by Patrick Gale
She dared to push her tongue into Wilf’s mouth in turn and was startled to feel him gently sucking on it. She opened her eyes and found he had kept his obediently shut. She had never noticed how long his lashes were before. She pulled back slightly, not because she was ready for him to stop – she was curious for him to continue – but in order to take a breath, without snorting through her slightly blocked-up nose. Wilf responded as though Margaret and Kieran had just walked in. He rolled off her, red in the face, swore, apologized and stumbled from the room.
She probably should have followed him, if only to give him the chance to rebuff her. But his kiss was having after-effects; her face and ears felt hot and tight and when she rose to follow him after all, she saw herself in the mirror over her sink and froze, amazed. They had not kissed for long but something – his stubble, his spit or the one acting on the other – had left the skin around her mouth looking so sore and pink that her lips had lost their neat line of definition.
She finished the last of her packing then dropped back on her bed to reread her notes on that morning’s chapter on the Greek middle voice. Reciprocal use, sprang off the page at her, Where middle voice used in the plural implies a reciprocal reflexive pronoun as in they embrace one another – aspazontai – or they talk with one another – dialegontai. She said the Greek words aloud, slowly, enjoying the exotic sensation of them in her mouth. Even a shopping list in this language sounded like words of binding enchantment. As she studied on, the fingers of the hand not holding the book brushed the tender skin about her lips.
Wilf was the only one not to put in an appearance at breakfast so she knocked on his door before she left the house. There was a big Alice Cooper poster on the door with ‘Wilf’ written on Alice’s forehead in magic marker. He had tried to do it in Gothic script.
‘Wilf?’
He grunted in reply, as though half-asleep, but she had heard a soft scuffle after she spoke so knew he was pretending. It was a house rule never to open a bedroom door unless invited so she waited.
‘I’m off to school now, actually,’ she told him, feeling self-conscious as Elaine the Pain and some of the others were passing on the stairs.
‘Actually,’ Elaine echoed.
‘Okay,’ he grunted. Sophie stood on until he added, ‘See you, then,’ dismissing her.
LENT TERM
(thirteen years, eleven months)
Returning to life in Tatham’s was a shock after a Christmas at home because, for Sophie at least, it was so constrainedly feminine. At Wakefield House everyone had their own room but there was no differentiation between genders. To Margaret and Kieran they were all simply the kids. Margaret would occasionally take a girl aside for a confidential moment or Kieran might drive some boys somewhere to watch football but most of the time the inmates were a pack, singled out by character traits, not as boy or girl.
Sophie had never been close to any of the girls in the home. This was probably Wilf’s fault. She began by trailing around after him then became his best mate, the exception to his belief that cruel early experiences left most girls in the place too damaged to be anything but dangerous liabilities. Independent in most of her thinking, Sophie had absorbed this attitude unconsciously. Certainly some of the older girls there had been terrifyingly unpredictable at times, some of the younger ones too unapproachably miserable or uptight, but Sophie might have befriended some of the saner ones among them had Wilf not got to her first. As it was, she could not remember ever being interested in the things girls were meant to like. Dolls were spooky, The Bay City Rollers and Donny Osmond grotesque, and she had never seen the point in mastering the thin, breathless art of skipping. She was not a tomboy. She had no objection to dresses and had once grown her hair halfway down her back. She took a watchful interest in her appearance and resented her failure thus far to sprout breasts. But given a contest between watching Wilf dismantle his bike or going out with the girls to play with testers in Boots and raid the Pick’n’Mix counter in Woolies, Wilf had always won the day. If she preferred to read in silence, Wilf never treated it as a personal betrayal. Theirs was a basic loyalty whereas friendship between girls seemed always subject to analysis, qualification and revision, to an extent disproportionate to the emotional rewards rendered.
The others in the home teased them often enough for being like a married couple but they had always been able to laugh it off, secure in the knowledge that they were more like siblings. Had she ruined all that? From the moment she was back on the Daughters’ Staircase Sophie felt she had been pushed across an invisible line into the female camp and could think of no reason but the kiss.
