No Talking after Lights (7 page)

‘Well, we'd better have another good night kiss, then.' He walked back to the door and closed it, so the room was dark, a line of light from the landing showing up the texture of the lino. He was still in his schoolmaster's suit, only he'd taken the jacket off and was wearing an old Fair Isle knitted waistcoat. The waistcoat crossed the room towards me, stretched across his chest. I wasn't in bed; I was still sitting on the edge with my legs dangling down.

‘Haven't I been a good girl?'

‘Oh, yes, a good girl, such a very good girl. Quickly now, into bed, quickly, under the sheets.'

I stared very hard at the drawn threads along the hem of my calico sheet, at the neat little squares they made, like the edge of a stamp, and I looked at the fat,
faded roses on my bedroom wallpaper, because you know how it is, after a while a dark room seems to become quite light. That's because your eyes adjust.

Walking down to the beach one day by myself, through the tall sea-grass, slippery to the hand like chives, I overheard two boys as they passed me, whipped by the wind.

That's just love innit?' the big boy said to his pal.

‘Oooh-er …' said the other, smaller boy, screwing up his nose and stamping on something in the sand.

‘Did you killed it?' the first boy asked.

I walked along the beach looking down at my feet where brownish, visceral ropes of seaweed coiled, glistening wetly on the sand. They felt squelchy if you trod on them, like something dead and putrefying, like the sheep I sometimes found in ditches, all slimy inside and covered with flies and maggots.

I still have the photograph taken of us that summer: all the village children lined up in forms outside the school. The teachers are in the middle of the group, my dada in the very middle. Some of the more daring boys have pulled a face, but most of us, conscious of the click that would freeze us for ever, are still and serious. If you made a face and the wind changed, you'd stay like that, and it was the same with the camera. My eyes are just two dark triangles - the sun is overhead and it blanks out my expression. I look like my father: the same thickset body and broad face, the same swarthy Celtic colouring. I was Dada's girl all right. My mother, who had come back from hospital pale and dry, moving slower than before, was cross when she saw the photograph.

‘What were you glaring like that for? Like a real black dog was sitting on your shoulder.'

I didn't answer.

Sylvia returned from that long-ago time and place to
find the Head still speaking, as though mere seconds had passed.

‘… Girls need discipline, yes. But even more than discipline, they need kindness. I assume you entered the teaching profession because you felt, if not a vocation…' Miss Parry smiled in acknowledgement of the irony ‘… at least a sympathy for girls; some understanding of their problems.' Mrs Birmingham leant back, her eyes tender and reminiscent, and continued, ‘Until they're ten or thereabouts, twelve if they're fortunate, little girls are privileged beings. Those years are the nearest we ever come, perhaps, to the Garden of Eden.'

‘I grew up in Gower,' said Sylvia, seeing she had to say something.

‘Land of our fathers, land of the free,' quoted the Head obscurely. Then, getting back to the point, ‘But adolescence, on the other hand, is not always an easy time. How are we to teach them, other than by precept and example? Being seen to lose your temper is not an example you would wish to set, surely?'

In the silence that followed, Sylvia felt her gorge rise and the dark mottling began on her neck. Mrs Birmingham noticed too, and waited.

‘May I know who has complained?'

‘No, you may not. You may deny the truth of it, however, if it is untrue. Do you?'

‘I may… occasionally, under pressure… speak a little harshly, perhaps. I will try to moderate my reproofs,' said Sylvia formally.

‘If there is anything you need to talk over, I am always here. I am concerned about the stealing, of course. For the time being I prefer to investigate that privately. As to yourself: perhaps there are personal problems? Could you take the first Parents' Weekend off?'

‘I have no personal problems, thank you, Headmistress. I shall not require the weekend off,' said Sylvia Parry.

‘Very well. And now, there's the lunch bell. Thank you.'

One-all, thought Sylvia, as she stood up to leave. I have been warned. But she hadn't heard about the stealing. I've got to watch my step all the same. Self-righteous cow.

She strode into the dining-room and stood rigidly at the head of her table as one of the seniors gabbled, ‘
Benedictus benedicat per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum
. Amen.' From the shelter of closed eyes and bent heads, Diana Monk looked anxiously across at her. Chairs and benches scraped the floor as the school sat down to lunch.

