As the headmaster’s daughters, Joan and her younger sister are not ordinary pupils—they do not have beds in the dormitory or parts in the school play or tuck boxes arriving through the post—and while her parents insist that this set-up is a privilege, to Joan it seems to be no more than a form of constant surveillance and, in her opinion, is bound to give them both asthma. She knows she should be more grateful, being reminded often enough of how lucky she is that her generation has not been sent off to the trenches, and that she is not obliged to run away from home in order to become a nurse in the Great War as her mother did when she was sixteen but, at the same time, she also feels there is something enticing about that youthful display of self-sufficiency, which only serves to make her feel more restless.
There is a whole world out there that is barely recognisable from the safe, padded vantage point of St. Albans. She knows this because she has seen it in her father’s limp, in the newsreels at the cinema showing the Welsh collieries and deserted shipyards of the North; in newspapers and books and films; in the pictures of small children in doorways with grubby knees and no shoes. She glimpsed it when the Great Hunger March passed through St. Albans a few years previously, a straggling procession of men and women so dirty that their skin seemed to have turned a deep, charcoal grey. Joan remembers how one of the marchers stopped outside the lodge as he left town in the morning, leaning against the garden fence and bent double in a fit of coughing.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ Joan had asked her father. ‘Shouldn’t we call the doctor?’
Her father shook his head. ‘That’s coal dust,’ he said. ‘Nothing you can do about silicosis. Cuts into the lungs and kills the tissue. And he’s walking to London with all the rest of them because he wants his job back.’
‘Why doesn’t he just get a different one?’
Her father had not answered this question immediately. He watched as the man drank the glass of water that Lally had taken out to him, and then struggled to catch up with the rest of the marchers. He turned away from her and limped out of the room, muttering, ‘Why indeed?’
He answered this question the following day, interrupting the chaplain just before the recitation of the school prayer in a way that only a headmaster can. He waved a newspaper aloft as he declared to the school that it was a criminal sort of government that refused to acknowledge the reality of life in what they called the ‘Special Areas’ of Britain. It was either a failure of imagination or wilful blindness, but either way it was a betrayal. He instructed each child and teacher in the school to close their eyes and picture life in the ship-building towns where no ships were being built, to think of the boarded-up shops, the Means Test man declaring that a family’s only rug must be sold before any relief could be granted. Imagine the destitution. And then imagine it in winter.
He quoted Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the coalition who was supposed to save the country from economic despair. ‘Has anyone,’ Ramsay MacDonald was reported to have asked in the House of Commons in response to the marchers’ request for an audience, ‘who comes to London, either on foot or in first-class carriages, the constitutional right to demand to see me, to take up my time, whether I like it or not?’
The question was rhetorical and its impact was lost on many of the younger schoolgirls, but Joan’s father let the words hang in the scuffling silence before folding the newspaper in disgust. ‘Our prime minister may not know it, but we have a duty,’ he said, frowning at a noise coming from a group of girls in the Upper Fifth, ‘to make this poor and hungry world a better place for everyone in it. To be responsible.’
Another pause, longer than the first, so that when her father spoke again his voice boomed into the beamed ceiling of the school hall.
‘From each’—she remembers his exact words—‘according to his ability.’
To Joan’s disappointment, her abilities seem to be limited to hockey and schoolwork. At first, she was unsure how either of these could be put to practical use in the way her father envisaged, but she suspected that one might be of more use than the other. Her science teacher, Miss Abbott, was the first to suggest she might try for university, and it was on her instigation that Joan applied to read Natural Sciences for the honours certificate at Cambridge; the flat, weather-beaten town where Miss Abbot had once spent her happiest years before the Great War marched in and snatched away the life she had planned.
Joan is excited about going, although it is less the qualification that interests her than the prospect of going somewhere, anywhere. And it is also the prospect of learning things that she would never have the chance of knowing if she didn’t go, of attending lectures in the mornings, reading books all afternoon, and spending evenings at the cinema watching Mary Brian and Norma Shearer being whisked away on horseback by Gary Cooper, then copying their hairdos later in case the same thing should ever happen to her.
Of course, she knows that in Cambridge she is unlikely to come across Gary Cooper. There will only be real men, men whose teeth do not glint in the moonlight and who ride bicycles instead of horses but still, endless, bountiful men. Boys, some of them, but even they will be a welcome break from the rippling sea of girls at school. Joan did not mention this to her father or Miss Abbott during the coaching sessions for the interview (‘And why do you wish to pursue your academic study at the University of Cambridge?’) but now it simmers under the surface of her enthusiasm. She knows that it is a privilege to be going and she is constantly reminded of this fact by both her father and the college scholarship fund but, frankly, she would have gone anywhere.
Joan’s father is delighted to see her go. He tells her that it will be a wonderful thing to be educated in the religion of reason. These are his words, not hers, although she knows what he means. They understand each other, Joan and her father, sharing a quiet sort of complicity that is not chatty enough for her mother or Lally. Other people tell Joan how much her younger sister resembles her, that they could be twins if not for the five-year age difference, and while Lally flushes with pleasure at this, Joan considers it to be eye-rollingly stupid, although she has to hide this sentiment from Lally. Her sister’s temperament is sweet and wide-eyed, and whereas Joan cannot remember there ever having been a time when she was happy to go shopping for dress material with her mother or make daisy chains in the garden, Lally seems happy to do it. It is only her father who does not see this resemblance and grunts his disagreement when anyone else alludes to it. He is complicit in Joan’s plans to escape, and Joan loves him for this more than for anything else.
