by Anne Morice
The only part of the original still intact was the stable block, with its blue-faced clock tower and enclosed brick quadrangle. Or, rather, the façade remained intact, most of the interior having recently been converted into a modern, well-equipped theatre.
Dr. and Mrs. Bland had been owners of this property for some dozen years, having acquired it in the following manner:
After scouring the country in vain for a suitable school for their daughter and only child, Pauline, Mrs. Bland had eventually solved the problem, with typical daring and panache, by founding one of her own. Pauline, at the age of nine, had been declared by her teachers, inspired less perhaps by impartial judgement than the desire to find favour with Mrs. Bland, to possess a natural gift for music and dancing, in addition to a quick mind and studious nature. Accepting this verdict without surprise, it had occurred to Mrs. Bland that the first requisite was a school which would foster these various talents in equal degrees. This might conceivably have been attainable had she not also demanded, in her refusal to accept second best in any department, that the surroundings, both inside and out, should conform to the highest standards of taste and comfort.
Since, so far as painstaking investigation could evince, no such establishment existed, she had instantly set about creating it, this venture having its origins in the medium-sized Queen Anne town house in the centre of Gillsford, which Dr. Bland had inherited from his father, along with a flourishing medical practice, and which was then the family home. A resident governess had been engaged, plus a regular supply of visiting teachers in the specialist subjects, and a small advertisement placed in The Times.
Mrs. Bland had received scores of replies to this, mainly from parents in a similar plight to her own. Having interviewed all those with engraved addresses which struck the right note, the applicants had been whittled down to five girls between the ages of nine and twelve and, a month later, the Constance Bland Preparatory School, as it was then known, had come into being.
This, as with every other venture she touched, had been a roaring success and in only three years the move had been made to Waterside House, the number of pupils increased to forty and the age limit extended to seventeen.
Dr. Bland still retained the ground floor of the old house for his surgery and consulting rooms, but the remainder had been converted into flats, the school in the meantime rising to such dizzy heights that a few years before I joined its ranks Mrs. Bland had extended the premises still further by acquiring the next-door property. This was called The Lodge and, although aesthetically inferior, was almost equal in size to Waterside and she was able to double her numbers yet again.
Sadly enough, the only drop-out in this heady, steady climb to success was the one for whose sake it had come about. After all the early promise, Pauline’s talent seemed to have waned in adolescence and fizzled out completely by the time she was old enough to leave school. To the best of my knowledge, the only two distinctions she had achieved there were the Divinity prize and her Girl Guides Life Saving badge.
Mrs. Bland showed no regrets about this. She was not one to waste time or sympathy on failures and Pauline, after all, had served her purpose. She was packed off to spend six unhappy months with a family in a Paris suburb and afterwards had worked for a time with her father’s medical team, answering the telephone and sending out bills and suchlike, but with such pathetic inefficiency that the rest of the staff had eventually demanded her dismissal. Pauline had returned to Waterside to become general dogsbody to her mother and a buffer state between headquarters and the teaching staff, a boring little niche which, now in her mid-thirties, she still occupied.
Headquarters, which is to say the private apartments of Dr. and Mrs. Bland, consisted of half a dozen of the larger and more attractive rooms, including a semi-circular colonnaded veranda overlooking the garden, and access for the pupils was strictly by invitation only. This could take one of two forms, the more common being to receive a reprimand so grave that the threat of expulsion hovered in the air throughout the interview, although judgement was usually tempered by mercy for those with very grand or rich parents. The other was when a group of more presentable-looking seniors was granted the privilege of handing round the apéritifs at one of Mrs. Bland’s cocktail parties.
On this occasion, owing to my exalted twin position of Judge and Old Girl, I had been invited to spend Friday to Sunday at headquarters, but the rosy glow which Toby had remarked on did not quite extend to memories of Connie Bland and I had quailed at the prospect of spending three whole days under her shrewd and critical eye. So I had explained that Robin was hoping to accompany me to at least part of the festivities, which was not a perfectly accurate way of describing it, and that we had therefore arranged to spend the weekend with my cousin Toby at Roakes Common, about twenty miles away.
However, there was one event in Friday’s programme which, from sheer curiosity, I had decided to attend. This was scheduled for four-thirty in the afternoon, when tea would be served to visitors and staff in the music room.
Anxious not to be late, I had allowed extra time for all sorts of contingencies on the drive from London, none of which actually occurred, and, as a result, turned into the Waterside drive at least twenty minutes too early.
There were only two cars parked near the front door, one of them being easily identifiable as the property of Dr. Bland. He had always driven a white Rover and he had regularly exchanged it for a new model every summer, very likely during the same week as he ordered his annual supply of wine and cigars. The second car was a shabby old Volkswagen which, assuming she too had remained true to form, could only have belonged to Pauline.
Equally reluctant to be the first as the last to arrive and aware that Mrs. Bland would frown quite as heavily on such pushing behaviour as on unpunctuality, I parked my car at a distance of about fifty yards from the house, in the protective shadow of the wall which separated the drive from the kitchen garden and stable block, and remained seated inside it for a few minutes, fixing my eyes hungrily on the rear mirror for signs of other guests arriving.
