My American

by Stella Gibbons

  On the Monday morning after the flat had been cleared out ready for the Martins to occupy, Miss Lathom was surprised to hear a soft knock on the door of her room, during the eleven o’clock Break.

  “Come in!” she called, lifting her eyes with a sigh from an American woman’s lowbrow paper which she was enjoying with her Horlicks and digestive biscuit. Which of the younger members of the staff was having a conscience over nothing now? Naylor, probably. Oh, dear.

  But the person who came in immediately was the Lee child, carrying a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.

  “Amy, my dear, what do you want? You haven’t an appointment, you know. You ought not to be here. What is it?” Miss Lathom’s tone was kind but brisk. Even the death of a father must not make a headmistress get-at-able whenever someone in Upper IV felt like seeing her.

  “Miss Lathom, please, can I speak to you a minute? It’s urgent.” So was Amy’s tone; though quiet, as usual.

  “Very well, just this once. What is it?”

  “Miss Lathom——” She came over and stood by the Head’s chair (and Miss Lathom had the strength of mind not to slide the lowbrow magazine under some half-term reports)“you’re the only person I can tell.”

  “All right. What’s it all about?” rather drily. She was guarding herself from a possible emotional explosion; little girls of nearly thirteen were uncanny fishes.

  “Well, you see, in this parcel I have some private things: I don’t want anyone to see them. Please will you take care of them for me and lock them up in your desk and never, never let anyone see them, Miss Lathom?”

  The Headmistress was completely taken aback and felt a little ashamed of herself and more than a little moved. She was also impressed in a curious way by Amy’s manner. The child might have been speaking without self-consciousness or fear to someone of her own age. Miss Lathom said kindly:

  “Of course I will. Give it to me.” She took the parcel, unlocked a drawer in her desk, and fitted the books comfortably into it. Amy watched the parcel, not Miss Lathom, in silence while this was being done.

  “There. It’ll be quite safe there.” Miss Lathom straightened herself and looked at the child. At that moment a thousand pounds would not have tempted her to ask what was in that parcel, though she was so interested by this sudden sidelight on the little Lee child that she longed to know.

  “Thanks most awfully, Miss Lathom.” But as Amy lingered, quite as aware as Miss Lathom that something more ought to be said to round off the incident, a sudden glow of happiness warmed her. Her stories were safe! The Beedings could never find out now! Miss Lathom, looking at her curiously, saw her face turn pale pink and her eyes suddenly shine. She leaned forward and said confidentially, her voice full of the writer’s pride:

  “Miss Lathom, they’re stories.”

  “Are they?” said Miss Lathom, calmly and in a low tone, very conscious that a door had been suddenly opened to her. She stood on the threshold, afraid of saying something that would cause it to shut.

  “Yes. A lot of them.”

  “Oh. Then I suppose you’ve been writing them ever since you were quite small?” Miss Lathom went on in the same quiet soothing tone.

  “Oh, yes. Ever since I could write properly—when I was about six, I mean. And before that I used to make them up to myself. I’m writing one now called The Mummy’s Curse. It’s about Ancient Egypt. At least——” She looked disturbed, and hesitated, “I was writing it, but now I’m afraid I shall have to leave it for a long time. Three years nearly. It’s awful, Miss Lathom. It was just Beginning to Run in my mind, and now I’ve got to leave it.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, Miss Lathom, there isn’t anywhere to write at home, now that I live with the Beedings. You see, they’re awfully kind but I don’t want them to see the stories because they wouldn’t understand.”

  “They might laugh, do you mean?”

  “Oh, no. The stories aren’t funny, Miss Lathom, they’re exciting. I just mean the Beedings wouldn’t understand. There’s no place I can have to write in at home, now.” Her voice was low and worried and she stared right into the Head’s eyes with her own bright brown ones, clear as water and like water full of secrets.

  Miss Lathom made a sudden decision.

  “Amy,” she said, unable to resist putting her suggestion in the form of a question so that she might have the joy of hearing the child cry, “Oh, yes, please!” “Would you like to have the old exam room to write in, after school in the afternoons sometimes?”

