‘Why not call on Flora?’ Mrs Pilling suggested hopefully. ‘The two of you were always such very good friends.’
Alice took to visiting the library and poring over books. She read her way, with difficulty at first, through all the books to which Jem, over the years, had thrown out such casual and easy reference. She read The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. She read Hamlet. She read Keats. She read T. S. Eliot. She read the Gospel According to St Mark. She read John Donne and Hopkins. She read Samuel Johnson on his travels in the Western Isles. Most of all she read the libretto of The Magic Flute. She read it over and over, in English at first, trying to catch at its mysterious truths. Then she opted for an out-of-school course in German.
Mrs Pilling, who had never intended that her daughter should become a bluestocking bent over grammar books, bought her a fake ‘fun-fur’ with corded pink toggles and shiny boots and a personal stereo and some tickets for The Rocky Horror Show. Alice left the fun-fur untouched in the box and filled the personal stereo with cassettes of The Magic Flute.
‘Alice, the girl was a thief, I must tell you,’ Mrs Pilling said one day. ‘You’re old enough to know the truth now. I’m sorry but it’s a fact.’ And she reported to her daughter the disappearance of the five-pound note and the silver bracelet.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Alice said fiercely. ‘You always disliked her.’
‘Darling—’ said her mother. Alice put her fingers in her ears.
‘Stop it, I’m not listening,’ Alice said. ‘If you say that again, I will hate you for ever.’ It caused a widening of that distance between mother and daughter which had begun with Jem’s exeat weekend.
Not that Jem had intended the Pillings to dislike her. Far from it. Jem had repeatedly and sincerely told Alice how much she liked and admired Alice’s parents.
‘Your father’s a love,’ she assured her friend. ‘I think he’s completely marvellous.’ And Jem had genuinely adored Alice’s mother. It had given her pleasure to loiter in the carpeted offices and to caress the streamlined desk lamps. She had gorged with enthusiasm on Mrs Pilling’s cooking and had always been hungry for more.
‘Your mother, Alice!’ Jem had said one day, with dizzy admiration. She had been witnessing Mrs Pilling’s performance on the office telephone. ‘Crumbs, your mother! I reckon she could sell a pebble-dashed prefab in the flight path for Heathrow Airport.’
Well, yes, but Alice knew by then that Jem’s mother would never call a vol-au-vent a ‘volley-vong’, the way her own mother did. In fact she would have no truck with such a thing at all. Thanks to Jem’s vivid evocation of her own mother’s cuisine, Alice knew that ‘marmite’ was not really a name which had come into being along with an English yeast extract, but rather a heavy clay pot in which Minette McCrail prepared the cassoulet. It was through Minette McCrail’s cooking, simple and perfect – the occasional preserved goose, the charcuterie, the wholesome country terrines – that Alice began inwardly to find dissatisfaction with her own mother’s catering, whose star turns for the local aldermen she came to perceive as artful shortcuts to rather showy and novel effects.
Competent, indefatigable and generous, Mrs Pilling had been the acknowledged star of the local businessmen’s buffet for over a decade. Her freezer was always kept stocked with bumper bags of cocktail bits and a large Black Forest gáteau. Mrs Pilling excelled at the club sandwich. She gleaned recipes unceasingly from every magazine and cereal packet, which she pasted on to alphabetically ordered cataloguing cards and kept in a pristine kitchen file box.
As a small child Alice had always enjoyed helping her mother paste up recipes. It had taught her to be organized and neat and purposeful. It was an activity she associated with learning to read. Because of it she knew her alphabet and she had noticed quite early on how nice the recipes sounded, because they all had alliterative titles. This had given her a cosy feeling about figures of speech which she had carried over into the English class at school. But it had not taught her the kinds of things which had made Jem so dazzling in class. If Jem were ever required to call upon examples of alliteration, her mind would conjure Felix Randal the Farrier in a moment, complete with his ‘great grey drayhorse’ and his ‘bright and battering sandal’. The ‘rough, rude sea’ would surface at once, and the furrow would follow free in the wake of the flying foam. Alice’s thoughts, meanwhile, would flutter prosaically towards the kitchen file box with its ‘Tasty Tuna Starter’, its ‘Tahini Temptation’, and its ‘Kiwi Cocktail Quickie’.
