The People on Privilege Hill (12 page)

 

Now, the driver of a car is usually two people (or a single schizophrenic). One of them is terrified, watchful of every other vehicle as a potential enemy; every other driver is about to swerve, overtake, fall asleep, attack and destroy. The other self is confident, skilled and in charge, and this second covert creature comes to the fore in time of trial. My useless left foot flapped against the hump that occurs down the middle of cars but my right foot behaved like Schumacher's on his best of days. I roared from the Lake District scene, sending Ludwig backwards into a heap behind me. In twenty minutes I was on the motorway, then on the road home. “How far have you to go?” the hotel had asked. “No distance at all,” said the Schumacher self. (“And if I die, I die,” said the fallen, defeated mess of a wife.)

Petrol?

I stopped. I could not get out, so I hooted and eventually a fat girl came waddling.

“I've hurt my foot. I can't get out. Can you get me some petrol? I'll have to pay with a card.”

“If you pay by card you have to come inside to activate your pin.”

“Can you find me the manager? I can't activate my pin.”

“There isn't a manager.”

“Then I shall call the police.”

She said, “Just a minute,” and disappeared for ten, returning with someone holding an electronic pin machine.

I roared on, took a wrong turning and found myself on the Birmingham ring road, which again I flew along to a chorus of wailing horns and cartoon-strip purple, yelling faces. I left at the correct exit and thundered on, cameras flashing, motorists blaring, the road vanishing beneath me and far away behind.

I did not stop.

I was desperate to pee, but it went off.

I hung on.

And I reached home.

 

The house was as dead as when I had left it the previous day. The note under the pebble guarding against possible flowers had not been disturbed. I turned off the engine and began to cry.

Then the pain began, grabbing me like a manacle. It was the devil's grip and he was saying to me, “Ha-ha! I am here! You have sinned. You have sinned against your good, kind husband to please a rat. You are also a fool. You should have gone to hospital. You may be in plaster now for months. A wheelchair case. You may limp for the rest of your life. You are now, officially, an old woman. You have ‘had a fall.'”

So in my weedless semicircular drive this summer morning I leaned back in my seat and wept. It was not yet eleven o'clock. I'd driven from the Lake District in two hours. Now I could not get out of the car, for a huge conflagration was raging inside my shoeless flapping foot.

I wept on and the postman came up the drive and gave me a jaunty wave. He stopped only when Ludwig set up a howl to waken the dead. Ludwig howled and barked and battered his paws against all the windows, and the postman paused and looked in.

 

He is a big man and I am small. He lifted me out and, still holding me, found the house keys in my bag and opened the door. He laid me gently on the sofa in the hall and got on to his mobile for an ambulance.

“But I am safe now,” I said. (And nobody need ever know.) I leaned over to the hall table to pull away the note I'd left saying I'd gone off with Lizzie Fisher and tore it up.

Sounds outside indicated the ambulance and the postman came back saying he'd left the dog next door—yes, quite agreeable. “We'll soon have you right,” he said and dropped a letter on my chest.

Thick expensive writing paper. Posted yesterday, the envelope handwritten in Ambrose's tense, consistent fountain-pen script. I knew at once it must have been written before he left and posted from the airport. The stamp was stuck on very straight.

The ambulance crew were examining my ankle, gently touching while they watched my face. Someone was giving me an injection of morphine in the arm. “It doesn't stop the pain, love, but it stops you caring about it.”

I said, “Thank you,” and opened the letter which began, All I can do is tell you the truth without preamble. It has been over for so long, has it not? In the end I have made the decision to go away with Lizzie Fisher.

 

 

B
renda was keeping on about how she and Stafford had met for the first time at this very place, at this same time of year, and how she had never slept with any other man and how they'd both been virgins at their wedding and how now, over forty years on, they were proud of it.

Eileen, a smouldering woman, was thinking about where Lily would park the car. There had been no instructions.

