Love to Everyone Page 6

  There were no open windows or icy breezes in the Miss Pinkses’ establishment. Quite the reverse: by midafternoon the combination of boredom, fumes, and stuffiness was so overwhelming it was all the young ladies could do to stay awake. Often Clarry drifted into a headachy sleep on the sticky tables.

  Peter was right, it was an awful school.

  “Since I went away she’s done absolutely nothing,” said Peter.

  “She sent you all those letters,” observed Simon, “and those two butterflies!”

  “I mean nothing intelligent. . . .”

  “Those butterflies were really clever,” said Simon, warming up his defense when he saw Rupert’s approving grin. “I couldn’t have made them in a million years. And you liked them! You kept getting them out and looking at them!”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” said Peter impatiently. “But I meant she hasn’t learned anything. Before I went away, I used to teach her—”

  “You didn’t!” interrupted Clarry indignantly. “I helped you! I helped you with your homework! Stop grinning like that! Vanessa, Simon, stop it! I did help him! And I didn’t choose to go to the Miss Pinkses’! You needn’t think I like it, because I don’t.”

  “Then why do you go?” asked Vanessa.

  “Because she’s too lazy to make Father send her somewhere better!” answered Peter.

  “I am not!” stormed Clarry. “And how could I, anyway? How can I make Father do anything?”

  “Of course you can’t,” said Rupert, putting an arm around her. “Shut up, all of you! Leave her alone! Clarry can do as she likes. Not everyone wants to go prancing off to Paris. Or boil their brains at university. I wish they’d let me into the Miss Pinkses’! They’d never get me out!”

  Vanessa and her brother laughed and Peter snorted in disgust, but Rupert took no notice and led Clarry away.

  “I’ve got to go back to Cornwall tomorrow,” he said, still with his arm around her. “Want to come with me?”

  “Father would never let me,” said Clarry.

  “Run away, then! Back to the ancestral home in the west! I’ve got money for train tickets.”

  “Just me?”

  “Just you.”

  “What about Peter?”

  “What about blooming Peter? Come on, Clarry! You’ve never seen Cornwall in winter. Come and surprise the grandparents! You could stay till it was time to go back to your lovely Miss Pinkses’ .”

  “I really couldn’t.”

  “You really could!”

  “Rupert?”

  “Mmmm?”

  “I don’t want to go back to the Miss Pinkses’ .”

  “Just because Peter teased you? ’Course you do! Where else would you go?”

  “Vanessa’s school.”

  “It’s all rules and frozen inkwells, according to Vanessa. Anyway, I can’t see you becoming a high school girl, stomping around in a mushroom hat.”

  “I wish you could,” said Clarry.

  Ten

  RUPERT HAD GONE, CHRISTMAS WAS suddenly over. All the brightness was being washed away by torrents of gray rain. Peter was exiled in his room with a sudden and ferocious cold. A new term with the Miss Pinkses was about to begin.

  Clarry brushed her hair very carefully, put on her most tidy dress, sewed up a hole in the knee of a stocking, and went down to tackle her father.

  “Oh, really, what now?” he demanded, as soon as she stopped hopping about from one leg to the other and pushed open the door. “I am a busy man, you know, Clarry!”

  “I know,” agreed Clarry. “But I need to ask you something very important. About schools.”

  “Has Peter put you up to this?” demanded her father explosively. “In any case, the answer is no! The subject is not up for discussion. Peter is staying where he is!”

  “No, no, no,” said Clarry, laying a hand on his arm. “Not Peter’s school. Mine.”

  “Yours?” he repeated, sounding completely surprised.

  “Yes,” said Clarry, and then as best as she could she explained about the handkerchief cases and ancient maps, the headachy oil stoves and the psalms, and Vanessa’s school, across the other side of town, where there were science labs and open windows and—

  “I didn’t particularly care for that girl Vanessa, as you call her,” interrupted Clarry’s father. “And why on earth would you want that sort of education, anyway?”

  “To learn things!” explained Clarry.

