It prised its way each morning like a chisel through the crack
between Jane’s flowered bedroom curtains and between the eyelids she squeezed
tightly shut in an effort to stay inside her dreams. It wasn’t acceptable in
Jane’s kind of family to complain about good weather, yet the strain of it told
on them, parents and children: they were remorselessly cheerful, while secretly
they longed for rain. Jane imagined herself curled up with a bag of licorice
beside a streaming windowpane, reading about the Chalet School. But her mother
said it was a crime to stay indoors while the sun shone, and Jane couldn’t read
outside with the same absorption; there was always some strikingly perfect
speckled insect falling onto your page like a reminder (of what? of itself), or
a root nudging into your back, or stinging ants inside your shorts.
The morning of the abduction, Mrs.
Allsop—dishevelled in a limp linen shirtdress—was wielding her secateurs up a
ladder, pruning the climbing roses. She was immensely capable; tall and
big-boned with a pink, pleasant face and dry yellow hair chopped sensibly
short. Jane admired her mother greatly, especially when she transformed herself
at night, for a concert in London or a Rotary Club dinner, with clip-on pearl
earrings and lipstick and scent, a frilled taupe satin stole. Jane coveted this
stole and tried it on when her mother was at the shops, making sultry faces at
herself in the mirror—although sultry was the last thing her mother was, and everyone
told Jane that she looked just like her. She certainly seemed to have her
mother’s figure, with not much bust, no waist to speak of, and a broad flat
behind.
“Why don’t you call up some of your old
friends?” Mrs. Allsop suggested from the ladder top. “Invite them round to play
Ping-Pong.”
Jane responded with evasive enthusiasm. (She
didn’t know her old friends anymore; that was what happened when you were sent
away to boarding school.) She said she was heading inside to find her Jokari
set (a rubber ball attached by a long elastic string to a wooden base—you could
hit the ball back and forth with a paddle all by yourself for hours on end). It
was part of the family code that sport and physical exercise were meaningful
ways of passing leisure time; without them, you risked dissipation, letting
value slip away.
Only Jane’s brother, Robin, was allowed a special
dispensation, because he was studying to get into Oxford—it was all right for
him to have his head stuck in a book all day and to go around scowling,
complaining that the sun gave him headaches. When Jane strayed into Robin’s
room (“Buzz off, shrimp, you’re not permitted across my threshold”), he was
curled up on his side on the bed, his clasped hands between his drawn-up knees,
his glasses off, and his book propped across his face, Pink Floyd playing
subduedly on the stereo. It was obvious that he’d been smoking. Mrs. Allsop
smoked, with a casual elegance that startled Jane, but only on the silk-stole
evenings, or if she had women friends around for tea. (For Robin, blind on his
bed with a headache and sex fantasies and short-circuiting flashes of insane
ambition, his sister, mutely protesting—she simply stood there till he got up
and pushed her out and locked the door behind her—was a visitant from his
insipid past, when they’d been friends.)
She carried the Jokari set down through the
patch of woodland toward the bottom of the garden. Her sister, Frances,
dark-skinned and fey, not at all like their mother and not yet old enough for
boarding school, had chums around to play with. They were supposed to be
clearing the drive of rabbit droppings with spoons and plastic bags, for money,
but they were all four hunkered in a semicircle under the pine trees, where
they had set out tea things for their dolls, a pinecone on each tiny plate, a
rabbit dropping in each tiny cup. Jane heard Frances chanting in two
alternating voices while the others watched, in thrall to her.
“Don’t want it! Don’t want it!” Frances said
in her whiny voice.
“Eat it up,” her vicious voice
replied. “Take your nasty medicine.”
When Jane came near, the little girls melted
into the undergrowth with hostile backward looks. She kicked their dolls over
and hurled the pinecones as far as she could toward the flaunting patches of
sky between the treetops (she had a strong throw, her father always said,
better than Robin’s); but she lacked conviction even in her malevolence. “We
hate her! She’s so ugly,” the witch-children hummed, drifting between the bald
pine trunks, keeping out of sight.
Jane remembered, as she often did, how once
at a friend’s house she had overheard the dotty grandmother asking too loudly
who the “plain” one was. The witches didn’t even bother to follow her, to spy
on her, which would at least have been some kind of game. She set up her Jokari
on a scorched patch of grass beside where their chalky drive debouched onto the
road. No cars passed. The road was a dead end, leading only to more big houses
like theirs, secretive behind their screens of trees, some atmospheric with the
half-timbering that Jane didn’t yet know was a badge of inauthenticity, some
with tennis courts from which the thwack of balls didn’t often come.
