Constance’s own letters back were flat and pedestrian. She had given up begging, for she knew now that Daddy would never give in. Instead she made up songs about running away, using the tunes of hymns they sang in Prayers, or songs they were rehearsing. ‘I’ll run away, I’ll run away, They can’t make me, I won’t stay!’ she scanned awkwardly; or, ‘Constance King has run away, run away, run away; Constance King has run away - No-one could stop her!’ These rhymes jiggled in her head and were obscurely comforting. Does everyone hear tunes inside their head, she wondered sometimes, or am I going nuts?
She walked around with a vacant expression, her mind and her senses turned inwards. Her work remained excellent. The teachers were pleased with her and had no reason to question her absent manner. Blue-stockings were notoriously awkward. Girls weren’t meant to be brainy and if they were, it was bound to cause difficulties.
The Lower Fourth had fragmented into half-a-dozen cliques, all with elaborate theories about the guilt of the others. Constance, with little alternative except to be a loner, found herself bracketed with Rachel and Jennifer. She didn’t like either of them. Rachel was fat and Constance thought she didn’t wash very often for she always seemed to smell: a rank, womanish sort of smell, like her mother after a game of tennis. There were often damp crescent-shaped patches under her arms, and a wave of what the others, with a snigger, called ‘BO’ would emanate when she put her hand up in class. Constance wondered if she too had ‘BO’ without knowing it, and would surreptitiously lift her arm and give a quick sniff, but all she could smell was cotton starch. All the same, she wished her mother had bought some Odo-ro-no on their last trip to Boots. Several girls in the dormitory made a great show of dabbing it into their armpits and then waving their arms around while it dried. Dusting powder was another favoured remedy. It came in small upright tins shaped like hip flasks, with holes punched into the lids, and sent a cloud of Cussons’ French Fern, Apple Blossom or Lilac over the dormitory. Some girls used a solidified, ice-blue stick that you pushed up and stroked across your forehead or wrists to keep them cool and fragrant on hot days. These items were considered essential and using them marked you out as someone feminine and well-groomed. Constance wished her mother had known this.
The girls were preoccupied with smells. Farting was sure to prompt an outcry of disgust, an exaggerated pantomime of nose-holding (the left hand held the nose while the right pulled an imaginary chain) and unpopular girls would be accused of having ‘let off and made a foul pong’. More often than not Jennifer was responsible. Her stomach was evidently delicate - she would confide, breathily, the details of what happened ‘on the lavvy’, and once invited Constance to inspect the result for worms. Constance shrank from these intimacies; but she shrank even more from the public disgrace of always being seen to be alone. Besides, she was useful to Rachel and Jennifer. She helped them with their prep, explained the simple things they failed to understand during lessons, and part of her enjoyed the superiority this conferred. Jennifer invited her to stay for half-term, but Constance knew that, however relieved Mick and Flick would have been to be spared her company, a rebuff would make her more unpopular still.
Unpopularity followed her like a shadow, dragging at her heels, slowing her step and distorting her face. It bowed her shoulders like a physical weight. Only in rare, sunny moments could she forget it. She discovered she was good at sprinting and long jump and the shouts of ‘Gosh, well done, Gogsy!’ from fellow-members of her house made her smile with secret delight. She was in Drake: named after Sir Francis Drake and identified by a blue hatband on felt and straw hats, and a diagonal blue ribbon worn across Aertex shirts for Games. The other houses were Rhodes (Cecil), which was red, and Clive (of India), whose band was yellow. Intense rivalry was encouraged between the houses and Constance’s surprising talent for running was her only source of popularity.
Another delight came from an accidental moment of perfect co-ordination when she swiped at a tennis ball and felt it spring lightly off her racquet to soar in a strong arc over the net and land beyond her opponent’s reach. But in the ordinary daily routine, queuing for milk or post at Break or waiting by a basin to clean her teeth at night, she knew she was shunned. Getting changed in front of other people was even more of an ordeal now that small folds of flesh had begun to point her nipples outwards, and she walked with her arms crossed awkwardly over her chest to try and conceal the horizontal fold they made in the front of her dress. Her physical development was slower than that of the other girls in her form, most of whom were a good year older, and she was torn between wanting to wear a ‘BB’ - brassiere - and dreading the day when someone would point out that she needed one. She heard them whispering about the curse, which she only half-understood; when she asked what it meant even Rachel said sharply, ‘Mind your own beeswax!’