In contrast, Joan’s mother is decidedly ungrateful about the whole enterprise. It is clear that she would like to march into that school and have a strong word with Miss Abbott for condemning Joan to eternal spinsterhood by educating her beyond all prospects of future happiness. It is made clear that she does not intend to let the same thing happen to Lally, oh-ho no. Her second daughter will be kept well away from Miss Abbott.
When Joan suggests that going to university is no worse than running away to become a nurse, her mother shakes her head and insists that the two things are quite different. ‘They were unprecedented times, Joanie. You can’t imagine it. You can’t imagine the sound they made, all those boys being delivered at the hospital door, crying out for their mothers as we unloaded them from carts and wagons and ambulances until they filled the corridors. Such a terrible, terrible time.’
Joan has heard this speech before and knows better than to say what she really thinks, which is that yes, it does sound terrible, but all times are unprecedented. Surely her times are unprecedented, too. But she also knows that her mother will not actually be able to stop her, and so while some of the other girls from her class will be enrolling in secretarial college in the autumn and others will be getting married and moving into their own homes, Joan is the only one who is going to university.
Before she goes, there is the University Trousseau to arrange; it is a com
promise, a tactical diversion, to allow her mother this slant on events. A list of items Joan will need is drawn up between them, and Joan is dispatched to the local department store to obtain great swathes of material so that she can be suitably upholstered before leaving. There must be some sort of tweed ensemble, a navy suit, a knitted outfit for lectures, a pair of chic trousers (chic is her mother’s word, indefinable for both of them), three blouses, two belts, two bags (one pretty, one practical), a mackintosh, a simple woollen dress and one smart dance dress. Her mother insists that she should also have a fur coat and she will not be budged on this. It is a huge extravagance, there is no question of buying one: one must be found.
‘You’ve got to look the part, Joanie,’ her mother tells her, surrounded by pins and cottons and materials cut into unlikely shapes on the living-room rug, although neither of them knows what the part should look like. They know only that they do not know, which is not quite enough.
No mention is made of purchasing the set texts or the equipment required for science practicals or any of the other things that Joan feels might actually come in handy for the course. University, it seems, is mostly a question of textiles.
During those first few days of living alone in Cambridge, Joan finds that she is amazingly, gloriously happy just to be alive. She loves her new home with its red-bricked Queen Anne architecture, its beautifully manicured lawns and sports field and tennis courts. Physically, she equates this excitement to the feeling in her stomach when she cycles very fast over the hump bridge at the back of Clare College, that sudden rush of giddiness in her stomach, and then the exhilaration of speeding downhill.
She attends lectures in the mornings, leaving her bicycle propped against the railings of the science faculty on Pembroke Street, and then sliding into the back row of the lecture theatre with her satchel under her arm. The days of chaperones are over, but the lecturers still largely ignore the female presence, addressing the audience as ‘gentlemen.’ They tend to stand directly in front of whatever they have written, mumbling ‘square this’ and ‘subtract that,’ and then wiping the board down to move on to the next calculation before anyone has had time to work out what they are supposed to be doing but Joan remains undeterred. She regards each lecture as a small dot of knowledge which will one day join to another dot, and then another and another, until she will finally understand at least some of the figures chalked up in minute smudges on the blackboard, and she is hopeful that this will come about before the summer examinations.
Her room at Newnham is on the ground floor of Peile Hall, a relatively new block with modern bathrooms and kitchenettes and a view out over the immaculate gardens. It is as large as the drawing room at home, with a small truckle bed pushed up against one wall and a thick-cushioned sofa against the other, leaving a huge expanse of carpet in the middle where she can practise handstands without the remotest possibility of breaking anything. The kitchenette has a single gas ring upon which she has not yet attempted to cook, preferring to skip breakfast in favour of an apple on the way to lectures, followed by a packed lunch of crusty bread with cheese or boiled ham, and then dinner in Hall, a large, light room with beautiful, corniced ceilings and long, communal tables. Although there is no one she immediately takes to in those first few days, she is not lonely. Everyone is astonishingly friendly, and these dinners are enjoyable, rumbustious affairs. She is not used to this after the cliques and hierarchies of school, and she puts it down to the fact that here, in Cambridge, everyone is a bit of a swot, and so for once there is nothing unusual about her.
On her third night, Joan is awoken by a smart rap on the window, followed by a scrabbling noise on the window ledge outside, as if a very large cat is trying to get into her room. She leans out of bed and pinches the bottom corner of the curtain between her finger and thumb and pulls it back. Her hockey stick is propped up against the wall, and there is something comforting about its proximity. She clears her throat, ready to scream if necessary, and peers out.
Two scarlet high-heeled shoes are standing on her windowsill.
