No one said a word. She stood in assembly and filed out with the others to the classroom and was, as usual, ignored. No one came to the classroom with a summons for her to see the Headmistress; no one said she smelled of paint or dust; and no one, as usual, asked her what she had been doing all weekend. She slept deeply that night.
On Thursday night, as arranged, Lance was waiting for her on the other side of the wall. They grinned at each other. It was all Rusty could do to keep herself from hugging him.
‘Hiya, Yank,’ she whispered.
‘Hiya, Creeper.’
‘Boy,’ she said, as they headed for the woods, ‘have I got a surprise for you.’
She thought he would admire her for staying there over the weekend. She thought he would be impressed. Instead he grew quiet.
‘What are you going to do?’ he said, when they reached the slope that led to the gate.
‘How do you mean?’
‘About the letter from your father? I mean, they’re bound to find out sooner or later.’
She shrugged and pushed the gate open.
‘I don’t know. I thought I’d hand it over tomorrow, but then if the letter’s dated inside, it’ll give the game away.’
‘You realize,’ he said, ‘that if you’re caught, you could be expelled, and then…’
He fell silent and they went on walking through the grass.
‘And then my life would be over?’ she muttered. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I was thinking of mine, actually,’ he said bashfully. ‘If they find out that I’ve been meeting you here, I might be expelled, too.’
Rusty stopped. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Look,’ she said, turning around, ‘if I do get caught, I won’t squeal on you. I promise. O.K.?’
He nodded and followed her over a small pile of bricks that lay in front of the hallway.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘you stay here. I want it to be a surprise.’
She stepped into the Cabin with her torch and lit the two lamps.
‘O.K.,’ she yelled. ‘You can come in now.’
The door opened slowly and Lance peered in. He stared around at the walls, his eyes and mouth growing wider and wider.
‘I say,’ he exclaimed.
‘Come in. Come in.’
He closed the door behind him.
‘Whaddaya think?’ she said, doing a James Cagney impersonation.
‘It’s frightfully good!’ he said. He gazed at the designs. ‘How on earth did you do it?’ .
‘They’re stencils. Traditional American. I’m going to paint the panelling in the doors too, and around the windows. That is, unless you have some other ideas. After all, it is your Cabin too.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
They stood awkwardly for a moment.
‘Let’s get a fire going,’ she said. ‘I want to begin sawing up those planks.’
‘Oh Lord. I’m hopeless at all that stuff.’
‘It’s O.K. I’ll do it. But if you can hold the planks steady, it’ll make it easier.’
While Lance dealt with the fire, Rusty laid a plank across the two stools. Then, a pencil in her mouth, she went over to one of the alcoves, measured the width of it with a piece of string, laid it across the plank, and made a mark.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Lance over his shoulder.
‘I’m going to make shelves.’
‘Aren’t you taking all this a bit seriously?’
‘Nope. For the first time in months I’m having some fun.’
‘But what on earth do you want shelves for?’
‘It’ll make it more like a real home. You wait and see.’
He frowned and then lit the pile of dry leaves and torn wallpaper under his pyramid of wood.
‘You know,’ said Rusty, noticing, ‘you’ve really got the knack now. When we go back to America, you’ll be able to have your own cookouts.’
He sat on the fireplace step and stared at her. ‘You’re mad,’ he said.
‘If I wasn’t, I think I’d go crazy.’
He shook his head.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Hold this steady for me.’
He leaned on one end of the plank and Rusty started sawing.
Between pauses to throw branches on the fire, Rusty sawed while Lance talked. Behind them the branches hissed in the fireplace.
Rusty asked Lance about his holiday, but he veered away from the subject. He just said he was glad to be back at school, but there was one good thing that had happened in the vacation. ‘After Christmas, I ran every day,’ he said.
‘You ran?’
‘Yes. It was an excuse to get out of my aunt’s house, and also I wanted to get really fit so that when I came back I’d surprise them all.’
Rusty stopped sawing for a moment. ‘Where’d you run?’
‘Down to the beach and along the pavement beside it.’
‘I’d love to do something like that. Only I’d like to roller-skate or go take a bike out. Did it make you feel good?’
He nodded.
