She knows that I have seen a thing or two in my time, although not quite how much I have seen, and certainly not how much I have done. But although I have done what most people would call some bad things, I have to say that I have very little time for petty self-interested power games, especially because in my line of work that kind of thing could cost people their lives.
Then one day she came with the story of the Ransom's Head Hunt, and the Bursar gallivanting off to Zurich. She didn't believe me when I told her that there was a coup d'etat in the offing. "Oh no, she said, "the school is going international, it's great! At last some fresh vision and fresh blood coming into the place!" I just tightened the screws on my tapestry frame and tried very hard not to look sardonic and derisory to her, which I know I sometimes can.
When she was little I had to hide so many of my feelings from her to protect her. One day, she would have been about twelve, we were sitting in the park, talking about one of her teachers, when I made some quick dismissive remark to show her how I summed him up. A look came over her face then as she looked up into my eyes, and I realized that the distance I had put between us to protect her was the very thing that was hurting her. She didn't feel protected at all: she felt excluded and put down. Her confidence in herself has always been a stunted thing and I have to look at her now every day and know that it is my work.
I explained my reasoning to her. "In the first place," I told her over a particularly well brewed pot of Orange Pekoe, "if Armstrong-Cripps is getting up off his gin sodden backside to do some work, you can be sure he is doing it for himself, not for Ransom's."
At Our Lady of Ransom's, the term 'head hunting' was bursting with a pregnancy of meaning that had already resulted in several miscarriages. Times were changing, and Ransom's was having to change with them. The school had recently been inspected, once as a school and then again separately for the boarding facilities and pastoral care. The added stress of the run up to these had led to an epidemic of resignations by disgruntled, burnt out staff. By any standards the Senior Management Team were starting to look a little careless with their human resources. There were even rumours of financial irregularities concerning Ransom's plc, the private limited company which had been set up to bring in revenue for Ransom's during the lets in the summer holidays. Funds left over in House budgets at the end of the school year would disappear by September and were rumoured to be subsidizing senior management holidays. The Head, Barbara Styles, was looking white. Pauline Jenkins, the Deputy, had her mouth set permanently at twenty past eight.
The Board of Governors' newly formed Forward Planning Steering Committee spent a weekend in intensive seclusion at The Royal Lancings Hotel, known affectionately to locals as the Skewers' Arms, and emerged triumphant with what they regarded as an inspired action plan. Ransom's was to reinvent itself as Ransom International College, with the International Baccalaureate to be offered parallel to the English National Curriculum. The magic phrase, "management restructuring", was heard at Ransom's for the first, but certainly not the last time. Not only were the goal posts being moved: there was evidently to be a whole new game. The Head turned a paler shade of white. The Deputy's twenty past eight mouth was now set at twenty five past seven.
Pensively the following Monday morning, the Bursar took one of his emergency bottles of Plymouth Gin out of the bottom drawer of his desk, leaving a bottle of duty free Tangerey untouched. He gazed up into the cobwebs in the top right hand corner of his office as he poured himself the second glass of the morning.
"With a little judicious networking and some oiling of the wheels," he thought to himself, "we might just turn this to our advantage."
This was his chance. He had devised his strategy. Sensing that Barbara Styles had only a tenuous hold on the headship, he now saw his best chance for edging her out and taking her place: he would pose as her stalwart henchman while quietly sawing away at the rather thin branch on which she sat.
Only that morning over his breakfast of bacon and volcanic coffee from, appropriately enough, the Great Rift Valley, Mrs. Armstrong-Cripps had been instructed which shirts, trousers and blazers to pack for his weekend trip to Zurich, on the Friday evening flight which he had in fact already booked but which he was miraculously about to find a rare last seat on after the coming proceedings of the day. Mrs. Armstrong-Cripps knew better than to ask why he was going to Zurich. The usual reply on such occasions was "Don't you remember anything I tell you?", when in fact he had never told her in the first place.
