The Following Girls Read online

  ‘Australia. Mummy didn’t really want to go when they first offered him the transfer, but now I’ve given her no choice, apparently.’

  ‘Australia?’ It didn’t sound any more real when Baker said it out loud, and when she tried to picture it she only saw koalas and eucalyptus leaves. An orange and yellow map showing concentric circles of rainfall (or lack of it).

  ‘Blimey. She didn’t waste much time.’

  ‘She was on the phone half the night in floods. “Transported” she called it. All my fault obviously. Dad turned the posting down a couple of months back,’ gabbled Bunty, ‘but they still want him so she made him ring and say he’s changed his mind and yes please can he have a zillion ozzie dollars and house with pool after all please and they said yes so we’re g-going.’ More tears.

  When would they go? Where would they live? What would they take? Who would they know? What were the men like? On and bloody on went Stottie and Queenie, like it was just chat.

  ‘A swimming pool . . .’ drooled Stott.

  Baker kept her head down, scrabbling under the bench for her tennis shoes. She ripped out the broken lace and began threading it back in a different pattern, awkwardly pinching the frayed ends of tape through the eyelets with the ragged pads of her nail-less fingertips. She breathed deeply, concentrating hard on reabsorbing the tears gathering in the back of her nose, but her eyes were wet when she met Bunty’s bloodshot glance and it was all she could do not to howl out loud.

  As they marched off to assembly Bunty filled Baker in on further details. Big brother Dominic was furious at his parents’ plan to leave the country and Bunty had a bruise on her cheek to prove it.

  ‘All my fault, he says. I tried telling him that I can’t be the only reason we’re going – I can’t be, can I? I’m sure Dad’s got a floozy somewhere, some other reason Ma wants out. Anyway, Dominic insists he wants to stay behind and be a boarder and just doss down with Aunt Marcia in the holidays. Australian schools would be full of grockles, Dominic says.’

  Dominic had unveiled this plan over supper the previous evening and, although his father was sure he’d see sense eventually, Mrs Bunter-Byng had a horrible feeling he was serious. He could be very stubborn. Once the plates were cleared the two children could hear her screaming and carrying on: that Roy had to do something and that she couldn’t go to Australia without her baby. Brother and sister, listening from their usual spot at the top of the stairs, retreated, embarrassed, to their rooms.

  Bunty’s mother had spent her life dabbing a sort of conversational concealer over the ugly fact that she preferred one of her children to the other. She had never hidden it particularly well. Yes, true, she was always scrupulously fair when filling stockings or slicing chocolate cakes or deciding bedtimes or smacking anybody but you only had to look at her, only had to watch her brush back his curly golden fringe with the tenderest possible touch of her pearlised coral manicure, to see that Bunty had only scraped silver in this particular race.

  It infuriated Baker. Mummies were supposed to be above all that. Weren’t supposed to go off in search of themselves, weren’t supposed to have favourites like a silly little child laying out its foreign doll collection in order of preference. Couldn’t the stupid woman have kept it to herself? It would all have blown over eventually, that creepy crush on her baby boy. Love didn’t stay the same. Give it five years – ghastly girlfriends, debts, in-laws, babies – and love could flood in or leak out, curdle, boil dry, evaporate. It wasn’t for ever – whatever the songs said. Any more than you could decide for ever and always which was your very favourite dress or which was the most comfortable chair in the drawing room. Ask yourself again in ten years’ time. Twenty. Ask when your knees didn’t bend any more. Bunty wouldn’t always have come second.

  Founder’s Day preparations meant that Tuesday morning games was cancelled (no sense getting them all sweaty) and school assembly was taken at an unusual lick. There was a rather terse prayer (the shortest in the book) followed by two verses of ‘The King of Love My Shepherd Is’ played allegro moderato by the versatile Miss Batty (the Prizegiving service would be starting at eleven and there was no sense giving them all hymn fatigue) followed by the news headlines. The Upper Third hockey squad had disgraced itself again, and could girls please note that the Biology Lab corridor was out of bounds until the locksmith and the insurance people had made their report (a happy snigger from Baker).

