“Ahem! For physical education - or PE, as I prefer - I have sourced a perfectly adequate style of school leotard for dance-based activities and what used to be referred to as a ‘gym suit’ for more, shall we say... robust pursuits. The latter shall include - but not be limited to - military-style drill and vigorous callisthenics and hopefully, more often than not, will be taken by a good friend of mine, a woman of some considerable expertise when it comes to inspiring lazy and recalcitrant young women, having been employed as gym mistress at one of the ‘short-sharp-shock’ young offender’s institutes the UK trialled some years back.” She paused, adding as if an afterthought: “...with Lady Marchment’s permission, of course!”
Having caught Karen Lamberton-Marchment’s raised eyebrows she was now indulging in a little damage limitation. She had been counting on her employer’s reluctance to undermine her authority and standing in the eyes of the two girls, but as much as anything else on the notion appealing to the darker aspects of the woman’s otherwise impeccably respectable self. But it was a gamble. She hadn’t mentioned it in advance and she wanted the atmosphere she had now created in this room to speak for itself, to set the scene and spark the tinder she felt sure was waiting in her employer’s psyche to be ignited. Nor had she mentioned that this gym mistress she had in mind had enjoyed - if enjoyed was the right word, perhaps endured - no little public notoriety and outcry at the time of her dismissal.
Whereas her own - Daphne Larkspear’s - discrediting had been largely confined to behind the scandal-muffling closed doors of a famous private girl’s boarding school, this other woman had had her face spread far and wide on the covers of both broadsheets and tabloids. The allegations of abuse and sexual exploitation still hung about her friend and one-time lover like a bad smell that refused to wash off and that potentially threatened to taint all those around her. Or at least that would have been the state of play had she not invested some of her late Aunt’s estate in helping the woman start again, changing her appearance through surgery, acquiring a new identity, national insurance number and passport to match. That too had been a gamble. The woman had been put on the sexual offender’s register - her disappearance from view had done more than just raise eyebrows. But this too, assuming she had read Karen Lamberton-Marchment correctly - and she felt confident that she had - would likely gel with her employer’s tastes; at least once her ex-pupil, with her help, came to realise her own potential. For now though she would keep her not-so-tame gym mistress friend’s... indiscretions, close to her chest.
She tried not to display the relief on her face as she saw Karen Lamberton-Marchment’s head slowly nod in acquiescence at the back of the room, her eyes meeting that of her employer and ex-pupil and communicating an unspoken understanding written in mutually exchanged smiles. She was elated even if doing her best to deny it to herself - and why not? Her judgement had been sound, the gamble had paid off! She couldn’t help but lick her lips as her eyes once again alighted on the woman’s stepdaughter. The girl was looking exquisitely sweet the way she was sitting there so contritely in her school uniform - her ex-pupil had already got the girl quite well tamed, even without her help; albeit with the complicity of a medical doctor. Young Alice would be positively domesticated once she had been put through a few of her old friend’s drill sessions.
She could already see the girl in the nineteen-thirties-style ‘gym suit’ outfit her friend had come up with. The girl’s bottom was going to look succulent in that, bouncing and quivering under the heavy leather Victorian reformatory strap her gym mistress friend favoured - the genuine article that was, too; a true antique. Judging by the groan the girl had let out when she’d mentioned it - the second she’d picked up on Alice uttering - she guessed that the girl had somehow seen an example of her friend’s take on the gym suit, or at least something like it. Either way it was as clear as day that the girl could already see herself in it, just as well as she could. Staring down at her employer’s stepdaughter, at the distaste and dismay written across the girl’s pale face, delighting in the girl’s uncomfortable fidgeting under her gaze, she took another mental note: She’d have the girl try her gym suit on, sooner rather than later, just for her own enjoyment. Not that there was likely to be any problem regarding its fit. It had been hand-made to the girl’s exact and detailed measurements - most detailed measurements; certain dimensions had been of the sort that had had to be acquired under the guise of a medical examination.
