‘Fir trees!’ said Augusta with a laugh that egged me to go on, but I had come to a lame end.
We were going into supper and Mrs Figg passed us. ‘Don’t dawdle, Sarah,’ she said.
I was not a dawdling girl, and I saw that I must have been copying Augusta’s dawdling walk. It was new to me, and I felt I had grown up several months. As we separated and went to our different tables Augusta said, off-hand, ‘Of course, Benedict’s quite mad. My father says it goes back to that awful pious nurse he had. She used to tell him that the Devil would get him and that he would go to hell. And then there was that awful Webb business.’ And, with that, she glided away.
But the phrase ‘that awful Webb business’ and Augusta walking away with her I-know-more-than-you-do look made me dog Augusta whenever I could. And I could see by her face that she noticed this. We went off the next day to play tennis on the school court. She was a slapdash tennis player, and even the few balls that came over the net seemed to know something. When we left the court and went to our dormitory to change I said, ‘My father didn’t cut down those fir trees. It was old Webby who used to work for the Shorts as well as for us.’
Augusta stood there with her blouse off. Her grown-up breasts, larger than mine, seemed to be staring at me. The bell rang and we hadn’t washed.
‘Run along,’ she said. ‘Actually,’ she said – we all said ‘actually’ in a cutting way in those days – ‘I was talking about Glanville’s first wife. She died years ago. She drowned.’
I felt I was like some silly fish dangling on a hook in hot air. I could not breathe.
‘Come along, girls,’ Mrs Figg called from the door of the dormitory. I choked my way into my clothes. I sluiced my face and through the water I saw the astonishing stone face of the drowning Webb in the drawing room at Lower Marsh.
Poor Benedict, I thought, and I ran down the clattering stairs to the dining room. I mumbled my way through grace and saw Augusta across the room saying grace beautifully, her lovely chin raised. Later she ate slowly, while I was racing through my food and spilled my milk. I was still wriggling on Augusta’s hook. I was in her power.
But Augusta was merciful to me, or else, I suppose, she saw the kind of opportunity she loved. If she was dreamy, she was also crisp.
In our free time it was easy for girls to be in twos, lying in the grass, and at last I was able to say, ‘Poor Benedict, his mother drowned.’ This explained the strange things he did, and his talk of the body in the room.
‘I did not say that,’ said Augusta scornfully. ‘Emma is his mother. Glan was married to Webb. Then he married Emma. What a thing to say! Did your father say that? If he did, it’s very wicked,’ she said sharply.
I said no, he’d never said anything like that, nor my mother, I swore. Augusta was still suspicious of this, but at last she saw how confused I was, and she forgave me. She said that Glanville had married a Miss Webb when he came home after the First World War; everyone was mad about her. It was not until much later that I began to wonder how Augusta knew the story. It must have happened before the war and she wasn’t born then. But she said that Webb had gone off to Egypt with a painter called Stolz and that he had left her, and so she had come home and drowned herself in the river at Fordhampton.
The one where father can’t afford to fish, I thought. And then I thought of Benedict digging a grave for Pharaoh and his wife in his garden.
I had already told Augusta about this the day after Cocky Oily, but when I mentioned it again now, Augusta cut the story short. ‘That boy is always digging,’ she said. ‘He wants to be an archaeologist, like that man in Glanville’s library.’ And she said dreamily, ‘I would never be a second wife, unless he was like Glanville.’
We got up from the grass laughing. I mean, I laughed; Augusta didn’t. Anyway, she said, Emma and Glan were sending Benedict to the grammar school in Newford. That would stop him running away because he’d come home every day by train. And she gave me one of her narrow-eyed looks. The Shorts were her possession.
The long holidays began. My father took us to Devonshire to stay in a hotel near a place where he went fishing. Mother and I went on long walks, and the only event of the day was to come back by the bridge over the river to catch sight of him. We were not allowed to go near him when he was fishing. Once or twice we drove ten miles to a high red-faced cliff – they were not chalky cliffs as they are in our part of the country. The waves were forever staining the sand red near the shore. We used to park on the cliff with other cars and walk not too near the edge and look at the sea glittering some days and on others tumbling fast down the Channel. I loved the Channel because it was wider here. This was the only time I thought of the Shorts and Benedict, for they were in Brittany. La mer: what a beautiful word! We had a set book by Pierre Loti to read in the holidays. My mother said she, too, had had to read it at school when she was a girl, yet she was no help with the words I didn’t know.
