English Girls

M Dooks S

Description

Maggie Pool's long and distinguished teaching career as Head of English at Layters Girls School is seriously threatened when a new member of staff is appointed and a teacher in her department embarks on a love affair with one of his students. Maggie's memories of this affair and the tragic consequences for all who become involved are triggered when she receives an unexpected letter many years after her retirement from teaching.A contemporary story of forbidden love is also closely entwined with one from our literary past in this novel about ideological conflict and the power of imagination in the world of love, literature and education.

Informations

• Publié par: eBook Versions
• Date de parution: 18 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781843962373
• Langue: English

Extrait

Published by Caxton Park

Copyright © 2013 Susan Dooks

Susan Dooks has asserted her right under
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
to be identified as the author of this work.

Extract from The History Boys by Alan
Bennett (copyright © Alan Bennett 2004) is
printed by permission of United Agents
( www.unitedagents.co.uk ) on behalf of Roger
McGough, and under licence from the
publishers, Faber Faber ( www.faber.co.uk ).

ISBN-13 978-1-84396-237-3

A CIP catalogue record for this
work is available from the British Library

Also available in paperback
ISBN-10 1492878715
ISBN-13 978-1-49287-871-1

ebook edition production
www.ebookversions.com

All characters and events in this
publication, other than those clearly in
the public domain, are fictitious and
any resemblance to real persons, living
or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored
in or introduced into a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means
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recording or otherwise without the prior
permission of the publisher. Any person
who does any unauthorised act in relation
to this publication may be liable to criminal
prosecution.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or
introduced into a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form
or by any means electronic,
photomechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without
the prior written permission
of the publisher. Any person who
does any unauthorised act in
relation to this publication may be
liable to criminal prosecution.
For Trevor
THE
ENGLISH
GIRLS


S M Dooks





CAXTON PARK
Contents


Title Page
Copyright Credits
Dedication

Prologue 2030

PART ONE - AUTUMN 2012
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

PART TWO - SPRING 2013
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Part IX
Part X
Part XI
Part XII
Part XIII
Part XIV
Part XV
Part XVI

PART THREE - SUMMER 2013
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII

Epilogue 2030

Acknowledgements
Prologue 2030


The letter came on Friday and changed nothing contrary to what letters have a habit of doing. In some ways it was surprising that it was a letter at all, other forms of communication nearly always taking precedence by this time. And it was just this hint of incongruity which made Maggie think about all those other letters in literature, even as she was bending to retrieve it from the front door mat. What a difference it would have made if the letter for Angel hadn t slipped under the carpet or the right note had been slipped into Cecilia s hand? And if Leo hadn t been so infatuated
Maggie flipped the letter thoughtfully against her left hand as she returned to the kitchen. She didn t open it immediately but propped it up against the cereal packet and finished her breakfast.
She had recognised the writing of course. Even after all these years she knew the distinctive style of all of them and this one was unmistakeable. A possible course of action was just to put it in the bin and wipe it from her mind. Such actions had become gratifyingly easy with age and mostly left no residue of regret and guilt. But in this instance something stayed her hand and instead she circled the letter warily as she left it propped in splendid isolation against the cereal packet while she cleared up her breakfast.
As well as being deterred from opening the letter by a faint sense of alarm she also wanted to savour the fact for a little longer that she had a letter, a personal letter, written in a hand she recognised, to open at all. Most of what dropped through her letter box went straight into the recycling but even those unwanted missives had begun to dry up recently. So a real letter was an event, something to find the paper knife for and slit open neatly so as not to spoil the rather thick, luxurious yellow paper of the envelope. Even then she hesitated, reluctant to draw out those closely written sheets as if she knew instinctively that things would never be the same again if she did and - she struggled for the right metaphor - the genie would be out of the bottle, the lid would be off and all Hell might break loose!
In the old days she could have put off the decision a little longer by having to look for her glasses but laser treatment had deprived her of that respite and she sought desperately for a few moments for some other delaying tactic. At the same time she felt angry at her own foolishness, after all it was only a letter. Impatient with herself she went to draw the sheets of thick paper from the envelope and there it was rolling, rolling, rolling out before her and nothing to stop it.
Part One