The ever more despondent Alice Lamberton had indeed seen an example of what Mrs Larkspear had meant by a ‘gym suit’. She had immediately recalled coming across a singularly odd garment in the same cubby hole as she had the school gabardine. It had been on top of a pile of things and had had a tag sewn to it carrying the description, ‘customer sample’. Had it not been for the drawing and photograph rolled up with it she would have been at something of a disadvantage.
As it was the photograph was from some mid-nineteen-thirties ‘health and fitness’ catalogue labelled with the moniker: One piece, bloomer-style, gym suit. Whereas the garment in the photograph was not particularly inviting to her teenage, fashion-conscious eyes, the drawing that had presumably been made from it depicted something worse, as if someone had gone out of their way to select all the most detracting features. The actual garment had been quite hideous in its realisation, a bizarre thing indeed. It was as if the design had somehow become an exaggerated, corrupted version of that drawn out on the paper pattern in its execution, as if someone’s imagination had been put to use on the fly - with needle and cotton in hand - and had got carried way out into the realm of some austere, utilitarian fantasy.
At the time she had decided that it must be something from the past that had, perhaps, lain there undiscovered for decades. But even with that in mind - and taking into account the era it represented - holding it up by its shoulders her eyes had taken the detail in with no little incredulity: It had been sized for an adult - albeit a small one - but the thought had run through her mind that surely no adult or adolescent young woman would have been seen dead in such a thing, even back then...
Mrs Larkspear’s misleadingly disarming Scots ascent cut through her thoughts at that point, intruding, drawing Alice Lambert’s attention reluctantly back to the already near-on unbearable tedium that this ‘schoolroom’ had so soon come to represent. How she was ever going to be able to withstand hour after hour and day after day of this level of monotony, she didn’t know - already she felt at the edge of despair.
And that bloody clock! She was beginning to dread each metronomic tick. It filled the silence between her teacher’s proclamations with an irritatingly unvarying cadence that seemed to underscore the sense of detached isolation that permeated the room. It jarred on her nerves, as if pointing out that time was passing, that out there in the real world, real people were leading real lives, getting somewhere, progressing. She feared it would drive her insane - but what if that was the point? Was that what her stepmother was trying to do, with the help of this bloody governess woman? Were the two of them trying to drive her mad, to get their hands on her inheritance by having her ‘put away’?
Handing out the sheaves of paper and a pen each to the two uniformed girls Daphne Larkspear smiled thoughtfully, perhaps wistfully: A total of ten thousand lines each would take some time. Setting out at the time of day they were, she doubted that either girl would see her bed that night - or even the next, if their work proved of insufficient quality. A little sleep derivation would do no harm to her task. Chronic tiredness combined with the cane and unrelenting discipline: it made for a great recipe when it came to breaking a pretty filly’s spirit.
“Ok! Start writing girls.” Once again she exchanged those like-minded knowing glances that said so much with Alice’s stepmother as the latter left the room, smiling contentedly and swinging her keys like the jailor she had become - at least in her own mind.
Fingering her cane, the fine ridge
d length of bamboo that presently lay across her desk she wondered how long she would have to wait to put it to good use. Not too long, she wagered. The girls would be tired, they would make mistakes. They would grow irritable and fidgety. But all that was fine. There was nothing like having a throbbing bottom to help a new girl through the process of settling down in the classroom. And she wouldn’t have long to wait...
Pen in hand and just a few pages in an Alice Lambert’s mind had begun to wander. The beige check pattern of the Formica desktop went in and out of focus, blurring and merging with the featureless beige flooring beyond its perimeter, the bare walls doing nothing to relieve the monotony.
Only the blackboard was capable of drawing the attention, and the words scrawled across it; the humiliating stipulations she was supposed hitherto to adhere to and live by. And arranged alongside it, as if to prove the point that she was now well and truly under the thumb of her much despised stepmother, there was the wall-mounted wooden rack with its suspended display of thin whippy canes and leather straps of varying weight and length - what Mrs Larkspear liked to call ‘corrective instruments’. From the mirror to her side a timid uniformed girl caught daydreaming engaged the corner of her eye; looking up another identically attired school child stared back, pale and blank-eyed, from the mirror pinned to the wall alongside the teacher’s dais.
