The Golden Day (6 page)

‘Have you got some work to get on with? Don’t answer me no, because I know you have. What work have you to get on with?’

Deirdre pulled out a book.

‘Writing,’ she stammered.

She held it up, but Dr Strangemeadows was supremely uninterested.

‘Very well. Writing. Sit down, girls, and get out your writing books and continue with whatever work you have been doing with Miss Renshaw. And,’ she raised a hand in the air, ‘do not waste my time telling me she has given you nothing to get on with because I know that to be absolutely untrue. I expect each one of you to work hard, without making any noise, while I go and see what on earth has happened.’

She was gone, instantaneously, like an apparition.

‘We’re in big trouble,’ said Cynthia.

Nobody answered. Shocked into obedience, the little girls pulled out their writing books and picked up their pencils, filling in the blanks between the words on the page. Subject, Predicate, Noun. These were things to cool their panic. Finite Verbs, Adverbial Clauses, Adjectival Phrases. These things were eternal – they could not change or disappear, like Miss Renshaw. The little girls filled in the spaces and they waited. Something would happen, they knew, very soon.

And it did. The next person to arrive, within minutes, if not moments, was the deputy headmistress, Mrs Arnold. Again, they sprang up like jack-in-the-boxes as she came in the door.

‘Sit down, sit down, girls, please,’ said Mrs Arnold.

Mrs Arnold was thin and grey and her back was bent, and she oozed cigarette smoke. Her hands shook as she spoke and she often stopped to cough and catch her breath. But her eyes, under the black-rimmed glasses and deep in the wrinkled face, were invariably kind.

‘Now, let me say first, nobody is in trouble,’ said Mrs Arnold.

They did not believe her. They couldn’t. They knew they were in trouble, very big trouble. They had lost their teacher!

‘I just need to get a few facts straight,’ said Mrs Arnold, sitting herself on Miss Renshaw’s cluttered desk, making a space by pushing back a pile of papers and a tin of coloured pencils. ‘I’ve just been speaking with Dr Strangemeadows. Let me understand.We seem to be missing Miss Renshaw, is that right?’

They nodded.

‘So let’s just take this step by step. Miss Renshaw took you down to the Ena Thompson Gardens this morning. For a lesson of some sort, is that right?’

They were silent.

Then Georgina muttered, ‘To think about death.’

Dr Arnold leaned forward with her good ear.

‘What was that?’

Elizabeth with the plaits intervened in a louder voice: ‘To write poems.’

Mrs Arnold coughed and spluttered.

‘Very good, very good, to write poems.’

‘Yes,’ said the little girls.

‘So down you went. So you sat in the Gardens together, and what – talked about what you were seeing, hearing, smelling? To write poems, these are the sorts of things you need to think about, aren’t they?’

They nodded.

‘Have you written poems, Mrs Arnold?’ asked Bethany, wiping tears from her cheeks.

Mrs Arnold was not to be diverted.

‘So, there you all are, writing poems. And at some stage, I take it, you were separated from Miss Renshaw? She went somewhere?’

Silence.

‘To get a drink? Something like that?’

Silence.

‘You see, girls, I can’t understand how you became parted. You were in the Gardens, with your teacher. How is it that you lost sight of each other? How is it that you’ve come back to school without her? This is the part I simply cannot understand.’

She broke into more coughs. She put a hand on the desk to steady herself. Some papers fluttered to the floor, settling like soft birds.

The cave. The cave. Morgan. The cave.

We won’t mention this, will we, girls? We won’t mention this to
anyone. It will be our secret.

‘Goodness me, we’d better find her then,’ said Mrs Arnold.

She straightened up to leave and the little girls once more all rose to their feet.‘Get on with your work, quietly now. Someone will be up shortly to take over until, er, until Miss Renshaw comes back.’

‘Mrs Arnold?’ Bethany put up her hand. Her face was wet and woebegone.

‘Yes?’ said Mrs Arnold, pausing at the door, her hand on the handle.

