France. When the list goes up, curiously my name will not appear.
FOOL
Yes, you think you will away to France but—oh dear. Have you not your father’s leave?
GIRL
What’s this? You have a plot, Fool?
FOOL
No plot. I simply indicate to dear Polonius how your marks suffer, that focus is needed, not diversion at the Easter holiday. Sorry, look you frowningly? I only want you better than you are.
GIRL
My father denies me France because of you?
WHARTON
(shuffling papers)
I’m losing all sense of order, have we reached that bit?
FOOL
Last autumn, on the yearly outing to the natural history museum, I watched the girl. Where others gaped at displays of constructed bears and wolves, this one wandered churlish and ill tempered. As if for her the whole class should be contracted in one dark brow of woe.
GIRL
Well, I had no cause to think the Fool might act differently.
FOOL
My intents are not wicked but charitable.
CROCONIUS happens past on his way to a town meeting.
CROCONIUS
What a crowd have we here. Is there circus in town?
WHARTON
Late on the entrance as always. Take guidance from the Fool who always makes a timely entrée.
FOOL
What ho, the hero arrives, the girl’s partner in foolishness. Think me not deceived. I have eyes. I see. The balcony remains fresh for me.
BRICK
The man with the hand dashed by white. So different now in our lessons. Once your terrible jokes and snooty voice were directed as much at the girl as your other pupils. But in a trice they ceased, you leave her be. Now when you look on her I see something change in your eyes, in the creases by your mouth.
FOOL
Then I am not alone in my suspicions.
GIRL
His terrible jokes remain, I assure you.
POLONIUS
(from behind a screen)
He drives you away from school to reveal our English nature on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. He indicates which trees own sap, which label as coniferous and those you won’t find in America. He tells you no horses galloped through the new world, lists which animals hibernate, which die, then forgets which of these befalls a fly. He charms, wheedles, adores. Finds reason to touch you, the better to beguile. Outside the classroom, you fall for his pedagogy. Table manners, the elegance with which he opens doors his deference to your opinions on trivial matters. Sandwiches? Curtains? Applications of philosophy? Habits of the domesticated cat? He wins you with humor and diplomacy and attention. Yet he remains as helpless without you as you without him. Green girl, do you believe such slyness? Tell me you do not.
Wharton pulls down the screen. Paul Gredville looks up meekly.
WHARTON
For God’s sake, Gredville. Have some self-respect.
GREDVILLE
Alright, I’m going.
And he does.
GIRL
In happy time, will it all come clear.
BRICK
You need awareness, I beseech you. This man has motivations. Find it in the stars, in their trains of fire. Look out, see it in the hills, bread, the locomotion of clouds.
CROCONIUS
Perhaps you should not be out in the hard morning. You lack outdoor wear. The air bites shrewdly.
FOOL
Your good beauties cause this girl’s wildness.
CROCONIUS
Come now, is she not an American girl? Do we not as masters have our pupils’ happy hearts at stake? I have taken the girl to tea in my home. I have made her the pie of our shepherds, I have shown her paintings and the men who made them. I have whispered in her hair. How she moves me as she tramps away in her big men’s shoes, her queer way of walking as though one ankle has need for the other’s assurance.
A BATTLE-AX on her way to market hears the ruckus and listens in.
BATTLE-AX
Like you I offered warmth, greenery, a respite from the bleak. My dog had reservations, for the girl had a peevish nature and often shot him dark looks. Dog, quoth I, this girl has need of our good charity. To the gardens we went, a conciliatory tour. Perhaps I should have been more certain with her. I could have revealed why I call that school Monster. I am old, you won’t listen. Leaving me forced to talk to a dog. When I was a girl, I was beaten like a rug. When I was older, I knew a man, he came to me with his right eye shot out. He should have been conscripted, fighting, what was he doing, a cyclops in my hospital, where was his eye? Other men were glad to tell their stories, this one stayed resolute, mute. I changed his dressing twice a day. The eye let go slowly, weeping as it went. I held the man at night, he wept for the right side of the world. Daffodils ate antelope, the sea turned to butter, yellow martlets lost in bricked chimneys. He was allergic to morphine, we had nothing else.
