by Hilary McKay
“Vanessa said I can have her old books and her grown-out-of uniform,” said Clarry, “and Grandmother has sent me ten pounds.”
“Did you ask her for that?”
“No, of course not!”
“Why would she do it, then?”
“Rupert told her about me taking the exam. I think she was pleased. She helped me before once, when I wanted to learn to swim.”
“So everyone knew, except me?”
Was he sad? He sounded terribly sad to Clarry. She could hardly bear it. “I truly don’t think it will make any difference to you, Father,” she told him earnestly. “I’ll just have to leave a bit earlier in the morning and be back a bit later in the afternoon. Everything else will be just the same.”
Her father sighed.
“And when I grow up,” she added anxiously, “I’ll be able to get a job and earn my own money and you won’t have to work so hard.”
“I hope I have never complained about that, Clarry.”
“Of course you haven’t!” she exclaimed.
“Well,” he said, and sighed again. “Well, I suppose you must do as you please.”
“Thank you,” said Clarry. “Oh, thank you, thank you! Would you like to come and see it, Father?”
“See what?”
“The school. So you know where I am.”
“Thank you. I do know the location as a matter of fact.”
“Vanessa says there are concerts and things, when parents are invited.”
“We’ll see, Clarry.”
“I didn’t mean to make you angry.”
“I’m not angry, just disappointed. However, you must tell me if there is anything you need.”
There were many things Clarry needed, but nothing would have made her say that to her father just then. With Grandmother’s ten pounds and Vanessa’s help she gathered together the essentials: three school blouses, a pleated blue skirt that Vanessa had outgrown, and a mushroom hat with a gold and blue ribbon. She also became the owner of eleven brown-paper-covered textbooks which she carried to and from school each day, sometimes sparing a penny for a bus if the weather was dreadful, usually walking, often reading a book as she trudged. As time went by, it was as if she wore an invisible track across the town. She grew a little taller, the books changed, and the new ones were heavier than the old.
“Hmm,” said Peter, inspecting them when he came home from his own school. “A bit different from the rubbish you were doing with those old bats in the attic.”
“Yes,” agreed Clarry.
“What does Father say about you being there now?”
“I don’t think he really notices.”
“I bet he never went to see it, did he?”
“Not yet.”
“He never will,” said Peter, and Clarry could understand why he was bitter. Their father had never visited Peter at his boarding school once. Not at the beginning when he had vanished into misery so deep that Clarry thought he must have died. Nor for the winter concert when (dressed in tissue paper kimonos) he, Rupert, and Simon astonished the whole school into wild applause with their performance of “Three Little Maids from School.” Not even recently, when scarlet fever had raged through the classrooms and corridors, and Peter had been one of the victims.
“I don’t mind Father not bothering about my new school,” said Clarry. “I truly don’t. It’s better in a way. It saves him worrying too much.”
“It saves him moaning too much, you mean,” said Peter, grinning.
“No, I don’t! Well, only partly. And it’s more private this way.”
Clarry had had private worlds before, but they had all been in her head. She had never had a private world with real live people in it. Now she had. At the new school she was not Peter’s nuisance sister, Rupert’s little cousin, her grandparents’ youngest grandchild, Mrs. Morgan’s kitchen helper, Miss Vane’s Good Deed, and her father’s personal destruction.
At school she was Clarry Penrose.
People noticed her smile and her too-long skirt, her quietness, her chopped-off hair, and the speed with which she could climb a rope in the gym. She became a person who walked miles to school, could be asked about math, honestly loved Latin, would remove unwanted spiders, and never had any money. A bit of an oddity, but so were many others. It was a good school, and accepted oddities as long as they had brains.
It was in every way different from the Miss Pinkses’. There was a rose garden in the front; a graveled drive; long, light corridors; and bare, cold classrooms. There was a library with a polished floor and blue curtained windows that held window seats, a gym with wall bars and ropes, a chemistry lab with Bunsen burners and a whiff of sulfur and explosions, a biology room with a field mouse family in a tank.
