Dancing Lessons (6 page)

When Miss Pitt-Grainger gets up steam, it's like a whale blowing or, since I have never witnessed that, how I think an alligator would sound if it spoke with an accent like hers, sawing the words up the length of its mouth and spitting them back at you. Her teeth are like that too, saw-edged. Unlike Matron, who tends to fade out words as she speaks, like a sputtering candle, Miss Pitt-Grainger is given to emphasizing them, sometimes with a hand gesture to signify pounding of the furniture, even if she's standing in the middle of the room, as she is now. I was just passing through the lounge and stopped when I heard the commotion.

Miss Pitt-Grainger is standing there waving her arms around, an unfortunate gesture as it makes the ample flesh on her arms jiggle, as does most of her when she speaks, for that is the most emphatic thing about her. Miss Pitt-Grainger is built like a tree trunk that has lost its firmness and is slowly being squashed, for fat seems to have gathered in strange places on her body so that when she walks or talks, different parts of her move, varying according to the mood she's in. This time it's mainly the upper arms and the jowls to match. Poor Annie the unofficial housekeeper is standing there saying nothing, but no doubt feeling the icicles darting from Miss Pitt-Grainger's blue eyes. Her straight snow-white hair bobs up and down as she speaks, looking as usual as if she had hacked at it herself. Her face has never known makeup, leaving her plain but regular features looking strangely vulnerable behind the thick glasses. Don't let that fool you.

Miss Pitt-Grainger (or the Pitt-Bull, as I have come to think of her) is the opposite of the Pancake Sisters, for everything about her proclaims the Death of Style. She wears simple short-sleeve cotton dresses in what used to be called a sprigged print, of the type not seen for many a year, so I can't help wondering where she gets them, probably from the same place she gets her shoes. The type of clunky sandals you'd only see in English magazines of small print and cream paper and dark muddy photos with advertisements in even smaller type with woodcut illustrations for goods which can be purchased only by post from furtive mail order houses located in places with names like Slough and delivered in plain brown wrapper. Big chunky sandals with small wedge heels and tiny decorative perforations in the leather and thick soles that will never wear out. Built for people like Miss Pitt-Grainger, for she has them in three colours—brown, black, and white. She reserves the white for daily wear. Why, I don't know, unless she uses it to do penance, for believe me, white means white. Miss Pitt-Grainger is the only person I know who still uses that horrible white liquid to clean her shoes, the kind all of us as children had to use on our crepe shoes. She does it every day.

Who am I to criticize another's style, you might well ask, but at least I just throw on any old thing that will fit me, I don't bother to make the effort, while Miss Pitt-Grainger's clothes are always neatly pressed and shoes shined or whitened faithfully, clean cotton handkerchief at the ready and handbag always by her side, even in the lounge.

Poor Annie! Miss Pitt-Grainger's jowls are acting in concert and the right hand is beating an imaginary drumstick in the air.

“There!” she is saying, pointing at the small table where the neatly folded square of newspaper rests, the crossword uppermost. “That's where I left it. For just one minute. To get ice”—icicles thrown at Annie—“since no one bothered to bring me any.” O yes, we know what for at 11:00 in the morning. We know what's in the handbag. We know who took her pencil, don't we? I had passed there a few minutes earlier and don't even know how it happened, I leaned over to take a peek at how far she had gotten and next thing I know, as I walked away, I felt the pencil in my pocket.

I feel a little stir of remorse at seeing Miss Pitt-Grainger's rage, directed at Annie, the nicest of the staff here, but I value my life too much to confess. “Oh dear,” I say, and Miss Pitt-Grainger's head snaps towards me. “Er, maybeyoutookit-withyou?”

She gives me an alligator snort and I'm surprised she even heard what I said. But she explodes. “Mrs. Samphire! My short-term memory is excellent, as everyone knows. I left my pencil right here. And you know it!”

