She had a camera, but the distant chiming of the afternoon roll-call bell had already begun, and Cecilia said she had to go.
‘Just quickly, dear.’ They both spoke at once, saying they mustn’t keep her, and when she hurried away Cecilia heard the voices continuing, a monotone kept low, hardly changing from one voice to the other. She could tell she was being watched, that the women were standing there instead of going on.
‘Who are they?’ Elizabeth Statham was in her running clothes, returning from the afternoon run she went on to keep in training for the games she was so good at. ‘Friends of yours?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know them at all.’
‘Funny they’d take a photograph.’
Cecilia didn’t attempt to reply. Frightened of Elizabeth Statham, she was at her worst with her, never knowing what to say.
‘Funny they’d want to give you flowers.’
Cecilia tried to shrug, but her effort felt clumsy and Elizabeth Statham sniggered.
‘Poor relations, are they?’
‘I don’t know them.’
She couldn’t hear the women any more, and imagined they must have gone. She didn’t look back. Elizabeth Statham would go on about it because she had a way of doing that, sitting on your bed after lights out, pretending to be nice.
‘Funny they’d know your name,’ she said before she continued on her run.
* * *
* * *
‘Come now,’ Miss Keble said that same evening, when they were home again and it was late.
Miss Cotell, not at first responding, said when the pause had become drawn out, ‘A dullness settles on me when I try to think. “I’ll think it through,” I tell myself, and then I can’t. That dullness comes, as if I’ve summoned it.’
‘It’s called being in two minds.’ Miss Keble, sprightly, gave her opinion.
‘I feel I have no mind at all.’
‘Oh, now!’ Miss Keble smiled and firmly shook her head.
‘How good you are to me, Keble,’ Miss Cotell thanked her friend before she went upstairs.
Miss Keble did not deny it.
* * *
* * *
Miss Cotell undressed and for a moment before she reached for her nightdress stood still, her nakedness reflected in her looking-glass. How old she seemed, the flesh of her neck all loops and furrows, her arms gone scrawny. The hair that Broughton had called her crowning glory was greyer and thinner than it should have been: she blamed herself, but blaming didn’t help. ‘How could I!’ she had protested, laughing almost when Broughton had asked if she would show herself to him.
‘Please,’ he begged. ‘Please.’ He wouldn’t now. He’d held her to him, the buttons of his jacket cold.
Shy as a bird she’d heard him called, but oh, he wasn’t. With her he could not be, he’d said.
Slowly Miss Cotell drew on her nightdress, then felt the sheets, the pillow, cold. He’d warmed her, and tonight she had known he would again. The caressing of his murmur did, and his touch was more than she could bear, his hands so soft as if all his life he had done no physical work. The blue of his eyes was a paler blue than she’d ever seen in eyes before, his hair like down, wheat-coloured, lovely. He whispered now as he had then and she did too, in the dark, since always they wanted that. She dried his tears of shame. She loved his body’s warmth. He’d chosen her. She’d wanted no one else.
* * *
* * *
Miss Keble, who had not experienced this aspect of life, was aware without resentment that she lived at second-hand. Her friend had done things: their reminiscences, so often exchanged, allowed no doubt about that. Yet Miss Cotell, seeming to lead the way, did not. Miss Keble, through listening and knowing what should be done, had years ago taken charge. ‘How little I would be, alone,’ Miss Cotell had a way of saying, and Miss Keble loved to hear it. Accepting her lesser role, she knew that it was she, in the end, who ordered their lives and wielded power.
She turned the pages of an old book she had never thrown away and knew almost by heart, Dr Bradley Remembers. But her thoughts did not connect with the people it again presented to her. What innocence there was in the girl’s eyes! She closed her own and saw the unspoilt features still a child’s, the dark, dark hair, the blue-and-red blazer, the pleated grey skirt. Vividly, recollection refreshed for Miss Keble all that the day had offered, and the joy that should have been her friend’s became her own.
* * *
* * *
Miss Cotell dreamt. When she answered the doorbell Father Humphrey was standing there, his back to her at first. ‘All done,’ he said, his voice stern, his handshake firm.
‘Thank you,’ he said, not opening the envelope she gave him.
* * *
* * *
Because Cecilia was to be Thisbe, Mr Normanton was given a seat in the front row. His daughter’s ambition, he knew, was one day to be an actress, a secret shared only with him. There had been such intimacies since Cecilia had gone away to Amhurst, as if each separation and each pleasurable reunion had influenced a closeness that had not been evident, or felt, before. He understood Cecilia’s reluctance to reveal to her friends the presumption of a talent, to keep from them her English teacher’s prediction that she would in time play Ophelia, and one day Lady Macbeth. It delighted Mr Normanton that all this had come about, that his solitary child had been drawn out in ways he had not been able to find himself, that in spite of his awkwardness as a father she had turned to him with her confidences.
Miss Watson took her place beside him, whispering something he couldn’t hear. The house lights dimmed, all chatter ceased.