Kicking off her flip-flops, she settled
resignedly into her game. The pock and thud of the Jokari ball on the baked
ground soothed her, and she started to care about whether she could break her
own record of consecutive hits. (She had passed Robin’s record long ago.)
Rapt,
she didn’t notice her father steering the Rover down the drive, on his way out
to pick up the Saturday paper; to save petrol, he liked to roll down with the
hand brake off, starting the engine only when he turned into the road. Jane
scooped low to the ground under an awkward shot, getting it up with too much
force just as the sleek black of the car eased into the edge of her vision; the
ball on its elastic must have seemed smashed deliberately and vindictively
against the car’s side window (which luckily was not open). Assaulted amid his
reverie, Mr. Allsop was outraged out of all proportion to the offense—nothing
was broken. He stopped the car and half stood up out of it to rant across its
roof at Jane: Stupid girl! Didn’t she have anything better to do?
Then the car
rolled on, ominously firing to life when it felt the road, and Jane was left
wounded, staring after it. The wings of her spirit, which had been beginning to
soar, faltered and flung her to earth, because, after all, she had been doing
her best, nothing else; and also because her father was supposed to be her ally
in the family, though they weren’t at all alike. Mr. Allsop was small and dark,
like Frances, easily bored, and clever with figures. He thought about Jane
vaguely, through a fog of fond concern, fearing that she had her mother’s flat,
bland surface without Mrs. Allsop’s force of conviction—or whatever it was that
kept her impermeable, buoyant.
Jane dropped her paddle in an
uncharacteristic gesture of despair. Tears stung her eyes; she stood with her
hands by her sides, palms outward, in a kind of resigned openness. What next,
then, if even her attempt at virtue had failed?
And that was how they first saw her. They
passed Mr. Allsop in the Rover; he was turning out of the unmade-up road just
as they turned into it. Mr. Allsop noticed them, because he knew most of the
cars that visited the road, and he didn’t recognize or much like the look of
this one: an expensive dark-green sporty two-seater convertible, with one
long-haired youth in a sloppy vest lolling in each seat, and one—smoking
something that might have been more sinister than a cigarette—squeezed into the
little luggage space behind, craning forward, as he was bound to, between his
friends.
The driver, who had one languid hand on the wheel, cornered carelessly
in a puff of chalk dust, tires spitting loose stones. (If they were my kids,
Mr. Allsop thought, catch me allowing them anywhere near my car. It’s not all
bad that Robin’s such a drip.) Had the family ever realized that Jane had been
abducted, her father would probably have remembered and suspected these
visiting aliens.
The boys were drunk and stoned, and hadn’t
been to bed at all the night before (but then they hadn’t got out of bed until
four the previous afternoon). They were out looking for girls, in Nigel’s
father’s car. (Nigel was the one squeezed into the luggage space.) They’d
finished their second year at Oxford and were staying at Nigel’s house, about a
twenty-minute drive from the Allsops’, while his parents were away in France.
After sagging at dawn, dozing in the angular Swedish armchairs in the lounge,
and filling Nigel’s mother’s fashionable ashtrays while listening to the Grateful
Dead, all three had found a second wind, swimming several thrashing lengths in
Nigel’s pool.
The loveliness of the morning had then seemed their own fresh
discovery: the light as limpid as the water, birdsong skimming the flat
echoless air, the sun’s touch intricate on their skin. They had decided that
they needed to find girls to crown the day. That was a few hours ago. It had
taken them a while to get started; and then there’d been a striking absence,
everywhere they’d driven, of available girls.
“She’ll do,” one of them called out when they
saw Jane, loud enough for her to hear. It was Paddy (not Irish at all), the
bulky, clever-looking one in the passenger seat, with small eyes like chinks of
bright glass and greasy hair the color and texture of old rope, pushed behind
pink ears. He took the joint from Nigel and blinked at Jane through its smoke
with a sort of appraising impartial severity, not lascivious.
“But where will we put these girls?” Nigel
asked facetiously, after one glance at Jane: he didn’t fancy sharing his small
space (and wasn’t, in fact, much interested in girls). Paddy explained that
they’d have to collect them one at a time.
Jane stood barefoot, hands still open in that
gesture of self-relinquishment. She wasn’t plain in that moment, though she
didn’t know it. Something was revealed in her that was normally hidden: an
auburn light in her face, her freckles startling as the camouflage of an
animal, blotting up against her lips and eyelids. There were ginger glints,
too, in her hair, which she wore in two bunches, fastened with
different-colored elastic bands. Her eyes with their pale lashes, because she
was unhappy, communicated keenly. Her family called her pudgy, but she just
looked soft, as if she were longing to nestle. Her jawline was pure, the pale
lips rather full, cracked, parted. She seemed not fake or stuck up—and, just
then in the dappled light, not a child, either. None of this was wasted on the
boys.
