What emerged now was the house, and when Françoise saw it, she leaned forward between the front seats of the car and said, “Wow!”
Grandpa Edmund was not (as she had feared) a croaking yellowing thing on a shadowed deathbed, with a heart fumbling for its next beat. He was, first, a voice calling greetings from the terrace above them. Then he was a white-haired, leathery-faced, black-waistcoated man who wrapped his left arm around her while leaning on a walking stick. He smelled of horse and old apples, and the only thing really wrong with him was that he was laughing and crying at the same time.
She grew to love the place, despite the scowling furniture in her bedroom, the peculiar food served in heaps, the sad painting of her dead grandmother that hung over the parlor fireplace. When it finally dawned on her that she was not going home, she was not unhappy.
She learned to ride the bicycle that Edmund had bought her, even though Nicole lamented the scabs on her daughter’s knees. And on a glittering morning in late October, her grandfather led her out into the courtyard to where Magnus, one of his great shire horses, stood waiting, its dappled coat like the shadows on the moon.
Peter, the groom, was the man who had driven them from Norwich; he looked more self-assured holding Magnus’s bridle than he had with his hands on the steering wheel of the car.
Edmund produced a carrot from his jacket pocket.
“Hold it like this, with your hand out flat,” he said. “He’d hate to bite your fingers off. Nasty taste to a horse, young girls’ fingers.”
She did it, daring herself not to close her eyes. The massive head loomed down. The soft clever lips explored her hand. She shuddered. The upper lip lifted; a scoop of monstrous yellow teeth, and the carrot was gone. Edmund applauded her by banging his stick on the cobbles.
“Well done, my lovely! Well done. He knows you now. Very well, then. Peter?”
“Sir,” Peter said. “Here we go, then, Miss.”
And he put his hands under her arms and hoisted her onto the horse’s broad back. Her legs stuck out sideways, like a dropped puppet’s. Peter passed the reins up to her.
“You won’t need ’em,” Edmund said. “Magnus knows where to go. Just you hold on. How’s the world look from up there, young lady?”
It all came to end just before Christmas. Gerard Mortimer had been making inquiries about the local schools. None of them met his standards (which were more disciplinary than academic), so he sought farther afield. Over breakfast on a bitingly cold December morning, he announced that in the New Year Françoise would enroll at a Roman Catholic girls’ boarding school near Cambridge. He extolled its virtues and emphasized the cost. His words meant almost nothing to Françoise. She turned to her mother for help.
“Maman?”
But Nicole didn’t look at her. She punted bits of fried egg around her plate, as though fascinated by the yellow smears they made. Her grandfather would not meet her eyes, either. He bit his lower lip and retreated deeper into the woolen blanket that he was wrapped in. (Françoise had no way of knowing that her education had been one of the many things that her father and grandfather had argued over, bitterly.)
Her banishment changed her utterly. Saint Ethelburger’s was the bleak obverse of the fairy tale: the orphaned, lost-in-the-woods, lonely, and menacing side of the story. The dark stepmothers of the castle were nuns, and they hated her beauty the instant she arrived. Her dark liquid eyes cut no ice with the sisters. Françoise responded to their animosity in kind. She became difficult, truculent, sullen, willfully stupid. Her attractiveness and foreignness made her a victim of the other girls. In less than a term, she shucked off her accent. Still she failed to belong. When she returned to school after her grandfather’s funeral, Gerard had to drag her, howling, from the car.
He made generous donations on top of the fees to keep her there; nevertheless, she was suspended twice, for a fortnight each time. Since this was exactly what Françoise earnestly desired, it was not exactly a smart tactic on the school’s part.
Against the odds, and under protest, she enrolled in the fifth form at the beginning of September 1961. She found herself sharing a dormitory with three older girls. One was an upper sixth-former called Madeleine Travish, and Françoise fell under her spell.
It was Maddie who renamed her Frankie: “It’s rather sweet, don’t you think?”