  The hall was dressed to look its best. Every girl wore a blazer. There were explosions of iris and pussy willow in two of the four urns and a strong smell of Traffic Wax rising up from the now slightly slippery parquet. Mrs Mostyn had swapped the familiar purple passion-killer for a very tight dress and jacket in a hideous hymn book green.

  Baker lived through assembly in a trance of misery at Bunty’s news. When she eventually looked up and scanned the stage she saw that the head girl’s rosewood throne was empty – not like her to miss a speech day. Whispers were being passed down the long rows of canvas chairs. By the time the chain of hisses reached Baker’s end it sounded like ‘knicker wiping’ but was, in fact, ‘nicked a white pin’. The surplus chair left vacant by Alison Hutchinson, the light-fingered head of Nightingale House, was under a cloth in the green room and would now be joined by another from the set because Mrs Mostyn had finally spotted the unearned badge on Linda Sprake’s blazer lapel. Nothing was said, the girl’s name wasn’t even mentioned: just a brief announcement that Heidi Dobrowski had been appointed head girl (and head of Fry House) with immediate effect. Mrs Mostyn cut short the puzzled applause and launched into some heart-warming yawn from Gladsome Minds, her delivery unusually impressive. She seemed almost aroused by the gravity of the offence.

  Baker managed to dodge the others after assembly and hid herself in one of the loos in the junior cloakroom, smoking her way through a new pack of JPS, trying to conceive of a world without Bunty. The imagined future stretched ahead of her, a photograph album with captions but no pictures: Bunty and Baker go flatsharing; Bunty and Baker get jobs; Bunty and Baker get married . . . So much of their future was bundled up together in Baker’s head that Bunty emigrating was like a fiancé dying, or being gazumped or having a miscarriage or failing the eleven plus: a whole chunk of your future cancelled. And what will you be when you grow up? People didn’t ask you that any more but, whichever of Miss Batty’s pink folders she ended up in, Baker had never been in any doubt of the only answer that truly mattered.

  Things had to change, Baker knew that. School would stop, parents would die, the man of your dreams might turn out to be a nightmare, an ex-husband, a late husband even (more room in the bed; less mess on the floor). But Bunty would have been a Diorella-scented shoulder to cry on when he dumped you for a dolly bird, been around for a long boozy lunch after the divorce came through, been there to squeeze your hand and pass the hip flask in the first car at the funeral, rung you up when another old girl dropped dead or had twins.

  But not from Sydney. Nobody ever just rang from Sydney. And even if they did, it was only ever thrifty, three-minute hellos, like Spam and Old Mother Spam: fine-thank-you-how-are-you-I-never-interfere.

  The tightness in her chest as she sat curled up on the loo felt like a great big blood pressure cuff, binding her ribs, making it harder and harder to breathe. The sobs gave her away.

  ‘There you are.’

  Baker could hardly see Stottie for tears as the other girl sidled into the cubicle and wedged herself into the ledge of the narrow window below the cistern.

  ‘Bunty’s been looking everywhere for you.’

  ‘I’ll never see her again.’

  ‘Of course you will. Course we’ll see her again. She won’t have died. She’ll just be living somewhere else.’

  ‘In Australia. Might as well be dead.’

  Talking made it much worse. She glared up at Stottie, snotty strings gumming her mouth together as she wailed.

  ‘I don’t want to grow old without her.’

  Anyon
e but Stottie would have sniggered, but Stottie wasn’t sniggering and Baker was too tear-blind to see the stricken look that opened and closed on her friend’s face the millisecond before she patted Baker’s hand and settled for silver.

  ‘She might come back.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. They’re emigrating.’

  ‘No, I mean once she’s left school. Come back here, get a job. We’ll all see her again. She won’t stay there for ever, she can’t do . . .’ Stottie’s certainty shaken by the thought of a swimming pool.

  She made Baker wash her face and comb her hair. Stottie herself was all tidied away in readiness for Founder’s Day and her Lady Henry handshake. She produced the all-important polythene bag from her inside pocket, then did the necessary with the contents of a twist of cling film.

  ‘Hope to God my mum never finds out.’

  ‘Nothing in the diary.’ said Baker, tartly.