It didn’t occur to Jane that the car would
stop for her; she watched it hungrily, sifting the silky dust between her toes.
Daniel, the driver, Jane saw at once, was the best-looking of the three; in
fact, he was crushingly beautiful—his features smudged and vivid at once, as if
sketched in black ink—and her heart fastened on him. When he had stopped the
car, he asked her what her name was and she told him. “Want to come for a
ride?” he said kindly.
She hesitated only for a moment.
“Not in the back,” she said, quite clear
about it. Already, she didn’t care for Nigel.
“Between us in the front,” Paddy said,
squeezing over.
And so she climbed in, carrying her
flip-flops in her hand. On a whim, she had decided against shorts that morning;
she was wearing a washed-out old dress in flowered cotton, with a Peter Pan
collar.
On their way back to Nigel’s house, Jane was
an accomplice in an episode of shoplifting—which fortunately went undetected,
or at least unreported. She had never stolen anything before; the possibility
hadn’t crossed her mind. But she was disoriented: as they drove along, Paddy
had pulled the elastic bands off her two bunches so that her hair blew crazily
into all their faces. Whipping across her vision, the strands of it were like a
hallucination, distracting her from her larger bewilderment at half sitting on
Paddy’s knee, feeling Daniel ease his arm around her once, on a straight
stretch when he wasn’t changing gears. (Nigel’s father had chosen a manual
gearbox on the M.G.C.) “It’s all right,” Daniel had said. “Don’t worry about
us. We’re not all bad.”
“I like her,” Paddy commented. “She doesn’t
talk too much.”
The oddest thing was that she wasn’t
worrying, although she knew she ought to be; especially when they made plans to
keep the shopkeeper talking while she, Jane, slipped bottles of whatever
alcohol she could get into their canvas haversack. “He keeps it in a little
side room,” Daniel said. “You don’t look as if you drink, so no one will
suspect you. If they do, you can cry and say that we kidnapped you and made you
do it.”
Jane didn’t recognize the shop, though it was
only a few miles from her home; her mother had most of their groceries
delivered, and, anyway, Mrs. Allsop would never have shopped in such a dimly
lit, cellar-smelling place, its windows hung with conflicting advertisements
for cigarettes and tea, its shelves crowded promiscuously with faded tins,
china souvenirs, regiments of sweet jars. A naked fat ham in orange bread
crumbs jostled for space on the counter with packets of parsley sauce and
marked-down broken biscuits.
Repulsion at the ham’s sickly flesh smell fuelled
Jane’s impossible swift acts. She chose the cool bottles by feel in the dark
little off-license nook, beyond a curtain of plastic strips, because she could
hardly see in there; her eyes were dazzled from the light outside. Her heart
thudded as violently as an engine stalling, but her hands were sure. The boys
paid for the sliced bread and tomatoes and tin of tuna they bought, thanking
the shopkeeper loftily as they left. Jane sat in the car again between them,
her trophies chinking on her knee.
“Isn’t she good?” Paddy said when they’d
driven on and he’d excavated in the haversack, finding dusty Mateus rosé and
Johnnie Walker and several bottles of barley wine.
“She’s a natural,” Daniel said.
“Now she belongs to us,” Paddy said. “We’ve
got the dirt on her.”
Jane sought in the recesses of her
consciousness the remorse that she knew ought to be lying in wait—that poor
honest shopkeeper, struggling to make a living! But it was as if all recesses
had flattened out for the moment, into a balmy infinite present amid the
sunshine and the gusts and swirls of wind as the M.G.C. swerved around bends.
Her consciousness was filled to the brim with her contact—astonishing because
she was so virgin in contacts—with the boys’ warm bodies, lapping against her;
she didn’t even much mind Nigel’s chin resting showily on her shoulder, when he
leaned over from his perch in the back. It had never occurred to her, until
now, that the masculine—a suspect realm of deep-voiced otherness, beard growth,
fact-authority, and bathroom smells—could be so intimately important, in
relation to herself; it seemed as improbable as two planets colliding.
Now, below the surface of the moment, she
began to wait in secret—patiently, because her self-discoveries were very
new—for Daniel’s hand to jostle her thigh when he changed gears. She stole long
gazes at him from behind the blinding strands of her hair, drinking in whatever
it was in his looks that tugged at her so exquisitely. His head was poised on
his slight frame in a way that reminded her of the poet’s bust (she couldn’t
remember which poet) on the piano at home, which nobody played; his dark hair
fell in floppy curls like the poet’s sculpted ones, and his face had the same
keen, forward-slanting lines. A fine dimple of skin, puckering beside his mouth
when he gave one of his rare quick smiles, was a fatal last touch: Jane thought
he was as handsome as a rock star or a film star—only more so, because they
flaunted crudely from their posters, whereas Daniel held something back.
