Peter, who took it upon himself to keep all discourse from ever erupting with any feeling, abruptly changed the subject. He looked over at Clive and said, “You’ve been away, ol’ boy, so you may not know that it is our little coterie in staircase seven who are to sit at high table with the poet laureate.”
“Since Margaret-Ann ate in her room, she may not know about high table tonight. She won’t want to miss this. I’ll run over and leave a note for her,” Clive said.
“I thought we did the high-table bard thing already?” I said. At that moment, I felt like there were enough bad bards in the British Isles that if they only threw half of their books on a bonfire, England would not need central heating.
“This is a new poet laureate: Cecil Day-Lewis,” Peter said.
“Brilliant.” Clive turned to me and said, “He is a live wire ex-commie Irishman turned establishment — writes great mysteries on the side under a pseudonym.”
Since this guy was not your average high-end, often dead-end, poet (I’d heard enough of them to last a rhyming lifetime), I decided Cecil Day-Lewis was worthy of a shower and my new blouse with the tiny mirrors that I’d bought in Soho. It was a straight copy of the one worn by the mod girl with the hash brownies. When Clive saw the blouse, he said it could be dangerous for epileptics to escort me anywhere in the sunlight.
This high table event might even be worth setting my hair in rollers and crawling under my hair dryer with the plastic hood while I read Day-Lewis’s A Hope for Poetry (1934). Of course there was no real hope for poetry, but these poets all read each other and assumed that, although they had almost no book sales, somehow others secretly read their works or had heard of them through osmosis. They seemed to have no idea that they were famous only in their own minds. One truly minor poet who visited our class said that he believed that poetry was just a powder keg waiting for a spark coming in the ’70s. (He thought that people couldn’t wait to get home from Carnaby Street to read Tennyson.)
>> <<
Margaret-Ann and I had to go to extraordinary lengths to get to a ladies’ washroom with a shower. To attend to basic bodily functions, we had to walk down our winding staircase, cross the large courtyard, turn and follow the path along the back garden, go behind the chancellor’s house and then ascend another staircase in the new wing. If it rained, we actually had to wear our wellies and macs over to the shower. The new wing was still under construction and the heat was yet to be hooked up. However, it was the only shower for girls. On a few occasions in the winter, the drain had iced over and we had to hack away the ice so the shower could empty. Fortunately now it was summer — for what that’s worth in England. Margaret-Ann and I sometimes went together so one of us could hold the flashlight or, as Margaret-Ann called it, “the torch.” (She loved using English terms.) I also toted a red metal toolbox that contained all my bathroom supplies and makeup.
As the hour of high table with the poet laureate approached, I donned my shower trek attire and closed my door and headed down to pick up Margaret-Ann. Since the new wing was still under construction, pipes were scattered everywhere and there were no curtains yet on the windows, but the glass was shaded. The showers were not like showers in dormitories in America where there were many sets of faucets on the wall in one big room with a drain in the middle. This was a large room with individual marble showers with curtains for each cubicle. It was typical of England to have the shower curtains up before installing the heating. Each shower had a bench in it so you could be seated while showering, which seemed strange to me. (Who sits in a shower?)
Margaret-Ann and I got into our separate showers. I remember distinctly that I was singing “Mellow Yellow” in an English accent when my curtain suddenly whipped open. A man stormed into the stall. He slammed me against the marble, seized my breast and twisted it painfully. I grabbed the glass bottle of green Prell Shampoo and hit him over the head with it as hard as I could. It spilled and he slipped. As he tried to get up, I kneed him in the groin. Margaret-Ann was now in the middle of the room screaming, “Get out!” He looked completely shocked to see her there. He stood up and grabbed my arm and began pulling it behind me as he tried to grab the other one. Blood was streaming from his head, obscuring his vision. I screamed at Margaret-Ann to go for help. She ran out and screamed down the hall of the empty building.