Girls were popular either because they conformed, naturally and without trying, to the prevailing idea of what was normal, or because they deviated from it in some remarkable way. Hermione Mailing-Smith was a perfect example of normality, never harbouring a single original thought, but she also deviated because of her fragile beauty. A cloud of adoration, like a solar flare, surrounded Hermione on her elaborately modest path through the day. She epitomized sixteen-year-old loveliness, legs tapering elegantly as a pair of scissors from the neat, flat ovals of her buttocks, her body curving and budding as though it moved underwater, while the fine, pale hair looped on top of her head flowed like the air itself. She had wide eyes, wide nostrils and small, pretty ears. One in a thousand girls conforms to this universal image of young girlhood. It was Hermione's accidental good fortune to be that one.

Because Hermione looked so exquisite, so sweetly vulnerable, it was impossible not to feel that her
character - her soul - must be heavenly too. The tributes beauty accepts make it easy to be generous. Hermione had always taken this attention for granted, making little distinction between the worship she received from her parents, other people's brothers, certain teachers, or her own contemporaries. At sixteen, however, she was becoming aware that the stares of men were more disturbing than those of the juniors. She was curious about the effect of her dazzling looks, the power she might wield, and impatient to put it to the test. She rather liked the idea of being cruel and seeing some young man languishing and fading away for hopeless love of her.

At school she was called ‘Hermy-One', the joke failing to conceal that she was the unique, the one and only Hermione. She was not clever, but most members of staff made allowances; she was not tidy, but someone else would always gather up her discarded clothes or papers, grateful for the brief intimacy this permitted. Her personal mannerisms were mimicked throughout the school — the way she unpicked the pleats of her heavy tweed skirt so that instead of kicking lumpishly around her calves it swung coquettishly from her hips; her way of writing capital letters with a loop and a flourish. She ran like a deer, springing across the games field to a background roar of ‘Oh, come
on
, Hermy-One! Oh, yes! Yes! She's
done
it!' More girls had ‘pashes' on Hermione than on any other senior.

In most cases a ‘pash' was a safe outlet for adolescent emotion and practice for sexual encounters to come. Charmian and Sheila were united in their mutual worship of Hermione. Others worshipped her in secret, deriving a bitter thrill from denying it.

‘She's not
that
pretty,' they would say, crossing their fingers.

The desire her beauty aroused was not always
passive, for Sylvia Parry was in thrall to Hermione. The taut blue veins at the back of Hermione's knees, the concave upward arch below her chin, the triangular breasts that tipped her Aertex shirt into twin points as she moved; these recurring glimpses tormented Sylvia. She would enter the Lower Fifth's form-room clotted with expectation, telling herself that Hermione was just an ordinary, silly girl, vain and shallow like most sixteen-year-olds, only to be ravished by the rediscovery that she was as flawless as in memory. In class the girl seldom asked a question and, if addressed, would smile abstractedly.

‘I don't know, Miss Parry. Shall I look it up?' Someone would thrust a book under her nose, open at the appropriate page.

‘Oh, yes,' she would say. ‘Here it is. Do you want me to read it out?'

‘You're supposed to
know
, Hermione,' Sylvia would admonish, grateful for the excuse to pronounce her name and look directly into her face, gulping down its details as greedily as a pelican, to be regurgitated later for the nourishment of her ravenous heart.

‘What made you want to teach biology?' Diana asked one evening, shyly curious.

‘Oh, it was the place. Gower. Not a lot to do there -nearest cinema was miles away - except read books, or go for walks. Lots of wild life, though. Just sort of happened.'

Gower was still Gower, in all its beauty: self-contained, teeming with life under hummocks of gorse and in rock pools. I was wild, too - cantering off on my own, hiding in cliffs that overhung the sea above Worm's Head or Oxwich Point. I knew they were high and dangerous. My mother would have beaten me if she'd known the risks I took. Often I scraped myself
against the jagged edges of rocks, or fell and grazed my knees until they bled.