Nigel had a bottle opener on his key ring,
and they started on the barley wine, after a discussion with Jane over whether
she drank alcohol or not. “I don’t,” she owned up candidly. “But I might
start.” Daniel, solicitous, said that they mustn’t give her too much, just a
little sip at a time. They watched her face to see whether she liked the taste
and laughed delightedly when it was obvious that she didn’t, although she
bravely insisted (“I do! I do quite like it!”), as entertained as if they were
feeding beer to a puppy.
If Nigel’s parents’ house had been anything
like Jane’s, she might have felt a pang of recollection when they arrived, but
although it was secluded behind trees like hers, and with the same defensive
air of privilege, it was modern—all glass rectangles and slats of unpainted
reddish wood. Somehow it explained Nigel, Jane thought: his angular unease and
his gape, as if he were blinking in reflected light. Daniel braked on the
gravel with a flourish, and they got out of the car, straggling in through the
front of the house and then out again at the back almost immediately, as if the
bright indoors were an optical trick, not absorbent like the gloomy interiors
Jane knew, which were dense with family history. A terrace at the back
overlooked a garden landscaped in Japanese style, with artful quartz boulders
and ginkgo and Japanese maple trees. The boys seemed unsure for a moment what
to do next; Jane knew from observing her mother that it was her role to fill
awkward silences.
“What a shame I didn’t bring my costume,” she
remarked conversationally, looking at the pool, which Nigel was supposed to
skim of its flotsam of twigs and leaves and dead insects every day, but hadn’t.
“What costume, Bo Peep?” Nigel said. “This
isn’t a fancy-dress party.”
He’d become waspish at the sight of the awful
mess in the house, torn between bravado and responsibility (he thought about his
mother); toying with the idea of washing dishes, he put it aside for later.
“My swimming costume,” Jane explained.
Transplanted out of her familiar world, she
seemed to find it easier to be dignified, as if she were moving inside a
different skin, sleeker. Perhaps it was partly the barley wine. She was able to
penetrate, too, into the others’ motives and relations—grown-up insight seemed
to come not through gradual accretion but all at once. Daniel had power over
the other two, she saw, just as he had power over her, though not through any
conscious exertion of his will. They tracked his movements and his moods: if he
was at ease, then they could be, too.
And yet he wasn’t tyrannical, was only
either pleasant or absent; if he was abstracted, you felt the curse of your
failure to interest him. (Paddy, who picked up a book to read as soon as he sat
down on the terrace, didn’t care as much as she and Nigel did. Because he was
cleverer, he was more detached, with reserves of irony.) Now Daniel suggested
coffee and sandwiches, as if this were a summer lunch party and not the tail
end of an all-nighter. The idea made everyone carefree; they discovered they
were starving. Nigel hunted in the fridge for butter. If Jane had been older,
she might have taken the opportunity to parade her femininity in the kitchen,
but it didn’t occur to her. Daniel and Nigel made tuna-and-salad-cream
sandwiches; she waited with an air of calm entitlement for hers to be brought
to her.
While they ate, they catechized her on her
opinions, and were delighted to find that she believed in God and expected to
vote Conservative when she was twenty-one. (“Not just because my parents do,”
she insisted. “I shall read the newspapers and make up my own mind.”) They were
sitting on the terrace in Nigel’s mother’s striking wicker chairs; Jane’s was a
shallow cone set in a cast-iron frame. Daniel was cross-legged on the terrace
beside her. She said that it was only fair for everyone to do a day’s hard
work, and that people who criticized England all the time should try going to
live somewhere else, and that she hated cruelty to animals.
All the time she
was talking, Daniel was doing something to her feet, which dangled from the rim
of the wicker cone: tickling them with a grass seed head, pulling the grass
backward and forward between her toes where they were calloused from the thong
on her flip-flops. Jane was suffused with a sensation that was mingled ecstasy
and shame: shame because she hated her feet, prosaic flat slabs that took an
extra-wide fitting. Daniel’s feet (he had been barefoot even when he was
driving and in the shop—the shopkeeper had stared) were brown and finely
complex, high-arched with wire-taut tendons, curling dark hairs tufting each
toe.
“D’you think we’re layabouts and social
parasites?” Paddy asked her.
“I thought that perhaps you were students,”
she said shyly. “I sort of know the type, because my brother’s trying for
Oxford.”
