GOOD DAUGHTERS Read online

Katia stood up.

  ‘Were there any other girls who thought that what was happening was funny?’

  Miss Blaize waited. She looked more awesome than ever. Her cropped dark hair had been slicked back, and the late sun highlighted features of the utmost severity. From their deep sockets, her eyes seemed to confront some appalling knowledge from which she was too resolute to turn aside; her lips were pursed and her mouth sunk in grim pain. It was the face of one who has looked on degrees of depravity mercifully hidden from most of mankind. As though mesmerized, several girls stood up. Alice and Daphne remained seated; Alice thought she had sufficient sins on her conscience without confessing to ones she had not committed, and Daphne thought, ‘I’m not going to be jerked up and down like a yo-yo by this woman.’

  An extraordinary change came over Miss Blaize. Pain was mercifully lifted from her. She became genial, and as she smiled at them it was as though she had it within her compass to feel affection, a quality they had not previously recognized in her. She began to talk and they felt a power encircling them, drawing them together. This, they were to understand, was not their headmistress, but a fellow human into whose being had been sewn the same incompatible instincts and desires, who felt the same pull of good and evil, who was as incapable as they of resolving the contest one way or the other. ‘It goes on all our lives,’ she said, not in her dramatic vein but in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone, ‘and the sooner we accept this, the better for all of us.’ She spoke then of an incident in her own past, not looking at them but towards the window, as though it opened into another world, and her voice – always a superb instrument of her moods – conveyed such an impression of pleasure and regret, sweetness and sorrow, that she held them under her spell although the incident she related was trivial enough. It was the early summer, and in her Sussex home her father was dying; in the last days of his illness it was necessary to employ a nurse, a good enough woman who fulfilled her duties to the letter but who was quite lacking in sensibility. She would insist on closing windows and drawing blinds, when all that the old man wanted was to look out to the hills. ‘There are some people who can never raise their eyes to the hills, whose capacity for life is limited, and sometimes we find ourselves tempted to hate instead of pity them. One day when the nurse was particularly churlish, I thought, “What am I going to do about this? If I’m not careful I’m going to be very angry with her, and that won’t help anyone.” And do you know what I did? I made tea and took it up to her. When we are angry it is often best to let our hands have their way . . .’ (Had she not been told of the use to which Daphne had put her hands? It was inconceivable that she could approve it.) ‘. . . to busy ourselves doing something practical and positive. We shall all meet people who anger us; and, more difficult perhaps, people whom we despise. We must be positive in our dealings with such people; otherwise we may be driven into bullying and tormenting. It is easier than you may imagine to become the tormentors of the weak and stupid.’

  It was by now apparent that Miss Blaize had little respect for Miss Punnett, and when she left the room having given no punishment to the form as a whole. Daphne said, ‘I bet Miss Punnett won’t be coming back next term. Miss Blaize would never have talked like that otherwise.’

  One or two people said, ‘Good riddance’, but without zest.

  That afternoon at evening prayers. Miss Punnett sat among the staff, her face puffy and her eyelids swollen. Cynthia Applestock had been sent home, and she never appeared at the school again.

  ‘What an old fraud Miss Blaize is!’ Daphne exclaimed in the cloakroom. ‘Talking to us about not bullying and then taking it out on poor old Punnett.’

  ‘She wasn’t much use, was she?’ Alice said.

  ‘She never did anyone any harm.’ Alice was surprised to see that Daphne was really angry. ‘I’m going to apologize to her.’

  ‘Well, I’m not.’

  Miss Punnett’s unequal contest with Cynthia had left Alice with a question in her mind. What would have happened if Cynthia had persisted in her refusal to leave the room? Once, when she was a small child, Alice had dreamed that the Leaning Tower of Pisa was about to fall on top of the house. The dream itself was not important. What had been important was that when her mother had comforted her, it had dawned on Alice that her mother could not have prevented the Leaning Tower of Pisa from falling had it so decided. Until that moment she had imagined her parents as a tower of strength. Belief in authority had survived, however, because she saw it upheld in home, in chapel, in school, in the ordered streets around her home. Now, it seemed that authority depended on people like Cynthia being prepared to accept it. The maintenance of authority was obviously a more precarious exercise than Alice had imagined.

