This is the first chapter. See what you think, and, if you like it, buy it.
HENGISTLEY, FEBRUARY 1998
The beer badger, the beer badger. Portia Bates woke up with the distinct feeling that she had just gone five rounds with the furry little sod. It was one of the multifarious beasts of Sussex mythology about which she had been warned by grinning locals when she had moved there. Unlike the dragon of St. Swithin's forest, which Portia's rational, scientific mind discounted as a particularly large and unruly horse, the beer badger was very real. Every Friday night it took all her money, hit her over the head and left its fur on the roof of her mouth. Ha ha. Attributing the self-inflicted wounds of alcohol abuse to a non-existent animal was all very well, but some motor system in her head told her to move and get on with her life. She shook her head muzzily, trying to get some feeling back into it, then whimpered in self-pity as her brain lurched towards the front of her skull with a resounding crash. Moaning softly and wincing at the brutal assault of the electric light on her delicate vision, she padded into the bathroom to look for aspirins. As she did so, she absent-mindedly switched on the little transistor radio which was strategically positioned in the hallway so as to be audible, provided no-one spoke or moved, in every part of the flat. Her cat looked at her with a languidly inquiring gaze as she pulled the entire contents of the medicine cabinet into the sink. Portia swore.
The cat continued to stare with unblinking self-possession, full of the smugness of its kind. An enormous and robust coal-black tom, it was unfazed by strong language. It was notorious in the area for the ripeness of its own vocabulary when defending Portia's flat against intruders or simply putting himself about. The radio squawked unkindly into a jingle and the cat moved into the kitchen, as far as it could get from the noise.
"Well, I hope you're having a great morning out there in the North Sussex and Surrey Downs area," the disc jockey burbled, "Because we sure are here at Radio Therapy, the hottest sound across the A23-A24 corridor."
"Uuurgh," said Portia, who didn't do early-morning conversation. Scrabbling in the basin, she found an old packet of painkillers.
"Yes," the disc jockey continued, "Make the most of it. It's a lovely morning but we're gonna have a pretty miserable afternoon. Heavy rain is forecast for the region, I'm afraid. Oh, well, it's not as if it's going to ruin a perfectly good Saturday, is it?"
Portia thought about this for a moment as she stared at the bathroom mirror. Her reflection looked back at her with unconcealed disgust. The green eyes, which had been known to enchant young men, had acquired a repulsively bloodshot hue, and the bloom of her normally healthy apple-red cheeks had gone to the colour of processed peas. The capacity of alcohol to make people sexually irresistible was clearly rather short-lived. Portia was twenty-eight but could add ten years to her appearance with the judicious application of lager and Scotch. But why wouldn't the weather ruin her Saturday? The song on the radio - a saccharine paean to lost love by an angel-faced young man who was adored by teenage girls but rumoured amongst teenage boys to be a confirmed homosexual with a rubber fetish - came to a close, and the disc jockey resumed his inane ramblings.
"Let's face it, who cares what sort of weather it is on a Monday? We're all at work anyway, so it might as well be pouring."
Portia lurched to attention like a guardsman and turned to the little radio.
"What do you mean, Monday, you little creep? It can't be Monday," she screamed, wincing as her throat constricted around the last words, squeezing them out as a desperate croak. How much had she smoked last night? Was there a karaoke? Oh, hell, hell, hell.
"And now it's time for the news here on Radio Therapy, the sound of today for Gatwick Airport and its associated trading estates," the man on the radio announced, with callous indifference.
"Mincing arse," Portia said, colourfully.
"Good morning. This is the independent radio news at eight a.m. for Monday, the twenty-first of February, nineteen-ninety eight," a different voice said.
"You're joking," Portia begged.
The announcer went on to describe in pithy generalities a mammoth government bill to restructure the welfare state, and to paint in vivid colours every detail of a party hosted the previous evening by a topless model who was fornicating with an actor in a soap opera. If he was joking, he was in no hurry to let the audience in on it.
Portia rasped a succession of thoroughly unpleasant words. But she was a practical young woman at heart, and went to hurriedly to wash and dress. If she put her skates on, she might just get to work in time for the official Monday morning staff briefing. There would be no time for breakfast but she didn't really feel like one after the eight pints of Guinness she had a horrible suspicion she had consumed the previous night. She could worry about what had happened to the weekend as she drove into town.
