by Patrick Gale
Angel relaxed again. She hurriedly finished writing the reports on her English class then combed her hair, repaired her lipstick and joined the staff at the back of the hall for prize-giving. By the time she was joining in the school song, Fields of Honour, Chambers of Wisdom, she had half-convinced herself that having the child tag along need be no bar to her enjoyment of time with Richard and might even enhance it. The time alone with him would be all the more precious for being the harder won. She had recalled, too, a dictum of her grandmother’s that other people’s children were a telling means of auditioning the prospective father of one’s own. Would he play imaginatively with the girl without teasing her? Would he prove hard and impatient or would he actively enter into Alice’s entertainment the better to woo Angel?
In the hour that followed, the school emptied with astonishing rapidity. Fathers and daughters carried trunks to cars. Mistresses, clutching travel bags, shepherded excited girls onto waiting buses for the trains south. There were hasty, tearful farewells on the terrace, rapidly swapped Christmas presents, a diminishing hubbub of greetings, promises, hearty invitations and sighed regret, then Angel found herself alone on the gravel, coat buttoned up against the icy moorland wind. There were no late parents, no missed trains. The evacuation was almost military in its precision.
She was not quite alone, of course. Adams, she knew, was still lying in the sick bay and the cleaning women had descended with mops, dusters, drums of bleach and carbolic and wax. She heard them chatting loudly as they worked and realized this was a last day of term for them too. Matron passed her on the stairs, jauntily got up in a lambskin jacket and vivid headscarf. She was carrying a tartan suitcase and a newspaper parcel of flowers from the garden and whistling at the pleasure of escape. Seeing Angel, she stopped whistling and modified the perkiness in her step, recalled abruptly to the responsibilities she was about to abandon.
‘I’ve rung the haematology department and made her an appointment for tomorrow at ten,’ she said. ‘And after that you’ll both be free as air.’
‘Oh good,’ said Angel.
‘Yes and I’ve had a word with Mrs Brack to let her know you’ll be staying on the extra night or two. She’s cleaning out the freezers but she’ll leave you bread and milk and eggs and so on in the pantry. If you have to buy anything, keep the receipts. Oh and you’d better give me your parents’ number so I can sort out about picking her up after Christmas or you’ll end up with her the entire holidays!’ Matron laughed gaily and Angel smelled sherry on her breath.
Approaching the sickroom door, she heard one of the cleaners chatting to Adams then realized it was another child. Hurrying in, she saw it was Lotta Wexel. She was sitting at the foot of Adams’ bed and chuckling at something. Hearing Angel, she turned, a smile still bright on her rounded face. Angel felt a stab of vexation.
‘Wexel? Weren’t you meant to be catching the London train? All the buses have gone!’
‘Oh I know. But I couldn’t go with poor Alice stuck up here on her own. And anyway, my parents don’t come over from Budapest until Christmas Eve so I was only going to be staying in an hotel.’
‘On your own?’
‘Oh yes.’ Wexel shrugged maddeningly, as though this were perfectly usual for an eleven year old. ‘So I might as well stay on too and keep Alice company. Oh please, Miss. Say I can.’
‘Well…I hadn’t really planned on staying…’ Angel felt even her modified plans under siege.
Newly arrived this term, Lotta Wexel was officially the nearest Alice Adams had to a friend, insofar as she spent most of her free time at her side demanding confidences and forcing them on the other girl in return. The bond was inexplicable. Where Adams was thin, pale and listless, Wexel was vigorously Central European. Pink cheeked and raven haired, she made up for the want of distinction in her looks with rude good health and a superabundance of energy. ‘Paprika in her blood!’ Miss Clandage would sigh.
Born in the saddle, apparently, she was one of several girls who rode with the local hunt during term time and was entirely without fear, riding at the front and taking hedges and walls in a frenzy of excitement. Her foreignness was untraceable in her accent, she was not too clever, her parents were well connected; she should, by rights, have been one of the most popular girls in her year, a natural pack-leader. However she elected to spend most of her time with the outcast Adams. Previously her closest attachment had been poor, sinister Kay Flanders. The other teachers thought there was something commendable in this and only Angel had found something faintly repellent in the India rubber cheerfulness with which Wexel had bounced back after Kay’s sudden death.
