Bilgewater Page 9

  “Something wrong, Marigold?”

  “No, Miss Bex.”

  “Are you in a draught?”

  “No, Miss Bex.”

  “You look as if you have a stiff neck.” In the corridor she put out a hand on my arm as I went by. “I shall be looking in on your father tonight.”

  “I like your shoes,” said Aileen Sykes in a corridor stopping the coach momentarily en route to Versailles. “Where d’you get them?”

  “Marks.”

  “They’re great.”

  “I say—look at Bilge’s hair,” said Penelope Dabbs. “All fancy.”

  I wished we didn’t have to wear uniform at school. I wished they could see the long orange cardigan. I wore it and an assortment of the rest of them—sometimes five garments at a time—about the House at home. In the evenings I walked slowly down through the gardens outside my bedroom window, very slow and tranquil and picked up Grace and together we strolled about the Playing Fields or along the Promenade, very slowly by the sea. Whistles and vulgar bellows emerged from the cafés and the dodgems as we went by.

  “I say, you do get whistled at. Don’t you notice it?” I asked Grace.

  She smiled. “Perhaps they’re whistling at you.”

  I would go to bed in a glow. I dazed into sleep. I did no work. Oxbridge was near. I paid no heed. I was the only one trying for Oxbridge but the rest of my form were all trying for somewhere and they were in torment. They were like the condemned with the eye on the axe, they were “terrified,” they were “dying,” they “hadn’t a chance.” They weren’t going to “get in anywhere.” They were learning up their notes each night, they were assailed by terrible dreams.

  Not I, Bilgewater. I sank into my bed and the minute my eyes closed, there was Jack Rose and I striding behind him in the orange cardigan and a bronzy tweed skirt I hadn’t yet actually got, two red setters at our heels over the purple moor, a castle in the background with butlers, and dancing till dawn. We walked like Titans or people out of Country Life into the sunset.

  But it is funny. Neither Paula nor father nor Puffy nor Uncle Edmund Hastings-Benson seemed to notice a thing. I stood about in conspicuous places like the House steps at twilight. “Oh good,” came Paula’s voice from above, “could you just run over to School Matron and get—”

  Father drifting in from somewhere or other, seeing my new outline on the steps stopped and said, “Hullo. Are you wanting to speak to me? Oh Marigold, it’s you! Didn’t recognise you for a moment.” I stood about the study on Thursdays looking the picture of experience and sophistication. “Glass of wine?” said Uncle Edmund. “Oh—sorry Bilgie. Thought it was Paula for a minute. Must be getting old.”

  “D’you like my shoes?” (He always looked downwards at females.)

  “Shoes? Splendid, splendid.” He was even more abstracted than usual. “How’s the new friend? Seen Grace lately?”

  That evening I flounced off in exasperation towards the Fives Court and lingered there as I had never dreamed of doing, until the boys began to go in to bed. Nobody noticed me. It was a dark, blustery November evening and the wind got hold of my new tufts of hair and knocked them into spikes. Terrapin came by and looked at me, hard.

  “What is it?” I said. “Don’t you know me?”

  “I know you,” he said.

  He was quieter, Terrapin, now, and I noticed that he had grown most surprisingly tall and bony lately. His hair, which had once hung like yellow matting, was shorter and he was more lively looking. He wasn’t in school uniform. He had a long skinny sweater on and long thin skinny denim trousers. His cheek bones stuck out. He looked like an Arthurian boy.

  Terrapin an Arthurian boy? I must be mad!

  “You look different.” But it was I, Bilgewater, speaking to him.

  “I’ve torn my school trousers.”

  “Haven’t you any more?”

  “No,” he said, “just these. What is it?”

  “What’s what?”

  “I thought you wanted to say something.”

  “Me? No. Oh no. I was just going in.”

