The Exiles in Love Read online

  ‘What does RIP stand for?’ she enquired.

  ‘Riddled in Parasites,’ Naomi told her, and the funeral degenerated into an invigorating fight. Ruth set off for the school bus in the highest of spirits and was totally unprepared for what followed. She climbed up the steps, all set to break the bad news that the hedgehog was dead and the good news that he was already successfully buried in a very pleasant spot, and found that she could not speak.

  Nor could she move. Or think. She stood rooted, with Naomi and Martin queuing impatiently behind her, while she stared idiotically into the bus driver’s face. He had black curly hair and a slightly broken front tooth. He had a small star tattooed on one cheek.

  He looked annoyed.

  Ruth stood there.

  He raised his eyes to Heaven and held out his hand for her bus pass. He had a plaster on his thumb and a heavy gold ring shaped like a snake. Ruth was conscious of a horrible hotness about her face and knew that she was blushing, a problem that usually only troubled her when she told enormous, immediately detectable lies. Naomi poked her hard in the back and she realised they were all waiting for something.

  ‘Pass?’ snapped the driver.

  Ruth nodded thankfully and stumbled to the nearest seat.

  ‘PASS!’ yelled the driver again and Naomi pushed forward, took it from Ruth’s unresisting fingers and handed it back to him.

  ‘Her hedgehog died,’ she told him, by way of explanation.

  It seemed to Ruth that the world must have suddenly stopped spinning. Now it began again, and she found herself once more and knew what had happened.

  I have fallen in love, she wrote, facing facts, in her diary that night. With someone. The bus driver. Written down it looked as stark as a death sentence. He was nice about the hedgehog, she continued, trying to soften the blow. I don’t know his name and I can’t remember what he looks like. Except for a broken tooth. And a tattoo. And a ring. I have started reading Jane Eyre, she added thankfully, sighing with relief to get on to familiar bookish ground again. Burnt porridge isn’t half as bad as she makes out.

  It was terribly inconvenient, being in love with the bus driver. Ruth had always found getting off to school each morning difficult enough as it was, and now it was much, much worse. It started with a dreadful feeling of numbness the moment she awoke, which gradually increased as the time approached when she must stand face to face with the object of her passion and hand over her bus pass. That was the point of extreme stress. It always seemed to go on for hours and only ended when Naomi shoved her in the back and made rude remarks from the step behind. Then, crimson-faced and with a pounding heart, Ruth would move forward and slowly begin to return to life. At the end of the day the whole nerve-racking process had to be gone through again. It seemed to Ruth that the words

  IN LOVE WITH THE BUS DRIVER

  must be painted across her forehead, and the only comfort was the fact that they were not.

  Nobody around her, not even Naomi, appeared to have recognised her symptoms. Other people on the bus made rude remarks about dead hedgehogs, but none about being paralysed by love. The bus driver was slightly curious about her behaviour.

  ‘Some sort of punk revival is it, then?’ he asked slightly wistfully on the second day of the affair.

  ‘What?’ asked Naomi, prodding her sister into a seat.

  ‘This dead-hedgehog-girl thing I keep hearing?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Naomi. ‘No. No, it was just a hedgehog that died under her bed, that’s all. Sorry,’ she added, seeing the disappointment on the driver’s face.

  He shrugged his shoulders and went back to his long silences and Ruth escaped for a while with Jane Eyre, who seemed to be as obsessed with food as her sister Rachel.

  Nobody has guessed, she wrote in her diary that night. I don’t think. Although Wendy did say in the middle of nothing that she thought he was looking sad. The bus driver. You can get tattoos removed but it leaves scars. It says something else on his arm that I can’t read. It is all upside down and hairy. Helen Burns is dying at Jane Eyre’s school but Jane hasn’t noticed.

  Jane Eyre soon stopped being such a comforting escape. Forty pages after Jane hadn’t noticed the illness of poor Helen, Mr Rochester arrived, tumbling from his horse at her undeserving feet and Ruth, still reeling from the effects of the school bus driver, was flattened once more.

