Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Two inches isn’t much, is it?’ Rosanna held her finished uniform against her waist and tried to judge the skirt length.

  ‘Look, we’ve got to be absolutely dead-pan at breakfast,’ warned Monty. ‘No giggling. Poker faces. We mustn’t look as if anything’s going on.’

  Simmering with delicious excitement, they appeared at breakfast next morning, feeling as if their newly revealed kneecaps were glowing neon-bright. None of the teachers noticed, but one or two of the other girls shot startled, envious looks at the immaculately raised hems. Monty grew blasé and crossed her legs with panache as she sat in a deep chintz-covered armchair at morning break. At lunchtime, one or two of the girls tackled them, but they pretended innocence.

  ‘Another inch, Cathy, go on; we’re bound to get away with it,’ Monty’s eyes were bigger and rounder than ever with the thrill of challenging authority.

  ‘No,’ said Cathy firmly, ‘it’s all round the school already: some little sneak’s bound to tell on us.’

  ‘Rubbish. No one can prove anything. We’ve just grown a bit taller, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with altering your uniform, anyway. No one’s said anything about Rosanna’s being more fitted.’ Cathy dug her heels in and Rosanna, anxious not to be conspicuous, agreed.

  ‘We’ve proved our point, we’ve got away with it. Let’s stop now,’ she urged Monty, pulling her red dressing gown around her.

  ‘I think you’re both absolute weeds,’ sulked Monty. After lights-out, she went alone to the laundry room by torchlight and turned up the hem of her tunic another inch.

  As the four hundred girls stood quietly waiting for Miss Sharpe to say grace, Grice, the housemistress walked suspiciously round the table, eyeing every girl’s hemline. As Cathy had predicted, the secret had been guessed and communicated. Monty felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle as Miss Grice approached, then heard her voice, for once low but still hectoring, say, ‘See me after breakfast, Miranda, if you please.’

  ‘I suppose you think that tampering with the school uniform’s very clever?’ she snapped, walking to and fro across the worn carpet in her study. ‘Well, let me tell you that it isn’t. What have you got to say for yourself?’

  ‘It’s the fashion, Miss Grice.’ Monty’s line in disciplinary encounters was what was called dumb insolence – the pretended innocent put-down of the enemy.

  ‘You’ll have plenty of time for fashion when you’ve left school, and we’re not bothered with you any longer. While you’re here, you’ll obey the rules.’ Monty’s eyes glazed and she gazed vaguely at Miss Grice, seeing her as a gesticulating doll about four inches high. ‘You’ll stay in detention this afternoon and put that hem down, and bring it to me when you’ve finished. And you’ll learn a hundred lines by tomorrow – I’ve marked the page.’ The worst punishment that was ever given to a girl at Benenden was to learn poetry by heart.

  In the beginning, Monty had simply been given a fat, blue book and told to learn a poem from it. She soon became proficient in all the poems of less than ten lines in this weighty volume. Miss Grice’s next manoeuvre had been to set a fixed number of lines to be memorized. Monty had countered by picking the most explicit love poems she could find and reciting them slowly, stone-faced, while looking Miss Grice straight in the eye as she intoned, ‘Enter these arms, for since thou thought it best, not to dream all my dream, let’s act the rest.’ She had an excellent memory.

  Miss Grice’s latest strategy was to specify precisely the lines she wanted Monty to learn, in a romantic Scottish ballad with a galloping metre. Thus the girls were even more firmly instructed that romance was right and sex was wrong.

  ‘Rotten, old boot,’ Cathy consoled her sister. ‘I’ll do the hem for you.’

  ‘You can’t, she wants to stand over me.’ Monty sulkily opened the poetry book. ‘Oh God, what slop. Young Lochinvar.’

  ‘Didn’t you learn that last term?’

  ‘Yes, the old bat must’ve forgotten.’ Monty was rapidly scanning the lines.

  ‘Never mind, Monty.’ Rosanna huddled thankfully inside her scarlet robe. ‘She’s just jealous. I mean, who’d want to look at her legs?’ They all shrieked with laughter.

  ‘Ugh. Don’t, what a disgusting thought. Not before supper, please Rosanna.’