So, back home again. It seemed dull. I rushed to my post at the end of our garden and looked across the water meadow, but there was no sight of Benedict on the first day. In the middle of the week I did see him in the distance with a girl taller than he and making for his house. I waved. They did not see me, and I tried to make myself look larger when they came into closer view. I waved again. They still did not see me. I felt something like a red-hot electric wire run through me – a wire that seemed to turn into a flame, as if I were alight. Then I went icy cold. Benedict was with Augusta! I was flaming with jealousy. I watched till they went out of sight.
My father was in the garden talking to my mother, who was pulling up weeds. I got carried away and went out to the road and walked along to the Shorts’ drive. There were cars outside the house, one of them Foxey’s red car. A party. And I wasn’t invited. I was stiff with misery. I went back to my room and tried to read, but I was listening, for hours it seemed to me, to hear the cars drive away. When I went to bed my jealousy went. I remembered that the next week I would see Benedict on the train to and from school.
But at first this was not so. On the first day of term Augusta told me that Benedict’s mother was going to drive him to his grammar school and bring him back each day. So I became a parcel again on my weekly journey. On Monday mornings I saw the politician doing his morning trot up and down the platform, and weekend people going to London with their papers, and a few grammar-school boys who got in at King’s Mill and played cards all the way. Their school caps had a yellow ring round them. On Saturday afternoons there was always a large crowd of them going back to their homes in King’s Mill or Fordhampton. About a dozen of them would stand on the platform bashing one another with their cases, and cheeking the woman who ran the buffet. Sometimes she turned them out. They crowded round the slot machines and tried to force them to yield up coins. I used to sit on a seat watching them. The porters grinned at the boys, but the ticket inspector hated the way they pushed past him. Sometimes a boy would be pushed onto my seat and I would walk away higher up the platform. There was a fat boy who was always eating chocolate.
The first Saturday I saw Benedict on the platform, he was keeping clear of the other boys. ‘Hullo,’ he said eagerly in his high voice, and the fat boy mocked, ‘Squeaky’s got a little t-tart.’
They stared at us and then went on pushing one another around. Benedict was carrying his violin case. I had never seen that before. I asked him why he wasn’t wearing the school cap.
‘Because I hate it,’ he said.
I can’t remember what we talked about except that I told him that I had seen him with an old lady walking across the water meadow and had waved to him. He was startled.
‘A witch,’ he said.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ I said. ‘It was Augusta. Don’t tell her I said that.’
‘I’ll tell,’ he said.
I knew he would, because every now and then after our train came in and we took our seats he said, ‘I’ll tell, I’ll tell.’
At Fordhampton, Glan was wa
iting for him, and my mother was there as well.
‘Aha!’ said Glanville in his insinuating way. ‘The apple girl.’
‘It seems damn silly,’ said my father to my mother when I got home. ‘Why couldn’t he have given Sarah a lift and saved you the trouble? Save petrol, too. Typical socialist.’
‘You don’t give the boy a lift,’ Mother said.
‘Don’t be an owl,’ Father said. ‘That man’s got nothing to do.’
So every Monday and Saturday I travelled on the train with Benedict. He had become quieter and it seemed that he had settled into the school. It was ‘beastly’ there, of course, but chiefly, he said, because the music master was angry when he told him the school piano was out of tune. He also hated Prayers, and the fat boy who got into the train at King’s Mill was the Devil. This came out one morning when a man across from us was reading a newspaper with a headline in big print: ‘CLIFF MURDER: HUNT FOR BRIGHTON YOUTH.’ Benedict began jumping up and down in his seat and said the fat boy had done it. ‘It’s Fatty! It’s Fatty!’ he said in a furious whisper. I told him not to be silly. At school I told Augusta this was now the only sign of Benedict’s being mad, but she had changed this term. She said it was Glanville who put these ideas into his son’s head. Foxey said so, too. But after this Benedict was calm. One day he brought his stamp collection and he showed it to me, and once I ruffled his black hair when he said I was as fat as Augusta. I knew what he meant: I was growing up. I told him Augusta would marry him if he was not careful, and I laughed because he looked scared. He was very polite after that.
