Mrs Fergusson witnessed the fall from the other end of the restaurant. She leaped to the rescue along with Alice’s father. Between them, and with some difficulty, they returned the elderly person to her seat. She was protesting loudly in rather embarrassing language and there was a compromising damp stain down one leg of the green flares. But the worst of it was that her upper dentures were missing. Flora retreated to her seat and sat, wooden with humiliation, making efforts towards invisibility. Yet, even in drink, the old woman’s sharp instinct for nastiness rose to the fore.
‘Flora!’ she shrieked through shrunken lips, ‘I’ll thank you to pick up my teeth, child, and not sit there gawping like a bilious goldfish!’ The child began to rise, but Mrs Pilling firmly stopped her.
‘Stay right there, my darling,’ she said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Alice’s mother approached the balletic proprietors who helped her scan the floor. The teeth were duly uncovered and returned by one of the reciting waiters who bore them icily towards the Pillings’ table in the centre of a starched white napkin. The teeth lay leering ghoulishly, tobacco brown, against their backdrop of boil-white linen.
‘The sense of occasion has got to Mother, I’m afraid,’ said Mrs Fergusson, twisting her fingers wretchedly in the placket of her blouse. But Alice’s father, being a straight man, had had enough of hypocrisy.
‘The old trout’s pissed as a stoat!’ he said. ‘For pity’s sake, Valerie, get yourself and the children into the car, eh? Let’s have the bill and get the hell out of here double bloody quick, if you’ll excuse my French.’
Alas, too late. As Mr Pilling summoned the waiter, the old woman leaned ominously sideways towards a potted palm.
‘Oh my sainted aunt!’ said Alice’s mother, and she hid her eyes behind one carefully manicured hand. ‘She’s going to be sick, Harry. Do something, please!’
Mr Pilling passed over his napkin, but the spillage was unfortunately not such as could be contained within its capacity. The old woman sat, beyond shame or restraint, belching forth audible rivulets of vomit which ran over her blouse front and down into the folds of the emerald flares. Flora’s mother, who had risen to her feet, scraped and mopped in silent mortification. The balletic twosome advanced stonily, bearing a roll of paper kitchen towel and a large green plastic refuse bag.
Mrs Pilling ushered Alice and Flora to the coatstand where she donned her small silver fox fur while the two girls buttoned their gabardines. Alice saw her mother make a special point of taking Flora’s hand.
‘I’m sorry about the dessert trolley, girls,’ she said. ‘But never you mind, my darlings. We’ll make a nice batch of chocolate brownies in the morning. What do you say to that?’
It was at that moment that Alice turned and looked back at the table. Her father was busy settling the bill and issuing the largest tip of his life. Mrs Fergusson was making unsuccessful efforts to remove the impenitent old woman from her seat. But what really engaged her attention was Mr Fergusson. She wondered if anyone else had noticed that he had begun to look very strange – or was it only the shadows and the candlelight? Could his face really have been changing its shape? Could Mr Fergusson really have been shedding his skin? It seemed altogether consistent with the bizarre quality of the night. Flora’s father had been so different from his usual self all evening and now his physiognomy was changing. His skin was a mess of violent, swollen lumps and his eyes, which had almost disappeared, seemed fixed at some point beyond the salt grinder. Alice tried not to stare at him, but she could not stop. Then Mrs Pilling saw Alice’s expression and she followed her daughter’s gaze.
‘Harry!’ she cried out in agitation and distress. ‘Call a doctor! Call an ambulance! Oh for pity’s sake, somebody, do something!’
When Alice at last began to confide the rudiments of this morbid occasion to her new friend, Jem showed every sign of taking it with the most ‘inappropriate levity’.
‘I expect he died from catching sight of the bill,’ she said. ‘Or else poor Mrs Thingummy managed to slip ground glass into his moules. Never mind, Alice. From what you’ve said about him, Flora is probably off lighting bonfires and dancing in the street.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Alice said. ‘Don’t.’
‘At least your mother was saved from “a fate worse than death”,’ Jem said brightly. ‘Imagine if she’d had him in the car all the way home. Or she might have been “rudely forced” in the car park while your father was dishing out tips.’ She reclined expansively on the grass of the school playing field. ‘ “Jug Jug,’ “ she said. ‘ “Twit twit twit”. That’s T. S. Eliot on the subject of violation.’
