9

At the end of that first Christmas term the upper school mounted a production of The Mikado, in which leading roles were taken by sixth form and staff and a few lesser parts filtered down to the younger pupils. It was rare for anyone below the third year to be considered, but Frances, as well as having a clear soprano voice, had the sort of black-haired, pale-skinned looks which could be made suitably oriental without further stretching the resources of the wig department, and she was duly dragooned into the chorus. As one of the few cellists in the school I auditioned successfully for the orchestra and found myself playing – or at least miming, until I had memorised the trickier reaches of the score – alongside much older girls, girls who wore tights and eyeliner and high-heeled shoes, and who seemed marvellously unafraid of the teachers.

This, we were given to understand by Mrs Twigg, was an honour and a privilege far in excess of our deserts and, rather than distracting us from our work, ought to spur us on to greater endeavour. These remarks were directed principally at Frances, whose initial interest in the production had been awakened by the discovery that final rehearsals were to take place during lessons. Frances was also, it emerged, in competition with Rad who, as well as being a boy genius, chess Grand Master and champion swimmer, was also a distinguished actor. I had no ambition to be up on stage, but was happiest in the twilit obscurity of the orchestra pit; participating but out of sight. The older girls, when they saw how timid I was, and how grateful for their attention, looked after me, fussed over me and made fun of my blushing. The girl whose music I shared, a prefect and therefore an object of some awe, turned a deaf ear when I strayed into unwritten keys, indicated where we were in the score when it was clear I was adrift, and smiled encouragement when, on familiar territory at last, I set to with any conviction.

Although I was content simply to be in the presence of Art, an additional incentive offered itself to the older girls in the form of a detachment of half a dozen boys from the local independent school drafted in to take the key male roles. Competition for their favours was fierce, and come rehearsal time a better turned-out collection of townswomen of Titipu it would have been hard to find. In the hot-house atmosphere backstage romances blossomed and died in a matter of days. Ko-Ko, the best looking of the boys, seemed to be working his way through the entire cast. There was always one puffy-eyed girl being comforted by friends in the changing rooms, or glowering from the wings at Ko-Ko and his latest conquest.

I had two reasons for looking forward to the performance – which was to run for three nights in the last week of term; the pleasure of being involved in something so far beyond my individual abilities, and the fact that Frances’ family would be coming to the opening night. At last I would get a glimpse of the legendary Radleys.

On the morning of the dress rehearsal I awoke with a sore throat and a shivery, dizzy feeling which was unmistakably the beginning of something nasty. Refusing to acknowledge these symptoms I put on an extra vest and staggered down to breakfast. Mother looked at me suspiciously as I sat at the table stirring my uneaten cornflakes, my teeth chattering.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ she asked, laying the back of her hand against my burning forehead. That settled it. ‘You’ve got a fever!’ she exclaimed, clattering around the medicine cupboard for the thermometer which a few minutes later confirmed her diagnosis. ‘Up to bed!’

‘I can’t – it’s the dress rehearsal today,’ I said urgently, my hot face getting hotter. ‘I can’t miss that or I won’t know what’s going on tomorrow in the real thing.’

‘If you don’t get up to bed now you won’t be well enough to be in the real thing,’ mother said sharply. ‘Go on and I’ll bring you a hot water-bottle.’ Water-bottles and ice-packs: there was no illness which could not be treated with the application of extreme temperature. I started to cry.

‘Come on, treasure,’ said father gently. ‘If you spend today in bed you might be better by tomorrow morning.’

‘And if you go in today,’ mother threw down her trump card, ‘you’ll probably pass on your sore throat to one of the soloists, and then you’ll be popular!’

If prayer could heal I would surely have been cured by lunchtime. I lay sweating under my sheets applying all my concentration to getting better. Mother had urged me to try and sleep, so I clenched my eyes shut and willed myself to drop off. When that failed I stared straight ahead hoping boredom would see me off. After a while the patterns on the wallpaper started to disintegrate and re-form themselves into recognisable shapes. How could I not have noticed until now the smiling face of Jesus looking down on me from above the bookcase? Or that curious snarling dog?

At lunchtime mother brought me some chicken soup and toast on a tray. She ate hers sitting on the floor beside my bed, and then when she had washed up she read me the first chapter of Jane Eyre, and we played rummy. Mother was always much more sympathetic to my maladies if they happened to fall on her day off. By evening time my temperature had gone up by a degree or so and I was starting to ache. My head felt as though it was filled with sand, one minute I was hot and dry as if cooking from within, the next cold and clammy. The water-bottle was alternately tossed out of bed and retrieved as this pattern repeated itself throughout the night. When morning came I was so weak, so wretched, so steam-rollered by flu that I had resigned myself to missing not only the show but Christmas itself. I was too ill to care.