CROCONIUS
I hoped to be the one upon whose shoulder she cried. I hoped to see her through all forms moods shapes of grief. I have been tender, I have been kind. Reproachful? I’m afraid so. And equally, have I caused her distress. My mother was ill, I had little choice but to wait by the phone. I am naïve enough to believe, sir, that I have also caused her a small form of happiness, a laugh for a painted handkerchief, bad weather, stale cake, Courbet. You brick, you hunch, you frown, sulk beneath your beetling brow. You threaten her and lose your books. How can this serve her?
BRICK
I am not duplicitous.
CROCONIUS
Then you call me so.
OPHELIA
If you had listened to me those times in the lab. Make friends not from here, you heard me advise it. These difficulties would not happen upon you now.
FOOL
A pleasant walk after lunch does much for my digestion. I like the vista of the playing fields, the open expanse undulates behind the changing rooms like a woman’s form. The progress of the new pavilion certainly attracts my interest. Here’s a day, no different from any Monstead day. A survey of the cricket pavilion. But you are there already, perhaps like me you chose to forgo the baked ham. You stand on the field, your gaze to the grass. Lo, our hero arrives muffled in his scotch scarf. Do you think you can remain unnoticed, in the middle of a field? We have a headmaster who, had he both eyes, could not see what is so plain to me. I desired only pleasant ambles. Why then am I treated to such intimacies between the two of you. The girl smiles up, one hand at her locks. Even from my distance, I can see you have remarked on it. What have you said, that her hair pleases you? That you long to touch it, whisper in it, to kiss it? Her gesture offers too much. I can tell you that hair is not a suitable subject for any staff member save to give instructions on restraint.
CROCONIUS
How do I convince you as to the nature of my heart?
GIRL
At Holiday he sat so close I could sense the short soft hairs on the back of his neck, his cunning profile in the dim light as the sellers of ice and sweets moved through the empty aisles. There weren’t many of us. It was a matinée and the girls were desperate to sell. They came up again and again and each time he smiled, not his real smile, the fangish one, he saves that for me when we two are alone, but a nice-enough grin. The girls retreated, he turned back, listened to me or finished his thoughts. In the black-and-white world, our cinema, our Oxbow, I needed only his unwashed smell and the idea of his neck.
CROCONIUS
We are friends, I pretend nothing else.
BATTLE-AX
I stood before orchids, prattling on about I know not what, the glasshouse reeled, I saw you fading before me. I knew from your scowl, your care with my dog, your hesitant way of disturbing memory, that you had no mother. She’s deceased you said but I knew already that danger lurked.
GIRL
Danger?
BATTLE-AX
Let me say, your arsenal needs
constitute more than a crafty way with a tire.
GIRL
I saw a painting. Perhaps I was the bishop of St. Lieven.
HAMLET
My father was a king.
The group threatens to be late for assembly. Here is the ELDER rushing past on his way to provide moral guidance for troubled minds.
ELDER
What have we here?
HAMLET
My father.
ELDER
Speak, my son.
HAMLET
My father would have died, no matter that I eased him to his end. I spoke to you of that, the day we returned from Oxbow. You see I always tell my confidences in cars, you pull them from me. I never mean to. But suddenly I find myself wanting to talk about my mother with her plans for lettuce. Rosie came to my father in his final moments. My father shouted Benny, What’s it all for? And from down the hall, Benny responded with the name of his favorite bitter. My hand stays on the wheel where I know you watch it slashed with white and wonder how it came to be slashed with white. If I could keep you out for a week of stale cake I would not bore you with tales of my mother waiting on Father’s last day wanting lettuces. Bringing photos of an old dog they had with a bad leg. It wheeled itself on a contraption Father made. And more, of a skiing holiday in France, the first car. When Mother came in, she pulled up a chair and for an hour we heard stories of that dog on wheels, and the one before that, which had legs.
ELDER
Ariiise ye, from the innocence of brutehood.
GIRL
Give me back my epic life.
