Pack of Cards

by Penelope Lively

  ‘Bob was always off on sabbaticals or leave of absence anyway,’ the Fellow in French remarked. ‘Hardly ever seemed to be here.’

  ‘A scholar of his standing …’ said the Senior Tutor severely. ‘Naturally he was much in demand. But it's true that possibly from the point of view of run-of-the-mill teaching …’

  ‘No point in being overstaffed,’ said the Bursar.

  ‘Quite,’ the Senior Tutor went on. ‘Not of course that there would be any question of cutting back, merely that we ought to look carefully at the …’

  The Fellow in Economics, who was given to reading outside his subject, said with a slightly frantic laugh, ‘Oh come, this is beginning to sound like an exercise in self-deception. We shall end up with some presents of fish and game.’

  ‘What?’ snapped the Fellow in French. ‘I don't take your point, Nick.’

  The Senior Tutor said in tones of gentle reproof, ‘Not really, Nick – it's just that we need to review the situation in terms of the College as a whole, rather than the immediate demands of the subject, of the teaching situation. Tragic as Bob's loss is, it does give us the chance to look carefully, to think about …’

  ‘A Research Fellowship?’ offered the Fellow in Politics. ‘Two years. Non-renewable.’

  ‘Without dining rights,’ said the Bursar.

  ‘They always manage to hang on after their time's up, Research Fellows,’ said the Fellow in French. ‘Why bring someone in specially?’

  There was a moment's silence, tampered with only by the Fellow in Economics, who seemed to be having difficulty with something he would have liked to say. The Senior Tutor, who knew him to be a bright young man, but diffident and perhaps a little inexperienced, gave him an avuncular smile and said, ‘Why bring someone in? Now that's an angle I hadn't thought of.’

  ‘There's Ken Lambert,’ suggested the Fellow in Politics.

  ‘Lambert?’ said the Fellow in French.

  ‘Research student,’ said the Bursar.

  ‘Ah,’ said the Senior Tutor thoughtfully.

  ‘He'd be glad of a bit of teaching,’ the Fellow in Politics went on. ‘Good practice for him.’

  ‘Cheaper than sending them out,’ said the Bursar.

  ‘If he needs teaching practice,’ said the Fellow in French, ‘I should have thought he'd be grateful enough for the chance without us feeling we need …’

  ‘Well, that's something we can look into another time.’ The Senior Tutor spoke firmly, gathering up his papers. ‘There are bound to be a few loose ends to tie up, but I think we've had a very useful session, and a valuable discussion of the broader aims of College policy. Perhaps, Tim’ – to the Bursar – ‘I could look in this afternoon and run through some figures with you?’

  The Committee to appoint a Fellow and Tutor in Modern History broke up. The Senior Tutor laid a friendly hand on the arm of the Fellow in Economics, thinking that the lad was looking a trifle peaky, and suggested a glass of sherry before lunch.

  A Clean Death

  THE TRAIN windows were still painted midnight blue for the black-out. Here and there, people had scraped at the paint, making channels and circles of bare glass behind which fled the darkening landscape. They had left King's Cross at four, in twilight, would be home, Aunt Frances said, by seven at the latest. Do, she had announced at the ticket office, assembling her welter of Christmas shopping – parcels and boxes from Harrods, Fortnum's, Marshall and Snelgrove – do call me Frances, just, I don't really like aunt, and Clive would like to be Clive, I'm sure. And Carol, smiling sideways, not looking at her, had known she could not, would have to say ‘you’ now, for always, be for ever picking her way round the problem. She huddled into her school coat, stiff with cold, her knees raw red between the top of her socks and hem of her skirt, and fingered again the ticket in her pocket, checked the brown suitcase in the rack, in which were her holiday clothes, her good tweed skirt and her two jerseys and the tartan wool dress bought today by Aunt Frances – Frances – with money sent by her father from India. The money had meant complicated arrangements of cheques and deposit accounts and Frances, irritated, queueing at the bank, glancing at her watch. Money from the bank in Calcutta, hot and crowded, rupees not pounds and shillings. Don't think of it, she told herself, the tears pressing again behind her eyelids, don't think of India. But it came, as it never ceased to do, clamorous with smells and sounds and what-used-to-be, and she sat, miserable with longing, watching the lights of Suffolk villages twinkle through the tattered black-out paint.

