The Golden Day (8 page)

‘Fractions, girls,’ said Miss Summers. ‘Let’s get going.’

‘Yes, Miss Summers,’ answered the little girls, meek with gratitude at the restoration of routine, and they pulled out their fraction books and sharpened their pencils and sank into the safety of numbers.

In the playground, there were whispers everywhere, swimming about the air like tiny darting fish. Miss Renshaw had run away. No, she hadn’t run away, she’d taken off her clothes and gone for a swim in the nude and been carried out to sea in a rip. No, she’d been eaten by a shark. No, it was a giant octopus. No, she’d had a nervous breakdown and been dragged off screaming to a mental hospital.

The little girls found themselves approached on all sides by older girls who would normally never even cast a downward glance at them.

‘What happened? What happened to Miss Renshaw?’

‘Tell us what happened. Is it true she’s disappeared?’

Bethany started to cry. It was easier that way. Once she started crying, she was surrounded by comforters.

‘It’s all right,’ they said, arms reaching out and smothering her. ‘Don’t be upset. Don’t cry. Do you want to go to Matron?’

No, no, no, no! Bethany shook her head.

After the morning break, when they returned to their classroom, there was bad news. Miss Summers told them that Miss Baskerville, their headmistress, wanted to talk to them alone. Alone in the huge, echoing assembly hall. Bethany burst into tears at once. How could such a small person have so many tears? Georgina groaned and kicked the back of her chair.

‘There’s no need to get so upset,’ said Miss Summers, taken aback, because she was not used to Bethany. ‘Miss Baskerville just wants to have a chat, you know, about – er – about what’s been happening,’ she finished brightly.

A chat. The little girls looked at her with pitying eyes. Poor Miss Summers. She was so new.

‘Do try to stop crying, Bethany,’ said Miss Summers in desperation. ‘You’ll make yourself sick.’

‘She’s always crying,’ said Georgina, ‘we don’t care,’ and she kicked the chair again.

Miss Summers took them down to the assembly hall at the appointed hour, eleven pairs of black shoes scuffing through sodden fig leaves. In through the double doors, lowering their heads, not looking at each other. They moved in a clump up to the front row of blue vinyl benches.

Miss Baskerville was already positioned behind the lectern on the stage waiting for them, suspicious and magisterial.

White-haired, with eyes that flashed unpredictably and were sometimes, it seemed to Cubby, thick with misery. What am I doing here? those eyes seemed to say. How did I get myself into this situation?

‘Sit down, girls,’ she said.

They sat. They knew what she was going to say. You little girls went out into the Ena Thompson Memorial Gardens and came back to school without your teacher. I repeat, without your teacher. I would like an explanation.

‘Very well. Is everybody here?’

Cubby felt her mind waft away. Miss Baskerville’s words were like music or the hum of traffic. She stared up at the huge honour boards suspended on the brick walls, and read the now-familiar names, written in golden paint on the glowing wood, of girls who had won prizes years and years ago. Dulcie Adams, 1928, the Betsy Graham Memorial Prize; Muriel Mapplechat, 1941, the Miss Pamela Glissom Memorial Prize; Anne Rosenzwieg, 1954, the Enid Macanulty Memorial Prize… What had happened to them all, wondered Cubby. To Dulcie, Muriel and Anne? Or, for that matter, to Betsy and Pamela and Enid and to all those others whose heroic, shining names were unfurled there, like the names of men lost in war.

What happened to all those girls once they had stepped outside the yellow gate?

They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Miss Renshaw had written that up on the blackboard for them to copy down in their books, to practise their italic script.

‘Adam and Eve, girls,’ Miss Renshaw said. ‘Out they went.

Never, never to return.’

Never, never.
Not now. Not ever.
But Cubby wouldn’t think about that, she wouldn’t.You have to stop thinking, that’s right. So she stopped thinking and listened to Miss Baskerville.

‘If any one of you has anything further you can say about this whole business, I need to know, now,’ said Miss Baskerville, balefully.

