Red Joan (3 page)

‘You've got to look the part, Joanie,' her mother tells her, surrounded by pins and cottons and materials cut into unlikely shapes on the living-room rug, although neither of them knows what the part should look like. They know only that they do not know, which is not quite enough.

No mention is made of purchasing the set texts or the equipment required for science practicals or any of the other things that Joan feels might actually come in handy for the course. University, it seems, is mostly a question of textiles.

 

During those first few days of living alone in Cambridge, Joan finds that she is amazingly, gloriously happy just to be alive. She loves her new home with its red-bricked Queen Anne architecture, its beautifully manicured lawns and sports field and tennis courts. Physically, she equates this excitement to the feeling in her stomach when she cycles very fast over the hump bridge at the back of Clare College, that sudden rush of giddiness in her stomach, and then the exhilaration of speeding downhill.

She attends lectures in the mornings, leaving her bicycle propped against the railings of the science faculty on Pembroke Street, and then sliding into the back row of the lecture theatre with her satchel under her arm. The days of chaperones are over, but the lecturers still largely ignore the female presence, addressing the audience as ‘gentlemen.' They tend to stand directly in front of whatever they have written, mumbling ‘square this' and ‘subtract that,' and then wiping the board down to move on to the next calculation before anyone has had time to work out what they are supposed to be doing but Joan remains undeterred. She regards each lecture as a small dot of knowledge which will one day join to another dot, and then another and another, until she will finally understand at least some of the figures chalked up in minute smudges on the blackboard, and she is hopeful that this will come about before the summer examinations.

Her room at Newnham is on the ground floor of Peile Hall, a relatively new block with modern bathrooms and kitchenettes and a view out over the immaculate gardens. It is as large as the drawing room at home, with a small truckle bed pushed up against one wall and a thick-cushioned sofa against the other, leaving a huge expanse of carpet in the middle where she can practise handstands without the remotest possibility of breaking anything. The kitchenette has a single gas ring upon which she has not yet attempted to cook, preferring to skip breakfast in favour of an apple on the way to lectures, followed by a packed lunch of crusty bread with cheese or boiled ham, and then dinner in Hall, a large, light room with beautiful, corniced ceilings and long, communal tables. Although there is no one she immediately takes to in those first few days, she is not lonely. Everyone is astonishingly friendly, and these dinners are enjoyable, rumbustious affairs. She is not used to this after the cliques and hierarchies of school, and she puts it down to the fact that here, in Cambridge, everyone is a bit of a swot, and so for once there is nothing unusual about her.

 

On her third night, Joan is awoken by a smart rap on the window, followed by a scrabbling noise on the window ledge outside, as if a very large cat is trying to get into her room. She leans out of bed and pinches the bottom corner of the curtain between her finger and thumb and pulls it back. Her hockey stick is propped up against the wall, and there is something comforting about its proximity. She clears her throat, ready to scream if necessary, and peers out.

Two scarlet high-heeled shoes are standing on her windowsill.

She pulls the curtain a little further back and looks upwards. A girl is half-standing, half-crouching in the shoes, resplendent in a black silk dress and a white scarf, and when she sees the curtain lift she smiles and puts a finger to her lips. She crouches down so that her face is almost level with Joan's.

‘Hurry up and let me in,' she mouths through the glass.

Joan hesitates for a moment, and then slides out of bed to undo the catch, and the girl steps through the window frame and into Joan's room. ‘My room's on the third floor,' the girl announces, by way of explanation, removing her shoes one at a time before jumping down from the windowsill. ‘Darned curfew,' she mutters, massaging her toes where her shoes have been chafing. ‘Sorry for getting you up. The laundry window was closed.'

Joan rubs her eyes. ‘Don't mention it.'

The girl glances around the room, taking in the heavy green curtains and the sofa with its collection of ill-matched cushions. Her hair and eyes are dark, her cheeks smooth and dusted, and her lips bear a bright slash of red lipstick. Joan is suddenly conscious of how she must look, standing barefoot in her nightie with small strips of muslin tied into her hair. She steps back towards her bed, supposing that this might encourage the girl to go, but the girl does not seem to be in any rush.

