WHITE ICE CAME APART LIKE UNDERCLOTHES ripping. Slips and underskirts ripping from the hem upwards to the bodice. Alice closed her eyes and saw it like that. Black and dark beneath the white. And cold. She didn’t know why, but every time she thought of the ice she saw undergarments tearing, she saw the dark place between her aunt’s legs.
She saw what she wasn’t supposed to have seen. Amah caught her but said nothing. Her aunt sat at her vanity table. On the outside Aunt May was white, not pink like red-haired Uncle Arthur, not dark like her father or creamy like her mother, but white, as white as ice, but then she cracked wide open and inside she was dark.
Every night, in her bed in the dormitory at Robeson Academy, Alice thought of the train going through the ice on top of Lake Baikal. Think of something pleasant, May used to say when Alice couldn’t sleep, Think of something you like, and while the idea of a train wreck wasn’t pleasant—no more than May’s own recipe for calm, the vision of a knife rending red slippers—it had become the surest vehicle toward sleep. The locomotive plunged, the ice opened like her aunt’s underclothes, and after it came all the cars full of people.
She never imagined them dying.
Some had been in their berths and had to wake up to change out of their nightgowns. They had to brush their long hair, which had tangled among the bed linens; they had to put it up again with combs and pins. They had to look among all the bottles and jars in their train cases to find their headache powders, their complexion creams, their nail buffers and corn plasters. Only when they were dressed and had had their good breakfasts, their cups of tea, their coffees and pain au chocolat, all warm and sweet and sticky in the middle, only then did she give them last embraces and farewell speeches.
Those who had quarreled she reunited. Those who traveled by themselves she allowed to write letters home, to say good-bye to family and friends left above, in the world. She allowed them to tidy their compartments, to set their belongings in order, to fold their clothes and to tuck their jewels away.
All of this took a long time, of course. Now thirteen years old, Alice was not so young that she imagined resolution to be uncomplicated. The train would have been resting at the bottom for hours before she was ready to let them go, and by that time there seemed little point in killing them—not when they’d survived the wreck, not when they’d learned how to live in the cold, dark water.
They didn’t breathe. How could they? But they spoke; they mouthed the words. They sat in the dining car, now rinsed clean of smoke from cigars that could no longer be lit. They played cards and charades; they read books and bought bicarbonate from the concession car, and they looked out the window at nothing. At the dark water pressing on the glass. They slept in their berths under sodden blankets, and the smell of wet wool didn’t bother them. Not underwater. Not when they were holding their breath for the rest of their lives.
…
ON THE SISTERS’ first night in the dormitory, Alice had felt her way to the room where the older girls slept, gently touching each curtain drawn around each bed, counting seventeen of them, just as she’d counted carefully when the lights were on. At the eighteenth curtain she’d run her hand over the linen until she found the opening, then pushed her head through.
“Ces?” she said.
“Mmm?”
She’d crawled into bed with her sister, fit herself exactly against her sister’s back the way she had on the train, her arms around Cecily, her knees bent into the backs of Cecily’s knees. They were lying together when the curtain parted and faces peered in: one, two, three of them, stacked like a totem and all talking at once.
“You don’t look Chinese. Are you sure you’re from China?”
“What’s it like?”
“Does your father have a pigtail? Is he yellow?”
“Let’s see your feet. Why, they’re not small at all! I thought they’d be pinched off, you know, like hounds’ tails.”
“What’s an S.T.? D’you know? Stands for sanitary towel. Well, do you or don’t you know?”
“If you’re not Chinese, what are you then? You don’t look English.”
“D’you sleep together in China, too? The whole lot of you in bed together? Your mother and father, as well?”
Alice said nothing in response. She sat silently up on her elbows, looking at the round pink faces.
As for Cecily, “How dare you even think we might be Chinese!” she’d said, and she leaned forward and twitched the curtains shut.
“THE LAKE OF Baikal is as deep as the deepest ocean.” Alice said this to the nurse, and the nurse said, “You’re studying geography, then?”
“No,” Alice said. “I’m not talking about that.”
“What, no geography?” said the nurse.
“No,” said Alice. “I mean yes. Yes.”
Geography, maths, spelling, general knowledge, deportment. And something else. What? She couldn’t think properly. Oh, French with Mlle. Vailard.
