Bilgewater (25 page)

But something came suddenly before my own unspectacled eyes—a vision of the black dress and the soft and luscious sables being scooped out by me into the carrier bags. If one reads or thinks much about the roots of causality and coincidence one is always coming back to the moment of vision, the chicken or the egg. I leapt from the bed, I flew from the room, I fled to Paula's suitcase and I flung it open. There inside the lid was what I had known all the time deep down: vast, black Paula letters saying

PAULA RIGG

323, CORPORATION ROAD,

BUDMOUTH,

DORSET

 

“Doesn't sound much like a farm,” I cried to Boakes who appeared looking very put-out in the doorway—“Where on earth—?”

I wrote on a piece of paper, “Come Back. Come Back, Come Back. He needs you so,” and I addressed an envelope, found a stamp and ran out to the pillar box in the road opposite the House whose first colletion was at 7
A.M.
Then I went back and slept soundly in my own bed till morning.

T
he final papers of the Oxbridge were all right. That is to say that the entrance examinations for a place at Girton College, Cambridge did not strike me as being all that. This is what I told people when I came out of the examination room at school anyway. It was a small room called the Hot Plate as the dinners were often kept hot there after cooking and a good smell of shepherd's pie hung about. It was gloriously warm. I was the only candidate and the room was still.

“How was it?” asked Aileen Sykes, wildly friendly, as I came out.

“Fine.”

“I say—have you heard—?”

“I must go now.”

The afternoon paper seemed all right, too. It must be queer not being able to do mathematics. Miss Bex was waiting after it was over. “
Now
then, Marigold?”

“Fine,” I said and marched off, stuck on my school hat and went home. I went by the promenade and kept my mind intensively on the beauty of the sea, the planes of the white sand and the rocks, the black, broken spikes of the pier. I could see old Pen marching along the sea's edge with Puffy trotting beside him. Pen loped with slow, swooping steps, clenching the pipe. Puffy bobbed. The walrus and the carpenter. They were considering passion. Not oysters. Oysters are supposed to be aphrodisiacs. Did Lewis Carroll know?

They were discussing passion and the shame of St. Wilfrid's. I wondered if they'd told Old Price.

“What d'you think, Price? The Head's wife has gone off with the Captain of the School and his daughter with the best Classics brain we've had in fifty years. The Head's in London looking for them all like Mr. Bennet. Bill Green is in charge of the School House and his Matron's left him.”

“Ah well. There have been these crises. I remember the zeppelins.”

“And Marigold Green has been running her father's House. They've all had the flu and the measles and she's messed up her Cambridge Entrance.”

“Cambridge Entrance? Dear me, do they have girls at Cambridge now? Dear me!”

Had I mucked it up? Had I just—when I let myself think about it—had I just perhaps written my name over and over again on the paper like they say people do sometimes when they're overdone? Or had I turned in blank pages?

No—I was sure I remembered handing Miss Bex pages with writing on them.

“What were they like, Marigold?” Father was briefly back in his study looking for things. Miss Bex was there yet again, pouring tea from a silver pot.

“Fine,” I said.

“I just came along to Hold the Fort,” said Bex, “and see you got some tea after all your endeavours. And I brought some little cakes.”

Father was looking frantically about for papers. “I can find them,” said Bex, briskly. “I did a good tidy-up before you came in. Oh I understand these servant problems.”

“I've got to go now,” I said.

“Don't over-prepare,” said Bex.

“I'm afraid I must go, too,” said father. “I'm living at the School House just at present, Miss Bex.”

“My
dear
! I have
heard
!” She gave him a long, very meaningful look. “But I can stay here. I shall be Of Use. I shall Man the Telephone.”

On the stairs Boakes hung about. “Bilge—what were yours like?”

“Oh fine.”

We looked at each other without conviction.

