Bilgewater

F
ICTION

A Long Way From Verona

The Summer After the Funeral

Bilgewater

Black Faces, White Faces

God on the Rocks

The Sidmouth Letters

The Pangs of Love and Other Stories

Crusoe's Daughter

Showing the Flag

The Queen of the Tambourine

Going into a Dark House

Faith Fox

Missing the Midnight

The Flight of the Maidens

Old Filth

The People on Privilege Hill

The Man in the Wooden Hat

Last Friends

The Stories

 

F
OR CHILDREN

Bridget and William

The Hollow Land

A Fair Few Days

 

N
ONFICTION

The Iron Coast

 

I
LLUSTRATED

The Green Man

Europa Editions
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New York NY 10001
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www.europaeditions.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 1976 by Jane Gardam
First publication 2016 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
ISBN 9781609453381

Jane Gardam

BILGEWATER

for
WP + V
^A
x 47
1918-1965

“Youth is a blunder.”
—D
ISRAELI

“Now—
counter to the previous syllogism:
tricky one, follow me carefully, it
may prove a comfort?”
—T
OM
S
TOPPARD
(
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
)

T
he interview seemed over. The Principal of the college sat looking at the candidate. The Principal's back was to the light and her stout, short outline was solid against the window, softened only by the fuzz of her ageing but rather pretty hair. Outside the bleak and brutal Cambridge afternoon—December and raining.

The candidate sat opposite wondering what to do. The chair had a soft seat but wooden arms. She crossed her legs first one way and then the other—then wondered about crossing her legs at all. She wondered whether to get up. There was a cigarette box beside her. She wondered whether she would be offered a cigarette. There was a decanter of sherry on the bookcase. It had a neglected air.

This was the third interview of the day. The first had been as she had expected—carping, snappish, harsh, watchful—unfriendly even before you had your hand off the door handle. Seeing how much you could take. Typical Cambridge. A sign of the times. An hour later and then the second interview—five of them this time behind a table—four women, one man, all in old clothes. That had been a long one. Polite though. Not so bad. “Is there anything that
you
would like to ask
us
?”

(“Yes please, why I'm here. Whether I really want to come even if you invite me. What you're all like. Have you ever run mad for love? Considered suicide? Cried in the cinema? Clung to somebody in a bed?”)

“No thank you. I think Miss Blenkinsop-Briggs has already answered my questions in the interview this morning.” They move their pens about, purse their lips, turn to one another from the waist, put together the tips of their fingers. I look alert. I sit upright. I survey them coolly but not without respect. I might get in on this one. But don't think it is a good sign when they're nice to you, said old Miss Bex.

And now, here we are. The third interview. Meeting the Principal. An interview with the Principal means I'm in for a Scholarship. How ridiculous!

I can't see her face against the light. She's got a brooding shape.

She is a mass. Beneath the fuzz a mass. A massive intelligence clicking and ticking away—observing, assessing, sifting, pigeonholing. Not a feeling, not an emotion, not a dizzy thought. A formidable woman.

She's getting up. It has been delightful. She hopes that we may meet again. (Does that mean I'm in?) What a long way I have come for the interview. The far far north. She hopes that I was comfortable last night.

We shake hands in quite a northern way. Then she puts on a coat—very nice coat, too. Fur. Nice fur. Something human then about her somewhere. She walks with me to the door and down the stairs and we pause again on the college steps.

There is a cold white mist swirling about, rising from the river. The trees lean, swinging long, black ropes at the water. A courtyard, frosty, of lovely proportions. A fountain, a gateway. In the windows round the courtyard the lights are coming on one by one. But it's damp, old, cold, cold, cold. Cold as home.

Shall I come here?

Would I like it after all?

M
y mother died when I was born which makes me sound princess-like and rather quaint. From the beginning people have said that I am old-fashioned. In Yorkshire to be old-fashioned means to be fashioned-old, not necessarily to be out of date, but I think that I am probably both. For it is rather out of date, even though I will be eighteen this February, to have had a mother who died when one was born and it is to be fashioned-old to have the misfortune to be and look like me.

I emerged into this cold house in this cold school in this cold seaside town where you can scarcely even get the telly for the height of the hills behind—I emerged into this great sea of boys and masters at my father's school (St. Wilfrid's) an orange-haired, short-sighted, frog-bodied ancient, a square and solemn baby, a stolid, blinking, slithery-pupilled (it was before they got the glasses which straightened the left eye out) two-year-old, a glooming ten-year-old hanging about the school cloisters (“Hi Bilgie, where's your broomstick?”) and a strange, thick-set, hopeless adolescent, friendless and given to taking long idle walks by the sea.

