The Explosionist

by Jenny Davidson

  There was no doubt it looked a lovely cake, but it soon became clear that the woman wasn’t going to cut it up and distribute the pieces—perhaps it was needed for another electric cookery demonstration later that afternoon?—and the girls drifted to the only part of the showroom they had not yet explored, the Electric Arbor at the back of the shop. Here fronds of synthetic greenery had been draped over the really expensive appliances.

  “But you said it could be delivered later this week,” cried a large lady in a fur jacket that made her look like a walrus. She didn’t notice Sophie and Jean gazing at her from the other side of a massive freezer chest.

  “That was the ordinary model,” the shop assistant said. “With the special features you’ve requested, madam, it will be a month or more before the manufacturer can ship it.”

  “I don’t want to wait a month!” the lady snapped. “I want it right now!”

  “Isn’t she awful?” Sophie whispered to Jean. It was curiously enjoyable to see a grown-up person behaving so badly in public.

  “Yes,” Jean said, “but Sophie, isn’t there something familiar about her?”

  Meanwhile the lady continued to harangue the helpless assistant. “Without the self-cleaning oven and the automatic timer with its on-off feature,” she complained, “I really might as well buy an ordinary model at the Co-Op!”

  “I’m very sorry, madam,” said the shop assistant, flustered. “I can promise you—”

  “Sophie?” Jean said, her voice wavering between horror and laughter.

  “Yes?”

  “I think that woman’s Miss Rawlins!”

  Sophie frowned. There had certainly been something familiar about the shopper’s face and figure. But how could their old chemistry teacher—the one Mr. Petersen had replaced in March when she left to be married—have turned into this fur-clad monstrosity?

  “She must have married a millionaire!” Jean exclaimed.

  “Let’s wait for her to come back out,” Sophie said, almost certain that Jean was mistaken. “It might just be, oh, I don’t know, her evil twin or something like that.”

  They hung around looking at the vacuum cleaners and electric hair dryers until the lady emerged from the manager’s office, still hanging on his arm but now clutching her checkbook.

  Then they edged closer to the counter, where the lady, still oblivious to their surveillance, brandished a massive gold-and-onyx reservoir pen over her checkbook. They could see the gold bangles on her wrists and a pair of diamond earrings hanging from her ears, earrings that Sophie’s great-aunt would certainly have called unsuitable.

  They saw the name on the checkbook: Miss Ailsa Rawlins.

  “It’s her,” Sophie said under her breath.

  At that moment their former teacher looked up and saw the two girls. She drew her coat more tightly around her and sniffed. “Jean Roberts and Sophie Hunter,” she said repressively.

  It wasn’t exactly a warm greeting.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Rawlins,” Jean said politely.

  “Good afternoon,” Sophie echoed, barely suppressing a fit of giggles.

  “What are the two of you doing inside on such a fine day?” Miss Rawlins asked them. “Have you already had your constitutional?”

  Jean and Sophie looked at each other, then shook their heads. Sophie dragged Jean away before they could disgrace themselves by collapsing into outright laughter. They broke into a run outside, ending up breathless in the grass below the monument to Walter Scott.

  “Our constitutional!” Sophie said, once they’d caught their breath.

  Just the word itself was enough to send them both into fits of laughter.

  “Strange, though,” Sophie added thoughtfully. “What exactly do you think she was doing in that shop?”

  “Well, obviously, buying an electric cooker! It’s natural to get everything fitted out new when you’re married, isn’t it?”

  “She left school to be married, you’re quite right. But why is she still writing checks in her maiden name?” Sophie sat up and brushed the grass off her hair. “Don’t most married women change their names and share a bank account with their husbands?”

  Jean shrugged. “Perhaps she kept the account she had before they were married,” she said, not very interested in this line of speculation. Then she perked up. “Perhaps the cooker’s a wedding present for her new husband!”

  Sophie shook her head. “I don’t think she’s married yet,” she said firmly. Something was nagging at her, but she couldn’t think what. “She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring just now. Bangles, yes, and earrings and some sort of necklace, but the ring finger was bare.”

