Mrs Marchmount nearly falls off a chair.

18/06/2008 by April First.

As I entered the office this morning I looked at Janice, and within seconds Havoc-Blythe popped his head round the door in that annoying way he has.  None of us had to say a word, but our thoughts were all of a kind: “What next?”

What next was the head arriving (two days running was unprecedented we all agreed), coming into the office and saying, bold as the brass door knocker on the front of the caretakers house would be if it were not tarnished, that he felt I had suffered particularly from the last few days events and perhaps I would accept “this” as a token of his understanding.  

From behind his back, like a rather poor magician who knows he has run out of tricks but can’t get off stage, he produced a bunch of sad looking flowers which had clearly come from the garage on Dunk Street.   I looked at them in what was (so Janice and HB told me later) a combination of horror, disgust, amazement and bemusement.  

Seeing as I was not going to take them and rush off to find a vase (a vase in our school office?) Mr Berlusconi put the flowers reverently on my desk and shuffled out.  

I am not sure if he heard the muffled laughter as he meandered to the deputy head’s room, and we certainly did try to keep our subsequent screams down to below 120 decibels, but it was hard.   We were still having fits when Mrs Marchmount came in, and demanded an explanation for the unruly behaviour which was so unbecoming in a professional office.   Janice told her the fully story at the end of which it was all Mrs Marchmount could do to hold on to her chair and thus avoid ending up in a heap on the floor.   I begin to see her in a new light.

Next in was the Bursar, but we told him it was Mrs Marchmount’s birthday and we had just sung her the traditional song.

Twenty minutes later we all watched the head sneak out through the side door and light up a cigarette in his car.   “I didn’t know he smoked,” said Mrs Marchmount.  “He doesn’t,” said Janice.

At the end of the day the flowers were still sitting on my desk wrapped in cellophane.  It seemed a shame to spoil their resting place so we decided to leave them there.

I may have done some work today, but I don’t recall any.

Havoc-Blythe called me at home and suggested that “us three Musketeers” as he now dubbed himself, Janice and I, should meet up for another pow-wow on the “Berlusconi affair”.  I said that I liked to keep my home life and work life separate.  He said that in a period of intrigue such as this, that was hardly possible, but I told him I would try.    There was a pause in the conversation and I was sure I could hear Janice’s voice in the background.   Immediately after putting the phone down I called Janice, but she wasn’t in.

Watched a DVD of Inspector Morse for the rest of the evening.

Posted in News | Print | No Comments »