‘But you can’t n-n-not speak-speak to her, can you?’ Alice ventured one day. Flora shrugged. Unlike Jem, Flora had never readily painted the features of her domestic life for Alice. The texture of personal interaction was not a strong interest with her. ‘I-I mean live in the same house and n-not speak?’ Alice persisted. ‘You can’t.’
‘Why not?’ Flora said.
‘W-well,’ Alice said. ‘W-what about mealtimes? W-when you’re s-sitting at the s-same table?’ Flora looked at her a little curiously.
‘What’s the problem?’ Flora said. ‘I really don’t see that there’s a problem. I don’t need her. I don’t need her any more.’ Alice had wanted to convey that one necessarily bent a little; was sometimes falsely kind. One gave and took; was pliable. One accommodated. But not so Flora. She had never courted popularity. This, in the end, had made her a highly unsuitable companion for Claire Crouchley.
When finally June was over, Flora laundered and mended her clothes and packed them into a small tin trunk. Alice’s mother, who hesitated to ply any Fergusson with largesse in the form of food, did not feed Flora a leave-taking supper or take the girls out to tea. She bought the child a pair of fine kid gloves and a grossly expensive leather portfolio for toting about works of art. The Pillings drove Flora to Victoria Station, where Alice and her mother took turns with a Kleenex to dab at the moisture which afflicted their eyes.
‘Paris eh?’ said Mr Pilling and was after that quite stuck for words. He shook Flora’s hand. Mrs Pilling kissed her.
‘Take care of yourself, lovey,’ she said.
‘I will,’ Flora said. Her eyes were not afflicted with moisture. She had them fixed on the future.
‘Goodbye, Flora,’ Alice said. She wanted to volunteer that she would come and visit Flora and wondered why she felt herself constrained. ‘I—’ she said. ‘F-flora maybe w-we. We. Well—’ But Flora gave her no help.
‘Goodbye, Alice,’ she said.
‘Goodbye,’ Alice said again. Flora never came home in the vacations and Alice did not see her again until the day she got Jem’s letter. That was two years on.
Alice’s place at Oxford distanced her still further from her parents and did little to modify her stammer, but for Miss Trotter and her staff her achievement was judged as one to have upstaged Flora’s. It was Alice’s place at Oxford, not Flora’s Parisian scholarship, which had warranted the granting of a half-holiday.
‘Hip-hip,’ called Miss Trotter from the podium and she raised her right arm like Caesar.
‘Hurrah!’ roared the school in unison.
The application to Oxford had been stage-managed from beginning to end by Miss Trotter, who had herself been ‘up’, as she put it, shortly after the war. Her Oxford vintage, combined with the fact that almost none of her girls ever aspired to university at all, meant that her information was considerably out of date. The Pillings’ information, on the other hand, was wholly non-existent.
Miss Trotter had proceeded confidently upon two firmly held convictions. The first was that her own women’s college had remained a pinnacle of scholarly distinction, and the second was that the universities – ‘even, alas, our two oldest and most distinguished universities’ – were currently dominated by a fifth column of younger, left-wing dons, who would misguidedly give preference to applicants from inner-city schools.
Thus it was that Alice found herself ensconced in a single-sex women’s college, favouring solid, hard-working and predominantly undistinguished young women, from fee-paying girls’ boarding schools. She was signed up, somewhat against her inclination, as a student of Classics.
‘I w-would p-p-p. Prefer English Literature,’ Alice said, but Miss Trotter had blithely overridden her.
‘Why so, Alice?’ she said. ‘Your Latin results have always been very pleasing. Very pleasing indeed.’
Alice searched for reasons. They were all to do with those magic doors into the mountainside which Jem had opened for her. And she could not begin to think of Jem now. Not before Miss Trotter. Not without weeping.
‘I-I think I am a bit tired of Jul-l-l-yus-s-s-Caesar,’ she said. (’Yulyo Chesaray’, as she remembered Jem calling him, merely in order to annoy Mrs Waters in the fourth-form History class.) ‘I am n-not very interested in th-throwing bridges ac-c-c-c. Ac-cross the Rhine.’