The next day was the general paper and I chose an essay called Coincidence. I wrote steadily, easily, fluently, unhesitatingly. I wrote of chess, relating it to mathematics, of the final appropriateness of events, of Shakespeare with reference to
Hamlet
, of
The Tempest
with reference to Sycorax, of the Eumenides, the “Kindly Ones,” with reference (veiled) to father, Mrs. Deering and the Reverend Boakes. I wrote of truth, and the necessity of it not to be manipulated and veiled in white samite, veiled in black sables, of Terrapin, of Terrapin's versatile father—in philosophical terms of course. I ended with a dissertation on the mathematical peace experienced in the realms of chess, in the pathways beyond accident, coincidence or desire.

I finished half an hour early and took pieces of my hair and plaited them carefully in many small pig tails, and when Miss Bex and the Headmistress arrived to let me out there were about thirty orange rat's-tail lashes wagging about my head. They looked surprised.

“
Well
, Marigold. How was it?” said Bex.

“Oh fine.”

“Good girl,” smiled the Headmistress. (Kind and quiet. I like her very much. I felt a heel.) “That's a good girl.”

 

“How was it?” said Boakes. “God knows,” I said, “except that I made an ass of myself. I let myself go. Well, no one expects me to get in anyway. What was yours like?”

“I covered some pages with words,” said Boakes. “The view of the Abbey from the window was very fine. And comforting.”

“Well, it's over and we can forget it,” I said. “No one expects either of us to get in.”

“Where will you go instead?”

“Oh—I don't know. Teacher-training. Trainee at Marks and Spencer. I love Marks and Spencer. They have wonderful clothes. Has the post come?”

It had, but there was nothing from Paula.

T
he next five days I spent not doing things. I behaved in such a curious way that when I think about it now, at Christmas, I can't believe that such a person ever existed outside the madhouse.

I suppose it was the shock of having finished with school. Believe it or believe it not I had not realised that when Oxbridge was over, school would be over, too, for ever. Five to seventeen. All those years and years and years of bells. Such an age and age of school. Those preps and speech days and Aileen Sykes and Miss Bex. The awful gym lessons. The terrible dinners. The smelly lavatories. The frightful, pitiless games of hockey with me always running the wrong way. The sniggers, the friendlessness. But at the same time the pattern, the plot, the safety was now gone. The plans all made for you, the security of knowing that on Monday come wind or high water you would have to be doing Double Applied. That if anyone wanted you in a hurry they would know for certain you would be in Room Eight, over the Quad. The sureness of what to do next. The sureness that you were not just wasting your time—because you had no choice in the matter anyway. The sureness that free time was precious and that the sands and the sea and the park and the garden had heavenly properties because, like heaven, they were except at certain moments forbidden and inaccessible.

Now I was utterly free. A master's wife and an imported assistant master and Uncle Pen had taken over the House and I was not needed at home. The brief occasions when father came back to deal with the odd essential thing—like Easby's parents who wanted to know why there had heen no trained nursing staff in the school when Easby nearly passed away (he was fine now) or when Posy Robinson's mother came over with six rose bushes and a bottle of champagne and a heavenly pair of lamb-lined gloves for me, to thank us—were always marked by the presence of Miss Bex.

The study grew yet tidier; bleaker and bleaker. The chess set was removed first from the fireside stool to the desk, then, when she set to work tidying the desk, elevated to the bookcase. When it was noticed to be on a tilt there, by father, Miss Bex decided to put it sensibly away in a cupboard, and father made no demur at any of this. His shoe-supply disappeared from under his desk, his bottles of rosé from his side desk shelf. Only the Botticelli gleamed at her still with its demon-cold, cruel, Spring, Grace Gathering eyes.

“It's a terrible thing to say,” said Bex, the Sunday evening, “but I've never felt I really liked that painting much. I could never
live
with it. It makes me—slighdy frightened. More shortbread?”

“I must go now, Miss Bex.”

“Now that you are an Old Girl, Marigold, can't you call me Ursula?”