Bethany tugged on a tear-sodden plait.

‘Miss Renshaw will come back, won’t she?’ she asked.

‘Of course she’ll come back.’ Mrs Arnold broke into a mystified smile. ‘She’ll come back, you silly child. There’s no question of that. She’s just down at the Gardens, looking for you all. Dear me.’

And she left, looking down at the ground, shaking her head. They heard her footsteps starting down the stairs.

‘We should have told,’ said Martine, glancing around furtively.

They knew what she meant. They should have told Mrs Arnold about the cave. About Morgan. Morgan, with his beard and his beautiful eyes, and his sweet-smelling cigarettes.

They should have told.

‘Maybe Morgan and Miss Renshaw met someone they knew,’ said the oldest Elizabeth. ‘They ran into someone and they all got talking.’

‘In that cave?’ said Icara. ‘Who are you going to meet in a cave?’

Icara is a realist, said Miss Renshaw, but the world needs dreamers, not realists.

‘But she will come back?’ said Bethany, turning to them all, beseeching, her blue eyes full of translucent tears. ‘Miss Renshaw will come back?’

‘Yes, yes, she’ll come back,’ groaned Georgina, putting the necessary arm around Bethany again. ‘She’s probably coming in the gate right now.’

They could almost hear the gate falling open, hinges squeaking.They could almost hear Miss Renshaw coming up the stairs, clicking her heels on the sixty-seven grey-green steps. Almost.

Cubby put down her pencil. She had lost heart somehow. She looked up at the blackboard. Across its flat rectangular expanse stretched the wondrous South Pacific Ocean as drawn by Miss Renshaw, complete with curling blue chalk waves and a white compass marked North South East West.There was a line of pink dashes showing the path of Captain Cook’s boat, the
Endeavour
, like a pink snail trail.

Cubby blinked. Suddenly the sounds of the classroom, the sniffing, the rustling of papers and dropping pencils, faded in her ears. She had that bleak feeling that she’d had in the cave, of being alone. She stared at the blackboard. She felt sick.

Because words were forming there, on the board, right before her eyes. Words grew in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as though they were being written by an invisible hand, in bright yellow chalk.

Cubby could see them perfectly. Four clear simple words,

Not now. Not ever.

written in Miss Renshaw’s own unmistakable, beautiful handwriting.

EIGHT
Floating Schoolgirl

N
OBODY ELSE SAW.
The other girls were heads down over their books, writing, murmuring, exchanging pencils. Nobody saw a thing. She, Cubby, was the only one.

That was the moment she began to float. Very deliberately, she turned her eyes away from the board and floated upwards, swimming through the air, like a dream. She floated out the classroom window, her hat half-flying off her head, high above the laneways and streets. She floated all day while they waited for Miss Renshaw to return.

If Dr Strangemeadows had indeed gone down to the Gardens to find Miss Renshaw half out of her mind with worry, she had returned alone.There was no message from anyone and no further visits from Mrs Arnold. Instead, Miss de Soto, the music teacher, arrived to supervise them for the rest of the day. She was round and fluffy with plump, powdered cheeks and an armful of spectacular jewellery – large rings and jangling bracelets. Her curved glasses were like the eyes of a bee. She brought her guitar slung over her back.

‘Put away your work, girls,’ said Miss de Soto. She tapped her foot. ‘Come down to the front and sit near me.’

Dutifully, and with relief, they sat together on a square of carpet at Miss de Soto’s feet.

‘That’s right. Up close. I want to hear every voice.’

‘I saw raindrops on my window

Joy is like the rain!’

sang Miss de Soto, plink-a-plink went the guitar, and the little girls, who knew the tune from their music lessons, sang along with her, although with less conviction. Was joy, after all, so much like the rain, really? But they were happy enough to lie on the floor and stretch out like cats and scratch each other on the back, trying not to think.

‘I saw clouds upon a mountain

Joy is like a cloud.’

The whole time Cubby was floating, far above it all.