Miss Trotter had considered this an eccentric objection, easily overruled. Since the state schools no longer supported Classics departments, she calculated, Alice would find herself less invidiously faced with competition from ‘the wrong sort of gel’ in this field. In her mind’s eye she envisaged a consignment of applicants, all dropping their aitches and chewing gum in the Examination Schools.
Alice’s first impression, as a result, was that to be at university was rather like being permanently committed to the Prep room. Having scotched, within the first few days, the airy, secret hope that Jem would somehow, marvellously, be there, the rising star of Balliol – a hope which had caused her to take with her the cardboard box full of exercise books labelled Convent of the Ascension – Alice watched with a degree of detachment as her fellow students giggled over an ageing Fellow’s exposed bra strap in the dining hall, or hid their pudding plates under the tables in order to wheedle seconds from the college servants. Alice, who had no stomach for participating in these antics, was quickly labelled as haughty. She retreated once more into reading, and into conscientious essay-writing and translations for tutors who were, in dress and style, not wholly unlike Miss Aldridge. Nowhere, it appeared, was there a pedagogue to be found whose shoes, like those of Miss Davidene Delight, could boast of exquisite rosettes.
Alice encountered Roland Dent while on a solitary walk along the river. He collided with her while traversing the river frontage on a bicycle. Roland was wearing a navy-blue track-suit and yelling instructions through a megaphone to a group of schoolboy oarsmen in a boat.
‘So frightfully sorry,’ said Roland Dent and, having resurrected her, promptly asked her to tea. He had a big, engaging public school voice of the more traditional sort; the sort calculated to cause mild derision among people like Alice’s parents.
‘The Rodent’s found a hag,’ said the party in the boat and, so it seemed, he had. Roland Dent was twenty-six. He was the son of an army chaplain. Having failed the eye-test which had kept him from becoming a professional soldier, he had borne the consequent frustration with fortitude and had become, instead, a successful and popular schoolmaster in a reputable boys’ private school. The role, as it turned out, suited him admirably, providing ample scope for his judicious and robust flair for leadership. He was excellent value for his employers, since he taught Mathematics competently, had no difficulties with crowd control and exhibited a rare enthusiasm for helping out with games.
Roland was optimistic and easy-going. Having soon found that his mildly sub-standard eyes were really perfectly adequate for the purpose of flinging chalk, he now fought the good fight from the classroom with laudable equanimity.
‘W-w-w-w,’ Alice said. ‘Th-th-th. I—’ She stopped, took a deep breath and started again. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Excuse me. I-but-I used to h-have quite-quite a bad stammer.’ Roland Dent was charmed. His unflagging energies quickly both camouflaged and intensified Alice’s somewhat muted sense of self and his agreeable, blameless male egotism meant that he simply did not notice. He noticed only her lovely serenity and her silences, and he fell for her pretty blue eyes.
Roland began to call on her with scrupulous regularity. On Tuesday afternoons he would appear on foot direct from the sports field, still dressed in his navy-blue tracksuit and usually with a whistle still hanging around his neck. On Friday evenings and Saturdays he would come, sometimes in his much-cherished mid-fifties Citroën DS, sometimes on a bicycle, but always vigorously sluiced, shaved and handsome.
While his major enthusiasms were for team games, military survival techniques, and old motor cars, Roland was none the less sufficiently large-hearted to be attent
ive and courteous to women, who were so obviously necessary for the satisfaction of bodily lusts and the provision of stable family lives. It was the least one could do, after all, to treat the dear things properly. They were also marvellously well adapted for producing tea at cricket fixtures, for turning out to do one proud in pretty frocks at prize-giving and for serving as occasional tennis partners.
Alice did not play tennis, but his affection for her, which expressed itself as a delicately patronizing and proprietorial tenderness, was none the less completely genuine and deepened quickly into love. He was charmed by her slightness of stature, by her quiet thoughtfulness and by her fragility. The stammer did not bother him and neither did her fear of water or her inability to drive. He assumed, in his sanguine way, that all these things would right themselves under the effect of his benign and forthright government, just as it always was with his apprehensive new first-formers. He believed, in his nice, unassuming way, that Alice was brighter than he was, but this did not ruffle his self-esteem. The only thing that ruffled him a little was Alice’s curious reticence when it came to sex.
