Facing the Tank Read Free Page B

picture after gory picture beside her. ‘And next time,’ she shouted over the hubbub, ‘it’ll have to be Saint Paul.’
    There were groans and they were gone. She gathered the drawings into a pile which she locked in her desk. As she walked down the battered parquet corridor to the playground and freedom, she could hear the dim murmur of,
    ‘Oh Lord, the Giver of Bounty, bless this food for ourselves and ourselves for Thy service. Amen,’ and the appalling clatter of benches being clambered over and plates being slung along tables as Junior Lunch started.
    The choir school was little, fleshing out its income and classes by taking in a few day boys as well as the twenty-six choristers. The standard of everything except music was cheerfully low, but the cachet of the place as an accepted springboard into Tatham’s was such that parents of unmusical sons continued to fork out inflated sums to send their children there. Emma’s qualification for teaching Divinity was less her history degree than the fact that her late father used to be Dean. The head of English had come there to teach the ‘cello once and had somehow taken over the English department during an epidemic of gastric flu. The French master was distinctly Dutch, although no one but Emma seemed impolite enough to have noticed. Anyone in the area with a Latin degree had been lured away by the house that came, along with better pay, with a job at Tatham’s, so what Classics the little boys gleaned had been gathered in a team effort from the staff’s schoolday memories. A well-thumbed copy of Kennedy’s Latin Primer was kept on a string by the kettle in the common room, the idea being to stay one lesson ahead of one’s class. Emma heard James Rees (Forestry degree) leading a senior class in their declension of an irregular verb as she mounted her bicycle and rode out into the Close. The lawns were covered with families in their Sunday best because the city schools’ confirmation service had just finished.
    Her father’s house stood on the corner of Dimity and Tatham Streets in an overstocked, walled garden. He had died five years ago leaving a twenty-two-year-old Emma sole heir, but it was still very much his house. He had retired there from the Deanery when Emma was just starting at Tatham’s. An historian who was also a priest, the ex-Dean had brought his history to the fore once more. He dedicated the eight years he spent in the house before his death to writing a double biography of Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey. The book, Disparate Men , had been a posthumous steady seller, not least in Barrowcester where Dyce-Hamilton’s discovery of an unlikely friendship between Tatham and Wolsey was a matter for some concern.
    The late Dean was regarded as having been a fair and noble one, not only in his policy of non-interference but also in his adoption of the baby Emma. He had married late, to general rejoicing and, his wife being well past a safe childbearing age, they filed for adoption and were granted a baby girl. Mrs Dyce-Hamilton died of cancer all too soon after Emma’s arrival, to general despair, and although a nanny had to be found, the care of the child was taken on whenever possible by her late-middle-aged father. As soon as she was old enough to sit still and silent on a grown-up chair, she was led by him to services in the Cathedral – hence her dispassionate but extensive knowledge of the Scriptures. The sight of him walking patiently slowly with her hand in his and, later, of them walking arm in arm, she now patiently slow, was one dear to the hearts of the diocese. She attended a local day school, but it was his careful coaching that had seen her through the Tatham’s entrance exam at thirteen. Once he had retired and begun work in earnest on Disparate Men she repaid the favour by devoting many of her weekends to helping him track down passages and, as the work grew, to typing up finished chapters. Then as now, Emma felt herself marked