“I’m glad you came. I’m perfectly fit to try.”
Janet came in, pushing the half-opened door back with a tray of tea things. She smiled at them both, planted the tray on the table, went out and came back with a plate of sandwiches and a home-made cake and then shut the door on them.
“Take your coat off, Lal, and sit down and be comfortable. Look at all these sandwiches Janet has made. You must have some.”
“One other thing I want to say to you, Flora. If you can come back to St Frid’s, if you do, I shan’t bother you. That won’t be any problem. Everybody will be delighted to see you. I don’t suppose you know how much they all like you there. But I’ll leave you alone. I just came because it seemed to me so totally wrong that anyone as good as Nan should be left to ruin her chances.”
“Oh Lal, forget it. I’ve been stupid. I didn’t more than half know what I was doing. Of course I shall come back and see if I can do anything for Nan. And I don’t want you to leave me alone. In fact if you can just wait while I stuff my things into my suitcase, I shall be most grateful if you’ll drive me back to Oxford tonight.”
“It’s very nice to see you here again.”
The Principal handed Flora a cup of coffee. “Charlotte Stacey obliged us by coming back to help us out this term at considerable personal inconvenience. She had arranged a visit to relatives in South Africa for October. She very kindly postponed it till Christmas. I can’t ask her to hand over your work to you now, much as I should like you to take on your own third-year students again. But anyhow there are only three weeks to the end of term. Poor Charlotte has found it all rather an effort. She is over seventy; she says that she doesn’t feel the same rapport with the present generation of students. I am sure she will be glad of some help from you. I suggest you have a talk with her and arrange it between you. She is a very pleasant woman—but you must have known her when you were up here? Was she your tutor?”
“No, but of course I knew her. I went to her lectures. I will ask her what she would like me to do, and relieve her in any way I can.”
“That should leave you with some extra time for your own work. Have you been able to get on with your book at all?”
“I read it through again and did a bit of rewriting during the last week or two. But I was nowhere near a good library.”
“I daresay you will find it all the better for the break. One does often come back with a fresh eye to work that has had to be put aside for a time.”
In the Principal’s warm room, with its fine, beautifully polished furniture, its big vases of autumn leaves and berries, its book shelves where the books without looking unused never looked untidy, Flora had her old feeling of being a girl up before her headmistress. Dr Singleton had welcomed her most kindly, but from below her firm benevolence there reached Flora like a faint scent her slight disapproval of a member of her staff who had allowed her emotions—of course she knew, had probably known while Hugh was alive—to interfere with her work, to cause her to apply for a term’s sick leave and then to come back before the term was over.
“One thing I must ask you to do, to take on Nan Coates again at once. Charlotte will be only too glad. She has been at her wits’ end about her. She frankly admits that she dislikes her. I doubt very much if anybody could like Nan who had only known her this term. I often feel that I want to smack her, I am determined not to send her down, not even for a term if I can help it when she has her final Schools next June. But really … she gives us all the impression that she wants to be sent down. Have you seen her yet?”
“No, I went to her room last night soon after I arrived, but she wasn’t in. She didn’t come to breakfast in Hall this morning.”
“At the moment she treats St Frideswide’s as an hotel.”
“It’s a great deal my fault.”
“I should not think along those lines, Flora, or you won’t be able to deal with her. Nan is a bully. She has deliberately taken it out of poor Charlotte. I have had her on the mat myself and told her that anxious as we are for her to get her First we couldn’t go on keeping her here unless she pulls herself together. She answered any question I asked her in monosyllables, and sat there looking mulish.”
“You know all about the pressures of her childhood.”
“Yes I do, but we are not dealing with her childhood.”
Flora who had always thought that that was at least half of what she was dealing with did not answer.
“We are dealing with a young woman, a scholar of this college, who is capable of getting a brilliant First, and owes it to us to make sure of it. No college can afford to throw away money unnecessarily nowadays. Do you know if Nan is still writing poetry?”
“When I was in Italy in August she sent me two new poems, good ones. Since then she hasn’t answered my letters. Lalage hasn’t heard of any poems of hers appearing anywhere. She asked her once if she was writing and Nan said that she couldn’t be bothered with it any more.”
“Which probably means that she is in an unproductive patch at the moment. If she can’t write that may well be at the bottom of what is wrong with her.”
“You know that her young man wrote from America to break off the engagement?”
“Poor Nan! She isn’t old enough to have learnt that one can’t live entirely by one’s emotions.”
Dr Singleton paused for an instant to let that sink in.
“We always thought that rather unsuitable engagement unlikely to last, didn’t we?”
“I thought Ralph Destrick wasn’t nearly good enough for her.”
“If you can convince her that the only thing to do is to put him behind her, she may be able to go forward and find somebody who is. In fact I understand that she already has, though she seems to have made another not very fortunate choice. But I feel sure that now you are back you will be able to get some sense into her.”
The Principal’s smile of dismissal came into play.