Alice winced. ‘It was the mussels, Jem,’ she said. ‘He was allergic to shellfish. He only ordered them because he – because my mother—’ She stopped. ‘But she didn’t know. None of us knew. He’d never eaten them before.’
‘Three score years and never eaten a mussel,’ Jem said. ‘Ah me! And to think my parents eat them all the time. They’re an aphrodisiac, you know.’ She paused, waiting for Alice to recover her humour, but Alice remained as she was, staring down wretchedly into the grass of the playing field. ‘Serves him right for being so creepmouse about his eating habits. Forget about him, Alice. He sounds worse than creepmouse. He sounds like a slug. A “creepslug”.’ She glanced at Alice, who still did not respond. ‘Alas, the poor sot,’ she said. ‘The lecherous ignoramus. And to think of his soul dispatched “unhouseled” to meet his Maker.’
‘Oh, but he wasn’t an ignoramus,’ Alice said quickly. ‘He couldn’t have been. He’d been to Cambridge and everything. Jem, he could even read Anglo-Saxon.’
‘He was ignorant in matters crustacaean,’ Jem said firmly. ‘And that’s unforgivable. Especially for a creepslug. A “Giant Mollusc”. What did you do with him, by the way? “Chuck him over the wall of the Protestant graveyard?” ’ Alice made no response.
‘Do you know?’ Jem said, straining for her attention. ‘One of Maddie’s boyfriends has made an academic study of snails. It’s uncompleted, unfortunately.’ Alice said nothing. ‘It’s uncompleted,’ Jem said, ‘because he doesn’t have enough evidence. He keeps going off to the ends of the earth to check on exotic specimens, but then he always finds the French have got there first and they’ve eaten them all with garlic butter.’ Alice still said nothing. ‘He’s a strange sort of man,’ Jem said. ‘He’s not quite suicidal, but he emulates the Passion of Our Lord.’
‘What?’ Alice said.
‘He bears the stigmata,’ Jem said. ‘He has a wound in the side of his chest. It oozes blood in Holy Week.’
‘Oh yuk!’ Alice said.
‘He got septicaemia last Good Friday,’ Jem said. ‘From all his relatives. They kept plunging their hands in it. That’s how Maddie met him. In the Casualty.’ Alice did not respond.
She was trying not to think of Mr Fergusson as a Giant Mollusc, but she could not stop his funeral from flashing upon her inward eye. She heard the oration in the Chapel of Rest and she saw his coffin, so brash and new – so DIY somehow – being carried through the ugly modern graves with their granite tombstones and their nasty glass orbs of everlasting plastic flowers gathering condensation and mould. She saw her mother throwing earth and flowers into the pit. And Flora, stunned, avoiding her eye. Flora flanked by her two joyless female custodians in dowdy clothes. Suddenly, as her mind indulged a moment’s surreal licence, she envisaged Mr Fergusson, airborne and in his clothes, a Giant Mollusc in his dark suit, as if catapulted through the air and over the wall of the cemetery. She wondered, would he land in the undergrowth or on the motorway, but there was no real landscape beyond the edges of her mind. He was leering horribly and especially at her.
‘Still,’ Jem was saying, ‘at least he’s Catholic.’
‘No, he isn’t,’ Alice said. ‘He wasn’t.’
‘’Course he is,’ Jem said. ‘Protestants don’t bleed in Holy Week.’ Alice looked at her rather absently.
‘I’ve written some
stories,’ Jem said. ‘You can read them if you like.’
‘Stories?’ Alice said with interest and she shook off the Giant Mollusc. ‘What do you mean “stories”?’
Jem shrugged modestly. ‘School stories,’ she said. ‘And a novel. The novel is a more sustained work of greater maturity.’
Alice looked at her with amazement. ‘What?’ she said.
‘A sustained work of greater maturity,’ Jem said.
‘You don’t mean it’s got chapters and everything?’ she said.
‘Oh, they’ve all got chapters,’ Jem said casually. ‘I’ve got them all under my bed in a box. I could get one for you right away.’
‘But the dorms are out of bounds until home time,’ Alice said. She had no sooner said it than she knew that it was not so. Not for Jem. Jem could open doors into the mountainside. Jem was already on her feet.
‘Alice,’ she said cautiously, ‘I’ve never actually shown what I write to anyone else before.’