  “But what would be the point?” asked her truly baffled father.

  “You don’t mind Peter learning things.”

  “Peter is a boy.”

  “Girls can learn things too!” cried Clarry. “I used to learn a lot when Peter let me help him with his homework. In Cornwall I learned to swim. Why is it different for Peter?”

  “Peter,” said her father, “will one day have to earn his own living.”

  “Well, so will I!”

  “Clarry, that’s enough,” said her father, getting up from his chair and beginning to fold his newspaper very carefully. “This conversation is quite unnecessary. Even if you do not marry, there will never be a need for you to live independently.”

  Clarry opened her mouth to protest, but her father was faster.

  “I’m sure there will always be a home for you within the family. If not here, perhaps with your grandparents, or even with Peter. Someway or other you will be provided for! Now, off you go!”

  He rolled his newspaper, patted her on the head with it in dismissal, twice, bump, bump, and was gone from the room before she could say another word.

  Until then, Clarry had not thought much about the future. Year after year, she had lived in the storybook world of childhood, the glowing adventures of summer in Cornwall, the long dull chapters of life in between, bookmarked in the middle by Christmas. The illustrations for the stories had changed, it was true. Rupert grew taller, sometimes he even stepped out of the book completely. Peter went to boarding school, and when he came back he glanced around the old familiar pages of home as if they held new words. But all through the book Clarry hardly changed at all, and it never occurred to her to wonder, What will happen in the end?

  Until her father’s “Clarry, that’s enough.”

  And there she was! Huge chunks of story turned over in wodges. Whole chapters skipped. Grown up, and nothing before her but other people’s homes.

  Clarry did not spend much time staring at this bleak last page. She rushed up the two flights of stairs to Peter’s room and clattered in without knocking.

  “God,” said Peter unwelcomingly, rolling away in bed.

  “How can I get away from the Miss Pinkses if Father won’t help me?” demanded Clarry, shaking his back.

  Peter groaned and hunched under the covers.

  “You know what will happen to me if I don’t,” said Clarry.

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes, nothing. Forever and ever and ever. Like Miss Vane.”

  Peter shrugged.

  Clarry pulled away his pillow and his eiderdown and heaved at the thin mattress until it slid to the floor with Peter still on it. He seemed to be laughing, or shaking at least.

  “It’s not funny!”

  “There’ll be an exam,” said Peter.

  “What?”

  “For that school Vanessa goes to.”

  “An exam?”

  “It’s miles away. Right across town, near their house. How would you even get there?”

  “Perhaps there are buses,” suggested Clarry. “Anyway, I could walk. Do you really think there’s an exam?”

  “I’m cold. I feel awful. Help me up.”

  Clarry helped him lift his mattress back, shook up his pillows, smoothed his eiderdown, fetched the blankets from her own bed, and piled them on top.

  “Wait,” she told him, and went down to the kitchen, boiled a kettle, and made tea. She stirred honey into it, wished for a lemon, and found one amongst the Christmas oranges. Mrs. Morgan was there doing vigorous things with a p
ile of onions and a very large knife. She asked, “What’s to do?”

  “Peter’s got an awful cold. All shivery.”

  “Hot-water bottle,” said Mrs. Morgan, groping in the dresser cupboard to find one.

  “He hates them.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Sweat it out. There you are, that’ll warm him! Check the stopper and wrap it up in something soft. Father gone out?”

  “I think he might have. He was a bit cross not long ago. What are you cooking, Mrs. Morgan?”

  “Onion broth, with barley to soften it. There’s a pair of chops for your father after, and you and His Majesty who doesn’t like hot-water bottles can have eggs whenever.”

  “Thank you,” said Clarry gratefully. Mrs. Morgan’s cooking was unspectacular and only fairly reliable, but it had kept them alive for a long time now. “Soup will be just right for Peter. I liked cooking that chicken at Christmas. I should learn to cook properly.”

  “Whatever for?” asked Mrs. Morgan.