Her fearsome stepmother stepped back into her mind, the implacably stern woman dressed head to foot in silk blouse, riding britches and those shiny calf-hugging rubber boots of hers and tapping her customary plaited leather switch against her thigh in time with every step. In her imagination she would have sworn she could actually hear the rhythmic crack, crack, crack of that wicked crop - why, she could almost smell the pungent vulcanised rubber of the woman’s boots.
The latter seemed to hang in her nostrils, even in imagination, just as had had the rubbery aroma of that gabardine she remembered so vividly or the odour that had hung about and around that horrid ‘gym suit’ thing she had come across in that cupboard that day. In common with the gabardine raincoat, that too had proved to be exuding a rubbery odour, although not of a comparable pungency. But in the case of the ‘gym suit’ she had been able to unimpeachably ascertain the cause.
All in one piece and buttoning up the front from the waist with notably chunky rubbery buttons, the ‘gym suit’ had consisted of a loose fitting front-buttoning sleeveless blouse conjoined at the tightly elasticated waist to a pair of puff-legged bloomer-type shorts. Alice could clearly recall how the blouse-like upper part or bodice had been possessed of a childish Peter Pan collar that buttoned demurely high at the neck, and had puffy, buttoned cuffs that fastened just below the shoulders.
She remembered how the latter provided a delightfully juvenile soft puffball effect but how that feature in of itself seemed guaranteed to extract maximum blushes from any possessing the sort of buxom teenage frame the garment had clearly been sized to accommodate.
Although she hadn’t yet considered it she was fast acquiring exactly that sort of frame, given the tedium of the school room, the inactivity inherent in sitting at a school desk day after day and the welcome distraction provided by eating the increasingly calorific and flavoursome meals she was nowadays being offered. If she balked at the sweetness, the fattiness or whatever, then all sorts of liquidised horrors could - and would - be offered in their stead; there would be a scaly fishiness suggestive of pilchard or mackerel heads or an offal redness having an obnoxious smell and iron-nail overtones to suit or a sickly cheesy vomit-yellow mash possessing a pungent odour that suggested exactly that. If all else failed then the ultimate sanction, as always, as in all things, was the withdrawal of her medication, the tranquillizers and sedatives she was becoming evermore dependent on; she could be made to bend for the cane, lie across her stepmothers knee, wear school uniform and sit meekly at a school desk - such was the humiliation inherent in addiction.
Indeed, such was the humbling power she was now under that even when actually told, quite clearly and overtly, that she was to be placed on a new medication, one having even stronger addictive side effects, she had been powerless to refuse to take her prescription, given a day or two of withdrawal symptoms. This had been so even though she had been told outright that these new drugs were capable of developing a real and near-unbreakable physical craving, whereas her previous medication had only led thus far to a psychological dependency. It has to be said, though, that the latter dependency had been somewhat surreptitiously encouraged, even augmented, through the power of suggestion and other psychological means that were mediated through the one-to-one psychotherapy sessions she regularly underwent with her stepmother’s tame psychotherapist.
The gym suit’s lower part, Alice remembered, had been styled like a pair of short-legged bloomers and was continuous with the blouse-styled top while delineated from the latter by the gathered elasticated waist band. These bloomer-shorts had had broad elastic running around their leg openings whereat the fabric had been gathered giving all the appearance of a pair of frilled baby rhumber pants, albeit minus the frills. The whole outfit had had an appearance that had been somehow half way between a scaled-up version of a toddler’s romper suit and some sort of sauna suit in that the fine harrow-grey serge had been teamed with a soft satiny inner lining with an additional layer of soft thin rubber incorporated, sandwich fashion, between the two.
