The Divines

by Ellie Eaton

  “Congratulations,” the wife says, leaning over and patting Jürgen on the back of his hand.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  The couple smile knowingly at each other.

  Jürgen’s T-shirt is inside out, my hair unkempt. As we brush against each other under the table, there’s a stench between my thighs, musky and sour, like overripe fruit. I cringe, thinking of our attic room, the paper-thin walls and creaking bed frame, and bury my head in Jürgen’s shoulder. The landlady slams a teapot on the table in front of us.

  Jürgen asks the couple how long they’ve been married.

  “Forever,” the old man groans.

  His wife flaps her napkin at him.

  “Fifty-four years this September,” she says.

  I can feel Jürgen’s fingers as they weave through mine, how his wedding band grates over my knuckles as he squeezes, causing me to wince.

  “Any advice?” Jürgen asks.

  The elderly pair gather their room key and newspaper and spectacles from the table. The husband gets up and pulls back his wife’s chair so she can stand.

  “Be kind,” the wife says.

  They nod at us.

  “Good luck.”

  During checkout Jürgen stops in front of the landlady and kisses me, a hand slipping down the back of my trousers, and then we pack up the car and are back on the road. I begin to think that the unpleasant incident at St. John’s is forgotten, that the whole ugly scene is behind us. But then, unexpectedly . . .

  “No school friends,” Jürgen says, sliding his hand up and down my thigh as I join the motorway. “That’s interesting, you know?”

  I can see that my new husband finds this baffling. I wish I’d never mentioned the word Divine. He can’t let it alone. He taps one finger against the glass as we cross the border into Scotland, staring out at the uneventful landscape, green fields with yellow pocket handkerchiefs of oilseed rape, culs-de-sac, warehouses and roadside cafés, food trucks parked in rest stops. We have another four hours of driving ahead of us to get to Skye, not to mention the ferry.

  “Not one?” Jürgen checks, uncharacteristically pushy.

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  The four men that are his best friends all come from the same Salzburg village where he grew up. Andreas, Hansi, Thomas B, Thomas F. Two of them were christened together, they went to the same school, shared their first cigarette in Hansi’s woodshed, stole their grandparents’ schnapps, chased their first girlfriends on Krampusnacht, pretending to be the Christmas devil, masked and growling, nipping their sweethearts’ ankles with leather whips, threatening to carry them to the underworld. They have shed blood together, hunted together, drunk wept at each other’s weddings, actually staggering around the dance floor like bears. They are his family, closer than his actual brothers (one older, one younger, who I have to remind Jürgen to call on their respective birthdays). He is loyal to the core and would do anything for these four men, including jumping on a plane at the drop of a hat, or loaning them money without any expectation of return. A private annoyance of mine.

  “Were you bullied?” Jürgen wants to know as we pull over to fill up with petrol.

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Unpopular then?” He pokes me. “Eine Streberin. How do you say, a geek?”

  “No.”

  I grip the pump handle, my knuckles blanching.

  “So you loved school?”

  “Who loves school? It was fine,” I snap, instantly regretting my tone. “I mean, I don’t remember. Can we just drop it?”

  Back behind the wheel he curls his hand around the nape of my neck to soothe me, rubbing his thumb up and down below my ear. He has calluses, little circular pads on the base of each finger from cycling that are rough as pumice.

  “You don’t know if you liked school or not? You must remember something.”

  “Not really,” I say, wriggling out of Jürgen’s grip, flustered, trying to concentrate on the road.

  “Try,” he says.

  I don’t answer.

  Why won’t I talk to him? Is it just that I’m embarrassed? The boarding school education, the implication of wealth and privilege, the Old Girls’ network. When I met Jürgen (a sculptor I was sent to interview for a Sunday supplement, a rising star), he was still sleeping in a tent in his studio, washing in a sink, subsisting on grants and sporadic commissions. A self-made man, the descendant of mountain people, literal peasants—cattle herders and cheese makers—he described to me during the course of that first meeting how he’d paid his way through art school felling trees and slaughtering goats.

