by Phoebe Wynne
Daisy frowned. ‘Is this the consent thing you were talking about last week?’
‘What?’
‘When we were swimming.’
‘Oh.’ Rose bit her lip. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘During swimming?’ Freddie interrupted. ‘Did I miss something?’
‘But, guys.’ Nessa put in, staring hard at the images, ‘can you imagine being a tree for the rest of your life?’
‘I don’t know, Ness.’ Daisy’s shoulders seemed to wilt. ‘Might be quite nice. And near her father … it’s a very pretty tree.’
‘I suppose the point is, girls,’ Rose urged, ‘she liberated herself from a man she didn’t want.’
Nessa wasn’t having it. ‘But then she couldn’t have anyone else, either?’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s true …’ Rose answered. ‘But hadn’t that always been her wish? It’s a tricky one.’
Nessa sat up, her freckled cheek touching the sunlight from the window. ‘Madam, before she went home, Clarissa was saying that everything you teach us is nonsense. I don’t think she likes you very much.’
Rose shrugged wearily. ‘I wouldn’t pay too much attention, Nessa. She’s got a bee in her bonnet, that one.’
Freddie tossed back her head. ‘I keep saying, she doesn’t even know you, Madam.’
‘I really don’t mind, Freddie. In fact, being disliked is one of the perks of the job.’
‘Yeah, but this is Clarissa we’re talking about.’ Nessa pulled a face. ‘She’s like a goddess.’
Rose moved away from the little group. Daisy was still staring at the images in the book, while Freddie turned the Medea postcard over in her hands.
‘A goddess, really? I don’t think any of us can aspire to deity, Nessa. They weren’t actually that nice, and,’ Rose added with a stifled laugh, ‘who wants to live forever? Better to be yourselves.’
Nessa rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t know about being ourselves, Madam. Have you seen us compared to the Sixth?’
‘Yes, Nessa, your inner beauty and your unbounded sass outdo them on a daily basis.’
Freddie laughed at that.
Daisy perked up. ‘Can we be heroines instead of goddesses, Madam?’
‘Why not?’ Rose scanned the faces of the three girls. ‘Good idea. You can be heroines.’ She nodded. ‘You will be heroines. Just like the women in these stories.’
Daisy was pleased and Freddie, her face tense with thought, gave her a glance before turning back to Rose.
The classroom door pushed open, knocking them out of their conversation. All four of them turned at the interruption. A distressed Emma took in the wide book laid out, the three girls sitting on the desks.
‘What are you all doing up here?’
Rose suddenly panicked. ‘We’re just discussing—’
‘I didn’t mean you, Madam. It’s breaktime. Move along, girls.’
The girls looked at Rose and she at them. In the next moment Nessa darted to the door, while Daisy closed the book, and Freddie pressed the postcard back onto the wall. Rose watched them as they gathered at the door next to a stern Emma.
‘Thanks for the lesson, Madam,’ called Daisy as she slipped through the gap.
‘It wasn’t a lesson,’ Nessa said quickly to Emma. She turned to Rose. ‘Bye Madam, and thanks.’
As Emma raised her arm like a bar across the open door, Freddie turned her tawny eyes to Rose, but was then gone in a flurry of red-gold hair. Emma trod down the stairs behind the girls; thankfully, Rose could only hear her undertones of rebuke.
Affiliates Day heralded the penultimate day of term, and Rose was glad to get there. It hadn’t begun particularly well; Emma had berated Rose in the Classics office about a matter that had come up during a common room conversation.
‘Did you tell Vanessa Saville-Vye she didn’t have to be a Compassion?’
Rose was staring into her planner, pressing her pen onto the page in front of her. She didn’t want to lie. ‘Oh. Nessa. She’s struggling, you see.’
‘My dear girl, you can try all you like,’ Emma was standing and gesticulating, like a Roman senator giving a speech, ‘but you can’t possibly have any say in these girls’ futures. It’s not for us to decide.’
