Bilgewater Page 19

  “Bilge,” one of the measles shouted and Mrs. Deering smiled. She looked as if once seated she would take very careful thought about disturbing herself.

  “All right,” said Boakes, “I’ll go.”

  I saw Paula’s suitcase on the floor beside her. “I brought it back,” she said and closed one eye.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “The—things—you left in the tower. Your—clothes.”

  “I didn’t know—”

  “Not very grand pyjamas. Still, I don’t suppose you were—?”

  “Shut up.”

  “He’s gone off with another one now. Oh you’re well out of it dear. He has a nasty streak. Mind, he did come after you next morning.”

  “Be quiet.”

  “He got the bike out again in the morning and went off to that Jack Rose’s. She said—the new one—she told me you’d just left with your uncle and some old vicars when he got there. He stayed on there a bit. Then he brought her—this other one to t’Hall back.”

  “I don’t want to hear.”

  “Back in to t’tower.”

  Boakes came in and there must have been something in my face because he said, “Whatever is it? D’you really want her to go?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Then she shall. Do you mind too much,” he asked Mrs. Deering, “can you tell us what we owe you? We think we can manage now. It was really the last couple of nights we needed someone.”

  “Well, well,” she said, “and I’m usually timely. Eight pounds.”

  “Yes. All right. Where’s Paula’s petty cash, Bilge?” He went out to find the money and Mrs. Deering leaned down in the rocking chair and flung open Paula’s case with all my awful clothes in—the ginger zig-zags, the old winceyette pyjamas. “There,” she said, sitting back. I scooped them out and ran out of the room and came back with the heap of black clothes and bundled them into the suitcase.

  “I’ve seen that coat many a time,” she said. “You looked a treat. Climbing on that bike in it in the middle of the night.”

  I thought I was going to cry, but Boakes came back and gave her the money and saw her and the suitcase to the door. I don’t think I moved one eyelash until he came back.

  “Of all the creepy old horrors. Wherever did you pick her up? She’s like Sycorax. The Furies. She’s terrible. She could really mess anyone up. She’s wicked.”

  I said then “I must go a minute,” and without stopping for a coat I picked up two of Paula’s carrier bags and ran as fast as ever I could out of the sick room, through the Private Side, out and down the steps through the drive and caught up with Mrs. Deering as she approached her bus stop.

  I called, “Hey.” The broad black figure stopped. “It’s our suitcase. The Matron’s suitcase. Can I have it back? I’ve brought some carriers.”

  At first I thought she wasn’t going to take any notice. A bus was coming up and she was smiling. “Going to me daughter’s,” she said. “Well it makes a change.”

  “Please!”

  “Well fancy you bothering! I’d have thought you’d be only thinking of what’s happened. They’ve gone off together you know. London, likely. They won’t find neither of them in a hurry there. Mind his family’s always been a bit funny. The father being a medium and Swedish. Lovely looking though. And the mother.”

  The bus had stopped. I grabbed the suitcase, shovelled the clothes into the paper bags and flung them under the stairs on the bus as she heaved herself aboard. I saw the sweet, soft folds of the sable coat sticking out of the top of one of them beside somebody’s sticky child’s push-chair.

  “She were a lovely girl, now. The new one,” said Mrs. Deering. “Well you can’t blame him can you?” There was some delay in the bus getting started for quite a lot of people were getting off and Mrs. Deering was blocking up the door, As they tried to get past her she leaned over to me and said, “There’s not much I don’t know, dear.”

  I turned away and carried the empty case back home, thinking about what she had said and sat down in Paula’s sitting room looking straight in front of me. The housekeeper had been in with the supper for the Sick Room and there was a bit of conversation going on in there, even some laughs. They were all much better, Boakes was nowhere to be seen, and there was no sign of supper for me. In a while, I thought, I’ll go and heat up some baked beans or something on Paula’s stove, but I didn’t. I sat on until how long after I don’t know, the phone rang.

  It was Pen for father. Was he with me?

