Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

by Helen Dunmore

  Most of the students whom I invited for interview have emailed to say that they can’t make it. The timing is awkward, because I’ve had to arrange the interviews after office hours. But it doesn’t matter. I have three students coming in, at carefully spaced intervals.

  My windows are full of darkness. I pull down the blind. It’s still only half past four: an hour and a half to wait until my first student. I’m restless, and although the pain has gone there is still a tight feeling inside my head.

  For some reason I keep thinking about Anthea. I wonder what my life at university would have been like without her there every weekend, arriving with her things in the blue Pan Am flight bag that her father got when he went to New York.

  I see her making coffee for people she doesn’t know and whom I’d never know either, not really, because I was the guy with the slightly weird girlfriend who didn’t belong. Suddenly I want to reach back through time and slap Anthea’s smiling face to the left, to the right, to the left again, until there is nothing left of her smile and she will never come near me again.

  I blink, and look at the clock. I must have been thinking for a long time, because it’s ten to six. Quickly, I put my jacket on and sit at my desk, ready to swivel round at the knock on the door.

  The first one is a tall, rangy boy from Weihai. He’s very much at home, with a relaxed smile that I remember from the student welcome party at the start of term. He’s had a good term; of course he has. He’s staying with friends in London over the Christmas vacation. I hadn’t noticed the American twang in his voice before. He talks about London with a casual familiarity which makes me angry. We chat for a few minutes, and he’s clearly wondering why I’ve bothered to call this meeting. I give him a couple of questionnaires about the student experience to return to me at the beginning of next term, and ask if he’d be willing to write something for the website. He’s flattered, and agrees. Will I need a photo?

  When he’s gone I realise I’m sweating. I open the window, then quickly close it again. The next student arrives a little before I expect her. She’s a puddingy girl whose spoken English was so hesitant at the beginning of term that I had a concerned email from her personal tutor. Fortunately, her written language turned out to be much better. She sits down squarely in the chair opposite me and tells me at length about the difficulties she has had with the other students on her corridor, and how much she would have preferred completely self-contained accommodation. I take notes, nodding, and thank her for this valuable feedback, which will be passed on to the accommodation office for future reference. My heart beats hard.

  At last I usher her out. She is still talking and making small, stiff movements of protest with her hands over the behaviour of her fellow students. I tell her again that I am grateful to her for coming along and sharing her experiences. She does not smile, but she nods in acknowledgement and I know that we have both emerged from the encounter without embarrassment.

  I sit down, and rub my eyes. Outside the ground is frozen hard. Trevor will have gone wherever he goes. All those lovely girls have dissolved as if they never existed. I say that they are lovely, in the indulgent way that a man who has found happiness in his life might say it. Fortyish, reasonably kindly, observant (as you have to be in my job) and a little world-weary. I am a better actor now than I was when I was eighteen. If I could have my time again, I wouldn’t start from here.

  I make a cup of instant coffee, and stir in sugar. It is quarter past seven. The admin building is empty at this hour, apart from security. They patrol at predictable times. They much prefer driving around in luridly striped vehicles which, if you don’t look closely, bear a passing resemblance to police cars. Day and night, they wear high-visibility jackets.

  Security is far better organised in China. On campus, there will be a control room where security staff scan the video feeds from cameras placed to cover all angles. They look calm, even serene, but if they see something out of place they react immediately, picking up a telephone and issuing instructions. You don’t see them stopping for cups of tea or banter with the students.

  I can smell myself. Quickly, I go to the sink and run my wrists under the cold tap.

  The third student is late and I’m beginning to think she’s not coming, when she taps at the door. She is muffled up against the cold, and she unwraps her long scarf carefully before she sits down. It’s a beautiful scarf. Cashmere, I think. Her hands are small and delicate as they fold up the scarf. She looks at me, and smiles. Her smile is exactly as I remember it.

  I take a questionnaire out of my desk, and am about to give it to her when I realise that my hands are trembling. I lay it on the desk, hoping that she hasn’t noticed. She is a polite girl, and keeps her eyes on my face, waiting for me to begin. I first noticed her when she offered to help clear away after the student welcome party. Please, it is a pleasure.

