The People on Privilege Hill

by Jane Gardam

  The baby, who had a runny eye but glorious red hair, suddenly reached across Brenda to Eileen’s finger and, without taking his eyes off her glowering face, stuck it in his mouth and began to chew it.

  “Hey!” said brooding Eileen, and the baby opened his mouth round the finger to laugh. Eileen made a sound like a laugh, too.

  “Unfortunately, Stafford and I never had children,” said Brenda, “though we both adore them and have many godchildren. We were both virgins when we married, you know. It was not unusual then. I’m not sorry about it. And we’ve never, either of us, ever slept with anyone else, which I expect you must find droll.”

  “Well, I’ve got a baby, thank God,” said Ms. Beech.

  “I’m not so sure about God,” said Brenda. “Stafford and I have always been humanists.”

  “I’m a woman priest,” said Ms. Beech. “My dead husband was the Bishop of Axminster.”

  Lily looked around at the room, the tables, the panelling, all scuffed and sticky. Tea was being dispensed from a machine on the wall into paper cups with optional lids. The paper cups were adding more to the pattern of white rings on the table tops. A few last notices curled from sticky tape on the panelling. The parquet floor was dirty.

  “They’ve been admitting men the last few years,” said Eileen, “and it shows.”

  “I was all against it,” said Brenda. “I wrote to the governing body. In our time no men were allowed in the building after ten o’clock at night,” she told Ms. Beech, “and they had to be out of our rooms by a quarter to. We worked all the better for it, I’m sure.”

  “Why were they more dangerous after nine forty-five?” asked the widowed Reverend Beech.

  “We often had to smuggle them out,” said Brenda, and the Rev. Beech called upon her God.

  “It’s true,” said Lily Strang.

  “In our year there were some who’d been in the war,” said Brenda. “They’d been in prison camps and fighting in Africa, and they still had to have their boyfriends out by ten o’clock.”

  “There was one who was married,” said Lily, “and Folly only let her husband in on her birthday.”

  “You made that up,” said Brenda.

  “She could never tell the truth,” said Eileen. “Novels were a godsend to her. Kept her out of the courts.”

  “Are you Lily Strang?” asked Ms. Beech, but said no more when Lily answered yes.

  “Stafford loved coming to visit me here,” said Brenda. “I used to like going with him to the gate. He was so graceful. He’d been in the Army Education Corps. Once it was almost eleven o’clock and anyone could have seen us going to the gate—it was summertime—Folly or anyone. ‘Don’t scuttle,’ he said. ‘Don’t be ashamed.’ I was in the sixth room along the front.”

  “Seventh,” said Eileen.

  Ms. Beech closed her eyes and the baby was sick.

  After tea they walked about until Brenda said that she must think about leaving. Stafford would be waiting to hear all about it. And she was really annoyed. She was fed up. She had had no idea that he could have come with her. “And he’s got diabetes now,” she said.

  “We can’t go yet,” said Lily, “I have to get Elizabeth back to the station. Really someone ought to see her all the way home—don’t you think?”

  Nobody answered.

  Sour old Eileen said, “I ought to be getting home myself.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I rather want to.”

  “You always do. You always want things to be over.”

  “I like to think about them afterwards.”

  “My God! Are you old!”

  “I’m depressed,” said Eileen. “It’s my temperament. I can’t help it. I knew it would be dreadful and it is. I like being at home. You know me.”

  “I do. It is insulting. Why can’t we go out to dinner somewhere?”

  “There’s a programme I want to watch. And I have to read a holiday brochure.”

  “When are you going away?”

  “Next spring.”

  “Far away?”

  “Yes. The Isle of Man.”

  “Oh, to hell, go home then,” said Lily. “Go with Brenda. If you’re lucky you might get a peep at graceful Stafford waiting at the bus stop. With the dog. Guess the dog? I guess a pug. With filthy breath. Well, I’m glad you can still laugh now and then.”

  “You’re still infantile, Lily.”

  They smiled at each other. They had always been friends.

  “Room three,” said Eileen. “That was my room. I was deflowered in that room the night of the ball.”

  “What? Eileen! You? No! When?”

  “During the supper interval. It was quite a long supper interval. I was famished by morning and only ate baked apples.”

  “However did you get him there? There were ropes on the stairs—I’ve just remembered that. Didn’t anyone see you? Folly in her stockings? Eileen!”

  “He was quite cunning. Quite ... inventive.”

  “Who was he?”

  “I’ll tell you one day.”

  “It wasn’t—? Eileen—no! Oh, Eileen! Oh, poor old Brenda! It was Stafford.”

  “Bye, Lily. Don’t put it in a book.”

  When Eileen had found Brenda, they went off together towards the bus, through the green gate, and Lily went searching for Elizabeth. The starling chatter on the lawns was still loud but spaces were beginning to appear. The flocks were flying. The banners looked lonelier. The Eng. Lit. circle of basket chairs was empty. Dr. Blatt could be seen being wheeled off briskly by Miss Folly. Professor Grimwade was gone.

  Lily wandered round the science blocks and past the library. One year Queen Mary had paid the college a visit and as she left had stood outside the library beside her great black car, saying goodbye, in the wind. The wind had not disturbed a hair of her head or the toque that was sculpted on to it. Ropes of fat pearls on a ski-slope of bosom, feathers, diamonds. Historic as the czar. Two long lines of students had stood clapping and the sound of the clapping had been like washing blowing on a blustery day. Black washing. Their gowns had fluttered about. Smuts flying from a chimney. “How nice they all look in their little gowns.”