  No.

  Later it rang again. It was Puffy Coleman to send good wishes to Posy Robinson—also to see if father was with me.

  No.

  Still I sat on. The sounds from the San. ceased. I went in and tidied up and put the lights out and sat on. At half-past ten father rang. He was over at the Headmaster’s taking charge of School House. Could Boakes and I manage?

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve got that old bird?”

  “We’re fine.”

  “Darling,” he said (the first time ever), “I know it’s your Oxbridge tomorrow.”

  “I’d forgotten.”

  “Don’t sit up. Don’t work late. Forget the sick room.”

  “They’re all all right,” I said. “All asleep. Couldn’t Jack Rose come back over here now? It’s Boakes’s Oxbridge, too tomorrow. I know it’s Rose’s as well, but Boakes is tired. He’s done such a lot.”

  There was a silence, then he said. “Jack Rose isn’t here, dear. He’s, he’s gone off.”

  “But it was Terrapin who went off.”

  “Jack Rose has gone off too.”

  “But they can’t both have gone off with Grace Gathering?”

  “Marigold,” said father, “I think you’ll have to know something. Rose has gone off with Grace’s mother.”

  “Hullo?” he said after ages, “Marigold? Are you still there? I suppose you’re a bit—shocked. I know that I—”

  I didn’t say anything at all.

  He suddenly shouted at the top of his voice, “Oh Marigold—for God’s sake find Paula.”

  I set about systematically taking every single thing of Paula’s to pieces. I began with the top left-hand drawer of her desk and worked downwards to the bottom—across the middle knee drawer, then down the right-hand side. I found nothing but House stuff—medical records, notes, handbooks, bits and pieces like sealing wax and safety pins and paper clips. In one drawer I found a folder and a box held together with elastic and I opened them without a qualm and found inside all kinds of things of mine: my first red dancing slipper when I was four (that hadn’t lasted long, I was like an elephant), a lock of hair stuck on a card and labelled “Marigold’s curl. First hair cut” and the date. There was my weight card from when I was born to three months. In the folder were all my really pathetic efforts at writing and colouring from about four to ten—all just about unreadable, and some feeble drawings. She’d labelled them Marigold’s Progress—also all dated. Then there were my music certificates and my O level certificate (I’d been wondering where that was) and two letters I’d written to her years ago when father and I had had four days in Scarborough. There was another box with a few letters in it and I grabbed it thinking that here at last there would be an address, but they appeared to be only from father ages ago when he had had to go to some Classics conference at Oxford. They seemed to be all about House matters but they were carefully tied up with pale pink ribbon.

  After the desk I looked everywhere—all through her dressing table, her wardrobe, her bookcase, her table drawers. I looked in old handbags, the box she keeps her stiff nursing collars in. There was not one hint of where she had come from in all the collection. It struck me that for the seventeen years of her life here there was very little to see at all—no records, few books, my mother’s old detested sewing machine. She appear
ed to have taken with her all her clothes. It was like going through the belongings of some old soldier, someone perpetually on duty, someone with no chance and no desire to do anything but serve a cause.

  What cause?

  I went and lay on one of the now-empty sick room beds—the one that Posy had had, but I’d had the measles so I wasn’t worried. At about midnight Boakes looked in. I was lying on top of the blankets with my hands behind my head staring at the ceiling.

  “Bilge?” he said. “You all right? You ought to be asleep. Exams tomorrow.”

  “So have you.”

  He lay down on the other bed.

  “Father’s over at School House.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Have you heard the latest?”

  “Yes.”

  “All this passion,” I said, “I suppose I’m pretty blind. Pretty immature for my age. I never guessed.”

  He got off his bed and came over and lay beside me on mine putting his arm round me and dropping The Comparative Method on to the floor with his other hand. “The school is foundering,” he said, “I don’t know what young people are coming to.”

  “Young people!”

  “Bilge,” he said, “were you terribly in love with Terrapin?”

  “Eh?”

