ORDINARY TIME: AUTUMN 2017They walked differently.
They didn’t trip and scurry anymore, powered by laughter and chatter; didn’t curl over and into one another, tugging down sections of hair to cover their faces. They unfolded their arms away from the former embarrassment of their blooming chests.
Overnight, they became tall.
Promenading side-by-side, their strides long and certain, linked elbows were their only concession to past girlishness. From main building to canteen, from chapel to school, they took their time as they went, letting you look, wishing to be acknowledged. This desire to be noticed was nothing new – they were sixteen-year-old girls – but no more did they seek attention by pretending they didn’t want it.
‘They glide now,’ said a boy from the First Year seniors, ‘they float.’
‘Like ghosts?’ said his mate with a snigger, to which the first boy replied, dead straight, ‘No, like… Queens.’
They took on a different scent.
A Second Year senior girl spotted three pairs of feet beneath the door of one cubicle in the toilets at lunchtime, mid-September, two weeks after the singing incident in chapel – Anna’s buckled T-bars, Jade-Marie’s brown brogues, Britta’s laced-up black boots with the heavy soles. They were sobbing in there, said the Second Year, or at least one of them was, while the others issued calming whispers and spluttered curses. This wouldn’t have been thought of as unusual – teenage girls were supposed to hide away in bathroom stalls if they needed to cry – but the aroma of them made it strange.
The signature scent of September was a sweet fizziness. The school toilets and changing rooms were a haze of cheap body spray, supplies still plentiful from the summer shipments. But the girls’ bathroom that day smelled earthy, meaty, feral. Laced across it was the churchiness of incense.
It was a smell that was disconcerting in its familiarity.
There were no more grand scenes of rebellion during worship. The girls’ protests in chapel became silent. They stood for each hymn, books open at the correct page, but their mouths remained flat lines. It was assumed amongst the teachers (and those pupils concerned with the fair meting out of justice) that Mr Crane was overlooking their behaviour as some kind of strategy – like a mother quashing a toddler’s public tantrum by deliberately ignoring it. He did not slam his hymn book against the oak lectern, issued no instructions to sing, just lifted his gaze to check on his charges at the end of each verse. The girls paid him no notice; they took their lead from the women in the biblical scenes in the chapel’s windows and on its walls, casting their eyes reverentially downwards or up high, as if in holy awe.
And this was what chafed against the community the most – the way the Eldest Girls became stingy with their attentions and their courtesies. They had been nice young women who looked their elders in the eye and replied yes, sir and no, miss without a trace of contempt. They’d started mannerly conversations made up of polite enquiries, pleasing a speaker by giggling at their jokes, whether funny or not. But now? In the words of a Third Year senior, the Eldest Girls had become, ‘up themselves’.
In the Provisions Store one Saturday, the usual conversation around the fresh produce shelves was reduced to dust by a sudden, blasphemous shriek.
This toddler tantrum could in no way be ignored.
If it had been Britta Sayers, named for St Brigid and her constant fire, behind the outburst, there would still have been shock, though less surprise. Britta’s mother, Rhoda, who worked at the Provisions Store counter, could be as rough as a bear paw in arguments over rations. Even clumsy Jade-Marie was a more likely candidate for this public, sacrilegious display, considering her past record in chapel.
But Anna Duchamp … She was an angel, couldn’t have looked more like one if she’d grown six wings and cried holy holy holy. Her mother, Ingrid, cut her daughter’s blonde bob into an immaculate copy of her own, and spent her days, when not tending to a horse she stabled with the hunt animals, making demure pastel dresses for Anna in dainty flower prints. If Britta and Jade-Marie were ever colluding on some ill-considered plan, it was Anna who would preach prudence, ‘Oh, but do you think we should?’
Yet, that day in the Provisions Store…
‘God damn you!’ she yelled into her mother’s face, her cheeks as pink as if they’d just been slapped, before striking out at a display of Egremont Russets, sending the crate to the floor, reducing them to a crop good only for cider, making all of the collected shoppers gasp.
The following Monday, Adrien Duchamp was seen at St Rita’s School, waiting in the corridor outside Mr Crane’s office. His daughter’s insolence had spread to the classroom, it was said – backchat to the teachers, laziness with her homework (the detail of the crimes depended on to whom you spoke). Her punishment: Anna was banned by her father from spending time with Britta and Jade-Marie outside of school. Yet the very next day the three of them were seen together on the harbour cobbles, making their way towards the track past the East Bay, coats zipped to the chin, arms linked, wearing shoes unsuitable for the terrain that lay ahead.
The other version of events was that Adrien Duchamp was visiting Mr Crane merely to discuss an insurance claim, and not his daughter at all. Anna’s father, with the assistance of accountant Robert Signal, managed the finances of almost everyone on the island. Everyone, that is, who had finances beyond the stash in their biscuit tin.
‘Because didn’t you hear, the school roof fell in!’
This was the talking point at Hope Ainsley’s monthly pop-up hairdressing salon in the scullery of the Counting House.
‘It collapsed on the head of that handsome new teacher,’ continued Elizabeth Bishy, the doctor’s wife. Her audience was the line of women who waited their turn. ‘A whole classroom utterly destroyed!’ she proclaimed.
Hope Ainsley worked pin waves into Mrs Bishy’s peppery black hair and nodded her agreement, while Martha Signal, beneath the heat lamp, put in: ‘He was almost killed, you know, that new teacher, so says Huxley’s wife.’
And this was not the only well-travelled story involving the handsome Mr Hailey.
The Eldest Girls had been seen communing in the senior corridor one breaktime, voices too hushed to be overheard. Britta Sayers was doing most of the jawing, confidently flipping those ropes of black hair over her shoulders as she spoke. The other two made noises of encouragement, geeing her up for the task ahead, then they scattered as if choreographed – Jade-Marie outside to the playground, Anna towards the infant and juniors’ block, Britta into Mr Hailey’s classroom.
‘Ah, Miss Sayers!’ was the greeting that was reported, its warmth suggesting Mr Hailey knew Britta well. Which he shouldn’t have – since the Eldest Girls had no teaching contact with him yet. Mr Hailey was still involved in the business of setting-up his science lab, rigging up gas canisters (‘Stolen gas canisters,’ said some), decanting and storing chemicals. There was much to be done before he was ready to branch out from his day-to-day teaching of the younger seniors and share his specialism across the whole school – and with the Eldest Girls.
Perhaps he had sought them out. Perhaps the girls had been drawn to him, this Pied Piper from the mainland, with his shiny gadgets and fancy shirts and waxy way of styling his hair.
No one could say what went on in that classroom that breaktime with Britta Sayers – the door was closed – but a certain spy, who had been better placed on a separate occasion, said Mr Hailey liked to use coin tricks as a seduction technique, had said the black hair of Lark women aroused him and – whisper it – had been seen trying to stick his tongue down the throat of that lovely Miss Cedars.
Britta Sayers was alone with him for a good twenty minutes. A low mumble of voices came from behind the door but with ominous gaps. Britta emerged flushed with colour, all the breath in the top of her chest.
‘Thank you,’ she said meekly, her voice an uncharacteristic squeak. That she had been heard to address him as ‘Ben’ alongside her thanks, was likely an embellishment added to the story later.
Sympathies regarding the situation were proffered over drinks at the bar of the Anchor. A young man in the classroom was certain to confuse the feelings of such impressionable girls. He was nothing but a cat among the pigeons, they said, or should that be, a pigeon among the cats?
‘That poor, new teacher,’ ran the popular line, ‘arriving on the island just when those Eldest Girls were ready to pounce.’