No Talking after Lights (20 page)

For very young he seemed, tenderly reared
Like some young cypress, tall and dark and straight
Which in a queen's secluded garden throws
Its slight dark shadow on the moonlit turf,
So slender Sohrab seemed, so softly reared.'

There was no reaction from the others and, slightly embarrassed, she went on: ‘And he looks so young that Rustum feels sorry for him, so he beckons him over and warns him not to fight. He asks Sohrab instead to come back to Persia and be like his son, which is kind of funny, you see, him not knowing. And Sohrab is so touched by this that he actually falls down before this old unknown warrior and says, “But aren't you Rustum?” Only this makes Rustum suspicious, and he thinks, maybe it's all a trick for him to beat me without having to fight, and then the Persian army would have been shamed. That's why he refuses, and they have to fight. And there's another good bit, listen, when Sohrab says, “For we are all, like swimmers in the sea,/Poised on the top of a huge wave of fate,/Which hangs uncertain to which side to fall.'''

‘Are you sure this is a proper story?' demanded Charmian. ‘It sounds more like a soppy old poem to me.'

‘It's a
story,
' said Constance firmly. ‘And they're just about to fight, father and son, and I'll stop now or Peach'll catch us.'

‘There, Charmie, look what you've done …' somebody
grumbled; but it was late and they soon slept, even Constance.

Mrs Birmingham slept too, and dreamed of chandeliers; of chandeliers and smooth parquet floors, of young men who moved stiffly and smiled vacantly; of dance floors and night clubs, frenetic with chatter and malachite cigarette-holders; of flappers, thin as waifs, insubstantial; or herself, always a weighty woman, sitting at the edge of the floor under the circling coloured lights, left out, watching as the maimed young men and sparkling girls receded further and further into a haze of jazz and cigarette smoke.

‘Come back!' cried Henrietta, ‘Don't go!'

She woke to hear Lionel muttering uneasily, ‘What is it?'

She reached a hand across to him. ‘You're there. Never mind. Just a dream. Go back to sleep, dear.'

In the darkest and most silent dead of night, when the house within which children and teachers, matrons and servants, the happy and the unhappy, all slept deeply, when the very house seemed to breathe evenly in and out, Constance clambered up through layers of sleep woken by something at the edge of her consciousness. Her eyes opened, closed; opened, and then, like a kicked swing-door, were suddenly wide and staring.

Silhouetted against the deep dark-blue of the night she could see Fiona on her hands and knees, while behind her, also on her knees, Anne rocked rhythmically back and forth. Tiny snickerings were being forced out of Fiona, which Anne, stifling her giggles, tried to hush. She seemed to have one hand under Fiona's tummy. They were obviously playing horses, but why in the middle of the night?

Constance was about to sit up and say, ‘Hey, you two, what's going on?' when for some reason the words of that horrid song Charmie had told her went through her mind - ‘He jumped on her till her tits bounced out' - and she blushed so deeply in the darkness that she could feel herself getting hot and tingly all over. Ugh, she thought, how horrid! and shut her eyes firmly.

The noises went on for a bit, till Fiona made a sort of long, whinnying ‘Whoo-hoo-hooo …' and then Anne squeaked several times, excited squeaks, after which she got back into her own bed and everything fell silent.

Constance stayed awake for a while, trying to work it out. Somehow she couldn't get out of her mind the idea that it had something to do with the curse, which was what made you a woman. Anne and Fiona both had the curse, so they were both women, so they played these peculiar games. Mummy and Daddy had always been modest and none of them ever saw one another naked around the house. In fact until she came here, no-one had seen her without her clothes on since she was a little girl and Mummy used to bath her. She had been taught to knock on her parents' bedroom door and wait for them to say ‘Come in', and Daddy never came into the bathroom when she or Stella were in there. She knew that bodies and what they did were often indecent, although it was never discussed at home, just as you didn't talk about what happened in the lavatory. She felt that if she let herself go on thinking about it she would be led down strange paths of the imagination into the future, and she preferred not to follow them. Yet the sight of Anne and Fiona playing horses had stirred something deep and uncomfortable, and it was quite some time before she could get back to sleep.

