The Following Girls (23 page)

Lady Henry ran her eye along the table of silvery empties and let off a small chirrup of pleasure as she spotted the largest of the trophies. She simpered nostalgically at the Drama Prize, thoughtfully swivelled round so that her own maiden name faced her. Her smile grew wider at the memory of the handsome corduroy doublet she had worn . . . buskins dyed to match and the spiffy gown Mama had had made for the first act before Rosalind went into the forest. And the applause! Wonderful waves of sound breaking over her. The Lower Fourth had gone quite potty (no second-former had ever taken the lead in the school play before – or since, as far as Lady Henry was aware).

She idly scanned Dr O’Brien’s list: funny how the same girls tended to win everything. Always had. Games of all kinds were monopolised this year by a Lower Sixth former called Smith who had also won ‘Girl who best embodies the Ethos of the school’. In Lady Henry’s day the Ethos cup invariably went to one of the swots, ideally someone with grade eight bassoon who’d won a place at Girton. The Smith girl was not that type. Lady Henry, who had been introduced to her on arrival, spotted her sitting alongside the dais with the other sixth formers and shuddered with distaste. Julia’s ensemble was slightly less
sportif
than usual but she still wore a divided skirt. Lady Henry glanced crossly at the veinless teenage thighs, at the tiny blazer plated with enamel pins – they’d give a deportment badge to anyone with a comb these days.

Miss Kopje (Elocution and Drama) felt her heart sink as Lady Henry placed herself before the lectern. Once in a while you got a speaker who really knew what they were about: who came in under five minutes with an address as dry and bracing as a double gin and tonic, but there was a collective sigh from the whole SCR as those queen motherly peep-toed shoes took up their ten-to-two, viola solo stance. They were clearly in for a marathon.

Lady Henry, one-time winner of the Mabel Sledge verse-speaking competition, liked nothing better than a few well-chosen words. The previous year, Miss Kopje had asked Lady Henry for her secret at the sherry gathering traditionally held in the head’s study afterwards and Lady Henry (who had a tin ear for irony) confided that her models were her father and ‘dear Winston’. Churchill had very likely given her that irritating habit of emphasising stray words, and Miss Kopje could hear him in those cheesy periods, in that fatal weakness for the triple construction, (‘Aspiration, Application, Dedication’ – you could practically see the capital letters, smell the fibre tip underlining them). One presumably had her papa to blame for the mania for internal rhymes: ‘Deny oneself; apply oneself; rely on oneself’ was a favourite (she’d used it last time she came). Every cliché was her friend. Miss Kopje and Miss ‘Fuckface’ Dempsey (Physics, Applied Maths and emergency Chemistry) pressed knees as the hoary old soldiers limped past:
nine parts perspiration
forsooth.

Mrs Mostyn slotted the base of her spine more securely against the back of her chair, consciously pressing each vertebra into the veneered wood, unfolding her shoulders to mirror the square curve of the high back. She tilted her chin to listening mode, her gaze stretching above the speaker to the raised top of Miss Batty’s baby grand. Like everything else in the hall, the pocket Bechstein had been given a brisk seeing-to with furniture polish and a fluffy duster but you could see the print of the great spanking hand that had pulled the instrument from its usual corner, a matt mess on the gleaming black surface.

Miss Batty, seated at her instrument in readiness for the first hymn, was meanwhile building a mental A–Z of symphonies (with a point deducted for every Haydn): Archduke, Baba Yar, Choral. She was already stuck at K when the speech finally got started.

‘It has
orphan
been said,’ Miss Kopje swallowed a smirk: what a tight, regal larynx the woman had, ‘that making a speech is like giving birth: easy to conceive, but difficult to deliver.’

Oh dear. You couldn’t call it silence, not with all those farts of mirth escaping from red-faced fourth formers. Their visitor saw at once that she had struck the wrong note. She had culled her opening remarks from the keynote address at a recent masonic ladies’ night, but it played very badly with the Fawcett staff and those parents (mothers mostly) whose girls had won a prize and who were gathered in the back of the hall (only one of them in a hat but that was South London for you). Happily the rest of her speech left the labour ward behind and stuck to old favourites.

