Fearful Symmetries (24 page)

In my upper berth, as we pull out of the Salisbury station, I tear a narrow strip from one of the violet
Crescent
line schedules, and twist it just so, then join the ends. I fold it into a Möbius strip. One end is joined to the other by the force on my right thumb and forefinger, so there’s only the illusion of infinity. I release the paper. It flutters to the uncomfortable mattress and is nothing but a straight line again. A railroad track. A straight line is infinite. Only a matter of perspective makes it otherwise.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” the conductor asks, and I look up from the book of Thomas Hardy stories I was reading. I think he’s talking about Anna, sitting there in the seat across from me. I look up, and she has her face pressed against the window, even though the light from the sunset on the lake is so bright I’ve had to pull the curtain on my side of the compartment shut. In the compartment across the narrow aisle, children are laughing so loudly that it’s hard to hear what the conductor says next.

I close my book.

“Well, Sir. You enjoy your visit,” says the conductor, and he smiles and leaves me alone with the blazing lake.

The seat across from me is empty.

“William, you haven’t heard a single word I’ve said.”

It always was.

At the black gate I turn my head, slow as slow ever is, and there is no black dog watching me.

I turn back to the garden, and there is no shadow. There never was.

Turn the little key.

The party ends and the woman screams as moments echo, and I turn the key, squeeze the trigger, and the gun is a thunderstorm above the Vieux Carré.

Everything she taught she’d learned from the books in her father’s study—and even then, only from the bottom shelves—she couldn’t have reached the top shelves without the ladder, and the ladder’s wooden rungs were lined with cracks that looked like spider webs. So, no geography, then (but her pupils would be English, so how much did they need to know about foreign lands?). Plenty of history—she liked the way the past could be packaged into neat little romances; they were like fairy tales but the difference was, these fairy tales were
true
. A smattering of French. A smaller smattering of Latin. Poetry. Fine art. She liked simple mental arithmetic, something about its solid rightness made her happy.

But what she taught didn’t matter; she was left under no illusions about that. Her task was to ensure the children were occupied and well-behaved, and that their wits were kept sharp to prepare them for proper education later. Children liked her, and that was the main thing. Adults didn’t, much; adults never quite knew what to say to her. She was unfailingly polite, but somehow always at one remove, everything she said sounded too considered and deliberate. But children seemed charmed by her.

In part, perhaps, that may have been the way she looked. She had such a very young face. Her cheeks were full and red like a baby doll’s. Her eyes, wide and innocent. The children instinctively might have recognised her as one of them, that for all the authority bestowed on her she belonged to their world, not the world of their parents. It was true that she always looked so serious and thoughtful, and she only rarely smiled. But that didn’t mean she ever looked disapproving, or in judgement of them. She seemed to be a little girl who wanted to be all grown up. Children understand that. They want the same thing.

It was only natural that Susan Cowley would be a governess. Even as a girl she’d had a calming effect on the other children playing around her; she didn’t seem to have any friends amongst them, not as such, but what of that? And Susan seemed to accept that role with incurious equanimity. Her little sister would be given all manner of pretty clothes; Susan, more and more, would get formal dress, bordering even upon uniform in its austerity, all befitting her future career. She never complained.

When she reached seventeen, her great aunt found her a placement at Exley Hall, to look after two young children of friends of hers.

It was impossible to judge how responsible Susan Cowley was for the Exley Hall scandal. Certainly, she never tried to offer any defence, and that may well have been her undoing. She seemed only too willing to take the blame, and so the blame was put squarely on her shoulders. And maybe that was right. The children were in her care. Whether or not she had done anything directly to influence events, that, surely, cannot be disputed.

There were no criminal proceedings, for it was hard to see how anything that had happened could be called a crime. The Exleys did not want any muck clinging to their son’s name. They did not want any word getting out. That said, Susan Cowley was unable to find herself another position afterwards, so someone must have talked.

Mr. and Mrs. Cowley did not know what to make of it all. Susan had always been such a quiet child, the reliable one, the boring one, truth be told. They did not discuss the matter. They tried to pretend nothing had happened. Mr. Cowley only lost his temper the once, and that was not even with Susan; at the dinner table the little sister began asking how it was that Susan was home again, didn’t she like being a teacher?—and at that, without a word, Mr. Cowley had got up and slapped the girl around her face. The child was so shocked she even forgot to cry.

