Bilgewater

by Jane Gardam

  ALSO BY

  JANE GARDAM

  FICTION

  A Long Way From Verona

  The Summer After the Funeral

  Bilgewater

  Black Faces, White Faces

  God on the Rocks

  The Sidmouth Letters

  The Pangs of Love and Other Stories

  Crusoe’s Daughter

  Showing the Flag

  The Queen of the Tambourine

  Going into a Dark House

  Faith Fox

  Missing the Midnight

  The Flight of the Maidens

  Old Filth

  The People on Privilege Hill

  The Man in the Wooden Hat

  Last Friends

  The Stories

  FOR CHILDREN

  Bridget and William

  The Hollow Land

  A Fair Few Days

  NONFICTION

  The Iron Coast

  ILLUSTRATED

  The Green Man

  Europa Editions

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  New York NY 10001

  info@europaeditions.com

  www.europaeditions.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 1976 by Jane Gardam

  First publication 2016 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  ISBN 9781609453381

  Jane Gardam

  BILGEWATER

  for

  WP + VA x 47

  1918-1965

  “Youth is a blunder.”

  —DISRAELI

  “Now—

  counter to the previous syllogism:

  tricky one, follow me carefully, it

  may prove a comfort?”

  —TOM STOPPARD

  (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead)

  PROLOGUE

  The interview seemed over. The Principal of the college sat looking at the candidate. The Principal’s back was to the light and her stout, short outline was solid against the window, softened only by the fuzz of her ageing but rather pretty hair. Outside the bleak and brutal Cambridge afternoon—December and raining.

  The candidate sat opposite wondering what to do. The chair had a soft seat but wooden arms. She crossed her legs first one way and then the other—then wondered about crossing her legs at all. She wondered whether to get up. There was a cigarette box beside her. She wondered whether she would be offered a cigarette. There was a decanter of sherry on the bookcase. It had a neglected air.

  This was the third interview of the day. The first had been as she had expected—carping, snappish, harsh, watchful—unfriendly even before you had your hand off the door handle. Seeing how much you could take. Typical Cambridge. A sign of the times. An hour later and then the second interview—five of them this time behind a table—four women, one man, all in old clothes. That had been a long one. Polite though. Not so bad. “Is there anything that you would like to ask us?”

  (“Yes please, why I’m here. Whether I really want to come even if you invite me. What you’re all like. Have you ever run mad for love? Considered suicide? Cried in the cinema? Clung to somebody in a bed?”)

  “No thank you. I think Miss Blenkinsop-Briggs has already answered my questions in the interview this morning.” They move their pens about, purse their lips, turn to one another from the waist, put together the tips of their fingers. I look alert. I sit upright. I survey them coolly but not without respect. I might get in on this one. But don’t think it is a good sign when they’re nice to you, said old Miss Bex.

  And now, here we are. The third interview. Meeting the Principal. An interview with the Principal means I’m in for a Scholarship. How ridiculous!

  I can’t see her face against the light. She’s got a brooding shape.

  She is a mass. Beneath the fuzz a mass. A massive intelligence clicking and ticking away—observing, assessing, sifting, pigeonholing. Not a feeling, not an emotion, not a dizzy thought. A formidable woman.

  She’s getting up. It has been delightful. She hopes that we may meet again. (Does that mean I’m in?) What a long way I have come for the interview. The far far north. She hopes that I was comfortable last night.

  We shake hands in quite a northern way. Then she puts on a coat—very nice coat, too. Fur. Nice fur. Something human then about her somewhere. She walks with me to the door and down the stairs and we pause again on the college steps.

  There is a cold white mist swirling about, rising from the river. The trees lean, swinging long, black ropes at the water. A courtyard, frosty, of lovely proportions. A fountain, a gateway. In the windows round the courtyard the lights are coming on one by one. But it’s damp, old, cold, cold, cold. Cold as home.

  Shall I come here?

  Would I like it after all?

