The headmistress is not as surprised as she pretends by what Linda now tells her; it adds details to a picture she knows in its main outlines. Hjordis, like all leaders, uses frequent broadcasts to entertain her followers and impress the surrounding universe. On warm weekends, when the girls have collected well-filled lunch baskets from the kitchen and taken them to the shrubbery, Hjordis walks up and down in front of The Fortress, sandwich in hand, delivering between bites loud speeches which sometimes provoke a muffled giggle or derisive shout from the depths of an elder bush. The twins sprawl and munch and listen on a blanket on the grass near by, nudging each other whenever Hjordis uses a word they think rude. Linda, hands clasped on top of head, stands under a tree in the only spot where applicants are allowed to stand. She has paid for this privilege with her lunch, which Hjordis (who often declares she prefers birds to people) has crumbled and scattered for the tits and robins. “Oua enemy boasts she is a Liberal!” cries Hjordis, “What does that mean? Mr Pargetta fo history says it’s to do with gun-boats and free trade – with freedom. What freedom does the enemy allow us? The freedom to choose a bush in ha rotten shrubbery!”
“You have a fortress!” sings a distant voice.
“I have a rubbish heap!” shouts Hjordis, “A sawdid rubbish heap when I should have a geodesic play-dome with a trampoline floa and walls of opaque or transparent panels in the pattern of my choice! One of my uncle’s factories makes nothing else! The enemy soon shot his offa down! In the shrubbery I prefer all my little gels to start as equals. Lies! Foul lies! She doesn’t give a damn for equality! In this world equality means just one thing: equal rights fo the equally rich. Do we have that? Do we hell! Oua people a a bloody sight richa than she is, she wouldn’t let us in ha school if they weren’t. But wha does that jumped up bourgeois bitch sleep and wha do we? She sleeps in ha motha and fatha’s beautiful old bedroom on the second floa while we sleep in the attics! The servants’ quartas! Each in a paw little room with a sloping ceiling that once belonged to a skivvy or housemaid or valet! And wha do we usually eat? In a cella off the kitchen, a cella that was once the servants’ dining room. Don’t be fooled by the Laura Ashley curtains and the windows above ground level, we eat in a putrid basement! And oua splendid modern classrooms and sculptcha studio and record lab, wha a they located? In the old stables and kennels, the outhouses wha a lot of animals and thea stinking grooms once lived! None of you object to that, do you? No, yaw all perfectly happy because now and then Lady Muck invites you upstairs to see how nicely she can handle the family silver and tinkle the teacups in The Land That Time Forgot – the breakfast room and dining room and drawing room which a still ha private property because of the money she gets from OUA people! OUA people! OUA people!” “You’ll bust a gut, Hjordis,” warns an American voice. It belongs to a millionairess from Texas, the only pupil Hjordis fears apart from a tall gangling untidy girl who reads the New Statesman. One of the twins approaches and holds out a dish with a chocolate éclair on it and a thermos mug of sweet milky coffee. Hjordis lifts these and walks slowly round The Fortress, eating and sipping in an effort to calm herself. Her brain is teeming with the sort of notions which always come to her when she talks loudly.
“This rotten system has got to stop and I mean to stop it!” she announces, returning, “The enemy has told you the cousin of a queen is coming hia. She has not told you that my motha and Harry Shetland’s motha were very very very close friends, so Harry is going to be my special friend, a closa friend than any two of you a! I am going to take ha unda my wing – my gang will protect ha.”
“What from?” sings the distant voice.
“From exploitation!” screams Hjordis, “The British public don’t give a tuppenny fuck fo how awdinry rich people like us get exploited by the middle classes, but they’ve a soft spot for royalty! Imagine the headlines! QUEEN’S COUSIN IN LIBERAL POVERTY TRAP! My uncle owns all the British newspapas. He and I will make the govament investigate this school aw fawce it to resign.”
“Bosh!” says a weary voice from nearby, probably the voice of the New Statesman reader, and elsewhere someone giggles. “Alright!” says Hjordis querulously, “My uncle only owns nialy half the British newspapas, but half is enough!”
She flings the empty mug toward The Fortress entrance and faces her gang.