Daniel said that he’d rather not talk about
Oxford. “His career there hangs in the balance between brilliance and
disaster,” Paddy explained on his behalf. (Daniel’s senior tutor had warned
that after certain brushes with the drug squad he might not be allowed to sit
his finals.) “And he doesn’t know whether he cares.”
“I think we should swim,” Daniel suggested.
“It’s just too fucking hot.”
Jane blushed: his word was so forbidden that
she hardly knew how she knew it—the girls never used it at school. It was an
entrance, glowering with darkness, into the cave of things unknown to her.
“But I haven’t got a costume,” she said.
“Bo Peep’s lost her sheep,” Nigel mocked.
“Swim nude,” Daniel suggested. “No one can
see—except us, and we like you.”
She looked around at them all to see if they
were joking, then drew her breath in testingly as you did on the brink of
plunging into water. Inspired (and she had been sipping barley wine again, with
her sandwich), just then she was capable of anything. Tipping herself out of
the cone chair, she took hold of the hem of her dress, to pull it up over her
head while the boys watched. (It was as easy as playing with Robin in the old
days, she thought, in the garden with the paddling pool.) She was aware
uninhibitedly of her young body beneath the dress, in its knickers and bra (she
would keep those on, perhaps).
But at that very moment another girl appeared
from inside the house, astonishing them all: she came through the sliding
doors, carrying a glass of fizzing drink ceremoniously, stirring the ice cubes
and sucking at it through a plastic bendy straw. Slender and disdainful, with a
long narrow nose and slightly squinting eyes, she was wrapped in a sarong. Her
chestnut-dark hair fell well below her waist in symmetrical waves, as if it had
been tied in plaits and then undone.
“She can borrow my old swimsuit if she
wants,” the girl said, with an air of unmasking male proceedings beneath her
dignity.
Nigel had leaped out of his chair, a
suspended wicker basket, which went swinging wildly.
“Fiona! When did you get
here? How did you get in? What on earth are you drinking?”
“Vodka,” Fiona said. “And I got in while you
were out, because you actually failed to lock anything up behind you,
you idiot. I mean, God, Nige, what if I’d been a burglar or something? Then I
was fast asleep, until you lot started banging around down here. And this
pool’s a disgusting swamp—weren’t you supposed to do something about it? Hi,
Daniel and Paddy. Hi, what’s-your-name. My cozzy’s in a drawer in the chest in
my bedroom, if you want it.”
Fiona was Nigel’s younger sister, aged
eighteen and returned by herself from the South of France on her way to drama
school. She chose to sit with her drink under an orange umbrella at the far end
of the terrace, as if she were semidetached from her brother and his friends.
But Jane, with her new intuitiveness, guessed that she sat there because it
meant that she was in Daniel’s sight lines the whole time she was yawning and
stretching and pretending to sunbathe, showing off her legs through the slit in
her sarong.
Jane borrowed Fiona’s swimming costume (which
was tight on her) and powered up and down the short pool with her strong crawl,
face turning into the water then out to breathe, as she’d been taught, all the
accumulated rubbish (leathery wet leaves, sodden drowned butterflies and daddy
longlegs, an empty cigarette pack) bobbing against her breasts and lips and
knees as she swam. No one joined her in the pool. Jane had hardly expected them
to; she had accepted immediately the justice of her defeat—right at the moment
that she’d had all the boys’ eyes on her—by the older, prettier, more
sophisticated girl. (Still, the word “woebegone” nudged at her, from a poem
she’d read at school.) When she got out, she would ask Paddy to drive her to a
bus stop, then to lend her the money for her bus fare home. She would ask for
his address, so that she could repay him: out of her pocket money, because she
could never tell her parents where she’d been.
Heaving herself out at the side of the pool,
she stood streaming water, too shy to ask for a towel. The others were planning
a visit to the pub in the nearest village. Jane had never been inside a pub in
her life, but she thought there was bound to be a bus stop somewhere in the
village.
“Come on, let’s go,” Fiona said
impatiently. There was only half an hour until afternoon closing time.
“We can’t all get in the car,” Nigel said,
worrying.
“We can if we hold on tight. It’ll be a
scream. Paddy, come on.”
Obediently, Paddy stood up, stuffing his book
into his back pocket. (It was Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf.”) He went to look
for shoes. Fiona was aware suddenly of Jane. “Oh, God, she’s still got that
costume on. Can’t you just put your dress on over the top?”
Jane looked down mutely at herself, still
dripping.