  CHAPTER 1

  My mother died when I was born which makes me sound princess-like and rather quaint. From the beginning people have said that I am old-fashioned. In Yorkshire to be old-fashioned means to be fashioned-old, not necessarily to be out of date, but I think that I am probably both. For it is rather out of date, even though I will be eighteen this February, to have had a mother who died when one was born and it is to be fashioned-old to have the misfortune to be and look like me.

  I emerged into this cold house in this cold school in this cold seaside town where you can scarcely even get the telly for the height of the hills behind—I emerged into this great sea of boys and masters at my father’s school (St. Wilfrid’s) an orange-haired, short-sighted, frog-bodied ancient, a square and solemn baby, a stolid, blinking, slithery-pupilled (it was before they got the glasses which straightened the left eye out) two-year-old, a glooming ten-year-old hanging about the school cloisters (“Hi Bilgie, where’s your broomstick?”) and a strange, thick-set, hopeless adolescent, friendless and given to taking long idle walks by the sea.

  My father—a Housemaster—is known to the boys as Bill. My name is Marigold, but to one and all because my father is very memorable and eccentric and had been around at the school for a very long time before I was born—was only Bill’s Daughter. Hence Bilgewater. Oh hilarity, hilarity! Bilgewater Green.

  I will admit freely that I very much like the name Marigold. Marigold Daisy Green is my true and christened name and I think it is beautiful. Daisy was my mother’s name and also comes into Chaucer. Daisy, the day’s-eye, the eye of day (The Legend of Good Women, Prologue 1.44), as my dear Uncle Edmund Hastings-Benson now and then reminds me (he teaches English as well as Maths). It seems to me a great bitterness that anyone with a name so beautiful as Marigold Day’s-eye Green should be landed with Bilgewater instead however appropriate this may be. “In the end,” says somebody, “almost everything is appropriate”, and indeed the boys over the years have had a peculiar flair for hitting on the right word for a nick-name.

  Nick-name. Old Nick’s name. Bilgewater.

  Bilgewater Green.

  My father and I live alone in his House except for about forty boys who live on the Other Side through a green door and along a corridor with Paula Rigg the matron. Our side—father’s and mine—is called the Private Side and we share it only with a cat or two and Mrs. Thing who comes in and does for us. Mrs. Thing changes from time to time and the cats vary as cats do and the boys arrive and pass by and depart like waves in me sea, but father and I and Paula are constant. Paula has been matron on the Other Side far as long as I
can remember.

  I am at the local Comprehensive. I don’t eat at home at all in term-time with my father as he takes Boys’ Breakfast and I have a hunk and a gulp at the kitchen table before I take myself off along the promenade to school, eat lunch there and have a tray of supper in my room prepared by Mrs. Thing if she remembers or if I’m lucky by Paula while father takes Boys’ Supper in Hall. But even if father and I don’t eat together and I am out of the House for most of the day and he has Prep. and Private Coaching for part of most evenings we spend most of the rest of our days together and usually in utter silence.

  For if I am Bilgewater the Hideous, quaint and barmy, my father is certainly William the Silent. Except when he is teaching he is utterly quiet. Even when he is teaching he never, so I’m told, has to raise his voice. He is amazed to hear of new masters with sweaters and fizzy hair cuts who smoke in class and have trouble keeping discipline. He shakes his head over this. He scarcely speaks at all. He moves so quietly about the House that you never know which room he’s in. You will walk into his study and he’ll just be standing there, perhaps looking down at the chess board, or up at the Botticelli Head of Spring above the fireplace or sitting with a cat on his knee looking out at the garden. He never rustles, coughs or hums. He never snuffles (thank goodness) and he never, ever, calls out or demands anything. If Paula comes in and puts a cup of tea down beside him he looks up at her and smiles as if that is what he has most yearned for: yet he would never ask. His peacefulness is everywhere he goes—in the House and out of it. He has not the faintest idea that I am ugly and we are very happy together.