One did best to start with the prizes for dull things like chess and music and the Duke of Edinburgh, Dr O’Brien had found. The chess prize (the glum glance at the book’s cover made it clear that the girl had it already) was followed by the Lady Jane Scott prize for needlecraft, then it was straight into the music certificates. These were so numerous that they were seen off in batches: piano; strings; woodwind.

Grade Six piano came fairly early in the running order and Baker felt Queenie pinch her arm as they watched Stottie gingerly extract her right hand from the bag concealed in her pocket, then join the queue for her Lady Henry handshake. They held their breath as the prizegiver’s face congealed with shock. The production line – nod, handshake, certificate – stalled for a long moment before she got nervously back into step like a schoolgirl timing her jump into a playground skipping rope. As Stottie clumped down the steps, she looked at the palm of her hand in a pantomime of disgusted disbelief then made an elaborate show of wiping it on her (pre-dampened) handkerchief. Behind her, sundry seventh- and eighth-grade pianists clumped off stage, ineffectually stroking their sticky hands against their skirts. Baker saw Stottie fish the tacky placky bag from her pocket and slip it unnoticed into one of the empty urns beside the steps. She caught Julia’s eye and both managed not to smile.

Dr O’Brien, who was still reciting the endless list of achievements, frowned slightly as one prize-winner after another had the same bizarre reaction. It looked to be some kind of mass prank. Exasperating. The whole stunt had evidently been undertaken on far too large a scale for any meaningful punishment. The thing was to establish the ringleaders: make an example.

The head’s hands carried on passing the squares of card to Lady Henry while her trained eye scoured the hall for abnormal levels of mirth, like a Post Office proof-reader scanning a sheet of stamps for a missing perforation. Nothing as yet . . . tubby little Prudence Compton had just picked up her grade three clarinet. She’d be back later for Most Improved Girl and yet even she,
even she
was rubbing her palm against the front of her jumper. Most peculiar.

The prize-passing lark was traditionally broken up by a musical interlude during which the choir sang the ‘Skye Boat Song’ and two thirds of the school anthem (the final verse about ‘mothers of England to be’ had been dropped over a decade ago). It was set, rather cheekily, to ‘Jerusalem’ and the piano had been primed by Stottie to go haywire when the melody climbed to its top note (‘Give thanks for
all
our school has done’) thanks to the velvety bulk of a long-lost board rubber bunged under the hammer of top E.

Baker and the Mandies were almost shaking with excitement as Miss Batty made her last-minute adjustments to the stool and shuffled showily with her sheet music. The head, anxious to shave vital seconds from the running time, always cut Parry’s hopelessly florid introduction and so the school song went straight into the first verse: ‘Shine Fawcett Shine’ etc. (The founder was a remarkable woman in many ways, Miss Batty conceded, but she was a lamentable lyricist.)

The Mandies held their breath . . . Worked like a charm. Miss Batty took an unscheduled bar’s rest to allow the muffled laughter to subside before they got to the second verse but a good half of the hall was still stifling uproarious coughs.

Lady Henry was scraping ineffectually at her sticky palm with a paper tissue and running through her deep breathing exercises ready for the second part of her address. She had already vowed to give the Fawcett prizes a miss in future.

The second set of prizes passed off without incident. Finally Lady Henry came to the Fawcett Cup, won this year by Nightingale, whose captain strode smugly forward as the guest of honour placed a still sticky paw on each handle of the solid silver rose bowl and presented it to the sixth-former, drenching the girl’s skirt, flooding the prize table and filling her own snakeskin shoes with cold water as she did so.

Teachers’ eyes instantly criss-crossed the room, a web of infra-red beams, ready to trap anyone whose reaction was more (or less) than the normal range of giggling. Dr O’Brien, with the presence of mind that distinguished a headmistress from a mere deputy, rose to her feet and, with the merest glance of command, jerked Miss Batty into gear and led the astonished hall in a rousing rendition of the closing hymn (
we shall not suffer loss
).

