Oh yes, thought Rusty bitterly, it was O.K. for her to be sent away, but not Charlie.
‘I’m sad enough as it is that I’ve spent so little time with Virginia. Ideally, I’d like her to be at a day school, but as long as we live here and have to creep around on tiptoe –’
‘Margaret!’
‘I’d rather she at least has the chance of some company of her own age and the chance to catch up with her education.’
‘So you’d rather Charles stay a namby-pamby. A little sissy, is that it?’
‘I’d rather be around to see him grow up.’
‘It’s out of the question. Of course he’s going to boarding school. It’ll make a man out of him. You should have seen the fuss he made in the barber’s. I was ashamed of him. The sooner he has some male company, the better.’
‘He had more male company in Devon than he does here.’
‘Oh yes,’ said her father. ‘The beloved Uncle Harvey.’
‘It seems,’ said her grandmother insinuatingly, ‘that this Harvey spent rather more time than was necessary with you.’
‘And what do you mean by that?’
‘Your conscience will tell you that, my dear.’
Rusty sat back, stunned. So that was it! Harvey and her mother must have been going out together! That’s why her mother had turned so red when Rusty had asked her all those questions about him. She felt sick. It was as though someone had stuck a knife into her middle and was twisting it around. She crept back up to her room.
She had been lying in bed for only a few minutes when she heard the doorknob moving. In the half-light she saw a small figure clutching a teddy bear.
‘Virginia,’ Charlie whispered.
‘Uh-huh.’
She heard him gasping, those strange gulping sounds that sounded as if he had asthma or a bad dose of the hiccups.
‘Teddy’s a bit frightened.’
‘Is he? Maybe you should close the door and bring him over.’
He shut it quietly and padded over to the bed. ‘He’s a bit sad, too.’
‘What do you think would make him feel good again?’ she asked.
‘I ‘spect he’d feel better if he got into bed with you.’
‘O.K.’
He handed the bear to her and she tucked it in beside her.
‘Don’t you think he’ll be lonesome without you?’ she asked quietly.
‘I ‘spect so.’
‘Maybe if you got in too…’
He nodded, hauled himself up on to the bed, and snuggled down under the blankets. Gradually he pushed the teddy bear aside and moved in closer to her. She could feel him shaking.
‘Virginia?’ he whispered.
‘Uh-huh.’
He began to cry. ‘I want to go home.’
She pulled him close to her and stroked his stubbly head with her fingers.
‘Yeah,’ she murmured, holding him as tightly as she could. ‘Me too.’
30
Rusty sat next to her mother on the station platform and picked at the skin along the side of her fingernails. The letter from her father, requesting that she stay at Benwood House at weekends, lay sealed in her blazer pocket. Even as she tried to make some sense of the weekend, her grandmother’s remark kept thundering repeatedly inside her head. She pressed her nails deep into the flesh of her hands.
Her mother was staring vacantly into the distance.
‘Mother,’ she blurted out quickly, ‘did you go out on dates with Harvey?’
Her mother looked up, startled. ‘Pardon?’
‘I said, did you go out on dates with Harvey?’
‘We spent some time together.’
‘Without Charlie? Just the two of you?’
She nodded.
Rusty turned away. ‘Did you go to dances? Stuff like that?’
‘Yes.’
‘How could you do that when Father was away fighting?’
Her mother gazed wearily at her.
‘I did nothing to be ashamed of,’ she said. ‘We kept each other company, that’s all. He was a good friend.’
‘Did you like him?’
‘I liked him very much.’
But did you love him? she wanted to say, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask it.
A train was approaching the station. Rusty stood and picked up her grip.
Soon her mother was beside her.
‘Virginia,’ she said quietly, ‘about the weekends. I think it’s for the best. Until we sort things out at home.’
Rusty refused to look at her.
‘It’s all your fault. You shouldn’t have made friends with that man,’ she said bitterly.
