Alice Under Discipline, Part 1

by Garth ToynTanen

  She now envisaged a number of circles marked out in the corner, each sited slightly higher than the first, in any of which, depending on the whim of her ‘carers’, Alice might be obliged to keep her nose in contact with the wall. Some might require straining on tip-toes to hold position, others perhaps necessitating a tiresomely bent-backed posture be maintained. Why stop there, why not introduce an extra ‘twist’? She laughed out loud, at the perceived pun that had just sort of popped up in her internal dialogue and its apt applicability to the image now springing up in her mind, her soft giggly voice reverberating off the empty walls.

  Yes, she thought, why not have some of those circles inscribed at either side of the corner’s apex. In that way, while obliged to stand square-on to the corner, Alice would be additionally tasked to keep her neck twisted to one side or another - and to a lesser or greater extent, as her disobedience might demand. Perhaps young Alice might be additionally charged with maintaining a stoop or stretching up on tiptoes... Or to keep a sheet of paper aloft, anchored between the tip of her nose and the wall? What a grand idea that would be!

  And there should be a raised dais in that tiny - oh so tiny - punishment room for the girl to stand on; a cylindrical platform possessing just barely sufficient area to accommodate both the girls feet if pressed smartly together. But then again: what if that platform was interchangeable? What if, on occasion, it could be swapped for one possessing an even narrower top, one narrow enough to oblige the girl to stand on one leg?

  Still deep in thought she looked up at the far end of the room; perhaps that end could be raised to form a dais, the chalkboard set to the rear with the larger desk and a suitably comfortable chair placed in front of it and perhaps an easel board to the right, standing on the floor just off to the side of the platform. The extra elevation of the dais would make for a significant psychological advantage for anyone sitting there supervising.

  One thing she was sure about was that she was not going to tolerate any tampering with her arrangement once finalised, nor would there be any scope for tantrum-fuelled kicking around of chairs and the like - and she felt sure there were bound to be many bouts of foot stomping, pouting tears. She would have the whole kit and caboodle firmly anchored to the floor with bolted brackets. She knew it could be done; she’d seen similar installations put to use in homes for the behaviourally disturbed and even in the behavioural research facility she had links to and helped fund. What was more it was work that, given the right set of parts and tools, she could undertake personally or at most with the aid of her housekeeper - and she could be relied upon for discretion; she had too much on the woman’s past for it to be otherwise.

  It was a similar state of affairs where Mrs Daphne Larkspear was concerned - what a find she had been, what a boon to be able to be track her down after all these years, even if it had taken the efforts of a grossly over-remunerated private detective. That sour-faced woman had taught at the convent school she herself had been a pupil at. They had all known what she had been like, had all heard tales of what she would do if she got you alone in her office, but her dismissal had been so hushed up that there had been barely a whisper outside that immediate knot of pupils known among themselves - and affectionately, by her - as ‘her girls’ - those that understood particularly well while that title of ‘Mrs’ was so inapt.

  There had been, though, rumours that there had been some sort of unwritten agreement that she would never hold another teaching post again. There were certain individuals, not a million miles away, who could say for sure - if pressed - that those whispers had been more than mere conjecture. Indeed there were letters, missives of flowery verse, outpourings of love and desire not too mention less fragrant and even more ill-advised suggestions - and all of it tucked away in her dear departed husband’s safe, along with the leverage she now kept there that gave control over his darling daughter.

  Not that she’d need any of it to persuade dear Mrs Larkspear to perform; not when she was offering the woman her heart’s most secret desire on a plate. She’d always been going on about the lack of ‘standards’ in the modern school system and hankering over the ‘good old days’ of strict discipline and even stricter uniforms, well now she could have all of that - in spades! The latter it seemed had always been the woman’s thing. She had barely mentioned the bare bones of her plan to her old teacher before the woman had been scratching out lines, seams and curves on a pad, with all the aplomb of a fashion house designer - though what had emerged through sheet after hastily scribbled sheet had had little to do with desirable aspirational dressing and more a modern teen’s worst nightmare.

