Red Joan (4 page)

Joan smokes occasionally but only in company and never yet in her room. It makes her feel self-conscious in a mildly pleasurable way. She likes the obligatory pout which the act of inhaling requires, the narrowed eyes, the wisps of smoke. It amuses her to think how furious her mother would be if she could see her now, smoking before lunch on a weekday—
Who do you think you are? Some sort of femme fatale?
—but her mother cannot see her, so she shrugs her assent, and the girl takes this as an invitation to come in. She hands a cigarette to Joan, and Joan places it between her lips in what she imagines to be the manner of a femme fatale. The girl strikes a match to light her cigarette, and then holds it out for Joan to do the same. Joan leans forwards, closing her eyes and inhaling gently until the cigarette catches.

There is a brief silence but it is not uncomfortable. The girl glances around the room, amused to see her shoes filed neatly by the door. ‘Thanks for last night. Sorry if I startled you.'

Joan grins. ‘You did rather.' She goes into the small kitchen to find an ashtray, rummaging through the cupboards above the gas ring and eventually locating the ceramic bowl she once made in a pottery class at school. She taps ash into it as she walks back into the room and places it between them on the desk. ‘Where had you been anyway? Anywhere good?'

‘I was with my cousin and some of his friends.'

‘Is he a student here too?'

‘He's at Jesus College. Doing a PhD.'

Joan waits for her to elaborate but she doesn't. Instead, she leans over the desk to read Joan's half-finished essay, her hand resting on her hip as her eyes skim the page, and to Joan's surprise, she realises that she is glad it was her window this girl chose to climb through last night. She likes her self-confidence, her ease. Joan catches sight of the invitation propped up on her bookshelf. ‘Are you going to the sherry party this evening?' she asks.

‘The tutors' sherry party?' The girl gives a small burst of laughter, and Joan feels faintly embarrassed for having mentioned it. The girl stubs out her cigarette and then turns to look at Joan. ‘Only if I can wear your fur coat.'

 

Her name is Sonya, an exotic, unusual name, which is fitting for a girl who does not walk through life but sails, who floats in and out of rooms without ever seeming to trip or falter. She makes perfectly ordinary people into an audience, even when they don't want to be. They think they are taking part but they aren't. Not really. Not like Sonya. She doesn't have the humble opinion of her own importance that besieges most girls of her age. She seems to know that she is different and doesn't mind it. Even her clothes are different, but not in the same way as Joan's. Joan's are too new, too homemade to look right. When Joan observes herself in the mirror, she looks as if she is dressed in someone else's clothes which don't quite fit. The hemlines are all too long, the waists too slack. It is an uncomfortable thought and she wishes she did not have it, but no matter how much she tells herself that she is grateful for all the effort her mother put into her University Trousseau, the tugging and pinning and late-night stitching, she cannot seem to wriggle out the thought.

Sonya, in contrast, wears what she likes; black silk dresses in the evenings and, in the daytime, all-in-one trouser suits and odd, mustard-coloured dresses with no shape, no darts or nips or tucks, which on anybody else would look like old sacking tied up with a too-thin belt, but which on Sonya somehow manage to look stylish. Not chic exactly, but deliberate. And then high heels, headscarf, bright red lips. It is almost a statement of anti-fashion, a shrug of contempt towards garters and girdles and primness in the days before dresses were supposed to make statements. Almost anti-fashion, but not quite. Because soon they will all want to look like her.

Sonya comes back to Joan's room that evening while Joan is getting ready for the party and proposes a swap: mascara for mink. Joan protests that she does not want anything in return. Sonya can just borrow the coat. There's no need for bartering. Mascara is unlikely to be the sort of thing she can pull off anyway so she'd rather not wear it.

Sonya waves her objections aside, wafting her back into the room. ‘It doesn't need to be pulled off. If you put it on properly, then nobody will know you're wearing it. They'll just be dazzled by how big your eyes suddenly appear. Come here and sit down.' She shows Joan how to apply it, dabbing the cake of black dye with a droplet of water and then brushing the mixture upwards along her eyelashes with a small brush. ‘There! What do you think?'

