Woman on Woman

by Hilary Chale

  “Yes,” said Pauline, “she must already have fought off one attack before I reached the top of the stairs.”

  “Then you fairly let her have it ... Four pace run and all. I had never seen this before. The welts were white and echoed all round.”

  “Yes, the sound of voices in other parts of the House suddenly came to a stop. They were all listening, and at this moment, believe it or not, I had ceased to hate her; this was simply official. I had laid on two: at my third run I got it in between them, so that they began to coalesce ... I reckoned I could work on that. By the end of the fourth run her bottom was heaving. Also my eye was in, you see, and my arm was limbered up. She was holding the legs of the table tightly, and I could see her knuckles showing white.”

  “I was getting alarmed at the speed of the strokes,” Robert said.

  “Yes, I suppose you were. Her back was beginning to shake somewhere about the ninth.”

  “Her back?” said Edmund.

  “Suppressed sobs,” Pauline said gravely. “She was taking it very well. When I turned for the last but one, blood was showing. I asked her if she wished to be held, she said ‘no’ and then ‘thank you’, and she took the last two without a sound.”

  “Had there been any sounds before?”

  “Gasps, I suppose, nothing to speak of.”

  Robert nodded.

  “I told her to stand up after the twelfth. Her pants fell round her ankles and she stepped out of them. Then she rearranged her kilt. I said something to the effect that she could find some surgical spirit on my window sill, and told her to take it to Atkinson’s study and wait for you, Robert. I told her that she could apologise to you if she wished.”

  “And presumably she picked up her knickers and went?”

  “Yes. Then I had to cope with Robert, her and Tome. I seem to remember giving you two strokes for being an idiot ... with your shorts still on.”

  “You didn’t even run up ... See why I thought you were wonderful? You did send me to Atkinson’s study, where I found Janet waiting.”

  “Did she actually apologise?”

  “Oh yes! Very handsomely.”

  “Then Tom tapped on the door.”

  “Esther says that he looked a bit sheepish and you said, ‘you’ve got yourself into a pickle, haven’t you?’ and then you asked him what he would have done if he had been upstairs with the House Hunt, and he said that if he had been upstairs there wouldn’t have been a House Hunt.”

  “That’s right, I pressed him. He said he would have tried to stop them and ...”

  “And, you said,” said Robert, “even to the point of becoming a fox yourself?”

  “Fox,” said Edmund, “oh I see.”

  “And he said, once you’ve started a thing like that you can’t stop.”

  “Oh yes,” said Robert, “this bit’s in Esther’s letter. She thought it was super. He said ‘I’m no hero, but the answer is ‘yes’ I think so’.”

  “And I thought that was good,” said Pauline, “if friends won’t stand by each other, who will. He knew nothing about Janet’s original nasty little joke, not beforehand. All he had really done was to confuse everything and innocently started a riot, and we couldn’t have that because it would lead us into having to punish people for things that other people had done.”

  “You make it sound funny, Miss,” he said, and I said it was in a way, but he probably did not know that I had just cane Janet for two offences but had halved the penalty, so it seemed fair to cane him for his one offence, and halve that penalty. He seemed to think it was perfectly fair.

  “Actually, he said he hoped it was fair.”

  “So he did. I wonder what he meant?”

  Robert said: “Apparently you began your thirteenth run of the evening very much in your stride.”

  “Yes, indeed. I thought I had to inflict real pain, otherwise I would be suspected of having pets. I needn’t have worried. It cut across and round him like a whiplash, leaving a violet tangent on the surfaces. Also my eye was even better. Although all the strokes combined upon one three-quarter-inch band, he took it silently, but at the fifth, somebody gave a low whistle. It was rare to draw blood so soon, but it jolly well did, and the last.”

  “You sound as if you enjoyed it.”

  “I can’t say ... Perhaps I did. Do you know, I think I was acting in self defence.”

  “I wouldn’t say anyone thought that at the time,” Robert said.

  “Anyway, I sent him and George to find the surgical spirit together and told George to put on his leotard. ‘With pleasure’ he said. You were just coming into the room, Robert, to tell me that Claudius Rex was waiting for me at my study, but at that moment we heard the Housemaster’s heavy footsteps and he walked in. He thought we were all rather late up, and I said that something had happened which couldn’t possibly wait. He said that in that case, if it was something which I would prefer to explain afterwards, he would stay up ... More Uncumbrian, I’m afraid. Canings had to be reported to the Housemaster after they had taken place: so afterwards was shorthand for after a caning.”

  She paused and swigged her own Ouzo. Then Edmund said, “this story is getting a bit of a maze. Does it get worse?”

  “Not much,” she said cheerfully. “Because if it’s going to, we might adjourn for a spanking and then resume.”

  “Oh Edmund, have we been boring you?”

  “On the contrary, but you must admit that you are rather stretching my comprehension. It’s a pity we’re in the middle of the Town Square.”

  “I suppose we mustn’t shock all these innocent Cypriots.”

  “What, Paphians?”

  They all three laughed.

  “I bet Aphrodite had a sore bottom sometimes!”