What Alice Adams gained from such a high profile protectress would be hard to say. She was so quiet and mirthless by comparison. One might almost have fancied her a kind of parasite, battening on the other girl’s hale ebullience. Looking at her now, her pinched face pale even against the pillows, Angel wondered if Adams were not a little reluctant, however, at having such a playmate thrust herself upon her. Then she realized the pleading in Adams’ eyes merely stemmed from fear lest this change of plan might jeopardize the promise of time with her mother’s menagerie. Angel mustered a reassuring smile.
‘Well of course you can stay on, Wexel. I have to take Adams into the hospital tomorrow for a blood test. We can make a trip of it. Maybe go to the cinema in the afternoon. How would that be?’
‘Oh yes!’ Lotta enthused and slapped the mattress beneath her.
‘But you’re not to tire poor Adams out. She’s not very strong at the moment.’
‘I know. Poor Alice.’ Wexel turned a sickly smile on her stricken friend.
Angel realized, bitterly, she would have to call Richard again. One juvenile invalid might not have changed their plans so very much but her tireless companion certainly would.
‘Don’t you need to tell your parents, Wexel?’ she asked, clutching at straws. ‘Won’t they worry if they call the hotel and find you’re not there?’
‘Oh no,’ Wexel insisted coolly. ‘They never worry. They won’t ring anyway. They’re far too busy travelling around. My father’s reclaiming some old estates of my grandmother’s which the Communists stole. One was turned into a loony bin. Just imagine! And another one was turned into a horrid collective farm. They’ll be fine, Miss. Don’t worry.’
As Angel turned from the room, Adams went into a spasm of panic.
‘Please, Miss. Where are you going, Miss?’
‘It’s all right, Adams. I just have to telephone my friend in London. To say we won’t be coming to stay there now. I’m afraid we’ll have to see the museums another time.’
‘Museums are boring anyway, Alice,’ said Wexel. ‘We can play hide and seek. We can climb up on the roof and pretend it’s a castle.’
‘You most certainly may not,’ Angel insisted.
‘Please, Miss.’
‘What, Adams?’
‘Can’t you call us by our Christian names now that it’s the holidays?’
Angel sighed. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘We’ll have supper at six as usual then you can come up to the staff sitting room where it’s cosier and we can watch television. How’s that?’
‘Brilliant, Miss. Thank you, Miss.’
‘Lotta?’
‘Yes, Miss?’
‘Have you got change for a fiver?’
As Angel walked back to the pay phone, change bulging her cardigan pocket, she heard Wexel’s laughter again and her low, insistent gossiping tone. She wondered what such inexperienced girls could possibly find to discuss at such length.
Richard was disappointed, of course, even a little angry. Why could she not just send this other girl packing, he asked. Why could she not assert herself for once. The questions were rhetorical, however. He knew Angel was not assertive. He suggested instead that he apply for a change of leave so they could meet up after Christmas instead. She could still see her parents, still maintain the fib about the school friend in town and that way they would enj
oy time alone as planned, unchaperoned by sick children. His patience lent her heart and she unpacked her things again with a sadness on the sweeter side of bleak.
Wexel saddled up her pony and galloped off onto the moor for two hours before supper. Perhaps Angel only imagined Adams’ relief, but the child certainly revived a little when left alone and came downstairs to nestle quietly in a window seat reading Edith Sitwell’s life of Elizabeth I. The last of the cleaners left. Disinfected and aired, whole sections of the school were now closed off. As the afternoon drew swiftly on and rain clouds scudded across the moor, Angel busied herself writing letters and tried not to dwell on the acreage of dark and empty rooms stretching out around them. The temperature plummeted and they retreated early to the staff sitting room where Angel lit the gas fire and wound the clock. Darkness fell before Wexel returned. Hearing the clatter of hooves in the stable yard, Angel realized, with a guilty start, that she had quite forgotten about the other girl and should, by rights, have been worrying about her. Adams, too, showed a trace of surprise, starting from her book and hastening to draw the curtains against the night.