  “Well—he always seemed to be so taken up with you. You could hardly have helped being. Good-looking and all that.”

  I put both arms round him and thought this is the second time I’ve been in bed with a boy. There now!—though goodness knows whom I thought I was challenging. I said, “It was Jack Rose really. Till I saw him at home. Terrapin—I’d known him too long.”

  “Too long?”

  “He was ghastly when he was twelve. He was ugly as me.”

  “You ugly? You’re mad. If you want to know,” he said, “I’ve never seen anything more marvellous than you.”

  “Marvellous?”

  “In that black dress in the Gothic tea shop in Durham. And marching through the Galilee chapel through the arcading under the crepuscular arches.”

  I said, “Oh Boakes! Oh Boakes!” laughing and crying at the same time. Boakes tightened his arm and solemnly took off his glasses.

  But something came suddenly before my own unspectacled eyes—a vision of the black dress and the soft and luscious sables being scooped out by me into the carrier bags. If one reads or thinks much about the roots of causality and coincidence one is always coming back to the moment of vision, the chicken or the egg. I leapt from the bed, I flew from the room, I fled to Paula’s suitcase and I flung it open. There inside the lid was what I had known all the time deep down: vast, black Paula letters saying

  PAULA RIGG

  323, CORPORATION ROAD,

  BUDMOUTH,

  DORSET

  “Doesn’t sound much like a farm,” I cried to Boakes who appeared looking very put-out in the doorway—“Where on earth—?”

  I wrote on a piece of paper, “Come Back. Come Back, Come Back. He needs you so,” and I addressed an envelope, found a stamp and ran out to the pillar box in the road opposite the House whose first colletion was at 7 A.M. Then I went back and slept soundly in my own bed till morning.

  CHAPTER 25

  The final papers of the Oxbridge were all right. That is to say that the entrance examinations for a place at Girton College, Cambridge did not strike me as being all that. This is what I told people when I came out of the examination room at school anyway. It was a small room called the Hot Plate as the dinners were often kept hot there after cooking and a good smell of shepherd’s pie hung about. It was gloriously warm. I was the only candidate and the room was still.

  “How was it?” asked Aileen Sykes, wildly friendly, as I came out.

  “Fine.”

  “I say—have you heard—?”

  “I must go now.”

  The afternoon paper seemed all right, too. It must be queer not being able to do mathematics. Miss Bex was waiting after it was over. “Now then, Marigold?”

  “Fine,” I said and marched off, stuck on my school hat and went home. I went by the promenade and kept my mind intensively on the beauty of the sea, the planes of the white sand and the rocks, the black, broken spikes of the pier. I could see old Pen marching along the sea’s edge with Puffy trotting beside him. Pen loped with slow, swooping steps, clenching the pipe. Puffy bobbed. The walrus and the carpenter. They were considering passion. Not oysters. Oysters are supposed to be aphrodisiacs. Did Lewis Carroll know?

  They were discussing passion and the shame of St. Wilfrid’s. I wondered if they’d told Old Price.

  “What d’you think, Price? The Head’s wife has gone off with the Captain of the School and his daughter with the best Classics brain we’ve had in fifty years. The Head’s in London looking for them all like Mr. Bennet. Bill Green is in charge of the School House and his Matron’s left him.”

  “Ah well. There have been these crises. I remember the zeppelins.”

  “And Marigold Green has been running her father’s House. They’ve all had the flu and the measles and she’s messed up her Cambridge Entrance.”

  “Cambridge Entrance? Dear me, do they have girls at Cambridge now? Dear me!”

  Had I mucked it up? Had I just—when I let myself think about it—had I just perhaps written my name over and over again on the paper like they say people do sometimes when they’re overdone? Or had I turned in blank pages?

  No—I was sure I remembered handing Miss Bex pages with writing on them.

  “What were they like, Marigold?” Father was briefly back in his study looking for things. Miss Bex was there yet again, pouring tea from a silver pot.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “I just came along to Hold the Fort,” said Bex, “and see you got some tea after all your endeavours. And I brought some little cakes.”