Beth Armstrong-Cripps was widely assumed to be irretrievably nice, a euphemism for stupid. She kept her unconcerned, amenable smile fixed in its usual place on her pale face and dropped her eyes back to the latest issue of Private Eye, a tacit form of rebellion which was all the more useful because it suggested just the right note of arrested development from her student days. When instructed to pass him the jar of rough cut bitter orange marmalade she was able to oblige without even losing her place in the Classifieds.
As she later packed his hand baggage suitcase it came as no particular surprise to her to find a partly used packet of condoms in the elasticated side pocket. What had passed for an intimate life between them over the two decades of their marriage had fallen so far short of intimacy that it now lacked the energy to sustain even a pretence. She looked down at the condoms in her hands and turned them over. Putting them back in the elasticated side pocket of his case, she realized two things simultaneously. First, that she did not care who he had sex with and second, that whoever he she it or they were she was actually grateful to them for diverting his attention. This absence of jealousy, or indeed of any feeling at all apart from detached relief, came as a landmark in a featureless desert to her, perhaps even in its way a falling away of chains. She made herself another large cup of the volcanic coffee from the Great Rift Valley, poured in some cream, stirred in some brown sugar crystals and sat down at her computer.
"I was thinking of popping up to London today," she said in a flat voice to a form behind her back in the hall, as the Bursar put on his jacket. She thought she detected a grunt in distracted response before the door slammed shut behind him.
Striding purposefully into the meeting with the dreaded Steering Committee an hour later, he sat down with a smile on his lips that was the joint product of a couple of stiff gins and the thought of a rather jaunty strategy. Whereas the Head seemed to shrink in her chair as the meeting opened, Brigadier Armstrong-Cripps (Retired), Bursar of Ransom's took his opportunity to boom his congratulations on their decision to reinvent the school and its management structure, thereby skating deftly past the potential minefield relating to why he and the Head had been excluded from this decision making process in the first place. He added how "immensely relieved" he was at the Governors' "inspired and inspiring" vision for the future of Ransom's.
This unexpected effulgence from the Bursar invoked in Barbara Styles and her Deputy Pauline Jenkins much the same speechless incredulity as if Marie Antoinette had just offered her personal congratulations to the inventors of the guillotine. Until, that is, the Bursar quite unmistakably nodded the two of them a knowing, private wink. "May I suggest," he went on fulsomely, this time turning to face the full seated spread of the Committee and betting his entire hand on an appeal to their love of exclusivity, "that the appointment to the new position of Head of College would be best not left to chance applications resulting from public advertisements, but that the interests of Ransom's would be best served by employing the services of a professional head hunter, if you will pardon the pun?"
Encouraged by a stunned absence of objections on the part of the Steering Committee, the Major added in a low tone: "As you know, I do have some experience of the international sector from my previous appointment at Sondermatt International School in Switzerland. I feel sure that, given a little time, I could reactivate some old networks and come back to you with the name of a suitable person to do the head hunting."
The "suitable person", whom the Bursar had in fact, needless to say, had in mind all along, turned out to be none other than Carl Hersching, the Chicago born Head of Sondermatt International School near Zurich and an old friend of Armstrong-Cripps from his Gulf War days. Armstrong-Cripps knew perfectly well that no one in his right mind, Hersching included, was going to turn his nose up at a headhunting fee of hundreds of thousands in whatever currency it was offered. The trick with the holders of the Ransom purse strings was to make the obvious look arduous. No sacrifice was to be too great for Ransom's, and he had already booked himself on the weekend flight to Zurich in a personal effort to 'persuade' Hersching to accept an obscene amount of money that, in reality, wild horses could not have kept him from.
