O Caledonia (12 page)

 

Seven lonely days make one lonely week

Seven lonely nights I cried, cried for you.

Oh my darling, I
'
m crying, boo-hoo hoo hoo...

 

She was drowned in desolation.

 

*

 

She wrote a letter to Hector and Vera every Sunday morning before church; she told them what a wonderful time she was having, what a lot of new friends she had made; she described a game in which she had shot the winning goal. She made it all sound as like Malory Towers as she could. Hector was unimpressed; to her surprise he wrote back saying that she hadn
'
t been sent to St Uncumba
'
s to be like Hilary Dibdin; he would like to hear about her work. Apart from maths, work was easy, so easy that it bored her. She had done it all before, years before and in the case of Latin and French, many years before. No one else did Greek; she had her lessons alone and these were a pleasure. They also enabled her to miss needlework. She could hardly believe that people could spend eighty minutes hemming what she called dishcloths and they called tea-towels, when they might be roistering and revelling through the Attic world. Soon she was to start reading Euripides
'
Medea;
soon they were to start making cotton knickers.

At half-term Janet was moved up a year and lessons became more interesting. Now she had an excuse for her friendless state: you made a best friend from your own house and your own year during your first term and you stayed together for the rest of your schooldays, a married couple. Naturally everyone in her new form had already paired off. Her status was altered too. Instead of being mad, as in mentally disabled, she became mad, as in mad professor. Girls began to ask her for help with their prep. They were obliged to smile when they did this. She no longer had to give up her chocolate bar; her neat pigtails were earned by a few adroit French sentences. Her feeling of numbness receded. One day as she sat alone on her side of the tea-table and looked at the row of complacent unfriendly faces opposite her, framed by the window and the billowing sea beyond, she imagined a great octopus emerging from the waters and floundering up the cliff. In through the window it would burst, fling its tentacles round their necks and tow them all off, wiping the sly grins off their faces, back to the depths whence it came. She began to laugh.
‘
So what
'
s the joke, Janet?
' ‘
Nothing,
'
she said, and then, with a new daring,
‘
Nothing you would understand.
'

She became aware that there were one or two other girls who were nearly as unpopular as herself. There was Ellen, a tiny, stunted creature who suffered from severe eczema and had to wear bandages which covered her arms and legs and neck. She scratched constantly and gave off a faint odour of putrefaction. Her life was a misery. Janet reflected that Raymond Dibdin would doubtless have wanted to shoot her. She thought of him with hatred; besides everything else, he had ruined Hallowe
'
en for her. Rhona had seen him being taken to the ambulance.
‘
His head was all swollen up; he looked like a whopping great turnip lantern,
'
she told Janet. Fortunately, at St Uncumba
'
s Hallowe
'
en was not celebrated, for it was an evil, pagan ritual. Instead they lit an enormous bonfire on Guy Fawkes night and burned a human effigy. How they cheered and clapped as the guy smouldered, blazed up and sagged forward, collapsing inwards, horribly real.
‘
It
'
s always an anxious moment, waiting for him to catch,
'
confided the housemistress. Janet watched the figures round the fire. Squat in their winter boots and heavy coats and scarves they looked like peasants from a Breughel painting; they were intent, mesmerised by the flames, by the pitiful burning figure. A mob, she thought, mob violence. She remembered the organ stop which was called Vox Populi. She wanted none of it.

She saw Ellen
'
s glimmering, bandaged form away in the outer darkness; she was coughing and wheezing in the smoke, for she also suffered from asthma.
‘
Ellen doesn
'
t seem well,
'
she said in responsible tones to Miss Smith.
‘
May I take her indoors?
' ‘
Of course, Janet,
'
beamed the housemistress.
‘
What a thoughtful girl you are.
'
Janet could scarcely believe it was so easy to escape. Ellen could scarcely believe that someone had bothered about her plight. Clutching Janet
'
s sleeve, she spluttered her way to the study room. Janet sat down firmly and opened her book. Ellen crouched over her inhaler in front of the gas fire. Every now and then Janet looked up and found Ellen gazing at her, eyes moist with gratitude. Oh God, she thought, I hope she doesn
'
t want me to be her friend. Ellen had an official friend, a brutal hockey fanatic named Cynthia, the only other leftover new girl. Cynthia called Ellen
‘
Smellen
'
. Janet felt a monstrous urge to be unkind to Ellen, to obliterate that gratitude and establish her aloofness; but she knew that this would bring her to the level of the other girls; she would be one of the mob. Twitching with irritation, she bestowed a vague, non-committal smile on Ellen and plunged back into her book. A few days later Ellen
'
s parents removed her from the school; it was too much for her frail constitution.

This meant a worse fate for Janet. She and Cynthia were now forced into unholy union, a union which was to last for four more years. Cynthia was very good at games and very bad at lessons; Janet was the opposite. Each despised the other
'
s abilities and let her know it. They had nothing in common save their mutual scorn. In grim silence they walked to school together through the windy streets, Janet panting to keep up. On the way back Cynthia would sing at the top of her voice and spin about like a dervish, squealing, her cloak whirling round her, to attract the attention of the grammar-school boys as they meandered homewards; she was happy because the day
'
s work was over. Janet scuttled along, with downcast eyes; her pigtails slapped her about the face. She dreaded the long cold evening, prep, charity knitting, the gleaming white walls of the dormitory where other girls huddled companionably together in their cubicles, giggling over their diaries. She tried to read, tried to sleep and yearned for Auchnasaugh.

