‘I will. You are very well and widely read, Olive … you’ve obviously made the most of the library but even a good grammar school like this hasn’t such a range of literature. Do you use the public one?’
‘Oh yes. They get me things from the stacks that they don’t have on the shelves – and from other libraries. They’re so helpful.’
‘That’s because any librarian loves readers like you. What about Shakespeare? Which plays are your favourites?’
‘I don’t know them all … but Troilus and Cressida more than any.’
‘Hamlet?’
‘Yes. We’re doing that for A level. I like Macbeth better though.’
She became conscious of a difference in the way Mrs Pratley looked at her. Up to this moment she had been interested, but this interview had been like the rest – dig a bit, find out, make some suggestions. Routine. Not Olive.
‘And Cymbeline … and The Tempest.’
‘You’ve seen all those?’
‘Oh no, only read them. I’ve only been to the theatre once – Romeo and Juliet. We’re doing that as well. I hated it.’
Mrs Pratley laughed again. But not at her. Not in that sarcastic way teachers had.
‘So. Literature and History. Literature or History?’
‘Yes. I love them but what could I do with them?’
‘Teach them of course! Pass on that love. You have what is worth everything in a teacher – a teacher of any subject – passion. Enthusiasm. Opinions. Knowledge. But enthusiasm most of all. Generations of girls would be so lucky to be inspired by a teacher such as you could become.’
She sat back, still smiling.
‘Take my word for it, Olive. It shines out of you. Otherwise, I’ll send you off to be a hospital almoner!’
After she had closed the door behind her, Olive found herself for a rare moment completely alone in the long school corridor. It had blue-and-cream tiles set in a line down the middle of terracotta ones, like a carpet runner, and the great brass ship’s bell – no longer used and with its rope looped up and tied – gleaming against the polished wood panelling. The smell of polish, and meat and potatoes cooking for dinner. The Honours Boards. The House noticeboards. The Games Teams noticeboards. And in the background, the classroom murmur. The scrape of a chair. Someone coughing.
She stood still and knew that for no particular reason, and for every reason, she would remember this.
Teaching. She supposed it was inevitable. She wondered how she would cope with teaching the things that meant so much to her, that enriched and enlightened and delighted her and made her heart beat faster, to girls who did not want to be taught about them, saw no point. It was the others – however few – those others for whom she would give up everything.
She walked up the stairs to the Common Room, wondering if Mrs Pratley felt any passion for teaching unwilling girls, as Olive herself had been, as they learned to draw maps of the Ruhr coalfield and list the principal industries of North America and construct geological strata from plasticine.
Perhaps, as Mrs Pratley was married, it did not matter so much. Her real life was elsewhere.
4
‘I WONDER IF you would care to come to Ladies’ Night, Olive? Of course, I always took your mother, but where Masons are widowers, you know, daughters or sisters are invited instead. It is quite formal. I don’t know how you feel about what you should wear … you remember Evelyn’s gowns, that sort of thing. She always looked very smart.’
They were sitting over the cheese and biscuits after a supper of kedgeree, which he had cooked. Ralph Piper was a good, plain cook who sometimes liked to experiment. Olive was a poor one, with a limited repertoire, mainly dishes learned in Domestic Science lessons years ago – cauliflower cheese, shepherd’s pie. She did not enjoy cooking but she was neat and swift. Her father was a painstaking, fiddly cook and left the kitchen like a bomb site, either for Olive to clear and clean, or for Mrs Bradley the next morning. Mrs Bradley had come once a week in Evelyn’s day but now she came three times. Olive knew that it was not only because she was glad of the money. She suspected that it was also because she felt sorry for her, a seventeen-year-old girl living alone with her father.
Olive spread some butter on her cream cracker and topped it in a careful pattern with tiny rectangles of Cheddar, avoiding her father’s eye. Masonic Ladies’ Night. Something close to panic moved like the sea within her.
‘Olive?’
‘I’m … I’m not sure, honestly. Isn’t there someone more suitable you could take?’
‘You are very suitable – who better? I understand that it isn’t going to be full of lively young people but we do have a very enjoyable evening, the food is quite choice, and there are gifts for the ladies.’
Olive thought of the silver dressing-table set – mirror, brush, clothes brush, comb, tray, backed in petit point. It was still on the chest of drawers in the room where Ralph now slept alone, one of the few things of Evelyn’s that he had wanted to keep.
A Ladies’ Night gift.
She got up and started to clear away, avoiding the rest of the conversation.
5
THAT YEAR THE first weeks of autumn were as warm as high summer. Schoolchildren started the new term in cotton frocks and Bedford College lawns were scattered with people lying spreadeagled, eyes closed and basking in the sun, or sitting in groups, talking idly. Or, like Olive, reading in deckchairs beneath the great spreading copper beech. Marlowe was a revelation, so was Webster. Shakespeare took a back seat for the time being.
Her head teemed with new words and works, so that not only the lines but the lives, and the truths told, the golden images and dark metaphors might at any moment come spilling out and walk about on the grass. She raised her head, and saw Faustus in black and the Devil in scarlet.
