Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses

by Catriona McPherson

  The girl who served me spoke very slowly and rather loud, welcoming me to St Columba’s, and she called me, to my astonishment, ‘mademoiselle’. I blinked and stared after her, feeling realisation begin to creep up on me from far away.

  Of course, the misunderstanding had the usual cause. When I did not understand what Miss Shanks meant – spouting French and lamenting German that way – I assumed she meant nothing, and she took the same view of my mentioning Gilver and Osborne. And then what with us both latching on to the shared notion of Miss Lipscott, and our determination not to challenge one another lest we appear to be fusspots, the whole conversation was a failure from start to end. Or rather, it was a failure as far as communication went; from my point of view it was a rousing success for here I was, in the school, sitting drinking soup with half of the sixth form, and if I had the nerve and could remember enough verb conjugations it appeared I was free to stay.

  Of course, I did not have the nerve. Not that ‘going undercover’ was unknown to me, but here at St Columba’s there would be a race between the real new mistress turning up, Miss Shanks deciding she had better ask who Gilver and Osborne were when they were at home, and (most likely of all) the paucity of my French vocabulary and the haphazard mess of my grammar undoing my ruse before the first lesson was hardly begun.

  I was going to spin it out through this evening, though, since here was a lucky chance to do some detecting, just when I needed all the luck I could find. I was too late, clearly: Fleur had bolted and gone, long enough ago for Miss Shanks to have rung the agency for her successor, but I surmised that the girls must know something and was pondering how much I could ask them. I wondered too if the mistresses – who were dispersed up and down the tables with a view to discipline – would retire to a common room afterwards for coffee and bluestocking chatter; there were certainly no coffee cups to be seen in the dining room anywhere.

  For the present, I decided to plunge in with the girls, who had been shooting me little glances and would be more suspicious, surely, if I did not start talking soon, about something, instead of just sitting here.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘My name is Miss Gilver. I’m the new French mistress. Thank you for not falling on me, but do let’s chat now.’

  ‘Welcome to St Cucumber’s,’ said one of the nearest girls.

  ‘Spring!’ said another. I took this to be a Christian name.

  ‘It’s affectionately meant,’ said Spring. She was an attractive girl of honey-coloured skin and thick honey-coloured hair, with a broad grin revealing a zigzag of pure-white bottom teeth. ‘On account of how the late and otherwise lamented Fräulein Fielding was such a one for salad. I’m surprised we don’t all have twitching noses.’

  ‘German mistress?’ I hazarded.

  ‘Head,’ said Spring. ‘Well, joint head. And Latin.’

  ‘She wasn’t really a Fräulein at all,’ said the other girl, a dashing beauty of statuesque proportions with ruddy cheeks and striking pale blue eyes. ‘I’m Eileen, by the way. It’s just that her name was Fielding and what with the Froebel method and all that . . .’

  ‘One must give one’s mistresses nicknames,’ I said, ‘I quite understand.’

  ‘Miss Gilver . . .?’ said a third. ‘What did your last girls call you?’

  ‘Katie!’ said Eileen. Katie flashed a devilish smile with a dip in the middle and gave a throaty laugh. If I really were the French mistress I should have to watch out for this one.

  ‘They called me Goody Gilver,’ I said, ‘because I hardly ever give out prep and I very often give out chocolates.’

  ‘Really?’ said a fourth girl, with a sweet heart-shaped face and a dark red bob.

  ‘No, of course not, Sally,’ said Katie. ‘She’s teasing us.’ And the look she gave me showed that she was thinking exactly what I had been thinking: need to watch this one.

  ‘What a pity,’ said a rather sophisticated-looking girl at the end of our little group. She had the poise of an artist’s model and a profile any artist would kill to sketch. ‘Stella,’ she said, indicating herself with a curl of her hand. ‘If you could have substituted cigarettes for the chocolates we might have been great friends.’ Her cut-glass voice swooped dramatically down on the word ‘great’ in a way that snagged on my memory and something too about the way she looked was familiar.

  ‘Stella . . .?’ I said.

  ‘Rowe-Issing,’ she drawled.

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Eileen. ‘Rendall.’

  ‘Warren,’ said Spring.