  Authority, at another level, was under threat at home. Louise had told her father that she wanted to act in the next production of the St Bartholomew’s Dramatic Society. It had now been decided that it would not be possible to do the whole of Dear Brutus, and instead it was proposed to present the dream sequence and two one-act plays.

  Judith and Stanley discussed the matter after the girls had gone to bed. Louise was playing her records and, as Stanley talked, in the dark garden Susanna sang of her love for the untrusting Figaro.

  Judith, who had been listening to the music which was being played louder than usual, threaded more wool into her darning needle and said, ‘Whether it’s right or wrong, we have to agree.’

  He stopped speaking, his cheeks flushed so that in contrast his rather colourless eyes seemed more flinty than usual; his head jerked back on its short, thick neck, and the movement thrust out chest and paunch. ‘I can hardly believe I have heard you aright, Judith.’ Even to his ears, deaf though they were to the music, this had a false ring about it.

  ‘We can’t be Louise’s right and wrong forever.’ Judith herself was surprised at the ease with which she laid down the burden of right and wrong.

  Stanley’s eyes expressed a wounded incredulity which must surely have shamed her had she paid attention to him. The contest between them was unequal. He, in spite of his vehemence, was vulnerable to attacks which she repelled without effort. She seemed impregnable, able to hold herself together as a person against whom his personality stormed in vain.

  ‘I only ask that you should listen to me.’ Although he meant to be reproving in a gentle, tolerant manner, he merely succeeded in sounding huffy.

  Judith put aside her darning and stuck the needle in the arm of the chair. ‘I have listened.’

  He became angry. ‘I don’t think you could repeat half of what I said.’

  ‘Well, what do you want me to say?’

  ‘Want you to say! What a way to talk to me, Judith. As though I would ever dictate to you what you are to say! I want the truth, of course. If you don’t agree with me, you must say so roundly; I shan’t take it amiss. But you must give me your reasons. That is not an unreasonable demand, surely? Instead of which, you are behaving as though I was the sort of person with whom it is impossible to have a reasoned discussion.’

  He spoke loudly, shutting out the voice from the garden which sang of things other than reason. It was important to him that it should be accepted that at all times he behaved reasonably. It was even more important that it should be understood he was tough- minded and disdainful of flattery. ‘I would sooner people attacked me than flattered me.’

  This was far from true. Stanley Fairley never attempted to ingratiate himself with others by offering false praise; indeed, when dealing with adults (he was generous to his boys), it might have been said of him that he was somewhat miserly of praise. But he was very anxious that others should praise him – although this must be done in a way that was utterly frank, and without the least hint of insincerity which he would unfailingly detect. To set about praising Stanley Fairley as he wished to be praised was a task to be attempted only by people of fortitude and integrity, whose intellectual credentials were impeccable.

  ‘Am I so very difficult to talk to?’ he ask
ed, allowing his hurt to be apparent in the hope – no, the belief – that she must then respond with a reassurance so warm as to sweep away all doubt. But while he was talking of reason, Susanna was concerned with the erotic; and Judith had been thinking that Susanna had somewhat the better of it. She replied, ‘It’s just that we look at things in a different way.’

  ‘You say that so calmly, almost as though it didn’t much matter.’

  ‘It doesn’t most of the time.’

  ‘Most of the time! Are you saying that “most of the time” we look at things differently?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’

  He was very agitated; a gulf yawned between them, and she seemed unconcerned about it.

  ‘You talk as though we are strangers,’ he said, and he thought that all these years they had lived together and yet must have been quite separate, seeing a different world taking shape around them every day.