Lily, who was driving the car, her cherry-coloured Alfa Romeo, was wondering why she was filled with heaviness: a heaviness unnatural to her, though natural enough for Eileen. It was Eileen's almost permanent condition and ever had been. Eileen had been silent at college and silent she remained. Eileen looked like a storm. In fact, Eileen's black brows and suspicious mouth and barrel figure reflected an even greater darkness at sixty-plus than in the student. Though for no obvious reason. Eileen's life since graduation had been highly respected, diligent and secure. She had been a secretary somewhere at the Foreign Office, never late with a memo; and she was considered rather a splendid institution once you'd become used to the expression of suppressed fury on her face.

The fourth woman, Elizabeth, was edging dreamily towards Alzheimer's.

Beautiful at nineteen, Elizabeth had left college at the end of her first year to marry someone from Devonshire with horses. All the year she had been in love with a Polish Jew called Ernie, a physicist she'd met at the inter-collegiate Freshers' hop the first night. And all that year on the college tennis courts the beautiful equality and power of the base-line returns of Elizabeth and Ernie had haunted the evening hours, as other girls sat at desks in their rooms above, trying to keep their windows shut against the laughter.

The year Elizabeth had been with Ernie her looks had lit dark places. She had shone in the rhododendron alley, in the grotto by the lake, in the backstreet café they all used to visit on Wednesdays after lectures on Paradise Lost. She had shone along the dark road back to the college at night after the theatre, several girls together eating chips out of paper—though Elizabeth didn't eat chips.

“Look at that girl!” you heard said sometimes as Elizabeth passed under a street light. “Did you see that girl?” At a time when women English Literature students were all trying to look like Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth effortlessly did so, but with an unselfconscious happiness Virginia Woolf never managed.

It had been a great surprise to meet Elizabeth again today, for even Brenda had twenty years earlier stopped sending Christmas cards marked “Kindly forward if necessary.” None of them had seen her since the Finals ball at the end of their third year, though Elizabeth, who had left after three terms (with a First in Part One and acrimony from the college), had had no right whatever to be at the Finals ball. She had brought her husband Rupert with her. A genial soul. They had left early.

The other three had danced all night. Then they had walked with their partners—one being Brenda's Stafford—to the green side-gate that led into the public park. They had walked—Lily entwined—as far as the bridge over the canal, said their goodbyes, walked back again and been checked in by a woman called the Home Tutor, Miss Folly. She had had a notebook and a cape and purple stockings, her habitual garb even at sunrise. Alert Miss Folly had seen them in by the gate like a milkmaid letting through the little heifers soon to be off to the slaughter of the world.

That sleepy, rose-blown morning forty years ago the three girls had drifted back via the grounds, up the stone steps between the Italian urns, across the lawns, in through the glass doors. Long dresses had been soaked with dew. Lily, who had spent most of the night inside the skirts of a large willow, entangled in strong arms, had been barefoot and tipsy, balancing about on her toes. Poor Brenda had been in a daze of love for Stafford. Eileen had been thoughtful and terse. Her partner had been somebody's faceless brother who hadn't made much of her.

So that was that. Tomorrow they would be scattered. Six weeks later would come their Finals results. Six weeks after that, up would come to the college the next intake of fledgling schoolgirls, hesitant or bold, plain or pretty, stupid or clever, and one or maybe two “remarkable.” Of these four now elderly women only Elizabeth had been in any way remarkable.

 

And Elizabeth, who could have done anything, had kept her secrets. Why she had left. Where Ernie, the Polish physicist, had gone and why. Nobody knew or felt they could ask; young women then were shy with each other.

 

The four girls had all read English Literature. Brenda had then taught it, Eileen had ditched it, Lily had tried to write it, and Elizabeth had drifted off to Barnstaple, not with Ernie but with Rupert, and had had five children and not much else.

And now Elizabeth sat in the front of Lily's Alfa Romeo saying “What a lovely car,” while Eileen sat glum in the back with Brenda chatting of chastity.