“At ease!” she tells Linda. Linda thankfully lowers her hands, sits on the grass and rubs her legs. Hjordis strolls about muttering in a discontented tone only heard by those in the clearing: “We aren’t a propa gang, we haven’t an ally. We have everything else … strong leada … powaful enemy … a Fortress … an army …” (she stares at the twins until they salute her) “… a hopeless horde of frantic applicants …” (she grins sarcastically at Linda, who blushes guiltily) “… but no ally. Don’t worry. The ally will soon be hia.”
But Harry disappoints Hjordis. Harry answers the intensely whispered message, “My motha was yaw motha’s best friend!” with the same gloomy stare then turned-away face she gives everyone. Nor can Hjordis get her alone to explain things more fully. Harry is not given a bedroom in the attics, but one beside the headmistress’s bedroom on the second floor. In the shrubbery she at once climbs to a high branch of the tallest tree, shifting to the opposite side when Hjordis tries talking to her from underneath. For two weeks Hjordis, like Hitler after the loss of Stalingrad, is too ashamed to make a public announcement, but she is braver than Hitler. One Sunday she declares to the world, “I was wrong, I admit it! The daughta of my motha’s best friend has joined the enemy! The descendant of Teutonic warlords is now spying fo the liberals! I don’t know what you get up to in these bushes of yaws and I don’t care – it’s none of my business. But Big Sista Is Watching You! These beady little eyes in the sky don’t miss a thing that happens unda the leaves! Thank God my Fortress has a solid roof! And there’s room in it for everyone! Why not join me in it? I’ve a big tin of lovely biscuits.”
“Pipe down you silly sow!” says someone wearily.
“Dismiss!” Hjordis whispers quickly to the twins, then runs to The Fortress and shuts herself deep inside. She cannot weep when others see or hear her.
Linda is too young to hide grief. A week later, tear-stained and furious from yet another failed examination, she charges to the foot of the chestnut tree and yells up into it, “Come down, Harry Shetland! Come down ere to me you bloody bitch! You gotta be my friend! You gotta ply wiv me now now now! Efel says you gotta and I’m so lonely I want to kill meself oh!”
She bangs her brow seriously against the trunk until half-stunned and dizzy she falls to the ground. Reviving after a moment she bangs the back of her head on the ground in a half-hearted way, then sighs and dozes off for a while. When she at last opens her eyes she sees the face of Harry frowning gloomily down at her from very near. Most of Harry’s weight hangs from a hand grasping a branch among the leaves overhead, one leg kneels on a low bough, the other dangles, she sucks the thumb of her free hand. The pose suggests she is wondering whether to climb lower or higher and has been wondering for a long time.
“Will you play wiv me?” asks Linda, sitting up. After a watchful moment Harry puts both knees on the bough and creeps swiftly to where it dips near the ground before curving up into broad-leaved branches. She sits in the dip with her back very straight, ankles crossed and hands folded neatly on lap. Linda approaches and stands before her, hopeful and awed.
“Let us consida the case!” says Harry suddenly and clearly, “Of a certain paw very dirty little gel. She has been wawned repeatedly against dirt and against opening ha mouth about you and me, dearie. She has been shown what will happen to ha if she ignores these wawnings. Yet she she ignoas these wawnings. She gets dirty. She talks. Quick! What must be done to ha?”
“The troof is,” explains Linda, “I want to play kings and queens, though I don’t know much about them. You must know a lot, so you can tell me what to do. You’re taller than I am so you’d better be king. I don’t mind if you boss me a
bit.”
“No royals please!” says Harry sharply, “Royals a just not on. We have no time for interlopas be they German, Greek, black, brown on Irish. We do not speak for the lost cause of racial purity. We speak against boredom. Please direct yaw attention to this paw little horried getl who does not deserve ha great advantage. How will we punish ha? Smacking and nipping a the usual thing.”
“Alright,” says Linda in a resigned voice, “You be queen and I’ll be king. But I must sit beside you like we’re on a frone togever. Will you elp me up?”
“We said no royals!” Harry reminds her, “We said smacking and nipping a the usual thing. We a prepared to hia anything else you propose, but ponda well befoa you speak! Just now you a the dirtiest and smallest of us. Yaw voice is comically coarse and ill-bred, it brands you as an interlopa from the start. Perhaps you a the paw paw paw dirty dirty dirty little girl of whom we speak!”
“No I’m not!”
