The Complete Stories (72 page)

Compared with that, an unexplained but entirely ordinary boy with red hair wasn't extraordinary at all. He had just gulped and “Hullo.” But when she stood at the windowsill and watched him, where he was half-hidden below the Chinese elm, he had looked, she thought,
like a painting. She saw him in a field struck by the wind, all agitated gold. His long legs, bare, his arms long and hanging at his side, his face tilted towards her, had made him at that moment not “too tall” as she had first thought but like someone drawn out, drawn upwards with the strain of being where he was, or who he was, as in one of the swirly paintings in the school corridor. It was the heightened reality of him that attracted her. As if he belonged to a world with other rules of perspective, or to another order of beings, and had come to induct her into other possibilities than she had so far discovered at home or at school, to reveal to her how she might cross into the further reaches of herself. Until he came into her life she had not known how suffocated she felt here, where every moment of the day was
for
something and had to be filled; or how it frightened her that the whole of life might be like this, that those corridors where you must never run, and stairs you went down only on the left, and
quietly,
might lead to places where the rules that applied were different only in detail, not in kind, and were invisible to her only because no one had ever pointed them out (that was for later, as Miss Ivers said of so many things) or given them names.

So she kept his secret because it was her own, and knew he would come again. She did not even bother to wait for him, since she knew she had only to fall asleep and he would be there; and when he was there she would immediately be awake.

Standing again
,
boots in hand, at the washroom door, he recognised in the scene some benevolence of nature that was reserved only for him. He had not expected it, but there it was. The world often surprised him like this. Behind him the raised window was a funnel for moonlight and the gathered noises of the garden, which he found comforting: soft wing-beats that might be an owl or a flying fox, the shifting of leaves, a stirring of furred creatures hunting. Beyond that, the wall he had come over; which formed in his mind a barrier he had passed between the world outside, that still made itself heard in the distant sound of a car (a Falcon, he guessed, changing gears as it turned uphill), the self they knew from the overalls his mother washed and the under-things she laid out for him, and this other self standing in socks and
shorts at the threshold of a different world entirely, a strange still world of children sleeping in rows under bluish sheets, which belonged to the night, to this place only, and was female.

It was to him as if these children slept here always; as if this room were always closed and moonlit, even when it was light elsewhere, because this was the only way he had seen or could imagine it, or cared to. The room hovered above the nightsounds of the garden like a spaceship in a wood, with rows of encapsulated virgins. They slept. They awaited his arrival. The door at the end of the room led nowhere, and the light out there came not from a corridor but from space; nothing familiar lay beyond: no stairways to other parts of the building. This room was its own place, afloat on the children's breathing and on his own will. When he blinked it was not there. It had been waiting—for how long?—till he should at last appear. It was always half-dark and could never be otherwise. Never. Because if he let the light in he would have to let in along with it all those ordinary, exterior events and conditions that belonged to daylight and the sequence of days, which would put it for ever beyond him, whereas this way it was entirely his. No past led up to the room and no future away from it. It simply was. And it was here because he had found it here.

He listened to the children's breathing. That too, strange as it might be to him, was a comfort. Its regularity calmed him. Could he find her out, he wondered, by the note of her breath?

He had not seen, on that last occasion, which bed she had come from, but had decided—
he
had decided—that it was from the second bed on the right, in which last time, as he stood here, a body had spoken and stirred. All his re-enactments of that last time, achieved under the pressure of his need to come back here, if only in imagination, had begun with the turning of that body under the sheet, the first mysterious disturbance and coming alive of the still room as he had originally seen it. In his re-living of that moment he had made certain changes; he had allowed himself to see what he had, in fact, only heard. A child rose up out of the second-last bed on the right, met his gaze, swung her legs slowly over into the dark between the beds—he loved this moment, the contact of her bare foot with the cold pavement—and came down between the rows of sleeping forms, her nightdress transparent in the bluish light, holding out her hand to him.

He had been over it so often that he had quite erased that other ver-
sion in which she surprised him from behind, caught him sitting clod-dishly on the floor, struggling with the laces of his boots. In his new version of their meeting he woke her by the force of his own gaze upon her and she came quickly and willingly.

Now he fixed his gaze once more on the second-last bed on the right and waited for her to stir. And was again surprised.

From the first bed on his left came a small gasp; a child pushed herself into a sitting position and their eyes made contact in the dark. She drew down the sheet, swung her legs over. And he thought with a moment's passionate fury that he had been foiled, that the initiative had been stolen from him, and from
his
child, by an impostor. But she did hold out her hand to him, and when she came and stood before him he saw that it was the same child after all.

M
ARYLYN
S
HORE
had come back to school in the new term with a hamster.

Pets were not allowed, but the hamster had lived for nearly two weeks in a wardrobe in the dormitory. It was Marylyn's, but in sharing the secret of its presence the others had come to think of it as theirs as well. They had fed it biscuits smuggled in from tea, and bits of lettuce and carrot, and were allowed briefly to stroke its fur. It became part of their dormitory life. Their sleep perhaps had a new quality because of their knowledge that it was there at the bottom of the wardrobe, and because, being nocturnal, they knew it was abroad, a tiny heartbeat in the darkness, while they slept. It moved in their sleep. It gave the night a different texture.

But the animal was discovered at last and transferred to the science lab, where Marylyn and the others were still able to feed it but where it passed out of their private world, and the glamourous light of a shared secret, and became just one more of the school's public properties.

Since Marylyn and the rest refused to tell the hamster's name (they had in fact called it Eustace), Miss Wilson, the headmistress, decided on Ruggles.