The Victorian buildings behind her were quiet and half empty in the afternoon haze. From somewhere behind high hedges, the pock of a tennis ball on racquet and cries of ‘Out’. Olive wanted to play. It was the only game she had ever enjoyed and been quite good at, though she over-served and was a clumsy runner. But her hand–eye coordination was excellent. Noticeboards in the hall invited new players, as they invited new actors, singers, folk dancers, bridge players. She had not yet signed up for any of them. There was too much to take on and all at once.
She was glad, now, that she had come to one of the women’s colleges of London University – though there were plenty of male tutors. The competition for places at the large, mixed colleges was very strong. Men dominated. There were big faculties of Law and Theology at King’s, as well as a Medical School. She would almost certainly waste an application, Mrs Pratley had said.
‘Not that I want to put you off if you are really determined, Olive, but honestly, we get very few girls into those. You will get a place at Westfield or Bedford College without any trouble. They’ll be lucky to have you.’
All the same, down for the interviews, and with part of a morning free, she had walked through London to look at King’s, walked into the court, become caught up in a sudden exodus from lectures, a surge of bodies, men in black gowns, men carrying books, men running. There were women too, but fewer. She had retreated.
Bedford College had been a haven of calm, set in its green gardens, with trees round the lake, courts and playing fields beyond.
She had a room overlooking the park. The sound of traffic was distant, and unheard at night. It might have been in the middle of the country. London was there if she wanted it, but for now she was happy, in a world that seemed to have been made especially for her.
She pieced together the jigsaw, and saw that the picture was in fact quite clear and easy to follow. It was an extension of school, but with fewer rules and people in charge. Young women lived together. Studying, listening, taking notes, meeting and talking, talking, talking. People were no longer so petty. Friendships were formed. People drifted together and apart, but did not seem to fall out explosively, and there was little backb
iting. Life was too full, too interesting, for that.
After much thought, Olive joined the Drama Society.
The corners of the garden were thick with leaves. In the early morning, the lake exhaled a fine mist like breath, which dissolved as the sun touched it. Nights grew colder. Frosts iced the grass. There was the smell of bonfires.
She became embedded in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English and all things Elizabethan. She was required to study the literature of the eighteenth century, tried hard and failed to appreciate it. It seemed to her bland and pompous, against the edginess, spikiness of earlier writers.
Mary Murdoch, with whom she shared her room, had a boyfriend at home in Lincoln. They wrote to one another twice every day. There was always an envelope addressed in his bright blue, looped hand, waiting on the post shelf. She was studying Biological Sciences, he was in Durham doing Theology and preparing for holy orders. They would finish their degrees and marry as soon as she had a teaching post and he a curacy. It was all agreed, sealed and franked. There was a portrait photograph of him on Mary’s bedside table – pleasant-looking and somehow already middle-aged, with family and parish responsibilities.
Olive wondered if that would be her before long. Was there some Paul or Roger or Jeremy out there for her, wearing tweed sports jacket and unobtrusive tie? Whenever she tried the idea on for size, as it were, she jumped back, as if she had received a mild electric shock.
Mary’s boyfriend, Anthony Whittaker, came down for the weekend and shook hands with Olive and said that he had heard a lot about her.
‘I feel I can trust Mary with you.’
What did he mean? She supposed it meant that she was quiet and wore large glasses and plain skirts and jumpers, and so was safe.
6
THE DEMONS CAME running out of the bushes and leaped onto the stage that had been erected on the lawns leading down to the lake. They pursued Faustus, dressed in black with a scarlet hood, until, in a much rehearsed and perfectly executed move, he reared up and fell backwards, into the water.
On each of the four nights that the play was performed, warm, beautiful nights, with the floodlights surrounded by deep darkness and the pale moths drawn in to them, on each night, the actor playing Faustus fell in a flawless backwards somersault and there was a gasp, and a thrill rippled through the audience. They sat on tiered platforms high above the stage.
Olive had seen very little real theatre and the performances were a revelation. Forever after, she was to see a lake set in gardens, see Faustus leap, dive, fall, hear the splash. Hear the gasp.
She was the prompt, with the book and a torch, concealed behind laurels, to which at various points various actors crept, to hide and await their cues. She remembered the smell of their excited sweat and the greasepaint, saw wild eyes and crouched bodies, quivering with attention, poised to run out on stage.
No theatre was ever to hold so much for her again.
Waiting to go on for his last scene, and the plunge into the lake, Faustus stood beside Olive, concealed in the laurels. He had not spoken to her, he was too focused and intent, but on the Saturday night, she whispered, ‘Last dive,’ and he had looked at her as if she were a statue come to life. She had been there every night but somehow invisible. Relaxed now, he adjusted his scarlet hood, and smiled. Conspirators.
It had threatened rain but the clouds had moved off.
She had felt an unreal sense of being next not to a student actor, but to Faustus.
Faustus.
The final somersault. The last cry. The last applause.
Olive closed the book.