  Jürgen turns his whole body to face me.

  “Seriously, you’re kidding, right? You won’t tell me this?”

  Ashamed, I say nothing.

  He can see that I’m not going to budge.

  This does it. Silently thunderous, Jürgen takes out his guidebook and reads the history of Skye. His stare bores down into one page then the next. We’re not the kind of couple who bicker. I sit behind the wheel, gnawing on the inside of my cheek, trying not to cry.

  On the ferry to Armadale we stand apart, his hood up, my scarf wrapped around my head against the spray. He has his camera around his neck but doesn’t take one photo. When we get to the island, there are midges, huge biblical clouds of gnats. We cover our mouths with our T-shirts and run into the croft house we have rented, cornered together inside the tiny kitchen.

  “Oh my god,” I say, looking out at the bugs creeping all over the window frame, trying to find a way in. I try to make a joke about it but it falls flat. Jürgen is still furious with me, his new wife, for keeping secrets. He sits with the map spread on the floor, his precious road bike propped up against the wall. I open the bottle of single malt I bought on the mainland. I may have taken a few swigs already on the crossing. Dutch courage.

  My throat warm, I place the whisky dead in the middle of his map. Jürgen barely looks up. I take off my clothes—it is our honeymoon, after all—and straddle Loch Hourn. Legs spread shamelessly. Afterwards, we lie on the floor and drink the rest of the bottle, picking midges from each other’s skin.

  “Please, Sephine,” Jürgen begs. “Remember something. For me.”

  “Why are you so interested all of a sudden?”

  “That woman, she hated you. She called you a cunt.”

  “So?”

  “I want to know. I want to know about you back then.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  I curl under his armpit, press against his warm ribs.

  “Liebchen”—he circles the birthmark on my shoulder—“please.”

  I think of the elderly couple at the bed-and-breakfast. Be kind.

  “Fine,” I mutter. I believe, or so I tell myself, in the apotropaic power of marriage. That witch hasn’t jinxed us, we are invincible. Golden even. What harm can it do?

  “Memor amici,” I begin.

  Remember friends.

  2

  We sat, some of us early birds, on the ha-ha, legs dangling above the grass ditch, watching the Peck twins, Dave and Henry, play a so-called friendly game of tennis. It was mid-April or around then. The first day of the summer term, my fifth year at the school. What would turn out to be our last as Divine. A few weeks before the Gerry Lake scandal.

  Dave Peck wiped her wristband over her top lip where she was pooling sweat, squatting slightly, shifting from foot to foot in a slow, hypnotic rock, waiting for the serve. Henry, the prettier and leggier of the Peck twins, at least according to my memory, tossed the ball high. She jumped, her racket arm primed, so that it looked for a moment like she was suspended in the air, levitating, truly divine. Then she plummeted down on top of the ball, which her sister somehow managed to return, firing it into the distant corner, just inside the line. Henry frowned and picked up a new ball without saying a word to her twin. The Peck sisters were in the midst of a spat. Henry had spent the Easter holidays giving blow jobs to their private tenni
s coach in the swimming pool changing hut of their Hampshire house, leaving Dave alone on court to practice with a ball machine.

  “What happened to the Moose?” I asked the group.

  This was the name we’d given the much-talked-about coach, a former pro, whose real name was something exotic sounding to us, like Moussa. By then the phrase “the Moose” had already morphed amongst Divines into a code word for blow jobs and big dicks, and eventually just dicks in general.

  “Monaco,” someone said. “The Moose went to Monaco.”

  “Or, like, Abu Dhabi?”

  “Au revoir, the Moose.”

  “Yeah, no more moose.”

  “Brunei,” Henry corrected, taking a break as the sisters switched ends, leaning against the court fence, the flesh on her shoulder squeezing through the mesh of small diamonds so that she looked vaguely upholstered.

  “Hi, Joe,” she said to me. “How was Hong Kong?”