‘Are you a first year too?'

Joan is surprised by the implication in the question that this girl is also a new arrival. She seems so self-assured, so certain of the rules, that it is hard to believe she hasn't been here for years. ‘Yes.'

‘English Literature?'

Joan shakes her head. ‘Natural Sciences.'

‘Ah. I was fooled by your cushion covers.' She pauses. ‘I'm reading Languages. More modern than medieval. I say, I don't suppose you've got a dressing gown I could borrow? I don't want to get caught walking around like this. Better to pretend we've been up all night drinking cocoa or something like the rest of them.'

Joan nods and turns away, not wanting to let on that this was, in fact, how she had spent the latter part of her evening before going to bed, that she was one of
them
. She goes to the wardrobe and takes out her dressing gown.

‘Is that a mink coat?' the girl asks from behind Joan's shoulder, her voice suddenly curious.

‘Hmm, yes, I think so.' Joan gives a small shrug, self-conscious at having such a thing in her wardrobe, procured on indefinite loan from a second cousin who no longer had any use for it, but Joan cannot imagine that she will ever be bold enough to wear it. ‘It's a bit hideous, isn't it?'

‘Well, it's rather
fin de siècle
,' says the girl with a sideways smile, stepping towards the wardrobe. She reaches out her hand and strokes the coat, and then slips it off its hanger, tilts her head to inspect it, and flings it around her shoulders. ‘Although at least it's not Arctic fox. They're everywhere at the moment.'

‘Except the Arctic regions.'

The girl gives a short, surprised laugh. She turns around and glances at her back in the mirror. And then she lifts her arms and twirls, so that her silk dress clings to her chest and the mink coat spins out like a flapper outfit: miraculously transformed, made glamorous in a way that Joan has never imagined. So that is how you wear it, Joan thinks. Not draped or buttoned or belted. Just flung.

‘I don't think it's hideous,' the girl says. ‘It's different.'

Joan smiles. She expects that it is different because it was made so long ago that its cut is no longer recognisable. But there is something rich about it as it spins and flares, something luxuriant and soft which she can't help but admire as the girl discards it on Joan's bed. She must remember to thank her mother properly for finding it in her next letter. ‘I suppose it's not so bad,' Joan concedes. ‘I'm just not used to it yet.'

‘I'll bring your dressing gown back tomorrow,' the girl says, tiptoeing to the door and turning the handle. She peers out to check that the corridor is empty, and then looks back to nod towards the pair of scarlet stilettos lying discarded in the middle of Joan's room. ‘And I'll pick up my shoes then too, if that's all right? They don't make very convincing slippers.'

‘Of course.' Joan waits for the girl to close the door behind her. She picks up the fur coat and goes to hang it in her wardrobe, and then she glances at the girl's shoes, so bold against her beige rug. How could anyone walk in those, let alone climb onto a windowsill? Still considering this, she slides her feet into the steep cavities of bright red leather, a close fit but not uncomfortable. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and for a moment she pauses, no longer sleepy but giddy and precarious, before coming to her senses and taking them off, placing them next to her well-worn, low-heeled brogues, and getting back into bed.

M
s. Hart takes a photograph from the file and places it on the table next to the photograph of William. ‘Do you recognise this?'

‘Oh,' Joan whispers. It is the picture from her undergraduate laboratory pass while she was at Cambridge. She has not seen it for years, and yet it is so familiar to her that it is almost like glancing in a mirror; a tea-coloured and misty mirror, yes, but a mirror all the same. Her face in the photograph is powdered and rouged, and her eyes have a distant look about them, silvery-grey in the black-and-white spectrum. There will have been lipstick on her lips to make them so dark and defined, and they are parted slightly in a smile. How different she looks there from how she looks now. So young and innocent and, well, pretty. She has not used that word to describe herself for years. ‘Of course I recog­nise it.'

