The School of English

Copyright

This eBook single first published in Great Britain in 2015 by

Fourth Estate

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Copyright © Tertius Enterprises 2015

The right of Hilary Mantel to be identified as the author

of this work has been asseted by her in accordance

with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

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available from the British Library

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Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780008145552

Also available as part of a collection in PB ISBN: 9780007580996

and eBook ISBN: 9780008145552

Version: 2015-05-01

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The School of English

A Note on the Author

Read On

Also by Hilary Mantel

About the Publisher

The School of English

‘Lastly,’ Mr Maddox said, ‘and to conclude our tour, we come to a very special part of the house.’ He paused, to impress on her that she was going to have a treat. ‘Perhaps, Miss Marcella, it may be that in your last situation, the house did not have a panic room?’

Marcella put her hand to her mouth. ‘God help them. The family go in together, or one at a time?’

‘There is capacity for all the family,’ Mr Maddox said. ‘The need arising, which God forbid.’

‘Which God forbid,’ she repeated. The idea of group agitation … how, she wondered, does panic ignite and spread? Is it parents to children, children to parents? ‘Can the doctor do nothing for them?’ she asked. ‘There are pills to stop fear. Also they say, breathe into a paper bag. It does good in some way, I am not sure how.’

Mr Maddox – the butler – turned his eyes on her, and she knew she had made an error. Perhaps she had shown over-familiarity. Or perhaps she had mistaken his meaning; this seemed likely. ‘So it is not,’ she said tentatively, ‘a room you go in when you are frightened?’

‘It is not a mere room,’ Mr Maddox said, ‘but a facility. Follow and I will show you.’ But he turned back. ‘If you were making a joke, I heartily discourage you. I myself benefited from the care of English nursery teacher. I am joking like a native speaker. But in such exclusive postcodes as St John’s Wood, or in any leafy part of this great metropolis, it is easy to give offence.’ He patted the paunch beneath his T-shirt. (We are a modern, informal household, she had been told.) ‘Miss Marcella,’ he said, ‘come with me.’

She would never have guessed the door they passed through was a door at all. It seemed like mere wall. Once it was opened, the light came on by itself, and it showed a part of the house that was concealed except to those who were, like the butler, in the know: that was where he said he was.

‘Mr Maddox,’ she said, ‘I am to clean here?’

‘Weekly,’ he said. ‘Vacuum, air freshener, toilet clean. Even if never used.’

‘Which God forbid it should be,’ she said. She looked around her and began to understand the panic room. Mr Maddox showed her the big bottles of water and the cupboard with its supply of snack food. There was a sofa and two chairs, covered in a businesslike charcoal fabric; they looked hard and could have used some cushions. There was a lavatory with a cold block of soap, a supermarket soap inferior to that in the rest of the house. Why? she wondered. Why sink your standards of comfort? She saw how, from week to week, the green lavatory cleaner in the unflushed bowl would pool, a verdant lake deepening.

Against the far wall there was a single bed with a frame of tubular metal, made up with starched white sheets and a navy-blue blanket tucked in tight. ‘Only one to sleep?’ she asked.

‘Sleep is not envisaged,’ the butler said. ‘Within an hour, and please God within less, either the police or the security service will liberate. The bed is for a casualty.’

‘Sorry,’ Marcella said. ‘I don’t know this word.’

She had irritated Mr Maddox. ‘I thought you came here via The Lady. And good English guaranteed thereby.’

‘The Lady is not my employer,’ Marcella said. ‘It is only a means to an end.’ She stopped and wondered at the phrase: ‘a means to an end’. She said, ‘I am English-tested. In my bag here I have a certificate.’

‘I do not give a fig for your certificate,’ Mr Maddox snapped. ‘As for The Lady, I know it is not your employer. Do not trifle. I repeat: I believed that only a person of great excellence in the English language would peruse The Lady.’

‘No.’ Marcella began to feel tired. She thought she would like to stretch out on the panic room’s metal bed. She had seen worse beds, and some of them across the town, in Notting Hill. ‘The Lady is freely available to all seeking domestic work,’ she said. ‘It is only a magazine. It is not the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. It is not a manual of magic spells.’

‘Impertinence will not carry you far,’ the butler said. ‘Only by a short route to dismissal, and no employment tribunal for you, do not think it. Her Majesty’s Government in its wisdom is pleased to remove legal aid from you whingeing type of person. So once dismissed they stay dismissed. I am warning you.’