  “So’m I,” he said, “I’ve a prose to do.” He went off, unsmiling. I waited and I could have wept—at the stupidity of it, the pathetic, feeble, self-indulgent—

  “D’you like my hair,” I yelIed, running after him. I could have hit him.

  “I can’t see it,” he called in the dark.

  Then he turned and came back. “Bilge—” he said, “this Grace—”

  “Yes?”

  “She won’t do you any good.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I don’t know quite,” he said, frowning. “I don’t know. She’s just not your sort. She’ll make a mess of you.”

  “What do you mean?” I said and tossed my hair. “She’s stopped me being a mess it seems to me.”

  “I liked you before,” he said.

  “First I’d heard of it.”

  He winced and I was reminded of Uncle HB when he said that I was vulgar.

  “I did,” he said. “I liked you. You were yourself then.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Since the time of the Abbot Wilfrid unlikely institutions have obtained at the school of his foundation. There is good historical evidence according to father of his being an unlikely man himself, packing in a hundred things at once where one or two would have been enough for most saints and earned them quiet sabbaticals of prayer and peace on one of the rocks along the coast for many a year to come, or south in clement Canterbury.

  Wilfrid seems to have been a crack-on man, a man for throwing on a cloak and picking up a staff and setting off for face-to-face discussion. Always on the move—Ripon, Guisborough, York, north, south, up and up the one hundred and ninety-nine steps to the howling cliff top at Whitby and the high black walls of its abbey where Hilda his female counterpart, the first unmistakable Yorkshirewoman, awaited him to discuss synods and organisation and what to do with the holy Caedmon, the herdsman who saw angels and sang songs about them in the local dialect.

  Wilfrid, father had no doubt at all, accounted for the intense traditional activity in the school around the end of the Christmas term and the idiotic necessity for holding the school play, the school dance, the seven-a-sides at the same time as the Oxbridge entrance examinations—Hilda down the coast perhaps having pneumonia or being distracted by Caedmon or the pirates when it was all first arranged. Had she beeen consulted—or perhaps transported into the person of Paula—she would never have allowed such nonsense at all. “How can you expect,” she would have said, “public examinations to take place in a hall which is at night used for the production of a panto and the next evening—the first day of the Oxbridge Scholarships—for the Annual St. Wilfrid’s Grand Dance?” And only a man of the most appalling energy would then have arranged for the Rugby matches to take place the day after, knowing that three-quarters of the team all in hard training were likely also to be examinees.

  For the first time, the November of my transformation, a decision was taken about this proliferation, and taken for a wonder at one of father’s Thursdays. I happened to be present because I had been called down to speak to Miss Bex who had looked in again about something to do with my syllabus and Paula said if I went to say goodbye to her perhaps it would get her off.

  She had now gone.

  The subject of conversation was the ancient and immemorial one in that room of the ability of boys.

  “Wilson? Fool.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Three Cs and an E, he won’t make Surrey.”

  “Good chance in the re-take.”

  “Not a hope. Day boy. Knocking about the streets.”

  “Glegg then?”

  “Worse. Hull if he’s lucky.”

  “Sykes?”

  “Pretty sist
er,” said Uncle Edmund HB. “Won’t do anything though. Lives in Pearson Street.”

  “They used to say,” trembled old Price, “that the people in Pearson Street have blacklocks in their cake tins.”

  “There are curious things in Oxford and Cambridge cake tins,” said Puffy. “What about Rose, HB?”

  “Oh a dead cert. A dead cert. Solid chap. All-round fellow.”

  “Not so sure,” father frowned.

  “Great Scot, William, if Rose went to bits—”

  “He might. It’s happened. Remember Wellington-Wells.”

  Long silence while Wellington-Wells’s extraordinary failure to reach Oxford in 1910 is contemplated once again.

  “Oh Rose’ll be all right,” said Puffy.

  “Terrapin?”

  “Now there’s an interesting one. Anything might happen. Odd chap.”

  “I’m growing interested in Terrapin,” said Puffy, “There’s a great deal there. He used to be so very plain. What do you think, William?”

