by Patrick Gale
There could not have been a crueller time for exams. A levels took place in the concert hall where there was the luxury of a string of doors open onto the Warden’s Garden. O levels took place in the school’s gym at rows of little folding chairs and tables stacked in a barn the rest of the year. Although the room was as large as a large church it became insufferably fuggy by late morning with the sun on its roof and a hundred or more students fretting, sighing, fighting to concentrate. The doors and windows remained closed to keep out noise from a nearby street. Someone fainted every day. During the first history paper this had been one of the invigilators and chaos had broken out on his side of the gym just long enough for a flurry of blatant information-exchange. The only advantage of being in the gym was its proximity to the swimming pool; Sophie and Lucas had celebrated the end of each afternoon paper so far with a glorious, hour-long plunge.
Charlie did not come swimming, and not just because he swam like a frightened child. Where they approached papers with a kind of quiz-show relish, serene in the knowledge that they could not have done more to prepare, he became grey with second thoughts and apprehension and had to be treated as gently as in the weeks after his father’s death. It did not do to discuss papers in any detail with him once the test was over. Several times he had emerged early from a paper, crowing about what a doddle he had found it, what a relief, only for some chance remark (or, indeed, put-down) to make him see how wrong he had got an answer or how badly he had misinterpreted a question. It was not until getting to know Charlie that Sophie understood the necessity of teachers repeating the banal advice to remember to answer the question.
Asked to describe the changes in tone in Henry V, he wrote an essay about the changes of scene. Asked to define metaphor, he had defined simile. The worst occasion had been when they came out of the first maths paper, which Sophie had surprised herself by finding quite tough, to find Charlie boasting that he had spotted the trick question. Panicked, Sophie had turned at once to the question paper, only to reveal that the so-called, trick question had been a perfectly straightforward one which Charlie had misread in his haste to be finished. In her relief at being right after all, she had laughed. Charlie stormed off in a white-faced fury – her first direct experience of him being in what Lucas called a bait – and had not spoken to or acknowledged her for days. Apart from the social awkwardness caused when they tried going somewhere as a group, it had felt nearer respite than retribution and his abrupt, unspoken forgiveness when he needed to borrow the tidy notes she had taken summarizing the different meanings of and cases taken by cum had been a disappointment. She saw the relief on Lucas’s face, that they were getting on again, however, and was glad, if only for his sake.
The two boys were more than ever like twins this term since Lucas had persuaded Charlie to buy painter’s jeans to match his, with a little strap on one thigh for a paintbrush, a non-uniform they made more uniform still with the addition of white-on-blue striped Breton tops. During the one surreptitious teatime visit she had managed to pay to Mr Compton’s gloriously cool garden, he had slyly remarked that her friends had ‘taken to dressing like the hands on a rather louche commercial liner.’ Recalled when their double act was becoming a trial, the remark lent her strength.
She had been aching to tell Lucas about losing her virginity. He had long since lost his, after all, so would have been unlikely to disapprove. But the knowledge that he would feel compelled to tell Charlie, the way he told him everything sooner or later, and the certainty that Charlie would somehow find a way to pass on the intelligence to his mother, the Girls and Heidi, blocked the urge to confess to a boy. Instead she told Kimiko, her ever-loyal Suzuki, who was gratifyingly shocked, saddened and hungry for intimate details.
Fifth-form Daughters escaped the Daughters’ Chamber and dormitories to live higher up the staircase in shared bedsits. These were allocated by a lottery process but Daughters were expected to express a preference in study-mate. Sophie could not imagine sharing with anyone else but felt she ought to ask Kimiko before putting their names together on the list.
‘Oh sure,’ Kimiko said. ‘We’ll have such a great time. Just the two of us.’
Only then did Sophie wonder how she would have felt if Kimiko had said oh, no, sorry but she’d said she’d share with someone else, and she realized with a start that Kimiko was one of her closest friends.
