No Talking after Lights (9 page)

Lunch at the hotel was an ordeal rather than a treat. The dining-room at the Spread Eagle was filled with girls and their parents, not separated by the usual hierarchies of age and form, but muddled together, so that you could find yourself at a table next to one of the seniors, and didn't know whether or not it was all right to treat her just like anyone else. However hard the girls tried to speak quietly, as a hint to parents to keep their voices down, it was impossible not to overhear neighbouring conversations. The anxious advice or pride of someone's else's mother unwittingly broadcast to the nearby tables would cause a child to cringe and
blush with embarrassment. The well-meant heartiness of fathers was almost as bad.

‘Working hard, old girl? Nose to the grindstone, eh? That's the stuff! Not too much athletics, if you ask me. Can't have you ruining your legs. Spot of tennis is fine, though.'

‘But, Daddy, I'm in the house team.'

‘Jolly good. Play up and play the game. Happiest years of your life.'

‘Hum, hum, I don't think,' the child would mutter, for the benefit of those who could hear.

Everyone looked forward desperately to Parents' Weekend and it was always a disappointment. Once the holidays ended and the term began, parents and their children lived separate lives, and letters did little to bridge the gulf. They could not communicate their daily experience, except in meaningless clichés.

Charmian's mother had driven down from London with her friend in a low, shiny sports car, all scrolling curves and rich-smelling leather. Charmian and Sheila were squashed uncomfortably into the back as they drove first to the Post Office, at Charmian's insistence, to send off her parcel to Dr Barnado's Homes, before joining the lunch-time clamour at the Spread Eagle. Heads turned, Charmie noticed, as her mother entered. In a clinging crêpe-de-chine dress, with the ends of her plump fur stole thrown carelessly across one shoulder, she was the best-looking mother in the dining-room, Charmian thought. Uncle Dickie looked proud of her too, pulling out a chair and settling her first, and then making an elaborate pantomime of doing the same for Charmian and Sheila.

‘Have you got a nice part in the school play, darling, so we can all come and watch you?' asked Charmian's mother, fluffing up her own hair and then smoothing Charmian's.

‘She's the King of France's page,' said Sheila eagerly. ‘She's on nearly all the way through.'

‘Have you got a lot of lines to learn?' asked Fay Reynolds, addressing herself directly to her daughter and ignoring her tiresome plain friend. She had hoped for the opportunity for a little chat. Now that the divorce was agreed, the time had come to drop a few hints.

‘Why hasn't Daddy come too?' Charmian said.

‘Well, now, young lady, your father's a very busy and important man, and he's got lots of things to do, so you'll have to put up with me instead,' Dickie said.

‘Aren't
you
a very busy and important man, then?' said Charmian.

‘Now, now …' began Dickie, but he was interrupted.

‘Wasn't it sweet of Dickie to drive me down?' said Fay Reynolds to her scowling daughter.

‘Oh, it
was!
' simpered Sheila.

‘Waitress!' Dickie raised his hand and a girl in a black dress hurried over, fishing in her apron for a pad.

Across the other side of the room Constance had placed her knife and fork neatly together next to the fat and was talking to her parents in an urgent whisper, trying to get them to meet her eyes. Her parents thought fondly how smart she looked in her cotton frock and clean white socks, the straw hat with its blue hatband that showed she was in Drake House hanging over the back of her chair. What a good thing they'd got her into such a nice school, where she'd keep her English ways and make suitable little friends. Perhaps someone would invite her to stay next Easter holidays. She couldn't fly out to Kenya three times a year - it was too far and too expensive. An invitation from some nice girl in her form would be a weight off their minds.

‘Daddy, you've got to
listen
to me—'

‘
Got
to, Constance? I don't think I've
got
to listen to you.'

‘I mean,
please
listen to me. It's no good Mummy keeping on just saying it's a beautiful school in the heart of the country if I don't like it.'

‘Your mother and I decide what's best for you. Remember what I told you? If at first you don't succeed…'

‘Try, try and try again,' said Constance, her voice as bored as she could risk sounding, since this was what her father always said.

