But Miss Chatterjee stymied them all with her opening question. “Why was Edmund Burke,” she asked, “so very angry with the French revolutionaries?”
“Because the leaders of the revolution were wicked,” Priscilla said flippantly when nobody else spoke up.
Miss Chatterjee sighed. “One may denounce the wrongs done by people whose political beliefs one does not endorse,” she observed, “without mounting an impassioned assault on the very foundations of their philosophy. I ask you again, why was Burke so angry?”
“Because his whole world was threatened by what was happening in France,” suggested a small, very serious girl called Fiona.
“And what features of his world did Burke wish to protect?” Miss Chatterjee asked, perching on the edge of her desk, stretching out one long nylon-stockinged leg and examining the handmade calfskin shoe on her left foot.
“Kings and queens,” Nan said.
“Inheritance from one generation to the next,” said Priscilla in a submissive voice.
“Private property,” offered Harriet Jeffries. Something about the way Harriet talked always reminded one that her top marks were in penmanship and deportment; Sophie still hadn’t forgiven Harriet for being so horrible on Friday after assembly. But then, Harriet was always horrible, so there was no point expecting anything different. “Lords and ladies and country estates.”
“The English constitution,” Sophie said firmly. Harriet sounded much too enthusiastic about the lords and ladies, in a lending-library-romance sort of way. She really was a most awful girl.
“And what do you think of those things?” said the teacher. “Were they worth defending with the vehemence Burke musters for the occasion?”
“The constitution was worth protecting,” Sophie said, a little shocked by the question. “Look what happened when England lost it….”
Along the line of Hadrian’s Wall now stood miles and miles of concrete bunkers and concertina wire. Many girls had lost family members when England fell to Europe in the 1920s, and rumor spoke of concentration camps and mass graves. Ordinary Scottish citizens rarely received permission now to cross at the official checkpoint at Berwick-upon-Tweed; most in any case wouldn’t risk passing into what amounted to enemy territory.
“What about the king and queen?” said Miss Chatterjee. “Do you believe monarchy is a political good worth hanging on to?”
Several girls shook their heads, and Fiona spoke up.
“All the countries in the Hanseatic League have abolished their monarchies,” she said. “The Scottish parliament voted not to restore the Stuart line after we split with England, and Sweden and Denmark no longer have kings and queens.”
“What about Burke’s defense of property?” said Miss Chatterjee, her voice rich and smooth, like butter. “How does that sit with us?”
“The Scottish government has raised taxes and death duties on the principle that the very wealthy should subsidize health care and education for the poor,” Nan said slowly. “And everybody thinks that’s a good thing, even the people who have less money now they’re being taxed at higher rates.”
“Well, perhaps not quite everybody,” Miss Chatterjee said, laughing a little, “but certainly most of us do.”
“So the answer would be no,” Nan continued, answering the teacher’s question. “Burke’s defense of property seems like almost the opposite of what we would approve of.”
Miss Chatterjee nodded.
“Very good, Nan,” she said. “Now, what would you say if I told you that most of the models for Scotland’s constitution, and for the constitutions of the other Hanseatic states, can be found in the writings of precisely those individuals whom Burke abhors? That the sympathy with which we have read Burke is at the very least ironic, and possibly altogether misplaced? That if Burke represents politics as a matter of ‘us’ against ‘them,’ history would align us not with Burke but with his mortal enemies, the revolutionaries?”
But it was the political repression and state-sponsored violence of the European Federation that had their roots back beyond Napoleon in revolutionary France! How did Miss Chatterjee so reliably manage to turn Sophie’s brain inside out and make her see things in an entirely new way?
Lunch was much worse than usual: gray meat decorated liberally with gristle; starchy potatoes boiled down almost to mush; the smelly yellowish-green miniature cabbages that had been known as Brussels sprouts until Napoleon made that city his capital; and a disgusting pudding called a “shape,” made from milk, water, beet sugar, and gelatin substitute. It was a good thing Sophie was inoculated against disgust by Peggy’s cooking. At least at school she was spared the need to assuage the cook’s feelings by eating everything on her plate; here one of the dinner ladies would happily scrape whatever was left into a tin bucket for pig swill.
