Bilgewater

by Jane Gardam

  “What was terrible?”

  “That war.”

  “Which war?”

  “Well—the Last War. The—zeppelin war.”

  “I can remember,” says a very feeble voice in the corner if it is a warm evening—he comes on chosen evenings, Old Price, like Masefield’s blackbird—“I can remember the zeps. All the boys ran out along the cliff tops cheering. In their pyjamas.”

  “Ah,” says Puffy Coleman, lowering his teeth.

  “Ah,” says Uncle Pen HB. Then, “It wasn’t that war.”

  “Yes it was. What d’you think it was? The Napoleonic War?”

  “Scarborough was bombarded in the Napoleonic War,” whispers Old Price.

  “Now then Price, you weren’t in the Napoleonic War,” says Pen.

  “No. No. I onIy said—uff, uff, uff—”

  Father gazes at the uplifted wine. The Primavera watches through her wicked eyes.

  “D’you think Price was in the Napoleonic War, William?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Uff, uff, uff—”

  “Ha, ha, ha, ha,” says father, bewildered, looking round sweetly, kindly, at one and all, not at all sure, for he is a good bit younger than the others, what might or might not be so.

  They reflect.

  Oh it’s wild stuff.

  CHAPTER 3

  What all this rigmarole is meant to lead up to is the fact that although I had spent, quaintly and princess-like, so much of my life among people years and years older than myself and knew something about the peculiarities of grown-ups, I knew absolutely nothing about myself and others of my age and this is what made the first revelations when they came so unnerving.

  There were two of these in particular and they were several years apart, nor dramatic or exciting to anybody else but a swarm of troubles and misconceptions and shynesses and agonies sprang out of them.

  Both of them were to do with the boy Terrapin.

  The first was when I was thirteen and I was sitting in my bedroom towards the end of summer quite late one evening. It was still light—one of the occasional northern summer nights when it doesn’t ever get completely dark at all and you remember that Norway is only a few hundred miles away, nearer than Cornwall. It was a night as warm as Cornwall, light, shadowy, soft, not heavy or thundery; a basking, sleepy, scented night that makes you sigh and slowly blink and gaze.

  My bedroom window is a big one, low, with a sash, and I had been lying on my stomach doing my homework.

  I had finished this now and by lying with my elbows supporting my hands which were under my chin my nose rested on the bottom of the sill. Thus above the sill were only my great glasses and my luminous and disgusting orange hair.

  I am very long-sighted. I took my glasses off and gazed across the evening. There stood our garden first, pretty as a fire-screen, a lovely hazy embroidered mixture of hollyhocks, tobacco plants and roses all tangled up together against an old brick wall. Beyond the garden was the kitchen garden of the House with the Fives Court at the end of it, surrounded by tall trees, and then to my eyes more clear than all the rest was the distant high line of moors drawn with a sharp point across a great gentle sky. There were late sounds from the Fives Court, plonk, ker-plonk, thud, bump, and yells of boys’ voices. Somewhere about I could hear a boy practising on a flute. One, two, three notes, pause. Yell, ker-plonk, “Oh blast you Jenks.” One-two-three-four pause. Twitter of birds. The evening breeze. Ker-plonk. Onetwothreefour (go on, well done) fivesix, came the notes, then down again. Pause—then the whole phrase, effortless this time, complete. Mozart. Wonderful.

  I was utterly content with the content of being in the right place at the right time. I, Marigold Green, a figure properly set in a picture, an equation on a page, a note in a bit of music, non-transposable, irreplaceable. Ugly, quaint and square lay I, happy and at home where I belonged. Sleepily and happily I watched the boy with the flute—it was nice ordinary Boakes—walk mazily through the lettuces, beneath me across the lawn.

  “BILGEWATER.”

  I jumped so my chin cracked down on the window ledge. I swivelled my eyes, grabbed my glasses and stuck them on to my face.

  “FILTHY BILGEWATER.”

