by Patrick Gale
‘Yes. But I walked, like an idiot, and now I’ve got blisters on my toes.’
‘Now look,’ he said. ‘I know you like fruity teas and they had a huge choice so I brought several bags and some hot water.’
‘Goodness.’
‘Cherry, mandarin or…’ He exaggerated the need to peer at the third. ‘Yes, or mixed fruit.’
‘Cherry sounds lovely.’
‘Pop the others in your bag.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Go on.’
‘How absurd we both sound; like maiden aunts stealing sugar lumps from Fortnum’s.’
They laughed, uproariously almost, and she saw that he was wearing the tie she had given him two years ago, at Loulou’s Christmas party. He had bought a plateful of cakes and proceeded to sink his teeth into a chocolate one. His nose just cleared the icing. She decided on the vanilla one for the black swan and set it aside on a paper napkin.
‘What’s that for?’ he asked, dabbing crumbs off his chin.
‘A black swan. I teased it by crouching down with nothing to give. Made me feel guilty.’
‘Wouldn’t it rather have bread?’
‘Would you?’
‘Point taken.’
‘Bread or cake; they’re neither of them exactly natural fodder for a water bird.’
She took a mouthful of a rather nasty, dried-out flapjack and dunked her cherry tea bag up and down. The water did not turn pink but became a disappointing, traditional sort of brown. Suddenly she saw the statuesque camera woman approaching and turned back to Gus.
‘What are you up to this evening?’ she asked.
‘Nothing much. Tabitha’s having a drinks party.’ She wrinkled her brow to show that she knew no Tabitha. ‘You know. Tabitha. She helps run the Burden Friday Gallery. Anyway, it’s a choice between her or the reprint of La Dolce Vita. Want to come?’
‘I don’t know her.’
‘To the Fellini.’
‘No. I can’t.’ He looked a question at her and she thought quickly. Why couldn’t she go? Would she not love to? Sit close beside him and be bombarded by glamorous disillusion in a darkened room? She met his pale, bland gaze and thought that on reflection she would not. ‘I’ve a story to finish.’
‘I didn’t know you stooped to stories.’
‘Actually it’s a question of aspiring; they’re far harder than novels. And yes, I do sometimes. This one’s for a magazine. They pay absurdly well.’ She saw that he was not listening to her but was smiling politely up over her shoulder.
‘Can I help?’ he asked.
She turned round to a warm, brown cleavage and what, close-to, proved to be pure white cashmere.
‘I thought it was you!’ The woman’s camera — a large, professional thing — dangled from one hand. There was no time to make any kind of face as she bowed and kissed her warmly at the edge of each cheek. The brush of lip whispered in her ear and a scent of ambergris hung, delicious, after she had withdrawn. ‘How are you? You look so well!’ A long, smooth hand stroked her jaw and shoulder. The stranger laughed, brushing back tumbling hair. ‘Sorry. How awful of me!’ She turned to shake Gus’s hand. ‘Joanna Ventura.’
‘Angus Packard.’
‘I must run. I’m late again, but please,’ she turned back and touched the shoulder again, ‘ring me. Please?’ As she vanished into the crowd, Gus all but gaped.
‘Where have you been keeping her?’
‘Oh,’ she said drily, ‘Joanna’s hardly even in town so when she is I tend to keep her all to myself.’
‘She looks like Anita Ekberg.’
‘Who?’
‘The one in the fountain in La Dolce Vita.’
‘Oh.’
‘I didn’t know you knew any Americans apart from squat Jewish publishers.’ Funny. She had not noticed the accent.
She finished the story swiftly, perched on the edge of the bed, her coat unbuttoned but still on. Her women in love held their last meeting over cheap Muscadet outside the National Film Theatre. The rendezvous was ostensibly held for Gus/Rose to return an unlikely black silk petticoat. She handed it over to the jilted heroine, wrapped in a used, brown paper envelope, then broke down. She begged her to forget the hasty words of the previous night then went on to make an absurd scene when her generosity was rebuffed. The heroine paused in her return across Westminster Bridge to open the envelope and send the petticoat dancing down to the brown waters beneath them, then laughed wildly in the face of a man in a suit who stopped to rebuke her for littering the city.