Daniel hadn’t moved from where he was
spread-eagled now in a deck chair. He’d been watching Jane’s steady stroke in
the pool, how she submitted to the rhythm of it and forgot herself, forgot to
wonder whether they were looking at her or not. He had felt, while he watched,
that he was seeing deeply into her raw sensibility: fatalistic, acutely
responsive, open to anything. He was aware all the time, of course, of Fiona’s
maneuvering to make him notice her—there was a bit of past history between
them, which he was wary of reviving, not wanting her to get it into her head
that she had any rights of possession over him. Anyway, her blasé, bossy voice
was grating on him this afternoon. Her displays of sophistication seemed
childish, and he was unmoved by the skinny brown stomach flashing at him so
insistently from above the sarong.
“You go ahead,” he said. “Jane has to change.
I’ll wait and walk down with her. We’ll catch up.”
Fiona couldn’t hide the sour disappointment
in her face, but she had staked too much, too noisily, on her desperate need
for the pub to back down now. Jane looked anxiously from one to the other. “I
don’t mind,” she said. “You don’t have to wait for me.”
“What are you up to, Daniel?” Fiona
laughed ungraciously.
Daniel kept his eyes closed against the sun
while the others quarrelled, getting ready; Jane went inside to change. When he
heard the car receding on the road, he followed her in, confused at first in
the interior patchwork of light and shadows, after the glare outdoors. He stood
listening at the bottom of the open-tread staircase, his breath barely stirring
the bright dust motes in their circling. The house was as perfectly quiet as if
it were empty, yet he was aware of the girl standing somewhere upstairs,
equally still, listening for him. The moment seemed eloquent, as he put his
foot on the bottom step and started up, breaking into the peace.
He found Jane in Fiona’s room, where she’d left
her dress; she was still in the wet costume, although she’d pulled down the
blind out of modesty, so that he saw her waiting in a pink half-light. (She’d
been afraid, suddenly, to be naked, in case he came looking for her.) His mouth
when he kissed her (her first-ever kiss) seemed scalding, because her mouth was
cold from the water and from fear. She was cold and clammy all over. When
Daniel tried to peel off the sodden swimming costume it knotted itself around
her in a rubbery clinging rope and she had to help, rolling it and dragging at
it. They left it where it lay when she kicked it off, and its wetness soaked
into Fiona’s red rug.
Fiona found the wet patch on her rug later
and guessed immediately (she had intuitions, too) the story behind it; she thought
for one outraged moment that they’d actually done it on her bed. But her
bed was intact—thank God for that, at least. Daniel must have taken Jane into
the spare room, where he and Paddy were staying. By now it was late afternoon,
and Jane was in a phone box in the village, ringing home. (Nigel didn’t want
them using the phone at the house, in case his parents complained about the
bill.) Daniel waited for her, not interested in her difficulties over what to
say. He was smoking, leaning back against the phone box, head tilted to look up
at the sky, which was still immaculately blue, just beginning to pale.
Even
while Jane spoke to her mother in the ordinary words that seemed to flow
convincingly, as if from her old self, her new self pressed her free palm on
the rectangle of thick glass against which, on the other side, Daniel in his
blue shirt was also miraculously pressed, oblivious of her touch. (And she knew
now the long brown nakedness of his back under the shirt, with its ripple of
vertebrae.) Forever afterward, the smell inside one of those old red phone
boxes—dank and mushroomy and faintly urinous—could turn Jane’s heart over in
erotic excitement.
Her mother’s mild voice was in her ear,
incurious: they had begun to wonder where she was. “I told Daddy you’d probably
gone off to play Ping-Pong somewhere.”
“I’m at Alison’s,” Jane said. “Alison Lefanu.
You remember, from Junior Orchestra? French horn. Can I stay the night? It
doesn’t matter about toothbrush and pajamas. Her mum says I can borrow them.”
Mrs. Allsop, blessedly vague, sent her love
to Mrs. Lefanu. “The Lefanus live out at Headley, don’t they? You didn’t walk
all that way?”
“I was on my way down to the village, and
they drove past. I just got in.”
Jane was thinking, Will I ever see my home
again? It seemed unlikely.
“Don’t be a nuisance,” her mother said. “Eat
whatever they put in front of you, even if it’s cauliflower.”
Now they all sat talking on the terrace in an
evening light as thick as syrup; clouds of insects swarmed above the Japanese
water features, swallows slipped close along the earth, a blackbird sang. They
were drinking Jane’s shoplifted wine and her whiskey; then the boys started
messing around with a needle and little glass vials of methedrine, which Paddy
fetched from his room. “Don’t look, it’s not for nice girls,” Daniel said to
Jane, and so, obediently, she closed her eyes. The boys’ huddle over this
ceremony—so intimate, taken so seriously—frightened Fiona and made her even
more furious than the wet patch on her rug.
