Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [79]
“Tofu, dear,” said Miss Harmony. “That is not very kind, is it? How would you like it if somebody said that about you.”
“But my socks don’t stink,” said Tofu. “So they wouldn’t say it.”
164 The Sybils of Edinburgh
Miss Harmony sighed. This was not an avenue of discussion down which she cared to go. It was certainly true that Hiawatha appeared to wear his socks for rather longer than might be desirable, but that was no excuse for the awful Tofu to say things like that. Tofu was a problem; she had to admit. But he would not be helped to develop by disparaging him, tempting though that might be. Love and attention would do its work eventually.
“Now then,” she said brightly. “I have been thinking about what play we should do. And do you know, I think I’ve found just the thing. I’ve decided that we shall do The Sound of Music. What do you think of that, boys and girls? Don’t you think that will be fun?”
The children looked at one another. They knew The Sound of Music and they knew that it would be fun. But the real issue, as they also knew, was this: who would be Maria? There were seven girls in the class and only one of them wanted Olive to be Maria. That one was Olive herself. And as for the boys, and the roles available to them, every girl in the class, but especially Olive, hoped that Tofu would not be Captain von Trapp. And yet that was the role that Tofu now set his heart on. He would do anything to get it, he decided. Anything. 53. The Sybils of Edinburgh
The effect of Miss Harmony’s announcement that Bertie’s class was to perform The Sound of Music was, in the first place, the descent of silence on the room. If the teacher had expected a buzz of excitement, then she must have been surprised, for no such reaction occurred. Nobody, in fact, spoke until a good two minutes had elapsed, but during that time a number of glances were exchanged.
Bertie, whose desk was next to Tofu’s, looked sideways at his neighbour, trying to gauge his reaction. He knew that Tofu wished to dominate everything, and that the class play would be no exception. In the last play that they had performed, a truncated version The Sybils of Edinburgh 165
of Amahl and the Night-Visitors, for which the music had been provided by the school orchestra, Tofu had resented being cast as a mere extra and had made several unscripted interventions in an attempt to raise the profile of the character whom he was playing (a sheep). This had caused even Miss Harmony, normally so mild, to raise her voice and threaten to write to Mr Menotti himself and inform him that the performance had been ruined by the misplaced ambition of one of the sheep. When Bertie glanced at him, he saw that Tofu’s expression gave everything away. He was smiling, his lips pressed tight together in what could only be pleasure at the thought of the dramatic triumphs that lay ahead. Bertie looked down at his desk. There was something else for him to think about now. Whereas all the other children had seen the film of The Sound of Music, he had not been allowed to do so by his mother, who disapproved of it on principle.
“Pure schmalz,” she had explained to Bertie, when he had asked if they might borrow a tape of it and watch it one Saturday afternoon, after yoga. “Singing nuns and all the rest. I ask you, Bertie! Have you ever encountered a singing nun? And all those ghastly songs about lonely goatherds and raindrops on roses and the rest of it! No, Bertie, we don’t want any of that, do we?”
It occurred to Bertie that it might be rather fun to listen to songs about goatherds, and that anyway his mother appeared to know rather a lot about the film. Had she seen it herself? In which case, was it fair that she should prevent him from seeing it? That, to his mind, sounded rather like hypocrisy, the definition of which he had recently looked up in Chambers Dictionary.
“But you must have seen it yourself, Mummy,” he said. “If you know all that much about it, you must have seen it yourself.”
Irene hesitated. “Yes,” she said eventually. “I did see it. I saw it at