She pressed a button that corrected her typing then set the machine to print. As the daisywheel rattled away, she felt in her coat pocket for a handkerchief and found a ticket for the next evening’s showing of La Dolce Vita. There was writing on the back. A woman’s hand. She read it, turned the ticket over to check the performance time, then turned back to reread the writing. ‘I dare you,’ it said and there was a telephone number.
Suddenly the printer went wrong. There was a high-pitched bleep and a grinding sound as a half-typed sheet of paper was chewed up. She threw the ticket aside and, scowling, busied herself with freeing the page and returning the cursor to the beginning of her new text. The challenge was in red ink, however, and she could see it from the corner of her eye.
A SLIGHT CHILL
for Francesca Johnson
‘CAREFUL OF THE PAINTWORK, Harper!’ Angel sighed. ‘I said careful!’
‘Sorry, Miss,’ said the plump girl, labouring under the weight of her trunk. ‘It’s heavy. I slipped.’
‘I know, Harper. Just go a little more slowly and you won’t slip again. Girls have broken legs on these stairs before now. You might cause a serious accident.’
‘Yes Miss. Sorry.’
Harper moved on down the stairs and banged the paintwork again. She did not care. Usually Angel inspired a certain sisterly respect among the girls, fear even but it was the last day of term so a spirit of barely subdued anarchy scented the air along with the usual, stouter smells of disinfectant, boiled greens and a particularly noxious eau de toilette the fifth formers had taken to wearing. There was no time for punishments or black house stars. Trunks had to be packed and trunk lists checked. There were beds to strip and books to return to the library. Lockers had to be swept out and inspected and there was the brief, rowdy ceremony of prize-giving to be got through along with the usual perfunctory speech and presentation to a retiring mistress.
Very few parents lived close enough to collect their girls by car — most of the school population would be evacuated to Newcastle and the London train by a convoy of buses after prize-giving — and yet girls were already drawing arrogant strength from the incipient resurgence into their lives of men. The mere anticipation of fathers, stepfathers, older brothers and, in some unfortunate cases, mothers’ flash fiancés was already rendering the female rule of term time negligible. For a few brief, dangerous hours Miss Prewett, Miss Clandage and Dr Trudeau ceased to be terrible absolute rulers and became objects of mirth, even of pity. Angel always felt that the last day of term, more than any other, reminded one that the teachers were dependent on the girls for their livelihood. Girls returned to wealthy, even distinguished households for parties, new dresses, extravagant presents, a whole world of social advantage, while the likes of Miss Clandage would be spending Christmas visiting other, similarly frugal women or burdening families to whom they were not figures of awesome learning but unweddable sisters, ridiculous aunts. Miss Prewett would be earning her Christmas keep by executing tidy watercolours of her sister’s children in distant Taunton. Dr Trudeau was leading a skiing and study party in Aviemore. Angel would be visiting her parents in Hampshire but before then she would be seeing Richard.
Richard! She stood back in her corner of the landing as the girls trooped past her from the trunk store to the dormitories and looked on them with a fresh benevolence. She was one of them, she knew. She was not born to be a teacher. She was only marking time here, a kind
of skivvy doubling up as assistant matron and junior school English teacher. Times arose, had arisen often during this last, long term, when she feared the isolation of the place, its undiluted femininity, might be leeching away her youth and crusting her over. Matron or one of the older teachers would assume her complicity, envelop her with a deadening first person plural, and she would feel a chill across her heart. How many of them, she would wonder, had begun as she had, with no intention of staying much beyond a year or two only to give the place an entire life? At such times, however, she had only to think of Richard. His dog-eared photograph, used by her as a bookmark, was her passport to normality. She had even let some of the older girls glimpse it so they should know she was really one of them and a mere tourist in the common room.