  Jean stared at Sophie.

  “It couldn’t—”

  “She couldn’t—”

  They both spoke at once. Then Sophie succumbed to an uncontrollable fit of giggles.

  “I don’t like to say it,” she said, almost choking with laughter, “but I think Miss Rawlins may have become a kept woman!”

  “No!” said Jean, her eyes going wide with surprise. “How completely extraordinary…”

  “Yes, people do the strangest things,” Sophie said, suddenly grave.

  “It’s romantic, though, isn’t it?” said Jean, sounding as if she wanted reassurance.

  “Oh, it’s not strange that Miss Rawlins would prefer being someone’s kept mistress to teaching chemistry,” Sophie said, fighting another attack of laughter. “But it’s most peculiar that a millionaire should choose someone like Miss Rawlins to put in his love nest, isn’t it?”

  The two girls shrieked. For an instant Sophie felt that all was right with the world, what with the warm sun and the smell of grass and roses and the delicious prospect of spreading such an excellent piece of gossip back at school. Then a cloud passed over the sun and she shivered.

  “We’d best get a move on,” Jean said, struck by the same solemnity that had just come over Sophie.

  Jean had to pick up a few things at the shops for her mother, who had telephoned school in the morning to say that she was stuck in the flat with the baby on account of colic.

  “Do you want to come with me?” she asked Sophie. “I must be back at school by five o’clock; Miss Bagshawe wouldn’t give me a longer furlough, but she saw I couldn’t leave my mother in the lurch.”

  Peggy wouldn’t expect Sophie home for another hour. It was strange how nice it felt to be invited to do something quite ordinary; the shivery distress of a minute ago was gone, and she welcomed the prospect of more companionship.

  First they picked up a cottage loaf at the bakery, lingering to peer at the fresh floury baps and iced buns and Sally Lunns bursting with currants.

  “Have you any extra money?” Jean was often hungry, but she had to pay for the shopping with her own pocket money, which left nothing over for indulgences.

  “No,” Sophie said, not quite sorry enough to regret the Ibsen and Strindberg in her satchel. If she hadn’t run into Jean, she could have begun one of them this afternoon…. Shecast a guilty look at Jean as if the other girl could read her mind.

  Next they stopped at the Buttercup Dairy.

  “Half a pound of butter, please.”

  “Sweet or salted?”

  “Salted.”

  The girl behind the marble counter placed a square of greaseproof paper on the brass scales and cut a wedge off the slab. Dipping her two wooden paddles into a pretty blue-and-white porcelain bowl of cold water, she worked the butter into a perfectly round pat, pressing into it the stamp with its picture of the dairymaid with the cow holding a buttercup to the girl’s chin.

  Both girls averted their eyes when they passed the butcher’s shop, where several carcasses hung on hooks in the window next to a tray of jellied meats with the label “Potted Head.”

  “Will you come with me to my mam’s?” Jean asked, sounding nervous for the first time that afternoon. Then her voice brightened. “You could meet our new bull mastiff!”

  Sophie politely declined, secr
etly relieved she needed to be back for tea at Heriot Row.

  “Walk with me another few minutes, then,” Jean said.

  They lingered on North Bridge, leaning over the edge and looking out onto the central railway station and the chaotic spread of the city’s older sections. The bridge spanned the divide between Edinburgh’s two halves: the New Town, swept clear of all dirt and inconvenience and irrationality, its grid of elegant three-story houses characterized by their orderly insistence on life conducted without mess, and the Old, a warren of closes and wynds, ancient tenements of six or seven or eight stories, all bursting at the seams with people.

  It was probably a moral failing, but Sophie much preferred the New Town to the Old, because of the way it let one insulate oneself from the loud and smelly and generally off-putting lives of other people.

  “Do you like living in the Old Town?” she asked Jean, choosing the words carefully so as not to sound critical.

