Bare

Chapter 19

BUILDING HOME

He was halfway up the stairs when the office door opened above him.

Howard Prentice came through it. Red-faced.

The stride of a man leaving a conversation he'd lost. He saw Neil on the landing.

Stopped for half a second. Recognition, assessment, something harder underneath that didn't need a word.

Then past him. Close enough to catch aftershave and anger.

His shoes hit the stairs hard all the way down.

At the top, Mrs Webb stood in her doorway. Hand on the frame. Behind her, the office still held the shape of whatever had just happened in it.

'Neil. Come in.'

'Do you have ten minutes.'

'I have fifteen if you need them. Sit down. Are you well.'

'Yes. I am well. I am here because I want to tell you something in person before you hear it from anybody else. There are two things.'

'Go on.'

'I'm in a relationship with a man. Another teacher. Rory Cavanaugh. The relationship began after the mural project started. I want you to know from me and not from anyone else.'

Mrs Webb put down her pen at the word man. She did not pick it up again.

'Thank you for telling me, Neil.'

'There is a second thing.' He had rehearsed this one harder.

'I know what happened to Mark Holbrook. I was here then.

I saw what the governing body did not stop.

I have never raised it. I am raising it now because I need to know, before I go any further, that if a parent rings this school to complain about me because of who I am in a relationship with, the parent will be told, politely, that they are raising a matter which is not a matter. '

Mrs Webb was quiet for about three seconds. In the economy of a head's office, three seconds of silence was a long time.

'Neil.'

'Yes.'

'I need to say three things and I need you to let me say them in order. Are you going to let me say them in order.'

'Yes.'

'One. Mark Holbrook should not have left this school.

I was deputy then. I was in two of those meetings.

I should have broken the room I was in. I did not break the room.

I have carried that for eleven years and I carry it now.

If you want to know what I have done with it, the answer is: I have spent eleven years making sure I am a head who would break the room now.

That is the short version. The long version we can have over a coffee at some point if you want it. '

Neil said nothing. Which was the correct response.

'Two. I am the head of this school. My door is open on the subject of your relationship, or not open, as you prefer.

It is none of my business unless it becomes a safeguarding matter, and it is not going to become a safeguarding matter because the person you are in a relationship with is a freelance artist who has completed his contract with this school and is not in a position of authority over any pupil.

I am telling you this in advance because I want you to know that if a parent rings this school to complain about you, that parent will be told, politely, by me personally, that they are raising a matter which is not a matter.

Which is not a hypothetical. Howard Prentice rang me four weeks ago.

I suspect you knew, Sue is Sue, and in case you did not: the call was brief, the call was handled, the call is logged, and the call will not be the subject of any correspondence to the governing body because Mr Prentice has had a chance to think about what he was saying and has elected, wisely, not to say it again.

I did not tell you at the time because I did not need you to carry it.

I am telling you now because I want you to understand that thing two, when I said it, was already a thing I had done, not a thing I was promising. '

'Three.' Mrs Webb leaned forward. 'Some point in the next term I would like to invite the two of you to a small supper at my house.

My husband teaches secondary geography and has a very dull cellar of wines he bought on holiday in the Loire in 1994.

He would like to bore you about them. I would like him to have the opportunity. '

Neil looked at her. Mrs Webb, fifty-nine, two children grown, a husband who taught secondary geography, a cellar of dull wines from the Loire. The concreteness of the invitation hit him like a hand on the sternum.

'Thank you.'

'Don't thank me for doing my job, Neil. You can thank me for thing three if you like, but thing one and thing two are just the job.'

He laughed. He did not expect to laugh in this office today.

'Is there anything else.'

'No. That was it. That was all of it.'

'Good. Go and teach your second period. I believe you have Year 9 and An Inspector Calls.'

'Yes.'

'Good luck. I find the Birlings improve with age. The audience, not the play.'

He stood up. Walked to the door. Stopped with his hand on the frame.

'Mrs Webb.'

'Yes.'

'When you find Mark, tell him Neil Ashworth from English says he's sorry he didn't ring him back then.'

'I will tell him. Close the door behind you.'