While my fellow performers were being made up with five and nine and black eyeliner, I was being sponged down with lukewarm water; while they were deferring to the Lord High Executioner I was raving deliriously that there was a seahorse in the bottom of my bed. The third day brought a slight improvement: I now had the energy to mope and grizzle and shuffle around the house in my dressing gown and slippers feeling mightily sorry for myself.

Mother continued to ply me with easily digestible food, weak drinks and hot water-bottles or cold flannels. She often came to sit with me when I was awake: we were fairly galloping through Jane Eyre.

One afternoon, the day of the final performance and the last day of the Christmas term, I was sitting in bed trying to cheer myself up by making paper chains to decorate the sitting room. It had dawned on me that I wouldn’t be seeing Frances, or anyone from school, until the new term – until 1978! – and that I had missed the opportunity to send or receive any cards. As I licked and stuck the last link in the chain and tried to disentangle the rustling coils on my bed without crushing the paper, mother called up the stairs, ‘You’ve got a visitor’, the door opened and in walked Frances herself.

‘Hello,’ she said, pleased at having taken me by surprise. ‘I thought I’d better drop in on the way home – not that it is on the way – and see how you are. This room’s tidy. Where do you keep all your stuff?’

‘What stuff?’ I had a wardrobe, a desk, a bookcase and my bunk-beds. On mother’s advice I was occupying the bottom layer in case I threw myself out in a fit of delirium. I shuffled the paper chains on to the floor so she could sit down.

‘Oh, you know, bits and pieces.’ She plonked her school bag on my feet and produced from the turmoil within it a small parcel wrapped in red tissue paper and fastened with a strip of Elastoplast. ‘Happy Christmas,’ she said, handing it over.

‘Thank you,’ I said, delighted, careful not to probe the packaging in case I guessed what it was. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t got you anything, but I haven’t been out.’ I laid the parcel gently at my side.

‘Well, aren’t you going to open it?’ demanded Frances, disappointed.

‘I can’t open it before Christmas,’ I said, as if this prohibition had the full force of the law behind it.

‘Oh, all right. It’s nothing much anyway.’

‘It’s really kind of you.’

‘No, it was only cheap. It cost 10p.’

‘Don’t tell me what it is.’

‘I’m not going to. They were two for 20p so I got one for Mum as well.’

‘Well, don’t give me any clues. I’ll go and put it under the tree now.’ But there was no gagging her.

‘Don’t put it near a radiator or anything or it’ll melt.’

‘Oh Frances, you’ve given it away now.’

‘No I haven’t.’

‘You’ve said it’ll melt – it’s pretty obvious that it’s chocolate.’

‘No it’s not. Actually …’

‘Well, don’t tell me.’

‘… it’s a candle.’

‘Oh Frances!’

This exchange was interrupted by mother bringing in two cups of tea and some home-made biscuits – tooth-cracking peanut brittle and ever so slightly salty shortbread. Frances cleared the plate. ‘Oh great,’ she said. ‘We never get anything like this at home.’ Through a mouthful of crushed nut and toffee shards she brought me up to date with the progress of The Mikado.

‘The first night was really good, although the audience was a bit dead, and so the next day everyone who hadn’t been in it was wishing they had. And then last night there was a bit of a hoohah because Yum Yum forgot one of her lines and was just standing there waiting for a prompt which never came because the prompter was chatting up Ko-Ko in the wings. The audience was starting to fidget so finally Pitti Sing sort of hissed the line at her and Yum Yum said “What?” and the audience fell about. So now none of the other upper sixth girls are talking to the prompter – she’s a bit of a leper anyway because she’s just lower sixth – I don’t think they care about her making Yum Yum look a berk, they’re just jealous because Ko-Ko fancies her.’

‘Have your parents seen it?’

‘Mum and Rad came the first night. Dad was on an early shift so he couldn’t, but he might come tonight. It was really distracting with them in the audience, though. I could tell exactly where they were sitting because they came in late and the whole row had to stand up, and Mum’s got this sort of loud guffaw and I kept hearing it in really odd places which aren’t supposed to be funny.’

‘What did they think of it?’

‘Pretty good. Even Rad, and he’s got very high standards.’

Mother poked her head around the door. ‘Er, Abigail, can I have a word?’ she said with determined casualness. Puzzled, I followed her out of the room, leaving Frances sitting on my bed wiping up the crumbs on the biscuit plate with a wet finger. Once in the corridor mother whispered, ‘Is she staying for dinner? Because I’ll have to put extra rice on if she is.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘No, I can’t stay for anything to eat, thanks,’ came Frances’ voice from the bedroom. ‘I’ve got to get home and cook something for Rad.’

‘Oh,’ said mother, thoroughly abashed. ‘How are you getting home, dear?’ she asked at last, venturing to address Frances to her face.

‘Buses I expect.’

‘Oh, but it’s dark outside. Abigail’s father will run you home. Ste-phen!’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll be all right.’

‘Yes, she’ll be all right,’ I agreed. I was a little nervous at the prospect of unleashing Frances on my father whom she was quite likely to address as ‘Squire’.

