No Talking after Lights (14 page)

Nowadays Sheila, like Constance, seldom played. Instead, she bent over her garden each evening, pulling out weeds when they were only an inch or two above the earth; spraying with the finest rose on the watering-can so as not to inundate their delicate seedlings as they grew tremulously towards the light. Charmian had given up any pretence of helping, yet they were still bound together by secrecy, and Charmian had become bolder now that she had an accomplice and alibi. She seemed to delight in her cunning, and would steal pointless, useless things - a prep book in which someone had been marked 10/10 for a careful piece of work; a letter from someone's mother, left lying for a moment in the Covered Way. Out of the corner of her eye, Sheila would see Charmie's little hand dart out to pocket it. She would stroll away, taking her time, and be in the lavatory before its loss was noticed.

‘Hey! Where's my letter from Mummy?' the girl would ask a moment later; and Sheila would mutter sullenly, ‘Crikey, don't look at
me
. I haven't got your silly old letter.' And there would be an argument.

When the first pale-blue airmail letter arrived from Kenya, it seemed very foreign to Constance. Her mother could hardly suppress her excitement at the new life she had found out there, a world of swimming-pools and sundowners, cocktail parties and black house-servants. ‘The laundry boy is marvellous,' she wrote, ‘and irons Daddy's shirts far better than the laundry at home used to, and as for my summer dresses, you won't recognize your smart new Mummy!' Often she described outings they'd enjoyed together. ‘We three …' these descriptions began, as though she and Daddy and Stella were some holy
trinity from whose face Constance felt herself to be cast into outer darkness. ‘We three are going on a “safari” soon, just for the weekend. Stella's a bit young really, but you can imagine how she begged, and in the end Daddy gave in.'

Constance's own letters back were flat and pedestrian. She had given up begging, for she knew now that Daddy would never give in. Instead she made up songs about running away, using the tunes of hymns they sang in Prayers, or songs they were rehearsing. ‘I'll run away, I'll run away, They can't make me, I won't stay!' she scanned awkwardly; or, ‘Constance King has run away, run away, run away; Constance King has run away - No-one could stop her!' These rhymes jiggled in her head and were obscurely comforting. Does everyone hear tunes inside their head, she wondered sometimes, or am I going nuts?

She walked around with a vacant expression, her mind and her senses turned inwards. Her work remained excellent. The teachers were pleased with her and had no reason to question her absent manner. Blue-stockings were notoriously awkward. Girls weren't meant to be brainy and if they were, it was bound to cause difficulties.

The Lower Fourth had fragmented into half-a-dozen cliques, all with elaborate theories about the guilt of the others. Constance, with little alternative except to be a loner, found herself bracketed with Rachel and Jennifer. She didn't like either of them. Rachel was fat and Constance thought she didn't wash very often for she always seemed to smell: a rank, womanish sort of smell, like her mother after a game of tennis. There were often damp crescent-shaped patches under her arms, and a wave of what the others, with a snigger, called ‘BO' would emanate when she put her hand up in class. Constance wondered if she too had ‘BO'
without knowing it, and would surreptitiously lift her arm and give a quick sniff, but all she could smell was cotton starch. All the same, she wished her mother had bought some Odo-ro-no on their last trip to Boots. Several girls in the dormitory made a great show of dabbing it into their armpits and then waving their arms around while it dried. Dusting powder was another favoured remedy. It came in small upright tins shaped like hip flasks, with holes punched into the lids, and sent a cloud of Cussons' French Fern, Apple Blossom or Lilac over the dormitory. Some girls used a solidified, ice-blue stick that you pushed up and stroked across your forehead or wrists to keep them cool and fragrant on hot days. These items were considered essential and using them marked you out as someone feminine and well-groomed. Constance wished her mother had known this.

