Westwood (17 page)

Then she would go slowly upstairs, thinking of the feast of pleasures and sightseeing that would unfold before her when those light evenings came; the music that she would hear and the theatres she would go to, and the bright rough surfaces of the pictures in the art galleries that she would visit on Saturday afternoons.

The school was situated in a peculiarly depressing neighbourhood which had once been a handsome, stately residential quarter but was now rapidly deteriorating into a slum. The houses were large and solid, with fifty stairs from their front gardens to their attics, and their grey or cream façades were now discoloured and peeling. They no longer had railings or gates to protect their privacy, and their large windows were either boarded up because they had been blown in by blast, or covered with strips of paper. Cats and dogs and children darted in and out of the defenceless gardens, and trod down what little grass survived, and fragments of newspaper blew into the dusty hedges of privet or laurel, and lodged there until they became yellow with age.
Behind the dark windows glimpses of objects in the rooms, as if in an aquarium, could occasionally be obtained; a large bronze statuette of three girls in peasant dress, or an elaborately carved overmantel laden with vases filled with artificial flowers; or, more rarely, a shelf of books that looked as if they were loved and read, and hyacinths growing in a glass.

Margaret tried not to let her thoughts dwell upon the number of ugly and useless objects that must be collected together in the square half-mile of Curtis Park, Highbury, for the picture depressed her and actually made her feel physically confused. She hurried every day through those long, graciously curved avenues and crescents, for the ghost of the leisurely, spacious, orderly Victorian life that haunted them had no power over her imagination.

The numbers of the Anna Bonner School for Girls had increased considerably since its return to London from Worthing, where it had established itself in two large houses belonging to an elderly relation of its founder. Many of the secondary schools were still evacuated, and pupils who would have gone to them went to the Anna Bonner instead; as a result, it now had nearly two hundred girls, and still they came. The houses on either side of the school building (which suggested a chapel, with its rusticated stones and heavy gables) had been taken over to accommodate the new pupils, and the classes had grown so large as seriously to reduce the amount of individual attention that could be given to each girl. As individual attention was one of the traditions of the school, Miss Lathom, the headmistress, had set herself to deal with the problem by making two extra forms, consisting of the overflow from other classes, and putting two new mistresses in charge of them. One of these mistresses was Margaret.

The type of child which attended the Anna Bonner had changed in the twenty-six years that had elapsed since the First World War. The school had begun as a private venture in the ’eighties, modelled upon the famous Frances Mary Buss Schools in Camden Town, and its first pupils had been the daughters of prosperous shop-owners, dentists, business men, or Civil Servants, with a few doctors and parsons; but as the years passed, and Highbury and Curtis Park steadily deteriorated and the big handsome houses were turned into flats and then into tenement houses and the doctors and dentists made money and moved away to newer and more fashionable suburbs, the differences between the Anna Bonner and the secondary schools became less marked.

The Anna Bonner, faced with prospective pupils growing up in a neighbourhood that was still attractive to new, if poorer residents, because of its big gardens and wide roads, was forced to open its doors to anyone who could pay its fees and struggle through its entrance examination. Its name as a private school (though it now had a board of governors and was grateful for some help from the Board of Education) gave it the slight extra prestige sought by ambitious parents and it had traditions and customs that made it a little different from the secondary schools.

But the girls were not the ladylike little creatures of 1918, who never took off their hats in the street or talked loudly in the trams because Anna Bonner girls did not do those things. They were sturdy young amazons who played in shorts on games days, and cheeked the Air Cadets at the street corners on their way home from school; they went to the cinema regularly two or three times a week as a habit, and knew the number of husbands owned by every film star. Their fathers were shop assistants, linotype operators or wireless engineers, with a sprinkling of skilled factory workers.

Miss Lathom, the headmistress, thought that the new type of Anna Bonner girl had some excellent qualities. She was less sentimental and quarrelsome than her mother, attending the school at the same age, had been. She had more sense of humour, and she took (perhaps because the school compelled her to take) more interest in public affairs. It was the fault of her home,
rather than of herself, that the Anna Bonner found it more difficult each year to impose upon her the qualities of
Conscientiousness, Concentration and Courtesy
upon which the founder had based the school tradition.

