A Lesson in Dying Read Free

family would not be allowed to hurt him this evening. He hurried up the lane towards the school and was the first one to arrive. When the others came into the hall he was already sitting in his place at the head of the table, studious, bespectacled and calm.
    Irene Hunt unpinned the frieze of vegetables, flowers and fruit which the children had prepared for the Harvest Festival and threw it into the bin. It seemed ridiculous now that she had once had the ambition to be a student at the Royal School of Art. There was little sense of creativity in the visual arts form. After half term the bare space on the wall would be filled with the silhouettes of witches, cats and pumpkin lanterns. She did not entirely approve of Hallowe’en. It was, she thought, an American invention, but the children liked painting witches and it provided a focus for the craft work between Harvest and Bonfire Night. For forty years her life had been ruled by this calendar of childhood excitements and soon it would be over. At Christmas she would retire. For the last time she would teach her reception class to sing ‘Away in a Manger’, to perform the nativity play, to stick cotton wool onto black card in the shape of a snowman. It would be a relief to go. She had been forced into teaching by circumstance and though her disappointment had burned out long ago, she had never been fulfilled by it. It seemed to her that for the first time in her life she would have the opportunity to grow up, to become truly adult. She stood in front of the blackboard, a tall gaunt woman, and thought with pleasure that this would be the last parents’ meeting she would have to attend.
    The classroom door opened and Matthew Carpenter stood uncertainly on the threshold. When he had arrived as a new teacher at the school he had been full of enthusiasm and fun. There was little indication of that now.
    ‘Come in,’ she said. She was sorry for him and angry because of what Harold Medburn had done to him, but she was irritated too by his lack of fight and confidence in himself. Perhaps it was because she recognized something of herself in Matthew. She felt responsible for him. She should have had the confidence to stand up to Medburn years before. Well, she thought, soon she would be retired and there would be no need then for secrecy.
    The arrival of Matthew Carpenter had marked the one major defeat Harold Medburn had suffered in his relations with the school governors. When a vacancy arose in the school he had wanted to appoint a middle-aged women, one of the congregation of St Cuthbert’s Church where he was church warden. The governors decided that Mr Medburn’s influence on the school was already too strong. It needed someone younger, with fresh ideas, someone more cooperative, more willing to involve the parents. Matthew Carpenter had been appointed straight from college knowing nothing of the problems he would face. From the moment of his arrival Harold Medburn set out to make his position there untenable. He criticized and contradicted the young teacher, so Matthew became confused and unhappy. His class recognized his increasing nervousness and grew unruly and noisy. Mr Medburn was exultant and some of the parents who had expected most from Matthew were beginning to complain about the lack of discipline.
    ‘I don’t want to disturb you,’ Matthew said, but he went in and sat on one of the desks while she finished putting library books into piles for the next day. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do when you leave.’
    She looked at him. He seemed hardly more than a boy to her. He was long and thin with limbs that seemed to be jointed like a puppet’s, a thin face and long bony fingers. His hair was curly and impossible to tidy, but he tried his best to please Medburn by being respectably, even soberly dressed.
    I don’t know what you’ll do either, she thought. Some days she wondered if he would have some sort of breakdown. On those days Medburn would never leave