No Talking after Lights (15 page)

Her voice was precise and sombre and at the end the girls mumbled a shame-faced ‘Amen'. They scrambled to their feet as she dismissed them, and hurried back to their form-room. Sheila took Charmian's arm, but Charmie shook it off furiously and spat at her, ‘Leave me alone! I don't want to hear about who you suspect! Old Ma B's right … all this is horrid. Just shut up about it.'

Oh, Mummy, help me, thought Sheila. I don't know what to do and I feel so ashamed and I'm scared. Oh, Mummy, Mummy, tell me what's happening. Don't leave me alone. Please God, don't let Daddy leave us. Don't let Mummy and Daddy divorce and I promise never to do anything wicked again; ever, ever again.

Next morning Constance, in her Aertex shirt and brown-pleated shorts and plimsolls, saw the postman bicycling down the drive as she ran up it doing her daily athletics practice. On the way down again she was puzzled to see Charmian, who didn't usually go for early-morning runs, giving the postman a parcel and some money and then scampering back to her dormitory. She didn't stop to wonder why. In her mind she was Mowgli, loping easily across the plains of the Deccan beside the long, lithe stretch of Bagheera.

Half-term had emptied the school. The buildings lay becalmed under a cloudless sky. Jack Waterman, the gardener, cut the grass on the games field and dragged the paint-roller across its newly shorn surface, laying a complicated pattern of white lines in preparation for Sports Day. A flattened oval marked out the 440-yard track with staggered lines at the start to compensate for the outside bends, while down the centre of the field ran four parallel lanes for the 100 yards. The edges of the sandpit, landing ground for the high and long jumps, were trimmed and tidied, and a load of fresh yellow sand tipped into its greyish centre. Having thrust a handful of freshly mown grass into the cages of various hamsters, guinea-pigs and rabbits and topped up their bowls with oats and clean water, he called it a day and went home to listen to the cricket commentary. Denis Compton was on the point of scoring his 100th century and Jack wanted to hear history being made and the great roar as the crowd saluted their hero. When he was a lad, Jack had dreamed of being a cricketer, but the war and his gammy leg had put paid to that. Refereeing the girls' cricket matches was as close as he ever got these days.

Most of the staff had taken the long weekend off, glad of a respite from patrolling and controlling, and from the claustrophobia of the staff-room. Sylvia and Diana had not. They were happier in the cottage
than either would have been in the airless boredom of their own homes. It was a luxury to relax, uninterrupted by the clamorous bell that punctuated their lives, to talk without being overheard, to stroll or swim in privacy, sunbathing on the hot tiles around the swimming-pool and hearing the distant purr of the motor-mower like the buzz of cicadas in the south, where neither of them had ever been.

On the Saturday evening they sat in the thickening light of dusk on the lawn behind the cottage. Normally they would have been in full view of the girls' dormitories, but tonight they had taken the kitchen table and two chairs outside and eaten salad and cold meat with a celebratory bottle of wine, followed by strawberries with condensed milk. Diana, who had scarcely had a drink in her life before meeting Sylvia, was emboldened by two glasses of wine to ask questions.

‘Sylvia,' she said. ‘It's a lovely name. Why did your parents call you that? Bit un-Welsh, isn't it?'

‘My father's idea. He used to be an English teacher. Very keen on poetry.'

‘It is a poetic name.'

‘It was one of his typical jokes to show up my mother's ignorance. Apparently when I was born he came into the nursing home and said to my mother, “Who is Sylvia? What is she?” He'd hoped for a boy, you see. I was a disappointment. But my mother didn't understand the reference and just thought he wanted to call me Sylvia. So she did.'

‘Your father's not alive any more?' Fatherless Diana shrank from the word ‘dead'. In her family they always spoke of her father, who had been killed on the Somme, as having ‘passed on' or ‘given his life for his country'.

‘No. Oh, Diana. You
are
an innocent, and there are so many things you don't know. We've finished the wine,
haven't we? Pity. Get the cider from the larder.'

What have I started? thought Diana, as she fetched the bottle of cider from the cool, tiled floor of the larder. I must be very calm and not let her realize that she upsets me. I don't want to set her off on one of her rages.