Kimiko had become a genuine friend, as opposed to a convenience, by degrees so small Sophie would have been hard-pressed to say precisely when the promotion had occurred. Possibly it had something to do with Mr Compton’s gentle mockery of her spending all her time with Charlie and Lucas. Possibly it arose from a need for an exclusive female friendship to balance out their male one. Compared to the dramas and vicissitudes between the boys, friendship with Kimiko was a placid affair. She was calm, level-headed, loyal. But she was also, in her way, as much of a misfit as Sophie. It was easy to imagine that, once free from necessary obedience to parents and school, she would become eccentric or even subversive in ways of which her sympathies now gave only hints. What Sophie had taken for subservience was merely, she was starting to appreciate, the reticence of a careful foreigner. As Kimiko gained in cultural ease, casually abandoned religion and started dabbling in wild rock music and extreme literature, Sophie saw she had much the louder personality of the two of them.
Someone, not Charlie, had caught the ball. Lucas stretched then lay back on his deckchair. Everyone but Sophie and he clapped as the defeated batsman walked back to the pavilion and the next man in walked out. There was a trace of white powder around Lucas’s nostrils, from where he had last used his anti-hay fever puffer. The rims of his eyes were red and sore. When it was really bad, he said, it felt as though he had sand in his eyes. The drug made him woozy so he did not like to use it before exams, relying instead on the gym’s closed windows and Heidi’s old solution of smearing Vaseline thinly around each nostril to trap the worst of the pollen before it was inhaled. Plunging into the swimming pool when a paper was done was thus doubly a treat for him and he would dose up with his puffer while waiting for her to emerge from the changing room. They had swum after this afternoon’s chemistry paper, secure in the knowledge that Charlie never bowled and that even if the Dougalites batted first, he would only be the last man in.
‘He has Dice Cricket,’ Lucas said suddenly.
‘Is that a board game?’
‘You mean bored game.’
‘So amusing,’ she said – their current put-down for jokes that were clever but not remotely funny.
‘No, it’s dice. Little alloy dice. One gives runs and the other says things like caught, bowled, L.B.W. It lives in a little tin and it’s the dullest thing I think I’ve ever seen. The idea is that you make up your imaginary teams then have them play an imaginary match by endlessly throwing the dice and scoring it all, just like a real game.’
‘Only less interesting.’
‘He thinks I despise it because I don’t know how to write the scores down but he’s wrong; I just despise it. He loves knowing something I don’t.’
‘Well be kind. It’s a fairly rare occurrence.’ She hesitated. Perhaps she had gone too far? Just as there was an unwritten rule that only each boy was allowed to mock his own mother, so mocking Charlie was dangerous territory unless Lucas led the way, and even then Sophie wondered if he were merely humouring her. In one of her rare moods of open bitterness, Kimiko once said that Lucas would say anything to anyone for a snatched alliance.
‘I can’t wait for next term,’ he sighed as the new batsman whacked the ball for six and sent Charlie running. A change of subject. She had presumed too far.
‘You’re sick,’ she retorted. ‘I can’t wait for the holidays. Eight whole weeks of clearing tables, earning tips, eating leftover gâteau and NO BOOKS!’
‘I know you. You’ll have Catullus tucked in your apron.’
He was right, of course. However well her O levels went, she still had a sneaking fear
she would be below standard for the classics ladder and that her brain would atrophy over eight long weeks with no more stimulus than other waitresses’ chitchat. Only last night she had suffered an acutely plain and accurate dream in which she arrived in her A level Greek class only to have the don turn to her with sly pity and say, ‘Oh, Miss Cullen. I don’t think so. Do you?’ which was when she noticed that her scholastic gown and waistcoat had become a frilly French maid’s uniform and her exercise book a greasy order pad with Ratty’s Tunnel on the cover.
‘It’s the thought of no more maths and chemistry ever, no more of that.’ He flicked a hand at her Latin vocab list. ‘And a lot less of him!’ To her astonishment he indicated Charlie, smiling at him even as Charlie caught his eye between overs. ‘I mean, we’ll have to share a study – there’s no one else I could share with and live – but we won’t be in a single class together.’
‘I thought you’d become inseparable,’ she said, cautiously.
‘Doesn’t mean I like him. Oh. Well. I don’t hate him. Not really. But. Well.’
‘What?’
‘The moods are exhausting. He loses his temper at least once a week. Really loses it. So that a whole roomful of people falls quiet. There are so many forbidden subjects. I feel I’m walking on eggshells half the time. And he’s so competitive. He can’t stand it that he never comes first or wins a prize.’