Rose didn’t look up as Emma carried on. ‘You mustn’t interfere. I hear she’s been misbehaving a lot recently, answering back … For one thing, Deirdre said she was impossible during Conversation. Apparently the girl refused to engage in the discourse, or recite the rote responses, and said the others shouldn’t either! Appalling.’ Emma huffed, pulling off her glasses and rubbing them across her chest as Rose looked up. ‘I sincerely hope that that has nothing to do with you.’
‘Well,’ Rose responded, feeling emboldened by Nessa’s outburst, ‘I think that sounds really encouraging. Good for her if she wants to express herself.’
‘Well, there’s a limit to what they’ll take from her, let me tell you!’
Rose hesitated. ‘What limit? And who are you referring to?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Rose. And today of all days.’
‘I’m not doing anything today,’ Rose said dully, ‘they’ve told me I’m free to carry on as normal.’ Still an outsider, Rose thought, excluded from the very system that sought to rein her in.
‘Well,’ Emma turned back to her desk in a spin of crossness, ‘I am. What do you think my meetings have been about? Today is an important day!’
Rose watched Emma resume her work irritably; she wasn’t going to ask. Affiliates Day was for educational visitors, the formal proceedings centred around expansion – Rose at least understood that. In fact, she was grateful she’d be left alone, and that Frances was speaking to her again, even if she insisted that Rose looked at her differently now.
‘No, no, House See is fine,’ Frances had reassured Rose earlier that day, after she’d surreptitiously asked whether the Japanese girls would be hidden away again, now that they had their own house. ‘Open Day was market day and Affiliates Day is professional.’
Rose had looked at Frances, sick to her heart. Market day?
In her classroom Rose had smoothed out her tattered posters, just in case any visitors stopped by; she nodded briefly at the Daphne postcard that Daisy had picked out the week before, pressing it firmly back on the wall. Market day. She hadn’t wanted to push Frances any further, especially as their friendship seemed so fragile. Still: Market day? Every time her feelings threatened to overwhelm her, Rose had thought of Nessa, of her own mother, and then finally, of Bethany.
Just after breaktime and as an act of appeasement, Rose offered to fetch Emma a cup of tea. She found herself smiling desperately at every visiting face that passed her on the Great Stairs, along the main corridor too, where she passed a group of visitors led by a man with a thick Russian accent. His unlikely set were dressed in suits, two with an emblem pinned on the lapel and another with an insignia stitched to a breast pocket. Rose squinted at a school motto she thought she recognised. Affiliates, Rose thought dimly as other visiting groups bloomed behind them, so this was what the governors had meant.
But on her return the corridors were quiet; and stepping up the Great Stairs – carefully, with her two cups of tea – she spotted Hanako on the library landing, hovering outside the closed doors, clearly upset.
‘Oh, Madam!’ The girl saw Rose’s inquiring face. ‘I’m so nervous! They are making me speak.’
‘Who is?’ Rose stiffened. ‘About what?’
Hanako faced the door, her small teeth pulling at her lip. ‘I must go in, Madam.’
Rose hesitated, feeling the girl’s anguish. ‘Then let’s go in together.’ She nudged the door open with her knee as Hanako’s fingers curled around the doorknob.
The library was busy. The Headmaster was addressing a short semicircle of listeners, the tall room rearranged to acco
mmodate them.
‘In return the Japanese girls learn English and their families are associated with the prestige of Caldonbrae Hall. It is a very prosperous and successful scheme, which we are now preparing to roll out to other nations. But don’t take my word for it – let’s hear directly from one of our House See girls, Hanako.’
Rose stopped as an obedient Hanako moved ahead of her, drawn like a magnet up to the front and to the Headmaster’s side.
The girl began to speak. Rose anxiously moved over to the librarian’s desk to set down her two teacups, teetering in their saucers. She looked over the heads of the seated swarm of smartly dressed men and a few elegant women, all drinking in the exciting prospects of aligning themselves with the great Caldonbrae Hall. Hoping that they might increase their status in society, or bring in some wealth to boost their own institution’s assets. Learning how to train crowds of girls across England, Scotland and beyond to become wives. Rose felt her chest tighten with a quiet fury. The entire group seemed to be dirtying the very library itself, their ardent attention polluting the books. Unseen, Rose scowled at the Headmaster and his deputy standing at the front.