Joan looks at herself in the mirror and has to admit that the transformation is quite amazing. She has used Brilliantine on her eyelashes before but it has never had this effect. Now her eyelashes flick upwards and curl, and if she lowers them and looks slightly upwards as Sonya instructs, they give an involuntary flutter. So this is how it's done, she thinks with delight.

‘What did I tell you? You look like Greta Garbo in
Anna Karenina
.' Sonya grins at her, and then turns to Joan's wardrobe to extract the fur coat, her side of the bargain, flinging it dramatically over her shoulders and spinning into the centre of the room.

‘You have to be careful with it,' Joan says. ‘I'd get into so much trouble if I lost it.'

Sonya laughs. She extracts a headscarf from her bag—crimson with small white flowers—and ties it around her hair. ‘Of course I'll be careful. Now get a move on, Garbo. We're going to be late.'

Their shoes clip on the cobbles and the mink coat flutters behind them as they cross the river by The Anchor. There are wolf-whistles from the pub doorway as they run along Silver Street and onto King's Parade, half-mocking but also amused. Joan is not used to so much attention, noting with surprise that just as much of it is directed at her; a reflected radiance. She wonders if this is how it feels to be Sonya. Always looked at, always admired.

The sherry party is held in an old building in the centre of town, a square, wood-panelled room decorated with books and candles, and Joan and Sonya's arrival goes largely unheralded by the huddle of academics talking in the middle of the room. Sonya goes to hang up the fur coat in the cloakroom, and instructs Joan to procure her a drink. Waiting staff in black uniforms with pressed white collars carry silver trays of tiny glasses in which sherry shines and sparkles.

‘Dry or medium?' A waiter is standing in front of her.

‘Oh.' Joan glances at the tray of glasses and then looks back at the waiter. ‘I don't know.'

The waiter's expression is stern, but when he sees her confusion he grins and the skin crinkles around his eyes. He leans towards her. ‘New here, are you?'

Joan nods.

‘Take the dry. Medium is sweeter, but if you say you like dry sherry it sounds as if you know what you're talking about.' He glances across at the huddle of academics and then turns the tray towards her. ‘And that's what seems to matter most around here. It's the one on your left.'

Joan smiles gratefully, and selects two glasses from the tray, one for herself and one for Sonya. ‘Thank you.'

She sees Sonya come in and waves to attract her attention, and she observes a glance pass between Sonya and the waiter. The waiter bows in acknowledgement, a small movement but a definite indication that he recognises her, and then he turns away to greet the next entrants to the party.

‘How do you know him?' Joan asks once he is out of earshot.

Sonya takes a sip of sherry. ‘Who, Peter? I met him last night. My cousin knows him from when the waiters went on strike last year. He did some leaflets for them.'

‘Why were they striking?'

‘Just the usual. Wages, overtime, holiday.'

They are interrupted by one of the tutors, a tall woman with long, grey hair who is intent on persuading Joan to take her zoology course. She has recently had an article accepted by the
Journal of Animal Ecology
, outlining her research on host-finding parasitic insects, and she is intent on relaying the more intricate aspects of this paper to someone, but Joan is too polite to slip away with Sonya once it has become clear that the paper is not a short one. She sees Sonya joining a group of girls from their year with whom Joan had dinner on the first night. She remembers their conversation quite well: horses, boarding school lacrosse games, sailing regattas in the Solent. Their expressions are strained with interest as Sonya speaks, and she sees Sonya laugh politely in return, but she also notices that there is something distant about the way Sonya talks to them, as if she does not quite know how to interact with them. After a few more excruciating minutes of parasite-based conversation, Joan excuses herself from the tutor and slips across the room to join Sonya.

‘Thank God you're here,' Sonya whispers, handing her another sherry which she has managed to appropriate from a passing tray. ‘Drink this and let's get out of here. There must be something more exciting going on in this town.'

Joan hesitates. ‘Let's stay a little longer. I don't want to appear rude.'

Sonya looks at her with barely concealed irritation, but then she shrugs and gives a small half smile. ‘All right. One more hour, then we absolutely have to leave.'

