The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

  Among these adult people Cecilia was lonely, and friendless, too, on Buckingham Street. At weekends her father did his best, making an effort to be interesting on their strolls about the deserted City streets—the Strand and Ludgate Hill, Cheapside and Poultry, Threadneedle, Cornhill. He pointed out the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange; he said that London’s City was a village in its way. Sometimes, as a change, he booked two rooms at a small hotel in Suffolk, usually at Hintlesham or Orford.

  Cecilia enjoyed these weekend excursions, but the weekdays continued to pass slowly, for Mr. Grace came only in the mornings and the Maltraverses were not given to conversation. In the afternoons, when she had completed the work she’d been set, she had the spacious rooms of the house to herself and poked about in drawers, watched television, or opened the yellow folder to look again at the photographs of her mother. When she had money she went out to buy licorice allsorts or Kit Kat.

  She was fortunate, she knew. No one was unkind to her, no one was angry. She imagined nothing would change, that Mr. Grace would always come, the Maltraverses would always be too busy for conversation, that always there’d be the silent afternoon house, the drawers, and being alone. But her father, sensitive to the pressure of duty where his child was concerned, did not demur when he was advised that the time had come to send her away to boarding school, to be a girl among other girls.

  “You shall have a flower bed,” Miss Watson said.

  Smart as a mannequin, she was delicately attractive in different ways. Her voice was, her slimness, the gentleness in her eyes. A softly woven scarf—a galaxy of reds and rust against the gray of her dress—was loosely draped and almost reached the ground.

  “We are happy people here,” she assured Cecilia. “You shall be, too.”

  Amhurst the school was called, and Miss Watson, who was its headmistress, explained how the name had come about, told how the school had been the seat of a landed family, how outbuildings had been transformed into music rooms and laboratories, art rooms and the weaving room, only the classroom blocks being a new addition. She took Cecilia to a small brick-walled garden, which was, and always had been, the headmistress’s. She opened an ornamental iron gate in an archway, then latched it again as if shutting away everything of the school itself. She pointed at a flower bed with nothing growing in it and said it would be Cecilia’s own, where she could cultivate the flowers she liked best. Old Trigol was the school gardener, she said, a dear person when you got to know him.

  Cecilia disliked the place intensely, felt lonelier and more on her own than she ever had on Buckingham Street. She wrote to her father, begging him to come and take her away. She was the only new girl that term, and no one bothered with her except a senior girl whom Miss Watson had ordered to. “You pray?” this older girl asked her, and suggested that they might pray together. “Every meal’s inedible,” Mr. Normanton read. “A girl was sick after pilchards.”

  But as time went on Cecilia’s letters became less wretched. She discovered Mozart, Le Douanier Rousseau, and—recommended by the religious girl—St. Teresa of Lisieux. She found The Moon and Sixpence and The Constant Nymph among the well-used books in the school library. Two girls, Daisy and Amanda, became her friends. The religious girl reported to Miss Watson that settling in had begun.

  Mr. Normanton came often during that first term. He took Cecilia out on weekend jaunts—lunch at the Castletower Hotel, tea in the tearooms on the river. He met Daisy and Amanda, and before the term ended took them out, too. He was glad he had listened to the advice he’d been given, had realized what he hadn’t on his own: that his child would benefit and be happy as a girl among other girls.

  Cecilia grew lilies of the valley in her flower bed, having decided it was her favorite flower. She picked the first bunch on her fifteenth birthday and offered it to Miss Watson.

  “You are a person we take pride in, Cecilia,” Miss Watson said.

  The two women who were watching the hockey were on the other touchline, directly opposite where Cecilia, with Daisy and Amanda, was watching it, too, since attendance at home matches was compulsory. Cecilia remembered the women being on the touchline before, because when the hockey ended they’d passed close to where she and Daisy and Amanda were looking for Amanda’s watch, which had slipped from her wrist without her noticing. “Someone’ll stand on it!” Amanda was wailing, and the two women had hesitated as if about to look for the watch, too. Daisy found it, undamaged, on the grass, and the women went on. But when they hesitated they’d stared at Cecilia in a way that was quite disconcerting.

