Bilgewater

by Jane Gardam

  “Oh go on,” I said. “she’s clever. She knows a lot.”

  “She’d have to,” said Paula. “I wonder what Hamlet and Hardy would have thought of her.”

  I had never heard Paula unkind like this. She’s usually so unconcerned about looks.

  The next Monday when I met Miss Bex in a corridor she gave me a wide emphatic smile showing both rows of teeth and the little dampness that collects at each end of her mouth and causes a slight noise as she talks like a singing tap—a tap whose washer isn’t quite gone but will not last much longer. Remembering Paula’s unattractive attitude however, which I had found shocking, it being so very unusual, I didn’t give her the basilisk lens contortion I reserve for our chance encounters.

  “There you are,” said Bex, “You’ll be joining us this afternoon?”

  “Will I?” I said, “What exactly—?”

  “My Wordsworth and my Hamlet class.”

  “Am I in it?”

  “Well of course my dear. Didn’t your father tell you?”

  “He must have forgonen.”

  “Such a dear,” she said. She could hardly be meaning me so presumably it was father. “We don’t see each other all that much,” I said, and then could have kicked myself seeing a wave of pity come all over her face. “So brave,” she said, “So busy.”

  Now when I had begun to think carefully about doing extra English for the General Paper I had realised that I was glad. O level English of course is absolute rubbish—computer fodder. Kiddiwinks’ crosswords—but I had enjoyed the actual books. There had been some Wordsworth. I liked him. There was a good, solemn purpose about him and I liked the way he used to pace about the Lake District making up poems with Dorothy running behind and then kindly writing them all out. The distaste that Wordsworth seemed to have had for the act of writing made me feel close to him. And I liked the way the Wordsworths wrapped themselves up in blankets out on me fells and just lay there, getting things straight as the rain poured down. And that great big unhappy nose.

  And Wordsworth’s passion at the glory of the lakes, shaking and shining under the rolling sky. I wondered if Wordsworth had long sight. Dorothy it seemed to me probably had short sight. Precise. I loved Dorothy. Such an awful cook. I sat thinking about her and her brother throughout the whole of the first lesson with Miss Bex whilst the others took careful notes. Only at the end of the lesson did I decide that there must be something more to be discovered than the structure of the Wordsworths’ optic nerves.

  I made a conscious decision—Miss Bex I realised was speaking to me and I had just been gazing back—that I would set about this English business seriously. I would begin to work really hard—since the first bell was going—at her Hamlet class, which was coming next. I said “Thank you Miss Bex,” in answer to whatever she had been saying to me and also because she was looking rather exhausted and does try so, and the damp bits round her mouth were beginning to show again. “Poor Bex,” I thought. “I’m going to please her. I’m going to change. I’ll surprise them,” and looking round I rather wished there were someone I could tell. I looked all round everyone and felt rather sad, for there were all the same old lot I’d gone up the school with, all indoctrinated with the idea that Marigold Bilgewater Green was ghastly, all in a huddle together.

  For the very first time in my life I wished hard—I think perhaps I may have prayed—for a friend. I forgot Paula’s Second Law. Her First Law is BEWARE OF SELF PITY but her second law runs it very close: PRAY WITH CARE. The frightening thing about prayers, she says, is that they are usually answered.

  Well, off we went—there were twelve of us—into the Hamlet class. We were what was called Set B and few of us had done more than read bits out of Hamlet before. Not one of us had seen it except for a very terrible film that had been brought to the school in a bag and showed Hamlet looking pretty ancient in a gold wig wailing about some battlements in clouds of what looked like steam.

  Before this lesson Bex had had them all reading round the class, but it was so dreadful that now she had us up in the front like twelve-year-olds acting it from our books. As usual there were not enough books to go round so Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were sharing and chucking the book over to the Queen when needed. Polonius was bobbing about reading over the shoulder of the First Player and I remember that a very weird girl called Penelope Dabbs was dragging herself, stomach downwards, across the floor, being Hamlet, and gazing with great intensity at the King to see if he was going to have a funny turn. Her eyes stuck out on stalks as she directed them at the King (played by Bex) and she also held the book high in the air off the floor. As chief chap she at least had been allowed a book to herself, but as she waved it around, rolled her eyes, dragged her stomach over the splinters crying out and carrying on as Hamlet does, it did occur to me as odd that this was what was necessary to get me into Cambridge.

