The next day was not a comfortable one. Not for Pam, nor for Peter. Peter rose early to discover that Grandfather was dead and that Pam – far from being supportive to him – had become silent and remote. Neither was it a comfortable one for poor Lady Vanessa, who approached St Elfreda’s towards midday to encounter, lying in a spread of dried vomit near the porch, the precious iron key with which she had entrusted Pam and Peter.
And worse awaited her within. Not only did St Elfreda’s reek of stale urine and burnt-out oil wicks, but the old man was, by then, not in the best of moods.
Though the day was Sunday, Lady Vanessa took it upon herself to call upon Pam and Peter. It was clear to her at once that poor bereaved Peter had had no hand in the matter, but she could not fail to indicate how disappointed she was in Pam – Pam who had nothing to say for herself and simply sat there, silent and unyielding.
‘Partying is all very well,’ Lady Vanessa prompted gently. ‘But betraying a trust is a serious matter.’
When Pam did not reply to her, she went on, ‘You wrote me a very odd letter. I could make no sense of it at all.’
Pam said nothing for ages. She looked withdrawn; hostile, Lady Vanessa thought. She had never anticipated that Pam would be so disobliging.
‘Maybe I was drunk,’ Pam said.
Lady Vanessa got up. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I hope we can forget all about it.’ She looked with concern at Peter. ‘We won’t even think of rehearsing today,’ she said. She suggested they try the following morning.
‘I can’t sing,’ Pam said abruptly to her teacher’s departing back. Lady Vanessa turned.
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
‘I said that I can’t sing,’ Pam said. ‘I just can’t, Vanessa. I can’t and I’m afraid I won’t.’ And, with that, she got up and left.
Most of the teaching staff were entertained by the change in Jago Rutherford. It was bandied about the staff room during coffee breaks that Jago, the invincible, had fallen victim to the smallest member of the Upper Fifth. Christina, it was agreed, was small, but she was none the less perceived as being a formidable young woman who would constitute a suitably worthy challenge. What pleased the staff most was the effect that this new alliance was having on Christina. The pair were working well together and had been observed by all to be spending long, quiet hours together in the library.
‘It’s a pleasure to see Christina take herself seriously at last,’ said Miss Barnes, her English teacher. ‘I have always believed about that girl that there is more there than meets the eye. It’s been her bad luck to be so close in age to her sister. She’s been reluctant to compete.’
Jago, it was generally noted, had seemed to lose his arrogance. His body language was less imperious, he had ceased to be a little Caesar, and all his eager acolytes had suddenly been forsaken, as he now accompanied Christina almost everywhere; a faithful devotee. One of the masters observed that Christina now wore Jago’s sweatband wound twice around her wrist.
For Christina it was in many ways quite the best time she could remember. Jago, heartless, ruthless Jago, about whose sexual exploits the school mythology hummed, was now all hers. And the stories about him were nonsense, since Jago was gentle, courteous and reticent in the matter of physical approach. Admittedly he was a little more reticent than Christina sometimes wished. She had found herself, occasionally, much provoked by Jago’s nearness; by the tantalizing proximity of his exquisite brown forearm as they worked together in the library; by her desire to have him kiss her on the mouth, where he chose, instead, always, to kiss her on the cheek. But that would come in time. And it was nice, she reflected, that Jago, in the newness of his altered self, was asserting, by wordless implication, that theirs was a marriage of true minds.
It was no surprise to anyone, least of all to himself, that Jago, in the mock exams, had done brilliantly well. Christina’s results, however, were very pleasing to all and represented considerable advance. She had done especially well in maths, which was gratifying to her headmaster, since maths was also his subject.
Roland had never ceased to have a small soft spot for Alice’s younger daughter. It was always startling for him to encounter those uncannily familiar blue eyes, now bequeathed to a person of such wholly different temperament; a person who stared out of them so boldly and had no problem with eye contact as she came forth and spoke her mind, whereas her mother had always been given to blinking and stammering and shyly averting her gaze. He admired Christina for her spirit and hoped that she would go far.
