Look to Your Wife

‘I don’t intend to. She patronizes me about our relationship. She’s a cow. And I’m not going to be nice to her because she’s black. Because that’s racist.’

‘Lisa!’

‘What?’

Edward shook his head as he unlaced his shoes. Sometimes, Lisa was utterly impossible.

‘She likes you, Edward. A bit too much, in my view. I’ve seen her, with her velvet doe-eyes giving you the look.’

‘Lisa, she’s gay. I’ve met her partner.’

‘Don’t believe that for a minute. She told me she’s gender fluid. As if! I could float a canoe in her gender stream. You mark my words; she’ll be married by Michaelmas.’

Edward burst out laughing. God, Lisa was funny, even when she was being ridiculous.

Missy was sexy, though. He wondered if she did swing both ways. It was true, she loathed Lisa, and she did give him the eye. He quite liked those feminist types. At least she had an opinion about something. Maybe he should promote her to deputy head. Let’s face it, she deserved a break. What was it they said about religious studies teachers? ‘Can’t do: teach.’ ‘Can’t teach: Teach RS.’ Besides, Chuck was starting to drive him mad. He was getting a bit too big for his boots. It would teach him a lesson to announce that the duties had to be shared and a second deputy head would be appointed.

Edward decided to sound Missy out. No matter how tough they all behaved in staff meetings, the mob usually crumpled when he called them individually to come to his office for a little chat. He kept her waiting outside his door for a good ten minutes, pretending he was making a phone call. It helped to exacerbate their anxiety. They always thought that they’d done something wrong; that they were in trouble. It gave him the psychological edge.

The meeting did not go well. Edward asked Missy what she thought about extra-curricular activities. It was his belief that SJA was not doing enough. It was that sort of thing that created a sense of belonging and camaraderie. He went on a bit too much about improving standards. Missy was looking bored. When she finally spoke, she was bolshy. She was a prominent member of the Union, and this was exactly the sort of thing that the Union feared and loathed. The teachers were under great strain, too much red tape, and time spent on the phone speaking to stroppy parents. Edward insisted that books should always be marked promptly and handed back – no excuses. The staff were at breaking point. No, Missy certainly did not support the idea of extra-curricular work.

Later, he spoke to Lisa, when they were in the black BMW heading back to towards the Birkenhead tunnel.

‘She was a nightmare. I forgot that she was a powerful voice in the Union.’

‘So what will you do? Did you mention the deputy post?’

‘Well, I dropped the hint. I told her that her CV would benefit from a leadership role, that she was highly respected by the students and staff, blah blah blah, but then she blew it by banging on about the Union. I need her to be onside. I’m not sure that I trust her.’

‘But if you don’t promote her now, she’ll be really pissed off. You’ve dangled the carrot.’

‘No, it’s fine. I’ll find a way to give her something. Keep her quiet.’

‘Well you know my feelings about her, and I never change my mind: about clothes or men.’

‘That’s a quote from Jane Austen, isn’t it?’

‘Wow, Edward, you’re really learning. But it’s true. I don’t trust her one bit. Do you know what she said to me today? I saw her chatting with the girls in the loo, and as I walked in she said, “Oh don’t come in, we’re having a good gossip about you.” She’s a spiteful cow.’

‘Ignore her. She’s trying to rattle you. She’s jealous. I think she’s OK, deep down. What she needs is a good seeing-to by a real man.’

It was Lisa’s turn to be shocked.

‘You can’t say things like that. You’d be sacked, if anyone heard you.’

Edward chuckled; that wonderful, throaty laughter (as infectious as herpes, as Chuck once described it).

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, it won’t be me; she’s not my type.’

A police car’s siren wailed as they drove past the docks, and a slight look of anxiety flickered across Edward’s face. He watched as the car passed, and then he descended into silence. Lisa put her hand over his as he switched gear. Her man, her love.

* * *

Missy waited to see what would happen about the promotion. She guessed that Edward was sounding her out for the deputy headship. She knew she had it all; she was mixed-race, gay, female, clever, and young. God, if she only had a disability she’d be running the world! Missy was all for positive discrimination. Diversity was one of her things. She loved playing that game with all her white friends: ‘How many black friends do you have?’ That usually shut them up.

Missy’s mother was Liverpool–African. Her father was white, and from a working-class Catholic family. He was a boxer, and the gentlest man she had ever met. Her mother had died of cancer when she was thirteen, so it was always just Missy and her dad, Tony. Tony’s father was a racist, so they had very little to do with his extended family. Her father was insistent that she should be proud of her roots and in touch with her African heritage. He took her to the Maritime Museum at the Albert Dock, where she read about the eighteenth-century slave trade that had made her city rich on the blood and tears of African slaves. Tarleton Street, Tony explained, was named after one of the richest slave merchants. They owned plantations in the West Indies. They got rich on sugar and slaves.