My father—a Housemaster—is known to the boys as Bill. My name is Marigold, but to one and all because my father is very memorable and eccentric and had been around at the school for a very long time before I was born—was only Bill's Daughter. Hence Bilgewater. Oh hilarity, hilarity! Bilgewater Green.

I will admit freely that I very much like the name Marigold. Marigold Daisy Green is my true and christened name and I think it is beautiful. Daisy was my mother's name and also comes into Chaucer. Daisy, the day's-eye, the eye of day (
The Legend of Good Women
, Prologue 1.44), as my dear Uncle Edmund Hastings-Benson now and then reminds me (he teaches English as well as Maths). It seems to me a great bitterness that anyone with a name so beautiful as Marigold Day's-eye Green should be landed with Bilgewater instead however appropriate this may be. “In the end,” says somebody, “almost everything is appropriate”, and indeed the boys over the years have had a peculiar flair for hitting on the right word for a nick-name.

Nick-name. Old Nick's name. Bilgewater.

Bilgewater Green.

 

My father and I live alone in his House except for about forty boys who live on the Other Side through a green door and along a corridor with Paula Rigg the matron. Our side—father's and mine—is called the Private Side and we share it only with a cat or two and Mrs. Thing who comes in and does for us. Mrs. Thing changes from time to time and the cats vary as cats do and the boys arrive and pass by and depart like waves in me sea, but father and I and Paula are constant. Paula has been matron on the Other Side far as long as I can remember.

I am at the local Comprehensive. I don't eat at home at all in term-time with my father as he takes Boys' Breakfast and I have a hunk and a gulp at the kitchen table before I take myself off along the promenade to school, eat lunch there and have a tray of supper in my room prepared by Mrs. Thing if she remembers or if I'm lucky by Paula while father takes Boys' Supper in Hall. But even if father and I don't eat together and I am out of the House for most of the day and he has Prep. and Private Coaching for part of most evenings we spend most of the rest of our days together and usually in utter silence.

For if I am Bilgewater the Hideous, quaint and barmy, my father is certainly William the Silent. Except when he is teaching he is utterly quiet. Even when he is teaching he never, so I'm told, has to raise his voice. He is amazed to hear of new masters with sweaters and fizzy hair cuts who smoke in class and have trouble keeping discipline. He shakes his head over this. He scarcely speaks at all. He moves so quietly about the House that you never know which room he's in. You will walk into his study and he'll just be standing there, perhaps looking down at the chess board, or up at the Botticelli Head of Spring above the fireplace or sitting with a cat on his knee looking out at the garden. He never rustles, coughs or hums. He never snuffles (thank goodness) and he never, ever, calls out or demands anything. If Paula comes in and puts a cup of tea down beside him he looks up at her and smiles as if that is what he has most yearned for: yet he would never ask. His peacefulness is everywhere he goes—in the House and out of it. He has not the faintest idea that I am ugly and we are very happy together.

 

The Greens of course are thought to be odd and father's silence and my ugliness and the lack of what is called a social life is much remarked upon. In the holidays my father likes a school empty of boys and so we have hardly ever gone away. At my school I make no friends and have always sat and set off home again alone. I am hopeless at games and have joined no clubs. All the other girls who live in streets or estates around the town have always seemed to be in ready-made groups and gangs, and from the beginning, because of my eyes, I have always had to sit in the front of the form-room just below the mistress's desk, which is not popular territory. I have for years stayed in at Breaks, too—we are allowed: it is Free Expression—because for ages I didn't seem able to pass the time out of doors in the playground. Later on, when I could read it was easier, but it is not often warm enough on this part of the Yorkshire coast to read for long out of doors.

There was a girl once I got on with—the Headmaster's daughter at father's school. She was around for a bit when I was very little—a funny girl. But she went off to boarding school and the Headmaster has a house in France and a mother in Wiltshire. They get out of the North as fast as they can in the holidays. I've not seen her for years.

 

Let me describe how it is with me and father.

I drift in from school.

“Hullo father.”

“Ah.”

I put down my homework and walk about his study for a while. I find myself beside the fireside stool where the chess is out. I stand and regard the chessmen. After a while I move something and time passes. Boys clatter by outside. My father sits—working or reading. Or sits.

“I've moved a bishop.”

“You've moved a
bishop
?”

Time passes.

My father comes across and regards the board from the opposite side. He says, “Ah.”

We stand.

Then he sits down still looking at the board. Then I sit down still looking at the board. At last he says. “So you've moved a bishop?”

Then spring, pounce, he moves a pawn and we sit.

After a while I say, “Oh hell.”

“Ha.”

“That's it then.”

“Hum.”

“Isn't it? It's check? It's—”

“Well—”

“It's mate.”

“No. No.
Think
, Marigold.”