Bilgewater (12 page)

She had now gone.

The subject of conversation was the ancient and immemorial one in that room of the ability of boys.

“Wilson? Fool.”

“I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that.”

“Three Cs and an E, he won't make Surrey.”

“Good chance in the re-take.”

“Not a hope. Day boy. Knocking about the streets.”

“Glegg then?”

“Worse. Hull if he's lucky.”

“Sykes?”

“Pretty sister,” said Uncle Edmund HB. “Won't do anything though. Lives in Pearson Street.”

“They used to say,” trembled old Price, “that the people in Pearson Street have blacklocks in their cake tins.”

“There are curious things in Oxford and Cambridge cake tins,” said Puffy. “What about Rose, HB?”

“Oh a dead cert. A dead cert. Solid chap. All-round fellow.”

“Not so sure,” father frowned.

“Great Scot, William, if Rose went to bits—”

“He might. It's happened. Remember Wellington-Wells.”

Long silence while Wellington-Wells's extraordinary failure to reach Oxford in 1910 is contemplated once again.

“Oh Rose'll be all right,” said Puffy.

“Terrapin?”

“Now there's an interesting one. Anything might happen. Odd chap.”

“I'm growing interested in Terrapin,” said Puffy, “There's a great deal there. He used to be so very plain. What do you think, William?”

“Eh?” said father. “Terrapin?”

“You know him best. More or less lived here all his vacations when he was a junior didn't he? Some trouble at home.”

“Mmmm,” said father. You can get nothing out of him in what he feels to be a private matter. “Marigold,” he said, “oughtn't you to be in bed—or doing some work of some sort?”

But I hung about the door pretending to look at the chess.

“He's grown up lately—that's what it looks like to me. More able to take things,” said Uncle Edmund.

“He's had a lot to take,” said father almost in an aside, corkscrew searching. “He is a very gifted—aha. Yes. Here we are.”

“Well he's no rugger player or dancer and he's not in the play so he may do you credit,” said Uncle Edmund. “Get some sleep. God knows how many scholarships we lose through this idiotic Christmas socialising. Can't see why we can't at least get rid of the dance. Or get the damn thing over early.”

“We can't this year,” said Puffy. “Hall's still being decorated.”

“Well, hold it somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“On the pier.”

“On the
pier
! Good God man, the saints would turn in their graves.”

“I don't see why. I don't suppose there was a dance at all when the school was an abbey. Can't see all those monks giving the boys a Christmas twirl.”

“I remember the pier the night of the zeppelins—” Price began and was astonishingly interrupted by father saying, “You know—Why
not
hire the pier? It would be rather jolly. I like piers.”

“—all little bundles of flame dropping into the sea—”

“If it was on the pier I think I'd go.”

“You might
GO
!” I cried from the door.

“Yes. Yes.” He had quite forgotten I shouldn't be there. “Yes. Why not? I might enjoy a dance.”

“Good heavens!”

“I always used to go you know when your mother was alive.” (Uncle HB dropped his chin upon his chest.) “Yes. I'd rather like a dance.”

The effect of this was twofold in that first I reeled away to my bedroom and sat before some work for an hour doing it like a rather cheap calculator that needs re-charging, and thinking all the time “Father!
Father
! Horrible. Indecent!” and second that I then went off to find Grace and tell her.

“Terrapin interesting! Terrapin brilliant. Terrapin having much to bear. Terrapin grown up” was what I meant to discuss. Yet for some reason when I reached Grace's room I didn't. I only mentioned the saga of the dance. I decided to lead the conversation round to Terrapin again on Sunday when father, Paula, and I always have lunch together.

Father was in one of his more usual moods—that is to say he was looking as if he wanted to fly into the stratosphere and consider the meaning of meaning and Paula and I were peacefully at ease with him and some excellent Yorkshire pudding.

“D'you think that Terrapin's got different lately, Paula?”

“I do not.”

“They say he's changed.”

“He has not.”