When the bell went for the end of the day, Miss de Soto swiftly took herself and her guitar away, down the stairs back to the music room. The eleven little girls packed up their bags and began to leave. Cubby got up from the floor last of all. She was very careful not to look at the blackboard, not even the briefest glimpse. Where was her bag? Her head was giddy, as though she had been spinning around on a swing. She couldn’t feel the ground beneath her, her feet were like sponges.

A voice came from behind her, right inside her ear.

‘Cubby’

She turned around. It was Icara.

‘What?’ said Cubby.

Icara looked at her in a concentrated way.

‘Do you want to come over to my house?’

Cubby was astonished. Despite their friendship, she had never been asked to Icara’s house before. They were the sorts of friends who only knew each other at school, never after school, never on the weekends. Why was Icara asking her now? But Cubby was floating, she would go anywhere, do anything.

‘All right,’ she said.

‘Good,’ said Icara.

They walked down the stairs, their bags banging against each other. The playground was full of shouting, of arms and legs and running feet.The boarders lined up for their afternoon cup of tea and handful of sugary biscuits at a table next to the big old bell with its long rope that rang at the beginning and end of each school day. At the yellow gate prefects stood on duty, checking that everyone’s uniform was in order, hats on heads, ties around necks.

‘Your socks are falling down,’ said Amanda-fit-to-be-loved to Cubby as they passed through, and Cubby automatically bent down to pull them up. Within seconds they fell down again.

‘Come on,’ said Icara, tugging at her sleeve.

Cubby had no idea where Icara lived or how she got home, by train, bus, ferry. Icara didn’t speak, so Cubby simply followed her, light as a soap bubble, onto the bus that left from the bottom of the hill, every afternoon carrying great loads of girls away from the city. They sat together near the front, as the bus passed through a tunnel, past shops and along the bay, deep into suburban streets. At each stop more schoolgirls left, until it was just the two of them.The engine of the bus hummed, the brakes squeaked. Icara stood up and pulled the cord.

‘This is my stop,’ she said.

The bus halted next to a tall, leafy tree, on the corner of two shady roads. Cubby floated after Icara off the bus and down the narrower of the two streets. The houses had high walls and double storeys and thick lovely gardens. Icara must be rich, thought Cubby suddenly. These are rich people’s houses.

They stopped outside a building that looked like a museum, made of caramel sandstone bricks with old-fashioned stained-glass windows. Out the front was a fishpond, round and ornate like a stone wedding cake. Icara pushed open the gate.

‘Is this your house?’ asked Cubby.

‘Yep,’ said Icara.

‘It looks so old,’ said Cubby reverently.

‘It was built a hundred and ten years ago,’ said Icara.

A hundred and ten years…Cubby was overawed. She knew that in England there were buildings hundreds and hundreds, even thousands of years old – and in Egypt! well. But what were the castles of Europe and the pyramids of Egypt to little Cubby? They were like places in the
Thousand and One
Nights
, flickering on cinema screens or in black and white on the television at night, pages in encyclopedias to be flipped over with one hand. But this house was here, in front of her, a whole hundred and ten years old.

The front door had a huge golden doorknob and shiny lock. Icara opened it with her own key. When it swung forward, Icara threw her schoolbag down just inside, next to a hatstand covered with coats and hats.

‘You can leave your bag there,’ she said.

Cubby laid her bag gingerly next to Icara’s. Then Icara kicked off her shoes.

‘Mrs Ellerman says I have to,’ said Icara, pointing to her white-socked feet. ‘To keep the floor nice. Since you’re a guest it probably doesn’t matter.’

But Cubby was glad to slip off her own shoes, to feel the solid floor with her toes. She and Icara slid together in their socks across the wide space of tiled floor that opened out before them. They pretended to ice-skate.

‘Who’s Mrs Ellerman?’ asked Cubby.

‘Oh, she looks after us,’ said Icara casually. ‘My mother doesn’t live here.’

‘Oh,’ said Cubby. Then, timidly, ‘Where does she live?’