There was a long grey pause. Cubby looked sideways at Icara. Her possum-coloured hair had fallen forward into her face and her shirt was, as always, white and very clean. It was because she was rich. Rich people were clean. Cubby had noticed it before. When one of Icara’s shirts became frayed and grubby, she bought another.

‘Obviously there is more that you can say, and for some reason you are choosing not to,’ said Miss Baskerville, now sounding almost bored. ‘I fully expect at least one of you to stand up right now and tell me exactly what happened in the Gardens yesterday.’

Nobody stood.They couldn’t, even if they wanted to. They were frozen through, frozen to the heart.
It’s our little secret, girls,
we won’t tell anyone.

They returned to their classroom in disgrace, without a confession. Miss Summers busied herself distributing pieces of coloured paper and pots of glue to each desk.

‘We’re going to make collages,’ she told them, ‘in the style of Matisse.’

‘Who’s Matisse?’ asked Georgina without enthusiasm.

‘Matisse was a very famous French painter,’ said Miss Summers, pleased to have something she could explain. ‘And when he was an old man, he wasn’t very well, so he couldn’t paint. So he lay in bed and cut pieces of coloured paper and made pictures out of them.’

The little girls stared, at Miss Summers, at the squares of paper, out the window, at the ceiling, at the backs of each others’ necks.

‘Now,’ said Miss Summers with a frown, ‘who can tell me where Miss Renshaw keeps the scissors?’

Before anyone could answer, there was a knock at the door. All their eyes turned to the silver doorhandle, which was turning by itself as though there was a ghost pushing it. In walked the school chaplain, Reverend Broome, not in his normal blue-and-white chapel outfit, but in the black leather pants and jacket that he wore to ride his motorbike. The girls stood up automatically but they were disturbed. What was he doing here?

‘If I may take a few moments of your time?’ the Reverend Broome asked Miss Summers, stepping forward confidently into the room.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Miss Summers, taken aback. ‘Sit down, girls, and listen to what Mr Broome has to say.’

They sat. Mr Broome held his helmet in one hand and with the other hand he smoothed down his hair.

‘Let us pray,’ he said, rolling forward on his toes.

They bowed their heads, amid dictionaries and rulers and the smell of paint.

‘O God, by whom the meek are guided in judgment,’ intoned Mr Broome, who had an unusually loud voice, especially when he was praying. ‘Grant us, in all our doubts and uncertainties, the grace to ask what thou would have us do.’

Miss Summers did not close her eyes or even bow her head. She caught Cubby’s eye. Cubby looked away.

‘Amen,’ said Mr Broome.

‘Amen,’ said the eleven voices in response.

Mr Broome stopped rocking up and down on his feet and stood up very straight, like a soldier, looking out.

‘I can see every girl in this room. Every girl in this room.’

This was what he always said in chapel, but here it was less impressive. After all, it was not very hard – there were only eleven of them.

‘Has anyone got anything they would like to say?’ said Mr Broome.

Nobody did.

‘About what happened when you went out with Miss Renshaw?’

But what did happen?

‘I want you to think about it,’ Mr Broome went on, drenching each word with importance. ‘I want you to think, very hard.

Very seriously. Before it’s too late.’

Too late. The saddest words in the English language. Cubby had read that somewhere. But were they really? There had to be sadder words – like ‘Your whole family has died in a horrible plague,’ for example.

Mr Broome shook his head at the floor. The little girls waited. Soon he would go away. He couldn’t stand there all afternoon. They could last longer than him, much longer.

‘Too late,’ repeated Mr Broome.

Bethany slumped forward on her desk. The Reverend Broome looked across at her, hopefully.

‘Yes?’

It’s our little secret.

‘Nothing,’ said Bethany. ‘I just feel a bit sick.’

Mr Broome lost heart. There was something implacable about the eleven little faces in front of him – how could he hope to know their secrets?