  I turned my face and saw the boy Terrapin hanging out of a window. He was twelve then, a new boy, but he had made himself felt from the moment he had arrived last September. Even though he was quite close—the dormitory sticking out at right-angles from the Private Side and looking down at our garden too—I couldn’t mistake him. He had a voice, prematurely breaking, like a rookery.

  “BILGEWATER! FILTHY BILGEWATER! WATCHING US UNDRESSING!” Then I noticed that there were other boys behind him inside the open windows, springing about getting ready for bed. Terrapin I saw had no clothes on his top half and his bottom half was hidden by the window. Behind him I could see a leaping figure now and then, very white and dazzling, swinging pairs of pyjama trousers round its head.

  “BILGEWATER’S GOT A FILTHY MIND,” sang Terrapin.

  A hand came out of a window over his head, got down into his hair and jerked him back out of sight and the dormitory monitor looked out—Jack Rose, a year older than me—looked out quickly, rather embarrassedly, saw me, gave me a curt nod and vanished.

  Jack Rose was the nicest boy in the school. There’s always one, says Paula. Silver spoon boys, she calls them—good-looking, good at games, good at work, and charming. Intending to be a doctor. They’re always going to be doctors, Paula says. Once when he had seen me coming along home from school he had tweaked my hair as if it wasn’t vile and said “Hello Marigold,” (not Bilgewater) and I had dropped my satchel with the ecstasy of it all. A great huge heap of homework I’d been carrying had gone shooting over the pavement and he had helped pick it up and walked back home with me. He had pulled a funny face but not derisive at the door of the Private Side and winked. I cared more for Jack Rose’s good opinion than for rubies and the sound of trumpets.

  And now he believed—what did he believe? He believed I was—Whatever did he think? He thought I was a—(I began to blush scarlet)—a Peeping Tom! With the full horror of it I began to sink down on to the floor two feet beneath the sill and to press my face into the linoleum, rolling my cheeks against it, then into the smooth surface of my homework book. Perhaps I am, I thought. Perhaps I am a Peeping Tom. I began to weep. I asked to die.

  I decided that if ever I have a daughter like me which heaven forbid, I shall be available on an occasion like this. I shan’t be taking Private Coaching like father or out playing wild and passionate tennis like Paula. I shall be there.

  “Darling—whatever’s the matter? Whyever are you crying?”

  “Oh, oh, he said I was a Peeping Tom.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Marigold. Who said you were a Peeping Tom? What rubbish!” and my sweet mother’s head shoots from the window. Glare, glare of her eyes towards the dormitories. “You boys be quiet and go to bed at once.” Down comes the window.

  “Marigold darling, don’t cry. Don’t be silly. Who said—?”

  “Terrapin said.”

  “Terrapin! You goose, you goose, you beautiful goose! (My what a wallow!) Will you please sit up and blow your nose and tell me whenever anybody listened to Terrapin?”

  “Never.” (Gulp. Sob.)

  “Well then—”

  “He said—”

  “As if anyone would ever peep at Terrapin! At Terrapin!”

  Watery smile.

  “They’d turn to stone. Like the Gorgon’s head.”

  (Giggle. Laugh.)

  Incident over. Terrapin ever after called the Gorgon’s head and my mother and I laughing about it as the years roll by. “D’you remember that night when Terrapin called you a Peeping Tom?”

  That’s what will happen to my daughter, I thought. I’ll see to that. Down on the floor I lay
upon my silky exercise book for hours. After the first hour I thought, “I shall continue to lie here for ever. I shall lie here all night and I may die. No one will come.” I wetted the exercise book with tears. I felt the tears trickle down my nose side and on to the page and the ink spread, turning my ugly writing to a fuzz.

  “I will lie here till morning.”

  But after what seemed to be the best part of the night, in a daze I gave the most colossal sigh and heaved myself up and stretched up to shut the window. The Boys’ Dormitory windows were still wide open but dark. The Fives Court was silent. In the glimmering shadowy night I heard steps below me and saw Paula and father coming slowly through the garden, Paula still in tennis clothes white among the flowers now faded into white as well. Father’s voice was quiet and unperturbed and Paula laughed her loud nice laugh. They walked easily along together, Paula swinging her tennis racquet about, and passed out of sight. I felt a great yearning towards something or other, but slammed down my window as noisily as possible and went to bed in all my clothes.