Lily was turning now through the main gates of the college, the same black-and-gold scroll about them saying Semper Eadem. Now the car was winding down the college drive between much taller trees than they remembered, and Eileen was sighing and grunting and asking why they had come. She hated reunions.

The college was a women's college, one hundred years old, and it was closing down. Or rather it was amalgamating with a male college and moving to Leicestershire. The wonderful buildings, the great lawns, the avenues of trees, the botanic garden, the science laboratories had been bought by American bankers to train financial moguls from the Pacific Rim in the philosophy of money. Invitations to a final reunion had been sent out long ago by a committee, to such old students as had kept in touch, and there had been wide advertisement about it in the press. So hundreds, maybe thousands, of women were expected.

Coachloads of them from way before the war were arriving from all parts of the country, said Lily, who wrote fiction.

“God help us all,” said Eileen.

 

The day chosen for the reunion had been the day after Finals. The day after the final Finals of the college. The anniversary of the day of the rose-petal skirts in the dew, the strawberries and cream supper and the gentle Bucks Fizz, of the band that had played selections from
South Pacific
, of the goodbyes upon the little bridge and Miss Folly in purple. The day of the last breakfast together through the glass doors, of baked apples on oak tables, of servants in cap and apron who had served the baked apples at 6 a.m. And there had been silver toast racks.

Still in their long dresses that long-ago morning, some girls had gone trailing away to bed and others had gone outside again holding each other's hands (you could then) and talking of men (you did then) and of what was going to happen next.

Brenda had lifted her certain face to the sun and said, “He's asked me,” and Lily, half asleep, had said, “Are you going to?”

“Oh yes. We'll do it at once I should think. Before next term. We'll both be at the same teacher-training, after all.”

“Do it?” said Eileen. “Do what?”

“Well, marry,” said Brenda, firm and triumphant. Intolerable.

“Think of him in bed,” Lily whispered sideways (nasty) to Dilys Something, an awful girl wild for power, rich and humourless. She'd been at the ball with someone famous everybody thought they ought to recognise although he'd looked like almost everybody else. Nobody had ever heard of either of them again.

“He'll have one like a pencil,” said Lily, and Dilys stared.

“Where's Elizabeth gone?” black-browed Eileen asked.

“Oh, home,” said Lily, “ages ago. Where've you been? She said goodbye to us all. You're slipping.”

For Eileen had been a logbook.

 

And now, today, the last reunion, and here were the directions to the car park, about turn: off down the drive again to the end, out into a huge, roped-off area outside the grounds. It would be a quarter-mile walk back. Eileen looked satisfied. She'd known there'd be trouble parking but nobody ever listened to her. Of course.

Lily said, “Can you walk it, Eileen?”

“No need to be unpleasant.”

“Well, I know you've got a knee. We could have dropped you off.”

“I told you,” said Eileen, thumping away. “I'm O.K. You'd better lock the car.”

Lily, who had been about to, said there was no need. Not to fuss. It was all by invite. Old girls. Nobody here would be nicking cars.

“Want to bet?” said Eileen's square old back.

 

There were vehicles of every kind, and every kind and age of woman. Some were staring about them, some were greeting and exclaiming, some were putting their heads back inside their cars again to bring out picnics and sticks and Zimmers. Some were roaring up on mopeds, unfastening great medieval helmets and looking about sixteen. Some were pacing arm in arm, careful of the paths. Some were undoing pushchairs, humping children about. Lily set off after limping Eileen, and Brenda followed behind until she remembered hesitant Elizabeth and went back for her. The Virginia Woolf dazzle was long gone from Elizabeth now, but there was still a bewildered sweetness.

A surge of talk and laughter met them as they came to the steps behind the urns. Over the lawns above, hundreds of women were scattered like beads. “The noise!” shrieked Brenda joyfully. “The noise!”

And Lily thought, I shouldn't have come. I cannot bear it. I hate this sort of thing. But I will not let Eileen win. Though God knows, she's right.

