The Book of Leah

THE BOOK OF LEAH

Spend too long admiring someone from a distance and you convince yourself that you know them, but it’s an ambush. So it was with Ben.

We were formally introduced on the first day of school, Miriam Calder drawing us into a circle in the staff room. She took hold of him by his upper arms and manoeuvred him forward, as if he were a small boy who might need some cajoling to join in with the silly girls. He smiled awkwardly at us, at this unnecessary, quite literal, manhandling.

Miriam’s voice came like syrup: ‘Now then, ladies, I’m sure you’d like to welcome the lovely Mr Hailey to St Rita’s School.’

‘Ben,’ he corrected as he began his round of greetings – the primary teachers first, then an unimpressed Ruth French, followed by Barbara Stanney, who grasped his hand and shook it with the same manic passion she applied to the keys of the chapel organ.

‘Yes, Benjamin Hailey,’ said Miriam, as if his first name, the full version of it, belonged to her.

I could feel the heat rising up my neck as he worked towards me, greeting our part-time assistants next, reaching down for the hand of Faith Moran, who was matched in height by some of the juniors she helped to teach, then Dellie Leven, who gave a quiet ‘hello’.

My turn.

‘Hi, Ben,’ I said in a voice as cool and dry as the hand he placed in mine. Then I spoilt it by gushing, ‘It’s so good to have a man on the team at last!’

My cheeks stung with the too-muchness of myself.

A man – he was certainly that. Tall, clean, vital, yet vulnerable-looking, boyish. He was an exotic blond, his gaze narrow and green. Ask, and it shall be given you, says the Gospel of St Matthew, seek and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. I believed in the notion, but this was an extravagance, obscene. Ben was a white rabbit being pulled from a hat, a coin appearing from behind an ear. I wanted to laugh at the outrageousness of it all, which would have been preferable to my actual response – withdrawal. Our greatest fear is not that we’ll never receive the thing we long for, but that we will, and then what?

I ignored him, stretching only to pleasantries in the corridor, and, like the other women, I helped to nudge him through the timetable of the day. He fell easily into the role of the hopeless boy, not knowing where anything was, how anything worked. Merrily, we played the eye-rolling matriarchs, smug in the solving of his problems. It was a smart initiation. Mr Crane rarely breached the threshold of our staff room, unless announcing something important or calling us to prayer. We weren’t used to a man in our small, private space. Ben made himself as unthreatening as possible.