For two sublime years, we were the wingers. We could outrun the field.
For those two years, at Upton Hall School, all lacrosse matches depended upon us.
‘Pass to the wing!’ the captain would screech to the fumbling, tangled slow-coaches in midfield. ‘Pass to Minna! Pass to Flic!’
With the ball caught, cradled, we’d fly over the muddy grass. And the goal would tremble into sight and the opponents’ keeper would lumber out in her creaky shin-pads and our own forwards would prance up, neighing for the ball. But most times, our momentum just carried us on, we couldn’t resist it, and one of us would score a goal and then the whole team would come crowding round and clash their lacrosse sticks with ours in a victory salute.
But in summer, there were no lacrosse games. We weren’t heroines any more, just ordinary girls, and this felt worrying, as though we might soon die.
One hot day, as we sat in the Upton Hall rose garden, bored with everything, inattentively reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Minna said to me: ‘Flic, I’ve got an idea. Let’s fall in love with someone.’
My gaze moved up from Shakespeare’s text and rested on Minna’s features. She was growing into a beauty, with grey eyes and chestnut hair and a chocolate mole on her thigh. We were both fourteen. I said: ‘Who’ve you got in mind?’
Minna said: ‘No one. Let’s make it random, like Titania falls in love with that idiot disguised as a donkey. Let’s choose the next person we see.’
The next person we saw was the geography teacher, Miss Delavigne.
Along she came, with her black hair gleaming in the sunshine, wearing a coral-coloured dress.
‘Hello, Miss Delavigne,’ said Minna.
‘Hello, Minna. Hello, Flic.’
She stopped and made polite conversation. She came from the South Island of New Zealand and her pronunciation of certain vowel sounds was something new to us at Upton Hall School. When she went on her way, we appraised her. Her first name was Rosalind. Her skin was tanned, but her ankles looked chunky in navy canvas shoes. Minna said New Zealand women probably didn’t know anything about fashion, but we couldn’t let that matter to us; love was meant to be blind. We had noticed, however, that Miss Delavigne’s eyes were violet-blue and her teeth white as cuttlefish. We decided her age was thirty-nine.
We thought we’d start by being romantic and courtly. We stole a rose and walked to the bungalow Miss Delavigne occupied beyond the lacrosse field, and scattered the rose petals at the bungalow gate. When we came away, I felt sexy and strange, as though the rose petals had been virgin’s blood.
Then we decided we’d better get good at geography, so we stared at maps of New Zealand, trying to memorise place names and rivers and sites of mineral deposits. The place names that appealed to us most were Brightness Gully and Desolation Creek.
We agreed that our prime targets were to get ourselves invited to tea at the bungalow and to persuade Miss Delavigne to let us call her Rosalind.
Later in the term, our class went on an outing to the Science Museum in London. Minna and I held Miss Delavigne’s hands – one each – as we gazed at a diorama of a Maori village, and she said: ‘What the diorama doesn’t show is the sadness of the people.’
I looked at Minna because I had no idea what comment to make. And I saw that Minna had no idea, either. By now, we knew a lot about New Zealand weather and cabbage trees and flightless birds, but nothing about the country’s history. Miss Delavigne went on: ‘Shall I tell you something not many people know? My grandmother was Maori. She deserted her tribe to marry a white man, a pākehā, my grandfather, Josiah Delavigne.’
Minna said: ‘Does that make you feel sad, Miss Delavigne?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m proud of my Maori blood. But the Maori haven’t been treated well. They’ve lost far too much of their land.’
‘We’d love to see a picture of your grandmother,’ I said. ‘Have you got one at the bungalow?’
‘Yes. I keep one by my bed.’
I didn’t dare look at Minna. Pressing my hand against the hot glass of the diorama, I said: ‘You could invite us to tea and we could do some extra geography and you could show us the picture.’
In the coach going back to Upton Hall, Minna asked me: ‘Are you in love with her yet?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I liked holding her hand.’
‘I like her smell,’ said Minna.
I said: ‘Let’s pretend we’re in the Maori village alone with her, wearing skirts made of flax. Let’s pretend we’re plaiting feathers into her hair.’
So we put our heads close together and closed our eyes and imagined the sunlight depicted in the diorama falling on us and on Rosalind Delavigne and on all the acres of land stolen from her family, rippling away to the horizon. But we were so tired from the long day, we both fell asleep.
Near the end of term, we got our invitation to tea.
Laid out on a teak table was a sponge cake and a plate of Penguin biscuits.
The tea was in a floral china pot. Miss Delavigne had put on crimson lipstick. It was raining outside and Miss Delavigne had turned on the gas fire and lit a cosy little lamp. I tried to imagine that there was nothing beyond the windows, not even the lacrosse pitch or the rain, but only the deep, soft dark of the universe.
We drank the tea and ate the food and passed the picture of Miss Delavigne’s grandmother from hand to hand. The grandmother wasn’t dressed in a skirt made of flax, but in some starchy old dress, with a white lace collar and button-up boots, and I felt disappointed, except that her face was beautiful, with heavy black hair wrenched into a bun. Looking from her to Miss Delavigne and back again, you could see that some of her beauty had descended down the generations.
After the second cup of tea, Minna said: ‘It’s fine if we call you Rosalind, isn’t it?’
When Minna said this, Miss Delavigne inclined her head, as though she were listening for something, some animal noise out there beyond the windows of the bungalow. Then she said quietly, ‘What is it, you two? What is it you want?’
Neither Minna nor I could move or say anything. We just sat there dumb, like stupid lacrosse reserves on the pavilion bench. The fire burned blue. Then Rosalind Delavigne reached out and began stroking Minna’s chestnut hair. I saw Minna’s head move slowly sideways and I knew what was going to happen next: there was going to be a kiss.
I stared at the kiss, mouth on mouth. When, after a long, silent moment, Minna’s face was separate from Rosalind’s again, it was smeared with the crimson lipstick and her eyes looked drugged, as though by some weird sleep.
I waited, very still, because I thought that now, my turn for a kiss would come, but it didn’t. Rosalind got up suddenly and began pacing about the tiny, lamplit room. ‘Gracious!’ she said. ‘Gracious, how wrong of me! I just don’t know what happened there. You must go, Minna. Flic, off you go. Goodness me, if the Head knew. Really I dread to think . . .’
We walked back to the dormitories through the rain. I gave Minna my handkerchief so she could wipe Rosalind Delavigne’s lipstick off her face.
When she gave the hankie back, I said: ‘Minna, was it fantastic?’
But she didn’t answer. She strode on, as though what had happened had nothing in the world to do with me.
In the autumn term, there was a new geography teacher, called Miss Smith. When I asked the Head whether Miss Delavigne was coming back, she said: ‘No, dear. She’s returned to her faraway land.’
The lacrosse games began and we took our wingers’ positions on the field. But something was wrong with Minna: she’d lost her speed. The midfielders from the opposing team came charging towards her and tackled her long before she got anywhere near the goal. And soon enough, she was dropped from the team.
I thought she’d be upset about this, but Minna said she didn’t care, that lacrosse was for kids and she wasn’t a kid any more, hadn’t I noticed?
She showed me a photo of a boy called Jeremy she’d met in the summer holidays. She said: ‘That Rosalind thing was a laugh, but this is real.’
The winter began seeping in. And as the dark came down on the lacrosse pitch, I’d often stare over at Miss Delavigne’s bungalow. It was unoccupied now and I noticed that one window-pane was broken and that the paint was flaking off the door. In my mind, I named it Desolation Creek.