Bilgewater (7 page)

“For Pete's sake,” she said again stretching her legs as I gasped for air and blinked my streaming eyes. She gave a friendly nod across at Bex and turned back to me. “Don't you remember me?” she said, “I'm Grace Gathering.”

“Grace Gathering,” I said.

“I was your best friend when we were five. Don't you remember?”

“No,” I said. Then I began to. “Grace
Gathering
,” I said. “But you're the Headmaster's—You're at—You're not here!”

“I am now,” said the Vision.

She looked away and so did I and so did Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Polonius and all the royal family because the background music of vehement tapping had begun to gather speed and force. Bex in her might was entrenched behind her tall desk and the chalk clattered like a gun. “Might I just be
informed
,” she said, icicles forming on every fang, hoar frost puffing at the nostrils, “Might I just be
granted
—”

“Oh—I'm terribly sorry.” Grace leapt up and went over to her. “I think I'm probably going to be in this form. There's no one in the staffroom or the headmistress's little nest. I suppose I was a bit late. I just thought I'd try a few doors.”

“You mean,” said Bex coldly, “that you are a New Girl?”

“Yes.”

“In my Sixth?”

“I think so. I've been at a boarding school till now. I suppose I'm this sort of age.” She wafted her hand about in our direction.

“I see. From which school?”

“Dartington Hall.”

“I see.”

“I thought you were at Cheltenham,” I said and everyone looked at me as if a waxwork had uttered.

“Sacked,” said Grace Gathering.

“And Dartington?” asked Miss Bex.

“Sacked, too.”

She gave Bex and everybody a lovely smile.

“So I've come home to mum,” she said. “To School Home over the road from old Bilgewater.” She gave Bex an encouraging nod. “I'm sure things are going to be a lot better now.”

 

The bell went then and somehow we got the Shakespeares gathered up and old Bex out of the room and everyone drew close together like a pondering army. They huddled, every one of them over in a group under the Watts portrait of The Man who had Great Possessions, looking as if he's being sick in a corner. Somebody knocked over a vase of the dead chrysanthemums and as the water trickled down I realised why I was feeling so good. For the group in the huddle was looking across not only at the Vision but at me, too. The Vision and I were together. We were allies!

“Chrysanthemums,” said Grace smiling across at them as the water dripped, arranging herself on my desk. “Have you noticed how they look like sheep's bottoms?”

She twirled one. “In the wind,” she said. “We drove over the moors from York here yesterday—all the poor sheep with their bottoms turned into the wind. Just like grey chrysanthemums.”

The Bex VI, Set B, had no views on this so Grace turned back to me and tossed her pink candy floss about which did not look like dead chrysanthemums or sheep's bottoms. “Well old Marigold Bilgewater Green,” she said, “it's nice to see you again after all these years. I like your hair. It's gone quite curly. It's great to see a face you know.”

I
went bursting home from school to Paula that afternoon as I have never done before or since, up to the ironing room, over to the sick room, the San, down to father's study and at length ran her to earth with father over in the Long Dormitory. Boys scuttered out round my feet like rats from a barn as I flew in. I banged into Boakes with his face in a book as he walked out and I collapsed up to Paula who was demonstrating blind cords and neither she nor father showed any great interest in the news I brought.

“Grace Gathering's arrived,” I declared.

“Think they'd all been trying to hang theirzelves,” said Paula. “Shredded to bits so they won't pull downwards, or
elze
they get pulled about too hard and ping back!”

“Ping back,” said father meditatively, squinting out at a vista, “Hullo Marigold. Lovely cloud formation. Look.”

“So they'll have to be renewed and it'll cost a hundred pounds and will have to be faced.”

“Grace Gathering's here.”

“It's not dezent the way they spring about naked.” (She pronounced it to rhyme with baked.)

“Oh come now,” said father, “I'm sure it's not important. Who's arrived, Marigold?”

“Grace Gathering. She's been expelled from Dartington Hall. She's coming to our school. She's going to live at home over at the Head's.”

“Oh good. She'll be a friend for you,” Paula said, “and I'm not having those great hairy seniors prancing about no blinds drawn and young girls about corruptible. Who's this Grace Gatherin' then?”