One night, when he couldn’t sleep, Mr. Cowley found Susan in his study. She was sitting on the floor, a stack of books by her side, and she was leafing through them slowly. All her old favourites—Arthurian legends, a Latin primer, and tomes and tomes of rudimentary calculus. “Susan?” he asked softly, “are you all right?” It was the gentlest thing he had said to her since her disgrace; Susan looked up at him, but her face registered no surprise at his new tenderness. She nodded. Mr. Cowley stood there in the doorway, and he knew that this was the moment he should reach out to her, try to talk to her, maybe find out what had happened. This was his chance. And he couldn’t take the chance, or didn’t, at any rate; he nodded back, quite formally, turned, and went back to bed.

There came in the post one morning a letter for Susan. Inside there was a newspaper clipping advertising for young teachers at H___ Priory. There was no letter, no indication who it might have been from; Mr. and Mrs. Cowley wondered whether the great-aunt was offering some help, just as she had done before. She hadn’t spoken to the family since the incident but maybe she had relented. It was not a governess’s position; it was not ideal; it was to teach a class of young children of no discernible means or background, and the wages offered were meagre. But, as Mr. and Mrs. Cowley said, beggars could not be choosers. They looked for H___ on the map. It took them a while to find it; it was far away, and seemed very small, tucked away at the edge of the page.

Susan replied to the advertisement. She did not expect an interview. By return of post she received notice that the job was hers.

There was no direct railway line to H___. Susan was obliged to make no fewer than four connections, and each train she boarded was smaller and slower than the last—and emptier too, so that by the last service Susan was the only person in the carriage. It fell dark. It began to rain hard. No one came to inspect Susan’s ticket, and as the train crawled on she began to fear that the driver would just decide to stop, that he’d feel the journey wasn’t worth the effort, and that she’d be stuck there in the blackness and the wet forever. And she had the absurd desire to start shouting, to chivvy the driver on, to assure him he had a passenger and that he mustn’t give up, for her sake. Of course, she did nothing of the sort. She kept her composure, and only by hugging her suitcase close would she have given any outward sign that she was afraid. She sat still, looked out of the window into the pitch black, and hoped that soon she would reach her destination.

And, at length, she did. She hauled her suitcase onto the platform. The station was dark, and she could not see an exit. The rain sliced through her. “Over here!” she heard, and she realised that the platform wasn’t deserted after all; it was a woman’s voice, low in pitch, and she was gesturing at Susan to come and take shelter beneath her umbrella. The woman was large, and Susan couldn’t quite fit under the umbrella beside her; generously, the woman sidestepped and stood out in the rain to keep Susan dry.

“You’re Miss Cowley?” she said.

“Yes,” said Susan.

“Good! Follow me!”

And the woman marched on into the night, still holding out the umbrella for Susan, but she was striding away so fast that both of them got soaked. “It’s not always like this, sometimes the weather is quite nice!” And soon they were outside the station, and there was a little jalopy waiting for them. “Hop right in, the door’s open!” Susan took the passenger seat, and watched as the woman struggled against the wind and the pelting rain to get the umbrella shut. And then the woman was in the car beside Susan, and so drenched through that she couldn’t help but spray Susan with water as she shifted into her seat, like a dog shaking itself dry without worrying about the soaking it will give its owner. She beamed at Susan. She offered her hand, and Susan took it, and the woman pumped it up and down like a piston.

“I must say, I’m glad you’re you,” she said, and then blushed.

“Are you?” asked Susan.

“I thought you might be one of those dreadful old women! The school always gets dreadful old women, they never last long. Stay a term or two, and then go off to die somewhere, I’ll bet. Ha! Miss Susan Cowley, you must admit, the name sounds a bit elderly and a bit dreadful.”

“I had never thought,” said Susan.

“Like some Godforsaken spinster! Not that I’m judging. I mean, Valerie Bewes. That sounds shocking, doesn’t it? That sounds positively decrepit! I’m Valerie, by the way.” And she offered her wet hand again, and Susan had to take it. “I’m just so pleased you’re young, like me! We can be proper girls together!”

Susan didn’t think that Valerie looked especially young, she must have been thirty if she were a day. “Is the school very far?” asked Susan.

“Lord love you, you’ve travelled all day, and here I am jabbering! Yes, it is quite far. About nine miles, which isn’t too bad, but it’s uphill and this old girl doesn’t like climbing hills, and it’s dark and it’s wet—we’d better go slow. We should get moving, we can chat along the way!”

But they didn’t chat much. Valerie pointed at the hills and countryside (“Really, it’s quite nice when it’s daylight, and dry.”), and talked all about herself, and Susan quickly realised that the information offered was neither interesting nor pertinent. When Susan declined to join in the conversation, even Valerie at last ground to a halt. “You’re tired, poor darling, I’ll let you have some peace!”