Margaret found these quick, casual, bright-faced Londoners noticeably different from the children of Lukeborough, but she was not so nervous of them as might have been expected. She was neither timid nor self-conscious except when in the company of people like Hebe Niland, who possessed all that she most wanted and were all that she most desired to be, and in the presence of these Cockneys, perhaps the least impressionable class in the world, she was efficient, firm and successful. They were more impressed by personality than by any other human quality, because it was the quality they looked for and admired in the cinema stars; and she had enough personality to impress them. She deliberately acted a part with them; did not speak unless it was necessary, was witty when the opportunity arose, and used surprise, gravity or sarcasm to control them.

She was surprised at her own success. At the end of the first fortnight, as she sat on the dais surveying the rows of heads bending peacefully over their work, she experienced a stimulating sense of faith in her own capacities which was new to her. She despised these giggling fresh-faced children who still all looked alike to her, even when she had learned to distinguish Shirley Bates from Grace Plender, and she was scornful of the attempts at decoration in the classrooms, whilst the elderly staff seemed to her over-talkative and old-fashioned. Nevertheless, this was an old-established and prosperous London school with a reputation, and she, Margaret Steggles, at the age of twenty-three was a form mistress in it, and a successful one. It was a small triumph, she told herself; nevertheless, it was pleasant.

She would have been more pleased with her achievement if she had known how satisfied Miss Lathom was with her. Miss Lomax, of Sunnybrae Preparatory and Kindergarten School, Lukeborough, had written to her old friend and former staff-mate of the Leather-Workers’ School, Croydon, and told her about this interesting young woman who was teaching at Sunnybrae, and who was (according to Miss Lomax) wasted there. Miss Lomax thought that Margaret had a future in the scholastic world; she might one day make a notable headmistress. She had a gift for teaching, Miss Lomax considered, and considerable force of character.

Miss Lathom herself was not attracted to Margaret. Like most people, the headmistress was more susceptible to charm than to force in a character, and it was an additional handicap to Margaret that she had none of that immediate friendly interest in other people which sometimes serves to make a naturally charmless person likeable. Miss Lathom (who prided herself upon being a natural reader of female character with powers developed by twenty-five years as a headmistress) knew well that beneath her too-eager manner and self-absorbed expression there were strong feelings and much warmth of heart; but she also knew that nothing had yet happened to the girl to draw these qualities out and make them stronger than her self-centredness. There is a nature, mused Miss Lathom, which will have to be crushed by tragedy before it will blossom and give forth its perfume.

But if Miss Lathom was not drawn personally towards her new form mistress, she was pleased with her work. Margaret had been entrusted with a form which included one or two unpleasantly lively spirits, and if she had been incapable of managing them the fact would have been apparent within a few days. There had been no signs of failure. Miss Lathom had happened to go past Form IV’s classroom more than once during Margaret’s first two days in the school, at times when she might reasonably have been supposed to be in her own room, and had been reassured by the sound of a clear, composed voice dictating in the midst of an attentive silence. She was
relieved, too, that Margaret’s appearance was conventional and neat, and that her artistic tastes (emphasized by Miss Lomax) did not express themselves in purple capes or very large black hats. The only unusual note in her style was the little black velvet bow, and although Miss Lathom had at first had her doubts about that and feared that worse might follow, she finally decided that it was harmless.

Margaret would have been dismayed had she known that the fate of the little bow had hung in the balance, for it was dear to her since Hebe Niland’s comment upon it, and every time she put it on she thought of Mozart and music, and the Past, and Hebe, and all the people at Lamb Cottage.