‘Was it very hard for you? Knowing he'd wanted a son?' she said carefully, after a silence.

‘Oh, I think in the end he was quite glad I was a girl.'

‘So that was all right, then.'

Sylvia looked across the darkened lawn. On evenings like this, at home, you could always hear the sea swishing softly in the distance.

‘I was quite a sweet child, believe it or not. Very anxious to please. There were just the three of us, but I liked being an only child. When I felt like running wild I could go along the beach, collecting my shells and things. Roam across the moor. I wasn't lonely. School was a bit tricky, my father being a teacher, but he was respected. You know what children are like. Fair play. We were an upright family. Everyone knows you in a small Welsh community. A nice, safe little world, it felt like. Pass me my ciggies.'

She smoked in silence a while and Diana didn't like to interrupt.

‘When I was small, my toys were the rocks on the beach near our house. They were gnarled and beautifully shaped, with holes that the wind poured through and I peered and clambered into. I played quite happily all by myself. The sea came galloping across the sand towards me and I used to stand my ground, until it collapsed at my feet. I'd be holding my shoes by their straps, and the water round my toes made them numb with cold. I played every day on the long, empty beaches, even in winter, when the sky seemed to have closed down over the horizon, cold and black. The
reflection of the clouds darkened the water. I didn't need a bucket and spade or a rubber ball like the children who came on holiday. All I needed was a big stick to draw letters and patterns in the sand. I'd watch the sea wash them off, just like one of those magic slates on which you could draw things and then, swish, they'd vanish.

‘I learned to write when I was very little - my father taught me - and I carved huge, wobbly words in the sand: SYLVIA, of course, and MUMMY, but mostly DADDY. Once I wrote MY DADA, and he saw it when he came looking for me at tea-time, and teased me. But I meant it. He was my dada and no-one else's. I thought he was so strong and clever and good. I knew he went to school every day to teach other children but I wasn't jealous of them, only of my mother. What about you, Diana? Did you love your father very much?'

‘He died just before I was born,' said Diana. ‘I'm sure I've told you that already. I didn't love my uncles, exactly, but my father …? I think when I was very little my mother made me kiss his photograph good night. But there wasn't much kissing in our house. We weren't a huggy family.'

‘My father kissed me all the time.'

‘You must have adored him.'

‘Yes and no,' Sylvia said. ‘Luckily I remained an only child. I wouldn't have stood for a baby, I would have drowned it, so it was just as well none ever came along. Mother was just
there
- washing and ironing, cooking and cleaning, reading the Bible in odd moments, trudging off to chapel with her hat on, twice a day on Sundays. They never seemed to do things together much, except share the great big double bed with iron railings at the head and foot.

‘We had a lot of books and my father often read to me.
Little Grey Rabbit, The Wind in the Willows, The
Water Babies
. Even when I could read for myself he went on sitting on my bed at night, one arm round me, the other balancing the book on his lap, rolling out the stories in his strong Welsh schoolteacher's voice.
Children of the New Forest, The Mowgli Stories, Coral Island, Treasure Island
. No, those must have been later, I suppose.'

Why am I telling her all this? Must be the drink. Bet she's bored. I remember it all so clearly, not as though it had happened to me but to some other child. There I am, see me, a tiny figure on a great expanse of empty beach, below an even huger expanse of sky. I am crouching over trails left by water in the sand. Pools collected round the rocks and flowed away in little streams which soon gave out, leaving twisting, plaited patterns that looked as if a snake had slithered by, or like the footprints of some bird. There were patterns on the wild grey ponies, too. They had close, dense hair and after rain it would form matted whorls across their flanks. They were tame, you could pat them. I wasn't afraid.

Yes, I am lucky to have had that freedom, and the security and routine of home, which I took for granted, never thought about. It was an idyllic start in life for a clever, solitary child.

‘Yes, I was lucky, I suppose.'

The sun was dropping low, dodging behind the tall trees, flickering through their branches as it had flickered on the surface of the swimming-pool earlier in the day. The air grew cool and the wood-pigeons murmured and squabbled. Smoke from Sylvia's cigarette inscribed a pure calligraphic line wavering slightly at the tip.