Alice began to notice that her mother’s recipes came and went like padded shoulders and double-breasted coats. She judged this faddishness a lesser thing than the apparently classical timelessness of Mrs McCrail’s terrines. Alice took stock and realized that her mother’s ‘Prawn and Parmesan’ quiche had given way of late to ‘Lobster and Lymeswold’. She observed the demise of her favourite ‘Damson Delight’, which had been upstaged by a pudding experience entitled ‘Star Fruit Stunner’. Alice grieved for the contented hours that she and her mother had spent together as she had gained know-how in the art of presenting canapés. She had so enjoyed, as a little girl, learning to arrange these on shallow oval dishes with an eye to colour and radial effect. ‘Presentation is everything,’ her mother had advised, and she had made small, expert adjustments here and there to Alice’s childish arrangements. Now that Mrs Pilling managed a thriving estate agency she had acquired another maxim. ‘Locality is Everything.’
‘Food,’ Jem had said, ‘is sometimes very sexy.’ Mrs McCrail, Alice knew, bought beef fillets whole from the butcher’s and sliced them herself into inch-thick rounds with her time-worn Sabatier knives. She stood at the Aga in a bloodstained butcher’s apron, spatula in hand, and worked rough magic in a gridded cast-iron pan, while her family and guests consumed the simplest endive salad at the kitchen table. Her backless, wedge-heeled sandals – worn, Jem said, to give her height – would clack on the floor as she worked.
‘Beefstek for me is een-out!’ she would pronounce commandingly, and she would slap on to each plate an aromatic slab, singed without and bleeding within, coated in a dense gravel of pounded black pepper. It was all, Jem had assured her, analogous with the act of sex. Alice wondered now what messages one could decipher from canapés.
Jem had always presented her parents by implication as sexual operatives. This had had a curious effect upon Alice’s burgeoning fantasies. It meant that not only had Gordon McCrail become a sort of proxy father figure, guardian and guide, but he had also become her most powerful masculine heart-throb. Like Sarastro, he was never dimmed by the taking on of flesh and blood. His power was never clouded by actuality. Gordon McCrail would always be the tallest and most comely of that clutch of scarved undergrads, leaping from a small red sports car; Gordon McCrail, only son of the manse in Aberdeenshire, so gracefully paying court in French over the convent wall; Gordon – dared she think of him as Gordon? – nurturing his daughters on that seductive combination of high culture and delicate irony. Oh, the charm of a man like that! A man of letters! Alice tried not to feel let down by the fact that her own parents had met in 1960 at the Young Conservatives Ball.
With Jem’s departure, Alice found herself occasionally having conversations with Mr McCrail inside her head. When her own life bored or depressed her, she would come with relief upon Gordon McCrail making long-distance calls from his telephone in the summerhouse to American publishing houses, or shaving to Gregorian Chant. This had happened for the first time after Mrs Pilling had taken Alice to a local Amateur Operatic Society’s performance of Carmen. Alice’s mother had subsequently bought a recording of the opera’s ‘greatest hits’ and had filled the house for a fortnight with the sounds of singing gypsies. Alice had found the gypsies hard on the ear after Jem’s illicit re-education course in the music room.
‘Carmen is a pot-boiler,’ she remembered Jem saying once. ‘Even Bizet knew it. Gordon is very amusing when he’s quoting foreign composers. It’s because he can’t say his r�
��s. “If the people want wubbish, give ‘em wubbish.” That’s what Bizet said.’
Curiously, Jem had never mentioned this endearing speech impediment before. She had also suddenly begun to call him Gordon.
Alice once found herself waking from a dream, some months after Jem had gone. A dream in which she had come upon Gordon washing his car in a great sweep of drive which led to a stone country house. She knew at once that the house was Jem’s house. Alice was in a crisp summer frock, pastel-green in hue. Her hair was newly bobbed to the jawline and it gleamed like silk in the sunlight from recent washing. Mr McCrail wore a fetching pair of braces over a striped shirt and looked just like Jem, she thought, though he was very obviously a man. His clothes looked dashingly Simpsons of Piccadilly. Over his shirt he wore an apron printed all over with black and white typeface which said ‘Times Cook of the Year’.
