The Vanishing Princess

by Jenny Diski

  Part of her still thought that, in a way, dancing was for fools, especially when she watched the patients shuffling around the dayroom every Friday during the therapeutically approved Social. Anyone who was mobile was chivvied by the staff into going downstairs. They went from ward to ward turfing people out, even looking in cupboards for the more extreme unsociable types. There was always one cupboard with an unwilling socialite in it. The Social was supposed to be good for everyone: practice at joining in and being part of the larger community. It reminded Hannah, when she was not dancing herself, of the Caucus race in Alice in Wonderland. Round and round the room—always clockwise—they all went for the allotted two hours, as though they thought that if they went round enough times they’d break out of the circle and dance off into the real world. But Hannah knew by now that the real world was the last place most of them wanted to be, and the going round and round was actually a reassurance, or a kind of magical rite they hoped would keep them within the safe confines of the walls. Still, there was nothing else to do on a Friday evening, and, as long as Hannah felt no one outside saw her, she joined in with her teeth only slightly gritted. In fact, rather than singers of the acceptable peer-group taste, she loved Sinatra’s voice, the melodies of the songs he sang and, most of all, the lyrics.

  It seemed to Hannah that she had been going round in circles for ever, but this particular circle had been going on for only six months. It just seemed like an eternity. Funny things happen to time in the Bin. She had been there for four months. Before that she had been in her mother’s room for two days. Before that she had been in Banbury with her father for two months. And before that . . .

  Let’s take it nice and easy

  It’s gonna be so easy

  For us to fall in love

  Hey baby what’s your hurry

  Relax and don’t you worry

  We’re gonna fall in love

  The problem now of course is

  To simply hold your horses

  To rush would be a crime

  ’Cos nice and easy does it every time

  Two weeks after Hannah’s fifteenth birthday she sat, silently, in the headmaster’s study while he told her that he would have to ask her to leave. For a moment Hannah toyed with the idea of saying no, since he asked, on the whole she thought she wouldn’t. But she’d been at the school for long enough to know the code. This was a liberal, progressive, vegetarian boarding school where self-government and rational discourse were the golden rules by which all members of the community were supposed to live. So punishments were known as “the consequences of one’s actions,” prefects were called “servers,” and “being asked to leave” meant that Hannah had been expelled.

  A dogged air of reason hung heavily about the place, and it was supposed to go without saying that individuals of any age responded rationally to rational treatment. Or else, as was now apparent. If smugness were asphyxiating, you could have died of it there.

  Hannah knew there was no point in arguing with facts, however conveyed, and she certainly wasn’t going to give Nicholas, the Head (they were on democratic, first-name terms with the staff) the impression that she cared.

  “All right,” she said, “I will.”

  “I called your father and told him I could no longer accept responsibility for you after noon today. Unfortunately, he’s moving this weekend and can’t come to get you. I said I would keep you here until Monday, and put you on the train.”

  This was Friday. Hannah saw her chance.

  “You’ve given up responsibility for me from midday. I’m not your concern after that. I’ve got a friend I can stay with in town, and there’s a party I planned to go to tomorrow night.”

  It was a party Hannah had been to the previous night which was the cause of her present situation.

  According to the school gossip, Nicholas had really wanted to be a lawyer, but he had done his familial duty and taken over the school when his father died. He nodded seriously at the logic of Hannah’s argument, in spite of its obvious legal incorrectness. He was also, of course, swayed by the potential disruption of having an already expelled Hannah rattling round the school all weekend.

  He agreed to let her go, provided he could talk to the parent of the friend she planned to stay with, and if she promised to leave the party at midnight. (Nicholas never lost his faith in promises and reasonable requests—the following summer he was killed while on holiday in Gibraltar, run down by a lorry driving in the wrong direction down the one-way street he was cycling along.)

  Hannah did leave the party at midnight, a strict attention to honour she would always regret on principle.

  When she left Nicholas’ study, his secretary stopped her.

  “We phoned your mother to ask her if she could take you, since your father wouldn’t. She said no. No one wants you, do they?”

  Hannah just stared at her. Only later did she decide that the secretary must have been suffering hopeless love for her boss, and that that, rather than personal hatred, caused her to say what she did.

  All in all, it was a pretty miserable weekend. Hannah had come seriously adrift. She had always relied until then on her proven capacity for survival to take her to the brink of disaster but no further. She hadn’t really imagined that anything so final would happen.

  It was a kind of paradise, that school situated a mile or so from the garden city of Letchworth. It spread itself comfortably over several acres. Unmade paths (pitted with potholes that the pupils had to fill at weekends when their actions required consequences) linked the rambling country houses where they lived with the main teaching block, set around an old stone courtyard. There was an orchard just behind it where, if the weather was fine, Reg would conduct his Philosophy of Religion classes. But the trees, part of a system of organic gardening, though full of fruit, seemed only to bear wormy apples. One especially sunny day, Reg arrived with a great basket of cream cakes and distributed them among Hannah’s class. He said he’d wanted one himself, but couldn’t have borne to eat it while watching their yearning, junk-food-hungry faces gazing up at him. The vegetables in the organic garden next to the orchard grew on in silent disapproval, as Hannah’s form briefly raised their cholesterol levels and deepened their understanding of the Buddhist way. But as Hannah remembered the occasion later, in the hospital, and could almost taste the choux pastry melting with the whipped cream in her mouth, she was no longer certain that it had happened. She thought, perhaps, that the cream cakes were only ever promised—a tantalising joke—and that the virtue of the organic vegetables was never in serious jeopardy.