‘This is the photograph that will accompany the press statement on Friday.'

Joan looks up at her. ‘But why will the press want a photograph of me?'

Ms. Hart crosses her arms. ‘I think you know, don't you, Mrs. Stanley?'

Joan shakes her head, careful to maintain her expression of confusion. She can see the appeal of this photograph to any members of the press who might be interested in the story, if they know as much as William evidently thought they did. A lump rises in her throat, and for the first time, Ms. Hart's eyes seem to show a brief flicker of sympathy.

‘Where did you get it?' she whispers.

‘I'm afraid I can't tell you.'

‘Why not?'

‘It's classified.' There is a pause. Ms. Hart is sitting with her arms crossed. ‘What I can tell you depends on how much you tell me.'

‘I've got nothing to tell.'

‘Now, that's not true, is it?'

Joan feels her heart flutter inside her but she will not drop her gaze. Her voice is louder now. ‘I don't know what you think I've done.'

Ms. Hart looks down at her notes. She turns back a page, circles something, and then speaks. ‘You've said your father was a socialist—'

‘I didn't say that,' Joan interrupts.

‘You implied it.'

Joan shrugs. She is annoyed with herself for having said something that could be twisted in an attempt to implicate her father in . . . in what? She doesn't know. All she knows is that she must select her words carefully around this woman. ‘But I didn't say it.'

‘Well? What was he?'

Joan frowns, considering Ms. Hart's question. She wants to be sure of representing her father's beliefs correctly, given that he was always very particular about such things. ‘He would never have used that word to describe himself. He just believed there was more the government could have done to help people. Politically and socially. My father put a lot of store by institutions. It was in his nature. Public school, university, army officer, headmaster. He thought the government, as an institution, was letting people down.'

‘So he wasn't a member of any political organisation?'

‘No.'

‘And your mother?'

In spite of herself, Joan raises an eyebrow. ‘Most definitely not.'

‘So you wouldn't say that you were encouraged to take an interest in politics by anyone in particular?'

Joan looks at her and wonders when it changed. When was it decided that taking an interest in politics was something subversive? As she remembers, it was quite normal to be concerned by such things when she was young. Society meant something in those days. It was not like it is now, when the news is filled with nothing but gossip about people who have never done or achieved anything, who don't seem to know the first thing about grammar or the etymology of the word
celebrity
, who appear doll-like and too colourful and yet somehow the same. What sort of society glamorises these people? She knows what her husband would have said: that the rot set in with Mrs. Thatcher, and perhaps it did, but she also knows that it happened on the Left too, after all that fuss with the unions in the seventies. There was nothing for anyone to believe in any more, and the realisation of this saddens her, not just for itself but because she recognises it as an old person's thought. Redundant and unnecessary. She shakes her head.

‘Please speak up for the recorder,' Ms. Hart says, her voice firm and unwavering.

‘Nobody encouraged me. Nobody in particular.'

Ms. Hart looks at her as if she was expecting a different answer. Her gaze is unblinking. She waits a little longer. ‘Fine,' she says at last. ‘I believe you were about to tell me about your friendship with Sonya Galich, as she then was. If we're going to be chronological about it, that is.'

Joan shivers. She looks down at her feet, trying to weigh up how much she can tell them against how much they already know.

 

*

 

As promised, the girl comes to Joan's room the following morning to return the dressing gown. Joan is in the middle of writing an essay on diffraction techniques in the study of atomic particles and does not hear her approaching. When she looks up, she sees the girl leaning against the doorframe, dressed in a blue trouser suit and wool-covered slippers. Her hair is wound up and knotted in a chocolate brown scarf in a manner that Joan imagines her mother would dismiss as ‘washerwoman style' but which, on this girl, makes her look as if she has just stepped off a filmset. She produces a thin silver box and flips it open. The silver glints and sparkles in her hand. ‘Cigarette?'