Sorry, love. She apologised to him in her head. I am such a grump these days. Sorry.
* * * * *
The department head at Melissa’s school was not at all what Erin had expected. She’d imagined that the students would be good-looking, but not the staff, and certainly not her potential boss! He was young, only a few years older than her. Tanned, cropped dark-brown hair, a completely different species from her old department head at St Patrick’s (Ted, a lovely man, but sixty-odd and overly fond of his grey woollen cardigan).
‘Jack Thornton.’ Well dressed in dark trousers and a Ralph Lauren blue-and-white striped shirt, he shook her hand with the same conviction in which he’d stated his name.
‘Hello, Jack,’ she replied, feeling quite self-conscious and underwhelming in her far-from-new charcoal-grey suit. Her hair fell loosely to her shoulders, wisps straying over her face and constantly giving her the urge to gather it up in a ponytail (in fact, it had been in a ponytail until Mel had commanded her to take it down). Inside the open collar of her plain white shirt she wore two delicately twisted strings of small black beads, a going-away present from Lisha. Now she worried that the necklace jarred with the rest of her outfit and didn’t look professional. No, it was fine – otherwise Mel would have insisted she take it off.
‘Sit down, Erin.’ Jack gestured to one of the two seats across from him. ‘Would you like a tea, or a coffee? A glass of water?’
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ she said, her voice uneven from this belated attack of nerves.
‘Melissa tells me that you went to university together. In Dublin, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what have you done since then?’
Jack already had a copy of her resumé, and a cursory glance through would have told him that she hadn’t ‘done’ an awful lot.
‘I’ve been teaching – at the same school,’ she replied, nerves continuing to play havoc with her voice and causing it to sound raspier than usual. ‘St Patrick’s is a public school in a working-class suburb of Dublin. I taught French to a variety of year groups.’
‘Did you stay so long because you loved the job, or was there another reason?’
Jack asked the question in an open, nonjudgmental tone of voice and in return, Erin tried to be as honest as possible.
‘My father had a terminal illness, and soon after he died my mother developed Alzheimer’s. It was hard to think about my career development when all that was going on at home.’
Jack nodded, as though her answer resonated with him. ‘When we have instability in certain areas of our lives, it’s natural to want to keep everything else as constant as we can.’
Was he admitting that he had instability in his life, too? Or was he simply doing his best to be empathetic and put her at ease? Whatever his intentions, her nervousness seemed to be finally abating and a grateful smile pulled at the corners of her mouth.
‘In fact, it might shock you to discover that I’ve been teaching at this school going on ten years now,’ he revealed with a rueful shrug. ‘So we’re similar in that regard.’
He understood. He knew how it felt to get stuck somewhere, in a rut that seemed to get deeper and more entrenched and hopeless with each passing year.
‘Okay, I’m shocked.’ Her smile, completely of its own volition, turned into a grin. ‘But in our defence, I think every teacher should stay long enough to see at least one year of students progress the whole way through. There’s a lot to be learnt from seeing how much they grow and develop, and when you see them graduate you get a better appreciation of their journey, and your own part in it.’
‘I couldn’t agree more.’
Jack used this thread of conversation to talk about the values of the school and what kind of young adults they wanted to release into the world. He was openly passionate about the students and the role of languages and other cultures in their development. Erin added her own opinions and experiences where appropriate, and the more they spoke the less it felt like an interview, and more like a chat – with someone she liked.
‘Let me show you around before we finish,’ he offered when he had clearly covered all the things he wanted to say. ‘I can’t expect you to get a feeling for the school when you’ve been stuck inside my stuffy office.’
His office was far from stuffy. It was bright, relatively new and well organised, but Erin declined to point this out.
Jack walked her around the school, proudly showing off some of the classrooms and facilities, smiling and nodding at students along the way (he was obviously quite popular). Erin asked questions as they went, drew mental comparisons with St Patrick’s, and asked him to deposit her at Mel’s office when he eventually glanced at his watch and said that he had a meeting to attend.
‘Well, that’s everything, I think.’ Jack smiled as they stood outside Mel’s half-open door. His eyes glittered when he smiled, she noticed now that she was close up, and a very attractive dimple appeared at the right side of his mouth. ‘I don’t see the point in beating around the bush, Erin. I can see you fitting in here, and I hope you feel the same, and as the academic year has already begun, I’m keen to have you on board as soon as possible.’
Erin struggled to find an appropriate reply, both his proximity and his openness catching her off guard.
‘I suppose you will need at least a few days to sort out your tax file number and legalities like that.’
She nodded somewhat distractedly. ‘Yes, I’ll need some time to get organised.’
One last flash of that affable smile. ‘Well, give me a call as soon as you’re ready.’
‘I will.’
Mel was eating her lunch, a box of fresh noodles. ‘Well, how did it go?’ she demanded, undeterred by her full mouth.
‘Really well.’ Erin leant against Mel’s desk and folded her arms. ‘He’s nice, very straightforward … I could see myself working with him. In fact, I think he has pretty much offered me a job. I just have to get my paperwork sorted out.’
‘Awesome!’ Mel swallowed and grinned. ‘We can have lunch together every day, go for power walks during free periods, gang up on students who are mean to us …’
Erin eyed the box of noodles, her stomach contracting with a jealous pang. ‘Speaking of lunch, did those come from the school canteen?’
‘Yup. We have a cool canteen. It’s a cool school, really. You’ll love it here. And I knew you’d hit it off with Sir Jack.’
‘Did you?’ Erin asked, more than a little curiously.
‘Yup.’
‘How could you be so sure?’
Mel shrugged as though it were obvious. ‘Because he’s straightforward, as you put it yourself, and he’s easy to like – even when he’s asking me to stay late for meetings, or do extra lunchtime supervision.’
Erin’s lips twitched. ‘You could have warned me, you know.’
‘Warned you about what?’
‘I didn’t expect him to be so good-looking, and it sort of put me on the back foot at the start of the interview.’
Mel snorted. ‘Oh, come on. It’s just Jack. And you can’t fall for virtually the first man you meet over here. That’s so not allowed.’
‘Of course I haven’t fallen for him. I was just commenting, that’s all … Anyway, he’s probably attached.’