Virginia Fly is Drowning

by Angela Huth

  ‘Very well. Any way you want it.’ He stepped back. Interesting, thought Virginia, that he couldn’t be bothered to make a further effort to persuade her. Had he done so, she just might have succumbed. As it was, her weekend was coming to a premature end: the time she had looked forward to for twelve years.

  ‘Nice knowing you,’ Charlie was saying, ‘and don’t forget, honey, you write great letters. Gee, when I get back to Mirabelle and tell her I’ve met you, why she’ll go wild, sure as hell.’ He smiled at the thought. Mirabelle’s rages seemed to provoke in him some weird pleasure. ‘Anyway, if you change your mind, you know where to call me. And – thanks for coming. It was a great evening, anyhow. Really great.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Virginia again. ‘Perhaps if I hadn’t been so virginal I would have been more use to you. I wouldn’t have been so – uncompromising this morning.’ She managed to smile.

  ‘There, there, now don’t you worry about a thing, Virginia Fly. I’ll be all right. I can look after myself, don’t you worry.’ He went over to the pile of travel brochures and began flipping through them. ‘Dare say I’ll be able to make some acquaintances somehow.’

  Virginia went to the door. Charlie followed her quickly. He seemed keen for her to be gone now, so that he could get on with the business of finding someone to replace her, perhaps.

  At the door, Virginia said good-bye and thank you, and she hoped he would enjoy England. They shook hands, then Charlie backed away into the room. The last Virginia ever saw of him was standing silhouetted against the net curtains, in the now familiar underpants and angora socks, pulling at the lobe of one of his long ears. Virginia reflected that the gesture conveyed a certain relief. She envied him his lack of concern, and longed for air. But her own room, four floors up, was as airless and stuffy as Charlie’s had been. The bed was turned down, ready for the night before: the curtains drawn. Virginia wondered what to do. It was only half past nine. She had said she would call her mother before eleven to say if Charlie wanted to come down to lunch to-morrow. If he did, then Mrs Fly would have gone to Guildford, made the trip specially, in order to buy a superb joint. And she would make her best Yorkshire pudding, and show him the traditions of England were still worth something.

  Virginia didn’t ring her mother. She lay on the bed and slept immediately. She slept till three in the afternoon.

  When she woke she felt hungry and cold and her head ached with a dull throb. She went downstairs looking furtively about her – she didn’t want to run the risk of bumping into Charlie – and took a taxi to Waterloo Station. Charlie she thought, would be at the Tower by now, or the Zoo or the British Museum. Dearest Mirabelle, I saw the Tower of London yesterday and two baby polar bears at the Zoo (tell that to Charlie junior and Denholm) and I met my old penfriend I told you about, Virginia Fly. Well, Mirabelle honey, you don’t need to worry no more about her …

  At Waterloo Virginia found she had half an hour to wait till the next train. She had £20 in her bag, saved up for the weekend. She went to the chemist and spent £5 on things she had never bought in her life before: scents, bath oils, handcreams, talcum powder, expensive soap. The thin, bulging paper bag of these things gave her a certain pleasure to hold, knowing that to-night, privately in the bathroom, she would pamper herself, soothe her body. It was a small but new kind of anticipation.

  The afternoon was mild. Virginia caught the bus home from the station, enjoying her high view of the weak Surrey sun backlighting the bare trees, the muddy winter cows, the cars that crawled along the lanes at a speed which even her father would consider to be less than average.

  The bus stopped at the top of Acacia Avenue. Virginia walked slowly the length of the peaceful street with its uniform houses, and respectable gardens. Through windows she saw the flicker of television sets, people crowded round the football, people who knew nothing of the experience of last night, nothing of the Piccadilly seduction of one of their quietest neighbours.

  As soon as she put her key in the door, Virginia heard her mother’s anxious footsteps. Mrs Fly was flushed, her eyes both worried and relieved.

  ‘Ginny! What on earth? – I didn’t know what to do about the meat. I thought you were going to ring me.’

  Mr Fly appeared behind his wife.

  ‘Are you all right, Ginny?’ he asked, seeing her face.

  ‘Yes, thank you. It’s just that plans changed.’

