School portraits / Fourteen days in a Cardiff kitchen, then one August in Muscat
Fourteen Days on the Fridge
An offer from British School Muscat, a reservation fee due in fourteen days, and a contract that had been “with legal” for six weeks.
The offer from British School Muscat arrived on a Tuesday, and so did the clock. Rhys Pryce, nine, had a place in Year 4 at the Madinat Qaboos campus, provided his parents paid the reservation fee within fourteen days, after which the place would go to somebody else and the money, if paid and the place not taken, would stay behind. Owen Pryce’s contract with the company that was supposed to be moving him to Oman had, on the same Tuesday, been “with legal” for six weeks.
Harriet put a calendar on the fridge in Cardiff and crossed off day one. Owen asked her not to, and she asked him to get his contract signed, and they agreed that each of them had a point. Rhys, who had done the school’s assessment with the fifty-rial fee paid by the day as required, and come out saying the maths was “fine, but they do it in a different order”, mostly wanted to know whether there would be a pool. There were, Harriet had read, three. She did not tell him this, as it was leverage.
Day four, Owen rang HR. HR was pleased to hear from him. Day six, HR was still pleased, and legal was “looking at it this week”. Day eight, Harriet rang HR herself, with the voice she used on the council, and was told that these things take time, and that she sounded lovely. Day nine, the school’s admissions office replied to a cautious email from Owen in under an hour, which was the fastest anybody in the entire process had replied to anything, and which made the company, he said, look like a man asleep at a bus stop.
It was three hundred rials. It was not a fortune. It was, Owen said, the principle, and Harriet said the principle was a nine-year-old with no school in September. They had the argument in the kitchen, in the car, in the Tesco car park, and once in a text exchange so terse that Harriet’s sister assumed they were divorcing. On day eleven Rhys asked if they could all stop talking about Oman for one evening and watch something with a dog in it. They did. It helped.
Day thirteen, Harriet paid. She did it from the sofa with the laptop on her knees and the face of a woman placing a bet she disapproved of, and she sent Owen the receipt with no message, which he understood. Day fourteen, nothing. Day fifteen, Owen’s contract came back from legal, signed, with a covering note hoping the family was “excited about the next chapter”.
They were. They flew in August into air like a hairdryer and found the school, the three pools and a Year 4 teacher who had Rhys doing the maths in the Omani order by half-term. In September the first-term invoice arrived, and Harriet read it at a kitchen table in Muscat with her coffee. The three hundred rials had been credited against it, as the school had always said it would be. She had spent fourteen days gambling, it turned out, with money she was going to pay anyway. She did not tell Owen. It was leverage.