Wexel had evidently thrived on her ride. She had ridden miles, she claimed, taken several walls at a gallop, seen a fox and hawks and had great fun being chased by some young beef cattle. Her green eyes shone and her cheeks were scarlet from the cold. She was wet through but not even shivering.
Glad of an excuse to take charge again, Angel hurried her off to a hot bath and a change of clothes while she and Adams whisked up mushroom omelettes and a mountain of buttered toast for supper. The meal over, she sent Adams up for her bath and sent Wexel to watch the television and plan their evening’s viewing.
When she followed Wexel up, she found the television playing to an empty room. Happy of solitude, however brief, she watched ten minutes of the news then began to feel uneasy and climbed the dark stair to the dormitory wing to check on them, feeling the chill from the great, black windows she passed on the way. The fluorescent light from the washrooms spilled out across the newly waxed boards of the upper corridor. A small cloud of steam was gathering outside the open door. She could hear a bath filling. One of the great advantages of institutional life was the quantity of hot water the furnaces churned out. Baths here filled in moments.
At first, all Angel could hear above the gushing water was whimpering. Then someone turned the taps off and she heard, with a shock, that it was a thin, pallid, girlish voice singing.
‘…pink and purple and blue.
I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow.
Sing a rainbow too!’
The voice was weirdly magnified by the washroom acoustic. Angel froze for a moment, thinking, despite herself, of Kay Flanders’ trunk waiting below the table in Matron’s consulting room. Then she pulled herself together and strode into the washroom where Wexel was crouched behind a bank of washbasins, singing into the steam overhead. Adams was huddled in her dressing gown in a chair beside one of the baths, wash bag clutched in her lap.
‘Lotta, stop that nonsense at once and go downstairs to the television.’
Wexel stood grinning.
‘Sorry, Miss. Were you scared?’
‘Not a bit. Go on. Let poor Adams – I mean Alice – take her bath.’
Wexel came out and, with a parting grin at Adams, slapped down the stairs in her slippers. Adams slipped off her dressing gown, which she had held so tightly about her, and slid into the bath.
‘I wasn’t a bit scared,’ she said wearily. ‘I don’t know why she bothers.’
She began soaping herself, briskly unselfconscious. Angel was shocked at how skinny she was. Her ribs stood out and her veins showed grey-blue against her translucent skin. She put Angel in mind of some eerily transparent fish she had kept briefly as a child, their visible internal organs in constant fluttering motion.
‘Don’t be too long,’ she said, then paused. ‘What’s that under your arm?’ There was a reddish patch in the girl’s left armpit.
‘Nothing.’ Suddenly modest, Adams slapped a hand over the strange welt to hide it from view. ‘It’s just some eczema. Nothing serious. I often get it.’
Angel remembered seeing Adams adjust her shirt repeatedly at the supper table and realized the fabric must have been chafing her. Recurrent or not, the eczema was serious enough to have been scratched to the raw. She had glimpsed fresh blood, livid on its surface.
‘I’ll make us some cocoa if you like,’ she said. ‘Don’t be too long.’
She made a mental note to have a word with the doctor about it the next day. When she returned downstairs, she found Wexel merrily making cocoa already, singing innocently to herself as she whisked the milk.
The remainder of the evening passed quietly enough once she had put the girls to bed in their dormitory. At one point she thought she heard weeping but when she stepped out onto the stairs to listen, found it to be only giggling. The school was a red brick Victorian monstrosity, surrounded by uninhabited moorland and windswept hills — the folly of a long since bankrupt mining baron. Even with all girls and staff present, there was room to spare. Left alone there, the three of them were preposterously isolated. As rain lashed the windows and draughts moaned in the chimneys and caused distant doors to slam, she had anticipated bedtime fears but found Wexel and Adams apparently fearless and herself far more disturbed than they at the prospect of sleeping adrift on such a remote raft of bricks. The girls at least had each other for company. She was alone at the other end of a long corridor and a flight of stairs. Aware of her own absurdity, she found herself going to bed with a light left on outside her door for comfort and even then she tossed and turned, watching the racing of moonlit clouds through a gap in her curtains and trying in vain to wrestle her thoughts into quiet moderation.