  “Oh, yes, please, Miss Lathom!” cried Amy, in a deep, excited voice that was startling. “Oh, I would! Thank you very, very much, Miss Lathom! It is kind of you!” Her face had flushed deeper pink and her eyes sparkled with delight. Miss Lathom looked at her, smiling, experiencing a pleasure almost as strong.

  “Well, then, you shall. You’ll be quite safe there. I’ve got the only key, and no one ever goes in except to clean it twice a term so you won’t be disturbed. I’ll give you the key,” she turned to her desk, “and you can keep your stories in there too, so that you won’t have to worry me every time you want them,” turning to smile at her.

  “Miss Lathom, I promise faithfully on my sacred honour I’ll never worry you,” said Amy solemnly, “and I won’t ever tell a single living soul either, Miss Lathom.”

  “No, don’t, Amy, because it isn’t at all an … orthodox … thing to do, you know, and if the other chil … girls knew about it there might be all sorts of tiresome fusses. Besides, you want to have it all to yourself, don’t you? That’s the whole point.”

  “Oh, yes, Miss Lathom!”

  “All right, then. Run along now. Break’s nearly over … wait a minute. You’d better put your stories away first, hadn’t you? Yes. Hurry now, dear, there goes the bell.”

  She handed the parcel to Amy, who darted across the room to a door on the far side, and fitted the key in the lock, bending over with the books clutched to her chest and her pig-tail flopping forward. Then, just before she ran into the room, she turned and gave the headmistress a sweet and triumphant smile.

  Good gracious! thought Miss Lathom, staring at her through the open door of the old exam room, when all her secrets come out into her face instead of hiding behind it the child’s enchanting! Then she said:

  “That will do, now, Amy. Run along. You can come and write to-morrow afternoon after school.”

  “Yes. Thanks awfully, Miss Lathom, it is kind of you. Miss Lathom——” she turned again at the door, “I will dedicate The Mummy’s Curse to you.”

  “Thank you, Amy. I should like that very much,” answered Miss Lathom.

  The door closed.

  Now that’s the first time since Great-aunt Anna put me in charge here that I’ve done anything that might be described as imprudent, mused Miss Lathom, sitting down and stirring the cold Horlicks.

  Still, the circumstances are unusual. She’s an orphan. Great-aunt Anna always had a soft spot for orphans! And she’s unusual, too, and possibly gifted. I may be nursing a genius! But even if her stories are rubbish they obviously mean more than anything in the world to her, funny little packet, and she hasn’t much else.

  Suppose she overhears me having Naylor up on the carpet, or soft-soaping a Parent?

  She won’t. She isn’t the sort to eavesdrop, and anyhow she’ll be too absorbed in The Mummy’s Curse to hear anything.

  Oh, I feel sure it will be all right.

  Smiling, she drank her Horlicks and turned to the pile of half-term reports.

  Amy flew downstairs and joined her Form just as it marched into Room 6 for Scripture.

  “Enter Piggy, flushed and breathless,” muttered the Form wit. “Where’ve you been? We waited simply years for you by the sundial. Honestly, Piggy, you are feeble.”

  “So are you feeble. My suspender burst and it took ages. Do you know your feeble text? I don’t. I feebly didn’t look at it until this morning.”

  The old exam room was a
small chamber containing a row of desks at which pupils had formerly sat for the simple entrance examination admitting them to the Anna Bonner. Earlier still, in the ’eighties, it had been furnished with a sofa and a shawl, and here the Founder had been wont to refresh herself with fifteen minutes’ nap every day after lunch, and heaven aid anyone who woke her out of it upon any pretext whatever. Now the room was disused, partly because it was situated in a dark little cul-de-sac next to the Headmistress’s room and that made a bad impression upon visiting parents, and partly because it had no means of being heated, the builders of the ’eighties having light-heartedly omitted to provide it with a chimney because it was so small. It was entered by the door in the cul-de-sac; the door in Miss Lathom’s room was never used.

