Marking Time (15 page)

But supper was nearly finished before Stella arrived. She had missed the train, and consequently the school taxis, and had had to wait until another taxi turned up. Supper was provided for her,
and Miss Rennishaw suggested that Louise should stay and keep her company while it was eaten. So eventually they were alone in the large dining room, sitting at one of the eight round tables. She
was not in the least like a princess. Her hair was black and fine and curled all over her head; her skin was olive with no trace of colour; she had long narrow eyes of a greenish grey above high
cheekbones, a prominent bony nose and a pale, surprisingly elegant little mouth with a small dark mole set to one side and slightly below it. By the time she had noticed this much, Louise realised
that Stella was observing her with an equal curiosity. They exchanged faintly embarrassed smiles.

‘You’re not homesick, are you?’

‘Homesick?’

‘I mean, feeling a bit strange – your first evening.’

‘Oh, no! I was just thinking how glad I am not to be at home now. When my father hears I’ve missed the train, he’ll go through the roof. If I was home, I’d never hear the
end of it.’

‘Would your mother mind?’

‘She’d mind
him
minding, which comes to much the same thing. What’s it like here?’

Louise said truthfully that it was not at all bad. But that did not satisfy Stella, and by the time she had finished her apple charlotte, she had cross-examined Louise about everything and knew
about there being four different categories of work – cooking, parlourmaiding, housemaiding and laundry – and that they changed their jobs every week, that two mistresses taught
cooking, an Old Girl called Patsy superintended the parlourmaids, that the smaller Miss Rennishaw taught them how to clean, and that an ancient, sardonic Irishwoman, Miss O’Connell, ran the
laundry. They worked each morning, had the afternoons off, and then started at five, after tea, until supper was served and washed up. ‘Miss O’Connell’s the worst: she made me
goffer a surplice
three
times last term. Each time I finished it, she crumpled it all up, dipped it in the starch and made me do it again.’

Stella stared and then burst out laughing. ‘I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Well, you know what a surplice is? The white, smocky thing priests wear in church.’

‘Oh. Right,’ she said quickly.

‘Well, a goffering iron is a sort of—’

But here Miss Rennishaw the Smaller put her head round the door and told Stella that her father wished to speak to her, and Stella made a comic face of fear, but Louise could see that she was
also actually alarmed, leaped to her feet and followed Smaller out of the room, who returned a moment later to tell Louise that she might clear Stella’s supper things away and put them in the
pantry. When she had done that, she hung about the hall. She could hear Stella’s voice between long pauses. ‘Yes, Father, I know. Yes, it was. I said I’m sorry. I don’t
know. It just got sort of late. I know. Yes, it was. Oh, Father, it’s not the end of the world! Sorry. I’ve said I’m sorry. I don’t know. I don’t know what else to
say.’ It seemed to go on and on until it sounded as though Stella was in tears, and Louise began to feel awfully sorry for her. A minute later, Stella appeared, and as soon as she had shut
the Rennishaws’ sitting-room door made the comic face again, rolling her eyes and shrugging her thin shoulders in a parody of despair.

‘Jeepers!’ she said. ‘I’ve given my mother a sick headache, dinner was delayed because of all the telephone calls, I’m not fit to be allowed out because I’m
so selfish and irresponsible, and he’s a good mind to stop my allowance for the whole term.’

‘I thought you were—’

‘Crying? Oh, I had to sound like that. It’s the only way to stop him.
Fathers!
Do you have trouble with yours?’

‘Not – well, sometimes.’

‘I can’t wait to be grown up,’ Stella said as they climbed the stairs to their attic.

‘Oh, I absolutely agree with you there!’

The first bond between them. It was even better when Louise discovered that Stella, unlike all the others, had no wish to be a deb – ‘I hardly know what they are!’ she said
with entrancing scorn – but wanted to
be
something, although she hadn’t decided exactly what, which led the way into Louise’s ambitions about the theatre and the
impending audition. Stella was pleasingly impressed. ‘You can practise on me,’ she said. ‘I simply adore being acted to or played to – or anything like that.’

‘In fact, I might join you at the acting school,’ she said much later. ‘I think I‘d rather enjoy that.’ This shocked Louise, who felt that this was an irreverent
approach to her sacred art.

