That night of my birthday, I was interrupted and nearly caught. I had left the form-room and gone out into the hall and was lying down on the polar bear rug, revelling in its soft warmth. Suddenly the windows lit up as a car’s lights travelled quickly towards the house. There was a sound of brakes. It could only be Miss Faulkner, the Headmistress, whom we knew as ‘Chief’. She alone possessed a car. Doors opened and shut with quiet solicitude for the sleeping children in the dormitories above, and footsteps crunched over the flints towards the front door. I had no time to get up the long flight of stairs or to retreat again into the form-room. I crouched behind one of the chests and held my breath.
Chief came in, her rubber-soled shoes padding lightly over the stone floor. She was alone. The car drove away again, round to the small garage beside the house. She paced up and down the hall, whistling softly. At last, after what seemed to me an interminable time of waiting, the front door opened again, letting in another blast of cold air, and someone came in. There was not a sound. The two stood in the hall in silence, but I could not see who the other was. Tense myself, it was only my own tension, perhaps, that abated as the footsteps began to walk towards the stairs, yet it seemed as if some sudden stiffness in the very texture of the air about me slowly relaxed as they moved away from the hall. As they turned the corner of the staircase, half-way up, they came into my view – Chief and Miss Burnett. Chief’s arm was round the other’s shoulders. A door opened along the corridor above, and Chief’s arm dropped. The two stood on the stairs, full in my vision, looking up towards the gallery. Hard-heeled shoes emerging on to it were easily recognizable as Georgie Murrill’s. There was a long, weighted silence. Chief turned and looked at Miss Burnett, slowly, very deliberately, replaced her arm round her shoulders and they went on up the stairs, out of sight.
I heard their footsteps go along the gallery to Chief’s own suite of rooms at the far end. The double doors – mahogany outside, baize within – opened on easy hinges and shut again with a faint thud.
I was about to creep out and go up myself when I heard a movement above me. Miss Murrill was still standing in the long gallery. I heard her hard shoes tread very slowly back to her room, and when her doors were safely shut I made my way up to my dormitory on bare feet, my slippers in my hand.
CHAPTER FIVE
We’ve never, no, not for a single day,
pure space before us, such as that which flowers
endlessly open into; always world,
and never nowhere without no. …
a child
sometimes gets quietly lost there, to be always
jogged back again.
RAINES MARIA RILKE
THE following morning a steady rain fell. The clouds which had coursed all night through the sky had come to a standstill, and sunk down over the low hills in a thick grey quilt. The children in their ill-lit dormitories dressed to the monotonous patter of the rain against the windows. Walls sweated. The building felt like the inside of a well. During the day there was little opportunity for speaking together, for the three girls seldom foregathered as a trio except in the private places they knew of in the grounds, and then usually at the instigation of Margaret. She would never allow her friendship to be taken for granted. She did not regard herself as part of a trio at all. Both she and Rachel were independent of each other. They sought each other’s company when they needed it, when they had something vital to tell each other. But when, as so often happened, the fourteen-year-old Bisto attached herself to Rachel, Margaret was more reluctant to join her. If Rachel and Bisto invited her to come to one of their known meeting-places, they would as often as not wait in vain. For Bisto this was no hardship. She far preferred to have Rachel to herself. The fascination which Margaret exerted over both of them was in Bisto’s case only a reverence for the personality which commanded Rachel’s admiration. Like a dog, she would lick the hand of those who smiled on her mistress, and she was equally quick to snap at those who frowned. Rachel loved her with a half-protective, half-exasperated affection. It was as if she split her surface personality quite readily into two and gave half to each of her two friends. To Bisto went the romantic side, the side which fed upon mystery and upon association, which was firmly rooted in the physical delights of childhood, and most of all in the discovery of secret places. But with Margaret, Rachel felt a different sort of kinship. She was drawn to her because in her company the life of the world beyond school was glimpsed beneath the surface of Bampfield, like hidden streams whose windings are heard but only seldom seen. When Margaret withdrew herself, Rachel felt a sudden stillness, as though out of earshot, and was faintly troubled. It was the life of the adult and the intellectual to which Margaret, precocious and eccentric, beckoned her. Rachel was disturbed at its fascination, yet could not but respond. Thus even Margaret’s secrecy, which was the secrecy of the adult, had for Rachel an essential rightness, however painful it could sometimes be.
