Jill (18 page)

Much love,
John.

He found an envelope from the drawer and addressed it to:

Miss Jill——

His pen hung over the word “Kemp”. He did not like it. He did not, he found, want to connect her with himself in that way. What should he call her? After a moment he finished it:

Miss Jill Bradley.

Bradley was a nice name, it was English, it was like saddle-leather and stables.

                        
Miss Jill Bradley,

                              
Willow Gables School,

                                    
Nr. Mallerton,

                                          
Derbyshire.

When he had stuck down the flap and put a stamp on, he went out to post it without a hat, coat or scarf. The night was very dark and a huge warm wind whooped boisterously around the streets, streaming out his silky hair, pulling at the letter in his hand. He was trembling when he dropped it into a pillar-box, and leant against the wall a moment, filled with exultation at the idea of thus speaking with nothingness. He envisaged the
envelope wandering around England, collecting pencilled scribbles of suggestions on the front and back until, perhaps a year or more hence, it came to rest in some dusty corner of a dead-letter office. How many years would it stay there? Till he, perhaps, had changed out of all knowing.

He must write again, write dozens of them: dozens of letters to Miss Jill Bradley must wander through the postal service.

When he got back to the College he forgot he had not eaten, and sat down and wrote her another letter. This one was about the incident of his china-crate, which he described untruly:

I can’t say I found any difficulty in making friends here: the very first afternoon I got here I found an abortive tea party hanging about in my rooms.

(They had become “his” rooms; he did not share with anyone now.)

There were Chris Warner and the two Dowlings (the girl attractive in a cheap kind of way), an awful ass called Eddy and another quiet nondescript called Hugh Stanning-Smith, and they were all wondering what to do about tea. They didn’t much want to go out, because it was late, and they didn’t really know where to go, yet there was nothing in College except bread and milk and tea and so forth—they had no crocks of any description. So I was able to play Lord Bountiful and unpack all my new stuff, and everyone was happy and went away fed. Since then I have been relatively popular! In any case, it’s not every freshman who holds a tea-party on his very first day in College.…

But at this point, quite unexpectedly, his brain would not work any more; he could not keep up the run of incidents. He put the sheet carefully away and stretched himself out on the sofa. How drowsily content he felt. The warmth of the fire, the quiet night that rested all around, the complete absence of worry from his life combined as if to rock him to sleep. He smoked the last of the packet of cigarettes he had bought on that sunny Monday morning just over a week ago, and fell asleep where he lay.

On the next morning after breakfast he went out into the
windy, sunny town and bought a large pad of writing paper and a packet of envelopes. The girl gave him wrong change, but he did not notice.

For the next few days in November, he spent most of his time sitting writing in his room, lounging on the sofa or sitting upright at the desk by the window. He wrote slowly, but with ease, covering many double-sided sheets and occasionally folding three or four up and posting them. Often he forgot about mealtimes and failed to appear in the Hall; later he would feel hungry and buy some bread from the College kitchens, hurrying back to his room to eat it and to start a fresh letter. He did not write with any set plan, roving from one thing to another instinctively, describing, relating, falsifying, yet giving on the whole every detail of his four weeks at the University. It was surprising how little he had forgotten. “I was too excited to eat on the journey,” he told her, “and when one at last arrives, one is content to stand back and watch the motley crowd pushing for taxis, they are all so unlike any people one has ever seen before.” The only incident of importance he passed over was Mrs. Warner’s visit; but “The tradespeople are awfully decent when it comes to dealing with the University,” he wrote in another letter. “If you haven’t the small change to pay for a meal, for instance, you can just sign the bill and pay another time. I have done this often.”

Of course, all this had to be kept from Christopher, which because of Christopher’s natural incuriousness was not difficult. That Christopher had been the mainspring of the idea had long been obscured.

