Another Woman (9781468300178)

by Vincenzi, Penny

  ‘And what’s the point of that,’ said Harriet, ‘when I’m not going to be here with it? Oh Janine, it was so awful. The worst bad dream you ever had, only much much worse than that. I can’t stop thinking about it, it just goes on and on over and over again, in my head, like something on TV. I see it happening, I look out of the window and the gate’s open and I know I’ve shut it and I’m running and running down the drive and calling and calling him, and I can see him there, looking at me from the opposite side of the lane, sitting in the long grass, and then the lorry coming and him suddenly starting to pad over the lane towards me, rather slowly, wagging his tail, and then – and then the lorry on him, on him, Janine, tons of lorry, what do you think he felt like, can you imagine, and all my fault, all of it – oh Janine, how could I have done such an awful thing? I didn’t deserve him, did I, I didn’t deserve to have him. I wish I’d been under the lorry with him –’

  ‘Oh Harriet, my darling, chut, chut, please, don’t say such dreadful things. That would be no better, it would be a million times worse.’

  ‘Well I do. And then Mummy appeared, and she just led me back into the house, wouldn’t let me see him, wouldn’t let me near him, and Cressida was on the stairs, and do you know what she said?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘She said, “Well it was your fault, you know, Harriet, you should have shut the gate.” Even Mummy was cross with her. And her horrible kitten was fine, sitting there on her bed washing itself. I’ll never forgive her for that, never. Of course she said she was sorry, Mummy made her, but she didn’t mean it, and she was holding her kitten at the time, stroking it. It’s all right for her, she’s still got something to love. Anyway, I don’t want another puppy, I want Biggles.’

  ‘Well,’ said Janine, ‘well, my darling, it is all very sad of course. But the pain will get better, I promise you. That is the first important lesson you are going to learn in life, Harriet. That pain gets better. All pain. And when it gets better, you will find you do want another puppy, and you won’t forget Biggles, but you will love the new one, a little bit differently of course, and –’

  ‘But I’ve told you,’ said Harriet, ‘I’m not going to be here. I’m going to this stupid school. So I can’t love anything, differently or not.’

  ‘Well,’ said Janine with a sigh, ‘perhaps you will like the school and perhaps it will not be stupid. Now then, would you like me to stay here and read you a story until you are feeling a little bit more like sleeping?’

  ‘I’m frightened to sleep,’ said Harriet, ‘I dream about it all. What happened. Every night. I try to stay awake, but I can’t. In the end I go to sleep and the dream comes.’

  ‘Allons, allons, mignonne,’ said Janine, taking her in her arms again, stroking her hair. ‘You shall come to my room, if you would like that, and sleep in my bed with me tonight. And if I think you are dreaming badly, I will waken you. All right? And very possibly, I think, once you have slept one night without the dream, it will not trouble you again.’

  ‘I think it will,’ said Harriet, ‘but that would be lovely, yes. I’d like that. Thank you.’

  Janine held out her hand. It was such a beautiful hand, very white, with long slender fingers and brilliant red nails. Not the sort of hand you’d think would be comforting, but it was, warm and soft; Harriet closed her own round it and followed Janine along the corridor and into her room. And in the morning, she was still in Janine’s bed, and she realized she had slept all night without having the dream at all.

  All the same she didn’t get another puppy; she said she didn’t want one. If they thought they could make her less upset about sending her away, just by doing something easy like buying her another puppy, they could think again. She still couldn’t believe it was all happening. She watched the trunk that had been her mother’s filling up slowly with her new uniform, she was bought new shoes, a lacrosse stick, a rather formal-looking watch, she had a medical check at the doctor’s, she was taken to the dentist, she had her hair cut, all in readiness for this dreadful event and she was taken to tea with another little girl who was already there, at St Madeleine’s, who told her it was lovely, great fun, much better than being at home, and she counted the time that was left until she had to go, first in weeks, then in days, finally in hours, and right up to the last minute when she was dressed in her new uniform, all brown and blue, she really expected her father to come into the room and say, ‘OK, darling, it’s all right, you don’t have to go if you really don’t want to,’ but he didn’t; it was all coming true, the nightmare.