I enjoyed those train rides and I missed him for two weeks when he had flu. I was glad to see him when he reappeared on the platform at Newford Station. I had got there late because I had gone into one of the shops in the town to buy a lipstick like Augusta’s. I had run all the way from the shop, frightened that I had missed the train. At first I didn’t see Benedict. Some boys were crowded round the fat boy as usual, begging him to give them a bit of his chocolate. The fat boy was backing away from them and Benedict was watching. The fat boy was sly and stood back against the wall, looking around for some way of escape. One boy was pulling at his arm. Suddenly the fat boy broke from them and went up to Benedict, snatched his cap from his pocket, and cried, ‘Put your cap on, Squeaky, or I’ll report you.’
Benedict stood holding his violin case and did not put his cap on, and the fat boy suddenly stepped forward and pulled the cap down over Benedict’s eyes and face. I called out, ‘Leave him alone.’
And then I saw Benedict do a stupid thing. He pulled his cap off and sent it flying off the platform and onto the railway track, and then, white with fright, he dashed at the fat boy and struck him on the shoulder with his violin case, screeching out, ‘I’ll kill you!’
The fat boy moved away, frightened. Two women were watching us, and one of them said, ‘I will report you to your headmaster,’ and she said to her friend, ‘It’s Major Short’s boy.’ I got Benedict by the sleeve and we walked away from the crowd. I was giddy with temper and walked him far up the platform, and when I looked back I saw the boys gaping at the cap lying on the railway line. Two boys were beginning to follow us, but the others were still crowding round Fatty. And then the train came in. I got Benedict into a first-class carriage in front. Three of Fatty’s crowd raced up looking for us, but I pulled down the blind. I could hear the porters bawling, and the boys ran back. We sat still; the compartment had a notice saying ‘Ladies Only’. There was a long wait and a strange silence at our end of the train. I let down the window and saw some of the boys getting off the train, all laughing. I heard a porter shout, ‘Not this train!’ A whistle blew. The train, I saw, was much longer than the train we usually took.
‘We’re on the wrong train,’ I said. ‘It’s the express. Quick. It doesn’t stop at Fordhampton,’ and I tried to open the door. Then the train – one of the new diesels – moved out fast. I turned round. Benedict was lounging back on the seat.
‘I knew!’ he said, laughing at me.
‘You beast,’ I said.
I was scared. I saw the last of the pink houses of Newford and heard the chime of the signal box, as final and frightening as if it were killing itself with laughter. My father and mother would be waiting for me at Fordhampton and the train would whiz through. And that woman from Lower Marsh who had heard me shout in the mixup with the boys – she would report it all to my father. I lost my head.
‘Why didn’t you tell me it was the wrong train?’ I said. ‘I hate you.’
‘I’m running away,’ he said, delighted by my terror. ‘I hate that school. I hate Glanville. I’m not going back.’
There is a long wooded stretch outside Newford and all the leaves on the trees seemed to be talking about us. Had he planned it?
‘Where are you going?’ I said.
He was sitting there gloating and grinning. ‘To London,’ he said.
‘But that’s in the opposite direction. This train goes to Bath.’
‘I’ll get a London train there,’ he said.
‘You’re mad. It’s hundreds of miles away.’
What frightened me was that I had only two shillings on me.
‘How much money have you got?’ I said.
‘My aunt lives in Bath. She’ll give me the money,’ he said.
The train was speeding. Two little stations went by like a shout.
‘The Devil is on this train,’ he said with glee. ‘I saw him on the platform.’
I was standing up still, and the train swerved at King’s Mill when it crossed the river. A man was fishing there. I fell onto my seat. I was tired of Benedict and his Devil.