In the intervals of correspondence he went out for walks round the town, unplanned walks that were merely confined for the most part to the streets. He had grown accustomed to the buildings and did not bother about them any longer: on some afternoons he penetrated out on to the towpath by the river, watching the continual movement of the sky and the wind on the water, and the swans on the water speeding out of the way of a practising crew, and the grey water breaking in little waves against the banks. He wore his blue overcoat, and indeed was dressed identically as when he had arrived at the beginning of
the term. But the expression on his face had changed: before, it had been strained and mistrustful; now, it was relieved and dull. He looked much younger.

At last he began a letter he did not finish. “The other night,” he had written,

… we came out of the Bull into the dark when Eddy had one of his boring fits of bravado, during which he keeps badgering one to dare him to do something. In the end I said: All right, Eddy, go into the Union there and smash the first glass door you see. All right, he said, and straightway disappeared into porch. None of us had the least idea he’d be crazy enough to do it, but just as we were assuring each other that he’d come out in the end with his tail between his legs, there came the most fearsome sound of breaking glass. (The Union, as I dare say you know, is a seedy Gothic place full of decayed clergymen.) “Holy smoke,” ejaculates Christopher, and legs it, closely followed by Patrick and Hugh. I stayed behind to see the fun. Out rushes Eddy: “Come on, for God’s sake,” he gasped. “Were you seen?” I demanded. “No—but they’ll all be out——” Before we could budge half a dozen young men in evening dress came pelting out and up to us they come. “That way!” I cry, pointing with my walking-stick up the dark road where the footfalls of the retreating trio were still faintly audible, and off they go, uttering threatening whoops. Eddy laughed himself sick, and declared I’d saved his life.

But I often wonder why I don’t stay in more and read by the fire—do you know, the coal-scuttles here hold nearly a hundredweight, and we often empty one during a day. Not like the miner’s coal! Do you remember how it used to burn down to that glowing mass—and do you remember how if you held a piece of paper over the long glass mantle of the lamp, it would burst into flames? And how your hair nearly caught one night? I often wish——

It was at that point he broke off, with a slight frown, and took a piece of dry bread to chew. After some minutes he added:

—that we were still there, with you sitting in the basket chair——
and then halted again. He got up, wandered round the room;
stood idly making bread pellets and flicking them at the photograph of Mrs. Warner, then made up the fire. These sudden pauses were quite usual, but this time he felt that he had reached some insuperable barrier that it was unlikely he could remove. After twenty minutes or so, during which he scribbled faces on the margin of the letter, he put the sheets away and went out into the dark gardens, walking up and down the pitch-black great lawn.

The next day he tried again, even starting again on a fresh sheet, but he could manage nothing but a few scanty reminiscences of their holiday in Wales. Softly, as if in doing so he had given a cursory rub to some old portrait to which the dust was clinging thickly, her face was glowing in his mind. He lay back, surprised, in his chair. It seemed that he had never thought of her before. It was as if he had been talking to her from a public telephone-box, talking interminably, and then had looked up to see her listening in the next compartment, smiling at him through the glass with the receiver held to her ear.

“You——” he began, then broke off again. That sheet he tore up.

Suddenly it was she who was important, she who was interesting, she whom he longed to write about; beside her, he and his life seemed dusty and tedious. With every half-hour that he thought about her, her image grew clearer in his mind: she was fifteen, and slight, her long fine dark honey-coloured hair fell to her shoulders and was bound with a white ribbon. Her dress was white. Her face was not like Elizabeth’s, coarse for all its make-up, but serious-looking, delicate in shape and beautiful in repose, with high cheekbones: when she laughed, these cheekbones were most noticeable and her expression became almost savage.

She was a hallucination of innocence: he liked to think of her as preoccupied only with simple untroublesome things, like examinations and friendships, and, as he thought, each minute seemed to clarify her, as if the picture of her had been stacked away waiting in his mind, covered with dust, until this should
happen. He spent hours filling up sheets of writing paper not with letters now, but with her address and name, repeated at all angles in different hands (some intended to be her own) and hesitant attempts to draw her face. But he soon stopped this last activity, because every line he drew merely obscured the picture in his own mind, and he had to stop and wait for it to reform.