  There was sudden cheering and clapping: Amhurst had scored. St. Hilda’s—in their unbecoming brown jerseys a glum contrast to Amhurst’s jolly red-and-blue—looked defeated already and probably would be, for Amhurst never lost. It would have been Elizabeth Statham who’d scored, Cecilia imagined, and hoped it wasn’t or it would mean a lot of showing off later on. But Amanda said it was. “Bloody Statham,” Daisy muttered.

  They wanted St. Hilda’s to win. Favoring the other side eased their indignation at having to stand in the cold for an hour and a half on a winter afternoon. They hated watching hockey almost more than anything.

  “I tried to read ‘Virginibus Puerisque,’ ” Amanda said. “Ghastly.”

  Daisy agreed, and recommended Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?

  Cecilia wondered who the women were who’d come back again only a few weeks after she’d seen them before. They wouldn’t be Old Girls because Old Girls always hung around Miss Watson or Miss Smith and they weren’t doing that. They wouldn’t be supporters of St. Hilda’s because the visiting team hadn’t been St. Hilda’s the other time. She wondered if for some reason they enjoyed watching hockey matches, the way Colonel Forbes enjoyed watching cricket on Saturday after Saturday, in the summer term. Or like Trigol, who was allowed to take the afternoon off from the garden for Sports Day because he’d once been a high-jump champion, which wasn’t easy to imagine, Trigol being in his seventies now.

  When the two women stared at Cecilia the smaller one had smiled. Cecilia had smiled back, since it would have been rude not to, but Daisy and Amanda hadn’t seen that any more than they’d seen the staring, and afterward Cecilia hadn’t said anything because it was embarrassing, and silly to go on about.

  Miss Chalmers blew the final whistle and there were three cheers for St. Hilda’s and then for Amhurst, followed by clapping when the two teams walked off the pitch. The people who’d been watching followed, groups breaking up and new ones forming as they made their way back to the school buildings. The two women became lost in the crowd and Cecilia was aware of feeling relieved. But they were there again, by the cattle grid, where cars were parked on match days. The St. Hilda’s bus was there, too, the driver folding away the newspaper he’d been reading. The two women didn’t get into a car and drive off, as Cecilia thought they would. They stood about as if they had a reason to, and Cecilia avoided looking in their direction.

  They had taken the path through the trees and, emerging from what had become a small wood, they marveled at the open land, as that morning they had marveled at sunshine in February, misty though it was. Nothing as tiresome as rain had spoiled their walk from the railway station or their returning to it now.

  “I would have traveled a million miles for this afternoon,” Miss Keble summed up their outing as they approached the first of the bungalows on the town’s outskirts.

  Miss Cotell—less given to exaggeration than her friend—said nothing, but in her reticence there was no denial that the afternoon had been a pleasure. How could it not have been, she thought, their presence for the second time unquestioned, and the feeling as well that they had been right to return? How could all that not have been a treat?

  Miss Keble, sensing these thoughts, kept the subject going, marveling that so little achieved should seem so much a triumph, yet understanding that it should be. She would not easily forget the faces of the girls, their voices, too, and how politely they stood back,
respecting strangers. All of it was impossible to forget.

  Miss Cotell again was silent but still no less impressed and then, quite suddenly, affected in a different way, an urge to weep restrained. On the homeward train her tears, permitted now, were not of sorrowing or distress but came because her friend understood so much so well, because agreement between them, never faltering, had been today more than it had ever been before.

  Guessing all this, Miss Keble watched Miss Cotell recovering her composure. For some minutes they both gazed out at the landscape and the image of a prehistoric animal cut into the limestone of a distant hill.

  “I’m sorry,” Miss Cotell apologized. “Stupid.”

  “Of course it wasn’t.”