  The Greens of course are thought to be odd and father’s silence and my ugliness and the lack of what is called a social life is much remarked upon. In the holidays my father likes a school empty of boys and so we have hardly ever gone away. At my school I make no friends and have always sat and set off home again alone. I am hopeless at games and have joined no clubs. All the other girls who live in streets or estates around the town have always seemed to be in ready-made groups and gangs, and from the beginning, because of my eyes, I have always had to sit in the front of the form-room just below the mistress’s desk, which is not popular territory. I have for years stayed in at Breaks, too—we are allowed: it is Free Expression—because for ages I didn’t seem able to pass the time out of doors in the playground. Later on, when I could read it was easier, but it is not often warm enough on this part of the Yorkshire coast to read for long out of doors.

  There was a girl once I got on with—the Headmaster’s daughter at father’s school. She was around for a bit when I was very little—a funny girl. But she went off to boarding school and the Headmaster has a house in France and a mother in Wiltshire. They get out of the North as fast as they can in the holidays. I’ve not seen her for years.

  Let me describe how it is with me and father.

  I drift in from school.

  “Hullo father.”

  “Ah.”

  I put down my homework and walk about his study for a while. I find myself beside the fireside stool where the chess is out. I stand and regard the chessmen. After a while I move something and time passes. Boys clatter by outside. My father sits—working or reading. Or sits.

  “I’ve moved a bishop.”

  “You’ve moved a bishop?”

  Time passes.

  My father comes across and regards the board from the opposite side. He says, “Ah.”

  We stand.

  Then he sits down still looking at the board. Then I sit down still looking at the board. At last he says. “So you’ve moved a bishop?”

  Then spring, pounce, he moves a pawn and we sit.

  After a while I say, “Oh hell.”

  “Ha.”

  “That’s it then.”

  “Hum.”

  “Isn’t it? It’s check? It’s—”

  “Well—”

  “It’s mate.”

  “No. No. Think, Marigold.”

  Again silence. There is at length the clanging jamboree of the Prep. bell or the supper bell, or a boy arrives with an O level test paper or old Hastings-Benson puts his huge red face around the door and away my father goes.

  I believe that father’s friends are considered almost as odd as we are and Hastings-Benson (HB = Pencil, dimin. Pen. “In the end all things are appropriate,” ibid.) perhaps the oddest. He is certainly the nicest.

  He is old—generations older than father—and a Captain in the army in some War or other father was too young for. He won a lot of medals there and then went to Cambridge and became a Senior Wrangler. He is thus—or was—more brilliant even than my father who would never wrangle with anyone. He is a very big man even now and must have been a giant before he went to the trenches years and years ago and got gassed. It is the gas and the trenches, Paula says, that did for him and has resulted in his high shoulders and visits to The Lobster Inn every night along the sea-front these fifty years or so. “You’re so lucky,” visitors say, visiting from the major public schools. “He’s brilliant. Could have gone anywhere.” And in spit of The Lobster Inn his results are still pretty good and everyone’s so fond of him that it would be a great pity if he did go anywhere. Mind you at nearly eighty he’s not likely to go anywhere much now.

  His great friend is Puffy Coleman (History) who always stands sideways in the School Photograph because his teeth drop out. The Headmaster said at the last one, “Let’s see, Coleman—how many School Photographs is this for you?”

  “Thirty, Headmaster. Perhaps thirty-one.”

  “Then what about a full face this year? Quite solemn, you know. No need to smile.”

