Bilgewater (6 page)

“I think I ought to say,” she called to me as I gathered my books up to set off home, “that I am
not
very confident. It seems to me to be a very—
ambitious
idea.”

 

So it did to me. It seemed the most astounding idea. I hadn't really got used to the face that I wasn't dim and I had never even considered any university let alone Oxbridge in my life. I suppose it is another example of my queerness that I had never thought about after school at all. If vague thoughts of it ever obtruded I had damped them down fast, with the help of the memory of Miss Bex's familiarly exasperated face.

“The General Paper would be the trouble,” said father when I told him.

“Can I get help with that?” I asked. “Isn't it some sort of essay thing?”

“English,” said Paula, putting down a tea tray. “Could you sign this for Boakes's boil pills, William?”

“No, no Paula. No, no.”

“Why not?”

“Well the reading. The body of reading.”

“She reads all right now.”

“I am not deaf,” I said, “I am here. I am in your presence.”

“There are all the years she didn't. No, no. Too much to make up.” But I could see as he pushed the signed medical form back to Paula and at her earnest look back at him that he felt excited and I suddenly saw all the anxiety they must have had about me all the long years when I couldn't tell a b from a d: the worry that there was something wrong with me. All Paula's evenings reading to me came back, and the memory of her unshakeable faith—whatever the secret notes from staff I had had to carry back from school, saying ought I not to be assessed by psychologists or the organisers of loony bins and so on—that I would be all right in the end.

I had never thought I'd have to do any English again after O level and my writing is still very bad. Also the A level English teacher is Miss Bex—need I say!—and the books she was doing with the English lot were lovely ones and I didn't want them to be spoiled. I have always preferred thinking about a book to writing about it and I have always assumed that English was the subject along with Scripture meant for the duds or those who do things just for enjoyment. But for a General Paper—?

“Oh well,” I said, “All right. I'll do some English.”

“It's your decision,” said father. Paula went prancing off like the triumph of Jerusalem.

Miss Bex however did not. “Really?” she said. “English? For the General Paper for Oxbridge?”

“For Cambridge.”

I felt absolutely dreadful saying it. I knew I hadn't really got a hope of Cambridge although my Maths and Physics were all right.

I began to blush dreadfully and Miss Bex gave a little sardonic laugh. “Well,” she said. “I suppose we might let you have a
try
. I think I had better have a word with your parents. Will you ask them to contact me?”

“It's only my father,” I said. “My mother died.”

“Oh. Oh. I'm so sorry. I didn't—I hope it wasn't—?”

“Some time ago,” I said bravely.

“Oh dear. Did the Headmistress—?”

“I didn't talk about it,” I said. (I couldn't have talked about it. Having just been born it was before I coold talk. I am not proud of this conversation and I ought not to be pleased that she looked so terribly embarrassed.)

“I'll write to your father,” she said. “Perhaps he would let me come and have a little talk with him?”

“That would be better,” I said, “than his corning here. He doesn't go out of the House much. He lives a very quiet life.”

She said, “Ah.”

A week later I looked out of my bedroom window and sure enough there she was walking around the garden yacketing away at father, her head wagging, very earnest, and father leaning courteously towards her with his lovely absent-minded smile. As I watched he picked her a late rose—or perhaps just picked it and held it out for admiration, but she took it with great exclamations and stuck it into her big check tweed suit.

“Whoever's that?” asked Paula over my shoolder.

“That's Miss Bex. I'm doing Hamlet and Hardy with her.”

“God save them,” said Paula.

“Oh go on,” I said. “she's clever. She knows a lot.”

“She'd have to,” said Paula. “I wonder what Hamlet and Hardy would have thought of
her
.”

I had never heard Paula unkind like this. She's usually so unconcerned about looks.

The next Monday when I met Miss Bex in a corridor she gave me a wide emphatic smile showing both rows of teeth and the little dampness that collects at each end of her mouth and causes a slight noise as she talks like a singing tap—a tap whose washer isn't quite gone but will not last much longer. Remembering Paula's unattractive attitude however, which I had found shocking, it being so very unusual, I didn't give her the basilisk lens contortion I reserve for our chance encounters.