  Miss Keble went in search of tea, but there wasn’t any to be found. Miss Cotell fell asleep.

  The two—of an age, at fifty-five—had retired early from a government department. They had met there thirty-odd years ago, and their friendship had flourished on the mores of office life ever since, Miss Keble remaining in Benefits (Family), Miss Cotell making a brief foray into Pensions and then returning to Benefits. They had been together since, as close in retirement as they were before it.

  The landscape Miss Cotell was unaware of, while she dreamed instantly forgotten dreams, faded into winter dusk. Miss Keble failed to interest herself in a newspaper someone had left behind and instead thought about the house they were returning to, and the rooms in which their two lives had become entangled over the years, for which furniture, piece by piece, had been chosen together, where childhood memories had been exchanged. Miss Keble, as she sometimes did when she was away from the house for longer than usual, saw as if in a vision the reminders it held of foreign places where there’d been holidays: the Costa del Sol; the beach at Rimini; Vernon, where they’d stayed when they visited Monet’s garden; and the unidentified setting where an obliging stranger had operated Miss Cotell’s Kodak, allowing them to pose together. The house, the rooms, these images of themselves in places visited meant everything to Miss Keble, as equally they did to Miss Cotell.

  The house, in a terrace, was small, without a garden. At the back, the feature of a concrete yard was a row of potted plants arranged against a cream-distempered wall. Curtains of fine net protected the two downstairs front windows from the glances of passing pedestrians; at night, flowery chintz was drawn across; upstairs there were blinds. Everything—and in the yard, too—had been made as Miss Cotell and Miss Keble wanted it, an understanding that became another element in their relationship. Nothing had been undertaken, no changes made, without agreement.

  This house, in darkness, became theirs again when the train journey ended. It was cold and they switched on electric fires. They discussed what food should be cooked, or not cooked, if tonight they should open a tin of salmon or manage on sandwiches and tea. Both settled for a poached egg on toast.

  “It was good of you, Keble,” Miss Cotell said when, snug in their heated kitchen, they sat down to eat. “I have to thank you.”

  Their calling one another by surname only was a habit left behind by office life, for although they did not regret their early retirement office life clung on. They had wondered about other clerkly work, but it wasn’t easy—and was in the end impossible—to find anything suitable, especially since they stipulated that they should not be separated.

  “Both times I wanted to come with you,” Miss Keble said. “And I will again.”

  Tidily, Miss Cotell drew her knife and fork together on her empty plate. “I wonder, though,” she said, “if I have the heart for going there again.”

  “Oh, what a thing, Cotell! Of course you have!”

  “What more can come of it?” And whispering as if she spoke privately, although there was no privacy between them, Miss Cotell softly repeated, “What more?”

  Miss Keble knew and did not say. Warm and pleasant, the euphoria brought about by the day still possessed her. She wished Miss Cotell no ill will, wished her all the peace in the world, but still could not help welcoming in a way that was natural to her the exhilaration she experienced. She did not press or urge: they were neither of them like that. Resisting the flicker of satisfaction that threatened to disturb her features, she gathered up the cups and saucers.

  Miss Cotell folded the tablecloth and put away the salt and pepper. “How difficult,” she murmured, “to know what’s right.”

  “Of course,” Miss Keble said.

  It wasn’t until the following term that Cecilia again saw the two women. Summer had come, the long, light evenings, the smell of grass just cut, the flower beds of Miss Watson’s brick-walled garden bright with Crocosmia and sweet pea, with echium and Geranium sanguineum. When she was younger, Cecilia had preferred the coziness of winter, but no longer did. She loved the sunshine and its warmth, her too-pale skin lightly browned, freckles on her arms.

  She saw the women when she was returning from taking the afternoon letters to the postbox, a fourth-form duty that routinely came once a fortnight. She had called into Ridley’s when the letters were posted—honeycomb chocolate for Daisy, Mademoiselle’s bonbons. The women were on the path through the trees, coming toward her.