"Look after the house for me, Behemoth," she called to the cat, who yawned with amiable indifference in reply. Portia slammed the door as she left the flat, stuffing her blouse frantically into her patterned dark green skirt as she moved. She found that the scholar gypsy look not only disarmed people but was easy to put on in a hurry. Or take off, if you got the opportunity. Not that she did. Wrenching open the door of her rusty Fiat, she clambered in and turned her key in the ignition. After a few sickly splutters and wheezes, the old car's engine came grudgingly to life and Portia gunned it out of the peripheral estate she lived in and towards the centre of Hengistley.
As she drove, the sharp air blasting though the open window started to unblock the pores of memory and a picture began to emerge of the weekend. She had spent Saturday with Kieran Holby. That was it. She remembered now. He was one of her old students. Two years ago, he'd left College. He had made a bit of a hash of his A levels but had got it into his head that he might still be able to find a university course that would keep him occupied for three years. Portia had doubted it, but Kieran was an agreeable enough lad with a degree of roguish charm, so she had unlocked her office in the College and gone through a variety of options with him. Eventually, after many hours' hunting, they had found an aeronautical engineering course at a university in Wales which suited the boy down to the ground. He had been overjoyed and insisted on treating her to Sunday lunch at his parents' pub, an oak-beamed four-ale bar in a village five miles from Hengistley. One thing had led to another and Portia had ended up spending the day there, her stay prolonged by the discovery by the pub's quiz team that she was a teacher. This resulted in her recruitment for their joust against rivals from Surrey, and a victory celebrated in the rural style with life-threatening quantities of beer, and Portia had somehow been loaded into a taxi and sent home without remembering a thing about it.
She pulled up at the College with a minute to spare, and dashed from the car park through the quadrangle to the staffroom, high in the old building where the Principal would be about to hold court.
Sir Fulke Mercier's College, through which Portia was running, was a considerably older institution than its late Victorian main building and rather seventies status as a Further Education College might have implied. It had once been Hengistley's grammar school, and countless middle-aged and elderly men in the northern parts of Sussex owed it a great deal. For four and a half centuries, the school's policy of robust bullying and violent sports had trained village lads and small-town boys how to handle themselves in the big bad world.
It had been founded for precisely this purpose by Fulke Mercier, a local thruster made good, in 1502. Old Fulke had accumulated considerable wealth in the course of a long and thoroughly wicked life as a merchant in London. Seized by religious fervour as the grave approached, he had founded the school as an act of penitence in the hope that the Almighty would overlook the string of frauds and petty dishonesties which had marked his career. He had originally intended to leave his cash to his sons, but every last one of the little swine had inconsiderately died in a cholera epidemic which Fulke had prudently avoided by sailing to Antwerp. This had added to his feelings guilt and heightened his sense of urgency in endowing charitable works.
The school was to be free for any boy who might reasonably be expected to benefit from studying there, and the masters, a collection of semi-civilised fourth raters from the backstreets of Oxford, had been enjoined to batter literacy and numeracy into their charges with a minimum of pity or restraint. Life, in Fulke's experience, was cruel, hard and competitive, and a boy at his school would learn that very quickly indeed. In return for the investment made in the salaries of the teachers and the education of the boys, Fulke's immortal soul was to be prayed for each day in school assemblies.
Mercier's had prospered along with the town, surviving such minor hiccups as the discovery that Simeon Brocklebank, Headmaster in 1609, was a practising occultist who regularly tried to summon up the powers of darkness to deal with unruly pupils. Indeed, his burning on the town common only served to prove the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity, for his wily deputy had distributed flyers amongst the gathered spectators and gained another fifteen pupils. A Victorian refit and the acquisition of bourgeois respectability helped buy in a few teachers who could actually count and spell, and the school began setting exams for the first time in 1891. The injection of money provided by the 1944 Act meant that Mercier's offered such a good education, at least in comparison with the local secondary moderns, that the blatant sadism of a few of the teachers was overlooked by parents whose sole concern was their offsprings' examination results.