Constance’s unpopularity handicapped her efforts to be normal and unselfconscious. It surrounded her like a miasma, invisible but repellent. She constantly asked herself how other people managed to be liked. She knew she could never aspire to be like Hermione, loved for her floating beauty and effulgent smiles. But Madeleine was popular, despite her sharp tongue and temper; even Charmie was popular, though everyone knew she was horrid to poor, dogged, patient Sheila. What was the secret? She tried to learn the funny voices in which they talked. Hubble-bubble language, in which every word was gargled with double ells, was easy to pick up and perfectly comprehensible - but still they turned away from her. She sat in the library in case Hermione might come leaping down the stairs again, but she never did. Constance learned to imitate her handwriting to perfection, and as her hand reproduced Hermione’s pudgy, wide-open letters and the figure-of-eight loop of her Gs and Ys she felt herself transformed into Hermione - but only briefly. The magic eluded her.
Charmian gloried in her ability to devise new plots, scent new suspects. For several days she made Constance, Jennifer and Rachel seem the most likely culprits, so plausibly that the three of them went about their daily routine like lepers, shunned and yet watched by everyone else. The story spread that Constance had hidden her own pen so as to deflect suspicion, and once she came up to the dormitory at bedtime to find everything in her locker disturbed.
‘It was me,’ Charmian said brazenly. They voted me the one to look through your locker for that pen you say is missing.’
‘I didn’t just say it was missing: it is missing, so sucks boo to you. Well, did you find it?’ said Constance.
‘You’re too clever for that, aren’t you?’ taunted Charmie. ‘Clever dick, dirty trick, when you’re found we’ll make you sick!’
This period as a double outcast culminated in the disappearance of Rachel’s precious album of Royal Family photographs. She and Jennifer had spent Rest sticking in three new postcards (of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh with the golden-aureoled, smiling royal children) and fawning over their handiwork. That evening when they came up to the dormitory at bedtime the album had gone. Rachel’s face, already glistening from her strenuous run in response to the dormitory bell, was now streaked with tears, her sticky body heaving. Charmian, who normally avoided any physical contact, put her arms round Rachel’s chunky shoulders and said, ‘Poor Rache, how absolutely mingy! Everyone knows how you feel about that book. Well, the thief’s gone too far this time! Now there’s going to be trouble. Right, let’s all think back. Where was everyone after supper? Let’s start with me, I volunteer.’
Sheila and Jennifer and Rachel herself could vouch for Charmian’s presence in the gardens, at supper, in prep. It seemed that she had not been unobserved for a moment. Rachel and Jennifer were of course exonerated, but not Constance. Each member of Starlings had to give a detailed account of her afternoon and anyone who had spent even ten minutes alone was made to feel uncomfortable.
The next day at Prayers Mrs Birmingham announced that the Lower Fourth would have to miss their first lesson. She wanted them all to wait outside the study, and she would see each girl separate
ly, in alphabetical order. They sat in the Reading Corner, Anne and Fiona flicking through Horse and Hound with expert comments until it was Fiona’s turn to be summoned. Charmian seemed absorbed in Riding (’Oh, Sheila, look at that adorable pony - 13.2 hands - just the right height for me!’) and Constance, who’d read the magazine already, sat and stared at the beaky profile of Mr Punch and the wispy fairy figures floating round the edge of the magazine’s cover, like illustrations from a Victorian children’s book. After about twenty minutes her name was called and she went in.
‘Sit down, dear. There’s nothing to be frightened of as long as you tell the truth,’ said Mrs Birmingham. ‘I want you to think very carefully. Remember that God hears what you say, and then tell me what you know about these recent thefts.’
