In the dormitory called the Upper Nightingale Helena retailed the excesses of her mother. How the elderly couple in the house next door had been written to and requested to make less noise. How Mrs Archingford had been snubbed. How Judy Smeeth had been forbidden the house, how her mother’s sandy-faced brother had been summarily dismissed. She told how her mother had never visited the grinning little grandparents, and how they had never come to the house. She described the house – the Australian mezzotints, the fustiness, the dim lights and curtained windows, the dirtiness that was beginning to gather. In their beds, each with a pink lover, other girls of Upper Ni|htingale listened with delight. None of them had a mother whose tongue was like a whip. None feared a mother’s sarcasm. None dreaded going home.
When she closed her eyes after lights-out Helena saw her mother in the dark study, listing words and derivations, finding new words or words no longer used, all in loving memory. ‘Oh God,’ pleaded Helena in those moments given up to private prayer at the beginning and end of church. ‘Oh God, please make her different.’
Her mother supplied her with money so that at the end of each term she could make her way from the school by train and then across London in a taxi-cab. It was not her mother’s way to stand waiting at a railway station; nor, indeed, when Helena did arrive, to answer the doorbell until it had been rung twice or three times. It was not her way to embrace Helena, but instead to frown a little as if she had forgotten that her advent was due on a particular day. ‘Ah, Helena,’ she would say eventually.
These holiday periods were spent by Helena in reading, cleaning the kitchen, cooking and walking about the avenues and crescents of the neighbourhood. When she painted the shelves in her bedroom, her mother objected to the smell of paint, causing Helena to lose her temper. In awkward, adolescent rage, unreasonably passionate, she shouted at her mother. The matter was petty, she was being made petty herself, yet she could not, as she stood there on the landing, bear for a second longer her mother’s pretence that the smell of paint could not possibly be coming from within the house since no workman had been employed to paint anything. There was astonishment in her mother’s face when Helena said she had been painting her shelves.
‘I went out and bought paint,’ she cried, red-faced and furious. ‘Is there something sinful in that? I went into a shop and bought paint.’
‘Of course there’s nothing sinful, Helena.’
‘Then why are you blaming me? What harm is there in painting the shelves in my bedroom? I’m seventeen. Surely I don’t have to ask permission for every single action I take?’
‘I merely wondered about the smell, child.’
‘You didn’t wonder. You knew about the smell.’
‘I do not care for that, Helena.’
‘Why do you hate me?’
‘Now, Helena, please don’t be tiresome. Naturally I do not hate you.’
‘Everyone knows you hate me. Everyone at school, even Mrs Archingford.’
‘Mrs Archingford? What on earth has Mrs Archingford to do with it?’
‘She is a human being, that’s all.’
‘No one denies that Mrs Archingford is a human being.’
‘You never think of her like that.’
‘You are in a tiresome mood, Helena.’
Her mother turned and went away, descending the stairs to the study. Without a show of emotion, she closed the door behind her, quietly, as if there had not been an angry scene, or as if no importance could possibly attach to anything that had been said.
In her bedroom, that afternoon, Helena wept. She lay on her bed and pressed her face into her pillow, not caring how ugly she was making herself, for who was there to see? In waves of fury that came and calmed, and then came on again, she struck at her thighs with her fists until the repeated impact hurt and she guessed there would be black and blue marks. She wished she had reached out and struck her mother as she stood at the top of the stairs. She wished she had heard the snap of her mother’s neck and had seen her body lifeless, empty of venom in the hall.
Twilight was gathering when she got up and washed her face in the bathroom. She held a sponge to each puffed-up eye in turn, and then immersed her whole face in a basin of cold water, holding it there for as long as she could. Her hair was bedraggled as a result, clinging to her damp face. She looked awful, she thought, her mouth pulled down with wretchedness, but she didn’t care.
She walked along the crescents and the avenues, and down by the river, finding a common she’d only visited once before. She wished she could simply go on walking through the evening, and never return to her mother’s house. She wished that some young man in a motor-car would call out to her and ask her where she was going and say jump in. She would have, she knew she would have.
Instead she turned around and found her way back to the house, her footsteps dawdling and reluctant the closer she came to it. It was ten past nine by the clock in the sitting-room. Her mother, sitting by the electric fire, did not ask where she’d been.
‘He will be forgotten,’ she said instead, ‘if I cannot complete his work.’
She spoke in a voice so matter-of-fact, so dry and spiritless that she might have been reciting a grocery list. Vaguely, Helena had listened when once she’d been told that the work consisted of the completion of a scholarly book, an investigation into how, over centuries, the meanings of words had altered. ‘Difficult as it is,’ her mother vowed, still without emotion, ‘it shall not go unfinished.’
Helena nodded, for some reason feeling sorry she’d been so cross. There was a silence. Her mother stared without interest at the electric fire.
‘When you were little,’ Helena dared to begin.
‘Little?’
‘A child.’