Her father told her the story of the Zong massacre, where healthy slaves, including women and children, were thrown overboard, for an insurance claim, when the ship ran out of water. He told her about Lord Mansfield and Wilberforce, and Thomas Clarkson, the man who wrote the first history of the slave trade. Tony had inspired in Missy a love of history, but she had read religion and ethics at university. Tony was so proud of Missy. Time and time again, he told her to live her own life, get a boyfriend, and a flat, but she would never leave her dad. She hadn’t told him, either, that she was attracted to women. That could wait.

To begin with, Missy had quite liked the new head. He was a great appointment and he was really turning the place around. He set a very good example, but she didn’t like it when Lisa became his girlfriend. It was a bit of a scandal when the news broke that they were an item, and that he was leaving Moira. It was the talk of the staffroom. No one thought it would last. They were so unsuited, so different. She felt he was letting the side down, again. Though she had to admit, that working-class Lisa wasn’t quite such a sell-out as posh, blonde Moira. No matter, he would come to his senses once the sex wore off. He was too ambitious to be stuck with someone as gobby as Lisa.

Missy was annoyed when Lisa started getting into feminism. Far too close for comfort for Missy. Lisa was writing some tripe about fashion and feminism. Disguising her frivolity and shallow nature and obsession with clothes and lingerie by transforming it into something political. Well, she, Missy Robinson, wasn’t having any of it. She despised clothes and fashion. Gay men designing expensive clothes for stick-thin women starving themselves to death. She was waiting for Lisa to bring up the subject in the staffroom, so she could confront her. But she would do it cleverly: attack her with words, with considered argument. Missy did not buy into third-wave feminism.

She had been secretly flattered by the head’s attention. Promotion would be a great opportunity. She was glad that she had mentioned her interest in the Union. He was impressed by that, she could tell. He was right-on, Edward. She had a feeling that he wanted to get rid of Chuck. The power had gone to his head, and he was becoming insufferable. Since Edward had married Lisa and they had had the baby and moved to the country, the Head had become rather less visible around the school. Chuck, picking up the slack, was strutting around and giving orders as if he were the top man. When Edward was around, everyone mocked Chuck for running around him like a bitch on heat. Chuck was all right with Missy, but he kept his distance, too. He knew a rival when he saw one.

But then the weeks passed and no word was forthcoming. Edward was avoiding her, and then an announcement was made that Chuck would be carrying on as sole deputy head for another year. Bastard. Leading her on like that and then discarding her like orange peel. I bet that Lisa had something to do with it. She’d always been so thick with Chuck. She needed male adoration, that one. Well, you just wait. I’ll have my day with you. You’ll make a slip and I’ll be there to see it. To bear witness.

CHAPTER 7

The Fashion Mistress

They were both prone to itchy feet. Edward – as she always called him, though to the other staff he was Ed – began to worry that he had gone to the ends of the earth, fallen off the radar. His applications for deputy head positions at some of the great public schools went nowhere.

‘If it gets past ten years, I’m stuck,’ he said. ‘I’ve achieved everything I can here. From the brink of Special Measures to Outstanding, and North-West Region School of the Year. But once the turnaround is complete, it’s boring – and still bloody hard work. And you need a change as well. If I got a good position in the private sector, we’d have a house, and I’d have a bigger salary, and you wouldn’t have to teach any more. That’s what you keep saying you want. You could get on and finish that second book. You’ve been stuck on it for years.’

He saw no alternative but to look further down the public school pecking order. A respectable but dull, middle-ranking ‘minor public school’. He could make an impact there. Move them into the big league. Improve the Oxbridge acceptance rate while also starting a programme of scholarships for deprived inner-city kids. That would hit all the buttons.

Blagsford came up, and he walked it. His unusual background – street cred combined with Oxford – would give the school edge over all its rivals. The chairman of governors rubbed his hands with glee at the thought of Edward Chamberlain’s first appearance at the Headmasters’ Conference. But Lisa wasn’t at all sure she wanted to move away from her big family. Nan was such a great babysitter, and Emma loved her cousins. Edward always had an answer.

‘Come on, in your heart you’ve made the move already. You hardly see them now we’re out in Cheshire. When did your mum last babysit for us?’

‘And what about work? It really kept me sane, going back part-time once we knew Emma was OK. I was going to start again now that George is a bit older.’ This wasn’t true, but she had a point to make.

