by Patrick Gale
He turned the volume down somewhere before coming back to serve the tea Egyptian-style, in brass-handled glasses on a big brass tray he balanced on a squat carved table. There was a plate of tiny spiced biscuits he said were flavoured with cardamom so would taste of orange. The tea was strange, not really tea at all, blood-red and tart. He watched for her reaction as she took a sip.
‘I can get you something more normal if you’d prefer,’ he offered. ‘There’s Ceylon.’
But she shook her head. ‘No. It’s good. Thank you.’ She sipped again. It wasn’t good. It was strange but she wanted to prefer it to the normal stuff so drank more, thinking of it as hot lemon squash so that her palate didn’t react against its not being tea. She suspected he knew she was making an effort. ‘I like your jungle,’ she said.
‘Thank you. It’s not really mine. The house was radically remodelled by Fulke Winnall, who founded the art department in the 1900s. The house was his so he did what he liked with it – he obviously wasn’t short of a bob – and then he left it to the school in this state. He knocked down so many walls that it’s quite unsuitable for dons with wives and children. I just happen to be the current lucky bachelor. It’s a good retreat. When these windows are open in the summer and the fountain’s on, the splashing water seems to block out any sounds from beyond the walls. There used to be orange trees in here but they were forever getting infested by whitefly so I gave up and bought these instead.’ He batted at a palm leaf with his hand. ‘You’re going to be a classicist, I gather.’
‘Am I?’
‘Judging from your marks, you are,’ he said. ‘Would it please you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I’d like to be Senior Prefect.’
‘For that study?’
She nodded so unthinkingly that he smiled.
‘I didn’t think it’d be for power,’ he said, then thought a moment. ‘You’ve got good friends, haven’t you? I’ve noticed you together a few times, you, Behrman and the other one.’
‘Somborne-Abbot.’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Oh dear. Were we being noisy?’
‘Not especially. It’s good to have friends, especially outside your own house. But you like to escape them sometimes too, I expect.’
‘Yes.’ She looked for a way of explaining herself. ‘I’m not … They have strong personalities and I’m not used to being in a gang. Sometimes I need time apart to … Well, in a funny way, to be myself again.’
‘Odd, isn’t it,’ he said, ‘how friends can project an idea of you back that isn’t quite you? And rather than set them right, you work harder and harder to be that person they expect. Parents do the same thing. They’re often too busy driving to get the child they want to notice the one they’ve got. That friend of yours, Behrman. I expect his parents assume he’s going to leave here to go to Cambridge then up to the Bar like his father.’
‘They’ve never said.’
‘They don’t need to. It’s an assumption. And in fact he probably wants to go to Glasgow and be a painter.’
‘Actor,’ she said. ‘RADA. He hasn’t dared tell them.’
‘Hmm. More?’
‘Yes, please.’
He reached across from his sofa to refill her glass.
‘So how do you escape these friends of yours when you need to be yourself again?’
‘I go to the library,’ she said, ‘or take a long bath or lie on my bed with a book.’
‘And you come to morning service.’
‘Yes. But I’m not really a Christian. I tried to be but …’
‘Me neither.’
‘Aren’t you?’ To her surprise she found that she was profoundly shocked at this.
He looked wistfully out at the garden and sighed. ‘Not really. But I went along to morning service a few times out of curiosity then the Chaplain asked me to read the lesson and all at once the rest of the regular congregation seemed to die or drop away so I rather felt I had to keep going. But the peace is good and the contemplativeness of it. Organized religion can be as overwhelming and unsatisfactory as organized friendship. I dare say I could hand over the reading duties to you, now?’
‘Don’t you dare!’ she said without hesitation, which made him chuckle.
‘Do you like this music?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve never heard it before.’
‘Wagner. Tristan. Act Three.’
‘Oh.’