‘Right, Constance. Good. Now, you can have your say. What makes you think you don't like it?'

‘I've been here a month now, so it's not as if I'm just homesick. But none of the other girls like me and nobody wants me to be their friend, and come to that I think some of them are awfully soppy, with their teddies and glass animals and all that, and kissing their mothers' pictures good night…'

‘Oh, darling, do they really? I think that's rather touching,' said her mother.

‘Well, I don't kiss
your
picture good night,' said Constance ungraciously. ‘I don't see the point.'

‘I expect you seem a bit stuck up,' said her father. ‘Nose buried in a book, reading all the time.'

‘What's wrong with reading?'

‘It would be better if you joined in a bit more, tried to share their sort of hobbies and interests, instead of being snooty about them. Don't be such a chump, Constance. You're not the only pebble on the beach. School is about learning to muck in, to share and share alike. Teamwork and so on.'

‘Collect postcards of the Royal Family, you mean, or china horses, or read soppy stories and swoon over Richard Todd and Jean Simmons and thingummy Peck - whatever those film stars are called. You hardly ever let me go to a film—'

‘Darling, that's not true!' said her mother. ‘You saw
Scott of the Antarctic.
'

‘Not the sort of films
they
see, so I've no idea what they're talking about. I couldn't care less anyway. Oh, but that's not the point.'

‘Darling, we're being very patient with you,' said her mother. ‘We've driven all the way down here to visit you, even though we're off on Thursday and there's still a great deal to be done, because we wanted to see you happy and settled. It's too bad when all you do is complain.'

‘Buck up now!' said her father. ‘Shoulders back - big smile - remember the Brownie code? A Brownie is cheerful and does her best at all times. Try to remember that. It'll see you through.'

Constance shut her eyes and clenched her teeth and jaw and fists (I am a tree, I am a tree) and said in a passionate monotone, ‘The point is, I'm not happy here and I never will be, because you'll be in Kenya and it'll all be too difficult to arrange from there and if you make me stay I'm going to be frightfully mis and I shall run away - oh, crumbs, it's all so
rotten
…'

She looked up. Her parents weren't looking at her, but at one another. Her mother was making an apologetic face and she caught her father's indulgent smile. Nothing, she saw, would make them change their minds.

‘I've got a jolly good idea!' said her mother brightly. ‘Let me have a word with the Simpson twins. I'll explain that you're not very happy and ask if one of them will be your friend, just to help you settle down. Hmm?'

‘Good idea, Paula,' said her father heartily. ‘Now: pudding for a growing girl. What's it to be? Ice-cream?'

‘I need to spend a penny,' said Constance. Abruptly, without asking their leave, she got up from the table.
Straight-backed, Mowgli banished from the Council Rock, the little mermaid entering a strange element where every step was torture, she walked through the crowded hotel dining-room and went to the ladies'. She sat down on the lavatory and listened to the rain. A cheery line from
1066 and All That
sang in her head: ‘Oh, we don't want to leave you, but we think we ought to go …' Her head and neck and shoulders were hunched forward until only the cracked tiles on the floor met her eyes, but still she could not cry.

Sylvia Parry and Diana Monk were making the most of Parents' Weekend. They'd spent the rainy Saturday morning marking prep books and now they had all Sunday free. The morning was as hazy and fresh as a watercolour. Straight after church they had driven down to Brighton in Sylvia's Austin Seven. There they had had lunch in a smoky, grubby café on the front and now dawdled bare-footed through the cold shingle on the beach, sandals swinging in their hands, gazing at the rhythmical greeny-grey swell of the sea. It rose and fell against the pebbles with a soft, steady furling and unfurling. Small children in ruched seersucker swimsuits ran shrieking after each retreating wave and scrambled back, shrieking louder, as the next wave rose up the beach and spent itself. Dogs bounced and yapped, leaping for driftwood and rushing back to have sticks flung again.

‘Monsters,' said Sylvia. ‘Look at them: all wet and mucky.'

‘Dogs always get like that. They like it.'

‘Not the dogs: the children. Now they're going to have tar all over their hands and feet and some poor bloody woman has got to clean them up and listen to them whining all the way home. Or back to their miserable boarding-houses.'

