The Eunuch's Ward (The String Quartet) (2 page)

‘Here, I’ve got my little torch on me. You should be able to make it out under the light,’ Tanner was prattling on happily.

With the vestiges of the sense of touch that I still had left, I felt something cold and pointed circle between the lips of my vagina and around the opening to it.

‘To answer your question, Mrs. Ganis, hymen reconstruction is a big business in some communities. Also, these days we deal with overgrowth a lot too. In some cases the hymen bars the entry so badly that even the most energetic penis can’t break its way into the vagina. And some young husbands, I must say, care more about their bride’s comfort than their own reputation for virility.’

‘Ah,’ said my mother.

‘Ah, indeed, Mrs. Ganis. It takes a brave, or shall we say a foolishly besotted man to admit that he’s unable to deflower his woman. I’m glad to say that your daughter won’t be causing any such problems to her husband. If you wish to preserve her in this condition make sure that she doesn’t ride horses or bicycles...’

In a formidable surge of rage I let the blanket drop from my face. I took a deep breath and with superhuman effort tried to free my legs. Bakir’s palms must have been sweaty and slippery, for much to my surprise his grip on my knees loosened and my lower end snapped back together. Before anyone fully realised what was happening, in a knee-jerk reaction my legs abruptly struck out and my feet smashed the good doctor’s face with mindless force.

The episode somehow failed to reach my father or else, he decided not to act on it. He may have been even pleased to have a spirited daughter.

But the following morning my pony Esmeralda wasn’t in her stable and my red bike had disappeared from the garage.

* * *

The ridiculous thing was that Father worried over absolutely nothing.

The last thing I was interested in at the time was sex. At that particular time boys were below newts, rats and Bakir on my scale of attractions.

The summer fêtes at the Queen Matilda School for Girls were one of those occasions when the entire rural community came together. Nearly everyone in the village had either attended or had family members who’d attended Queen Matilda. The attractions on offer had never changed over the past hundred years or more. Stilt walkers, fire eaters and acrobats attired in
Commedia dell'Arte
costumes greeted the guests at the gates, the best bakers in the county offered their pies and carrot cakes, elderberry wine in brown bottles graced practically every stall, and Mrs. Perrin, the school secretary, read palms, tarot and crystal ball in the school orangery as her mother and grandmother had done before her.

My mother left her Lamborghini in the garage at home. She and I arrived to the funfair fairly early in the Range Rover. Sports cars didn’t look good at a village fête. Only parvenus drove fast cars fast down country roads. My father who’d always courted publicity didn’t mind the reputation of a lovable rogue, if anything it suited him down to the ground. No decent human being would ever dare think ill of a lovable rogue. But a parvenu, now that was a completely different ballgame. Parvenus were people that one met in busy bars in the City and share liquid lunch and a mutually beneficial handshake with them. Under no circumstances, to quote his favourite threat, should one be seen with them at the coconut shy corner or caught sharing an expensive hamper that they’d brought with them because they’d seen it done at Wimbledon. So, when in Rome, or more precisely when in the grounds of an expensive country school with a tradition longer than a Shakespearean play, Carys Ganis wore Laura Ashley dresses, partook of Mrs. Harvey’s excellent steak and kidney pudding served piping hot on a paper plate, bought a brown bottle of home-made ale to take back to her husband, he’d be hopping mad if she didn’t and that could have serious consequences for her credit card limit, as she’d explain to anyone who happened to be around, and ask Mr. Taylor for advice about sweet peas. Hers never looked quite as lush and vibrant as Mr. Taylor’s.

I never quite knew what happened to the food and drink brought home in some quantities from the fair. The Laura Ashley outfits invariably ended up in the school’s next year’s charity collections or were given to local women who came occasionally to help clear up after a major party or with spring cleaning at our Hartsfield House.

Another peculiarity of the Queen Matilda’s summer fêtes was presence of boys. Baby boys, young boys, young men, old men, and of course the fee-paying fathers, they were all allowed to attend as long as they were in some way related to a student. The practice was generally described as the entry point into the marriage market. Having watched locally grown talent for a few years I had some doubts about that.

But, I was wrong.