  She behaved, in her rage and terror, even worse than usual; she shouted at everyone, she refused to eat at mealtimes, (raiding the larder when no one was around for cakes and biscuits so she wasn’t hungry), she was rude to any of her mother’s friends who asked her kindly if she was looking forward to going to her new school; and she fought endlessly with Cressida, on one dreadful occasion pushing her from the top to the bottom of the stairs and knocking two of her front teeth out. They’d been loose anyway, so she couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about, and she said as much to her parents when they sat her down and asked her if she wasn’t ashamed of herself.

  ‘Harriet, darling,’ said her father (for he was more tolerant, tried to be more understanding of her behaviour than her mother was), ‘why did you do it? I don’t understand,’ and she said nothing, nothing at all, knowing that he wouldn’t believe her if she told him the reason, that Cressida had told her she couldn’t wait for her to go away.

  The night before she went she lay in bed so frightened she thought she would die, her heart beating in great painful thudding bursts, her hands clammy with fear, determined not to cry, struggling not to cry; and there was a gentle knock at the door and Cressida came in, looking so sweet, so concerned. ‘I shall miss you,’ she said, ‘I don’t really want you to go,’ and she climbed into bed with her. To her great astonishment Harriet discovered that that made her feel better, all her hostility suddenly vanished, and they fell asleep in one another’s arms. She woke later, much later, to hear her parents whispering in the doorway.

  ‘Look,’ her mother was saying, ‘isn’t that sweet? Would you have believed it possible?’

  And ‘No,’ her father said, ‘but it’s very encouraging. Maybe the separation really is going to be the best thing for them.’

  ‘I hope so. I’m so glad they’ve made it up, that they’re parting friends. Cressida’s had to take such a lot from Harriet these past few weeks. If she wasn’t such a sweet, forgiving little thing …’

  Go on, Daddy, go on, say something nice about me, say something that shows you don’t think it’s all me, thought Harriet, feeling quite weak with the huge effort of keeping still, breathing quietly and steadily when she wanted to leap out of bed into their arms, beg them, for the last time, not to send her, promise to be good.

  But ‘Yes I know,’ he said, ‘let’s hope this school can really do something for Harriet, make her a little bit sweeter too. Come on, we don’t want to wake them, all hell will be let loose.’

  And they went out, closing the door with infinite care behind them, and Harriet lay awake for hours, seething, aching with misery, and when she finally went to sleep she dreamed for the first time in ages about Biggles and his tiny golden velvet body settled into the long grass by the side of the road, the last look of adoration he gave her as he set off towards her on his fat paws, and the hideous sound of the lorry’s brakes screeching and then the dead silence that settled on everything, and nothing to be seen of Biggles but a small trickle of blood leaking out from under one of the lorry’s front wheels.

  The school was horrible. She could never remember feeling so lonely, so permanently, utterly unhappy, so literally sick with longing for home. They all wrote, even Cressida, but she wasn’t allowed to phone because the staff said it would be unsettling for her, and new girls weren’t allowed even a Sunday exeat for the first half of the term because that was supposed to be unsettling
too. Harriet couldn’t imagine being any more unsettled than she was already; she felt permanently sick, she had terrible diarrhoea almost all the time, she couldn’t sleep, and she seemed to hear and see everything from the end of a long tunnel. She watched herself getting up in the morning, getting dressed, picking up the awful breakfast, trudging from the house over to the school; going to lessons, playing games, doing prep, and then going to bed again, and lying awake hour after hour, unable to sleep. The other girls began by trying to be kind, but they gave up in the face of her awful, blank-faced hostility and started teasing her instead, calling her Po Features and Farty Pants, imitating her as she ran endlessly, doubled up, to the loo.

  She did badly at everything, made dense by misery, her considerable facility for games wrecked by increasingly poor health. When they came for her at half term, she fell into her father’s arms, sobbing helplessly; she was even pleased to see Cressida, and held her hand in the back of the car all the way home.