  Frances, in her corner, was wedged beside a young soldier with hair so short his head seemed almost shaven, and battledress that smelled of damp and sweat; she had flinched away from him, Carol could see, turning to the window, reading her London Library book. She looked up, caught Carol's eye, and said, ‘Ipswich in another few minutes now – lovely thought!’

  I've put you in the spare room, she had said earlier, not in with Marian, I thought you might rather be on your own, and Carol, who had feared to be classified with her cousins, as child, had been relieved. She did not know how to be with children, what to say, they made her feel awkward, inadequate. But I don't know how to be with grown-ups either, she thought, there is no one I talk to, I am quite by myself, it is as though I was some kind of thing there is only one of. At school she was not unpopular, but had no friends; she never walked with her arm round someone else's waist, or gathered over the tepid radiator in the form room, warming her hands and whispering. The other girls alarmed her; they were so worldly-wise, so cushioned by their confidence in how things were done, how to talk and act and respond. The school bewildered her, with the jungle of its customs and taboos. She remained uninitiated, an outsider, doing her best to use the right language, show the right interests, have the right emotions. She collected, as the others did, photographs of the royal family cut from newspapers; she stared at the battered fashion magazines passed from hand to hand, exhaustively discussed and analysed. At night, she lay silent in bed, hearing their whispers of cinemas and London musicals, and India created and re-created itself in the darkness, and she could hardly bear it. It set her apart from them, she knew; it was not quite the thing, to have been born in another country. It was not good to be different. She knew it, and felt inadequate; there was nothing she could do about it, nothing could make her one of them. Sometimes, not often, they asked her about India, but their curiosity was brief, it would evaporate within minutes. She would be talking – of the house, the garden, the heat, the people – and they would be gone, their attention switched, back with their own concerns. The other thing they never mentioned. The girl who had shown her round, her first day – one of the prefects – had said, ‘Bad luck about your mother, Carol,’ and she had known that it was unmentionable, death you did not talk about, like God, or love.

  She had learned how she ought to be, what was expected, and was quietly pleased that she had learned so much. She made fewer mistakes now, was more acceptable. She was managing.

  The train slid to a stop. Frances opened the door, and steam oozed up between carriage and platform, cold air gushing in, and country voices, voices all related to one another, Carol could hear. Accents. There was a girl at school who had an accent; that was not good either, she too was apart. Her parents did not pay, it was said, she had the Scholarship. Listening, in streets, on buses, Carol felt dizzied, sometimes, by voices: different, the same, connected. Like the babel of tongues in an Indian bazaar. You have to know who you are, she thought, who other people are, or it is impossible, you do everything wrong. Often I do not know who I am.

  They got out, festooned with parcels. If you could take the children's stocking presents, Frances said, and Nigel's train-set, I can manage the Fortnum's bag and the curtain stuff. And Clive will get the cases, no hope of a porter of course, not these days.

  Clive had come up almost at once, out of the darkness, and Carol thought wildly: do I kiss him or not, I can't remember, is it all relations, or not men ones? But he
solved the problem himself by holding out a hand, and they shook awkwardly, and yes, she said, I had a good term, and yes, it is lovely to think it's nearly Christmas.

  In the car, bumping through the East Anglian night, Frances recounted the day. London was awful, she said, I can't tell you, the shops so crowded, such a struggle on the buses, but I got everything, nearly everything, there was a problem with John's school things, they hadn't the games socks in yet … She sounded tired, but triumphant, like a huntsman at the end of the day, the job done. The road shone wet black in the car headlights and the fields that slid by were ribbed with snow; it was bitterly cold. A frost tonight, Clive said, Marian's cold seems a bit better – oh, and Mrs Binns left a pie in the oven for supper, she said give it another half hour or so, after you get back.

  They were close, easy, in their concerns, the running of their lives. Once or twice, remembering, they passed questions to her, or comments, over the back of their seats. Is it this summer you do School Cert., Carol, or next? This village is called Kersey, the church is so pretty, you'll have to walk over one day and have a look.

