Flora walked back to St Frideswide’s across the Parks. They were nearly empty now that the early January dusk was beginning to fall; minute by minute colour drained from the grass and the air grew colder. Le Rondini, baking in the summer sun, seemed like a remembered dream, and Miranda, although a stab of pain came with the thought of her, was beginning to seem like one of the coloured, moving figures in a dream, so that perhaps it might have been possible if Walter hadn’t been coming to meet her again.
Would she have been disconcerted? It took quite a lot to disconcert the Crofts. Miranda would probably have been charming, caressing, as untroubled as if she had never turned Flora out of the house at a few hours’ notice. Flora began to think it possible that she herself might have enjoyed the meeting. To take what people could give you and leave the rest seemed to make sense, but anyhow Walter was coming to take her out to lunch and that settled it. She left the Parks by the path that skirted the Lady Margaret Hall grounds, passed that dignified complex of earlier and contemporary buildings, and walked on to St Frideswide’s.
“I haven’t come to interrupt you for more than a second.”
Flora knew that Lalage in the first few days of term was strung up to a pitch of sleepless nervosity until she had her timetable arranged, and her work running smoothly. She was sitting at her desk with a big red woollen scarf wrapped round her over her jersey. She pushed her reading glasses onto her ruffled dark hair.
“What is it?”
“I was only going to tell you that I ran across Martin in the Turl. He was in a bad temper with the weather and the miners’ strike, but he said he would be seeing us soon.”
She did not tell Lalage about the invitation to lunch to meet Miranda. She knew that Lalage only found her own incursion into Martin’s private world bearable because it had ended so badly.
“I can’t at the moment imagine wanting to see anyone, not even Martin. Imagine, that little moron, Josephine Tress says she feels she must tell me that she doesn’t like reading history. She thought she didn’t last term, but she couldn’t manage to tell me then. Having to confront history again after a perfectly idle vac seems to have given her the necessary courage. I shall have to see the Principal about her this evening. She will probably be transferred to you.”
“Thanks, I don’t want your discards. Let her do P.P.E.”
“By the way, I pushed a note into your room. Nan, I should think, by the look of it. Someone had put it into the wrong pigeon hole downstairs. I happened to see it sticking out with your name on it.”
“I expect it’s Nan, she does things like that sometimes when she’s in an ingrowing mood, which I’m sure she is now. There was bound to be a reaction after the way she worked at the cottage. She was angelic altogether, she even did most of the washing-up. I’ve hardly seen her since we came back, what with timetables, and finding out how little work everybody did in the vac.”
“No, Nan’s not your only child, is she, now that term has started again. The difference between you and the unfortunate Mrs Coates is that she didn’t in actual fact have any other living daughters, but you do. Don’t let’s start talking now. I must get on.”
In her own room, Flora found a crumpled envelope. Nan’s handwriting varied with her moods. Flora had only to see the jagged scrawl in which her own name was written to know that the contents would be unwelcome:
“I shan’t be at your lecture tomorrow morning, and I can’t come to the coaching tomorrow evening. Rick will want me all day, he plans to get out a special number of the magazine about the strike. He says we may have to go to Garthwaite to get first-hand copy if the Government doesn’t come to their senses in a day or two.”
Go up there, in the first week of term when she had already had a warning from the authorities about her neglect of her work! Flora reminded herself that Nan in an aggressive mood often trailed her coat, and the less notice taken of the trailing the better. Anyhow there was nothing she could do about it at the moment. She got out her own timetable, and was soon absorbed in it, forgetting about Nan, who as Lalage had said, was not, once term had started, her only child.
“Sit down, Nan. I’ve only got a few minutes.”
“You always have now.”
“The first week of term certainly isn’t like the uninterrupted peace we enjoyed at the cottage. It can’t be, can it?”
Nan, slumping into a chair, did not answer. Her round eyes were like pebbles, her round chin looked square, her neck seemed to have thickened and shortened as if somebody had pressed her head down between her shoulders. Flora knew that physical expression of her worst moods, one which in her own mind she called hard-boiled.
“I want you at my lecture tomorrow morning, and I shall expect you at your coaching tomorrow evening at 6.15. What you do in between I shall leave to you, but do remember that you haven’t made up for all your lost ground in a fortnight although you worked splendidly.”
“We’ve got to get this number of the magazine together at once. We haven’t any time to spare if we’re going up to Yorkshire.”
“What good do you think you would do by going up there?”
“I want to be with my own people now everyone’s against them.”
“I don’t think everyone is against them.”
“Of course they are.” The Yorkshire accent deepened in Nan’s voice. “Colliers only exist for the rest of them as people to go down and get coal to keep them warm and light their houses and the streets, and keep industry going so they can make money. Colliers aren’t men to the rest of the country, they’re machines, useful machines, nobody cares how they live. Isn’t that true? You can’t say it isn’t.”
“I daresay it’s partly true. You always deal in absolutes. But we haven’t got time to discuss that now. Your work is what we’ve got to think about. The better degree you get the better the job you will get afterwards, and the more you will be able to help your people.”