BRICK
I had a stupid need for conkers. I waited for him as I always did on the steps to the boy’s changing room, thinking about conkers, how I never played anymore, the games I played at junior school, well I’ve dwelled on that already. I waited for him as I often did on Tuesdays, he had physics, we would walk to lunch together. You hadn’t been there very long, we had been in town together, the three of us and he asked about you. He wanted to know why I had brought you the day we sniffed glue. He called you that name, the one we all do. Two girls had tied you up under your bed, he thought that terribly funny. A bird in the dirt turned to us with bright eyes as we passed. I said to him I wish you didn’t find some things funny. He said But imagine her lashed to her bed like that, unable to get away. They were tearing off ivy, three men on ladders. One dropped a bit of yellow tin, it brushed my ear as we walked inside. Into School House. He said Come in here for a moment and brought me into the cloakroom. A first year was trying to hang his coat, we pushed him out. He said I don’t like you around her. I said I fancy, he said You don’t, I said Listen, he said No. I said You aren’t hearing me, I won’t leave her, I won’t do as you say. He said Leave I said he said Fuck off I said Don’t he said Fuck I said I love.
OPHELIA
Why did I burn down the pavilion if not for this? You are a Science Girl, you still have chance for university.
GIRL
Am I a Science Girl? Or did he say that to protect me, I don’t know.
OPHELIA
So the burning was in vain. Remember the bunsen flames. Think that you joined me as I crossed the field, the lighter atwitch in my hand. I knew not what I did. Hard light from the pyres of padding and bibs, the smell of burning plastic jolting me awake. The flames moved to eat netting draped on a shelf. Standing in the doorway, the fire grew hotter and hotter at my back. I did not know what I was nor where I should have been, for there were only the two of us, myself and the pavilion. Our arrangement was clear. Gladly will I suffer for you that you may leave your mark.
ELDER
(sourly)
No better than a beast.
GIRL
In Maine I did not think Is this a school? Is this any sort of voice to have? What way is this of weather or plants? How it was in Maine was simply how it was.
ELDER
Now you are a girl who thinks too much.
GIRL
I would return to days before a balcony, photographs, a tire. Days before questions.
ELDER
You are American, they have difficulties discerning right from wrong. It is their moral code which does not translate.
CROCONIUS
She has an eye.
WHARTON
An I?
CROCONIUS
A gift. Her art will serve her well, save her perhaps.
GIRL
In London, a hidden woman revealed herself. Hello, she said, This is a museum, a place where we have bodies. Look at me, my smart brown suit and shoes that clack behind my hidden door. I have you already fooled and the art hasn’t yet begun. Here I am, delirious in my skin. My nerves own my body, she said, Which I can temper and abate at will. Hello, I said, I am a cynical science girl, atoms disturb me. I am full of blood, bile and enzymes. Goodness, she said, You are harmonious. Oh, I said, I did not know. Come with me, said she, I will take you to a place where outline does not exist. I do not want to go there, I said, Even to a place of abstraction, even to a place where the real is exact. Well, she said, You will never be a blue lady if that’s your attitude. You have not yet made it behind the wardrobe where real art is kept and until that time you’d do well to listen to your elders and, if you need reminding, well your betters too. I said, because I was proud, I have a head with individual character. She didn’t like that much, saying, When you are naked you are ideal, that is if you are a true nude. If you insist on owning all this character on your head or in your face well so be it, but you will never be a study. Character compromises, dear girl. Yes, I said, I know, but I don’t care if I never end up behind the wardrobe. I don’t mind telling you I was close to tears. For abstractly, I am still rewarding. Oh no, she said, That’s not true at all and if you continue to speak in that tone of voice you will never be analogous.
