Across the playground, a short woman – perhaps ten years older than me – came barrelling towards the gate.
‘Wait!’ she called. ‘I’ll let you in!’
I groaned as I recognised her from one of my interviews. It was Paula Paxton, the deputy head. Grant would have said she was the perfect mix of overenthusiastic and underachieving. Though she’d been very nice to me when I met her before, I just wasn’t really in the mood for company.
‘Ms Armstrong,’ she panted as she unlocked the gate. ‘I saw you from my office and thought you would want to come in rather than lurk outside. So I said to myself, I said “Paula, run downstairs and let her in – she doesn’t want to be lurking outside,” and I raced downstairs and then when I saw you pick your bag up, I thought I’d missed you.’
Faced with such jollity, I winced. Despite how nice Paula had seemed at my interview, I wasn’t sure I could deal with her kindness today when I was feeling fragile. She saw my reaction and she paused while opening the iron gate.
‘I’m babbling,’ she said. ‘I always babble when I meet new people. I’m sorry.’
I managed a weak smile. ‘Don’t be,’ I said.
She reached out and took my bag from me.
‘Coffee?’
I smiled more genuinely this time. ‘Coffee would be great.’
I followed her through the echoey corridors of the school. Generally, I disliked schools out of hours. They needed the children to make them feel alive, I always thought. But today, I appreciated the quiet stillness of the building. It was cool inside, no fancy air-conditioning could compete with hundred-year-old thick stone walls.
I was wearing a vest top, cropped jeans and Havaianas that flipped and flopped loudly down the hall. Paula Paxton was dressed for work in a neat wrap dress with court shoes and – I thought – nude tights. It was thirty degrees outside, and it was the summer holidays, so I wondered if she dressed like that all the time. On the beach. At the gym.
‘God, I’m so hot,’ she said, over her shoulder. ‘I’ve been to a funeral.’
Oops.
‘Sorry,’ I muttered, feeling horrible for having had nasty thoughts about her. Paula waved her hand at me.
‘Nah, don’t be. It was some client of my husband’s firm. I only went so I could bring the car home afterwards because I need to go to the supermarket later, and I could have got the bus, but I’ll have a lot of bags …’
I smiled and she stopped.
‘Babbling again,’ she said. ‘Here are the offices.’
She opened a door on her left. It was an original, thick with paint and with a wobbly window on the top half.
Inside was a sort of reception area with seating and two desks for the secretaries I assumed. Beyond it were two more doors, similarly old-fashioned, one marked “head teacher” and one marked “deputy head teacher”.
‘I’m on the left,’ she said. ‘I teach as well, obviously, so I don’t use my office much. But I have the coffee machine. Milk and sugar?’
After suffering in too many staffrooms where the only refreshments on offer were clumpy catering tins of instant, I was pleasantly surprised to hear there was a coffee machine. I smiled.
‘Just milk, please. I’ll just have a look at my own office if that’s okay?’
‘Hold on,’ she said. She opened the top drawer of one of the desks and pulled out a key.
‘This is yours.’
I wondered if there was any point in keeping a key just centimetres away from the door it unlocked but I didn’t say anything. Instead I simply unlocked the door.
‘I’ll fire up the Nespresso,’ Paula said. ‘Well, it’s not a real Nespresso, because they’re so expensive. It’s just the Marks and Sparks version, but I find it’s just as good …’
She trailed off, much to my relief.
‘Just come in when you’re ready.’
I nodded and, taking a deep breath, I went into my new office.
It was pretty bare. There was a big desk by the window, a round table, and two empty bookcases. On one wall there was an old-fashioned black and white photograph of a young woman wearing what I thought was Edwardian dress, and a fierce expression.
‘You’re going to have to go,’ I told her out loud. ‘I can’t have you looking down on me so disapprovingly.’
My voice bounced around the empty room.
Suddenly overwhelmed by everything, I sat down at my new desk and put my face in my hands. This was my last chance to save my career and start again but it just seemed like a huge task. Was this going to be a massive mistake?
I sat like that for a few minutes, wallowing in my misery over my new life. None of this was my fault, I thought. I was just another one of Grant’s victims, like the parents he fooled, and the kids he let down, and whose SATs results he faked, and the PTA whose funds he siphoned off. Though that bit had never been proved, and like I said, he’d never actually admitted the rest – just insisted it was all a misunderstanding. I took a deep breath and rubbed my eyes, trying to pull myself together. I couldn’t fall apart now, not with Paula Paxton in the next room.
‘Excuse me, Ms Armstrong,’ a voice said, making me realise that Paula Paxton wasn’t in the next room; she was in my room, clutching two mugs of coffee.
I forced my head upright and tried to smile. But my neck felt weak and my smile weaker.
‘Oh dear,’ Paula Paxton said. ‘Oh dear.’
She put both mugs on the desk and in two strides was next to me. Tentatively, she touched my arm.
‘Feeling a bit overwhelmed?’ she said.
Her kind voice almost made me fall apart. With super-human strength I managed to nod, without looking at her.
‘I know what happened,’ she said. ‘In your last job, I mean. You don’t have to explain.’
Of course she knew. She’d been in my interviews; she must have read my application. Knowing she knew made me feel oddly relieved and embarrassed at the same time. I couldn’t bear her feeling sorry for me. It was the sympathy and the sad faces and the tilty heads asking ‘how ARE you?’ that had made life in London so completely awful.
Paula rubbed my arm gently and then went round the other side of the desk and sat down opposite me. She pushed one of the mugs towards me and picked up the other one.
‘I think I should tell you just how thrilled we are to have you here,’ she said in a conversational tone. ‘I’ve read all the things you’ve written in Teacher magazine. And I was actually at your training day in Brighton.’
This time I did manage to meet her eyes.
‘Really?’
Grant had been the face of our schools. We worked together but he was the driving force. He was the one doing the Tedx talks, and writing for the broadsheet education supplements about his views on education policy, and his approach to helping young children learn. He was outspoken, handsome and funny, and he really knew his stuff, so he was very media friendly. He’d even been on Question Time once. In fact, I thought it was his profile that had led him to make the bad decisions he’d made. Education is a long game and seeing children through their years at school can sometimes