The food still sat heavily in Sophie’s stomach as she plodded, lagging behind the other girls, along the strip of land adjoining the New Burial Ground to the school tennis courts. Sophie was such a poor athlete that the games mistress turned a blind eye to her skiving off, so long as she made some pretense of helping to carry the equipment. Sophie had a funny halfway status that gave her more liberty than the real boarders, although a bit less than the school’s handful of day girls, but she was careful not to abuse it.
In tennis season, Sophie served as ball girl, and whenever too many balls vanished over the stone wall to the gardens of the houses behind the courts, she would scramble through a hole to retrieve them. That was how she had befriended the professor, a Swedish neurologist now retired from the University of Uppsala and living in one of these houses. After a serendipitous tennis-ball-related encounter, Sophie developed a habit of visiting him once a week or so for lessons in everything from entomology to the Russian language. Unlike most grown-ups, the professor did not tell Sophie that she was too young to understand the sort of thing she liked talking about, whether it was the theology of Count Tolstoy, the novels of Richard Wagner, the verse of Albert Einstein, or the operas of James Joyce.
After they had finished that day’s lesson, the professor’s housekeeper—a pleasant, somewhat stern woman called Solvej Lundberg, who had come with him from Sweden—would bring in a tray of tea.
Today it was Sophie’s favorite, toast with anchovy paste and a Battenberg cake with its checkerboard of pink and yellow cubes. She had picked up the habit of pulling the cake apart and eating each cube separately, a trick that would have earned her a scolding in Heriot Row. When she took a bite of toast, though, she found she wasn’t hungry after all. Her eyes had a twitchy feeling that might mean she was about to cry.
“We have a surprise for you today, Sophie,” said the professor, cutting into her thoughts.
“Oh?” Sophie said dispiritedly. “What is it?”
Rather than answering, he held a finger over his lips and cocked his head to listen. The street door opened, then slammed shut. The loud footsteps in the hall told Sophie everything she needed to know.
“Mikael!”
Mikael was the housekeeper’s nephew. His mother shipped him over to Edinburgh every so often from Denmark when she felt she couldn’t manage him, and Sophie was very fond of him.
It was as if Sophie’s wish for someone to confide in had been magically granted—Mikael was the cleverest person Sophie knew, with the exception of Miss Chatterjee (but teachers didn’t count).
“I didn’t know you were coming!” she said after Mikael had helped himself to an enormous hunk of cake.
“Oh, yes. By the way, Aunt Solvej,” said Mikael, giving Sophie a sly wink, “I wouldn’t say no if you rustled up a new lot of buttered toast, no anchovies.”
Two of Mikael’s most noticeable traits were his bottomless hunger and his excellent colloquial English, spoken virtually without an accent.
Mrs. Lundberg returned shortly from the kitchen with plain buttered toast and several new kinds of biscuit as well, including chocolate digestives and coconut macaroons with glacé cherries on
top. It was surprising how much hungrier Sophie felt now.
“Join us for our repast,” the professor urged, but Mrs. Lundberg would never sit down in the presence of visitors. Instead she cleared the cups and plates and rumpled Mikael’s hair as she passed.
It was rather a blow when Sophie looked at her watch and saw the time.
“Sophie, you wretch, you mustn’t go yet,” said Mikael. “I’ve only just laid eyes on you!”
But Sophie had to leave if she wanted to reunite with the tennis players before they all walked back to school. She kissed the professor on the cheek and said good-bye to Mrs. Lundberg, who pressed a packet of cake and sandwiches into Sophie’s hand.
Mikael stepped out into the garden with her. Often these days Sophie came and went by the front door, but the way through the garden and over the wall was quicker and less conspicuous.
“It’s good to see you,” she said to Mikael outside in the garden, feeling shy now they were alone together. “How long are you here for?”