 

And I spent my time not doing things. I set out to see Mrs. Rose. I got a sort of obsession about Mrs. Rose. I wanted to tell her about the beads in the pot and say how lovely the food had been; that I was so terribly sorry about Jack going off with Mrs. Gathering. I got to the door of the Dentistry in the bus, and then let the bus pass by and ended up somewhere in Billingham in a maze of dingy houses and walked there for hours and then went home. On the Sunday I decided to go and see Mr. Boakes and set off again in the same old bus. I got to the church in time, but the sight of the white-haired ladies, all helping each other in, and the dismal clank of the bell pulled by Mr. Boakes's little woollen paws filled me with tremendous gloom and I passed by and looked in shop windows, Sunday-locked shops, examining samples of wall-to-wall carpet and imitation leather sofas. Then I went back home again and found I'd missed lunch. On Monday I went over to the Comprehensive, skirted the buildings and stood on the cliff top where the hay-cocks had been and Grace so all-powerful and quiet, holding her wet nails to the ocean. There was nothing there but the loop of wire swinging in the cold wind.

On the Tuesday I went by train to Durham and it rained. The cathedral was cold and draughty and crowded. Children cried and shouted. One—inside in the main aisle—was sucking an ice-cream. In the Galilee Chapel, the tomb of the Venerable Bede looked dark and dreary—a block of stone covering nothing. The tea shop was shut. A card on the door said Closed for Alterations. There were signs of builders there, a bar being built, a counter for plastic trays.

 

On the Wednesday—the last day for a telegram from Cambridge if either Boakes or I were to be worthy of inspection (for at Oxbridge, you are only told if you are wanted. If they don't want to see you, you hear nothing)—on the Wednesday I decided that I would go to Terrapin's.

There was a piercing, cold wind and sleety rain and I got out of the bus, this time in daylight at his broken-down and noble gateway and stood looking up the drive. It was shorter than it had seemed in the dark. You could see from the gate where it curved round to the terrace. The tall swaying trees were only moth-eaten pines. There was a heap of rubbish beside the lodge, which had boarded up windows and pieces of wood nailed across the door. I could not see the Hall, not even its tower, and I stood about on the windy empty road and caught the next bus home.

Boakes was in his room when I got back, reading away about the Perpendicular and Decorated, eating a thick piece of Dundee cake. His glasses were crooked. He looked silly and plain. I said, “I suppose no post came?”

“No.”

“We haven't got in then.”

“It seems not.” He smiled imperturbably. “Come and have some tea.”

I wandered away downstairs and to the study and found, as usual, Bex sitting on the sofa very close to father and looking appealingly or so she thought into his face. He wasn't actually looking back, but there was something about him that was new. It was a sort of—what? A sort of renunciation, a relinquishing, a giving up. The fingernails were slipping from the precipice, the towel was being handed over—as I watched he began slowly to unravel his muffler. He gave it her and she tenderly patted it away, and I knew what I had been running away from all week and much longer—since I had come back from Jack Rose's, since Bex had installed herself each tea-time, since well
OF COURSE
—since Paula had gone away. “She's got him,” I thought. That's why Paula left. “He's had it. And so have I.”

“There was nothing from Cambridge?” I had to say something and it just came into my head. Nothing on earth would normally have made me show to Bex that I cared. It was just that I had to speak, to break the spell between them, and this came cut.

She looked across at me and gleamed with her teeth and said in a horrible, falsely gentle way, “I'm afraid not, dear.”

“Was there, father?”

He was fluttered and fussed. “Um—no, dear. No.”

“Shall I go?”

“Go?” he said.

“You seemed busy.”

“No, no. Of course not.”

“Perhaps she could just see about Boakes being in? Couldn't she William? Just see that he can take charge while we're out?”

“Out?”

“Yes dear—your father is coming for a little quiet supper with me. Now that all the exams are over and term ending, there is no real need for him to be in the House.”

“I do know that,” I said. “I've lived here for some time.”

“Marigold,” said father, “you're being rude.”

“Are you really going out?” I said.

“Well—er—um.”

“Of course your father's going out. My dear, your father doesn't go out enough. It is quite ridiculous.”

“But it's Thursday.”

“Whatever has that to do with it?”