  Lady Henry had been planting a tree, a crab apple, and had had to change her shoes in the back of the car. Lady Henry was much in demand. She had few obvious qualifications but she arrived in a Bentley, wore pearls and a hat and her name looked well in school magazines and local papers whenever she presented a cup or cut a ribbon or let tiny crumbs of mortar trickle from the blades of gilded ceremonial trowels.

  The headmistress took the floor, her gown flowing impressively over her tweeds, her blue-black hair held in tight, cartoonish waves by the best part of a can of lacquer, the gas cabinet pong cut with a few dabs of long-fermented Blue Grass. Applause was the life-blood of any Founder’s Day. Dr O’Brien, like Julia (and unlike Mrs Mostyn), had learned precisely how best to harness the energies of four hundred bored but excitable adolescent girls: noise and plenty of it. Like a music hall barker, she began to talk up the delights of their guest – distinguished, tireless charity work, active on many committees, a true Fawcettian and so on – and cranked up a fairly respectable ovation as Lady Henry’s clean navy courts made their way to the platform where she was installed behind a refectory table, its lino hidden by a length of red plush from the drama cupboard and dotted with a burglar’s wet dream of silver plate.

  Lady Henry ran her eye along the table of silvery empties and let off a small chirrup of pleasure as she spotted the largest of the trophies. She simpered nostalgically at the Drama Prize, thoughtfully swivelled round so that her own maiden name faced her. Her smile grew wider at the memory of the handsome corduroy doublet she had worn . . . buskins dyed to match and the spiffy gown Mama had had made for the first act before Rosalind went into the forest. And the applause! Wonderful waves of sound breaking over her. The Lower Fourth had gone quite potty (no second-former had ever taken the lead in the school play before – or since, as far as Lady Henry was aware).

  She idly scanned Dr O’Brien’s list: funny how the same girls tended to win everything. Always had. Games of all kinds were monopolised this year by a Lower Sixth former called Smith who had also won ‘Girl who best embodies the Ethos of the school’. In Lady Henry’s day the Ethos cup invariably went to one of the swots, ideally someone with grade eight bassoon who’d won a place at Girton. The Smith girl was not that type. Lady Henry, who had been introduced to her on arrival, spotted her sitting alongside the dais with the other sixth formers and shuddered with distaste. Julia’s ensemble was slightly less sportif than usual but she still wore a divided skirt. Lady Henry glanced crossly at the veinless teenage thighs, at the tiny blazer plated with enamel pins – they’d give a deportment badge to anyone with a comb these days.

  Miss Kopje (Elocution and Drama) felt her heart sink as Lady Henry placed herself before the lectern. Once in a while you got a speaker who really knew what they were about: who came in under five minutes with an address as dry and bracing as a double gin and tonic, but there was a collective sigh from the whole SCR as those queen motherly peep-toed shoes took up their ten-to-two, viola solo stance. They were clearly in for a marathon.

  Lady Henry, one-time winner of the Mabel Sledge verse-speaking competition, liked nothing better than a few well-chosen words. The previous year, Miss Kopje had asked Lady Henry for her secret at the sherry gathering traditionally held in the head’s study afterwards and Lady Henry (who had a tin ear for irony) confided that her models were her father and ‘dear Winston’. Churchill had very likely given her that irritating habit of emphasising stray words, and Miss Kopje could hear him in those cheesy periods, in that fatal weakness for the triple construction, (‘Aspiration, Application, Dedication’ – you could practically see the capital letters, smell the fibre tip underlining them). One presumably had her papa to blame for the mania for internal rhymes: ‘Deny oneself; apply oneself; rely on oneself’ was a favourite (she’d used it last time she came). Every cliché was her friend. Miss Kopje and Miss ‘Fuckface’ Dempsey (Physics, Applied Maths and emergency Chemistry) pressed knees as the hoary old soldiers limped past: nine parts perspiration forsooth.

  Mrs Mostyn slotted the base of her spine more securely against the back of her chair, consciously pressing each vertebra into the veneered wood, unfolding her shoulders to mirror the square curve of the high back. She tilted her chin to listening mode, her gaze stretching above the speaker to the raised top of Miss Batty’s baby grand. Like everything else in the hall, the pocket Bechstein had been given a brisk seeing-to with furniture polish and a fluffy duster but you could see the print of the great spanking hand that had pulled the instrument from its usual corner, a matt mess on the gleaming black surface.

