by Susan Hill
7
SHE WENT OUT with Malcolm Crowley four times that term. Mary made sideways remarks. Olive did not say that she went because she was unsure how to refuse. And the evenings were always enjoyable. She liked him. He did not have her interests but they had things in common, small things, and when he held her hand in his own warm one, she felt safe. When he put his arm round her, she smelled his cleanness. It became familiar. When he kissed her, his dry lips pressed together, she – what did she feel? Nothing. Something. She did not want to recoil. She felt – for some reason, the word ‘interested’ came to her. In the last week of term he asked her to make a visit to his family. The suggestion made her panic but she did not know why. She was safe, wasn’t she? This was nice, kind, safe Malcolm Crowley.
She wanted to back away.
On the second weekend of the vacation she took the train to Cheltenham and she might as well have taken it home, for the Crowleys’ house was so like her family house, in a similar residential road, detached, with a small front garden and a large back one, with apple trees, overlooking playing fields. Edwardian. Solid. Rooms of the right proportion. A house comfortable in its own bricks and mortar. Fitting. Not imposing, but not reticent either. Olive felt both reassured and strangely disappointed, for she had wanted difference, a challenge even, her horizons expanded. Here they were safely reinforced and bounded, and by the Crowleys, he, larger and heartier than her own father yet still not unlike him. They would have recognised one another.
Malcolm’s mother was not like Evelyn Piper. She was shyer, quieter, nicer. She smiled a lot. She merged into the background in a way her mother had never done, and from choice.
It was all very suitable.
Malcolm took her into town in his father’s MG sports car, and then on, into the country. Soft low hills. Gentle meadows. Not dramatic country. Nothing to startle.
Olive looked at his face as he drove. How had he come to be chosen as Faustus? Yet he had done it well. Donning the scarlet and black, he had donned the terrible, tragic, doomed figure. Of course, actors were not the characters they played, any more than writers were the characters they invented. And yet …
That evening they went, all four of them, to the local theatre to see The Winslow Boy.
‘Very satisfactory,’ Peter Crowley said. ‘You see what they mean by “a well-made play”.’
‘You could have been an actor,’ Olive said to Malcolm. But it turned out that acting was not a serious career, acting was a hobby. Hobbies were important though, and he might well join the local amateurs, once he was settled in his work, and life.
‘Nice people,’ Moira Crowley said. ‘You’ll meet some really nice people.’
‘Isn’t that how you two met? Over a prompt book, as it were?’
Peter Crowley took her arm. She did not quite want it, though not because it was in any way unpleasant, but because it seemed somehow too proprietorial. She felt herself being drawn into a place where she was not sure she wanted to be.
They sat drinking a last cup of tea, Malcolm beside her with his arm along the back of the sofa, not quite round her. His sister Belinda was coming tomorrow. Husband. Two children. He was a Deputy Head Teacher. They lived twenty-odd miles away.
‘They knew one another at school,’ Moira said, and indicated a wedding photograph on the dresser. Belinda, puffy taffeta sleeves and a floral doughnut on her head. Is that how it would be? Should be?
And if it was, why not? Olive had no answer to give. What she felt inside herself, an unreality, even a panic, was no answer. She glanced at Malcolm’s hand, alongside her own shoulder. A clean hand. That was right. Clean.
As she crossed the landing to the bathroom, she heard ‘Really nice girl’ murmured from behind a door.
There were two bathrooms. No jumble of other people’s toothbrushes and flannels.
‘Really nice girl.’
There were books in her pleasant, quiet bedroom – good though not new novels, the Bible, The Oxford Book of Verse, a Roget’s Thesaurus, a Complete Shakespeare. Some Enid Blyton school stories. ‘Belinda Crowley’ written in careful ink. Anne of Green Gables. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
She took The Forsyte Saga from the shelf and plunged into the family and their world at once.
Just after midnight, she heard a sound. Silence. Then a soft sound again. Her door handle turned.
‘Hello?’
‘I just … you know. Are you all right? Everything you need and – all that?’
He wore pale blue pyjamas and a navy dressing gown with red piping that looked new.
‘It’s all really – really nice. Thank you. I’m fine.’
He came into the room. Hesitated. Closed the door. She did not know what to say and so after a moment turned back to her book, but the words blurred on the page.
‘It’s a really nice room,’ she said.
He looked at her. Why was he looking at her?
‘Are you all right, Malcolm?’ she asked, after several more moments.
He came over and climbed onto the small double bed and lay down and rolled on his side towards her.
Olive’s mouth went dry. She could say nothing. Not ‘What do you want?’, not ‘Go away’ – anything she might have said that she really meant would have sounded impolite. And she was a guest.
‘Put your book down. It’s a heavy book.’
She did so, keeping her place first, carefully, with the ribbon marker.
There was silence. He reached over her and switched off the lamp.
‘This is all right?’ he said. ‘This is OK? You’re all right with this?’
She did not know. Not when he touched her body. Not when he tried to remove her nightdress and had to ask her to do it. Not when she smelled his familiar smell and felt his unfamiliar smoothness. Then she felt something … a small stirring of pleasure, even a shadow of excitement. Of wanting. Wanting more. Yes.
