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AS I TURNED DOWN THE corridor, I wondered whether I had what it takes to be a housemistress. And just what did it take anyway? Having never been to boarding school myself, before I came to St Bride’s I had only a hazy idea of what the role required. It didn’t seem to need a particular personality type, judging from the quartet of housemistresses at St Brides. Each was so different that you’d be hard-pressed to find any common qualities between them: Oriana, haughty, self-contained, controlled; Nicolette, warm, organised, calm; Mavis, terse, old-fashioned, but caring beneath her shell; Judith Gosling, matter-of-fact and wry. How did Miss Harnett decide who to appoint?
As I took my place at the desk in the Poorhouse prep room with a pile of essays to mark, I was glad that Oriana had made my duties tonight so clear. As a quiet, discreet presence, I should keep order without intruding on the girls’ leisure time or private conversations.
At eight o’clock, two of the girls helped me to make 25 mugs of cocoa and hand them round with a huge biscuit tin. We all enjoyed watching an absorbing nature programme about wombats, with much oohing and aahing, followed by earnest enquiries about the possibility of keeping a wombat as a House pet.
I broke the news to them gently.
“I don’t think there are any wombats in England.”
“Yes, there are, Miss, I’ve seen them at Longleat,” said Imogen.
“No, they’re lions, silly,” said Tilly. “I’ve seen the signs for them on the motorway nearby.”
“They haven’t only got lions,” said Imogen. “They’ve got loads of animals. They’ve got tigers and elephants and monkeys and everything. And now wombats and koala bears.”
“When we went there, we went on the safari park drive-though and a monkey sat on my dad’s car and did a massive poo,” said Poppy. “It was worth going just for that.”
I looked at my watch. “Speaking of dads, isn’t it time any of you who want to message home did so?”
Imogen let out a joyful peal of laughter. “I thought you were going to say speaking of massive poos.”
The others collapsed into giggles as they reached for their phones. I couldn’t imagine Oriana leading a conversation like this. I hoped it wouldn’t feature in their texts and emails home.
* * *
I EXPECTED TO HAVE trouble getting the girls to bed on time, with just five small bathrooms to share between them. However, as with mealtimes, they’d been programmed to operate at high speed. When I toured the dorms just after nine-thirty, they were all snuggled up in bed in their pyjamas, cuddling teddies, and with reading books in hand. None of the books were the ones I had set them to read in class, and I didn’t know whether to be pleased about that or not.
It was fascinating to see how each girl marked her territory around her bed with a halo of posters, magazine cuttings and photographs on the wall behind it. There were family snaps, solo selfies, group shots of girls on school outings. Among them I spotted a few famous faces: royals, film stars or high-flying business types, but I did not enquire about the girls’ relationships to them, knowing Miss Harnett preferred equal status for all. Of course, I kept a surreptitious look-out for the colour plates that might have come from the Bursar’s vandalised library book, but found none.
Arriving at the last dorm I had to check, that of the youngest pupils in the House, I was startled to discover beside one girl’s bed a large cardboard cut-out that at first I mistook for a real man. He was dressed in evening wear and held a gun in his hand, looking like the poster for a James Bond film.
Imogen must have heard me gasp.
“Don’t mind Daddy,” she said cheerily, putting her arms round his two-dimensional self for a hug and a kiss before climbing into her bed. “The gun’s not real.”
“What are you going to read us tonight, Miss?” asked Tilly from the bed in the far corner, busy plaiting her long dark hair, presumably to keep it tangle-free overnight.
That took me by surprise. “Me? Now? Read to you?”
“Miss Bliss always reads to us for fifteen minutes.”
I wondered why Oriana hadn’t included that in my briefing. Were they having me on?
“Really? What does she read?”
“The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking,” they chorused, clearly relishing the name.
“Aren’t you—?” I was about to say “too old for these stories”, which I remembered enjoying back in primary school. But as I clocked their eager, hopeful faces, soft in the low light cast from their bedside lamps, I realised the connection: they shared the motherless Pippi’s vulnerability. Seeing her sea-captain father only at rare intervals, she claimed complete self-reliance and gloried in her independence, though her more conventional friends suspected her of making up her madcap adventures to hide her loneliness.
“Pippi Longstocking it is, then,” I beamed, gratefully accepting the big green hardback that Imogen held out to me.
I looked around the room. “Where does Miss Bliss usually sit to read to you?” There were no armchairs, just a low hard stool beside each bed, all now draped with discarded school uniform. Tilly pointed to the empty bed opposite Imogen’s. The Bursar had mentioned there were still a few vacancies for pupils, and I remembered now that in each dorm there’d been at least one empty bed and dressing table. Each House could have accommodated 30 girls, not the 25 I had in mine. What a difference those extra school fees would make to balancing the Bursar’s budget. It made me feel almost sorry for him.
I slipped my shoes off onto the faded bedside rug and climbed on to the wooden bed, at the foot of which lay a blanket made of knitted squares, presumably the product of a house knitting project. Settling down onto the sagging mattress, I pulled the blanket over my legs, feeling the chill as the central heating in the dorms went off after bedtime. I opened the book at the bookmark and took a deep breath. One chapter should be plenty, I thought, glancing up at the girls’ eager faces.
As I read, the girls gradually clicked off their bedside lights, until I was conscious of sitting in a dark room, the only lamp still illuminated focused on Pippi. Halfway through the second chapter, I glanced around to check how many of the girls were asleep and realised that while I had been reading they had all styled their hair into two plaits, which they’d arranged at right angles to their heads, draped across their pillows as they lay down. Each had closed her eyes, slight chests gently rising and falling in the comfortable rhythm of sleep. Perhaps they were all Pippi Longstocking in their dreams, reliving the chapter in which her father returned home from sea.
For a moment I closed my eyes too, leaning back against the headboard, wondering what my own parents were doing right now. What had I been thinking to neglect them for so long, simply to keep Steven sweet, prioritising his needs over theirs? These girls here were separated from their families by their fathers’ volition, the by-product of demanding jobs and deceased mothers, not through any fault of their own. I had no such excuse.