‘Sometimes, I wish I was a boy. I’m not allowed out on my own hardly at all. If I want to mail a letter I practically have to have written permission from the King!’
‘But that’s not the best part,’ he said, butting in. ‘This afternoon we had rugger. Hardly anyone could catch me, once I had the ball. I just ran and ran. One time I almost ran the full length of the field. I was so excited that I just swerved around the other chaps, leapt out of the way, and nearly scored a try.’
‘That’s swell.’ And she began sawing vigorously again.
‘The opposing team started calling me Yank. But it’s completely different now. I quite like being called it.’
‘I’m not called Creeper any more. I’m not called anything. I’m invisible.’
The end of the piece of wood she was sawing fell to the ground with a clatter.
By the time they left the Cabin, Rusty had ten ‘shelves’ sawn.
‘Can you come tomorrow night?’ she asked.
‘Tomorrow’s Friday.’ He looked worried for a moment. ‘You’re not going to stay here for the weekend again, are you? It’s awfully risky.’
‘I don’t know. I might.’
‘Anyway, I can’t come. You see, because I did so well this afternoon, I’ve been asked if I’d like to join in some trials for the reserve team for my House.’
She could see he was overjoyed.
‘That’s terrific. See, I told you you’d make it.’
He grinned.
‘So when we can we meet?’ she said. ‘Saturday?’
‘I’d rather it was after the weekend.’
‘O.K. How about Monday?’
‘All right.’
She pulled some money out of her dressing-gown pocket. ‘Could you buy me some sandpaper when you go into town?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. ‘We have to go in a foursome. The others might get suspicious if they saw me buying it.’
‘Well, take the money anyway. If you can’t buy it, you can give it back to me.’
‘I’d rather you gave it to me afterwards. Our pockets are checked. We have to hand over all our pocket money to Matron at the beginning of term and then have it ticked off as we collect bits of it. Don’t they do that at your school?’
‘Uh-huh. But they don’t know I have it. Remember, they still think I’m a weekly boarder.’
On Friday after prep, Rusty walked – as casually as her beating heart would allow – up to the dormitory to pack her grip. Outside it was pouring with rain. The prefect was waiting for her downstairs, gazing dismally out through the arched doorway.
‘You don’t have to come with me,’ said Rusty. ‘I’ll be all right by myself.’
‘Are you sure?’ said the prefect, brightening.
Rusty nodded and walked out around the corner along the side of the school building to the front. Ahead of her, at the foot of the long drive, stood the large towering gates. The night was as black as black. She wanted desperately to run, just in case somebody suddenly yelled out, ‘Virginia Dickinson, come back here immediately!’ But she went on steadily, her feet splashing forward, opened the gate, and closed it swiftly behind her. She took a backward glance at the four-winged building that she hated so much. Shafts of light seeped out through drawn curtains as the rain swept across it.
She turned quickly and ran alongside the wall, over the ditch, and through the trees.
By the time she had reached the Cabin, the rain seemed to have soaked into her bones, making her fingers shake and her teeth chatter, like someone doing a clog dance inside her mouth.
The rain turned into hail. She watched the tiny icy balls bounce viciously against the windows while she laid the fire.
Once the fire had gathered strength, she picked up the bricks and placed them at each side of one of the alcoves, laying a cut plank on top. It fit beautifully. On top of the plank, at the sides, she piled up more bricks and laid another plank across them. When she had constructed five shelves on each side, she sat on a stool in the middle of the Cabin and surveyed her work.
‘This is getting to be more like a real home every day,’ she whispered.
She wrapped the blankets around herself and lay down on the camp-bed. Her plaits were still damp. She lifted them up so that they draped over the top of the pillow… anything to avoid them trailing down her neck.
In the morning she hunted through the rubble for any objects she could put on the shelves. She remembered Kathryn saying that what made a stage-set look real were all the little details like ornaments, books on the shelves, pictures on the walls.
She scrabbled around, picking up any book she could find. They were all damp. Upstairs there were three faded paintings of rural scenes. The glass in the frames was cracked and broken, but there was a rusty chain at the back of each, so they could still be hung up.