“Then it must be me,” says Harry, twisting round and hanging over the bough with her legs on the near side, arms and head on the other, the seat of her blue corduroy overalls level with Linda’s face.
“Begin!” she commands in a muffled voice. But Linda’s mind has not been shaped by dread of punishment. The idea of hurting someone puzzles and repels her.
“I can’t!” she complains, and “Wy should I?”
“This very horrid little gel has been expecting it fo weeks and weeks and weeks,” Harry explains, “And it gets worse the longa she waits. She’ll be so glad and grateful when you stop. And then you may kiss ha and say You and me ur still pals dearie ur we no? Ur we no?”
“That’s stupid!” says Linda.
Harry twists round and up then creeps swiftly along the bough toward the tree trunk.
“Oh don’t go awy!” cries Linda in alarm, trotting beside her, “Honest, I meant no arm!”
“Thank you fo a lovely aftanoon,” says Harry coldly, gripping a higher branch, giving a little leap and disappearing quick as a cat into the upper foliage. Linda is left crying, “Come back, please come back! I didn’t mean to annoy you!”
Linda’s cries are not answered. She stands thinking for a while, then abruptly turns and trots quickly through the bushes to the clearing. The ramshackle conical tower of The Fortress vibrates with a muffled voice declaring that A Hard Rain’s Going To Fall. The only other life is some small birds pecking the remains of Linda’s lunch from the grass. She goes to the tree where applicants are allowed to stand, lifts up a half brick and bangs it on a sheet of rusty iron hung by a rope from a branch. The noise is loud. She drops the brick and waits. At last a twin emerges. She is wearing jeans and a bush shirt and smoking a slender brown cigarette. She strolls around the clearing until, seemingly by accident, she stops in front of Linda. After looking at her thoughtfully from the shoes up to the bruise on her brow the twin blows a cloud of smoke over Linda’s head and says, “Well?”
“I got infomytion,” says Linda in a small voice.
“About?
“Enemy.”
“Which?”
“One in tree.”
“Don’t move,” says the twin, and returns quickly to The Fortress. The noise of the record stops, then both twins emerge followed by Hjordis.
Pupils who show interest in make-up are given lessons in it by the headmistress and usually learn to subtly accentuate their most pleasing features. Hjordis deliberately uses white face powder, scarlet lipstick, dark eye-shadow and eyebrow pencil to model herself on the Wicked Queen in Walt Disney’s Snow White. She wears a black dress and black opera cloak lined with scarlet silk which flutters behind her as she goes straight to Linda and says, “What have you discovad?”
Linda tells her. Hjordis gets her to repeat it slowly, then questions her closely about tones of voice and exact positions, then says, “You a moa cleva than I thought, Linda. The time is nia when I believe you may be fit to join us.”
“Oh!” whispers Linda.
“Don’t get happy too quickly!” Hjordis warns her, “I have one moa test fo you. Pass that and you could be inside The Fortress befoa teatime with me yaw friend fo life. If you fail I don’t want to see you again. Eva. You will be entie-aly friendless hia.”
“Wot’s the test Yordis?”
She is told and trembles with fear and anxiety. It is a terrible test, but the reward for passing, the punishment for failing, is overwhelming.
She returns apparently alone to the chestnut tree and shouts up forlornly, “Arry I’m very sorry I didn’t do wot you said! Please come down! Please ply wiv me please! I’ll do exactly wot you tell me to do!”
She shouts this at intervals for a very long time, standing near the dip in the long low bough. After five minutes she would gladly stop but is now aware of Hjordis behind a nearby holly bush. Linda becomes so conscious of Hjordis that she is suddenly surprised to see Harry sitting upright on the bough before her, ankles crossed and hands folded as if she had never left it.
“What is wrong with this little gel?” asks Harry almost kindly, frowning at Linda in a puzzled way. Linda’s mouth is opening and shutting, trying to tell Harry noiselessly to go back up the tree. Hjordis walks over to them saying pleasantly, “Hello Harry Shetland! I hia my friend Linda failed to oblige you. May I help?”
Harry wriggles up to kneel on the bough, but a twin is sitting astride it between her and the trunk, and another twin approaching from behind. Linda gives a little wail and runs away.