  This is it again, she thought. Two at once: I’m a bigamist, or is it ambidextrous? What happens in the end? She turned feverishly to the back of the book to find out. There he was, burned, blind, and grovelling to the unspeakable Jane. She ransacked the pages to see how this could possibly have come about and discovered the mad woman in the attic, Grace Pool the drunken nurse, and the money-grubbing Blanche. And poor majestic Mr Rochester; Jane had abandoned him solely because he was unfortunate enough to possess a wife already. Here she was, pages and pages later, stealing cold porridge from the mouths of honest pigs.

  ‘Ruth!’ said Naomi urgently from behind. ‘RUTH! Wake up! Give him your bus pass!’

  ‘Who?’ asked Ruth vaguely. ‘Who?’

  ‘The driver!’ hissed Naomi.

  Ruth fumbled her way out of her daze and back into life again. The bus driver gave her a stare of heart-melting indifference.

  That was what it was like for Ruth, the first week of being in love. She gave up sleep in favour of Mr Rochester’s sardonic charms, and no sooner had morning arrived than the distant sound of the bus’s diesel engine was blowing her mind.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was late spring: a time of miracles, dandelions on every patch of green, a rumour of tadpoles in the ditches, and somebody had heard a cuckoo call. At Rachel and Phoebe’s school, plans for the celebration of May Day were in progress. A new May Queen would be appointed. Nominations were already being taken for the throne. There was a box in the entrance hall in which you could drop your friend’s name, beside a pile of little cards waiting to be filled in:

  I should like to nominate my friend

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  to be May Queen

  Because they are . . . . . . . . . . . and . . . . . . . . . . .

  Rachel looked the box longingly, every time she passed.

  ‘Would you like it to be you?’ she asked Phoebe.

  ‘No,’ said Phoebe.

  ‘I should like it to be me,’ said Rachel.

  Phoebe stared at her sister in surprise. Only for a few minutes in the morning did Rachel look presentable. Usually by the time she got downstairs she was beginning to come undone. For the rest of the day she looked as though she was falling apart, rather like a toy that has been played with by dozens of grubby children for years and years. Right now her hair was straggling in all directions from the remains of a fat brown plait, her clothes hung in grubby bunches, her nails were bitten, black-edged elastoplast drooped from both knees, and she was walking with a curious, heaving gait, due to a large lump of chewing gum stuck on the sole of one shoe.

  ‘Oh, I should like it to be me!’ said Rachel wistfully.

  ‘Would you really?’

  ‘With a crown and a throne and wings.’

  ‘Not wings,’ said Phoebe firmly. ‘That’s God. You’re getting mixed up.’

  ‘Riding on a lorry round the playground.’

  ‘Milk-float,’ corrected Phoebe. ‘The triplets’ dad’s milk-float.’

  ‘With flowers in my hair,’ continued Rachel, stooping to gather a bunch of fallen blossom as they passed beneath a cherry tree. ‘Like these.’

  ‘They’re dead,’ said Phoebe.

  ‘They’re not. They’re hardly trodden on. Does that look right? Or not?’

  ‘Not,’ said Phoebe.

  Rachel’s smile turned upside down and she began to sniff.

  ‘Put them a bit higher,’ said Phoebe, giving up, ‘then they will.’

  It was hard for Phoebe to be a super sleuth detective all the time; she was only eight years old and, despite her best efforts, every now
and then her human side broke through. She had a system of secret message hiding places in which she squirrelled away occasional observations and speculations on life. The following day a new piece of information was added to the collection.

  ‘I rote down racHel for may quene’ recorded Phoebe (as usual not bothering to turn it into code because very few people could read her writing anyway). She heard Rachel’s footsteps on the stairs just as she finished, and hurriedly posted it in her latest hiding place, under a corner of the bedroom carpet.

  Mrs Conroy had known about the hiding places for some time, but had always nobly resisted the temptation to look. However, the May Queen intelligence almost disappeared inside the vacuum cleaner before she saw it; she caught it just in time and noticed Rachel’s name at once.

  Dear little Phoebe, she thought when she had smoothed it out and read its contents. and she replaced it carefully on the square of floorboards where Phoebe had written:

  PRIVAT

  and smiled because this was exactly the way she had always dreamed of her daughters behaving.