  Judith laughed. ‘What nonsense! I know you better than I know myself. It’s only your thinking I don’t always follow.’

  Only his thinking! He so longed to share with her his enthusiasms, his ideals, his perplexities. Every day he tried to wring from her the responses he required, and every day he was snubbed, defeated and puzzled, his disappointment as sharp as on the first day of their courtship: while long ago she had accepted him as he was, and made her way around his angularities without attempting to soften them.

  ‘In what way do we look at things differently?’ The agitation in his breast was so great, he was scarcely able to draw breath while he waited for her to reply.

  ‘You see things as they ought to be, and I see them as they are.’

  ‘But those are two aspects of one view, surely, my dear? I see further ahead than you, but you see what is before us more clearly. We complement each other as husband and wife should.’

  The song had ended and, in the silence, Judith found herself considerably less sanguine about many things than she had been before.

  She said impatiently, ‘We can’t prevent Louise going out of the house and finding her own amusements for much longer. At least on this occasion we know the people she will be with, and many of them are young people we have received here in our own home. We may not always be as fortunate as that.’

  He sat with bowed head. Her words conjured up a picture which was distressingly different from his own view of their loving, united family. ‘We can’t prevent Louise going out of the house . . .’ as though they were gaolers, when he had seen them as shepherds, gently, wisely guiding their children along the right path.

  ‘If you are saying we should not try to influence our children,’ he re-phrased, ‘have you thought of the other forces which will certainly influence them?’

  ‘If we don’t allow them as much freedom as other children, it begins to look as though we’re afraid our influence won’t last.’

  ‘Not allow them freedom!’ This was an unfair blow. Stanley Fairley was not obsessively possessive, and provided he felt his family were pointed in the right direction, he did not attempt to intrude himself into the meandering patterns of daily life. If one of the children spent a whole afternoon shut away in her bedroom, he did not see it as his duty to stand at the bottom of the stairs shouting, ‘What are you doing up there all this time?’ and if he saw them lying idly in the garden, he did not immediately break into their daydreams with suggestions of things for them to do. Whatever else might be laid at his door, his was not the tyranny of the love which seeks to share each moment’s pleasure with the beloved. ‘Not allow them freedom! I fought in one world war for my unborn children’s freedom, and I would fight in another for them.’

  ‘Well, then, you must let them have their freedom, otherwise there won’t have been much point in your fighting.’ She was irritated that he could not discuss this without dramatizing himself and bringing his war service into it.

  ‘We started by talking about Louise and now we are talking about you. We always end up talking about you, Stanley. But freedom for Louise means being able to do things you don’t approve of.’ She picked up her pile of darning, and began to put it in her basket, afraid of what else she might say. ‘I’m going to make our cocoa now.’

  He stayed up long after she had gone unrepentantly to bed. ‘We always end up talking about you, Stanley.’ How could she have said such a thing? He thought about his family all the time, more than they thought about him. Judith would have forgotten much of what he had said by the morning, whereas it would be a long time before the words she had said this night ceased to disturb him. How could she have accused him of being self-concerned? He was so proud of her. When they gathered round the piano to sing and he saw her, so lively, not holding back like some of the silly women his friends had married, he could have cried with gratitude that he was blessed with such a wife. Was she proud of him? Sometimes she spoke to him rather in the manner of a school prefect – ‘your elder sister voice’, he would tease. Did she really think he was selfish and a bad father? He, who was always so pleased and excited by the children’s small successes – Claire’s recitation of ‘Meg Merrilies’ at the chapel concert, Alice’s poem in the school magazine, Louise’s performance as Elizabeth Bennet in the school production of Pride and Prejudice . . . Louise! He had almost lost track of how this had begun. Now, in his concern about Judith’s unjust attack on him, he no longer found this business of Louise’s play-acting so important. It was probably a whim. By this time next year Louise would be interested in something else. That was the way of the young. The important thing was to keep a sense of proportion.