Linda’s terror does not stupefy but makes her sensible. She pushes as fast and straight as possible through a rhododendron clump, nearly tumbles down a steep slope to the sunken garden, charges across three flowerbeds, up a flight of stone steps, through the rose arbour and across the lawn. As she passes two older girls in bikinis and dark glasses sunbathing on a blanket, she gasps, “Efel! Where’s Efel?”
“Boozing in her private apartment I guess,” says the Texan millionairess. Linda toils up a slope to the terrace, runs across it to an open french window, charges through the music room (where Clara, a fine pianist were she not tone deaf, struggles with Rachmaninov) and into the hall. Only then does she start shouting.
The headmistress is enjoying a glass of sherry and a glance through Encounter when she notices the shouts. They make no sense until she goes to the head of the stairs, hears “Efelefelefel!” and sees a small sturdy figure striving up toward her.
“Well Linda?” she asks. Linda halts and gasps, “Yordis Arry conker stop em Efel! Stop em!”
“Speak moa slowly.”
“Arry asked I smack er I wouldn’t Yordis is!”
The headmistress cannot move without dignity but can walk faster than many people run. She walks straight to the chestnut tree by the exact route Linda took from it, even striding over the flowerbeds. She is slowed by her height when pushing through the rhododendrons, so Linda catches up. They hear a wild wailing with several words in it but at first only please is distinct, please repeated very often. Arriving beside the tree they do not see exactly what they expect, though nearby the twins cling together as if afraid of something.
Harry lies flat on her front on the ground, head pillowed on arm and turned sideways so they can see her calm, absentminded, no longer frowning face. Hjordis squats beside her, whacking at her bottom with wild windmill flailing of the arms and crying frantically, “Please beg fo mercy! Please beg fo mercy! Aw just ask! Oh please, please, please ask me to stop doing this!”
“I ask you to stop doing it Hjordis,” says the headmistress firmly, “Stand up. Stand up and take my hand quick quick quick! You too Harriet. Help Harriet up, Linda. Good. Take my hand, Harriet. Linda, take Harriet’s otha hand and don’t let go. Twin one, hold Hjordis’s otha hand. Twin two, hold Linda’s other hand. Now we must all hold tight to each otha and not let go fo I am taking you all to a wondaful place you have neva seen befoa. Follow me!” The headmistress is perfectly happy. Such moments (she knows) bring out the best in her. Childish souls have ground each other into
chaos and now she will strike a nobler order into them. Hjordis, mewing at intervals, (that is how she sobs) clutches her hand almost gratefully. Harry is relaxed, blank-faced and docile, Linda and the twins awed and excited. Looking like a goose at the head of a flight formation the headmistress leads them from the shrubbery by the easiest way, making a slight detour to pass the sunbathers on the lawn. She likes to feel she can still astonish older pupils. As they approach the terrace Linda says, “I’m sorry I told Yordis wot you said to me, Harry.”
“No need for sorrow!” says Harry, absentmindedly quoting her mother’s words to a guest who dropped a delicate porcelain cup he had been asked to admire, “You have taught me a lesson I will rememba till my dying day. I am almost grateful to you.”
Linda gasps. The headmistress squeezes Harry’s hand and says, “That is the longest speech I have eva heard you make, Harriet, and a very good speech it is. Though a bit hard on paw old Linda. You and Linda don’t know it yet but yaw going to be great friends one day.”
Judy looks down at Linda with curiosity, Linda looks apprehensively up at Harry.
The headmistress leads them into the hall, up the broad stairs to the landing of her own apartments, round the stairwell past the drawing room and dining room, then stops beside a door they have not seen open before. She says, “Let go hands everyone and listen carefully, especially you, Hjordis. The Fortress is a thing of the past. Tomorrow Hjordis will take ha possessions from it and bring them hia, and in the evening we will set fia to it, perhaps letting off a few squibs and rockets at the same time. Yaw new gang headquartas, Hjordis (I speak as one leada to anotha), lie behind this daw. It is a very special place. No child has been in it since I was a child, no grown-up but myself and a cleaning-woman has seen it since my parents died. Am I correct, Hjordis, in thinking Linda and Harriet are membas of yaw gang?” She stares hard at Hjordis who at last realizes she is dealing with an intellect greater than her own and murmurs, “Yes Ethel.”
Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012 Page 31