  It was a sunless little apartment with one narrow window of red, yellow and blue glass overlooking the School garden, but it was clean and pleasantly quiet, and here during the next three years Amy spent her happiest hours. Sometimes the autumn moon crept into the sky while she was writing there in the late afternoon, when the school building was empty save for a few pupils taking music or typewriting in remote rooms; and she would look up, pen resting against her lip, and stare into that solemn silver face. Sometimes on spring afternoons, when the rosy reflection of sunset fell on the worn grey floor-boards and tinted the crayon portrait of the Founder near the door, and her wrist ached from writing, she would go over to the window and gaze through the narrow panes of red or blue glass at the familiar garden thus transformed into a sinister landscape under a lowering sky. No one ever chanced on her desk-full of stories or discovered that she wrote there.

  In this room The Mummy’s Curse was finished, and Amy proudly showed the dedication to the Headmistress:

  To Miss Lathom, M.A.

  with

  The Author’s Silent Gratitude

  “I put ‘silent’ because of course I can’t ever tell anyone how kind you are to let me have the old exam room, Miss Lathom,” explained Amy.

  She did not explain that she had laboriously covered all the exercise books with cretonne in the fond hope that her headmistress would not recognize them as School property; and Miss Lathom turned a blind eye on that fact, which confronted her as soon as Amy presented the book.

  Any desire that Miss Lathom may have had to read The Mummy’s Curse disappeared when she glanced at its opening lines. They seemed to her disappointingly bald, without Style, Originality or Sensitiveness to Beauty. They were made up of short words in short sentences, describing the desert at noon and two men sitting below the newly carved Sphinx waiting for a third, whose name was not given. Miss Lathom’s thoughts returned more than once during the day to that picture. She found herself wondering who they were waiting for, and why. But there was nothing unusual in that: of course one always wanted to know what happened in a story. It was just a story, that was all. That was the impression Miss Lathom received of The Mummy’s Curse, and as she had more than enough duties with which to fill her days without wasting time on reading rubbish, she was glad that she had not asked if she might read it.

  Amy had no intention of letting her read it; she whisked it away at once and never mentioned it again, and the next day she had begun The Hero of the Desert which was about Colonel Lawrence, and had almost forgotten The Mummy’s Curse, as writers do forget their earlier works.

  And so for the next two years the months glided past while she lived her two lives, the bustling ordinary life with the Beedings and the secret one with her stories in the old exam room at school. She adjusted herself to the balance in time, as she had adjusted herself to life alone with her father. She missed flying cut-outs from the window at night and having the evenings alone to dream over her American books and the back numbers of The Prize that Tim had brought home every week; but she soon got used to sitting in the brightly-lit Lounge with any of the Beedings who happened to be at home, taking her turn with the wireless earphones, gossiping with Mona about the stars in her cinema magazines, sometimes neatly darning her stockings or putting a patch in her bloomers.

  The Beeding home life was constructive as well as active, and when they were at home all were occupied; Mona was the only one who knew the meaning of boredom. Had they lived in the eighteen-eighties instead of the nineteen-thirties Mr. Beeding would have read aloud to them while they worked. Their only fault as a family was their inability to imagine a human being who might sometimes wish to be alone; and in this they were not unique.

  As for the sharing of Dora’s bedroom, Amy found it more than bearable; it was pleasant. Beside her bed, which stood in an alcove, she had a table with a roomy drawer where she kept her Curios, the box of cut-outs and other small treasures. Her American books were kept on the table with her brush and comb and her handkerchief case made of pink satin embroidered with bright violets and “A” in yellow, a birthday gift from Mona which Amy much admired.

  Dora was so neat, quick-moving and quiet that it was like sharing a room with a needle or a pin. She did not snore, or scatter powder, or dream, but lay thin and silent in her bed all night and awoke punctually at seven o’clock every morning to wash herself in cold water and dress with amazing speed inside the shelter of her pyjamas, which she dodged on and off and peeled up and down in the most complicated manner imaginable to prevent the world from getting the smallest peep at her naked self. Amy performed the same contortions, but slower, inside a narrow nightgown with long sleeves and a high neck; and while they dressed they shot muffled comments at each other about the look of the weather.

