Life: An Exploded Diagram (14 page)

Which caused Maddie to roll her eyes.

Maddie had a boyfriend back home in London. He was called Giles. They hadn’t done It yet, hadn’t Gone All the Way, but they’d gone a good part of the distance. Maddie’s detailed accounts of their swoony gropings and fumblings enthralled and horrified her roommates in equal measure.

“Gosh, Maddie, you never!”

“Urgh! Doesn’t that feel horrid?”

“No, actually. It’s rather delicious.”

One late afternoon, Frankie and Maddie found themselves alone, walking back to school along the short and shadowy avenue from the playing fields. They were in sports kit. The wind off the Fens goosepimpled their skin.

Apropos of nothing, Maddie said, “God, I love snogging. I miss it like mad. I can’t wait for Christmas.”

Frankie nodded sympathetically. “Yes, it must be awful. Giles sounds like a brilliant snogger.”

“He is, actually.”

Frankie considered this for a few paces. Then she said, “I . . . When you and Giles. I mean, when you’re snogging . . .”

“Come along, Mortimer. Out with it.”

“Yes. Sorry. What I mean is, Maddie, you seem to do it for hours and hours. What’s actually so good about it?”

Maddie stopped walking, so Frankie stopped, too.

“It gives you the most wonderful sort of a flutter. Down There. Do you know what I mean?”

Frankie shook her head. Maddie sighed. Then she grabbed hold of Frankie’s hair (which was tied back in a ponytail, for hockey) and tugged her face to her own and pressed her mouth against Frankie’s, which had opened in surprise, or possibly protest. And then Maddie’s tongue was wriggling about in it, as if urgently searching for something valuable it had lost among Frankie’s teeth. Maddie’s other hand slid down Frankie’s back, pressing her belly into hers.

“Mnnn . . .”

Frankie tried to push Maddie’s tongue away with her own, which only encouraged it. After this wet battle had gone on for some time, Maddie’s teeth fastened on to Frankie’s lower lip and nibbled at it.

Eventually Frankie fought free, and the two girls came apart and stood looking at each other, breathing hard.

Frankie wiped her mouth on her wrist and said, “
Bon Dieu.
”

“
Exactement,
” Maddie said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t feel a bit of a flutter downstairs, darling.” She adjusted her sports bag on her shoulder. “That’s called French kissing, by the way. Did you know that?”

On the first day of the summer term, Maddie walked into the dormitory and tossed her blazer and her beret onto the floor. Somehow the other girls knew and were agog.

“Maddie?”

“Tell us, Maddie.”

She fell cruciform onto her bed.

“I am no longer a virgin,” she declared to the ceiling. “In fact, Giles and I have been at it like billy-o the entire hols. I can’t imagine how I’m going to get through a whole term without it. I expect I shall get Frustration Migraine. Which is an actual medical condition, incidentally. The Victorians suffered terribly from it.”

The girls considered this in silence.

Then serious bespectacled Teresa Candless said, “Aren’t you worried about, you know, getting pr — in the family way?”

Maddie waved a hand languidly. “We take precautions, naturally.”

Veronica gasped. “Maddie! You don’t mean
birth control,
do you?”

Maddie laughed and sat up. “
Birth control!
God, what an expression, Drewe. Sounds like something on a spaceship or something.
Switch on the birth control, copilot. We’re going in!
’ Ha!”

She regarded poor Veronica with benign contempt.

“If what you mean is, do we use contraceptives,” Maddie said, “the answer is yes. Of course we damn well do.”

This was awesome. Venial sin compounded by defiance of the Holy Father’s sternest prohibition! The girls’ shock was sharpened by incomprehension. It was Frankie who asked the question.

“How, exactly?”

After a long moment, Maddie got off the bed and went to the door, opened it a crack, and peered up and down the corridor. Then she went to her suitcase, unbuckled its straps, and rummaged. She brought out her toilet bag, opened it, and sat back down on the bed. She opened the bag and produced a little yellow package, displaying it on the palm of her hand.

“Behold,” she said, looking at Frankie, “a French letter.”

“A
what
?”

“Giles calls them rubber johnnies, actually, which is rather vulgar, but never mind. The proper term is a
sheath.
Like what you keep a knife in.”

She peeled the packet open and plucked out a brownish, flaccid, circular object the size of a large coin. The girls goggled at it. Its very presence in Saint Ethelburger’s was like one of Satan’s horny toenails appearing on the chapel altar during Mass. Just to be on the safe side, Teresa crossed herself, twice, rapidly.

To Frankie, it looked like a thin, greasy toffee.