His name was Malcolm Crowley and now, in dry clothes, blue shirt and cords, he came over to her at the after-play party. She had been about to leave. The whole Dr Faustus time had been the most enjoyable of her life, but she was exhausted, her energy and concentration crashed as he had crashed into the lake.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘What for?’
‘Well … being there, I suppose.’
‘Behind the bush?’
‘Yes … behind the bush. It was reassuring.’
No one was paying them any attention. Olive drank her wine, which tasted acid-sweet. He was at King’s Dental School. His father was a dentist, had been there before him. He was nothing like Faustus. Of course not. It had all been … what? What were actors? What were the characters they pretended to be? What happened to them when the lights went down and their costumes were removed? They did not exist. They had never existed. For some reason, she found that disturbing.
Malcolm Crowley.
He smiled at her, raising his glass of beer. And then someone tapped his shoulder.
Speeches. Thanks.
Olive hid her half-full glass behind a lamp and left.
She dreamed about the play. Costumed figures processed across lawns in the fading light. Words floated on the still air. The crackle of applause, losing its impact as it too floated away, without the usual retaining walls of a theatre to bounce it back.
A late blackbird singing. The shout. The backwards fall. The splash.
She held it for days like a box of photographs inside her head.
What next? What next? She was asked for suggestions.
An envelope, by hand, addressed to her, sat on the post shelf.
Hello. Three weeks left. Time flies! I enjoyed our brief encounters. How about another, not so brief? I could meet you in the Goldfish Bowl café – do you know it? Thursday or Friday. We could have a pie and some beer? Or there’s Spaghetti House. Whatever you would like.
All best,
Faustus
So this is how it began. She had stepped onto a moving staircase from which she did not know how to alight, though she supposed that the staircase might stop of its own accord at any point. She could not think of any good reason to refuse his invitation.
‘You like him, don’t you?’
Mary had just washed her hair and was lying on the rug in front of the electric fire to dry it. The room smelled of hot hair.
‘Yes. No. I mean, I don’t really know him.’
‘Of course you don’t, but now you will.’
‘Will I?’
‘Olive, it’s what all this is about.’
The pub was noisy and full of cigarette smoke. The Spaghetti House was quieter.
‘Love this, don’t you? Love Italian food. Have you been to Italy?’
‘No.’
He had a very fine fair down on his upper cheeks, like the down on a small child’s arm. Grey eyes. He was neither tall nor short. Amiable. Trying to please.
She tried back.
She looked at his rather thick fingers, holding knife and fork, and saw them inside a mouth. Felt them inside her own mouth. She had been to the dentist the last time she had been home.
‘Will you act in the next play?’
He shook his head. ‘Bit close to exams. Maybe the one after that. It takes you out of yourself … out of … you know.’
‘Teeth?’
He laughed loudly, showing his own.
‘What is the next play anyway?’
She told him the options she had seen on a list. Not even a longlist, yet.
‘Hope it’s The Importance of being Earnest.’
‘You as Ernest?’
‘Yes. You’d make a great Miss Prism.’
‘Oh no. I wouldn’t act. I couldn’t. I’d like to direct sometime. Or assistant direct anyway. But anything backstage. Looking on. I love that.’
‘Yes. You are a looker-on, aren’t you?’
Walking to the Tube station, he put his arm round her. He smelled immensely clean. He bought her ticket. Saw her through the barrier and waited until she was out of sight. Nice manners, her mother would have noted. Her mother had always been impressed by manners. Her mother would have liked him.
It was seven stops, after which she had to catch a bus or walk the last mile. She would walk. She wanted to go over everything. Not what had happened but how she had
felt about what had happened, every one of her reactions, for this was as new to her as being born.
The train was quiet. She sat down. An elderly man moved across the carriage to sit opposite her. He wore an old coat and unmatching shoes. She looked at his shoes, still working her way through the evening in her mind, step by step, and as she did so, her eyes travelled up from the old man’s unmatching shoes to his sludge-coloured trousers and to his hands, which were on his knees. The knees were splayed apart and tucked in between them, not quite concealed by them, or by the coat, was something she did not recognise or understand, a reddened finger of flesh with its tip flushed purple. She stared and the man moved his hands and then lifted his head and looked her full in the face. In the eyes, before his own eyes somehow directed her to look down again.
She got up and ran, as the train clattered into the next station. It did not matter which station. She left her bag behind her on the seat.
She did not tell anyone what had happened, mainly because she was unsure if anything had. She had been bewildered and frightened. The next day, the College secretary rang the train line.
‘It’s there,’ she said, beaming with pleasure for the anxious-looking girl with large spectacles, in front of her desk. ‘It was handed in. You’re very lucky.’ She gave Olive a slip of paper on which she had written the address and phone number of lost property for their area.
It had been handed in very early that morning, and everything was there, her purse, student card, powder compact and the lipstick she never wore. All there. Handed in by an old man.
J. Smith. They showed her his signature in the book.
She still told no one, not for the rest of her long life, and after a while the whole thing faded and she simply stopped caring about it.
J. Smith.
J. Smith.
J. Smith.
It was a long time before it dawned on her that this was almost certainly not his name.