  ‘Like proper little girls,’ she told her mother when she telephoned her that night.

  ‘Don’t raise your hopes too high,’ warned Big Grandma. ‘Fond though I am of Rachel, she does not strike me as May Queen material. Far from it, I should say! But it’s nice to know you’re pleased with them. And while you’re thinking positively . . .’

  ‘I must do something about Rachel’s hair.’

  ‘Cut it off!’ said Big Grandma, who always thought everyone should have their hair chopped off. ‘You’re not listening. I have an idea to put to you.’

  ‘I can’t cut it off. She won’t hear of it. She wants to grow it long enough to sit on!’

  ‘Or dangle out of the window,’ said Big Grandma. ‘They’re growing up now, even Rachel. And you’re right, you must do something about her hair! If it’s not all tangled up with chewing gum, she’s using it like a handkerchief. In fact, it’s about time they acquired a bit of je ne sais quoi! And, speaking of which, do you remember those summers we spent in France when you were a child, after your father died?’

  ‘We can’t possibly afford to take the girls abroad this summer,’ said Mrs Conroy in alarm.

  ‘I know you can’t. I wasn’t going to suggest it. But do you remember Brittany? And the little stone house in Monsieur Carodoc’s apple orchard?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And Julie Carodoc, who you played with? You know, we always kept in touch.’

  ‘You and Julie?’

  ‘Monsieur Carodoc and I . . .’

  ‘Really, Mother!’ Mrs Conroy exclaimed suddenly.

  ‘Well, why shouldn’t we have done? Charles and I were very good friends. I value my friends.’

  ‘Even so . . .’

  ‘Do listen,’ said Big Grandma, so pleadingly that for the next few minutes Mrs Conroy did listen, only interrupting with such remarks as, ‘Impossible!’ and, ‘As if I hadn’t enough to do!’ and, ‘Where could he possibly sleep?’ All of which Big Grandma completely ignored.

  ‘And how are Naomi and Ruth?’ she asked, when Mrs Conroy’s last ‘Impossible!’ seemed to have been uttered. ‘Have they followed Rachel and Phoebe’s example? Are they also behaving like proper little girls at last?’

  Mrs Conroy was forced to admit that this was unfortunately not the case.

  ‘Ruth has been dopier than ever since she brought home that last hedgehog that died under her bed,’ she told Big Grandma, ‘and I’m afraid Naomi has started writing poetry. As if reading it wasn’t bad enough . . .’

  ‘What is it like?’

  ‘Very gloomy.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Big Grandma ominously. ‘Well, think about my suggestion. Please. It would be so good for the girls.’

  ‘All very well!’ began Mrs Conroy.

  ‘And mean such a lot to me.’

  Darkest of trees, the bitter ash

  Bows stricken by the lightning flash

  And all about the woodland track

  Fallen leaves are withered black.

  wrote Naomi. She was writing a lot of poetry these days, and all of it hopelessly bleak. Naomi had fallen in love. The temporary English teacher had arrived.

  He had come straight from college, but as far as Naomi was concerned, he might have been straight from Mount Olympus. On his first morning he sauntered into the classroom, opened all the windows and glanced contemptuously at the register.

  ‘Had we but world enough and time,’ he remarked and tossed it to Naomi.

  ‘Andrew Marvell,’ said Naomi, already completely lost to this dazzling combination of anarchy, poetry and oxygen.

  He stared at her in surprise. Surely she was a girl. She was certainly wearing a skirt. Perhaps this was one of those amazingly broad-minded schools one read about in the Guardian. (It certainly hadn’t struck him that way at the interview.) Or perhaps he had hit upon a rebel already.

  ‘Well, fill it in, then, er . . . Andrew,’ he replied cheerfully, and with that he pulled a book from his pocket, settled himself down on the teacher’s desk with his feet resting on the chair, and began to read aloud from Henry V, which was not on the syllabus.

  It was an astonishing performance. Nobody in the class had ever heard anything like it before. And his voice was amazing; his audience – who, on hearing of his youth, had fondly expected to eat him alive – sat reeling while the words dropped like blows. It was like being forced to listen while someone banged an enormous gong over your head. When he stopped speaking they found there was still ringing in their ears.