After a pause she said, “How does it work, Maddie?”

“How does it
work
?”

“Yes.”

“Dear God,
ma chérie.
Giles puts it on his thingy, of course.”

“His willy?”

“Of course his willy, you goose. What did you think? His
foot
?”

Frankie studied the limp object. By now she knew a good deal about Giles’s fabled willy, but she couldn’t imagine how the two things might fit together. Maddie read the blankness in her gaze and sighed theatrically.

“Lord love us and save us,” she said, and cast her eyes around the room. They came to rest on the hair brush on Frankie’s bedside cabinet.

“Pass us that.”

Frankie did so. Maddie eased the French letter onto the end of the brush’s handle, where it hung, drooping. She circled its thick rim with her thumb and forefinger and slid it, unfurling it, up to where the handle widened.

The three other girls stared at the result. The oily johnny hung slackly from the brush, with its little nose aimed at the floor.

Maddie sensed their disappointment.

“It’s not like that on an actual willy, of course,” she said.

A couple of months later, Frankie sulked through her O-level exams. The last one was Latin, and as soon as it was over, she went back to the dorm, where she tore off the hateful uniform and cut it to shreds with a pair of scissors she’d pinched from the sewing room for the purpose. Then she dressed in proper clothes. There was no way she was going to lug her heavy suitcase, so she packed a few things into her sports bag. She walked unhurriedly past the chapel, whence came the reedy uncertain sound of Junior hymn practice, and down the drive. To her surprise — and slight disappointment — no one tried to stop her. She shinnied over the locked gates and marched through light drizzle up to the main road, where she hitched a lift in a butcher’s van. She cadged a cigarette from the driver and without much difficulty charmed him into taking her to Cambridge station. At Norwich she phoned her mother from a call box. Nicole was dismayed, though not surprised; she’d already had a call from Saint Ethelburger’s. Sister Benedicta had made it plain that Françoise’s return would be neither expected nor welcome.

Her father ranted at her, of course. She endured it more or less silently. He sentenced her to hard labor, which is how she came to be working in the strawberry fields. And how she came to test Maddie’s snogging technique on awkward but absolutely gorgeous Clem Ackroyd.

F
OR WEEKS, SOFT
fruits gave them cover. After strawberries, there were gooseberries, black currants, raspberries. Frankie worked her sentence, weighing and loading, stacking the stained empty punnets. And at every opportunity, at increasingly risky opportunities, she would excuse herself through a gap in a hedge, slip into the shade of a tree, amble behind a trailer, to be with Clem. They kissed avidly, clumsily, not knowing what to do with their sticky, juice-stained hands. They did not talk much; they were short of time, and breath. When they did speak, death often cropped up.

“I was dying for that.”

“God, my father would kill me if he knew I was . . .”

“My dad’d skin me alive . . .”

“Wouldn’t it be delicious to die like this?”

At first it was a game; it was a hazardous mischief. But not for long. They each soon found the hot days shrinking into the stolen minutes — ten, fifteen at most — when they were together. Other time became numb.

Clem trembled, waiting in hiding for her. Shook physically. He found these moments hard to bear because it was like being too much alive. His own blood seemed to torment him.

“Yer got it bad, comrade,” Goz said, riding home.

The boys still went to the fields together but worked separately now. Clem’s distraction was proving uneconomic.

“Have I?”

“Yeah. And yer playing with fire. It’s a good job yer so bleddy wet.”

He couldn’t stop thinking about her. It was ridiculous. It was like a mental illness or something. A continuous rerunning of little films in his head. Her eyes slowly opening after a long snog. Tipping her head back to swing the hair away from her face. Pulling a damp strand of it from her lips. The movement of her bum as she walked away. At home, he sat in the living room trying to stop the projector, black out the images. Silently reciting the names of the kings and queens of England until the shameful bulge in his jeans subsided and he could stand up.

Ruth turned away from the telly.

“Wassup with you, Clem?”

“Nuthun. I’m orright.”

“You look like someone who’re lost a fiver and found a shillun.”

“I’m orright, Mum. Bit bored, is all.”

“You usually like this program.”

“Yeah. Not very good tonight, though, is it?”

George said, “Do you mind? I’m trying to watch this.”

Clem checked the state of his lap. He stood up. “I might go out for a bit.”

He spent the nights praying that his bed wasn’t creaking too audibly. Luckily, his grandmother was often loudly murmurous in the nights, praying for something else altogether. Clem synchronized his devotions with hers.