Pam had not done all that well in the exams. She had done well, of course, but not as well as usual. In short, she had done just well enough for her results to pass without appearing to provoke undue concern. And she had certainly done well enough to stay ahead of Stetson Gregory.
The Gynae Bloke and the Hell Hound
At this time there was not much to intrude upon Christina’s happiness. The prize of Jago’s devotion, coupled with the novelty of her recent academic success, had rendered her almost wholly self-absorbed. She was taken up entirely with thoughts of herself and Jago.
Her very creditable performance in maths meant that she now found herself promoted to membership of Roland’s additional maths group – a small class of mathematical hopefuls of which Pam and Jago were already members. Christina found that she looked forward to the class and progressed in noticeable leaps. She especially enjoyed being taught by Roland who was one of those benignly endowed teachers for whom all pupils, no matter how wayward, will put their best foot forward. She liked the shapes of his neat, lucid sentences and the patterns of his tall, jagged writing as he wrote up examples on the blackboard.
‘He has beautiful hands,’ she whispered one morning to Jago who sat beside her. ‘Don’t you think he has beautiful hands?’
Jago did not hear her. He was watching Pam across the room. Intermittently, throughout the lesson, Christina’s sister had been doodling slow, spiral ellipses into being on the back of a wallet file. She always began these at the centre, he noticed, and she spiralled slowly outwards until each elliptical shape had assumed a diameter through its wider axis of something like five centimetres. Then she began again. The action impressed Jago as one of absolute futility. He loathed himself, as he watched her, for his inability to intervene. Sometimes he felt as though his brain was going to explode.
There were occasions, such as these, when the buoyancy of Christina’s spirit was difficult for Jago to handle. Though he had become so genuinely fond of her – devoted to her; indebted to her – he was, right then, truly thankful that the lesson was almost at an end. It was getting on towards ten-thirty and, within the hour, he, along with Christina and certain members of the drama society, were due to leave for London on a visit to the Barbican Theatre.
Roland wiped the blackboard clean and put away his papers. The class rose and began, slowly, to move out. Yet Christina, in her enthusiasm, lingered after the rest. Jago suffered himself, mutely, to linger beside her. She chatted to Roland with a brightness that always embarrassed him slightly.
‘I really like those matrices,’ she said. ‘The way they come together. Horizontals to verticals. They’re so elegant.’ She made Insey Winsey Spider movements with the fingers of her small white hands. ‘They’re sort of like dancing the galliard,’ she said. ‘Sort of like writing a sonnet. Has anyone ever thought of trying to construct a sonnet matrix?’
Jago cringed. Roland laughed. ‘Would that be Shakespearean?’ he said. ‘Or Petrarchan, Christina?’
‘Oh,’ Christina said, disarmed. ‘I suppose I mean the kind that comes in groups of four with a rhyming couplet at the end. I guess the rhyming couplet could cause a bit of trouble.’
‘Ouch,’ Jago said, hoping to stop her. ‘Don’t be so girlie, Chris.’
Roland laughed again. He moved off towards the classroom door, wanting his morning coffee.
‘Enjoy the theatre,’ he said. Then he left.
Jago had noted, as Christina talked
, that Pam was waiting around outside. She was hesitating. He saw that she tensed and lowered her eyes as Roland emerged from the classroom. Jago deduced that Pam was waiting for her sister. He considered that she looked particularly burdened. Evidently so did Roland, who paused and looked at her carefully, searching her face for clues.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘is everything all right?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Pam said, rather too promptly. ‘Perfectly all right. Thank you.’ And, though he continued to stand and search her face, she yielded absolutely nothing.
Reluctantly, Roland gave up. ‘Come and see me,’ he said, and then he moved off.
Inside the classroom, Jago was glancing uneasily at his watch. ‘Chris,’ he said, ‘I have things to do before we go for the train. Listen, I’ll meet you in the library. Ten minutes, okay?’ He passed Pam in the corridor without acknowledging her presence. Then he proceeded to the dormitory, where he snatched a few moments’ indulgent, solitary misery.