  My father was a banker; my parents had recently moved for his work.

  “It was passable. Sorry about the Moose.”

  “Thanks, I mean, I don’t know.” She bounced her racket against her heel. “We’re going to write to each other and stuff, it’ll be cool. I’ll see him at half term.”

  The Moose had it made. St. John the Divine, a private boarding school, was staffed almost entirely by women, with the exception of Padre, our school chaplain, and a couple of ancient art and maths teachers; the Moose had had zero competition. The chances of us giving out blow jobs during the eighty-four days of that summer term, not counting exeats (weekend leaves) and a half-term holiday, were highly unlikely. Sebastian Moussa was probably thirty-two or -three, drove a convertible, and had a French accent. He was a god. We knew nothing about his life off court. This was preinternet, remember; no one could google anyone. For all we knew he could have been married with six children. The man was an enigma.

  I remember that whenever I thought about Sebastian Moussa, who had the muscular knees of a long-distance runner and hard, dark brown thighs, I always started to feel my palms clam up and had to rub them across my school tights before anyone noticed because, at sixteen, I had never actually seen in the flesh or touched, let alone sucked, any moose. In this respect I was somewhat behind my peers. Divines were known for being sexually precocious. I had an extremely vivid imagination but couldn’t for the life of me visualize having a part of someone else, especially not that part, in my mouth, or what I’d do with it once it was there. (In Second Year I was dared by my best friend, Skipper, to suck another Divine’s thumb and, despite still being a resolute thumb sucker myself at that age, remember the repulsive, alien sensation of George Gordon-Warren’s knuckle jammed against my lower teeth, her long nail nipping my roof cavity, so retch-worthy an experience that soon after I gave up the habit. If George’s thumb made me gag, how, I wondered, could I possibly manage a penis?)

  Which isn’t to say I was frigid—an accusation we used to toss around back then—or unattractive, not a total disaster at least. True, I didn’t have much in the way of breasts and had something of a mousy, forgettable face, but I had grown my hair long to master the flick, a single swipe of the hand, our signature move, that folded one’s hair into a side quiff. We never tied our hair up back then unless it was for sports and were constantly tossing our heads from one side to another throughout the day. I’m surprised we didn’t get whiplash. I had the same slippery fine hair I have now, which made this style hard to maintain and so I got in the habit of tilting my head to one side, inadvertently giving me a Princess Diana kind of coyness. Not exactly a coquette like Henry Peck, but still, it seemed to appeal to the boys. At least the kind of boarding school boys we knew back then: Harovians, Etonians, Radleians, Stowics. Except that by the Fifth Form the closest I’d come to sex was some cack-handed fumbling through a tuxedo zipper at a school dance. Skipper, one of the most popular girls in our year, a safe bet for head girl, knew this, as did the other Divines and so all this moose talk back then made me feel vaguely fraudulent, as I often did during that period of my life, riddled with insecurity. Still, I continued to smile at Henry Peck that day as if I was in on the moose joke, kicking my legs against the crumbling stone wall of the ha-ha, and changed the subject before Henry returned to the question of my Easter holidays. No moose then, either.

  Jürgen lifts his head to interrupt my story.

  “Coquette?”

  “Jane Eyre was one of our set texts, we were fifteen and sixteen years old, we knew all about coquettes.”

  “Okay,” Jürgen concedes. “Go on.”

  He lies back down.

  “Wait, the Peck twins, where are they now?”

  “I don’t know. That’s not important. Are you going to keep on butting in?”

  “Nein, nein.”

  I cuff him on his thigh.

  “Pass me the whisky.”

  My husband rests the bottle on my naked hip. It’s obvious the effect my story is having on him—the teenage girls, the uniforms, the long manes of hair.

  “Do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “The flick.”

  “The flick? I don’t remember.”

  “Ja, you do.”

  He leans forward and pulls the clip from my bun.

  “Go on. Show me.”