  Sycophantic faces framed by half a mile of books had looked down from the tall library windows. What would the bankers do with the library? Make it into a canteen.

  Lily walked towards the lake, beside the botanic gardens, into the grotto with the dry fountain. She found a winding path she had forgotten and coming along it towards her was a trim woman of about her own age, who went by, looking down and sideways, with a reserved smile. After she’d gone, Lily realised it was someone called Ellie Simmonds who’d read French and had always had a reserved smile.

  Suddenly she was overcome with affection for Ellie Simmonds who had lived with her parents at Potters Bar in a house all mock-Tudor beams and arty latches. She’d invited Lily to stay there for a weekend several years after they’d left college.

  Why ever?

  They’d played ping-pong with her brothers and made noisy jokes. And into the pillow Lily had sobbed at night, broken-hearted about the one inside the willow, who had left her, and about this terrible step backwards: ping-pong with schoolboys. How on earth had she come to be staying with Ellie Simmonds? Could Ellie Simmonds possibly have guessed?

  Think. Think of the one under the willow. Think, Lilian—can you even remember his name? And all that agony. Didn’t happen now, presumably. It was the girl who made the running these days. Oh, we were so bottled up and costive and feeble. Oh, we were so good!

  God—and I wore pink taffeta and sweated under my arms.

  She watched the departing back of kind, shy Ellie Simmonds who would still be embarrassed to discuss a broken spirit.

  And—God!—long, grey gloves, thought Lily. And a silk rose. A grey silk rose! At twenty-one I was wearing a grey silk rose. It was a nice dress, though. A Vogue pattern. He had the most wonderful, gentle hands.

  Over towards the tennis courts she f
ound Elizabeth, who was standing beside the posts that had already been dragged out of the ground like teeth and tossed on top of the heaps of black tennis nets piled up like fishing gear on a quay. The tennis courts were to be rebuilt in the new sports complex that was to cover all the lawns.

  “We lost you, Elizabeth. Eileen and Brenda had to go.”

  Elizabeth came over to her and stood smiling.

  “Elizabeth—will you be all right? I’ll come all the way home with you on the train if you like. I mean it. I’d like to go to Devon.”

  Elizabeth said, “Train?”

  “Train home. I’m Lily. Dear Elizabeth.”

  “I know you’re Lily. I was thinking. Yes. No—it’s all right. Rupert got me a return ticket. He’ll meet me. I’m fine. It’s very early days, you know. At present. Quite happy. I’m busy packing. Do you remember Ernie? He was a physicist. A Pole.”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  Lily took Elizabeth’s arm and they started off towards the car park. “Elizabeth—you don’t know how jealous we all were. You were so fearless. So positive. And getting the hell out ... out of all this college stuff. Getting your life right. Knowing exactly what to do. Even at nineteen. And not coming back—”

  “I wasn’t fearless,” she said. “I was a romantic fool. You should all have stopped me.”

  “We should?”

  “Well, you could have, Lily. You could have made me come back.”

  “But you were unapproachable. Olympian. We were scared stiff of you. You were so sure. So wonderful and beautiful.”

  “I was a mess.”

  Lily said, looking up at the scroll of Latin over the gates, “You know, it’s the place I remember. The atmosphere. The Eng. Lit.’s all pretty hazy. All those lectures. All that reading. When I try to remember Keats now, it turns into Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s all quotations. All that Anglo-Saxon, I’ve forgotten the lot.”

  “Glad it’s not just me,” said Elizabeth. At the car park she said, “What a wonderful car. Is it yours?”

  At Paddington station Lily went with her on to the platform to find the reserved first-class seat and several men, some quite young, looked at Elizabeth with admiration and she smiled at them. Then she walked back with Lily, to see her off the platform.

  “Bye, Elizabeth,” said Lily. “It’s lovely you came. We’d none of us forgotten you, you know. We never will.”

  “Don’t count on it,” said Elizabeth, then her face looked blank. Over Lily’s head she said, “I don’t suppose you ever see him?”

  “Never. For goodness sake, Elizabeth—he was all yours. Utterly yours.”

  “Who? Who was?”

  “Well, Ernie of course.”

  “Yes, Ernie,” she said. “Ernie. You see—I had some notion that Ernie might turn up today.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “The Virgins of Bruges” and “The Latter Days of Mr. Jones” were first published in The Spectator in 1996 and 2003 respectively. “The Milly Ming”, “Babette” and “Learning to Fly” were “Woman’s Hour” readings on BBC Radio 4, and “Learning to Fly” was published in the Sunday Express Magazine in 2000. “Waiting for a Stranger” was published in Country Life in 2002.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jane Gardam is the only writer to have been twice awarded the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel of the Year (for The Queen of the Tambourine and The Hollow Land). She also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime’s contribution to the enjoyment of literature.

  She has published four volumes of acclaimed stories: Black Faces, White Faces (David Higham Prize and the Royal Society for Literature’s Winifred Holtby Prize); The Pangs of Love (Katherine Mansfield Prize); Going into a Dark House (Silver Pen Award from PEN); and most recently, Missing the Midnight.

  Her novels include God on the Rocks (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Faith Fox, The Flight of the Maidens and Old Filth, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

  Jane Gardam lives with her husband in England.