An Earnest Performance

"That Monday one of my own girls was kind to me, and I stood there and searched her for the catch. I have never forgiven myself for how good I was at it."

Battery Point was still under when I pulled away from my mother's, and the dark did not properly let go until I was down on Sandy Bay Road with the river on my left gone the colour of a knife.

I drove the whole of it with the heater roaring and the radio off and my son not in the car.

My body would not learn it. Every few hundred metres my eyes went up to the mirror the way they had gone up to it on every school run for a year, looking for the back of a head in a booster seat, for the small socked foot that used to work its way loose and kick at the passenger seat in a rhythm that meant he was happy. There was nothing there but his koala, face down where he had dropped it getting out on Saturday, both its ears rubbed to the backing by three years of the same thumb.

I had not been able to make myself move it. So I drove past the yacht club and the rowing sheds with a one-eared koala riding in the back and a lump of Tasmanian granite rolling out from under the passenger seat every time I braked, and I could not have said which of the two of them I had brought for the company.

The St Michael's car park had begun to fill by the time I turned in. I put the Corolla down the far end, under the big oak that dropped acorns on every bonnet in reach and that the groundsman had been threatening for six years, and I turned the engine off and did not get out.

I sat in the ticking quiet with my hands in my lap and watched the school arrive.

They came the way they came every morning of the world. In twos and threes with their bags on one shoulder and their blazers hanging open against a rule nobody enforced before the bell, heads bent over a phone or thrown back and shrieking at a thing that had happened on the weekend and would be forgotten by Wednesday. Two of my Year Nines went past the bonnet with their heads together over one screen, walking into each other and not caring. A little one broke into a run for no reason except that she was eleven and it was cold and her body still did that when it was glad.

And not one of them looked at the woman in the blue car under the tree, because a teacher in a car park was furniture, and I had been furniture to eleven years of them, and it had never once cost me a thing — until that morning, when being furniture, being nobody, being a shape behind glass that no one would come and ask a gentle question of, was the only thing on earth I wanted, and I was not sure I still knew how to do it.

My hands would not warm. They had been cold since Saturday afternoon, cold in a way that had stopped being about the weather somewhere around the second night, and the heater had blown on them the whole way down the hill and got nowhere. I folded one right round the other in my lap, the way I had held so many cold shaking hands in the wings over the years, and they stayed cold.

Behind my eyes was the particular grinding ache of a woman who had not slept — not dozed, not once gone under — who had lain on her own sofa in her coat all night with a rock on the cushion beside her, listening to a house that locks did not work on, and had got up at half past four to unlock every door and then lock them all again for no reason she could afterwards give.

I put the mirror down and had a look at what I was going to be asking a room full of children to believe.

It was worse than I had let myself expect. My face had the grey I had watched come up under a hundred girls before a hundred opening nights, the grey of a night with none of the right kind of sleep in it, and my eyes had gone back into my head, and my mouth had set itself, while I was not watching it, into the flat hard line I had spent my whole adult life teaching frightened girls to take off their faces before they walked on.

I went at it properly, because there was no other way to go at it. Concealer first, worked in under each eye with the pad of my ring finger the way I had done it ten thousand times and taught it a hundred, and it lifted the worst of the grey and left the rest. Mascara, to open the eyes back up.

Then the lipstick, out of the door pocket where it lived — not the everyday one, the other one, the red that was too much for a Monday and that I kept for exactly the mornings I needed a room to look at my mouth and leave my eyes alone.

Nial had named it. Years back, a parent evening, the winter I was carrying Sammy — I had come out of our bedroom in it and the coat that still did up, and he had looked up from doing his tie in the hall mirror and said, well, there she is, war paint on, God help the fathers. He had been so pleased with himself. I had told him he was an idiot. The name went onto the lipstick and stayed there, the way the things that man said stayed, welded to the object — so that I had not been able to pick that gold tube out of the door pocket that morning without hearing him say it.

I put my war paint on in a school car park with my husband four days gone and his voice doing the caption, and my hand was not steady, and I did it anyway, slowly, and got the line clean.

I pressed my lips together. I sat back. I looked.

And there she was. Mrs Triffett, who ran the drama department, who was never rattled, who could get a shaking fifteen-year-old down off the ceiling four minutes before curtain and send her back out to do it again. Red mouth, straight back, everything where I had put it. She would hold. She had all her lines, and I had never once in eleven years had to think about them, and I was not going to start that morning.

The cold came off the mountain and in through the door the second I opened it, and I did the things my body knew — bag onto the shoulder, keys threaded through the fingers, chin up, walk — and went in at the Sandy Bay gate on the tide of them. I said good morning to the ones who got theirs in first, and I meant not one syllable of it, and every last one took it and walked on, because they were children, and because I had been saying good morning, all fine, for twenty years and had it down to a thing you could set a watch by.