Under these circumstances it was quite impossible to continue writing to her, and the unfinished letter he sealed up in an envelope and then burnt. Yet he was not content. He began writing about her in the third person, about how she sat playing the piano in the evening, then tore it up. Then he wrote about her getting up in the morning, and tore that up. At last he began to put down what he had told Christopher in the first place, and, page by page, covered with erasures, he managed to evolve a continuous narrative about her; awkwardly, incompetently, he began to build her up outside his life, by describing her own. It was much easier, for all that, than continuing to write the letters: he found his invention put out more flowers than he had expected.

When he had finished it, it was a kind of short story: he had not begun to write with any idea of what the finished product should be, for he had no idea of how writing was done; but on the evening he completed it, he sat down after dinner and copied it all out once more, changing words here and there and correcting mistakes in the spelling.

I

Jill (the story began) would not leap out of the train as soon as it stopped and crowd to the barriers, and she disliked all the girls who did. They were all dressed like herself, in black hats with maroon, blue and white ribands, this annoyed her, too.
When she had adjusted her hat in the glass, deliberately, she stepped to the door and tugged at it.

Heavens! It wouldn’t open!

She struggled and tugged, growing red in the face and afraid she would be carried on to Lord knows where.

A bushy-mouthed porter in shirt-sleeves came to her rescue, pulling the door open with a superhuman jerk, and saying:

“There y’are, missy!”

Jill did not like being called missy, and hated not only the porter, but the whole business of returning to school. She put on her blue woollen gloves and handed her ticket over to the ticket collector. Except for one girl who had been sick, she was the last one off the train. This meant that the school omnibus, which stood outside like a patient beast of burden, was full, or nearly full, when she reached it. This was to take them all on the last stage of the journey back to Willow Gables, for the second term of the school year: Christmas lay behind them, and the day was in January, a cold one.

She halted uncertainly. Miss Keen called to her from inside the bus:

“Come along, Jill. There’s room here.”

Wearily she climbed aboard the ’bus, shaking as cases were dumped on the roof, and sat down between Maisie Fenton and Joy Roberts. She disliked Maisie more than Joy: Maisie was a small dark spaniel-like girl.

“’Lo, Jill.”

“’Lo, Jill.”

“Hallo.”

“Decent Christmas?”

“Oh, tolerable, thanks.”

“We had a marvellous time,” said Maisie Fenton eagerly. “Just ate and played games and slept. Mummy seemed to have thought of marvellous new ways of doing everything.”

She went on to tell them how a company of public school cadets had camped near their house, and how her father had known the master in charge and how some of the boys had come to their Boxing Day party.

Jill had not had as good a time as Maisie, but pretended she
had. She hated Maisie, and envied her, and hated herself for envying her.

And now the driver started the engine with a shuddering roar: Miss Keen climbed aboard once more, banged her head, but shouted sweetly:

“All in?”

They started, amid delighted squeals. “Off at last!”

Out of the window Jill could see nothing but the frozen fields that the lane ran through, the tangled ditches, the scraps of snow. She had not gone away to school till she was fourteen and even now disliked it. They passed barns with auctioneer’s posters half torn down where they had been pasted, a signpost pointing only one way, a plough standing behind a hedge.

She could hear Miss Keen talking indulgently with the girls who sat beside her:

“So what did you do, then, Phyllis? …”

“How perfectly dreadful.”

For some reason this irritated her, as did the tradition of raising a cheer as the ’bus turned into the school gates. Jill’s spirits sank lower and lower: she was as familiar with the routine as an old convict is familiar with the routine of entering prison.

At the end of the drive was the school, with a stone fountain before it, choked with leaves.