  “Oh, yes,” Jean said. “When my dad’s out at work, my mam’s got all the other tenants in the building to be friendly with. The only reason she had to ask me to get the messages today was that the neighbor’s children are down with the chicken pox and she didn’t want to leave the baby. It’s like having a huge extra family. You can make a new friend whenever you like, and there’s always someone to talk to.”

  Sophie tried not to shudder. It sounded like her idea of hell.

  The road along the bridge was fairly empty. A few cars went by, and then a brewer’s dray drawn by four Clydesdales, an attractive sight against the hoardings plastered with bright advertisements for proprietary brands of dynamite like Atlas, Hercules, and Goliath.

  Meanwhile, walking toward them on the pavement was a girl they both recognized at once.

  “Sheena Henshawe!” Jean exclaimed.

  Sheena Henshawe had left the Institution for Young Ladies two years earlier, trailing clouds of glory. She had been captain of the hockey and lacrosse teams as well as the girls’ rifle eight. Sophie still cherished the memory of the evening at supper when Sheena had casually introduced Sophie as her shooting protégée.

  “Do you think she’ll remember us?” Jean whispered to Sophie as Sheena came up level with the streetlight.

  Sheena had gone on to IRYLNS, like many of her classmates, and Miss Henchman had even mentioned Sheena by name in a recent assembly meant to spur the girls on to new heights of patriotic endeavor.

  “Of course she will!” Sophie said, outraged at the idea that Sheena might have forgotten her old friends. “She knows you and me both; she was head girl in our house that time when we all had to do detention for booby-trapping the Faraday house entryway, don’t you remember? And she often used to give me and Nan tips on marksmanship.”

  They watched the young woman walk toward them against the backdrop. Several inches taller than either Jean or Sophie, Sheena wore a mint-green linen suit that by some miracle looked neither dirty nor crumpled, despite the warmth of the day and the grime of the nearby trains. The heels of her shoes were so high that Sophie wondered how she could walk in them.

  When Sheena came closer, though, Sophie suddenly doubted her own conviction that the older girl would remember them. Girls who’d left school seemed to become foreign creatures, inhabitants of a strange new world.

  As Sheena came up level with them, her eyes swept over the two schoolgirls with no sign of recognition.

  “Well!” said Jean when Sheena had vanished out of sight at the other end of the bridge. “She looked as though she thought we weren’t fit to wipe the bottom of her shoes with! Sophie, she wasn’t always such a snob, was she?”

  “No,” Sophie said, rather more shaken than she wanted Jean to know. “She was much the nicest of the girls in her year. She gave me that set of colored bamboo-fiber pens for my birthday, and she showed me how to work square roots without a slide rule. She can’t have forgotten us, she simply can’t!”

  “Could she be terribly shortsighted,” Jean suggested, “and not able to recognize us without her spectacles?”

  But Sheena had had the best eyesight of anyone on the shooting team.

  “Sophie?” Jean said.

  “What?” said Sophie.

  “Didn’t Sheena look lovely just now?”

  Sophie grunted skeptically.

  “That’s exactly what I’ve always imagined a first-class secretary looking like,” Jean continued. “Those shoes! Oh, Sophie, I’d do anything to become like Sheena….”

  Sophie was offended as well as surprised.

  “You can’t mean to say that you look at that—that creature that used to be Sheena and want to be like that yourself?” she said, almost in tears at the thought of how Sheena’s glossy new carapace made her indistinguishable from any other young woman. “It’s horrible! I’d rather die than grow up and leave school if it means I’ll turn into a complete blank.”

  “If I go to IRYLNS and get a real job,” Jean said, her eyes dreamy and placid, “I’ll be able to live in a flat with an electric kitchen. My dad would be proud of me then. He often says how much he wishes he had an IRYLNS-trained secretary to help him in his office, rather than the useless one he’s got now.”

  There was no point arguing. Sophie felt the gulf between herself and Jean open up wider than the span of the bridge.

  “I must go,” she said abruptly.

  “All right,” said Jean, still mesmerized by the vision of beautiful clothes and a weekly pay packet. “See you in school on Monday, then.”

