The Learning Curve Read Free

uniformly accepted as typical of her ‘team-spirit’ attitude. It meant that six teachers were able to enjoy their holiday with an extra spring in their step at the thought of possible promotion next year, without having to deal with competition or interviews during the summer.
    So not only would there be a new Reception class teacher to welcome to Heatheringdown this term, but there would be a bit of politics to add a touch of excitement to the proceedings. Nicky wondered if the teacher might be male. They could do with some more men in the staffroom.
    By the time she had returned there after playing with her interactive whiteboard, the entire staff of Heatheringdown Primary had arrived. Which meant seven teachers and five assistants were fighting over the kettle, folding themselves into chairs, and, with their knees now somewhere near their eyes, describing their holidays and making the same jokes about how glad they were to be back at school. And one new – female – Reception teacher was pretending it was fun.
    Nicky looked round the room. Her older sister, Claire, had once told her that ninety per cent of marriages started as office romances. Whenever she thought of this statistic, Nicky wondered where the other ten per cent met their match. Wherever it was, she would have to start going there soon. Out of the seven full-time teachers here, only three were men. One was Ned and the other two were Pete and Rob.
    Pete was great, of course, but he was not what you could call boyfriend material. His frame was slight, bordering on petite, at little over five foot six, and in some trousers it looked as if he had no bottom at all. Ally and Nicky often wondered if it hurt him to sit down. His features seemed to have been painted on with the thinnest of paintbrushes. Delicate eyelashes framed soft blue eyes, the finest of lips curved around small, even teeth. Were he a woman, every man he ever met would have wanted to protect him. As a man he was invisible. He was Rob’s best mate, right-hand man and all-round good laugh.
    Rob, though, was something else altogether. Everyone knew that Rob Pattison, teacher of Year 5, the nine- and ten-year-olds, was the best-looking guy in the whole school. It was one of those things that just went without saying. It mostly went without saying because the other thing that went without saying was that Rob Pattison knew he was the best-looking guy in the school. In fairness to him, it would have been hard for him not to know. Apart from the way women reacted to him, there were always mirrors. Rob was tall, dark, broad and handsome.
    To anyone who did not know Rob and Nicky’s history, which meant everyone except Ally and Pete, it appeared that Nicky was the only woman in the school who had been given a Rob Pattison vaccine. (‘One short sharp prick and then it was all over’ had been a favourite staffroom joke during their first year at the school.) And she was also the only attractive woman who escaped the Rob Radar; that is, he refused to treat her as a potential notch on his bedpost, but rather as a close and respected friend and confidante.
    To anyone who did know their history, such as Ally and Pete, it sometimes appeared that Nicky and Rob were simply taking a sabbatical from a relationship that had begun – and ended all too precipitously – seven years ago, and they would one day slip back into it as comfortably as if they were slipping on an old sock.
    ‘You’d better be careful,’ Ally warned Nicky once, after an entire lunch-break of raucous flirting. ‘People will talk.’
    ‘Oh don’t be ridiculous!’ laughed Nicky lightly. ‘It’s just friendly banter. He’s like a brother.’
    ‘If I looked at my brother like that,’ muttered Ally, eyeing her gravely, ‘my parents would call social services.’
    The plain, and sometimes uncomfortable, truth was that Nicky and Rob did have a colourful history – and not an ancient Greek sort of history; more a