She went inside and crashed around
the house, effecting a transformation: washing dishes, scrubbing the stove and
the kitchen floor, throwing the windows wide open, emptying ashtrays with a
clang of the dustbin lid. She shook out the mats from the sitting room,
cracking them like whips over the boys’ heads on the terrace. Gradually, as she
worked, the resentment slipped out of her and her mood changed. She began to
enjoy her own strength and to feel serenely indifferent to the others. If her
brother’s friends wanted to get doped up, why should she care? She started to
think about drama school. Later, she warmed up some tinned soup, and brought
out cheese and crackers for them all. By this time it was dark and the only
light came from the lamps she’d turned on inside.
Daniel was trying to explain the idea of the
soul as it was understood in the Hindu Vedanta. His words were punctuated by
the clonk of the bamboo shishi-odoshi in the garden, which filled up with water
then tipped and emptied, falling back against its rock. What he wanted to
describe was how the soul’s origins were in wholeness and light, but on its
entry into the world it took on the filth of violence and corruption. The soul
trapped in the individual forgot its home and despaired; but despair was only
another illusion to be stripped away. He wanted to say that revolution was a
kind of cleansing that conferred its own immortality in a perpetual present.
Art had to be revolutionary or it would die in time. He believed as he spoke
that he was brilliantly eloquent, but in truth he was rambling incoherently.
Paddy, getting the gist of it, quoted poetry
in an ironic voice: “ ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are
sweeter.’ "
“Signor Keats, I do believe,” Nigel said.
“Oh, that’s the poet,” Jane
said. “We have his bust at home, on the piano.”
Cross-legged on a cushion at Daniel’s feet,
she was leaning lightly against him, as if she could ground the tension
quivering in his right foot, which was balanced across his left knee. His intelligence
seemed as ceaseless as an engine working. She felt exceptionally attuned to the
boys’ voices rising through earnestness to mockery and back again, although she
hardly heard their words, only what ran underneath: a current of strain, a
jostling of contest and display. She saw how Nigel tried to match the other two
and failed, and how he suffered, yearning for Daniel’s approval.
Meanwhile, her
own new knowledge filled her up, not in the form of thoughts but as sensations,
overwhelming. Her experience in the strange bed that afternoon hadn’t been
joyous: there’d been some swooning, obliterating pleasure in the preliminaries,
but then too much anxiety in the clumsy arrangements, which she had known (from
her biology lessons) would follow. Remembering it all now, though, she was sick
with desire and longed for the time to come when Daniel would touch her again.
When they did go to bed, however, Daniel was
suddenly exhausted; stoop-backed, he crawled between the sheets in his
underpants, turning away from Jane, toward the window. “Watch over me” was the
last thing he mumbled.
And so she kept vigil faithfully for hours in
the quiet of the night, presiding over the mystery of her changed life,
adjusting her body against the peremptory curve of his turned back and legs in
the narrow single bed. But at last she couldn’t help it—she fell asleep
herself. And when she awoke in the morning Daniel was gone. After a while, when
he didn’t come back, she put on her underclothes and her dress, and set off
around the house in search of him. Downstairs, she smelled Paddy’s sweat and
saw the tousled mess of his hair, poking from the top of a sleeping bag on the
sofa in the lounge. Nigel was making a racket outside with the sliding door of
the garage, in search of the net for the swimming pool. Jane climbed upstairs
again. Nigel’s parents’ bedroom was at the front of the house, opening off the
landing ahead of her; the door was ajar, and Jane stepped soundlessly inside.
It was a beautiful room, like nothing she’d
ever seen before, with a pale wood floor and plain white walls, creamy
sheepskin rugs. Fresh sunlight, pouring through windows all along its length,
was reflected in the mirrored doors of the built-in wardrobes; the curtains, in
some kind of rough white translucent linen, were cut too long for the windows,
and the cloth fell in heaps on the floor. A huge bed seemed to be all white
sheets and no blankets. (Jane had never seen a duvet before.) In the bed, with
the duvet kicked to their feet, Daniel and Fiona lay naked and asleep, facing
away from each other, their slim tanned legs tangled together. Jane, who had
done the Greeks in history, thought that they looked like young warriors in a
classical scene, fallen in the place where they had been wrestling. She
withdrew from the room without waking them, as quietly as she had come in.
Nigel, rather the worse for wear, in his
pajama bottoms, was smoking and skimming the pool, dumping the rubbish in a
soaking heap beside him. He watched when Jane came to stand at the pool’s
brink; she stared in with dry, hot eyes.
“So now you know,” he said.
