Jerusalem the Golden (11 page)

As the girls changed for the dance, giggling, excited, she had moments when she thought that she could not do it, that she would prefer to go in her skirt and jersey. She knew she looked better in her skirt and jersey, but she had not the courage to wear them. Then she thought that she would not go at all, that she would stay behind and pretend to be ill. But she wanted to go. The only dances she had ever
been to had been school dances, and she wanted to go to this one. So she put the dress on, and thought for a moment that perhaps it was not quite so frightful after all, and then, after looking at herself for a little longer, wondered if it were not in fact more frightful than she had ever imagined. She hardly dared to draw the curtains to show herself to the other girls, though she had warned them of the horrid sight in store for them. Pride always restrained her from describing her mother’s attitudes in too much detail, and she tended rather to laugh them off, but nevertheless her friends had some shrewd notion of the situation. She had described the dress to them, haltingly, trying to make her account amusing, searching desperately for a tone that would make its existence plain and casual and innocent to them, but she had not quite attained it: ‘My cousin Mavis,’ she had said, laughing. ‘You should just
see
her, you can’t imagine, you would have to
see
her to know why she chose it,’ and all the time, as she spoke, some more assured, sophisticated account underran her words, silently, in her own mind, an account by some other girl, some girl who could wear such garments, and laugh at them, and explain them, and not suffer – some girl so far above such things that nothing could pull her down. Some girl who would never need to make such explanations, some girl who had been bred in a world which did not admit such dresses.

And, when, finally, she did emerge from her curtain cubicle to face the other girls, they took it very well, for they could afford to be charitable, and they were secretly glad that Clara’s style was cramped, for without some handicap she would have been a more serious threat. So they greeted her with comforts and praise, and said they liked the colour, and Janice lent her a necklace; Clara did not much like the necklace either, for it was made of large artificial pearls, and she secretly suspected the donor of malicious intent in offering such a loan, but she put it on just the same, and ignored her suspicions, and allowed herself to be comforted, because she wished to be comforted, and because it was too late to get out of going. And when they got there, they found that both anticipation and anxiety had overestimated the occasion, for like the reception at the Hôtel de Ville, the dance was nothing but a stifling, uncomfortable, noisy, joyless crush.
The rooms provided were far too small for the thousands of English scholars who were crammed into them, and the originally excessive numbers were heavily augmented by gate-crashing French students who had been hanging around the fringes of the course all week trying to pick up girls at the Lycée doors. There was a band, somewhere, but it could not be heard or seen. There were soft drinks, somewhere, but they could not be reached. The school parties stuck as rigidly together as they had done upon Victoria Station, lacking only their uniforms and labels, disastrously hampered by lack of space. Clara’s contingent sized up the situation in a disappointed trice, and hunched itself together in a corner to confront the disorderly scene by a solid front of backs. Only Janice, eternally hopeful, kept her eye upon the possibilities; she perched herself, kneeling, upon a chair, so that at least her head could be seen above the crowd.

For three quarters of an hour they stood there, and bitterly complained and rejoiced in rumours of police intervention, faintings, and thefts – and then, slowly, the floor began to clear a little. They did not know whether it cleared because people had left voluntarily, or because people had been evicted, but clear it did, and a few couples from the co-educational schools ventured forth to dance. Janice, from her vantage point, managed to catch the eye of a boy to whom she had spoken on the boat, and terrorized, fascinated, he responded to her insinuations and oglings and came over to ask her for the pleasure of her hand. At this, Rosie, Katie, Heather, Isabel and Clara felt themselves put upon their mettle, and they swerved round, slowly, to expose their disdainful faces. The competition was, alas, horrific, as they had ill-advisedly placed themselves in a predominantly female quarter of the hall, where few boys were bold enough to venture. However, after a couple of dances had elapsed, Clara thought she spotted the civilized young man who had assisted her on the Channel crossing; once she had spotted him she turned rigidly away, so deep was her horror of imitating Janice’s conduct, but she lost nothing by it, for within a couple of minutes he presented himself, courteously, at her elbow.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I thought I saw you. Isn’t it the most shocking scrum? Why do you imagine we all stay instead of going?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Clara. ‘Perhaps we just don’t like to give up.’