Shut indoors by the now constant rain, tempers were frayed, friendships strained. Bisto saw with grief the great Rachel amusing her form-mates with her mimicry and indulging in savage jokes against junior staff. Detailed for most of the hated supervisory jobs, and lacking the capacity to inspire respect, these wretched art mistresses and music teachers endured in the chilly, stuffy, overcrowded form-rooms a kind of hell, while the rain beat incessantly outside, and there was no one within earshot to hear the yells, the crash of furniture, and their own feeble cries of ‘Girls! Girls! Please be quiet!’
If Bisto could have hated anyone she might have hated Rachel at these times. Everything she witnessed revolted her gentle nature, yet the pull of her devotion prevented her from absenting herself or averting her eyes. She watched Rachel; felt compelled to watch and was ashamed that she found a certain delight in this cruel and debasing sport. It was as if Rachel were to acknowledge a taste for cutting up kittens alive, and yet, thought Bisto, as she watched her mincing up the music mistresses, this is not the real Rachel. She is doing it because she is unhappy, because that accursed Margaret sits over there reading and will not speak to her, and has said no more about this secret that she has found.
Eventually, bored with her afternoon’s activities, and perhaps a little disgusted with herself, Rachel summoned the faithful Bisto. Together they left the noisy classroom and went down the corridor to the music cells. Damp, ill-smelling little cubby holes, unheated and barely furnished except for a moth-eaten piano and stool, they at least afforded privacy. They found an empty one. The keys of the piano were moist and sticky. Rachel shut the lid down and sat on the stool. She laid her Virgil and notebook on the lid and started to work. She was translating Book VIII of the Aeneid into Miltonic blank verse, and Bisto, who was not very much interested in Latin, found the poetic frenzy when it came upon Rachel rather hard to bear. Yet it was of course gratifying to think that one knew a future Milton or Dryden. Usually Bisto sat and knitted or worked slowly and painfully on a teacosy for her mother, on which she was embroidering a peacock. But the swift and secret egress from the form-room had prevented her from getting permission to fetch this. And nothing was to be done at Bampfield without permission. In any case, the cold of the music cell would have numbed her fingers. She sat huddled on the bare boards of the dirty floor and dreamed of what Margaret could possibly have to show them.
Bisto was a romantic. Her imagination led her always into the paths of adventure and action. The secret places were for her, doors to a world where she and those she loved and admired became figures of romantic splendour and stature. Margaret’s find – was it a hollow tree? A tree in which they could hide from the others and watch them running past at their inane games of tag and prisoner’s base? Or was it something more mysterious and evocative like the stone obelisk they had discovered that unforgettable day last summer?
They had left the open paths in the pleasure gardens, to creep furtively under twisted laurel boughs. In these now overgrown shrubberies, there were to be found little ponds, ornamen
tal, neglected clearings once cultivated, and other sad relics of the garden’s splendour from the Georgian days. On this occasion, deep in the midst of a shrubbery, they came across a stone obelisk, lying on its side. Carved on it were the words:
IN MEMORIAM
J. W. B.
SEVASTOPOL
1855
They stood reverently in the presence of this stone. Who was commemorated upon it, only to be forgotten? Some member of the family on whose grounds they stood? There was something exquisitely sad about the fallen stone, set up less than a hundred years before to be a permanent record of the family’s loss in the service of their country, and now dragged away and buried deep in the memorial laurels.