  “All the same, and much as I regret it, I think that you had better go on.”

  “OK, I went and talked to Claudius. I’m not good at mimicking voices, but he talked something like this: ‘Ah’ve been lookin’ round an’ ... ah think it mus’ have been me’. It turned out that he was the one who had originally suggested that Janet might be ‘persuaded’, and then, apparently, it had got out of hand. She wasn’t popular, her said. He hadn’t been there when it exploded. In the library looking something up. He had seen things get out of hand at home ... This was a reference to riots in the Caribbean. I thanked him and told him to go to bed. He asked me not to be too hard on them and I said that I would be as hard as I could, and sent him off.”

  “I was still in the Common Hall when you came back.”

  “Naughty Robert! You shouldn’t have been. All the pressure I suppose.”

  “You had a second long one, and George was in his leotard and you arranged to do them two at a time over the opposite ends of the caning table.”

  “Yes. We sent for them all together and fairly yelled at them, for mass bullying. They said it wasn’t really. The whole House was bloody furious and it blew up spontaneously. I said I understood that side of it and I had already caned Janet, but terrorism was intolerable, especially mob terrorism.”

  “And you made them all say they understood,” Robert added.

  “Were you still there?”

  “Yes, throughout, in fact.”

  “You’d have got more than two if I’d been quite myself! Then we made them bend over the opposite ends of the table.”

  “Bare bottomed?”

  “Oh yes. Twelve each. George was left-handed, I was right, so we could run from opposite sides without getting in each other’s way.

  “This became a legend, you know,” Robert remarked.

  “I ran first, and then George made his run, and so on. Esther kept count for each of us. I was in a state of blazing cold anger (if that’s not a contradiction) so I had a sort of tigerish power. George seemed to feel the sam
e. One girl screamed and begged to be let off because she couldn’t stand it.”

  “George simply stood over her,” said Robert, “and told her that she didn’t have any mercy on Janet either.”

  “M-m. She got down again,” Pauline said reflectively. “Then, as we finished each pair, we asked them why they had been beaten ... pretty varied responses. The second pair admitted that they bullied, and where sorry. The last pair were a bit different because one of them was the House Idiot, and the other urged us to let him off.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes! He didn’t ask for anything himself. It was the other who persuaded us. So the other got his twelve while he stood by.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I just felt tired, I remember asking George if he had enjoyed it. He said ‘yes, for once’, which was funny because I thought he always did. I certainly couldn’t say that I didn’t.”

  “Always?” said Edmund.

  “No. Not always, then, of course, we had to go and see the housemaster, who took one look at us and gave us a drink.”

  Eight Years Later

  “I met Susan in Cambridge accidentally the other day.”

  “Susan?”

  “Deemster ... You remember her, Jessie.”

  “At Porchester ... of course, I haven’t seen her since she left.”

  “Nor I,” Gayle said, “but that’s hardly surprising.”

  “It’s a long way from Porchester Hall to Dothegirls.”

  Gayle Chandler shifted in her chair, reached for the teapot, changed her mind and lit a cigarette.

  “You’ve still got the habit,” Jessie said, “it reminds me of Susan.”

  “Yes,” Gayle laughed, “lots of things remind one of Susan.”

  “Pity she didn’t stay on.”

  “True, she’d have been Head Girl, had she but known it.”

  “What actually happened? I know there was a fuss, but ... it’s ... Er, eight years ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “And girls come and go.”

  “I don’t think you were there. It was the year of the Great Virus. Remember? Almost all the staff caught it except me.”

  “And then you went off to Dothegirls and I got this job at Girton.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were saying about Susan.”

  Gayle, who never smoked more than half a cigarette, reached for the packet again. She and Jessie were old and intimate friends.

  “Susan ... where was I? Oh, yes, she came home with me here and I gave her tea ... all very odd!”

  “What’s odd about tea?” said Jessie.

  The packet was empty. She got up and crossed to the corner cupboard for a new one. Jessie guessed that she was gaining time. She was facing the cupboard when she continued.

  “Susan ... you remember ... clever, hard working, adequate athlete, good hockey player.”

  “But when she got into trouble, it was quite big trouble,” Jessie interrupted.

  “Yes, indeed! Smoking in the barn. Whiskey under the stairs. Guinea Pig in Mademoiselle Henriot’s desk. Permanganate in the pool, you name it.”

  “That was a crisis! The day before the Swimming Gala, I remember. We had to empty the darned pool and get the fire brigade to help us fill it in time. You gave her six of the best.”

  “I certainly did! In the gym. It was empty. I had to make her fetch a chair because the horse and everything else was already outside. It echoed like thunder ... they probably heard it in Barchester.”

  “And everyone saw the marks at the gala.”

  “Yes. I fairly let her have it.”

  “In those bikinis; she had some explaining to do,” said Jessie.

  “Serve her right!”

  “But most of the parents roared with laughter.”

  “And Susan won the diving competition.”

  They both chuckled and Gayle said appreciatively:

  “You know, there’s something about Susan.”

  “You were saying?”