  ‘I said to your father: I said, “What shall I do about the meat?” Didn’t I, Ted?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Virginia. ‘I hope you didn’t buy it specially.’

  ‘Well, I did as a matter of fact. Better be safe than sorry, I thought.’

  Virginia stepped into the hall. Her parents made way for her.

  ‘You look quite upset,’ said Mrs Fly, suddenly noticing. ‘Is there anything wrong? What’s happened to Charlie?’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Virginia, ‘Charlie isn’t quite the man we expected. He’s married.’

  Mrs Fly let out a yelp of indignation. Mr Fly said ‘there, there.’ Then they controlled themselves and made a fuss of her. Brought her tea and chocolate cake, and turned the television on to a film she liked. Didn’t ask any questions. And Virginia, exhausted, for once didn’t reject the warm, dull, safe spell they wove around her. She felt in need of a welcome of any kind.

  Late that night she burned the huge pile of Charlie’s letters, and his photograph, in the boiler. And for several days she continued to wear a scarf, till at last Charlie’s teeth marks faded from her neck, and the bruises on the rest of her body disappeared.

  Chapter 5

  The following Monday, Virginia asked her art class to paint a composition called ‘A Bad Day.’ It was keeping them even quieter than the sunsets. Louise Holcroft’s head was bent low over a picture of a woman with a long sad face standing behind a blue and brown striped fence. She was scrubbing at the paper, painting the fence with great care but with a brush that was far too dry.

  ‘More water,’ said Virginia, passing on, and noticing that Louise pursed her lips. She was not a child who took kindly to advice.

  Mary Edgeworth had painted a tall, ugly standard-lamp and was now at work on a pot of geraniums.

  ‘What have they got to do with a bad day?’ asked Virginia.

  ‘They’re the two things I most hate in our house,’ replied Mary. ‘On bad days, they show up specially.’

  Virginia smiled. She liked her class. They were a good, hard-working group. Imaginative, for the most part. Curiously sensitive to her moods. She wondered what sort of a teacher she made them.

  It was warm for once, in the classroom, a winter sun coming through the windows and illuminating the children’s bright paintings of bad days. Virginia felt surprisingly contented. She wondered at what age you ceased to paint a bad day in bright colours. Maybe it wasn’t till you were quite grown-up, or middle-aged.

  She was looking forward to break with particular pleasure. In her bag were two unopened letters, and she was saving them till then. One, she knew from the handwriting, was from the professor. The other was the letter she’d been waiting for, the letter she knew would come. A rather uneven hand, vivid blue ink, postmarked Ealing and addressed care of the television company. Someone had seen her smile.

  The bell went, shrill, echoing. The children rose immediately, at once chattering and laughing, all their concentration snapped off by the ringing peal which marked their day, and meant now milk and buns.

  ‘Dry your paintbrushes and put your water away, don’t forget. I want to see everything neat and tidy. Sarah, you’ll spill it if you do that. Hurry up, Lucy, can’t you? The bell’s gone.’

  Virginia shouted her routine admonitions. They seemed to take an age, putting their art things away. But at last the classroom was empty. Virginia picked up her bag and a pile of books and walked down the clattery linoleum corridor, which smelt of chalk and gym shoes, to the staffroom.

  This was a light, airy room overlooking a strip of we
ll-beaten garden, and playing-fields in the distance. The cream walls were hung with atlases and time-tables and a few prize poems and paintings done by former pupils. The staff, an ill-assorted, nice crowd, stood round a trolley of thick green cups of Nescafé, pecking at their cigarettes, letting the smoke curl up into the air and swirl about the beams of sunlight. When Virginia came in they turned to her and smiled, and raised their cups, clasped in two hands to warm their bluish fingers.

  ‘Our celebrity! How’s virgin life to-day?’ Mr Bluett, the gym and games master, poured her a cup of coffee. He was a friendly, teasing man, pock-marked, shaggy, nearing the age of retirement, though he didn’t like to think about that. Soon, though, the pupils would notice. Even the simplest vault was becoming a struggle. He had always had a certain affection for Virginia: she lent him her books of Christopher Fry and on Thursdays they had both, by mutual consent, refused the rice pudding for so many years, that at last the cook had relented and sent them up special plates of water biscuits and lumps of unfresh Cheddar. It made a bond between them.

