Grace Hardie (9 page)

She had even brought one of the kings and queens to life by describing how Ethelred the Unready had had a bad chest, just like Grace herself as a little girl, and how – like Grace again – he had moved from the marshy swamp of Oxford to live on the top of a hill – at Headington, only just across the valley from Greystones.

She often talked about Grace's own hill as well, describing how most of the land had been a royal hunting forest where deer and boar were chased and shot. And how, later, the road from Oxford to London had climbed over the summit so steeply that in the days when there were no railways, and certainly no motor cars, the passengers in
each stage coach were expected to get out and walk up Shotover Hill, and sometimes even to push the coach. They would all be very nervous, she said, because the top of a hill, when the horses were going so slowly, was a favourite place for highwaymen. Aunt Midge's descriptions of things that had happened once upon a time were just as exciting as anything Grace read in story books, and were always true.

She didn't on this walk say anything more about school – a subject which perhaps she preferred to put out of her mind during the holidays. But five days later, as the end of her visit approached, Kenneth came to sit beside his sister on the edge of the croquet lawn.

‘Aunt Midge thinks you ought to be sent to school,' he said.

‘How do you know?' But Grace could guess how he knew. Kenneth had the bad habit of listening at doors. It was a habit made tempting by the fact that their father disliked being in a closed room. Except in his glasshouse, where he was careful to guard against draughts and changes in temperature, Gordon Hardie tended to leave doors open behind him. This meant that any passing child who found an excuse to stray into the adults' part of the house and then lingered in a corridor might hope to pick up some interesting snippets of information. Kenneth, though, was the only one who deliberately courted such opportunities. His brothers and sister disapproved – but could not quite bring themselves to pretend a lack of interest in any news which concerned themselves. ‘What did they say?'

‘They were all talking last night. Aunt Midge thinks that girls should have as good an education as boys. Father said that they'd thought about sending you somewhere, but of course the village school was out of the question. Mother said that she'd been to visit Mrs Clancy's, and she didn't
think the teachers there were any better than Miss Sefton. And Miss Sefton gives you individual attention.' Kenneth pronounced the words carefully, making it clear that he was giving a verbatim report. ‘So then Aunt Midge said, what about the Oxford High?'

Aunt Midge herself was an Old Girl of the Oxford High School for Girls. She had had such good teachers there that she was able to pass examinations and study at the university. Lessons at the Oxford High School would be very different indeed from lessons in Miss Sefton's schoolroom. Grace waited to hear how her parents had answered.

‘Father said No. Just like that. He said that the standards would be too high. That you weren't brilliant like Aunt Midge had been. But you'd want to do well and you'd try too hard and it would make you ill again. Out of the question, he said.'

Grace supposed it was true that she was not clever – although it was hard to know for sure, when she had no one with whom to compare herself. Except when Miss Sefton was in a bad temper, she said, ‘Very good, Grace,' to every piece of work. Anyway, since it seemed that the subject of school had been dismissed, there was no point in wondering whether she would have enjoyed it.

‘Let's play croquet,' she said. In the past few months she had started to shoot up in height, so that she was nearly as tall as Kenneth and could at last control the long-handled croquet mallets.

The game was interrupted by a message from one of the maids, summoning Grace to the drawing room, where her mother and aunt wished to speak to her.

‘Your aunt has invited you to spend a few days with her in London, Grace. Would you like to do that?'

‘Yes, please.' Grace's eyes brightened with excitement.
It would be the first time she had ever spent a night away from home by herself.

‘I hoped you might.' Her aunt smiled in a friendly way. ‘So you can travel with me when I leave tomorrow. I have a week before the new term begins. I could show you a little of London.'

‘We'll ask Gordon when he's next going there,' Mrs Hardie said to her sister-in-law. The House of Hardie had an establishment in Pall Mall as well as in Oxford, and Grace's father divided his time between them. ‘He can collect her from you and bring her home. Off you go then, Grace, and choose what you want to take.'