Given that Roland’s sexual energies were in no way unequal to his considerable energies for field and water sports, he proved himself quite remarkably patient and gentlemanly in the face of Alice’s reluctance. It galled him a little from time to time that, after three months with Alice, he had still engaged in nothing with her beyond what he would have considered routine as a schoolboy with his partner on the night of the sixth-form dance. But he was confident of her in the long run and convinced she was worth the wait. His intentions towards her were entirely honourable and it did not take him long to resolve within himself that Alice was the woman he was going to marry. She was a sweet, quiet, lovely little thing with a jolly decent brain. Roland was justly confident that he would become a housemaster quite soon and probably, in the long run, a head. He was completely confident that he could make Alice an adequate and supportive husband.
* * *
When Alice, at the end of her third term, decided to move from her college room into digs, Roland Dent was more than ready to sanction the arrangement and to take on all the major humping of books and trunks – though he did pause a little quizzically over the box of Jem’s convent exercise books.
‘ “Convent of the Ascension”?’ he said jovially, before shipping them out to his Citroën. ‘This a skeleton in your cupboard, my poppet? Been concealing an idolatrous past?’
‘I d-don’t think so,’ Alice said earnestly. She was often rather slow to pick up on the style of his jokes; a thing which he invariably found endearing. Right then it made him laugh.
‘I can’t see that it’s f-f-f-funny for a person to be a C-thacoholic,’ Alice said. Roland put down the books and kissed her.
‘My adorable funny-face,’ he said. ‘Dear me. I detect that you have leanings.’
‘ “Leanings”?’ Alice said stupidly.
‘The convent exercise books,’ he said. ‘Don’t look so worried, sweetie. I’m teasing you. I never knew about the convent school, that’s all.’
‘Oh,’ Alice said. ‘No. They belonged to my best friend. She was C-catholic.’
‘ “Was”?’ Roland said with levity. ‘She isn’t dead, I trust?’
‘I don’t know,’ Alice said bleakly. She had intermittently wondered if Jem had perhaps died on that train. Could the train have crashed and she not been told? She struggled without success against the fall of tears. Roland was appalled.
‘Oh, sweetie,’ he said, and he drew her neat blonde head protectively towards him until it lay against the zip of the navy-blue tracksuit. ‘Oh good Lord, my darling.’
That was the first time that Roland had called her ‘my darling’. She had sat in his car after that, with her things piled all around them and had poured out what sounded to him like an oddly intense and lingering schoolgirl crush on a brainy little RC who, having unscrupulously won her friendship through blatant insubordination and constant flouting of school rules, had then abandoned her and never bothered to write. Alice’s distress angered him. Bloody Romans, he thought. They could be so bloody devious. He wasn’t a person not to live and let live, but, there, it had to be said: the moment you befriended one of them, you ran the risk, so to speak, of having another of them plant a bloody bomb in your barracks and that was a fact.
‘Roland,’ Alice said. ‘Do you think you could help me to find her?’ Roland hesitated, just a moment.
‘Is it really necessary?’ he said. Alice did not answer him. ‘Oh good Lord!’ he said. ‘Of course I’ll help you, sweetie. If the thought of a little girlie nostalgia can make you dry your eyes.’ He paused. ‘She’ll probably bore you rigid, my darling, and she’ll almost certainly disappoint you.’ Roland kissed her. ‘It is also just possible,’ he added lightly, ‘that said Catholic schoolgirl has gone off and taken the vow of silence. Listen, old thing. If we find this little package has shaved her head and is scrubbing floors in a nunnery with a toothbrush, or whatever – that’s when we’ll call it a day.’
Alice said nothing. She contemplated the convent as a serious possibility.
‘I mean, they do come on a bit like the Moonies occasionally,’ Roland said. ‘The old RCs. Nothing against them, you understand me, but they’re awfully good at the three-line whip.’
‘I really loved her, Roland,’ Alice said.