“
There
you are,” said Bex, “You'll be joining us this afternoon?”

“Will I?” I said, “What exactly—?”

“My Wordsworth and my Hamlet class.”

“Am I in it?”

“Well of course my dear. Didn't your father tell you?”

“He must have forgonen.”

“
Such
a dear,” she said. She could hardly be meaning me so presumably it was father. “We don't see each other all that much,” I said, and then could have kicked myself seeing a wave of pity come all over her face. “
So
brave,” she said, “
So
busy.”

Now when I had begun to think carefully about doing extra English for the General Paper I had realised that I was glad. O level English of course is absolute rubbish—computer fodder. Kiddiwinks' crosswords—but I had enjoyed the actual books. There had been some Wordsworth. I liked him. There was a good, solemn purpose about him and I liked the way he used to pace about the Lake District making up poems with Dorothy running behind and then kindly writing them all out. The distaste that Wordsworth seemed to have had for the act of writing made me feel close to him. And I liked the way the Wordsworths wrapped themselves up in blankets out on me fells and just lay there, getting things straight as the rain poured down. And that great big unhappy nose.

And Wordsworth's passion at the glory of the lakes, shaking and shining under the rolling sky. I wondered if Wordsworth had long sight. Dorothy it seemed to me probably had short sight. Precise. I loved Dorothy. Such an awful cook. I sat thinking about her and her brother throughout the whole of the first lesson with Miss Bex whilst the others took careful notes. Only at the end of the lesson did I decide that there must be something more to be discovered than the structure of the Wordsworths' optic nerves.

I made a conscious decision—Miss Bex I realised was speaking to me and I had just been gazing back—that I would set about this English business seriously. I would begin to work really hard—since the first bell was going—at her Hamlet class, which was coming next. I said “Thank you Miss Bex,” in answer to whatever she had been saying to me and also because she was looking rather exhausted and does try so, and the damp bits round her mouth were beginning to show again. “Poor Bex,” I thought. “I'm going to please her. I'm going to change. I'll surprise them,” and looking round I rather wished there were someone I could tell. I looked all round everyone and felt rather sad, for there were all the same old lot I'd gone up the school with, all indoctrinated with the idea that Marigold Bilgewater Green was ghastly, all in a huddle together.

For the very first time in my life I wished hard—I think perhaps I may have prayed—for a friend. I forgot Paula's Second Law. Her First Law is
BEWARE OF SELF PITY
but her second law runs it very close:
PRAY WITH CARE
. The frightening thing about prayers, she says, is that they are usually answered.

Well, off we went—there were twelve of us—into the Hamlet class. We were what was called Set B and few of us had done more than read bits out of Hamlet before. Not one of us had seen it except for a very terrible film that had been brought to the school in a bag and showed Hamlet looking pretty ancient in a gold wig wailing about some battlements in clouds of what looked like steam.

 

Before this lesson Bex had had them all reading round the class, but it was so dreadful that now she had us up in the front like twelve-year-olds acting it from our books. As usual there were not enough books to go round so Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were sharing and chucking the book over to the Queen when needed. Polonius was bobbing about reading over the shoulder of the First Player and I remember that a very weird girl called Penelope Dabbs was dragging herself, stomach downwards, across the floor, being Hamlet, and gazing with great intensity at the King to see if he was going to have a funny turn. Her eyes stuck out on stalks as she directed them at the King (played by Bex) and she also held the book high in the air off the floor. As chief chap she at least had been allowed a book to herself, but as she waved it around, rolled her eyes, dragged her stomach over the splinters crying out and carrying on as Hamlet does, it did occur to me as odd that this was what was necessary to get me into Cambridge.

I wasn't in it of course.