“I mustn’t keep you when you are busy settling in. I don’t need to repeat how very glad we are to have you back with us and to see you looking like yourself again. Come and tell me how you get on with Nan, and if there is any way in which I can help you.”
It had proved easier to pick up her relationship with Lalage again, anyhow on the surface, than Flora had ever imagined. They had talked all the way on the drive back to Oxford with a growing sense of returning familiarity. There were areas which by tacit consent they both avoided; neither of them mentioned Martin Croft. Flora knew that he must have given Lalage a sardonic and probably very amusing account of her visit to Le Rondini. She knew that Lalage must long to hear from her about her enviable opportunity of seeing another facet of Martin’s life. They left all this for another time. Lalage for the first few miles of the drive was tongue-tied and stiff; then she began to relax, and was soon filling Flora up with the term’s gossip of St Frideswide’s and of Oxford. It was only when they were driving through Kennington that Lalage, with a return of diffidence, asked Flora about herself.
“Do you feel any better now, about Hugh?”
“Yes, a little. I am beginning to. It’s there all the time from waking in the morning to going to sleep at night, knowing that I shall never see him again. But now I more often remember the good times we had together, and feel happy because we had them. I often feel Hugh near me, at first he seemed to have gone right out of reach. I think the truth is grief does gradually become manageable just because you have to go on living. I feel a great hollow, I go on with things round it. I know that I shall never be happy in quite that way again.”
“I think very likely you will.”
“I expect I shall love someone else someday. I can’t imagine it at the moment, but I hope I shall. It’s such waste not to be loving. But I know it will never be the same.”
“I suppose one never does actually repeat an experience. You know I often used to envy you what you had with Hugh.”
“You don’t need to now.”
“Never mind. I
envy you another thing, and admire your being brave enough to see that you will in time move on to someone else.”
This recalling Lalage’s situation with Martin to both of them, Flora hastily turned the conversation in another direction. Someday she would tell Lalage all about Miranda, but not yet.
When she left the Principal’s room she went again to Nan’s. There was no answer to her knock. She opened the door and looked in. The room was in chaos; books and clothes all over the floor, one window curtain as if it had been pulled too roughly hanging from the end of the rail. The bed looked as if somebody had hastily dragged back the bedclothes without bothering to straighten them.
Tucked into the looking-glass were the photographs of the Coates family, Mrs Coates broad and buxom, smiling as if mental distress had never touched her; a snapshot of John Coates and his eldest son walking back from the mine; Ben stooping to release a carrier pigeon from the ground. Flora had seen all these before. Only one snapshot, the graceful figure of Ralph Destrick raising a punt pole out of the water against a background of overhanging trees, was no longer there and had not been replaced. Perhaps his successor was less photogenic. Flora, after one brief glance round, was turning to go, when the door handle was wrenched out of her hand and a push sent her against the bed so hard that she sat down on it with a jerk.
“What are you doing in my room?”
“Looking for you. There was no answer when I knocked, so I looked in to see if you were still asleep.”
“No, you didn’t. You were spying on me.”
“What for? Oh Nan, I’m so glad to see you again.”
“You won’t be seeing me. I’m leaving. I’ve come back here to pack my things. I’m moving in with Rick—my friend who runs our group.”
This was hurled at Flora with an old childish defiance that she recognized, not without some relief. How many times had Nan assured her that she was going back home to Yorkshire, that she was going to London to get a job, and had forgotten her whirling words in an hour.
“Shall we go to my room, and have a talk about your work? I only got back last night.”
“I know. I met … anyhow it doesn’t matter to me. I’ve had enough of this home for distressed gentlewomen.”
“Why are they all so distressed?”
“That’s just like your sort, think you’ve got an answer to anything by laughing about it. They’ve got the mentality of distressed gentlewomen. I haven’t any use at all for them.”
They were standing close to one another. Flora saw with regret that Nan’s glorious sheet of hair had been cut short; that it hung in ragged ends just below the level of her chin. She was much thinner, and there were dark marks under her eyes, hardly disguised by the green eye shadow which looked as if it had been hastily and lavishly applied. There was an inflamed cold sore on her lower lip, a thing that often happened when she was out of sorts, and a smell of unwashed armpits came from her as if she had slept in her clothes. Rick, whoever he was, was not making her happy. Flora saw that she was ripe for any foolishness, but she was Nan, the girl she loved and thought worth taking any trouble over, if only at the moment she knew what trouble to take.
She hesitated for an instant; Nan saw it and hardened.
“I’ve finished with this place. I don’t want to be bothered by anybody in it any more. This kind of education is completely out of date. It’s a dead hat. You’d better go away now while I pack.”
“I’m not going.”
“It’s my room.”
Flora ignored this undeniable truth. She suddenly lost her temper.
“You’re spoilt, Nan. That’s what’s the matter with you.”
“Spoilt!”
The suggestion, so entirely at variance with Nan’s image of herself as an unwanted and psychologically damaged child, brought her up short with astonishment.
