Free Maxwell’s House by M. J. Trow Page B

Hits.
    ‘So what was it all about, then?’ he asked.
    ‘Jenny wasn’t the confiding sort,’ Janet said. ‘She had that rather enigmatic smile, didn’t she? A sort of Leighford Giaconda. God knows what sort of turmoil went on behind that placid smile.’
    ‘But you had an inkling?’
    Janet propped one leg up on Maxwell’s foot-rung, balancing that by resting her towelled head on her elbow. ‘Yes. Yes, I did. I don’t suppose an old chauvinist like you believes in intuition, do you?’
    ‘Is the Pope multi-lingual?’ he asked her. This wasn’t Anthea Edwards. He knew she wouldn’t say yes.
    ‘Three days, your writ says,’ she murmured.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Three days’ absence, then we have to send out a note to parents asking why their darlings have been away.’
    ‘Diamond’s writ,’ Maxwell told her, ‘not mine.’
    ‘Well, anyway. It didn’t come to that because I saw Mrs on the Wednesday night.’
    ‘Mrs Hyde?’
    ‘Yes. You know I run an evening class at the Tech?’
    Maxwell didn’t. There was a lot, he was beginning to realize, he didn’t know.
    ‘Just basic sculpture.’ She offered him a cigarette. ‘Oh, you don’t, do you? Always surprises me, that. You may look dissolute …’
    ‘Thanks!’ He punched her gently in the shoulder.
    ‘Oh, Max,’ she laughed. ‘You’re a grand old man; you know you are. No, I think it’s sexual.’
    ‘What? Me not smoking?’
    ‘No, the people at the pottery class. They like the feel of wet clay oozing through their fingers …’ Her voice died away. For all Janet Foster was the one who’d introduced life drawing classes for the A level course, she had a rudimentary prudery somewhere.
    ‘That’s why Mrs Hyde joined the class?’ Maxwell asked.
    ‘It’s possible.’ Janet, while still defending her viewpoint, had retreated a few miles. ‘She’s a very attractive woman. More so than Jenny, wouldn’t you say?’
    Maxwell could barely remember the woman. He’d met her perhaps three times in his life, always across a cramped table during the melee of parents’ evenings. Both the Hydes had radiated arrogance. Jennifer, it seemed, had decided against Oxbridge. Snobbery wasn’t her forte. Wait until you’re asked, Jennifer, Maxwell had thought. Not a single member of staff had mentioned the girl to Maxwell as somebody with a fighting chance at either of the country’s oldest universities. The spires would not dream in the Hyde household. Perhaps sensing this, Jenny herself had turned them down, denying the world of academe the keen thrust of her biological mind. What a waste to natural science. And what a waste of Geoffrey Smith’s time, too, when, in accordance with Mr and Mrs Hyde’s wishes, he’d given up his own time to polish her English in readiness for the entrance exam. Even had her round to his house from time to time. As for snobbery not being her forte, that had a ring of truth. At Leighford, she was Jenny, ordinary, popular, gregarious. At home she was Jennifer, blue-stocking extraordinary. It was not the first time that Maxwell noted two utterly different kids – one at school, the other at home. Literally, in this instance, Jekyll and Hyde.
    ‘Anyway,’ Janet was cradling her cocoa in both hands. ‘Marianne – that’s Mrs Hyde to you – came up to me afterwards. She made small-talk for a while, then asked me if I’d noticed anything … odd … about Jenny.’
    ‘Odd?’
    ‘Yes. Apparently, just recently, two days or so before this, she’d become quiet, moody.’
    ‘Had you noticed that?’
    ‘No, I can’t say that I had. Course, it’s difficult when you don’t actually teach them. And you can’t count the tutorial period.’
    That blissless state when every tutor at Leighford High spent fifty minutes a week in the company of twenty-five strangers, attempting to discuss the Great Issues of Life. No, Maxwell agreed, nodding; you can’t count the tutorial period.
    ‘It all came out in the wash that Jenny had