There was something the matter with her head, and she had to go over and over the things she knew. What were they? She knew that at home in China Mah Foo was taking care of her dapple pony, thirteen hands high and a cross between the native Mongol and a Shetland, pouring potassium permanganate into the crack of his right forehoof so that it hissed and produced a wisp of purple smoke (a pretty trick but one with limited curative properties, just the kind of thing to which the Chinese were prey). She knew that even though the climate in China was considered unhealthful for children, it was all right for horses and for Tony, her dog, a Boston bull bred in Seattle, Washington, purchased in Banff, Canada, and shipped on the Princess Christina from San Francisco to Hong Kong and on to Shanghai in time for her birthday. She was resigned to Tony’s staying home in Shanghai because, as everyone knew, England had no rabies and a six-month quarantine for all pets made sure she never would. Ireland had no snakes because Saint Patrick drove them over a cliff into the sea, but that was a fairy story for Catholics, and she was a Jew. Chinese children had their own stories. Aunt May said that once the rivers of Fukien were filled with crocodiles, but Han Yü wrote them an obituary so convincing that when the literate reptiles encountered his words they rolled over onto their green backs and stopped breathing.
She had been carried from the dormitory rolled up in her mattress. Someone had come into the room. She was hot and thirsty and thought Ma Robey was bringing the water she’d wanted. Miss Robeson’s mother had been in and out of the little infirmary on the top floor. She’d tied up Alice’s throat in cheese cloth wrapped around a sachet of asafetida, so vile-smelling that even though she couldn’t get any air up her nose, the foulness of it penetrated her consciousness; it went right through her skull and into her head and made her retch violently.
“I’d call the doctor tonight, if I were you,” someone said, and someone else sighed loudly in exasperation and said, “Yes, I’d better.” And then they’d made an astonishing noise on the stairs, as if they were jumping down in hobnailed boots.
And Arthur, her uncle Arthur, he was on the other side of the wall washing his coins. On the advice of his sister, Dolly, he disinfected his money with carbolic soap; through the wall she could her them clinking against the enamel basin. In the morning they would be stacked, bright and shining, and there would be wet bills pinned to a string drawn across his dressing room. It was so humid in Shanghai that it took days for them to dry sufficiently to use.
But the doctor didn’t come. Another man came instead, and he leaned down and she could see only his eyes because a cloth was tied around his nose and mouth, and Well, he’s a bandit, she’d thought, banditry being a commonplace in Shanghai. Words came out of the criminal-looking cloth: “Easy now, miss.” And then the bandit had bundled her up and she’d kicked and cried and called for her father.
Alone in the Fever Hospital’s children’s ward, Alice knew that already the school had burned her clothes, her dolls, her books. The linens on her dormitory bed and the white curtain pulled around it would have been stripped off by the charwoman, just as they were when Elizabeth fell ill, the woman’s mouth and nose protected by a handkerchief knotted at the back of her neck. Everything was stuffed into the furnace; the mattress, too expensive to discard, dragged onto the roof to air. But if Elizabeth’s mattress had been taken to the roof, why was hers taken with her to the hospital?
“Is this my mattress?” she asked the nurse.
“Well, who else’s, I’d like to know.”
“I only meant was it the school’s or the hospital’s.”
“It’s the fever talking now, is it?” said the nurse. She dipped the flannel into the bowl, then wrung it out and sponged Alice’s other arm.
Alice felt on the pillow for her hair, but it was gone. Someone had cut off her braid and sent it to be incinerated as well. In-cin-er-a-ted. The sounds added up to something hotter than a regular fire.
The first Friday of every month, the hairdresser came to wash their hair. He started with the youngest girl and worked his way up to the eldest, and after all their hair was dry, he brushed it out and sometimes then he singed the ends with a red iron. He never used scissors. He said it was bad for a girl’s hair, to cut it with a blade. In the winter, when the windows stayed shut, the smell of burned hair lingered for days.
At home, just the previous summer, Alice had measured her braid against that of one of the boys who carried May’s chair. “Velly velly long!” he’d said. “Just as!” But he wouldn’t leave his braid down; he’d rolled it back up and tucked it under his hat so that when he went out revolutionaries wouldn’t harangue him. Along with bound feet, the queue, as it was called, was regarded as a sign of oppression and backwardness.
“Look here,” Alice remembered Aunt May saying to her uncle at the breakfast table. She pushed the paper toward Arthur. “I’m everything that’s wrong with China.”
“What is it?” Alice had said, reading the editorial over her uncle’s shoulder as he kissed her aunt’s white knuckles. Another diatribe from K’ang, the reformer, against opium and foot binding, against sedan chairs carried by boys with long braids.
“Oh, dear,” Arthur sighed. “They’ll bring the foot tax back, it looks like.”
And in August May had bought herself a pair of Western women’s shoes in which she might disguise her suddenly illegal feet, and so avoid being forced to provide revenues to maintain the empress dowager’s flower gardens—an aesthetic that had fallen into disfavor supporting sanctioned beauty.