  “Eh?” said father. “Terrapin?”

  “You know him best. More or less lived here all his vacations when he was a junior didn’t he? Some trouble at home.”

  “Mmmm,” said father. You can get nothing out of him in what he feels to be a private matter. “Marigold,” he said, “oughtn’t you to be in bed—or doing some work of some sort?”

  But I hung about the door pretending to look at the chess.

  “He’s grown up lately—that’s what it looks like to me. More able to take things,” said Uncle Edmund.

  “He’s had a lot to take,” said father almost in an aside, corkscrew searching. “He is a very gifted—aha. Yes. Here we are.”

  “Well he’s no rugger player or dancer and he’s not in the play so he may do you credit,” said Uncle Edmund. “Get some sleep. God knows how many scholarships we lose through this idiotic Christmas socialising. Can’t see why we can’t at least get rid of the dance. Or get the damn thing over early.”

  “We can’t this year,” said Puffy. “Hall’s still being decorated.”

  “Well, hold it somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  “On the pier.”

  “On the pier! Good God man, the saints would turn in their graves.”

  “I don’t see why. I don’t suppose there was a dance at all when the school was an abbey. Can’t see all those monks giving the boys a Christmas twirl.”

  “I remember the pier the night of the zeppelins—” Price began and was astonishingly interrupted by father saying, “You know—Why not hire the pier? It would be rather jolly. I like piers.”

  “—all little bundles of flame dropping into the sea—”

  “If it was on the pier I think I’d go.”

  “You might GO!” I cried from the door.

  “Yes. Yes.” He had quite forgotten I shouldn’t be there. “Yes. Why not? I might enjoy a dance.”

  “Good heavens!”

  “I always used to go you know when your mother was alive.” (Uncle HB dropped his chin upon his chest.) “Yes. I’d rather like a dance.”

  The effect of this was twofold in that first I reeled away to my bedroom and sat before some work for an hour doing it like a rather cheap calculator that needs re-charging, and thinking all the time “Father! Father! Horrible. Indecent!” and second that I then went off to find Grace and tell her.

  “Terrapin interesting! Terrapin brilliant. Terrapin having much to bear. Terrapin grown up” was what I meant to discuss. Yet for some reason when I reached Grace’s room I didn’t. I only mentioned the saga of the dance. I decided to lead the conversation round to Terrapin again on Sunday when father, Paula, and I always have lunch together.

  Father was in one of his more usual moods—that is to say he was looking as if he wanted to fly into the stratosphere and consider the meaning of meaning and Paula and I were peacefully at ease with him and some excellent Yorkshire pudding.

  “D’you think that Terrapin’s got different lately, Paula?”

  “I do not.”

  “They say he’s changed.”

  “He has not.”

  “They say he’s matured.”

  “Whatever does that mean? Cheese matures.”

  “Well don’t people?”

  “There’s several opinions.”

  “He’s less ugly.”

  “Whatever’s that got to do with it? Whatever’s looks—?” Her eyes flashed and her hair swayed.

  “You don’t know what it’s like to be plain,” I said.

  “Now leave off that. BEWARE OF SELF PITY. Mind, I begin to understand it, lookin’ at that show.”

  “What show?”

  “That tatter-heap atop of the head.”

  “It’s a feather cut.” I shook it. In fact I was delighted. At least and at last she had noticed.

  “Cost a pound so it’s rumoured. Around the bazaar.”

  “Well father paid. He didn’t mind. I’ve got it. Mother left me some. Grace found out from Uncle HB. My mother,” I said, “knew what a young girl would need.”

  “Didn’t do her much good,” said Paula. “You don’t need haircuts in heaven.”

  “Well I’m not—”

  “Nor likely to be. Dear Lord! Looks!”

  “He is very remarkable,” said father finishing the apples and custard and flying down from somewhere round the back of Hayley’s comet. “In my view. Possibly—is there any more?”