To have Pam there, in place of Jago, caused Christina’s feet to touch the ground with a bump. Of late, she realized, there had been something less than exhilarating about her sister’s presence. It seemed to her – now that she gave the matter thought – that her sister had, for the last few weeks, been devoid of Peter’s company. And why had Pam cried off the concert like that? Hadn’t that been rather weird?
‘Chrissie,’ Pam said, ‘look. I’m sorry to intrude on you.’ Then she stood there, saying nothing. Nothing at all. Christina became a little agitated as she waited for Pam to speak.
‘Pam,’ she began. She stood, on the edge of impatience, worrying that the time was passing and that she needed to head out for London.
‘You’re not to tell this to anybody,’ Pam said. ‘This thing that I’m about to say. Please, Chrissie. Nobody. That’s including Jago.’
‘Tell what?’ Christina said.
‘I need you to promise me,’ Pam said. ‘I need you not to repeat it.’
‘All right,’ Christina said. ‘I promise.’ But then Pam, once again, said nothing. She was silent for so long that Christina began to think she had given up all intention of speech.
‘I’m probably pregnant,’ she said at last.
For quite a while, Christina could only stare. Then she leaned against the classroom wall and closed her eyes for a moment. When she looked up, it seemed to her that Pam had not moved an inch; had not moved a muscle.
‘Those kits,’ Christina said, inadequately, having no experience in these matters. ‘Those tests. You haven’t used one, have you?’
Pam’s shrug surprised her with its air of apparent indifference. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘But all I know is I’m nearly four weeks late.’
They lapsed once more into silence.
‘Who?’ Christina said. She added, without much hope, ‘Not Peter, I suppose?’
‘Of course not Peter,’ Pam said. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Chrissie.’ Then she said, ‘I don’t know who, as a matter of fact. Isn’t it irrelevant?’
Christina could not but fail to be astonished by this remark. It seemed to her so wholly out of character. ‘Jesus, Pam,’ she said. ‘But how can you not know?’ She was exasperated by her sister’s total lack of oomph. Why was Pam so hell-bent on behaving like a victim? Why was she allowing time to pass and doing nothing to help herself? Why was she apparently so incapable of seizing the reins of her own life? And why, in heaven’s name, had she – she, of all people – abandoned herself so prematurely to the act of procreation without so much as a thought for the consequences?
‘Pam,’ Christina said, ‘look. I’m about to leave for London but I’ll come back this evening with one of those testing kits. It’ll be okay, I assure you. It’ll be negative. It’s anxiety. It’s hormones. Dearest Pam, don’t worry. Promise me that you won’t worry. Not until I get back.’
When Pam neither budged nor responded to her, Christina, mistakenly, awkwardly, talked on. ‘Pam,’ she said, ‘about contraceptives –’
‘Don’t,’ was all Pam said.
‘Well, about the “Holy Father” and all that,’ Christina said. ‘Encyclicals and that. All that’s meant as a counsel of perfection. Only crazies would ever begin to take that stuff seriously. People don’t. People like our parents –’
‘I was raped,’ Pam said. She said it so undemonstratively that Christina, bent upon making her point, did not at first register the utterance.
‘All those years,’ Christina said. ‘And our mother’s been pregnant once –’
‘I was raped,’ Pam said again. ‘Chrissie, please. Somebody held me down. He was drunk. He spewed into my mouth.’
Christina was stunned into silence. She felt a shiver, as if in response to cold, unearthly fingers taking hold of the back of her neck – the more so because her sister’s delivery had been so unnervingly without emotion.
‘It’s the reason I reneged on that concert,’ Pam said. ‘I can’t sing right now. It feels as if, every time I open my mouth to try, I’m choking on someone’s vomit.’
They stood, after that, facing each other, stiffly, like two blocks of wood. Christina sensed that, had she reached out to her sister; had she tried to embrace her, Pam would have edged away; would have avoided her touch. She became aware that, while moisture had started to blur her own eyes, Pam’s eyes, by contrast, were unencumbered.