‘At any rate, I have planted a seed,’ he murmured to Miss Summers. ‘Something may come of it.’

He shook her hand and smiled, then left the room quickly. They sat very still, listening to the sound of his big black motorbike boots clattering down the four flights of stairs.

The next day, a letter arrived at the homes of the eleven little girls. It was typed on a small sheet of white paper with the blue embossed school crest.

Dear parents,

You may have heard from your daughter that Miss Renshaw has been absent from school recently following a class excursion.

In the immediate future it seems unlikely that Miss Renshaw will be returning to her current position. However, we have now engaged Miss Merrilee Summers to take the girls in Miss Renshaw’s absence. You will be pleased to hear that she comes with the highest qualifications.

Yours sincerely,

(Miss) Emily Baskerville
Headmistress

ELEVEN
Hiding Schoolgirl

W
HEN THE MOTHERS AND FATHERS
opened the envelope and read Miss Baskerville’s letter, they were bewildered. What did this mean? They looked at their daughters and asked questions.

‘You lost her?’ said Cubby’s mother.‘How could you have lost her?Your teacher? I mean, I’ve heard of children getting lost…’ The mothers and fathers rang up other mothers and fathers and asked more questions. Some had even rung the school and demanded to speak to Miss Baskerville. But this was not encouraged. The situation had changed, that was all. Class 4F was no longer Class 4F. It was Class 4S and in the morning Miss Merrilee Summers, with her cap of silky red hair and the highest qualifications, entered the room and set them to work.

The little girls liked Miss Summers. She didn’t shout. She wore nice clothes. But they missed their teacher. Miss Renshaw was gone, but she was still there with them in the room. She was there in her chair, with its worn cushion. The folders on the teacher’s desk belonged to Miss Renshaw, the tin of drawing pins, the narrow vase of blue glass. She was there in the posters on the walls, in the books on the shelves, in the signs saying ‘Pencils’, ‘Mathematics’, ‘Extra Reading’, ‘Social Studies’ and ‘Natural Science’.

They constantly expected to hear her voice. Each time Miss Summers called out to them, in the corridor or on the stairs, to stop running, stop talking, stop eating, stop shouting, stop banging, stop being so silly, it should have been Miss Renshaw calling.

Mrs Arnold, the deputy headmistress, reappeared in their remote classroom. She knocked on the door and put her head around. At once, the little girls stood up.

‘Sit down, sit down, girls,’ said Mrs Arnold, waving away the courtesy.

She perched on the edge of the front desk again and looked at them over her thick-rimmed black glasses; kindly as always. They looked back. Their eyes were clear, but their hearts were dishonest.

‘Now, I know you girls are feeling very upset about Miss Renshaw,’ Mrs Arnold began.

Yes, yes.

‘And I know you all want to do your very best to help her.’

They did. They nodded, and Mrs Arnold nodded back, encouragingly.

‘Now, you see, the fact of the matter is, some of you – it may be not all of you but some of you – have something more you can tell us about what happened that day.’

No nods now.

‘I don’t want to accuse you of hiding anything. Perhaps you don’t quite understand the seriousness of the situation.’

There Mrs Arnold was quite wrong. They understood too well.
Don’t say anything
, they whispered to each other, inside each others’ heads.
Don’t tell.We can’t tell.

‘I know that you are all good girls,’ said Mrs Arnold. ‘I am sure of it. And I know you want to do the right thing.You may be afraid, but you mustn’t be afraid. You must do the right thing.’

Oh, the right thing! It was too late for the right thing!

Mrs Arnold stood up to go.

‘You know where to find me, girls, any of you, any time. My door is open.’

She nodded at Miss Summers and was gone, coughing all the way down the four flights of stairs.

‘Right then,’ said Miss Summers uncertainly. She had some chalk in her hand. ‘Let’s copy down the week’s spelling now, shall we?’

She turned her back on them and started to write on the blackboard. Her writing was nothing like Miss Renshaw’s. It was childish and lacked Miss Renshaw’s flair.