  I ask her if she has enjoyed the term. Have there been any problems? The slightest of frowns creases her forehead. She looks as if she is trying to find some little problem, in order to please me. Finally she says, ‘Everyone has been very friendly.’

  ‘And you like your family?’ I ask her. This is a pet scheme of mine. I match students to local families who offer Sunday lunch a couple of times a term. A sense of welcome is so important.

  Yes, she likes her family. They have taken her on a visit to an English country house.

  ‘Good,’ I say. ‘So everything’s going well. The first term isn’t always easy, but you’ve clearly made an excellent beginning. Would you like some tea?’

  She shakes her head. ‘No thank you, no tea.’ She says it in a small, polite but absolutely firm voice. She is refusing me.

  I smile at her indulgently as I get up to fill the kettle at my little sink.

  ‘Please,’ she says, more insistently. ‘No tea, thank you. I must be at home.’

  Her English is breaking up slightly, under pressure. I swing round with a kindly, disbelieving smile. ‘I have Silver Needle!’ I say. She thinks that I am offering her ordinary English tea. But she shakes her head again.

  ‘No thank you. It is very kind, but no thank you.’

  I stare at her, confounded. What am I going to do now? In China this would never happen. She looks back, still polite but embarrassed too, because I’m insisting and I’m a senior official in her university. So why has she refused me? Doesn’t she understand that it’s polite to accept what you are offered? I flick down the kettle switch and lift the little teapot, just big enough for two, ready to warm it when the water boils.

  She has got to her feet. She has picked up her scarf and is holding it close to her body as she looks at me. ‘Please,’ she says again, ‘I must be at home.’

  I open the packet of Silver Needle with shaking fingers. It is awkwardly sealed. She is edging towards the door, but I am in her way. I have a little chased-silver scoop for the tea. It’s important to do these things with a degree of ceremony, otherwise we live like beasts.

  ‘It won’t take long,’ I tell her. Her fingers clutch the scarf. A drop of sweat runs down my forehead, tickling like an insect. She won’t stop staring. The kettle is coming to the boil.

  ‘Sit down,’ I tell her. ‘Please.’

  I think that she’s going to obey me, but at the last moment she dodges under my arm and rushes for the door. Her fingers scrabble for the handle but it’s too late. I take hold of her, turn her round and point her towards the chair where she was sitting.

  ‘All I want is to drink tea with you,’ I tell her.

  She stumbles to the chair and sits down with her arms wrapped around her body. The kettle switches itself off.

  I am tired, so tired. My headache has come back, worse than ever. I just want this to be over. Anthea used to make coffee all the time. Why did she do that? This girl is crying, but all I want to do is make her welcome.

  ‘My mother,’ she says. She looks at me but her eyes keep flickering to the door.

  ‘Your mother?’
/>   ‘My mother – does not make me drink tea.’ She is crying but she still manages to speak quite clearly. ‘I never like it.’

  My hand goes slack. Slowly, the Silver Needle tea pours from the scoop on to the floor. I watch it go. I will need to clean it up. I move closer to her, and she shrinks back in her chair. There is a smell of sweat and I’m not sure if it is hers or my own. My room is brightly lit and much too hot. I think of the snow outside.

  I step back and make a movement with my arms, as if I’m shooing a cat. ‘Go,’ I say, ‘go, go, go—’ I can’t seem to stop saying it. She edges out of her chair and retreats backwards, her eyes on me, fumbling for the door behind her. She has dropped her scarf. She makes a sound in her throat, wrenches the door handle, and then she’s gone. I hear her feet clatter down the empty corridor, and then a door bangs.

  I put the chair back in its place. I am sweating and trembling. Everything is over; I know that. I cannot come back here. I have lost face.

  For a moment I don’t know what to do. I even start scooping the tea up from the floor. If I make tea, and sit down, and drink it, then maybe everything will be all right. But I know it won’t. I go to the shelf above the sink, where I keep pound coins in a mustard tin. It is heavy. I put the tin in my pocket, and without bothering to put on my coat or switch off the lights, I leave my office, stepping over the cashmere scarf.