‘I bowwowed it fwom my wife,’ he said, employing his deficient r’s. ‘It’s far too big for her, I’m afwaid.’ He was washing his car to The Magic Flute, which was emanating from a cassette machine behind him and, since his glasses had steamed up from the hot water, he had taken them off to look at her. Alice wore no petticoat under her cotton frock and the sun was shining through it. His eyes followed the length of her brown summer legs through the fabric.
‘My wife is vewy much your height,’ he said. ‘You have the same pwetty eyes, my dear.’
In the dream, Alice was perfectly clear that Minette McCrail was a rival. She knew that, stripped of her butcher’s apron and wedge-heeled sandals, Mrs McCrail lay sluiced and pinkly couched upon tumbled satin in the bedroom upstairs, playfully rump upwards, like the King’s mistress in the Boucher painting which Jem had once shown her. Alice had thought at the time that the King’s mistress had looked like an advertisement for Johnson’s Baby Powder. She talked aloud, then, in her sleep.
‘What’s that, my lovey?’ Mrs Pilling said. She was fervently solicitous for Alice’s well-being and often these days came to look at her as she slept.
‘Johnson’s Baby Powder,’ Alice said irritably in sleep.
‘That’s right, my lovey,’ Mrs Pilling said. She pulled up Alice’s quilt and gave her a wistful pat. It was so difficult to know what was best for Alice these days, now that the offer of new toys and chocolate brownies no longer met her needs. Perhaps the girl needed a boyfriend? A nice, tall schoolboy to pick up the phone and ask her to the pictures.
But in the dream Mr McCrail was wiping his glasses on his shirt tails. He was smiling irresistibly into Alice’s eyes. ‘Ever seen The Magic Flute, young Alice?’ he said. From somewhere behind him, came the sound of Tamino’s singing. Tamino was singing his love for a woman whom he had not found. All he had was the knowledge that her image purified his heart.
Miss Trotter arranged a meeting with Alice’s parents at the Lower Sixth parent evening. It was in the same week that Alice had discovered the stammering judge in The Marriage of Figaro. She wrote a letter to Mozart about it in her head.
Dear Mozart.
Did you have a speech defect? It would make me very happy to know this because letters sometimes scramble themselves on my tongue. I ask you this because of your stammering judge and because of the Pa-Pa-papageno song. I know that you sometimes used to write your name backwards. Trazom. I know this from a book I once read called Little Wolferl of Salzburg.
Yours sincerely, Alice.
‘My staff, as you know, were delighted with Alice’s exam results last summer,’ Miss Trotter said. ‘Her progress ever since has been quite outstanding.’
‘She’s been working much too hard, I think, since the McCrail girl left,’ said Mrs Pilling. ‘And it worries me, Miss Trotter, that her stammer has got so much worse.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Miss Trotter. ‘The McCrail girl. We never quite knew what we were up against there, though I must admit she came to us with a most ambiguous report from her convent school in South London.’ Mrs Pilling made some enquiries. In response Miss Trotter consented to seek out Jem McCrail’s file.
‘Veronica’s fees were paid to us by standing order,’ she said. ‘They were paid through an Italian bank with arrangements to terminate when the girl turned sixteen. I confess that this, rather mercifully, gave us the way out.’
‘Italian bank?’ Mrs Pilling said. ‘Good heavens.’
‘I do have an address for the girl’s mother,’ Miss Trotter said, reluctantly. ‘But I would strongly advise at this stage against having Alice make contact. We would all, I think, like Alice to have as few distractions as possible.’ She ran her finger along the line of an index card. ‘Ah, here we are,’ she said. ‘If you’re quite sure that you really want it.’ Mrs Pilling hesitated for just long enough to allow Miss Trotter to continue. She replaced the card and shut the file. ‘Mrs Pilling,’ Miss Trotter said, ‘my staff and I believe that Alice should try for Oxford.’