“Till July,” Mikael said, grinning. “Good, isn’t it? My mother’s really fed up with me; she told me to stay away till she cooled down.”
“What did you do this time?” Sophie said.
“Oh, I borrowed someone’s motorcar and had a bit of an accident.”
“I didn’t know you could drive!”
“My brother gave me a few lessons last summer. To tell the truth, though, I really don’t know how to drive!”
“Will you have to pay for the repairs?” Sophie asked.
“No, fortunately the car belongs to my mother’s ‘gentleman friend,’ and he’s simply rolling in money,” said Mikael breezily. Sophie looked at him with envy. In his place, she would have been dying of mortification. “Anyway, I’ve got all sorts of things to tell you about. Friday afternoon, the usual time and place?”
“Perfect,” said Sophie.
They stood smiling at each other for an awkward moment. Then Sophie clambered over the wall and returned to school.
SEVEN
THE GIRLS’ RIFLE CLUB met that Thursday in the school gymnasium. Standing in a row of girls facing the targets opposite, Sophie bit the paper off a cartridge and poured the powder down the rifle bore, then put the greased bullet in the bore and rammed it down on top of the powder.
An hour of shooting left Sophie filthy and exhausted but much happier than before. (Funny the way firing a gun always put her in a good mood.) She and Nan walked back to their room and changed into their dressing gowns before going to take the extra bath allotted to members of the Rifle Club.
The bathroom had a row of cubicles, each with its own tub and taps, and the two girls ran hot baths, a luxury unknown at the National High School for Boys down the road (Sophie was glad of the hot water but sorry boys and girls should be treated so differently).
“My dad visited on Sunday afternoon,” Nan said as they soaked in painfully hot water. “He says that this time it really looks like war.”
Sophie admitted that her great-aunt had been saying something very similar.
“Sophie, what will you do if war breaks out? How will you serve, I mean?”
Sophie smiled at Nan’s phrasing, but the question demanded serious thought.
“Oh, it’s impossible,” she said, feeling the back and shoulder muscles that the hot water had loosened snap back into tight bands. “It’s easy for you. Your family’s been army as far back as anyone can remember.”
“Yes,” said Nan, the affirmation echoing off the tiles of the cavernous bathroom. Sophie envied her certainty. “I know I’ll join the women’s army auxiliaries—there’s never been any doubt, and a declaration of war will simply speed things up a bit. All three of my brothers are in the army already, of course, and there’s no reason for me not to follow them. But what will Jean do, and Priscilla? What will you do, Sophie?”
“If it were fifteen years ago, and war not even on the horizon,” Sophie said, thinking out loud, “I suppose it’d be a pretty sure thing that I’d go to university. Miss Chatterjee told me that when she first began teaching here, almost all the girls stayed on for sixth-form work, and quite a few of those went to university as well. Now most of us leave after the fifth form.”
“That sixth-form group this year is like a ghost ship,” Nan agreed, splashing for emphasis. “There are so many empty seats, it must be terribly discouraging. And last year not a single girl went on to university. All the really academic girls go now to IRYLNS instead. Is that what you’ll do, do you think?”
Sophie sighed. “I don’t know. You’d think Great-aunt Tabitha would like the idea of me going to IRYLNS, but when I suggested it this weekend, she practically bit my head off. I think she’s going to pull strings and try to get me admitted to university.”
“Do you think she’s got that kind of influence?” Nan sounded impressed.
“I hope so,” Sophie said, only realizing as she said it how very much she wanted it to be true. “The auxiliaries would be absolutely dire! Seriously, can you see me in a khaki uniform saluting my superior officer?”
“No, it’s true,” Nan said, “I can’t picture that at all.”
“Imagine how poorly I’d do in the PT testing,” Sophie added. “I couldn’t do a single press-up last time they made us in gym! They’d probably ship me off to some awful farm in the middle of nowhere. Even a factory job would be better than having to work as a Land Girl.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Nan said thoughtfully. Nan liked the outdoors more than Sophie did. “Farming wouldn’t be so bad. But I think you should hold out for university.”
