The Lido Girls

by Allie Burns

  ‘Thank you,’ she remembered to say. Her sadness had flipped in the air like a pancake and had now flopped back to fill the pan. Her eyes met Miss Lott’s and she smiled back. The connection surged between them, the meeting of two kindred spirits. Natalie knew she didn’t have to say another word, because the Principal had heard and understood every thought that had just flitted through her mind.

  Chapter Four

  The very high plain dive

  By springing out and not downward the diver keeps control in the air and avoids turning over and striking the water with her back.

  Natalie walked past the gymnasium just as the local children filed in. She smiled as warmly as she could, meeting their eyes, her hands clear of their perch on her hips, clasping them instead in front of her skirt. But each child, dressed in baggy hand-me-down shorts and shirts, bowed their heads at the sight of her as they cantered past in silence to line up on the mats.

  She seemed to terrify the locals, no matter how amiable she tried to be.

  If they knew she’d been dismissed they mightn’t be so reverential. Having slept on it, she’d decided not to heed Lacey’s request that she leave quickly and quietly.

  She glimpsed the gymnasium through the double doors to say farewell. It had been a ballroom before the building was bought and transformed by Madame Forsberg. The chandelier’s crystals dripped down from the ceiling and rose incongruously above the suede-skinned vaulting horse and its splayed wooden legs.

  The equipment had been pioneered here in Britain. These children were privileged to have the chance to use it. The juxtaposition of the chandelier and the equipment gave her a sense that the old way was losing out to the new. Only she was out of touch; this wasn’t new any more.

  Miss Hollands, a physical woman with strong thighs, hands clasped behind her back, looked away from Natalie as soon as she came upon her in the corridor and went straight into the gymnasium, blew her whistle and set the children to scale the ropes. So the staff already know. News travels fast. She hesitated at the glass in the door. The children pulled themselves up the rope with grimaces that revealed a mess of teeth, the yellow-hued adult ones too large in contrast to their snub noses and porcelain jaws. Miss Hollands still didn’t look her way.

  Despite what she and Delphi felt about the college’s exclusivity, they did good work to improve the health of the local children. The schools could never afford equipment like this.

  Down the corridor and out of the French doors, she came to the front lawn where students were setting up for Clinic.

  New to the college this term, Miss Ford stood at ease at the edge of the lawn. She supervised the girls as they prepared to deliver remedial physiotherapy to unwell children from the neighbouring villages. Miss Ford didn’t acknowledge Natalie’s presence either. Her voice a deep murmur as she instructed Joan Mason on how to manipulate the lower leg of a local girl of about eight, who lay on her back on top of a white bed sheet. The empty cage of her callipers to her side, she squinted up at the sky as Joan pressed the pads of her fingers along the girl’s shin.

  ‘It looks like we’ll be blessed with a lovely day.’ Natalie tilted her face up towards the sun. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and it was really beginning to feel as if winter were firmly behind them and spring was finding its feet.

  ‘It does.’ Miss Ford’s deep voice was clipped.

  ‘Good work, Mason,’ Natalie added.

  As Joan lowered the girl’s leg and lifted the other up straight, Natalie looked behind her at the balcony of Miss Lott’s living room. The doors were open again and the curtains flitted about in the breeze, as if nothing had changed.

  Joan had set the girl’s right foot back down and Miss Ford squatted to her knees to help ease the metal cage back on. Then together they raised the girl to standing.

  Joan had a gentle touch, Natalie thought. The young girl hobbled back across the lawn to her mother to calls of encouragement from Joan. That call to nurture others was something that couldn’t be taught.

  Miss Ford remained silent, her head twitching to check out of the corner of her eye whether Natalie had gone. She decided that she ought to oblige her and push on.

  *

  ‘Ahem.’ Natalie waited. She stood in Margaret’s narrow study room between the desk and bed. The room was so ordered as to be unloved. It looked nothing more than a place for the girl to rest her head. Just her pile of novels and sketchpad out on the desk, no signs of study. Nothing to suggest she had tried to make the place homely at all.

