The People on Privilege Hill

by Jane Gardam

  The fourth woman, Elizabeth, was edging dreamily towards Alzheimer’s.

  Beautiful at nineteen, Elizabeth had left college at the end of her first year to marry someone from Devonshire with horses. All the year she had been in love with a Polish Jew called Ernie, a physicist she’d met at the inter-collegiate Freshers’ hop the first night. And all that year on the college tennis courts the beautiful equality and power of the base-line returns of Elizabeth and Ernie had haunted the evening hours, as other girls sat at desks in their rooms above, trying to keep their windows shut against the laughter.

  The year Elizabeth had been with Ernie her looks had lit dark places. She had shone in the rhododendron alley, in the grotto by the lake, in the backstreet café they all used to visit on Wednesdays after lectures on Paradise Lost. She had shone along the dark road back to the college at night after the theatre, several girls together eating chips out of paper—though Elizabeth didn’t eat chips.

  “Look at that girl!” you heard said sometimes as Elizabeth passed under a street light. “Did you see that girl?” At a time when women English Literature students were all trying to look like Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth effortlessly did so, but with an unselfconscious happiness Virginia Woolf never managed.

  It had been a great surprise to meet Elizabeth again today, for even Brenda had twenty years earlier stopped sending Christmas cards marked “Kindly forward if necessary.” None of them had seen her since the Finals ball at the end of their third year, though Elizabeth, who had left after three terms (with a First in Part One and acrimony from the college), had had no right whatever to be at the Finals ball. She had brought her husband Rupert with her. A genial soul. They had left early.

  The other three had danced all night. Then they had walked with their partners—one being Brenda’s Stafford—to the green side-gate that led into the public park. They had walked—Lily entwined—as far as the bridge over the canal, said their goodbyes, walked back again and been checked in by a woman called the Home Tutor, Miss Folly. She had had a notebook and a cape and purple stockings, her habitual garb even at sunrise. Alert Miss Folly had seen them in by the gate like a milkmaid letting through the little heifers soon to be off to the slaughter of the world.

  That sleepy, rose-blown morning forty years ago the three girls had drifted back via the grounds, up the stone steps between the Italian urns, across the lawns, in through the glass doors. Long dresses had been soaked with dew. Lily, who had spent most of the night inside the skirts of a large willow, entangled in strong arms, had been barefoot and tipsy, balancing about on her toes. Poor Brenda had been in a daze of love for Stafford. Eileen had been thoughtful and terse. Her partner had been somebody’s faceless brother who hadn’t made much of her.

  So that was that. Tomorrow they would be scattered. Six weeks later would come their Finals results. Six weeks after that, up would come to the college the next intake of fledgling schoolgirls, hesitant or bold, plain or pretty, stupid or clever, and one or maybe two “remarkable.” Of these four now elderly women only Elizabeth had been in any way remarkable.

  And Elizabeth, who could have done anything, had kept her secrets. Why she had left. Where Ernie, the Polish physicist, had gone and why. Nobody knew or felt they could ask; young women then were shy with each other.

  The four girls had all read English Literature. Brenda had then taught it, Eileen had ditched it, Lily had tried to write it, and Elizabeth had drifted off to Barnstaple, not with Ernie but with Rupert, and had had five children and not much else.

  And now Elizabeth sat in the front of Lily’s Alfa Romeo saying “What a lovely car,” while Eileen sat glum in the back with Brenda chatting of chastity.

  Lily was turning now through the main gates of the college, the same black-and-gold scroll about them saying Semper Eadem. Now the car was winding down the college drive between much taller trees than they remembered, and Eileen was sighing and grunting and asking why they had come. She hated reunions.

  The college was a women’s college, one hundred years old, and it was closing down. Or rather it was amalgamating with a male college and moving to Leicestershire. The wonderful buildings, the great lawns, the avenues of trees, the botanic garden, the science laboratories had been bought by American bankers to train financial moguls from the Pacific Rim in the philosophy of money. Invitations to a final reunion had been sent out long ago by a committee, to such old students as had kept in touch, and there had been wide advertisement about it in the press. So hundreds, maybe thousands, of women were expected.

