The Script Said Kiss Him. She Dropped Him Instead.

Being tipped backwards by a colleague is an act of professional trust, and on the night the trust ran out about halfway down.

The colleague was an English teacher at Ecolint, the International School of Geneva, on its La Grande Boissière campus. The man on the way down was the drama teacher, who had arrived in 1979 as a single father with three children and a department that kept him late. The English department had rallied round, and the children got collected. One of the English teachers ended up helping with the plays.

In 1982 the staff put on a play themselves, which teachers do about once a decade and then talk about for the rest of their lives. They chose Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound. The drama teacher was cast opposite the English teacher. The script called for a romantic clinch, and the plan was a film-poster kiss: she would bend him backwards and hold him there.

She bent him backwards. She did not hold him there. He went down flat.

The hall, full of pupils and parents, came apart. And the thing about a drama teacher is that he knows exactly what to do on the floor. You get up, you dust yourself off and you take the laugh as if you had planned it.

I have done amateur dramatics once, in Madrid, in a parents’ production of a Spanish farce I did not fully understand. I had one line, which was “The doctor is here.” On the night I said it during the wrong scene, to a character who had already died, and the man playing the corpse sat up, looked at me and said, in perfect English, “Not for me, love.” It got the biggest laugh of the evening. It is the only review I have ever had.

At Ecolint, the staff room did what staff rooms do, which is say nothing and notice everything. It noticed through the following year.

In the summer of 1983 the drama teacher and the English teacher got married.

This is the most efficient courtship I have ever heard of, and I am trying to work out what it means for the rest of us. You do not need candles. You need a Stoppard script, a school hall, two hundred witnesses and a partner willing to drop you in public and then marry you anyway.

My husband proposed to me on a bridge in Prague, in the rain, after two false starts and a ring he had left in a different jacket. When I told him the Ecolint story he thought about it for a while and said he would have preferred being dropped.

He has asked me, more than once since, whether I would catch him. I have told him it depends on the script.