The girls were never going to be the danger. That was the mistake I had made the whole way down the hill, bracing for the wrong thing — thirty of them to a room, and every one so completely taken up with herself, with her lines and her friendships and the boy from Hutchins and the mark that had come back wrong, that not one of them could have pictured a teacher having a life at all on the far side of the staff car park.

The danger was in the staffroom. The danger was Yvonne from Geography, who was kind, or Bill Hollis, who had buried his wife two winters back and had gone quiet and watchful about other people's trouble ever since — any grown adult who might put a hand on my sleeve by the urn and drop their voice and ask whether everything was all right at home.

Because I had no defence left against being believed. Marie Chalker had said oh, Jenny down a phone line at half past six that morning, in a voice with the whole bottom gone out of it, and it had very nearly put me on my own kitchen floor with the kettle still in my hand. I could stand in front of a person who thought I was overwrought — I had been doing it since Saturday, and could do it in my sleep. What I could not stand in front of was somebody who took one look at me and knew.

So I did not go to the staffroom. I signed nothing, made no tea, put my head into no pigeonhole. I went the long way instead, past the chapel and down by the music rooms where somebody was already in and running scales, the same four bars climbing and falling and climbing again through the wall, and I let myself into my own classroom before another soul was in it, and shut the door behind me, and stood a moment with my back against it in the dark.

The drama room had always been the one part of that school that was mine and not theirs. They had built it and timetabled it and put my name on the door, and over the years I had made it into a country.

The posters going up both walls were every show I had dragged out of these girls in that time — the Blood Brothers that had three mothers openly weeping in the second row, the Wild Duck not one parent had forgiven me for, the Guys and Dolls we did the year I was carrying Sammy, when I blocked the whole of the Havana scene sitting on a stool with my swollen feet up on another and a Year Eleven walking it through for me. The costume rack in the corner was jammed past closing, half of it run up by my own hand at the kitchen table with the television going and Nial asleep in the chair.

And the smell of the place — the greasepaint, the hot dust off the lamps, the mustiness that came up out of old velvet in the cold — had met me at that door every working morning for eleven years and told me, without fail, exactly who I was.

That morning it met me at the door and told me nothing at all.

I got the lamps on and the chairs down off the tables and my marking out of my bag, and squared the pile to the corner of the blotter — a pile I had not the slightest intention of touching — because my hands wanted a job and there was none I could give them that mattered.

Out in the corridor the first voices were coming. My seniors, first up on a Monday, the ones I had had since Year Nine and watched turn slowly into people. I straightened the pile one more time. Then I went and stood where I stood at the start of every lesson, in the light, at the front of my own room, and I put the face on the rest of the way, and I waited for them to come in.

They came in the way the Twelves always came in — as though they owned the place and had grown a little tired of owning it. Bags dropped where they stood, blazers off and slung over the backs of chairs, three separate conversations carried in from the corridor and going at full pelt before a single one of them had sat down.

I stood at the front and let it wash in.

I had long since stopped calling the roll off a list. I took my register by looking — one sweep of the room, the way I read a rehearsal: who was in, who was missing, who had been crying in the toilets before the bell and wanted leaving alone, who had come in light that morning and could be leaned on to carry the rest. Pip Bowden had her head down on the desk under one arm, which meant a late night and nothing worse. The Direen twins had come in still arguing and would be no use apart until they had finished it.

Serena was already up at the front, moving the chairs.

She always moved the chairs. I had never once asked her to. Some morning back in Year Ten she had decided that the ragged horseshoe I left them in was not good enough for the work we did in it, and she had started coming in early to set them properly, and she had done it for two years, and she was going to make somebody a terrifying stage manager one day.

"They're in your Bracknell shape," she said, not looking up. "We're doing the interview scene, aren't we."

"We are." I got my script off the desk. "And you're going to hate me, because you're reading Gwendolen and stage-managing at the same time, and I want the chairs struck the second Jack sits down."

"That's not fair on Gwendolen."

"Nothing is fair on Gwendolen. That's rather the point of her."

She almost smiled at that, and went back to the chairs, and I turned to the room and clapped my hands twice, and thirty girls came down off the ceiling and into their seats, more or less, and the one hour of the day that I actually knew how to do began.

And for a while it was real. There was so little of that fortnight that was not a performance of one kind or another — and this was. For forty minutes, it was real.

Because the work had edges. It asked me for things I could give without reaching down into the part of me that had spent the weekend holding a locked house together. It asked me to hear whether a line had landed, and I could hear that in my sleep. It asked me to see whether a girl was hiding at the back of her own body, and I had been seeing that for twenty years.

Nobody in that room needed me to know where my husband was. They needed me to know why the joke was not working — and I knew exactly why the joke was not working, and just then it was the only question in the world that had an answer.

