Flowers on the Grass (28 page)

The girls next door reminded her of the High School. They all wore dark-green tunics and blazers with a crest and hard round hats with bands that matched their green-and-white-striped ties. Pamela wore a grey flannel coat and skirt copied from one of Estelle’s and a grey beret with a real gold clip that Eric had given her last birthday, when she had wished desperately for riding lessons. In her suitcases were some new cotton dresses that Pamela thought much too long, but Estelle said that fourteen was not too young to start being fashionable. Look at the Americans, she said. Pamela was tired of looking at the Americans. Estelle turned her eyes Westward all the time, but Pamela couldn’t see what was wrong with England.

It was quite nice being able to wear slacks or shorts or anything you liked at Rosemount, but all the same, there was something about a uniform. It gave you a safe feeling to put
on the same things in the same order every day, and to mark Sunday with your own clothes. There was nothing to mark Sunday from the rest of the week at Rosemount, except chicken for lunch and the few cranks who went defiantly to church. Pamela would have liked to go, for the sake of clinging to old custom, but she did not dare, because they thought her queer enough as it was. Peter made jokes about clergymen, and didn’t approve of morning prayers or grace before meals, like there had always been at the High School.

At York, the eight girls spilled out onto the platform, dropping books and cricket bats, and were set upon by other girls in the same uniform who had been farther down the train. They made such a chattering crowd on the platform that passengers and porters had to steer round them, until a red-faced open-air-looking woman came up in a hard green felt hat and a blazer and started to bully them into collecting their luggage.

“Oh, Miss
Feeny”
they clamoured. “Oh please, Miss Feeny!” and Pamela wished that it were her Miss Feeny, too. At Rosemount no one bullied you into doing anything. If you had luggage, you must look after it yourself or lose it. That was Independence. There were no Miss Feenys, for everyone, even the Head, was called by their Christian name. That was Equality. No teachers really, for they were called Helpers, which was Encouragement; and if they cursed you, you were entitled to curse them back. That was Liberty of the Subject.

Pamela had to change at York, to take the branch line to her country station. There was no one she knew on the second train, for you were allowed to trickle up to Rosemount when you liked within the first two or three days of term. She was not disappointed, for she did not like any of the others very much, except Linda, who had got T.B. from not changing her wet clothes and would not be coming back this term or probably ever again.

Pamela took a taxi from the station to the school, which was a spectacular red house with gables and towers and unreasonable windows, on a windy hill above a huddled stone village. She paid the driver without feeling grand, for she was quite used to taxis by now. She left her trunk for Jock to bring in when he had finished with the cows and went
along to Peter’s room. Although he was the Head, you were allowed to go in there whenever you liked, without knocking. It made Pamela laugh when she remembered the trembling line in clean blouses waiting outside the headmistress’s study at the High School. She had only been in that study three times in her life. Once when she came, in tears of fright; once when she was rude to the French mistress, in tears of shame; and once when she left, in tears of real distress. Everyone was always in and out of Peter’s room, for it had french windows and was a short cut to the garden.

When Pamela went in, he was on the floor, cutting out curtains.

“Hullo,” she said. “I’m back.”

“Who’s that?” He looked up. He was a lean grey man with a face like a wolf and huge spectacles shaped like an eye-bath, with half-inch-thick horn-rims. “Oh, hullo, Pam. Had a good Easter? Christ is risen, and all that?” That was the kind of joke he made. After a while you just paid no attention.

“Yes, all right, thank you. I’ve got that book you wanted. Estelle—my mother—got it from America for you.”

“Oh great, great. Thanks most tremendously.” When he smiled, his teeth were long and narrow and even and looked false, although they were not, or the school would have known it. They knew all the intimate personal details of all the staff.

“Come and look at this,” he said, crawling about among the bright cretonne.
“Don’t
you think it’s rather exquisite? Angles, you see, to counteract the bulges of that extra-ordinarily ugly bow window. How anyone in their sense could have perpetrated a monstrosity like that—but typical of the whole house, don’t you see? Polypi and pustules breaking out all over it like a Rowlands print.”