  Beyond the orchard was the neatly mown and rolled playing field, laid out for cricket, lacrosse and football; and beyond that was a meadow which, though strictly speaking not school property, was very much the pupils’ territory. Courting couples and smokers, released from the day’s lessons, wandered into, and then disappeared beneath, the thigh-deep grass and wild flowers. From a distance their position could be spotted by the plumes of forbidden smoke that spiralled up into the air, like the camps of so many Indians, signalling to one another.

  It was idyllic, as Hannah remembered it.

  Of course, she hated the compulsory cold bath and morning walk before breakfast, especially on frozen winter mornings when her curses took on visible form in front of her face. And she had never been able to summon enthusiasm for muesli. A decade later, it might look neat and healthy in pretty earthenware bowls on the modern breakfast table, but at school it came by the gallon in vast tin vats, copiously wet and thick, waiting to be slopped into the pupils’ plates and given a good stir every now and then with a giant metal spoon so that the repellently plump raisins were distributed fairly throughout the dreadful, glutinous mess.

  It certainly wouldn’t have looked, to an outsider, as if Hannah would remember her time at the school as idyllic. She took the precepts of self-government and maintaining a questioning attitude to life as far as she could. She joined the school council and proposed wi
ld (and probably illegal) motions, which were passed, and then, on the informed advice of the Head, expunged from the minutes. She refused to participate in the dangerous madness of lacrosse, laid down her stick and sat, a precursor of Bertrand Russell, in the middle of the pitch until the games teacher called the Head, who thereafter drove Hannah out into the countryside at the beginning of each games period and left her to find her way back in time for English. As she trudged across the fields smoking the cigarettes she had stuffed up her knickers, she had the uneasy feeling that whoever had won the battle, it hadn’t been her. She took down every other line of the notes the physics teacher wrote on the board, and turned them into poems about parallax; and maths classes were held up while she demanded to know why she should accept that parallel lines meet at infinity. So what if it was axiomatic? What if it wasn’t true anyway?

  But until she started climbing out of the dormitory window to attend midnight parties, nothing more dramatic happened than a look of weariness and the suggestion from Hannah’s tutor that she might channel some of her energies into joining the debating society.

  Finally, though, she found a way to get to them.

  She had returned to school that term after a particularly angry Easter at home, determined to be bad. She made a clear and conscious decision as she stood in the rattling corridor of the train, hating the place she was leaving behind, but knowing also that she wasn’t going to get what she wanted from where she was heading. So far she’d been awkward and difficult but remained within the ethos of the school. And then it came to her, like a revelation, that going too far was a territorial concept. It was a matter, literally, of going beyond the school bounds. It never seemed to matter greatly what was going on in the meadow where the couples sank out of sight and the puffs of smoke rose, so long as it was going on between members of the school. As in a properly constituted family, what went on, discreetly, between themselves was tolerated. Outsiders, even the partial outsiders, were another thing. There were some non-boarders at the school, but they had to be off the premises once the school day was over, and the local town was off-limits without written slips and a good reason. Being caught in the town without an exeat was a serious offence.

  So Hannah began to spend most of her free time there, in a coffee bar which had just opened. The new coffee bars, with their hissing, foreign-sounding machines and drinks—Gaggias, espressos—and their rock’n’roll-filled jukeboxes, were notoriously the first step on the recently invented teenagers’ rocky road to ruin. Once or twice Hannah was seen through the steam-clouded window by a passing teacher and the warning she received confirmed that she was taking the right route.

  She met Bob, five years older than herself, and a trainee reporter on the local paper. He had read a little Kerouac and Burroughs and pressed copies of Jude the Obscure and Ulysses on Hannah. She and Bob blew smoke at each other across their cappuccinos as they discussed despair and Raskolnikov. Very existential, and a perfect fit for Hannah’s own private sense of doom. They set each other stories to write that had to begin: “The chair hated the table . . .” and they mulled over the novel Bob planned to write when he wasn’t so tied up with reporting council meetings and weddings; it was to be five hundred pages long and span five minutes of the hero’s life. And she climbed out of windows and down drainpipes late at night to join him and his friends in their celebrations of the human predicament, which, like most other parties, consisted of cider and heavy petting, although, for reasons Hannah couldn’t fathom, they never quite succeeded in going the whole way.

