South Riding (49 page)

“Well, you remember I went into Kingsport?” She was glowing, eager.

“Well, I went to the doctor. I’d been having a bit of a pain— here. I thought I’d better do the thing well while I was about it. And Tom, you mustn’t mind. I don’t mind. Look. Look at me. I couldn’t mind and look like this, now could I? Darling Tom, it’s cancer. They can’t operate. It’s not always painful, and I may live for years still. Those tablets stop the pain when it does come on. Tom—
you are not
to mind.”

She struck his hand with her own weak fleshless fingers.

“You’re sure? He might have been mistaken.”

She shook her head, biting her lip now.

“No. I’ve been twice since. There’s no mistaking.”

“Oh, Lil—why didn’t you tell me?”

“I can’t think now. I can’t forgive myself. I thought somehow I could keep just the same. I didn’t realise . . .”

“Oh, Lil.”

“I’ve been so bad to you. It was cruel of me. I never thought. . . . I meant to be kind, Tom. You do believe I only meant to be kind?”

He nodded, speechless.

“I love you so much. You can’t think how much I love you. You’ve been so good to me.”

“Lil—is it
bad
?”

“A little—sometimes.”

“When you’ve—not spoken?”

“Sometimes it was the pain—but more often the tablets. They’re wonderful. They make it all unreal, Tom. Sometimes they make you a little unreal too. That’s hardly fair, is it? You’re so nice to me.”

“Can’t we do anything? I’ll go to Stretton. Don’t they have treatment nowadays? All that in the paper. Radium, isn’t it?”

“No; I asked. Not for my sort. If there had been, I’d have told you. Honest.”

“You wouldn’t have kept back—just to save telling me?”

This time she lied light-heartedly. “No. I ought to have gone earlier. But I thought it was all nerves. Tom, don’t take it badly. There’s nothing to fret about. We can’t live for ever. Only—only.”

He looked up at her with silently imploring question.

“Don’t hate me too much when I’m hateful.”

“Oh—Lil.”

He gathered her into his arms then and sat holding her on his knee, like a child again. She felt his cheek wet against hers, but whether with her tears or his, she could not say. Even the smell of beer about him seemed homely and comforting— nothing dreadful.

It was all right now. He had been blaming himself for it, thinking that she was like Mrs. Pollin. This was what came of lying. Never again would she insult him by telling him anything but the naked truth.

That even now she had deceived him about the fatal delay in treatment did not occur to her. She had forgotten that their journey from Leeds had really sealed her fate. Because Tom shared the knowledge of her illness, she felt now redeemed and purified, as though she had told him everything. She lay back in his arms, upheld and enclosed by truth—completely happy.

She hardly knew when he carried her up to bed.

T
HE BICYCLE SHED
stood behind the High School buildings, a long dim jungle of steel and wire beneath a sloping roof. Showers dancing on corrugated iron almost deafened the members of the Anti-Sig Society huddled together in one corner with winter coats bunched round their ears and cheeks bulging with liquorice allsorts.

Above them hung a notice-board on which was pinned a sheet torn out of an exercise book bearing the peculiar inscription, “A.S.S.”

From time to time day-girls entered, abstracted bicycles and pedalled off into the rain, paying small attention to the conspiratorial group in the dark corner. The bicycle shed was a recognised committee-room for unofficial school societies.

“Judy’s got top marks. Judy presides,” said Nancy.

A plump child with limp straw-coloured hair wriggled on to the lamp shelf.

“Midge Carne has an idea,” she announced.

“We ought to re-read the rules of the society.”

“Why?”

“That’s the right thing. Before every meeting.”

“No—not the rules, the minutes.”

“Well, we haven’t any minutes.”

“I founded the society,” said Midge. “I say it’s the rules. Judy can read them.”

Judy lit a bicycle lamp and bent forward to bring a battered exercise book into range of its narrow delta of light. She read:

“This society shall be called the Anti-Sig Society or A.S.S.

“It’s object is the abolition of the Sigglesthwaite monster from Kiplington School.

“Members are elected by a committee consisting of Midge Carne, Gwynneth Rogers, Nancy Grey and Judy Peacock.

“The society meets weekly and gives marks to the members, judged by their behaviour towards the Sig.

“Marks shall be given for the following points:

Also whoever does it shall be called Queen A.S.S. for the term and preside at all meetings.

Top marks otherwise for the week make a president.

“This society was the idea of M.C.”

“I have a really splendid idea,” announced Midge.

“All right. Get up on to the president’s seat.”

Judy slid down; Midge climbed.

She sat on the shelf dangling her legs, looking down on to the ring of upturned faces in the lamplight.

These were Them. These were her friends. She had triumphed. In the first term of her second year she sat there, presiding over Judy and Maud and Gwynneth, warm and secure in the confidence of their friendship. She was one of a Group, a Family. She belonged.

Her triumph was all the more sweet because she had nearly lost it. She had returned to Maythorpe after the Measle Term to the worst summer holidays that she had ever known. After the bright precision of Miss Burton’s little house, after the discipline and companionship of school, Maythorpe seemed lost in unhappy desolation.

