No Talking after Lights (8 page)

I'm going to run away and that'll show them, she thought. She made a song of it: I'll run away, far, far away, and come again another day - no, that was silly - she'd never come back. Not ever.

Sheila stared at her supper, an iridescent orange triangle of smoked haddock lying in a tepid puddle of milky liquid. She ate the bits of potato that weren't
dyed yellow and put her knife and fork together.

Charmie was talking across her to Mick and Madeleine: ‘… so then this girl, she's an orphan you see - I think that's it - yes, and she's fallen on hard times and she has to go and be a typist because she hasn't got any money and she's so ashamed she changes her name. That's so no-one will know it's her. But the boss's son - he's a lord really, only his father's making him start at the bottom - well, he keeps noticing her ‘cos she's so pretty and sad and everything, and …'

The other two listened bright-eyed, eating mechanically.

That's not how you told it to me, Charmie,' interrupted Sheila. ‘You said it was her who was the duke's daughter, only…'

‘Oh, shut up, who cares anyway, it's my story.
You
didn't see the film. Quick, take my fish, I don't want it.'

I don't want it either, thought Sheila, crumbling the shiny yellow flakes on her plate. She turned them over so that the black skin was on top.

‘Pass your plates along, everybody!' commanded Hermione, the senior at the head of the table.

‘Whose is this? Who hasn't eaten their fish?'

‘Please, Hermione, Sheila hates fish. Do let her off,' said Charmian.

‘Sheila Dunsford-Smith, is this your plate?'

‘Yes, Hermione.'

‘Well, sit here and eat it or you won't have any pudding.'

Torn between the desire to obey Hermione, thus earning her fleeting approval, and her disgust at the sight of the mangled fish, Sheila answered, ‘But I don't want pudding.'

‘That's got nothing to do with it. You know the rules.
You can ask for a small portion, but you must eat what's on your plate.'

Conscious of having been scrupulously fair, Hermione turned back to her neighbour.

Long after the others had scattered for the last forty minutes of their day, Sheila sat over her congealing plateful. At last she was released by Diana Monk, who glanced into the dining-room and was moved to pity by her slumped shoulders and trapped expression. Five minutes later, enclosed within the warm red brick walls of the kitchen garden, Sheila knelt by their plot, turning the earth with a fork as listlessly as she had picked at the fish.

‘Sheil! Sheeeeei-la!' she heard, and saw Charmie up by Pets, beckoning to her urgently. ‘Quick! Only ten minutes left and Mick's just started counting. Here.' As Sheila joined her she smiled radiantly and said, ‘Gosh, you were super to get me out of that stinky fish!' Together they raced off to crouch behind the garden shed, arms round each other's shoulders, panting and flushed under the rose-pink evening sky.

The last rays of the sun soaked into the plump rectangular cushions on the bay-window-seat. The Head and her Deputy sat in their usual armchairs over a pot of weak coffee, the wireless tuned to the Third Programme.

‘You were right about Sylvia Parry,' said the Head. ‘There is something threatening there. No wonder she frightens the girls. That little one - third-former, Katherine —'

‘Wilson?'

‘Yes, little Katherine Wilson, she'd been sent out to stand in the corridor yesterday. I happened to come across her. She was petrified. Shaking like a leaf. She isn't yet ten. I can't employ a woman who terrorizes
small children. Why is she doing it? Frightening little girls … is the woman right in the head?'

‘She's responsible for more order marks than any other member of staff,' said Miss Roberts. ‘And she and the unfortunate Diana Monk are up to something.'

‘Well, perhaps. You could be right, though personally I doubt it. In any case one couldn't dismiss her for that. They'd both deny it.'

‘But one's never very happy about it,' said Miss Roberts vehemently.

The Deputy Head's unmarried state resulted from the fact that no man had ever asked her. She liked men well enough. She thought lesbianism was unnatural and wicked, and would have preferred to dismiss staff whom she suspected of such leanings, but unfortunately the law was not on her side.

The Head continued to brood.

‘She's never administered corporal punishment, as far as I know…'

‘Henrietta, she doesn't need to. She frightens them to death as it is.'

‘What am I supposed to do, Peggy? I can't possibly replace her at this stage of term - not with O and A levels just coming up. I've tried to talk to her. She denies having any personal problems.'