Edward was exasperated. Lisa was always changing her mind about whether or not she wanted to carry on teaching. ‘You won’t have to work – Blagsford are offering a big salary and a free house.’

‘Great, so we’ll be homeless when you get bored and leave.’

‘We’ll sort something out on that front – a holiday home by the sea, maybe, or a London flat.’

Lisa liked the sound of a London flat.

Then Edward played his trump card.

‘Look, you don’t really want to go back to teaching.’

This was the truth. She’d crack open the champagne if she knew for sure that she’d never have to spend another hour in a classroom in her entire life. She knew what Edward was going to say next. They always read each other’s minds.

‘All you want is a little bit of money that you can say is your own. That you’ve earned, and that you can spend on whatever you want. Which is mainly designer dresses. And shoes. And make-up. And more shoes.’

Lisa laughed. He was so right. That was why there had been no regrets when she left her brief starter marriage. Pete had been a control freak. He had insisted that she close down her bank account and get her teacher’s salary paid into their joint account. The account in her married name. She should always use her married name, he insisted. The only compromise he allowed, and even that had been a battle, was that she could be Miss Blaize at St Joseph’s.

Then, one afternoon towards the end of the summer holidays, when she was bored at home because Pete was out playing cricket all day, as he did every Saturday, she took a DVD case off the bookshelf. Out fell a folded bank statement. She glanced at it and saw that it came from an unfamiliar bank. So Pete had kept his own personal account, despite making her giving up hers. She looked down the row of figures. Every month, there was a payment for a few hundred pounds, marked ‘Dividend’. It took a while for her to work it out. But there could be no question. He had some sort of family trust fund that he’d never told her about. The sums weren’t huge, but that wasn’t the point. It was the principle. She took the statement and found her own hiding place for it.

She said nothing to Pete that night, though she did refuse to make love to him – on the grounds that he had come in late from drinking with his cricketing mates. The folded statement was her get-out-of-jail-free card.

Edward knew all this. They had talked over the circumstances of their respective divorces a thousand times. When they married, he insisted that she should keep her own name and her own bank account, and that he had no interest in how she spent her teacher’s salary and any other earnings. ‘You won’t find me snooping around your private account for Ladies’ Nice Things,’ he assured her.

‘Listen, though,’ he now said, ‘you’ve got your magazine column, and that could be the beginning of a career as a proper freelance fashion writer. One thing leads to another. That’s what I’ve found with my articles about education policy. Soon you’ll be getting all sorts of commissions – but that’ll only happen if you’re near enough to London to go to parties and openings, and to start meeting the editors. It’s such a trek from Cheshire. Blagsford has a really fast link to Marylebone on the Chiltern Line. Most reliable network in the country.’ With all his London meetings, Edward had become a bit of a railway timetable nerd.

This was the clincher. Lisa had always rather regretted how she had scuttled home after her MA and fallen into teaching textiles. She should have gone back to London and tried to make it in the fashion world. She had hoped that publication of Lipstick and Lies would lead to other opportunities, but it hadn’t happened, mainly because she was stuck in Liverpool. Now she’d just had her first real break.

A friend from her Manchester Art School days had become features editor at City & County, an upmarket monthly glossy magazine. She’d asked Lisa to start writing a regular column answering readers’ requests for fashion tips, with a spin that offered nuggets of information from fashion history. It was a neat idea, and Lisa’s first couple of columns – for which they’d made up the readers’ questions – had gone down well. Edward was right – working out of Blagsford would give her many more opportunities to go to London and build on this success.

* * *

Jane (by EMAIL) to The Fashion Mistress: I am getting married this summer in a marquee in the country. I have my wedding dress, but am struggling to find something for a breakfast party we are hosting the following day. I want a more relaxed look that’s still a bit bridal, which I can wear again. I am 25, 5’ 6’’ and a size 12. I have good arms. My budget is £350.

A touch of lace will help to carry through a romantic wedding theme into the day after. As it’s a summer wedding, you can pep things up with a pop of colour. Mango has a lace, sleeveless dress in acid yellow, or for something slightly more ‘fash’ and floaty, you could go for a two-piece silver set from Hobbs. Tuck the cute cami into the culottes’ grosgrain waistband, and keep heels fuss-free – or wear with white brogues.

What kind of lace? Duchess point (Point Duchesse) is the term for a Belgian lace that does not have a réseau. It was named after the Duchess of Brabant, Marie-Henriette of Austria, who was a supporter of lace production. It is made entirely on the pillow, with a pattern where the leaves and flowers naturally join, so there is rarely a bar thrown across to connect them. As there is no réseau, the designs are more continuous. It’s that elegance which makes it my favourite lace.

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