Lipcott?’ the warden said.
‘Consumption, I think.’ The warden’s face showed a moment’s dismay, then with an impatient click of her tongue she moved on to another huddled band.
In the next couple of days two rumours swept the building. One: that there would be another fire-practice next term, and that it would be held in the middle of the night. Two, that the fire-doors – which we had noticed for the first time this week, and which some of us had immediately perceived to be useful – were locked unless there was a drill scheduled. There was no mystery about the motive for this. It was a way of keeping out boyfriends.
Or keeping them in, of course, to be burnt to a crisp. If you had a man stay overnight at Tonbridge Hall, and you were caught, the penalty was expulsion – expulsion into the hard world of the freezing bedsit at the end of a tube line, or the sordid flat-share in an area known for its prostitutes. Strangely, no one went to check, to see if the fire-doors actually were locked; the rumour, the dilemma it presented, was too delicious to refute. We talked about it and we all agreed – if you had a man in your room and the siren went, you would just have to put him in the wardrobe and leave him to take his chance, leave him crouching on top of your shoes and hope it was only a practice. If it wasn’t . . . ‘Yes, Mrs Smith, I’m afraid this is all that’s left of your son Roger: just this molar. Here are his textbooks, brought from his digs, and one or two little mementos we thought you’d like to have. The rest of him? They didn’t find much, I’m afraid. His anorak had gone up in the blaze. And his condom. A pity. He was so young!’
The third thing that happened was that I wrote to my parents to say that at Christmas I’d been invited to stay with Niall’s family. It was true that I was already becoming very nervous about the invitation, but I saw the advantages of it. Why nervous? Well, how would I go on? What was their bathroom etiquette? I did not possess a dressing-gown. I was accustomed, at Tonbridge Hall, to go into the bathroom fully dressed, and come out fully dressed; slightly damp, but very proper. I imagined that, in a private house, this might be seen as strange. I rehearsed, once again, a little speech, to explain myself to the world: I’d left my bathrobe behind at Tonbridge Hall because it took up so much space in my suitcase, it was really thick, you see, fluffy, you know those towelling ones?
I was beginning to convince myself, as I rehearsed this excuse; my fingers smoothed its pastel pile, which would be (variably) peach, pure white, mint green. So I’ll borrow Niall’s, I heard myself say, and . . . well, I supposed Niall must have a dressing-gown. I had never seen such an article. We walked about before each other naked, as if we were the fount and origin of the world. If he had a dressing-gown I imagined it to be made of a hairy plaid, brown and white, its collar edged with smooth-twisted cord and its belt tasselled, suggestively swinging, at the centre of each tassel a blunt silken knob. Such a dressing-gown to me seemed far less safe than nakedness; far less acceptable in the family home.
Then again, what about food? I had eaten my Sunday lunch at Niall’s house every week for two years. We ate, working by rota, roast lamb, roast beef, roast pork. In my own home, I was still not considered capable in the kitchen. My mother sighed and implied that it was one of the results of thinking too much, that I could not burn a carrot in quite the way she could; ‘She’s academic,’ she would say, ‘and I dare say you can’t expect anything else . . .’
Niall’s mother, though, was eager for any help she could get; her cooking was enthusiastic, and left the kitchen plastered with grease, with vast roasting pans of scalding fat, with snails of pastry sticking to their boards. Every pudding she made required the boosting up of the oven to 5oo°F: the kitchen would fill with fug and steam, and we would open the windows and lean out, gasping, into the garden where Niall’s father was imposing stripes on the handkerchief lawn. Lemon meringue pie: the Everest peaks pale beige and studiedly crisp, the meringue beneath a soft lather of whipped sweetness. Then, even more triumphant, there was Baked Alaska: the oven now so hot that blue wisps seemed to issue from its every orifice, and when the door was opened, the heat knocked us back, laughing, and I would wrap a tea-towel around my hands like a surgeon dons his gloves, and I’d go in, and I’d fetch it out . . . speed was of the essence then, so that we could sink our teeth together, our family teeth, into the hot sweet froth on top and the oily frozen block of vanilla ice beneath.
But . . . stay for three weeks? What would we eat at family meals, routine meals? Bread and cheese? I imagined butter on proper bread, laid like golden pavements. Milk? Yes, Niall’s mother would never mind at all if I said to her that I liked to drink milk, could I order some, would she get me an extra pint? But three weeks – would she not glance up one day, see my greedy mouth at work, and notice my relish for the flesh of her only son? After Sunday lunch I always washed up, and Niall would stand behind me, a damp Irish linen towel in his hand, and lick the nape of my neck as I scrubbed and scoured away the gravy and the fat and those burnt-on bits that require you to thrust out an elbow and frown. If I leant forward, to get a better purchase on the grease, he would creep his hands up beneath my skirt and pull down my pants. Three weeks . . . how could we hope to get away with this sort of thing? I knew no other way to do the washing-up.
However: I had made the decision. I could not think how I would survive, otherwise: what, go home to the quartering of a quarter of boiled ham, the meat-paste dole, the three bananas that stood in for a bowl of fruit? I would visit my parents, of course, we would only be five or six miles away.
My mother replied to my letter by return of post. The reply was very long and very bitter, denouncing my ingratitude, my improvidence, the laxity of my morals. As an unmarried girl, she said, I should be under my parents’ roof, not under the roof of people they did not know, whose manners and outlook were no doubt frivolous, degenerate and the talk of the district; and there could be no good reason for my wanting to be away from home unless I was planning to conduct myself in a way which she hoped no daughter of hers would ever think of in a thousand years.
I shook my head over the letter, as I read it; as if there were someone in the room to see me do it. I dimly remembered a time before she had been angry . . . the spring days when we had walked up to the hills, the twilit afternoons when she had told me of her youthful triumphs in dance halls, the day when she had sat me on the table and taught me to sing a rude song about Karina. But after that there was nothing but snarling, and the dull pressure of her finger ends as she pinned and fitted clothes on me; the stutter and hum of her sewing-machine, the swearing and rending of cloth: the reiterated question, ‘If this Julianne Lipcott can come top of the class, why can’t you?’
The letter was written, I perceived, not on what came to hand – not Basildon Bond, not the back of the milk bill, but on writing-paper that someone must have given her for a Christmas present: white paper bordered with roses, cut roses, pink ones, drooping on their stems, frilled and framed by pale thornless leaves. The envelope, I remember, was embellished in this way: the Queen’s head in the right-hand corner, and on the left another rose. The burden of the letter was this, when the verbiage was stripped away: if you’re not coming home for Christmas, don’t bother to come home ever again.
I was in my room when I read this letter, alone. I felt dazed, and was tempted to sit down on my bed, but I had a ten o’clock lecture and it was already, let me see, it must be . . . I picked up Julianne’s travelling clock and stared at it. I had come away from home, you remember, without a lot of ordinary things that people have, and one of those things was a watch. I fed my arms into my duffle coat, picked up my bag of books and somehow arrived in Houghton Street, not having noticed the journey.
Someone asked me was I all right, and I nodded; I had no tutorials, and as far as I remember I didn’t speak for the rest of the day. It didn’t occur to me that the letter might have been written in haste, that perhaps she was already regretting it. I had grown up believing – indeed, seeing – that my mother was a very powerful woman. She was not someone who changed her mind. Her edicts were handed down and I obeyed them.