At last the Christmas holidays came. Very early in the morning they were on the station platform. The air was vaporous, the sky mother-of-pearl. Circlets of ice crunched and melted under their feet. Then there was the anxious thrill of climbing on to the train
–
was it the right one? would it stop at the right place? had she lost her suitcases? would it ever start?
–
and the great surge of relief as it jolted into motion, the gathering speed, the landmarks, at last the great rusty dinosaur of the Forth Bridge. Janet remembered the old railway poster
‘
Over the Forth, To the North
'
and excitement rose in her, so that she could hardly breathe. On and on and over the Tay, and the first sight of the hills; tears welled in her eyes. The other girls had all gone now, some even wishing her
‘
Super hols, Janet
'
. No one lived so far north as she. Hector was there to meet her at Aberdeen station. There was a sparsely decorated Christmas tree at the end of the platform. Looking at it, Hector observed,
‘
This will mean death to thousands of innocent birds.
'
Through falling snow they drove west into a hushed landscape. It was dark when they reached Auchnasaugh. The snow had stopped and the stars glittered in myriads. She had forgotten that the heavens held so many. She stood for a moment on the drive, straining after the intense silence of the hills, the damp pine scented air. She thought,
‘
I am alive again.
'
When she went to see Lila she found the room in darkness; the fire spluttered low and fitful, illuminating only the inert shape of Mouflon. She shuffled cautiously across the room, sliding her feet as though walking through deep sand, lest she kick over any of the books, cups, glasses or ashtrays which she knew would be littered there. She reached the long table where the lamp stood. Blindly she stretched out her hands, feeling only empty air. Someone knocked on the window. Three times the knock came.
‘
Who
'
s that?
'
she shouted.
‘
Wait a minute, I can
'
t find the lamp.
'
No one answered. Janet stood motionless, suddenly afraid. She heard footsteps retreating, crunching across the frozen grass. Her shaking hands found an object. Slowly she moved her fingers over it. The texture was delicate, soft like vellum or the skin on a baby
'
s head. Her heart began to thump. She felt a broad plane, like a brow, now cheeks, smooth as her own, but cold, cold. It was a head. It was a severed head. She lurched back from it, screeching.

Lila came gliding through the door and switched on the lamp:
‘
Janet, my dear, whatever is the matter?
'
On the table was that prize of prizes, a giant puffball.
‘
I kept it specially to show you. It
'
s so rare to find one at this time of year.
'
Janet sat down abruptly; she was still shaking.
‘
Someone was knocking on the window. They ran away when they heard my voice.
' ‘
Don
'
t be absurd; it would just be a branch in the wind.
' ‘
There isn
'
t a wind. It
'
s really still tonight.
' ‘
Well, I shouldn
'
t worry. If it doesn
'
t worry me, it shouldn
'
t worry you. Tell me about school.
'
Janet started to tell her. Lila poured herself a tumbler of whisky. Soon it was clear to Janet that Lila wasn
'
t listening; she was gazing at Mouflon and her eyes were glassy. Everyone that evening had asked her what school was like, and Janet had willingly begun on either the official Enid Blyton version (for adults) or the dismal truth (for Francis, Rhona and Lila). In each case there was a brief show of keen interest from grown-ups,
‘
Oh, what fun it sounds! Of course, we were sure you would love it! Things have certainly changed since my day!
'
(Vera);
‘
An excellent opportunity
'
(Hector);
‘
Aye, it was fair time you were awa
'
frae those great gowking lads
'
(Nanny). There was no interest at all from her siblings,
‘
How dreary. Tell me no more. If I were you I
'
d jump over the cliff (Francis);
‘
Oh yes, good. Have you heard about my stick insect?
'
(Rhona). She heard Vera telling Constance, who was staying for Christmas, how pleased she was that Janet had made friends with Cynthia:
‘
She sounds such a sensible, wholesome sort of girl, a good influence.
' ‘
Yes,
'
said Constance, assuming her didactic manner,
‘
it
'
s so interesting that even quite young children will choose a friend who is entirely different.
' ‘
Attraction of opposites, I believe it
'
s called,
'
said Hector helpfully.
‘
No, Hector, that
'
s really rather crude. It
'
s something infinitely more profound, that yearning for completion which we find in Plato. The desire and pursuit of the whole.
'
Then, as usual, they drifted off into their own compelling lives, Constance and Vera to the nursery where Constance liked to observe Caro (
‘
The infant is primitive
'
), Hector to his motoring magazine, Rhona and Francis to their vivarium, and now Lila into her whisky and her vague, unfocused sorrow.

Janet now realised that, inconceivable as it seemed to her, life at Auchnasaugh had moved on without her. Her absence had made no difference. But without Auchnasaugh she had been maimed, deprived of her identity, living in two dimensions only.