Returning girls, even Kimiko Matsubara, swapped stories of their Christmases and flashed photographs and all the talk was of holiday romance – older brothers’ gorgeous friends, glamorous male cousins, actors drooled over during Christmas trips to the RSC – and Sophie found herself implicated in it.
‘What about you, Cullen?’ a normally sullen older girl asked, who had just slapped up a poster of Ian McKellen as Richard II over her bed. ‘Anything to report?’
Sophie was so stung by the dismissive way the girl flicked her eyes over Sophie’s continuing lack of chest that she muttered something about having had a festive snog. Of course she was then expected to tell all so she gave them a mildly upgraded version. Wilf became William, a boy she’d known from childhood, suddenly lust-husky and tongue-tied. Yes they’d kissed, and on a bed, but she had called a halt when he wanted to go further. (Was that a lie, she wondered as she said it.) When asked if he’d be writing to her she scoffed that he could barely spell, truthfully enough though the admission gave her a pang of guilt. When they asked if she had his picture she shrugged and said she knew what he looked like.
For some reason her offhand treatment of a barely literate stud won her far more maturity points than mere breasts would have done and the hierarchy in the Daughters’ Chamber subtly shifted to accommodate her. Purvis and Weatherall, two middle-school girls who had never acknowledged her, began to involve her in their more public conversations and Kimiko, who had mustered no more than a new, shorter hairstyle for the show-and-tell session, humbly assigned herself to a wanly studious first-year from Aberdovey whom they had spent their first term ignoring.
Upstairs, room was mysteriously found for her to sleep in an older dormitory. Climbing the steps to Hall for dinner on the first evening back, Weatherall and another middle-school Daughter Sophie didn’t know engaged her in conversation long enough to imply they invited her to sit at their subtly bad-girl section of the Daughters’ table, midway between the seniors and where Nurse presided over the youngest.
But all this fresh acceptance only served to make Sophie feel more constrained by femininity. In Chapel, the Daughters sat in their own pews in a sort of Lady Chapel, like so many worshipping villagers screened off in a monastery church. She had keenly looked forward to her new div because Lucas would be there and Kimiko wouldn’t, but she had to sit in the front row with Purvis and Weatherall, both of them hothoused through the scholarship exam but flagging now that they had to study under their own steam. No boys sat in the front row with them but social freaks. Boys were actually placed there as a punishment for inattention. And Lucas sat two rows back, out of her view, and gave her only a muffled, oh hello sort of greeting on the first day, as though they had barely met.
She looked about her at Scholars doing their Wilfish boy things, kicking footballs, flicking bread pellets, ignoring girls and seethed in impotence. She was prepared to understand Lucas’s standoffishness; whatever his good intentions, befriending her in the holidays did not automatically entail being her friend at school. Different rules applied in term-time, overpowering personal preference. For all he knew, she might turn out to be div freak. What she could not understand was the hypocrisy of the other Daughters. To hear them talk amongst themselves was to suppose them boy-mad, barely intellectual. And yet in classes they were all studious conformity and, far from being grate
ful, appeared to react to any social approach by a male classmate with disdain. Perhaps it was a matter of age and only boys two or so years older, or even men, were worthy of interest? Or was it rather that the Daughters prized themselves so highly, or so lowly, that they could not conceive of a male friendship uncoloured by romance?
Things changed in the sixth-form, apparently. The thirty or so girls admitted to the sixth-form without scholarship had their own common room, wore their own approximation of the boys’ relaxed uniform and went about with what seemed to Sophie a daunting social aplomb. They were there because their parents paid handsomely. They went home every evening after lessons, not staying on for prep like Lucas, and rarely had the peaky, unpampered look of the sixth-form Daughters. They had first been admitted in 1970, in a two-pronged mission to raise money and stamp out vice, and had been causing trouble ever since, breaking boys’ and teachers’ hearts and winning prizes that had previously been the preserve of boys. Sophie had small hope of befriending one when her turn came. Meanwhile she had two years of respectable isolation to endure.