  The cold strikes through my jacket. The cafés are still open; it’s only eight o’clock. For some reason I think that Trevor will have come back, but his corner is empty. I lean down and empty the mustard tin into the folds of the blankets he sits on; then I fold them over again so that the coins are hidden. After a moment’s thought, I also take off my jacket and leave it there.

  Oddly enough, I feel warmer in just my shirt than I did with the jacket on. It’s quiet again. My feet slither on the packed ice, but I’ve a good sense of balance, and I don’t fall. Soon I’m beyond the shops, bars and cafés, taking side streets, going uphill towards the Common. It’s beautiful there in summer. My hands hurt but they’ve stopped shaking; at least, I think they have. On my first recruitment trip to the Far East I went to Hong Kong; that was before we got going in mainland China. I couldn’t sleep on the flight. I went to stand at the back of the plane, and there below us, in the dawn light, were the mountains of Mongolia. At least, that’s what the steward told me they were called. I gazed down at them for a long time. They were huge red mountains, deeply ridged, ancient, folded into themselves. There wasn’t a mark of human existence. They looked like a dream as our plane throbbed over them, on and on. The light grew strong and the shadows between the ridges grew deeper. We passed over them like gods, but I knew that if the engine note changed and failed we would be down there, and the red mountains would be real.

  Soon I’m in the middle of the Common. There are no street lights here, and so you can see the stars. I can’t see them tonight. Her face gets in the way. All I wanted was to drink tea with her.

  I lied to you about the scarf. I brought it with me. It’s very soft. Probably from the Qinghai area. I’m still holding it as I walk towards the darkness under the trees.

  A VERY FINE HOUSE

  I’M HOME AT last. It’s taken all my life to get here. Home.

  I can hear the children, two floors down. The sound’s muffled by closed doors. It’s only because I’m listening so carefully that I can pick it up at all. I’m on the first floor, and they are deep down in the Lower Ground Floor Accommodation: that is, the basement. I’m upstairs, in the elegant First Floor Drawing Room, which looks out over the recently landscaped south-facing garden. There are four floors: basement, ground floor with kitchen and family room, first floor with drawing room and bedroom suite, and the children’s bedrooms on the top floor. I could tell you the dimensions of every room. I know them all by heart, even though this is my first day here. My first hour, almost.

  Of course I won’t call this room the drawing room. That’s so pretentious, don’t you think? Drawing rooms and master suites and cloakrooms and mature trees and original features. All very well for estate agents’ particulars: in fact, it is expected from them. My home is ‘a fine Gentleman’s Residence in a prime position with charming lower-ground-floor accommodation, which could easily be converted to form a separate apartment’.

  Or, in other words, a basement which houses the remains of a kitchen range, a servants’ toilet, and a warren of cellars where people have been burying bodies for two hundred years.

  Children love secret passages and hidey-holes. They’ll be fascinated by the bell-board, and the thought that someone upstairs could press a bell and a tired girl in the kitchens would have to put on a clean apron and toil upstairs to find out what was wanted this time. You rang, ma’am? The basement’s going to be converted into a huge playroom, with white paint and spotlights everywhere. Even though it’s dark and dusty now, you can see the potential.

  Seeing the potential is very much my thing. I do read all the magazines – Your Period Home, Converting Period Property, Foraging for Features, Victorian Interiors – but I like to have my own vision. Without vision, a house is nothing. Just a doll dressed in whatever was closest to hand.

  This house has got everything. I knew it was for me as soon as I saw it. It wasn’t on any of the agents’ websites, and there wasn’t a For Sale board outside. You can afford to be discreet, with a house of this quality. I was new to the city, and the agents didn’t know me yet. I saw the photograph go into the window of Gibbet and Glyde. Yes, literally, just as I was passing. I glanced, and stopped dead.