Autumn 2012
I


The corridor was empty and the windows still tightly closed which wasn t unusual as she was invariably first in their building in the morning and when she wasn t she always felt unaccountably irritated and wrong footed for the rest of the day. She put her bags down and started to open the windows, pausing at the second one to admire the tulip tree in all its Autumn magnificence.
It was then that she heard it, a low murmur of voices, trembling and excited, as if barely able to contain their emotion. For a moment she felt the guilt of an intruder suddenly privy to a private passion and instinctively stepped backward as if retreat was the only feasible option. Annoyance and common sense reasserting themselves in equal measure she coughed loudly and strode boldly into the second classroom on the left of the corridor.
On first entering the room she could see nothing clearly as the blinds were down and the half light of the early morning still persisted on that side of the building. Then two figures came into focus and for a few moments she couldn t recognise them as they separated and moved apart with jerky, hasty movements which sent a chair from a neighbouring table crashing to the floor and returned the scene to some kind of normality.
Rosalind had passed her and left the room before Maggie registered Matthew s we were only going over an essay and then he too was gone through the door into the adjoining classroom. The door banged defiantly behind him and the scene was over, finished. For a moment Maggie realised that what she had seen or perhaps sensed as she entered the room just didn t add up. Her heart was thumping uncomfortably in her chest and the old anxiety about heart problems hovered in the back of her mind mingling uneasily with the excitement which the fleeting scene had created in her. She knew that she would need to think and do something about what she had seen but for the moment there were more pressing concerns to deal with. How often do we sideline the really important in favour of the more pressing and we usually rue the day!
Maggie didn t bother to open the rest of the windows but walked quickly to the end of the corridor, down the steps at the end, and turning sharp left entered the English Staff room. Despite Matthew s early and unexpected appearance in the classroom Maggie did not expect him to materialise in the staff room and so she assumed it would be empty. The second surprise in some ways agitated her more than the first, perhaps because of the first, but when she saw a stranger in her chair idly glancing through her teaching file the anger and distress she had contained in the classroom a few minutes earlier broke from her with a violence that at the same moment she realised would be acutely embarrassing.
What the Hell is going on? Who are you?
Maggie dumped her bags by the door as a young woman, slim, elegant and attired in a tailored grey trouser suit rose calmly from the chair, shutting the file gently with her left hand as she did so.
I do apologise. I didn t realise the seats were allocated!
A slight sneer in her voice relieved Maggie of some of her embarrassment and she was able to reply quite calmly.
It helps if we know where we are based if only to be able to keep a grip on all this stuff. She gestured vaguely in the direction of her bags.
I am here for the job interview, the second in department. The name is Christine - Christine Lodge. I thought I d arrive early and get a feel for the place and what the Head is looking for. I d heard she s keen on data and how we can use it to push up results and I m right with her there. You don t seem to indicate anything along those lines in your planning notes but perhaps it s all on the computer, which is what I would expect.
Maggie gazed at the young woman with a sinking heart and a dragging sense of inevitability.
What the Head is looking for and what is best for the department, for the teaching of English she enunciated the words carefully are not always the same thing. A thought to bear in mind, she concluded with some asperity.
The young woman gazed at her in a mildly patronising way and then said almost sympathetically, I expect it s hard to focus on these things when you are in your last years of teaching but we have to if we are going to go places in our careers.
Maggie winced slightly at the clich and busied herself filling the coffee machine and washing the few stained mugs dumped rather unceremoniously in half an inch of dirty water at the bottom of the sink.
How many other candidates are there? Christine continued, ignoring Maggie s body language and sliding into a chair at the far end of the table, near to the door.
I think there are three others and they should be arriving by 8.45. We ll make our way over to the Head s room when I ve finished here.
Maggie felt reluctant to offer Christine a coffee and give her the opportunity to quiz her about anything else. She suddenly felt a desperate longing to be alone for a few minutes to digest the experiences of the morning. The day already had an ominou