  “No. I did ask you.”

  “Custard?”

  “Too late.”

  “Who’re we talking about?” I asked.

  “Well Terrapin. Tom Terrapin. D’you know, Paula, Marigold, just between the three of us I think Tom Terrapin may be the cleverest, most original boy I’ve ever taught.” He sat back and gave us his smile.

  “Then he’ll likely miss a scholarship,” said Paula who knows more about boys and examinations than any University Board. Her sick-room and the San are stripped for action in examination weeks with all the beds turned down, hot water bottles at the ready, though in fact hardly any of them need them after a short burst of her wisdom and incisive reflections at the idiocy of judging anyone by some bits of paper scribbled down in a few hours when the balance of the mind is disturbed. Father says anyway that you can’t judge anybody’s real ability until after the second Degree.

  “That is not the point,” said father, “I wasn’t talking of scholarships. I was talking of Terrapin. He might be. I think he might be—um, aha, something. Marigold,” he said with the same air of apparent logic that honestly does make him a very trying man, “why don’t you ask him to the dance?”

  CHAPTER 12

  The Pier Pavilion is a long, wooden yellow shack on the landward end of the pier which trails a little way seawards and then drops down towards the water in a mess of black and broken spikes. A ship had hit the pier in the war—it is the most undramatic and yet treacherous piece of coast, so flat that from out to sea you can’t see it at all, and unwary sailors think they may have made a mistake and crunch up on to the shelf of rock that runs out just beneath the cold, grey water that has made havoc since the Vikings. There is a chain across the pier about a hundred yards beyond the back of the pavilion and beyond this nobody goes.

  Most of the pavilion is on dry land but at the back towards the stage the boards beneath your feet grow cold and you can look down between the cracks and see the sea whitening rhythmically beneath you. When I was a small child I once went to a horrible fancy-dress dance there and sat alone for hours on a tip-up red velvet seat round the side of the ball room, glaring through my glasses at all the fairies and clowns, decked out myself in whatever it was that Paula had found for me at the last minute, speaking to no one. All that I really knew of the pier was the hell of that evening and the terrors of the final parade: th
at and the cracks with the sea underneath, and the great tumult of the band.

  But I had a distinct conviction nevertheless that the Pier Pavilion was not much of a place—even then, and it must be much more battered by now. I passed it when I walked home from school and fish and chip papers scraped around its doors. Pop music, flashy lights, and vomiting locals hung about its shadows of a Saturday night, unbeautiful among the tilted fishing boats drawn up outside upon the promenade and the swash and glimmer of the sea and the shore beyond. It was a real rough dive.

  Yet Grace, when she stopped me at school on the corridor between lessons, seemed delighted.

  “Have you heard?” she said. “It’s fixed. The pier.”

  “What! The Old Boys’ Dance?”

  “My father O.K.’ed it yesterday. It’s to be just before Half Term so’s to get it over before all the Christmas flap.”

  “Have you seen it?” I said.

  “The pier? Of course I’ve seen it.”

  I remembered the pink hairdresser’s and how she’d found that when she had hardly been in the town a couple of days. I had a decided fancy, all of a sudden, that Grace knew the pier quite thoroughly.

  “You don’t mean you’ve been there?”

  She smiled from the heights.

  “Good heavens—Awful people—” I thought of Aileen Sykes and Beryl. They were the sort. Bare mid-riffs. Purple lips. Someone once told me that Beryl’s mother worked there at the ticket office—eating biscuits and knitting. A wave of loyalty to ancient St. Wilfrid’s flooded over me.

  “This’ll be a private dance,” I said, “I don’t see the pier being the place for a private dance.”

  “Do you go to many private dances?” asked Aileen Sykes weaving up. “Northanger Abbey I suppose.”

  “I just—No—I’m just surprised,” I said, “I don’t see it being all that—partyish—at the pier.”