“Well she's Grace
Gathering
. She was once my best friend. Don't you remember. She's
terribly
friendly and she's grown simply beautiful. And
kind
,” I added coldly as Paula started leaning about with a tape measure.

“What's the matter with you?” she said. “Who's
un
kind? B
EWARE OF SELF PITY
. All I have to get straight at the moment is whether I can order new
bloinds
.”

“Couldn't you—run up some of those nice net curtains we used to have long ago?” father asked a bit exhaustedly.

“Dirt catchers. Fol-de-rols. Burned them all long since and there'll be no more in my time. After my time may be. And they need good thick bloinds in winter as well as curtains. For warmth. No patience with this Tom Brown's Schooldays fiddle-de-dee—” On and on they went.

“I'm going now,” I said and they paid no attention. “I'm going across to the Head's to look her up.” This was a very extraordinary thing for me to do as I never stirred foot after school over the House doorstep but all Paula cried was, “Supper. Don't forget your supper. Eggs and beans gets leathery.”

“I shall be
out
to supper,” I declared and vanished round the woodsheds, loitering over the road, past the other Houses, and out of sight towards the Headmaster's wrought-iron work and Georgian front door. What I thought I was going to do when I got there I know not, but the arrival of Grace had shaken me very oddly. I had felt quite certain from the moment she appeared that she had been in some way Sent—that she was some sort of salvation, even though until the moment she had put her head round the door I had not realised that I was in need of any salvation at all. Like the man who had had great possessions, I had been fine—or so I thought. I hadn't known how much I needed a friend.

A narrative and an equation are one, in that they are some sort of an attempt at a statement of truth, at what—as Hardy says—every one is thinking and nobody dares to say: so that in case you are thinking that I was a bit weird in my feelings for Grace Gathering, a bit steamed up like the third form girls get about mistresses or Puffy Coleman gets about the new boys—let me tell you quite coolly that I am not like that. I have a very good balance of hormones all distributed in the right places. The only thing that ever worried me was that I started brewing them so early and at—well I'd better admit it—even eleven, I couldn't sometimes sleep for thoughts of Jack Rose.

But I'm not funny. My wonder and delight at the sight of Grace, at Grace's attention and friendliness to me were simply that I saw a wondrous hope in them that I might bask in them a little, might tag along. I might be associated. Something very promising had walked into Miss Bex's Hamlet with Grace Gathering—a sort of hazy hopefulness, a sleepy, delicious content of the kind I had felt that evening long ago when Boakes had played the flute by the Fives Court, or that other afternoon when I had been walking along Madeira and Jack Rose had come along and said I could read
Ulysses
.

In other words I saw that where Grace Gathering went there would be romance and that if I hung about perhaps some of it would come off on me. Romance I saw in its best Tennysonian or mediaeval sense. If a cynic of course like Terrapin were to read this he would say, “Ha—Bilge thought that Grace would attract boys and if she hung around she, Bilge, might get some of the left-overs.”

But Terrapin held no threat for me. He was my evil genius of long ago. I hardly saw him now. The only two romantic episodes of my life he had squashed flat but there was no way he was going to get at this one. Grace would not even be aware of the Terrapins of this world, just as she would not be at risk from or aware of the romamic twaddle of dear old Uncle Edmund Hastings-Benson. Grace I saw as a figure far, far above coarseness or sloppiness—a figure of real Romance, a creature of turrets, moats and lonely vigils, gaundets and chargers, long fields of barley and of rye.

And now I was to be associated with her. I imagined myself as I wandered over father's House playing fields towards the cricket pavilion then back again along the road, past Grace's house but not looking at it, back to my own home again, trailing a hand along the School House railings: I saw Grace Gathering in a floating dress and a tall cone of a hat with a flimsy bit of net fluttering behind it, drifting down to a river and lying flat out in a boat and the boat floating smooth, smooth, down the river into a pearly haze beneath bridges. And I heard Grace's voice singing, singing, softer, softer and stopping, and then at the last bridge Lancelot himself leaning sadly over, sadly gazing.