Uh-oh. This is serious business, and I start to back out of the room. My eyes meet Annie's and she rolls hers at me, which makes me feel better and I try not to smile. For Miss Pitt-Grainger can abide no frivolity and particularly loathes Heathcliff, the only other English person here and who is given to salacious little witticisms with all the ladies, even me. Of course I won't bother to tell her how many times I have gone into the empty lounge and picked up her crossword and filled in a clue or two. Or occasionally changed what she had, to something quite nonsensical, just to annoy her. Serves her right for using a pencil with an eraser. And for abandoning her things to go and get ice for her mid-morning gin and tonic. She hasn't caught on to my messing with her stuff yet, or maybe she just thinks it's her age, despite what she claims, but the pencil thing is another matter. Pens too. I admit I swipe them when I see them. Can't help it. Have been known to ease them out of handbags and pockets. A nice little cache since I've been here, but so cleverly hidden that I'm sure no one can find them. Or have they? If they have, surely Matron would know? Plus the girls who clean, Cherry and Maisie, and who are the chief talebearers to Matron, know that I have a drawer full of all these new pens and pencils, still in their packaging. I sometimes open the drawer right there in front of them and hand them brand new pens and pencils as gifts for their children, so why would I want to take other people's?

I leave Miss Pitt-Grainger with her rant and another “Imsureitwillturnup,” which only makes her glare at me anew.

“It had better,” she says. “Or I'll have to think that I'm staying in a place where people
steal
things. Something that never happened before—”

Before what? I'm too scared to hear the rest of it so I make a fast getaway and head for my room to download the loot, which is burning up my pocket. Why O why O why, I ask myself. Miss Pitt-Grainger's anger has shaken me because she's made the taking of a half-used pencil into such a major thing.

I can't help worrying since I'm already in everyone's black book. My daughter is ashamed of me. The residents hate me. Matron wants to turn me out. My house is destroyed. I have no one to turn to. So, after sitting on my bed and thinking for a while, I've decided that I'd better turn myself into a model citizen. From now on. Seriously.

I will take a vow and, see, I am writing it down in my journal, a real vow, signed and sealed—there, my fingerprint even, in black marker—TO USE ONLY MY OWN PENS AND PENCILS FROM NOW ON.

To show that I am serious, I am going to make a point of taking the new ones out of their packaging. There! I have lined them up in the drawer. More than one layer. But the worry is still there, and I'm thinking it would be prudent for me to start returning some of my borrowed loot until the current charges against me blow over, just in case. Not to their owners, of course not, as if I could remember, but to nooks and crannies throughout the house, which is old and has many, down the sides of sofas and under cushions, in dark unswept corners, so they'll look nice and cobwebby as if they have lain there for ages, even out in the canna lily beds, inside Matron's car, her office even, all places where, over time, they will be found. No evidence left to convict me. Unless Matron has bought a fingerprinting kit, which I wouldn't put past her. A good plan, I think. And I am proud of myself, for I have never been good at planning.

YOU'D THINK I HAD
everything all planned out the day I left home, wouldn't you? But it was a Friday afternoon like any other. For as long as I could remember, on Friday afternoons Aunt Zena sent me down to Mr. Lue's grocery with a list of the next week's requirements and payment for the previous week, since on Fridays there was no school after lunch. I wasn't expected to carry anything home—I was, despite it all, being brought up as a young lady. So Mr. Lue would put everything together and the yard boy, Danny, would go on Saturday morning to collect it, carrying everything in a basket on his head. I loved these errands and looked forward to Friday afternoon with a passion, for it was the only time I was ever let out, so to speak. Not that the leash wasn't tight, for I was warned not to speak to anyone on the way, and Aunt Zena actually timed me: I was expected to take one hour, no more or less. There was no time for dawdling, even if I wanted to. But with the three-pence she gave me for myself, I was always able to buy Paradise Plums and gumdrops, wrapped icy mints and sticks of black licorice, and sample each on my leisurely walk home. I always made sure I had enough left in my pockets, heavily rationed, to tide me over the week. For years, nothing happened on these walks, I said hello to people whose houses I passed, all of whom I knew, and they said hello to me. There was never any traffic on our country road, except for the red Royal Mail bus morning and evening, which I took to and from school, the parson's buggy on Sunday, and the truck that delivered Mr. Lue's provisions once a week. Not counting the market dray that left laden on a Wednesday night and returned on Saturday, or the farmers and market women on their donkeys.