But on the librarian’s desk, a stack of paper nudged her hand. Rose looked down. Beside her steaming teacups was a pile of brochures, cleanly printed and identical to the ones she’d seen on Open Day. She weighed one with her eyes, it was dense with information. Frances had said they were sixth-form prospectuses. Rose lifted the topmost one and flicked through the pages carefully. There they were: pictures of the Lower Sixth, each of them advertised, labelled and precisely described. Open Day was market day – Rose could still hear Frances’s statement, loud over Hanako’s nervous stuttering. She bit her lip to avoid the scream in her heart.
Pages of girls’ faces. Each Lower Sixth’s ‘provenance’ beneath her portrait, then a division of three threads: Discipline, Study, Value, each with a list of achievements. Rose remembered those men in this very room, dripping all over the pictures, poring over the girls for sale. Suitors, Rose thought. Not fathers at all, as Frances had said. As her chest thrummed Rose flicked to the back pages: ‘Make an Arrangement’.
Rose looked up suddenly. Hanako had stopped, struggling to find her words, her eyes marred with tears. The Headmaster was approaching the girl, making to circle her shoulders with his arm.
‘Leave her alone. Stop this!’ Rose shouted out before she could stop herself. Her hands gripped the brochure as dozens of faces turned to her, the Headmaster’s first of all.
‘Madam?’ the Headmaster’s face was creased with unpleasant surprise.
‘Can’t you see she’s upset?’ Anger bubbled up in Rose’s chest and she darted forward. ‘And no wonder! This is a disgrace.’ The library seemed to hollow out with silence as the listening audience turned to Rose. ‘And all of you! You’re complicit in all of this!’ Rose saw several affronted faces and Vivien’s venomous eyes. ‘God, me too. And you’re here, desperate to be a part of it? You’re disgusting. You and your private schools should be abolished!’ She sobbed as she felt the full weight of the last weeks, the truth of Hope and its system reflected here in the Headmaster’s face, in these intrusive visitors, in those printed pictures. ‘You and your ruling classes! You’re all fucking disgusting!’
‘Miss Christie,’ the Headmaster called out to her, touching Hanako’s shoulder, and regoverning the room. ‘Now, that’s quite enough. Please remove yourself from the library so that we can get on with our meeting.’
‘Leave Hanako alone,’ Rose shrieked back across those rows of startled faces. ‘Don’t you touch her!’
Everything happened in slow motion. Two teachers rose from the back row, moving to block Rose with their figures and an extended arm. Vivien took the Headmaster’s place and held Hanako’s shoulders, while the man himself moved around the seated group.
‘And I’m not one of your Madams, either!’ Seeing the Headmaster’s approach, Rose glanced up at the tall immovable bookcases of the library; she wanted to throw herself at them, rock them back and forth and heave them over. Over the heads of these greedy and anticipating visitors. But Frances was suddenly at Rose’s elbow, her face lit with horror and astonishment.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, do forgive us for these unexpected theatricals.’ A beat of fear struck Rose at seeing the Headmaster nearing her, at hearing Vivien’s sonorous voice. ‘We sincerely apologise.’
‘Indeed,’ the man with the Russian accent responded scornfully, turning back to Vivien. ‘Bad form, Ms Johns. Bad form.’
Frances was guiding Rose away quickly. Rose kept her eyes on the Headmaster, marshalling her courage. They met at the library doors.
‘Now that you’ve had your little outburst,’ the Headmaster said quietly, his mouth barely open, ‘I hope that’s over with.’
Rose heaved her chest and realised she was vibrating with fear. ‘I won’t be bullied by you. I don’t know how you live with yourself.’ She could feel Frances’s tightening grip on her arm. ‘This school is a disgrace. And now you want to spread it further, like a disease.’
The Headmaster’s gaze was reserved for Rose’s face alone. He said smoothly, ‘Frances, you know what to do.’
‘Yes, Headmaster.’
‘No,’ Rose snapped at Frances beside her. ‘Don’t touch me!’