‘Diana Monk doesn't look capable of making trouble,' said Peggy, and smiled wryly. ‘She'd never stand up to her. No, I think it's a matter of temperament. Parry's one of those people with more than their fair share of anger. She could fly off the handle at the slightest thing. Did you give her a formal warning?'

‘Not this time. I hinted that she could do with a weekend off, but she turned it down.'

‘Let's hope we don't get any parents complaining. That could be tiresome.'

‘Keep an eye on her for me, won't you, Peggy?' The
rain-pattering sound of applause swelled from the wireless. ‘Now then, shall we listen to the news?'

Half an hour later, after the usual depressing reports from the Korean war (it couldn't - could it? - affect her boy in Hong Kong), Henrietta Birmingham sat looking out across the darkened lawns to the trees silhouetted against the slate-blue sky. Too late for the sunset, too pale for moonrise; only the evening star hung above the earth. She used to watch it as a girl from her bed in Scotland. She had had a bedroom to herself by the time she was twelve, but when the boys were away at the Front she preferred to sleep in the old nursery, with its memories of the time when they'd all been children together under the benevolent eye of Nanny, rather than stay in a grown-up room empty of ghosts. How hard it is being a girl, she used to think when her brothers' stilted letters arrived. They told her nothing, hardly more than their dutiful letters home from Eton, but she read between the lines and imagined the thrill, the rivalry, the dramatic challenge of doing your best -not just in a cricket match, but for your country. She had envied them at first.

Jamie had kept his promise to write, but what was she to make of the cryptic lines which expressed no pride and delight? He was just being modest. He must be doing marvellous things. She longed for something broader and greater than her own limited horizons, for the chance to escape, to be brave and glorious, for something beyond the narrow confines of girlhood. But the world, her parents, Nanny, her brothers, even Jamie - they all thought her yearnings foolish. They told her that one day, when a good man asked her to marry him, everything would fall into its proper place and she would find her destiny.

Every evening she prayed for them, alone in their nursery with its alphabet frieze round the walls, toys
tidily ranged in the toy cupboard, watching her through the glass doors, books in order on the shelves (she would take them out sometimes, wistfully -
Jock of the Bushveld, The Crimson Aeroplane)
. Praying was all she could do, and so she prayed for hours: first for Jamie, that she might see him again, then for the other two, that they might not be wounded or … or called to God just yet. She prayed for all British soldiers and airmen, and for the Canadians and Australians, and the brave Indian regiments whom she had seen marching at the King's coronation; she prayed as well for all German officers and soldiers and all poor prisoners wherever they might be; and most earnestly she prayed to God to make the generals end this wicked war. Finally, opening her eyes to the high, cold, hardhearted moon, she prayed for their happiness. Not for her own. She knew she wasn't good enough to deserve that and in any case she didn't know what would make her happy.

The next year her eldest brother, Alistair, died, and a month or two later Jamie was wounded on the Somme. But God answered her prayers. Jamie came back. Back, it is true, with one leg missing, a mockery of her fleet-footed young companion. When they sent him home to convalesce, she was the one who sat beside his bed all night, while the nurse or Nanny dozed next door; she was the one who listened while he moaned and twitched in his sleep. She heard his panic-stricken roars and cries, and started when he jerked bolt upright out of his dreams to clutch the stump of his knee and groan at the pain in his missing leg.

‘Tell me, Jamie. Never mind how disagreeable, don't spare me. Tell it all to me, and maybe that will take away the nightmares.'

At first he would scowl at her.

‘You're a girl. Don't be stupid. Get the nurse. Tell her
I need morphine.
Get her
for me, Henrietta.'

After a while, though, the blackened, charred desolation in his mind began to find its way into words. Her old nightmare took on shape and detail. ‘It was like roasted chestnuts on the nursery fire - when they're all burnt and black, the flesh in the middle oozing and sweet. The noise was like hell. I hear it in my head.' The sounds he made were a parody of her brothers, as boys, playing soldiers: ‘Boom, bang, thump, whistle, wheee, boom-boom,' but then, ‘scream, yell, moan, gasp.' They'd never mimicked the noises of pain, just keeled over and died obediently. After the bang-bangs you were dead, for a moment or two anyway.