  I wasn’t in it of course.

  Since the time when I couldn’t read I haven’t been asked to take part in things and I just sat there at my desk. Outside it was raining. The classroom had grown very dark. The desks were all at untidy angles, pushed back, and the dirty blackboard behind and the awful flowers in vile vases on the ledges were especially depressing. Flowers in classrooms are as depressing as flowers in hospitals—they just emphasise the fact that you can’t get out and see them growing. Classrooms break your heart.

  “No!” bellowed Bex at Penelope Dabbs. “Not—oh, you are a stupid year! A stupid year!”

  “Blaa blaa blaa,” droned somebody else.

  “Blaa blaa blaa,” wailed forth Penelope Dabbs, and behind them all the door opened and a radiant vision appeared.

  For a moment it hung on the air. The door swung slowly back and forth and then the vision was gone.

  “Hullo?” called Bex, swinging round. “Did someone knock?” She looked questioningly at me as I was the only one who hadn’t got her back to the door. As usual I said nothing but not for the usual reason, that no one was interested.

  I gawped.

  The door opened again, wider this time, and a girl came in and leaned against the edge of it and leaning back began to swing herself gently to and fro. Then as if her eyelashes were too heavy for their lids she half shut her eyes and surveyed Miss Bex and everybody else from beneath them. They were great thick black eyelashes like hearth brushes and above were very beautifully marked black eyebrows which one would have expected to have been painted on and yet I felt sure were not. The slits of eyes between them were a blazing turquoise.

  The girl was big and looked almost boneless. She was about seventeen, I thought, with a large pale face. She wore a green dress that clung to her all over and showed off very long, white arms. But her hair was the main astonishment. It was a huge shower, a sort of waterfall of golden—well almost golden pink! It was like candy floss, a gigantic cloud of light. It went on and on and up and up and out and out and it gathered all the light in the whole dreary atmosphere into itself.

  There she stood, sleepily against the door, easily comfortably swinging about, with all that hair—and like the eyebrows you could tell that it was natural, you can sometimes: there was no doubt of it—all that hair burning and glowing and shining like a mediaeval heavenly host in gilt and marble. And I thought, Oh my! If Uncle Edmund Hastings-Benson could see this!

  “Yes?” said Miss Bex.

  The girl smiled.

  “Did you want me?”

  Still the girl smiled.

  “Is it something to do with—” Miss Bex’s voice trailed off. What could this creature be to do with? Was she Ophelia en route to the brook? Not she. Large, confident, sure the girl stood.

  She said at last, “Well I just don’t know. I don’t know where—”

  “This is the Sixth Form. A level English. Set B,” Miss Bex said, sharpish.

  “Well, it might—”

  “Whom are you looking fo
r? Who are you?”

  “Oh I do wish I knew.” She gave a huge sigh and looked about her and seeing me in the front row staring back she said, “Oh hullo.”

  “Hullo,” said I.

  “What is all this about?” asked Miss Bex and tapped the chalk vigorously against the wall—she’s a great tapper.

  “Haven’t seen you for years,” said the Vision. “How are you?”

  “I’m all right,” I heard myself say. “Come in. They’re doing Hamlet.”

  “Hamlet!!” Her colossal eyes opened wide as she gazed around the floor boards and P. Dabbs on her stomach: and all of a sudden I was overcome. My decision in Wordsworth to be good and take English seriously and be kind to Miss Bex vanished away. I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t aiming to upset them. I just sort of exploded. I made a rude, loud, tearing sound with my mouth, covered it up with my hands and made a worse one, knocked my glasses off, dropped my face against the desk and howled and howled and howled with laughter. As in five years at the Comprehensive I had hardly ever uttered a sound before and hadn’t laughed like this in front of anyone except perhaps Paula in the whole of my life you can imagine the rest. Someone—good old Penelope D.—smote me on the back. Someone else moved my arms up and down as in life saving. Phyllis Thompson ran for a glass of water and Bex ordered an immediate opening of all the windows.