‘Not a good place to start if you know nothing of opera. He had trouble with religion too. He liked religiousness – the feelings that religion can induce – but wanted to find ways of arousing those feelings away from church through music drama. I only discovered the other day that he had dreams of writing a Buddhist opera because Buddhism appealed to him with its apparent lack of churchiness. Astonishing idea! A bit like Lord Britten’s dream of adapting Mansfield Park. One of those pleasures we shall never taste. Ah well. It’s been a pleasure meeting you, young Cullen.’
Sophie stood, understanding herself dismissed. She worried that her expression had revealed her lack of comprehension but, as he opened the garden door for her and she thanked him for the karkady, he added, ‘You must come again. Feel free to drop in any weekday afternoon. If it’s not convenient, I lock the gate or simply don’t come to the door.’
‘Thank you, sir. Sorry. I mean, thank you.’
She said nothing about the visit to Lucas or Charlie afterwards. Or even to Kimiko. It might have felt like smugness. She told herself she would mention it if the subject arose naturally but it never did. For fear of proving a bore, she went back several times that term but always on different days of the week. On her second visit they sat out in cool sunshine by the pond and talked about the Phaedrus. He was actually an English don but he took a deep interest in every subject and gave the impression of having read more widely than any teacher she had met so far.
Thereafter she never had him to herself on visits. She was one of a select band, she realized – ma Petite Bande he called them – quoting yet another book she could not place. They were all students who had caught his eye or ear for some reason. She was flattered. All the others seemed to be extremely clever and all of them were older than her. But house rules applied. So long as they were drinking his karkady there was no sneering or teasing or pulling of rank and ideas and discoveries were batted about as though they were equal members of a symposium, not vastly unequal representatives of a hierarchy.
Time spent in Mr Compton’s garden room left her inexplicably euphoric, even though she often did little there but sip and listen. At times the conversation made her feel that everything was connected, Greek, maths, opera, Lucifer, Mrs Somborne-Abbot and the redness of hibiscus tea and that she was teetering on the brink of a point, maturity perhaps, where the artificial divisions between subjects would tumble down and she would begin to make calm connections for herself without effort.
She never met other girls in the house, something that gave her a pleasure she could not explain to herself, given that she would not have liked to be the only girl in somebody’s class. A boy brought a girl with him just once when Sophie was there. Because he had to introduce her, it was immediately evident that she was uninvited. Nobody said anything unwelcoming and Mr Compton was his usual self towards her but Sophie could tell from the way the boy talked more to the girl than to anyone that he had broken an unwritten rule. The two of them sat apart on an old swing seat, like a faintly ridiculous courting couple in an H.G. Wells novel. She saw neither of them there again.
EASTER HOLIDAYS
(fifteen years, three months)
Dear Lou,
You get no sympathy at all. If Jean Luc’s big brother is so beau you can’t dormir for dreaming of him, practise your best boudoir Frog and tell him so. At best this means the two of you live happily ever after, at worse, he tells their maman and your fucking exchange trip comes to an early end and we get to play again. It’s Jean Lu
c I feel sorry for. No wonder he’s sulky if you’re pining after Christophe all the time. Would he do for me? Not even a little bit?? Oh. Okay, then.
Revision going to plan. Naturally, because there’s nothing else to do. You’ll have to help me with the French, though Ça m’agace!! I’ll trade you for Latin.
This place is going to get even quieter soon because my only real mate here leaves tomorrow. Guess that just leaves Heidi. I can go and see her and pretend to be pining for you and we’ll have a long, girly heart-to-heart about your needs.
Keep your hair on. Joke.
Kiss me there but mind the zit. Miss Phix.
Sophie reread the letter. It was a prepaid aerogramme and she had written too large and run out of space. She sealed it and carefully copied out the address in Poitiers Lucas had sent her. Then she turned to the postcard Charlie had sent her from Cornwall.
He wasn’t in love but complained of being bored from spending time with horse-faced girls whose brothers were all too young to be interesting.
