GOOD DAUGHTERS Page 11

  There was a knock on the door. Colette Biggs, form captain of Lower Four Aleph, had arrived. She would now conduct Miss Blaize, like a guard of honour, to the classroom, while the other form captain maintained that atmosphere of meditation necessary to the occasion. The advent of Miss Blaize was usually awaited with some trepidation, and pupils were anxious to re-read notes, so that they would have a ready answer if called upon to summarize the contents of the previous scripture lesson. Something, however, seemed to have gone wrong on this occasion. As Miss Blaize and Colette walked along the passage above the assembly hall, it was apparent that whatever else was happening to Lower Four Aleph, it was not meditation.

  The girls had settled quickly after the change bell had sounded. Monica Pilgrim, the other form captain, was away sick. Alice, as last term’s form captain, was in charge. She wiped down the blackboard, and said to the other two girls who were arguing about tennis practice, ‘Leave it until break; we can sort it out then.’ Valerie Pewsey, a precocious girl who spent the greater part of lessons curling her hair around her fingers and thinking about Ginger Rogers’s latest film, said to her neighbour, Ena Pratt, ‘Lend me your notes; I can’t find mine.’

  ‘You should listen,’ Ena said virtuously, ‘then you wouldn’t need notes.’ She made no move to produce her own.

  Valerie poked Katia between the shoulder-blades. ‘Lend us your notes. You don’t need them anyway.’

  The Jews and Roman Catholics were excused scripture lessons, and arrangements were made for them to be instructed by members of their own faith. As no such facility was available for members of the Russian Orthodox faith – and as her family seemed unconcerned – Katia attended scripture lessons. She had had the benefit of more concentrated religious instruction than most of the other girls and, although her contributions were not invariably congenial to Miss Blaize, she nevertheless scored some notable successes during discussion.

  Ena, who longed to impress, but had never learnt that her brand of sanctimonious Protestantism was anathema to Miss Blaize, said, ‘Why don’t you let Val have your notes? You know it all.’

  ‘And anyway, it doesn’t matter to you: you’re not a Christian,’ Valerie said reasonably.

  Katia was incensed. ‘You’re one to talk about being a Christian! I’ve seen you in the back row at the Roxy.’

  ‘Never mind about the Roxy now,’ Alice said. ‘You can have my notes, Val.’

  Valerie said sweetly, ‘At least I don’t go with old men.’

  Alice said, ‘Leave this until break, will you?’

  ‘What’s this about old men?’ Daphne felt this was a situation which would not improve with keeping.

  ‘I’ve seen her at the ABC in Hammersmith with the old man who plays the violin outside the tube station.’

  Katia seemed to balloon out of her seat, and to grow larger and larger as she towered over Valerie. Her sallow face paled to ivory. She sucked in saliva and spat at Valerie. Consternation reigned. Those who had seen what happened expressed their views noisily, while those who had not stood up, determined not to miss any further action. Sympathy was almost entirely with Valerie. ‘Mucky little sod,’ Daphne said as Valerie scrubbed her face.

  Katia surveyed them, and said with grand impartiality, ‘I despise you all. You are insignificant creatures whose mothers think of nothing but housework.’

  A stunned silence greeted this judgement, which was quite out of keeping with the usual classroom repartee, and was in fact attributable to Mrs Vaseyelin. Alice took advantage of the lull to say loudly, ‘Have we all got our Bibles open? It’s the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter Five.’ She was pleased to see several people hastily flipping over pages; the insurrection was over. Miss Blaize’s arrival coincided with what Alice regarded as her victory. The room was quiet, and the girls were studiously regarding their Bibles.

  ‘Who is in charge here?’ Miss Blaize stood in the doorway looking thunderous, but speaking softly; behind her, Colette peeped at her form-mates as though expecting to witness a Bacchanalian rite.

  Alice said that she was in charge.

  ‘Why are you not wearing your form captain’s badge?’

  ‘I’m not form captain this term, Miss Blaize – only for today because Monica Pilgrim is away.’

  ‘So you feel that exonerates you from any attempt to exercise authority?’

  Alice, who felt that she had right on her side, said, ‘I was trying to exercise authority.’