In the evenings, after prep and prayers, the talk in the dormitories turned, frequently and inevitably, to sex. Inevitably because the sisters hunted down any word or whiff of sex like terriers after a rat, thus guaranteeing it a welcome refuge in the girls’ imaginations, where it bred a host of impure and wildly inaccurate thoughts. Maddie knew a thing or three, though, and had scant respect for the Dire Warnings regularly issued by Sister Benedicta.
“Listening to what she has to say about sex is like, well, I don’t know. Like taking music lessons from someone who’s been deaf from birth. God! Did I ever tell you what she said to me about patent-leather shoes? No? Well, this is true, as I live and breathe. ‘Madeleine,’ she says, ‘you must never go into town wearing patent-leather shoes.’ ‘Why not, Sister?’ says I. ‘Because,’ says she, ‘boys might see your knickers reflected in them.’”
“Golly,” said sweet, plump Veronica Drewe. “I’d never have thought of that.”
Which caused Maddie to roll her eyes.
Maddie had a boyfriend back home in London. He was called Giles. They hadn’t done It yet, hadn’t Gone All the Way, but they’d gone a good part of the distance. Maddie’s detailed accounts of their swoony gropings and fumblings enthralled and horrified her roommates in equal measure.
“Gosh, Maddie, you never!”
“Urgh! Doesn’t that feel horrid?”
“No, actually. It’s rather delicious.”
One late afternoon, Frankie and Maddie found themselves alone, walking back to school along the short and shadowy avenue from the playing fields. They were in sports kit. The wind off the Fens goosepimpled their skin.
Apropos of nothing, Maddie said, “God, I love snogging. I miss it like mad. I can’t wait for Christmas.”
Frankie nodded sympathetically. “Yes, it must be awful. Giles sounds like a brilliant snogger.”
“He is, actually.”
Frankie considered this for a few paces. Then she said, “I . . . When you and Giles. I mean, when you’re snogging . . .”
“Come along, Mortimer. Out with it.”
“Yes. Sorry. What I mean is, Maddie, you seem to do it for hours and hours. What’s actually so good about it?”
Maddie stopped walking, so Frankie stopped, too.
“It gives you the most wonderful sort of a flutter. Down There. Do you know what I mean?”
Frankie shook her head. Maddie sighed. Then she grabbed hold of Frankie’s hair (which was tied back in a ponytail, for hockey) and tugged her face to her own and pressed her mouth against Frankie’s, which had opened in surprise, or possibly protest. And then Maddie’s tongue was wriggling about in it, as if urgently searching for something valuable it had lost among Frankie’s teeth. Maddie’s other hand slid down Frankie’s back, pressing her belly into hers.
“Mnnn . . .”
Frankie tried to push Maddie’s tongue away with her own, which only encouraged it. After this wet battle had gone on for some time, Maddie’s teeth fastened on to Frankie’s lower lip and nibbled at it.
Eventually Frankie fought free, and the two girls came apart and stood looking at each other, breathing hard.
Frankie wiped her mouth on her wrist and said, “Bon Dieu.”
“Exactement,” Maddie said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t feel a bit of a flutter downstairs, darling.” She adjusted her sports bag on her shoulder. “That’s called French kissing, by the way. Did you know that?”
On the first day of the summer term, Maddie walked into the dormitory and tossed her blazer and her beret onto the floor. Somehow the other girls knew and were agog.
“Maddie?”
“Tell us, Maddie.”
She fell cruciform onto her bed.
“I am no longer a virgin,” she declared to the ceiling. “In fact, Giles and I have been at it like billy-o the entire hols. I can’t imagine how I’m going to get through a whole term without it. I expect I shall get Frustration Migraine. Which is an actual medical condition, incidentally. The Victorians suffered terribly from it.”
The girls considered this in silence.
Then serious bespectacled Teresa Candless said, “Aren’t you worried about, you know, getting pr — in the family way?”
Maddie waved a hand languidly. “We take precautions, naturally.”