This superhuman feat of negotiating skill on the Bursar's part not only necessitated two further trips to Zurich, complete with, needless to say, accommodation in four star hotels, but also required Ransom's to live up to its name by putting up the equivalent of a king's ransom in advance, so that Hersching would be able to launch his exclusive mission unimpeded. Not unreasonably, when putting the proposal to Hersching the Bursar placed a strong emphasis on Ransom's poverty as a church foundation, and during this delicate stage of the negotiations knocked about a third off the maximum fee which the Governors' had placed at his disposal. This shrewd move enabled a substantial percentage of the advance payment to find its way into a numbered Swiss bank account belonging, by lucky chance, to the Bursar himself, in gratitude, as it were, to himself on behalf of Ransom's for his outstanding services to the school in its hour of need.
On a hill with a stunning view overlooking a Swiss Alpine lake, Sondermatt International School was at formal lunch in the Great Hall of Sondermatt Chateau. Those students, that is, who had bothered to turn up that day, because there had been ructions with the Dining Hall Prefects who were entrusted with maintaining order and decorum at mealtimes. It appeared that they had been misusing their office to show favoritism to friends, who were not instructed to remove caps on entering the Hall, nor remonstrated with for using bread rolls as missiles, or for similar lapses of decorum. The Domestic Bursar who oversaw the Prefects had responded by disbanding them, and the majority of the students had responded by boycotting lunch. When, therefore, Carl Hersching stood up to formally introduce the Bursar of Ransom's to the student body of Sondermatt, the Brigadier was greeted with an unusually thin round of welcoming applause. Hersching then went on to outline his response to the catering unrest. Armstrong-Cripps listened in nonplussed silence as Hersching announced that those who had not been at lunch would now not be permitted to attend supper, while those fortunate few currently in the Great Hall for lunch could expect a glass of wine with their supper. Armstrong-Cripps's incredulity grew as they were on their way out of the Great Hall, when the Domestic Bursar went over to the Sondermatt wine cellar to procure six bottles of reject wine, when he overheard two members of house staff announcing that those students who were barred from supper that night would be allowed to go to the local bar for the evening.
"This is shaping up even better than I thought," mused Armstrong-Cripps to himself, as he helped himself copiously to the mini bar in his hotel room later that evening. The fine tuning of his five year plan for Ransom's was beginning to take shape nicely. The essence of the plan was to find the Mother of all College Heads, an absolute disaster of a leader that some highly reputable international school could not wait to get rid of, and would therefore recommend to the hilt, so that Armstrong-Cripps himself would never be suspected of deliberate sabotage. Indeed it would be part of this plan to play the devoted second in command. It was pure genius. What could possibly go wrong?
As the months came and went back at Ransom's, the Governors' Forward Planning Steering Committee waited, and waited, and waited. Hersching was reportedly in Canada, in Indonesia, in New Zealand. He certainly travelled more extensively than at any time before in his well travelled life, but it was not until a full seven months later that it occurred to Dame Alice Evans, Chair of the Governors and principal architect of the Ransom Reinvention, to ask whether Hersching was actually visiting any potential candidates for the Headship. Following a tentative written inquiry as to how the search was progressing, Hersching was discovered to be absent from Sondermatt on a prolonged, if rather impromptu, sabbatical leave, from which, alas, ill health prevented him from returning until many months later. So it came about that a premiere league school, which the Bursar had repeatedly insisted could not possibly afford a second washing machine for a boarding house inhabited by sixty girls, was inadvertently divested, in Phase One of the Bursar's plan, of close on three quarters of a million pounds sterling in pursuit of a phantom, and a headless one at that. The next letter sent out to Ransom parents announced a substantial rise in school fees for the following school year to cover "increased running costs", but principally of course to cover the running of Hersching by the Bugger Dear, as he was known to those below him in the Ransom pecking order.
In a tour de force of brinkmanship, the Bursar managed to retrieve, just in time, both Hersching and a decently short list of allegedly suitable candidates for the headship of the reinvented Ransom's. After all, the last thing he wanted to do was to create the impression of dozens of potential candidates all champing at the bit to try their hand at running Ransom's. It was vital that the process be both obscenely expensive and fraught with pitfalls. He and Hersching had scoured the globe for potential heads that other schools were desperate to get rid of. Gratifyingly on cue, the Board of Governors and the Parents' Association dissolved in an orgy of relief and gratitude to the very men who were in reality fleecing them for all they were worth, and who intended to go on doing so for some time. It was not to become clear until much later that this squandering of precious nonprofit school funds had been part of the Bursar's plan all along. He had even provided Hersching with a time frame for his globetrotting ventures.
