The Following Girls (17 page)

‘Amanda has a 50p piece on hers. All the others have 50p pieces.’ Amanda’s heart also had ‘Volvo’ and ‘escape hatch’ written very, very small where ‘valve’ and ‘ventricle’ ought to be but her labelling lines had been drawn with a ruler and Miss Peters had not registered the words themselves.

Miss Peters barely missed a beat: ‘June is a numismatist.’ The look on her face betrayed her.
Oik
, it said.
He won’t know what it means
. But Bob Baker, who had always worn his public schooling very lightly (a safer bet on the building site), was one too many for her. ‘I don’t care three groats what she does with her leisure time. The half crown was demonetised in 1970. I think you’ve been rumbled, Miss Peters.’ He’d arrived home much chirpier than usual that time.

He hadn’t mentioned any of this in his note to Dr O. The letter, written in a miserable rage after his Monday night nightmare, was as brisk as a site report, expressing general disappointment at the school’s failure to motivate Amanda and floating the idea that she might be happier ‘elsewhere’. Any number of staff meetings had floated the exact same idea, of course, sighed Dr O’Brien as she re-read the sheet in her hand. A great many people would be a great deal happier if Amanda Baker were elsewhere but £1,200 a year was not to be sneezed at and besides, Dr O’Brien’s stubborn streak was aroused by this talk of Elsewhere. What did Elsewhere have that Mildred Fawcett didn’t? She was determined to use this meeting to see off all this defeatist talk. She settled back in her chair and beamed mildly in the girl’s direction (Judith hacking away at Holofernes could be a huge help at such moments).

‘Have you been happy here, Amanda?’ (She’d toyed with ‘Are you happy?’ but the past tense kept up the tension, kept up that sense of axes about to fall.)

‘All my friends are here.’

‘Ah. Yes.
Friends
. Amanda Bunter-Byng? The older Stott girl?’ the head topped up her smile with a refreshing glance at Moreau’s
Salome
. ‘Are you sure that you are all a good influence on each other? Amanda Stott could lose her scholarship if her grades were to slip. Have you thought about that? Would you want that on your conscience?’ It sounded almost, well, like a
threat
.

Baker’s shoulders curled forward and her attention strayed to the window behind the head’s head, to the steel ash tray tucked almost out of sight on the sill outside. O’Brien watched as the girl’s pupils shrivelled in the morning sunlight and two discs of almost yellowish green turned to face her, but Baker still didn’t reply. Dr O’Brien looked down at her desk, pretending to gain inspiration from the papers on her blotter. ‘Miss Gleet is very pleased with your novel.
Snapdragon
something?
Promise
?
Summer
?’

‘Harvest.’

‘
Harvest
? I’d no idea snapdragons were grown on that kind of scale.’ She gave a slight shake of the head to stop the thought from landing there. ‘Miss Gleet wants me to take a look at it. Very original style, she says.’

Original? Moron. Called herself an English graduate?

‘And she was most encouraging about your plot summary: “A haunting tale of love and loss” she tells me. I very much look forward to reading the finished draft.’

Was that the answer? frowned O’Brien to herself. Legend had it that if you stumbled on something that one of your girls was good at, be it chess or the cello, it unlocked their confidence and other successes would follow. Worked every time for Enid Blyton. Perhaps the Baker girl’s scribbling would keep her out of mischief. If that failed, she’d have to suspend her – she’d have a staff room coup on her hands otherwise.

‘Mrs Horst tells me that you were reading this during her lesson.’

O’Brien produced the confiscated copy of
Ads and Admen
from an in-tray to the right of her telephone. It fell open at the spread on ‘The Four Faces of Adman’s Eve’ (housewife; icon; instructress and something known as ‘the self-touching nude’). O’Brien’s glance batted between the bubble-bathing beauty savouring the softness of her own scented shoulder (
patchouli, bergamot and wild jasmine open up a world of sensuous secrets
) and St Agatha, stroking the proud curve of her disembodied breast.
Plus ça change
.