Mrs Mostyn smiled grimly as the youngest girl in the school presented Lady Henry with a bunch of jonquils, while O’Brien chuckled through some cock and bull story about having kept the bouquet in water but no amount of hearty business-as-usual could deflate the happy hall. The traditional epilogue (nine cheers in all for head, staff and school) broke all previous records for volume. Word had already spread about Lady Henry’s syrupy grip, and the ceremony’s watery finale was like the climax of a television comedy programme: a boss to dinner, a custard pie lying in wait on a table, a tray of drinks, a soda syphon. The piano played them out with the school song (a skilful switch from D Major to E Flat Major made the right hand safe once more) and Mrs Mostyn almost expected to see the credits roll: ‘Based on an idea by –’ whom? Probably one of the Amandas in Upper Shell. Amanda Baker? Surely not after last week. Or Amanda Bunter-Byng? Emigrating, apparently. Nothing to lose . . .

The rest of the staff instinctively manned the swing doors as the girls filed out, listening for clues, watching for any signs of triumphalism. A few minutes later, as the hilarity cleared and the first lunch sitting gathered into a rough queue for the dining hall, Mrs Mostyn skilfully picked off one of the more callow and feeble Lower Fourths: huge, lashless eyes blinking rapidly behind heavy convex lenses. The wily Geography mistress framed her question with care:

‘Was anyone
with
Amanda Baker when she filled the trophy with water?’

Resistance was useless. Every foe is vanquished. We will take our revenge.

Baker had headed back to the Shell cloakroom for a quick fag. Two of the cleaners were putting away their mops and buckets. They had just been paid and the older one was checking the notes and coins in her mini manila envelope. The other, younger woman was off down the shops with hers (something nice for his tea), but the old crone managed things differently. Her cleaning hours were nine till one which meant that her old man was out at work and none the wiser.

‘Finks I only work Fridays. Keep the rest in the Post Office. Don’t need him to sign nothing like you do with the bank.’

‘Rainy day?’

The woman scoffed.

‘Raining now.’

Sitting on the loo in her usual sideways pose Baker noticed with surprise that the scribbled gag about Cookery O levels had been wiped from beneath the loo roll holder. She pushed gently at the enamel notice on the back of the door with her foot. The missing screw still let the plaque swing freely but the graffiti beneath had disappeared. Gone. All of it. In its place a freshly painted oblong in a slightly whiter shade of pale grey. The extra coat fitted the sign to the millimetre.

Chapter 16

Julia was already two thirds of the way down the first joint when Baker arrived.

‘Excellent work with the treacle yesterday, Mandibles.’ She picked a baby Swiss roll from the pack she’d brought and posted the entire thing into her mouth, a factory chimney of sponge collapsing into her waiting face.

‘Did you hear about what happened to the head girl?’ You could hardly make out the words for cake and butter cream. ‘Indefinite suspension from duties pending investigation. What
swines
, eh? Wonder where she got the badge from? Can’t have pinched it from the office, not Linda.’

Baker’s whole body was suddenly paralysed with guilt, so that the smoke she had just inhaled remained trapped inside her by the held breath. It had only been a cautious puff but now every particle of dope was maximised, fizzing under her skin, scrambling her brain. All at once she was too afraid to speak, convinced that she would blurt out the truth and Julia would hate her for ever and tell everyone and make her spend the rest of her life in Coventry.

‘Why Coventry?’ she demanded, out loud.

‘What about Coventry?’

‘
Coventry
Coventry. You know. When nobody speaks to you.’

‘Maybe that’s what Coventry’s like:
very very quiet
,’ whispered Julia, ‘one big grudge . . . Anyway. None of the sixth are sending Linda to Coventry. Everyone likes old Lindy-Loo and they can’t put the head girl in detention so it’ll all just blow over. Bloody hope so. Bloody boring. S’all they talk about in the common room. It dies down for a bit then Heidi Doodah starts it up again. Well she would, wouldn’t she? Being deputy. Suppose she thought her luck had changed. Maybe it was her with the badge? Those creeps will do anything for promotion. It’ll be
murder
next: a compass point between the sixth and seventh vertebrae, a cyanide capsule in her third of milk. The head girl is dead; long live the head girl.’