  I pretend to scowl but stand up, catching sight of myself in the sitting room mirror, my naked torso above the fireplace, small white breasts, my nipples mutinous in the cold and hard as bullets. I enjoy looking at my wide, milky colored bottom, more than a handful, slightly dimpled at the edges. So different from how I was fourteen years ago when I was all edges and bone. I rub my hand across my soft belly. Absorbed by my own flesh. I almost forget Jürgen is waiting.

  “So,” he prods, “go on.”

  I comb my fingers through my knots, flattening my palm, and I do it. It turns out I haven’t forgotten; in fact I perform it perfectly, my hair cartwheeling over, the apotheosis of the flick. I look at Jürgen as I used to look at those Radley boys, head tilted sideways, draped in gold, Hellenic.

  “Güt,” he says.

  He kneels before me, cupping my breasts in his hands.

  “Do you want to hear this or not?”

  “I do,” he rasps, squeezing a nipple, “I do.”

  “Jürgen.”

  “Keep going. Tell me about the scandal.”

  3

  A long-standing Divine tradition was to toss our brown leather lace-ups into the branches of a weeping cedar at the front of the school. My grandmother and mother had both done it, as would I a few weeks later in a moment of post-GCSE exam euphoria. On that first day of summer term I watched as a funeral procession of cars came peeling off the road and up the driveway, looping round the Circle with this shoe tree in the center. Cars paused by the entrance while royal blue school trunks with brass buckles and our names painted on the sides were solemnly heaved onto the grass by the long-suffering maintenance staff, grave as pallbearers, then the parents went gliding on in search of a parking spot beside the boarding house.

  St. John the Divine had a campus of two halves, conjoined twins, linked by a large metal bridge. This bridge, an ugly eyesore of a construction, straddled the two splintered parts of our school grounds like some vast metal stick insect. Built at the behest of concerned parents, its intent was to stop Divines having to cross the road below on foot, putting an end to us playing chicken with townies who had been known to accelerate on sight, honking their horns, cutting so close we could hear the snorts of laughter, the spray of puddle water against our calves. Which says something about the civic sentiment back then. Long before the scandal.

  We all loathed the bridge. In winter we clung to the frozen banister, bobsledding down the near vertical set of steps. In the summer it radiated an unpleasant tarry heat underfoot, hot enough to burn through white plimsoll. That said, the view from the top was the best in the school. Standing in the middle you could see, to the east, pairs of strung shoes, polished as conkers,
spinning at the top of the cedar tree in the center of the Circle and next to that the laundry, sports halls, tennis courts, orchard, and the redbrick boarding houses where we junior years slept—formerly the property of a wealthy Victorian landowner, now renamed after saints, St. Gertrude, St. Hilda, et cetera. These various buildings were spread across the town, like a tumor, partitioned from disapproving locals by an imposing brick wall.

  The Other Side was what we called the remainder of the school and included pretty much everything you could see to the west of the bridge: the chapel, classrooms, science labs, refectory, the headmistress’s office and an oval vestibule known as the Egg (a kind of prechamber of the headmistress’s office, where Fat Fran’s henchwomen liked to congregate in large wingback chairs), and finally, the Sixth Form accommodation, Lower and Upper. These Sixth Form dormitories—two modern-looking brick bungalows, once a retirement home for Divine nuns, long dead, though their chalky odor still lingered—had the benefit of being set back from the road, away from the other buildings. This gave the occupants the illusion of privacy. Something Sixth Formers felt rather superior about.

  The life of these Sixth Form girls seemed unimaginably sophisticated to us. Gone were the unflattering Edwardian school uniforms (blue tweed skirts, beige shirts, and ankle-length black wool cloaks in winter, striped cotton tunics in the summer months). Gone were the weekly dorm inspections, the endless monitoring of tuck lockers filled with snacks, and mandatory lights-out. Instead these Sixth Form girls wore their own clothes, lounged around the bungalow during free periods, drove their own cars home at half-term, and—the thing we coveted above all others—slept in private bedrooms, some of them rumored to be en suite.