No Talking after Lights

by Angela Lambert

  Constance lay and looked at the double-sided, leather-framed photographs of her parents that stood on top of her locker like an open book: her father stern yet young in his tropical uniform; her mother soft-focused into ethereal, unlined prettiness. They looked nothing like the two people who’d seen her off from Waterloo Station. She hadn’t got a picture of Felix, her black cat, to tuck into a corner, nor any glass animals. She lay rigidly in bed, trapped within the narrow iron frame, ignoring the murmurs around her. I will be a tree, she thought, summoning up the old trick. I will feel my roots growing up into my toes, feel my body stiffen and swell and become eternal, immobile - and solid, reassuring, tree-like. I am a tree. As the sap ran along her limbs making her fingers and tongue thicken and grow numb, Constance fell into tree-ness and deafness and dumbness and sleep.

  Every evening Peggy Roberts and Henrietta Birmingham would sit in the drawing-room together for an hour or two. Nobody knew anything about Miss Roberts’s family. She was not impoverished, for she had put £5,000 into the school in return for the job of Deputy Head. She too was a stately and imposing woman, as tall as Mrs Birmingham, though it was obvious at first glance that she had never been pretty. Her great shyness manifested itself in a formality that kept everyone - girls and parents - at a distance. She seldom smiled; she had never been given a nickname. Yet she conveyed an underlying kindness and sensitivity which made Old Girls single her out at reunions, feeling that somehow they should try and make amends. On these occasions they would find conversation as difficult as ever.

  For both women, the school was the hub and purpose of their lives. Despite this, and the fact that they had been born only a few months apart, their intimacy was mostly silent. Each was content to spend time in the other’s company, but they did not gossip and rarely discussed the school. They watched What’s My Line? and nature programmes on a flickering black-and-white television; they read; Miss Roberts embroidered tapestry cushions or kneelers and read travel books, especially about Italy. After the news ended at quarter past nine, Miss Roberts would usually go up to her bedroom above the drawing-room, and shortly afterwards Mrs Birmingham would take the car up the long school drive, back to her querulous husband.

  That first evening of the summer term Henrietta Birmingham had sat on the window-seat beside the bay windows that overlooked the lawns and the rhododendrons. From this vantage point she could watch the girls who strolled under the cedars, gossiping about their holidays. Under one tree stood the heavy iron roller with wooden handles which the gardener and his lad would drag over the freshly mown grass. Nearby, curving amply like a duck’s breast, was the bin into which the grass mowings flew in a twinkling green spray. The Head had watched the sunset streaks against the deep slate-blue of the sky glowing purple as they gradually intensified into darkness like the last embers of a fire, and listened to the seniors chattering and laughing on the bank below the bay window, unaware that their voices drifted up to her in the still evening.

  How untrammelled they were by the restrictions that had hedged about her girlhood - the strait-jacket of class and gender, the imminence of war - she thought. Their world was carefree; they picked their self-absorbed way through adolescence, listening only to the beat of their own hearts, careless of death. Even at fourteen she had not been carefree. Her two older brothers, trained in the Eton Officers’ Training Corps, had volunteered as soon as war was declared. Her nearest brother, seventeen-year-old Jamie, chafed to be allowed to join them at the front. ‘Don’t you see, Hetta,’ he’d said to her, almost crying with the urgency of it, ‘the war’ll be over by Christmas and if they don’t let me go now, I’ll miss it. If they make me wait till I’m eighteen, it’s going to be too late. And then how shall I ever face Alistair and Hugo?’ The war hadn’t been over by Christmas, nor yet by his birthday, but Jamie had worried away at his parents, sworn he wouldn’t take up his place at Oxford, until in the end they’d given way.