Every morning began with assembly: one hymn, one Bible reading, one prayer, and a list of announcements. These covered everything from the correct place to store outdoor shoes to Those in Our Thoughts Today. Those in Our Thoughts Today only ever made the list once; the following day they were expected to have got over whatever it was that had caused their mention. The school motto was “Quaere verum,” which meant “Seek the Truth.” It should have been “Do Not Fuss.”
Not fussing was the basic expectation of every girl, and came in very useful when it was time for the midday meal. This was either mince and two boiled potatoes, fish and two boiled potatoes, or cold meat and two boiled potatoes, and was always followed by half a hard green apple and an optional portion of rice pudding. If you didn’t eat your midday meal no fuss was made. You simply went to a little room by the gym and signed a book to say you were fasting. Fasting people were given a spoonful of cod-liver oil and a glass of lukewarm milk, a combination so appalling that people seldom signed the book twice. Clarry, ravenous after her hurried bread-and-butter breakfast, long walk, and five morning classes, managed her dinner with no problem at all.
She became friendly with a lot of people very quickly. Friendly, but not friends, except for Vanessa, much older and seldom seen beyond a cheerful wave now and then. Friends her own age at school meant more than Clarry could manage: tea at each other’s houses, birthday presents, and shared outings at weekends. Even so, there were a lot of people to call “Hello, Clarry!” in the mornings, and “See you tomorrow!” at the end of the afternoon. “Yes, tomorrow!” Clarry would call back, as she turned toward home.
Somewhere along that hour-long trek, schoolgirl Clarry was left behind. She would enter the door of the tall stone house as quiet as a shadow, scuttle upstairs with her books and her mushroom hat squashed under her coat, and reemerge in her old blue dress, as if the long school day had never happened. She was often hovering on the stairs when her father came home, sometimes with a book, sometimes with the knitting Miss Vane had recently introduced to her Sunday school pupils. “It’s a square for the Home Mission Blanket,” she told her father once. “Miss Vane is collecting them and sewing them together. We have to hand in one a week.”
“Excellent,” said her father.
“When she has one hundred and sixty it will be a whole blanket for a poor family,” said Clarry, encouraged by his approval. “We each have a color, but it has to be a dark color because of not showing the dirt. I’m maroon.”
“Very nice.”
“Mrs. Morgan made a stew this morning and I’m hotting it up for our supper and there’s greens and some apple pie from yesterday. Do you think it would be nice to eat it in the kitchen? It’s warmer there.”
“Eat yours in the kitchen by all means,” said her father cordially. “A very good idea! I will have mine in the dining room, as usual.”
“Oh,” said Clarry. “Oh. Would you rather I was . . . rather I stayed . . . would you like me to keep you company?”
“As a matter of fact, I have some thinking to do,” said her father. “Another day, though, I would be very pleased to have you.”
It became a pattern that they both soon followed: Clarry in the kitchen with her dinner and a book. Her father
in the chilly dining room with his thoughts. However, on Sundays they ate together, discussing with a strained sort of politeness knitting, the weather, the latest letter from Peter, whether Clarry was happy (“Yes, thank you, Father”), whether her father was happy (“Yes, thank you, Clarry”), and whether Peter was happy (“It really isn’t relevant at this stage of his life”).
Other more interesting topics introduced by Clarry, such as the acquisition of a kitten (“I don’t think so”) or what one would buy first should one acquire a million pounds (“I really don’t have time for such silliness”), always resulted in Clarry’s father leaving the table before pudding, saying, “Do carry on without me. I have a great deal to do.” It might have been lonely for Clarry, but it wasn’t because of the vast amount of homework school expected her to accomplish. No one could be lonely with Latin and French to translate, chemistry practicals to write up, literature to analyze, and endless quantities of math.
I am so glad I moved to the high school, wrote Clarry to Peter and Rupert.
I knew you would be, replied Peter smugly. About time you started using your brain.
Rupert also wrote back to her:
Congratulations on surviving so much education! The trick is knowing when to stop. My whole aim now is to ESCAPE!
