The Orientalist and the Ghost (19 page)

The drinks arrived and glasses clinked in a birthday toast. Cherry cola bubbles fizzed up Sally’s nose. She’d never heard the Milnars have a conversation before and was curious to know what they’d talk about. But before either had the chance to say anything a woman called
huskily:
‘Hello, Frances! Fancy seeing you here! Christopher! How are you?’

They looked up and saw a girl in a black crochet shift dress. The woman drinking the cocktail at the bar hadn’t been a woman after all, but seventeen-year-old classmate and foreign diplomat’s daughter Delilah Jones.

The fifth form was dominated by a clique of five girls and the clique in turn dominated by the invincible Delilah Jones. She was the first girl that Sally had noticed at Amethyst – even though Sally’s desk was three rows behind her and she could only see the back of her head. Sally’s eyes were drawn to her chestnut hair, glossy and thick and somehow outshining the hair of her classmates. And then there was her voice: sonorous, husky and achingly mature. A voice that stood up to Mrs Pritchett’s academic shrill as they debated the imagery in
Paradise Lost
. A voice that was destined for the élite of society. All morning Sally longed to see the face that yielded such a voice and was not disappointed when Delilah glanced round. Though not quite beautiful, Delilah was striking, with dark intelligent eyes and obscenely full lips, and while her masculine eyebrows and crooked nose would have ruined the looks of a lesser girl, Delilah made these imperfections work.

Standing, smiling, before the birthday party, Delilah flicked her chestnut hair. At five foot ten Delilah was the same height as Sally, but unlike Sally she held her back poker straight, as if every inch was deserved. The
hair
flicking was a habit of hers at school, though she was never prone to twirling strands around her fingertips and wistfully gazing into the distance. Delilah Jones was not a dreamer. She was quick and smart as the crack of a whip. She’d gained an A level in Latin at fifteen and in the fifth form was studying for A levels in French and German. She was applying to study PPE at Oxford, and once she was in would bring the institution to its knees. No one doubted it.

Delilah was no bluestocking, though. She had a deathly glamour about her, and having lived in New York, Hong Kong and Paris made no secret of the fact she thought Kuala Lumpur a primitive city and a frightful bore. The other girls in her élite group of friends were Francesca, the child of an Anglophile Cambridge-educated sultan; Lillian and Meredith, Eurasian twin daughters of a Perak palm-oil plantation owner; and an English rose called Rebecca. Sally was enchanted by them all, but none of them was as legendary as Delilah, the nonchalant eye of a hurricane of rumour and myth. She was deflowered at thirteen, it was said, by a diplomat friend of her father’s in New York. She had had an affair with a married man, whispered another source, but changed her mind about eloping after he’d confessed to his wife. The more outrageous the rumours the more believable they were: Delilah had invited two builders into her home and paid them fifty dollars to sodomize her; had bullied Catriona Peterson in the lower sixth until she drank a bottle of nail-polish remover and had to leave school without A levels; she
howled
when the moon was full; had a set of retractable glow-in-the-dark claws … Sally was hooked on the scandal and terrible beauty of Delilah, and Frances was the only girl she knew who didn’t share this fascination. Sally had been full of questions about their illustrious classmate. Did she have a boyfriend? Where did she live? Frances neither knew nor cared. Sally had never seen them so much as pass the time of day before, and was surprised to hear Delilah greet Frances so warmly, as though they were great friends. Delilah shone her smile at Frances, and Frances nodded grimacingly back, before shooting Sally an indiscreet, meaningful look, as if to say:
See! This is why I don’t like to come to this phoney club!
Delilah elected to ignore Frances’s rudeness and spoke instead to Mr Milnar.

‘Christopher, did you receive an invitation to Daddy’s party next week?’

Christopher
? How could she speak to a man twenty-five years her senior as though they were equals?

Mr Milnar cleared his throat. ‘Invitation?’

Delilah put her hand on her slim hip, smiled a ‘don’t play innocent with me’ kind of smile.

‘I made certain a copy was sent to you. Wrote it out myself.’

‘Ah, yes, I do recall …’

‘Good! So you’ll come, then?’

‘Forgive me, but I think I have a prior engagement. Please pass on my apologies to your father and tell him I will ring him in the week.’