  The afternoon before he left the two of them had walked over the moors and hills. They hadn’t talked much. They were very close; each had always known what the other was thinking. As the heather scratched her feet and fronds of bracken snapped off against her skirt, she had thought, All the joy is fading from my life, all the happy hours have passed, and now I shall never be anything but wretched. Poor Henrietta! she reflected now, as though that girl had been some other person, not herself. How she had longed to do her bit. To be allowed to nurse, or even - imagination strained to devise what might be needed - even just to gather up blood-stained bandages and dressings and throw them in the incinerator. But at her age she was not allowed to do anything except pray. She had prayed with a passion that surely God must hear: O Lord of these hills and horizons, fasten Thy gaze from beyond on to this my brother and keep him safe. But in case God should take no notice of the prayers of a selfish child, she had broadened her request to include all soldiers and all officers, yes, and the Germans as well, all those in danger and pain.

  The late afternoon had turned a sullen bronze and grey as they walked. The snow was receding from the tops of the hills. Jamie had stared at the crags and clouds with an intensity that transferred itself to her, driving the chilly landscape into her memory for ever.

  That night, after praying again on her knees on the cold floor of the nursery - Let him come back home and I will be a blessed soul and sing Thy praises eternally - she had climbed into bed exhausted by emotion. When she slept, she dreamed of Jamie’s death, saw his fire-encircled figure sprint through a nightmare landscape of broken trees and desolation. She had woken in terror, and been unable to speak of it to anyone. It was her first experience of utter loneliness.

  The servants gathered in the hall next day to see Jamie leave. He was bright-eyed, impatient and proud, his thoughts leaping ahead to the comradeship of the trenches. She felt as though she were hallucinating, entering into his mind, seeing what he saw, knowing what she knew. ‘We have already said our farewells, Jamie,’ she told him calmly when he stepped forward for a parting embrace. Her mother had been shocked and thought her cold. Jamie had climbed into the back of the motor-carriage and settled himself between his parents to be driven to the local railway station. As they all clustered on the sweep of gravel to watch him go, she had been the only one not to wave or smile bravely (half the housemaids were sobbing), or shout, ‘Good Luck!’ or, ‘Give the Boche one for me!’ The shiny, square car made its way along the drive towards the stone gateposts by the lodge, and her keen young eyes could just make out the figure of the lodge-keeper as he swung open the heavy gates to let it pass. She remembered their protesting creak and, as though the moment had been photographed, saw her lanky, fifteen-year-old self in a dress that reached to her calves, with black stockings and shoulder-length hair held by a tartan ribbon: rigid, apart, charged with her premonitory secret.

  These girls knew nothing of death. Even those whose fathers had been killed in the Second World War had been too small to remember them. One or two widowed mothers, struggling to find the school fees on a service pension, came alone to Parents’ Weekends or Speech Day - plucky little women coping without a man. Their daughters had pictures of both parents on their lockers, but the father was just a young man in uniform: an image, an absence, not a subject for grief.

  Divorce, however, was different. When the school had opened there had been no divorced parents. Already, six years later, there were at least half-a-dozen, the product of hasty wartime marriages that could not survive the years apart. Fluffy Mrs Reynolds had turned up at one Parents’ Weekend last term with a man who was not her husband and not an uncle either, and had simpered archly as she introduced him, proud of her unsuitable friend. Roly or Ricky or Dicky, she’d called him. No, not Roly; Roly was someone else. They had whisked Charmian off to lunch at the Three Feathers and Charmian, presumably, had noticed nothing. Perhaps she should have a word with Charmian’s best friend, Sheila, who was a kind, conscientious child.

  Fathers were seldom close to their daughters
. It was the mother’s responsibility to provide a safe haven for children. Lord knows, thought Henrietta Birmingham with sudden irritation, they did little enough else. Hair-dos and manicures were the mileposts which measured out their lives. Their finger-nails were burnished to a soft glow by hours of buffing with chamois leather and curved into perfectly matching ivory crescents; their hair was eternally patted into place in order to display their pretty, boneless hands. Most mothers were empty-headed appendages to their husbands, only too glad of the social freedom gained by entrusting their daughters to the care of other women. Forgive me, Lord, my intolerance towards my own sex. I could have been one of them.

  Until a girl leaves home for good to start her own household (it is different for boys; but then, everything is different for boys), her parents’ marriage is the proscenium arch within which her life is enacted. Unthinkable that it might collapse, or the curtain come down. A father or mother cannot have an understudy. And that is how it should be, thought Mrs Birmingham; marriage is a sacrament, an indissoluble union for the procreation of children, in sickness and in health.