Sturmführer Christine says to bring you and Lucas when she rents this place again. Would you like that? Surf and stuff to celebrate finishing our Os? She has painted her toe nails cerise and decided she likes The Bee Gees. Spare me. Next stop: hot pants and disco dancing on dad’s grave. Kisses, Brown Girl in the Ring.
She started a suitably non-committal reply. The thought of being trapped in a Cornish holiday house with Christine Somborne-Abbot and the Girls was too frightening to contemplate just then. She had been promised a waitressing job in the summer holidays. Charlie, like Lucas, had an allowance and would fail to understand the preciousness of the five pounds a day she would be earning.
The landing creaked, then there was a light tapping on her door in the pattern – two short, two long – she had agreed so long ago with Wilf that she didn’t need a moment’s reaction time before calling out hi. He was still flushed from his after-work bath. Now that he was an apprentice mechanic at UBM, no amount of washing quite removed the air of diesel and oil that hung about him but it was not unpleasant. The effect was similar to the contradictory, tarry-clean smell of the anti-dandruff shampoo Sophie used.
He flopped in the armchair between the table where she worked and the window. Both were pieces of furniture Kieran and he had found in skips and dragged back to the house.
‘You all packed?’ she asked.
‘Yup,’ he sighed and looked at his hands in the way he did when upset.
He had broken his nose during term-time, when he and some mates from work were drawn into a drunken brawl outside a disco. Far from spoiling his face, the new, broader nose was the making of it, providing an air of craggy resilience that suited him better than his old one had done. His other new look was a chunky silver identity bracelet he had bought with his first pay packet. He was forever fiddling with it, as he did now, turning it around his wrist, still unused to the sensation of it flopping down onto the top of his hand.
‘It’s going to feel so weird without you,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll still come and see us.’
‘I hope you’ll come and see us,’ he countered.
‘Well, sure,’ she said, dropping her pen and pushing back her chair so she could face him properly.
But she wasn’t sure. Tomorrow Wilf’s mother, Elsa Franks, was coming out of prison and he was going to live with her. He had always complained about her, dismissing her as stupid and irresponsible and a lousy mother. But from the day her letter came saying she had a release date it was as though he had never said a word against her. A great store of filial respect had been revealed in him.
With help from his social worker, he found them a brand-new council flat in the town centre and busied himself getting it ready. He let slip details about her he had never revealed before, that she had a bad knee now and couldn’t manage stairs, that she loved music, that she was nearly sixty – far older than Sophie had always pictured her. He checked himself occasionally, as if remembering, under Sophie’s gaze, the number of times he had called Elsa ‘useless scrubber’ and ‘poxy witch’.
‘I’m all she’s got, Soph. I’ve got to do right by her. I won’t be there for long. Three or four months max and we’ll be driving each other up the fucking wall. She’s a filthy temper. She killed a bloke, don’t forget.’
And Sophie didn’t need to point out the obvious rejoinder, that his mother was all he had too.
So tonight was his last in the home and tomorrow his first in ten years out of its shifting tribe and back in a family of two. Sophie knew she would have to meet his mother and was unaccountably apprehensive. His leaving the home to move in with Elsa threatened to define him, to fix him in a way that would also accentuate the unconnected paths they were taking.
‘This your revision plan?’ he asked, suddenly rolling out of his chair to tweak the two sheets of A4 off her table. He sat down again at once to examine them but the comforting smell of him reached her, diesel and Dettol. He persisted in turning his bathwater milky with disinfectant in the belief it would clear up the spots on his shoulderblades.
‘Jesus H, Soph,’ he breathed, looking over the neat table she had drawn herself. ‘No wonder you didn’t want a holiday job yet. When’s your first paper?’
‘Oh, a few weeks into term, but I figured it was easier to revise before term starts so I can spend the time that’s left going over whatever’s still giving me trouble.’ She had been rigorously methodical, dividing the days in the holidays by the O level exams she would have to sit, discounting the general paper, so that each paper should have an equal share of revision time. ‘There’s something nice about ticking stuff off,’ she told him. ‘And when the time runs out for something, the time runs out and I have to move on. That’s quite nice too.’