  ‘Madden,’ said Sally. ‘Sally Madden. And Katie Howard.’

  I was barely listening as the introductions went on, so surprised was I. The Rowe-Issings were friends of ours, or acquaintances anyway – some of our very grandest connections, in fact, always invited to everything and seldom accepting – and it was the echo of her mother Candide’s face in her own which had made young Stella so familiar to me. I looked around the dining hall again. If Basil and Candide were sending their girls here it must be quite an outfit – the odd little headmistress notwithstanding.

  ‘How long has your old French mistress been gone?’ I asked Eileen. She seemed, of all of them, the best combination of common sense and eagerness to please.

  ‘Just four days,’ Eileen said. ‘We’ve been reading a play with Hammy – Miss Shanks, I mean – but we’re thrilled you’re here now. In time to help us with our exam prep.’

  I hoped my smile was not too sickly. Pearl Lipscott had told me on the telephone the day before that St Columba’s went in for university places for its girls but I had not followed the thought through to its conclusion: that to get into a university one had to pass examinations (even though the fast-approaching end of Donald’s brush with education had been hastened by his tendency to treat three-hour exams like bear attacks through which one had only to sit perfectly still and keep breathing). The tin lid was firmly pressed on any plan to keep this subterfuge going.

  As to the hard fact that Eileen’s answer had provided along with the little fright, four days was welcome news in a way, since it meant that I could not have stopped Fleur from bolting if I had set off in a fast car the minute Pearl had engaged me.

  ‘Exams aside, though,’ Spring was saying, ‘old Pretty-vicar is no loss. She had a mean streak when crossed and it was getting worse.’

  ‘Ill-bred,’ said Stella in that same drawling tone. ‘Badly brought up anyway.’

  I could not help smarting for poor Fleur. She was a little spoiled, it was true, and I had heard her being catty, but I would never have accused her of a mean streak and I could not imagine what she had done to be saddled with ‘Pretty-vicar’. Even without knowing what it meant, it sounded beastly enough to have made me cry if someone used it as my nickname. I hoped briefly that Goody Gilver stuck, before reminding myself once again that my schoolmistress life would be over after pudding.

  At the moment we were still on meat and potatoes and I shovelled it in as though gardening, but I noticed that the girls – at least the more elegant ones – picked and scowled and grumbled as all schoolgirls ever have always done.

  ‘And where did she go?’ I asked, choosing Sally this time to fix with my nearest approximation of a schoolmistress’s stare (wishing I had half-spectacles to stare over). ‘Rather inconsiderate of her to leave at this stage of the summer term, eh?’

  Sally frowned a little and smiled a little, unsure what to make of this woman who did not shush their own gossiping but rather joined in.

  ‘She was called home to care for a relation who’d been taken ill,’ she said. ‘That’s what Ham-miss Shanks said anyway.’

  ‘That’s what Ham-miss Shanks always says,’ said Katie. ‘The relations of our mistresses aren’t a very stalwart lot. How many have we mislaid now?’

  ‘Well, science and history,’ said Eileen. She leaned back to let a maid take her dinner plate away and then leaned forward sniffing deeply as another replaced it with a pudding bowl. ‘Steamed chocolate and coconut, yum. An
d Latin, of course.’

  ‘And music and PE – although that was just one – and now French,’ said Katie, all the devilish sparkle in her face replaced with a frown. ‘It sounds quite a crowd when you say them together that way.’

  ‘And no one ever sees them go,’ said Spring in sepulchral tones.

  ‘They just vanish,’ said Stella, ‘leaving no signs of their passing.’

  ‘Except,’ said Katie, ‘for the deep tracks of their heels where they were dragged across the earth to the—’

  ‘Who’s left?’ I said, belatedly realising that no schoolmistress in her wits would sit and listen to such impertinent nonsense. ‘I certainly can’t teach you history and Latin. If Miss Shanks wanted a good all-rounder she ought to have made it clear to the agency. Well, well, we shall just have to see.’

  Of course, with this little outburst I was paving the way for a swift retreat back to Alec at the pub but the girls were not listening to me. They were glancing at one another as though the respective totals of mistresses departed and mistresses remaining had only just occurred to them for the first time.