  As a good Christian, she had never questioned her marriage vows, and suffered pangs of guilt for not spending more time with her husband. Had he taken any interest in the school, she would have been happy to tell him about the girls and her daily life, perhaps even to ask his advice. As it was, Lionel Birmingham, a lifelong hypochondriac with a few genuine illnesses - enough to get him classified as Medical Group III during the First World War, so that he had spent it safely behind a desk - had little interest in anything beyond his own bodily functions. But now, at sixty-five, his health was genuinely deteriorating. The doctor had warned her that lung cancer was a possibility, but she dared not pass this information on to Lionel, who continued to smoke heavily, as he had done all his life.

  It is time I went up the drive, she thought.

  The housekeeper greeted her at the door of the Lodge.

  ‘Not too bad today, Mrs Birmingham,’ she said. ‘He ate a bit of fish for his supper, and I made him a nice pudding, and now he’s listening to the play on the wireless.’

  ‘Very good, Ridley. I can take care of everything else. You may go.’

  Mrs Birmingham’s childhood stood her in good stead with parents and servants, who were awed by her commanding air and old-fashioned voice. Mrs Birmingham said ‘orf’ and ‘’otel’ and never softened her tone with the mock-deferential requests that some considered necessary nowadays, with servants becoming so choosy. She would not have dreamed of suggesting an extra evening off to her housekeeper, and Ridley, who valued her autonomy at the Lodge and had learned to turn a deaf ear to Mr Birmingham’s occasional croaking summons, never dreamed of asking for one.

  Mrs Birmingham walked into her own drawing-room, where she knew a tray with Nice biscuits and two cups of cocoa would be waiting. She would have preferred to sit down and drink hers alone and reflect, or perhaps write to her son James in Hong Kong, but all that would have to wait. She lifted the tray and carried it slowly, heavily up the stairs.

  ‘Is that you, dear?’ Lionel called shakily.

  Of course it’s me. I weigh fourteen stone and Ridley’s half that. Can’t you tell the difference in our tread? Look at the bedside clock. You know it’s me at this hour.

  ‘Coming, darling,’ she called.

  She walked into their bedroom trying not to inhale too deeply, for the stale smell of cigarettes and decrepitude permeated the air.

  ‘Let me open the window - perhaps the night air will make you feel better. Hasn’t it been a lovely spring day?’

  But, pointing fastidiously at the skin on his cocoa and complaining about the petrol fumes from the drive, Lionel wanted the window left shut.

  Dear Lord who has suffered many adversities and always had compassion for the sick, grant me Thy patience, prayed Mrs Birmingham. Forgive me my intolerance, help me not to show irritation towards my husband, who is sick, sicker than he knows …

  Sitting together behind drawn curtains in their cottage, Diana Monk (who taught maths and Latin) and Sylvia Parry (biology) lingered over a sherry. Timetables had been drawn up and roneoed ready to be pinned on the board and they had, by common consent, abandoned coffee and the gossip of the staff-room.

  ‘Why are you smiling like that, Monks?’

  ‘You know why. I’m actually quite glad to be back.’

  ‘Did you have a good time in the Easter hols? Did you miss me?’ Sylvia mocked.

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘No reason.’

  A long pause. Finally Sylvia said, ‘Pour me another sherry. Please.’

  ‘I’m not used to this. It makes me all red in the face. Do I sound all right?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd. Three glasses of sherry can’t do you any harm.’

  ‘But I’m not used to it.’

  As the sherry swirled through her head Diana began to feel relaxed and rosy with emotion. She spent her dull and dutiful holidays at home in Tulse Hill with her mother and uncles. This shabby cottage was the nearest either she or Sylvia came to having a place of their own.

  She and Mother and Uncle Aidan and Uncle Ralph formed a unit, self-contained and not unhappy, except that for the last twenty years none of them had felt love for any of the others, nor, apparently, for anyone else. They were bound together by habit and necessity, by oddness and family and the fact that all their possessions were shared, so if any one of the four had left, the remaining three would have been deprived of furniture or plates or cutlery.

