Rusty stood outside the Headmistress’s study. It was Monday and she had been summoned to report to Miss Bembridge during the lunch-break. She knocked at the door.
‘Enter.’
Rusty pushed it open. Miss Bembridge was sitting at her desk. ‘Sit down,’ she said, indicating a chair.
Rusty did so.
‘Now,’ Miss Bembridge said. ‘I have just been having a long talk with your mother on the telephone. It’s about your school work.’
‘I’m a little behind, but I’ll –’
‘Did I ask you to speak?’
‘No, Miss Bembridge.’
‘Then kindly remain silent.’ Miss Bembridge picked up several pieces of paper.
‘According to the mistresses, you are more than “a little behind”. As well as having done no Latin or French, you have also done no algebra, geometry, English history, or geography.’
Rusty opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it again.
‘I have therefore decided that this year you will give up the lighter, more peripheral subjects, and instead take extra Latin, French and mathematics. Some of those lessons will take place with the Juniors, the rest will be private in your break-times and after supper. For the remainder of this term there will be no art, singing, gymnastics or Greek dancing.’
‘But,’ stammered Rusty, ‘art and gymnastics are two of my favourite subjects. Couldn’t I give up lacrosse instead?’
‘Certainly not. There is no better place to learn team spirit than on the lacrosse pitch. I hope that when the school holds Saturday matches, you will stay and support the teams,’ said Miss Bembridge. ‘Of course, that will be entirely voluntary, but you could do with some good points to cancel out several of the marks that you have collected in the course of the last week.’
Rusty wondered if they were going to do something different to her each week to make her more miserable.
‘Now,’ said Miss Bembridge kindly, ‘are there any problems you’d like to discuss with me?’
‘Is it possible for me to have a hot-water bottle? I’m awful cold at night.’
‘I’m afraid not. There’s a shortage of rubber in this country. There’s been a war on here, you know. Hot-water bottles are difficult to come by.’
‘Uh, then could I have the window by my bed shut?’
‘I’m afraid not. We believe that girls will have a fresher and deeper sleep with the windows open.’
‘But I get so cold, I can’t sleep. Maybe if I had an extra blanket.’
‘If you washed less frequently, you’d stay much warmer.’
‘Excuse me?’ said Rusty.
‘I hear that you wash all over at least once if not twice a day. You realize that, by doing that, you’re removing all the natural oils from your skin?’
I don’t believe I’m hearing this, thought Rusty. ‘So I don’t get to have a blanket, is that it?’
Miss Bembridge pulled herself up sharply. ‘Don’t you dare speak to me in that manner, young lady!’
‘It feels like everyone here is trying to make me as unhappy as they possibly can.’
‘Nonsense. We can’t change the way the school is run just for one pupil, simply because she’s been a little softened by luxury.’
Luxury! thought Rusty. Oh, what’s the point? She doesn’t want to listen. She fell silent.
‘Well, Virginia Dickinson, is that all?’
‘Wha, yes ma-a-am,’ drawled Rusty in an American accent so broad that it bordered on Deep South. She saw immediately that it had infuriated the Headmistress. Feeling exhilarated, she stood up.
‘Ah guess ah’d best be moseying on back to class, Missy Bembridge. Ah sure as heck don’t wanna be late!’
Miss Bembridge got to her feet, red-faced with anger.
‘Thank you. That will be all.’
‘Whah, thank you, Miss Bembridge. Good-day to you, Miss Bembridge.’ And with that she walked out, head raised, triumphant.
That night, after lights out, as she stared across at the empty top of her chest of drawers, she vowed that from now on she’d be more American than an American.
When she awoke, she was standing barefoot in her pyjamas in one of the school corridors. She had no idea where she was or how she had got there. Once she had recovered from the shock, she began to feel her way slowly along the walls. She raised her pyjama collar up high around her neck. Under unseen doors, cold draughts of air blew across her feet. Fumbling and shivering in the dark, she seemed to pad around the icy floor for hours, till she began to believe that she’d never find her way back to Butt wing.
Eventually she found the stairway and climbed swiftly up it, her hand resting on the banister to guide her.
The next night, she woke up at the bottom of the stairs.
As the weeks went by, the sleepwalking continued. Sometimes nothing would happen for two or three nights.
Mondays were the worst. She always seemed to travel further on Mondays.
September crawled slowly into October. The branches of the trees surrounding the high walls of the school dripped with rain. The skies and mornings grew darker and colder, and the leaves from the woods began to drift across the sodden lacrosse pitches. Flowers died, the dawn chorus grew quieter through lack of member birds, and the wind found new openings in the doors and windows.
Because of her difficulties in sleeping at night and her sleepwalking expeditions when she did sleep, Rusty grew constantly more tired.
She loathed Latin, and since it was Miss Paxton who gave her extra Latin coaching, Miss Paxton loathed her. Each evening, when the girls shook hands formally with the mistress before going up to the dormitories, Rusty was last in line, for in Butt House they lined up in order of popularity. Every Monday evening Miss Paxton read out the new order, and every Monday Rusty was last. The girl who was always in front of her sweated visibly when the list was read out, and such was her joy when she heard it wasn’t her who was last that Rusty felt she was doing her a favour, and all with no effort.
She was reported to Matron for spending too much time in the lavatory. She had hoped that there, at least, she could be alone with her thoughts, but someone must have noticed… Judith Poole, she suspected. Rusty had to quickly make up her mind to say whether she had constipation or Montezuma’s Revenge. She chose the former.
Matron gave her something called ‘Number 9’, and within a short space of time she was clutching her stomach and spending even more time in the lavatory.
One Saturday, for a treat, her mother took her and Charlie to the cinema. It was an American film with Mickey Rooney in it. Rusty had seen it before, one summer in Vermont, and she started to cry. She was so worried that her mother would take her out that she buried her head in her handkerchief and pretended to have a cold.
Sometimes, alone in her room, she would sing every American song she could remember, ending off with ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. One afternoon she heard Charlie creeping up the stairs, and she knew that he was listening, so she chose one that Uncle Bruno used to sing to her when she was little.
‘A horsie and a flea and three blind mice
Sat on a kerbstone shooting dice.
The horsie sneezed and fell on the flea,
“Whoops”, said the flea, “there’s horsie on me!”
‘Boom-boom, ain’t it great to be crazy!
Boom-boom, ain’t it great to be nuts!
Silly and foolish all day long,
Boom-boom, ain’t it great to be crazy!’
And Charlie laughed.
Rusty slowly opened the door and found him sitting on the floor with his teddy-bear.
‘Like that one?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said crossly. ‘It’s silly.’
‘So who was doing all that laughing?’
He thrust the teddy-bear forward. ‘Teddy,’ he said, and he picked himself up and stalked off.
She tried to tell her mother she didn’t want to go to college, but she was never able to get very far.
‘You’re far too young to know what you want to do when you leave school,’ her mother said. ‘You’ll go to university.’ And that was that.
Each morning, back at school, when the bell rang, a sense of doom sank deep into the pit of Rusty’s stomach and, as she hauled herself out of bed, she wondered how she was going to survive another day.
She began to notice that her breasts were getting smaller and that her clothes were loose. In fact, it wasn’t just her breasts that were shrinking, but her whole body. Sometimes she had the feeling that she was disappearing altogether. Often, when she hadn’t spoken to anyone for days, nor they to her, she had to pinch herself to make sure she was still there.
She felt as though she was being shrunk to fit the school, her grandmother, and England itself.
Her accent and her L. L. Bean coat were the only things she possessed that reminded her of America. She hung on grimly to both.