She pulls the curtain a little further back and looks upwards. A girl is half-standing, half-crouching in the shoes, resplendent in a black silk dress and a white scarf, and when she sees the curtain lift she smiles and puts a finger to her lips. She crouches down so that her face is almost level with Joan’s.
‘Hurry up and let me in,’ she mouths through the glass.
Joan hesitates for a moment, and then slides out of bed to undo the catch, and the girl steps through the window frame and into Joan’s room. ‘My room’s on the third floor,’ the girl announces, by way of explanation, removing her shoes one at a time before jumping down from the windowsill. ‘Darned curfew,’ she mutters, massaging her toes where her shoes have been chafing. ‘Sorry for getting you up. The laundry window was closed.’
Joan rubs her eyes. ‘Don’t mention it.’
The girl glances around the room, taking in the heavy green curtains and the sofa with its collection of ill-matched cushions. Her hair and eyes are dark, her cheeks smooth and dusted, and her lips bear a bright slash of red lipstick. Joan is suddenly conscious of how she must look, standing barefoot in her nightie with small strips of muslin tied into her hair. She steps back towards her bed, supposing that this might encourage the girl to go, but the girl does not seem to be in any rush.
‘Are you a first year too?’
Joan is surprised by the implication in the question that this girl is also a new arrival. She seems so self-assured, so certain of the rules, that it is hard to believe she hasn’t been here for years. ‘Yes.’
‘English Literature?’
Joan shakes her head. ‘Natural Sciences.’
‘Ah. I was fooled by your cushion covers.’ She pauses. ‘I’m reading Languages. More modern than medieval. I say, I don’t suppose you’ve got a dressing gown I could borrow? I don’t want to get caught walking around like this. Better to pretend we’ve been up all night drinking cocoa or something like the rest of them.’
Joan nods and turns away, not wanting to let on that this was, in fact, how she had spent the latter part of her evening before going to bed, that she was one of them. She goes to the wardrobe and takes out her dressing gown.
‘Is that a mink coat?’ the girl asks from behind Joan’s shoulder, her voice suddenly curious.
‘Hmm, yes, I think so.’ Joan gives a small shrug, self-conscious at having such a thing in her wardrobe, procured on indefinite loan from a second cousin who no longer had any use for it, but Joan cannot imagine that she will ever be bold enough to wear it. ‘It’s a bit hideous, isn’t it?’
‘Well, it’s rather fin de siècle,’ says the girl with a sideways smile, stepping towards the wardrobe. She reaches out her hand and strokes the coat, and then slips it off its hanger, tilts her head to inspect it, and flings it around her shoulders. ‘Although at least it’s not Arctic fox. They’re everywhere at the moment.’
‘Except the Arctic regions.’
The girl gives a short, surprised laugh. She turns around and glances at her back in the mirror. And then she lifts her arms and twirls, so that her silk dress clings to her chest and the mink coat spins out like a flapper outfit: miraculously transformed, made glamorous in a way that Joan has never imagined. So that is how you wear it, Joan thinks. Not draped or buttoned or belted. Just flung.
‘I don’t think it’s hideous,’ the girl says. ‘It’s different.’
Joan smiles. She expects that it is different because it was made so long ago that its cut is no longer recognisable. But there is something rich about it as it spins and flares, something luxuriant and soft which she can’t help but admire as the girl discards it on Joan’s bed. She must remember to thank her mother properly for finding it in her next letter. ‘I suppose it’s not so bad,’ Joan concedes. ‘I’m just not used to it yet.’
‘I’ll bring your dressing gown back tomo
rrow,’ the girl says, tiptoeing to the door and turning the handle. She peers out to check that the corridor is empty, and then looks back to nod towards the pair of scarlet stilettos lying discarded in the middle of Joan’s room. ‘And I’ll pick up my shoes then too, if that’s all right? They don’t make very convincing slippers.’
‘Of course.’ Joan waits for the girl to close the door behind her. She picks up the fur coat and goes to hang it in her wardrobe, and then she glances at the girl’s shoes, so bold against her beige rug. How could anyone walk in those, let alone climb onto a windowsill? Still considering this, she slides her feet into the steep cavities of bright red leather, a close fit but not uncomfortable. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and for a moment she pauses, no longer sleepy but giddy and precarious, before coming to her senses and taking them off, placing them next to her well-worn, low-heeled brogues, and getting back into bed.
SUNDAY, 2.39 P.M.
Ms. Hart takes a photograph from the file and places it on the table next to the photograph of William. ‘Do you recognise this?’
‘Oh,’ Joan whispers. It is the picture from her undergraduate laboratory pass while she was at Cambridge. She has not seen it for years, and yet it is so familiar to her that it is almost like glancing in a mirror; a tea-coloured and misty mirror, yes, but a mirror all the same. Her face in the photograph is powdered and rouged, and her eyes have a distant look about them, silvery-grey in the black-and-white spectrum. There will have been lipstick on her lips to make them so dark and defined, and they are parted slightly in a smile. How different she looks there from how she looks now. So young and innocent and, well, pretty. She has not used that word to describe herself for years. ‘Of course I recognise it.’
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