‘You've never seen… you can't possibly imagine our faces,' Jamie told her. ‘People making ghastly grins and jokes. Bad form to show you were afraid. Ever heard the word rictus? It's in between grinning and dying. The men's faces grinding over their skulls, and sometimes just skulls. Like this - look at me, Henrietta.
Look at me
. Yes, they did that, too: eyes screwed up against the light. And then a smile, fine old boy, don't you worry about me. Don't you ever dare think war is fine and noble, Henrietta. Don't tell Mother I said so.'

She would force the nurse to let her help when the dressing on his stump was changed, force herself to confront unblinkingly the crazed red flesh that had been his leg, the seeping yellow and black lines where the wound was healing slowly, to cradle the hot, ugly stump while cool fresh gauze was wound around it, so that it looked cared-for and hygienic, hidden from fastidious eyes.

Soon he would call her at night and spew up the jagged fragments of his nightmares. ‘The horses, Henrietta - have I told you how the horses stank? How the rats would crawl out from inside their bellies, after
gnawing out their livers. The liver is the best bit, and the old rats knew it. We had rats in the trenches, too, and we used to stick bits of cheese on the end of the bayonet and when they came and nibbled the cheese we'd pull the trigger. Oh, we had our laughs. Do you know the colour that rotting horse turns? A sort of slimy bluey-green.'

She never covered her eyes or ears; she accepted whatever he had to tell her and still looked steadily back at him as though uncontaminated by his horrors. Their parents never knew. Her mother was relieved that Hetta's awkward desire to nurse was stilled by having Jamie to care for.

During the day she would wander exhausted over the summer hills, falling asleep with her face on her arm, waking up to find the scratchy heather embedded in her stockings and hair as the birds sang high up in the clear sky. She would plunge her arms into the ice-cold water of a lochan until her flesh vibrated from the chill, and then shake the freezing drops into the bright air. It was not a time when she could pray. She was angry with God for allowing such things. Nature became her church, the trees its pillars, the hills its altar. The sunsets were its stained-glass windows and the stars its candles. Submerging herself in the changeless calm of her surroundings, she would fall into a healing trance and go home to another night with Jamie.

A friend from school, a comrade of his called Roly, who had come through the same horrors, had been wounded but survived with all four limbs intact, came to pay him a visit. Only his mind was shattered. He watched the tall girl with grey-blue eyes and long, shining hair and wondered why the corners of her mouth trembled and why she narrowed her eyes when she looked at him. When he wanted to talk to Jamie
alone she would not leave, saying, ‘I have heard it all. Nothing you can say will shock me.' After a nod from Jamie he took her at her word, and she heard the familiar stories from another man's mouth. But when he began to talk about the two French girls they had rogered and she realized what that meant, she was shocked; she understood that there was even more frightfulness in this war than Jamie had told her, of a kind that she hadn't imagined, that could affect girls like herself; and that she too would have been corrupted and changed, as Jamie had been.

‘That evening at dinner Roly was placed beside her. She wore her hair down; they thought she was still a child. Nobody mentioned the war for fear of distressing her mother. But later they sat together on a sofa by the fire and he told her what a splendid chap Jamie was and how gallant, just as though she'd been any foolish, ignorant young sister. She looked directly into his eyes.

Tomorrow I will take you out on the hills, Mr Graham, if you would like it,' she had said quietly, so as not to be overheard. ‘My mother will not insist that anyone accompanies us. She is used to me wandering by myself. Then we will talk about my brother.'

The drawing-room carriage clock chimed ten. I will think about that another time, said Henrietta Birmingham to herself. She turned out the light that had shone down on Peggy Roberts' tapestry, and closed the door behind her.

The first tidal excitement of the term mounted like a wave, crashing on the shores of Parents' Weekend. On the Saturday when they woke up it was raining. Those who lived nearby were collected by their parents and taken home to stay until Sunday evening, home with their dog or pony, sleeping in their own bedroom and eating their favourite meals. But those whose people lived far away had to choose between a picnic eaten in the car beneath dripping trees, or lunch in one of the local hotels, surrounded by other Raeburnians in clean striped dresses and newly polished sandals. They didn't clean their own shoes, of course, but laid them out in rows in the Covered Way to be polished by Waterman, the gardener, and collected them next morning.