  Coachloads of them from way before the war were arriving from all parts of the country, said Lily, who wrote fiction.

  “God help us all,” said Eileen.

  The day chosen for the reunion had been the day after Finals. The day after the final Finals of the college. The anniversary of the day of the rose-petal skirts in the dew, the strawberries and cream supper and the gentle Bucks Fizz, of the band that had played selections from South Pacific, of the goodbyes upon the little bridge and Miss Folly in purple. The day of the last breakfast together through the glass doors, of baked apples on oak tables, of servants in cap and apron who had served the baked apples at 6 a.m. And there had been silver toast racks.

  Still in their long dresses that long-ago morning, some girls had gone trailing away to bed and others had gone outside again holding each other’s hands (you could then) and talking of men (you did then) and of what was going to happen next.

  Brenda had lifted her certain face to the sun and said, “He’s asked me,” and Lily, half asleep, had said, “Are you going to?”

  “Oh yes. We’ll do it at once I should think. Before next term. We’ll both be at the same teacher-training, after all.”

  “Do it?” said Eileen. “Do what?”

  “Well, marry,” said Brenda, firm and triumphant. Intolerable.

  “Think of him in bed,” Lily whispered sideways (nasty) to Dilys Something, an awful girl wild for power, rich and humourless. She’d been at the ball with someone famous everybody thought they ought to recognise although he’d looked like almost everybody else. Nobody had ever heard of either of them again.

  “He’ll have one like a pencil,” said Lily, and Dilys stared.

  “Where’s Elizabeth gone?” black-browed Eileen asked.

  “Oh, home,” said Lily, “ages ago. Where’ve you been? She said goodbye to us all. You’re slipping.”

  For Eileen had been a logbook.

  And now, today, the last reunion, and here were the directions to the car park, about turn: off down the drive again to the end, out into a huge, roped-off area outside the grounds. It would be a quarter-mile walk back. Eileen looked satisfied. She’d known there’d be trouble parking but nobody ever listened to her. Of course.

  Lily said, “Can you walk it, Eileen?”

  “No need to be unpleasant.”

  “Well, I know you’ve got a knee. We could have dropped you off.”

  “I told you,” said Eileen, thumping away. “I’m O.K. You’d better lock the car.”

  Lily, who had been about to, said there was no need. Not to fuss. It was all by invite. Old girls. Nobody here would be nicking cars.

  “Want to bet?” said Eileen’s square old back.

  There were vehicles of every kind, and every kind and age of woman. Some were staring about them, some were greeting and exclaiming, some were putting their heads back inside their cars again to bring out picnics and sticks and Zimmers. Some were roaring up on mopeds, unfastening great medieval helmets and looking about sixteen. Some were pacing arm in arm, careful of the paths. Some were undoing pushchairs, humping children about. Lily set off after limping Eileen, and Brenda followed behind until she remembered hesitant Elizabeth and went back for her. The Virginia Woolf dazzle was long gone from Elizabeth now, but there was still a bewildered sweetness.

  A surge of talk and laughter met them as they came to the steps behind the urns. Over the lawns above, hundreds of women were scattere
d like beads. “The noise!” shrieked Brenda joyfully. “The noise!”

  And Lily thought, I shouldn’t have come. I cannot bear it. I hate this sort of thing. But I will not let Eileen win. Though God knows, she’s right.

  Women sprawled in groups on rugs. Some had brought wine. Others like schoolgirls were in jeans, eating out of plastic bags, with rings in their noses. Others had pearls in their ears. Some wore lipstick and floating skirts, and had had their hair done. Some looked determinedly dirty and ill and scornful and hip. Some carried handbags. Some peered down into cameras. Some carried photograph albums of grandchildren. There paced the present principal, unknown to Lily and co., ready for Leicester, eagle of eye, in a silk suit. There went a white-haired woman in a long tea gown and Doc Martens and a hat.