They stay until the end, as by the time the hour is up Sonya has found an appreciative audience of language students who are amazed at how well she speaks German, and she is blithe in her acceptance of their compliments. Joan, however, is cornered by a girl she has never met before: Margaret, a Classics undergraduate, who confides in her at great length about a secret engagement with a young man who works on her family's farm, and when she finally escapes from Margaret, there is someone else wanting to tell her about a fascinating piece of research she is conducting on the contact between Reindeer Tungus and Russian Cossacks in north-west Manchuria. Joan tries to appear interested but it is a struggle, and she loses count of the number of tiny glasses of dry sherry she is obliged to drink. When Sonya comes over to claim her, she is relieved to have an excuse to leave.

They walk home arm in arm, both of them giddy from too much alcohol, and giggling at the memory of how the other girls had responded to Sonya's recitations of German poetry. Sonya does an impression of one of the girls. ‘Which boarding school did you say you attended in Surrey?'

Joan laughs, even though she is curious to know the answer to this too. Sonya has no trace of a foreign accent, just a lingering drawl that sounds more American than European, but Joan is pretty certain she is not English.

Almost as if Sonya can read her thoughts, she says suddenly: ‘I was only there for two years.'

‘At boarding school?'

She nods. ‘It was in Farnham, in Surrey.' A pause. ‘But I was born in Russia.'

There is a silence as Joan absorbs this fact. There is something about the tone of Sonya's voice that makes it clear this is a carefully guarded piece of information. ‘Are your parents here in England too?' Joan asks.

Sonya does not look at her, and it takes a few seconds for Joan to work out that this was a tactless question. ‘My father was killed a few years after the Revolution. A small uprising. It's okay,' she adds quickly, shaking her head to forestall any sympathy Joan might attempt to offer. ‘I never even met him.' She stops. ‘And my mother died of pneumonia when I was eight.'

Joan feels suddenly very young. She reaches out and squeezes Sonya's arm. ‘I'm so sorry.'

‘It's all right. I don't remember very much about her either. I went to live with my uncle and cousin in Leipzig after that.' She grins. ‘That's where I learnt to speak German.'

‘The cousin you saw last night?'

‘Yes. Leo. He sent for me to come here when Uncle Boris moved to Switzerland.' She pauses. ‘We're Jewish, you see.'

‘Oh,' Joan says again. ‘It must have been terrible for you.'

‘I don't know. Surrey's not that bad.' She glances at Joan, a sly, sideways glance. ‘Besides, I had Leo so I wasn't exactly on my own.'

Joan feels a stab of pity for her, even though she knows better than to voice it out loud. How different it sounds from her own childhood, so easy in comparison, born in the aftermath of a war she would never have to know. Yes, she knows all the stories: that her father served in France as an officer in the trenches, that her mother was a nurse, that they met in the field hospital in the Somme near where her father's left leg is now buried. It is supposed to be a happy story, this account of her parents' first meeting, a tale of hope and salvation. She can picture her mother administering the anaesthetic as the doctor cut into the shattered, shrapnel-flecked flesh of her father's leg, gangrenous and useless, a straight incision this time, revealing the smooth whiteness of his bone, thick as an elephant's tusk. Ah yes, a happy story; Joan's father lying in a hospital trolley as he waited for his wooden leg to be fitted, an old man at the age of twenty-two, with just enough gumption left to reach up and take his nurse's hand and ask her to marry him.

‘My mother taught me to play the piano,' Sonya says, breaking in on Joan's thoughts. ‘She used to chalk the keys onto the kitchen table and we'd play along to the gramophone. That's my clearest memory of her. She could play anything—Chopin, Shostakovich, Beethoven.' She pauses. ‘Or so she said. She sold the piano when I was a baby so I never actually heard her play.'

Joan imagines Sonya's mother: tall, elegant, perhaps a little thinner than Sonya, but other than that, exactly the same. She watches as Sonya places her handbag unsteadily on the cobbles in front of her, and then runs her fingers through her hair, as if this action might restore her sense of composure. She flicks her hair, shaping it into a loose ponytail, and then twists it, piling it up on her head and pinning it expertly into place with a pencil extracted from her pocket. How does she do that? Surely it will not hold. But it does. The dim glow of a nearby street lamp glances off the pile of dark hair, bringing out an array of colours: hints of rust, chocolate, gold. Her skin is splashed with tiny freckles, fading now that the summer is past, but still creamy and healthy-looking. Yes, Joan thinks, Sonya's mother would have been beautiful too.