  A skeleton on a stand, for anatomy studies, at the head of the bed, had its palms splayed outward as if to welcome the company.

  Margaret, lying on her back, snapped her eyes shut as soon as Natalie loomed over her.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be helping at Clinic?’

  Margaret reopened her eyes.

  ‘I’m resting.’ She addressed the ceiling as she spoke. ‘I heard you’d been dismissed.’ She arched an eyebrow and turned her attention to Natalie to gauge her reaction.

  She didn’t want to talk about it with the girl and so she ignored her and pulled the chair out from the desk, turned it to face the bed and sat down.

  ‘You did very well at the display last night. Stopped Lord Lacey in his tracks and showed your parents a side to you that they didn’t know existed.’

  ‘They laughed at me today about Mummy’s headscarf and Daddy’s tatty old suit.’

  ‘The other girls?’

  ‘Who else?’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t just go to the river to dream and read, you know. I go to get away from them. They’re impenetrable if you don’t fit in.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ Margaret snapped.

  ‘The more you hide from them, the harder it will be.’ Margaret tugged at her white sheet and pulled it close. ‘I think I’d really prefer it if you were to sit up while I spoke with you.’

  ‘I don’t have to do as you say any more.’ Despite saying this, Margaret still heaved herself up on her arms and propped her pillow against the bare wall. Her chin-length waves were tangled and she still wore her gymslip from the morning’s drills, Natalie noticed.

  ‘If you applied yourself like you did last night,’ Natalie said, leaning in to look plainly at the face that she hid behind her hair, ‘you could have your pick of friends. They’re competitive; they can’t resist a winner.’

  ‘But I’m not the competitive sort. I’m not their sort at all. The longer I’m here the more I see that I don’t suit boundaries and rules. The freedom Mother gave me was a gift, not a punishment. But I do so love the sport. I know I’m good at it…’

  ‘Miss Wilkins. The way I see it is this: you’re here, like it or not, until the end of the year, at the very least. You bring so much to the college – why not take something from it too? You’re a talented diver, swimmer, batswoman… I could go on. I think you should show them that a whimsical actor’s daughter with talent is more at home at this college than a disciplined baron’s daughter with none.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Natalie smiled. She had got through to Margaret; she’d seen it in her face.

  ‘You ought to be worrying about yourself, not me.’

  ‘I’ll be all right. I have been here a long time. One might say this is just the challenge I need.’ At least I sound confident. I have no idea what I will do once I leave these grounds. ‘And I have to tell you that I know exactly how you feel. I had no parents at all when I came here, so I had to be better than everyone else too, simply so they’d overlook my second-hand uniform and lack of status. But I decided I’d rather that, and it was easy, actually, because I was better than most of them. And so are you.’

  ‘Well it hasn’t worked out well in the end, has it?’

  She stood from the chair, hands on hips, and winced as Margaret wiped her nose on the back of her hand.

  ‘That’s as it may be, but times are changing and it isn’t too late for you.’

  *

 
; No sooner had she left the dormitory entrance than Natalie collided with Miss Lott’s secretary, Mrs Lancaster.

  ‘Lord Lacey has heard you’re still here, you know. He’s looking for you and he’s not best pleased. You ought to think of saying the last of your goodbyes.’ She thrust Murray’s lead, the dog attached to it, into her hand and suggested that she take him down to Miss Lott at the Lodge on her way out.

  Murray exhausted the ground on which to piddle or sniff within the circumference that his lead would take him and looked up at the two women with his mouth open, his tongue working like a piston.

  The dog tugged. He knew the way. Without turning to bid Mrs Lancaster farewell she allowed Murray to lead her out on to the path to the Lodge.

  Murray paused to lift his leg, staining the trunk of a sweet chestnut tree. As she looked anywhere but down she spotted Miss Lott unsteadily propped against the Lodge’s doorway, holding on to the frame for support.

