O Caledonia (17 page)

It was cold at the zoo. The sky had clouded again and there was the bite of frost in the wind. Vera took the little ones off and left Francis and Janet to look around on their own. Francis vanished into the snake house. Janet stood watching the monkeys. How dispiriting to think that these were close relations. On the other hand, perhaps this explained a good deal about human behaviour. They crouched on their branches picking fleas off each other and eating them. They were constantly on the move, changing places, slyly poking, pulling, jostling. They seemed unable to concentrate on anything for more than a moment. Then they noticed a blackbird trapped in their enclosure, desperately flinging itself against the netting. A hideous hunt began, with the monkeys anticipating every move of the bird, swinging and leaping, blocking its flight path. Janet shouted at them. She waved her arms about. They paid no attention. At last the bird sank in exhaustion to the floor. The monkeys crowded round it. The bird was motionless; only the faintest tremor in its breast showed that it still lived. The monkeys lost interest; back they went into the high branches where they resumed their scratching, pinching and intent scrutiny of each other
'
s backsides. A man came with a wheelbarrow. He released the bird and, to Janet
'
s joy, it flew at once.

Lions strolled lethargically on a muddy slope. They were tarnished by winter and dulled with boredom. A black panther glared from its den, so much a part of its enclosing darkness that only the two emerald chips of its eyes were visible. The lions stiffened, moved forward to their fence; suddenly they were alert and purposeful. Perhaps it was feeding time. Janet turned to see what they were watching. A group of nuns were coming along the path, their black habits billowing against the leaden sky. Were ancestral voices whispering to these lions, reminding them of what might be done with missionaries? Cheered by this thought, she moved on. An extraordinary creature confronted her from a small rectangular pool. It towered up out of the water, monumental and tragic. Its thick grey skin hung in flaps and folds, its great round face was a mass of whiskery wrinkles; its brown eyes brimmed with yearning and sorrow. Sea lions frolicked heartlessly around it, slapping eddies of cold water up its flanks. It was a sea elephant, a manatee, a dugong, she read. She remembered that sailors were said to have mistaken these creatures for mermaids as they reared from the waves of far oceans, sunlit and turquoise. How could this ever be? The world must possess no creature more dolorous. Snow began to fall, fluttering and settling on the huge stony form. It did not move. Janet turned away miserably. She looked back at it once; it was still motionless, gazing unfathomably into the blizzard while the shining black sea lions leapt and played.

Woeful and cold she felt as they drove homewards. They passed the wolves, scrimmaging together in the dusk, fending and ripping at a small blue anorak.
‘
Well now,
'
said Francis,
‘
I wonder what they
'
ve done with the owner.
'
Lulu gasped; fearfully she clutched Rhona
'
s arm.
‘
Don
'
t be silly, Francis,
'
said Rhona,
‘
I saw you chucking that in to them.
' ‘
Only something I found in a puddle. I thought it might cheer them up.
'
Vera sighed heavily. Janet sat in the front this time. Steadily the windscreen wipers fanned through the slush and mud. The snow had stopped but there had been a great burden of it on the canvas roof and now it was melting and dripping down all the windows like streaming tears, like the tears of the manatee. She shook her head hard, trying to dislodge the thought. There had been a happy fish in the aquarium house. It was a skate, a pure white skate, and it had moved vertically, floating up and down on a little wake of bubbles, like a handkerchief or a small pale ghost. As it floated, it opened and closed its mouth, and it had seemed to Janet that it was soundlessly singing
‘
Hallelujah, hallelujah
'
. Its fluent effortless dance was a dance of praise, a joyous offering.

For most of the journey the little ones were quiet, but as they turned up the drive to Auchnasaugh and birthday tea and candles, excitement broke loose again.
‘
What IF,
'
they shrieked.
‘
What if a penguin rode on an elephant?
' ‘
What if a pear jumped over the moon? No, a melon.
' ‘
What if a slow-worm?
' ‘
No, Caro, that
'
s not how you do it.
' ‘
Water
'
s dripping in from the roof,
'
said Francis. The canvas was sagging heavily inwards.
‘
Oh never mind, we
'
re almost there,
'
said Vera, accelerating perilously. The car skidded, zigzagged, straightened. In the headlights they saw Jim pedalling laboriously towards them. He was on his way home; two rabbits and a pigeon dangled on strings from his handlebars; the rabbits
'
stiff hind legs swung against the spokes of his front wheel.
‘
I must just have a quick word with him.
'
Vera braked abruptly. The car lurched sideways again. There was a rending sound; an avalanche of slush and ice water engulfed Janet
'
s head.
‘
The roof
'
s split! Look at Janet!
'
squawked Francis. They looked, they squealed with laughter, they looked again and collapsed in helpless mirth. Vera wound up her window, waved to Jim, glanced at Janet and began to laugh too. Janet was speechless from the shock of the cold; her hair was saturated, water was still pouring over her face, on to her lap, soaking into her coat, trickling even into the capacious recesses of her padded pre-formed brassiere, bought to leave room for growth. (Growth, what a hideous word.) The car drew to a halt by the front door.
‘
What if,
'
proposed Francis,
‘
something extremely funny happened to Janet?
'
Blindly she rushed into the hall and up the stairs. The twin lagoons gurgled beneath her jersey. Far below she heard Caro trying again,
‘
What if a clown jumped into a bucket of socks?
'

 

*

 