  The second incident was on a lovely day, too—in the summer holidays with the House empty except for us, the big front door wide open and the sunshine pouring in. Paula was out in the raspberries. I’d asked her if she’d wanted help but she had wanted to be by herself. She sings when she’s by herself, very loud and rather off-key. She knows this bothers me, try as I may not to show it, so often she goes off by herself and has a good sing when there’s no one about.

  If you remember I mentioned the swimming pool and how precious it is to me in the school holidays and how father would suddenly appear beside it as I was swimming and look at me simultaneously with Aeschylus, and, Aeschylus winning would wander away.

  This day—the summer after the Peeping Tom affair—I had decked myself in a Japanese dressing gown I had found in one of Paula’s clothes boxes. Goodness knows where it had come from but it’s as well that it was there because I had been setting off down the main stairs in just my bathing dress and I am square and thick: but something made me turn back and have a burrow about. I took off my glasses and put a pair of queer old pink high-heeled shoes with pink feathers growing out of them on my bare feet, grabbed a towel and set off. In the hall sat Boakes, reading, outside father’s study door so I was much relieved I had. As I passed I suppose he saw the feathers go by and looked up and said, “Hello. You swimming? Want to go a walk?” I said “No thank you Boakes,” because it wouldn’t be very thrilling since he would have read all the time with the end of his nose grazing the paper, and I sailed ahead to the pool. I swam about for a while and soon there was father who must have got rid of Boakes after setting him to the gate. After a few more lengths I looked up again to see that as usual he had disappeared, but that Terrapin had taken his place.

  Terrapin was a local boy but a boarder. There are many fewer boarders at father’s school than day boys and there is a long list of boys waiting to be boarders. Nowadays boarders, says Paula, all seem to come from broken homes or are in need of care and protection or are characters of exceptional depravity. You have to be pretty deserving to get in as a boarder from a distance, so you can imagine what sort of a hard case you have to be to get in as a boarder when you live just a few miles away, as Terrapin did.

  Great rumours circulated about Terrapin—both parents were said to have put their heads in gas ovens, all his other relatives were alleged to have gone to Australia in a body rather than take him on. One somehow heard these things—half heard them from gossip among girls at the Comprehensive and what seeped into my ears around father’s House though never a breath did I hear from father or Paula who never even hinted to anyone that they knew the slightest thing about any boy’s private life.

  But there was clearly something spectacularly odd about Terrapin because not only was he a boarder and local but now it appeared we’d got him in the school holidays, too. There Terrapin stood in father’s place at the edge of the pool.

  “Hi Bilgewater,” he said.

  He had a sepulchral voice now, still hoarse and rough as when breaking. Terrapin’s voice was taking its time, breaking slowly, like the dawn on a wet day. But it was a voice of great power and when he spoke his eyes stuck out and cords appeared in his neck. He grunted at intervals between statements, and simultaneously with the grunts he picked his nose. He was a very short boy with fine straight white-yellow hair which came from a central point on his skull and hung down all around with his awful face peering out of the middle. He looked like a small albino ape.

  I said, “Get out,” and turned on my back. Then thinking of his sticking-out eyes scanning my big hips I turned on my front again.

  “Where’s your father?” He was looking at me and not at my face either, with a really frightful leer and I began to kick my feet up and down tremendously sending up a wake like a battleship. I rushed down the pool at a rate of knots.

  When I got to the steps at the other end he was there, squatting down at the top of them waiting for me to come up, so I spread myself out underneath him with my arms and elbows lying along the railing round the edge, and I stared into the distance.

  I heard grunt, grunt up above.

  He said, “You haven’t half got nice arms.”

  I kicked off and did a thundering sprint down the pool again with my head in the water all the way, only my legs moving, with water going up fit to raise rainbows. When I got to the far end I kept my back to him and hung on to the hand-rail. When eventually I got out he had gone.