In response to Pam’s passivity, Christina was all at once flooded with resolution. She knew, as she stood there, that her sister needed her and that she, personally, would move heaven and earth in the matter. She would nail whichever slimy bastard it was that had so horribly abused her sister. And neither would her sister find herself a martyr to the creature’s alien sperm. Not if she could help it.
‘Pam,’ she said. ‘You must have some idea who it was who did this thing to you.’
Pam threw off the question. ‘It was dark,’ she said. ‘Chrissie, forget it. I didn’t mean to tell you. I don’t know what possessed me. I was lonely. I’m sorry.’
But Christina was all resolve. ‘We’re going to tell Roland,’ she said. ‘We’re going to tell him this minute.’
Pam shook her head. ‘Chrissie, think,’ she said. ‘Just imagine if it was you.’
Christina thought. Imagine if it were she. Would she want it told? Would she want to risk the leaks; the raised eyebrows; the smirks on the faces of the likes of Stetson Gregory; the murmurs that she must have had it coming to her? No. Pam was right. She would not want it told.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘All right. Listen, I’m going to put off Jago.’
‘No,’ Pam said. ‘Please don’t. That’s really the last thing that I want.’
Christina had no idea, as she conceded to Pam, reluctantly, how near the London theatre visit would bring her to finding the answer to her sister’s needs. The answer came in the unlikely person of one Dulcie Jackson.
She met Dulcie that afternoon in the ladies’ lavatory at the Barbican. It was during the interval at a schools’ matinée performance of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
Since Jago had so recently come good, that day Christina was, as usual, marking this minor miracle by wearing Jago’s overcoat – a voluminous article made of cashmere that Jago had bought from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Shop during a weekend at home. He had found it lying in a large cardboard box under a pair of cretonne curtains. When Jago wore it, it hung to mid-calf, making him look like a handsome officer en route to the Eastern Front. On Christina the coat skimmed the ground, obscuring her feet that were shod in Jago’s outgrown walking boots. Jago’s feet had outgrown the boots just after his ninth birthday.
Dulcie’s companion in the ladies’ lavatory was an ample blonde classmate who was teasing her hair ferociously with a fine-toothed metal comb. Both girls were wearing new high-street clothes; flash get-up for a school outing. Dulcie was tall and lean and strong. Atalanta in Calydon. Her skin, which was darkish Afro, had been highlighted at the cheekbones with a purple-tinted face gel embedded wi
th tiny, luminous particles. Her hair had been dragged back severely from her brow into a short, high, plaited ponytail.
She wore her favourite skin-fit, dark indigo jeans that hugged her tight, shapely buttocks and long lean shanks in a manner that daily threatened to induce orgasm in young male commuters with whom she shared the Northern Line to Finsbury Park. On her upper body she wore a bright yellow, short-waisted stretch-lycra bust bodice that fitted taut over her high, conical breasts and left a span of her midriff exposed. Dulcie toted a short, lime green teddy bear jacket spattered with black dalmatian blobs hanging from one shoulder. Brass fans dangled from her ears. On her elongated, size eight feet, she wore backless, fake snakeskin stilettos. Since, at the moment of Christina’s entry, she was being reflected full-length in the glass, it was possible for anyone coming into the room to register, at once, the dual charms of her lumbar vertebrae and of her deeply concave umbilicus.
‘Fuckinell,’ she said to the Teaser, staring rudely, as Christina made her entrance. ‘Look what the cat dragged in. Where the fuck d’you reckon she buys ’er clothes? Fuckin Tramps’ Outfitters?’
‘Yeah,’ said the Teaser, and she went on teasing. ‘Fuckin freak, I reckon.’
Christina crossed in haste to the lavatories and bolted herself into the furthest cubicle. She hardly dared pee for fear of provoking further volleys in the class war. Yet, even on so brief an exposure, she had been shaken by Dulcie’s looks.
‘Hey, Dulce?’ the Teaser was saying. ‘What the fuck’s going on then, in this fuckin play? You’re the fuckin brainbox, then. Fuckinell, I reckon it’s fuckin stupid. Fuckin load of double fuckin Dutch.’
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