“So, so unfortunate and infelicitous!” May tried them on before the family, laughing and crying at once. “Have you ever seen anything to beat them for ugliness!”
“I rather like them,” Dick said carefully.
“Yes.” Dolly’s voice went up in enthusiasm. “Elegant!”
“You’ll have to stuff the toes with cotton wool.” Arthur shook his head with distaste at the shiny, dark leather laced up over his wife’s ankles.
Alice had seen May put on the Western shoes at times other than when she was going out. She caught her when her only witness was herself, or so May thought. Alice found her aunt in her dressing room, taking off her tiny Chinese slippers. She pulled on one and then another layer of Arthur’s thickest wool socks and slipped her feet into the high-lacing leather. Stood for whole minutes before the mirror, turning first to the left, then to the right. Looking glass in hand, May turned her back to the full-length mirror and walked two wobbling steps to see what she might look like from behind.
“Insufferable,” she whispered, “insufferable.” She could still hear Yu-ying: We will tell them that you never cried out. Say the words: I never cried out.
“What are you doing!” May gasped, her voice strangled, so startled to see Alice that she almost fell.
“Nothing,” Alice said. “What are you doing?”
May dropped the hand mirror to her side. “Practicing.” How could a person compose herself so quickly? If anything, her voice was even more lilting than usual. “Pretending to be modern in readiness for the foot tax.” May smiled. “You know how I feel about the empress dowager—you don’t think I intend to buy even one daisy for that old bitch!”
SCARLET FEVER WITH rheumatic complications. Alice’s knees and elbows and finger joints throbbed. Her dreams tried to explain the terrible burning of her hands and included upset kettles and overturned spirit lamps. A birthday cake ignited by candles so the icing melted and poured off. Reaching for a piece, she caught her white gloves on fire.
Then suddenly Alice was walking down a road and her aunt was walking before her, walking swiftly, walking as she never did in life. It was foggy, dusk. A black dog pursued May, its head down, its tail down as well. The fur on its neck bristled. Alice was frightened by the look of it. When the dog sprang at her aunt’s back, May turned her head in surprise. The dog plunged its teeth into May’s throat, she sank to her knees.
Rabid, Alice thought, a rabid dog. But her aunt wasn’t dead, she was weeping. She was holding a curtain that hung magically in the road, hung from nothing: no pole, no rings. The curtain was red velvet, as red as blood, and then blood was dripping onto May’s hands, her clothes, her shoes. Alice screamed and screamed, and when the nurse came, she caught her hand and cried, “I know why she wears so many underclothes! So many slips and skirts and garters. The layers of white bindings!”
“Who?” said the nurse. “What?”
“They’re bandages! Don’t you see? Real bandages! To stop the blood!”
“Who?”
“Why, May, of course, Aunt May.”
The nurse was angry because she’d cried out, she would wake the other sick children. But she was the only one there, the other beds were empty, they’d all gone home, they were dead or recovered. The ward was hot, or was it cold? Wrapped in a wet linen sheet, she shivered and her hands itched. Crying only makes it worse, the nurse said, and the obedient tears began to burn as they fell.
A hundred times the train derailed, and Alice plunged after the locomotive, down and oddly through her aunt’s underclothes, through bandages and blood, down through cold water, so cold. A smooth glide to the bottom of the lake, where fish with eyes like dinner plates swam up to the glass windows of the coaches. Litovsky held out his arms, and he and Alice danced in the dining car, around and around the piano stacked with dirty dishes, and the solemn staring fish stared and stared, and he bent her back over the lid of the closed piano, among the greasy plates, and kissed her deeply.
May had come to see her. Alice was sure that she had. It couldn’t have been a dream, because here was the proof: a tin of biscuits tied with a pink ribbon. Alice was imprisoned in a dreary London hospital, but May had come and May would rescue her. If she could bite just one biscuit, it would work like a spell: her aunt would appear by her side. But the nurse wouldn’t allow it.
“Nothing. Not a thing but beef tea.” And, no, she wouldn’t take the biscuits and let Alice have the tin, because “What do you want with it? Just a picture of a dog. Now don’t make a fuss, a big girl like you. Aren’t you ashamed?”
…
“YOU MUST NOT be frightened of marriage, girls,” lisped Miss Clusburtson. Girlth.