  ‘Ah, there you are.’ Her smile was shaky and her words ran into one another. Her dress was so big on her, flopping off the shoulders, the belt tight but meeting no resistance. She had always been slight, but now the shape of her hip bones pushed through the floral fabric.

  Inside, behind Miss Lott, a lady of similar height and hair colour removed books from the shelves and stacked them into apple crates. She looked up and nodded and then returned to the books. Natalie recognised her from the photograph, now gone from the empty side table.

  Miss Lott bent herself into her chair. She moved slowly as if she’d aged twenty years since she’d clambered on to the motorcycle just last night. Her hair was limp and the grease at the roots made it a darker shade of grey.

  Murray clambered on to his mistress’s lap and while she stroked him, Natalie retreated to the kitchen, her jaw and throat too tight to even raise her lips to a smile.

  When she came back, Miss Lott’s sister flipped an apple crate for a seat. Natalie dunked her rich-tea biscuit into her tea and watched the tan tideline turn it dark. The soft half melted to nothing on her tongue, but the sweetness couldn’t overpower the acidic taste in her mouth.

  ‘Mr Lovett has agreed to keep the motorcycle in the shed…’ Miss Lott’s mouth was dry and claggy, with dried spittle at the corner of her pale pink lips ‘…until you’re ready for a lesson or two and you’re settled into your new home. I think he was a bit put out that I hadn’t left it to him.’

  ‘Then that’s kind of him,’ Natalie said. She pushed aside the rest of the biscuit and the tea.

  ‘Help yourself to a book or two, if you’d like.’

  Natalie daren’t look up. She focused her attention on the spines of each book, going through each of the three columns a good few times, before sliding out the yearbooks from the years she’d both joined and graduated from the college. She piled them on the rug.

  Miss Lott cleared her throat. ‘Don’t be sad. I will be in good hands.’

  Her sister paused to squeeze Miss Lott’s shoulder.

  ‘You know over the years…’ Miss Lott’s thin voice filled the silence ‘…from time to time, I’ve asked myself if the professional life was the right choice for me. But when I tried to imagine myself in a quiet and empty home…’ she paused to catch her breath, twiddling Murray’s fur ‘…dusting the sideboard and waiting for the sound of my husband’s key in the door…’ she stopped again ‘…it’s then that I knew without doubt, that I made the right choice, that my career was the only path I could have ever taken.’

  Miss Lott slumped from the exertion of her speech and closed her eyes.

  ‘Teaching would have been poorer without you,’ Natalie replied.

  After a while the sister unfolded the tartan blanket and placed it over Miss Lott’s knees. A moment later, Miss Lott’s eyelids fluttered across her grey-blue watery eyes.

  ‘Now you’ve lost your job,’ her frail voice began again, ‘you’ll be thinking perhaps you should have tried harder to find a man to marry, but I like to think that if you could have had a husband, you wouldn’t have taken one anyway.’

  It was meant as a consolation, but Natalie had never been given the option. She’d not had to choose between her career and a man because there was never a chap who wanted her as a wife. The war had carved out a lonely existence for her, and teaching had finished her off.

  ‘As you say, I’ll never know,’ Natalie said, ‘but at the moment it feels as if everything I have worked for has come to nothing.’

  Miss Lott was growing too weak to continue. ‘You don’t have to follow me… Don’t feel you should… Take the scythe in hand and hack your own path,’ she said, and then her eyes closed in a long blink.

  Her sister raised her hands to her tweed-covered hips and sighed.

  ‘Hope, you should rest now.’ She had the same sharp, jerky mannerisms as Miss Lott, the same kindly manner too. ‘We’ve a long drive to Scotland ahead of us,’ she explained to Natalie.

  ‘Enjoy the motorcycle, my dear,’ was the last thing Miss Lott said. The hand stroking Murray’s back came to a halt and then her chin led her head’s descent, the rise and fall of her chest almost imperceptible.

  After a few moments, her sister wrote her Highland address on to a piece of paper for Natalie and then sensing that she would want to say goodbye to Miss Lott alone, she shook Natalie’s hand and clopped off up the curved staircase to the room above.