He said. “She had a lovely face

The Lady of Shalott.”

And beside him on the bridge stood I—Bilgewater. It was to me he said it.

“Alas,” he said, “Grace Gathering. Dead, poor thing and not for me. Not
really
my sort of course,” he said—Jack Lancelot. “Not a girl one could
really
love, really get close to,” and he held out his pale doctor's hand inside its mediaeval knitted-metal glove, Jack Rose did, and lifted my hand to his lips. “Oh Bilgewater! Marigold!”

Together we walked off the bridge, together for ever with Grace Gathering's great big white and gold body sloshing about under the bridge and tipping about on the tide.

A narrative must be what everyone is thinking and nobody dares to say. I present you therefore with my obedience to Thomas Hardy, my attempt at naked truth, the thoughts I really thought, the fantasy I really had.

Though it's not somehow as good as
Ulysses
.

T
he next day brought no sign of her. She didn't appear in our class and I didn't see her in prayers. “Whatever happened to that girl?” Penelope Dabbs sniggered. “Was she an illusion?”

“Perhaps,” said Phyllis Thompson with a meaning look. She's full of meaning looks. Though nobody understands the meaning, which is bad luck on her. “She's something to do with Marigold.” (I'm usually Marigold at my own school if I'm anything unless they have a brother at St. Wilfrid's and know.) “Who is she, Marigold?”

“She's the Headmaster's daughter. I knew her when I was little for a bit.”

“She's rather weird,” said Phyllis Thompson.

“She's rather much,” said someone else, “she talks class.”

“Class,” said Penelope. “Where's she been all these years?”

“Being kept out of the way of the likes of us,” said Doris Nattress, “in case she gets talking North.”

“She'd talk how she wanted, that one,” said Phyllis, “wherever she was. She'd do what she wanted.”

For a moment everyone was united with envy.

“Maybe she's been in prison somewhere.”

“She's not old enough.”

Everyone shrieked. “Her hair's too long.”

“But Dartington is a prison, isn't it?”

“No it isn't. That's Dartmoor. Dartington's a posh school where they do as they like. They're all wicked and then they turn out terribly well in the end.”

“Sounds like Enid Blyton.”

They howled and screamed with mirth. I was unamused.

Wednesday came, Thursday. Then Thursday evening I was up with Paula as usual and Paula's telephone cleared its throat and she picked it up. “She's eating her supper,” she said. Then, “Oh, all right then.” She put the phone down and seized my plate and ran with it to the oven. “Message,” she said, “You're to go and take it down there. Go on quick. They're hanging on on your father's phone.”

I went off to the study, waded through everyone's outstretched feet, blinked my way through the pipe smoke to the desk where the phone was off the hook waiting for me.

“Hullo?”

“Marigold?”

“Yes.”

“My
dear
. It's Girlie Gethrun heah. Yes. Girlie, Grace's mother. Isn't it lovely? She's heah! Coming to your school next week. Such fun! Much beh then bah school. Your fah
so
Sensble. Mech mah sef-raant.”

“Who is it?” asked Uncle HB.

“Some mad woman,” I said.

“—so abah six-thirty then?”

“What? Sorry?” (Puffy and Old Price had got started on zeppelins close to my right ear.)

“Will six-thirty be all right?”

“All—? Oh, yes,” I said, “lovely.”

The line clicked off. “Oh heavens,” I said, “I'm in a mess now.”

“Nonsense, nonsense,” said father gently dusting a wine glass with an antimacassar.

“But I am,” I said, “I've been asked to something at six-thirty but I don't know what or which day or where.”

“Ah,” said father. He paused near the chess set and put down the wine glass. I drifted up. Time passed. Father moved a rook and looked at us all with a face of beatific joy.

“Aha, aha,” said father—and I do not wonder, for he had set down the rook. It was the most brilliant move. It was one of the cleverest things he had ever done. It was a game that had been concerning both of us for several weeks and a sticky game up to now. With sheer admiration I sank down and found myself on Puffy Coleman's knee. He brushed me off as if I were a spider and looked huffy. Huffy Puffy.