The girls were preoccupied with smells. Farting was sure to prompt an outcry of disgust, an exaggerated pantomime of nose-holding (the left hand held the nose while the right pulled an imaginary chain) and unpopular girls would be accused of having ‘let off and made a foul pong'. More often than not Jennifer was responsible. Her stomach was evidently delicate - she would confide, breathily, the details of what happened ‘on the lavvy', and once invited Constance to inspect the result for worms. Constance shrank from these intimacies; but she shrank even more from the public disgrace of always being seen to be alone. Besides, she was useful to Rachel and Jennifer. She helped them with their prep, explained the simple things they failed to understand during lessons, and part of her enjoyed the superiority this conferred. Jennifer invited her to stay for half-term, but Constance knew that, however relieved Mick and Flick would have been to be spared her company, a rebuff
would make her more unpopular still.

Unpopularity followed her like a shadow, dragging at her heels, slowing her step and distorting her face. It bowed her shoulders like a physical weight. Only in rare, sunny moments could she forget it. She discovered she was good at sprinting and long jump and the shouts of ‘Gosh, well
done
, Gogsy!' from fellow-members of her house made her smile with secret delight. She was in Drake: named after Sir Francis Drake and identified by a blue hatband on felt and straw hats, and a diagonal blue ribbon worn across Aertex shirts for Games. The other houses were Rhodes (Cecil), which was red, and Clive (of India), whose band was yellow. Intense rivalry was encouraged between the houses and Constance's surprising talent for running was her only source of popularity.

Another delight came from an accidental moment of perfect co-ordination when she swiped at a tennis ball and felt it spring lightly off her racquet to soar in a strong arc over the net and land beyond her opponent's reach. But in the ordinary daily routine, queuing for milk or post at Break or waiting by a basin to clean her teeth at night, she knew she was shunned. Getting changed in front of other people was even more of an ordeal now that small folds of flesh had begun to point her nipples outwards, and she walked with her arms crossed awkwardly over her chest to try and conceal the horizontal fold they made in the front of her dress. Her physical development was slower than that of the other girls in her form, most of whom were a good year older, and she was torn between wanting to wear a ‘BB' - brassiere - and dreading the day when someone would point out that she needed one. She heard them whispering about the curse, which she only half-understood; when she asked what it meant even Rachel said sharply, ‘Mind your own beeswax!'

Constance's unpopularity handicapped her efforts to be normal and unselfconscious. It surrounded her like a miasma, invisible but repellent. She constantly asked herself how other people managed to be liked. She knew she could never aspire to be like Hermione, loved for her floating beauty and effulgent smiles. But Madeleine was popular, despite her sharp tongue and temper; even Charmie was popular, though everyone knew she was horrid to poor, dogged, patient Sheila. What was the secret? She tried to learn the funny voices in which they talked. Hubble-bubble language, in which every word was gargled with double ells, was easy to pick up and perfectly comprehensible - but still they turned away from her. She sat in the library in case Hermione might come leaping down the stairs again, but she never did. Constance learned to imitate her handwriting to perfection, and as her hand reproduced Hermione's pudgy, wide-open letters and the figure-of-eight loop of her Gs and Ys she felt herself transformed into Hermione - but only briefly. The magic eluded her.

Charmian gloried in her ability to devise new plots, scent new suspects. For several days she made Constance, Jennifer and Rachel seem the most likely culprits, so plausibly that the three of them went about their daily routine like lepers, shunned and yet watched by everyone else. The story spread that Constance had hidden her own pen so as to deflect suspicion, and once she came up to the dormitory at bedtime to find everything in her locker disturbed.

‘It was me,' Charmian said brazenly. They voted me the one to look through your locker for that pen
you
say is missing.'

‘I didn't just say it was missing: it
is
missing, so sucks boo to you. Well, did you find it?' said Constance.

‘You're too clever for that, aren't you?' taunted Charmie. ‘Clever dick, dirty trick, when you're found we'll make you sick!'

This period as a double outcast culminated in the disappearance of Rachel's precious album of Royal Family photographs. She and Jennifer had spent Rest sticking in three new postcards (of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh with the golden-aureoled, smiling royal children) and fawning over their handiwork. That evening when they came up to the dormitory at bedtime the album had gone. Rachel's face, already glistening from her strenuous run in response to the dormitory bell, was now streaked with tears, her sticky body heaving. Charmian, who normally avoided any physical contact, put her arms round Rachel's chunky shoulders and said, ‘Poor Rache, how absolutely mingy! Everyone knows how you feel about that book. Well, the thief's gone too far this time! Now there's going to be trouble. Right, let's all think back. Where was everyone after supper? Let's start with me, I volunteer.'