Women sprawled in groups on rugs. Some had brought wine. Others like schoolgirls were in jeans, eating out of plastic bags, with rings in their noses. Others had pearls in their ears. Some wore lipstick and floating skirts, and had had their hair done. Some looked determinedly dirty and ill and scornful and hip. Some carried handbags. Some peered down into cameras. Some carried photograph albums of grandchildren. There paced the present principal, unknown to Lily and co., ready for Leicester, eagle of eye, in a silk suit. There went a white-haired woman in a long tea gown and Doc Martens and a hat.

“There are some really old ones over there; best keep away,” said Lily. “I remember those basket chairs. They've brought them out of the bursar's room. It was all basket chairs and hyacinths. She wore paisley shawls. There was an ivory cigarette box. She'll be dead now.”

“She was dead then,” said Eileen, “and they can't be the same chairs.”

“There's no organisation,” said Brenda. “They haven't even tried. Talk about the last day in the old home. You can hear the removal vans revving up round the corner. There's not even tea. What's that banner doing? There are all sorts of banners, it's like a rally.”

“That one says Social Studies,” said Lily. “Whatever are Social Studies?”

“What the thick ones did,” said Eileen, “the spotty ones with the dirty hair. You could always tell the sociologists.”

“Thanks a bunch,” said a skeleton with glinting ringlets of Afro gold lying about at Lily's feet on the grass. “That's what I am.”

She looked about ten. Beside her was hunched a bored and venerable man with massive shoulders, who hung his head and clasped his hands about his knees.

Brenda inspected him with surprise. “I didn't know we could bring husbands. Well, I do think that should have been made clear. I met my husband, Stafford, here, you know. More than forty years ago and at exactly this time of year.” She sat down on the grass. “You go on,” she said to the other three. “I'll stay with these younger ones for a moment.”

Brenda was a year younger than the others, having been precocious at school. “They're older than me,” she told the sociologist and the thinker. “I came up early. I should really have stayed and tried for Oxford but I was impatient. Thank goodness or I would never have met Stafford. When did you come down? You look almost young enough not to have come up yet.”

“In 1970,” said the girl. “I've been with my husband twenty years in the Third World.”

“Well, my goodness! I must say it suits you. I do apologise. I'm hopeless at ages, I suppose because I simply can't believe in my own. Between ourselves, I feel about twenty-seven.”

But the ancient husband had climbed to his feet and given his hand to the girl. They walked away.

“Well, their manners are not ours even if they have been married twenty years and she doesn't call him partner,” said Brenda. “Sociologists were always short on manners. I suppose they have to be like the clients.”

 

In the circle of basket chairs about a dozen cobwebby people were sitting under the English Literature banner. One appeared to be asleep. You could see it was an exclusive circle set apart from the mêlée, for conversation was nominal and the champagne was Grand Cru. It was the English Faculty.

Eileen, Brenda and Lily stood, feeling younger but sad. “D'you recognise anyone? There can't be any of ours left.”

“I think the sleeping one's drunk,” said Eileen.

Suddenly Elizabeth spoke. “It's Dr. Blatt,” she said and went across all smiles, and knelt on the grass. “Dr. Blatt? It's Elizabeth.”

“Hello,” said Dr. Blatt, opening an eye. “Oh, hello, Elizabeth. I never see anyone these days. I'm always in Bodley.”

Others in the circle of dons looked up at the quartet of their long-ago students, but without significant interest. Lily and glowering Eileen hovered. Brenda would have liked to speak, but found herself a bit uncertain of how to bring in Stafford.

“I think that one's Folly,” Lily said to Brenda, and Miss Folly looked up brightly and raised her glass. She had not changed until you looked again and saw the map of the years, the purple hands and fat ankles. Her black braids were scanty and grey but she was still wearing coloured stockings.

“This must be a sad day for you,” said Lily.

“No, no. Not at all. We must move on. We were always leasehold, you know. It is time to be out of the ivory tower. I, of course, retired years ago. To become a nun.”