The school, like most of its kind, had become a sound and worthy institution, good at what it did and playing an important role in the life of the town. Needless to say, it was just at the point that Mercier's and its fellow grammar schools were doing best that the government decided to close them down. The edicts of Shirley Williams had filled the town with horror, but the quick-witted headmaster acted swiftly to prevent the school's traditions of excellence through robustness from being subsumed in a tide of progressive conformity. Elbowing the headmistress of the local girls' grammar school out of the way, he had announced that Mercier's was henceforth to be a further education college, offering bespoke qualifications to such young folk of the town as were aged sixteen and above and could meet the entry requirements. A very few older staff had grumbled at the abolition of uniforms and the arrival of girls, fearing the collapse of civilisation and mourning the loss of their freedom to wage unrestricted physical warfare on their charges. Most, however, were delighted to be spared the trauma of comprehensivisation, and overjoyed not to have to teach spotty thirteen-year-olds, wrestling with the spiteful anaconda of puberty, any longer. Some younger staff had been particularly pleased to see female students arrive, and a number of affairs bloomed in the stock-cupboards and departmental offices.
Mercier's sailed on, ruthlessly crushing any local institution which dared to compete against it in the provision of education to the young adults of the town. An attempt by the short-lived Liberal Democrat regime at the district council to open a less elitist College, offering courses in hairdressing and beauty treatments, was stopped in its tracks by acts of arson and a whispering campaign about the sexual proclivities of its principal. Mercier's portrayed itself simultaneously as an historic and prestigious qualification emporium and as a go-getting university substitute where teenagers might find themselves. The questionable accuracy of both of these claims was known only to the staff, who did their best to ensure that debate and understanding of educational issues in the town was kept to a minimum. Publicity for the College was handled by a shadowy clique of male teachers who were so spectacularly amoral that it was noted in the staffroom that they would have made ideal collaborators in the event of the Nazi conquest of England. Carefully edited exam results and tales of happy trips abroad filled the pages of the town newspaper, with grumblings suppressed by means of a closed relationship with the editor. An old Mercionian himself, he had convinced himself that the beatings and rote learning of his youth had made him the man he was today. He never printed a letter complaining about his alma mater and never changed a word of its official press releases, even if these were manifestly untrue, as had been the case with the report of how an upper sixth boy had saved a child from drowning in the local park. The boy had actually knocked the infant into the water by accident, whilst staggering drunkenly back from a liquid lunch, but had been forced to go to the rescue when the indignant mother accosted him. He had then squelched miserably into the college, where his teacher, recognising a useful photo-opportunity, dragged him back to the park and offered the mother twenty pounds to recreate the scene for the camera.
Mercier's was an academically efficient and pleasantly appointed institution. Its middle-class students were willing to learn, for the most part, and the staff were paid just enough to afford the little town's expensive prices. Teachers were free from the National Curriculum and were allowed considerable latitude in the delivery of their personal subject-related hobby-horses. The relative ease of their lives was kept secret from other schools and, apart from self-congratulatory puffing in the press about exam results, from the world at large. It was a happy land indeed for any teacher lucky enough to get a post there. Such, at least, was how things appeared to Portia, as she wheezed into the staffroom and flopped down in an armchair next to one of the English teachers, and waited for the Principal to make his announcements.
By ten o'clock, Portia was keeping her richly-deserved hangover at bay by oscillating between cups of bad coffee and glasses of gin and orange juice. She had hurriedly made photocopies of various pictures before the lesson and had given them to the students, who were discussing them in groups. Portia wandered amongst them, nudging the wayward back onto the subject in hand and encouraging the rest. A collection of distinctly unacademic girls from the mixed comprehensive were poring over a copy of an oil-painting of a muscle-bound athlete wielding a javelin. Portia inclined her head - she was keeping her hands firmly in her pockets in case they shook - at the picture.
"So what's that, then?" she asked
"It's a naked man, miss," offered one of the girls, whose name was Amazon ("After the ship, miss. My dad served on it. Then he was on Antelope in the Falklands, so that's my brother's middle name. Poor little sod.").
"Don't you know anything?" her friend asked.
"Indeed," Portia said, "Youthful and inexperienced though I am, I have seen one before."
The girls tittered. They lounged in their seats, simultaneously displaying, and declaring their indifference to, their chests, and darted occasional glances at the boys to see if they were looking. The boys had a football magazine, and weren't.
"But is there anything distinctive about him?" continued Portia.
"I can't speak for you, miss," the girl said, "But I sure as hell don't know any blokes like that. He's far too fit. It's not very realistic."
Another girl took time out from a piece of chewing gum to demur.