She had not seen Grantey since the afternoon at the Cottage, nearly a month ago, and she had not walked over to Hampstead since. Although she frequently passed Westwood on her way to shop in Highgate Village, and always looked in through its gates, she never once caught a glimpse of its inhabitants. The windows were screened by curtains of net through which it was impossible to see, and had it not been for the well-kept appearance of the mansion, it might have been shut up. She would loiter wistfully past, trying to find fresh food for her imagination and yet not appear to be rudely staring in, wishing that the front door would open and Gerard Challis himself come out.

The thought of Gerard Challis attracted her even as did the house’s exterior, and every day she found her imagination playing about him and about the inside of the house – which she believed that she would never see.

How she longed to see the inside of Westwood! Every time she passed by and gazed at it, the same thought struck her: in spite of the changes that had overtaken social life in England in the course of the past four years, and the crumbling of so many conventional barriers, and the invasion of private life by public control, an unofficial person like herself was still unable to obtain the entrance to the home of a celebrity; less able, indeed, than she would have been eighty years ago, when social barriers were higher, indeed, but the educated and the uneducated were separated by a wider gulf than they are to-day, and she, as a well-read and educated young woman, would have been on the same side of the barrier as Gerard Challis. She might even have been invited to a summer garden-party or winter evening
conversazione
given by Mrs Challis to the educated portion of the community in the little, isolated Highgate Village of those days. And so far as the peculiar social advantages of to-day were concerned, she was also out of luck. She was on the fire-watching rota for Stanley Gardens, but she watched with the fat efficient man who owned the greengrocery in Archway Road and a girl cashier from a local bank, while Mr Challis, presumably, watched with others in Simpson’s Lane, and although less than a quarter of a mile separated their homes, they never met. It’s like
The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate
, thought Margaret despondently. We all live in a sort of organized chaos nowadays when you might expect to meet anyone, but in fact you don’t. And it is so maddening that I
do
know someone who lives in that house; I know Grantey, but I simply can’t do anything about that. I don’t know why; I just can’t.

In fact, she was too sensitive to force her society where there had been no sign of its being welcome, even when the person concerned was an elderly servant.

She spoke to no one of her obsession with Westwood and its master, for she was afraid of seeming
escapist
. While there was agony and misery all over Europe, it seemed to her despicable that the chief interest of her secret life could be a beautiful playwright living in a beautiful house! She was ashamed of herself.

Had she been old enough to suspect how many other people were sustained by their secret lives
because
of all that was going on in Europe, she would have ceased to feel ashamed.

She had indeed hinted once or twice at her feelings to Hilda, but had received so little encouragement that she had withdrawn into her reserve again. There was no trace of romance in Hilda’s early morning nature; it was all sparkling dew and cool sunlight and its few slight shadows were speedily dispersed. Delightful as such a companion might be to a deeper nature for a few hours, there was sometimes a sense of something wanting, and as the weeks passed, Margaret became aware that her friendship with Hilda was not turning out to be the unalloyed pleasure to which she had looked forward.

It was not that Hilda was so absorbed by the claims of her boys that she had no time to spare for Margaret, for she was always pleased to see her or to hear her voice on the telephone, and they usually managed to go to the pictures together once a week and often, if the weather was not too severe, for a walk on the Heath on Sundays; and these occasions were very pleasant, for Hilda was at her most entertaining when walking swiftly through the cold air and chattering away like a much-courted blackbird, or seated beside Margaret in the cinema and excitedly pinching her arm, but she could not, or would not, be serious. She would immediately change the subject if Margaret began to speak of the many topics, including her own dissatisfactions, that interested her. Hilda had made up her mind, after hearing the story of Frank Kennett, that Margaret ought to snap out of it, and she discouraged the discussion of reconstruction or religion, because it always ended in Margaret’s getting browned-off. It was done in all kindness, for she was fond of her friend, and had, she thought, her best interests at heart; but Margaret was beginning to find it irritating and to wish for a companion who would sometimes permit her to talk about the dreams which thronged her mind. She still loved her friend; Hilda would always have that place in her affections which is reserved for the oldest friend; the friend with whom there is often no link surviving save the twenty-five or so years which have elapsed since a mutual youth; but she sometimes felt, not without guilt, that she had outgrown her.