When Nights Were Cold (6 page)

‘But I'd have loved to study somewhere like this. I envy our daughters. I can't wait to read Leonora's letters and find out what adventures you've all been up to.'

‘Yes, indeed,' said Mother. ‘But I understand that the girls are closely chaperoned and there is a very clear schedule of study, with chapel every morning.'

Mrs Locke swallowed her smile and gave a serious, emphatic nod.

Her daughter looked at me with interest. Her eyes were sharp but friendly. She exuded warmth and colour, made me think of fireflies.

‘We'll enjoy ourselves though, won't we, Miss Farringdon?'

‘Certainly,' I said, brightly, to annoy Mother.

I wanted to ask my new friend what it was like to have an actress for a mother, a mother who didn't care what the neighbours thought and who yearned to be in her daughter's place at university. I must have stared at her quite hard but she smiled back, with no trace of shyness or nerves.

‘Come, Leonora,' said Mrs Locke. ‘Let's see if we can find some flowers for your vases.'

Leonora Locke hurtled down the corridor and her mother followed, upright and graceful.

I shut my sitting-room door and Mother began to cry, not her usual silent weeping into a handkerchief but a series of sharp hiccoughs which grew faster and louder until she collapsed to her knees and sobbed. I had never seen her so wretched.

‘And these are the sort of people you're going to live with. They're not like us. I tried to warn you and now you see for yourself.' Her sobs intensified until she seemed to be choking. I went to her but she pushed me away. ‘What a supercilious woman. And as for the facilities – laboratories and classrooms, for goodness' sake. It's like a boys'boarding school. Did you notice that the students in the corridors called one another by their surnames? They don't even say
Miss.
Grace, it is all wrong for you. Why won't you see sense?'

I crouched down, placed my hand on her back, touched the soft rim of skin that bulged over her corset.

‘You'll have to go home without me,' I said after some time. ‘I'm sorry. I can do without your encouragement, but I would, at least, like you to stop crying. It isn't helping either of us. Mother, please.' I stroked her arm. ‘There's no point to all this unhappiness.'

She balled a handkerchief into her eyes.

‘You're very severe for a girl of eighteen.' She tried a brave smile and squeezed my hand. ‘I'll go now – I know you want me to – but I shall say this first. You'll always have a bed in your own home and, if you've grown out of being a student by Christmas, we'll be pleased to have you back. Your father and I will always be good, compassionate parents, no matter what you do, I'm sure.' She shook her head and sat in silence waiting for her breathing to calm. ‘And we shall always have Catherine.' She stood, straightening her hair and hat. ‘I'm leaving now. Your father wants pork chops for supper and I didn't tell Mrs Horton to get any.'

Poor Catherine, I thought. She will be there until she's a dusty old skeleton perching at the piano or hunched over the sewing box.

I stared into the large mirror, watched my room as it was reflected back to me. I saw a small, scared face among large, unfamiliar furniture. My reflection looked empty, as if I weren't behind my own eyes. I wanted the excitement back but my mother's tears had ruined it all. I didn't want to go home but I no longer liked being here.

I placed a small painting of a ship sailing from Cardiff on my mantelpiece. Father had kept it on his study wall and when I was a child he had found me sitting on the floor staring at it. He took it from the wall and gave it to me. I touched it now and blew a little dust from the glass. The room looked just a little better.

Before dinner, I went to find Miss Locke. I knocked on her door but there was no reply. I knew that I would feel more lonely and nervous if I stayed in my rooms so I decided to take a walk around the building. I set off down the corridor, along the central walkway and into the other side of the hall. I soon became disorientated and could not remember which quad was which and whether I was in the east or west side. I hurried up and down corridors, onto another floor, and finally had to leave the building, follow the path around to the clock tower at the main entrance and begin again. When I arrived back at my room, now choking back tears and beginning to hate the place, Leonora Locke appeared from her room and bellowed my name. A couple of doors opened, faces poked out to see what the noise was about, but Locke seemed not to notice. She grinned and ran towards me.