He was eighteen, and finishing school just as Clarry was beginning. He had endured twelve years of it but the grandparents had no intention of allowing him to escape. Oxford was their next plan for Rupert, Oxford University, whether he liked it or not, because it was a family tradition.
Count me out! wrote Rupert to Clarry. Family tradition be blowed! I’ve done my share. Twelve chalk dust years of “Sit there and learn this!” Twelve years of clammy morning chapel! Twelve years of listening to inky men in flapping black gowns tell me what to do! TWELVE ENDLESS STULTIFYING YEARS AND THEY THINK THEY’LL MAKE ME GO TO UNIVERSITY! NO, THANK YOU!
More and more, as she grew older, Clarry was the person to whom Rupert wrote with his dreams and schemes and startling ideas. Clarry tried hard to understand, even when she didn’t agree, especially about school and university. After all, it was wholly her fault that Rupert had been sent away to boarding school when he was only seven.
I think Oxford would be wonderful, she wrote back, but I do see what you mean, because sometimes I dream I am back at the Miss Pinkses’ and in my dream I run away down the stairs, and down the stairs, and down the stairs, but I am always still there. The grandparents are furious with you, though. My father says you are the first in the family for three generations not to aim for university.
“What, girls too?” I asked, and he said, “Obviously not counting the girls.”
“I don’t think obviously not counting the girls is fair,” I said. “Why should the girls never go, even if they would like to do, and the boys always go, even if they would rather not?”
So Father went away.
Most of the time there is only Father and me in the house, me in my room right at the top and him in his room right at the bottom and all the empty rooms in between, but yesterday was lovely because Vanessa came and stayed the night. She said, “Give my love to Rupert whenever you write.”
Mrs. Morgan says to tell you it’s a load of nonsense to go to university. You’ll have to be done learning one day, she says. She thinks you should be on the stage!
I have been thinking about our summers in Cornwall. The long rail journey, and the feeling of getting closer and closer. Then, toward evening, the train stopping at last at the little station and there you always were, waiting and waving. It was the best moment ever. Perhaps you might like to be a railway porter, Rupert. You’re good at meeting trains.
I have other plans just now, replied Rupert, by way of a cheerful crumpled postcard. However, one day I may be a railway porter, but only at one station and I will only meet one train, which no one will be allowed to travel on except Peter (perhaps) and you.
Usually Clarry shared her messages from Rupert, but not this one. The breezy jokes were typical Rupert, but ‘other plans’? She wondered, and put it away privately, under her pillow, where it gave her uneasy dreams.
At the end of Rupert’s last term of school he didn’t go back to Cornwall. He had a friend whose family lived in Ireland, a fiery-headed footballer named Michael who had won the Latin prize, and he went home with him instead.
“Is he nice?” Clarry asked Peter.
“I suppose so,” admitted Peter grudgingly. “Everyone said he was a bit mad, but I think they say that about a lot of people. He was very brainy. So brainy he didn’t get expelled when he stole a car.”
“Stole a car? Whose car?”
“The Head’s. The Old Fish’s.”
“What did he do with it?”
“Oh, just went off for a weekend. He brought it back all right.”
“Well,” said Clarry, “if Rupert has to go to university, at least he’ll have someone good fun to go with.”
“Perhaps,” said Peter, but to Clarry’s surprise he seemed suddenly worried.
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh.” Peter shook his head irritably, as if shaking away an annoying thought. “That chap’s going into the army. Like his father. Silly fool.”
“You just said he was very clever!”
“For goodness’ SAKE!” snapped Peter. His mood was not improved by the arrival of a postcard that same afternoon.
Having a lovely time, wish you were here, wrote Rupert. Lots of love, and DON’T WORRY!
Clarry and Peter were not having a lovely time. It was summer, as gold and green and blue as any summer they had ever known, but this year they were not in Cornwall. The grandparents, exhausted by Rupert and his battles, had decided they had had enough of grandchildren. Vanessa had been whisked away by her mother to visit an aunt. Only Simon was about. He trudged across town every few days to ask, in the most roundabout way he could devise, for the latest news of Rupert, always beginning, “Vanessa said to ask . . .”