  They arrived, and the house seemed to burst, spilling out into the night like a ripe fruit; light, voices, the small shapes of children running and leaping beside the car. Dogs barking. Wireless music. The country night lay black and still and freezing all around, and here was this confident, unassailable place, waiting. The children bounced and shrieked. Did you find the balloons? they cried, and have you got my ribbon, and are there any sweets? Mummy! they shrieked, Mummy! And Frances was hugging and recounting and saying, oh, and here's Carol, say hello to Carol.

  Hello, they said, and then their voices were back on that note of excitement and demand, and everyone was going into the house, shutting out the darkness – the endless snowy fields, the black roads.

  She woke early in the morning, perished with cold. She had got up in the night to put on her underclothes beneath her pyjamas, and then her jersey on top, and still had lain frozen in the bed, curled knees to chest, the rest of the bed an icy pond. She listened to the noises of the house expand around her: the children's scampering feet, their voices crooning to cats or dogs, the rattle of a boiler being filled, Frances and Clive talking in the bedroom. It was an old, wooden house; it rang and echoed. Presently she got up and went to the bathroom that Frances had said she should share with the children. It smelled of flannels and damp and toothpaste; there was a full pottie in the corner. She stripped to the waist, as you had to do at school, and washed under her arms, up her neck, over the growing breasts that she felt must be so obvious, that slopped and bounced under her jerseys.

  She dressed and went downstairs. On the bottom step there was a dog, a great golden lion-headed thing, lying right across it. She stood there, not knowing what to do, and it did not move, but looked at her and away again. And then one of the children – Nigel, the youngest – came from some room and saw her and said, ‘Are you frightened of her?’ And before she could answer he had gone running into the kitchen and she could hear him shout, ‘Daddy! She's frightened of Tosca – Carol's frightened of Tosca.’

  She could hear them laughing. Frances said, ‘I expect she's not used to dogs, darling.’ She came out and tugged at the dog's collar, still laughing, saying what a stupid, soft old thing she was, wouldn't hurt a fly, you mustn't mind her. And Carol could think of no reply: she was not afraid of dogs, liked them, but in India a dog may be rabid, you do not go near a strange dog, never. It was instinctive, now, the hesitation, a conditioned response, just as at night, always, she thought, for the rest of her life, she would feel unsafe without the shrouding security of a mosquito net.

  Clive was in the kitchen, nursing a cat. He stroked and tickled it, talking baby-language to it so that Carol was both embarrassed and fascinated. There was something wrong, apparently, it was ill. ‘Poor Mr Patch,’ crooned Clive. ‘Poor pussy. Poor patchums,’ and the children gathered round soft with sympathy, offering it tit-bits. ‘We are a terrible animal family, I'm afraid, Carol,’ said Frances, frying bacon. ‘Everybody is mad about animals. The children will show you the pony after breakfast.’

  She trailed with the children, in a wind that cut through her mack, clutched her bare knees, was shown the garden and its secret places, the hens, the rabbit hutches, the pony, the orchard. And then they became involved in some game of their own and she came back into the house alone and stood at a loss in the kitchen, where Frances mixed things and talked to a woman washing up at the sink.

  ‘This is Carol, Mrs Binns,’ she said. ‘My niece, you know.’ And Carol felt herself appraised, not unkindly, not critically, just with the shrewdness of a person who liked to see what was what, how things were.

  ‘You'll be much of an age with my Tom, I should imagine,’ said Mrs Binns. ‘Fourteen he was, in October. We'll have to get you together. He's at a loose end, in the holidays, Tom, there's no one much his age, not nearer than the village.’

  At school there were girls who had, or who were rumoured to have, boyfriends. The reputation gave them an aura, of daring but also of distinction; they too were set apart, but in a desirable way. They had moved on a little, on and up. Carol knew no boys, had not, she thought, spoken to one since long ago, since nursery days on another continent. She stared at Mrs Binns in alarm.

  ‘Mmmn,’ said Frances. ‘What a good idea,’ and Carol, puzzled now, saw that for some reason it was not. But Mrs Binns, saying, ‘Well, you must look in at the cottage, dear, your auntie'll tell you where it is,’ had turned now to the table and taken up the pink and pimpled carcase of a chicken. ‘I'll do this for you, Mrs Seaton, shall I?’