  When it was time to go back, she locked herself in the lavatory and refused to come out; it was only when they promised that if she wasn’t feeling better by the end of term she could leave that she agreed to return. Then Cressida wrote to her, warning her not to believe them, that she had heard them saying the school was doing her good, that she was bound to settle down in time, and she realized that if she was ever to escape she would have to take some action herself.

  The best thing, indeed the only thing, she decided, was to get expelled; once she had thought of it, she was excited at the sheer simplicity of the notion. She embarked upon her plan with the nearest to enjoyment she had felt for a long time, and started stealing the other girls’ things, over a period of a few weeks: a watch, a bracelet, a transistor radio, and some money from the lost property fines box, left unattended one day on the secretary’s desk. She left everything in her locker, which was duly searched when the alarm went up. Harriet stood in the headmistress’s study, looking at all the things on the large desk, and waited to hear the wonderful words, ‘We’ve asked your parents to come and take you home again.’ She had even begun to pack a few things in her attaché case before she was sent for, so confident was she.

  Only the wonderful words didn’t come; instead the headmistress went droning on for hours about letting herself and her parents down and instead of being expelled, she was taken to the school psychiatrist, a droopy woman with greasy hair who said things like ‘Nobody is angry with you, Harriet, just very upset’ and ‘You must learn to understand yourself better, Harriet, and then you will know why you do these things.’

  She had to spend an hour three days a week, learning to understand herself; the psychiatrist, who dressed in sagging beige garments and whose name was Dr Ormerod, asked her endless questions about her family, whether she felt they loved her, how she felt about her sister and whether she was angry about being sent away to school. Harriet certainly wasn’t going to make Dr Omerod’s job easy for her and give her the satisfaction of telling her she hated her sister, that she knew her family didn’t love her and she was extremely angry at being sent away to school; and besides she knew that if she did that, she would be labelled disturbed and unhappy, rather than bad, and crush any hopes of getting expelled. She said she loved her family and especially her sister, and she loved school, but she had lost her watch, she didn’t like the girl the bracelet belonged to and she’d needed money to buy the new David Cassidy LP.

  She’d confidently expected this to do the trick and that her parents would be finally phoned and told to come and collect her immediately, but Dr Omerod who had sat listening to her very carefully, clutching her beige cardigan tightly around herself, her crumpled beige face very solemn, had suddenly smiled and said, ‘Well done, Harriet. You’ve made some very big progress. You’ve learnt to confront yourself, be honest about yourself. A lot of grown-ups can’t do that, you know. I’m proud of you. I’m going to talk to Miss Edmundson again, and see what she thinks, but I would like to see this whole thing set behind you. We need some more sessions of course, but I think we’re very well on our way.’

  Harriet gave up, resigned herself to a life sentence.

  And then Sir Merlin turned up.

  She had always adored Sir Merlin. Even when she was tiny, only two or three, his visits were wonderful occasions, exciting, unpredictable; he brought her extraordinary presents, a stuffed monkey, a real shrunken head, a baby python. She loved the python and slept with it for a few weeks, but it began to grow rather large and feeding it was a problem. Sir Merlin came to an arrangement with the local abattoir where it was let loose on the large rat population, but Maggie, finally driven beyond endurance when it rose up at her one morning from the depths of the airing cupboard where it liked to sleep, insisted slightly hysterically on it going to the zoo. When Harriet was only six, he took her on a four-day camping expedition in a remote part of the Pyrenees; she returned exhausted, sunburnt, covered in mosquito bites and blissfully happy. Since then he had taken her on a trip every two or three years to all manner of marvellous places, as once he had taken her father. Together they had travelled to India, Morocco, Egypt, and had driven the length of America in a boneshaking truck; Harriet, while loving every trip more than the last, had come to associate travel with acute physical discomfort. And the best thing of all about her journeyings was that Cressida had shared none of this enchantment, had never shown the slightest desire to go. Even as a child she had liked her comforts.

  ‘Bit of a softic, your sister,’ Sir Merlin had remarked one night as they lay together in the confines of the truck, gazing at the glories of the Arizona night sky. It was the nearest he had ever come to criticizing Cressida, but Harriet knew he didn’t like her, and it made her happier still.