Hiding, waiting for him, Frankie felt angry. Angry that she hungrily fancied a badly dressed working-class boy like Clem Ackroyd. Angry that she couldn’t be with him whenever she wanted to. Angry that she should have to conceal herself from people who worked for her father. Then Clem would step through a gap in the hedge or brush aside a veil of leaves, and her breath would catch in her throat and her whole body would come alight.

Over dinner, her mother looked at her. “What’s the matter, darling?”

“Pardon, Mummy?”

“You’ve hardly eaten anything. Don’t you like it?”

“It’s good. I’m just a bit tired.”

Nicole turned to her husband. “Gerard, how much longer are you going to continue this farce, treating your daughter like a laborer? She is exhausted. She can hardly lift the food to her mouth.”

“Nonsense, Nicole. It’s doing her the world of good. Look at her. She’s the picture of health.”

“She is too much in the sun, Gerard. She looks like a Gypsy. Her nose is peeling.”

Mortimer dabbed his lips with his napkin, then grinned.

“Very well,” he said. “Françoise, I’m putting you on parole. Time off for good behavior.”

She looked across at him, frowning, not understanding.
Parole
was French for “word” or “speech.”

“You don’t have to work anymore,” her father said.

Frankie tried to keep her hand steady, lowering the heavy silver fork onto the tablecloth.

“It’s okay, Daddy. I like it, actually. The people are nice. Funny.”

“Françoise,” Nicole said. “What has that to do with anything?”

Frankie forced a shrug. “Nothing, I guess. I just like being in the fresh air. And it’s something to do. I’ll work until the end of the season.”

Gerard Mortimer leaned back in his chair. “Well said. Spoken like a farmer’s daughter, eh, Nicole?”

His wife pulled the corners of her mouth down and cut a neat slice from her veal for the spaniel who sat by her chair.

On the day following this conversation, Frankie did not plant her mouth on Clem’s as soon as they were alone. She did not even look at his face. Instead, she unbuttoned his shirt, silently concentrating, as if it were a strange and difficult task.

“Frankie?”

They were kneeling in the lee of a low brambly hedge where the long lines of raspberry canes petered out. The sky was paper white and the air was heavy and thick.

A vortex of midges coned above their heads.

She opened his shirt and put her arms inside it, holding him, her palms against his shoulder blades. She rested her head on his shoulder. After a moment or two, he put his arms around her, his fingers meeting on the hard nubble where her bra fastened.

“Frankie?”

Still she wouldn’t speak. He lifted his right hand and buried it in her hair. Cautiously, he caressed the place where her neck met the base of her skull, marveling at how fragile it felt. He was certain that this silent embrace was her way of telling him it was over. That she was finishing with him. It made him gasp, as if he had been slapped by a gust of sleet out of the hot summer sky. He pulled her head away. She lifted her face. He was baffled to see that her eyes were wet, yet she was smiling.

“What?” He failed to keep the anger, the vast disappointment, from his voice.

“You smell nice,” she said. “For a boy.”

Then at last she kissed him, more urgently than ever before. She lifted herself up on her knees, and her hands rose up to the nape of his neck. Her nails pressed into his skin, hurting.

He was convinced that this was their good-bye kiss, the parting embrace.

So when they broke apart, he blurted, “I love you, Frankie.”

It was a shameful and desperate declaration. They were like foreign words. He had never heard real people use them. He’d shocked himself. He needed her to say that she loved him, too. To cancel out, to pardon, what he’d said.

She didn’t.

Instead, she said, “We can’t go on like this.”

It was like something you heard on the telly. He lowered his head like King Charles I inviting the executioner’s ax.

Frankie leaned away from him, pushing stray hairs from her face.

She said, “D’you know the little lane between Borstead and Bratton Morley?”

He looked up at her gormlessly. “What?”

“Do you?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s a place where it goes through some woods. Skeyton Woods, they’re called. There’s a bridleway that goes off the lane. It’s got an old gate across it. Know where I mean?”

“Yeah. Frankie —”

A man’s voice called from dangerously close by, startling them. Frankie got to her feet, stooping to stay below the level of the raspberry canes.

“Meet me there tonight. Seven thirty. Okay?”

He nodded. Then she was gone.

Clem shoved his bike through the gateway and concealed it in a shallow ditch screened by bracken. He knew the place well, had known it all his life. He had a faint memory trace of walking in these woods with his mother when he was little. Before they’d moved to Borstead. For some reason the memory had a sad coloring to it.