  They must live nearby, Cecilia thought. Probably they went for walks and had found their way to the hockey pitch. But hockey was over now until September.

  Sunlight came through the trees in shafts, new beech leaves making dappled shadows on the women’s clothes. How drab those clothes were! Cecilia thought. How ugly the taller woman’s features were, the hollow cheeks, her crooked teeth, one with a corner gone. Her friend was dumpy.

  They had stopped, and Cecilia felt she should also, although she didn’t want to.

  “What weather at last!” the dumpy woman said.

  They asked her her name and said that was a lovely name when she told them. Violets were held out to her to smell. They said where they’d picked them. A dell they called the place, near the fingerpost. They could have picked an armful.

  “We hoped we’d see you,” the taller woman said. “For you, my dear.”

  Again the violets were held out, this time for Cecilia to take.

  “We’re not meant to pick the flowers.”

  Both smiled at once. “You didn’t pick them, you might explain. A gift.”

  “Look this way, Cecilia,” the dumpy woman begged.

  She had a camera, but the distant chiming of the afternoon roll-call bell had already begun and Cecilia said she had to go.

  “Just quickly, dear.” They both spoke at once, saying they mustn’t keep her, and when she hurried away Cecilia heard the voices continuing, a monotone kept low, hardly changing from one voice to the other. She could tell she was being watched, that the women were standing there instead of going on.

  “Who are they?” Elizabeth Statham was in her games clothes, returning from the run she went on every afternoon. “Friends of yours?” she asked.

  “I don’t know them at all.”

  “Funny, they’d take a photograph.”

  Cecilia didn’t attempt to reply. Frightened of Elizabeth Statham, she was at her worst with her, never knowing what to say.

  “Funny, they’d want to give you flowers.”

  Cecilia tried to shrug, but her effort felt clumsy, and Elizabeth Statham sniggered.

  “Poor relations, are they?”

  “I don’t know them.”

  She couldn’t hear the women anymore and imagined they must have gone. She didn’t look back. Elizabeth Statham would go on about it because she had a way of doing that, sitting on your bed after lights-out, pretending to be nice.

  “Funny, they’d know your name,” she said now, before she continued on her run.

  “Come now,” Miss Keble said that same evening, when they were home again and it was late.

  Miss Cotell, not at first responding, said when the pause had become drawn out, “A dullness settles on me when I try to think. ‘I’ll think it through,’ I tell myself, and then I can’t. That
dullness comes, as if I’ve summoned it.”

  “It’s called being in two minds,” Miss Keble said.

  “I feel I have no mind at all.”

  “Oh, now!” Miss Keble smiled and firmly shook her head.

  “How good you are to me, Keble.” Miss Cotell thanked her before she went upstairs.

  Miss Keble did not deny it.

  Miss Cotell undressed and for a moment before she reached for her nightdress stood still, her nakedness reflected in a looking glass. How old she seemed, the flesh of her neck all loops and furrows, her arms gone scrawny! The hair that Broughton had called her crowning glory was grayer and thinner than it should be. She blamed herself, but blaming didn’t help. “How could I!” she had protested, laughing almost, when Broughton had asked if she would show herself to him. “Please,” he begged. “Oh, please.” He wouldn’t now. He’d held her to him, the buttons of his jacket cold. Shy as a bird she’d heard him called, but oh, he wasn’t. With her he could not be, he’d said.

  Slowly Miss Cotell drew on her nightdress, then felt the sheets, the pillow, cold. He’d warmed her, and tonight she had known he would again. The caressing of his murmur did, and his touch was more than she could bear, his hands so soft, as if all his life he had done no physical work. The blue of his eyes was a paler blue than she’d ever seen in eyes before, his hair like down, wheat-colored, lovely. He whispered now as he had then and she did, too, in the dark, since always they wanted that. She dried his tears of shame. She loved his body’s warmth. He’d chosen her. She’d wanted no one else.