  Within this household she, the solitary child, had been urged to study, to train, to earn. She had always known that they would eventually depend on her for their livelihood. While she was growing up the uncles had helped with her homework, her mother had made all her clothes, and every evening after school, and later from London University, Diana had returned to their shabby semi-detached house in Tulse Hill. They had never asked about her friends and Diana, who had few enough in any case, never brought anyone home. When, after painstaking hard work quite unleavened by inspiration, she had finally secured a good degree in mathematics, it was a relief to escape into the world of girls’ boarding-schools.

  At the end of the first day of term, Diana lay awake in her narrow iron bed, although the night was silent except for owls and the wood-pigeons’ cooing. Her bedroom window was shut and the curtains tightly drawn. She wondered whether Sylvia was awake, and shivered.

  On the other side of the wall Sylvia was indeed awake, mentally reciting the litany of her childhood in Gower, the necessary incantation of memory.

  I brought back shells from Oxwich Bay and arranged them in matchboxes, sorted and named; cockles and cuttle-bones (not strictly a shell at all, but a mollusc, Dada said), lovely spiralling whelks and the one with a funny webbed end to it called a pelican’s-foot shell. Occasionally I found a sea-urchin, delicately green and violet, and he’d put it on the mantelpiece until my mother got tired of dusting it and threw it away. I gathered three different colours of seaweed from the beach to press between blotting-paper and put into an album, labelling the different varieties. He liked that. He liked me to be methodical. I made careful drawings of wild flowers, and he taught me their names. I didn’t make close friends at school. Being the schoolmaster’s daughter set me apart. Our teacher, fat, bossy Mrs Powell, was in awe of my father and she left me alone. There was no-one I wanted to talk to. I was happy. A secret is a word from legend and fairy-story that keeps a child in thrall, a magic word. He must have been, let me think, thirty-nine then, so I was eight.

  We would set off together on summer mornings and as we walked along narrow lanes beneath tall hedgerows he’d say, ‘You mustn’t talk to the other children about what goes on at home Sylvy, my Sylvy. That’s private. A secret. Can you keep a secret?’ I was surprised and indignant that he could even think I’d tell anyone about our private times, him and me and Mother tightly enclosed in our little house that leant up against the parson’s. We were Chapel, or at
least Mother was, so we passed the time of day with the parson and his wife, but nothing else.

  ‘I wouldn’t. Nosy Parkers. It’s none of their business.’

  ‘There’s my good girl,’ he said. ‘You keep close.’

  Sylvia lay awake till long after the clock above the old stables that were now the garage had chimed midnight.

  Two

  The L-shaped wooden floor of the junior common-room was scattered with huddled groups of fourth-formers playing jacks. The tiny rubber thump of a bouncing ball alternated with the metallic swish of practised hands scooping up the star-shaped metal jacks, sweeping them into the other hand, and deftly catching the ball again. Rings of two, three or four girls sat mesmerized by the game, impervious to those who hovered behind them watching knowledgeably, to the noise of wind-up gramophones in the background, and to the deepening dusk as it flattened the long summer shadows beyond the french windows.

  On a patch of rough ground in front of the pets’ shed another group of girls had fed, cuddled and bedded down their rabbits and guinea-pigs for the night and was now playing Kick the Can. The girl who was It counted to fifty while the rest hid in the trees and bushes behind the shed or over towards the games field. When time was up she kicked the can as a signal and ran in search of the others. A girl who’d been seen and chased and touched was out and had to stand in captivity beside the can, unless another player could dash up, touch her and kick it, in which case she was free again. The summer air smelled fresh and sweet, for the games field had recently been mown. The game was in perpetual motion, as figures in cotton frocks ducked and swooped, giggled and ran, swerving and tripping, shrieking as their hearts and lungs pounded with the thrill of the chase. The last person to remain uncaught was It next time. Like dryads they flew, coiling themselves round trees, beckoning teas-ingly and laughing as they sped off. What agony if a best friend was languishing by the can; what resourcefulness in contriving to release her; what light-footed bliss as both raced off triumphantly, brimming with liberty.