  But Mr. Coleman after a lot of pondering and swinging about in his gown which is green as grass and has buttercups and the eyes of day sprouting out of the seams and dates from the time of St. Wilfrid the Founder—Mr. Coleman swings about, rotates his jaw a bit as is his wont before utterance and says, “No, Headmaster. Not this year. I think not,” and does his usual click-toes left-turn, appearing as usual peering deeply into Hastings-Benson’s right ear with his nose almost touching the tassel. The tassel that is to say of Hastings-Benson’s mortar-board because my father’s school is immensely out of date, dresses to kill and stands on ceremony and Hastings-Benson stands higher on ceremony than most. He has stood on cerernony for so long that he has come to symbolise the school in the four corners of the earth—perhaps rather further in these days now that the Empire is over and the Commonwealth a shadow—but still he is remembered. On various nostalgic occasions when Old Boys are gathered together they will talk of their schooldays and say, “Remember old Hastings-Benson?” And they will all start to roar and laugh.

  It seems to me that Uncle Edmund Hastings-Benson has served his country well if someone, twenty, thirty years on can say, “D’you remember him?” and roar and laugh. Such a man is an immortal, a god come down. In fact let me state boldly that if I had to choose between Hastings-Benson and a god come down, full ankle deep in lilies of the vale (Keats. Paula) it would be Hastings-Benson for me every time. I love him. We understand each other. He is far from dead yet.

  I will tell you why they laugh at him: he is always falling in love. My mother was his first and everyone apparently said then, no wonder for she was such a beauty. “That wonderful hair. And really—married to poor old Green!” In fact however I don’t believe my mother loved Uncle Edmund at all—or just as everybody does. As I do—for I have been told that my mother adored my father, poor and old though he may seem, and my father for all these seventeen years has never looked at another woman. He keeps her photograph by his bed where it has turned the colour of white coffee and very soft and faded. You can’t see much of her really but the hat which is floppy with a rose in it, a string of amber beads, and a lovely gentle chin not in the least like mine.

  My mother fairly set Uncle HB off and all my life I have known that we have
to be kind to him because he’s sad. Love has always made him sad. It’s odd he has kept at it so assiduosly when you come to think of it. On and on he goes however—first it’s the girl in the chemist in the town, then it’s the new woman on school dinners, then it’s the terrible ’cellist they got in for the school orchestra, then it’s the Pro they took in for the school Christmas production of Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. That one was a tremendous do—just last year—and I was in at every phase of it because Mrs. Bellchamber—the actress in question—stayed in our House and Uncle Edmund was round morning, noon and night, leaving his classes, forgetting the Scholarship Sixth, abandoning the second eleven and you could hear the noise from his Silent Study right over on to Scarborough promenade. The reason being that he was nowhere near it being over in the school theatre ostensibly supervising the lighting for the first night, which is why the whole stage, auditorium and half the High Street was plunged into darkness and a quiet, able boy called Boakes who really knows something about lighting was flung to the floor from a ladder with such a charge of electricity through him that he will be safe from rheumatism to the second and third generation if such, and no thanks to Uncle Edmund, he manages to produce.

  When this actress left, Uncle Edmund’s plight was pitiable. He pinned people down, he pressed them against walls to talk about it. Paula would put her head round father’s study door when we were deep in chess and cry, “Run—he’s coming!” and my father would be out of the back door and hiding in the Fives Court. Once when Uncle HB was very desperate he went off to see Puffy Coleman—the one who stands sideways—and when he found the door locked, the front door and the back door, too, he went round to Mr. Coleman’s back shed—I suppose he guessed Mr. Coleman had seen him coming and had gone up to bed and down under the blankets though it was mid-afternoon and a warm Spring. He took a ladder out of Mr. Coleman’s shed and put it up against the back wall of Mr. Coleman’s house. Mr. Coleman said that it was most unpleasant and eerie to hear the clump clump of the ladder getting into position and the scraping on the wall, and the two spikes of ladder appear between his bedroom curtains and the bounce and creak of Uncle Edmund Hastings-Benson’s mounting feet. Deeper down beneath the sheets he went as Uncle E. HB’s great big red face and huge hook nose and kind little blue eyes rose like the dawn behind the pane and tap tap tap—“I say, Coleman. Will you let me in? I’m afraid I really must talk to you. It’s about Mrs. Bellchamber.”