‘Rose!’ Frances’s voice was brittle behind Rose’s ear. ‘Calm down. There are people here …’
‘Get away from me,’ Rose cried out bitterly.
Rose somehow elbowed her way out of the library, shaking Frances away as the door fell closed. Her head hammered in agony as she tore down the Great Stairs, along the main corridors and back through the passageways, her arms propping her up, her knees brushing against the walls. She felt broken, hot, split apart. But she had no regret over what she had spoken aloud – or what she might have jeopardised for herself. She wanted to tear apart that group of consorting schoolmasters and teachers ensconced in that great library.
Too late she remembered the cups of tea she’d placed on the librarian’s desk. Fortunate for the Headmaster that she’d forgotten them – she would have gladly overturned the burning fluid onto her own hands and let them scorch her flesh for her own complicity, before smashing the porcelain into pieces and driving them deep into the Headmaster’s face.
SUMMER TERM
‘Caldonbrae Hall is highly unique in its founding vision, and as such,
it is enormously successful in achieving its aims.’
HM (CI) Inspectorate of Schools within
the United Kingdom, 1992
Caldonbrae Hall prospectus, 150th anniversary edition
BOUDICCA
eo provectas Romanorum cupidines ut non corpora, ne senectam quidem aut virginitatem impollutam relinquant. adesse tamen deos iustae vindictae: cecidisse legionem quae proelium ausa sit; ceteros castris occultari aut fugam circumspicere.
Roman lust has gone so far that our very persons, regardless even of age or virginity, have not been left unpolluted. But the gods are on the side of a righteous vengeance; for a legion which dared to fight has perished, and the rest are hiding themselves in their camp, or are considering fleeing.
(Tacitus’ Annals XIV.35, written c.AD116)
Boudicca is celebrated in Britain today – there’s a heroic bronze statue of her in a horse-drawn chariot that stands high beside Westminster Bridge and gazes at the Houses of Parliament. Some irony there, perhaps, when she could be seen as an anti-colonialist Celtic terrorist that fought against the might of the Roman superpower.
Boudicca was queen of the Iceni, a native Celtic tribe of England, and ruled alongside her husband, King Prasutagus. She certainly looked the part, with her tall stature, ribbons of red hair, gold jewellery, and fierce eyes that shot out firebolts – an exaggeration of the truth, perhaps, to strike fear into the hearts of her enemies.
Boudicca’s husband, King Prasu
tagus, was an ally of Rome during the invasion, and upon his death he left the kingdom jointly to the Roman emperor and to his wife and daughters. But the local Roman governors had other ideas. They took over the kingdom, raped Prasutagus’s grieving daughters and had Queen Boudicca flogged. It would have served them better to kill her. The Iceni people were loyal to their queen, and desperate after the seizure of their lands. Led by the furious Boudicca, the Iceni revolted against the Romans. The death toll was so huge that the Roman emperor Nero considered withdrawing all forces from Britain. However, in one final stand, the Roman army amassed its might. They managed to outnumber Boudicca’s forces in the Midlands, and win a decisive victory.
At the battleground and refusing to be captured, Boudicca tugged on the reins of her horse-drawn chariot, her daughters beside her. She told her comrades that they could choose to either take their own lives or become Roman slaves. Her own choice was clear – she could only win or die. Boudicca returned home for that purpose, killing her daughters before killing herself. The province of Britain was once again under Roman control.
But the Romans did not forget. The courage of Boudicca and her Iceni was a warning to the superpower that its invading tyranny would not go unchallenged.
19.
‘I wish you’d cheer up, Rose,’ her mother scowled from her wheelchair. ‘I thought you were only staying a week.’
Rose shifted her gaze away from the windows of the glass conservatory. ‘The administrator already told you, I’m staying for the whole holiday.’
‘Can’t you go back to Scotland? I can’t have you moping around here like this. What on earth is the matter with you?’
‘Nothing is the matter with me,’ said Rose in a monotone. ‘I’m just thinking.’
That’s all Rose had done for the last ten days: think through what had happened, what she’d seen on Affiliates Day and what she’d heard at the meeting with the deputy head the following morning.