  He said to Judith the next day, ‘If we had been able to have a rational discussion, I would have been able to make my point without being accused of trying to be “Louise’s right and wrong”. Because we are discussing drama, there is no need for us to be dramatic!’

  Judith, sensing that this speech was a prelude to surrender, held her peace.

  ‘I merely wished to make the point that we should not overlook the effect this may have on Louise’s studies and to suggest that we should speak to her teachers. It is Sports Day this week, and there is always an opportunity for informal talk.’

  ‘What a very good idea.’ Judith was not displeased at having the final decision passed on to more objective adjudicators.

  Sports Day dawned grey with a thin drizzle of rain, but by two o’clock in the afternoon, the rain had cleared away and folding chairs and benches had been put out for staff and parents. When Judith and Stanley arrived, the Middle School Rounders Final and the Upper School Tennis Final were in play and contestants were being lined up for the first track event of the afternoon, the City Train Race; these consisted of very young children, each child having at its feet a man’s hat, scarf, overcoat, umbrella, newspaper and briefcase. When the whistle was blown several children looked around to see what their neighbours were doing, and one parent shouted, ‘Put Daddy’s hat on, Marjorie!’ Marjorie put on a bowler and her face disappeared; she then grovelled on the grass and fell over the briefcase belonging to her neighbour. Some discord ensued. Meanwhile, one sturdy creature, a trilby rammed around its ears, was already stumbling towards the finishing tape clasping paper, briefcase and umbrella and, despite becoming entangled in the trailing coat and rolling over, reassembled itself in time to win. Marjorie was by now in tears, and two other contestants had failed to start, but seemed in no way disheartened.

  ‘Do you remember Claire winning this?’ Judith said to Stanley.

  ‘And not knowing she had won because she couldn’t see.’

  This was probably the only way Claire was likely to win on the sports field, since in this one area she was quite lacking in the competitive spirit. Later in the afternoon she lost the relay race for her form, fumbling the baton exchange and subsequently falling further and further behind.

  ‘Never mind,’ Alice said when she consented to speak to her parents. ‘She’s enjoying herself taking snaps of all the people she’s cracked on.’

  �
��Is she cracked on many people?’ Judith asked.

  ‘One or two prefects and several members of staff. Claire never does anything by halves.’

  Claire had already taken snaps of the prefects and members of staff on whom she was cracked when Miss Blaize came into sight, strolling towards the pavilion with the Chairman of the Governors, Mrs Brinley Harris. Miss Blaize, looking more massive than ever in purple Donegal tweed and an inverted chamber-pot hat in pale pink, was nodding and smiling at pupils and parents, seeming to invite a familiarity which would not have been tolerated on other occasions. When developed, most of the snaps showed staff looking at the pupils with amused resignation; a look quizzical, as though uncertain whether their pupils really knew how to handle their apparatus, but kindly and quite lacking in selfconsciousness, a look which they probably wore most of their school life. Only Miss Blaize betrayed in front of the camera a lack of social assurance as she tried uneasily to temper majesty with benevolence.

  Shortly after she had been snapped by Claire, Philippa Bellamy met Mr and Mrs Fairley. None of the Fairley children excelled at art, but Miss Bellamy liked Louise because she did not suffer from the malady which affected so many sixth formers. Sixth formers, in her view, did not study, they appropriated whole subjects to themselves, put up a palisade and signalled the less gifted to keep out. Within the magic circle, they spoke of great artists and writers with amused condescension as though they had established a personal relationship with them. Miss Bellamy not only found this boring, but offensive. However unconventional her appearance, there was a sense in which she remained at all times very much a mistress.

  When Mr Fairley told her that Louise was hoping to take part ‘in one of these little amateur theatrical events’ she cried, ‘Bravo! I must try to see it.’ The sun was hot now. Miss Bellamy’s bony face was greasy, and powder had clotted in the open pores in her large nose; but she radiated such exuberant goodwill that Mr Fairley, who liked women to be lively, thought her very handsome.