  “Then you needn’t always do it all by yourself. And we could make exciting things, like at Grandmother’s house in Cornwall. Saffron buns and apple dumplings and—”

  “I often make you a cake!” interrupted Mrs. Morgan, ponderously indignant.

  Rough Cake Mrs. Morgan called it. “I’ll make you a Rough Cake,” she would say, and later it would appear, currants and raisins in a heavy fragrant slab with brown sugar sprinkled on top. Very sustaining. Delicious on hungry days.

  “I love your cake, Mrs. Morgan,” said Clarry. “It’s just the sort of thing I wish I could cook.”

  “I’ll show you, one of these days,” said Mrs. Morgan. “Get off up to your brother now, before we have pneumonia on our hands.”

  Clarry collected her things and went, not fast enough for Peter, though, who complained, “You’ve been forever,” as soon as she opened the door.

  “Ten minutes. Less. I made you tea with lemon and honey and you’re to put this under the blankets. You’ve got to sweat it out, Mrs. Morgan said.”

  “What does she know?”

  “Lots of things we don’t. Peter, what about Vanessa’s school? Do you think I could really go there?”

  “You could if I helped you.”

  “Will you help me?”

  “Yes. Leave me alone a bit to think.”

  Clarry went back to the kitchen and made a cake with Mrs. Morgan. They mixed it in the enamel basin usually used for washing dishes.

  “Goodness,” said Clarry, who had not expected that.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Morgan, “it’s only a rough cake.”

  The Rough Cake was a success and neither smelled nor tasted of washing up. Clarry and Mrs. Morgan gazed at it with pride.

  “What else can I learn?” asked Clarry.

  Mrs. Morgan sighed and gave her a look. “I daresay Mr. Morgan would show you a bit on his guitar,” she said.

  “Oh,” said Clarry. “Yes. One day that would be nice.”

  “For, you see,” went on Mrs. Morgan, “if I was to learn you like the things you was saying, fancy work, saffron buns and dumplings and the like, then what?”

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you, my girl! You’d be down here making them! You get too clever in this kitchen and you’ll be landed with it!”

  “Mrs. Morgan?”

  “Yes, my dear?”

  “It’s not just cooking I want to learn.”

  “ ’Course it isn’t. Nor was it with me.”

  “What did you want?”

  “Blacksmithing!”

  “BLACKSMITHING?”

  “Time was, Clarry, I could have taught you to shoe a horse! My father had a forge, and there was just me and my brother, and he was much younger. And nothing did he care about it. I started off holding the horses’ heads, and then I was on the bellows, and before I finished I could shoe a horse and what do you think of that?”

  “I never knew girls could!” said Clarry, hugely impressed.

  “Girls can do anything, but they’re hardly ever let.”

  “Why did you stop shoeing horses? Because you married Mr. Morgan?”

  “Because my brother got interested in the forge.”

  “Oh.”

  “And when my father died, it went to him, the forge and the cottage with the garden and the two pigs out the back and the old horse and the cart.”

  “How unfair!”

  “And my brother drank it all away and I went scrubbing and charring! But I’ve still a store of horseshoes, put away for special. Made them all myself.”

  Clarry flung herself into Mrs. Morgan’s enormous arms and hugged her.

  “Us girls must stick together,” said Mrs. Morgan, hugging her back.

  Peter’s cold made his eyes and nose run, his head ache, his chest wheeze, and his temper frightful. Clarry dosed him with lemon and honey, Vanessa sent butterscotch for his sore throat, the Bony One appeared one afternoon and visited the kitchen to boil up hot black licorice water, and Mrs. Morgan cooked up vats of mutton soup, beef broth, stewed chicken, and gruel. Despite all this, he was still coughing when his new school term began.

  “I’ll tell Rupert how you are when I get back, shall I?” asked the Bony One, when it became clear that he would have to leave without Peter.

  “Don’t bother, he won’t care,” said Peter, and then, in a moment of humanity, seeing his friend’s disappointed face, “Yes, all right, if you like,” and started coughing again.

  “Poor old Peter,” said Clarry.

  “You should be pleased I can’t go,” said Peter.

