Bilgewater (11 page)

We were over in the Head's House in her bedroom in the attics. Posters covered the walls. There was a hi-fi and coloured rugs, a bed draped with shawls and things and a row of old dolls. The dressing-table had an army of bottles of make-up and jars of cream. A mobile was stuck to the ceiling with bluetack. In my unprecedented jeans and shirt I sat at the dressing-table undoing bottles and smelling them and I grinned.

“What's the matter? Haven't you thought?”

“I haven't. But I was laughing at ‘whom.'”

“Whom?”

“‘
Whom
do you think of marrying.' I was wondering how many people with green nails say ‘whom.'”

She looked blankly at me.

“All right,” I said, “I just find it interesting. I've lived more in civilised society than you have.”

“I wouldn't call Green's House society. It's hardly in the world. It's the most unworldly place—I don't know how you stick it. I'm the normal one.”

“I suppose so.”

I looked round her room again. From television plays and a few people's conversation I could tell that it was normal, but to me it was as familiar as a Tibetan monastery. In fact I would perhaps have felt a Tibetan monastery more ordinary, for my room and my father's room across the road were as bare as cells, with iron beds, grey blankets, one table each and a common denominationallong shelf of boolo. The grate into whieh I had flung my clothes had never needed a fire. Well, it may have needed a fire but it had never been given one. I had never had dolls and if anyone had bought me a mobile I would not have known what to do with it.

There was however my upright piano and a picture of Winston Churchill in a sort of Chinese boiler suit. I don't know how that had got there, I had certainly had nothing to do with it. Looking round Grace's room with its huge poster of some young man gazing into a pool with indeterminate flowers growing all over the place and a slinky female eyeing him from across the bank I thought perhaps that I might take Winston Churchill down.

“D'you like it?”

“What?”

“Narcissus.”

“Who?”

“The picture. Hasn't he got a marvellous spine?”

I looked quickly at the row of knobs and away. I still couldn't look at naked boys. I wondered for about the millionth time why Grace had been expelled from both Cheltenham and Dartington Hall.

“Go on. Look. He's heavenly.”

“Not exactly heavenly,” I said taking a quick glimpse through one eye.

“Put your glasses on. You can't see that close up without them. When are you going to get some decent ones?”

“I might. It's a bit of a waste—”

“Look—
make
your father buy you some. Edmund says he could. You don't have to wear all that National Health wiring. Get some gold ones. They're marvellous. People are buying them and putting plain glass in. They're dead fashionable.”

“Dead fashionable,” I said.

“What?”

“It's just—funny. With ‘whom.'”

“Look Bilge,” she said, “do shut up about words. Think of what you look like. You may have poor eyes but other people haven't. It's anti-social. You look a million times better especially since you washed your hair, too, but you've got to keep
at
it. Looking good.”

“Oh, it isn't worth it.”

“Of course it is. Look—who do you think of marrying?”

“‘Who' this time. Farewell Dartington Hall.”

“They say worse things than ‘who' at Dartington Hall.”

I left the dressing-table and lay on the floor and rolled about on it banging my head now and then into the sheepskin rug. I have noticed in literature that the physical movements of the young are seldom accurately described. Then I got up and pressed my face into the attic window. Boys walked below in twos and threes in their black blazers. It was windy. Leaves flew and spun. The pages of the exercise books under their arms whitened and flapped. The smaller boys ran and knocked each other about. Sometimes a master in a black balloon of a gown crossed the green grass towards the cloisters. A bell rang somewhere and the boys—some of them—began to run. Saturday morning school had a more light-hearted look about it than on weekdays and I watched it with, well—love, I think—as my mind went about.

“You know,” I said, “I don't much care for you saying ‘Edmund.'”

She painted another long nail and said, “You simply have not a clue about men, have you? You have no
feeling
for men.”

“I wouldn't say that.”

Jack Rose's figure appeared below, unmistakable in a First
XV
blazer and the Captain's segmented cap of black and white diamonds. He loped on his powerful legs and the minions scattered at his approach like Don John of Austria's. I got hold of Grace's window catch and clung on to it for support until my heart had stopped thundering.

“I wouldn't say that.” This is the best conversation, I thought, the best and most promising and the most real that I have ever had in my life—and bother Paula and chess and character-building and silence. I have arrived. I am normaI. I am like the others.

I wonder then, why am I saying nothing about where I am going at Half Term?

But I was not ready to go looking for an answer to this. I was not ready even to think about it myself. I had heard nothing more about it since Jack Rose had asked me the first week of term and though I had asked my father if he had had a letter from Mrs. Rose and if so, please could he open it, I had the most extraordinary impediment in my speech about discussing things further. Father and I had hardly been apart from each other for a weekend in my whole life. To go to Jack Rose's without father, without anyone, seemed so unlikely and fanciful that I rather wondered if I had imagined the invitation altogether. The afternoon of its being handed out by Jack had been a very weird one—Terrapin sitting concussed in the changing rooms, not speaking. I had become a little concussed myself perhaps, just looking at him. I remembered telling Terrapin. Perhaps I had invented the whole thing just to annoy him? After all it was the afternoon of my nervous breakdown on the Headmaster's lawn.

 

But though I put the Half Term visit out of my mind I found that my interest in my new image had grown to immense proportions. Not a shop window down the High Street or the Prom. was free of my gaze and I looked endlessly at my hands. I twirled my feet. I wore the new shoes every day—even at school. I began to give a sort of toss to my head, quite spontaneously, at no fixed moment, accompanied by a half-closing of the eyes.

“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.”

S
ince 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.