Jerusalem the Golden (7 page)

As so often happened, she deliberated too long about the introduction of her own affairs, and when she finally found the courage to speak, she chose a bad moment. She waited until tea time, and listened in silence while Mrs Maugham recounted her adventures with Mrs Hanney to the rest of the family: they were received in silence by Alan, Arthur and her father, who did not waste their speech. Then Clara, into the lull that accompanied the pouring of tea, said sullenly,

‘I saw the headmistress today. About what to do next year. I’m going to do French.’

Her mother poured the last cup of tea, stirred it vigorously, picked up her slice of bread and butter, took a mouthful, chewed it, and then, ‘Suit yourself,’ she said.

Long before she left school, Clara discovered that whatever negligent indifference might greet her in the bosom of her family, she was capable of arousing strife in breasts other than those of Miss Haines and Mrs Hill. The bosomy metaphor is appropriate, for Clara developed young, to the astonishment of her contemporaries, who had convinced themselves that sexual and intellectual precocity never coincided. Clara regarded her own development with unreserved satisfaction, for she knew that it promised well. By the time she was fifteen, her stock in the school rose enormously by virtue of the fact that she was a constant recipient of billets-doux from the boys of the neighbouring Grammar School. The girls in her class, who had hitherto regarded her as relatively plain, and as a non-starter in the fashion stakes, with no notion of how to twist a school beret or hitch a school skirt, quickly reconsidered their assessment of her, and she found herself elected to an honorary membership of the fastest, smartest, slickest coterie. She was naturally gratified by this change of front, and drew the appropriate moral – the possession of big breasts, like the possession of a tendency to acquire good examination results, implies power.

She never came to take her membership quite for granted: she had admired the in-people for too long ever to feel herself to be truly one of them. Most of them had been in from the start, born survivors, born leaders: amongst these lucky few were numbered Rosie Lane, an athletic, pretty, small-faced girl whose father owned a large grocer’s, and whose primal popularity had been cheaply purchased by the judicious distribution of dried apricots and jelly cubes, which the girls devoured whole. Another was Susan Berkley, a bossy,
self-willed creature, whose natural vigour went, as adolescence progressed, the natural way. Then there were Heather and Katie, inseparable friends, who bolstered each other by their mutual devotion; never had they known a moment’s shame of friendlessness, never had they had to look for a partner in dancing or in gym, never had they walked alone from classroom to classroom, and their confidence overflowed and imposed itself upon all beholders. These four, in Clara’s year, were the hard core of self-satisfied splendour, and to them others had been added. Isabel Marshall had been added at the age of fourteen, when her gawky, bony clumsiness had suddenly transformed itself into dazzling beauty, and Clara, her especial friend, was added a year later when her breasts grew. And then there was the odd case of Janice Young, who was, if anyone ever was, the doomed and unalterable scapegoat – she was not pretty, she was not clever, she was not good at games, and yet, during her fifteenth year, she managed to make herself acceptable as one of the inner ring. The inner ring itself could never quite understand her arrival there, and concluded finally that she made it through sheer cheek. She was irrepressible, shameless, brazen; she ran after the boys, and the boys, to the amazement of the other girls, meekly succumbed, and took her out, and bought her presents. She talked about her boyfriends in a tone of most frightful, spine-chilling, whimsy determination, and they took it. She threatened them, she menaced them, and one day in this vein she would marry one of them. She was not to be resisted. And Rosie, Susan, Heather, Katie, Clara and Isabel could not resist her either; they let her join them, weakly, unable to refuse such primitive intention. They showed, from time to time, a faint suspicious desire to force her to provide her non-existent credentials, but every time, just as their forces gathered for the attack, she would produce out of her hat some new and dazzling boyfriend, all ready to pay tribute to her elusive powers.