  The Vision however simply coiled herself over two chairs and waited. “Don’t worry,” she called. “It’s all right. She does things like this. She always was barmy. Shut up Bilgie, for Pete’s sake.”

  “For Pete’s sake,” she said again stretching her legs as I gasped for air and blinked my streaming eyes. She gave a friendly nod across at Bex and turned back to me. “Don’t you remember me?” she said, “I’m Grace Gathering.”

  “Grace Gathering,” I said.

  “I was your best friend when we were five. Don’t you remember?”

  “No,” I said. Then I began to. “Grace Gathering,” I said. “But you’re the Headmaster’s—You’re at—You’re not here!”

  “I am now,” said the Vision.

  She looked away and so did I and so did Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Polonius and all the royal family because the background music of vehement tapping had begun to gather speed and force. Bex in her might was entrenched behind her tall desk and the chalk clattered like a gun. “Might I just be informed,” she said, icicles forming on every fang, hoar frost puffing at the nostrils, “Might I just be granted—”

  “Oh—I’m terribly sorry.” Grace leapt up and went over to her. “I think I’m probably going to be in this form. There’s no one in the staffroom or the headmistress’s little nest. I suppose I was a bit late. I just thought I’d try a few doors.”

  “You mean,” said Bex coldly, “that you are a New Girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “In my Sixth?”

  “I think so. I’ve been at a boarding school till now. I suppose I’m this sort of age.” She wafted her hand about in our direction.

  “I see. From which school?”

  “Dartington Hall.”

  “I see.”

  “I thought you were at Cheltenham,” I said and everyone looked at me as if a waxwork had uttered.

  “Sacked,” said Grace Gathering.

  “And Dartington?” asked Miss Bex.

  “Sacked, too.”

  She gave Bex and everybody a lovely smile.

  “So I’ve come home to mum,” she said. “To School Home over the road from old Bilgewater.” She gave Bex an encouraging nod. “I’m sure things are going to be a lot better now.”

  The bell went then and somehow we got the Shakespeares gathered up and old Bex out of the room and everyone drew close together like a pondering army. They huddled, every one of them over in a group under the Watts portrait of The Man who had Great Possessions, looking as if he’s being sick in a corner. Somebody knocked over a vase of the dead chrysanthemums and as the water trickled down I realised why I was feeling so good. For the group in the huddle was looking across not only at the Vision but at me, too. The Vision and I were together. We were allies!

  “Chrysanthemums,” said Grace smiling across at them as the water dripped, arranging herself on my desk. “Have you noticed how they look like sheep’s bottoms?”

  She twirled one. “In the wind,” she said. “We drove over the moors from York here yesterday—all the poor sheep with their bottoms turned into the wind. Just like grey chrysanthemums.”

  The Bex VI, Set B, had no views on this so Grace turned back to me and tossed her pink candy floss about which did not look like dead chrysanthemums or sheep’s bottoms. “Well old Marigold Bilgewater Green,” she said, “it’s nice to see you again after all these years. I like your hair. It’s gone quite curly. It’s great to see a face you know.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I went bursting home from school to Paula that afternoon as I have never done before or since, up to the ironing room, over to the sick room, the San, down to father’s study and at length ran her to earth with father over in the Long Dormitory. Boys scuttered out round my feet like rats from a barn as I flew in. I banged into Boakes with his face in a book as he walked out and I collapsed up to Paula who was demonstrating blind cords and neither she nor father showed any great interest in the news I brought.

  “Grace Gathering’s arrived,” I declared.

  “Think they’d all been trying to hang theirzelves,” said Paula. “Shredded to bits so they won’t pull downwards, or elze they get pulled about too hard and ping back!”

  “Ping back,” said father meditatively, squinting out at a vista, “Hullo Marigold. Lovely cloud formation. Look.”