The photograph showed him in uniform. He was a captain in the 17/21st Lancers and currently based at Sandhurst where he seemed to spend much of his time teaching mountaineering skills and planning the next expedition he would lead to the Himalayas. He had seen no active service beyond an early tour of duty in Northern Ireland but still it worried her when he wrote her letters on regimental notepaper which bore the motto Or Glory beneath a menacing, winged death’s head. (Dr Trudeau had been on the point of leaving the school for marriage when her fiancé’s plane was shot down on a bombing mission.) Richard and his solicitor brother owned a small flat in Baron’s Court. The brother was away at the moment so the first precious days of Richard’s Christmas leave and her school holidays were to be spent in indulgent privacy at the flat before she joined her parents in the Itchen Valley. He had pressed her to spend Christmas with him too and she was sorely tempted. She was an only child, however, so subject to extreme parental pressure at this time of year. She was lying to her parents as it was, having told them she was spending a few days with an old school friend. They knew Richard existed, approved of him, indeed, as a future son-in-law but Angel sensed that they preferred not to think of her as a sexual animal just yet. She knew, from chance remarks, that her father, especially, liked the thought of her spending her days immured in this chaste, all-female institution rather than having her gad about town with her contemporaries.
The last girls, juniors mostly, struggled past her down the stairs with their empty trunks on their backs. The smallest helped one another out, bearing their luggage between them, grimacing at how strenuous the steepness of the staircase made this. Angel walked up to check that the trunk store was empty. One remained. She stooped to read the label and saw with a shock that it belonged to Kay Flanders. Kay, a cowering creature, unpopular for no discernible reason, had died suddenly in her sleep earlier in the term. In the rush to have the whole ghastly business over as soon as possible so as to cause as little distress as possible to the other girls, no one had seen fit to empty the trunk store to uncover her suitcase. Her uniform and sports kit had been donated to the school second-hand shop, her few remaining belongings — her ‘effects’ as the undertakers called them — parcelled up and borne back to her family with the tiny, bloodless corpse. Angel locked the trunk store door and carried the oddly pathetic suitcase down to the sickbay for Matron to deal with. She paused on the way to tear off the incriminating label and crumple it away in her cardigan pocket. Ghoulish stories were already circulating in the dormitories that Kay’s pale shade loitered in the blue washroom humming I Can Sing a Rainbow while she jabbed at her skinny limbs with a pair of carefully nametaped nail scissors. Angel wanted nothing to feed the myth. Girls would say anything to frighten one another. Girls’ imaginations were flexible as the tiger in their cruelty. The suitcase always reappeared, they said, lying in wait for whichever junior was luckless enough to be last in the line to reclaim her trunk. It was neatly packed with Kay’s dismembered body, they said. On quiet nights, they said, it could be heard shifting around in the crowded attic, twitching, hungry.
She found Matron taking a girl’s temperature. It was Adams. Alice Adams, a wan, spiritless little thing, rarely without a runny nose or a patch of eczema. Angel found herself suddenly coy about drawing attention to the dead girl’s suitcase, realizing that Alice Adams had subtly replaced Kay Flanders as the girl always on her own, in the corner, at the back, the girl nobody wanted on their team, the girl found indefinably unwholesome. Adams gazed up at Angel as Matron took back the thermometer to read it. As ever, her small eyes were dully reproachful.
‘Guess who fainted,’ Matron said. ‘Set down her trunk on her bed then keeled over. Thank heavens she wasn’t on the stairs or someone might have been hurt. Well Adams. No temperature. How do you feel?’
‘A bit sick, Matron.’
‘Well go and lie down in there for a bit, out of everyone’s way, then we’ll see how you feel in a little while. Have you fainted before?’
Adams nodded seriously. ‘Last week,’ she said. ‘But not for long and I felt all right afterwards.’
‘Hmm. Well go and lie down for now.’
Adams walked into the sickbay and closed the door behind her.
‘I found Kay Flanders’ trunk,’ Angel said.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Matron. ‘Stick it under the table and I’ll get it sent home to the parents. Listen. I was going to come and find you anyway.’
‘What?’
‘You’re going back to your parents for Christmas, aren’t you?’
‘Well yes. Eventually. I was going to spend some time in London first. With a school friend.’
‘Ah.’
‘There’s a problem?’
Matron jerked her head towards the sickroom door as answer.