  ‘Oh young Lochinvar is come out of the West. Through all the wide border his steed was the best,’ muttered Monty rapidly.

  ‘Grice’s knees go blue in the cold, you know, and her varicose veins stick out. I’ve watched them.’ Rosanna pulled out a magnifying mirror and tweezers and began to tweak at her thick glossy eyebrows.

  ‘Those revolting divided skirts of hers are shorter than a mini-skirt anyway; what’s this for?’ Cathy picked up a strange implement from the bagful of cosmetic instruments designed to enhance Rosanna’s looks without breaking the no make-up rule.

  ‘Oh come ye in peace here or come ye in war, Or to dance at our bridal, young Lord Lochinvar?’ Monty raced through the poem in a rapid chant.

  ‘Eyelash-curlers – look, you do it like this.’ Rosanna picked the curlers up and demonstrated. ‘Then you put some of this cream on at night and you get really thick eyelashes.’

  ‘You’ve got really thick eyelashes, anyway.’ Cathy looked at her own face in the magnifying mirror. Her skin was the colour and texture of creamy new milk. The natural shade of her lips was cinnamon pink, and above her short, straight nose her eyes gazed out, rayed in shades of brown from dark clove to bright topaz. Cathy liked her looks. For the sake of politeness she echoed the others’moans about their imperfections, but deep down she was prepared to believe she was beautiful. Of course, eyelashes could never be too long or too thick, and hers might look even better if they curled more. Hopefully, she dabbed on some of the black cream.

  ‘She looked down to blush, And looked up to sigh. With a smile on her lips and a tear in her eye. He took her soft hand’ere her mother could bar…’ Monty gabbled on as fast as she could, then threw the poetry book across the room with a yell of triumph. ‘Know it, know it. Can I have some of that?’

  ‘You don’t need it either.’ Cathy handed the tiny pot to her sister.

  ‘I bet you wouldn’t do what she did.’ Monty smeared the cream generously over her lids and studied the effect in the mirror. Her lashes stuck together in spikes, making her eyes look like big black stars. Impatiently, she pushed away the tangle of black curls which hung almost to the wide bridge of her nose. Why didn’t her hair fall in a sleek curtain down to her eyebrows, like that of the models in the magazines? like Cathy’s did?

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Run off with your secret lover on your wedding day.’

  ‘I’d be marrying my secret lover, anyway.’ Cathy made remarks like this with a solemnity which never sounded complacent, only serenely confident.

  If sex and love were enthralling, marriage was their greatest fascination, and they all felt they knew everything about it. Except of course, the only important thing – whom they were going to marry. There were innumerable ways of consulting fate on this. Although they scoffed loudly at superstition, and dared each other to walk under ladders or leave spilled salt untouched, the girls would count cherry stones, study astrology or carefully peel the skin off an apple in an unbroken ribbon. Then you had to swing it three times round your head and let it fall behind you. The shape of the fallen peel foretold the initial of your future husband’s name.

  The peel always fell in a wobbly curve, so that many of the girls seemed to be destined to marry a Charles or a William. In view of the narrow range of boys’names considered acceptable in their social echelon it was probably quite an accurate prediction.

  Their romance-sodden languor increased as the weather grew warmer. When Midsummer’s Eve came in the ripe heat of June, they decided to try the ultimate prediction.

  ‘What you have to do,’ Cathy explained, ‘is sit in front of a mirror, with another mirror behind you, in your nightdress on Midsummer Night, with your
hair unbound, and a candle on either side of you. Then you look in the mirrors and at midnight you see your husband’s face behind you.’

  ‘How spooky, I wouldn’t dare,’ said Rosanna, shivering in imagined horror.

  ‘Well, I don’t care about getting married anyway. You do it, Cathy.’ Monty, suddenly annoyed by the complacent way her sister talked about the whole business of marriage, wanted to challenge her. ‘Come on, where shall we do it?’

  ‘Well, we can’t do it in the corridor because someone’s bound to hear us – where else is there a big mirror?’ Rosanna was always practical.

  ‘The boot room, but…’

  There was unspoken agreement that the boot room was much too prosaic. ‘You’d need a big mirror or you wouldn’t be able to see him properly.’