  Frances looked at the chicken with distaste. ‘Yes, please, if you would. A beastly job. I'd be sunk without you, I really would.’

  Mrs Binns laughed. She stood at the sink, rummaging with deft, knowledgeable hands in the chicken's insides. ‘It's a matter of what you're used to. I did my first bird when I was – oh, younger than Carol here.’ Appalling things slid from within the chicken and lay on the draining-board. Frances, Carol saw, had turned firmly away, busy with her pie-dish. Carol said, ‘In India you buy chickens live. They hang them up by their feet in the bazaar, in bunches.’

  ‘How absolutely horrid!’ Frances exclaimed; her voice was tense with emotion. Mrs Binns, halted in her work, looked up. Frances went on, vehemently, ‘That is what is so awful about those places – they are so foul to animals. One really cannot stand it. I remember going to Morocco, before the war, and it simply spoiled the holiday, the way they treat the donkeys and things. You had to walk about trying not to notice – it was wretched, we were so glad to come home.’

  Mrs Binns said in neutral tones, ‘It's not nice to see, cruelty to animals.’ She swilled the chicken out under the tap and put it on a plate. ‘His dad give Tom a gun for his birthday, for rabbiting, but he told him he's to use it properly, no maiming things, he's to see there's a clean death.’

  Frances's face was set in disapproval. ‘Mmmn. Isn't fourteen a bit young for a gun?’

  Mrs Binns was packing the chicken with stuffing now. Crumbs of it fell from her fingers and lay on the table, smelling of herbs, of summer. ‘Rabbits are terrible round us now – had all my cabbage. He's the makings of a good steady hand, Bob says – Tom has. Three he got, last week.’

  ‘Mmmn,’ said Frances again. She got up, putting away flour and fat. ‘Could you do the bedrooms next, Mrs Binns, and then I think the dining-room windows need a going over.’

  At lunch, Frances and Clive talked of Mrs Binns. Clive said that she was a card, quite a character, and tales were recounted, remarks that Mrs Binns had made, her opinions, her responses. They were told with affection, with indulgence – much, Carol noted, as the children were spoken of in their absence. ‘But,’ said Frances, ‘I cannot approve of that boy being given a gun. They will start them off slaughtering things so early, people like that, I hate it.’

  Marian said in stricken tones, ‘Does he kill rabbits, Tom? Oh, poor ra
bbits … Mummy, can't you tell him not to?’

  ‘No, I can't, darling, it's not up to me. There, don't think about it – I don't expect he does it much. Finish up your sausage and then you can get down.’

  One girl at school got letters from her boyfriend. It was known, and envied. She took them away and read them alone, in the cloakroom, and later could be seen, pink-faced and giggling, poring over selected passages with her best friend. Carol said, staring at the bowl of frost-nipped chrysanthemums in the middle of the table, ‘Mrs Binns said I could go over to her cottage sometime.’

  There was a silence. Clive picked up the cat and blew softly into its fur, murmuring to it. ‘Poor Mr Patch,’ he mumbled. ‘How are your insides today – how's your poor tummy?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frances. ‘Well, just as you like, Carol.’ She began to clear the table. ‘I think a walk this afternoon, to the village and back, I need some things from the post office, anyway.’

  The landscape was black and white under huge white skies – black ploughlands striped with white runnels of snow, criss-crossed with the dark lines of hedges, trimmed with the stiff shapes of trees. They walked along a road bordered by fawn-coloured rushes and grasses, each one starred and bearded with frost; icy wind poured through the skeletal hedges; there was a chain of crisp puddles along the uneven surface. The children skittered ahead, sliding on the ice, darting off into the fields on brief excursions. Clive and Frances walked arm in arm, Carol a few paces behind. Their talk and occasional laughter came back to her in irrelevant, incomprehensible snatches. I am so cold, she thought, colder than I have ever been, colder even than I am at school, will I ever be warm, how do people get warm, ever, in their lives? In India, in childhood, she had been too hot; always, one was sticky with sweat, looking for a place out of the sun. I cannot remember that now, she thought, I have no idea, really, how it was, it is like something in a book, something that happened to someone else. The gap had lengthened between her and the others; Frances, looking back over her shoulder, called, ‘Not far now – we shall have to get you used to walking, Carol.’