"Yes, he is. He looks like a Chippendale. I saw them at the leisure centre."
Portia had too and prayed that the girl hadn't noticed her in the crowd.
"Or that bloke in the footer team, the one who got his kit off for rag week."
"Bet he's hung like a baby's arm."
"You can't see though, can you, miss? Because of the way he's standing."
"He's got a great bum, though."
The girls cackled.
"Why would they show this sort of thing?" Portia asked, through gritted teeth. She was beginning to wish she'd given the girls a picture of a building instead.
"Because people want to see it. It's like page three."
"It was painted before the War. They didn't have page three then."
"Really? What was in the papers?"
The question was asked in genuine innocence. Portia shuddered.
"News, possibly," she snarled, "Though I'm just hazarding a guess there. Look. Think politically. You don't, as you've said yourselves, see blokes like that every day. So why make - as these people did - loads of posters and paintings and sculptures of this sort of figure?"
"It's romanticised," contributed a shy girl, who tended to sit at the back and say little, "It's a kind of ideal bloke. Do they want all blokes to look like that?"
"I can think of worse things for blokes to look like," Amazon sniggered, and leaned back in her chair to wave the picture at a boy on the other side of the room.
"Oi, Rob! How come you don't look like this, then?" she shouted.
"'Cause I haven't any incentive," Rob said, "If there was some half decent totty round here, I'd think about it. No point building up muscles just to impress an old bag like you, is there?"
"Bastard," Amazon replied, affectionately.
"Christ," Portia said, "What's the significance of this thing politically?"
"He looks pretty macho. Do they want people to be sort of fit and healthy and tough?"
"Well done," Portia said, "They certainly do. What can a load of fit, healthy tough blokes get up to?"
There was more tittering.
"I can think of a thing or two," said an earthy girl who was the offspring of a Methodist clergyman.
"Fighting?" the shy girl volunteered again.
"Quite right. So which twentieth century leader would be likely to encourage this sort of art, then? Mahatma Gandhi? Nelson Mandela? John Major?"
"Hitler, Miss," said several of the students simultaneously, naming the only twentieth-century leader they could actually remember.
"Good show," Portia said, "Well done. Excellent."
She felt a welling up, like an over-shaken tin of lemonade, of that feeling of achievement which all teachers get when, by dint of bullying, cajolery or bribery, they manage to get the right answer out of children without actually telling them beforehand. Portia was widely considered to be good with students, and enjoyed this gratifying sensation regularly. She genuinely liked teaching, which had the capacity to lift her up when she was down, especially when concepts of potentially nightmarish difficulty penetrated the students' minds without the use of agricultural machinery. Having satisfied herself that they had got the basic idea, she went on to elaborate for the whole class the significance of art in National Socialist Germany. Time began to fly by and she began to enjoy herself. With a minute to go before their break, the students were sufficiently interested and engaged not to commence their habitual shuffling and rattling of pencil-cases. Portia roared into a grand summary of her topic.
"So, when you go into the exam and you get asked about culture in Nazi Germany," she declaimed, her voice rising to a crescendo, "Think of this," (she waved a picture of a buxom nude) "as vulgarity, this," (a chocolate-box picture of peasants in the fields) "as sentimentality, this" (the naked man) "as brutality and the whole damn lot as unoriginal, boring and opposed to individualism of any kind."
The class cheered. Breathless and exhilarated, Portia bowed and blushed. As the students filed out to go to their next class, Portia called the normally quiet girl, who had joined in the discussion with an unusual degree of enthusiasm, over to her desk.
"That was a good point you made about the paintings in Russia being the same as the ones in Germany, Susanna," she said.
The girl looked at her feet.
"Thank you," she said, hesitantly.
"Have you been reading about the topic?"
"No," Susanna said, "It's my grandfather. He's Ukranian, you see. He ran away from the Red Army, and worked for the Germans in the war, and then the Americans. He said it was pretty much the same with the Communists and the Nazis. The same style of propaganda pictures, I mean, and getting bossed about all the time. And always eating cabbage soup."
"Gosh," Portia was impressed, "Well, you must ask him all about it."
"I do, miss," said Susanna, suddenly animated, "It's awfully interesting. I didn't before I came here. Ask him, I mean. But it's interesting, isn't it? History was a bit boring at St. Eva's, but it's, erm, better here."