‘You're brave to go exploring alone. Could you just help me with my pictures and things? Then we can do yours, if you like.' She lowered her voice. ‘I'm not sure where to hang the male nude.'

She shot me a sideways glint and looked for my response. I started, tried to hide my surprise by adjusting a hairpin just above my ear, but I suspected she was testing me. Voices rose and babbled behind us in the corridor and, for safety, I reached for Leonora's arm.

‘I'd love to help.'

‘Splendid. Come on then.'

She led, chattering about her mother and their frightful journey from London in a crowded train compartment with a man who kept coughing over them. She told me that I had interesting hair and she liked it, that she already regretted choosing to study science because she wasn't much good at practical work, she was terribly afraid that everyone would be very clever and she had promised her mother that she would join the Suffrage Society straight away, but she wasn't sure that she wanted to join anything until she knew who was who and what was what.

‘I'm a suffragist, of course, and I can already tell that you are, but all societies and clubs have people one likes and people one can't bear.'

As she spoke, her hands made quick, graceful gestures. I felt ungainly and awkward, found myself tongue-tied.

‘You seem very calm,' she said. ‘How do you do it?'

I did not know how I seemed or even quite how I felt, but I had managed something at last. I had got away from home and put myself into another place.

Chapter Five

I did not know it then, but Locke was indeed to become my closest friend, and a fellow member of the Society. Our names were destined to be spoken together for years. Now it doesn't seem enough that our rooms were close, that we shared a bench in the lab, that we met on the first day, giggled at college dances in the picture gallery when either of us had to waltz with Hester the Hippo, no, not enough to make sense of what followed. In another, wilder world we roped ourselves together, crossed crevasses, fought blizzards and we suffered our first mortal loss. How can I trace that back to the genteel surroundings of our student life, this pleasant nursery for grown women where the height of excitement was the evening cocoa party or a new fashion for pinning up one's hair? I wish that Locke and I could have seen each other one more time before she died, had an afternoon or so of mutual forgiveness, of agreeing to put things in the past, but there it is. We did not. The Society is no more. It is all gone. And yet – the face at the scullery window. I fear that some ghost from the Society will always be with me.

The cocoa parties were strange and spirited meetings where young women discussed politics, suffrage, religion and whatever in the world needed putting right. Each evening, after dinner, we gathered in sitting rooms up and down the corridors, to better ourselves and the world, and to nurture our burgeoning friendships. We talked of flower pressing, cooking, gardening, embroidery and many other things I am sure I have forgotten. We gossiped about friends and staff, of course, and our families. If a girl had an eligible brother or two, she faced regular interrogation and was certain to receive more than the average number of invitations for the holidays. Locke and I liked to make fun of our biology lecturer, Miss Doughty, a brisk and earnest Candlin alumnus whose age could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty. Locke was poor at practical work so I conducted most of her dissections and experiments while Miss Doughty seemed not to notice. She moved from bench to bench, seeing only the bones and muscles and blood, as I took my knife to a rabbit or a tortoise and Locke pretended to be searching for something in a cupboard.

Locke and I were sipping cocoa in her room after lights out one evening. Others had come and gone but we had not finished talking. She sat in her armchair with her knees up to her chest, her pea-green dress falling to the floor, her hair adorned with pretty fan-shaped combs of ivory, and I on the rug by the fire in a plain blouse and skirt, hair unpinned, as it always began to come down by the evening of its own accord. I stuck pieces of bread on toasting forks and propped them against the fireguard. Locke had a lover in London, a young actor named Horace who was playing a pirate in a West End theatre and whom she missed. They had met in the summer at a party and fallen in love playing charades. They wrote to each other almost every day, yet she had no intention of marrying him.

‘He's handsome and I'm sure he'll be famous one day, but I could not be the person I am with him, if I were his wife. Where would the passion go?' She shook her head as though this were both obvious and sad, as though she had learned through years of experience, though I suspected she had picked up the comment from somebody else, perhaps her mother. ‘You must meet my family and friends in the holidays and you must meet Horace. I am sure that we could find a lover for you amongst his friends.'