  She turned to walk out, and then she paused for thought: Should there be a clock? Surely there should be a clock? But was there any need for one - was it even desirable, come to that matter; and wouldn’t it just be distracting? No, there probably wasn’t any real need, but then again she had just the thing to match the décor she had in mind.

  The timepiece in question was an old 1950s wall clock that had come as part of a job lot of fixtures, fittings and equipment that she had purchased at a North London sale room. She had made the purchase on behalf of a charity she helped support and the furnishings - having been salvaged from a famous London mental hospital in the process of being converted into residential apartments - had been thought perfect for a project they had been chewing over. Much of that purchase had indeed been pressed into service. The poor old clock, though, had seen better days; yet it seemed to have a charmed life and, despite being a useless piece of plastic, had somehow avoided both the builder’s skip and the local recycle yard and presently resided in an old outhouse.

  It seemed such a shame to waste it. It would be equally useless anywhere else, it had just the right institutional look - and it was even beige! It had once graced the wall behind a departmental reception desk, its plastic case functional rather than decorative. It had a large face and an eye-catching sweeping second hand, but that was where its utility ended nowadays - the hour and minute hands hung limply, permanently indicating half past six, and merely swung to and fro if one rocked it.

  Actually, the latter was not quite true - once mounted up on a wall the clock’s behaviour became a little more complex. In situ it took on a bloody-minded character as if its innards were possessed by some mischievous demon, determined to drive all and sundry quite insane by its antics. Indeed, quite unpredictably, both the hour and the minute hand would on occasion begin to struggle their way up the clock face, jittering and quivering and threatening to fall back at every step.

  Sometimes the minute hand in isolation would decide to tackle the climb to the top of the hour. Once there, the long, slender, black arrowhead would wobble, hesitating either side of ‘twelve’ and wavering from side to side like some over-anxious schoolchild’s hand quivering excitedly in class. Other times it would jerk suddenly past this uncertain equilibrium, as if powered by a stretched elastic band, succumbing to gravity and plummeting back to the bottom like an executioner’s axe - usually, but not always, in a clockwise direction.

  The stubbier hour hand, by contrast, rarely, if ever, made it past 9 o’clock, whereupon it would shudder to a standstill. Sometimes it would stick there for days. At other times, wherever it had happened to grind to a halt, It would twitch for a while, as if determined to continue on its way - perhaps for a few dozen ticks, perhaps longer - before unpredictably slipping back down to its customary half-past-six position. Always, though, the bright red second hand would continues to tick its way around the dial as normal, as if that was of any use.

  There was another problem suffered by this useless old hospital clock, though: Despite being electrically driven It suffered from an intrusively loud tick. Once connected up - it ran on mains electricity - it issued a particularly maddening metronomic tapping that most people would find hard to live with outside the noisy hustle-bustle of a hospital intake room it had originated from.

 
But was any of that such a detraction from the clock’s utility, when it just looked so ‘right’? Did it really matter that it did not actually give the time? In fact, now she came to think about it, that aspect of it was perfect. Yes indeed! It had the potential for distraction, but it was the unwelcome distraction of the dripping tap, the flickering fluorescent lamp on the verge of failing, or the hidden or misplaced gizmo that intermittently bleeps in the dead of night, yet defies location. It was not something that might lead to wistful daydreaming - quite the opposite in fact; it tended to continually break one’s chain of thought. There were circumstances under which the right sort of distraction had it uses.

  Carefully closing the door behind her she turned the key in the lock. A good sturdy lock, she noted. Slipping the heavy iron key in the hip pocket of her skirt she made a mental note to have wire mesh fitted over those windows - just as a precaution; there was so much crime these days she felt sure the contractors would understand. If a room was to be modified for the use she had in mind, this was it. With the addition of the usual accoutrements one might expect and a few books it would be perfect - especially given all those little refinements she had just come up with.