  “There are some really old ones over there; best keep away,” said Lily. “I remember those basket chairs. They’ve brought them out of the bursar’s room. It was all basket chairs and hyacinths. She wore paisley shawls. There was an ivory cigarette box. She’ll be dead now.”

  “She was dead then,” said Eileen, “and they can’t be the same chairs.”

  “There’s no organisation,” said Brenda. “They haven’t even tried. Talk about the last day in the old home. You can hear the removal vans revving up round the corner. There’s not even tea. What’s that banner doing? There are all sorts of banners, it’s like a rally.”

  “That one says Social Studies,” said Lily. “Whatever are Social Studies?”

  “What the thick ones did,” said Eileen, “the spotty ones with the dirty hair. You could always tell the sociologists.”

  “Thanks a bunch,” said a skeleton with glinting ringlets of Afro gold lying about at Lily’s feet on the grass. “That’s what I am.”

  She looked about ten. Beside her was hunched a bored and venerable man with massive shoulders, who hung his head and clasped his hands about his knees.

  Brenda inspected him with surprise. “I didn’t know we could bring husbands. Well, I do think that should have been made clear. I met my husband, Stafford, here, you know. More than forty years ago and at exactly this time of year.” She sat down on the grass. “You go on,” she said to the other three. “I’ll stay with these younger ones for a moment.”

  Brenda was a year younger than the others, having been precocious at school. “They’re older than me,” she told the sociologist and the thinker. “I came up early. I should really have stayed and tried for Oxford but I was impatient. Thank goodness or I would never have met Stafford. When did you come down? You look almost young enough not to have come up yet.”

  “In 1970,” said the girl. “I’ve been with my husband twenty years in the Third World.”

  “Well, my goodness! I must say it suits you. I do apologise. I’m hopeless at ages, I suppose because I simply can’t believe in my own. Between ourselves, I feel about twenty-seven.”

  But the ancient husband had climbed to his feet and given his hand to the girl. They walked away.

  “Well, their manners are not ours even if they have been married twenty years and she doesn’t call him partner,” said Brenda. “Sociologists were always short on manners. I suppose they have to be like the clients.”

  In the circle of basket chairs about a dozen cobwebby people were sitting under the English Literature banner. One appeared to be asleep. You could see it was an exclusive circle set apart from the mêlée, for conversation was nominal and the champagne was Grand Cru. It was the English Faculty.

  Eileen, Brenda and Lily stood, feeling younger but sad. “D’you recognise anyone? There can’t be any of ours left.”

  “I think the sleeping one’s drunk,” said Eileen.

  Suddenly Elizabeth spoke. “It’s Dr. Blatt,” she said and went across all smiles, and knelt on the grass. “Dr. Blatt? It’s Elizabeth.”

  “Hello,” said Dr. Blatt, opening an eye. “Oh, hello, Elizabeth. I never see anyone these days. I’m always in Bodley.”

  Others in the circle of dons looked up at the quartet of their long-ago students, but without significant interest. Lily and glowering Eileen hovered. Brenda would have liked to speak, but found herself a bit uncertain of how to bring in Stafford.

  “I think that one’s Folly,” Lily said to Brenda, and Miss Folly looked up brightly and raised her glass. She had not changed until you looked again and saw the map of the years, the purple hands and fat ankles. Her black braids were scanty and grey but she was still wearing coloured stockings.

  “This must be a sad day for you,” said Lily.

  “No, no. Not at all. We must move on. We were always leasehold, you know. It is time to be out of the ivory tower. I, of course, retired years ago. To become a nun.”

  “You made it a very beautiful ivory tower,” said Lily, remembering red leaves and dahlias in a gold jug, and a blue velvet chair, and six or seven Lear etchings pinned haphazardly down the side of a rosewood bookcase in the tutor’s old rooms. “I remember your Lears,” she said, and got a strange look.

  “There was a suicide on her floor,” whispered Eileen. “While she was entertaining a drip of a priest on a mandolin.”