“There! You see! You think that would be all right, me getting into another better-paid profession and helping them. They won’t need help after this. They’ll be paid decent wages. The Coal Board and the Government will have to give in. The power stations are running short of fuel now, the Government won’t dare to let the strike last much longer. Rick says the miners have won already.”
“Then I don’t see there’s any necessity for you to go to Yorkshire.”
“It’s a fine chance for Rick to get out a very special number of the magazine. If we go to Garthwaite, to my home, he’ll be able to get copy other people won’t get with my Dad being Deputy at the pit, and me knowing everybody. We must go, only we haven’t got the money for two railway fares.”
“Then how about Rick going up to Garthwaite alone? Your father and brothers would be able to show him anything he wants to see, and you could get on with your own work.”
“Compared with what’s happening at the pits my work is irrelevant. Rick says so. He’s taught me a lot.”
“Haven’t I too?”
Flora had not intended to make that personal appeal, and disliked the sound of her own words as they came out of her mouth, but they had more effect on Nan than anything else she had said.
“You have, of course you have. I won’t let you down in the exam, I promise. There’s plenty of time yet.”
“Not any to spare.”
“I can easily do two terms’ work in one if I’m put to it,” Nan boasted.
She jerked herself out of her chair, and stood with her back to Flora leaning her elbows on the mantelshelf.
“The College has been very patient with you. I shouldn’t try their patience too far.”
Nan made a shrugging movement which sent a lustre bowl keeling over the edge of the shelf, and down to the floor where it scattered a miscellaneous collection of small objects.
“Sorry!”
“It’s all right, it isn’t broken.”
Nan knelt on one knee and began to pick up paper clips and safety pins. She held out her cupped hand
.
“Your car keys are here, did you know?”
“Yes, they’re the duplicates. I put them there so that Lalage could take them if she wanted to borrow my car; hers is in dock. Tell me, Nan, would Ben advise you to go there now when your term has just begun?”
Nan scrambled to her feet and swung round.
“That’s not fair, using Ben against me!”
“I’m not. I think he would be just as much for you about this as I am. There isn’t a telephone in your home, is there?”
“No.”
“Is there any place near that you could ring and ask them to take a message to Ben so that he could ring you back this evening?”
“There’s the pub round the corner.”
“Have you got their number?”
“I’ve got it, yes,” Nan said unwillingly.
“How about doing that? Ask them to give Ben my extension number, then you can talk to him in here in peace. You could find out what’s going on at home, and whether he thinks you are really needed.”
“I don’t want to talk to him.”
“Isn’t that perhaps because you know what he would say?”
Nan did not answer at once. Then, as if half against her will,
“I might give Rick what money I’ve got and he can go up there on his own. He can stay at our house.”
“That’s a very good idea. And now I’m afraid I must let you go, it’s time for my coaching.”
“I promise anyhow I won’t go to Garthwaite without letting you know.”
On the Thursday of that week Flora was giving her first coaching to Lindsay Marrick, a girl who should have come up in October, but had been obliged by an attack of glandular fever to miss her first term at St Frideswide’s. Lindsay had sat for a scholarship and had been awarded an exhibition. It had transpired during the interviews that she was the only child of a widowed mother, that she lived in a West Country village, and went in every day by train to her secondary school in the nearest town. They had done very well for her work, but she had not had much fun with the other girls, as she had always caught the first train home after school, partly so as to get to her homework, but also clearly because she was tied by her heartstrings to her mother who, Flora and Dr Singleton had agreed, was evidently devoted, but probably too all-pervading. “In fact,” the Principal remarked, “the child promptly got ill when it came to the point where she was going to leave her.”
They were concerned to settle Lindsay down happily at St Frideswide’s but, having missed a term’s work, coming up a stranger when all her contemporaries had made themselves thoroughly at home and a certain limpness left by the fever were against her. Flora soon elicited a number of small troubles which were distressing Lindsay although she was sensible enough to know that they were trifling.
“I couldn’t find my own room again after dinner the first night. I got onto the wrong landing and walked in on someone else. I’ve been so afraid of doing it again. This is such a big place. I haven’t managed to find the library yet without asking someone, and it seems so silly to ask when I’ve been here since Saturday. This morning I had to go to a lecture in New Building No. 1, and I thought it would be that very modern block with all the glass, I never thought it could be that old brick place with 1907 on the stone over the door, so I was late for the lecture, and when I went in I couldn’t see a seat anywhere at first. All the girls in my year know each other already, and they seem to have been here for ages.” Her voice trembled. “I shall never be like that, I don’t think I shall ever have any friends.”
They were interrupted by the half-kick half-bang at the door with which Nan always announced her arrival. The door opened and her rough red head came round it.
“Can I speak to you?”
“Not just now. I’m busy.”
“It’s important.”
Flora said sharply, “I can’t be interrupted during a coaching, you know that.”
Nan cast a venomous glance at Lindsay.
“When will you have finished with her?”
“I have another coaching immediately after this one. Come back at 7.15 if you like.”