She was just pulling away some wood from a high mound of rubble when Several of the bricks and lumps of plaster slid aside, revealing a table. She pushed the debris off it and hauled it out. It was split off at one end and two of the legs were missing but, on examining it carefully and finding the legs, she felt hopeful that she could attach them back on.
She dragged it across to the Cabin and after a lot of manoeuvring finally managed to pull it through the doorway.
For the rest of the day she worked away at the table. She rescrewed the legs on, replaced some of the bent nails, and strengthened the top. Then, after measuring it, she sawed off the ends so that they matched up. Even after a good wash, the wood was grey and rather dismal-looking. A good lick of paint would change that, though.
That evening she dried as many books as possible in front of the fire, knocked all the glass out of the pictures, and hung them up on the walls. Occasionally she had the most terrific bouts of hunger and cold, but keeping busy kept both feelings at bay.
That night she slept in a happy exhausted stupor. Inside her Cabin she felt untouched by the world outside. She felt safe and she didn’t hurt any more.
On Sunday she placed the dried books on the shelves, put her carpentry tools and stencil equipment on a special shelf of their own, and under the two bottom shelves stacked as much chopped wood as would fill the space from the floor up. The rest of the wood she put in the wooden tub.
After she had painted vine leaves and birds in the panels of the door, she wrote another letter to her parents. The one from her father still lay propped up on the mantelpiece. She couldn’t bring herself to touch it now.
The following morning she cleaned herself up and headed for the woods. It had started raining again. She just hoped she wouldn’t appear too muddy. She posted her letter and walked back through the school gates. Since she hadn’t eaten since Friday, she felt a little light-headed, but she was beginning to grow used to being hungry. It was when she bent down to remove her galoshes that she felt dizzy. She sat down quickly on the cloakroom bench, and the feeling passed.
In assembly, when she still hadn’t been publicly hauled up by the Headmistress, she felt both relieved and worried. She’d been away two weekends, yet nothing had happened. She was almost disappointed. It meant that nobody cared about her or missed her at all. Still, maybe she was on a winning streak and could go on like this until half-term.
At midnight, she met Lance by the wall. He was beside himself with excitement.
‘I’m in one of the reserve teams for my House,’ he cried.
Rusty immediately began walking into the woods.
‘Did you get the sandpaper?’ she said abruptly.
‘What? Oh. Well, I managed to get hold of a couple of pieces from the woodwork room. I didn’t go into town after all. You see, one of the chaps in my House who’s already in a team had heard how fast I was on Thursday, and he asked if I’d like to go for a run with him and do some practice in passing. So I jumped at the chance.’
Rusty stared ahead. She just wanted to reach the Cabin. Then she’d feel all right.
‘Aren’t you pleased that I’m in the reserves?’
She glanced at him. ‘Sure I am. I guess I’m a little cold. That’s all.’
She was pleased that he had got into the reserves. But it was the way he talked about it that unnerved her, that and his mention of the other boy.
They came to the tall trees by the slope and slid down.
‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, as they walked through the gate, ‘you know the prefect I fag for?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Well, yesterday he actually praised me for the way I lit his fire! I mean, he actually praised me!’
‘Does he ever thank you?’ she said over her shoulder.
‘Pardon?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ And she strode on ahead.
‘He’s really rather decent,’ went on Lance. ‘I think I’m awfully lucky to be his fag, really.’
Rusty felt such a heel. She resented his enthusiasm for school people and school activities, and yet he had been so miserable when they first met. She ought to feel happy for him.
‘I want to surprise you again,’ she said. ‘Wait there.’
As soon as he stepped inside, she could see by his face that he was staggered. She leaned against the chimney breast with an artificial swagger, one leg crooked nonchalantly across the other.
He stared at the alcoves, the pictures on the walls, the neat piles of chopped wood, and then spotted the wooden table.
‘I found it under all that junk outside,’ she said. ‘It was broken but I fixed it. Look at the panels on the door.’
He closed the door and gazed at them admiringly.
‘I wish you could see it all in the daylight. Then you could see the colours right.’
He turned around slowly. He was frowning.
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said.
‘So what’s wrong?’
‘You stayed another weekend.’
‘I told you I might. Look, don’t worry. It’s a cinch.’
He drew out the two pieces of sandpaper. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘it’s not much. What did you want it for?’