Pamela sighed and shifted her weight to the other foot. This was one of his favourite themes—the faults of the old house and the iniquities of the family who had lived in it for hundreds of years. She thought the old red house was lovely, and the legends of the Torrin family, which she had found in a book under the stairs, fascinated her, but she did not say so. Rosemount had taught her one thing, anyway. She had dropped so many bricks in her first term that she had learned now to hold her tongue among alien minds. She never said what she thought.

When Peter held up the bizarre cretonne, draping it against himself as if he were a fashion model, Pamela said: “Yes, it’s wonderful. How bright of you to have found it. Oh look—there’s Babette!” She hopped over the bunches of material and jumped down the three steps into the garden, glad of an excuse to get away, for she never liked being alone in a room with Peter. It made her feel somehow like seeing snakes in the reptile house at the zoo; wanting to draw back, your spine shuddery a bit, although you knew they could do you no harm.

“Three more bloody months,” Babette greeted her gloomily, kicking at a drooping peony, although she did not particularly dislike Rosemount. She did not like any school. She had been expelled from three and refused by two before she was taken in here. She would not be expelled from Rosemount. No one ever was. You could never do anything bad enough.

They walked together to Lady Torrin’s summer-house, a little filigree retreat among the rhododendrons, in which she used to receive her soldier lover, while the old earl they had made her marry lay crippled in his bed, calling for her. Pamela knew. She had read it in the book, but she would not tell the others, least of all Babette, because they would turn it all into sex. You could not be romantic at Rosemount, for there was an explanation for everything. Sometimes at breakfast Peter made all his “friends”, as he called the children, tell him their dreams of the night before. Then they would all have a long discussion about what the dreams meant, sitting on and on at the table, forgetting about classes, until it was almost lunchtime, and old Pearl, who tolerated anything that Peter did because he had once saved her from the consequences of infanticide by a petition to the Home Office, simply swept a few crumbs onto the floor and laid the places round them.

The others all loved to discuss their dreams, but when it was Pamela’s turn she always said: “I didn’t have any.”

“You wouldn’t,” they scoffed. “Your subconscious is atrophied.” But she would not tell them about the flying horse that came to her window and took her away to where Bucephalus and the Tetrarch and Brown Jack grazed on pastures wet with stars; and about the time she heard moaning in a ditch and it was the Queen knocked down by a lorry, and Pamela saved her life and lived ever after at Buckingham Palace, “like one of the family”.

“I didn’t dream,” she would say. Her dreams were the treasure that gave life its only value. She wasn’t going to have them pulled to pieces and scattered on the table like sham jewels for everyone to despise.

They sat in the summer-house and ate chocolate. Babette said her father was on the black market in sweets. Whether or not this was true, she had an unlimited supply, which she kept in a locked drawer, for things of value were not safe at Rosemount.

“D’you know what?” Babette asked, while Pamela was sitting trying to feel like Lady Torrin waiting for her captain to come shouldering through the rain-wet rhododendrons.

“No, what?” She hoped it was a secret. Secrets were exciting, but you were not supposed to have any at Rosemount. The contents of everyone’s mind must be as free to the community as a convent wardrobe. That was Sharing.

“Old Gabriel’s sick,” Babette said. “We’ve got a new stooge. Male, I’m glad to say.”

“What’s he like?”

“Wet, I expect. They always are, especially the floating ones.”

“He couldn’t be worse than what we’ve got already,” said Pamela. “Perhaps he’ll be nice.”

“Oh, don’t be so naïve,” said Babette, getting up to leave her. “How could he be? He
teaches!”

If only he would! If only someone would come here from whom she could learn, someone she could admire. A mistress for preference. At the High School she had had crushes on elder girls and mistresses like everyone else. Here, the Helpers were not remote enough to be hero-worshipped. You could not have a crush on someone who called you a stinking little twerp, or took your hair grips without asking, or wandered about the corridor cleaning his teeth, with his braces hanging down. You might have a “Thing” about someone. Most of the elder boys and girls had it about each other, and Selina had one about Peter, but that was different. Pamela knew. Estelle had told her the facts of life long before she wanted to hear them. She took her to all the most unsuitable plays and films and explained the mystifying parts in forthright detail, although Pam would much rather have gone to see a Western, or
Where the Rainbow Ends
.