On Thursdays, Miss Clusburtson taught laws of health instead of maths, a supplementary course whose text was a book of drawings that made a body look like the cutaway of a passenger ship. A Deck. B Deck. C Deck. Steerage. Lower abdomen, pronounced by Miss Clusburtson as ab-doe-man, was the means of referring to the locus of any indelicate function. She handed out pamphlets for the girls to keep. Folded inside was a picture of an upside down woman, either that or a tree. It was both: the woman’s ashamed face was hidden under the grass, her trunk diverged into two thick limbs topped by leafy feet. Between them, in the tree’s crotch, was a nest of curly hair, and inside the nest an indistinct, vulval egg. Alice hid the pamphlet in her underclothes drawer. The picture had a distressing power, the way it buried the woman’s head and left her private parts in the light.
“One of the teachers keeps telling us not to be afraid of marriage,” Alice said to May.
“Does she really?”
“Yes. But I think she means consummation.” Alice whispered the word.
“Do you?” May said. She put her hand on Alice’s hot head. Her voice was like water trickling. Alice touched her smooth silk knee.
“She took us on a trip to the cast courts.” Halls filled with plaster casts of renowned statuary. There the lower abdomens of naked males were dressed in paper underclothes. “And some of the girls were terribly mean to her,” Alice wept. What was it about a fever that made a person cry all the time?
“Oh, Lord,” Claire had said. “Save us. It is deadly deadly beastly beastly deadly bloody dull in here. And there’s no air. I’ll die if we don’t leave.”
“Watch your pen, Claire. You’re getting ink on my jumper,” Alice had said.
“Bloody bloody beastly bloody dull!”
“There’s dirty bas-reliefs in India,” Claire said. “My father’s seen them. It’s disgraceful pictures of people lighting the lamp, all of them at once, men’s things out of their trousers and the women with their knickers off.” The class was dispersed around the cast of Trajan’s Column: Roman soldiers marching wearily up and around in stripes, as on a barber’s pole.
“What’s lighting a lamp have to do with it?” Alice asked.
“What are you, the village idiot? It means doing it. Hindus think that if you get expert at copulation it’s religious. That’s why me and my sisters were sent home.” A missionary’s daughter, Claire was full of contempt for Christ and an astonishing authority on all things immoral. She wasn’t supposed to be friends with unrepentant Jews. “But I don’t care,” she said.
“What do you mean, unrepentant?” Alice wanted to know.
“It means it doesn’t matter to you whether or not you go to hell.”
“But,” Alice protested, “it does.”
The girls walked double file, each holding a partner’s hand, through plaster reproductions so faithful as to make the actual redundant, to ruin the real places later. Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise from the Baptistry of the Florence cathedral. A pulpit from Pisa, and a set of stairs ascending to nothing.
For whole long minutes they stood before the Pórtico de la Gloria from Santiago de Compostela, to which men in nightshirts were glued by their backs, all of them gripping musical instruments. None of their eyes were open, their faces were tipped heavenwards in sightless ecstasy. It looked like a music class for the blind or the backward. Below them, Christ held up his hands in a gesture of shock and dismay, just the way Mr. Samuel did when he heard Alice’s faltering attacks on Ma Robey’s old piano. Other men displaying scrolls and open books wore a look of malicious delight, as if anticipating all the poor marks on next week’s history examination.
“This floor,” said Miss Clusburtson suddenly. “I want you to look at this mosaic floor, girls. Opus feminae. Work of women. It was made by women inmates from the Woking prison.”
“Thith mothaic oputh wath mathe by inmathe,” Claire said, not so low that the teacher couldn’t hear.
“Don’t,” whispered Alice. “She can’t help it.”
Above them, Michelangelo’s David towered, his groin obscured by brown paper, like something from the butcher shop. Claire thrust her chin forward in a manner that presaged aggression. “Mith Cluthberthon,” she said.
“Yes, Claire.” Yeth.
“Why if you’re always telling us not to be frightened of marriage aren’t you married?”
Miss Clusburtson looked at Claire for a long moment before managing to speak. “You’re speaking of my private life, Claire. It’s not—”
“It’s because of that, isn’t it?” Claire jerked her head toward David’s modestly wrapped genitalia. “You don’t want relationth with men. Ith you whoth frightened.”
Eleanor Clusburtson went pale and then flushed a deep red.
“You might,” Claire said with a worldly, superior tilt of her head, “be an invert. A lizzie.” The fourteen girls standing hand in hand around the statue began to laugh, most of them out of nerves more than amusement. Still, having begun they couldn’t stop. They clung to one another, gasping.
Enflamed by the hysteria, Claire climbed onto the pedestal and pulled the paper from David’s loins. “Well,” she said, touching the uncircumcised tip of his plaster penis, “I thought it would be a bit more—well, just a bit more.”