‘Did you ever want children?' asked Diana.

‘Fat chance of that! No, thank God, I never did. I'm not that stupid. Don't tell me you did?'

‘Not exactly. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that it dawned on me I wasn't very likely to have them. I think you take it for granted, when you're growing up, that you'll get married and have a family. I mean, most girls do. It's either that or be a spinster.'

‘I never did. But then I knew all along I'd never marry, ever since I was about twelve, anyway.'

‘You don't talk much about your childhood.'

‘No bloody wonder. What do you want to know? I've told you we lived by the sea in Wales - the Gower Peninsula. Have you ever been there? It's beautiful, I'll give it that. There are wild ponies and rare birds and ruined castles and prehistoric stones. Best of all, miles and miles of beaches, and sort of moor and scrub where you could just walk all day without seeing hardly anyone. I miss that - being alone.'

‘Sorry.'

‘I didn't mean anything personal.'

‘It sounds bliss.'

‘The place was. I'm only talking about the place. The sea had buried villages and you could see the ruins at low tide. But as for the Welsh … tough, sentimental, Chapel…'

‘Heaven.'

‘No, definitely not heaven.'

They walked along in silence, their skirts swaying against their legs in the breeze, their bare arms goose-pimpled. The air was bitter with the ozone smell of the sea, and gulls cried plangently on the slant of the wind.

‘Don't let's go back yet.'

Prayers on the Monday morning after a Parents' Weekend were always tricky. The school routine had
been disturbed, some of the girls who'd gone home were now homesick all over again, while the rest felt a sense of anticlimax. Mrs Birmingham had a couple of tiresome interviews with parents to brood over. The Cathcarts had given trouble with some tale of a lost (she heard the implication that it might have been stolen) photograph frame. Privately she blamed them for putting temptation in the way of the domestics by giving the child a solid-silver frame to take to school, but she had promised to investigate. Peggy would look into that - she was in charge of all the domestic arrangements - but she herself would need to make enquiries in case it could be one of the girls. Her mind ran over these necessary steps as her voice intoned the prayers. ‘Give us Thy goodness and truth, O Lord. Make us pure in heart and honest in thought, word and deed. For Thy sake …' The school breathed a respectful ‘Amen'.

Peggy Roberts scanned the Lower Fourth from under downcast eyelids. The King child's parents had said she was slow to settle down: could she be stealing? The Cathcarts were not absolutely sure that the frame
had
been stolen, but a silver frame was probably worth five or six pounds. She hated to have her cleaning staff accused. They were decent Swedish country girls, known by the school as ‘the Scandies', and the last people she would suspect of dishonesty.

‘You may go to your classes now,' said Mrs Birmingham. ‘Michaela Simpson, will you come and see me during Break? Thank you, dear.' She smiled to show it was nothing unpleasant. No need for the girl to worry all morning. As she and Miss Roberts processed out of prayers she paused by Miss Valentine.

‘Can you spare five minutes before your first lesson?' she murmured.

The three women sat in the Head's study. Beyond its
closed door they could hear the clatter and squeak of the girls surging into their first class. Miss Valentine's usually cheerful face was anxious. The rumours and suspicions that buzzed covertly through the school and staff-room whenever there was a bout of thieving were dreadfully upsetting, and the recent incidents had been happening in her own form, the Lower Fourth. So far it was just the photograph frame, someone's leather writing-case and a fountain-pen that were missing. But you couldn't watch 120 girls every minute of the day; she couldn't even watch the twenty-three in her own form, and lockers, despite their name, were not locked. She ran through possible culprits in her head. Sheila Dunsford-Smith wasn't looking at all happy this term, though it was hard to associate her open face and stocky figure with ideas of deceit. Her friend Charmian was too stupid for the necessary subterfuge.

‘What about the new girl, Constance?' the Head was asking. ‘Constance King? A very intelligent child, but a bit of a loner. I'll keep an eye on her. Deborah Brewster looks a bit sly, though it's unfair to judge by appearances. She's another outsider.'