  Father was looking frantically about for papers. “I can find them,” said Bex, briskly. “I did a good tidy-up before you came in. Oh I understand these servant problems.”

  “I’ve got to go now,” I said.

  “Don’t over-prepare,” said Bex.

  “I’m afraid I must go, too,” said father. “I’m living at the School House just at present, Miss Bex.”

  “My dear! I have heard!” She gave him a long, very meaningful look. “But I can stay here. I shall be Of Use. I shall Man the Telephone.”

  On the stairs Boakes hung about. “Bilge—what were yours like?”

  “Oh fine.”

  We looked at each other without conviction.

  The next day was the general paper and I chose an essay called Coincidence. I wrote steadily, easily, fluently, unhesitatingly. I wrote of chess, relating it to mathematics, of the final appropriateness of events, of Shakespeare with reference to Hamlet, of The Tempest with reference to Sycorax, of the Eumenides, the “Kindly Ones,” with reference (veiled) to father, Mrs. Deering and the Reverend Boakes. I wrote of truth, and the necessity of it not to be manipulated and veiled in white samite, veiled in black sables, of Terrapin, of Terrapin’s versatile father—in philosophical terms of course. I ended with a dissertation on the mathematical peace experienced in the realms of chess, in the pathways beyond accident, coincidence or desire.

  I finished half an hour early and took pieces of my hair and plaited them carefully in many small pig tails, and when Miss Bex and the Headmistress arrived to let me out there were about thirty orange rat’s-tail lashes wagging about my head. They looked surprised.

  “Well, Marigold. How was it?” said Bex.

  “Oh fine.”

  “Good girl,” smiled the Headmistress. (Kind and quiet. I like her very much. I felt a heel.) “That’s a good girl.”

  “How was it?” said Boakes. “God knows,” I said, “except that I made an ass of myself. I let myself go. Well, no one expects me
to get in anyway. What was yours like?”

  “I covered some pages with words,” said Boakes. “The view of the Abbey from the window was very fine. And comforting.”

  “Well, it’s over and we can forget it,” I said. “No one expects either of us to get in.”

  “Where will you go instead?”

  “Oh—I don’t know. Teacher-training. Trainee at Marks and Spencer. I love Marks and Spencer. They have wonderful clothes. Has the post come?”

  It had, but there was nothing from Paula.

  CHAPTER 26

  The next five days I spent not doing things. I behaved in such a curious way that when I think about it now, at Christmas, I can’t believe that such a person ever existed outside the madhouse.

  I suppose it was the shock of having finished with school. Believe it or believe it not I had not realised that when Oxbridge was over, school would be over, too, for ever. Five to seventeen. All those years and years and years of bells. Such an age and age of school. Those preps and speech days and Aileen Sykes and Miss Bex. The awful gym lessons. The terrible dinners. The smelly lavatories. The frightful, pitiless games of hockey with me always running the wrong way. The sniggers, the friendlessness. But at the same time the pattern, the plot, the safety was now gone. The plans all made for you, the security of knowing that on Monday come wind or high water you would have to be doing Double Applied. That if anyone wanted you in a hurry they would know for certain you would be in Room Eight, over the Quad. The sureness of what to do next. The sureness that you were not just wasting your time—because you had no choice in the matter anyway. The sureness that free time was precious and that the sands and the sea and the park and the garden had heavenly properties because, like heaven, they were except at certain moments forbidden and inaccessible.

  Now I was utterly free. A master’s wife and an imported assistant master and Uncle Pen had taken over the House and I was not needed at home. The brief occasions when father came back to deal with the odd essential thing—like Easby’s parents who wanted to know why there had heen no trained nursing staff in the school when Easby nearly passed away (he was fine now) or when Posy Robinson’s mother came over with six rose bushes and a bottle of champagne and a heavenly pair of lamb-lined gloves for me, to thank us—were always marked by the presence of Miss Bex.