Free Wrote For Luck by D.J. Taylor Page B

prove. Doubtless there were people somewhere who thought a West Midlands accent demonstrated authenticity, roots, a vindicated purpose. Well they were wrong.
    The house, whose silence he had looked forward to, was full of small, unsettling intrusions. In the kitchen he found his wife’s cousin Finula and her fast friend Cecily – quartered on the premises this past week – having one of their terrible conversations. He was used to his wife’s cousin Finula and even, up to a point, to her friend Cecily – engrossed, amnesiac creatures in their late fifties – but dealing with them required tact. ‘Mead is a very excellent drink,’ he heard his wife’s cousin Finula saying. Rather than preposterously free associating, Cecily gave one of her trademarked laughs – a full-throated sea-lion’s bark that had once, in a country lane, caused serious disturbance to a flock of sheep. Head down over the stove as he made his coffee, he attended to the conversational ebb and flow, which resembled a series of inexpertly flung javelins each landing a field’s length from its intended target.
    Once Finula had engaged him in a literary conversation. Did he think
Atonement
was a nice book? It depended on what you meant by a nice book, he shot slyly back. After all, hadn’t George Orwell once said, apropos of Dali, that great art could still want burning by the public hangman? But you could not have this kind of conversation with Finula. Just as he had novocabulary with which to discuss her profession, which was some kind of local government work, so she had no vocabulary to discuss books. Remembering this he deduced that in some way Finula and the new headmaster were confederate: each lacked the ability to discriminate.
    Beyond the window the Norfolk fields descended into autumnal twilight. His wife came smiling into the room, and Finula and Cecily ceased to exist. ‘The Mannerings want to extend their garage,’ she said – the Mannerings lived at the bottom of the garden – ‘and put up a conservatory. Do we mind?’
    ‘Of course we mind,’ he said. The new headmaster; Cecily and Finula; the Mannerings. They were all the same, he thought, agents of the
ubermensch
, wreckers and despoilers.
    Obscurely, after months of one-man guerrilla warfare, he found he had an ally. Most of the school staff were young, keen and sporty. Mr Deloitte, the art master, was old, cynical and treated the badminton set to an occasional negligent supervision. ‘You’ll get nowhere with the new man,’ he explained. ‘He’s one of the change for change’s sake brigade. There’ll be girls in here in a couple of years, I daresay. The boarding house is beyond saving. But you can have a lot of fun bamboozling him. They never understand irony, of course. And whatever you do, don’t refuse that offer of staff rep. on the governing body.’
    ‘They won’t want me,’ Crowther said, thinking of the letter that had lain on his desk since the end of last term.
    ‘They’ve no choice, have they?’ Deloitte said. ‘Senior man, aren’t you? Do you know, the wretched character’ – he meant the new headmaster – ‘actually gave some parent my homenumber. Had some fishwife ring me up to ask if Johnny would pass his GSCE.’
     
    Slowly, sedately, without noticeable excitement, the autumn passed. A cement mixer and tessellations of scaffolding appeared in the Mannerings’ garden. Finula and Cecily departed for Chichester. Several books, a ceramics kit and three copies of
Readers’ Digest
followed them in a brown paper parcel. Still the letter from the governing body lay on his desk. Details of an early retirement package of quite startling munificence were posted on the common room notice board. All these things seemed to him to be connected: they demanded a decision from him that he did not want to make. Finally there came a day when he sat once again in the headmaster’s study in the defective arm-chair.
    Outside the rain lashed the Cathedral