‘But you don’t have to come at seven on the dot,’
Delilah
cajoled, the knowing smile never leaving her lips. ‘You can come at whatever time you like. You know how our parties are, things are liveliest after midnight …’

Oh, leave him alone
, Sally thought.
He doesn’t want to come to your stupid party!
But despite her irritation, she couldn’t help admiring Delilah’s bravado as she chattered on. There was no self-doubt or nervous tremor in her voice. And how lovely she was in her crochet shift dress, as though she’d just stepped out of a
Vogue
fashion spread. Sally wondered if Frances shared her outrage. Frances was stabbing the ice cubes in her cherry cola with her straw, as though she were trying to drown them.

‘… so you have no excuse!’

‘Thank you, Delilah. As I said, I shall see on the evening.’

‘Well, we’d be delighted if you came. It’s always a pleasure to have you as our guest.’

Delilah beamed at Mr Milnar, and Mr Milnar smiled back in obvious discomfort. Delilah fluttered her fingers in a coquettish wave and turned to go. Mr Milnar looked relieved by her departure, but shaken and pale. Hunched over her glass Frances slurped noisily through her straw. Sally could hardly believe she was seventeen (or thereabouts). She was so immature. But then, they were all children compared with Ms Jones.

Sally had never dined with Mr Milnar before and when the food arrived she sat very stiffly, chopsticks
trembling
with performance anxiety. Mr Milnar tucked a napkin into his shirt collar and with a murmured
bon appétit
began selecting titbits from each dish. Conversation was negligible, with Frances speaking only to Sally in pig Latin. Mr Milnar took no notice of his daughter’s rudeness as he ate, nor of her tense, chubby friend, who was so intent on making a good impression that she took only dainty bird-like mouthfuls from her plate. Sally’s attempts to be ladylike backfired, however, when a fish bone got caught in her throat and, too self-conscious to cough, she tried to dislodge the bone by swallowing. She keeled over, a choking shade of violet, and Frances leapt up excitedly to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre. And all Sally could think as Frances walloped her trachea free of the bone was how silly Mr Milnar must think her.

Once the plates had been cleared away, the waiters wheeled out a cake fizzing with sparklers, and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to a bashful Frances, who puffed out the candles to a smattering of applause. As the smoke wafted from the candle wicks Mr Milnar stood up and announced he had to go and speak to an acquaintance at the bar.

When he’d gone, Sally said to Frances: ‘Delilah Jones was coming on a bit strong, wasn’t she? She was like a bloody steamroller. And I can’t believe she was calling your dad “Christopher”!’

‘That’s his name.’

‘I know, but isn’t it a bit rude of her?’

‘I don’t know. They know each other from parties, I suppose.’

‘He doesn’t seem to be much of a partygoer, though, your father. He didn’t seem at all keen on going to Delilah’s shindig – not that that stopped her from going on at him!’

‘She doesn’t care. She’s relentless. She’s spoony over him.’

‘She fancies him?’

‘She used to phone our house all the time. Sometimes she’d ask to speak to him. Sometimes she’d just listen to his voice, then hang up. Once, before Christmas, she came over. I was in bed, but I heard Ayah let her in. She went to Father’s study. I could hear her shouting in there.’

‘Really? What was she shouting?’

‘I couldn’t hear properly. Mad, hysterical stuff. She was only in there for ten minutes, and when I heard him helping her back down the stairs I went and crouched by the banister for a look. Delilah was drunk and crying and falling over with her miniskirt up to here.’ Frances drew her hand level with her chest. ‘My father had his arm around her to keep her upright, and she kissed him. Suctioned her mouth to his like a sink plunger.’

‘Did he kiss her back?’

‘No, he pulled away. He told her off. Practically carried her outside and put her in a taxi. She was bawling.’

Sally needed a moment to absorb this information.
The
Great Delilah Jones, drunk and disorderly and acting like an idiot.

‘I can’t believe she just came over here and invited him to her party like none of that had happened.’

‘I know. She has no shame. And talk about bad taste in men!’

Sally feigned a nod of agreement. ‘You can’t stand her, can you?’

‘Not one bit. And I can’t stand
him
either. They deserve each other.’

‘Finished eating now, girls?’

They glanced up. Mr Milnar was back from the bar. It was impossible to tell how long he’d been standing there and how much he’d overheard.

‘Yes,’ said Frances, pushing aside her slice of birthday cake, flattened to marzipan and icing sugar putty with her fork prongs. ‘Can we please go home now?’