  Miss Batty, seated at her instrument in readiness for the first hymn, was meanwhile building a mental A–Z of symphonies (with a point deducted for every Haydn): Archduke, Baba Yar, Choral. She was already stuck at K when the speech finally got started.

  ‘It has orphan been said,’ Miss Kopje swallowed a smirk: what a tight, regal larynx the woman had, ‘that making a speech is like giving birth: easy to conceive, but difficult to deliver.’

  Oh dear. You couldn’t call it silence, not with all those farts of mirth escaping from red-faced fourth formers. Their visitor saw at once that she had struck the wrong note. She had culled her opening remarks from the keynote address at a recent masonic ladies’ night, but it played very badly with the Fawcett staff and those parents (mothers mostly) whose girls had won a prize and who were gathered in the back of the hall (only one of them in a hat but that was South London for you). Happily the rest of her speech left the labour ward behind and stuck to old favourites.

  One did best to start with the prizes for dull things like chess and music and the Duke of Edinburgh, Dr O’Brien had found. The chess prize (the glum glance at the book’s cover made it clear that the girl had it already) was followed by the Lady Jane Scott prize for needlecraft, then it was straight into the music certificates. These were so numerous that they were seen off in batches: piano; strings; woodwind.

  Grade Six piano came fairly early in the running order and Baker felt Queenie pinch her arm as they watched Stottie gingerly extract her right hand from the bag concealed in her pocket, then join the queue for her Lady Henry handshake. They held their breath as the prizegiver’s face congealed with shock. The production line – nod, handshake, certificate – stalled for a long moment before she got nervously back into step like a schoolgirl timing her jump into a playground skipping rope. As Stottie clumped down the steps, she looked at the palm of her hand in a pantomime of disgusted disbelief then made an elaborate show of wiping it on her (pre-dampened) handkerchief. Behind her, sundry seventh- and eighth-grade pianists clumped off stage, ineffectually stroking their sticky hands against their skirts. Baker saw Stottie fish the tacky placky bag from her pocket and slip it unnoticed into one of the empty urns beside the steps. She caught Julia’s eye and both managed not to smile.

  Dr O’Brien, who was still reciting the endless list of achievements, frowned slightly as one prize-winner after another had the same bizarre reaction. It looked to be some kind of mass prank. Exasperating. The whole stunt had evidently been undertaken
on far too large a scale for any meaningful punishment. The thing was to establish the ringleaders: make an example.

  The head’s hands carried on passing the squares of card to Lady Henry while her trained eye scoured the hall for abnormal levels of mirth, like a Post Office proof-reader scanning a sheet of stamps for a missing perforation. Nothing as yet . . . tubby little Prudence Compton had just picked up her grade three clarinet. She’d be back later for Most Improved Girl and yet even she, even she was rubbing her palm against the front of her jumper. Most peculiar.

  The prize-passing lark was traditionally broken up by a musical interlude during which the choir sang the ‘Skye Boat Song’ and two thirds of the school anthem (the final verse about ‘mothers of England to be’ had been dropped over a decade ago). It was set, rather cheekily, to ‘Jerusalem’ and the piano had been primed by Stottie to go haywire when the melody climbed to its top note (‘Give thanks for all our school has done’) thanks to the velvety bulk of a long-lost board rubber bunged under the hammer of top E.

  Baker and the Mandies were almost shaking with excitement as Miss Batty made her last-minute adjustments to the stool and shuffled showily with her sheet music. The head, anxious to shave vital seconds from the running time, always cut Parry’s hopelessly florid introduction and so the school song went straight into the first verse: ‘Shine Fawcett Shine’ etc. (The founder was a remarkable woman in many ways, Miss Batty conceded, but she was a lamentable lyricist.)

  The Mandies held their breath . . . Worked like a charm. Miss Batty took an unscheduled bar’s rest to allow the muffled laughter to subside before they got to the second verse but a good half of the hall was still stifling uproarious coughs.

  Lady Henry was scraping ineffectually at her sticky palm with a paper tissue and running through her deep breathing exercises ready for the second part of her address. She had already vowed to give the Fawcett prizes a miss in future.