The floor of the panic room struck cold into Marcella’s feet. The salary promised was small, but she needed a roof over her head, and here was that roof: NW8, live-in, for flexible person must like dogs, with experience of specialist laundry and helpful attitude, non-smoker. At a good distance north of here, there was a room over a fried-chicken shop, where certain of her countrywomen gathered and passed The Lady hand to hand, as if they had never reached the age of the internet: they were not digital, they could not recharge, they were unable to keep a laptop in case it was filched from their very laps, or any portable device that simply added to what they had to carry; they feared street robbers. The Lady, therefore, scanned by so many eyes, became limp and grey; it became circled in red, crossed in green, starred in blue. In the room above the deep-fat fryers, a woman might conceal herself from officers, police or other types: hiding if she was wanted, hiding if she was unwanted – that is to say, dismissed. She might resort there for a night or more, if she had no alternative but the streets. Sometimes the women lay end to end, exhausted, rolled into sleeping bags or blankets, grey faces vacant in sleep; when they woke, they hardly knew their own names.

So it was with a look both humble and contrite that Marcella made her apology to Mr Maddox. ‘I only asked the meaning of a word. In future I shall buy a dictionary.’

‘Well, you are young,’ the butler conceded. ‘Perhaps you may yet learn. “Casualty” is an injured person. Gunshot wound for example.’

She could see such a person would need to lie down. ‘Who has shot them?’

‘Intruder. Kidnapper. Abductor. Robber. Outrager. Terrorist. Desperado.’

‘Peril on every side,’ Marcella murmured.

‘This is a very basic panic room,’ the butler explained. ‘A bullet will not pierce it, and the air, being filtered, is able to eliminate most chemicals and biologicals, but it is designed to accommodate only till the security men come at the touch of a button. I mean, the panic buttons,’ he instructed. ‘They are placed in all living areas.’

‘Are they red?’

‘Red? Why would they be?’

‘How shall I know them? If I do not spot them I might press them when I am dusting, at a time when there is no terrorist threat, and this can lead to The Boy Who Cried Wolf.’

The butler stared at her. As she suspected, though his English was more florid than hers, his range of allusion was less.

‘Of course they are not red,’ he said. ‘They are concealed so our employers can press them discreetly. They are in hidden places.’

‘But I must dust them,’ Marcella said, ‘hidden or not. I was recently in Notting Hill, where I was dismissed for failing to dust the chair legs.’

‘That cannot have been your only fault,’ Mr Maddox said. He spoke as if weighing the matter, and his tone was dubious. ‘In Kensington, certainly. In Holland Park, perhaps. In Notting Hill? I doubt it. You had better be open with me. What else did you do? Or should I say, what did you omit to do?’

‘I was not raped,’ Marcella said. ‘I consented.’

The circumstances were simple and they were these. The family – that is to say, her previous family, in Notting Hill – had left for ski break. The child Jonquil was taken out of school, but Joshua, who was fifteen years old, was left behind, either because he was not worthy of ski break, or because it was his exam year, Marcella has now forgotten; there was a row about it in the kitchen, during which Joshua dropped a glass jar of multigrain multiseed on the floor, and this she remembers because of the complaints made for days after, about gritty grains under bare soles. The upshot was that his mother said, we are going for ski break, Joshua, even if you throw the whole of Waitrose breakfast aisle on the floor. You do what you like, Marcella will clear it up. You may get your chance another year, may I remind you we are a hardworking family and we deserve it.

Later, as she was climbing to her room, she found Joshua sitting on the stairs and crying. He was a huge, thick-bodied boy, and it seemed he was using up all the air, his big face wet with tears, his breath heaving in and out. It was her personal stairs he was sitting on; no reason for him to be there; his room was below, second floor. ‘Don’t look at me,’ he said.

She understood he was ashamed of crying, such a large boy. But why did he come there, if not for her to look at him?

She said, ‘Do not snivel, Joshua.’ She meant it kindly, but she saw him stiffen. Perhaps the wrong word? ‘Sniffle, I mean,’ she said. ‘Do not do either. There will be other ski breaks.’

‘It’s not my fault my mother fucked off and left me with her,’ he said. Left me with a stepmother, he meant. ‘But it’s always me that has to be punished for it. Why’s that, then?’

He did not expect her to have an answer. And yet she did. She said gently, ‘When you are punished, Joshua, it is not always because you have been bad. Often it is because others have been bad.’

She waited. He was not intelligent. He did not understand her. ‘The sooner you know this, the better for you,’ she said. ‘It is not just, of course.’

‘Not just what?’ He was staring at her.

‘It is not …’ Irritation bubbled inside her, and swelled inside her mouth like a balloon. Always she tried to feel sorry for him. But perhaps if he did not take up so much room, and if he were more hygienic. ‘I mean to say, it is not fair. But it is the way things are. Now, hurry. Your father is waiting to take you back to school. Among your laughing comrades you will soon forget your miseries.’

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