Before her mother could speak, Rusty whipped open a door, leapt into the train, and slammed it behind her.
Uniformed girls pushed by her in the corridor, giggling and shouting. Rusty ignored them and walked past the compartments without stopping. ‘Hey, watch where you’re going!’ exclaimed one of the older girls, as Rusty shoved her way past.
Eventually she found a quiet corner, pushed her grip up by the wall, and sat on it, her head in her hands. She hated her mother. She hated her father. She hated her grandmother. She hated school. She hated England. She hated everybody and everything.
She opened her grip and took a look at the clothes and stencils, and the stencilling equipment she had hidden under her pyjamas. Next to her jeans, plaid shirt, Wind-breaker and trapper cap lay the half-dozen stamped envelopes her mother had given her.
‘We’re only allowed to write Sundays,’ Rusty had reminded her.
‘I know.’ And she had handed her some money. ‘This is your pocket money for the term. You’ll need to give it to Matron.’
The money was in the inside pocket of her blazer.
Rusty didn’t remember much about the journey or the rest of the day. As the girls drifted into their various cliques, she continued to rage inside. She moved automatically up to Matron to collect her sheets and towels, and back to the dormitory to unpack her trunk. She slipped her other clothes under the mattress and hid the stencils and stencilling equipment behind the chest of drawers.
If anyone spoke to her, she snapped angrily at them and was surprised to find that they scuttled away.
It wasn’t until she was lying in bed in the dark that she remembered the envelope.
By Friday morning Rusty had still not touched the envelope containing her father’s letter. All through lessons she waited to be summoned to the Headmistress’s study. Her parents were bound to have contacted Miss Bern-bridge by now, she thought, for they would probably be wondering why she hadn’t been in touch with them. But nothing happened. Everything seemed to continue as normal.
When the afternoon lessons began, Rusty’s heart was pounding so fast she thought she would be sick. She stared with fixed concentration at her books and ticked off the minutes in her notebook. Prep was almost unbearable. She knew she should give the envelope to someone, but she couldn’t seem to form the words or move in the right direction.
As usual, she was granted permission to take her grip up to the dormitory, and as usual she placed her pyjamas, dressing gown and sponge-bag in it, adding underneath them the clothes, stencils and stencilling equipment she had smuggled in.
Downstairs, the same prefect stood in bored fashion by the arched entrance to the hallway of the wing that formed Butt House. Rusty changed into her outdoor shoes in the Fourth Form cloakroom, pulled on her rubber galoshes over them, and slipped into her Beanie, hat and scarf.
The prefect walked through the door with her. They had hardly turned the corner when the prefect said, ‘Look, you’ll be all right on your own again, won’t you?’
Rusty nodded. She didn’t dare open her mouth.
Without looking back, she walked around to the front of the school, down the drive to the large wrought-iron gates. She lifted up the heavy latch, swung it open, and, in case anyone was watching said, rather feebly, ‘Hello, Mother, how nice to see you,’ and closed the ga
te.
As soon as she was hidden behind the wall, she ran along the pavement to the corner, jumped over the ditch, and scrambled through the trees. A car swept by, its headlights sending a wide arc across the road.
She pulled her grip over a bush and flattened herself against the wall.
She moved cautiously along the wall to the next corner and peered around. Ahead of her lay the woods.
‘O.K.,’ she murmured. ‘Here goes.’
It took her longer than usual to reach the tall trees at the top of the tiny slope, for she had to make countless detours.
Once inside the Cabin, she lit one of the lamps and placed it on the stone platform in front of the fire. It was then that she remembered the letter. She undid her Beanie, pulled out the crumpled envelope from her blazer pocket, and propped it up on the mantelpiece.
She cleared the grate and got a fire going. It seemed strange to be doing such a familiar action in such unfamiliar clothes. She had been used to being in the Cabin dressed in pyjamas, with her cardigan and dressing gown on top. It felt out of place somehow to be in her uniform. She spread out one of the blankets and sat cross-legged on a pillow, staring into the fire and adding wood.