“He’s having a lovely time,” Clarry told him, the day after the postcard.
“Yes, I know that,” said Simon petulantly. “Sailing on the lake and all those dances . . .”
“What?”
“Well, that’s what he said, anyway. On a card that came for Vanessa . . .”
“A postcard?”
“Yes. Shamrock and a donkey. But it didn’t say anything about what he was going to do next. That’s what I . . . Vanessa . . . we . . . were wondering if you knew.”
“Oh,” said Clarry, so startled to hear about the postcard to Vanessa that she couldn’t think what else to say. “No. No, sorry, Simon. He hasn’t told us anything. Do you miss him?”
Simon stared down from his lonely bony height at Clarry and asked, “What do you mean?”
“I miss him,” said Clarry. “So I thought you might too. Is Vanessa all right?”
“Yes. Staying with Mum at our great-aunt’s cottage. Drawing things. Dresses. And she says they speak French to each other all day to practice for when she goes to Paris. I mean, if she goes. . . .”
Then Peter came down and he and Simon went off together, Peter with his hopping limp, and the Bony One with his bones, and Clarry returned to her books. In her high room at the top of the house she walked in private landscapes so vivid that the real world went almost unnoticed, except now and then, when very startling things happened.
“Rupert’s joined the army,” said Peter. “So has his stupid Irish friend. I knew they would. I guessed they would. The fools, the fools, the fools!”
Twelve
IT WAS 1914, BRITAIN WAS at war with Germany, and Rupert had joined the army. The grandparents in Cornwall acted like it was the end of the world. Peter was appalled. For the first time in his life, he and his father were in agreement. When Clarry tried to argue he snapped, “You don’t understand.”
It was true; she didn’t.
One day in August there was a great banging on the front door and calling in the street, “Come ou
t! Come out! Wherever you are!” and there was Rupert, taller, broader, browner, eyes sparkling, laughing with delight at the sight of Peter staring from an upstairs window, at Miss Vane, hands clasped to her heart as she peeped through her curtains, at Mrs. Morgan’s great bellowed “Ha!” and most of all at Clarry’s flight to be the first to reach him. He swung her in a circle, kissed her on both cheeks, and said, “I’ve got two hours. Aren’t you going to let me in?”
They let him in, and then they gazed at him. He was in uniform, khaki brown, brass buttons, pockets everywhere. A flat-peaked khaki cap was pushed way back on his head. He looked wonderful.
“I left my kit at the station,” he said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to have kit. “We’re on our way to camp. Gosh, this is better than school!”
“Good thing Father’s not home,” said Peter, and Clarry said, “Yes,” in thankful agreement, without taking her eyes off this new glowing Rupert.
“I know, I’m the family disgrace,” he said, grinning. “Hurry up! Don’t waste time! Where shall we go for lunch?”
“What?”
“I won’t see you both for ages. Grab a jacket, Pete! Clarry, stop worrying!”
“But this dress . . .”
“It’s fine. Blue. Is it blue? Quite all right.”
“Shall I get my Sunday white? We’ve never . . . what do people wear for lunch? I’ve got a skirt Vanessa gave me.”
“Clarry, you’re fussing! Come on! Get a hat or something. Ready, Pete?”
“Money,” mumbled Peter, his cheeks burning red with shame.
“I’ve got it. We’ll grab a cab at the corner.”
“A cab!” protested Clarry. Cabs were for going to the train station, when you had more luggage than you could carry, but still, willy-nilly, she found herself being driven down the street, with Rupert in front and Peter beside her, and soon they were seated in a large hotel, and she was confronted with a menu as big as an atlas.
“Hurrah, Cornish lobster!” said Rupert, reading over her shoulder. “Iced soup, lobster salad! Lemonade, Clarry? Ginger beer? Raspberry? Beer for me, what about you, Pete? A beer for you?”