Veronica gasped. “Maddie! You don’t mean birth control, do you?”
Maddie laughed and sat up. “Birth control! God, what an expression, Drewe. Sounds like something on a spaceship or something. Switch on the birth control, copilot. We’re going in!’ Ha!”
She regarded poor Veronica with benign contempt.
“If what you mean is, do we use contraceptives,” Maddie said, “the answer is yes. Of course we damn well do.”
This was awesome. Venial sin compounded by defiance of the Holy Father’s sternest prohibition! The girls’ shock was sharpened by incomprehension. It was Frankie who asked the question.
“How, exactly?”
After a long moment, Maddie got off the bed and went to the door, opened it a crack, and peered up and down the corridor. Then she went to her suitcase, unbuckled its straps, and rummaged. She brought out her toilet bag, opened it, and sat back down on the bed. She opened the bag and produced a little yellow package, displaying it on the palm of her hand.
“Behold,” she said, looking at Frankie, “a French letter.”
“A what?”
“Giles calls them rubber johnnies, actually, which is rather vulgar, but never mind. The proper term is a sheath. Like what you keep a knife in.”
She peeled the packet open and plucked out a brownish, flaccid, circular object the size of a large coin. The girls goggled at it. Its very presence in Saint Ethelburger’s was like one of Satan’s horny toenails appearing on the chapel altar during Mass. Just to be on the safe side, Teresa crossed herself, twice, rapidly.
To Frankie, it looked like a thin, greasy toffee.
After a pause she said, “How does it work, Maddie?”
“How does it work?”
“Yes.”
“Dear God, ma chérie. Giles puts it on his thingy, of course.”
“His willy?”
“Of course his willy, you goose. What did you think? His foot?”
Frankie studied the limp object. By now she knew a good deal about Giles’s fabled willy, but she couldn’t imagine how the two things might fit together. Maddie read the blankness in her gaze and sighed theatrically.
“Lord love us and save us,” she said, and cast her eyes around the room. They came to rest on the hair brush on Frankie’s bedside cabinet.
“Pass us that.”
Frankie did so. Maddie eased the French letter onto the end of the brush’s handle, where it hung, drooping. She circled its thick rim with her thumb and forefinger and slid it, unfurling it, up to where the handle widened.
The three other girls stared at the result. The oily johnny hung slackly from the brush, with its little nose aimed at the floor.
Maddie sensed their disappointment.
“It’s not like that on an actual willy, of course,” she said.
A couple of months later, Frankie sulked through her O-level exams. The last one was Latin, and as soon as it was over, she went back to the dorm, where she tore off the hateful uniform and cut it to shreds with a pair of scissors she’d pinched from the sewing room for the purpose. Then she dressed in proper clothes. There was no way she was going to lug her heavy suitcase, so she packed a few things into her sports bag. She walked unhurriedly past the chapel, whence came the reedy uncertain sound of Junior hymn practice, and down the drive. To her surprise — and slight disappointment — no one tried to stop her. She shinnied over the locked gates and marched through light drizzle up to the main road, where she hitched a lift in a butcher’s van. She cadged a cigarette from the driver and without much difficulty charmed him into taking her to Cambridge station. At Norwich she phoned her mother from a call box. Nicole was dismayed, though not surprised; she’d already had a call from Saint Ethelburger’s. Sister Benedicta had made it plain that Françoise’s return would be neither expected nor welcome.
Her father ranted at her, of course. She endured it more or less silently. He sentenced her to hard labor, which is how she came to be working in the strawberry fields. And how she came to test Maddie’s snogging technique on awkward but absolutely gorgeous Clem Ackroyd.
FOR WEEKS, SOFT fruits gave them cover. After strawberries, there were gooseberries, black currants, raspberries. Frankie worked her sentence, weighing and loading, stacking the stained empty punnets. And at every opportunity, at increasingly risky opportunities, she would excuse herself through a gap in a hedge, slip into the shade of a tree, amble behind a trailer, to be with Clem. They kissed avidly, clumsily, not knowing what to do with their sticky, juice-stained hands. They did not talk much; they were short of time, and breath. When they did speak, death often cropped up.