The neglected lawns grew tall as a watered meadow. The unpruned roses straggled across the paths and dripped from the leaning archways. Apples rotted as they fell below the orchard trees. No callers came, but as human life receded from the old house it seemed to take to itself its own nonhuman populace. Mice scratched and whimpered under the bedroom floors; bats hung in the attic; earwigs and spiders ran up the window curtains. When Midge tossed her tennis ball accidentally against the ivy, sparrows and starlings flew out with such shrill chatter that the whole house seemed to have come alive to scold her.

Her loneliness first bored, then terrified her. Elsie, disgruntled and dour, banged about the kitchen. Her father was out all day. Castle was worse. The harvest had not gone well. Hicks was just awful. Daddy had sold three hunters before harvest. The morning when they went away, Trix, Ladybird and the Adjutant, Midge stood on the step that led from the little tiled back-yard to the great gravelled stable-yard, and watched Hicks lead out of the stable first the big bay, then the grey flea-bitten spotted mare, the Ladybird, then her father’s bright golden heavyweight, the Adjutant. Carne took the bridle reins, looked at their mouths, bent down and felt their knees. Ladybird was saddled; the other two wore their stable cloths. Hicks mounted the grey, and Carne handed him the bridle reins of the others.

“Be back about four?” asked Carne.

Hicks did not speak. Midge saw his ugly, rather comical face distorted by an odd convulsion. He nodded; he chirruped to the horses; he was off down the drive, riding one, leading two. Carne watched them go.

Midge ran down to him, torn by forebodings, urgent to ask, “Daddy, where’s he gone? What’s happening?”

But Carne did not seem to hear her. He strode off past the stables towards the hind’s house beyond the western stackyard without a word, his face set hard as stone.

So Midge was glad when the holidays were over.

She returned to school eager yet suspicious, sniffing its atmosphere, shying back from innovation like a suspicious and timid little animal. Her habit of suspecting the worst made her inclined to see every change as frightful. There were over fifty new girls and they were awful, slummy, common, with appalling accents. There was another boarding-house along Cliff Terrace. There was a new form, the Remove, and Midge was in it. “It’s for us duds,” said the irrepressible Judy. “Not at all,” Midge replied. “It’s for delicate girls who need special attention and don’t take matric. That’s why I’m in it. I had measles
very
badly, and Dr. Campbell says I must be careful of my heart.”

But, heart or no, Midge missed the special privileges of illness. Miss Burton had withdrawn from her brief intimacy. She was preoccupied with new buildings, new girls and reorganisation. People said that the school was being a success, but what mattered to Midge was whether she could be a success inside the school. She was uncertain again, and insecure.

So something had to be done, or life would be too wretched. “The sensitive girl, aristocratic and delicate, looked with dismay upon the vulgar rabble surrounding her,” she told herself. It was bad enough that Miss Carne of Maythorpe should be herded with all these tradesmen’s just too frightful daughters, but if, on top of that, she was to find herself, Lord Sedgmire’s granddaughter, despised by her inferiors, she could not bear it.

Then, with a sudden ecstasy of creation, she invented the Anti-Sig Society.

Ragging the Sig was fun and it was easy. It was part of a popular and legitimate Kiplington fashion. It was Sporting.

There was no intention of malice in it. Mistresses, with their huge statutory powers, were fair game. They were not human beings. They did not possess the common human feelings. Their lives were mysterious. They appeared at the beginning of term and vanished at its close. From the Great Deep to the Great Deep they went, incalculable, inapproachable, unreal.

Therefore for girls to persecute them was heroic. All the risk, all the adventure, lay on the side of youth, which must brave the anger of entrenched authority. Therefore Midge, swinging her thin brown legs in the light of the bicycle lamp after second school, surveyed her audience with legitimate pride.

“Listen,” she said. “You know our nature prep.?”

“‘Write a study of some living creature whose habits you have observed for yourself,’” quoted Maud.

“I’ve got a marvellous idea. You know how she loves the stickleback. The little stickleback? Why not the Sigglesback? Who’ll dare to write an essay on the Sigglesback? We’ve studied it, haven’t we? We’ve observed it for ourselves?”

She watched her great idea rippling across their faces like light on water.

“The sigglesback—a bony little creature—cold-blooded— lives in the mud.”

“Builds nest.”

“In its hair.”

The idea was catching on.

Here was creation. Here was glory.

“It prefers dirty water.”

“It never mates.”

Glory, glory, glory. Midge was a leader. She was popular. She was safe. Friendship encircled her. Leadership enthroned her. When had she doubted? When had she been afraid?

“It’s marvellous!”

“Midge, you’re priceless!”

“Shu-uh!”

The creaking door at the far end of the shed opened. The Sigglesback herself, dank hair in a fringe below her drenched felt hat, mackintosh dripping about her tall bowed figure, botany specimen tin slung from her shoulders, entered pushing her bicycle.

She found difficulty in shoving it into its place. She had been collecting leaves and bark and Mycetozoa for tomorrow’s lesson. She was almost blind and half crying with exhaustion after pedalling her cycle against the blustering wind. She was a figure irresistibly comic.