Lily Merchant was in my class. A large, loud, horsey girl, the youngest daughter of Sir Alec Merchant, a high court judge. She must have been lonely because she was always inviting me over for sleepovers, trips to the cinema and birthing of foals. I didn’t mind Lily all that much. Once she’d start talking she couldn’t stop and that meant that I didn’t have to listen at all. And I did enjoy horse riding and grooming, while giving wide berth to foaling.

That summer before my 13
^th
birthday I was put on the ‘Ask Me’ duty at the fair. It involved wearing a bright yellow tabard with ‘Ask Me’ printed in dark green on the back and front, and making myself as visible as possible around my designated area, on that occasion around junior labs, toilets and the arts suite, all on the ground floor of the school. Over the two hours of my tour of duty I was partnered by Rosebud Munro, another student from my own class. Rosebud was a pretty blonde with cheeks and lips that suited her name. Her parents Lucinda Dwyer and Michael Munro were occasionally billed as the new Olivier and Plowright, a line of publicity that earned them more respect than money and limited their appeal to those who actually knew who Olivier and Plowright were. Surprisingly, my mother said ‘wow’ and looked impressed, my father said nothing until he found out everything worth finding out. Which was very little. What money there was, it was in the hands of Mrs. Munro, Michael’s mother, and what fame there was mattered only to those with more sense than money. Leon Ganis had no interest in his thespian neighbours but didn’t object to my association with their daughter.

Which was just the way I liked it.

That Sunday the two of us had very little to do, there were no new parents or guest celebrities to take around, and everyone else knew the place better than they’d ever wanted. Still, it was with a sense of relief that after two hours of smiling encouragingly at anyone who’d strayed our way, we pulled off the tabards and handed them over to the next shift.

That was when Lily Merchant cantered over.

‘Follow me, chickens. You’ll have the time of your life.’

Rosie and I looked at each other. Following in Lily Merchant’s footsteps wasn’t exactly cool, but then neither were the most likely alternatives on offer, like pony rides or the game of rounders against a girls’ choir from Alton. So, we both shrugged and, with as big a show of indifference as we could muster, followed where she led.

Little did we know just how life-defining that casual decision really was.

No matter how expensive and posh the school, and no matter how large or small, new or dilapidated the actual building might be, every school has a bike shed and the same things are happening behind it world over. Ours was in a pretty good shape, as it goes. No idea what its original purpose might have been, a gardener’s cottage some said. That sounded likely because the taps and other fittings that had survived suggested domestic use. It would have also been appropriate because currently it was used by our two lady gardeners Liz and Lizzie, Lezzies for short, which they may or may not have been. Anyway, that was where Lily was heading, recruiting more followers in her stride.

‘C’mon, boys. All your birthdays and Christmases have rolled up at once.’

We were a group of about eight or nine, boys and girls, when we entered the shed, and there were five or so more hanging about the entrance.

‘What are they all looking so shifty about?’ Rosie said what I was thinking. ‘What do they know that we don’t? Lily, hey, Lily...’

Lily was too busy to answer. She paired off two boys and two girls, linked herself arm in arm with a lanky, sun-speckled son of the village bank manager and whistling ‘
Here Comes the Bride
’ fairly accurately, she led the little procession indoors.

‘Bloody hell, Nat, they’re playing weddings,’ Rosie laughed. ‘I don’t believe it. She’s organised a mass wedding. C’mon, let’s go somewhere else.’

Later, I wished hundreds of times that I turned back and walked away as Rosie had suggested. It wasn’t as if I didn’t suspect what was afoot. I remember the butterflies in my stomach, the mixed feeling of nausea and fascination that kept me where I was.

‘Just a minute, Rosie. I suspect that Lily the Hypo may have surpassed herself this time.’

Once inside, Lily let go of her partner, pulled the other two girls to the tatty remains of a corner settee and the three of them sunk down onto the grubby leather, screeching and flailing their legs in the air.

‘Over here, lover boy,’ Lily ordered her chosen mate, whipping off her pants at the same time. ‘Make me come and you can keep them as a trophy.’ She hung the trophy, made of thin white cotton, with fraying elastic around the waist and a trace of skid-marks along the gusset, on the handle of the lawnmower closest to the settee.