‘Worse things happen at sea,' my mother would say as she swabbed the cuts with Dettol, and she'd stump off, leaving my father to comfort me. He would pull me on to his lap and I could smell the sweat of his clothes and the Brylcreem on his hair, and he'd whisper, ‘Worse things happen at sea,' and laugh into my ear.

I took longer and longer walks. To justify them I would say as I left the house that I was studying the plants and shore-life. I sketched and wrote down the Latin names of what I drew. So the beautiful pink and violet shell was
Gari fervensis
, the big pink scallops were
Chlamys opercularis
, and very occasionally I'd come across the rayed artemis,
Dosinia exoleta
, a round shell with markings that looked like ancient writing - Sumerian, I thought later. I learned the names of all the crabs, from the fierce, attacking fiddler crab,
Portunus puber
, to the timid shore crab,
Cracinus maenas
.

‘Other children collected stamps or cigarette cards; I collected the natural history of Gower, drew it and labelled it. I became more knowledgeable than anyone, even my father, and that, I suppose, is why I am a biologist. Or at any rate, a biology teacher.'

Diana Monk had no idea that Sylvia cherished powerful fantasies about Hermione. It did not occur to her that she had the right to be jealous. She barely acknowledged her own emotions, let alone Sylvia's. As for the girls, it wouldn't have entered their heads that a member of staff might trespass into their zone; and, indeed, what Sylvia Parry felt for Hermione was not an adolescent ‘pash'. Although they sometimes shocked and excited one another with smutty conversations after lights, most girls were entirely ignorant about their own sexuality. By the time they reached the
Lower Fourth some had started the curse, but they couldn't have explained accurately what its function was, even though they giggled in class when the English teacher read out, The curse is come upon me! Cried the Lady of Shalott.' They kissed each other good night, but these kisses were still the smothering hugs of children and not yet the explorations of precocious young women.

Occasionally a ‘pash' between a pretty junior and a receptive senior might lead to a secret meeting in the long grass at the end of the games field. They would usually just talk, unfamiliar with the vocabulary of desire, hardly knowing why they wanted to be alone, until by accident they brushed against each other's little breasts and discovered how nice it felt. But the prelude was so long and the subterfuge so elaborate that most ‘pashes' were over before reaching even this innocent stage. In any case, ‘pashes' were discouraged, and once a term Mrs Birmingham would talk vaguely in Prayers about being pure in mind and body and (the relevance was obscure) about the undesirability of friendships between girls from different forms. Then the school would sing ‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling'.

Very rarely was there a scandal. Letters hidden under pillows during term or sent by post in the holidays would be intercepted, diaries read; there would be a brief episode of melodrama, and all contact would be forbidden. For a while the girls concerned would whisper and cry in the dormitory at night, but it never lasted long. Sometimes a girl would develop a passion for one of the teachers, but this was ridiculed. Teachers were in the enemy camp, although Miss Valentine was an exception. Her face glowed with such cheerfulness, her voice was always so lilting and good-tempered, that she was generally agreed to be ‘an absolute darling'.

The Lower Fourth breathed heavily over its prep.

‘I saw you sucking up to Miss Valentine. Yuk! How could you? Practically slobbering all over her. It's only because she gives you good marks…'

‘It's got nothing to do with you, so MYOB. If you weren't so jolly lazy, Fiona Cathcart, you might get decent marks too.'

‘I haven't got a pash on her, so I don't write it all out twice and do beautiful darling little maps with lovely green and blue outlines,
that's
why.'

‘I don't care,' said Madeleine and made a face, scrunching up her nose and mouth and poking her head forward.

‘Anyway,
some
people are trying to
work
, in case you hadn't noticed. Which, ‘cos I've looked everywhere and I still can't find my rotten pen, is hard enough, without your sarky comments.'

Constance looked as though she were working, but she was not writing her English essay ('My Best Friend'), which had been easy and had only taken her ten minutes, even though the best friend she described was imaginary. Now she was writing a letter. She knew it was hopeless and she was only putting herself in the wrong and sounding ungrateful. She knew her mother would tell her to make more of an effort to join in and find a friend. So she added, ‘I do
try
and join in. But I'm no good at jacks and nobody ever tries to catch me in Kick the Can. Oh, well, there goes the supper bell so I'll have to stop now. Masses of best love, Constance.'