Alice felt so profoundly honoured that she almost wept. To have first access to Jem’s most precious and private self! Access in advance of Patch, or Maddie, or the Talmudic scholar. Access in advance even of the man of letters!
‘Oh Jem—’ she said, but words failed her. ‘Oh Jem—’
Chapter 10
Alice made a start that afternoon during Religious Studies. Miss Paton, as luck would have it, was disposed to discuss ‘sudden bereavement’.
‘Slugdeath and the Giant Mollusc,’ Jem whispered to Alice at once, but Alice felt, none the less, that she needed escape from the topic. And what better escape than to bury oneself in the first of Jem’s inviting stories?
Alice had used to enjoy Religious Studies in the junior school when Miss Brooks had always told them stories out of the Bible. Since she had received no religious education, either at home or in church, these stories occasionally engaged Alice with all the furious emotive power of fairy tale and myth, filling her with terror. Most dramatic among them, she remembered, were the sacrifice of Isaac, the boyhood of Samuel, and the Angel of the Annunciation. These three stories could make her hair stand on end.
Just to think of Abraham and Isaac! It was like Hansel and Gretel. Your parents could lure you into the woods and suddenly they were wearing different faces. Mr Wolfman and Mrs Witch Lady. Here is my murderer’s knife. Here is my poisoned cake. Of course your parents wouldn’t really, would they? Only sometimes in dreams. People could turn round and they weren’t your parents. They had the wrong faces. And nothing was but what was not.
Then Samuel. Only to imagine it! Not only did your mother hand you over to some appalling, black-clad priest, just as if you were a harvest cabbage, or a pot of quince jam, but then the priest made you go to bed all by yourself in the temple every night. And then, on top of it all, you woke up because the voice of God was booming your name in all that terrifying, supernatural darkness. And the priest didn’t tell you to tuck in with him for the rest of the night the way your mother would have done. No. He sent you back to your own dark room to wait for the voice to come again.
Last of all, there was the Angel. No mere voice, but a real presence. Corporeal. Moving through locked doors. Alice had not been tutored in prayer, but if three things occasionally induced attempts at it, then these were those three things. Abraham and Isaac, the boyhood of Samuel and the Angel of the Annuciation. She prayed that God would find no special reason to single her out, either directly, or by messenger. She petitioned against the glinting knife and the disembodied voice in the awful dark, and the Angel of God in his white clothes. Alice had thought angels were women until the coming of that angel. Afterwards, she knew that angels were male. They had names like Michael and Gabriel.
The knife and the voice of God would on balance be less unthinkable than the angel. The feathered deputy, strong as iron for all his poncy dress. Moving inexorably through the fastened casement. Oh the horror of it! Please God – if there is a God – save me from the iron angel in his exquisite robes of silk.
These powerful and dream-haunting narratives did not pursue Alice into the upper school Religious Studies class. The lessons there were dominated by moral education for responsibility. Miss Paton, who now led ‘discussion’ from the floor, concentrated on social and family topics. This meant that the class was disposed, once a week, to pool its ignorance and bigotry on such matters as abortion, homelessness, alcohol abuse and bereavement.
‘A sudden death in the family,’ said Miss Paton. ‘I would like you all to think about it, Form Three. How would you go about giving comfort to a bereaved friend?’
Jem’s first story was called The Divine Miss Davidene Delight. It was handwritten in a series of lined exercise books stamped ‘Convent of the Ascension’ which Jem had filched, in batches, from the stock cupboard of her previous school. Alice was drawn into the narrative with immediate and grateful pleasure, since Jem had wasted little time on the scenery and had plunged right into the story.
‘I’ve seen her!’ Jem had written, ‘I have actually, truly seen her!’ Diana’s sapphire-blue eyes half closed themselves in rapture as she spoke. ‘The divine Miss Delight is back from Lausanne and – would you believe it, Minerva my dearest – she is wearing the most glorious, the most exquisite new tailor-modish rig-out!’ Minerva the Unmoved remained most formidably unmoved.
‘The woman is a walking clothes rail,’ she observed, hoping to dampen her friend’s ardour, for she considered this passion of Diana’s for the class mistress to be silly and most unseemly. ‘How unsuitably and immoderately Miss Delight indulges in the purchase of unnecessary hats and shoes!’ she said.