‘You can’t just
decide
to act,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘Why
not
? Because it’s not just a job, it’s more of a calling. I mean, you have to be some good at it in the first place.’

‘Like you, you mean?’

‘I never said I was.’

‘But you
think
you are. Perhaps you just want to be famous. I don’t care about that. I would do it just to find out what it was like. If you’re interested in things,
it doesn’t matter too much if you turn out to be no good at them. It’s doing it that’s fun.’

‘Oh.’

‘You don’t agree with me?’

‘I just haven’t thought about it like that.’

They were to have many conversations of that kind during the term, which was the coldest, the Miss Rennishaws said, that they could remember. Everybody had hot-water bottles and wore bedsocks,
and shut their windows at night after the taller Miss Rennishaw had been round to say good night to them. She believed in fresh air of any temperature. There was a coal fire in their sitting room,
which meant that half a dozen of them could get warm at a time. There were plentiful meals in spite of the rationing that had begun before the term started. Recipes were being changed. To begin
with, it didn’t seem to make much difference: their four ounces of butter was doled out to them on individual saucers, but bacon and sugar were pooled – cooking was done with margarine
and lard. Meat was not rationed until the end of the term, but it had become more expensive, and they were taught to make more stews and pies and to use offal, the latter being generally unpopular.
Louise stopped going to confession, but she felt too nervous of Miss Rennishaw’s disapproval if she gave up church as well, so she went. Stella came the first Sunday with her, and stood and
sat and knelt, but was mute. ‘I don’t know the words,’ she said, when Louise asked her afterwards why she hadn’t joined in. ‘I shan’t come again, anyway,’
she added. ‘I just wanted to see what it was like.’

‘Don’t your family ever go?’

‘Never.’ She answered so repressively that Louise dropped the subject.

Stella’s curiosity seemed to embrace everything, and to be insatiable. It led her to trespassing: ‘Let’s see where this path
goes
to’; to examining the contents
of people’s chests of drawers when they were housemaids together (‘Barbara Carstairs has a box with false
eyelashes
in it – black – not at all like her sandy ones,
and Sonia Shillingsworth has a photograph of someone in her underclothes drawer that definitely isn’t her brother,’ whereupon Louise, although shocked, would fall into the trap of
asking, ‘How do you know?’ ‘She hasn’t got one – I asked her’). It led her to dipping her fingers into jars and tins to taste the contents, to experimenting with
pots and bottles of cold cream and astringent lotions – even lipsticks were tried and then hastily rubbed off. At the same time Louise discovered that she could be intensely and unexpectedly
private and resented questions of any kind. She was very funny: in a few weeks she could imitate anyone in the school, not only their voices but everything else about them. But she was also a
wonderful audience: weeping at Louise’s Juliet, and laughing until the tears ran down her face at her sketch of a dancing-class teacher. ‘Angelic Louise! Oh, I love people who make me
laugh. And cry. You’re the only person here who could do that.’ She was wonderfully sympathetic about Louise’s parents being so uninterested in her career. ‘Although,’
she said, ‘it can be worse if they have definite ideas for one.’

‘Do your parents have ideas for you?’

‘
Do
they! Sometimes my mother wants me to go to university so that I can thereafter be a teacher or work in a library or something. But my father simply wants me to make a good,
suitable marriage. And then sometimes it’s the other way round. They have rows about it and then they make up and blame it all on me.’

‘What about your brother?’

‘There was never any question about him. Peter’s always been going to be a musician. As soon as he left school he went to the Academy. The only thing is, he’ll get called up
before he’s finished his training. He got deferred to finish his first year because he had a double scholarship. So he’ll only have one more term.’

‘Perhaps the war will be over before then. Nothing much seems to happen.’

‘It will.’

‘How on earth do
you
know, Stella?’

‘I just do. My father says Hitler’s become unbelievably powerful – and he’s insane.’

Louise noticed that many conversations ended with Stella quoting her father as though there was nothing more to be said. Sometimes, as now, she found this irritating. ‘Well, it
doesn’t seem as though much is going to happen. I mean, all our evacuees have gone back to London and there haven’t been any of the air raids we were told would be so frightening. And
my father says that with every month that goes by, we’re getting more aeroplanes and ships and everything, which makes it less and less likely that the Germans would dare to attack us. So
honestly, it is possible, Stella, that your father may be wrong.’