  “It’s all connected with the way she left ... it was a frightful epidemic. Those of us who were still on our feet were practically run off them. Susan was a senior girl.”

  “Helpful, I recollect. She managed one of the bed-making teams.”

  “Yes. All the monitors were ill ... I nearly closed the school.”

  “And then she sort of disappeared.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” said Gayle.

  “All right, tell it your way, and for Gawd’s sake stub out that cigarette.”

  “It was a particularly exhausting Friday, but she was full of beans, as ever. Cheerful, taking trays, running errands, washing up ... eventually I sent her to bed. I’d had to put her in that little dormitory with the fire escape.”

  “Fire escape? I think I see where this might be going!”

  “Calm descended upon the hallowed scene, so I told Frumpy ... remember her? Sterling but not photogenic, to mind the shop while I had a quick one at the pub.”

  “And you found Susan there?”

  “Oh no! I’d have stood her a beer if I had.”

  “I’m agog.”

  “I found her with a young man. Canoodling would be a euphemism. I saw a pair of feet waving behind that memorial bench by the back gate. So I called out. It never occurred to me that it might be ‘one of ours’. I went over and they disentangled and stood up and I made them put their pants on ... I was shaking and couldn’t trust myself. If it had been very dark, I might have pretended not to recognise her, but there was a lamp-post in the road, and anyway she called me ‘Miss Chandler’.”

  “I see.”

  “So I got rid of him and sent her to bed again, said I would see her in the morning. I sat up half the night looking through her reports back to the year dot, and her punishment book ... I’ve still got it, by the way.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Mostly reprimands. Fewer caning than I thought.”

  “I suppose they stand out in one’s mind,” Jessie said. “I certainly did her myself.”

  “Seeing her next day was easier said than done, because I was so frightfully busy ... Temps, doctors, Public Health Inspector, incessant parental telephone traffic and a plumber too.”

  “Was she around?”

  “But yes! Bright as a button. Helpful as before, not over-doing it, not slinking about guiltily or anything, just natural.”

  “So?”

  “I decided not to throw her out as is customary.”

  “Too useful,” Jessie said cynically.

  “No, she had a basically good record. I thought that this was a case of hyperactivity and growing up quickly coming together. Some of her pranks had been really funny, and she hadn’t been a Bad Influence, quite the reverse.”

  “Mustard and cress on the garden gnomes’ beards.”

  “Exactly ... then there were more disasters after lunch and then it was supper time, and more trays and washing up. At bedtime I realised that it was her home weekend. I couldn’t cancel it, of course, without explaining to the parents, who might have gone through the roof before I was ready. So I sent for her.”

  “Awkward interview?”

  “It was short. I said I was considering her future, not strictly true: I had made up my mind; and that she should attend me on Monday.”

  “Was she surprised?”

  “Yes, but she probably didn’t know what to make of it, at that particular moment.”

  “And the next day she went home?”

  “Yes and it was there that she went down with the Virus ... Perfectly genuine. Doctor’s certificate and all, but she didn’t come back. I had a charming letter from her father asking to be let off a term’s notice because t
hey were being moved to Bangkok ... you know these multinational employers ... and that was that, until last Tuesday.”

  “Weren’t you worried?”

  “In case she had got pregnant? Oh yes! Worried stiff, but I heard nothing and eventually presumed the best.”

  “Why is all this a run up to last Tuesday? It obviously is, but why?”

  “Give me time. I came face to face with her in Petty Cury. Gasps. General hellos and hand shakings. I was really pleased to see her, though we hadn’t had a squeak for ages. She was looking a matured Susan, if you get my meaning. Just the same, only now she’s twenty-five. We stood getting in the shoppers’ way and eventually I suggested coming home. She had her car and followed me.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She’s an Oriental interpreter. She learned Thai in Bangkok and went on from there.”

  “She was pretty bright. Couldn’t she have taken a professorship or something?”

  “Dunno, ‘spect so. Anyway I made tea and dragged the Madeira cake from its lair and she talked about life in south east Asia and this of course led straight back to that fateful night. You know how direct she was ... she asked me what I’d have done on that Monday Morning.”

  “What would you have done? You never talked about it.”

  “I said that I wouldn’t have ruined her simply for doing what everyone does sooner or later. Six of the best was hardly enough, when she had already had it for turning the swimming pool purple and I could hardly make her write out ‘I must not copulate in school’ two hundred times ... she would have laughed like a drain and again asked what I would have done. I asked her why she wanted to know ... she seemed to become a bit het up and pressing.”

  “Sounds like late school-girl crush stuff.”

  “I don’t know ... I don’t really think so, but you could be right.”

  “I suppose that if you had not made up your mind when she went home, there might have been nothing to tell.”

  “As I said, I had made up my mind by the Monday. But anyway, she began to explain that the event had been on her mind. She didn’t think that she was going to be sacked, because she would not have been sent home for her usual weekend if that was seriously in the wind and she had screwed herself up to go back and face the music; but this Bangkok thing came up and she was sort of left in the air. And the thought of it made her go hot and cold all over. Not the fucking ... that was fun ... but getting away with something when she had been caught.”