‘My sister cried buckets when her pony died,’ Claire said. ‘He had cancer.’
‘Our goldfish died yesterday,’ Lenora said. ‘My brother fed him sawdust.’
‘The most comforting thing one could do,’ Jem said, ‘would be to supplicate for the remission of the dead person’s sin.’ For a moment Miss Paton stopped and stared at her. So did all of the girls. ‘Well,’ Jem said, a little defensively, because she felt the eyes of the class upon her, ‘surely? If the “bereavement” was all that “sudden”, then the dead person is very likely to have died in a state of unabsolved sin. It would be a comfort for his relatives to know that one was trying to save him from the everlasting bonfire.’
‘How dare you?’ Miss Paton said. ‘A member of this class has recently suffered the tragic loss of a parent.’ Alice determinedly read on.
It was teatime at the Moated Grange School for Young Ladies, went Jem’s text. And the two ‘young ladies’ in question were waiting in the bun queue to be served by the benevolent Christabel Lockwood. Christabel was the current bun monitor of the Lower Fifth.
‘Psst,’ Alice whispered, and she nudged Jem discreetly. ‘Don’t you spell “current” with an “a”?’
‘Only if it’s “currant” as in Christmas pudding,’ Jem said. ‘What I mean there is “of the moment”.’
‘But not if it says “Christabel was the currant bun monitor”—’
‘She wasn’t the “currant bun monitor”, for heaven’s sake,’ Jem said. ‘She was the bun monitor for that week.’
‘Oh I see,’ Alice said. ‘Sorry Jem. It’s terribly good so far.’
‘It’s not a work of great maturity,’ Jem said, who had written the story when she was ten years old, ‘but it’s formative, I suppose.’ Alice read on.
‘But Min,’ persisted the rapturous Diana. ‘Miss Delight is wearing the most perfect sea-green silk. So altogether and utterly smart. And on her shoes, such exquisite rosettes.’
‘Alice,’ said Miss Paton kindly. ‘I had hoped that you, of all people, might add to our discussion.’
‘Yes, Miss Paton,’ Alice said, looking up. She thought wistfully how elegant it might have been to have had a class mistress clothed in tailor-modish sea-green silk. Miss Paton was dressed from throat to hem in discouraging polyester Prussian blue. Alice involuntarily scanned her feet for signs of exqu
isite rosettes.
‘Well now,’ said Miss Paton. ‘You could help us here, Alice, I’m sure. How would you go about giving comfort to a bereaved friend?’
Alice thought about Flora’s averted eyes at the funeral and about the faint shuffle of feet behind Flora’s front door. ‘P-p-p,’ she said. ‘I-I w-would-would 1-1-1.’ She stopped and took a breath. Jem’s story was lying in her lap. ‘I would give my f-friend a good book,’ she said. ‘To read. And t-t-t.’ She stopped. Miss Paton waited for a moment. Lenora Gripe began to snigger.
‘To take her mind off her grief,’ Miss Paton said. ‘And give her strength? A thoughtful answer, Alice. Well done.’ She looked around the room to locate the source of sniggering. ‘ “A good book”,’ she quoted sternly in the direction of Lenora Gripe, ‘ “is the precious life-blood of a master spirit”. Can anybody tell me which of our great writers said that?’
‘Shakespeare?’ Claire volunteered hopefully.
‘No,’ said Miss Paton. ‘Not quite Shakespeare.’
‘Milton,’ Jem said. Miss Paton, being loath to encourage precociousness, ignored her.
‘Please, Miss Paton,’ Claire said. ‘Not Shakespeare. I meant Milton. Wasn’t it Milton, Miss Paton?’
Chapter 11
‘Alice,’ Jem said, ‘would you keep all my stories for me?’ ‘Well, of course I’ll keep them,’ Alice said. She was both surprised and honoured by the request. ‘But, Jem, are you sure?’ Jem was holding a pile of eight exercise books at the time. The girls had met at the far end of the playing field – a thing they had taken to doing half an hour before the morning’s first bell.
‘I don’t mean just these,’ Jem said. ‘I mean all of them. I don’t quite like to leave the whole box under my bed. Some idiot is bound to ferret them out and flash them round the dormitory.’ She paused, a bit hesitant. ‘I suppose you must have noticed that they all think I’m a bit peculiar.’
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