‘Three Wishes . . .?’ The head’s face had the same troubled, faraway, quiz contestant look that Bunty’s had worn – as if there were a right answer and she had forgotten it. What would Salome’s other two wishes have been? She dragged her thoughts back to the matter in hand.

‘Have you perhaps been thinking of a career in Sales? Jennifer Osborne, Head of Stanhope, 1972 I think it was, is with some sort of market research outfit. Housewives, butter, margarine, washes whiter, that sort of thing. Very enjoyable apparently.’

‘All the margarine you can eat? No, that wasn’t why I was reading it.’ Baker straightened slightly. ‘More a case of knowing your enemy.’

‘Ah. Sisterhood.’ A pitying smile. ‘Strange isn’t it how women conspire in their own enslavement.’ She glanced back at the magazine:
a radiant, lovelier you
– just a few petrochemicals in the bathwater. ‘When I was a girl, the chemist’s shop in Battle High Street sold two kinds of bath salts: cheap bath salts and expensive bath salts. In the war we used lavender.’

Baker felt confused by the sudden change of subject, the confiding tone. Whose side was she on?

‘Rather an unusual letter.’ O’Brien too had spotted that their little chat was heading off-syllabus ‘He’s clearly very angry, but there’s a strange third person quality about it. Like a lawyer’s letter, as if he wasn’t personally involved. And he uses the past tense at times. Rather revealing. As if it were already over and done with. As if you . . .’

She stopped short at the look on Baker’s face and pulled another smile.

‘I am taking trouble with you, Amanda,’ she continued, ‘because you are worth trouble and because your mind appeals to me. I want you to get the results we all know you are capable of, and we are all here to help you in any way we can. I know you find discipline frustrating, but I hope you’re going to knuckle down and produce some decent results in this week’s exams.’

Knuckling down. Everyone to dress the same, wear the same ponytail, draw the identical diagram, sing the same notes, want the same jobs, buy the same bubble bath, eat the same cheese.

‘Get some good grades under your belt and Sixth Form will all feel very different. Fresh challenges. Far more
freedom
.’

The freedom to wear grey instead of blue.

Chapter 11

Thursday’s first exam was being held in the assembly hall. All four Mandies bundled their bags into a corner under the grand piano and, while they were waiting, Queenie (the canasta player’s daughter) reached down the pack of hymn numbers and shuffled them expertly, the cards fluttering within her hands like a trapped bird. She then replaced them neatly on the corner of the hymn number frame. ‘Plough the fields and sca-tter,’ hummed Stottie.

The Geography mock had been co-written by Combe and Mostyn and was an oil-and-water mix of urban planning and palm fibre. One third of it was missing-words-and-labelling, one third short essay questions, and the rest was multiple choice (
Which of the following is NOT a type of irrigation: a. Archimedes screw; b. noria, c. sakia or d. silage?
). Mrs Mostyn had been left in charge of producing the final result and the pages were, as always, run off on the school’s ancient Banda apparatus. ‘Bandered copies’, Mrs Mostyn called them but it couldn’t really be made to work as an English verb – or so Stottie said. Italian no problem:
bando
(I run off countless purple copies),
bandiamo
(let us run off countless purple copies).

Mrs Mostyn arrived a minute before kick-off to explain apologetically to Miss Combe (who was invigilating) that the extreme right-hand edge of the hand-written master had not
quite
copied as it ought. She then proceeded to delay the start, clocking up ten minutes in injury time while she made sure that each page was properly corrected. Miss Combe (whose own papers were always flawlessly typewritten) gave a small, superior smirk at the methanol-scented sheets.

Miss Combe relished invigilating and paced the room Colditz-style, occasionally ratcheting up the tension with the inevitable ‘Thirty minutes have gone, you have sixty minutes left’ lark.