  ‘What about the headmistress’s cloakroom?’

  ‘Monty!’ Rosanna squealed in horror.

  ‘There’s a big mirror on chains in there. We could take it down easily between us.’ Monty looked challengingly from Cathy to Rosanna.

  ‘I know – we could take it to that room under the stage. There’s another mirror there – the one we use to check our costumes. No one would find us.’ This was indisputable. The room under the stage in the great hall was accessible only from a trap-door in the corridor outside.

  Under Monty’s generalship, the scheme took on wilder and wilder proportions. The following day they took a pair of 3ft candles in brass candlesticks from the chapel. They synchronized their watches like commandos and met at eleven o’clock on Midsummer’s Eve at the bottom of the stairs, with their cloaks over their nightdresses, or, in Rosanna’s case, over her baby-doll pyjamas.

  ‘Walk on the grass, then no one will hear us,’ commanded Monty in a whisper. They ran furtively down the avenue of trees; the limes were beginning to flower and the air was sticky and tartly-scented with their pollen.

  By the dim beams of their pocket torches they tiptoed through the corridors to the cloakroom by the headmistress’s study.

  ‘Careful, the chains will rattle,’ panted Monty as she and Rosanna struggled to hold the heavy looking-glass. With Cathy holding the chains, they carried the mirror crabwise down the corridor. Cathy heaved at the brass ring in the floor which opened the trap-door, and they slowly negotiated the steps into the ominous darkness below.

  ‘That torch is useless. Light the candles, Rosanna.’ There was a scrape of a match, a flare of light, then darkness.

  ‘Blast, dropped it. Hang on. I’ll try again.’ This time the wick caught light, and when Rosanna held the candle up they could make out the huge wicker baskets which held the costumes for the school plays.

  ‘Cathy, shut the trap-door and then no one will be able to hear us.’ Monty began pulling the creaking skips together. Soon the scene was set according to Cathy’s instructions, and the flickering reflections of the candlelight shone around the dark cellar.

  Monty found a dusty, Elizabethan-style stool and planted it between the mirrors. ‘There you are, Cathy – take off your cloak.’ Cathy, shivering slightly in her sprigged cotton nightdress, sat down and Rosanna brushed her loose straight hair for her.

  ‘Move back you two, I can see you in the mirror.’ They drew back.

  ‘What time is it? I can’t see.’ Rosanna peered at her tiny enamel-faced wristwatch by the light of the nearest candle.

  ‘Ten to twelve.’

  A solemn silence fell as they settled down to wait for midnight with mounting apprehension. Cathy, her lips quivering with nerves, gazed into the mirror, trying to concentrate on the black space behind her head instead of on her pale oval face reflected to infinity.

  She looked like a bride already, Monty thought wistfully, wishing her own hair was smooth and straight, her own nose fine and small, and her skin creamy and absolutely without pimples, as Cathy’s was. For all she envied it, Cathy’s effortless beauty was something of which she felt vicariously proud.

  Rosanna worried that she would be unable to find a husband to match her parents’detailed demands; Monty, secretly convinced that no one would ever want to marry a fat, frizzy-haired, bow-legged creature like herself, and utterly determined not to end up like her own mother, had great misgivings about the whole idea of getting married. But Cathy had always been quietly confident of her future, and unconsciously the trio had elected her as the bride-to-be.

  There were noises in the still night. The wicker baskets gave tiny creaks. Above them, the polished oak floorboards settled with occasional groans. A hunting owl shrieked in the park outside.

  ‘What’s the time now?’ Cathy whispered, her voice hoarse with tension.

  Rosanna held her watch towards the light again. ‘One minute to go.’

  Cathy gazed intently into the mirror before her. Clearly they heard the distant whirring of weights as the school clock prepared to strike. As if pulled by an invisible thread, the three girls leaned forward and stared into the mirror’s depth. The candles guttered, the clock struck and a pale shape appeared momentarily in the reflected dark.

  Suddenly, Cathy screamed, half-jumped to her feet and shrieked again with fright. Rosanna screamed too, and fell back against a basket. Monty turned round, wide-eyed with terror, and gazed straight at a furious Miss Grice, who demanded:

  ‘What in the world are you girls doing?’