  Cressida did not miss out altogether, because Theo, who thought she was wonderful, took her on long, exotic, sanitized holidays, staying in five-star hotels, flying in private planes, sailing on luxury yachts: all very far removed from the wondrous, vast, magical experiences that Harriet shared with Sir Merlin. The unique bond between them, forged by their first shared adventures, was strong and powerful; and Merlin had fought hard alongside Janine, Harriet knew, to spare her the miseries of St Madeleine’s. But he had not won.

  She was sitting on a bench in the playground playing cat’s cradle with herself when she heard the familiar poop-poop of his beloved dark green Lagonda; hardly able to believe she wasn’t dreaming, she looked up and flew across the tarmac to him, flinging herself into his arms.

  ‘You’re looking very thin,’ he said, picking her up and setting her down again on the running board, and his brilliant blue eyes were concerned. ‘Don’t they feed you here?’

  ‘They try to,’ said Harriet with a shrug, ‘but I can’t eat it.’

  ‘Damnfool idea, the whole thing,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to take you out for lunch. Just got back from Java. Wonderful place. Tell you all about it. Come along. I suppose we should warn someone.’

  ‘Grandpa Merlin, they won’t let me out for lunch,’ said Harriet, her eyes round with horror. ‘We’re not even allowed out on Sundays and this is Tuesday.’

  ‘Oh rubbish. I’ll just tell ’em. Come on, Harriet, where’s your spirit gone?’

  ‘Dr Omerod’s busy killing it off,’ said Harriet with a sigh.

  ‘Who’s she? Never mind, tell me later. Hey, you!’ He waved his stick at one of the staff who was walking towards him.

  ‘Grandpa Merlin, you can’t do that,’ said Harriet, ‘you have to be polite to staff.’

  ‘What for? If they can’t look after you properly they don’t deserve politeness.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Miss Foxted, the Latin teacher, as beige and droopy as Dr Omerod, her bosom hanging almost to her waist, with plaits coiled over her rather large ears, was hurrying over to them, out of breath with anxiety, ‘You really can’t park that car there.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Sir Merlin, looking at her in genuine puzzlement. ‘What harm’s it doing? I don’t see any p
recious plants beneath it, anything like that.’

  ‘Well, it’s … it’s the playground. It’s dangerous.’

  ‘Stuff and nonsense. Girls aren’t blind, are they? Can see a car when it’s moving, I imagine. Now look here, I’m taking Harriet out for the day. Have her back by bedtime if you like.’

  ‘You can’t do that, I’m afraid,’ said Miss Foxted, her beige face strained with anxiety and disapproval. ‘It’s a working school day, you know. And we insist on formal appointments, even for day exeats. Besides, I’m afraid I don’t even know who you are. It would be irresponsible of me to allow Harriet off the premises.’

  ‘Well, I can see that,’ said Sir Merlin, suddenly reasonable, holding out his hand, ‘I’m her father’s godfather. Sir Merlin Reid. How do you do. Want to phone I expect. We’ll wait here for you.’

  ‘Sir Merlin, I really can’t–’

  ‘Look,’ said Sir Merlin, ‘look, go and talk to your boss, whoever she is, will you? We haven’t got all day.’

  ‘But – I really don’t see – that is –’ Miss Foxted’s voice trailed into helplessness.

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Sir Merlin. ‘We’ll come with you.’

  They followed Miss Foxted across the playground towards the headmistress’s study, stood outside while she went in; they could hear her voice, and Miss Edmundson’s voice, slowly rising. Finally Miss Edmundson came out. She smiled her gracious, understanding smile at Sir Merlin, held out her hand.

  ‘Sir Merlin! How nice to meet you. Now then, I understand you want to take Harriet out for the day. I’m afraid that will be quite impossible, against all our rules. Later in the term, one Sunday perhaps–’

  ‘Have you phoned her father?’

  ‘Certainly not. There is no question of her going out, therefore no question of phoning him.’