  It was a nasty end to a nice afternoon, Sophie thought, walking up Dublin Street to Abercromby Place and from there along the north edge of Queen Street Gardens toward Heriot Row. She sped up as she came near to the house, and the only strange thing was that the Veteran was lurking on his cart just down the road. He didn’t ask Sophie for money, but she had an uneasy feeling he was watching her.

  If only Sheena had seen them and stopped, or even just smiled to say hello! Was that what growing up meant, abandoning one’s memory and friends and reinventing oneself without the least shred of connection to one’s former life?

  NINE

  THE CLOCK STRUCK FIVE as Sophie let herself in at the front door and went to the kitchen to find Peggy amid steam and general flouriness.

  “Thank goodness you’re home; your great-aunt’s been running about the place like a chicken with the head cut off. You’re not to have tea in the kitchen after all—herself wants you upstairs for supper with the visitors.”

  Sophie sliced herself a thick doorstop of bread and took a bite, wondering who the visitors might be.

  “There you go again, eating your bread without any butter or jam!” Peggy exclaimed, slamming a pot of raspberry jam down in front of Sophie along with the butter dish and a knife and plate. “And brought up in the most civilized city in the world! Do put something on that; it gives me the horrors to watch you swallowing a dry crust.”

  Sophie cut her piece of bread into two and spread butter on one piece, jam on the other. She liked jam and she liked butter but she didn’t like jam and butter together.

  “Who’s coming to supper, then?” she asked.

  Peggy made a clucking noise of disapproval.

  “There’s three of them,” she said. “A government minister and her gentleman assistant, and a spiritualist lady, and me with no time to get any fish into the house!”

  Though Sophie’s great-aunt believed it was a very good idea for women to be vegetarians, whenever a man came to dinner Peggy was expected to serve fish, which Great-aunt Tabitha referred to as “brain food.”

  “Best go and wash and change into something decent before they get here,” Peggy added. “Your great-aunt won’t like to see you in that awful old jumper.”

  It was really Peggy who cared about what Sophie wore rather than Great-aunt Tabitha, but Sophie obliged her by changing into a newish marigold-colored frock.

  After washing her face, Sophie waited in her room until the doorbell announced the first arrival. She too
k the stairs slowly, then smoothed down her hair, which she had forgotten to brush, and let herself into the sitting room.

  There she found two people engaged in a tête-à-tête. The taller was an imposing woman of heavy, almost masculine build, her ash-colored hair styled into a rigid armature. Her conversation partner was a young man with thick, wiry, close-cropped bronze hair, a prominent nose, and an athletic figure. Curiously, the minister and her assistant had exactly the same color eyes, a distinctive pale green, though the man’s were hooded and deep-set while the minister’s bulged out of the sockets almost like peeled grapes.

  They broke off talking to look at Sophie but turned back to their conversation without introducing themselves. She was relieved when Great-aunt Tabitha burst into the room and swept Sophie over to meet the visitors. The older woman was Joanna Murchison, the minister of public safety (Great-aunt Tabitha quite often had members of the cabinet to supper); the young man was Nicholas Mood, the minister’s devoted assistant. Great-aunt Tabitha and Joanna Murchison had been at school together, though Sophie thought the two women regarded each other with more wariness than affection.

  Amid all the introductions the doorbell rang again, and a moment later Peggy ushered into the room a very attractive woman, thirty-five years old at the most, her sleek black hair cropped close to her head to show off the diamond studs in her ears; she wore a midnight blue silk blouse and a long, narrow black velvet skirt with high heels.

  “Miss Grant, how delightful to see you!” said Great-aunt Tabitha. “Let me introduce you—Joanna Murchison, Ruth Grant, Nicko Mood. Sophie, this is Miss Grant, one of the most talented spiritualists in the Society.”

  The Society was the Scottish Society for Psychical Research—but Miss Grant couldn’t be a spiritualist, she was much too nice-looking….

  “I’m the kind of spiritualist,” said Miss Grant, smiling at Sophie’s expression, “who doesn’t have drifty tresses and lots of scarves and rings with locks of hair in them.”