* * *
* * *
Miss Cotell and Miss Keble talked about the evening, tickets for which Miss Keble had discovered could be purchased by the public when the requirements of friends and parents had been satisfied. They’d been at the back and more than a little cramped but hadn’t minded. They had noticed the honouring of Mr Normanton, placed next to the headmistress, and when someone asked Miss Keble who he was she was able to say he was the father of the girl who had been enthusiastically applauded as Thisbe.
It was almost midnight now and in their bed-and-breakfast room their beds were close enough to allow for conversation that would not disturb if their voices were kept low. Tonight had felt like the height of what they could hope for, Miss Cotell reflected, the end at last of what had been a beginning when, alone, she had visited what Father Humphrey called the priest house on a cold April afternoon a long time ago now. ‘He’ll come to you when he’s ready,’ a slatternly woman curtly informed her and didn’t answer when Miss Cotell remarked on the weather.
‘Well, now?’ Father Humphrey greeted her when he came, a big, tall man who asked her how she had heard of him and she explained that another girl in Pensions had mentioned him.
Awake, Miss Keble was drawn back to that afternoon too. In hearing about it there had been a description of the slovenly woman, her dishevelled grey hair hanging in wisps about her face, her fingernails edged with black; and the priests who’d passed silently through the room while Miss Cotell waited had been described in similar detail. The two women had thought it likely that tonight they would talk again about that time, but found they didn’t. A lorry drew up on the street outside, a door was banged and a man’s voice said, ‘This place’ll do.’ A dog began to bark but not for long.
Miss Cotell and Miss Keble slept then. Period costumes coloured their unconsciousness, and the rhythms of period music were faintly there again; and Mr Normanton’s dark blue suit was, his polka-dotted tie, the hat he carried with his coat.
‘I cannot leave,’ Miss Cotell confessed at breakfast. ‘I cannot without saying how all of it was wonderful. I cannot, Keble.’
They bought two gifts, Miss Cotell’s a narrow bracelet of coloured stones set in silvered plate, Miss Keble’s a sele
ction of chocolates she was assured were special. They had become familiar with the bells of the school, the one that ended classes, the lunchtime summons, the roll-call bell at half past four, the hurry-up one five minutes later. They knew a clearing in the woods and brought the sandwiches they made there. They could see the path, but no one appeared on it all day.
It had to be said, Miss Keble, impatient, told herself while they waited. It had to be and Cotell was not the one to say it, for it was not her way. Cotell did not ever press herself, never had, never would. Too easily she went timid. But even so, and more than ever, Miss Keble could see in her friend’s eyes the longing that had so often been there since they’d first begun to come here. She could sense it today, in gestures and intimations, in tears blinked back.
At twenty past four they walked to the school.
* * *
* * *
Cecilia caught a single glimpse of the two women and looked away and didn’t look again. Whoever was on afternoon duty would surely ask them what they wanted, why they were here in Founder’s Quad where visitors never were without a reason. She heard a prefect asking who they were, and someone saying she didn’t know. It was a relief at least that Elizabeth Statham was excused this roll-call because every afternoon now she had to train for Sports Day.
‘We wanted just to say how much we enjoyed last night,’ the taller of the women said, and the dumpy one added that wild horses wouldn’t have stopped them coming back to say it.
‘These are for you,’ the tall one said.
They held out packages in different-coloured wrapping paper, and Cecilia remembered the flowers they’d pressed on her, which she’d had to throw away. It was Miss Smith on duty, but she appeared to be unconcerned by the women’s presence, even acknowledging it with a hospitable nod in their direction as if she remembered them from last night. They spoke softly to one another when the roll was called and while Miss Smith read out two brief announcements.
‘Cecilia, if you visited us,’ the dumpy woman said then, ‘you would like our house. We’re not that far away.’ She said that the packages, which Cecilia had not accepted, were gifts, that the address of their house was included with them, the phone number too.
No one was near enough to hear and the curiosity about the two women had dissipated. Already girls were moving away.
‘They are for you,’ the tall woman repeated.
Cecilia took the packages, then changed her mind and put them on a seat. ‘I don’t know you. It’s kind of you to give me presents but I don’t know why you want to.’
‘Cecilia,’ the dumpy woman said, ‘you’ll have heard of Father Humphrey?’
‘I think you’re mistaking me for someone else.’
The tall woman shook her head. She had looked startled when the name was mentioned, had held a hand out as if protesting that it shouldn’t be, anxiety in her eyes.
‘Father Humphrey died,’ the other woman went on, disregarding all this. ‘Miss Cotell heard. And when she went back to the priest house she asked me to be with her for support. The same housekeeper was there, and I said that any papers left behind might concern Miss Cotell. The housekeeper had her objections but she let us peruse the papers for five minutes only and, truth to tell, five minutes were enough. Father Humphrey was a man who wrote everything down.’
Cecilia wondered if the women were unbalanced, if they had found a way of wandering from a home for the deranged. For a moment she felt sorry for them but then the smaller one began to talk about their house, about a cat called Raggles, and flowers in pots, and after a hesitation the tall one joined in. They didn’t sound then as Cecilia imagined the mad would sound, and the moment of pity passed. The cat had strayed into their back yard as a kitten. Their house was called Sans Souci. If she came she could spend a night, they said. They spoke as if they were suggesting she should come often and described the bedroom she would have, which they had wallpapered themselves.