  Virginia smiled good-naturedly at Mr Bluett. Since the television programme, she had come in for a good deal of leg-pulling from the staff, and enjoyed her sudden notoriety.

  ‘The virgin smile,’ observed Miss Breedy, the maths teacher. She had made the same remark every day since the programme, and Virginia was finding it hard to respond with the same appreciation as she had done the first time. Miss Breedy was a fifty-eight-year-old virgin herself, though virgin, with its implications of fresh young things swathed in simple garments, was too light a word to apply to her. Tall and thick-limbed, moustached and frizzle-haired, she was an aggressive spinster with a surprisingly small voice. She stumped about the place singing arias from The Magic Flute, and in the evenings loaded herself with bags of books to be corrected in her bedsitter in Croydon. Once, guessing Miss Breedy wasn’t much in demand at the weekends, Virginia had asked her home to lunch on Sunday. Miss Breedy, meticulously neat when it came to writing figures in small squares, was curiously clumsy outside the field of mathematics: she spilt her glass of sherry, her gravy, her trifle and her coffee. But she made up for it by being the first person able to make Mr Fly understand the decimal system. Virginia liked her.

  But to-day she didn’t want to talk to Miss Breedy, Mr Bluett or any of the others. She took her coffee to a small, low modern chair on spindly legs, in the window. Outside, everything was prematurely spring-like: a few crocuses spearing the edges of the grass, the odd snowdrop by the netball pitch. Virginia warmed her hands round her cup. When she drank she could smell the soft flowery smell of the expensive handcream she had put on them that morning. It was her new luxury and she was enjoying it. Her fingers, touching each other, felt uncommonly soft: the smell was delicious. Even Mr Fly had noticed it. He had raised his head in the air at breakfast and sniffed. What was it? Definitely not an average smell, he had said.

  Virginia opened her bag and took out the professor’s letter first. She slit open the envelope slowly, unfolded the single sheet of paper with care. It was only a paragraph long. Before she read it Virginia held it away from herself and contemplated the pattern the writing made. It was pleasing; the professor had fine handwriting: strong, small and neat. He managed to keep very straight lines.

  My dear Miss Fly, it said, To-night I listened to you on the television and I saw you smile. You gave a magnificent performance, considering the subject, though what on earth induced you to talk on such a thing I cannot imagine. However, I write not merely to congratulate you, but also to ask you if, before finally entering into what I believe they call an everlasting bond with your fiancé Charlie, you would spare one day out with an old friend? I have next week to go to Bolton and deliver a score, and make a lecture to some students there. Would you care to accompany me? Not a very exciting invitation, I am afraid, but whenever I have seen you off on the train, on so many evenings, I have thought to myself, one day I will accompany her on to a train. Should you accept, it would indeed be a pleasure, but of course I shall quite understand if, on Charlie’s account, you dismiss the whole idea as out of hand. Yours in anticipation, Hans.

  Virginia pondered on the idea of a day trip to Bolton. She could easily get a day off school. In eight years she had only ever requested one afternoon off, for the dentist, so a second dentist appointment would cause no suspicion. But did she really want to go? She had never seen the professor, except for the one awkward lunch at home, before six in the evening. How would he appear in broad daylight? What would they talk about, in a whole day together? How many hours would it take her to tell him about Charlie, and what would she say?

  Then Virginia began to imagine the pleasures of the journey: the train breakfast, a pile of unrumpled newspapers in a clean first-class carriage (the professor always disapproved of her habit of travelling second to Guildford), the fresh fields and woods streaming beyond the windows, the tall blue chimney stacks of the north: new sights and voices for a day. A little break, as her mother would say, is as good as a holiday. Virginia decided to accept.

  The second letter was plump: thirteen sides of soft, cheapish paper covered with an energetic but ill-formed Biro. The writer rambled on about the excellence of Virginia’s performance on television; how natural she had appeared, and yet how lonely. Virginia smiled to herself. People always connected virginity with loneliness. If you looked cheerful you were considered to be putting on a good face; look serious and at once you’d be accused of unhappiness. In fact, though much of Virginia’s life had been spent alone, in every sense, she knew nothing of the sensations of lonelinesss.