‘Goodness.' I fiddled with the hem of my blouse. Young men in the park had begun to pay me attention lately, but I always ignored them and went on my way. Locke seemed decades ahead of me. I admired her nonchalant confidence. ‘That might be nice.' I had liked the butcher's boy once and used to wait in the garden to see him swing through the back gate with his bicycle, gently fending off the neighbourhood cats and dogs as he took out a parcel of sausages or beef suet. I would sit by the door and hope for a smile. I had no idea whether or not I wanted a lover now, or should want one.

Locke's sitting room was pretty with vases of flowers on every surface, elegant figurines on the shelves. The framed sketch of a male nude had hung beside her mirror but the maid reported her to the housekeeper and she was ordered to take it down or jeopardize her future at college. She promised me that it was still hanging somewhere in the room but wouldn't tell me where. I wished I had a few secrets of my own. My notes and diaries about the Antarctic were carefully concealed so that no one would see them, but only because they would seem silly and boyish. I thought Locke the most glamorous and amusing person I had met.

We spoke in low voices so as not to disturb the student next door, Cicely Parr, a second-year and captain of the hockey team. Locke and I discussed our futures. Most Candlin students expected to teach or to marry, but Locke and I had dismissed these on our first evening at college.

‘I write plays,' said Locke. ‘All I'm doing now is a comedy, a light-hearted farce, just to practise my skills.'

‘If I thought of working in the theatre, it would finish my parents off altogether. My mother would end up in an asylum, or try to put me in one. No, I want to see the world, places I could never get to on holiday, even if I were rich, go on ships to – as far as I can get.'

‘Ah. A sailor girl. How exciting. Men adore a woman in a sailor's uniform and I do think it would suit you. I saw one in the theatre last year and she sang a very comical song—'

I laughed. ‘I wasn't thinking of doing it in the music hall. I meant the sea, the real sea.'

‘But it would be much easier, and you could make a living at the same time.'

There was a rap on the door. Before we could speak, it swung open and Cicely Parr stepped in. Her hand was pressed tight against her forehead in a gesture of pain and somewhat theatrical martyrdom. She wore a flouncing white nightgown with ruffles around her neck and an odd lace cap on her head that seemed too small and gripped the skin of her forehead. She was tall, pale, pimpled and cold-looking. When Locke first saw Parr she had remarked, unkindly, that Parr looked like a corpse.
There's no blood in her,
she said.
She drained it out of herself.

If someone complained about noise after lights out, we had to write a letter of apology and deliver it before eight o'clock the next morning. Parr seemed uncommonly affected by noise and made regular complaints about raucous first-years. I knew her well from hockey practice and knew that she could not have cared less who liked her and who did not. She was a very separate sort of person, aloof and quite contained. She seemed not to need friends and was not always kind or friendly to her team. She ordered us around the pitch as though we were foot soldiers, screaming when we were too slow, and turning her back when we did well. Once or twice I saw her so worked up about some trivial mistake one of us had made that her eyes reddened and filled with tears. She would blink them away quickly rather than let us see her so weakened. Everything was a serious matter for Parr. I didn't dislike her – though most of the team did – but she was a little nicer to me than to the others. We had discovered that we had both been at the Olympic Games the previous year, in the stadium at the same time, watching Britain win the tug of war. It was hardly a strong connection but she treated me with a little more respect after that, would pass a comment at half-time,
Might win this one, Farringdon, I reckon,
which would not be worth noticing from anyone else but from Parr seemed like an offer of friendliness that never managed to go further.

‘Why such a din?' She winced, fixed her eyes upon Locke.

‘We were practically whispering.' Locke glared back.

‘I'll go to bed now—' I moved to stand but Locke pushed me down again.

‘Farringdon, we needn't hurry to please someone who has entered without knocking.'