‘How much we’d like it if you came!’ Through the anxiety that had not gone away, the tall woman smiled as she spoke, her chipped tooth, crooked and discoloured, sticking out more than the others.
‘My dear, Miss Cotell is your mother,’ Miss Keble said.
* * *
* * *
Cecilia went away, leaving the two packages on the seat, but she had gone only a few yards when she heard the women’s voices, raised and angry as she never had before. She looked back once and only for a moment.
They were not as she had left them. They confronted one another, trying to keep their voices down but not succeeding. ‘I gave my sworn word,’ the woman who had been called her mother was bitterly exclaiming.
The voices clashed in accusation and denial, contempt and scorn; and there was the sobbing then of the woman who felt herself deprived. She had wanted only to be near her child, all she deserved. ‘No more than that.’ Cecilia heard the words choked out. ‘And in your awful jealousy how well you have destroyed the little I might have had.’
Cecilia hurried then. ‘We cannot come back,’ she heard, but only just. ‘Not once again. Not ever now.’
There was a protest furiously snapped out, and nothing after that was comprehensible. Cecilia kept trying again to think of the women as unbalanced, and then she tried not to think of them at all. Afterwards she told no one what had been said, not even Daisy and Amanda, who naturally would have been interested.
* * *
* * *
That summer Mr Normanton took his daughter to the Île de Porquerolles. In previous summers he had taken her to Cap-Ferrat, to Venice and Bologna, to Switzerland, making time on each journey for a stay in Paris. It was on these excursions that Cecilia first came to know her father better. More of his life was revealed, more of a past that he’d thought would not interest her. His childhood added a dimension to his lonely father’s role; his young man’s world did too. Every time Cecilia returned from school to Buckingham Street she was aware that melancholy disturbed him less than it had. On their holidays together it was hardly there at all.
At Porquerolles, while every bay of the island’s coast, every creek, every place to swim was visited, Cecilia felt her company relished; and her father’s quiet presence was a pleasure, which it had not always been. Silences, a straining after words to keep a conversation going, uncertainty and doubt, too often once had become the edgy feeling that nothing was quite right.
It was hot in August, but a breeze made walking comfortable and they walked a lot. They talked a lot too, Cecilia especially – about her friends at school, the books she had read during the term that had just ended, Elizabeth Statham’s subtle bullying. She hadn’t meant to say anything about the women who’d been a nuisance and when something slipped out she regretted it at once.
‘They wanted money?’ her father asked, stopping for a moment in their walk along the cliffs to look for a way down to the rocky shore below, and going on when there was none.
‘No, not at all,’ Cecilia said. ‘They were just peculiar women.’
‘Sometimes people who approach you like that want money.’
He was dressed as he never was in London, casually, without a jacket, in white summer trousers, a coloured scarf which she had given him at his throat, his shirt collar open. Cecilia, who particularly noticed clothes, liked all this much better than the formality of his suits. She said so now. The women were not mentioned again.
But that evening when his whisky had been brought to him on the terrace of the hotel he said, ‘Tell me more about your women.’
Cecilia bit into an olive, cross with herself again. He was curious, and of course bewildered, because she’d left out so much – the women being there at the hockey matches and then appearing on the way through the woods, and how she’d thought they might suffer from a mental affliction. She described their clothes and the way they had of speaking at the same time, each often saying something d
ifferent, how they related in detail the features of their house and spoke of their cat. Her father listened, nodding and smiling occasionally. She didn’t tell him everything.
Shreds of the day’s warmth were gaudy in the evening sky as the terrace slowly filled and new conversations began. A dog obediently lay down beneath a chair and was no trouble even when the couple with him finished their drinks and went off to the restaurant without him. A Frenchman, relating an experience he had recently had, brought it to an end and was rewarded with quiet laughter. Cecilia, puzzled by jeu blanc, used several times, missed the point.
‘I played a lot of tennis once,’ her father remarked when they were being led to their table in the restaurant. ‘I doubt I ever told you that.’
‘Were you good?’
‘No, not at all. But I liked playing. Jeu blanc’s a love game.’
* * *
* * *
On their last morning, walking to the harbour as every day they had during their stay, Cecilia talked about becoming an actress and heard more than she had before about her father’s work and his office colleagues, about the house in Buckingham Street when first he knew it, about being married there. Passing the farm that was the beginning of the village, he said, ‘The marriage fell to pieces. When we tried to put it together again we couldn’t. I let you believe as you did because it was the easier thing and sometimes, even, I pretended to myself that it was true. I was ashamed of being rejected.’
Bougainvillaea hung over garden walls. Across the street from the crowded fruit stall, the café they liked best hadn’t come to life yet, their usual table not taken, as often it was. Their coffee was brought before they ordered it.
‘I thought that perhaps you guessed,’ her father said. ‘About the marriage.’
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