  ‘But, my dear, you weren’t succeeding, were you? I could hear the noise from this room as I came up the stairs.’

  ‘It took a bit of time,’ Alice admitted. ‘But they were quiet when you arrived, Miss Blaize.’

  Miss Blaize, who regarded this as entirely due to her presence, was not impressed. She looked at Alice sternly, Katia got to her feet. ‘It was my fault, Miss Blaize; it was all my fault.’ She was sweating, and her voice shook with emotion. Miss Blaize looked at her without favour.

  ‘I am not at this moment concerned with who was responsible for the commotion.’ She turned her attention again to Alice; ‘What concerns me, my dear, is that you were afraid to fetch a mistress to quiet the class because of what your friends would say about you.’

  Alice’s friends looked woodenly at their desks. Katia and Alice spoke in unison.’

  Alice said, ‘I didn’t fetch a mistress because I was quieting them; we were just looking up Chapter . . .’

  Katia said, ‘It wasn’t Alice’s fault. Miss Blaize, it was . . .’

  Miss Blaize said, ‘Will you both sit down. I will see you later in my study.’

  She walked across the room, and Colette, thus released, scurried to her desk. Miss Blaize opened her Bible and looked at the class. If she was searching for weakness, she had no difficulty in finding it; the pupils maintained that in this respect she had a nose like a bloodhound. She said to Valerie, ‘Will you remind us of what we know about St Paul?’

  Valerie rose to her feet and intoned, ‘He came from a little town where he would not have had much opportunity for learning . . .’ The members of the class bowed their heads while Valerie proceeded to make a neat reversal of everything she had been told about St Paul.

  When she had finished, Miss Blaize said, ‘You were here last week, I suppose, my dear?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Blaize.’

  ‘Don’t you keep notes, my dear? You obviously have a very bad memory. So it is particularly important that you should make notes.’

  Valerie said that she had lost her notes.

  ‘You mean you have lost your scripture notebook? That will include the whole of this year’s work, won’t it?’

  Valerie, not wanting to pursue this any further, said that she had left her scripture notebook on the bus. Miss Blaize gazed at her, and Valerie hung her head and was silent – she had long ago learnt that this was the best way to weather storms. Miss Blaize, unprepared to be led in labyrinthine pursuit of Valerie’s notebook, turned her attention to St Paul. Ignoring Ena, who had been eagerly waving her hand for some time, she said to Daphne, ‘What can you tell us about St Paul, my dear?’

  Daphne briskly reinstated St Paul, taking care to quote that he was a citizen of no mean city, so that Miss Blaize would not assume that she was merely taking up the options left to her by Valerie.

  When the lesson was over, Miss Blaize left the room trailing Alice and Katia behind her.

  ‘Now, my dears,’ she addressed them when they were seated in her room. ‘You have been faced today with a testing situation, and one which I myself have come up against in the past – and which, I admit, I found very difficult.’ She paused, looking out of the window. The third-formers were no longer gambolling in the flower border. ‘Most of us have our failures,’ she said sadly. ‘There is something inhuman about a person who has never had a failure. The important thing is to learn from failure.’

  She paused. Katia was resentful. Miss Blaize was aware that reason would make no impression on her. Katia was ill at ease with l
ife, and no wonder: the girl had had a bad beginning; even her Russian ancestry was not pure. These mixed origins produced an irrationality which was not conducive to sober consideration of the facts of a situation. Miss Blaize looked at Alice.

  ‘I didn’t think I had failed, Miss Blaize.’ Alice spoke quietly, surprising both herself and Miss Blaize by her composure.

  Miss Blaize talked about St Paul, about moral courage, about the need to stand firm even when all one’s friends have forsaken one. ‘Even Demas,’ she added, striking a sombre note as though at the recollection of a personal betrayal.

  Alice listened. Miss Blaize, as she looked at the girl’s attentive, good-natured face, could almost have imagined that Alice Fairley was humouring her. She appealed to Alice, and beyond Alice to all those girls who, on leaving school, must uphold the tradition of dedicated service in an increasingly undisciplined world. ‘You told yourself that it was wrong to speak. So you chose to neglect the responsibility placed upon you as form captain. Did it occur to you that this was not only a responsibility to your fellows who were in your charge, but also to the people who trusted you to fulfil your duties?’