‘Sounds fucking awful.’
There was laughter from Kieran downstairs. He rang the bell for supper and the house was full of hurrying footfalls, flushing loos and chatter. They could hear Margaret arguing with Zacky, who was still kicking a football around the garden. It was a house tradition to make supper a bit special on anyone’s last night. The leaver got to choose the main course and the newest arrival, the pudding. This was Margaret’s way of knitting new arrivals in and, Sophie supposed, subtly reminding the leaver that the tribe would carry on without them. Choices had to come from Margaret’s repertoire. She kept a box of index cards showing well-thumbed recipes she had successfully scaled up for bigger numbers.
Used to the time it took to call in and settle the youngest ones, Sophie and Wilf made no movement to go down just yet.
‘What did you choose?’ she asked.
‘Shepherd’s pie,’ he said.
‘You’re joking! We have that every week, nearly.’
‘So? I like it. I like the way she gets crunchy bits round the edges.’
‘Does your mum cook?’
He shook his head slowly and looked at his hands again. ‘Not unless she’s learnt inside. The last meal I remember her making was one of those horrible meat pies from a tin and a tin of beans and a tin of carrots.’ He snorted, amazed. ‘I’m going to have to teach her how a freezer works. Soph?’
‘What?’
‘If you suddenly heard from your mum, whoever she is, and she wanted you back, you would go?’
Sophie thought. ‘I dunno. I mean, it wouldn’t really be back, would it? I don’t remember her. I remember books. Nothing but books. And being very quiet. And looking out of a window into trees. Maybe there’s a good reason I remember that but not her. Or him. Maybe there was just a dad and he couldn’t cope on his own.’
‘But would you go if they asked?’
‘I’d be curious,’ she said. ‘I can’t pretend I wouldn’t.’
‘You’d probably be pissed off too,’ he said, grinning.
‘Yeah. Give ’em a piece of my mind. Oh. I dunno. It’s not going to happen, anyway. I’m fifteen. No one wants a fifteen-year-old.’
‘I thought you were sixteen now,’ he said.
/> ‘Next birthday.’
‘You could pass, you know.’
She caught his covert glance at her tits. ‘Thanks,’ she told him.
‘I’m going to miss you,’ he added. ‘It’s going to be weird, isn’t it?’
He looked tragic suddenly and she knelt on the floor in front of his chair so she could hug him. He hugged her back and gave a fruity sniff, so she knew when she next looked his eyes would be red and cloudy with tears.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘It’s not the end of the world,’ although there was a wrenching in her heart too. She bent to kiss him on the side of the face but he turned at the same moment so they kissed on the lips. Properly, as they would have said a year ago.
Margaret called up the stairs so they had to pull themselves together and go down. He blew his nose and she brushed her hair, avoiding his eye, then they went down. She didn’t feel all churned up as she had when Charlie had once cupped her breasts while kissing her. She felt only sad, a desperate, hungry sort of sadness like her salty homesickness when she had started at Tatham’s, a sadness that could only be answered by touching him.
The spaces left for them at the kitchen table were far apart, which was probably a good thing. She sat between Kieran and Zacky. Zacky had stopped trailing around after her, brutally cured of his fixation by her absence during term-time, but he still saved her a place at meals when he could and liked to sit on the floor and lean against her legs when they were all watching television.
In answer to someone’s questions, Kieran said how he had been in care too, as a boy, raised by very strict monks in Ireland. ‘Like a boarding school, only we never went home,’ he said. ‘And the only women we ever saw were the statue of the Blessed Virgin in the playground grotto and the laundresses who collected the dirty clothes and sheets once a week. They were in care too, poor girls, only they were older.’
‘Were you unhappy?’ she asked him.
‘Miserable,’ he said. ‘As sin itself. I had good friends but I was miserable. They were very tough with us.’