Clara felt herself to be extremely fortunate in her membership of this group, and the insecurity of Janice’s position in it fortified her, for she knew herself to be more secure, less irritating, less tactless in every way than Janice. So she was especially kind to Janice. She was also rather surprised by the way in which she took her own newly
acquired charms, for she was almost as determined as Janice to make the best of herself, and she had more to make the best of. Some of the girls – and even, oddly enough, the dashing, heavy-lipped, inviting Susan – were a little nervous about their developing selves, and a little alarmed by their own powers. Clara, on the other hand, was not at all alarmed. She did her best to stimulate a constant flow of love letters, and found the collecting of admirers a very satisfying pastime.

The chief scene for amorous exchange was the entrance to the boys’ swimming baths, for the girls had no baths of their own, and were obliged to use those of their brother school for their weekly afternoon’s lesson; here, on the steps, small red messenger boys would collect, proffering envelopes from their elders. The girls enjoyed their swimming lessons, titillated by the well-known fact that some of the more daring boys used to watch them changing through an easily accessible sky light. This well-known fact was somehow never discussed in public by the girls, for public admission of it would have destroyed and inhibited its oddly private thrill, and would have shamed the vain ones into cowering in their cubicles, as the timid and modest already did. As it was, such girls as fancied themselves would leave their cubicle doors open, in the hope that tantalizing glimpses of leg and breast and buttock might be seen through the high and smoky glass, and once Clara, taking advantage of the convention that they were unobserved, walked the whole length of the changing room draped only from the waist down by a small towel, on the pretext of borrowing a safety pin. The other girls, knowing quite well that she had done it for the benefit of one Geoffrey A. Machin, were shocked and admiring, but the convention restrained them from expressing either shock or admiration. On another famous occasion, Clara, stark naked, drying herself in her cubicle, caught sight of her own image in the wet tiled floor: ‘Good God,’ she cried out, ‘just look at me, how weird I look from underneath,’ and all the girls had cried out, ‘Ssh, ssh, Clara, somebody might be listening.’

‘Whoever could be listening?’ cried Clara loudly, knowing that Geoffrey A. Machin and Peter Hawtrey had cut Geography in order
to do just that, and the other girls clucked and murmured and veiled themselves, thinking such deliberate flouting of the conspiracy of shame to be in doubtful taste.

But Clara had not cried out, originally, through vanity, nor for the benefit of her friends on the roof. She had been truly moved by herself, by her own watery image, by her grotesquely elongated legs, her tapering waist, and above all by the undersides of her breasts, never before seen. She stood there and stared at herself, seeing herself from that unexpected angle, as though she were another person, as though she were a dim white and blue statue on a tall pillar, a wet statue, a statue in water, a Venus rising from the sea, with veined white marble globes for breasts. She had never expected to be beautiful, and she was startled to see how nearly she approached a kind of beauty.

She had never expected to be beautiful because nobody had ever suggested that she might be so. Some mothers assume beauty in their daughters, and continue to believe it to be there, in defiance, often enough, of the facts, but Mrs Maugham was not one of these mothers. She assumed plainness, and she found it. She was so devoted to the principle that beauty is a frivolity and a sign of sin that she would have been ashamed to have it in the house. Nevertheless, her conviction of its absence was not wholly generous, nor wholly without malice. (On one occasion, with magnificent inconsequence, she had remarked after staring at one of Clara’s dazzling reports, ‘Well, handsome is as handsome does’; this was the only occasion on which she had ever said anything complimentary about Clara’s looks.) Clara as a child had fully supported her mother’s attitude, for she was in no way a pretty child; she was sullen, dirty, and her features were too big for her face. As she grew older, however, her face grew as well as her hips and bosom, but her way of looking as though she were about to burst out of her clothes became an asset rather than a disadvantage. She had not expected to be such a kind of girl; she had watched this kind of girl for years (the lips discreetly reddened, the loud laughter on the school bus, the tossing of long hair beneath rakish berets, the swinging of hips, the whispering in the garden) but she had never expected to become one. She had expected to be one of the others.