At lunch on the second day of term, however, liberation was granted her. Jonty Mortimer was a kind of god, being Senior Scholar and thus Senior Prefect. A keen footballer, son of a union activist, his retention of his Lancastrian accent in a school where the Iranians, Nigerians and Russians all swiftly acquired the school’s drawling version of received pronunciation implied a moral vigour his fellows lacked. All this, his Byronic head of hair, the rumour that he had sired a child off one of the kitchen staff and the extreme rareness of his smiles meant that the Daughters’ table fell silent as he approached. Even Nurse paused in doling out Queen of Puddings.
‘Cullen?’
It was not the fashion among the boys to use Miss as the dons did. Sophie had so not expected to be addressed by anyone so important that she had just taken a large mouthful of pudding which was too hot to swallow in a hurry so she merely raised a guilty hand to shoulder-height as everyone at the table turned to look at her.
‘Christ, you’re a bit small, Cullen! What do you weigh?’
She told him, sitting up straighter.
He shrugged. ‘Well, rules are rules so you’ll have to do. But do try to grow. You’re the new bell-ringer replacing Jansen.’
‘But I don’t know how,’ she said, bewildered.
‘Which is why you’re meeting me at Cloister Gate at two.’
‘I’ve got netball.’
‘Damn. Who else has got netball?’
A flurry of hands answered him.
‘She can’t do netball,’ he told them and strode away back to top table.
Sophie was rounded on at once by her new friends, who were suddenly less friendly.
‘You’re so lucky,’ Purvis sneered.
‘But I don’t want to ring bells,’ she assured them.
‘You’d rather play netball?’ Even Kimiko was faintly hostile in her envy.
‘Well, no. I’d rather stay indoors and, I dunno, read.’
‘Being a bell-ringer,’ Weatherall explained, ‘is like winning the Pools.’
Chapel had a ring of eight bells. Each bell was assigned to a Scholar (or Daughter) for the duration of their career in the school. There was neither choice nor volunteering in the matter. In homage to the patterns beloved of change-ringers, each new ringer was selected on a purely mathematical basis according to his or her exam rating in their year’s intake. There were always twenty new Scholars chosen each year, including Daughters. Their twenty positions were taken to correspond to the notes of a chromatic scale ascending from middle C. Each bell-ringer was someone who simply happened to score marks that put them in a position corresponding to the next note in the school song. When four bell-ringers left, the four new scholars corresponding to the next four notes of the song were assigned their bells. Because few of the Scholars were musical as well as clever, the Bell Captain had long since been issued with a reduction of the song to its numerical equivalents. The Nurse before the Nurse before last had worked this up into an arcane sampler which hung in the ringing-chamber beside the long roster of bell-ringers past.
Quite apart from the time it bought her, quite honourably unchaperoned in the company of boys, being a female ringer was prized as access to a kind of licensed Hellfire Club. Thanks to their required presence in a chamber beside but not quite in Chapel, a tradition of free thought and religious unorthodoxy clung to the Captain and his band. They were exempt from attending the church services they announced, from serving in the school army corps, from playing for any Schola team against their will. Bell-ringers traditionally went on to study classics, maths or philosophy.
Sophie was so nervous that she wolfed down her pudding and hurried through the Slipe, the passage that led under Hall to the cloisters and the rest of the school. She was at the gate to the cloisters ten minutes early for fear of keeping Jonty Mortimer waiting but he was there ahead of her. As he nodded his greeting and led her through the cloisters to the foot of the bell tower, she caught a whiff of cigarettes off his velvet-edged gown.
‘Go on up,’ he told her. ‘I’ll bring the others when they come.’
Of course there were others. Jansen would have been only one of several Scholars leaving last term after sitting Oxbridge. Relieved, but also obscurely disappointed at not being as singled out as she had thought she was, Sophie made her way up the spiral stairs.
