The Madness of Love by Katharine Davies

Author:Katharine Davies [Davies, Katharine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-53804-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

When she was rehearsing the scenes that they weren't in, Miss Vye sent Fitch and the others outside to the playing field to learn their words and practice their scenes. Leo had lent Fitch a guitar and he was using it for the songs he had to sing as Feste. Fitch had given it to Pete to look after and he was strumming under the oak tree in the shade while someone tested him on his lines. Some of the others had started messing about and making grass whistles. Fitch and Suzy moved off to practice their first scene. They had added a few bits of stage business which they were perfecting before they showed it to Miss Vye. Something was happening between them but it was hard to put it into words. After a while they wandered back over to Pete who was leaning with his back against the tree trying out a few riffs. Pauline and Lou had started making daisy chains.

Boase was coming toward them. He was walking across the grass as though grass was a toxic substance. Fitch thought, He is probably coming to say, “Keep off the grass!” but when he eventually reached them it was only to remind them about the math exam, which he called the mathematics examination, the next day and which they all knew about anyway. At the moment he was focusing his nastiness on Pete. He mainly ignored Fitch now and so Pete was the next obvious target. Pete was even worse than Fitch at math.

“You, Peter Flagg, will be sorry if you fail the mathematics examination tomorrow.”

Pete shrugged. Boase looked at him silently. Pete was the biggest boy in the year. Behind Boase's small blue eyes, he seemed to be calculating something. Then he stopped calculating. His mouth fell slack. He had seen the girls who were dancing on the bank with their school shirts tucked into their bras.

“What are they doing?” he asked, like some sort of idiot.

Pete looked at the girls moving in unison. The late-afternoon sun was glinting in their ponytails. “What does it look like?” Pete said.

“It looks to me, Peter, as if, like you, they are wasting valuable time.”

He strode over toward them, his pale gray slacks flapping in the wind. They could see him gesticulating and the girls standing with their hands on their hips, outraged by everything he stood for. As he came past again, the girls trailing behind him, he told them to run around the playground picking up litter. There was no litter so they ambled about, pretending to look in the gutters until he was out of sight. A sixth-former appeared and said Suzy and Fitch were needed.

Fitch and Suzy went into the hall and showed Miss Vye what they had been practicing. She watched carefully, stopping them every now and then and getting them to repeat some of the lines until she was satisfied. She complimented them on their comic timing. For the next section, Suzy went back outside.

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