  Alice admitted that she had not looked at it in this way. She was surprised to find that it was possible to escape relatively unscathed from a difference of opinion with authority. She had no mind to push matters much further, but was not happy with the present conclusion. ‘I didn’t think about sneaking,’ she said.

  Miss Blaize studied her thoughtfully and then asked, ‘Do you now think it would have been advisable to fetch a mistress to control the class?’

  Alice, having no quarrel with ‘advisable’, conceded that it might have been. They observed a few moments’ silence. Miss Blaize decided to rest her case.

  ‘I should like you to reflect on this, Alice,’ she said. ‘Then come to see me on Wednesday.’

  When the girls had gone. Miss Blaize took time for reflection. She had presented Alice Fairley with a suggestion which the girl could accept, and Alice in her turn had appreciated that Miss Blaize was defending discipline in the school, and that discipline must not be seen to lose ground. It seemed quite a mature understanding to have reached with a girl whom she had previously thought of as a nice currant bun of a creature.

  She sent for Miss Lindsay.

  ‘How is Alice Fairley getting on? I know the little one is rather too clever for her own good, and Louise uncommonly attractive. Alice must have some gifts, one imagines?’

  Miss Lindsay drew thin brows together and tried to imagine Alice’s gifts. ‘She is good at English, but I doubt that she’ll make much of it. She is the kind who doesn’t expect to be better than anyone else at anything – except scoring goals at netball.’

  ‘Some of this may be our fault?’

  ‘She hasn’t any spark.’

  ‘Sparks can go out. I should like to see one or two of Alice’s essays.’

  When Alice and Katia returned to their formroom, notes of apology had been left on their desks. Daphne’s embellished with spirited drawings representing them as Christian martyrs confronting a gigantic Nero. ‘What happened?’ Daphne asked Alice.

  ‘I’ve got to see her on Wednesday morning when I have had time for reflection,’ Alice answered.

  Daphne said coolly to Katia, ‘None of this would have happened if you hadn’t been so ready with your spit.’

  Katia turned away; it was apparent she was very upset.

  That evening, Alice said to her mother, ‘May I go next door? Katia was upset at school today, and I’d like to see that she’s all right.’

  ‘As long as you don’t stay too late.’

  It was a dry, windy evening, the rambler roses bobbing about and the spent lilac dropping its last blooms. The Vaseyelins’ front garden was a tangle of long grass and briars. The windows on the ground floor were open and the thin curtains billowed out, catching on the ivy.

  Jacov opened the door. He had no jacket on, and had his shirt sleeves rolled up. He said that Katia had gone to bed, feeling unwell. Alice followed him down the corridor into the kitchen. He said, ‘Excuse, please,’ and turned off the tap over the sink, which was full of pots and pans. There was a smell of spice and greasy washing-up water. ‘My mother and Anita are out tonight,’ he said, ‘so I am in charge.’

  Alice offered to help with the washing up, but he refused, so they sat at the kitchen table and talked. Honeysuckle grew heavy as thatch above the window and made the room dark. The wind rattled window-panes, and somewhere above a door banged insistently. Alice said, ‘Katia was upset because one of the girls had seen her with the man who plays the violin outside the Empire . . . Actually, I’ve seen her with him, too.’ She was unhappy at betraying Katia, but she had thought a lot about it on the way home from school, and decided that for Katia’s own good she must tell. She could not imagine Jacov being angry, but the Vaseyelins were unpredictable. ‘I don’t want to get her into trouble. Only, I thought . . .’

  Jacov said kindly, ‘There is no trouble. He is our father.’

  ‘Your father!’ Alice stared, uncomprehending. Was it to meet him that Mrs Vaseyelin went out to catch the Number 12 bus at The Askew Arms in the evenings? It seemed a very odd way of going on. ‘But why doesn’t he live with you?’

  ‘Because there are too many of us.’ Jacov smiled as though this should have been self-evident.

  ‘You mean there isn’t room?’

  Jacov shrugged his shoulders. ‘In a way, yes. Before we came to England, we had a big house with servants, and he did not have to see us often. But in England we are too much for him. So he lives alone and my mother goes to see him. Sometimes he comes here, but only occasionally. It is hard for him.’