  The house is Grade II listed. The agent explained the implications to me, because a listed building can be a stumbling block for some purchasers. You can’t touch the exterior. I nodded, as if I didn’t know it all. I explained to him that my husband worked in London during the week, so I was doing the preliminary viewings. The glossy brochure wasn’t ready yet, but the agent gave me draft particulars. I put on my reading glasses, although I didn’t need to. I knew already, you see. It was like falling in love, only better. We were a match. But I didn’t want the agent to guess that I’d made my mind up, because then they start to get silly. You have to be a bit cunning, a bit of an actor.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, letting a shade of disappointment into my voice. ‘Only four bedrooms …’

  ‘The fifth bedroom is in the base—in the lower-ground-floor accommodation,’ he corrected me eagerly.

  I love times like these, when it’s a buyers’ market. Prices are flat, and people are staying put. Then the estate agents start to jump. The very ones who’ve been so snotty, so sure they’ve got nothing to show you … suddenly they’re returning your calls twice over.

  I read through the particulars slowly, keeping my head down. I could feel the agent taking me in. Mid-forties, expensive jeans, buttery leather jacket, hair blunt-cut and skilfully highlighted, crocodile loafers. Husband sweating it in a bank somewhere, wife left to make the lifestyle decisions.

  The house had everything I wanted. I’d known as soon as I saw it. You can tell a house from its face. And this one wasn’t just a face, it was a voice too, a beautiful voice that no one else could hear. Home, it said. Home.

  ‘The drawing room is particularly elegant,’ the agent encouraged me. ‘There are the original French-style doors to the terrace, and working shutters.’

  ‘Cornices? Coving?’ I murmured.

  ‘Of course. All original. And a very nice marble fireplace, not in fact original to the house, but absolutely of the period.’

  ‘And the bedroom balcony is sweet,’ I let myself observe. ‘It does seem as if it might be the kind of thing we’re looking for … Now that the boys are away at school, we ought to be able to manage with four bedrooms—’

  ‘If I might just correct you: five bedrooms.’

  ‘But I suppose it needs work.’

  ‘An opportunity to put your own stamp on the property – your personal touch—’

  ‘Damp?’


  ‘Dry as a …’ He floundered, as if for a moment he’d lost sight of cliché, then he brought it out triumphantly. ‘Bone!’

  ‘Bone. Lovely.’

  ‘Shall I arrange an early viewing? If I might advise you, houses of this quality rarely remain on the market for long.’

  No, they don’t, do they? Not even now, in a buyers’ market. I knew that, and so I put in an offer the day I saw you. Of course I had to telephone my husband first to discuss it, but that was all right. He trusts my judgement.

  The vendor accepted my offer. I knew he would. I know exactly how to pitch these things. Now, at last, I allowed the agent to hear the excitement in my voice as I told him I would arrange a survey as soon as possible, get my solicitor to write to the vendor’s solicitor, get everything under way. I smiled at him, really smiled at him for the first time.

  ‘It’s a lovely house, Edward,’ I said. ‘I’m very happy.’

  And I meant it, every word. Happiness, oh happiness. You don’t often feel it, do you? Not really. Not on those occasions when happiness is called for and expected. Weddings, engagements, christenings, new jobs, exam passes. I try to feel it, but I just can’t. But at that moment, sitting opposite Edward on one of the agency’s dark brown squashy leather armchairs, I was flooded with pure happiness, until every cell in me was radiant with it. Impressive, original, integral, magnificent, full-height, double-panelled happiness.

  ‘I can’t wait to tell my husband,’ I said.

  Was that my mistake? Shouldn’t I have smiled? Maybe if I’d kept my poker face all the way through, allowing myself only the mildest expression of satisfaction, maybe then none of it would have happened. Did I tempt fate? Did I betray you by betraying my feelings? We were made for each other. I knew it, and you knew it. Your lovely quiet façade was like a smile when I watched you from the other side of the road. I was always calling to see you. Discreetly, on foot, never stopping long. The vendors were away, visiting a daughter in Italy. Imagine going to Italy, when they had you. They didn’t deserve you.