  The writer of the second letter ended with an invitation: It would be so nice if we could get together. Why don’t you come by Thursday week, evening, and we could go down to The George for a drink? I don’t know if you care for pubs, but it’s a very lively friendly place, better than my kitchen my friends say. Looking forward in anticipation to hearing from you. Yours sincerely, Rita Thompson (Mrs).

  Sudden laughter came upon Virginia. She laughed herself to scorn, out loud, sensing that behind her some of the staff shifted their positions to look at her. She could imagine their raised brows and looks of concern. Swivelling round in her chair, still laughing, she put their minds at rest.

  ‘My first fan letter,’ she explained.

  Miss Breedy found herself wincing a little at the manifestations of such fame. She knotted her hands over her large bosom, privately grateful for the warmth of anonymity. Mr Bluett joined in Virginia’s laughter.

  ‘I thought you had a funny look in your eye.’ He wagged his finger at Virginia, and a bell rang sharply, hurting his ears, which it never used to do.

  The staff gathered up their text books and went back to their classes. Virginia was free till the 12.30 lesson. When the room was empty she got up and began collecting up the empty coffee mugs, arranging them in precise, neat lines on the trolley. Her knees felt shaky and her hands trembled slightly. Some instinct told her that Mrs Rita Thompson of Ealing would remain her only fan. There would be no more letters. For the first time for years she felt the warning signs of self-pitying tears. At once angry with herself, she hastily sat at the large round table in the middle of the room and took a pad of Basildon Bond from her bag. Above her head the last of the cigarette smoke tangled itself round the shafts of sunlight, and through the window she could see Mr Bluett, suddenly in shorts, forcing himself round the netball pitch in a measured jog.

  She took up Mrs Thompson’s spongy letter, re-read it, and settled down to accept its kind invitation.

  Before breakfast, one morning the following week, Virginia found the professor waiting for her at the platform barrier at Euston station. He had that air about him of someone who has got up earlier than is his custom, and who has not yet fully established the kind of relationship he is going to have with the day. His tie was askew and his grey hair in a muddle: he wore as usual his Sherlock Holmes coat with its cloaklike shoulders, and carried a bundle of crumpled
papers under his arm.

  ‘Ah! Miss Fly. On time as usual. Me, early as usual. Good morning to you.’

  ‘Good morning, Professor.’

  ‘Please, for heaven’s sake, call me Hans.’

  ‘And me Virginia.’

  Their little ritual over, they smiled uneasily at each other. The professor took Virginia’s arm and they walked down the platform. Virginia registered the familiar bulk of his body was comfortable. She looked forward to breakfast.

  The professor had booked a table. Virginia found on her seat a large pile of carefully folded newspapers. She took off her coat – it was warm in the carriage – and settled herself down happily. Hans was already disrupting the neatness of the laid table – pushing away cutlery and plates – to make room for his notes, which he read with instant concentration, stopping only to cross out the occasional word with a blunt pencil.

  Virginia looked about her. She studied the hurrying grey men on the platform, shoulders hunched, faces serious and secretive, responsibilities packed heavily into their fibre-glass brief-cases. She wondered whom they had first seduced, and when, and where, and how it had been. A tall middle-aged woman with a thin wide mouth of scarlet, and a coat to match, came busying along with a scattering of poodles at her high heels. She juggled their leads with some skill, so that they didn’t trip her up. She stopped just by Virginia’s window. The poodles barked silently, and a smallish sandy man, blinking fast, caught up the scarlet woman. They mouthed things at each other and the man, in some agitation, dabbed at his jowls with a string-gloved hand. The woman handed him the bunch of leads with a flicker of a smile, and then was gone, into the train. The poodles took their chance. Instantly they zigzagged round the man’s legs, knotting him up like a maypole. He was helpless, confused, ashamed. Just then the red woman swept down the passage between the Pullman tables, and in a careless glance noticed her man’s dilemma. She stretched across Virginia’s table with no apology, and opened the top window.