‘Oh poppet,’ he said. ‘Don’t be an idiot. Don’t debase the terminology.’ He meant that ‘love’ was what existed between a man and a woman; between himself and her. He switched on his engine and smiled at her with all his love. ‘Ever read these silly bloody women who write away to the magazines?’ he said. ‘ “Dear Marj Proops, My heart belongs to the games mistress. Please put me on to Lesbian Line.” All that. The sisters were always wildly keen on it, I remember. Used to keep them in hoots for hours.’
‘What?’ Alice said.
‘Agony aunties,’ he said. ‘No?’ He put the palm of his hand protectively to her face. ‘What a superior creature you are. Always reading the Old Worthies.’ Alice didn’t really feel equipped to answer him. ‘Do you think me a fascist?’ he said.
Alice shook her head. ‘I think you’re very kind,’ she said.
Roland was, for the moment, satisfied. ‘You mustn’t think that I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I mean about schoolgirl friendships. I’ve had the sisters to keep me informed.’ He lapsed, after a knowing sigh, into a lighthearted parody which succeeded in making Alice laugh against her better judgement, but his tone reminded her so vividly of Claire Crouchley. ‘ “You’re not my best friend, Mavis,”’ she said. ‘ “You’re only my second-best friend. Gertie is my absolutely-absolutely best friend. That’s ever since the middle of last week.” ’ He was much gratified to see her smile. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘My adorable silly. I’m madly proud of you, as you must know.’ Roland placed his arm around her shoulders. ‘And you are coming home with me? To meet the parents? ‘Course you are,’ he said.
Alice dispatched a letter to Miss Trotter before the following weekend. Then she left in the car with Roland to visit his parents in Hampshire. The idea daunted her a little, and only partly because Roland’s father was a clergy man. On this score she had misgivings that Roland’s father might suddenly demand of her, the uninitiate, that she chant the Athanasian Creed.
‘R-roland,’ she said, with some hesitancy, en route. ‘I’ve never even been christened.’ Roland merely laughed, as he did about all her little deviations from what he considered to be the norm.
‘Oh, jolly good,’ he said. ‘Yet another candidate for “to Such as are of Riper Years”. I shall of course inform my father at once.’
‘N-no—’ Alice said.
‘And would you like him to assemble the regiment?’ he said. ‘Around the font, I mean.’
Why was he always teasing her, she wondered. And so often about things that were real concerns of hers. And why did his jokes so often disconcert her, when they were always
so benignly meant. ‘Don’t look so alarmed, my poppet,’ he said. ‘The parents don’t live in the Middle Ages, you know.’
Chapter 14
But it did seem to Alice that Roland’s parents lived in some sort of a time warp, charming as it was. They were called Father and Mother. That was what Roland called them. They called each other Peter and Heather. Alice thought that they were like an affectionate, middle-class couple before the First World War, managing sensibly on limited means. Heather Dent bottled fruit in glass preserving jars with a rubber rim and a clamp. In the evenings, to Alice’s astonishment, she mended socks. She sat in a wing armchair beside an Edwardian fireplace with a darning mushroom and a basket filled with plaited skeins of wool.
Peter Dent kept bees. He worked each morning at an old pedestal desk in a room full of books, with a threadbare Turkey carpet on a dark, oak-stained floor; a room which, for all that he seemed to her otherwise wholly without pretension, he referred to as his ‘library’. Roland’s mother, wearing a straw hat like Virginia Woolf and sitting in the garden at a battered cricket table, observed to Alice, as she poured the afternoon tea, that the russet apples had been very abundant the previous year. She had brought out the tea cups and saucers on a tray with an embroidered cloth. The Dent household possessed no such thing as a mug, except for the one which was kept in the bathroom to accommodate Father’s shaving brush. It depicted the coronation of His Majesty King Edward the Seventh.
‘Darling,’ said Mother to Roland over tea, ‘will you ride tomorrow if it’s fine?’
Peter Dent was relentlessly agreeable, both to Alice and to his family, in a manner just short of heartiness. When he invited Roland to drink his home-brewed beer, the two of them drank it out of pint-sized tankards while the ladies drank his elderflower champagne. And when Father gripped Roland by the shoulder and said was he ‘winning the battle’, it took Alice some time to realize that he was asking Roland about his schoolmastering job.
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