  “So they’ll have to be renewed and it’ll cost a hundred pounds and will have to be faced.”

  “Grace Gathering’s here.”

  “It’s not dezent the way they spring about naked.” (She pronounced it to rhyme with baked.)

  “Oh come now,” said father, “I’m sure it’s not important. Who’s arrived, Marigold?”

  “Grace Gathering. She’s been expelled from Dartington Hall. She’s coming to our school. She’s going to live at home over at the Head’s.”

  “Oh good. She’ll be a friend for you,” Paula said, “and I’m not having those great hairy seniors prancing about no blinds drawn and young girls about corruptible. Who’s this Grace Gatherin’ then?”

  “Well she’s Grace Gathering. She was once my best friend. Don’t you remember. She’s terribly friendly and she’s grown simply beautiful. And kind,” I added coldly as Paula started leaning about with a tape measure.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Who’s unkind? BEWARE OF SELF PITY. All I have to get straight at the moment is whether I can order new bloinds.”

  “Couldn’t you—run up some of those nice net curtains we used to have long ago?” father asked a bit exhaustedly.

  “Dirt catchers. Fol-de-rols. Burned them all long since and there’ll be no more in my time. After my time may be. And they need good thick bloinds in winter as well as curtains. For warmth. No patience with this Tom Brown’s Schooldays fiddle-de-dee—” On and on they went.

  “I’m going now,” I said and they paid no attention. “I’m going across to the Head’s to look her up.” This was a very extraordinary thing for me to do as I never stirred foot after school over the House doorstep but all Paula cried was, “Supper. Don’t forget your supper. Eggs and beans gets leathery.”

  “I shall be out to supper,” I declared and vanished round the woodsheds, loitering over the road, past the other Houses, and out of sight towards the Headmaster’s wrought-iron work and Georgian front door. What I thought I was going to do when I got there I know not, but the arrival of Grace had shaken me very oddly. I had felt quite certain from the moment she appeared that she had been in some way Sent—that she was some sort
of salvation, even though until the moment she had put her head round the door I had not realised that I was in need of any salvation at all. Like the man who had had great possessions, I had been fine—or so I thought. I hadn’t known how much I needed a friend.

  A narrative and an equation are one, in that they are some sort of an attempt at a statement of truth, at what—as Hardy says—every one is thinking and nobody dares to say: so that in case you are thinking that I was a bit weird in my feelings for Grace Gathering, a bit steamed up like the third form girls get about mistresses or Puffy Coleman gets about the new boys—let me tell you quite coolly that I am not like that. I have a very good balance of hormones all distributed in the right places. The only thing that ever worried me was that I started brewing them so early and at—well I’d better admit it—even eleven, I couldn’t sometimes sleep for thoughts of Jack Rose.

  But I’m not funny. My wonder and delight at the sight of Grace, at Grace’s attention and friendliness to me were simply that I saw a wondrous hope in them that I might bask in them a little, might tag along. I might be associated. Something very promising had walked into Miss Bex’s Hamlet with Grace Gathering—a sort of hazy hopefulness, a sleepy, delicious content of the kind I had felt that evening long ago when Boakes had played the flute by the Fives Court, or that other afternoon when I had been walking along Madeira and Jack Rose had come along and said I could read Ulysses.

  In other words I saw that where Grace Gathering went there would be romance and that if I hung about perhaps some of it would come off on me. Romance I saw in its best Tennysonian or mediaeval sense. If a cynic of course like Terrapin were to read this he would say, “Ha—Bilge thought that Grace would attract boys and if she hung around she, Bilge, might get some of the left-overs.”

  But Terrapin held no threat for me. He was my evil genius of long ago. I hardly saw him now. The only two romantic episodes of my life he had squashed flat but there was no way he was going to get at this one. Grace would not even be aware of the Terrapins of this world, just as she would not be at risk from or aware of the romamic twaddle of dear old Uncle Edmund Hastings-Benson. Grace I saw as a figure far, far above coarseness or sloppiness—a figure of real Romance, a creature of turrets, moats and lonely vigils, gaundets and chargers, long fields of barley and of rye.