We put the Bracknell interview on its feet. Harriet Clennett read Lady Bracknell with a notebook held out in front of her like a subpoena, which was wrong, and wonderful, and I let it run because the class needed to laugh before I took it apart.

Then I took it apart.

"Stop — stop there, and everyone watch this, because Harriet's about to teach you something without meaning to." Harriet froze, wary. "Say the list again. The eligible young men. But this time, don't perform how funny it is. She doesn't think she's funny. She thinks she's conducting a job interview for the position of her daughter's husband, and she is deadly serious — and that is why it's funny. Take all the jokes out and leave the seriousness in. Go."

She went again, flatter, graver, deadpan. The room got it — the whole room, I watched it go through them like a light coming on down a row of houses — and three of them laughed properly for the first time, because for the first time she had let them.

This was the thing I was for. Not the shows, not the parents crying in the second row. This: thirty girls in a cold room finding out together that the truth was funnier than the joke.

"Good. Good. Now hold that, and give me the handbag."

Harriet drew herself up, and paused — she had learned the pause; I had spent a week beating the pause into all of them — and delivered it. "A handbag?" Pitched down, appalled, magnificent. They roared, and she stood there lit up with it, seventeen years old and briefly certain she was going to be an actress, and I thought, don't, darling, it will break your heart — and I did not say it, because it was not the morning to be saying true things to children.

Then somebody further back, walking her own scene through under her breath, read Lady Bracknell's other line. The famous one. She read it low, to herself, not for the room.

"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness."

And it went into me sideways, under the ribs, before I could get a guard up.

Because I had lost one. On a Saturday morning, through a fogged shower screen, without knowing I was losing him. And two days of policemen and a sister-in-law behind a counter had spent every hour since teaching me what I now looked like from the outside — a woman who had lost her husband and could not say how — teaching me the word for it, which was not misfortune. The word they used, in the pause before they answered me, in the way they wrote things down, was the other one. Carelessness. As though I had set him down somewhere, like a glove.

I stood in the middle of my own classroom with my script open in my hand and lost the thread of my own lesson.

It cannot have been more than a breath. Nobody saw it — nobody but the one who saw everything, and I did not yet know she was watching. I got it back. I brought my eyes up off the middle distance and put them on Harriet and said some ordinary next thing about resetting for Gwendolen's entrance, and my voice came out level, because my voice always came out level; I had built it over twenty years so that it would come out level with the rest of me in pieces.

But my hands had gone cold again — the cold that had nothing to do with the room — and I put the script down on the desk so that no one would see them, and I called Serena up to read.

She left the chairs and came to the front, and she did Gwendolen.

And she was extraordinary. She had been extraordinary since she was fourteen, in the flat unbothered way of a child who had not yet found out it was supposed to be difficult. She did the whole passage about her ideal having always been to love someone of the name of Ernest, and she played it dead straight — no wink, no send-up, a girl entirely and ridiculously in earnest about the syllables of a name.

When she reached the spade — I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade; it is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different — she let just the thinnest wintry drop of contempt into it, the exact drop I had spent a week trying to get out of her and into the line, and the class fell apart.

And I laughed.

Not the class's laugh. My own. It came up out of me before I had cleared it, the first thing in three days to get past the guard without my permission, and it startled me so badly that I put my hand up over my mouth — to stop it, or to hide it, or to hold it in, I could not have said which.

Wilde had built an entire play out of people holding a face on over the top of the truth, out of the frantic maintenance of a surface — and there I stood teaching it to thirty girls with my own surface on and my own truth four days gone up a mountain. I let the joke of that land on me, once, all the way, privately. Then I let it go, because the bell was a few minutes off and there was a scene to reset and a girl waiting to be told she had been brilliant.

"That," I said, "was the best it has been. Do you know what you did differently?"

Serena thought about it honestly, the way she thought about everything. "I stopped trying to make it funny."

"You stopped trying to make it funny." I let the room hear it. "Write that on your hand. All of you."

The bell went over the top of the last word, and the room came apart the way it always came apart at the first note of it — thirty chairs going back at once, bags swept up, scripts abandoned face-down on the desks, the whole ensemble dissolving into thirty separate lunchtimes and out through the door in under two minutes flat.

I called the usual things after them — folios Thursday, learn the muffins scene, Pip, drink some water — and not a soul heard me, and it did not matter, because that was the shape of the end of every lesson and I could have done it asleep.

Then the room was quiet, and it was only me and the lamps and the posters and the smell of the place that had stopped telling me who I was.

Except that it was not quite empty. Serena had not gone with the others. She was over by the front desk, taking her time putting her script into her bag, in no hurry at all — and I knew, the way I knew a held beat from a lost one, that she had stayed behind on purpose, and that she was working up to something, and that it was going to be about me.