Sheila and Jennifer and Rachel herself could vouch for Charmian's presence in the gardens, at supper, in prep. It seemed that she had not been unobserved for a moment. Rachel and Jennifer were of course exonerated, but not Constance. Each member of Starlings had to give a detailed account of her afternoon and anyone who had spent even ten minutes alone was made to feel uncomfortable.

The next day at Prayers Mrs Birmingham announced that the Lower Fourth would have to miss their first lesson. She wanted them all to wait outside the study, and she would see each girl separately, in alphabetical order. They sat in the Reading Corner, Anne and Fiona flicking through
Horse and Hound
with expert comments until it was Fiona's turn to be summoned.
Charmian seemed absorbed in
Riding
('Oh, Sheila, look at that adorable pony - 13.2 hands - just the right height for me!') and Constance, who'd read the magazine already, sat and stared at the beaky profile of Mr Punch and the wispy fairy figures floating round the edge of the magazine's cover, like illustrations from a Victorian children's book. After about twenty minutes her name was called and she went in.

‘Sit down, dear. There's nothing to be frightened of as long as you tell the truth,' said Mrs Birmingham. ‘I want you to think very carefully. Remember that God hears what you say, and then tell me what you know about these recent thefts.'

There was a pause, during which Constance was very conscious of the Headmistress's watery blue eyes watching her. She met them steadily, noticing the flaky texture of the Head's skin. Her complexion was bleached of colour to a sort of bluish-grey, the more so because it was overlaid with a layer of white powder that had lodged in the creases around her nose and mouth, where it flaked like the skin itself. The veins on her cheeks had broken, making a tracery of tiny red lines. Constance could not have said whether Mrs Birmingham was fifty or eighty; she seemed the embodiment of age and grandeur, carved in delicate skin and fine white hair, but as solid and unchanging as the figures chiselled out of Mount Rushmore that Constance had seen in the
National Geographic
magazine.

‘I don't know anything about it, Mrs Birmingham, honestly and truly. And my pen still hasn't turned up either. I suppose it must have been stolen, like all the other things. But I've no idea who by.'

‘Very well, Constance. If you're quite, quite certain there isn't anything else you'd like to tell me …? You needn't worry; nothing will go beyond this room.'

‘I would, but I can't. I don't know anything.'

Thank you, Constance. In that case you may go. Would you ask Madeleine Low to come in next please?'

One by one, they went in and, after a few minutes, came out again. Rachel cried. Mick and Flick went in separately. Everyone was aware of the drama of the occasion. When they had all been seen, Mrs Birmingham opened the door to the drawing-room and said, ‘I would like you all to come in here and sit down while I say a few words to everyone together.'

They trooped into the warm, scented room and squeezed together round the window seats and on the sofas. The last half-dozen or so sat on the floor. Miss Roberts sat in the wing-chair beside the fireplace, but Mrs Birmingham remained standing. Her eyes went from one face to another in silence. Finally she said,

‘I had hoped, indeed I have prayed, that the culprit would own up this morning of her own accord. Nobody has done so. I have heard a number of names mentioned whom other girls suspect. I have heard no firm evidence that would lead me to take any notice of these suspicions. This is a very serious thing to have happened, and a very sad thing for whoever is responsible. I have no alternative, for the time being, other than to punish you all. Sweets have already been stopped. Now, I intend to stop all parcels …' there was a low murmur of complaint ‘… except on birthdays, when they will be opened under the supervision of a matron; and from now on there will be no more playing outside in the evenings, except at weekends.'

A gasp of disappointment ran like a current round the group.

‘If the thefts continue, I shall have to consider what else must be done,' said Mrs Birmingham. ‘And now, I'd like you all to close your eyes and bow your heads.
We shall end with a prayer. O Almighty God, to whom all hearts and minds are open