The Collected Stories

‘History’s longest soak,’ her mother said, still quoting from the Daily Express. Her father laughed again.

Eleanor rose and carried the dish she’d eaten her Special ? out of to the sink, with her cup and her saucer. She rinsed them under the hot tap and stacked them on the red, plastic-covered rack to dry. Her mother spoke in amazed tones when she read pieces out of the newspaper, surprised by the activities of people and animals, never amused by them. Some part of her had been smashed to pieces.

She said goodbye to both of them. Her mother kissed her as she always did. Winking, her father told her not to take any wooden dollars, an advice that was as regular and as mechanical as her mother’s embrace.

‘Netball is it?’ her mother vaguely asked, not looking up from the newspaper. There wasn’t netball, Eleanor explained, as she’d explained before, in the summer term: she wouldn’t be late back.

She left the flat and descended three flights of concrete stairs. She passed the garages and then the estate’s playground, where Liz Jones had first of all been done. ‘Good-morning, Eleanor,’ a woman said to her, an Irish woman called Mrs Rourke. ‘Isn’t it a great day?’

Eleanor smiled. The weather was lovely, she said. Mrs Rourke was a lackadaisical woman, middle-aged and fat, the mother of eight children. On the estate it was said that she was no better than she should be, that one of her sons, who had a dark tinge in his pallor, was the child of a West Indian railway porter. Another of Mrs Rourke’s children and suspect also, a girl of Eleanor’s age called Dolly, was reputed to be the daughter of Susie Crumm’s father. In the dream Eleanor had had in which her own mother was fat rather than thin it had seemed that her mother had somehow become Mrs Rourke, because in spite of everything Mrs Rourke was a happy woman. Her husband had a look of happiness about him also, as did all the Rourke children, no matter where they’d come from. They regularly went to Mass, all together in a family outing, and even if Mrs Rourke occasionally obliged Susie Crumm’s father and others it hadn’t taken the same toll of her as the obliging of Eleanor’s-father by her mother had. For years, ever since she’d listened to Liz Jones telling the class the full facts of life, Eleanor had been puzzled by the form the facts apparently took when different people were involved. She’d accepted quite easily the stories about Mrs Rourke and had thought no less of the woman, but when Dolly Rourke had said, about a month ago, that she’d been done by Rogo Pollini, Eleanor had felt upset, not caring to imagine the occasion, as she didn’t care to imagine the occasion that took place every morning after breakfast in her parents’ bedroom. Mrs Rourke didn’t matter because she was somehow remote, like one of the people her mother read about in the Daily Express or one of the celebrities her father told lies about: Mrs Rourke didn’t concern her, but Dolly Rourke and Rogo Pollini did because they were close to her, being the same as she was and of the same generation. And her parents concerned her because they were close to her also. You could no longer avoid any of it when you thought of Dolly Rourke and Rogo Pollini, or your parents.

She passed a row of shops, Len Parrish the baker, a dry cleaner’s, the Express Dairy Supermarket, the newsagent’s and post office, the off-licence attached to the Northumberland Arms. Girls in the grey-and-purple uniform of Springfield Comprehensive alighted in numbers from a bus. A youth whistled at her. ‘Hi, Eleanor,’ said Gareth Swayles, coming up behind her. In a friendly manner he put his hand on her back, low down, so that, as though by accident, he could in a moment slip it over her buttocks.

There’s a new boy in Grimes the butcher’s, Liz Jones wrote on a piece of paper. He’s not on the estate at all. She folded the paper and addressed it to Eleanor. She passed it along the row of desks.

‘Je l’ai vu qui travaillait dans la cour,’ said Miss Whitehead.

I saw him in Grimes, Eleanor wrote. Funny-looking fish. She passed the note back and Liz Jones read it and showed it to her neighbour, Thelma Joseph. Typical Eleanor, Liz Jones wrote and Thelma Joseph giggled slightly.

‘Un anglais qui passait ses vacances en France,’ said Miss Whitehead.

Miss Whitehead lived in Esher, in a bed-sitting-room. Girls had sometimes visited her there and those who had done so described for others what Miss Whitehead’s residence was like. It was very clean and comfortable and neat. White paint shone on the window ledges and the skirting-boards, lace curtains hung close to sparkling glass. On the mantelpiece there were ornaments in delicate ceramic, Highland sheep and cockerels, and a chimney sweep with his brushes on his back. A clock ticked on the mantelpiece, and in the fireplace – no longer used – Miss Whitehead had stood a vase of dried flowers. Her bed was in a recess, not at all obtrusive in the room, a narrow divan covered in cheerful chintz.

‘Le pecheur,’ said Miss Whitehead, ‘est un homme qui… Eleanor?’

‘Peche?’

‘Tres bien. Et la blanchisseuse est une femme qui…?’

‘Lave le linge.’

Liz Jones said it must be extraordinary to be Miss Whitehead, never to have felt a man’s hand on you. Gareth Swayles said he’d give it to her, she’d written on one of the notes she was constantly passing round the class. Imagine Swayles in bed with Whitehead!

‘La mere n’aime pas le fromage,’ said Miss Whitehead, and Liz Jones passed another note to Eleanor. The new boy in Grimes is called Denny Price, it said. He wants to do you.

‘Eleanor,’ said Miss Whitehead.

She looked up from the elaborately looped handwriting of Liz Jones. In their bedroom her father would be making the noises he used to make in the wrestling ring. Her mother would be lying there. Once, when she was small, she’d gone in by mistake and her father had been standing without his clothes on. Her mother had pulled a sheet up to cover her own nakedness.

‘Why are you writing notes, Eleanor?’

‘She didn’t, Miss Whitehead,’ Liz Jones said. ‘I sent her –’

‘Thank you, Elizabeth. Eleanor?’

‘I’m sorry, Miss Whitehead.’

‘Were you writing notes, Eleanor?’

‘No, I –’