  Now she would settle with a sherry and look through all those sketches her old teacher had sent her - she would want to have come to a decision by the time she arrived to move in. Then there were all those fabric swatches to look through, even when a style or set of styles were settled upon. And then there was that corsetiere woman Mrs Larkspear had given her the address of and that she had still to get around to consult. That might prove interesting, although she might have to tread warily given some of the decidedly singular specifications her old teacher had suggested.

  Tapping lightly down the stairs, her high heels clattering on the dark wooden treads, her hand tracing the length of the polished banister rail and poised ready should she misplace her footing on the narrow steps, her mind again flashed back to her old teacher and that ‘reunion’ get-together she had engineered.

  Mrs Larkspear had always been one of those tweedy old fashioned teachers who one felt would have had little compunction in putting to good use the school strap, rattan cane or Lochgelly tawse across the bottom or hands of her girls at the slightest sign of insolence or the mildest of perceived infractions had it been left up to her. Of course she had never been given the chance to have a free hand - such measures had been frowned on even then - officially. Unofficially on the other hand, at least in so far as some of her ‘inner circle’ of girls had been concerned - her ‘favourites’ - she had been apt to flout the rules, once she had something ‘on’ a girl, some hold over her, and the poor thing felt unable to speak up.

  More than one had been encouraged to be ‘friendly’ under the persuasion of the pliant bamboo wand she kept in her room - hidden in plain sight as a support for one of the many tall house plants she kept there. Some had taken longer to wear down than others - and she had only ever gone for ‘straight’ girls - but alternated with supervised ice-cold showers together with enforced early morning cross-country runs urged along by the switch she would carry with her, a good hard caning administered on a day-to-day basis always did the trick in the end.

  She had never suffered that sort of thing herself. She had been too clever for the aging perverted dyke. In fact unbeknownst to the redoubtable Mrs Larkspear it had been her testimony, anonymously forwarded to the powers that be, that had indirectly led to the woman’s downfall; she had done just enough to flag up the trail of crumbs, she’d let others follow it. It was ironic, therefore that she should now be the one to help kick-start the rehabilitation of the woman’s professional reputation through finding her a post where her old fashioned views on educational practices would be appreciated. What was more, it was a post that would be clear of all those interfering modern restrictions and legal obligations she had found so frustrating and where a blind eye would most decidedly be turned to any ‘extracurricular activities’ that might come to the woman’s mind.

  She had been glad to see the woman still dressing in her customary tweed jacket-and-skirt ensembles or woollen twinsets and retaining that slightly butch hair style she’d had back then, albeit that it had been allowed to grow and was these days tightly pinned back to achieve the same effect. She had been gladdened, too, to see that same sparkle light up in her old teacher’s hard blue eyes. She didn’t doubt that given a free rein this woman would keep a girl busily embroiled in a life of never-ending punitive tedium - in fact, the perfect private tutor-cum-governess; just like back in those ‘good old days’ the woman had forever been rambling on about when she’d been at school.

  CHAPTER 4

  DOMESTIC DISCIPLINE IN THE HOUSE OF DAPHNE LARKSPEAR

  Karen Lamberton-Marchment had rounded off her tour of the more obscure, rarely visited, corners of the great house with a thorough exploration of her rambling home’s other extreme, vis-à-vis the many basement rooms. This was an area that had once served as the ‘downstairs’ ‘engine room’ of the house, back in those far-off days of ‘domestics’, scullery maids, ‘tweenies’, parlour maids, butlers and footmen and the like. It was also a zone that had yielded much to investigation, offering discretion, privacy, security and isolation while requiring very little in terms of modification beyond the fitting of sturdy locks here and there, a little ‘bricking-up’ and the addition of one or two key fitments and fittings - all factors that went to bolster her plans.