The summer term at St Uncumba
'
s was almost bearable. Although the weather was always cool because of the sea breeze, the monotone grey dispersed and sky and water vied with each other in subtleties of blue and green. There was no more hockey, and you only had to play cricket if you showed promise. Otherwise there was tennis and swimming. Janet played tennis with her usual ineptitude, but because it was not a team game no one minded, except Cynthia, who would become exasperated and then furious and start hitting very fast and very accurate balls at Janet and the game would end. They swam in a huge natural pool among the rocks; the tide swept in twice daily and flooded it, bringing marine exotica, and not always removing them as it withdrew. Janet lost her pleasure in swimming here after meeting a six-foot eel with goggling eyes. On sunny days when they went riding they wore their swimming costumes under their jodhpurs and Aertex shirts; they would gallop along the wet shining sands and then take the saddles off and swim the horses. This was marvellous. The horses trod warily into the shallows; they picked their feet up high and skipped sideways at the little waves. Then as they waded deeper they arched their necks and snorted, pushing their muzzles into the green swell. Their flanks grew wet and slippery. And suddenly with a wild forward lurch they gave themselves to the sea, wantonly plunging, surging and wallowing. The billows washed into Janet
'
s face, the wind took her breath, she clung to the mane, elemental air and water, terror and ecstasy. She could die like this and never know the difference, horsed on the sightless couriers of the air.

One day Cynthia announced that she was going swimming in the sea. At the time they were returning from their Sunday afternoon walk, in crocodile as usual, marching along the shore road. On one side lay the dunes, crowned in spiky marram grass, on the other the lonely shards and splinters of the ancient cathedral. The roar of the strong wind almost drowned the distant peals of bells.
‘
Don
'
t be ridiculous,
'
said Janet.
‘
It
'
s freezing cold and the waves are all going in different directions. You
'
ll be sucked under and that
'
ll be the end of you. Not that I care, but I
'
ll get the blame.
' ‘
Shut up, you drip.
'
Cynthia twisted her wrist.
‘
Come on, quick, now, into the dunes.
'
Hopelessly Janet scurried after her; the sand blew into her eyes, her hat floated off down the beach. Gasping and choking, she retrieved it and crouched in the comfortless grasses. Before her lay the flotsam and jetsam of the retreating tide. The sea was swollen and evil. Only Cynthia could want to bathe at such a stupid time. It was like swimming on New Year
'
s Day or across the Channel, which of course was exactly what she would have in her pin-sized mind. Why couldn
'
t she just swim to Germany and be done with it? Germany would suit Cynthia very well, she reflected, watching the blonde athletic figure strike through the waves, turning her head from side to side in the absurd mechanical manner demanded by the crawl. Janet herself only floated or did breast stroke, keeping her head upright, well out of the water, and moving very slowly but, she believed, with a certain stately poise.

Suddenly she saw that Cynthia was not alone. Coasting and rolling, a couple of waves further out, were two round, bobbing heads. As Cynthia turned and swam along the surge of her wave so they swam along theirs, heads turned towards her, great dark eyes gleaming with merriment through the spume. A pair of seals were having sport with Cynthia, parodying her movements, coming in closer. Janet leapt to her feet and ran to the water
'
s edge; she waved and pointed and shouted into the wind. Cynthia swam powerfully shorewards and strode scowling and dripping out of the water.
‘
What
'
s the matter? Is someone coming?
'
she demanded, shaking herself like a dog so that freezing droplets flew all over Janet.
‘
Two seals were swimming with you. Look!
'
They stared out at the sea. The seals were gone, there was nothing but the whelming deep.
‘
You just made it up, didn
'
t you, to get me out of the water?
'
Janet ignored her. They tramped back to the boarding house in angry silence, mitigated for Janet by the prodigy she had seen and Cynthia had not seen.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER NINE

 

 

After that summer term all terms merged in Janet
'
s mind. She had tried St Uncumba
'
s in every season, months without end, fogs impenetrable, cold, windy sunlight
–
and she found it wanting, wanting in human kindness, in vision, in apprehension of the glories of the world. But the raw, sheer edge of her misery was blunted; she had learnt to cope, even to survive, by deviousness, by reading, and, as always, by day-dreaming. She saw other, younger, girls become the persecuted quarry; although she was sometimes troubled by a perverse impulse to join their tormentors she never did so. Her reason for this was not honourable; it was simply disdain. She believed that she moved on a higher plane, beyond spite, beyond compromise. She had found a French word,
mesquin;
this she applied silently and liberally to the preoccupations of others. Her heart was hardened. Leafing through a magazine one day, her eye was caught by a photograph. For a moment, she took it to be a frieze from a Greek vase, nymphs and cupidons stepping through a graceful pastoral. Then she read the caption. It had been taken by a German war photographer and it showed Jewesses and their infants on their way to the gas chambers. Soon afterwards she came upon John Hersey
'
s account of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She could no longer have faith in God or man. She transferred any religious impulse which might yet linger within her to the Greek gods who did not even pretend to care especially for humanity or to value its efforts and aspirations, being far too busy with their own competing plots, feuds and passions. Now when she prayed she stood in darkness, beneath the moon, and repeated her message three times, with rigidly clenched fists and unwinking stare, forcing all her strength upwards to the chilly disc or crescent which sometimes glanced slyly back at her, sometimes reeled drunkenly off into the torn clouds. She was in retreat from the world, in a state of numb and impotent horror. Francis told her that she was a boring monolith, concentred all in self. He was right, she thought, but she knew no way of expressing her state in words, no way of escaping her carapace. The lonely call of an owl, which once had thrilled her, now pierced her with apprehension. Man
'
s inhumanity to man and beast dominated a world of vicious anarchy and disgrace. Only the trees and hills and the night sky held to their orderly beauty,
‘
O look upon the starry firmament
'
. She found an astronomical globe and took it to her room; she sat on the floor studying it and she wept. She did not know why she was weeping.