The school thought she had gone home. Her parents thought she was at school. She had a whole weekend to herself: two days to make the Cabin as homey as she could.
As soon as the flames were roaring up the chimney, Rusty blew out the lamp. She warmed her pyjamas and dressing gown in front of the fire, hung up her uniform on the hook at the back of the door, and got into her nightclothes. She wrapped the blankets around her like a caterpillar in a cocoon, rolled herself on to the camp-bed, and lay huddled on top of it, watching the fire.
She was woken by the light coming in through the windows. She sat up quickly. A great cloud rose from her lips. It was freezing. It was the first time she had seen the Cabin in daylight. Cobwebs hung from the corners, and dust and grime covered the faded white walls. She pushed herself out of the roll of blankets, put on her jeans, plaid shirt, cardigan, Windbreaker and sneakers, and pulled on her mother’s overalls. As she buttoned them up, she could still smell the oil on them. She rolled up the trouser bottoms and sleeves and went out to explore.
All around her, sticking out of the mounds of bricks, plaster and timber, were various abandoned objects.
Having located the kitchen, she scrabbled among the debris and found a large oval wooden tub, a bucket, a rickety old step-ladder, various pieces of torn material, the head of a broom, and a cracked mirror.
She turned the tap on. It gave a rumble and shuddered. Dark-brown liquid oozed out. Eventually it flowed more easily and became almost clear.
Rusty knew it would be dark by four o’clock, and she wanted to get as much done as possible.
She sliced the twigs off a long thin branch and wedged it into the hole in the head of the broom. Her stomach gave a hungry gurgle. Ignoring it, she cleared the Cabin out, unhooked the curtains, and left them to soak in the bucket.
Then she attacked every room like a whirlwind, shoving the broom into every corner and crevice, sweeping the walls and floor.
As soon as she had finished, she dragged up one of the large cans of paint from the cellar and prised the lid off. The paint was so thick that she had to hold a stick with two hands and grip the can between her feet before she was able to stir it into creaminess.
By the time she had painted the ceiling, walls and two alcoves with the two paintbrushes she had smuggled back from Beatie’s, it was already getting dark. She washed the brushes under the tap, pulled the camp-bed and blankets back into the Cabin, and began to lay a fire.
The next day she painted the door and windowframes.
Having no soap, she squeezed and rinsed the curtains repeatedly until the water was clear, and hung them soaking from the branches of the surrounding trees, smoothing the material so that when they dried they would have no creases in them.
Then came the part she had been waiting for: the stencilling.
She knew that it would be difficult to keep the paint at a steady consistency. If it was too watery, it would dribble over the card and down the wall; if it was too thick, it would stick out oddly in congealed lumps.
A sharp pain stabbed at her stomach. She stood for a moment until it had passed. It was just another hunger cramp.
She peeled offseveral strips of the faded wallpaper from upstairs and began slowly and methodically to try out her mixed colours. Back at the Omsks’, Aunt Hannah used to spend hours encouraging her to do colour exercises. Sometimes she had got so bored and impatient with that, but, as Aunt Hannah said, everything has its own grammar. The more words you knew, the more you could express yourself, and colours were a little bit like that. And when Rusty had mixed something up to the exact colour that she wanted, and had danced up and down in the studio, Aunt Hannah would grin and say, ‘Atta girl,’ and all that endless dabbling around made some kind of sense.
She was glad that the paint on the walls wasn’t such a stark white. There was the slightest touch of yellow in it, making it more buttermilk in colour.
Rusty stood on the ladder in the far corner opposite the windows, and stencilled flowers and leaves in barn red, ochre and green, climbing down and stippling the stubby stencil brushes on the old wallpaper if they dripped too much, and then climbing back up and doing a balancing act, with the stencil card in one hand and the brush in the other.