“Yes. Spoilt. Spoilt by the family who so kindly took you in so that you shouldn’t go to strangers, and who must have made all sorts of sacrifices for you. I’m sure your mother did the washing-up many a time so that you could get on with your homework. I expect you were spoilt at school. They were proud of your chance of a scholarship, and they were probably quite impressed by your tantrums. You’ve certainly been spoilt here where everybody has done their best to foster your talent and help you.”
“Well, you haven’t spoilt me, anyhow.”
“I must have, or you wouldn’t expect me to have no life and troubles of my own but just to be here when you want me. You think everybody is there only for you. You’re a bloody little egotist.”
Flora took hold of Nan’s solid shoulder and shook her, thus releasing a good many pent up feelings of her own. She pushed the girl away from her so hard that Nan in her turn sat down with a flump on the bed. She stared at Flora with her mouth and her round eyes wide open.
After a minute she said in a complaining, childish voice,
“Ralph ditched me.”
“I’m very sorry. I know how you must have felt about that. I just wonder: when you think about it now, do you truly think you would have wanted to spend the rest of your life with Ralph?”
“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with anyone. That’s why I get on so well with Rick. He understands that nobody expects to do that nowadays. He’s written several articles about out-dated conceptions. He runs a magazine, you know. I help with it.”
“Does he print your poems in it?”
“I haven’t written any. I don’t write that sort of thing any more. No, he wouldn’t print them if I did. It would be a waste of space when there are so many urgent problems. I don’t suppose you’d like the magazine, or Rick.”
“As I haven’t seen either I can’t tell. I am always interested, as you know, in anything you write.”
“I don’t write for the magazine, I type, cut Roneos, and put it in envelopes and post it off.”
“And fit in your work at odd moments, or aren’t you doing any?”
“It’s not important. I can see that now.”
“Is Rick paying you a salary? If you get sent down from here does he propose to keep you while you go on typing and putting copies in envelopes?”
“No, of course he can’t. He hasn’t got money except for a grant, and paper and stamps for the mag cost such a lot. They won’t send me down. It was only that old Singleton cow using it for blackmail.”
“They certainly wouldn’t keep you here to give up your work and act as Rick’s secretary. Why should they?”
“Well, all right if they don’t. I can get a job. I’ll go out cleaning people’s houses.”
“Better start with this room. You see what I mean about your being spoilt. You don’t really expect, do you, to be treated the same as other people?”
“I’m not the same as other people. I wasn’t the same as the rest of them at home, and I’m not like the other people here.”
“You think you’re something special?”
There was no answer.
“I think so too. At least, I did because I thought you were going to be a good poet, and that’s rare. There’s nobody else I have come across in this college who is likely to be. But you tell me you’re not going to write any more poetry. Girls who just do all the donkey work for the young man they fancy at the moment are not rare at all.”
Nan flung herself back onto the disordered bed, her short skirt rucking up to show two long ladders in her tights: her eyelids dropped for a second over her eyes. Flora saw how tired she was. Nan flung out one arm with a pettish gesture.
“Do go away. I hate you.”
“O.K. Does Rick want you to leave St Frid’s and throw yourself on him?”
“I haven’t asked him. I wish you’d leave me alone.”
“I’m going to now, so that you can make your bed and get into it, and have a good sleep. Will you come to my room at five o’clock? Then we’ll see where you’ve got to in your work and where you most need to make up lost ground. I’m going to ask Miss Stacey if she will mi
nd you coming back to me at once.”
A flicker of the old engaging grin passed over Nan’s face.
“She won’t mind.”
“All right, we’ll assume that she won’t and you come to me at five.”
“I don’t know that I will.”
“I shall expect you.”
Flora went out shutting the door crisply behind her.
I’ve only won the first round, Flora reflected as she dropped off to sleep that night.
Charlotte Stacey had agreed to turn over all Nan’s work to her with frankly expressed relief.
“I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to do better with her, especially as I recognize her potentialities. But she’s been wasting her time and mine.”
At ten minutes past five Flora, waiting in her room, was coming to the conclusion that her bid had failed, when there was a shuffle against rather than a knock on the door. Nan looked less bedraggled; she had washed her face and brushed out her short bob of bright hair. Her expression and manner made it clear to her old tutor that she was only there on sufferance. Flora took no notice, but slowly extracted from the girl what she had or had not done during the vac, and the first half of this term. The gaps appalled her; the only consolation was that Nan herself was staggered, though determined not to show it, when she was confronted with a situation that she had never allowed herself to examine. Flora saw that brooding all the vac over Ralph’s defection, disconcerted by not finding her tutor there when she came back to Oxford, she had thrown herself on Rick and his magazine as a way of flouting a world in which she felt that she was once again an unwanted child.
“I’m going to tell you the truth, Nan. I think you can still get your First, but it won’t be the certainty we all expected. You’ll have to work all out for the next six months. Charlotte Stacey is perfectly willing to hand you over to me at once. I’ll do everything I can to help you. The rest of the work Charlotte wants me to help her with is very light compared to my ordinary programme, I shall be able to give you extra coachings.
Snow and Roses Page 19