‘You know, Charmian,' began Mrs Birmingham, ‘why you are here? Why I have asked you to see me?'

‘Yes, Mrs Birmingham.'

‘Why?'

‘Because someone thinks it's me that's been stealing things.'

‘Yes. Have you?'

‘I don't know.'

This was a surprise. The other two had both said no, Michaela Simpson with proud indignation, Constance King with a clever and convincing analysis of why she might be suspected (new girl, hence outsider, hence victim and scapegoat). The Head was beginning to wonder herself if the evidence might not point to Charmian as the culprit. She was prepared for the child to deny it with a flourish of offended vanity, and yet she had allowed herself to hope she might confess, in a storm of tears and remorse, after which they would pray together for God's forgiveness. Then Charmian would repent; would agree to confess, first to Miss Valentine and then to her form, and then …

‘You
don't know
, Charmian? You must
know
…'

‘Well, of course I don't
think
I took them. But if the staff say I did, and I know some people in my form, like f'rinstance Constance King, if they think I did, and now you believe I did - well … I don't know. I just can't say absolutely no any more. ‘Cos if everyone
thinks I'm the thief, them maybe I
am
. Maybe I did it and forgot. Maybe I sleep-walked. Maybe the devil tempted me …'

This is hysteria, thought Mrs Birmingham. The child sounds as though she has stepped straight out of the witches of Salem. This kind of thinking is dangerous. If it spreads, then I'm facing something a great deal more serious than childish stealing.

‘Charmian!' she said abruptly. ‘Stop this silly nonsense
at once
. I asked you a perfectly straightforward question and I want a simple, straightforward answer: yes or no. Did you steal Miss Peachey's necklace, and the photograph frame, and the pen, and the scrapbook and so on, or did you not?'

There was a pause. Charmian's turquoise-blue eyes looked blankly back at her. Then she heaved her shoulders up and down once, and sighed.

‘I don't
think
so,' she said. ‘But it's all been so sort of muddled this term. I mean, what you told me about Mummy and Daddy, which I don't understand a bit, I still don't, and then the awful thing of Sheila's mother, which is all so ghastly, and oh, Mrs Birmingham …' Charmian blinked several times and began to breathe fast and heavily.

‘Sit down, dear. On that chair there. That's right. Sit down. Have you got a handkerchief? Good girl. Blow your nose.'

Charmian took her handkerchief and shook it as she had seen her father do, into a large, all-enveloping square, and buried her nose in it. Behind its folds she thought, Shall I cry or not cry? She thought of the rabbit's bloodshot eyes every time she jerked a whisker out, and of how its front paws scrabbled frantically, and her own eyes seemed to swell and overflow.

‘Is there nobody you can talk to?' the Head asked.

‘I used to talk to Sheila,' said Charmian. ‘We used to
meet up by Pets …' and her eyes filled up again.

Dear God, who knowest the heart of this Thy child
, prayed Henrietta,
give me Thy wisdom and Thy infinite understanding, that I may help her find her way down this troubled path
. She smiled with great tenderness at the bowed little figure in front of her.

Charmian watched the smile and thought, Phew! Done it! She stored away the knowledge, for the rest of her life, that even the apparently omniscient couldn't tell if you were lying, as long as you kept your nerve. She smiled tremulously back.

Ten minutes later, having listened wide-eyed to the Head's attempt to explain why some mummies and daddies couldn't stay married, and had to get what was called a divorce, Charmian escaped from the soft pastel warmth of the drawing-room. As she walked sedately down the hall she thought to herself,
She
doesn't know much about it! She didn't say anything about them not having the same bedroom any more. She hasn't the foggiest clue. On an impulse, she turned and raced up the three flights of back stairs to a top-floor dormitory. In seconds she had swept half a dozen bulging-eyed glass animals off the top of lockers, stuffed them into her handkerchief, and was walking sedately down again. This is fun, she thought, and it's easy-peasy. You just need to believe no-one will see you, and they don't. And even if they did, I'd say I'd been to see the Head and she told me to go and get a clean hanky. Which is true anyway. Easy as pie.