In the midst of what Miss Robeson called the most disgraceful chaos with which Robeson Academy had ever had the misfortune to be associated, Miss Clusburtson stood silent, unmoving, her hands at her sides.
Alice broke away from the group and grabbed Miss Clusburtson’s frozen arm. “Please,” she said. “I need you to take me to the W.C.” She pulled, but it was as if Miss Clusburtson were cemented into the very mosaic she’d pointed out. “It’s an emergency!” Alice pulled harder, and Miss Clusburtson came free and allowed herself to be dragged away from the rest of the class, still reeling under Claire on the pedestal.
Alice towed Miss Clusburtson around a cast of the Virgin drawing back from Gabriel in fastidious alarm, as if the angel had made a lewd suggestion, and tore past lesser saints and personages, all white white white, as if with shock, and none paler than Eleanor Clusburtson. Inside the washroom, Alice bolted the door and Miss Clusburtson fell against the sink, her hands covering her eyes, tears leaking out from below.
“Wash your face.” Alice turned on the faucet. “Use cold water. Then we’ll go back and you’ll tell Claire she’s to be expelled.” But Miss Clusburtson didn’t move, she went on weeping silently.
“Now,” said Alice. “I hope you’re not crying for Claire. She won’t give a fig. She’s been thrown out of dozens of schools.” Alice tried to pry the thin hands from her teacher’s eyes but gave up. “All right,” she said, after a few more minutes. “You stay here. I’ll check on the rest of them.”
But when Alice returned to the statue of David she found him quite alone, his paper pants rumpled but restored. The hall was empty except for an ancient-looking scholar standing before Trajan’s Column and making notes on a bit of parcel paper. “Pardon me, please,” Alice said. “Have you seen a lot of girls?”
“Girls?” the man asked. “What sort?”
“Schoolgirls. About my size.” The man shook his head.
“WELL, THEY’VE GONE,” she reported to Miss Clusburtson, news that at last inspired the woman to remove her hands from her face.
“Gone? What can—What do you mean, gone?”
“I mean they aren’t there, not one of them. They’ve … They must have left.”
“Oh. Oh no no no.” Miss Clusburtson swayed as she moaned. “No no no. She’ll have me out on my ear. I’ve lost them, thirteen boarders. I’ll go to prison.”
“You’ll make mosaics,” Alice tried to joke. “Much nicer than school-teaching.”
But Miss Clusburtson only shook her head. “What shall I do? Whatever shall I do?” she said over and over, wringing her hands and pacing and giving every sign of impending hysterics.
“Please don’t,” Alice begged. “It won’t help a bit, crying won’t. What we need to do is think. Tell you what, we’ll have tea in that shop at the corner, the one we went past on the way.” Miss Clusburtson stopped pacing and stared at Alice as if she were speaking another language. “It’s all right,” Alice said. “I’ll pay. I always bring a bit of money, just in case. Something my aunt taught me.” She patted the teacher’s cold hand. “That and separate bank accounts. When you’re married, I mean.” Alice hooked her arm through Miss Clusburtson’s, noting the sharpness of the elbow hidden by the gray sleeve. “We’ll have a big tea,” she said. “Food helps a person think.”
But at the tearoom, Miss Clusburtson wilted over the steaming cups. “Now we’ve run away. We’ve run away. Away from the scene.” Her scone grew cold; she didn’t touch her tea.
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve had an accident,” Alice said.
“We have?”
“Definitely. We’ve …” Alice took the spoon from the jam jar and put it in her mouth, licked it clean, and replaced it. “I know.” She leaned forward over the table, exhaling sweet fumes. “We’ll tell Miss Robeson that I began to menstruate. Just today. For the first time. In the cast court.”
Miss Clusburtson opened her eyes wide. “Did you?” she asked, looking newly terrified.
“No! That’s what we’re going to say. We’ll tell her I was frightened and that I needed your help. The girls will back us up. They heard me say emergency, they saw us going to the water closet.”
Miss Clusburtson shook her head. “She’ll find out. She’ll know we’re lying.”
“How?”
“She’ll ask for proof, and we haven’t any.”
Alice folded her arms belligerently. “She’ll demand bloody drawers? I’d like to see her try.”
“You don’t know Miss Robeson.”
“We’ll tell her I threw them away and came home without.”
“Then she’ll absolutely know we’re lying.”
“No! Listen! This is—I’m telling you, I mightn’t be good at maths but I’m brilliantly clever at this sort of thing!”
Miss Clusburtson opened her mouth but nothing came out, so Alice had to accept astonishment in lieu of congratulation.