My Secret Lover

party like the Queen has, with cucumber sandwiches. The kids could all
bring cakes and dress up as posh people, and we can hang some bunting up.’
    ‘It’s simple,’ says Mrs Vane.
    ‘But effective,’ says Miss Goodman.
    I just knew that she’d have a pastel
hat left over from a niece’s wedding that she’s been dying to wear again.
    So that’s that.
    Which of us is wondering if we really
are senior teacher material now?
    ‘And since it’s a mufti day, the
children could all bring 50p for a charity,’ I add, which clinches it.
    There isn’t even a vote, although I
anticipate differences of opinion about which charity, but we will leave that
for another day.
     
    ‘Daddy!’
    Ethan screams past me. His father
stands out in the playground because he’s wearing a crisp white short-sleeved
shirt and white trousers and looks not dissimilar to Kevin Costner in No Way
Out.
    Michelle thinks that Sven Goran
Eriksson looks a bit like Kevin Costner, but I think it’s just her way of
understanding why all those attractive younger women are after him.
    I wonder if Ethan’s dad is in the US
Navy? I suppose there might be an intelligence unit. Odd, because this part of
North London is one of the farthest points in England from the sea and strange
to put staff in uniform if it’s secret.
    He could be a dentist, of course, or
an osteopath.
    ‘You look well,’ he says, as I
approach.
    It’s a bit of a familiar comment, but
we have seen each other outside school. It’s often difficult to adjust.
    ‘Ethan needs a name label in his
sweatshirt,’ I say, trying to reassert the professional boundaries.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, giving my body
a frankly inappropriate once over.
    I shiver, even though it’s quite a
summery day.
    ‘I’ve been away quite a bit,’ he
says.
    ‘Yes, I’ve been meaning to have—’
    ‘Dad, guess what?’
    ‘What?’ his father and I say in
unison.
    ‘I’m going to be someone famous.’
    ‘I’m sure you will be,’ says his dad,
putting his arm around him.
    I like it when parents encourage
their children’s ambition. There are quite a few not a million paces from where
I’m standing who would say something like, ‘Not if you spend all your time
watching television.’
    But I’ve missed the moment for a
quiet word.
     
    * * *
     
    It’s coming up to the news on Radio
4, but first the presenter tells us, with exactly the same calm mixture of
enthusiasm and sang-froid as she would have if she was announcing the end of
the world, there is a series of programmes about food preserving beginning
later in the week.
     
    Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beeeeep!
    ‘BBC Radio 4. The News at Four
o’clock.’
    ‘The Foreign Office has advised all
British citizens to leave India...’
    How on earth can they get a whole
series out of preserving food? Even Radio 4, where they stretched the history
of one lifeboat out for weeks. I mean there’s freezing and there’s canning,
isn’t there? End of story.
    And drying, I suppose.
    There’s pickling and bottling (but
they could get those into the same programme), and preserving itself, like jams
and chutneys and things. But that’s it.
    Oh, there’s salting. Curing. And
smoking. Bound to get a whole programme out of an Orkney smokery where you
can’t understand a word the smoker is saying, but there’s lots of sloshing
around in fish tanks.
    When we went to that Korean
restaurant, I’m sure Andy told me that they used to bury cabbage in pots
underground. It tasted like it, frankly. And in France you sometimes get pate
and bits of duck embalmed in fat. There’s a name for it. Is that what confit
means? Or is it potting? Like potted shrimps?
    God, I love potted shrimps. How could
I have forgotten them until this minute? Trying to remember the last time I had
them.
    We could have potted shrimps on the
wedding buffet table. Got to have something other than poached salmon and
coronation chicken and Mum won’t tolerate Thai.
    ‘Thai?’ she says, as if I’m being
somehow disrespectful.
    Potted shrimps are English and
traditional. They’ll no doubt appear in the Radio 4 series, which she is bound
to listen to, and she’ll be OK if Gary Rhodes gives them the thumbs up. Of all
the celebrity chefs you could follow, fancy choosing Gary Rhodes!
    Vladimir gets a rash with seafood, but there will be
other things.
    ‘...BBC Radio 4 News.’

38
     
    Differences between men and women:
    6. Astronomy.
    ‘What we need is a western horizon
with no