  “Why?”

  “That exam.”

  Clarry had asked Vanessa, and found that Peter had guessed right. There was an exam. Vanessa had said, “Oh, that exam! But you could do it, Clarry. History questions. Math. Some Shakespeare, Twelfth Night. It’s always Twelfth Night, everyone says. Scripture. I think that was all. And there will be the forms to sign, of course.”

  “What sort of forms?”

  “Entrance forms. For parents. I’ll go to the office and get them for you, if you like.”

  Vanessa had done this the next day and made the trip across town to deliver them. Now Peter demanded to read them.

  “I was going to show you when you were better,” said Clarry.

  “I’ll have to go back to school when I’m better. Show me now.”

  “Father will have to sign them before I even begin.”

  “He never will. Give them to me!”

  Peter signed the forms: P. Penrose, in his usual cramped handwriting.

  “Shouldn’t you even try and make it look like Father’s?” asked Clarry.

  “No. If you get in there’ll be more forms to sign sometime or other. Easier not to start faking things. Come on, what’s next? ‘Employment of Father.’ What’ll we put? ‘Dithers around’?”

  “No!”

  Insurance and banking, wrote Peter. Mother deceased.

  They both hated looking at those two words so much they turned to the next problem.

  “ ‘Address for Correspondence,’ ” read Peter. “It’ll have to be here. ‘Date.’ There, done it. You can post it. What about that exam?”

  “Vanessa’s going to help. She says Twelfth Night is full of jokes and we can read it together,” said Clarry. “I’m learning all the kings and all their dates, that was Rupert’s idea. I’ll talk to Miss Vane about Scripture, without saying why. Simon said it was bound to be Saint Paul. He said examiners love Saint Paul.”

  “I’ve forgotten who he is,” said Peter. “Don’t try and tell me. I don’t believe in any of them. The only thing that really matters is math.”

  Over the next few days, wrapped up in blankets and reeking of eucalyptus, Peter hurried Clarry through a refresher course of long division and multiplication, fractions, percentages, and angles of triangles. Unfortunately his father noticed how much he got better during this process. He was sent back to school before he had time to instruct Clarry on the areas of circles
. As his train pulled out of the station he leaned from the window to shout last-minute advice:

  “Find out about pi!”

  “Pie?” asked Mrs. Morgan. “There’s pork and there’s apple and there’s steak and kidney, and now and then there’s rabbit, and when I was a girl there was rook!”

  “Rook pie?” asked Clarry, aghast.

  “Dark meat,” said Mrs. Morgan.

  “But what did it taste like?”

  “Cat,” said Mrs. Morgan. “It was very like cat and I didn’t care for it.”

  I found out about pie from Mrs. Morgan, wrote Clarry to Peter, and Miss Vane was perfect for Scripture and Saint Paul. She said her father traced his journeys on a map and marked them all with different colored inks. She showed the map to me. Green and blue and purple. Red for Damascus and black for Rome. Miss Vane said her father was a man very like Saint Paul. They both wrote letters all the time and both were bald. But Miss Vane likes Saint Matthew best. She says he may have been a tax collector but he was the only one who took the trouble to write down what he heard at the Sermon on the Mount.

  When Clarry eventually sat the exam for the high school, the Scripture question was the first she read: “Describe two saints, giving a brief summary of their lives and their contributions to Christianity.”

  Clarry was so thankful that she smiled.

  Eleven

  TWO WEEKS AFTER CLARRY SAT the high school entrance exam, a letter arrived, addressed to her father. It said that his daughter had obtained a place and could begin after Easter.

  Clarry’s father was not a shouter, or a banger around. He was a sulker. His silent anger filled the air like a dark and clammy fog. He kept it up until Clarry was reduced to a hovering misery about the house and a whole week had passed. Then one evening, meeting her on the stairs, he looked at her directly for the first time for ages and said, “I was not consulted at any stage.”

  “Right at the beginning you were,” replied Clarry bravely.

  “I don’t suppose for a moment you considered the extra expense.”