  ‘I shall mention it to my father when I write on Sunday,’ said Stella Rowe-Issing. ‘It’s too bad, really, considering the fees she rakes in. The Fräulein would never have stood for it.’

  ‘She’d have said Nein in the strongest terms,’ said Spring, making the rest of them giggle again. ‘Nein! Ich es . . . What’s refuse to countenance?’

  ‘Something nicht,’ said Stella. ‘Such a dull language and so ugly.’

  There was indeed coffee in a staffroom as I had hoped (once the girls got to making up German words and giggling there was no return to sensible conversation and I left them to it). The serving maid collected me after pudding and led me most solicitously through the corridors to a corner room on the ground floor which had probably started life as a business room – terribly masculine and panelled in walnut to within an inch of its life – but was now the haven of the mistresses and their retreat from the grey-and-yellow hordes.

  Despite the wave of departures which the girls had related to me, there was still a good handful of mistresses in there, sitting around in what were quite clearly their personal little upholstered empires, each with a table drawn up close at the side and each of these tables bearing evidence of its owner’s habits and concerns. Miss Shanks’s winged velvet had a lumpy patchwork rug thrown over it and more patches and batting escaping from a cloth bag on the papier-mâché table top. She did not, however, sit down and start stitching, but stumped off to a decanter of port warming by the fire, after pointing me into a low bergère tub chair (which creaked a little but was more comfortable than many bergère chairs I have encountered in my time) and introducing me to a Miss Christopher, a little woodland creature of a maths mistress, and a Miss Barclay, an out-and-out geography mistress of a geography mistress, with tight curls scraped into a crinkled bun, wire-rimmed spectacles and a collar and tie, who were perched at either end of a hard-looking empire sofa in yellow pleated silk with a buffer of exercise books delineating the border halfway along its length.

  ‘Call me Barbara,’ Miss Christopher said, once Miss Shanks had gone. ‘If you’re staying. If you’ve decided to.’

  ‘Ssssh,’ said Miss Barclay softly. ‘Help yourself to a chocolate truffle, Miss Gilver. They’re very good.’ She nodded at a petits-fours plate on the low table between us, as she poured a cup of coffee for me.

  ‘Or are you trying us on appro?’ Miss Christopher went on. ‘Any other jobs in the offing? You are from Lambourne, aren’t you?’

  ‘Barbara!’ said Miss Barclay. ‘Don’t pay any attention, Miss Gilver.’ She gave me a smile. I returned it, but I did not miss the tight grip she had on the bon-bon dish as she proffered it to me, nor the sharp look she gave her colleague as she turned back to her. ‘Don’t quiz the poor woman after her long day,’ she said. ‘I’m sure Miss Shanks has seen to everything.’

  ‘Excuse me, I’m sure,’ said Miss Christopher. ‘Naturally nosy. And I can plead overwork too, fraying my manners.’

  ‘You must indeed be run ragged,’ I said, taking a sweet. ‘Double duties and all that.’

  Neither woman answered; Miss Barclay stood, straightened her rather severe coat and skirt (St Columba’s, it appeared, did not dress for dinner) and set off to offer the chocolates around the other armchairs in the room. Barbara Christopher busied herself with sugar and cream. My eyes followed the departing sweets and I looked at the three mistresses to whom Miss Barclay was taking them. Right by the fire was a stout woman wedged into a clubbish armchair and knitting very fast; beside her, half-reclining on a red shot-silk chaise, was a black-haired, beak-nosed creature with handkerchief-points to her frock who had to be the art mistress and beside her (hence almost escaping notice) was a poor beige slip of a thing who did not benefit from her proximity to such glamour and who blinked and shrank away as Miss Barclay approached her. Or so I thought until I looked again, whereupon I became convinced it was me the poor dear was blinking at, I who had driven her backwards into her cushions with my very presence.

  ‘Who are those three?’ I asked Miss Christopher. She wiped her hands – very stubby, very brown little hands, which made me think of a mole’s paddles with dirt ground into them – down her frock and made a great display out of swallowing a mouthful of truffle.