TWO
1
Grey fog settles on the tracks. The wind picks up, swinging the sign Chittock Leigh Chittock Leigh. A rattling from down the platform is not the sign but a fourth former at the vending machine. A day Father drove her to Euston himself. Took the morning off work, bought her the ticket, pressing it into her palm as if she weren’t the same girl who’d spent the summer caroming around the new city with a tube map, no lunch, cinema schedule. To the perfume counter at Selfridge’s, the market, a warren of stalls selling old pewter teapots and military overcoats. Lawrence of Arabia twice, Wuthering Heights, A Brief Encounter which takes place much of it on a train platform. As well as in a café like Bishop’s where she bought her fried egg sandwiches where the man took the woman’s hand between the salt and pepper shakers. Gilbert walks across the platform to Darton at the machine. A possible word of caution regarding exploding refreshments and Gilbert moves Darton back to the group. When Father disappeared to buy her ticket she watched a man kiss a woman on the mouth. She left lipstick on him. There was always kissing in train stations. Spenning doesn’t watch Thorpe draw a map for him in the air, he’s checking checking and again his list. Tempton, Thaxted, Williams, Woodward. Betts stares blankly into space. On the balcony or the mezzanine knees tented her skirt. Had he said something out loud. I watch you. A screech. Betts turns, Thorpe brings down his hands, the map disappears. Conductor nods, whistles again. Off to the side Brickie has one hand at the back of his knee Puck in his beak says the night will never end. We are all in this together. And it will go on and on. Father said, Never wander near the park or Kings road where there is a dark element. Meaning the loitering roosters, rollies clamped between yellow fingers. Even the girls had vicious hair and one smashed a man’s camera when he took a picture. Down the platform, Gilbert looks up over his ushering fourth formers, smiles or maybe it’s a grimace. Behind her, Dr. Thorpe, If you please ladies, plural because Fi Hammond is rushing up from finding her yellow pullover forgotten at the ticket counter. Dr. Thorpe, bull’s breath out his nose, Miss Hammond, fourth formers are down in the next carriage with Mr. Gilbert and Miss Devon and that not being a regulation
jumper let me not catch you wearing it. Fi runs toward Gilbert, ankles flying up in white dashes. And Gilbert, watching her over the heads of his group, switches to Fi as she gets closer. That’s perspective for you. Can’t be helped. Thorpe’s voice in her ear, Up we go. If she resists he will bring up Thomas à Becket or Augustine because something in her behavior or the consequences of it will have resonance for the man. Oh, reaching for the handrail can Gilbert see her own white socks. Oh, pinkish from schoolwash. Oh, in a fake way as if it is A Brief Encounter, Pardon Me, Dr. Thorpe I Was Lost in Thought. Turning at the top of the steps to watch Thorpe raise his thumb to signal Devon or Gilbert or the stationmaster or himself.
Vanessa next to Sophie. Opposite, a choice. Girl who sweats or Brickie. Swaying, the train has begun, and here’s Spenning shuffling papers staring Well Sit Down Then, Girl. She has to go with the stink or risk Flirt.
Three parts to this excursion and you’d do well to listen today so that tomorrow’s essay questions don’t induce suicide pacts. Of equal weight will be Mr. Betts’ comments before and after Tartuffe this afternoon. Now, we are inclined to think of Bath as a Roman town, however it did not come into prominence until—
The train picks up. Rattles out of town. They are leaving. Past the cemetery police station ugly house another and another four fields flash past a country road parallels a moment man on a bike barking dog field field field. Nessa has a bit of paper, Sophie draws on it, they laugh. And laugh. Helpless, Nessa leans forward against her knees. Sophie glances up at her, she has been seeing Maine in Sophie’s shoulder. Smile, sheepish. Turning, a farmhouse. Behind it, cows humped in hills. It will rain. Cold hands. In her lap, nails cut straight across. Patches of eczema. Stop it, Catrine, that’s disgusting. Out the window, a red mini drives up a hill. I’m not doing anything, Ness. The mini arrives at the farmhouse, she steps out, takes down the scarf she wears to protect her hair from the wind. Inside, he watches a football match, can hear it in the background. Father, yes love. Father. I have a question, Yes love oh go go run man you’ve legs of con-oh. Crete. Father. I’m listening bach, Damer’s a fool is all. What’s on your mind? Easter, Father. France. Remember, the school has a trip there. Silence. Offside, crowd roars. Penalty, he says and she hears the television snap off. A trip to France is it. I want you near at Easter, Easter marks a year. But Father, pushing at the coin return, Father the trip’s after Easter, only for a week, and there’s four weeks of holiday, Father. Daddy. Da. Holiday not vacation as if Holiday will push the balance to yes. We’ll take the ferry. Hovercraft or something. Papa. The cart rolls by.
Schooling Page 17