Since the time when I couldn't read I haven't been asked to take part in things and I just sat there at my desk. Outside it was raining. The classroom had grown very dark. The desks were all at untidy angles, pushed back, and the dirty blackboard behind and the awful flowers in vile vases on the ledges were especially depressing. Flowers in classrooms are as depressing as flowers in hospitals—they just emphasise the fact that you can't get out and see them growing. Classrooms break your heart.

“No!” bellowed Bex at Penelope Dabbs. “Not—oh, you are a stupid year! A
stupid
year!”

“Blaa blaa blaa,” droned somebody else.

“Blaa blaa blaa,” wailed forth Penelope Dabbs, and behind them all the door opened and a radiant vision appeared.

For a moment it hung on the air. The door swung slowly back and forth and then the vision was gone.

“Hullo?” called Bex, swinging round. “Did someone knock?” She looked questioningly at me as I was the only one who hadn't got her back to the door. As usual I said nothing but not for the usual reason, that no one was interested.

I gawped.

The door opened again, wider this time, and a girl came in and leaned against the edge of it and leaning back began to swing herself gently to and fro. Then as if her eyelashes were too heavy for their lids she half shut her eyes and surveyed Miss Bex and everybody else from beneath them. They were great thick black eyelashes like hearth brushes and above were very beautifully marked black eyebrows which one would have expected to have been painted on and yet I felt sure were not. The slits of eyes between them were a blazing turquoise.

The girl was big and looked almost boneless. She was about seventeen, I thought, with a large pale face. She wore a green dress that clung to her all over and showed off very long, white arms. But her hair was the main astonishment. It was a huge shower, a sort of waterfall of golden—well almost golden
pink
! It was like candy floss, a gigantic cloud of light. It went on and on and up and up and out and out and it gathered all the light in the whole dreary atmosphere into itself.

There she stood, sleepily against the door, easily comfortably swinging about, with all that hair—and like the eyebrows you could tell that it was natural, you can sometimes: there was no doubt of it—all that hair burning and glowing and shining like a mediaeval heavenly host in gilt and marble. And I thought, Oh my! If Uncle Edmund Hastings-Benson could see this!

 

“Yes?” said Miss Bex.

The girl smiled.

“Did you want me?”

Still the girl smiled.

“Is it something to do with—” Miss Bex's voice trailed off. What could this creature be to do with? Was she Ophelia en route to the brook? Not she. Large, confident, sure the girl stood.

She said at last, “Well I just don't know. I don't know where—”

“This is the Sixth Form. A level English. Set B,” Miss Bex said, sharpish.

“Well, it might—”

“Whom are you looking for? Who are you?”

“Oh I do wish I
knew
.” She gave a huge sigh and looked about her and seeing me in the front row staring back she said, “Oh hullo.”

“Hullo,” said I.

“What is all this about?” asked Miss Bex and tapped the chalk vigorously against the wall—she's a great tapper.

“Haven't seen you for years,” said the Vision. “How are you?”

“I'm all right,” I heard myself say. “Come in. They're doing Hamlet.”

“
Hamlet
!!” Her colossal eyes opened wide as she gazed around the floor boards and P. Dabbs on her stomach: and all of a sudden I was overcome. My decision in Wordsworth to be good and take English seriously and be kind to Miss Bex vanished away. I couldn't help it. I wasn't aiming to upset them. I just sort of exploded. I made a rude, loud, tearing sound with my mouth, covered it up with my hands and made a worse one, knocked my glasses off, dropped my face against the desk and howled and howled and howled with laughter. As in five years at the Comprehensive I had hardly ever uttered a sound before and hadn't laughed like this in front of anyone except perhaps Paula in the whole of my life you can imagine the rest. Someone—good old Penelope D.—smote me on the back. Someone else moved my arms up and down as in life saving. Phyllis Thompson ran for a glass of water and Bex ordered an immediate opening of all the windows.

The Vision however simply coiled herself over two chairs and waited. “Don't worry,” she called. “It's all right. She does things like this. She always was barmy. Shut up Bilgie, for Pete's sake.”