  None of this was radically different from what was on offer at school. It was possible, most weekends, if you were in with the right people, to sneak out of the dormitory and attend a huddled gathering in one of the huts dotted around the playing field that served as rooms for some of the sixth-form boys. And, in all likelihood, both Hardy and Joyce were freely available in the school library. But the fact that Bob was not from the school was crucial. They knew it and so did Hannah. She’d found a place she felt she belonged that was neither school nor home, and what was more, she was accepted. If it also breached the fundamental, unspoken rules, then so much the better.

  Until, that is, she was caught returning in time for breakfast, happy and tired, from that last party, and she was out, firmly and for good. The limbo weekend was a prelude to going home, and that was not a happy prospect.

  For a year before going to the school she had been living with her father and stepmother, locked in a grim and silent battle. Her stepmother was a plain, hard-working and, to Hannah, mysteriously Protestant woman who had been diligent and dutiful all her life. She had brought up a family on her own when her first husband deserted her, and ran a newsagent’s that required her to be up and busy by five every morning, seven days a week. She always wore one of those dull, flowery, sleeveless overalls that slipped over her ordinary clothes and tied firmly at the waist, as if to emphasise her commitment to the virtue of persistent hard work. Her lips seemed perpetually pursed and quivering with self-righteousness. Now, in middle age, she found herself, improbably, the companion of choice of Hannah’s ageing and tired, but still handsome and, to her, debonair, father. She devoted herself to maintaining his comfort and continued presence with further drudgery and was less than delighted when Hannah arrived: insolent, angry and bent on winning back her vanished-but-now-found father. For his part, her father sat at the still centre of the rivalry, wondering wistfully if he shouldn’t write his memoirs. “After all,” he would say from the depths of the chintz-covered armchair he had substituted for excitement, “there’s nothing Errol Flynn did that I haven’t done.”

  The social workers and shrinks who by now were hovering over the dysfunctional family could see that no good was going to come of this arrangement, and since returning to the volatile mother Hannah had run away from was deemed out of the question, they decided to send her to the school, which took a small number of council “cases,” and where, it was hoped, the liberal, progressive atmosphere would suit Hannah.

  Well, now they knew. And Hannah had wondered on the train home what Banbury was like (the previous Friday being the first she’d heard of their move from London), and what kind of schools the town had.

  She needn’t have bothered. Hannah’s stony-faced father met her at the station and took a deep, chest-expanding breath as they walked to the car.

  “I’ve done a lot of bad things in my time, Hannah, that I should regret.” He had, and some of them not entirely unconnected with the predicament Hannah now found herself in. “But I was never sacked from school. Now, you earn your living like everyone else. I’ve got you a job locally. You start tomorrow.”

  So education was at an end, and, though this was unexpected, Hannah supposed that if one jumped off the edge of a cliff, one had no right to be surprised at anything one might find at the bottom.

  She went to work the next morning at Cullens the grocers, filling the shelves and packing orders into cardboard boxes. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant; for one thing, they roasted their own coffee and the fumes of the best Arabica filled the air deliciously.

  Since Hannah wasn’t speaking to anyone in the house, nor they to her, she spent a lot of her time wondering. When she wasn’t filling shelves, she lay on her bed in the spare room in the attic and wondered why it was that Lolita, silly girl, didn’t appreciate Humbert, and how it was that Radio Luxembourg always faded to a crackle whenever they played a record she liked, and whether there really were more spiders in her room than anywhere else in the world, and what was going to happen.

  The first thing that happened was that she got the sack again. It wasn’t anything she’d done especially, more a matter of attitude and facial expression. The former being about not taking the initiative fast enough when goods needed replacing on the shelves; the latter, more decisive, fault being the greater problem. Not looking as if she minded about anything required an internal organisation of her facial muscles to keep everything light and steady, but the
external manifestation of this internal effort tended to bring the word “belligerent” to the furious lips of those who scanned the language to explain the anger Hannah engendered in them. Anyway, that was what the manager said, that he didn’t like the belligerent look on her face and she shouldn’t bother to return on Monday.

  On Monday, thanks to her father’s efforts to keep her employed, she began work selling shoes at Freeman, Hardy and Willis. She quite enjoyed it, and although she missed the smell of fresh-roasted coffee, she discovered a new pleasure in the scent of leather. She particularly enjoyed the tea-breaks, when she gossiped with her fellow sales assistant, who (though she seemed fairly old to Hannah) was about twenty-eight. What interested Hannah most were her tales of married life. It seemed that after nine years of what was apparently a happy marriage her husband had never, not once, seen her naked. She undressed in the bathroom and they “did it” under the bedclothes with the lights off. This was the first grown-up sex Hannah had heard about (apart from the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley she’d tried to make head or tail of at school) and she was amazed.

  “Never? Not once?” she’d ask, thinking how difficult it must be to arrange in a small council flat.

  “Well, it’s not nice, is it?”

  The other assistant found Hannah just as odd: the peculiar school she’d been to, and expelled, and Hannah had confided to her that what she really wanted to do when she grew up, as she still thought of it, was to be a writer.

  They found each other very interesting.

  But it was that last confidence that did it. The manager had overheard them talking and later in the day Hannah was called into his office.