“They say he's matured.”

“Whatever does that mean? Cheese matures.”

“Well don't people?”

“There's several opinions.”

“He's less ugly.”

“Whatever's that got to do with it? Whatever's looks—?” Her eyes flashed and her hair swayed.

“You don't know what it's like to be plain,” I said.

“Now leave off that. B
EWARE OF SELF PITY
. Mind, I begin to understand it, lookin' at that show.”

“What show?”

“That tatter-heap atop of the head.”

“It's a feather cut.” I shook it. In fact I was delighted. At least and at last she had noticed.

“Cost a pound so it's rumoured. Around the bazaar.”

“Well father paid. He didn't mind. I've got it. Mother left me some. Grace found out from Uncle HB. My
mother
,” I said, “knew what a young girl would need.”

“Didn't do her much good,” said Paula. “You don't need haircuts in heaven.”

“Well I'm not—”

“Nor likely to be. Dear Lord! Looks!”

“He is very remarkable,” said father finishing the apples and custard and flying down from somewhere round the back of Hayley's comet. “In my view. Possibly—is there any more?”

“No. I did ask you.”

“Custard?”

“Too late.”

“Who're we talking about?” I asked.

“Well Terrapin. Tom Terrapin. D'you know, Paula, Marigold, just between the three of us I think Tom Terrapin may be the cleverest, most original boy I've ever taught.” He sat back and gave us his smile.

“Then he'll likely miss a scholarship,” said Paula who knows more about boys and examinations than any University Board. Her sick-room and the San are stripped for action in examination weeks with all the beds turned down, hot water bottles at the ready, though in fact hardly any of them need them after a short burst of her wisdom and incisive reflections at the idiocy of judging anyone by some bits of paper scribbled down in a few hours when the balance of the mind is disturbed. Father says anyway that you can't judge anybody's real ability until after the second Degree.

“That is not the point,” said father, “I wasn't talking of scholarships. I was talking of Terrapin. He might be. I think he might be—um, aha, something. Marigold,” he said with the same air of apparent logic that honestly does make him a very trying man, “why don't you ask him to the dance?”

T
he Pier Pavilion is a long, wooden yellow shack on the landward end of the pier which trails a little way seawards and then drops down towards the water in a mess of black and broken spikes. A ship had hit the pier in the war—it is the most undramatic and yet treacherous piece of coast, so flat that from out to sea you can't see it at all, and unwary sailors think they may have made a mistake and crunch up on to the shelf of rock that runs out just beneath the cold, grey water that has made havoc since the Vikings. There is a chain across the pier about a hundred yards beyond the back of the pavilion and beyond this nobody goes.

Most of the pavilion is on dry land but at the back towards the stage the boards beneath your feet grow cold and you can look down between the cracks and see the sea whitening rhythmically beneath you. When I was a small child I once went to a horrible fancy-dress dance there and sat alone for hours on a tip-up red velvet seat round the side of the ball room, glaring through my glasses at all the fairies and clowns, decked out myself in whatever it was that Paula had found for me at the last minute, speaking to no one. All that I really knew of the pier was the hell of that evening and the terrors of the final parade: that and the cracks with the sea underneath, and the great tumult of the band.

But I had a distinct conviction nevertheless that the Pier Pavilion was not much of a place—even then, and it must be much more battered by now. I passed it when I walked home from school and fish and chip papers scraped around its doors. Pop music, flashy lights, and vomiting locals hung about its shadows of a Saturday night, unbeautiful among the tilted fishing boats drawn up outside upon the promenade and the swash and glimmer of the sea and the shore beyond. It was a real rough dive.

Yet Grace, when she stopped me at school on the corridor between lessons, seemed delighted.

“Have you heard?” she said. “It's fixed. The pier.”

“What! The Old Boys' Dance?”

“My father O.K.'ed it yesterday. It's to be just before Half Term so's to get it over before all the Christmas flap.”

“Have you
seen
it?” I said.