There was a pause, during which Constance was very conscious of the Headmistress’s watery blue eyes watching her. She met them steadily, noticing the flaky texture of the Head’s skin. Her complexion was bleached of colour to a sort of bluish-grey, the more so because it was overlaid with a layer of white powder that had lodged in the creases around her nose and mouth, where it flaked like the skin itself. The veins on her cheeks had broken, making a tracery of tiny red lines. Constance could not have said whether Mrs Birmingham was fifty or eighty; she seemed the embodiment of age and grandeur, carved in delicate skin and fine white hair, but as solid and unchanging as the figures chiselled out of Mount Rushmore that Constance had seen in the National Geographic magazine.
‘I don’t know anything about it, Mrs Birmingham, honestly and truly. And my pen still hasn’t turned up either. I suppose it must have been stolen, like all the other things. But I’ve no idea who by.’
‘Very well, Constance. If you’re quite, quite certain there isn’t anything else you’d like to tell me …? You needn’t worry; nothing will go beyond this room.’
‘I would, but I can’t. I don’t know anything.’
Thank you, Constance. In that case you may go. Would you ask Madeleine Low to come in next please?’
One by one, they went in and, after a few minutes, came out again. Rachel cried. Mick and Flick went in separately. Everyone was aware of the drama of the occasion. When they had all been seen, Mrs Birmingham opened the door to the drawing-room and said, ‘I would like you all to come in here and sit down while I say a few words to everyone together.’
They trooped into the warm, scented room and squeezed together round the window seats and on the sofas. The last half-dozen or so sat on the floor. Miss Roberts sat in the wing-chair beside the fireplace, but Mrs Birmingham remained standing. Her eyes went from one face to another in silence. Finally she said,
‘I had hoped, indeed I have prayed, that the culprit would own up this morning of her own accord. Nobody has done so. I have heard a number of names mentioned whom other girls suspect. I have heard no firm evidence that would lead me to take any notice of these suspicions. This is a very serious thing to have happened, and a very sad thing for whoever is responsible. I have no alternative, for the time being, other than to punish you all. Sweets have already been stopped. Now, I intend to stop all parcels …’ there was a low murmur of complaint ‘… except on birthdays, when they will be opened under the supervision of a matron; and from now on there will be no more playing outside in the evenings, except at weekends.’
A gasp of disappointment ran like a current round the group.
‘If the thefts continue, I shall have to consider what else must be done,’ said Mrs Birmingham. ‘And now, I’d like you all to close your eyes and bow your heads. We shall end with a prayer. O Almighty God, to whom all hearts and minds are open
Her voice was precise and sombre and at the end the girls mumbled a shame-faced ‘Amen’. They scrambled to their feet as she dismissed them, and hurried back to their form-room. Sheila took Charmian’s arm, but Charmie shook it off furiously and spat at her, ‘Leave me alone! I don’t want to hear about who you suspect! Old Ma B’s right … all this is horrid. Just shut up about it.’
Oh, Mummy, help me, thought Sheila. I don’t know what to do and I feel so ashamed and I’m scared. Oh, Mummy, Mummy, tell me what’s happening. Don’t leave me alone. Please God, don’t let Daddy leave us. Don’t let Mummy and Daddy divorce and I promise never to do anything wicked again; ever, ever again.
Next morning Constance, in her Aertex shirt and brown-pleated shorts and plimsolls, saw the postman bicycling down the drive as she ran up it doing her daily athletics practice. On the way down again she was puzzled to see Charmian, who didn’t usually go for early-morning runs, giving the postman a parcel and some money and then scampering back to her dormitory. She didn’t stop to wonder why. In her mind she was Mowgli, loping easily across the plains of the Deccan beside the long, lithe stretch of Bagheera.