But Stella’s face – her whole body – implied the utter impossibility of this. Louise dropped the subject. By now, they loved one another enough to disagree, to disapprove, to
snub each other, but they never actually quarrelled.

‘I’m so lucky you were here!’ Stella would say. Sometimes this exclamation would be followed by a list of Louise’s attributes: she used her mind, she’d
read
things, she was determined upon a career, she was ‘a serious person’, until Louise, blushing with pleasure at being so appreciated, would disclaim the virtues, aware all
the time that she neither read nor thought enough to be so extolled, and she would counter-attack with Stella’s talents, which seemed the greater to her because they were so lightly borne
(Stella could not only play anything she heard by ear but had perfect pitch; she also turned out to be fluent in both French and German and to have a photographic memory – she could read a
recipe once and remember every detail of it). Sometimes it was how lucky it was that they had met, and Stella proceeded to outline the boringness of the other girls: one could see them all, she
said, and proceeded to
enact
the seven ages of the deb. ‘All horsy to begin with, with shining, healthy pink faces and Harris tweed jackets talking about cubbing and fetlocks, and
then simpering away in tulle and white net with little pearl necklaces and tight perms, and then all soppy and radiant in creasy white satin being married, and
then
in cashmere with larger
pearls holding some ghastly baby – oh, I left out being
presented
with those idiotic white feathers in their hair and long white gloves – and then looking much fatter in a suit
with a complicated hat at their child’s speech day, and then looking completely
passe
in beige lace at their daughter’s coming-out dance . . .’ Her caricatures of all
these phases were accompanied by wonderfully comic expressions, and her hands delineated the appropriate clothes until Louise was helpless with laughter.

‘Henrietta’s not so bad,’ she would say eventually.

‘She
is!
She sleeps on her back so that her face will stay smooth when she’s old.’

‘How do you
know?’

‘Mary Taylor told me, because she’s always having nightmares and Mary has to wake her up.’

‘Well, there are the Seraphic Twins.’ Angelica and Caroline Redfern were identical: ash blonde with velvet brown eyes and amazingly long, elegant legs, and widely regarded as the
height of glamour.

‘Oh,
them
! It’s only there being two of them that impresses people. You know, like pairs of things being more valuable than one of them from the collecting point of view.
Two minds without a single thought is more like it.’

Louise, after she had laughed, said she thought Stella was in danger of being priggish. ‘I mean, we aren’t actually that much more marvellous.’

‘I never said we were. But we make the most – well, more – of ourselves. We
want
to be more.’

Somehow, Stella always had the last word. As, Louise recognised, Nora had also often done. Perhaps I am a weak character, she thought incredulously. Surely not! All the same she knew that Stella
was her best friend, and as she, unlike Stella, had never been to schools, boarding or otherwise, this was a new and exciting experience, and the only sad thing to dread was that after this last
term they would be parted, as Stella was staying on to complete her course. ‘Although I might not,’ she said. ‘You never know. I loathe cooking, and I’m certainly never
going to do any housework, and what’s the use of me learning how to interview servants when soon there won’t be any?’

‘Stella, don’t be so
mad
! There’ll always be servants.’

‘There won’t. They’ll go and do war work and then they won’t want to come back. Would you?’

‘That’s different.’

‘Now you’re relying on the old class structure.’

‘So what? That’s what we’ve got.’ But here she had hit on a new and hitherto entirely concealed vein in her friend, as Stella launched into her political views. What did
Louise think class structure depended upon? Educating people so badly that they could only do the dull and menial jobs,
or
relying upon them having some vocation, like nursing, where they
wanted to do whatever it was so badly that they would put up with being very poorly paid. There was nothing like making sure people were half educated and not paying them properly to keep them in a
place where nobody else wanted to be, she finished. They were lying head to tail on Louise’s bed, eating Walnut Whips and wrapped in their eiderdowns, and for a moment or two they were both
silent, although the storm outside, a shrieking wind and rain slamming against the windows, felt to Louise like her own thoughts, chaotic and noisy – and aghast.