“I was dying for that.”
“God, my father would kill me if he knew I was . . .”
“My dad’d skin me alive . . .”
“Wouldn’t it be delicious to die like this?”
At first it was a game; it was a hazardous mischief. But not for long. They each soon found the hot days shrinking into the stolen minutes — ten, fifteen at most — when they were together. Other time became numb.
Clem trembled, waiting in hiding for her. Shook physically. He found these moments hard to bear because it was like being too much alive. His own blood seemed to torment him.
“Yer got it bad, comrade,” Goz said, riding home.
The boys still went to the fields together but worked separately now. Clem’s distraction was proving uneconomic.
“Have I?”
“Yeah. And yer playing with fire. It’s a good job yer so bleddy wet.”
He couldn’t stop thinking about her. It was ridiculous. It was like a mental illness or something. A continuous rerunning of little films in his head. Her eyes slowly opening after a long snog. Tipping her head back to swing the hair away from her face. Pulling a damp strand of it from her lips. The movement of her bum as she walked away. At home, he sat in the living room trying to stop the projector, black out the images. Silently reciting the names of the kings and queens of England until the shameful bulge in his jeans subsided and he could stand up.
Ruth turned away from the telly.
“Wassup with you, Clem?”
“Nuthun. I’m orright.”
“You look like someone who’re lost a fiver and found a shillun.”
“I’m orright, Mum. Bit bored, is all.”
“You usually like this program.”
“Yeah. Not very good tonight, though, is it?”
George said, “Do you mind? I’m trying to watch this.”
Clem checked the state of his lap. He stood up. “I might go out for a bit.”
He spent the nights praying that his bed wasn’t creaking too audibly. Luckily, his grandmother was often loudly murmurous in the nights, praying for something else altogether. Clem synchronized his devotions with hers.
Hiding, waiting for him, Frankie felt angry. Angry that she hungrily fancied a badly dressed working-class boy like Clem Ackroyd. Angry that she couldn’t be with him whenever she wanted to. Angry that she should have to conceal herself from people who worked for her father. Then Clem would step through a gap in the hedge or brush aside a veil of leaves, and her breath would catch in her throat and her whole body would come alight.
Over dinner, her mother looked at her. “What’s the matter, darling?”
“Pardon, Mummy?”
“Yo
u’ve hardly eaten anything. Don’t you like it?”
“It’s good. I’m just a bit tired.”
Nicole turned to her husband. “Gerard, how much longer are you going to continue this farce, treating your daughter like a laborer? She is exhausted. She can hardly lift the food to her mouth.”
“Nonsense, Nicole. It’s doing her the world of good. Look at her. She’s the picture of health.”
“She is too much in the sun, Gerard. She looks like a Gypsy. Her nose is peeling.”
Mortimer dabbed his lips with his napkin, then grinned.
“Very well,” he said. “Françoise, I’m putting you on parole. Time off for good behavior.”
She looked across at him, frowning, not understanding. Parole was French for “word” or “speech.”
“You don’t have to work anymore,” her father said.
Frankie tried to keep her hand steady, lowering the heavy silver fork onto the tablecloth.
“It’s okay, Daddy. I like it, actually. The people are nice. Funny.”
“Françoise,” Nicole said. “What has that to do with anything?”
Frankie forced a shrug. “Nothing, I guess. I just like being in the fresh air. And it’s something to do. I’ll work until the end of the season.”
Gerard Mortimer leaned back in his chair. “Well said. Spoken like a farmer’s daughter, eh, Nicole?”
His wife pulled the corners of her mouth down and cut a neat slice from her veal for the spaniel who sat by her chair.
On the day following this conversation, Frankie did not plant her mouth on Clem’s as soon as they were alone. She did not even look at his face. Instead, she unbuttoned his shirt, silently concentrating, as if it were a strange and difficult task.