Bisto, her mind far away from Virgil, closed her eyes to recall the mystery and wonder of that discovery – for she, of the three, secretly rejoiced in it still, though she pretended that it bored her. Round it she had woven a story of heroism. Brave J. W. B. had not died from a cannonball or grapeshot, but by the knife of an assassin who had crept into the wards of Florence Nightingale’s hospital where he lay wounded. J. W. B., tossing in a fever, had heard the stealthy footsteps, seen the white-robed figure (a Moslem fanatic) lurking by the door, his eyes shining in the moonlight, his hand clasping a dagger, waiting for the Lady of the Lamp on her rounds, to plunge his assassin’s knife into her heart. Gritting his teeth against the pain, the gallant J. W. B. had crawled from his straw pallet across the mud floor of the ward, leaving behind him a trail of blood from his still open wounds. And just as the faint glow of the lamp could be seen approaching through the open door, he had raised his body with a tremendous effort upon his shattered legs and flung himself upon the assassin, to receive a fatal wound and immortality.
This summer they would act it, thought Bisto, she and Rachel and Margaret, in a clearing in the laurels near the fallen obelisk. Margaret would be the assassin and Rachel of course would be Florence Nightingale, and she herself … no, perhaps Rachel had better be the gallant J. W. B., and she would be Florence Nightingale. It was the least interesting part even if in name it was the most famous.
‘I’ve thought out a wonderful play we can do at that obelisk we found last summer,’ she said suddenly. It was Bisto’s failing that she always clung tenaciously to things and pursued them, squeezed out of them the last drop they could give, and went on squeezing when there was really nothing more to extract. Rachel was annoyed.
‘You’ve interrupted a wonderful line,’ she said severely.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Bisto, and relapsed humbly into silence and the Crimea. A few minutes later, Rachel put down her pen. Always uncertain at heart of the value of her creative work, Rachel could not bear to keep it to herself. She must read it or show it to others, seek their support for what she had done, seek even their criticism, for adverse comment had a stimulating effect upon her, stiffening up the sinews of her pride and impelling her to revise, cut and even destroy, in the interests of the perfection that she craved. ‘Shall I read you what I’ve done today?’ Rachel asked.
Bisto buried her Nightingale drama and, dumb with cold, settled back against the flaking wall to listen to fifty lines of frigid Miltonic blank verse on the subject of Aeneas’ shield. Line after line dropped into the cold air of the cell, and Bisto heard them as an isolated series of sounds which held no meaning for her. Misery invaded her heart. Rachel was too clever for her. Was life always to be this way? A cold empty room, and clever unintelligible words? Was there no warmth anywhere, no friendly hand, no friendship without words?
CHAPTER SIX
Timidi dammae cervique fugaces
nunc interque canes et circum tecta vagantur.
VIRGIL
(The hinds and the nervous, swift-footed stags wander now among the dogs and around the homesteads.)
THAT night, as I lay in bed, I watched the clouds piling up over the trees in the park. The moon appeared to be racing across the sky and only with difficulty did I succeed in mooring her above one of the elms in the playing-fields. The air lay heavy over the house. A few drops of rain fell on the sill at my shoulder. In the unnatural light, trees and bushes appeared purple and the grass a vivid yellow. Suddenly a brilliant flash split the sky, lighting up the scared faces of the girls around me, and stabbing me so fiercely in the eyes that I was momentarily blinded. I held my breath, waiting for what I knew would come, and with a sudden hissing, as though the lightning were a white-hot bar of iron thrust into water, the rain came down and peal after peal of thunder rumbled above the black clouds.
I never remember the details of the park being invisible to me at night. It was as if I lived perpetually in the land of the midnight sun. There was not a human sound to be heard, except the breathing of my five or six companions; but there were innumerable animal sounds: the sudden scream of a rabbit, for snares were common all over the park and I must have pulled up and destroyed dozens in my six years at Bampfield; the varied hooting and screeching of the owls which I so often saw gliding across the moonlit park between the clustered, top-heavy elms. But the most characteristic sound was one which I imagine few people hear. It was the pistol crack of antler meeting antler. Then would come the rustle and thud of hoofs, as the stags manoeuvred on the muddy ground for position, and crack! it would come again, as they locked their heads in combat. Every night the deer would approach the house. In winter they came right up to the walls, and their hoofs made a light rustling over the loose gravel when they left the grass and crossed the sweep of the drive to find shelter under our windows. We heard them coughing and shuffling and blowing through their nostrils, and then, again the sudden sharp crack of antler on antler. In the morning I would lean out and see the soft brown forms lying under the windows, shining with rime, for all the world like glistening seals upon a beach.