‘I was going to sand the edges of the shelves. They look nice like that. Well, never mind. This’ U probably be enough for the table.’ She looked at him. ‘Who’s going to do the fire?’
‘I will.’
‘O.K.’
She started sanding the sawn ends of the table. She was acutely aware that Lance wasn’t talking very much, but she was too scared to ask him why. It was only when he had got the fire going that he came over and watched her.
‘See what a difference it makes?’ she said lightly. ‘It comes up all nice and smooth.’ She began to round off the sharp corners. Eventually she could stand it no longer. ‘O.K.,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’
He leaned on the table and traced his fingernail along the wood.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you know how much I want to do well in rugger?’
‘Yes, though I don’t know why it’s such a big deal.’
‘I told you. It’s the only way I can be noticed. I mean, once I’ve done something for the House or the School, I’m bound to make friends.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, there’s this boy I went running with on Saturday. He came and watched me play in the afternoon, and he was jolly impressed.’
‘So?’
‘So I don’t think I’ll be able to come here so often, because I’ll be joining him for practices, which means I’ll really need to get a good sleep at nights.’
Rusty looked away. She felt choked.
‘I’ll still come on Thursdays.’
She threw a pillow on the floor and sat down in front of the fire. Lance came and sat beside her.
‘I really like it here,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve made it look splendid.’
‘So how come you don’t want to visit any more? I thought we were buddies.’
‘I’ll still be coming.’
‘I guess.’ And she picked up a branch from the wooden tub and threw it on to the fire.
It was a dismal evening. Rusty felt Lance slipping away from her like Janey and Skeet and Beth, and she felt helpless to do anything about it. The two of them sat there quietly, making small talk until the fire had died down.
On Wednesday, Rusty received another letter from her mother. It was all about something funny that Charlie had said, and how pleased she was that Rusty’s schoolwork was progressing well. And she talked about how hard her father was working at the office and how she thought it might be a nice idea for them all to spend the Easter holiday in Devon. It wasn’t until the postscript that she mentioned her father’s letter. It said:
P.S. We still haven’t received a reply from Miss Bembridge. We realize that she must be very busy, and we assume that it’s because you’ve settled in well as a full-time boarder that she perhaps hasn’t felt the need to contact us yet. Could you ask her to get in touch with me, preferably by letter, as I’m never quite sure when your grandmother has taken the phone off the hook. It would just make me feel more at ease. I’d like to call her myself, but your father seems to think I’m making a fuss over nothing.
Rusty folded it up and shoved it into her blazer pocket. She desperately wanted to have a quiet think but, before she knew it, a bell had rung. Thinking was out of the question. From now on her every hour was accounted for.
That night she lay awake until the dawn, and it was a struggle to stay awake in the classes the following day. The teachers, thinking she was stupid, made the usual sarcastic comments about her to the other girls, but she was completely oblivious to them. All she cared about was whether the sky remained clear.
It was the Bull who sent her to Matron. She had asked her to stand up, as it was obvious she hadn’t heard the question she had been asked. Rusty had hardly dragged herself to her feet when she woke up on the floor and found that the side of her forehead was bleeding. The next thing she knew, two extremely strong arms were hauling her up into a sitting position and pushing her head firmly between her knees.
Orders were being snapped out to other girls to help lift her back into the chair.
‘Now, my girl,’ Miss Bullivant roared, ‘you are to go straight to Matron.’
‘I feel O.K. now,’ she mumbled. ‘Guess I must have got up too fast.’
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear a certain word,’ the Bull snapped.
When Rusty looked up, she actually saw a twinkle in her eye. Boy, she looked almost nice.
‘Thank you, Miss Bullivant.’
‘Right,’ she bellowed. ‘Off you go to the San. And stand up slowly.’
San? Oh yes, that was the infirmary.
‘Yes, Miss Bullivant.’
‘Now go on with you, girl!’
Rusty moved hazily from the classroom and down the corridors towards the San. She had arranged to meet Lance that evening, and it wasn’t raining. She couldn’t be put in the San tonight. She just couldn’t.
Matron looked as thin and grim as ever. She sat behind a sparse desk in a cold, well-scrubbed room and glared at her.