‘I’ll rape you,’ he said.
‘You won’t,’ I said. ‘Silly little Squeaky.’ And I got up and rumpled his hair. ‘You’d better look at your violin. You smashed it when you hit that boy.’
This stopped him. He opened his case and took out his violin and looked at it very carefully and then he took up his bow and played one or two notes. They sounded very sad. All this time I had been trying not to cry, and it was the sound of those notes, like someone speaking, that stopped me. In that moment I recovered my wits. I looked about the compartment and noticed the communication cord. A notice said ‘Emergency. To Stop Train Pull the Cord. Penalty for Improper Use £5.’ I was scared. When the train got near Fordhampton I knew I was going to pull the cord and make it stop there. I sat down and got out one of my school books and pretended to read, but I was looking at the fields. When the train got to Flour Mill I would get ready to pull the cord. This calmed me. I got up and said, ‘I am going to the lavatory.’ I was dying to go. ‘There’s one for you at the other end of the corridor,’ he said.
There was the door marked ‘Toilet Vacant’. I went in. The window was of frosted glass so that I couldn’t see out, but I could tell by the sound of the train crossing the river where we were. We’d crossed one bridge. There were two more to come. I knew how long that took. I wasn’t long in the lavatory before someone tried the door. I waited. Then I pulled the catch. It had stuck. It wouldn’t open at first; when it did there was the ticket inspector on the other side. The inspector always tested the door in order to catch any one hiding from him. He was a big man with a red face and a black moustache like a wet paintbrush.
‘Sorry, Miss. Ticket, please.’
‘It’s in my bag in the compartment,’ I said. He looked at my hat – we wore straw hats with a red band at my school – and slowly followed me to the compartment. Benedict was not there, and as I opened my bag I heard a deep rumbling noise, louder than the noise of river bridges. We were rushing over the High Street at Fordhampton. The station platform screeched at us, people flew away in a stream of dots, the green top of the town hall danced away, and the brick orphanage on the outskirts of the town looked down on us from fifty narrow windows. I had forgotten this was an express train. With a final clap Fordhampton vanished, the points clattered, and the oak woods closed in on us. Benedict
came into the compartment.
‘Ticket,’ the ticket inspector said to Benedict, who got out his train pass.
‘We’re going to Bath,’ Benedict said coolly.
‘You’re in first class!’ said the inspector. ‘Fordhampton, it says here. That your violin? We’ve passed Fordhampton.’
He took my train pass and looked at it and said the same thing. Then he sat down with us and got out a printed pad. ‘Both going to Bath? Plenty of room in third class in the next coach.’
He slowly turned the pages of his pad. ‘You’ll be owing me some money,’ he said. ‘Ten pounds each. You got in at Newford, I see. It comes expensive.’ He looked very sly when he said this and then sighed and said sharply, ‘First class – let me see. Fifteen pounds each, I make it. Holidays begun early, eh? Playing in a concert?’ He was looking around in the compartment, and I knew he was trying to see if we had smashed the lightbulbs or slashed the seat.
‘We got into the wrong train and some boys locked us in. We thought it was the Fordhampton train,’ I said. ‘My father is waiting for us. He’s a brigadier. It’s terrible. No one told us at Newford. I’m not going to Bath, and we missed our lunch.’
‘Well, it will be a long wait,’ said the inspector. ‘But your friend’s going to Bath. With his violin?’
‘No, I’m going to London. I’m in the school orchestra,’ Benedict said calmly.
I was so amazed I could only say, ‘Benedict!’
‘I am,’ said Benedict.
‘It’s a funny way to go to London. Down to Bath, up to London, wrong way round. Cost you more. Twenty-five pounds, I make it.’
‘Where is the buffet car?’ said Benedict, putting on an important voice.
The inspector said it was two coaches back. ‘Stay where you are,’ he said. He got up slowly. He put his pad in his pocket and said he’d be back later on. We waited and waited.
‘Why did you tell such lies? We’ll be arrested.’
‘Let’s go to the buffet car,’ Benedict said. ‘I’m hungry.’
A Careless Widow and Other Stories Page 5