The intruder, who looked about middle age with salt and pepper short curly hair, was English, with a round, florid face. He was of a huskier build than most English and wore a blue cotton shirt with a button-down collar. Not the shirt of a workingman. I remember thinking that. I didn’t notice anything more. As he heard Margaret-Ann’s piercingly loud, unearthly shriek retreating down the hall, he looked around the room like a caged animal. He still had a hold of one arm and was trying to twist it, but I kept moving around so he couldn’t keep it behind me. He tried to get closer to me, and I attempted to hold him off. The blood was mixing with the Prell on the floor, making a purplish brown colour.
Suddenly Roy came into my mind and I remembered something he’d said to me in grade four: when you hit a bully, you have to use something sharp — you’ll never overpower him. As the blood was running into his eyes, I realized he was momentarily unable to see, so I had a second to act. I wriggled out of his grasp and I ran for my red toolbox that I used to carry my bathroom products to hit him again with the edge of the metal. As I picked it up and got ready to swing it, he rubbed his eyes with both his hands. Breathing heavily, he looked at me with fury in his eyes and ran out of the room. I will never forget that look. It was as though he knew me. His face registered bewilderment, then shock over a betrayal and then just plain rage. I straightened up and tried to put on my red shirt but my one arm wouldn’t work and I’d cut my feet on the broken glass.
Finally the Barson and Reggie came running down the dark hallway of the vacant building with Margaret-Ann, whose tiny body was naked other than the suds she had on her head. The suds made her look as though she were wearing a white Marie Antoinette wig. By now my legs were quivering like they had the time I had hypothermia as a child, so I sat down on the wooden bench near the row of sinks. The three of them stood just inside the door, looking at the shattered glass and the blood. The Barson said, “No worry, my dear. We have everything locked. He can’t get out.”
I guess that was supposed to be comforting.
Reggie saw my hand hanging at my side (I later found out I had a rotator cuff injury) and silently helped me slip on my long T-shirt, which I primly tucked under me with my one working hand. Reggie began cleaning up the glass. I said, “Leave everything for the police,” and I threw Margaret-Ann her Laura Ashley shift with the pink and white flowers.
The Barson said, “Oh, there is no need to overreact just yet. Steady on, we’ll have the bloke in a matter of minutes.”
“Either you call them or I will,” I said, still panting.
“Oh we will,” Reggie spoke up.
I began to calm down and said I was going back to my room to get dressed. I looked at Margaret-Ann, who was holding the towel rack and shaking so hard the chrome rack was making a rat-a-tat sound as it quivered against the tile. She whispered, “I had to run out without my clothes.”
“Of course you did. You saved me from being raped. Thank you. He knew you meant business and that’s why he took off.” She was still naked. She seemed in shock. She was holding the shift I’d handed her as though it were a crunched-up Kleenex. I pulled it over her head as best I could with one working arm. “There, now you’re dressed.”
The Barson said, “I didn’t let anyone in who wasn’t authorized. It’s not easy with this addition and the roofing on the old building being worked on and ladders everywhere. Still, there were no strangers.”
“It doesn’t have to be a stranger,” I said.
Margaret-Ann went into a lavatory stall and began throwing up. I held her head and helped her down the hall as
best I could. She said, “I feel decidedly unwell.”
The Barson said, “I wouldn’t make hay of this until we’ve some facts. No point in stirring up trouble with the poet laureate on his way.”
As I held Margaret-Ann and guided her back to her room, Peter and Clive came out to see what had happened. Peter said, “You were walking so slowly across the quadrangle, I could tell something was wrong.”
“There was an attempted rape in the girls’ shower in the new building,” I said as I led Margaret-Ann into her room and helped her cover her wet shift with a blanket. Peter and Clive followed us into the room.
“There was no rape!” Margaret-Ann yelled at me as though I were the rapist.
“I know that,” I said quietly. “The guy forced his way into the shower and grabbed me, and Margaret-Ann went for help. I cut him with a shampoo bottle; he got scared and ran away.”