  Elizabeth asked Dr. Blatt if she would come to tea with her yesterday and old Professor Alice Grimwade—once her junior tutor—watched them go off together, Elizabeth pushing the chair. “That girl with Alzheimer’s,” she said. “I remember her. She knew her Tragedies. There are so few intellectuals coming up now. They all want to go into the City.”

  “She’s side-stepped tragedies,” said Eileen.

  “That is the remark of a fool, Miss Belling.”

  And Eileen blushed. Miss Grimwade had even remembered her name.

  “You have kept in touch with Elizabeth Vaughan then, have you Miss Belling? Miss Dodds?”

  “We haven’t seen her from her last day to this last day,” said Brenda. “It was Lily who heard from her. Elizabeth wrote to Lily’s publisher. Elizabeth asked us to meet her off the train. When we saw her—well, we saw—”

  “Tragedy, I fear. Well, it was our tragedy that she left. Why didn’t you stop her, Lily Strang? You were always timid. But you’ve kept your maiden name for your books, I see.”

  “I’m not exactly Mrs. Gaskell.”

  “No,” said Professor Grimwade.

  Two younger women standing waiting for audience nearby, one holding a baby, the other struggling with a two-year old, looked jolted and tried to remember Mrs. Gaskell. At the same moment they realised that Lily Strang must be “Lily Strang,” whose novels sold all over the world in twenty-seven languages and were in every supermarket beside the sweets. When you looked, you could see the earrings could be Hermès. They turned hastily to the professor.

  “I just wanted to say, Professor Grimwade, after all this time—to thank you for your lectures on Eliot.”

  “We were here in 1984,” said the other, grabbing her child who had begun to crawl about among the academic legs. “It was after one of your lectures that I had almost a mystical experience—I really discovered Eliot. Under that tree.”

  “I wonder what he was doing?” said the professor and held Lily’s gaze as if daring her to say: Maybe he was spread out like a patient etherised upon a—

  Lily didn’t.

  “You really, honestly, so inspired us,” said the first woman hitching up her baby against her chest in his harness.

  “Dear child,” said the professor, and became thoughtful. “Have you read Miss Strang’s novels? They are very entertaining.”

  “Which,” she said after the two mothers had gone, “is more than they are. I often wonder how we managed to choose such dull girls. And such ugly ones. We once chose a girl because she was pretty. No brains, but she did just as well as anyone else.”

  Lily felt certain it was her and felt wretched.

  “It wasn’t you, Miss Strang.”

  Then she felt worse.

  “Do you remember many of us, Dr. Grimwade?”

  “No. None. Not at first. Then you say
your names and sometimes I see the face through the face. Some of you of course change hardly at all, like poor Eileen Belling. Formed in the cradle.”

  “Have I changed?”

  “Still changing, Lilian. You were very unformed. I have waited a long time for your fame.”

  “I thought I was academic. You might have told me I wasn’t. I gather it was pretty obvious.”

  “It would have been cruel. You had to find out for yourself,” said the stark old crow.

  Brenda had discovered some tea inside the college, through the glass doors, and came back to tell the others. She found Lily, head down and walking very quickly away from the circle of elders.

  Eileen was over by the lupin border, sitting staring up at the rows of residential windows. “I was third along the front,” she said. “You were seventh along, Brenda.”

  “I was sixth,” said Lily.

  “No, fifth,” said Eileen, who forgot nothing.

  “You forget nothing,” said Lily. “It must be hard having total recall when all it does is make you so miserable. You ought to see someone about it. Have you thought of it?”

  “No,” said Eileen.

  She shambled off with Lily towards tea. Elizabeth and Dr. Blatt in her wheelchair were nowhere to be seen. Brenda had gone on ahead and was seated at one of the long oak tables of the baked-apple breakfast. They were covered in white heat marks, now, and unpolished. Brenda was talking to a fiftyish-looking woman with a baby on her knees.

  “This is Ms. Beech,” said Brenda, “a single parent. How much braver she is than us, though I don’t think I could ever have gone along with the idea myself, morally—I’d better be honest. I’ve been telling her that the last time we sat at these tables was after our Finals ball when my husband Stafford proposed to me. We have been happily married for over forty years.”