‘And what can I do for you?’ she said accusingly.
‘Miss Bullivant sent me. I passed out in class.’
‘I assume you mean you fainted.’
‘Yes, ma’am. And I guess I must have caught my head on the corner of someone’s desk. But it’s only a scratch.’
Matron rose and took a cursory glance at it.
‘So you fainted?’ she said. ‘Sounds like constipation to me.’
Rusty gulped. That’d be another dose of Number 9! Boy, she hated that stuff; but if she didn’t take it, she might have to stay in the San.
She watched Matron pull the muddy-coloured bottle out of a cupboard.
That day she picked up five order marks for running in the corridors en route to the lavatory, plus a sixth for yelling in exasperation, ‘I have the runs!’
At midnight, even as she climbed down the scaffolding, she had to stop at intervals, every time a pain shot through her empty insides, and wait until it had passed.
The fact that Lance wasn’t by the wall to meet her only heightened her irritation. After fifteen minutes of waiting she headed on through the woods to the Cabin and set to laying a fire. She felt so cold that she ached.
While she was warming herself, she heard someone moving through the grass. She stiffened. The door opened and in walked Lance. He closed it hurriedly behind him, and pulled up a stool by the fire.
‘Sorry I’m late. I had a bit of trouble getting out.’
He opened his hands to the flames. He looked awkward, secretive. For a while neither of them spoke.
‘How did the rugger go?’ she asked.
‘Actually it went splendidly. Vernon-Jones thinks that if I carry on the way I’m going, I’ve a good chance of getting into the team next year.’
‘Who’s this Vernon-Jones?’
‘He’s the chap I was telling you about. The one I’ve started running with.’
Rusty stared into the fire. ‘Next year?’ she murmured. ‘So you really won’t be coming back to America with me?’
‘I never said I would,’ he remarked quietly.
She snatched up a couple of pieces of wood from the tub and hurled them into the fire.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you just make the best of things? I’m sure you’ll make friends at your school soon.’
Rusty whirled around and glared at him. ‘I suppose now that they’ve started getting friendly, you don’t want us to be buddies any more. That it?’
He blushed. ‘Not exactly. Only it is getting rather dangerous.’
‘O.K.,’ she snapped. ‘Are you trying to tell me you don’t want to come here any more?’
He clasped his hands together tightly and looked down at the floor.
‘You’ve done an awful lot to help me,’ he muttered. ‘And I’m really grateful. I mean, what with the fires and cheering me up when I was miserable.’
‘Uh-huh. And?’
‘It’s just that I’d hate it if any of the other chaps found out about me meeting you here.’
‘In case they tell? And you get a beating?’
‘No, I could face that. But...’ He hesitated. ‘It’s because you’re a girl.’
Rusty looked at him quickly. ‘But we’re not doing anything mushy. We’re not dating or…’
‘No. It’s not that. You see, if they thought I had a friend who was a girl, they wouldn’t think much of me. They’d laugh at me or think I was stupid or a bit of a namby-pamby. I wouldn’t have a hope of getting in a team then.’
A namby-pamby? Where had she heard that word before? She had a vague memory of crouching down by some stairs, eavesdropping. And then she remembered. It was what her father had called Charlie.
‘So a namby-pamby is a boy who likes girls, is that it?’
‘No. It’s being wet, you know, oversensitive. Cowardly. Like a girl. Empty-headed, soppy, that sort of thing.’
Rusty sprang angrily to her feet. ‘You really take the cake!’
Lance looked almost alarmed. ‘I don’t think that way about you, but the other chaps will.’
‘You make girls sound like creatures from outer space.’
‘Well, I don’t mean to. But boys are more adventurous and strong, you know. I mean, that’s what they think.’ He turned and pointed to the walls. ‘I mean, look at all this nice stencilling you’ve done. Boys are no good at that sort of thing. They have to be tough,’ he stammered. ‘I mean, girls are good at making places homey, like…’
Rusty stared at him. in amazement. ‘What the heck’s happening to you? You get into a reserve team and suddenly everything’s different. Last semester you hated those “chaps”, now they’re “rather decent”. If you want to know something,’ she said, waving at the walls, ‘it was men who used to do stencilling and make houses pretty inside. They had their own stencil cards and equipment, and they used to ride on horseback all over the place, miles and miles, and then stay at someone’s place, paint their walls and furniture, even the floors, and then they’d move on again. So you’re talking through your hat. You can make a place homey and be strong too, and be brainy. Boy,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You are the dumbest thing out. What about the pioneers? They had to make a home in the middle of nowhere, with wild animals around them, stuff like that.’