It was all arranged as easily as that, and everything about the visit was an adventure. Grace had travelled in a train before, because her mother took all the children to the seaside for a month each summer. But the bustle of the London terminus was bewildering – and were she to become separated from her aunt, she would have no idea where to go. Not wanting to seem babyish by holding hands, she kept as close as possible until they were safely inside a cab.

The roads were as crowded with vehicles as the railway station had been with passengers. Carriages and carts and horse buses and motor buses overtook each other and hooted at each other and turned in front of each other in what seemed a chaotic and dangerous manner. It was a relief when Aunt Midge leaned forward and told the cabbie to stop.

‘Is this where you live?' asked Grace. They had come to a halt in front of an imposing double-fronted mansion, four storeys high.

‘No. I live in a tiny stick of a house. Almost as tall as this, but very, very thin. I'll tell the cabbie to take our luggage on there, because you and I can walk from here.
This is my school. I thought you might like to have a look at it, since we were passing.'

‘Does the school belong to you?' Aunt Midge used the phrase ‘my school' frequently and Grace had never been quite sure what it meant.

‘Alas, no. I'd have liked to own something like this. But to buy a building of this size, with the grounds which are necessary, and then to equip it and employ staff – I could never have found enough money. And the business side of it would have been a worry as well. So in the end I had to choose whether to have a small school of my own or to be in charge of a much larger one without owning it. I chose the large school because it has so much more to offer the girls – we can employ more teachers, better teachers, in a greater variety of subjects. And although I have to satisfy a board of governors I run the school very nearly as though it were my own property. There are a few rules which headmistresses have to obey, that's all. Just as there are rules for the girls.'

‘What kind of rules?' asked Grace, climbing down to the pavement and waiting while the cab was set on its way again with their luggage.

‘Not many. I have to be a member of the Church of England, and unmarried. To live within three miles of the school. And generally to be a respected member of the community.'

It wasn't clear to Grace what that implied, but by now her aunt was leading the way up the steps towards the front door.

‘It looks like a house,' Grace commented.

‘This part of it
was
a house to start with. This is where the school began – with only a few girls – and we still use the rooms in it for small classes of the older pupils. But so many girls wanted to come here that four years ago we put
up a new building in the garden. That's where the new girls start off. Come and see.'

She unlocked the door and led the way through the old building and along a covered corridor which linked it to the new wing. Opening the first classroom door, she showed Grace into a large, bright room. Its windows were high – the pupils here would not be able to stare at the garden, as Grace so often did in her schoolroom at Greystones – but they ran the whole length of the wall. At the end of the room a blackboard and easel stood on one side of the fireplace, with the teacher's desk and chair on the other. Facing these were twenty desks arranged in rows. They still had a shiny new look to them – quite unlike the schoolroom table which four Hardie boys had stabbed with knives and pen nibs and on which they had inked their initials before Grace sat down at it for the first time. Each desk had a bench attached to it, a shelf beneath for the storage of books, and an inkpot and pen tray set into the top.

‘It looks bare now,' said Aunt Midge. ‘But as soon as the new term starts, the walls will be covered with charts and pictures and pieces of specially good work, and the orders.'

‘What are the orders?'

‘We have little tests every Monday morning, to make sure that everyone has worked hard and paid attention during the previous week. All the marks are added up as the term goes on, and the name of each girl in the class is put up in order. It's like a ladder – everyone starts in the same place, but someone who works hard can climb right to the top.'

‘And someone else can fall off the bottom,' suggested Grace.

‘Not fall off, exactly. Anyone who finds herself at the bottom will work harder next term, and do better.
Most of the lessons take place in these classrooms, but we have special rooms for art and music and exercise.' She led the way down a corridor, opening doors as she went.

‘Climbing ropes!' Grace clapped her hands at the sight of some of the gymnasium apparatus. ‘I can climb ropes. Mama said that it was a most unladylike activity, but Papa said that I might want to go to China one day, like a certain young lady he'd known once, so that the nearer I was to being a monkey, the better. Anyway, Frank built a tree house once, and that was the only way in.'