Because she was so pleased with herself for having found a neat and happy solution to the problem, Miss Wilson made rather a cult of Ruggles; she frequently referred to him in her pep-talks, and pretended, in
a way the girls thought childish and affected, that he was a real personage and a full member of what she “our raft,” so that Ruggles became, in the end, as much one of Miss Wilson's attributes as the moth-eaten gown she wore, her Eiffel Tower brooch, her green-ink corrections, and the tiny bobble of flesh on her left eyelid.

Meanwhile, the creature's shadow, in his incarnation as Eustace, continued to occupy a place in the life of the dormitory, which had substance in a smell they might pick up from the bottom of the wardrobe, or a memory of how his small heart had beaten when they held him, very carefully, between the palms of their hands. Eustace became a code-word. Having left behind his essence, his secret name, the forbidden animal could be evoked out of the darkness of almost any occasion and went on dwelling among them in a form that was invisible to the eyes of authority and no longer needed feeding with anything but their childish complicity.

It was with the thought of Eustace clearly in mind that Jane decided to keep her visitor entirely to herself. She thought of him now under a code-name, like Eustace, and when he was about to tell his real name once she warned him quickly, "No, no, you'll spoil it. You mustn't tell your real name. Not to anyone, not even to me.” She knew he would not remain undiscovered for ever, that sooner or later the others would certainly find out; but it seemed to her that if she kept her secret name for him, and if, for the others, he remained nameless, she would have something at least that was her own and that the boy would be safe.

The others did find out of course, it was inevitable. First Sheryl Payne, then Jill McArthur, then everybody. They sat up in their beds now, except for the sleepiest of them, whenever he came, and watched, and questioned, and tried to steal him away with all sorts of tricks—a different trick in each case, but she always recognised it, she knew them all so well—and with foolish, little-girl stories (how could he be interested in such things?) about their horses, their houses, the places they had been. She had never tried anything like that. It wasn't necessary. It was her bed he sat on; and the others, when gradually over the nights they got used to his presence and had gathered into the familiar atmosphere of the room his odd smell of car-grease—the others, when he had been made safe at last (she at least knew that he was
not safe)
came on tip-toe over the cool floor and sat cross-legged on the beds opposite.

From there, gravely, in a little hum of female excitement, they watched. But did not enter the charmed circle. They came only to the edge of it, their faces lit by what they did not understand but felt the glow of just the same, while she and the boy, just the two of them, burned at the centre. There was nothing now, she felt, as she looked out at their scrubbed faces, still a little fuzzy with sleep, that would ever take her back and make her one of them. She had crossed some border in herself that was still, for them, far in the future. There was no way back.

The others
,
watching, saw them as through glass, in a luminous bubble, they were so utterly absorbed in one another, had been drawn into such a distant dimension; and this both fascinated the children and freed them. Accepting the strangeness of the thing, and its attendant glamour, made them spectators and left them untouched.

What they might have been thinking, with a worldliness that was already an aspect of the women they would become, was “What does she see in him?” It was a mystery, but the question made it ordinary. What-does-she-see-in-him referred to the boy's patent unattractive-ness, to his being too tall, too red-haired, too freckled, to his having bony knees and bitten-down fingernails that were lined with car-grease. These facts set him in a light so common (as the question itself set the whole situation in the light “boyfriends” “romance") that they quite forgot the unusualness of his being there at all in the more interesting mystery of his having chosen Jane and of Jane's having chosen him. His ugliness, since it wasn't their affair, seemed endearing. It was only later that they would see these characteristics that had made him safe as part of what also made him monstrous—his grease-stained hands, his being all arms and legs. But by then he would have passed out of the dormitory world, where everything was softened by the hour, the lingering glow of sleep out of which he had woken them, and their own hunger for fairy-tale, into the panicky blaring of police sirens and arc-lamps that made the school park with its millions of leaves into a dangerous jungle. Then some of these children, who had sat entranced by the spectacle of Jane and her visitor, and had even flirted a little with the unusualness of him, would fly into hysterics; he would rise up out of
their sleep, with red hair on the back of his wrists, as a terror they could get around only by crying out aloud, till they found themselves safely awake again in their father's arms.

“This is Eustace,” she had told them on that first occasion. And they stared. Was it a joke? Who would have suspected Jane, dumpy Jane, of having a sense of humour? Or did she mean some sort of transformation? They stared.

Jane concealed a smile at her own cunning. The secret significance of the word, which was already informed with both these possibilities (and was not her name for him) immediately cast its spell, not upon the boy, who remained unchangeable, but on her foolish schoolfellows, for whom he was immediately softened and silvered over and made familiar and small. He slipped into the circle of maidens like a changeling prince; puckering his brow a little, poor boy, and wondering where all this might lead.

She took his hand then, and he relaxed and felt safe. But he thought of the moment later as the point where he first lost control of things, where he was taken over and made an instrument of her more powerful will. What did it mean: Eustace?

But he was delighted at first by these others; by the glow they made in the room, by the increase ten times over of the specifically female atmosphere they created. They were a magnetic field of which he was the centre. Only gradually did it dawn upon him that this wasn't really so. Their attention wasn't a single force, but a set of forces that pulled him many ways. He couldn't keep track of himself. He felt torn apart, felt odd bits of him being passed around from one to the other of these children like sections of an enormous doll, an arm off here, there a leg. They didn't actually touch him, it was something stronger than touching. He felt parcelled out into so many places he no longer knew where his real centre was, if not in the one part of him they seemed unaware of, though he made no attempt to hide it. Their innocence, which had its own wilder aspects, its knot of chaos, had stolen the initiative from him. He became first resentful then cunningly resourceful. These others were a mistake. They wanted to make a pet of him, whereas what he wanted to make of himself was something quite different.