“The horrible thing,” Sophie said to Nan as they hurriedly dried themselves and put on their pajamas, “is that we’re being forced to choose now about things that really should be able to wait till we’re older. It’s hard to say what’s worse, the suddenness of having to choose or the chance that if we don’t make up our minds soon, the choice will be taken away from us altogether.”
In spite of this disturbing conversation, the evening’s exercise and the warm bath had relaxed Sophie, and she lay in bed in a pleasant haze, looking forward to double-period chemistry the next morning. She was asleep before she knew it, a rare thing this far into the summer term, when dusk fell long after even the oldest girls’ bedtime.
A few hours later, though, she found herself standing spread-eagled, back against the bedroom door, her throat raw from the shout she’d just unleashed.
A light went on by one of the beds. Priscilla’s sleepy face turned toward her.
“What on earth just happened?” she asked Sophie.
By now Jean and Nan were both sitting up.
“Yes, what’s the matter, Sophie?” said Nan.
“I don’t know,” Sophie said, her voice rough. She cleared her throat and cast her mind back. She couldn’t remember a thing. Something moved in the shadows, and Sophie thought her heart might actually explode with terror.
“Sophie screamed,” said Jean. “That was what woke us, I think.”
Sophie spread her hand flat across her neck and collarbone and took another deep breath. Her hands were freezing, the skin of her chest hot and feverish, and she could feel her heart pumping at twice the usual speed.
“You must have had a nightmare,” Nan said. “What was it, Sophie? My brother Sam always says that when you have a bad dream, the best thing to do is talk about it.”
“But I can’t remember,” Sophie said, deeply shaken. “I might have been in a factory. And someone was having an argument.”
“What kind of a factory? Who was there? What were they arguing about? What were you doing there?”
But Sophie could answer none of Nan’s questions.
“Go back to bed!” Priscilla finally said. “We’re perfectly safe here. A bad dream isn’t going to kill you, horrible though it may be.”
In bed again, Sophie’s feet were freezing cold and she folded her left foot behind her right knee to warm it up, then switched sides to warm the other f
oot. It took longer for her heart to stop hammering in her rib cage. If this was perfectly safe, what must grave danger feel like?
In the morning Sophie hardly remembered the interruption to the night’s sleep, though she felt irritable and poorly rested. The others didn’t let her off lightly, though. They pestered her right up until they got to chemistry and discovered, not Mr. Petersen, but the biology mistress, Miss Hopkins.
“Mr. Petersen can’t be with you today,” the teacher told the class. “You may use this time to catch up on work for your other classes, and lessons will resume on Monday.”
The sound of scratching pens and the rustle of pages soon filled the classroom. Sophie couldn’t concentrate, which was most alarming. She was used to being able to work even under the most adverse conditions. It was a great disappointment not to see Mr. Petersen, of course, but there was no reason missing him should make her so uneasy.
At twenty-five past nine, a first-form girl crept into the room to deliver a note to Miss Hopkins.
“Girls,” said the biology mistress, speaking abruptly as she ran her eyes over the note, “I must leave you. You may speak with one another while I am away, so long as you moderate your voices. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes; Nan, I authorize you in the meantime to discipline any girl who creates a disturbance.”
After she left, the girls looked at each other. Sophie tried to get on with her English essay. Many of the others took out the bundles of knitting that had been all the rage that term and began to click away with their needles.
The low murmur of conversation couldn’t cover up the noise of Priscilla poking Jean in the side and snickering.
“Sophie,” Priscilla called out softly.
Sophie looked around.
“Where do you think Mr. Petersen’s gone?” Priscilla said.
Sophie decided to ignore her and turned back to her work.
“If Miss Hopkins comes back and tells us there’s been another bombing,” Priscilla persisted, “will you admit the odds just got much better on Mr. Petersen being one of the bombers?”
The Explosionist Page 5