The Rehearsal

shortcut through the St. Sylvester grounds they always shout out “Syphilis!” or “Saint Molester!” sometimes without an audience, but always with a judicious sense of evening the score.

Today Isolde is picking her way across the balding field toward Abbey Grange, threading a path around the wind-blown litter and the scuffed mud-holes crusted beige with last night’s ice. Steam rises from the netball courts as the sun warms the wet asphalt, and the patched netting behind the soccer goal is bright with dew. The painted divisions on the courts have faded from white to a dirty thready gray. The school is mostly weatherboard, cream and fawn, but there is a clump of newer buildings among the old, recently painted and brighter than the rest, standing out like shiny patches of skin over a new burn. All the trees are restrained with iron collars and ringed by chiseled seats that spell the name and fate of every student once imprisoned there.

Isolde walks slowly, watching the creeping tidemark of gray mud and lawn cuttings advance over the lip of her school shoes and into the damp wool of her socks. Most of the girls are pouring into the school through the main entrance, and Isolde is thankfully marooned as she makes her way toward homeroom. Thus far since Mr. Saladin left the school Isolde has enjoyed a special kind of freedom, all the students awkward and stepping around her as if she is very fragile, all the teachers brisk and absent and clearly trying to treat Isolde in the most ordinary, invisible way. The privacy is welcome but Isolde knows that soon the mileage of this reflected notoriety will run out. She has noticed with a kind of indifferent contempt that none of her teachers now draws comparisons between her sister and herself, not even the netball coach who was once so fond of repeating, “I swear, you two—there must be something in the water at your house.”

Isolde aims a kick at a flattened Coca-Cola can and it advances a few meters toward the school. She resolves to kick it all the way to homeroom. The first bell rings. Isolde aims another kick at the can, shifting to her other armpit her English project, a hand-drawn poster rolled stiffly into a tube and secured with rubber bands.

For this particular assignment Isolde has drawn a king dead in his bed with a sword through his heart, and the spreading bloodstain on the blanket forms the shape of Scotland. Underneath is the quoted line “Bleed, bleed, poor country.” Isolde is good at drawing, portraiture especially, and she is proud of this particular effort, drawn in colored pencil and charcoal, and sprayed with an aerosol lacquer to prevent it from smudging in the tube.

“You know whenever the word ‘country’ is used in Shakespeare it usually means something to do with ‘cunt,’ ” Victoria said when she saw the poster, leaning her elbows on the back of one of the dining-room chairs and looking down at the drawing with a critical eye. “Everyone was way more smutty back then.”

Isolde put down her pencil and pulled the text of the play toward her. She scoured the quoted passage uncertainly, and then said, “I don’t think it means that here. There’s nothing in the notes.”

“Well, it’s a school edition, isn’t it?” Victoria said. “They’re not allowed to put the filthy stuff in. Trust me, country always means cunt. Country matters—that’s Hamlet. And same with the word ‘cunning.’ O cunning love. Means cunt.”

They spend a moment looking at the picture. Then Victoria adds, “You learn it in seventh form. After English stops being compulsory they let you in on all the good stuff.”

“Do you think I should start again?” Isolde said, pinching a pencil shaving between finger and thumb and looking down at the static image with new eyes.

“No, I reckon it’s even cleverer now,” Victoria said generously, putting her head to one side to see the picture better. “The bleeding and everything. I bet you get top marks.”

Mr. Horne is standing by the entrance to the car park as Isolde trudges quietly past with her poster under her arm. He is shaking his fist intermittently at the scarved and mittened flood of girls pouring into the school, shouting “Get off and walk!” at the cyclists who stand up on their pedals and weave around their classmates and trail their helmets from their handlebars by a single strap.

“Morning, Isolde,” Mr. Horne calls across to her, touching his first two fingers to his forehead in a kind of salute. Isolde smiles and waves and mounts the steps to the music block where she has homeroom.

As she enters, one of her classmates swoops down and says, “Hey, Issie. You all right?” She makes a mock-sad face at Isolde, pulling down the corners of her mouth like she is begging, and in her mind’s eye picturing herself as motherly and caring and kind.

Isolde scowls. “Today is not a good day,” she says, because it’s easier to pretend that it isn’t.

Saturday

“A man can be powerful and still be loved,” Patsy reads aloud, “but it’s rare to see a woman loved for her power—women must be powerless. So as women gain power in our society, they also find love more difficult to attain.” She closes the book and looks at the saxophone teacher questioningly. “Do you agree?”

This is a scene from a long time ago. The saxophone teacher looks younger. Her skin is tighter underneath her eyes and the droopy muzzle lines around her mouth have not yet started to show. Patsy is surrounded by books and papers and ballpoint pens. Outside it is raining.

The saxophone teacher leans back in her chair and ponders the question doubtfully. “I knew a couple with a baby,” she says at last, “a baby boy, maybe fourteen months. The father worked all day, came home every night, and the baby would smile and simper and reach out his little arms and perform for his daddy. But if the mother left for a while, maybe left him with a relation or a neighbor if she popped out on her own, when she came back the baby would be furious. He would scowl at her and turn away from her and refuse to be held by her, and howl if she came too close. In the baby’s mind, she had no right to go away and leave him. The father’s love was conditional and it had to be fought for. The baby had to win his father over, and he did. But he saw his mother’s love as rightfully unconditional, and when she took it away he felt nothing but injustice and contempt.

“At first,” the saxophone teacher says, “I felt sorry for the mother. I thought the baby was being terribly unfair. But then I think I changed my mind.”

“You changed your mind?”

“Yes,” the saxophone teacher says. “She had a kind of power too. She had a kind of influence. That’s what I saw, in the end.”

“You haven’t really answered the question,” Patsy says. “I asked, do you think that as women gain more power in the world they find love more difficult to attain?”

“No,” the saxophone teacher says. “I object to the wording of the question. I object to the assumption that power and love are necessarily two discrete things.”

“You always object to the question,” says Patsy in mock-irritation. “We never arrive at any answers because you are always objecting to the question.”

“It’s what you learn at university,” the saxophone teacher says. “At high school they expect answers, but at university all you’re supposed to do is dispute the wording of the question. It’s what they want. Ask anyone.”

Patsy sighs and brushes a crumb off the dust jacket with the flat of her hand. “Ridiculous,” she says, but she sounds defeated.

“I had a friend in first-year,” the saxophone teacher says, “who would begin every essay the same way. Suppose she was set an essay on Images of Violence in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. She would begin the essay, ‘The problem of violence in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is twofold.’ It was always the same. No matter what she wrote on. ‘The problem of nationalism in prewar Britain was twofold.’ Always the same.”

“What if it wasn’t twofold?” Patsy says, scowling afresh at the textbook on the table.

“It always is,” the saxophone teacher says. “That’s the secret.”

Wednesday

“There’s this girl at school,” Bridget says, “who tells these weird lies. The reason I think they’re weird is that I don’t think she even knows she’s lying when she does it.”

“Which girl?” the saxophone teacher says.

“Willa,” says Bridget vaguely. “But you wouldn’t be able to tell. She’s good.”

Bridget fiddles with her reed for a second and then looks up.

“Like, I always made this mistake,” she says, “whenever I read the word misled I didn’t realize it was mislead, to lead somebody astray. I thought that there was a word mizle which meant to diddle somebody, and if you were mizled then it meant you’d been diddled. So I always said mizled, not miss- led.”