School portraits / One school year, August invoice to April invoice
The Ten Per Cent Child
A third child, a published sibling discount, and a four-year-old in Jeddah who learned exactly what she was worth.
Poppy Ashworth found out she was the discount at the dinner table in Jeddah, aged four, and she has never let the family forget it. Her father Graham had been going through the British International School of Jeddah’s fee page aloud, as he did with all documents, and had reached the line that gives ten per cent off tuition for the third and subsequent children. “That’s Poppy,” said Oliver, fifteen, with the satisfaction of an eldest. Poppy looked up from her peas. “I’m what?”
Graham tried to explain that the school simply charged a little less for a third child, and that this was kind of it, and that it did not mean anything about her. Grace, eleven, explained it better: “You’re the one on special offer.” Poppy considered this for the length of time a four-year-old considers anything, and then announced that she was the best value and would like more juice. Her mother Lucy, who had spent the move to Saudi Arabia being described by removal men as “the one with the three”, said nothing and poured.
The school had been the easy part of the move. British passports, the admissions priority that came with them, places in all three year groups, and a campus in Al Mohammadiyyah with an artificial football pitch that Oliver called “fine” with the intensity of a boy who had found it was better than fine. The hard part was the household economy that Poppy now ran. She was cheaper, she pointed out, when asked to share. She was cheaper at bedtime. She was cheaper, she told a bewildered woman at the compound pool, than Grace, and Grace was old.
Graham, who liked a document, found the invoice schedule steadying. Three term payments: August, January, April. A separate exam charge for Oliver in the third term when his IGCSEs came round, which Oliver described as “paying to be tested” in the tone of a man who has discovered injustice. Graham pinned the dates to the fridge. Poppy drew a star next to her name on each one. “That’s where I’m less,” she said.
The January invoice landed on a Thursday, and Graham sat with it and his calculator and his coffee while Lucy watched him do the thing he did, which was check a sum that a school finance office had already checked. The discount was there, as published. Ten per cent, Poppy’s line. He said, half to himself, that it was good of them. Poppy, passing with a biscuit, corrected him. It was good of her.
In April the third-term invoice came with the exam fees under Oliver’s name and nothing extra under Poppy’s, and she took this as further proof. Then she came home from school with a reading certificate and a friend called Dalal and a request for a sleepover, and was, for one whole evening, just a child who had had a good day. It lasted until pudding. Grace got the larger slice. Poppy looked at it, then at her mother, and said the only thing she had ever needed to say in that house: “I’m ten per cent.”