The park, in the fresh light of morning, never ceased to delight me: the abstracted air of tree and bush, the long delicate shadows, the rain-dark rushes. At night, too, I knew it. More than once I climbed out of a lower form-room window and stalked out over the grass, to stand under the elms and look about me. The lights of the staff rooms in the house gave me courage, and allowed me to watch in delicious trepidation the dark forms of the moving deer, to listen to the sound of the stream, always much louder at night, and the creak of branches above my head. A nightjar would whirr in the shrubbery, or an owl brush past me like a moth, and I would climb in and make my perilous way back through the dark corridors, and get into bed with my heart beating fast and my mind full of sensations which I have never forgotten.
I came to love my surroundings so deeply that I became a slave to them. For a few years after I had left school I felt compelled at intervals to return there, not to see anyone, but to renew my relationship with the place, with the shrubberies deep in the leaves of many seasons, the statuesque elms, the derelict park. It possessed me, though I had the illusion of possessing it. I can remember having this strong feeling of possession quite consciously; of saying to myself, as I stood alone on the grass: I belong here. This is my place. This is where my roots are.
While I was at school I never confided this feeling to anyone. I confided it only to Bampfield itself, to the long lime avenues, with their carpet of moss and primroses, to the dark, arcanian shrubberies, and the network of acrid-smelling paths that interlaced them. But when I was with my fellows, Bampfield was to me as it was to them, school. The park was the domain where we strolled on the innumerable occasions when we evaded games; the lime avenues, like the groves of Academe, were fruitful of talk, of endless critical talk. Like lords we walked these tall avenues. I never remember playing in them any of our usual games. They did not lend themselves to frivolity. But there among my confederates I tore the regime to pieces; ridiculed Chief’s latest sermon; poured scorn on the prefects who were too scared of us to curb our irredeemably bad behaviour. In the cold, deserted shrubberies, talk became more philosophical. Here we smoked, walking slowly among the laurels and rhododendrons, our feet making no noise
on the brown leafy paths, where the leaves of a dozen seasons lay unswept.
And Bampfield gave me my private worlds. I knew many places that hardly anyone else knew. Girls are not adventurous nor are they explorers like boys and few of us strayed from the paths in the gardens or penetrated the overgrown shrubberies along the stream. Nor was I any more adventurous than the rest, but a habit of solitude due to a year of lameness, and the overwhelming desire to know intimately the whole of my domain, led me to explore it inch by inch, though a natural fear of the unknown led me sometimes to take companions with me on my more daring explorations. I found that they seldom wanted to return to these secret places, often difficult of access. I returned alone.
Deep in the shrubberies was a derelict rose garden, well known to most of us as a playground, but only I knew of the little iris garden that lay beyond it, hidden in the laurels, the path to it now completely overgrown. I found it one afternoon in early summer – a small circular clearing in the bushes, carpeted with thick green moss that sank beneath my feet. In the centre were a few neglected shrubs. One was a magnificent fire-bush. Later, on an autumn afternoon I found it blazing in the shadows, untouched by sunlight. All around the long, derelict garden were clumps of iris which, though choked and half-buried in bramble and couch grass, still produced a few flags of brilliant blue and yellow. That was how I first saw it – a little theatre of green desolation, lit with tapers of blue and yellow flame. Later, when high summer came, I used to go there by myself and sit on the dry moss and read Shelley’s Adonais and Keats’s Hyperion. The garden was surrounded not only by rhododendron and laurel, but also by tall trees, and looking upwards one would see the sky as nothing more than a small blue plate amid the dense, surrounding green.
The Chinese Garden Page 3