  I felt sick. He was the most revolting thing I had ever seen. He was like Caliban—Paula had been reading me The Tempest on Thursdays—he was so foul I should have liked to get him by his beastly ankles and drag him into the water and trample him down. Every time he came up for air, all snotty, neck and eyes bulging, down I would bash him.

  “Bilge! Bilgewater! Help! Help!”

  “Down you go, you filthy boy.”

  “Help! Help! I can’t swim!”

  “Drown then!”

  But the terrible thing at the time—I think I was thirteen. I might just have been fourteen. Perhaps I was twelve—the unthinkable thing was that when he said that about my arms I felt pins and needles sweep over me in a wave, starting at the top of my skull, rushing downwards to the base of my spine.

  “You haven’t half got nice arms.”

  I examined my arms that night at bedtime, turning them outwards and inwards. I have a pale skin and a very precise blue vein going diagonally across the inside of the elbow. The hands at the ends of the arms are all right, too, with pointed effective fingers and clean nails. I like clean nails.

  Mrs. Gathering, the headmaster’s wife at father’s school, once came to tea when I was small. She brought her daughter—the one I rather got on with, the one who went away. Funnily enough I can’t remember the daughter on that occasion though I think there was something about her breaking one of my dolls—all I rememher is Mrs. Gathering getting hold of one of my hands by the tea trolley and saying “Beautiful hands.” She said it dramatically. I thought she was a bit of an ass. But I remembered the compliment—my first. This one of Terrapin’s was my second.

  My hands and my arms. My hands and my arms. I asked Paula next day if I could have a sleeveless dress and she said “Yes my duck. If ever I get the time.”

  There is one more unnerving incident. The mention of the headmaster’s wife has reminded me of it. It was the summer before last when I was fifteen and took place in the lavender walk which is a sort of love-nest in the local park much patronised by my form at the Comprehensive late in the evenings. They get in over the railings by the railway bridge with father’s school day-boys. It must be quite crowded in the lavender walk on moonless nights by the way they all talk about it before prayers next day while I am sitting gooping out of the window.

  I Iove the park. It is overgrown and often empty. On weekday summer mornings to wander there is like being
in a private garden. It has a high-hedged, mediaeval look. Round a corner might appear tall folk in wimples, veils and scarlet tights and shoes with curling toes, serenading each other with lutes. Down a rose garden you might glimpse a turret with a trumpeter and a fleecy cloud. I was wandering there drowsily one morning after O levels when we had time off and there was no Prep. and there was no one about to talk to at home. The smell of the lavender in the hot morning sun was enough to turn heads much more sensible than mine.

  And Mrs. Gathering came suddenly humping out of a lavender bush.

  She said, “Marigold! Marigold!” and her big soft eyes mooned down.

  “Marigold!” she said. I didn’t recognise her at first—what with the house in France and in Wiltshire and a solitary nature she was a woman seldom seen about St. Wilfrid’s. She was given to sofas and thinking. Some people said that she suffered from melancholia, others from her husband, father’s Headmaster, who is a pewsy man, little and plump, like a dynamo in a dog-collar, a great writer of lists, a man of committees. He never does any actual teaching now except for a lesson or two of Theology which he never calls Scripture or R.E. or anything like that. He distributes the Theology to a very favoured few, the ones who are chosen by him for his old Oxford College. It is said that he makes a special trip to Oxford each Autumn, the season of UCCA and mellow fruitfulness. “All my boys,” he says, “are sure of a Place and most of an Award.” This is rubbish as father and the Thursday Club often remark—because it is years now since the school has had a scholarship to Oxbridge and even Places are getting rather few and far between. The school has been on the down with Dr. Gathering. “I make a point of still knowing a lot of people,” he says, handing all his work over to father and making for his first class carriage and the best train south. His visits co-incide with his daughter’s half terms at Cheltenham. He goes on to her after Oxford—it is astonishing how she is kept out of sight—and then proceeds to his London Club.