It was a case of the watched pot, however, and, as it happened, the only action came from a point some distance ahead of me, when three girls came tripping out of the quadrangle and made their way halfway down the length of the house to the front door. They were all wearing long black cloaks over their blue and white print dresses and they were giggling and chatting as they strolled along, displaying to perfection that unself-conscious grace which seems to get built into every dancer, however youthful and inexperienced. It was clear from their relaxed and cheerful demeanour that they had not been summoned to headquarters with the threat of expulsion hanging over them, so presumably were to be members of, or more likely waitresses at, the tea party. This at least carried the assurance that I had come on the right day, as to which certain doubts had begun to creep in, but it also acted as a warning that the present lull might be deceptive and that I was in imminent danger of being caught red-handed in my skulking operation and, worse still, forcibly rescued from it. So I decided to use up the remaining time by embarking on a sentimental pilgrimage to some of the old haunts.
(2)
Directly ahead of me and at the opposite end of the house to the veranda, was a covered brick path, dividing the kitchen premises from the stable yard. It led to the river bank and a set of stone steps down to the towpath and a boathouse, just visible through overhanging trees, and I had an urge to see this boathouse again. It had been the focal point of some of the happiest hours I had spent at Waterside, for it had housed, among other and grander craft, two elderly punts, and during the summer term about a dozen of us at a time had been allowed to take them out on our own for an hour or two in the late afternoon.
Punting was forbidden, on the grounds of being too dangerous for such feckless and inexpert crews, but there were half a dozen paddles to each punt and on the rare occasions when we had all pulled together we had managed to work up quite a decent speed on the downs
tream trip to Gillsford Bridge.
The exercise was enjoyable, not only in itself and in the sense of freedom it gave, but also because it was one of the very few outdoor activities permitted to us. Team games and riding were strictly banned, since they tended to develop the wrong muscles in a dancer’s anatomy, and the only sports we were encouraged to take up were tennis and swimming. However, as there were only two tennis courts at our disposal, no swimming pool at all, and the river too polluted for safety or pleasure, our chances of indulging in these recreations were somewhat limited.
It cannot be claimed that anyone who spends a minimum of one hour’s daily practice at the bar is seriously deprived of physical exercise, but nevertheless we frequently compared our lot unfavourably with our contemporaries in other walks of life and the fact was that, whereas most private schools raise money from bequests, endowment funds, parent blackmail and all the rest of it, to provide just those amenities which were lacking at Waterside, Mrs. Bland had decreed that every last penny that could be scraped together in this way should go towards building and equipping the theatre. This policy resulted, I had always suspected, less from her passionate dedication to the arts as from the belief that the shows which were mounted there were distinctly more palatable to parents, prospective parents and influential visitors than the sight of numerous muscular females flopping in and out of the water, while the rest of the school stood on the sidelines and screamed.
I did not meet a soul on my way down to the river, but seated at the top of the flight of steps and hunched over a sketch pad was a stout female aged about sixteen. Her blue and white dress was crumpled and paint-stained and the already dusty black cloak had been rolled up to make a cushion. Nevertheless, I was immediately drawn to her by virtue of the orange headband round her untidy brown hair and bade her a civil good afternoon. If she had been Claudius at prayer, she could not have started more guiltily.
“Sorry,” I explained, “I didn’t mean to scare you to death. It was the sight of another human being which made me bark like that.”
“Please don’t apologise,” she replied, scrambling to her feet in a surprisingly clumsy and uncoordinated fashion. “It’s only because I’m not supposed to be here at all that I almost had a heart attack.”
“Mind if I join you for a while?” I enquired. “I have an urge to feast my eyes on the boathouse. I’m Theresa Crichton, by the way.”
“And you’re one of the judges. I know, I recognised you. Waterside’s pride and joy! Patsy always lets us stay up to watch television when you’re on, however late it is.”
“Good for her! What’s your name?”
“Actually, it’s Constance McGrath, but you can’t have two Connies in the place, so I’ve come to be known as Hattie. I expect you can work that one out, being an Old Watersider?”
“I thought he was Mad Dan McGrew?” I asked, after a pause for mental convolutions.
“Near enough.”
Although so ungainly in her movements, there was no gaucheness of manner and in the course of these introductions she had slid into the Walter Raleigh role and was spreading out her cloak, so that it covered almost the entire flight of steps. Graciously motioning me to the top one, she re-seated herself a few steps lower down, placing the sketch pad behind her and out of sight. She then produced a tin of butterscotch, offering one to me before going to work on them herself.
“The reason for all that surprise at seeing you here,” I explained, “was that the whole place seems so unnaturally deserted. If I didn’t know it for a fact, I would never believe that there are up to a hundred people going about their business behind these walls.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d been anywhere near The Lodge. It’s absolute bedlam. Three dress rehearsals, one after another, and everyone screaming that they’ve forgotten their lines and their costumes don’t fit. Patsy’s so busy taking tucks and trying to calm everyone down that she won’t notice whether I’m there or not; and Connie’s got her tea party to keep her occupied, so it was a good chance to skip away for a bit of peace and quiet.”