“The pier? Of course I've seen it.”

I remembered the pink hairdresser's and how she'd found that when she had hardly been in the town a couple of days. I had a decided fancy, all of a sudden, that Grace knew the pier quite thoroughly.

“You don't mean you've been there?”

She smiled from the heights.

“Good heavens—Awful people—” I thought of Aileen Sykes and Beryl. They were the sort. Bare mid-riffs. Purple lips. Someone once told me that Beryl's mother worked there at the ticket office—eating biscuits and knitting. A wave of loyalty to ancient St. Wilfrid's flooded over me.

“This'll be a private dance,” I said, “I don't see the pier being the place for a
private
dance.”

“Do you go to many private dances?” asked Aileen Sykes weaving up. “Northanger Abbey I suppose.”

“I just—No—I'm just surprised,” I said, “I don't see it being all that—partyish—at the pier.”

Aileen went into hysterics and Grace turned her head aside for a minute. “Honestly,” she said, “Bilgewater—honestly!”

“I don't see anyone going, that's all,” I said. “It's smelly and cold there. The Old Boys are getting on—some of them.”

“Never met any meself,” said Beryl. “I'm only going since it's the pier. I go every Saturday.”

“
You're
going!”

I couldn't help it. She's so huge and greasy. You can tell she never washes her tights. “My
father's
going,” I said.

It nearly gave them apoplexy.

 

“Thank goodness anyway,” I said, “that I am not,” and I stuck to this through the next couple of weeks with unshakeable firmness. “Oh go on, Bilgewater,” they said—almost half the form. It was the big joke. Hair, shoes, orange cardigan, I was still the big joke. Everybody far and near had decided to go to the St. Wilfrid's Dance since it was at the pier and not in the ancient cloisters.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I can't dance. I hate the pier.”

“Go on. It's great.”

“It's not.”

“Why?”

“It's—sad,” I said.

“Go on—cheer it up then.” They were all on about it, morning, noon and night. Dinner time. On the bus. Whom they were going with. They had even stopped talking about the exams.

“And that shows
something
,” said Paula. “It's a wise idea to have it now. Gets their minds cleared.”

“I'll keep mine cluttered then,” I said. “I'm not going.”

“Well I am,” said Paula. “I love a dance.”

“At the pier!”

“Snob,” she said. “Watch your motives. For all the world a Victorian aunt now. Like your mother.
She'd
never have gone to the pier.”

I thought of the hat brim, the delicate chin, the string of amber beads in the photograph. Ladies in amber beads used to organise the fancy dress balls when I sat on the tip-up velvet seats. I all at once remembered. I remembered the way they used to sail about, these ladies holding glass ice-dishes, poising their tea spoons high. The picture was graceful and pleased me.

“I don't know, Marigold. I don't know,” said Paula in a voice all earthy and tired. “I don't know what to make of you.”

 

On the day, she ran into my room about five where I was doing some Applied at my table and said, “You are going to come, my lover, aren't you?”

“I told you. No thanks.”

“Oh Marigold.”

“It's no good. I'd loathe it.”

“How do you—That Grace is going. And your hair's lovely just now.”

“Very interesring,” I said. “The sudden revelation to Paula of the loveliness of Bilgewater's hair.”

“I always told you it would be—”

“Oh, shut up,” I said. “It's back nearly where it was anyway. The fringe is grown out. I'm not going.”

At eight the phone rang and after they'd all bellowed and yelled I answered it. “Are you ready yet?” asked Grace.

“I'm not going. I told you.”

“Oh don't be silly.” Her voice went up high and Dartington and I could see her grand and noble profile in my mind, the excellent, easy, well-bred sort of way she crossed her legs and leaned back holding the phone, “I'll call for you.”

“I'm working.”

“Jack Rose was asking if you—”

“
I AM WORKING
.”

“We'll
both
call for you.”

I put down the phone and sat down at the desk. I couldn't concentrate one bit. There was a knock at the door and in came father.

“Well now.”