  As each was absorbed in her own affairs and not very interested in the other and each was tidy and reserved, they made satisfactory stablemates. And when Amy awoke trembling from a bad dream as she somtimes did, it was comforting to lie awake in the dark and slowly realize that Dora was there, quietly asleep in the narrow bed on the other side of the room.

  She still missed her mother painfully, and it terrified her to think about the two bodies, lying inside the earth together on Highgate Hill. She knew that they, their real selves, were with God in Heaven; yet somehow this picture was not so real as the picture of two bodies inside the cold earth. She thought of them on wild nights when the rare snow whirled over London and the wind screamed high overhead in the darkness. How strange and awful it was to put people into a hole in the earth, people one had known. Her mother, whose warm hand she could feel now, clasping her own!

  She sprang up and dashed across the room to the wireless, to sit by Mrs. Beeding, anything to drive that thought away!

  But as the months passed, the memory of her father and mother slowly sank deep, deep into the clear dark water of her unconscious memory, to lie on the floor of that mysterious ocean and trouble the upper regions only occasionally. The Hero of The Desert was finished and The House with a Secret begun. That was finished in its turn and so was The Mysterious Barge, which was about smuggling in Essex; and all these stories were hidden away in the desks of the old exam room. Amy never showed any more of them to Miss Lathom, who was much occupied during Amy’s last year at school with the long illness and death in the Summer Term of her great-aunt, the almost legendary Founder; and Miss Lathom did not ask her more than once or twice, “how are the stories going?” She was a little disappointed in the Lee child; she had seemed to promise interesting developments, but none had come. It was only a lonely child’s passion for scribbling; common enough, if not common at the Anna Bonner. Miss Lathom, like everyone else, soon took Amy for granted. That was exactly what Amy wanted.

  During her two years with the Beedings her height and weight increased satisfactorily as a result of Mrs. Beeding’s cooking, and insistence upon walks in the Fields or Up Highgate as opposed to mopeyness. Her nerves improved: she learned to take buses, smells, and cut-up rabbits more or less for granted. Edie would have been pleased. She was lonelier than ever, but she was more or less used to that, too, and never consciously thought about it. Her loneliness and lack of someone to love only found expression in dark unchild
ish moods of depression. Then she dreamed that the crowds in the streets could not see her, because they were all hurrying past her on their way back to happy homes. She dreamed she stood in front of them screaming: “I’m Amy Lee! Look, I’m Amy Lee!” but nobody saw her or stopped, and she awoke crying heartbrokenly in the dark bedroom. “Do shut up, Aime; you’re dreaming,” Dora would mutter crossly, turning over, and after a while Amy would fall asleep again.

  But these dreams did not come often; and as a whole her life was tranquil. The months slipped away, and presently three years had passed since the little American boy had given her the coin on her birthday at Kenwood House.

  CHAPTER VIII

  WHEN HE WAS sixteen Bob Vorst suddenly made up his mind that he would be a doctor.

  His father and mother were pleased, for Boone was causing them much grief and worry at the time and they naturally turned to the younger son for comfort. It was fine that he should have made up his mind for himself so young, and a doctor’s career was a splendid life-work. As well as helping one’s fellow men, it was possible to make a fortune.

  On a late summer morning during the Great Depression, he said casually at breakfast:

  “I’m going to be a doctor.”

  “Well, well, that’s fine,” said his father sarcastically and affectionately, looking up from his paper (it was The Sentinel, which had not yet followed The Inquirer and The Independent into the maw of the New York syndicate). “Now you’re all fixed up, anyway. And when did you make up your mind?”

  “Yesterday.” Bob was not irritated; he was slowly stoking himself with food which he chewed steadily with his beautiful widely-spaced teeth. His day at the High was a heavy one, crammed with hard exercise and with studies which he did not find easy, and he could not get through it on the toast and orange juice which was enough for his sister Irene, sitting opposite him and slowly sipping with her rounded arms resting on the table.