‘Nothing to take home to the Sturmführerin.’
‘Something like that. You know that Eng. Lit. thing I won last term with the essay on Typhoon? Well he was so angry I’d won, he had to go all around house telling people I’d copied it from a book.’
‘But he copied his. I remember him showing me.’
‘Exactly. We went to the library after Allsford announced the competition and it was sort of fun choosing writers we weren’t studying but just liked.’
‘I took Salinger.’
‘And I took Conrad, and Charlie, for some reason, took Tennessee Williams. He found a book that had only been out a year, for heaven’s sake, and just copied out a chapter on Streetcar. He didn’t realize we were just using the books to give us a head start. He copied it out very neatly. He even asked me what I thought some bits meant.
‘Me too. Hetaira, he needed, and catharsis.’
‘And he was so pissed off when he saw I wasn’t just copying too. He tried to make out I wasn’t playing fair by not cheating. And when I won the bloody book token that did it. Turkey shut him up though. Turkey and Dago. I could’ve kissed them. He was going on and on about how I’d won the prize by copying something from a book and they just told him, “But he still won, which is all anyone cares about.” He’s such a girl! Sorry. But do you know what I mean?’
‘Fights dirty,’ Sophie said, ‘takes spiteful, nasty little revenges and keeps a tally of all your weak points.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I thought you adored him, Lou.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘But you’re such good friends.’
‘Huh. Just remember I didn’t know him until Headbourne said I had to be nice to him and take him home and stuff.’
‘Do you think he’s even gay? I mean deep down?’
‘Oh. Completely.’ But he paused for thought. ‘I mean he really is a girl. He’s far more of a girl than you.’
‘But he hasn’t … done much, has he?’
‘Nobody fancies him. He thinks it’s like prison or something and all these men are desperate for a woman so they’ll fall for a bloke who looks womanly. He doesn’t understand it’s a different thing involved. It’s a buffet where one of the dishes has run out. No more chicken. So they think, okay, I’ll have beef. They don’t want chickenybeef.’
‘Chickenybeef. Suits him.’
They laughed and it was a while before they were able to stop.
‘So pale and colourless yet somehow beefy,’ Lucas stammered which set them off again. A Dougalite fielder turned round and glared. They stopped laughing because it was a boy Lucas had always had an inexplicable thing about and who was said to be persuadable if one caught him at the right moment. But nobody fancied gigglers any more than they wanted Charlie.
‘He used to kiss me,’ she admitted. ‘In the library.’
She half-expected him to say that Charlie had told him but he simply looked astonished and sat forward in his chair.
‘No!’ he breathed, using one of their catchphrases. ‘Tell me it’s not true, Tina.’
‘I thought he’d have told you. Maybe he was ashamed.’
‘So … What was it like?’ he murmured, wincing in anticipation.
She looked at him, looked out at Charlie, who was now facing them again in silly midriff or whatever and frowning because the sun was in his face. From this distance, too far to register his mood, he looked handsome in a gold-haired, school of Rupert Brooke fashion, greatly helped by the cricket whites.
‘It wasn’t,’ she began thoughtfully, ‘terribly nice.’
‘How? Wet? Smelly? Some men’s spit smells really odd.’
Some men? How many men had Lucas kissed?
‘It was always a bit sudden,’ she recalled, ‘and then it was, I dunno, too complete. It was as though he lacked whatever bone in your skull holds your faces apart from each other. He sort of swamped me and I couldn’t breathe. It was like kissing someone with no teeth, I suppose.’
Lucas was beginning to giggle again.
‘But the worst of it,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘Well … You should shut your eyes when you kiss. Shouldn’t you?’
‘I’ve no idea, actually.’
‘They always do in films so one assumes it’s usual. But I checked once or twice and he never shut his. He just stared. As though he wasn’t involved at all but wanted to see the effect on me. As though it was an experiment.’
‘Which I suppose, in a sense, it was.’
‘He’s going to be handsome, though. One day,’ she said. ‘When he loses his puppy fat.’
‘You think?’ Lucas stopped laughing, stung.