The staff-room during Break was a hubbub of nerves and noise. It smelt of cheap clothes, warm bodies, powder and chalk dust. Untipped cigarettes added their stale grey smoke to the thick air. Miss Valentine's clarion indignation cut through several flustered conversations in different corners of the room.

‘I think it's disgraceful!' she said. ‘Nothing more or
less than a witch-hunt. On the basis of a whole lot of unsubstantiated allegations, three of my form are given the third degree, including my form captain. When she walked into their geography class after seeing the Head the poor child looked devastated. As for Constance King, that's all the good of the last eight weeks undone. She's a highly intelligent, sensitive girl - shut up, Sylvia, I don't want to hear your bitchy remarks - and a great deal of damage has been done.'

‘And Charmian?' said Sylvia Parry. ‘Do let's hear your perfectly splendid defence of Charmian.'

‘All right. OK. So you think she's the culprit. Give me one single shred of evidence. One.'

‘God, you're so self-righteous it makes me sick! If we had any fucking evidence—'

‘Language!' admonished a voice.

‘If we had
any fucking
evidence, I said, we wouldn't all be acting like a bunch of amateur sleuths.'

‘Yet you wrote her name down, didn't you? As chief suspect?' Ginny Valentine said.

Sylvia Parry's voice grew dangerously soft, like the wolf who's eaten chalk. ‘The names we wrote down were confidential, or so I was given to understand. May I have
your
evidence for that remark?'

Diana interrupted. ‘Ginny, you don't know and how could you, so drop it. I know it's twice as unsettling for you, what with it being your form, but do let's try and talk about something else for once. Who's going to win the Ladies' Singles? Five bob on little Mo, anybody?'

‘I'm glad you've got five bob to chuck about…' said ‘Bibs' Whitby; and conversation veered to the standard complaints about how badly they were paid, compared with men, and the iniquities of the Burnham scale, until the bell rang. All but one headed off to their classrooms, books clamped under one elbow.

Only Mrs Whitby, the games mistress, was left
behind in the staff-room as the others dispersed to teach. She had not been at the previous evening's staff meeting, for it was assumed that she didn't know enough about individual fourth-form girls to have any basis for suspicion. She'd come in earlier than usual to draw up a detailed timetable for Speech Day's exhibition of swimming and diving.

The one member of staff who lived at home with her husband and children, Bibs Whitby had a sense of proportion that the other teachers lacked. In the cramped staff-room each tremor of favour or success was elevated into melodrama. Everyone took sides. Gossip ricocheted off the walls, as fact was overtaken by the wilder constructs of rumour, malice and invention, passing from girls to staff like Chinese whispers. By now the building itself seemed to emanate guilt to such an extent that if in years to come someone with second sight were to walk through its rearranged rooms, the sense of that guilt might touch them too. Charmian's unhappy, pointless thefts - such
small
crimes, she would say later, laughing, as she told some man a pretty tale about her schooldays - the grit of those small crimes now permeated the bricks and dust of the building.

The teachers, in this hermetically sealed, stuffy domain, knew nothing about the rituals of courtship and marriage. Worse than that, thought Mrs Whitby, they were completely ignorant of the realities of bringing up children. It showed in how much store they set by imposing authority and commanding obedience, and the footling methods they used to boost their own self-confidence and punish any child who showed spirit: the pompous ritual of order marks that had to be written in a book and verified with the teacher's initials. She'd seen the book. SP, SP, SP, SP the initials ran down the last column. And the crimes? Running
down the corridor. Interrupting in class. Whispering in class. Coming late to the lunch queue. There was something wrong with any child who
didn't
behave like that, and something wrong with a system that regarded it as right and proper for children to be grave, slow and deferential.

Her own twin sons were ten, her daughter twelve, and she focused attention upon them with an intensity far greater than she gave to all the lumpy girls in the flapping shorts and Aertex shirts. Comparing the other teachers' lives with her own, she knew that she was lucky. They had scores of girls in their charge, but at the end of each day only she read her three children a story, inhaling the smell of Pears' soap and warm Viyella: her
own
children, not some other woman's. The unmarried teachers had missed out on a woman's proper destiny, and she felt a thread of contempt for them. What did they know of bed, poor spinsters? As for that unstable pair, Sylvia and Diana, Bibs disliked even being in the same room as them.