I could have headed her off. I had turned that manoeuvre a thousand times — the bright, busy sorry-darling-I'm-late-for-a-meeting that had got a hundred children out of a doorway without one of them ever feeling the door shut. I had it loaded and ready.

I did not use it. I have never been able to say why, except that I was tired in a way I had not been tired before, and some part of me I did not care to look at wanted to see what the girl would do.

So I let her take her time, and I busied myself with nothing at my own desk, and I waited for her to find her way to it.

"Mrs Triffett." She had stopped with her bag half done up. "Can I say something? And you can tell me to mind my own business."

"You can always say something, Serena."

She came a little closer — not all the way; she left the front row of chairs between us, which was its own kind of manners — and she chose her words the way she chose them on a stage, laying each one down and having a look at it before she reached for the next.

"You're not okay. And I know it isn't folios." She held my eye while she said it, which the others could not have done. "My mum went through something last year, and she did the exact face you did this morning when I asked her. The one that says everything's fine so that you'll stop looking." She stopped. "I'm really good at listening. Everyone says it like it's a bad thing. But I am."

And there it was — the kindness, coming at me from the one direction I had not thought to guard. I had spent the whole drive down bracing against the staffroom, and it had not once occurred to me that it would come from a seventeen-year-old with her bag half done up.

For one second — less — I wanted to tell her. Not because she could do anything; she was a child, and it was not hers to carry. I wanted to tell her because she had asked me plainly, with no form to fill in behind it, and I had not had a plain question from anybody since Saturday that did not have a file underneath it.

I looked at her standing there behind the row of chairs, being braver than the grown adults down the hall, and my throat went, and the whole true thing came up as far as the backs of my teeth. Nial. The office. The list. The shape going through my kitchen in the dark.

I did not say any of it. I put it back down where it lived, and I gave her the other thing, warmly, the way I gave everybody the other thing.

"That's a very kind thing to offer, and I mean it." I came round and started gathering the loose scripts off the front desk, to give my hands a job and my face somewhere to be. "And when I need an ear, I'll know exactly whose door to knock on. But I'm only tired, love. Go and have your lunch while there's still a table."

She looked at me a moment longer. Then she nodded, and something crossed her face and was gone — disappointment, I thought, the ordinary disappointment of someone who had put out a hand and had it not quite taken — and she shouldered her bag and said, "Okay. See you tomorrow, Mrs Triffett," and she went.

The door swung to behind her. The scales had stopped in the music room. And I stood in my own classroom with an armful of scripts and let the breath I had been holding go out of me.

And then I saw the script.

Hers. Green cover, her name down the spine in silver pen, on the front desk exactly where she had been standing — the script she had carried up to the front, the script she had been putting into her bag a moment before. It was still there. She had walked out of the room without it.

And the thing sat up in me again.

She forgot it. A girl got talking and left her script behind, which had happened in that room on a hundred lunchtimes, with a hundred girls, and I had never once in eleven years so much as noticed. But I stood there on that Monday and looked at a forgotten script, and my mind went straight across the room to it and picked it up and turned it over, hunting the catch. She had it in her hand. She was putting it away. Why leave it — unless leaving it was the point. Unless it was a reason to come back. A way into the room again this afternoon, another go at me.

I crossed to it and picked it up, and I had it open and was fanning the pages under my thumb — looking for what, I did not know; some folded note, some mark, some proof of a thing I was inventing while I stood there — before I had made any decision to touch it at all.

Then I heard myself. I was standing over a child's copy of a Wilde play with my thumb going down the edge of the pages, and I heard exactly what I was doing.

I was building a case against a seventeen-year-old. Against a girl who had stood behind a row of chairs, more decent than the grown adults down the hall, and put out her hand to me — and I had taken that, the kindest and most ordinary thing in the whole grey morning, and run it through the same machine that had taken my mother's worry on a doorstep and my own son's questions in a sandpit and come out the other end holding evidence.

I had done it to Sammy two nights before, in the dark, with his koala in my hand. I had run a detective's questions over my own three-year-old. Of everything that had been done to me since Friday night, that was the one thing I had not been able to forgive — and here I was doing it again, to a child who read Gwendolen like an angel and was going to make somebody a terrifying stage manager one day.

I put the script back down on the desk. I squared it, the way I had squared the list on my husband's blotter two days before — and I caught myself at that too, squaring a child's script into the exact centre of a desk so that no one would know I had been near it, and I took my hand off it as though it were hot.

My hands were as cold as they had been in the car.

Down the corridor a door went, and voices, and a burst of laughter, and the ordinary lunchtime of an ordinary school came up through the floor.

I had come in that morning frightened of the staffroom — of some kind soul with a hand on my sleeve and a gentle question I would not be able to stand. And it turned out that the kind soul was a girl of seventeen, and the hand on the sleeve was an offer to listen, and the one person in that whole building I could not be left alone in a room with, in the end, was me.