‘Do you feel like trying to have a dance?’ he said.

‘It looks,’ she said nervously, ‘a little difficult.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind your toes being trampled on …’

She hesitated, sadly, desperately anxious to accept, absurdly delighted that he had asked her, that he had so coolly bothered to cross the room to ask her, and yet at the same time horrified by the thought of displaying herself, by the thought of dragging her hideous dress from its hole-in-the-corner obscurity, by the thought of dancing at all, for she did not know how to dance. All the dancing that she had ever done had been at three school dances, and in sessions for instruction in the art of the polka, the mazurka, and the tarantella, and she did not think they would be much help to her now. On the other hand, she did not feel that she could refuse him, because if she refused him, by what right and for what purpose had she gone there in the first place? Such a false position was not for her, nor for her was the taunt of cowardice, so she smiled and assented, and allowed him to drag her into the sparsest area of the room.

It was not, as it happened, too bad. The floor was so thickly covered that there was no space for displays of skill; the most that the most expert could do was to shuffle feebly back and forth. Clara, clasped to the young man’s bosom, reflected that he was in no position to notice her lack of grace. Nor could he possibly notice her dipping hemline. He held her quite tightly, and tried to prevent other people from banging into her. His hair was thick and shining and symmetrical like a yellow flower. She was proud of him, and of herself, but she was not too happy, for the strain was too great for happiness. He too seemed to feel some sense of strain, for he was too busy avoiding people to talk to her much; when he trod, helplessly, for the fifth time upon her foot, she stopped still, and said to him, lightly, and with a sense of great daring:

‘It really is too bad, don’t you think? Don’t you think we might give it up?’ The perfection of her tone, so perfectly deceitful and concealing, amazed her.

He stopped, and he seemed relieved.

‘It’s dreadful,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry I keep treading on you, I just can’t help it. Should you mind if we went to look for something to drink instead?’

‘Is there anything?’ she asked.

‘I thought I saw something,’ he said, ‘in one of the other rooms.’

And so she followed him, in search of a drink. She was delighted by the success of her bravery, because she was far happier talking than dancing. She liked to be good at things, and she was not good at dancing. They found some drinks, eventually, in a small beleaguered ante-room, where he fought his way through to the bar and acquired some fizzy orange.

‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ he said, as he returned modestly with his two bottles and straws, ‘but better than nothing.’

And they stood in a corner and drank them, and exchanged their names, at last: she much admired the clear way with which he presented his own. Peter Harronson, he said he was called. She thought the name faintly familiar, and faintly Scandinavian, but she did not like to ask where it came from, in case she should have known. Similarly, when they exchanged the names of their schools, she found herself immensely relieved when he declared that he was at Winchester, for she had heard of Winchester, she knew something about Winchester, she did not have to feign a non-existent knowledge of Winchester. Indeed, she was rather proud of the magnificent logic with which she countered his Winchester admission.

‘Ah, then,’ she said, sucking on her straw. ‘Then you must have been to Paris before.’

He did not even query her reasoning; he took it, for what it was.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘once or twice, I have.’

‘Well, then,’ she continued, with what seemed to her to be the very height of aware sophistication, ‘why ever did you want to come here on this sort of trip?’

He seemed, strangely enough, to be very slightly disconcerted by her question.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I thought it might be amusing. And
then, you know, the others were coming. And it gave one something to do with the holidays. And there were those lectures, too. They told me they’d be useful.’

‘Did they really?’ said Clara. ‘I thought they were pretty dismal, didn’t you? I mean, really.’