She smiled. Portia blushed for a second time.
"You're kind," she said. On the foundations of such little words of comfort, together with the ego-massaging knowledge that she could lift even the most feeble students to a slightly higher level of mediocrity, was the happiness of her life constructed. Portia understood the one great truth of teaching; it was a process in which individuals who wanted to be liked came together in a room and rewarded one another. Not all of her colleagues believed in this, and others simply had not grasped it at all. Portia's success lay in the affection she had for her students. Mercier's had been her first teaching post, and she had amply rewarded the Principal's faith in her by boosting both her department's results and its standing in the College. She was universally beloved and seen as the heart and soul of the Humanities Faculty, and had, through the years, built up a retinue of deeply loyal former students, known to envious colleagues as the Family, who kept in touch with her years after they had left Hengistley.
"A shining example of professional brilliance," the Principal had said, as he introduced her to the Governors on Prize-Giving Day. Mercier's was her life.
Portia walked into the Humanities office feeling a hundred times better than she had three hours previously, and lit a cigarette. She found Mike Cochrane, who taught English and Drama, looking at a computer terminal, presumably searching for mentions of his name on internet play reviews. As Portia came in, he ran his fingers through thick blond hair which was - to what she knew was his secret delight - still there, as that of the glamorous Head of Law was said to be thinning. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his rather fashionable waistcoat, where they rested against a stomach considerably firmer than that of the Head of Politics, whose vast expanse of beer gut was a College landmark. Portia did not think Mike an unduly vain man - in fact, he had a fairly low opinion of himself - but she was well aware that the knowledge that he was less repulsive than some of his colleagues helped him to sleep at night.
"Hello, gorgeous," he said.
"All right, big boy?" responded Portia, who found that flirting with Mike worked better than slapping him about, "How are things?"
"Bloody hopeless with this thing," Mike said, "But not as scary as what's in the staffroom."
"What's in the staffroom?" Portia asked.
"All of us have had photocopies of the relevant situations vacant pages of the Times Educational Supplement crammed into our pigeon-holes."
"What?" Portia snorted smoke incredulously from her nose, a dismissive dragon.
"There's also an enormous poster which says "Voluntary Redundancy - opening a new door to the future". It urges us to submit suggestions to the Principal about what we'd like to see in our personal references, were prospective employers to ask him for such things."
"What on earth for? We've got loads of money. They've just started to rebuild the Clutterbuck Hall and last year they stuck up an enormous gym with a fitness suite. The Vice-Principal, whatshisname, Walpurgess. He was wittering on at staff meetings last month about how Mercier's will look thoroughly beautiful after he's finished spending thousands of pounds on his refurbishment programme."
"It's not as simple as that, apparently," Mike said, "I've seen some of the paperwork, though I can't say I understand it. That was a separate budget. The budget which pays for the staff is different, and it doesn't cover enough for all of us."
"But if they get rid of people, won't the class sizes go up?"
"Presumably. But that's an efficiency gain. Weren't you listening in the staff meeting last week?"
"I was doing my marking. Everyone does in staff meetings."
"We're a business, Portia. Not a real one, of course, but we're meant to behave like one. Be efficient and slimmed down and virile and that. A tiger in the educational jungle."
"Oh, well," Portia said, "It can't affect us, can it? Humanities has great results. We work much harder here than anyone else. It would do them good to get rid of some of the dead wood."
"'Mercier's College, Greene Road, Hengistley, etcetera, 20th May 1998. Dear Portia, I am writing on behalf of the governing body to inform you that I am giving you three months notice from 31st May 1998 that your post will be made redundant with effect from 1st September 1998. Your final day of employment with the college will be on 31st August 1998.' Then it goes on to talk about redundancy payments and how they're worked out," Portia's voice tailed off into a whisper as she sank into the overstuffed armchair in the Humanities office.
"No 'sorry to lose you' or anything like that?" Mike asked.
"Not a sausage," Portia said.
"So that's it, then."
"Mmm," said Portia, and helped herself to a glass of whisky from the filing-cabinet. She stared around the room where she had spent her breaktimes, given revision tutorials, and cuddled weeping students whose lives had been temporarily wrecked by boyfriends, girlfriends or her colleagues.