And—“Here we are!” said Valerie, at last. And there was the school in the distance. Ever since she had accepted the post Susan had wondered what the school might look like, and the reality of it was that it was small and flat and rather unassuming. She felt some relief, and also a little disappointment.

Valerie explained that, its name notwithstanding, the school had really very little to do with H___. It was simply the closest town, and no one could agree what the name of this bit of countryside precisely was. The children were taken from the various villages and hamlets around, sometimes to a distance of fifteen miles—all the communities who didn’t quite belong to anyone else, they could fit in here. Most of the children boarded; it was simply too much effort for them to go back to their parents very often. There were never more than a hundred pupils in the school at any one time, and they were divided into three classes. The youngest, and largest, were the eight to ten year olds, who’d be taught by Miss Cowley. The middle class was for the ten to twelves, taken by Miss Bewes herself. The remaining class ranged all the way from twelve to seventeen, and Mrs. Phelps was in charge of them. That said, very few of the children were seventeen; in fact, very few of the children stayed at the school once they were teenagers.

“And what happens to them after that?” asked Susan.

“Oh, Lord knows. They probably go off and marry each other! I don’t think there are any pupils from H___ Priory who have ever amounted to much. They come from the countryside, they just drift back into it again.” Valerie laughed. “No, they’re fine, they’re good kids, mostly.”

Bordering the school was the little cottage that Susan and Valerie would share. Valerie seemed to think Susan already knew and had agreed to this arrangement, and Susan had no desire to disabuse her. “It’s nice and homely,” said Valerie. “Shared bathroom, shared kitchen, shared personal area, you know, all mod cons. Separate bedrooms. Let me show you
your
bedroom.”

The bedroom was plain. It was not as pretty as her bedroom at Exley Hall, or even her bedroom at home. The bed looked hard, the single pillow lumpy. The walls were bare.

“It just needs to be lived in a bit,” said Valerie. “It’s wonders what you can do with a few pictures around. I’ll show you my bedroom, later, if you like.”

Valerie offered to make them both some supper, she had soup on the stove. Susan declined, but thanked her. Valerie said that she would introduce her to Mrs. Phelps the next day, and then to the children.

“All right,” said Susan. “Thank you. Good night.”

Valerie laughed, and said, “My darling, whatever must you have done to end up here!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, I don’t mean anything by it! I’m sorry. But as if anyone would
choose
to come here. Most of them can’t get away from the place fast enough. Like Miss Fortescue, good riddance, the miserable old trout. Oh, I tell you, my darling, it’s going to be so much more fun living with you than it was with her!”

The Bewes woman left her then, mercifully, but not before once more offering Susan her hand to shake. And Susan got undressed, and lay on her bed, and propped her head up on the pillow as best as she could, and stared up at the ceiling, and listened to the rain, and tried not to dream about Edwin this time.

In the morning it was still raining hard, and Susan and Valerie had to run from the cottage to the school, Valerie whooping with joy as if it were some great game.

Susan was introduced to Mrs. Phelps. Mrs. Phelps did not shake her hand. Mrs. Phelps had no interest in her hand whatsoever.

“The headmaster and I are sure you’ll be most suitable, Miss Cowley,” she said. “I doubt we’ll have much cause to speak again, we’ll be in different classrooms, of course.”

“Of course.”

Susan wondered whether she was going to meet the headmaster as well. Valerie laughed, and said she hadn’t seen Mr. Phelps in simply ages; he stayed in the house, bedridden most likely, and passed on instructions through his wife. “Or maybe he’s run away,” she joked. “Or maybe he’s dead! Anything rather than live with that old dragon.”

Valerie took Susan to her own classroom. The children were already inside.

“Just don’t let them know it’s your first time,” she said.

“How do you know it’s my first time?”

“Oh, my dear, it’s so obvious! To me, I mean, not to them. Just try to keep them occupied. There’s a whole stack of books in the cupboards, get them reading, that eats up the time. And if anyone misbehaves, just strike them with the cane.”

“Oh!” said Susan. “No, I couldn’t!”

“You’ll be doing them a favour,” said Valerie. “That way they’ll know you’re in charge. You’ll be doing me a favour too, I’ll be inheriting some of these kids next term! The cane is your friend. Miss Fortescue, she got through half a dozen of them, we had to get in a fresh supply!”

“Yes,” said Susan. “All right.”

“Don’t you worry, you’ll be wonderful. You’ve got just the face for it! The children will adore you. And tonight I’ll make us some nice supper, and you can tell me all about your adventures.”