Five
Half-term had emptied the school. The buildings lay becalmed under a cloudless sky. Jack Waterman, the gardener, cut the grass on the games field and dragged the paint-roller across its newly shorn surface, laying a complicated pattern of white lines in preparation for Sports Day. A flattened oval marked out the 440-yard track with staggered lines at the start to compensate for the outside bends, while down the centre of the field ran four parallel lanes for the 100 yards. The edges of the sandpit, landing ground for the high and long jumps, were trimmed and tidied, and a load of fresh yellow sand tipped into its greyish centre. Having thrust a handful of freshly mown grass into the cages of various hamsters, guinea-pigs and rabbits and topped up their bowls with oats and clean water, he called it a day and went home to listen to the cricket commentary. Denis Compton was on the point of scoring his 100th century and Jack wanted to hear history being made and the great roar as the crowd saluted their hero. When he was a lad, Jack had dreamed of being a cricketer, but the war and his gammy leg had put paid to that. Refereeing the girls’ cricket matches was as close as he ever got these days.
Most of the staff had taken the long weekend off, glad of a respite from patrolling and controlling, and from the claustrophobia of the staff-room. Sylvia and Diana had not. They were happier in the cottage than either would have been in the airless boredom of their own homes. It was a luxury to relax, uninterrupted by the clamorous bell that punctuated their lives, to talk without being overheard, to stroll or swim in privacy, sunbathing on the hot tiles around the swimming-pool and hearing the distant purr of the motor-mower like the buzz of cicadas in the south, where neither of them had ever been.
On the Saturday evening they sat in the thickening light of dusk on the lawn behind the cottage. Normally they would have been in full view of the girls’ dormitories, but tonight they had taken the kitchen table and two chairs outside and eaten salad and cold meat with a celebratory bottle of wine, followed by strawberries with condensed milk. Diana, who had scarcely had a drink in her life before meeting Sylvia, was emboldened by two glasses of wine to ask questions.
‘Sylvia,’ she said. ‘It’s a lovely name. Why did your parents call you that? Bit un-Welsh, isn’t it?’
‘My father’s idea. He used to be an English teacher. Very keen on poetry.’
‘It is a poetic name.’
‘It was one of his typical jokes to show up my mother’s ignorance. Apparently when I was born he came into the nursing home and said to my mother, “Who is Sylvia? What is she?” He’d hoped for a boy, you see. I was a disappointment. But my mother didn’t understand the reference and just thought he wanted to call me Sylvia. So she did.’
‘Your father’s not alive any more?’ Fatherless Diana shrank from the word ‘dead’. In her family they always spoke of her father, who had been killed on the Somme, as having ‘passed on’ or ‘given his life for his country’.
‘No. Oh, Diana. You are an innocent, and there are so many things you don’t know. We’ve finished the wine, haven’t we? Pity. Get the cider from the larder.’
What have I started? thought Diana, as she fetched the bottle of cider from the cool, tiled floor of the larder. I must be
very calm and not let her realize that she upsets me. I don’t want to set her off on one of her rages.
‘Was it very hard for you? Knowing he’d wanted a son?’ she said carefully, after a silence.
‘Oh, I think in the end he was quite glad I was a girl.’
‘So that was all right, then.’
Sylvia looked across the darkened lawn. On evenings like this, at home, you could always hear the sea swishing softly in the distance.
‘I was quite a sweet child, believe it or not. Very anxious to please. There were just the three of us, but I liked being an only child. When I felt like running wild I could go along the beach, collecting my shells and things. Roam across the moor. I wasn’t lonely. School was a bit tricky, my father being a teacher, but he was respected. You know what children are like. Fair play. We were an upright family. Everyone knows you in a small Welsh community. A nice, safe little world, it felt like. Pass me my ciggies.’
She smoked in silence a while and Diana didn’t like to interrupt.
‘When I was small, my toys were the rocks on the beach near our house. They were gnarled and beautifully shaped, with holes that the wind poured through and I peered and clambered into. I played quite happily all by myself. The sea came galloping across the sand towards me and I used to stand my ground, until it collapsed at my feet. I’d be holding my shoes by their straps, and the water round my toes made them numb with cold. I played every day on the long, empty beaches, even in winter, when the sky seemed to have closed down over the horizon, cold and black. The reflection of the clouds darkened the water. I didn’t need a bucket and spade or a rubber ball like the children who came on holiday. All I needed was a big stick to draw letters and patterns in the sand. I’d watch the sea wash them off, just like one of those magic slates on which you could draw things and then, swish, they’d vanish.
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