A quarter of a mile or so from where he now stood, waiting, was the Dip, an old gravel pit overhung with trees. In the days before he’d become an outcast Grammargog, he’d been one of the Millfields Gang, who’d bike to the woods to play hectic daylong games of stalking and warfare there. Beyond the Dip, the bridleway forked. The left branch emerged, eventually, onto a farm track behind Bratton Manor. He assumed that Frankie would come from that direction. After an eternity of ten minutes, he could hardly resist the urge to set off to meet her, to get to her sooner. But she’d said the gateway. It seemed to him that his insides were actually vibrating with indecision. And the swelling fear that she would not come.

She wouldn’t, he realized; she’d never intended to. She’d planned this cruelty as a way of ending things between them, knowing that he’d be too hurt, too humiliated, ever to go near her again. This sudden, terrible certainty untethered his heart. He groaned aloud, and although he was alone, he felt shamed by the hot tears that blurred his vision. He took refuge in anger. At himself, for spoiling everything by saying he loved her. By getting serious. How
could
it get serious, seeing who he was and who she was? He’d scared her off. He cursed himself:
You effing idiot, Ackroyd.
He made himself curse her:
Stuck-up bitch.

He’d go home. Sod it. In a minute. Definitely.

After a while, he heard a soft thudding and looked down the track. Christ, someone on a horse. He was about to duck back out of sight when he realized it was her. Bucking up and down in the saddle to the easy rhythm of the horse’s trot. A brown horse dappling bright then dark in the light slanting through the trees. Seeing Clem, it slowed, hesitated. He saw her urge it forward by tightening her knees and heels against its body. It came on cautiously, tossing its head a little, whiffling. She was wearing clean jeans and a beige tweed jacket over a white T-shirt. Her hair was partly tied back, leaving long tresses hanging on either side of her face. Clem stuck his hands into his pockets, trying not to look like someone about to faint from relief. Or joy. Or fear of horses.

“Easy, boy,” Frankie said, bringing the uneasy horse to a halt. She swung herself out of the saddle.

She said, “Hello,” as if to someone she’d met by chance, and walked to the horse’s head. She put her hands on its hard flat cheeks.

“This is Clem. Clem, this is Marron. Isn’t he gorgeous? This is one of our favorite rides.”

She looked at Clem at last. “Say hello. Wait, give him these.”

She took three sugar cubes from her jacket pocket.

“Sit them on your hand, like this.”

He let the horse slobber them up, then wiped his hand on his jeans.

“Have you been waiting ages? I’m sorry. But listen, I had this terrific idea. I told Mummy that I was feeling guilty for neglecting Marron while I was working in the fields. I said that I’d try to find the time to take him out once or twice a week when I got home. And she bought it! She said that it was a
très bonne idée.
It means we can meet in the evenings! Don’t you think that was clever of me?”

He did, yes, and was dizzied by these new possibilities. But her brittle-sounding chatter was like a barrier between them. He was keenly aware of Marron’s rolling eye. And, yet again, of how achingly beautiful this girl was, how impossible all this was.

“Clem? Don’t you?”

“Yeah. Brilliant.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I . . .”

He moved toward her. She turned her head to glance back down the track, and he understood.

“This way,” he said, and walked to where a narrower path led away into the bracken. The horse was reluctant to turn and was nervy on the path. Frankie led him by the bridle, making encouraging
chut-chut-chut
noises. After five minutes, they came to a little dell inside a group of ancient beech trees, their trunks like huge clenchings of gray-green muscle. Light came in shifting dazzles through fans of leaves that descended almost to the ground.

“Will this do?”

Frankie surveyed the scene. “Hmm. Is this where you bring all your girls, Master Ackroyd?”

“Only the special ones.”

She looped and knotted Marron’s reins onto a low branch, then regarded Clem mock seriously.

“How many special ones have there been?”

But he was too impatient for games. “None. You’re the first, Frankie. Honest.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Come here, then.”

They stooped under the fringe of the leaf mantle. Their feet rustled the rust-colored leaf litter. Frankie took her jacket off, spread it on the ground, and sat on it. He knelt in front of her and slid his hand into her hair, finding that delicate place at the top of her neck. He leaned toward her.

“No,” she said, “like this,” and lay on her side, resting her head on her hand.

They had never lain down together, and Clem hesitated, fearing he would not be able to hide his uncontrollable stiffening from her.

“Come on,” she said. “We haven’t got
all
night, you know.”

“You mustn’t go too fast,”
Maddie Travish had told her.
“Because if you do, the boy will think you’re a tart. So no touching anywhere on the first three dates, okay? After that, a hand on the bum is perfectly acceptable. If you like him, if his breath doesn’t stink or anything like that, you can let him touch you up here. But only outside the bra. Definitely not
inside
the bra until at least the fifth date.”