‘You’re all right, aren’t you? You know what I mean … this is all right?’
She supposed he was asking whether she was happy to accept it. Liked him. She was unsure.
She did accept him and then felt a pain that astonished her and with it a sense of having her entire self known by another person, as it had never been. The pain went on for a short time, and then stopped, but the sense of pleasure and wanting disappeared and the feeling that she was no longer her own self and never would be again did not leave her for years.
How to look him in the face the next morning? But he was as before, as usual. Olive felt as if they could all see through her, that she was transparent and they knew.
Belinda. Nigel. Tim. Penny. Roast beef. Apple pie. Cheese. The children raced about in the garden. Nice children. Nice-looking. Could they see through her too? She knew that Belinda was appraising her and she did not want to be appraised. She did not want to be here. It rained and the children came pelting in. Belinda gave her mother some sort of meaningful look.
Olive picked up some plates and took them into the kitchen.
‘Why have you come to lunch?’ Penny had slipped in behind her, silent as a shadow.
‘Because they very kindly asked me.’
‘I see. Do you like them?’
‘Do you mean your grandparents?’
‘Everybody.’
‘I do.’
‘Have you got any children?’
‘No. But if I do, I hope they’ll be like you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re both so well behaved and you’re both fun and I love the colour of your hair.’
‘But Tim has brown eyes.’
‘And you’ve got blue.’
‘Blue eyes are best.’
She was not exceptionally pretty, but she had such spark. She seemed to quiver with life and energy. Beside Penny, her brother was dull. Nice. Well mannered. Dull.
The spark was everything.
Malcolm came in with more plates, Belinda with dishes.
‘I’ll get the rest,’ Olive said.
&
nbsp; ‘I’ll help you. I want to stay talking to you,’ Penny said. And took her hand and the spark and the life seemed to leap between them.
Olive looked round the front room where they had coffee and chocolates. A family. Malcolm had his arm along the back of the sofa again, not quite touching her.
Family.
She felt as if she were itching all over, with frustration, irritation and with the need to leave, now. Nice people. A family.
She never wanted to see any of them again.
8
‘ARE YOU HAPPY, Olive? You often look so serious.’
‘Do I? I’m sorry.’
‘Solemn. Yes, solemn is better. You were a solemn little girl of course.’
Was she? She did not remember feeling solemn. She had played, as small girls play, raced about the garden with friends, like Belinda’s children, laughed at silly jokes. She remembered one. She and Monica Peel had told it to one another over and over again.
‘What did the earwig say when it fell off the wall?’
‘’Ere-we-go.’
They had shrieked with laughter every, every time, so how could her father say that she had been solemn?
Her first year was over and she was home in Leamington for the long vacation. She went to the library for Victorian novels, for they were to have their time in the sun next term, and at the library, she saw a notice advertising a vacancy for holiday relief staff.
‘Strictly not a permanent post. Enthusiasm and a tidy mind important. No experience necessary as training will be given.’
‘I remember you, Olive, of course I do. I can’t think of anyone I would rather have to work here.’
Biddy French had been Librarian for as long as Olive could remember. Very short hair, in a bristle cut, which had always been white, above a soft, young-looking face. Eyes that looked and looked into Olive’s own, as if searching for something there.
She learned everything quickly, because she had often observed it, and because she was interested, deft, well organised. The library suited her. It was quiet even when busy, with a satisfying peacefulness when it was not. She had plenty to do but was never rushed. It would not have been a stimulating enough job for her permanently but it was a delightful way of spending that warm, sunlit summer and earning money.
Malcolm wrote, friendly, slightly awkward letters, words not being his forte. But he tried, describing, as carefully as in a school essay, the Italian resort where he had been with a friend’s family, and giving news of his own, and asking after her, wanting to know what she was ‘up to’. A couple of postcards came too, weeks after his return. One of them was also signed by Moira Crowley.
Olive wrote short replies, friendly, not intimate, and did not post any of them. She decided that, when her second year began, she would not see him again and so she tried to shut everything else about him out of her mind. It was not difficult. He had not made a strong mark.
It was hot for weeks. The grass on the verges and across the town parks turned yellow-brown. Trees shed their leaves early. The outdoor swimming pool was crowded every day with splashing, shrieking children. But in the library they kept the blinds pulled down, so that the rooms were cool and shady. People took refuge there. Old men stayed all day reading the newspapers and Biddy kept an eye but tolerated them.
On Fridays they stayed open until nine o’clock. Olive was stacking the last returned books onto a trolley ready to be shelved in the morning, Biddy was seeing out two last borrowers before locking and bolting the main doors. Staff came and went via a side exit.
Olive straightened her back and stretched.
‘Are you in pain?’
Biddy was standing behind her.
‘Not really, it’s just bending over the trolley – things are never at the right height. I suppose they can’t be, for everyone.’
She felt Biddy’s hands on her, massaging her neck and shoulder muscles.
‘Feel how knotted up you are! You must keep moving and stretching every so often.’
She kneaded her back. Olive felt the tension loosen, even while the pressure of Biddy’s hands was making her muscles burn.