  ‘Doesn’t he love you?’ Alice asked.

  Jacov appeared nonplussed by the question, as though love – which for Alice seemed as essential to family life as yeast to bread – to him represented the unknown factor in a difficult equation. He sat with his elbows on the table, head bowed as he examined the past. His shirt was damp under the arms, and Alice could smell sweat.

  ‘I think he loved Sonya.’ He said this as though making an offering to Alice which he hoped she would find acceptable. As she still seemed troubled, he went on, ‘She was the first child, so I suppose it was not so irksome for him, just having the one around. Then she died, which was satisfactory.’

  ‘Satisfactory!’

  He raised his head and looked at Alice. ‘Satisfactory is not a good word to express what I mean. The dead are secure, nothing can change them, you understand? My father can love Sonya and she will never hurt him; he can imagine how she would have grown up, what she would have become, and none of it will be painful because she will not be there to disappoint him.’

  ‘How dreadful!’ The idea that it might be better to be dead than to disappoint one’s parents was worrying.

  The evening breeze stirred the tangled greenery around the open window, and the sharp-sweet smell of honeysuckle drifted in from the garden. ‘How seriously you take everything, Alice.’ Jacov’s tone did not imply that she was wrong to be serious – he was merely recording an observation about a person whom he liked, but who was different from himself.

  Alice, wanting him to be the same as herself, said, ‘Aren’t you angry with him for caring about Sonya and not being interested in the rest of you?’

  ‘I may have been angry at one time.’ He was not at ease talking about his feelings, but he seemed unable to bring the conversation to an end, perhaps for fear of hurting Alice. ‘It is a mistake to be angry for long. It turns into bitterness, and bitterness only hurts the person who is bitter. One cannot afford to be bitter. You see, I am concerned with self-preservation.’ He grimaced comically, inviting disapprobation.

  Alice said, ‘I think you are very good.’

  ‘No, no, you mistake.’ He became anxious. ‘I am selfish. I forgive my father, if there is anything to forgive, and I try to understand him, because it will be better for me that way.’ A moth
fluttered through the open window and dropped on the table between them. Jacov looked at the clock; it was half-past eight. No doubt he was aware that Mr Fairley would not think it correct for him to be sitting alone with Alice in the evening. He ran his fingers through his curly hair and sighed. Alice thought he was unhappy. Had he scraped his chair back a few inches, she would have guessed that he wanted her to go.

  He was released from the need to act by the arrival of Louise.

  ‘The front door was open, so I came in. You’ve got a moth, did you know?’ She bent forward and trapped it in cupped hands. ‘Shall we put it out in the garden?’

  Jacov, who had risen to his feet, said, ‘You are not afraid?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She smiled at him in the warm, direct way which Alice admired because it seemed so brave. Tonight, however, her gaze wavered. ‘I can feel it fluttering. Ugh!’

  Jacov opened the kitchen door; she went to it and released the moth, which flew back into the kitchen.

  ‘Do we catch it again?’ Jacov asked.

  She remained in the doorway, the wind ruffling her thin dress. She put up a hand to her head, twisting a tendril of hair into place. ‘We’d better go. Mummy sent me to fetch Alice.’

  They walked round the side of the house to the back gate. The wind made a dry rustling in the leaves of the trees, and the brambles tore at their dresses; one caught in Louise’s hair.

  ‘Let me do it,’ Jacov said as she raised a hand. ‘Otherwise you will prick yourself.’

  ‘But you will prick yourself.’

  ‘It is my bramble, so I am responsible.’

  They were so close that when he leant forward Louise’s breasts brushed his shirt, and Alice felt a discomfort in her own breasts.

  ‘This is bad,’ he said. ‘I shall have to take this fastening out. Will it all come down?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She looked at him as though he had surprised her. Alice could see that she was breathing more quickly. He began to take the hairpins out, one by one, not hurrying, releasing Louise’s hair very gently, in a way which Alice found excruciatingly embarrassing. She turned away, and stared into the back garden. It had been hot in the kitchen, and now the wind cooled the sweat on her body and made her shiver.