  Okay, so perhaps the house had never been grand enough to have justified a butler and footmen, but she couldn’t help but reflect on how such a household would almost certainly have included most of the rest of the domestic servant pack, back in that time of hand, foot and finger luxury. Now there was only the housekeeper; though she could be useful in her way. But of course soon, if all went well, there would be the addition to the household of a sort of governess-cum-school ma’am figure in the overbearing and domineering form of the redoubtable Mrs Daphne Larkspear - and perhaps the poor repressed young thing that presently ‘kept house’ for her. Yes, now she - Karen Lamberton-Marchment - had been left in charge the house was coming back alive.

  The housekeeper, though, was a strange bird. She had always harboured some sort of unexplained grudge against the master of the house in his lifetime. It was something she had taken little care to disguise yet at the same time had apparently never been admonished for - something else that had always gone unexplained. Yet since his untimely passing this animosity of his housekeeper’s, rather then subsiding, had somehow become transferred on to his daughter’s shoulders, and noticeably so, as if the girl were acting as a proxy for her true target. But what had merely been a sort of grudging disrespect, in the case of his daughter, had become magnified, more focused somehow, manifesting as an almost pathological dislike that bordered at times on an out and out irrational hatred for young Alice. She knew her father’s housekeeper had few scruples and she had always thought she could read something of a spiteful nature in her, residing just below the surface. Now she was beginning to suspect that there might actually be some kind of psychopathology at work there too, perhaps something that might be amenable to a little manipulation - now that would be useful.

  Full of self-satisfaction Karen Lamberton-Marchment now seated herself comfortably by the drawing room fire, a full schooner of sherry already in hand. It was a hand cut lead crystal glass, one of her best, one of the special ones she kept for such occasions, when she was in a celebratory mood, and the flames danced in the facets of its stem. Her mind was made up and her plans for her errant stepdaughter were now well in hand. With very little else in life to trouble her she could now afford the time to relax - it was a present to herself. Reclining back in her favourite resting place, one of a pair of elegant Georgian Revival high wingback armchairs in the manner of George III that were set to either side of the grate, her mind drifted back to the second meeting she’d had with her ex-teacher.

 
On that occasion she had visited Daphne Larkspear at her home, a Georgian townhouse standing on a leafy square situated in a surprisingly fashionable part of Hackney, East London. She remembered feeling a little nonplussed standing, waiting, on her ex-teacher’s step and not a little envious. She had always admired Georgian architecture and all things Georgian and yet her present home, though imposing in a rambling sort of piecemeal-built style, was in actuality largely early Regency, though she did her best to make it look the part.

  She had been straight away introduced to the young girl who ‘lived in’ with Mrs Larkspear, shown what Daphne Larkspear had achieved with her over the years. It had clearly been intended as a demonstration of what she expected to achieve with her Alice once she had the girl in her hands. And it had been an impressive, if frightening one.

  She recalled that the girl had been small built, much like Alice, though perhaps even more petite if anything, almost birdlike in stature. She had been with the ex-teacher since leaving school and had seemed to possess all those qualities she hoped one day to see in Alice. Quiet, subdued and polite, there could be no doubt as to that girl’s status about the house. It had been she who had come to the door, dropping a low curtsy with head bowed and fingertips lifting her skirt hem with the utmost servility.

  She remembered the girl had been dressed head to foot in the garb of a servant girl, every detail carefully chosen to reinforce her position in life, both in her own eyes and those of others who might by chance make her acquaintance. The pastel lilac button-through dress she had been dressed in was in a thick, practical workwear-grade polyester that slithered and rustled and whooshed with every movement, yet was well fitted and closely tailored to her figure. The latter was particularly the case where it came to the bodice, which adhered closely to the girl’s extraordinarily high and thrusting bust line to the extent that the chunky hard plastic lilac buttons nestled deep between two sharply delineated hillocks yet without any hint of tightness or of pulling around the buttonholes.