She moved the step-ladder around the room and did the same in the other corners; but where the alcoves were, she made the design level with the mantelpiece because she had an idea of putting shelves there. Once she had painted the corners, she returned to the far wall, the one with no windows, door or fireplace, and gradually stencilled a trail of vine leaves that dipped and arched all the way to the design in the next corner. Then she returned to the beginning of the trail of vines and very carefully placed another stencil card over it, painting in yellow daisy-shaped flowers so that they nestled among the leaves. By the time she had reached the second corner with the yellow daisies, it was already mid-afternoon.
She climbed down the step-ladder and stood back to look at her work, thrusting her hands into her mother’s baggy overalls. For the first time in months, she felt like her old self again.
Outside, the curtains were completely dry, but so cold to the touch that Rusty wondered at first if they were still a little damp. She hung them back up at the windows.
‘Boy!’ she yelled. ‘They’re the same dark green as the vines!’ And she danced like a lunatic on the wooden floor.
She tore in and out of the Cabin, dragging in as much wood and leaves and dry wallpaper as possible, in an effort to beat the darkness. Under the rubble she found three broken kitchen chairs. She hauled them into the Cabin.
Two of them had their backs broken and legs missing. The one with a back had only two legs. She took a torch outside and found two more legs. With a lot of sawing and banging, she made two stools by hammering a leg into each vacant hole and sawing off the broken backs completely.
It was later, while she was sitting on one of her homemade stools, turning bricks and planks of wood over to help them dry out in front of the fire, that she began to realize the seriousness of what she had done.
She decided that she must plan her return trip to school carefully. She wrote a letter to her parents, telling them how she was getting along in maths and English, and added that she hadn’t received many order marks that week. She didn’t tell them how lonely she still felt and how, for no apparent reason, she had started snapping at everyone, or how she hated them both for hating each other.
The next morning she rose early, hammered in a nail above the mantelpiece, and hung the cracked mirror up over the fireplace. In spite of the bitter cold, she stood outside by the tap and washed, and cleaned her teeth. Her fingernails had traces of paint around and beneath them, so she had to rub the skin violently and use a small nail to push out the paint from underneath.
She ran
quickly into the Cabin, stood in front of the mirror, and brushed her hair firmly, plaiting it and adding the regulation green ribbons at the bottom. Once she had her uniform on, no one, she thought, would ever suspect that she hadn’t been with her parents that weekend. She pulled on her galoshes over her walking shoes, put on her hat, Beanie and scarf, and stood in the doorway for a moment, to take a last look at the room. She closed the door, stepped over a pile of bricks, and walked into the grass.
Once she reached the ditch next to the road, she leapt over it and skidded on to the pavement. To her right was the bus-stop, and a little farther ahead a pillarbox. She ran along the pavement and put her hand inside her pocket for her letter to her parents. It was then that she remembered the one her father had written! She had left the envelope propped up on the mantelpiece.
She posted her own letter and walked back swiftly to the bus-stop. She needed time to think. If anyone spotted her, she could always pretend that she’d just hopped off a bus.
There was nothing she could do about it now. She’d have to wait until her next visit to the Cabin. As yet, she still didn’t know if she had been discovered. If she had, she would know, the moment she stepped through the school gates.
31
No one said a word. She stood in assembly and filed out with the others to the classroom and was, as usual, ignored. No one came to the classroom with a summons for her to see the Headmistress; no one said she smelled of paint or dust; and no one, as usual, asked her what she had been doing all weekend. She slept deeply that night.
On Thursday night, as arranged, Lance was waiting for her on the other side of the wall. They grinned at each other. It was all Rusty could do to keep herself from hugging him.
‘Hiya, Yank,’ she whispered.
‘Hiya, Creeper.’
‘Boy,’ she said, as they headed for the woods, ‘have I got a surprise for you.’
She thought he would admire her for staying there over the weekend. She thought he would be impressed. Instead he grew quiet.
‘What are you going to do?’ he said, when they reached the slope that led to the gate.
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