‘Well, there’s no such things as pioneers now,’ he said pompously.
‘There certainly is. I’m one.’
‘Don’t be an ass. You know it’s all pretend.’
‘You sure have changed your tune!’
He leapt to his feet. ‘It’s all your fault that I can’t come here again. You’ve made it too risky.’
‘Well, those “friends” of yours’ d be right about you. You are a pantywaist, or a namby-pamby, or whatever you call it. But not because you’ve been with a girl. It’s because you’re afraid of what they’ll think. You’re afraid to be different. You sound just like the girls at my school, cooing and spilling goo over a game. You just have to do what the darned Romans do. No wonder you like Latin!’
Lance turned on his heel, flung open the door, and slammed it behind him. Rusty felt devastated. She hadn’t meant to say such hurtful things.
She sank down on the stool and buried her head in her hands.
The effects of the Number 9 treatment lingered into the next day. As soon as she had swallowed down some breakfast, she began running for the lavatory again.
As the lessons dragged slowly on, Rusty kept her eye on the door, waiting once again to be discovered. She had history in the afternoon and found, to her alarm, that the Bull kept staring at her.
‘Virginia Dickinson,’ she roared, ‘come up here.’
Rusty hauled herself forward.
‘Stand there in front of me,’ Miss Bullivant said. ‘I want to take a good look at you.’
She peered at Rusty from her head to her feet and back up again.
‘You eating?’ she snapped.
‘Yes, Miss Bullivant.’
‘Well, you look too thin, if you ask me. Far too thin.’
‘Must have been the Number 9 Matron gave me.’
At that the class giggled. Rusty was amazed. It was the first time she had ever made any girl laugh at a joke of hers.
She was halfway down the aisle when Miss Bullivant called out to her again. ‘Feed you at home all right, do they?’
Rusty turned around. She could feel her face growing hot. ‘Yes, Miss Bullivant.’
The teacher gave a grunt and returned to the Mon-mouth Rebellion.
The classes were over and Rusty sat in the large room where the fourth-year prep was taken. She propped her head up with her hand. She was still smarting inside from the quarrel with Lance. She felt he had somehow betrayed her.
Eventually the bell rang and she gathered up her books. When she came out into the corridor, she found the prefect who was normally in charge of her on Friday evenings waiting for her.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Rusty. ‘Am I late?’
‘No. I’m early. Look,’ she said, ‘do you mind if I don’t see you off again?’
‘No. Of course not.’
As soon as Rusty was around the corner, she leaned against a wall out of sheer relief. Then, as usual, she took her grip up to the dormitory, packed, and walked out of the arched doorway to another weekend of freedom.
That weekend she did nothing but paint. The only can of paint that was still usable was dark green. She painted the table and the two makeshift stools and, while they were drying, stencilled a design of leaves and flowers in the centre of the main wall. It was a little lopsided, but it was the best she could do.
She placed a pineapple design on the centre of the table, using the ochre for the pineapple and dark brick red for the leaves at the top of it. Grandma Fitz said that the pineapple was a symbol of hospitality. She could pretend to have visitors for meals. Even as she thought of that, her stomach gave an insistent gurgle.
On Sunday afternoon she sat by the fire, just gazing around at the colours. She wished she could share it with someone. She boiled some water in the saucepan over the fire and, when it had cooled, drank it.
The next morning she posted her letter to her parents and went back into school.
She stood with the others as they recited their way through a series of prayers, sang a hymn about fighting the good fight, and then sat down for the sermon from the Headmistress.
‘And now,’ said Miss Bembridge after several announcements had been made, ‘I have some rather good news for you all. Today I will be sending off letters to your respective parents informing them that half-term will be two days longer than planned. The reason for this extension is that a team of workmen will be coming to the school to remove the scaffolding.’