“You don’t know he became frightened,” Margaret-Ann screamed hysterically at me. “This is pure supposition.”
There was a knock at the door. I jumped and my heart began to race. The door opened and Reggie entered, accompanied by what I presumed were two plain-clothes policemen, although everyone in England wore plain clothes so it was hard to tell. In fact, they both looked surprisingly like the intruder. I decided to call him “the intruder” since “rapist” set off Margaret-Ann.
The police asked me what had happened. I gave a description of the man and the event. Then Margaret-Ann gave her version of the story. She had remembered brown unlaced work boots. I hadn’t seen them.
The policeman then asked if we knew him. When we both said no, he asked if we were sure about that. When I said I was positive, he asked if he could possibly have been a man I’d met in London when I’d stayed out all night there. Perhaps I hadn’t remembered him?
He also asked why we were alone on a building site. I explained that was where the girls’ shower was located and we were told to use it. Then he asked the strangest thing in a tone I had come to really dislike. “You were nude at the time, then?” He looked at his mate in a knowing way.
“Yes, I said I was taking a shower. Even in England one must disrobe.” I really didn’t like this guy. I was fragile and I looked him right in the eye to let him know I wasn’t putting up with any of his bullshit. One thing I’d learned about England: yelling was frowned upon. What really frightened the English was getting “called out” as they referred to it, by someone who was one step above them in the elaborate hierarchy of British life. I quietly said, “I have no intention of having an assault in the afternoon and then someone acting as though I’d been doing a water dance in the nude on a construction site.” I snapped into what had become my new English self, complete with Oxford accent. “May I speak to your superior? I don’t care for your line of questioning. I am not feeling protected, which is, I believe, the job of the police.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said in quiet terror.
“I’ll decide what is necessary. I called you — now I’ll call the chief inspector.” I stormed out of the room, went to the Barson’s office and called the chief. He was there in fifteen minutes. He entered Margaret-Ann’s room, where we sat with the plain-clothes detectives, Reggie, the Barson, Peter and Clive. The chief inspector was old, with white hair and a moustache that still had some blond hair in it, and wore a suit with a matching vest. He said that he would take over from here and never once looked at his underlings as they departed. He sent everyone out of the room except for Margaret-Ann and me.
I told him what had happened. He never asked me about the flunkies and I never mentioned them. He went over every detail. Margaret-Ann simply couldn’t answer. The only thing she could continually say was “I had to run out disrobed or it would have been too late.”
He said, “Of course you did. You were brave and did the right thing. Catherine was brave as well. She never ran away and left you there. She took him on, which I would venture to say took him by surprise. Catherine, I suspect he was watching your room and knew when you put on the red long shirt you were going to the shower. I imagine he had no idea you picked up a friend on your way to the shower. So I’m moving you two up to the top floors and putting my men in one of the downstairs rooms for an unspecified time or until this rascal is apprehended. If you are going anywhere in the evening, please don’t go unaccompanied or else tell our man. I will introduce you to him presently, and I will be back in the morning. Do you think you need a doctor’s care? We can have one brought in here promptly.” When I assured him I would be all right, he said, “I think you need to rest now.”
Margaret-Ann didn’t say anything when he left, not even goodbye.
>> <<
Peter, Reggie, Clive and the Barson helped us switch quarters. At about a half hour before dinner, I was lying listlessly on my new bed. My body ached all over and my arm now moved only in sudden jerks. Far worse than my physical injuries was my state of mind. I was upset but felt I had no right to be. I was almost as upset by the police insinuating it was my fault as I was by the attack. Clive entered and said quietly, “You had best get ready for dinner. We are at the high table in less than half an hour.”
Now, nearly fifty years later, when I look back on that moment, I wonder why it never occurred to me to stay in bed. Why didn’t I say, “I don’t feel up to going and talking and being pleasant to the poet laureate and pretending that I feel just fine one hour after an attempted rape. My breast is swollen, all black and blue, my shoulder hurts, my arm will not move in any requested direction and my feet are scored like a country ham.” For several years after that, my heart pounded when I saw the Prell Shampoo commercial on television. When the pearl dropped through the green viscous liquid, it felt like fingernails screeching down a blackboard until the pearl finally hit the glass bottom.