But she repudiated his offer of companionship
in her unrequited love. Her experience was not like anyone else’s. She asked
only if he would drive her home, and he said he’d get the car out as soon as
he’d finished with the pool.
“I’d like to go now,” she said crisply,
sounding like her mother. “If you don’t mind.”
On the way back, they hardly spoke, except
when Nigel asked for directions as they drew near the house. Jane forgot, in
her absorption, to notice the way they’d come, so that she never afterward knew
where she’d been. And she never saw Nigel’s house again, or any of the boys
(Fiona once, perhaps, at a party).
He dropped her off at the bottom of the
drive. It was still quite early in the morning—only nine o’clock. Jane stared
around her as if she’d never seen the place before, as if it were more
mysterious than anywhere she’d been—the scuffed dirt at the edge of the road,
the old mossy gateposts, blackbirds flitting in the dead leaves at the bottom
of the hedge, the hard lime-yellow fruits in the hedge apple tree, her own
footprints from the day before intact in the dust, the Jokari paddle left where
she had dropped it.
Her mother didn’t seem surprised to see her
so early.
“Did you have a nice time, dear?”
Jane said that she’d had fun. But that
afternoon she suffered with pain in her stomach and bloating (“What exactly did
you eat at the Lefanus?”). And the next day her period came rather copiously
and early—which ought to have been a relief but wasn’t, because it hadn’t
occurred to her until then (despite the biology lessons) that she could be
pregnant. The weather changed, too. So it was all right for her to curl up
under her eiderdown, hugging a hot-water bottle to her stomach, reading her
Chalet School books and looking up from time to time at the rain running down
the window. Her mother brought her tea with two sugars, and aspirin.
Jane never told anyone what had happened to
her (not even, years later, the boyfriend who became her husband, and who might
have wondered). And in a way she never assimilated the experience, though she
didn’t forget it, either. As an adult, she took on board all the usual Tory
disapproval toward drugs and juvenile delinquency and underage sex, and never
saw any implications for her own case. She was fearful for her own daughters,
as normal mothers were, without connecting her fears to anything that had
happened to her. Her early initiation stayed in a sealed compartment in her
thoughts and seemed to have no effects, no consequences.
Jane and her husband divorced in their
mid-fifties, and her friends advised her to have counselling. The counsellor
was a nice, intelligent woman. (Actually, she couldn’t help feeling exasperated
by Jane and her heavy, patient sorrows: her expensive clothes, her lack of
imagination, the silk scarf thrown girlishly over one shoulder. Of course, she
was much too professional to let this show.) Jane confessed that she had always
felt as if she were on the wrong side of a barrier, cutting her off from the
real life she was meant to be living.
“What’s it like, then, real life on the other
side?”
Haltingly, Jane described a summer day beside
a swimming pool. A long sunlit room with white walls and a white bed. A breeze
is blowing; long white curtains are dragged sluggishly backward and forward on
a pale wood floor. (These women’s fantasies, the counsellor thought, have more
to do with interior décor than with repressed desires.) Then Jane got into her
stride, and the narrative became more interesting. “A boy and a girl,” she
said, “are naked, asleep in the bed. I am curled on a rug on the floor beside
them. The boy turns over in his sleep, flings out his arm, and his hand dangles
to the floor. I think he’s seeking out the cool, down there under the bed. I
move carefully on my rug, so as not to wake him. I move so that his hand is
touching me.”
That’s more like it, the counsellor thought.
That’s something.
As for Daniel, well, he trained as a lawyer after
he’d finished his literature degree. He got out of the drink and the drugs not
long after university. (Paddy never did; he died.) Daniel lives in Zurich now,
with his second wife, whom he loves very much, and occasionally, when he’s
bored with his respectable Swiss friends and wants to shock them, he tells
stories about his wild youth. He is in international human-rights law; he’s a
force for good. He’s a good husband and father, too (more dedicated, because of
the wildness in his past). Of course, he’s ambitious and likes power.
He can just about remember Nigel, and Nigel’s
parents’ house that summer, and Fiona (they were together off and on for a few
months afterward). But he has no memory at all of Jane. Even if by some miracle
he ever met her, and she recognized him and told him the whole story (which she
would never do), it wouldn’t bring anything back. It isn’t only that the drink
and the drugs made him forget. He’s had too much happiness in his life since,
too much experience; he’s lost that fine-tuning that could hold on to the smell
of the ham in the off-license, the wetness of the swimming costume, the girl’s
cold skin and her naïveté, her extraordinary offer of herself without reserve,
the curtains sweeping the floor in the morning light. It’s all just gone.
[The End]
From The New Yorker
No comments:
Post a Comment