“You amaze me! Things must have got a lot more lax since my day. As I recall, every single one of us, not excluding the halt and infirm, had to pitch in on these occasions, even if it was only as third spear carrier or helping with the make-up. Unless, of course . . . you wouldn’t be in the ballet group, by any chance?”
“You must be joking! I was five foot ten and twice as wide before I was fourteen. Madam kicked me out years ago. And they know so well that if they ever did give me a spear I’d only trip over it. No, I designed the set and that’s my lot. They can all prance about on it to their hearts’ content, so long as they don’t expect me to join in.”
“Then, forgive me saying so, Hattie, but isn’t it all rather a waste of time?”
“What is?”
“Your being here at all. I mean, the education’s not all that hot and if you don’t want to dance and you don’t want to act, what’s the point of staying on?”
“Oh, plenty of point, believe me! It’s not this dump that’s the attraction, it’s the fact that they let me go for two whole days every week to art classes at Oxford. There and back in a taxi too, for which no doubt my father has to cough up about four times the fare; but I ask you, what other school would let you do that? ‘Oh no, dear’, they’d say, ‘First get your A levels and then you can make up your mind what you want to do.’ That’s no use to me. I decided ages ago what I wanted to do and A levels don’t come into it. I don’t know how many A levels David Hockney has. Four dozen, I dare say, but I bet he’d have been just as good a painter with none.”
“I expect you’re right. Is your father coming on Sunday for Speech Day?”
“No, he’s in South America. He’s an ambassador. It makes a nice change after his last posting, but it’s a bit far off. And my mother’s dead, so she can’t be here either. Which means that I’ve got to be farmed out at some boarding establishment or other and I’d settle for this one any old day. You can say what you like about Connie; I know she’s a snob and a tyrant and blazingly unfair sometimes, but she does understand about giving people a chance to develop in their own way. There’s probably self-interest at work there too, but it happens to operate in my favour. I expect I shall quite miss her.”
“Miss her? Why do you say that? She’s not giving up, is she?”
“Not as far as I know. That’d be the day, wouldn’t it? No, I meant that I’d miss her when I leave here at the end of this term and start at a full-time art school, that’s all. It’s coming up to four-thirty, by the way. You’ll miss her yourself, if you don’t watch it.”
“Yes, I know,” I agreed, curiosity about this unusually outspoken girl making me reluctant to leave, “but before I go won’t you show me what you were working an when I interrupted you?”
“What? Oh no, you don’t want to see that, do you? It’s nothing in particular. Just a crazy idea I’m trying out. I haven’t got it nearly right yet.”
For the first time she sounded faintly ill-at-ease and on the defensive, signifying perhaps that this was something close to her heart and so when she eventually was persuaded to hand over the sketch I cautioned myself to be tactful and to take my time before giving an opinion. This was just as well because time was certainly what t needed.
In contrast to the smudgy little drawing of the boathouse I had been expecting, with possibly a few fuzzy willows in the background to lend perspective, this was a precise and delicate pen-and-ink drawing, crammed with detail and executed with immense care and exactitude. And that was not all. There was a touch of the Blake about it, not to mention the Bosch and, even irore than admiration of the technique, it was wonder at the mind which had conceived it which temporarily rendered me speechless.
In essence, it was a picture of birds, beasts and fish, not connected with each other in any recognisable way and with no attempt at realistic proportions, a particularly repellent-looking hyena, for example, being about four
times the size of the lion. Some were in full face, others in profile and every single one, however tiny, had the face of a human being. One or two were easy to identify, as much by behavioural characteristics as by their features. The plump and smiling dolphin in the centre of the picture, for instance, puffing a cigar and holding a glass of wine in one flipper instantly brought Dr. Bland to mind and surely the squirrel in the bottom left-hand corner could only be Patsy, her little pile of nuts representing the secret caches of toffees and chocolates which were always brought out for those in trouble, most particularly the poor little homesick new girls who lay sobbing in their beds at night.
There were others, though, that I could not place at all, among them the lithe, long-legged cat halfway up a ladder, which seemed to be perched on the dolphin’s back, and the scruffy-looking bird, with its bow and arrows, the arrows, for some reason I was quite unable to fathom, being bottle-shaped.
Although, on her own admission, it was still unfinished, the theme of this work was left in no doubt, for it already bore the stark, somewhat alarming title of “Schizo”.
I did not think it would be fitting to ask for any amplification of this and, indeed, was at a loss for a suitable comment of any sort, except to say that I hoped to see more of her work when there was time to study it carefully.
Hattie did not reply, but held out her hand for the drawing, with an enigmatic expression, and when I turned back to wave goodbye to her she was bent ever her sketch pad again, apparently once more oblivious of my existence.
THREE
The three graceful girls were on duty in the music room and one of them bobbed a plate of cucumber sandwiches under my nose, while dropping the regulation Waterside curtsey.