What no one except the Bursar himself knew was that the real Headhunt was not to begin until after the appointment. The beauty of his plan was that it did not even much matter who was appointed, although the more money was spent on finding the hapless new incumbent, the more he himself would appear as the school's knight in shining armour when the appointment turned out to be a total failure, which he intended it would. He couldn't lose: if the new incumbent turned out to be incompetent and obtuse, all he had to do was sit back and wait for them to shoot themselves in the foot. If, on the other hand, he or she turned out to have talent and class, he knew that he could rely on the rest of the Senior Management Team to sabotage and undermine them for all they were worth. There are, after all, few people quite so vicious as mediocre abilities brought face to face with real class and talent. But whoever was going to profit from this game was going to need a strong stomach.
None of this impending debacle need ever have leaked out to the employees of Ransom's had the school not been quite so careless with its boarding staff and found it necessary to interview, among others, a Ms Kimberly Brockman, a young Canadian teacher who had spent the last two years working at Sondermatt. Arriving at the school at ten on a Tuesday morning, Ms Brockman, who gave the impression of being a very pleasant young woman in the throes of post-traumatic stress, was given a brief tour of Martyrs' Complex. She had applied for the Assistant Housemistress's position currently occupied by Carol Smith, who was already enthusiastically packing to leave, even though there were still several months to go to the end of the school year.
She smiled wanly as Carol directed her into the Sanatorium, which was part of Martyrs' Complex. Bridget Dawes, one of the two school nurses, was attending to Sophie Foulkes-Banfield, the ten year old daughter of the President of the Ffoulkes International Banking Corporation. She was a pupil at Young Ransom's, the junior part of the school. Mrs. Ffoulkes-Banfield had come to take her home, as Sophie was running a high fever. "I'll just give her a Paracetamol to keep her temperature down until you get her home," said Bridget kindly. "Here, take this bottle of mineral water too. You need to drink plenty of liquids!" She handed the flushed looking Sophie a plastic bottle. "After all," Bridget added conversationally, "we've got to get you fit for the Middle School!"
The voice of Mrs. Ffoulkes-Banfield exploded into the enclosed space of the Sanatorium surgery in that tone and volume that was unique to people of her station in life, a tone that expressed its obliviousness to any need for consideration for people who did not belong to that class. "OH!", she boomed, "we're not keeping Sophie HERE after junior school! She's going to Cheltenham Ladies College! RANSOM'S is for GROCERS' daughters!"
"I must remember to inform the Head of this flattering assessment!" mused Carol, rolling her eyes discreetly in Bridget's direction, while the latter did her best to conceal her smile behind a starched cuff. "Well I expect we can kiss our new applicant goodbye after that," thought Carol to herself. She cast a glance at Kimberly, whose expression, whatever she might have been thinking, was a wall of impenetrable discretion. Carol indicated to Kimberly that they might like to move on with their tour. "See you at lunch," said Carol to Bridget over her shoulder, and ushered Kimberly towards the staircase.
"Now, let me show you the girls' accommodation!" Bridget heard Carol's voice fading down the corridor and, having seen her social superiors out of the sanatorium and watched them drive off in their four wheel drive, popped another DVD in the player for the two girls being kept overnight in the San and settled back into a comfy chair to have five minutes with the Daily Mail crossword and a cup of coffee.
Thirty miles away, Beth Armstrong-Cripps was doing the same thing on the 10. 27 train up to London. Had the Brigadier known where she was going and what she was going to do there, it might have taken the smirk off his face. As a wise person once said: "If you're cocky, there's something you don't know."
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