A week after Frances’s seventeenth birthday the fifth form sat their mock O levels. It was an excellent year for Amethyst, with most pupils getting straight As and a few luminaries, such as Delilah Jones, passing mock A levels too. There were only two failures in the class. Though they’d heard rumours of the approaching exams, Sally and Frances hadn’t bothered to revise. After reading the results posted on the class noticeboard they sneaked off to the toilets and in the privacy of a cubicle split their sides laughing, communicating between splutters of mirth: ‘
What d’you get for maths?’ ‘F … How about you?’ ‘I got an E.’ ‘An E! What a clever clogs!’
‘You’re
both pathetic!’ sneered a girl in the next cubicle but one, and Sally howled. For the rest of the day a flicker of eye contact was enough to set them both off again. Even after final bell, when the fifth-form failures were summoned to the headmistress’s office, they
still
could not control themselves.

‘This will not do,’ said Mrs Pritchett, headmistress of the Amethyst International School for Girls since 1951. ‘I have discussed your grades with your subject tutors and have organized a timetable of after-school classes that you will attend for the next ten weeks until exams. You will both put your heads down and study. No pupil graduates from Amethyst without pass grades! Do you understand?’

Not even the formality of the office and the formiable Mrs Pritchett could cure the girls of the giggles. Sally hung her head to hide her smirk, but the presence of her partner-in-crime was irresistible as nitrous oxide. A wayward snort of laughter escaped her nose, and she clamped her hand over the offending orifice, quaking with laughter.
Out!
ordered a disgusted Mrs Pritchett, frowning as the girls hiccuped past her to shriek in the corridor.

The last laugh, however, was reserved for Mrs Pritchett. She watched from her office window as Sally and Frances raced out into the sunny courtyard and tore open the letters addressed to their fathers. Their jaws dropped in outrage and disbelief.

‘Maths classes! Twice a week after school,’ Frances gasped. ‘Science classes twice a week.
And
we have to
report
to the library every lunchtime. I can’t believe this! That bitch Pritchett! She may as well handcuff us to our desks!’

When both patriarchs had read the letters – Mr Milnar having received the torn fragments of his copy from the Good Fortune Fabric Emporium manageress, who saw Frances scatter them in the street – they had a brief telephone symposium and agreed to ground their daughters until the O levels were over in June. Sally and Frances were spitting with rage. Oh, the injustice of it! Why couldn’t everyone just leave them to fail their exams in peace? Frances took the curfew harder than Sally (who’d spent most of her adolescence shut up in her bedroom anyway). To Frances, school was a prison she agreed to be incarcerated in between the hours of 8.30 and 3.30, so long as she could do as she pleased afterwards. Now the only incentive to get through the day was gone Frances sank into a depression. Too old for rooftop hunger strikes, she stomped about the apartment, glaring at her father whenever he was in eyeshot. She threatened to quit school altogether; to leave home and get a job. But far from ready to be an emancipated adult, Frances confided to Sally that the sweetest revenge would be to sit the stupid exams and fail the whole bloody lot.

The first after-school revision lesson was maths with Mr Leung. Frances and Sally sat in the stuffy classroom, muffling yawns as Mr Leung chalked tetrahedrons and polygons on the blackboard, hands flying about as he lectured on axis of symmetry with mind-boggling
enthusiasm
. Up from the yard below came the sound of the netball club: the stampede of plimsolls as they ran laps to the pips of Miss Van der Cruisen’s whistle. For the first time in her life Sally wished she was running laps too. Anything to get out of extra maths. Frances carved up her desk top with her compass, staring mutely at Mr Leung and his avid spectacle-magnified gaze. Mr Leung was in his late twenties and a funny-looking man; though acne-studded and bum-fluffed like a teenage boy, he had hair that receded far back on his crown, like a cockatoo’s crest. He was a good teacher and though most girls made fun of him and his pimples they were often swept up by his passion for the cosine rule and universal significance of pi. But not Frances.
Frances, what is the difference between a rhombus and a trapezoid? How would one go about finding out what this exterior angle is?
To every question Frances shrugged and Mr Leung had to turn to Sally for the answer (which she guiltily supplied, colluding with the enemy). Because of Frances’s abstention, the lesson dragged, and they were all thankful when the hour was up. Though she’d been difficult and rude, Mr Leung spoke kindly to Frances as she scraped back her chair.