She did not want this. She wanted to pull away but was not sure how.
‘Thank you, that’s better.’ She twisted slightly. ‘I’m fine now, really.’
Biddy’s hands went still but she did not take them away.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Oh …’
‘Do you smoke?’
‘No. No, thank you. I do have to get home.’
‘One drink though, surely … nothing serious but I do have a bottle of rather good sherry. I don’t suppose you’re a whisky girl.’
Olive shivered.
She liked Biddy French. She enjoyed working with her. She was pleasant and fair-minded, she ran everything smoothly, she was popular with the borrowers and put her staff’s welfare before her own. If there was an unpopular slot on the rota, Biddy would take it herself. If someone had to work after-hours, Biddy would.
Yet from the beginning, Olive had felt uncomfortable around her and was confused as to why, but the way Biddy looked at her sometimes made her feel awkward and she would try to get away to the other side of the library. Why? What could happen? Biddy French wasn’t dangerous. She wouldn’t … what? Wouldn’t what?
Now, she felt the hands on her back and shoulders and neck, kneading again, smoothing, feeling, and some obscure part of Olive had, even without her realising, wanted it to continue. In a moment of panic, she fled to the thought of Malcolm. Malcolm in her bed. Malcolm’s closeness and smoothness and it reassured her at once, it felt right, now that she remembered it, right in retrospect as it had not felt right when it had been happening. Not right. No, but not wrong. Not out of place, not unnatural, as Biddy French’s hands on her back had felt.
‘No, thank you but I really have to get home.’
She saw Biddy’s face for a split second, shadowed with hurt and disappointment, before she turned briskly, waving a dismissive hand.
Olive hesitated and then half ran towards the door.
9
DREAMS.
Dreams?
She woke at three o’clock and again at half past five and then lay as the moon washed like a gentle tide over the carpet, the wall, her bedcover. Her.
The moment she had surfaced and before the moonlight, she remembered Biddy French and felt anxious and uneasy. Yet she had only been concerned and kind.
She had been something else. Olive knew that.
There were women. She knew that too. She had read things and been surprised but not shocked. Puzzled. Even amused. And then forgotten about it. It held no interest for her. She remembered that, just once, her mother had referred to women who shingled their hair and wore men’s dinner jackets and ties. She had looked up from a photograph in an old magazine, of a tall, slender woman with very dark eyes and closely smoothed-down shingled hair, with a cigarette in a holder. She looked elegant.
‘But she’s in a play, isn’t she?’ Olive had said. ‘She’s acting.’
Evelyn’s face had set in an expression Olive had never seen before.
Until she was sixteen she had had long hair, tied back for school, put up for going out, or occasionally left loose, but it had come to irritate her, washing and drying it took too long, and so she had had it cut, and when short, it waved a little. Her mother’s was long and coiled at her neck, or plaited on top of her head, and at first she had regretted the loss of her daughter’s long, silky hair, knowing but not saying that men found long hair more attractive. But Olive had chosen, and besides, there had been no shingling, just a smooth bob to her chin. Women had short hair now, curly, or straight, often permed. It meant nothing. None of them, that Olive had ever seen, wore men’s formal shirts and trousers and dinner jackets, except on stage, in plays.
She should go to work as if nothing had happened.
Nothing had happened.
Had it?
She was on the mid
dle-of-the-day rota. Biddy would be there. So would Sandra. But it was not a late opening.
She wanted to call in and say that she was unwell. But she was not and she knew that Biddy would realise.
Go. Go in and face her and carry on as usual. Keep away from her if she was embarrassed.
‘Do you feel all right, Livi? You look a bit washed out.’
Her father always made breakfast – nothing cooked, but cereal and toast and tea and jam or honey and sometimes fruit. He laid the table, set everything out. They shared jobs, he did not expect Olive to wait on him.
‘I do things for myself when you’re away, after all.’
Now, he looked across at her, though not with more than a fleeting concern.
‘I just woke up too early.’
‘Not like you.’
‘No.’
There was a letter from Moira Crowley. Malcolm would be twenty-one in October. They were giving a large dinner party – hotel, friends, drinks, five courses, and a family lunch the next day. Of course she would be invited, this was just to let her know well ahead of the date, and of course she would stay.
‘Yours affectionately,
Moira.’
Of course.
Of course.
She showed the letter to her father. He put on his glasses.
‘And will you want to go? They seem very nice people but this is your life not mine … That is a friendly letter. But you don’t have to accept, you know. One rarely has to accept.’
‘I know. Of course.’
She realised that her father understood her better than she had known, and for a second, she wanted to tell him about Biddy French. He would have listened and understood and given sane advice if she had asked him for it. Far better tell him, as she could never have told Evelyn. She did not hesitate because of anything at all that he might think or say, but because of what she herself felt, her own uncertainty and embarrassment, which she had not yet made any sense of.
She replied accepting Moira’s invitation, and then wrote a second letter, addressed to ‘The Librarian’, resigning from her temporary job ‘because of unforeseen circumstances’. Biddy would have every right to withhold two weeks of her wages, or even insist on her finishing her time there.