II
The Prince and the Highland Brain Surgeon
Chapter 13
Alice heard nothing from Jem for nearly four years. She understood only in retrospect how much of that time was spent in grieving. It was a grief which seldom surfaced, a kind of internal bleeding. Jem had taught her to read a lot, which, though gratifying in itself, had brought distance. Distance from her family; distance from almost all her peers. None the less, Alice had experienced a cautious reconciliation with Flora; a truce bounded by two unstated conditions. Neither Flora’s father nor Jem McCrail was ever mentioned between them.
Time had not been kind to Flora since her father’s death. The three Fergusson women, left behind in possession of a significant accumulation of wealth and a very large, eminently marketable house in a most salubrious locality, showed no signs of easing up. Not a bit of it. The two Mrs Fergussons dedicated themselves still further to the pursuit of the deceased man’s frugality and watched each other the more zealously for every smallest lapse. A drop of milk over the margin, a scrape of margarine in excess of strictest need: these things would bring down the one upon the other with triumphant reprimand. And both of them watched Flora.
As time went by, a series of small strokes somewhat reduced the mobility and the mental faculties of the elder Mrs Fergusson, and doubled the incontinence and the stench, but they did little to curtail her poisoned vigilance.
Flora’s grandmother, who at first had remained adamant that no one other than her daughter-in-law be responsible for her personal hygiene, had come gradually, through increasing mental confusion and tetchiness, to permit no interference at all. Flora’s mother, in consequence, had been obliged to desist from dragging heavy, soiled bedlinen from the old woman’s room to knead by hand in the bath tub. She left the old person untouched.
District nurses, who came and went in their smart blue uniforms, were similarly obliged to leave their parcels of disposable sheets and incontinence pads stock-piling in the Fergussons’ porch. None the less, they always paused to fill in the record card, which they had pinned to the back of the weather door. ‘Object of Visit’ the record card stated (and it provided a little blank box). ‘To bathe the patient’, the nurses filled in, after unclipping their roller pens from the breast-pockets of their uniforms. They always specified the date and the hour with conscientious precision. ‘Result of Visit’ the record card stated (and it provided another little blank box). ‘Bath refused’, wrote the nurses. Then they added their signatures, and sped off gratefully in their cars.
Alice’s mother had understandably not ventured to intervene again, though she fretted in private over Flora’s pallor and dowdiness, and over her unreformed front teeth, almost as much as she worried in private over Alice.
‘Flora will spend her time blowing dust off piles of old papers,’ Mrs Pilling said to her husband. ‘She’ll end up in a museum, just like her father.’ She bit her freshly glossed lower lip. ‘And if we’re not careful, Harry,’ she said, ‘our Alice will go the same way. She spends the whole day reading. What a pity if she ended up having to wear glasses.’ Her pare
nts placated themselves by contemplating the very likely appearance of a nice young man – one of these days.
Just as the girls had entered their second term in the Upper Sixth, something rather glamorous happened to Flora, which was announced in the Wednesday assembly. She won a scholarship, awarded by the French government, to the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. The assembled schoolgirls clapped and cheered, and Mrs Fergusson, who for eleven years had played the piano to accompany the hymns, faltered for the very first time.
That Wednesday, Alice saw Flora once again metamorphose. The exchange with her mother was brief and devastating. Flora, in general so dutiful, so accepting of austere parental decree, bloomed, took on colour, grew tall and spoke.
‘I’m going, mother,’ she said, and Alice saw clearly – as she had seen only once before on the occasion of the infant Christmas play – that Flora was compellingly beautiful. ‘Neither you, nor my grandmother nor hell itself will stop me.’
‘You’ll starve, my girl,’ her mother said, and she drew up her mouth in that mean, pinched little gesture, born of all those decades of repressing Scarlatti in the gas cupboard. ‘It’ll be no use me saying I told you so.’
Flora uttered one brief, ruthless laugh, her voice terrifying, once more the hanging judge.
‘Fortunately I’m very well prepared for that,’ she said. ‘Because you’ve starved me all of my life.’
As far as Alice observed it, Flora simply stopped speaking to her mother after that. With unswerving and awesome resolution she sat out the remainder of the school year in almost total silence at home. She gulped the last of the oil-globule soup with her mind fixed on the cross-Channel ferry and the call of her future beyond Calais.
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