Her foster-mother and father—Estelle and Eric as she had to call them—were very kind. Pamela was conscious that
it was generous of them to have adopted her, for there was nothing special about her. She was not even pretty, with her straight black hair and solid face, so she tried her best to please them and to do what they wanted. She had never known her real parents, who had been killed in a skidding car soon after she was born. She knew only that they had not been married. Estelle, with her passion for honest statement, had thought it her duty to tell Pamela this, and, having made quite an important thing of it, then tried to explain that it didn’t matter at all.

Pamela had been brought up by an aunt, who had died when she was at the High School, and the aunt’s rich, childless friends had taken over Pamela, body and soul and even name. They might have had a name like anyone else, but no, they had to be called Ruelle. Pamela Ruelle. She hated the sound of it. Before the year was up, just when she might have been captain of Under Thirteen cricket, and was in the middle of a crush on Miss Parkins, they had removed her to Rosemount. After that, they talked of sending her to a college on the Isle of Skye, where you learned how to co-ordinate your body with the elements. It meant health for the rest of your life.

Eric and Estelle were homeopaths, so Pamela had to be, too. They did not hold with things like magnesia and syrup of figs and Friar’s balsam, on which she had been reared, but gave her drops of colourless liquid or tiny white pills which did not even give you the illusion of doing good. Pamela suspected that although the pills came out of differently labelled bottles they were all the same. Once when she was in a homeopathic hospital with a broken ankle the night nurse had told her that they had special pills made only of sugar of milk which they gave to people who made a fuss, and they slept, thinking they had been given a powerful drug. Pamela had to stuff her face in the pillow when she heard the dying-duck woman in the next bed say to the nurse: “You must drug me again tonight—heavily,” and then sleep like a log on her harmless sugar pills; which proved, Estelle said in her “explaining” voice, when Pamela told her the story on visitors’ day, “that illness comes from yourself and can only be cured by yourself”.

“What about my broken ankle? Being kicked by that milk pony was nothing to do with me.”

“It might have been a subconscious wish to hurt yourself
that made you go near the pony at all,” Estelle said. “That’s what Freud believed. When his children got hurt he used to say: ‘Why did you do that?’”

“How infuriating,” Pamela said, snuggling her chin under the sheet and glad that, although she had odd ideas, Estelle was better looking than any of the other visitors.

“I don’t think so,” Estelle said, drawing on her gloves as the bell rang. “Most interesting.”

At Rosemount you could take homeopathic medicines, or none if you liked. There was no matron to hand out pills and cough syrup, and if you cut yourself you went to the cupboard in Peter’s bathroom and found some strapping among his talcs and toilet waters. Bobby Manning, who was a diabetic, had to do all the syringe business himself, unless he felt generous and let someone else have a go at stabbing him in the arm or leg. You could put yourself on any peculiar diet you fancied, and no one but the vegetarians ate their cabbage.

You could do anything you liked at Rosemount, it seemed, except learn anything useful. Pamela wanted so much to learn, so that she could have a job and be independent in the world. Eric and Estelle were very kind, and her home with them was so beautiful that she hardly dared to go in without taking oif her shoes. She could manage with them for now, but she must be able to get away and change her name and earn her own living as soon as she was grown up.

At Rosemount, the Helpers and the twenty-odd children had their meals together at a long table down the middle of what had once been the dining hall of the Torrins. There were no places. You just grabbed a seat anywhere as you came in. That was the way it was. No privileges were necessary because there were no restrictions, and the staff must not be put before the children, because that would retard progress. Pamela was willing to be progressive if she must, if that was what Eric and Estelle wanted, but she would have preferred meals to be like at the High School, with the staff talking soberly and eating genteelly at the top table on their own. She did not like having to eat with the Helpers, for Kathryn always had a drop on the end of her nose, even in summer; Humphrey’s Adam’s apple looked as if it were perpetually trying to swallow a lump of gristle, even when it was mince, and Alice’s scent overpowered everything, even curry. Alice and Humphrey were married. At least, Pamela thought they
must be, whatever the others said, for only married people went in the bathroom together.