There were a few titters and gasps in the midst of stunned silence.

I said, ‘She’s blooming barking,’ and rammed my elbow into the stomach behind me. There was a satisfying yelp of pain, and the hand that was trying to travel up my leg dropped off. The banker’s boy was fiddling with his zip, trying to free the tail of his chequered shirt from its teeth. I could feel the steamy heat of suspense around me. That was the other moment when I should have left and dragged Rosie away with me. But, I didn’t. Like everyone I stood there and watched with bated breath.

Lily wasn’t known for her patience.

‘Give it here,’ she lifted herself from her seductive recline and reached for the problem area.

There was a sound of ripping and Lily ended up with something long and flabby in her hand. It looked nothing like the large swollen examples of grown-up sexual desire that sometimes sneaked their way to our computer screens when the school firewall was down, or I saw pictured in the magazines that my father’s bodyguards usually left around.

‘Looks like an overcooked cannelloni,’ Rosie said aloud, ‘only smaller.’

I admired how cool she was.

Her remark must have woken up the boys’ competitive spirit for two of them immediately jumped on the other two girls that had been waiting for attention with their knees apart. The others were fumbling with their trousers, panting and sweating, their eyes darting around as if looking for guidance. One of the seductresses on the sofa uttered a muffled scream, pushed the boy off her and ran past me, two others quickly took her place, bringing their quarry with them.

‘Whoa!’ Lily cried jubilantly, ‘we’ve got a take-off!’

All around me, the boys held their pale little witchetty grubs in trembling fingers, kneading them gingerly, filling the room with a sticky-sweet smell that made me heave. The boy right next to me was crying and trying to shake something snot-like off his fingers.

I had enough. Only, I couldn’t move. I mean, I literally couldn’t move, there were too many frenzied critters packed around me. I looked at Rosie. She was staring ahead with unseeing eyes as if something had struck her on the head and only the support of the bodies around her kept her upright.

I stuck my fingers into my mouth and whistled. ‘Miss Payton approaching at two o’clock’, I shouted and whistled again.

It had an immediate effect. I had enough room to grab Rosie by the arm and pull her out. Some vague memory told me that there was a wooden bench to the right of the shed, by the patch planted with sunflowers and red currants. In between the fleeing children, I dragged Rosie there to vomit in peace. I say peace but what I really mean is undisturbed. She was shaking all over, her lower jaw was rattling alarmingly. Having no idea what to do next I let her stomp around in circles, flailing her arms one minute, hugging herself another, shivering and muttering something incomprehensible. Eventually, I noticed the water tap on the side wall of the shed. It took a long time and quite a bit of strength to get Rosie close enough, but once I managed to collect cold water into my palms and pour it first over her neck, then over her face, she calmed down. She even bent down and stuck her head under the tap. A few minutes later, with her hair and the back of her top completely wet, she let me lead her to the bench. As Rosie sat down I was just about to sigh a sigh of relief when she screamed and jumped up on her feet again, shaking her hand.

‘He did it on me,’ she shouted. He did it on my skirt. He did it on me.’ Just like the boy in the shed a few minutes ago she was trying to shake a blob of slime off her hand.

Which brings me back to my virginity tests. In those days, there was no way that I would have willingly taken part in any kind of sexual activity or even looked at a boy without shuddering. My father worried about nothing. Rosie and I swore never ever to have anything to do with the opposite gender.

Never ever!

Chapter 4

Queen Matilda wasn’t offering A Levels, and I had to be sent elsewhere. If any of the top six-form colleges were to accept me, I had to do exceptionally well in my last year of junior school and get straight As at GCSE exams. I didn’t know why my father had chosen the Caroline String High School for Girls but I didn’t particularly mind. It was in London, in Belgravia, no distance at all from our penthouse along Chelsea Embankment. It would have been even better if both Rosie and I could board at the school, or if Rosie came to share the flat with me, but neither was an option. Rosie’s parents wanted her to join them at their own place near Barbican, and my father wouldn’t hear of boarding. Eleanor String, the great granddaughter of the founder, wasn’t anywhere strict enough by his standards.