He closed the door behind him. Walked down the corridor past the history block.

Looked into the classroom where Mark Holbrook had once taught.

A Year 8 class was in it now, heads bent over exercise books, a supply teacher at the front.

The room was the same room. The rain was the same rain.

The building had not changed. He had. And Mrs Webb, it turned out, had been changing alongside him the whole time, as buildings change around people who stop seeing them.

The conversation happened in May, on a Tuesday, over pasta that was better than usual because Rory had finally learned to salt the water.

'Move in with me while we look for our place,' Rory said.

Neil's fork paused. 'Move in?'

'Here. My flat. Or your flat. Or a different flat. I don't care about the flat. I care about the waking up.'

'The waking up.'

'I wake up in your flat three nights a week and you in mine four, and every morning I have to work out where I am. Where my toothbrush is. Which counter the moka pot's on. I don't want to keep working it out. I want one counter. One toothbrush. One alarm.'

'You don't use an alarm.'

'You're right on that one. I use you. You wake up at six regardless of circumstance. You're a human alarm clock.'

'That's not romantic.'

'It's efficient. And I want it every morning. Same bed, same person.'

Neil ate his pasta. Thought about counters. About toothbrush locations. About owning a flat.

'Freddie needs a room,' Neil said.

'Freddie could have a room. Here. The box room. Kieran and Carol are starting uni in Manchester in September. They'll need somewhere. The box room becomes Freddie's room.'

'You've thought about this.'

'I've thought about nothing else for three weeks.

' Rory set down his fork. 'The Cologne cheque.

From Serena. I've been sitting on it since February.

That's the deposit.' He picked up his fork again.

'I've measured the box room. Eight by ten.

Enough for a single bed, a desk, and a bookshelf.

The window faces east. Morning light. I've priced a new mattress. '

'You've priced a mattress.'

'A good one. Children need good mattresses.'

'Where did you read that?'

'Gemma told me.'

'You've been talking to Gemma.'

'Gemma rang me on Saturday and said, and I quote, "If you don't ask him to move in soon I'm going to do it for you and nobody wants that." Then she told me about mattresses. And a special pillow. For kids.'

Neil pushed his pasta around the plate. The kitchen was Rory's kitchen, the kitchen where the garlic burned on Wednesdays, where Kieran left cereal bowls with the devotion of a man building a monument to laziness. The kitchen he'd walked into months ago and never fully left.

'What about the studio?'

'The studio stays. My studio, my work. We need a house. Ours. A kitchen, a bedroom. Ours.'

'And your painting?'

'Bare goes in the bedroom. The two figures go above the sofa.'

'The bedroom?'

'Where you see it first thing. Where it's just us.'

'And the sofa?'

'Where else? It was made for a wall. Specifically a wall in a home. Specifically our home.'

When Neil looked at him, Rory looked back. Green eyes, steady, the half-smile absent. The serious register.

'Yes,' Neil said.

His parents' house was the same house.

The front door stayed shut in his mind for a long time.

It opened now.

Diane was already in it. Apron, not the Christmas one, a weekday apron with an old tomato stain on the pocket. She had done something to her hair. Brushed it for a Sunday lunch, and the brushing was visible, and she did it anyway.

'Come in, love. Come in, Rory.'

Rory. First name. First time.

Rory inclined his head, the small formal register of walking into a house where his ease was not going to help him. 'Thanks, Mrs Ashworth.'

In the hall: lamb in the oven. The hallway clock Neil heard ticking his whole childhood, still set two minutes fast because Malcolm believed being exactly on time was a failure of character. The photograph of Neil's graduation on the telephone table.

Malcolm came out of the sitting room.

He was wearing a tie. Navy. The Sunday shirt, the one he wore for church when Neil's grandmother was still alive and for nothing else. Malcolm had not worn a tie to a Sunday lunch in his own house as long as Neil could remember.

'Mr Cavanaugh,' Malcolm said. He extended his hand. 'Malcolm.'

'Rory, not Mr please.' Rory took the hand. The paint was worked into the knuckles as it always was, and Neil watched his father's eyes register it and not flinch.

'Come through. Diane's done the lamb.'