Swivelling squeakily on her high-gloss crepe-soled brogues every time she was called from her station to dispense more paper, she would look obsessively over her shoulder, convinced their requests were merely a blind to allow notes to be passed, or for mad, map-related mimes to be enacted while her back was turned – like they were all playing a huge game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. As she patrolled the rows she pulled aside blotters and parted the lips of pencil cases with bony, ink-stained fingers. Like a medical. Yuk.

The Mrs Mostyn half of the paper was all Ordnance Survey symbols, typical homes in Malawi and a map of Africa to label. Miss Combe was obviously responsible for the rest: rift valleys, pebble formation and (a special favourite) Brasilia. Bunty
hated
Brasilia, convinced that Miss Combe and all the little Combes back at headquarters had personally invented this paradise of plate glass and toy trees purely as a means of tormenting fifth form Geography students.

‘Why would anyone want a
new
capital? I mean,’ persisted Bunty after their first lesson on it, ‘if someone tried to sell you the idea of ditching London and building a new one at astronomical expense in the middle of North Ants or somewhere, you’d have them sectioned.’

‘It’s
all
made up,’ Queenie had drawled in reply. ‘D’you think anyone really uses an Archimedes screw, for heaven’s sake? Or that daft buckets-on-wheels thingy? You’d have a hose or a syphon or a watering can or something, like a normal person. It’s all bollocks.’

Today’s Geography questions were either far too easy or completely bloody unfathomable:
Account for the limited population of
either
the highlands of Scotland
or
those of Wales. Give a geographical account of the African savannah
. Not even a ‘please’. Queenie, who kept a copy of
Mad
magazine inside her Geography textbook, was more familiar with her own virgin body than the continent of Africa and had little chance of passing the latest exam but the clean sheets of folio and the unnatural silence of the exam hall triggered a surreal flight of fancy when she got to the missing words section.

During the Cretaceous Period, Africa’s coastal areas were almost completely covered by
custard
and glacially derived
lemon curd.
These formed superficial deposits of
Marmite
which in places are so thick as to eradicate all visual clues as to the nature of the underlying
toast
. Much of the
Arctic roll
melted causing large amounts of
jam
to be released forming important
puddings
in the coastal areas. Today,
Ovaltine
and
Tizer
drilling is conducted both on land and offshore on the
sideboard
. The continent’s considerable geological age has allowed more than enough time for widespread
despair
yielding soils leached of
marmalade
.

The Mostyn’s late start meant that there was hardly time for Bunty to wedge in a Mars bar before three of the Mandies were back in the hall for their Chemistry exam (Queenie was over in the annexe for her Domestic Science practical, making a pig’s ear of a lamb’s liver).

Miss Gray, invigilating, was quite a young woman but her suspicions gave her a tight-lipped, thwarted look, as though she were utterly certain that crimes were taking place and was only prevented by pettifogging notions of Fair Play and the rules of evidence from disqualifying the whole miserable lot of them. She was absolutely right of course: everybody cheated.

Baker’s furry pencil case was a mess of chewed, unsharpened HBs and the lids of long-forgotten felt tips each of which contained the miniature crib-sheets she had made the previous evening – French irregular verbs, Boyle’s Law, noble gases – each printed in tiny, exquisite lettering like doll’s house shopping lists. At junior school there had been a girl, Wendy Somethington, who used to amuse herself by writing the Lord’s Prayer on the back of fourpenny postage stamps with a very sharp pencil. Angels on the heads of pins would have been a piece of fucking cake in comparison.

Unfortunately, Baker’s cribs did not contain the method for making carbon monoxide and so, when the watchful Miss Gray’s back was turned, she passed a note to the girl in the seat behind her while scratching an imaginary itch between her shoulder blades. Barely two minutes later she felt a tap on her back and reached behind her to retrieve an exquisite diagram the size of a bus ticket detailing the flasks, retorts, marble chips and acid required. Baker copied it faithfully, using her ducky little chemistry stencil, then panicked as Miss Gray’s chair scraped back from her desk and she began yet another brothel-creeping circuit of the room. The tiny scrap of white was thrown into dangerous relief by the dull green of the blotting sheet.