when it’s ironed.’
‘A vest,’ Harriet suggested.
‘I don’t know what it is.’
‘I think a vest probably.’
Soon after that the children left the furniture-room. There was tea in the dining-room then, a daily ritual in the holidays, the long mahogany table with curved ends lard for six. The Headmaster liked it to be so. He liked Mrs Arbuary to make sandwiches: sardine and egg in winter, in summer cucumber and tomato. The Headmaster’s favourite cake was fruit-cake, so there was fruitcake as well.
The dining-room was a darkish room, wallpaper in crimson-and-black stripes combining with two pairs of curtains – velvet, in crimson also, and net – to set this sombre tone. The grained paintwork was the same deep brown as the curlicued sideboard, on which were arrayed the silver teapots and water-jugs, the gravy boats and loving cups, that Mrs Arbuary had inherited at the same time as the furniture and her legacy. It was an aunt who had died.
The children took their places at the table. Mrs Arbuary poured tea. The maid who had been observed in the piano master’s company brought in a plate of buttered toast. She and the other domestic staff – Monica and Mrs Hodge and Mrs Hodge’s husband, who was the general handyman –continued to come daily to the school during the holidays, but for much shorter hours. That was the only way the Arbuarys could keep them.
‘Thank you, Reene,’ the Headmaster said, and the girls began to giggle, thinking about the piano master. He was a man who had never earned a nickname, and it was a tradition at the school not ever to employ his surname. Since Jonathan had passed that fact on to his sisters they had not, even in their thoughts, done so either.
‘Well,’ the Headmaster said next. ‘We are
Mrs Arbuary, who rarely instigated conversations and only occasionally contributed to them, did not do so now. She smeared raspberry jam on a finger of toast and raised it to her lips. The school was a triumph for her husband after a lustreless career in Hong Kong, but it had brought her low. Being answerable to often grumpy parents, organizing a kitchen and taking responsibility during epidemics did not suit her nature. She had been happier before.
‘A good term,’ the Headmaster said. ‘I think we might compliment ourselves on a successful term. Eh, Jonathan?’
‘I suppose so.’ The tone was less ungracious than the sentiment. Jonathan drummed as much cheeriness into it as he could muster, yet felt the opinion must be expressed honestly in those words. He had no idea if the term had been successful or not; he supposed so if his father claimed so.
‘A single defeat on the hockey field,’ the Headmaster reminded him. ‘And your own report’s not half bad, old chap.’
‘Georgina got a frightful one,’ Harriet said.
The girls attended a day school in the town, St Beatrice’s. When the time came they would be sent away to boarding-school, but at the preparatory stage funds could not be stretched. Once, years ago, Mrs Arbuary had suggested that the girls might receive their preparatory education at her husband’s school, but this was before she appreciated that the older values did not permit this.
‘Georgina,’ Mr Arbuary said, in his Headmaster’s rather than his father’s voice, ‘has much to mend this holidays. So, too, has Harriet.’
‘My report wasn’t too awful,’ Harriet insisted in an unconvincing mutter meant mainly for herself.
‘Speak clearly if you wish to be heard, Harriet. Reports are written to be assessed by parents. I would remind you of that.’
‘I only meant –’
‘You are a chatterbox, Harriet. What should be placed on chatterboxes?’
‘Lids.’
‘Precisely so.’
A silence fell around the table. Mrs Arbuary cut the fruitcake. The Headmaster passed his cup for more tea. Eventually he said:
‘It is always a pity, I think, when Easter is as early as it is this year.’
He gave no reason for this view, but elicited none the less a general response – murmurs of agreement, nods. Neither Mrs Arbuary nor the children minded when Easter fell, but in the dining-room responses were required.
Increasingly, there was much that Jonathan did not pass, on to his sisters. Mrs Arbuary’s nickname, for instance, was the Hen because a boy called McAtters had said she was like a hen whose feathers had been drenched in a shower of rain – a reference to what McAtters, and others, considered to be a feeble manner. It had been noticed that Mrs Arbuary feared not just her husband, but Miss Mainwaring the undermatron and most of the assistant masters. It had been noticed that she played obsessively with one of heir forefingers whenever parents engaged her in conversation. A boy called Windercrank said that once when she looked up from a flowerbed she was weeding there were soil-stained tears on her cheeks.
Jonathan had not passed on to his sisters the news that their father was generally despised. It had been easier to tell them about Old Mudger, how he sometimes came into the dorm if a boy had been sent to bed before prep because Miss Mainwaring thought he was looking peaky. ‘Well, friendly, I Suppose,’ Jonathan had explained to Georgina and Harriet. ‘Anyway, that’s what we call it. Friendly.’ Margery had an inkling: he’d seen it in her eyes. All three of them had laughed over the Mudger being friendly, Georgina and Harriet knowing it was funny because no one would particularly want to be friendly with their father’s old schoolfellow. But they wouldn’t laugh – nor would he – if he told them their mother was called the Hen. They wouldn’t laugh if he told them their father was scorned for his pomposity, and mocked behind his back as a fearsome figure of fun.
And now – these Easter holidays – there was something else. A boy Jonathan did not like, who was a year older than he was, called Tottle, had sent a message to Margery. All term he had been bothering Jonathan with his messages, and Jonathan had explained that because of the Headmaster’s rules he would have no opportunity to deliver one until the holidays. Tottle had doubted his trustworthiness in the matter, and two days before the term ended he pushed him into a corner in the lavatories and rammed his fist into Jonathan’s stomach. He kept it