The axe had not differentiated between the successful and the unsuccessful, the diligent and the indifferent. The last few months had been horrible, as rumour and counter-rumour circulated as to who was to be culled. Then, towards the end of the Spring Term, the word flew around the College that the Principal was issuing preliminary black spots in person. As lunchtime approached, she had felt giddy with relief. He had not come for her. Five minutes before the end of her lesson, there had been a knock on the door. The Principal came in and smiled amiably at her. Portia had carried on teaching, with the Principal occasionally offering the benefit of his knowledge, much to the confusion of the students, until the end. After the students had gone, he broke the news. He was polite and genial, but the fact remained that difficult economic times required sacrifices to the gods of the account ledger headings, and she might well be among the victims.
Portia was furious. It was not merely that she knew perfectly well that a number of other staff - who, for instance, had worse attendance records than truanting teenagers or couldn't actually spell - were regarded by colleagues and students alike as useless whilst she was universally worshipped. It was not even that the government's pious homilies on schooling were being flouted in an institution over which the Department for Education (now there was a misnomer; if ever ministers had run a system so as to be against education, it was in England) exercised such rigid control. What really irritated Portia was the fact that, as she trudged miserably from office to classroom, she could see all around her the building projects, largely cosmetic, into which the Vice Principal was channelling so much money. Having discovered the joys of corporate rebranding, he had redecorated the entire College in blue, its official colour, down to shiny notices in the toilets suggesting that problems be reported to the maintenance staff. It was after seeing these that Portia had had a series of nightmares in which the senior staff played a prominent part. In one of them, the Principal and Dr Walpurgess had dragged her from her classroom and stuffed her into a van along with the other people who were being made redundant. They were driven through the night to an unknown destination. Eventually, they were pulled from the van and bundled into cells in a grim, barrack-like building in what looked like Eastern Europe, or perhaps Liverpool. Walpurgess, dressed in a black shirt, had summoned a drably uniformed guard.
"Watch her," he said, "She's trouble."
"You bastard," she shouted, "You're only management because you can't teach to save your life."
Walpurgess leered sadistically at her, and took the guard's rifle.
"Any last requests?" he asked.
"My job back, you overpaid scum," Portia had bawled.
"You can't have it," Walpurgess sneered, "Under the directives of the Strategic Plan's Accommodation Programme, your classroom is to be demolished and turned into a car park for government inspectors. There will be pretty flower beds all around it, and a rather attractive water sculpture. Now that your department's been slimmed down and made more efficient, they'll appreciate the view."
Then he walked over and shot her. Portia had woken up in a cold sweat of terror and anguish.
And now she arose from her armchair, the coup de grace still in her hand.
"I'm going to the pub," she said, and walked with dignity up to the Hertford Arms, where she drank fifteen large gins.
"Stop here," she slurred to the taxi driver as he drove her home later. He pulled the car up to the kerb by the College. Portia lurched out and staggered into the senior staff car park. She stared up at the old building, which loomed above her in the darkness. At one time she had found its bulk vaguely comforting. Portia would work late into the night on projects for her students or reports for her masters, hammering away on computers or reviewing the latest tapes of crudely sensationalised programmes from the History Channel for use in lessons. Even alone, the darkened corridors held no fears for her. She knew by instinct how to move about the building, welcomed the strange gurgling sounds that the Victorian piping made in the twilight hours, knew the cycle of the boiler in the staffroom coffee machine off by heart. The unevenly fitted paving slabs by the sports hall made a funny plonking sound if you rode your bicycle over them, as she did when she came in at weekends and was feeling healthy. The English corridor had little red emergency lights that winked at you in the darkness if you went downstairs to borrow fags from Mike's desk. The big windows of the Politics room gave a fine view over the town park which she would not see again. All gone. It had been her home, where she felt as safe and secure as a child in the womb, and now she was to be expelled from it.
The Principal's car had gone, but the Vice-Principal, whose profligacy on the issue of blue paint Portia had come to identify with her redundancy, was working late, and his BMW was still there. She stared at it for a moment, aimed carefully, and hurled the bottle of lager she had taken for the road through its windscreen. It made a satisfyingly large hole, but no alarm went off.
"Cheapskate," muttered Portia, vaguely.
She dropped to her knees on the grass, and wept.
"Cheapskates," she sobbed, "Cheapskate bastards."
Portia would recall, when it was all over, that it was at this point, as the despair and misery flowed out of her, that the iron had entered her soul.