She had been able to ascertain the latter with some degree of certainty. As what was apparently a type of ‘manufacturer’s sample’, certain of the inner seams had been left unfinished, presumably deliberately to allow someone’s detailed inspection of that very feature. In particular, internally along the line of the crotch the inner lining had been left incomplete, drawing up short of the gusset whereat the rubber intermediate layer intruded. Seemingly malformed in some manner during manufacture, the rubbery central seam at that point, she remembered, had arched gently upwards and was fringed like a bobbly, curved wedge-shaped comb with a lumpy protrusion at the front that had the appearance of the pad of a small thumb.
All in all the costume had made for a strangely contradictory mix of modesty and exposure. Modest, in that one’s person would be covered from the upper thighs to the neck - exposing, in that the trim-fitting bottom-hugging lower section featured a back seam that curved inward and upward with such acuteness that one would have been forgiven for forming the strong impression that the babyish shorts were already fitted to a particularly curvaceous young female bottom. Held up by the shoulders, the lower section’s seat naturally took on the form of two sharply delineated tight half-moons. How humiliating it would be to have to...
“Alice Marchment! You’re daydreaming! Is that all you’ve written girl?”
That wasn’t her name - she was Alice Lamberton, always had been, always would be! She heard her own indigent voice ring out from the far distance, as if she were still half-submerged in her daydream, the bare classroom walls echoing it back to her, the acoustics of the sparely-furnished space painfully ‘live’. “That’s not my name; I’m Alice Lamb... Owww!”
There was a different sort of ringing in her head now. The slap around the face had been sharp, hard and unexpected and left a fearsome numbing sting in its wake. “Alice Marchment... say it!” Slappp! “I said say it...” Ssllappp!!! “I said... SAY IT GIRL - ALICE MARCHMENT... M.A.R.C.H.M.E.N.T” The stony faced dour Scots woman spelled out Alice’s stepmother’s maiden name slowly, letter by letter, as if speaking to an idiot or a retard, simultaneously drawing back her palm like a serpent drawing back its head and about to strike. Your father’s dead, girl. “What’s your name, girl... Say it...” The slender wrist flexed rearward like a spring winding up, the long fingers coming together and stretching to their fullest, the skin across the soft womanly palm tautening...
“Marchment... Alice Marchment... Miss Daphne” Even as she blurted it out Alice could feel the blood rushing to her cheeks. A shame-fill
ed blush was rising to meet the challenge of the rosy-red hue that had just been hand-slapped and painted across her delicate high cheeks. The outline of the woman’s fingers - visible along both sides of her pretty face - were fading fast now as the paler spaces between flooded with fresh colour.
Daphne Larkspear was standing before her, looming over her, the sheaf of paper Alice had been writing on clutched in one hand, having been summarily snatched up from the diminutive school desk’s top. The domineering woman teacher shook the wedge of papers threateningly as she spoke. Her spectacles, sparkling in the naked fluorescent light, reflected a red-faced, shattered Alice, the red and gold diagonal stripe of the school tie for some reason appearing particularly prominent to the stunned girl.
“That’s better, good girl.” Satisfied that her message had been received loud and clear Daphne Larkspear’s voice had immediately lost its outraged edge, regaining once again its cultured soft-spoken Edinburgh intonation that so often came across reassuringly, almost motherly.
“If that silly empty-head ‘lesbianised’ little boot licker, Angel, can come to terms with her identity change I’m sure you can. Lady Marchment is the only legal family you have now, or will be once you’ve come of age and added your signature to the documents that are being drawn up. And if she wants you to take her name, then that is what you are going to do.”
‘Lesbianised’ - what did that mean? Did ‘lesbianised’ even exist as a word? And that term ‘boot licker’? What exactly did she mean by that? Alice’s head was spinning, partly from shock, partly from the physical impact of the viscous face-slapping she had just received and partly through the sheer enormity of the nonsense the woman was spouting.
Alice Under Discipline, Part 1 Page 16