When she slept at last she dreamed, not of ghoulies and ghosties but, in exaggerated technicolour, of Richard. Nothing happened in the dream. He just sat on a rug in dappled shade and becoming battledress, talking contentedly in a language she could not understand and breaking off his monologue occasionally to smile at her and touch the side of her face with a roughly bandaged hand.
In the morning she realized she was not the only one to sleep badly. Wexel was up before any of them, taking her pony for a dawn canter, but Angel found Adams still paler and weaker than on the previous day. When she offered to drive into town and see if she could persuade the doctor back with her, however, the possibility of being left behind seemed to galvanize the child into action. Wexel returned before long, noisily full of the joys of the winter landscape and soon the three of them were crossing the moor in Angel’s Morris Traveller.
They caught the haematology department on a miraculously quiet day. Samples were taken and Angel told that if she cared to return after three, results would be ready by then. In the interim, she took the girls for an improving walk around the castle ruins, followed by an indulgent trip to watch a deeply sentimental cartoon film at the cinema.
As they took their seats, Adams made a sudden apologetic darting movement past Angel so as to sit on the other side of her from Wexel. Angel was concerned that Wexel’s feelings would be hurt but the girl said nothing of it, merely enthusing about how excited she was to be seeing the film, having heard so much about it from the others. Having made such protestations, it was strange therefore how often Angel looked about her during the film to find Wexel’s stare fixed not on the screen but across Angel on Adams’ obediently attentive face. Caught out a second time, Wexel turned hastily back to the film but now it was Angel who turned to stare at Adams, struck again by her air of mute parasitism, her excessive emotional hunger. The way she devoured the mawkish events on the screen was of a part with the way she had darted through to another seat so as to have unlimited access to an adult. Watching her, Angel felt two waves of revulsion, the first at the child, the second at herself for so easily joining the ranks of despisers and bullies.
The junior haematologist confessed herself confused.
&nbs
p; ‘Could I have a word in private?’ she asked.
‘Of course. Alice, go and see what Lotta’s up to in the waiting room. We won’t be a minute.’
Adams left the room. The haematologist watched the closing door then turned back.
‘I have to say that if Dr Murchison were still here we’d have sorted this out in a minute; she’s the expert on things like this. Are you sure all these details are correct? Her blood type and so on?’
‘Well…’ Angel shrugged. ‘I didn’t take them myself. The parents supply most of them to Matron and each girl has a medical at the beginning of the academic year. Why?’
‘Has she…’ The young doctor frowned, picking at the rubber on her pencil then looked up. ‘Has she been abroad recently? To the Tropics, perhaps? India?’
‘Not to my knowledge. Her mother lives in New Zealand. I don’t know if that counts. Why?’
‘Well…’ The doctor tried to laugh. ‘You’ll think I’m awfully stupid but we took two samples and I looked at them over and over and got a colleague to check and, well…There’s something not quite right.’
‘Does she have a virus?’
‘Not that I could recognize. It’s more as though she has a whole new blood type. Now listen. There’s probably no need to worry. She is very anaemic and that can be dealt with at once. I’ll give you an iron prescription for her and you can make sure she eats plenty of iron-rich food. Meanwhile I’m going to send these samples on to London for a second opinion.’
It was agreed that Matron, who lived in Sussex, would drive Adams into London for a further examination after Christmas. Shopping for dinner on the way back to the car, Angel collected the prescription and bought spinach and steak. Wexel chattered all the way home about the film, about other films, about the Christmas lights in the department stores. Deaf to her prattle, Angel caught glimpses of Adams’ listless face watching her in the rear view mirror and caught herself thinking that, far from being sick, the child was not even human.