Pools of wintry light were shed by narrow, cobwebbed windows. The soft stone of the narrow steps had been so worn that she had to tread on their outer edges to avoid slipping, clinging to the grimy rope looped through hooks in the wall which served as a rail. The stone around each window slit was as thickly carved as the cloister pillars with initials and dates going back to the fourteenth century. The later, nineteenth- and twentieth-century carvings tended to be slapdash and shallow, as though executed in a hurry with only penknives or compass points but some of the really old ones were expert and seemed to have been chiselled with professional tools. Possibly some of the early Scholars had been masons’ sons.
The stairs wound on and up until Sophie began to fantasize that they had no end and that she might turn around and run down and down to find they had lost their beginning. At last she arrived at a point where an iron gate blocked the steps. She tried the gate but it was locked. There was a low wooden door in the wall a few steps further down. She went back and tried that. It gave onto a short walkway, open to the sky but enclosed by a head-high parapet on one side and, dizzyingly, by one of Chapel’s stained glass windows on the other. Walking gingerly because the duckboards were wet and slimy, she reached the door on the other side and let herself into the ringing-chamber.
After the stairs, this was dazzlingly bright, lit by great windows in front and to her left. The wall to her right gave onto the perilously steep Chapel gallery where Sophie felt compelled to sit at once, assailed by vertigo and the strange scents of Chapel; candle wax, old hymn books and the leather of several hundred kneelers.
Unless one counted the annual Mayor’s Carol Concert in the Guildhall, life at Wakefield House was innocent of religion and Sophie found all church interiors oppressive and rather frightening as a result. Worrying though the fat, stripey bell ropes might be – she had recently read The Nine Tailors so knew how bells might kill a man – she had not relished her first term’s experience of Chapel and would be glad to be spared it. There were baffling, oddly hearty sermons, often by members of staff rather than the Chaplain. The choir music was all right but she hated both the miserable and triumphant hymns and hated still more the inexplicable attempts to encourage more congregational singing by the regular inclusion of mass renditions of, alternately, the ‘Libera Me’ from Fauré’s Requiem, Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’ (which came across like a rugby song) and the ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ from Nabucco.
Jonty Mortimer arrived with two other first-year Scholars, whom he didn’t think to introduce, and set about a lightning first lesson in bell-ringing. His i
nstruction was lent an extra edge by his pointing out that they would be tested on their knowledge this time next week and be given an hour’s detention if they failed to score a hundred per cent on the theoretical side at least. They were each assigned a bell – Sophie was number one, the highest and smallest – and a sort of raised hassock to stand on when ringing. The striped ends of each rope, he explained, were called sallies. Each bell was attached to a sort of bar called a headstock which could pivot through three hundred and sixty degrees on a stoutly fixed frame. During a ringing session, the resting position of a bell was upside-down, where it was said to be rung up. So their first task was to ring the bells up. Then, when the sally was pulled, the bell would swing down and up again, taking most of the rope up through the cast-iron guides and through the ringing-chamber ceiling. One then tugged the rope again to bring the bell back to its starting point. At the end of a session all bells had to be rung down again to make them safe to leave.
‘So it goes “ding” once in each direction?’ one of the boys asked, earning Sophie’s immediate gratitude. She was as nervous as if they were about to start a race. Mortimer gave him a withering glance.
‘Very good, Bunsen. A ding in each direction. Any other questions?’
‘Is it …?’ Sophie began.
‘Hmm?’ Mortimer asked.
‘Is it dangerous?’
‘Of course. Potentially. The rope moves fast and hard but you let it play through your hands when you’re not pulling on it – so no rope burn or getting lifted off the ground – and obviously you wouldn’t go winding it round your ankle or neck. So. A first go each at ringing up then we’ll try some basic calls. Bunsen, you first. You’re going to set it rocking then pull it down and let it rise up on the other side. Ideally just one ding on its way up then it rests there. Like this.’ He rang the tenor bell up. One tidy ding. ‘Okay? Off you go.’