  ‘That’s the bell,’ he said. ‘Off you pop. We live to fight another day. What did you think?’

  There was no one left to answer except Naomi, who had just discovered that she had filled in the register with nobody absent until the end of term (which would certainly be the case if all his performances were as spectacular as his first).

  ‘Trite,’ replied Naomi, to pay him back for thinking she was Andrew Marvell.

  ‘Half-right,’ he said taking the register. ‘Trite but fantastic. You’re not a boy, are you?’

  ‘No,’ said Naomi.

  Big Grandma telephoned again.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘As a favour to me.’

  It was not like Big Grandma to ask for favours.

  ‘Say, yes,’ urged Mr Conroy, when he and his wife discussed her suggestion that evening. ‘Why not? It’s not as if you didn’t know the family.’

  ‘A long time ago,’ remarked his wife.

  ‘Not that long. And it’s not often she asks for anything. And look at all she’s done for our girls! Having them to stay. Rushing here to help out!’

  ‘Julie Carodoc was a nice girl,’ admitted Mrs Conroy. ‘And those summers on the farm in France were lovely. I shall never forget them. Perhaps that’s what she’s remembering too.’

  ‘What else could it be?’ asked Mr Conroy.

  At school the Temporary English teacher continued to dumbfound his classes at full volume, reading aloud whatever he happened to grab from the English literature stock-room on his way up the stairs. Naomi’s class were swept straight from Agincourt into the middle of a Cotswold winter, and no sooner had Cider with Rosie been gutted and slung back on the shelves than they were in Alabama, America, passionately not killing mockingbirds. And then, before they had time to catch their breath, the cherry was once again being hung with snow. He had an unnerving habit of zigzagging backwards and forward through the texts without bothering to explain his sudden leaps to his listeners, so they were left with a feeling of being hurled through a random assortment of time. Once, during a pause for breath, someone dared to ask, ‘What is it all about?’

  ‘What is what all about?’ asked the Temporary English teacher irritably.

  ‘All this poetry and shouting and stuff.’

  ‘Stuff!’ roared the Temporary English teacher. ‘It’s English literature! And for homework tonight you can all of you write me a list of ever
ything you have ever read. Stop groaning! I shall use it as a guide to your level of intelligence, so it had better be comprehensive. There’s the bell. Go home. Has anyone filled in the register?’

  ‘I filled it in last week,’ Naomi told him. ‘I filled all of us in till the end of term.’

  ‘Have you got second sight or something?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Naomi, ‘but I expect we’ll all be there.’

  ‘And do you wonder what all this “stuff” is about?’

  ‘Of course not,’ replied Naomi truthfully. She alone in the class had the advantage of already having read the contents of the English stock-room, and she said again, scornfully, ‘Of course not!’

  The temporary English teacher looked hard at Naomi. ‘You remind me of someone,’ he told her, and left the room.

  At Rachel and Phoebe’s junior school, May Queen fever was hotting up. Phoebe had influence and she called on her friends to help.

  ‘Put my sister.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I said so.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Because she’s desperate.’

  Desperate was a hard word to spell.

  I should like to nominate my friend

  . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  to be May Queen

  Because they are . . . . . . . . . . . and . . . . .

  . . . . . .

  wrote quite a number of Phoebe’s obliging friends.

  The list of the ten people with the most nominations was posted on the notice-board at the end of the week. Rachel read it, and it seemed as if the ground lurched beneath her feet. The hair on the back of her neck stood up and her skin became icy cold.

  As soon as she could, she stole the list for herself.

  It was the most momentous thing that had ever happened to her. It was like being offered a fresh start in a new life, a chance to be someone other than grubby, plodding Rachel, the girl with the three clever sisters. She pored over the list until it dropped to pieces in her warm, sticky hands, and she wondered constantly which intelligent admirers had caused her to be included. It would have broken her heart to know that it was Phoebe. Fortunately Phoebe (although already bored to howling point by the subject of May Queens and deeply regretting her moment of weakness) was not a secret girl sleuth for nothing and could keep a secret.