‘I'm sure you can do almost everything that the other girls here can. You're probably very good at cricket, from practising with the boys. I don't expect you know how to play hockey, though. That's our winter game here. Would you like to try?' Aunt Midge opened a cupboard and pulled out a hard white ball and two battered hockey sticks. ‘Come on,' she said, unbolting a door which led out on to a large area of grass. ‘There's no one looking.'

Grace took off her straw hat and her gloves and her summer coat with its cape collar and ran out on to the field. Her aunt taught her how to bully off, and they practised, making satisfying clicks as their sticks banged together, until the first time that Grace was able to get the ball away. Then she was shown how to dribble it. She was a good runner and her hands and wrists were strong; she was quick to get the knack of the game, although she tended to hit too hard, sending the ball ahead of her. Her aunt, running even faster, demonstrated how easy it was to rob her of possession, dribbling the ball herself for a few strokes before allowing Grace to tackle her and get it back.

‘You're very good at it, Aunt Midge!'

‘I used to be once. When I was at school and university I played a lot. But I'm out of practice now – as well as
out of breath! Dashing around a hockey field is thought undignified for a headmistress, I'm afraid.'

‘Not being a respectable member of the community?' suggested Grace, laughing. She hit the ball as hard as she could manage away from the school building and then, biting her lip with concentration, dribbled it back again. ‘I wish I could go to a school like this!' she exclaimed.

‘Do you?' Just for a second, before bending to pick up the ball, her aunt gave her a considering look. ‘Well, perhaps …' She didn't finish the sentence. ‘You must be getting hungry,' she said briskly instead. ‘And my housekeeper will be wondering what's become of us. Shall we walk home?'

The distance was not very far – not long enough, indeed, for Grace to sort out her thoughts. She had taken her aunt's invitation, when it was first issued, to offer exactly what it said: a brief holiday visit. But suppose there was more to it than that. Was the inspection of the classroom – and even the hockey lesson – all part of the argument which Kenneth had reported after his session of eavesdropping? Aunt Midge would not have wanted to press the matter of schooling unless she believed that her niece would enjoy it. Now she had heard Grace's own opinion. What was she going to do about it?

They had arrived at a house which had no front garden. Between it and the road one flight of steps led up to the front door and another, behind iron railings, went down to a basement area and a kitchen in which someone could be seen preparing a meal. Grace followed her aunt up the steps and waited while she unlocked the door.

Inside the hall, Aunt Midge held a hand out towards Grace in welcome. ‘Here we are,' she said, smiling affectionately. ‘Very small compared with Greystones, but I hope you'll be comfortable. Lots of stairs, I'm afraid. There's only a dining room on this floor. We have
to go up to the drawing room and up again to the bedrooms.'

Still holding her niece's hand, she turned towards the staircase and then gave a startled gasp as the figure of a man appeared on the half landing. Her grip tightened round Grace's fingers until it hurt.

‘Patrick!' she exclaimed.

Grace was as startled as her aunt by the stranger's unexpected appearance – a little frightened even, since her first thought was that he must be a burglar. It was reassuring to find that her aunt appeared to know him by name – and the man himself was smiling and holding out both hands towards them in a friendly way.

‘Welcome home!' he exclaimed – but he cut the words off oddly, as though he would have suppressed them altogether had he had time to think about it. There was a moment of silence – a curious silence, as though everyone was waiting for someone else to speak first. Puzzled, Grace looked from one adult to the other.

‘Miss Hardie!' In the end it was the gentleman who took the initiative. ‘I hope I didn't alarm you. Your housekeeper kindly allowed me to await your arrival here. Your luggage had just been delivered when I called, so that she was expecting your return at any moment.' He turned towards Grace, whom perhaps he presumed to be one of the headmistress's pupils. ‘I had the good fortune to meet Miss Hardie while she was on holiday in Switzerland a few weeks ago,' he explained. ‘She expressed interest in a modest sketch I was making. I've taken the liberty, Miss Hardie, of having the painting framed, in the hope that you'll accept it as a memento of your stay in Lugano.'