Whereupon half the class collapsed in laughter, while Daisy stood up and burst into tears.
By the time Vanessa had mediated, only forty-five minutes remained for writing, which Daisy insisted was unfair, since “Some people write very fast without thinking,” looking hard at Derrick, who by now was established at his own small table in the corner of the room, where the pigeon would cause least physical violence. So Vanessa had agreed there would be no reading out, and instead she had taken all the writing in, which meant she had doubled her load of marking.
Daisy, of course, was very annoying. But Vanessa had become a little anxious about Derrick, whose scripts, though skilful, were increasingly violent. Perhaps she shouldn’t be encouraging him?
It was very odd, this writing business. Looking quickly, she sees that the best piece comes once again from the infuriating man with the Father Christmas beard, who has written a skit upon this morning’s class, where the teacher is whimsical and ineffectual, and the pigeon is actually crawling with maggots—
But she forgives him, since he has made her beautiful.
Vanessa falls asleep for an hour, and dreams she is writing the book of a lifetime. It spools from her fingers, witty, brilliant. She has written two thirds of the book before breakfast, though Daisy stands there, wailing and pointing, “You went too fast! You killed the pigeon!” She is about to deny it when she looks under the desk and finds she is making love to the boy, whose penis is a fat, pearly-pink pigeon, and she thinks, “This is brilliant, it doesn’t stop me writing! I could have been doing this all these years!” She has almost finished, she is coming, she is there — but when she stands up to take her bow, she finds she is naked below her waist, and sees Justin waiting behind her, staring, hang-dog, heavy, unloved by anyone, jealous of the boy with the thin dark body, and he says, “You see, you forgot about me. It’s all your fault, you forgot about me.”
Waking, she remembers that rush of pleasure that came with the sense that she had written brilliantly. Her headache is gone, the voices have vanished. Full of resolve, she goes down to her study.
But there are so many books in there. The piles seem to loom like cliffs all round her, the base eroding, the summits frowning. She picks up a novel she has never read which is touted on the front as ‘The book of the century…Brilliant writing, subtle, heart-piercing.’ She reads a few pages. It is banal. Sighing, she returns to her own writing, but she finds her mind wandering over to Mary. At five o’clock, she telephones Tigger.
“Mary seems to have made some friends,” she tells him. “She brought this Ugandan person to the house. They were nattering away when I came home.”
“Good for her,” says Trevor. “She’d get bored, otherwise. You’re busy with your teaching, N’essie.”
“Don’t call me Nessie,” she snaps, at once. “It’s a stupid nickname, honestly, Tigger. And please don’t talk about me like that. I’m not a teacher, you know, always teaching people. I’m a writer. It would be frightful to be a teacher.”
“It was the summit of my ambitions,” he says. “I always wanted to teach history. But as it turned out, I was better with my hands.”
Some dim memory is stirring in Vanessa. “Do you know I’ve just remembered something. I think Mary once wanted to be a teacher. May even have trained as a teacher, over here. I think she didn’t finish, the money ran out.” Which makes her feel better — Vanessa has the job that Mary Tendo always wanted.
“It’s not over yet,” says Trevor, gnomically. “There’s more to Mary than meets the eye. Toodle-oo, Ness. Got things to do.”
“What are you up to?” Vanessa asks. She has always unconsciously kept tags on Tigger.
There is a pause, which in another man might have sounded guilty, and something which might almost be whispering, and then he says, “Got to read a book.” That ridiculous urgency, as she should have predicted, as if otherwise the book might escape him.
He was like that about reading, he did it on purpose, he had to stick out and be difficult. They might have made a go of it if he had been more normal. But as it was, poor Justin did not really have a father, not a normal, useful father, that is. Justin did not have a normal family.
And then she remembers this morning’s letter. She gets up and runs back up to the bedroom. It is still on top of the duvet, unopened. She sees, as she sticks her nail into the envelope, it comes from the village where she was born. The letter is from Lucy, her country cousin. Her heart lifts with real excitement. She settles against the pillow to read.
To her surprise, Lucy writes well, although she is not educated, just a housewife. Vanessa thinks, writing well must be in our family. She feels a little twinge of pride. It is stuffed with news: very little is bad. Uncle Frank, the husband of Aunt Isobel, has been an invalid for years with Parkinson’s. “I pop in and see Dad every day, but we think he can’t go on forever. He’s had a good innings—83!” The rest of it is a kind of social diary: who has married, who has children, the village scandals, the new village hall, which they have been building on the site of one three hundred years old, which Vanessa remembers: dank lath and plaster. And Lucy is inviting her to the opening. “Why don’t you bring Justin down to see us? We’re having a knees-up at the end of October. My place isn’t a palace, but you’re very welcome.”
Vanessa is shocked by how pleased she is. They still remember her. They might even love her. There is still a world to which she belongs, although she has neglected it for half a lifetime. The silent world of her mother and father. Though once she had longed above all to escape it, time has rinsed it in reminiscent sunlight. She imagines: overlapping leaves of oak trees, the soft green body of a hilly landscape. Her mother’s garden, with its vegetable beds. A place where she need not be busy.
Then she checks herself. She is being sentimental. The party will be a fluorescent-lit bore, where people will get drunk and do karaoke. And no one will know what to say to her. Of course she won’t go. She will get on with her novel. And what will she say, if they ask about Justin? Her contemporaries’ children will all be working, dropping babies like rabbits, chubby grandchildren; bragging about sales targets, cars, trampolines, plans for camper-van trips to New Zealand…She pushes the letter away, firmly.