Mother shot me a cross look before going back downstairs to ferret him out.

‘Extraordinary girl,’ I overheard him say to mother on his return from this errand some half an hour later. ‘I rather like her. Never stopped talking. She kept saying, “Just drop me at the end of the road”, but I insisted on driving up to the door and when I said I’d wait to make sure there was someone in, she said, “Oh, there won’t be anyone in”, and then offered to make me a fried egg sandwich.’

‘Good heavens. Do you think she’s got a bit of gypsy in her?’

I buried my laughter in the pillow.

As we had said our goodbyes Frances had asked what I was doing for Christmas. ‘Nothing much,’ I said. ‘There’ll just be the three of us on Christmas Day, and maybe my granny.’ I failed to suppress a little groan. ‘And then on Boxing Day we usually go next door for drinks and peanuts. They haven’t got any children, but they’ve got some tropical fish so it’s not too bad. What about you?’

‘Oh God, millions of people descending. It’s our turn this year, although I’m sure I remember doing all the sprouts last Christmas. We’ll probably go out for a meal on Christmas Eve up in Highbury with Uncle Bill and Auntie Daphne. That’s Mum’s brother. Then there’ll be about eighteen of us for Christmas dinner. Last year on Boxing Day we took a picnic over to Hampstead Heath, but I suppose it’ll be Bromley Common this year.’

My eyes were beginning to smart with envy. ‘Your Christmas sounds so much more exciting than mine.’ She didn’t make any attempt to deny this. I tried another tack. ‘I wonder if your family look anything like I imagine them,’ I hinted.

‘Oh, you’ll have to meet them,’ she finally conceded. ‘I would invite you over, only, only, I don’t want to introduce you to my family because they’ll try and take you over – they always do.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘I can’t explain. They’ll start acting as if you’re their friend as much as mine. As if they discovered you.’

I had never before considered myself an object of discovery, and I lay awake that night in a state of pleasant agitation, trying to envisage that moment in the foreseeable future when I would, in some mysterious and magical way, be taken over.

On Christmas Eve, the first day I was well enough to go out, father and I paid a visit to the newsagent’s where all those years ago I had caught him buying that Easter egg. I was looking for a present for Frances; her red package, which, now that she had let it slip, felt and smelled overpoweringly candle-like, was sitting on top of a modest pile of presents under our artificial tree.

The shop windows were spattered with spray-on snow and a line of loopy writing which proclaimed A HAPPY XMAS TO ALL OUR CUSTOMER’S.

‘Customer’s what?’ said father. Coloured fringes of metal foil and fairy lights flashed along the edges of the shelves. Behind the counter an assistant was stickering packs of Christmas cards and Advent calendars with half-price labels. A thick bunch of mistletoe was hanging over the door and the newsagent was frisking around pretending to kiss any girls that came through. The doorstep was covered with trodden berries. Giftware was somewhat scanty, and after dithering over an address book – the sort of thing I was often given, though I had no addresses to put inside, except my own which I was unlikely to need to look up – I settled on a keyring in the shape of a fried egg. This seemed appropriate. Frances at least had her own door key. Father bought a large jar of peanuts and some chocolates ‘for the tree’.

After tea we left mother in the kitchen peeling chestnuts for the stuffing, and drove round to Frances’ house to drop the present off. She lived a good fifteen minutes away in a slightly less salubrious part of the borough, although Balmoral Road, the busy main road on which she lived, looked smart enough, with rows of three-storey Victorian semis.

Although a light was on in the front room and there was a car in the driveway – a dirty yellow Triumph Spitfire with a torn black hood – the doorbell’s metallic rattle was answered only by distant barking, followed by the clatter of paws on floor tiles and much louder barking. When I pushed open the letter box, which was at knee height, a white muzzle with a black nose and two rows of sharp teeth rammed itself into the slot. Growth. I withdrew my hand swiftly. Peering into the living room I could see a real Christmas tree festooned with lights and thick, snaky tinsel. High though the ceiling was, it could not quite accommodate the tree, whose topmost branch was bent over, pinioning a plastic fairy to the plaster moulding. On the floor beneath was a landslide of brightly wrapped presents reaching half-way across the room. The mantelpiece and window sills were crowded with cards. In the centre of the floor was a coffee table on which were at least a dozen used mugs, a large bowl of nuts and an even larger heap of nutshells. The gas fire was roaring away as bright as neon. I could almost feel the heat coming through the window: I didn’t fancy the chances of that other candle.

Growth wandered in from the hall and picked his way through a litter of fallen nutshells to the hearthrug where, impossibly close to the fire, he flopped down. A gentle hooting from the road reminded me that father was waiting on a yellow line. I pushed the keyring in its green and gold wrapping through the letter box which sprang shut like a trap, bringing Growth scampering back to the door. And to the sound of growling and ripping paper I returned to the car and our own quiet Christmas.