‘Women will fancy him. He’ll be a vet or a doctor and he’ll get a reputation for being good with children and old ladies, and women will want to sleep with him.’
‘But he’s gay.’
‘Actually I think he’s just very unhappy and he wants to be on whichever team is currently winning.’
‘So what about me, Oracle?’
‘Oh, you.’ She looked briefly at Lucas then back at her Latin. Caelebs, she reminded herself. Bachelor. ‘You’re a poof.’
‘I know that but what else do you see for me?’
‘Oh,’ she said, airily. ‘You’ll be very international.’
‘Chinese boyfriends?’ He wrinkled his nose.
‘Grow up. Nice, easy international. Italy or somewhere. New York.’
‘Christ, that would be fun. You could come too.’
‘Huh.’ High on confession and won-back intimacy, she was on the point of telling him her old fantasy about them sharing a little house and all of life but bed, then remembered he would be sharing a study with Charlie all through fifth-form so said, ‘Huh,’ again.
They fell to watching cricket for a while, Lucas made briefly studious by a strikingly handsome cricketer from the other team who threw himself into the empty deckchair beside them. The stranger made a few comments on the game then, somehow sensing he was talking to quite the wrong people, excused himself, leaving Lucas to sigh.
‘Don’t,’ she told him. ‘Sighing’s almost as unsexy as giggling. No one fancies boys who sigh. At least, not initially. I’m hungry.’ She was inspired by the sight of a woman emerging from the pavilion café with a cup of tea and a polystyrene tray of chips.
‘I’ll go.’ He rocked out of his chair. He was always generous with her, knowing her funds to be far shorter than his. ‘What’ll it be. Banana sandwich or chips?’ He paused. ‘Or both?’
She watched him strolling towards the café, his hair still tous
led from swimming, hands thrust deep in the new jeans pockets because he never knew what to do with them when he walked. She saw him cast a look of spaniel hunger at the impervious batsman who had just left their side, and she discovered that an ache could be a kind of pleasure.
SUMMER HOLIDAYS
(fifteen years, seven months)
‘More chicken, Sophia? Lucas? No? Or a crab sandwich? Delicious crab, only caught yesterday apparently. I’d never have made so many if I’d known no one was eating. Good, girl, Sophia. Put some flesh on those bony knees of yours. Me too. Mmm! Crab. So good!’
Sophie and Lucas were sitting in a sand dune in Cornwall with Christine Somborne-Abbot, several polystyrene surfboards and a large, green cold-box. Charlie was playing rounders with his sister Emma and a clutch of female non-relations whose friendship his mother was so keen he cultivate that she had insisted on coming over here every day although there was a far more exciting beach on their doorstep. Tim, Charlie’s interesting brother, was not with them. He was free to come – he still hadn’t returned to university or found himself a job – but apparently preferred a few weeks’ hard labour on his uncle’s farm in Dorset.
Lucas liked Polteath because it was aglow with men and so crowded one could ogle undetected. Sophie liked it because it faced the open Atlantic so had magnificent breakers and she enjoyed trying to surf with the boards they had found in the holiday house’s garage. But Charlie had intimated to them, after one afternoon of such treats – made bliss by regular visits to a circling ice cream van – that Polteath was not quite the thing. This bay, on the other hand, was ‘Sloane-Square-on-Sea’, whatever that meant. So they had come here this morning, Sophie bringing the surfboards on the off-chance that they could still use them.
The girls Charlie was intended to befriend were younger sisters or cousins of schoolfriends of Emma and Jenny and Sophie had no sooner met them than she knew this trip was a Big Mistake. They were all roughly sixteen and gave the impression, quite unfairly, of all having thick, waist-length hair and being called names that ended in A. Lucas was still trying nicknames on for size. Rubellas. Viyellas. Salmonellas. It might well become a party game. The Vanillas was the most successful collective noun for them so far. When Mrs Somborne-Abbot introduced her as Sophia, Sophie saw they were prepared to give her a sporting chance, on account of the A-ending and Tatham’s, but were mystified by her because she was short-limbed and smiled. None of them smiled. They made sounds of merriment often. They chuckled and harrumphed and hoorayed. Yet they did it all with hidden teeth and an overriding air of boredom.