  ‘I’ve never been so pleased to hear the Voice of Doom, I can tell you,’ Monty tried in vain to lighten their mood as they waited outside the headmistress’s room the next morning. Girls gazed curiously at them as they passed, knowing that they must have done something dreadful to be waiting there.

  The oak door opened violently and Miss Sharpe’s voice called them in.

  ‘Never in all the time I have taught at this school have I heard of anything so stupid.’ Her tone was icy with contempt and her blue eyes glared at them one after the other. ‘Quite apart from the fact that you have desecrated the chapel, stolen school property and broken school rules, you could have burned the whole school down.’

  Cathy and Rosanna looked uncomfortably at their shoes. Monty, glazed-eyed as usual, comforted herself with a daydream of the school consumed by flames, and Miss Sharpe’s charred body tumbling from the castellated parapet.

  ‘I don’t know what you were all doing and frankly I don’t want to know. Take that smirk off your face, Catherine.’ Cathy’s long, upturned top lip always made her seem to be smiling when she wasn’t, and she no longer tried to explain. ‘I’m surprised at you, especially you, Catherine. This sort of behaviour is quite out of character. And you, Rosanna, you’ve made a very good start here and I hope you’re not going to spoil it.’ Oh dear, thought Cathy, she’s going to come down hard on Monty. ‘But I’ve seen quite a lot of you recently, Miranda, haven’t I?’

  Why does she always use those mealy-mouthed expressions, wondered Monty with contempt. Miss Sharpe continued, ‘I had thought all this teenage rebellion, or whatever you choose to call it, was over, but I can see now that you haven’t changed and I‘m beginning to wonder if you ever will change, Miranda.’

  Same old story, Monty thought. Can’t she come up with anything new?

  ‘You will all be confined to the school for the rest of the term,’ Miss Sharpe announced at last. ‘I shall be writing to your parents, of course, and if there is any repetition of these escapades, I shall suspend you immediately. As for you Miranda, I really don’t think there is anything more we can do for you here. You will be allowed to sit your exams, but we shall not expect you back next term.’

  As if sitting bloody exams was a treat, sneered Monty to herself. As if I wanted to come back here.

  Cathy, usually the first to raise the spirits of the other two in times of gloom, said nothing as they walked back to their lessons. Monty, full of brittle bravado, demanded, ‘So did you see anything in the mirror, after all?’

  Cathy shook her head. ‘Only Grice. It’s only a superstition, anyway, isn’t it?’

  ‘You really didn’t see a t
hing?’ Monty pressed her sister, sensing that she was keeping something back.

  ‘No, of course I didn’t. Didn’t you hear what I said?’ Cathy spoke with irritation, and Monty let the matter drop. They walked on in silence until they parted to make their way to the classrooms. Cathy probed her memory, trying to bring back the picture she had seen before the panic of discovery made everything unclear. She had an indelible impression of a small man with greying hair and an aura of vitality. The only man she knew who matched the picture was her father.

  Arches of bright sunlight, the light, rich sun of Paris in summer, lay across the narrow pavement, shaped by the graceful arcades of the Rue de Rivoli. The boutiques selling leather, luggage and elegant but useless gifts pulled their blinds halfway down to protect their stock from the sunlight, but James Bourton’s eye was not distracted by the gilded nicknacks on display.

  He walked slowly around the Place Vendóme to the Ritz, and ordered himself a whisky-soda at the bar. The barman knew him well. Milord James was almost the last of the real English clientele, elegant, cultivated, free-spending, and a pleasure to serve. Naturally, he always put up at the Ritz. They had had the honour of serving him for almost twenty years.

  He seemed a little abstracted today, the barman noticed as he returned to his position midway down the gleaming counter, perhaps even a little pale. Many men needed a drink to help them accept bad news, but the barman was not the sort who cared to listen to his customers’troubles; their difficulties were always to do with money or with women, neither of which was susceptible to reason or really important. James drank his whisky rapidly and ordered another, then a third. Had the barman looked closely, he would have seen that not only was his customer pale beneath his permanent light tan, but that the beautifully manicured hand clamped around the glass was shaking violently enough to make the ice ring against its sides.