‘She’s not well. I mean, she doesn’t have a temperature or any obvious symptoms but she’s getting more and more weak and listless and I’m convinced she’s anaemic.’
‘Shades of Kay Flanders.’
‘Well exactly. I don’t want to start a panic about viruses or anything on the last day of term but I do want Adams checked out by the haematologist in town.’
‘I could drive her in.’
‘Bless you. The trouble is — God I hate to ask you this.’
‘What?’
‘Well there was never any question of her going home for the holidays since there’s only the mother and she’s out in New Zealand.’
‘Ah.’
‘She was going home with the Lloyds who’d offered to take her skiing with them but frankly I don’t think I can allow it. She’s far too weak. And I was wondering whether — I mean, I can happily take her on from about the twenty-eighth but between now and Christmas is simply impossible for me. Could you bear it? We’d all be so grateful, Angel. She’s a sweet little thing really. Very quiet. Fond of books. I don’t know why they’re all so beastly to her.’
Angel cursed herself. If only she had told the truth from the beginning, if she had blithely admitted to looking forward to six days of uninterrupted Richard, lie-ins, romantic walks round Kensington, last minute Christmas shopping instead of repeating the virginal lie about the old school friend. Confessed now, the truth would sound like a sad, graceless little fiction, and the impatient, uniformed, mountaineering fiancé from Sandhurst, like the product of too many cheap romances read in a practical flannel nightdress.
‘Yes,’ she heard herself say without a trace of hesitation. ‘Of course I can.’
‘Count your blessings, Angel,’ her mother was always telling her. ‘Then complain. There’s always a bright side if you’ll only look.’
Her mother would have been proud of her. Sitting at the foot of Adams’ bed, explaining the change in holiday plans, she was rewarded by an enchanting smile from the child’s bloodless lips. Skiing, apparently, would have been a torment to her, much less skiing with the Philistine Lloyd girls. ‘Can we go to the British Museum and see the mummified cats?’ she asked, excited. ‘Can we go to the National Gallery, Miss?’
‘Of course,’ Angel told her, ‘but only if you promise not to faint.’ And she realized that her plans need not be wholly scuppered. Richard’s brother was not there. Alice Adams c
ould have his room and surely be bribed to say nothing to Angel’s parents about the sleeping arrangements. Certainly, there could be little afternoon passion — unless, as seemed probable, the child could be exhausted sufficiently to take to her bed for an after lunch nap…
‘Do you like animals?’ she asked. ‘Dogs and things?’
‘Oh yes, Miss! My mother never let me have a pet because she thinks they make me wheeze. But they don’t.’
‘Well my mother has always preferred animals to humans,’ Angel assured her. ‘So you’ll have a lovely time when I take you home. She has several dogs. Six I think.’
‘Six?!’
‘Then there are the cats and she looks after several ponies from the village, so you’ll be able to go riding if you’re feeling strong enough by then.’
Alice Adams’ pleasure was cheaply bought. Angel foresaw an easy transfer of duties once they were back at her parents’ house. There was nothing her mother enjoyed more, than an animal-mad child; she liked to exploit their weakness in a kind of indulgent slavery. Alice would soon be set to mucking out stables, mashing dog food and wielding currycombs. She would love every minute of it, regain some colour in her soap-pale cheeks and prove no trouble at all.
Before prize-giving, all the girls had to gather in their forms to be set their holiday essays and to hear how well or badly each had done in the course of the term. The clamour from these traditionally rowdy gatherings followed Angel down a corridor on her way to call Sandhurst from the pay phone under the stairs. To thwart queues, the apparatus had been meanly rigged so as not to receive incoming calls. Because of this, most of her communication with Richard was by mail, her three or four pages of chat being met by his unvarying two sides of more buttoned-up reports of barracks life. On this occasion, her stock of change had almost run out by the time he was called to the phone so she had a scant two minutes of his voice. She blurted out about Alice Adams, fearing his disappointment, but he was sweet and funny and said it would be fine and could he see the mummified cats too. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘I’m horny,’ just before they were cut off, so she was blushing as she emerged from the phone cupboard.