The head disappeared, the door was pulled to with a bang. Flora forgot Nan as she consoled and encouraged Lindsay, pleased to find when she began to discuss her work that the girl had extended her reading a good deal during her illness, and was ready, indeed eager, to make the step forward from school to university work. Flora would enjoy teaching her.
She did not remember Nan until the other pupil had left. She wondered then what the urgent problem was, and hoped that the visit to Yorkshire was not coming up again. She got ready for dinner; the second bell rang but Nan did not appear. At dinner, Flora, from her seat at the high table, looked along the tables in the hall where three hundred girls ate and chattered under the stern or benevolent gaze of the former principals or distinguished scholars of St Frideswide’s whose portraits lined the walls. Nan was not there. Flora went back to her room and spent the evening putting the finishing touches to the new lecture she was going to deliver tomorrow morning.
St Frideswide’s, envisaging the possibility of a long strike, had already reduced its central heating. When Flora had finished her work on the lecture she was cold and ready for bed. Longing for Hugh, always there but sometimes partitioned off, flooded her mind. When, after some time, she fell asleep it merged into her dreams; he was back with her in the cottage, and she was aware in the dream that it was not all right, there was some terrible sense of loss near. After a while the images faded and she fell into a deeper sleep, but when, with the morning, she came back nearer to the surface her last dream before waking was not so much of a dream as a feeling of uneasiness about Nan which reminded her as soon as she woke that there might be some trouble brewing about which she did not know.
At lunch time on Friday Flora collected a plate of food from the buttery hatch, and carried it to the seat next to Lalage’s at the high table.
“Do you want the car this afternoon, Lal?”
“No, thanks.”
“I thought I’d run over to the cottage, and put the stove on for half an hour. The place gets so damp and I shan’t be going there next week-end.”
In the park her car was not where she had left it. She looked round but there was no sign of it. She was standing in the middle of the park, puzzled, when a colleague, Janet Foss, drove in, and manoeuvred her car into the empty space. She got out and slammed the door.
“Hulloa, Flora! You look as if you’d lost something?”
“I have. My car.”
“Haven’t they brought it back yet?”
“Brought it back? Who?”
“I saw Nan Coates and her current boy friend drive off in it just before I left.”
“Good God!”
“What’s the matter? Didn’t you know they’d taken it?”
“No, I didn’t. Nan doesn’t drive.”
“The boy friend does, or tries to. I saw him scrape your mudguard on the gate. You were a bit rash to lend it to them, weren’t you?”
Flora saw Nan kneeling on the floor in her room with the car keys in her hand.
“Yes. Perhaps I was.”
“If you want a car urgently, take mine.” Janet held out her keys. “I shan’t be using it again today.”
“No, thanks awfully, it doesn’t really matter.”
“You’re not going to stay here and wait for them to come back, are you? In this knife-edge wind?”
“No, I’m coming in, but don’t wait for me.”
Flora did not want to talk to anyone about her car’s disappearance until she had had time to think. Of course they had gone to Garthwaite.
I suppose Nan came in last night to tell me that they were going; probably they had borrowed their railway fares, and she was so angry at not being able to speak to me just when it suited her that she did this.
I won’t teach that girl any more! I’ll tell the Principal that she must be transferred to Connie Marlow. I don
’t care whether she gets her First or not. Meanwhile I’ll ring up the police. I want my car back.
In her own room she flung herself into the chair by the telephone but did not at once pick up the instrument. She was startled when the bell rang suddenly in her ear. She snatched off the receiver, half expecting from somewhere to hear Nan’s voice.
“Flora? Walter here.”
“Oh, Walter.”
“I rang you several times this morning but I couldn’t get you.”
“No, I was lecturing in one of the other buildings.”
“I see; look I’m very sorry and much disappointed, but I shan’t be able to come over on Sunday. That fool of a boy …”
“Who?” Flora was still half bogged down in her own problem.
“Tom, of course, my Tom. He’s rushed off from Fordwick to join the miners’ pickets in South Yorkshire. You know he has a friend at college who comes from there. Tom seems to have some idea of attaching himself to Scargill’s mobile picket, but I’m pretty sure those will be miners only, they won’t want him. Anyhow I am going up to Yorkshire tonight to see what he’s doing and to get him to go back to Fordwick if I can. I don’t suppose Fordwick will send him down; more likely in one of those new universities a trendy Vice Chancellor would feel obliged to join the miners’ picket himself as a gesture, but the worst of the trouble with police is round Doncaster, and I want Tom out of it. I’m so very sorry about our lunch. Is there any chance you would be free the Sunday after?”
“Yes. Thank you. I’m sure I can. Walter, I do want to consult you about something. Have you a few minutes to spare?”
“Of course.”
She told him what had happened.
“Good God what a nuisance these kids are!”
“I want my car back, but though I’m very angry with those two, I don’t want to get Nan into any more trouble. She’s been working so well lately. I don’t know what’s the best thing to do.”
“Come up to Doncaster with me tonight.”
Snow and Roses Page 22