And of late, him, Charles Leacroft Samphire, sitting loosely astride his horse in the shade of the big almond tree where the road widened, just around the bend before Mr. Lue's grocery and the church, looking bronze and handsome like all the Samphires, his feet in leather boots, his pants tight-fitting blue drill, his shirt white linen rolled up at the sleeves, no collar or tie but a bandana knotted around his throat, his leather hat pushed back on his head. That's the way he always dressed, from the first time I saw him out of the corner of my eye. I managed to take him all in before dashing those very eyes to the ground, for looks could kill, I knew that. Dressed and looking like no one else I had ever seen, but in body, in that loose-limbed casual way he had, reminding me of my father.

Of course the minute I saw him I stepped to the other side of the road. My face grew hot under my straw hat, then my entire body, as if fire ants were attacking me. I made the mistake of glancing at him and he raised his hat and smiled, but I didn't smile back, for I would have been smiling at the devil, or so Aunt Zena would have said. Oh, I knew who he was all right, everyone knew Charley Samphire, or Sam, as they called him, especially fathers with grown daughters who kept their shotguns to hand. Or so Aunt Zena said. Sam was in fact my father's relative, of a large clan that lived some miles away, but while the women of the family were regarded as decent, Sam and his brothers were not allowed to cross the threshold of our house. For what reason, I never knew, except that they were bad and wicked. Sam and his brothers were many years older than me; they were in the category of adult, so I never paid the stories much mind. Or Sam either, for that matter, on the few occasions I had glimpsed him in the past. Mostly at a distance, once at the wicked end of the common where Harvest Festival sales or Emancipation Day picnics were held, where the young men gathered to smoke and drink out of cream soda bottles filled with white rum, and ogle the shameless girls who promenaded arm in arm in twos and threes up and down past them. But that was a long time ago, before I had shot up almost to my father's height and sprouted breasts and hair under my arms and other places too embarrassing to mention and Miss Celia had silently handed me one day
What Every Girl Should Know
.

Well, did that book help? Of course not. I remained as green as a sweet-cup shell and as thick. I had no girls my age to share secrets with. I was never allowed to dawdle after school or keep friends and I never made any. “You sleep with dogs, you rise with fleas,” Aunt Zena would intone, as she timed my coming and going. I only realized later, of friends Aunt Zena could not speak for she had none.

WHEN I WAS LITTLE
, my only friends were books and pencil and paper. I was quick as a child and learnt to read at an early age. At first they were proud of me and encouraged my reading and writing. I can remember Miss Celia giving me spelling exercises every day and checking them off on my slate. All ticks, usually. She taught me to add, too. All before I went to school. Unlike the other children around, I had to speak proper English. I had no difficulty in school answering questions or responding when spoken to, but I would never volunteer speech, not even to other children. After my father left home, that time for good, I found it harder and harder to speak. I would try, but the words seemed to crawl under my tongue and bury themselves there, refusing to come out. My vocal cords tightened to the point of pain. Yet there was so much I wanted to say! Once I got old enough to discover I could put my thoughts on paper, I started to do so. I had only fragments of paper to write on. Soon I discovered that I could not leave these fragments carelessly, for someone would find them and I would be cross-examined. “What do you mean by ‘lonely, lonely, lonely,' child? Do you think you are a poet or something? And who is ‘The Wickedest Person in the Whole World'? Yourself?” So I learnt not to leave words hanging around, and I started to hide my bits of paper. I no longer scribbled words in my exercise book, for they checked those from time to time with dire results. And since paper was hard to come by, not like today, I resorted to tearing blank pages out of books, saving brown wrapping paper, peeling off the insides of labels, opening old matchbooks, saving paper from packaging, anything that came to hand. I became a real paper rat. I scraped up pencils too, wherever I could, for I couldn't stop scribbling, I was writing more and more, longer pieces. It wasn't for the sake of writing so much as for the refuge these scribbled words provided, so I hid them securely, as tightly as a snail's shell, my soul hidden inside. Until the day Aunt Zena discovered the cache. She read them all aloud to Miss Celia while I stood there, my face flaming, and then she tore them to bits, piece by piece, and threw them at my feet. I vowed after that not to commit anything to paper again. Not to keep anything in my heart. Not to show anything on my face. Not to say more than I needed to. Not that I stopped writing. But from that day on, other than my schoolwork, it was all written inside my head, waiting.