‘Thanks, Maggie,’ he said. As he spoke, he looked directly into her eyes. For a moment, Maggie thought she saw something there that she had never seen before, but then it was gone. She must have been mistaken.
Later, after the guests had all gone, declaring the party a success as they went, and Maggie was finishing off the tidying up, she tried to recapture his expression in her mind, but it eluded her. She wasn’t really sure that it had been there in the first place.
Tiger never appeared.
29
THE TWENTY-TENS
2013
Hope took a deep breath and pushed open the classroom door. It was a good ten years since she had last set foot in an educational establishment, but it still had that same smell – hot bodies, stale food and bleach. Did all places of learning smell like that, she wondered? She imagined that they must do. This wasn’t her old school, but if she closed her eyes then it might have been.
There was a low-level hum of chatter in the room, again, just as she remembered there being at school. Lots of people not concentrating on the job in hand. That had been her, back in the day – sitting as far from the teacher as she could get away with and firing spitballs of paper across heads with her ruler.
Still, that was another time, a different Hope.
The desks were arranged in pairs, each facing the whiteboard at the front. That was a blessing, at least. She hated it when the room was arranged into a horseshoe so that the discussions were forced to be more participatory. She had no wish to get to know anything at all about her fellow students, to discuss topics with them or hear their views. The only important person in this room would be the tutor, although there was no sign of him as yet. She hoped he wasn’t going to be one of those scatty types who was too easily led off topic and filled the allotted time with anecdotes that were of little interest to anyone else. Teachers like that were a dream when she’d been at school, but she wasn’t a child any more. She was here to learn.
The room was almost full, and Hope cursed silently to herself. She had intended to be here first so that she could get her pick of the places, but the phone had rung just as she was leaving: an international call that she needed to take to make sure that the rest of the day continued to run smoothly in her absence. By the time she had sorted the problem, she was twenty minutes behind where she had wanted to be. There were still a few spare places scattered about, though, and she spotted, with relief, a double desk in the back row. She made for that one, keeping her head dipped and her cap pulled down low, and laid claim to it.
She sat on one of the chairs and put her bag on the other one. There were plenty of other free places. No one would come and sit next to her if it looked like she was saving the seat for someone else. She might even be the last to arrive. She took her pencil case and new notebook out of her Mulberry briefcase, a gift from a shoot in London a few years ago but still pristine, and placed them neatly in front of her. She was ready.
Moments later the door opened, and a boy came in and headed straight for the desk at the front. He wasn’t really a boy, Hope knew, but he could barely be out of university. She batted down a mild pang of irritation. She was here to learn, so she expected the tutor to be at least older than her own twenty-eight years, and preferably in the balding and middle-aged camp so she could be sure that they knew more about their subject than she did. The tutor took a slim-looking laptop out of his messenger bag and opened it up on the desk in front of him. Hope’s paper and pen felt instantaneously outmoded. It hadn’t occurred to her to bring her own laptop, but she would next time. She took a sly glance at her fellow students but some of them didn’t even appear to have paper and pen.
A few moments passed as the tutor – Carl Watts, according to the course details in the Further Education Prospectus that had landed on her doormat the previous month – hooked his laptop up to the system and opened up PowerPoint and then, when he was sure that all was ready, clicked on to the first slide and cleared his throat. The murmuring diminished.
‘Good evening, everybody,’ he began. ‘My name is Carl Watts, and I will be your tutor on this course, which I’ve snappily titled “Building your Business from Scratch One Step at a Time”。’
He looked about the room proudly, as if he really believed that this was a snappy title, and Hope’s heart sank a little. If the tutor turned out to be an idiot, then she might have to have a rethink. She hoped this was his stab at a little ironic humour, although she feared that he really was as pleased with himself as he looked.