  Natalie crouched down by the arm of Miss Lott’s chair. Murray twisted his neck to see what she was doing. The poor dog – he’d been just a puppy when Miss Lott first got him. He was going to miss his mistress terribly when she was gone. She stroked the white wisps of fur on his head, feeling the fragility of his skull underneath, pushing his ears down. He must know. Animals don’t need language; they sense these things. She did this for a while before she turned her attention from Murray to Miss Lott.

  Her jaw slack, her face gaunt and shrunken. Her illness had tightened its grip now that she had nothing left to fight for.

  Natalie rubbed her own palms together and then placed one warm hand on top of the one Miss Lott still rested on Murray’s back. She held it there for a few moments, whispering her thanks and love to her old teacher.

  Once she’d lifted her hand with care, she snatched up her books and ran from the Lodge, out on to the gravel path and through the woods until she reached the riverbank, where she sank to her knees and cried and half-heard her own anguish, half-noticed as her tears darkened the dried, cracked earth.

  Well she wasn’t going to become a relic after all. There was nothing left for her here now. It really is time to go.

  Chapter Five

  The standing comeback

  The diver jumps backwards off the board but then swoops forwards before facing down and entering the water.

  ‘Perhaps a break by the coast is what you need?’ Delphi asked as she topped up her glass. Natalie’s knife and fork hovered above her plate. ‘This could be your way of making it up to me after the Prunella debacle.’ They both laughed. They had reached a point where they could see the funny side of it, and it was such a relief to laugh: the glow in her belly, the lightness in her face.

  She had run to West London, to Delphi’s family. She had avoided facing her brother William and their strained relationship, avoided having to tell him how she’d thrown it all away. Avoided the lecture, avoided his wife, and him finding her a job, any job, whether she wanted it or not.

  ‘But seriously,’ Delphi pressed on with the same request she’d made earlier that day. ‘A holiday would do us both the world of good and Jack has been working on Mother and Father to let me go. They’re much more likely to say yes if I’m with both of you.’

  Jack’s escape plan had come together. He had got a job, as the Lido Manager in a resort on the south coast. He’d been trying hard not to look too pleased with himself, but the whistling betrayed exactly how happy he was.

  ‘The British diving coach will be travelling the coast this summer,’ he’d explained. ‘He will w
atch all of the competitions and select his team for the Berlin games next year.’

  The escape plan applied to Delphi too. He had an idea she could teach keep-fit at the Lido; a more realistic option than training as an instructor with the League. Delphi had been weighed down by tiredness since their trip to Olympia, and this had made her more determined than ever to get out, keep busy and stay awake. What appeared to be standing in the way of this plan was Natalie.

  ‘It will be perfect. Dance halls and concerts and What the Butler Saw on the pier. And our own fitness classes too,’ Delphi pressed on.

  ‘I’ve told you, I don’t think I can.’

  ‘You’re not still holding out on that letter you wrote to the Board of Education, are you?’

  She forked in a mouthful of roast potato.

  ‘Oh, Natty dear. They don’t understand the meaning of clemency. To hell with them, I say.’

  ‘It’s easy for you to say when your parents are happy to feed and clothe you and give you a home.’

  ‘They’re a little too happy, as well you know,’ Delphi snapped back.

  ‘That’s as may be, but I need to find another job. I can’t keep living off your parents, and a few fitness classes on the coast will not put a roof over my head.’

  Delphi fastened both hands beneath her chin while she chewed and watched her friend.

  ‘You only left the college a week ago, and besides going away might distract you from dwelling on Miss Lott.’

  Miss Lott’s sister had written with a short update to say that Miss Lott had rallied a little on arrival in Scotland, but not enough to give any hope of a recovery. Before Natalie took a sip of water she raised her glass so they could toast Miss Lott.

  ‘I’m still not going. It’s just not practical. Imagine if William finds out I’ve been sacked and then hears I’m doing star jumps with sunburnt holidaymakers?’