However, I felt I had to do what I’d committed to do no matter how much turmoil I was in. So I must have shovelled all my pain and fear in with one long swallow and said, “Right. I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”
No one had answered at Margaret-Ann’s door, so I moved on without her. As I descended the stairs, my legs were a bit shaky, which I thought was odd. Still I walked in red patent leather stacked heels on lacerations that opened with each step.
I was seated across from the new poet laureate, Cecil Day-Lewis. As he greeted me, I wondered why, if someone makes it to the lauded position of poet laureate, don’t they get their teeth fixed and buy a jacket that fits?
He was craggy but handsome and wore his bow tie with aplomb; he was also charming and engaging and had more animal magnetism than most men have in their sixties. He really knew how to tell a story. They all began with famous people: “When I was fettered to Auden before I found my voice …”
I noticed I was having trouble following the conversation. I seemed to be out of sync. I heard someone say Day-Lewis had written The Magic Mountain. “Wait a minute, Thomas Mann wrote that,” I said.
Clive snapped, “The Magnetic Mountain is what the poet laureate wrote, Cathy.”
“Oh sorry. I’m not myself tonight,” I said in a daze.
“Feeling indisposed?” Day-Lewis asked kindly. He was the first person other than the chief inspector to speak solicitously.
“Yes.” He looked at me to go on. Finally I said, “I was assaulted in the shower today and I seem to be a bit dazed.”
“Appalling ablutions,” he replied.
There was an embarrassing silence. Clive finally said, “Really, Cathy, we have a poet laureate here, not Florence Nightingale.” Peter began a discourse on The Magnetic or Magic Mountain and everyone rushed forward with their literary quips.
It was as though I had defecated on the table and now they all had to whip into gear and sweep it away. I was terribly embarrassed and realized I’d done something awful. I was only trying to explain truthfully why I didn’t hear the title correctly.
I didn’t say a word the rest of the night. After dessert, when I felt I would not make “an issue,” I excused myself. Reggie must have been told to walk me back to my room so I wouldn’t be out alone at dark. As we got to my door, he said, “I’m ever so glad you gave that guy a bit of welly today. Not many English girls would have done it.”
I curled up in my bed, in my unfamiliar room, holding one of my fuzzy slippers with a donkey head perched over the toe or, as my father called them, my donkey-hote slippers. My mother had said that they were far too big to pack — they did take up half the suitcase, but I guess I knew that I might hit a low like this when I had no one to turn to. I wasn’t calling my mother or father. They had enough on their plate.
As I held my donkey, I began questioning myself. Although my long red shirt came almost to my knees, maybe I shouldn’t have worn it to cross the quad and trot around to the shower. Maybe my short skirts were provocative. Why had I been alone in a big, empty building? The windows were shaded glass so that wasn’t the issue. Why had the first policeman wanted to know why I hadn’t run away?
Now there had been this whole embarrassing fracas at dinner. No one other than Reggie acted like I’d done the right thing. I mean I wasn’t the rapist. Why was it so bad to have mentioned it? Maybe I was making a mountain (magnetic, magic or otherwise) out of a molehill? The British fought in the war and had the blackouts — I guess I was overreacting. It was hard to feel so raw, so emotionally wronged, yet have all of surrounding society tell me to “put a sock in it.”
The next morning, I felt a strange combination of anger, embarrassment and shame. Reggie knocked on my door. “I’ve brought you some tea, Miss.” He came in and brought the paper. He said that, much to everyone’s shock but mine, Margaret-Ann had pulled up stakes and vanished. A cab picked her up with all of her belongings. She left a short note for her don. He said, “It’s ever such a pity as she was in line for a first.”
Coming Ashore Page 10