‘I don't know why my parents married. I never saw them be demonstrative. I was the same. Never cuddly or anything. Welsh as slate.' Sylvia didn't smile. She
finished her cigarette and smashed the tip into the lawn, grinding it under the sole of her shoe. A long silence divided them. Diana's colour was high and she felt blood pulsing in her cheeks and neck. The veins stood out on her hands. She could hear, as well as feel, her heartbeat.

‘I'm going for a walk now,' Sylvia said abruptly. ‘On my own, do you hear? On my
fucking
own! I don't like all this reminiscing. It's pointless.'

Diana watched her head off quickly into the smoky dusk, then she stood up and carried the supper things indoors. She washed up and put everything on the draining-board. She carried the cumbersome table back into the kitchen, and the chairs, dried the plates and cutlery and put them tidily away, then closed her bedroom curtains and sat behind the open window, waiting for the sound of Sylvia's returning footsteps.

Henrietta Birmingham carried the tray into her bedroom, placed it on the chest of drawers and helped her husband to sit up. He leant forward while she plumped the pillows, then sank back into them with a wheezy sigh.

‘No skin on the cocoa today,' he said.

‘That's because I made it for you. It's Saturday, remember? Ridley's evening off.' Goodness, she thought, how rare it is to see him smile. ‘After church tomorrow, would you like a little drive?' she suggested. ‘We needn't go far.'

‘I'd have to get dressed up,' said Lionel. ‘All that palaver.'

‘It's going to be another hot day,' Henrietta coaxed. ‘Just a shirt and your linen trousers. I'd give you a hand.'

‘Has it come to that?' he asked. ‘Can't even dress myself?'

‘You could try, and then if you needed me, I'd give you a hand.'

‘Lot of fuss and bother for nothing,' he said sulkily. ‘Not worth the effort.'

He means he can't face the humiliation, thought Henrietta. He doesn't want to admit how weak he's become. Should I try to persuade him?

‘Would you rather I asked Peggy for a drink before lunch? She often says how much she misses talking to you.'

‘Withered old trout. I'd rather talk to the trees.'

‘Think about it, dear. The fresh air and a change of scene would do you good, I think. And it would please me.'

‘Long time since I've done
that,
' he said, and gave her another thin smile.

She put out her hand, and closed it over his grey one, its bluish veins shockingly gnarled. Her hand was warm, his cold and flaccid. Did he ever please me? she thought. She stared at his hand and her eyes glazed and locked as she withdrew from him, deep into the privacy of thought. It was our wedding night that gave him a hold over me. It made us equal, in his eyes. We are all equal, in the eyes of God, she thought, and her hand tightened over his. She squeezed it briskly.

‘We'll see how you are in the morning,' she said. ‘Try and sleep now.'

By Sunday Constance knew that half-term wasn't going to be nearly as bad as she'd feared. The twins, away from school, were actually being quite nice to her, and their mother was a darling. She fussed over Constance as though she were a third daughter, chattered enthusiastically about her parents ‘Dear Paula, she's divine!
Such
a good sort! And your father … what a wonderful man he is! I'm quite in awe of him,
you know!' - and encouraged her to eat large, delicious meals.

‘It's lovely, your house,' Constance had said shyly to the twins on Friday morning, after Mrs Simpson had shown her the sprigged, cosy attic room where she was to sleep. Mick and Flick were bouncing on the beds in the room next door, shrieking, confident and unfamiliar in their mufti. ‘Really cosy and homely.'

‘It's not ours,' they said scornfully. ‘Our house is much nicer. Daddy's just rented this one, for Mummy, for the Season.'

Constance thought ‘season' was a funny way to describe the summer, but all she said was, ‘Well, yours must be pretty smashing then.'

Gradually they thawed and became more friendly and inquisitive. Constance dropped her guard and basked in the family atmosphere and the knowledge that, for the first time in weeks, she did not have to be perpetually on the defensive.

That afternoon, as Mrs Simpson dozed on the terrace in her sun-dress and the girls lazed about, halfheartedly trying to catch butterflies and grasshoppers in the unkempt paddock, Mick took her by surprise.