  ‘Housekeeper – she always sits in here with us on account of . . . Well, she always does. Miss Lovage, the art mistress.’ I was right then. ‘And,’ she went on, ‘the English mistress, Miss Lipscott.’

  I made a disgusting noise caused by gasping mid-sip which put Miss Christopher’s rough manners into deep shade and had to be banged on the back with one of those little mole hands until I finally managed to stop coughing.

  ‘Miss Lipscott?’ I said, staring over at the woman, ‘I thought she was missing.’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Christopher. ‘Why on earth would you think that?’

  ‘And so Miss Shanks sent for a replacement,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Miss Christopher again. ‘We need a new French mistress. It’s Mademoiselle Beauclerc who’s disappeared.’ She jumped and looked over her shoulder. When she spoke again it was in a low voice. ‘I don’t mean disappeared, of course. I mean gone.’

  ‘Beauclerc,’ I said, light dawning. ‘Miss Pretty-vicar.’

  ‘Those terrible girls,’ said Miss Christopher, looking rather rattled. Across the room, Miss Lipscott was standing up and brushing down her frock, although as far as I could tell she had not eaten a morsel, ‘It’s Stella R-I,’ Miss Christopher was saying. ‘She’s the ringleader, but such a feather in our cap to have her here.’

  I cleared my throat with one final splutter.

  ‘Are you all right, Miss Gilver?’ said Miss Barclay, passing with the plate of petits fours. ‘Coffee down the wrong way? Miss Fielding had a marvellous remedy for a frog in the throat. Something to do with opening the oesophagus. Quite yogic.’

  From the corner of my eye I could see Fleur – except that how could that faded woman be pretty little Fleur? – lean in close to the headmistress and whisper something. Miss Shanks whispered something back. Fleur looked over at me, whispered again and then slipped out of the room, whereupon Miss Shanks spun to face me like a top which had just been given a good flick with a whip. Her round little pudding of a face was as long as it ever could be, with mouth dropped open and eyebrows arched high. Then, with a jolt, she came back to life and bustled over.

  ‘Mrs Gilver?’ she said in tones of numb dismay.

  ‘Yes?’ I said, trying for an innocent air, even though Fleur had evidently shot my cover to smithereens.

  ‘You’re a widow?’ said Miss Shanks.

  ‘No, no, not so far,’ I said, smiling. ‘My husband is alive and well and . . . very modern.’

  ‘But I couldn’t possibly allow a married woman to teach in one of my classrooms,’ Miss Shanks said. It flashed across my mind to ask her why. Presumably all of the girls ha
d mothers who were married women and, universities notwithstanding, were mostly bound to end up married women themselves one day. Perhaps seeing one in the wild at a tender age could be part of the education St Columba’s offered them. But Miss Christopher was gawping at me enough already. ‘The agency certainly didn’t mention anything about it,’ said Miss Shanks. I gave it up as a bad job then and turned to extrication.

  ‘Gilver and Osborne?’ I said. ‘Why would they?’

  ‘Who are they?’ said Miss Shanks. ‘It was Lambourne Scholastic and Domestic we approached.’

  ‘Who?’ I said, eyes wide.

  ‘There seems to have been some considerable misunderstanding,’ said Miss Christopher. She had drawn her set of chins right down into her neck with disapproval.

  ‘I agree there must have been,’ I said. ‘I’m with Gilver and Osborne.’ Here I fished out one of our cards from my coat pocket, where I always keep a supply, and blessed their vague wording. Miss Shanks read it with her lips moving. ‘We were very much hoping to be engaged to help you with this rather pressing staff shortage you’ve come in for.’ I swept along, feeling the wind of good fortune under me. ‘Five, isn’t it? Four in the academic subjects – French, Latin, science and history – and also music and PE. What rotten luck.’

  ‘How did you . . .?’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I asked Lambourne for a French mistress only. Who told you . . .?’ Miss Barclay had rejoined us, bringing the dashing art mistress with her. I noticed that what I had taken to be a glint of sheen on her dark head was actually a white streak, which only added to her allure.

  ‘I should have to ask one of the secretarial staff,’ I said, thinking of how Pallister, my butler, would not even go as far as to set my business letters out separately from my social correspondence on the breakfast table, ‘but I rather think it was a parent.’