On this point, however, he did not follow her, for he clearly took her to be complaining of the endemic tediousness of all lectures, rather than of the inadequacy of this particular lot: he equally clearly did not wholly concede the point, for he said, faintly, falsely, without enthusiasm, ‘Oh yes, I suppose they were.’

And she, warned off intellectual discussion by years of experience, withdrew, and could think of no more to say. And he too seemed to have exhausted his conversational store; she thought that they would both have liked to continue talking, but they could think of nothing to say. They were too young. And in the silence, she grew more and more conscious of the impossibility of her dress, and of her scuffed and inappropriately coloured shoes, and of her warm face. She wanted to get away, and she did not know how to get away. All explanations, all excuses were crude and deadly, and she could not bring herself to make them, but she could not sit there either, contemplating her own slow lapse from grace. She was immobile, cruelly transfixed, but in the very moment of immobility she saw most clearly a time when such moments need not be. It was left to him to move. He rose to his feet, and said:

‘Should we go and see if there’s any more room for dancing? It might have cleared a little more by now.’

And she too rose, and found herself saying, ‘Thank you so much, but if you don’t mind I think I’d better go and see what’s happened to my face.’

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘of course,’ and he even showed her the corridor that led to the Ladies’ room, and she escaped, and they escaped from each other. She stayed in the Ladies’ room for a long time, amongst girls fainting, and weeping and grieving over laddered stockings, and when she emerged he had disappeared. She was wholly relieved that he had gone, for his absence enabled her safely to join her friends, to receive their questions and their anecdotes,
and to hear of the brazen, wonderful audacity of Janice, who had not yet returned to the fold, and who had been seen leading, yes,
leading
her captive from the floor, in search of fresher air and darker night.

In bed that night, Clara thought of Peter Harronson and his fair hair. And she thought of the Italian’s hand inside her stocking. And she thought of Walter Ash. Her life, she thought, seemed to be thickening up quite nicely.

The next morning, they left Paris. The station from which they departed was being cleaned, and she thought, what a strange thing to clean, a station. What would they say in Northam, if anyone proposed to spend money on cleaning Northam Station? And then, looking at the workmen, and the yellow emerging stone, she almost noticed that the station was not intended to be a station but a work of art, a building ambitiously decorated with scrolls and figures and carvings: ill-decorated, but decorated nonetheless.

That summer she gained a place at London University, and parted from Walter Ash. Her parting from him took place in a field of buttercups and small cows; they had gone there together on their bicycles one hot afternoon, she with the intention of reading her book, and he with the intention of persuading her to remove as many of her clothes as possible. They lay on his jacket, and she tried to read while he tried to kiss her. She won. After an hour the sun clouded over, so they picked up their things and started back towards the fence where they had left their bicycles. At the far end of the field, by the gate, there was a group of small cows, and as Clara and Walter approached, these cows turned round to face them. They were in a solid line, between them and the gate. There were about twenty of them. They did not move.

Walter and Clara slowed down. Clara was frightened, but on the other hand she could see that they were only small cows. They were not even small bullocks. And she thought it was quite intolerable for Walter Ash to hesitate, even though she herself found it necessary to hesitate. She stood there, timidly, full of a most mordant rage. Then, pained beyond belief in some tender pride, she advanced alone upon
the cows, and they parted softly and meekly before her and Walter Ash followed her, and they regained their bicycles.

And she thought, quite calmly: this isn’t good enough for me, I shall get further if I’m pulled, I can’t waste time in going first.

When Walter Ash rang her the next day she would not speak to him. She returned his letters unopened, and threw away his small gifts. She stayed indoors for the rest of the summer, lying on her bed, trying to read.

Clara knew that Clelia would contact her, and she did. Less than a week after their first meeting at the poetry reading, she found a message waiting for her, asking her to ring Clelia’s number, and she rang, and Clelia invited herself round to tea.

‘I would ask you to come here,’ she said, ‘but there seems to be some kind of disturbance going on, and I don’t want to add to it.’