Although she was pleased with what she had become, and saw some future in it, there was one aspect of it that she did not like. She did not, could not like the boys. She persevered with them, in the hope that a taste for men, like a taste for the other desirable sophistications of life such as alcohol and nicotine, could be acquired through hard work. But it was hard work. She often shrewdly suspected that they found it hard work too, and that for all their signatures of fondest love they did not really like her; they wanted her, they thought that she would do, but they did not really like her. The difficulty was increased by the fact that she wanted good-looking boys only, and for some reason the really good-looking boys were quite impossible to cope with. For one thing, they could pick and choose, and they usually chose somebody else. And when one of them did choose her, she found herself quite unable to talk to him at all. There was one particularly disastrous episode with a boy of startling beauty; he was called Higginbotham, but even such a name could not dim his lustre nor silence his éclat. This Higginbotham, the admired of all beholders, honoured Clara with a note one day, delivered at the door of the swimming bath by a small minion; it said:

Dear Miss Maugham,

I have observed you several times coming and going. Perhaps you have observed me, I am often around, if you are not fixed up at the moment what about me waiting for you at the bus stop tonight? I can go your way.

Yours faithfully,

J. R. Higginbotham

The receipt of this letter threw Clara into ecstasy, for she had indeed observed his comings and goings, and had been suitably taken by his solid, rocky, regular features and by the dashing abandon of his hair style. She flashed the note around, proudly though covertly, and looked for him at the bus stop, but she could not look for him without some misgiving. She hated to admit it to herself, but there was something in the style and appearance of his note that would not do. The looseness of the syntax was a familiar symptom enough, but coupled with the handwriting it took on a more sinister light, for
the writing was one of those faint, regular, carefully looped hands which indicate an underlying antipathy to the written word. She knew, from looking at it, that they would not get on. But she passionately wanted to get on with him; she made every effort to entertain and to captivate, for in proximity he was even more dazzling than from a distance. Her excitement, as she sat next to him on the narrow dirty furry seat of the bus, was almost too much for her. But it would not do. He did not find her amusing, and she found him quite disastrously dull. She could not have said that she found him dull, because she did not know it, and was conscious only of her own failure, and her misery at her own personal inadequacy quite drowned any sensation of boredom. When he asked if he could see her again the next day, she would not have dreamed of declining; they saw each other for about a fortnight, and her enthusiasm for him increased with each meeting, though he said not a word of any interest in the whole two weeks. They had no level of communication at all, and a bus ride with him was an ordeal rather than a pleasure, for she had to rack her brains to reply to his remarks about the weather, the town’s football teams, the cinema, his headmaster, and so forth, but nevertheless when he wrote her a note saying:

Dear Clara,

I think it would be better if we stop seeing each other, I find I have a lot of work to do with my Alternative Maths,

Yours ever,

James

she burst into floods of horrible tears, and cried for a whole day.

It was on the rebound from Higginbotham that she took up with the first boy that she came near to liking. He was not nearly as beautiful, but on the other hand his preliminary note promised other qualities. It read:

Dear Miss Maugham,

I have had my eye on you for some time. Now that Higginbotham has been given the brush off, may I venture to approach you? I hope that you
won’t think I am
rushing in
, for I assure you that I am no
fool
, unlike certain other people. Nor am I an angel, exactly, you will find that out for yourself, that is if you give me a chance. There is a good film on at the Rex. This is a hint. I await your response.

Yours in hope,

Walter Ash

Clara knew quite well who Walter Ash was, and therefore did not flash this letter around the classroom, as she knew he was not a great prestige catch; on the contrary, he had a reputation for being rather a bore. Nevertheless, she thought his note had possibility. The syntax was not perfect, perhaps, but it was a great deal better than Higginbotham’s, and the use of such lengthy phrases as ‘venture to approach’ and ‘await your response’ showed some acquaintance with the useful clichés of the language. The handling of the ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ theme, though not wholly elegant, showed ambition, and the assumption that Clara was responsible for the dismissal of Higginbotham showed courtesy, though she would have preferred his name to be left out of it altogether. All in all, she thought she would give Walter Ash a try, despite the fact that people said he was very conceited, and despite his appearance, which was slightly against him, as far as his ears went. Only slightly, however. There were girls who were prepared to put up with far far worse than Walter Ash’s ears.