‘Paradise Lost,’ said Eileen. ‘Miss Lipscott loves it.’
‘Juliet hates it as much as the rest of us!’ said Katie. ‘She just thinks that reading hateful boring tripe is good for the soul.’
There was so much about this remark I should have pounced upon, from the casual use of the nickname, past the intemperate language, to the disparaging of the great John Milton, but so panicked was I by the thought of having to teach a single sensible thing about such a poem that I said nothing, instead shooting off to the sideboard, ostensibly to fetch some eggs and bacon, but really because Miss Shanks was standing there and I felt an urgent need to reassure myself. A bit of Scott and Shakespeare, she had said. Paradise Lost was far beyond both my brief and the pale.
‘Exams, Miss Shanks,’ I said. ‘The papers. The girls said they were written and that the upper sixth is studying Milton. I’m sure they’re just teasing the new girl?’ My voice went up at the end and sounded as unsure as could be.
‘Milton, eh?’ said Miss Shanks. She was stirring a pot of scrambled egg with a wooden spirtle and in her black church costume and already wearing a black church hat she looked rather witchy. ‘Well, Miss Lipscott was a one for that kind of thing.’
‘But the papers?’ I said. ‘Do I have to write an exam paper? On Paradise Lost?’
‘No, no, no, it’s written, Miss Gilver. The upper sixth and the fifth form are accounted for. School Certs, you know. It’s just the first to fourth forms and the lower sixth you need to take care of.’
‘Oh!’ I said, standing with the chafing dish lid in my hand, letting the uncovered bacon get cold. ‘Is that all? And do you happen to know what sort of stuff…’
‘You’ve all day after chapel to prepare, Miss Gilver,’ said Miss Shanks. She had finally got the scrambled egg stirred up to her satisfaction and now she scraped a great heap of it onto her plate with the spirtle and left me there. As my eyes followed her back to her place I saw that our little interchange had not gone unnoticed. Miss Christopher was watching me. She glanced at Miss Shanks and at Miss Barclay and back to me, saw me looking at her and finally lowered her gaze as though to spread toast with butter took all the concentration with which she had learned to subject a frog to dissection.
‘Well,’ I said, sitting back down. ‘Why ever Miss McLintock and Miss Stanley left, it wasn’t because of muddle in the organisation.’
‘What?’ said Spring.
‘Who?’ said Sally.
‘You were right, girls,’ I said. ‘The Higher Cert exam papers are written already and safely under lock and key.’
‘Who’s Miss Stanley?’ said Katie. ‘Was she before our time?’
‘Golly, how long have the mistresses being fleeing St Cucumber’s?’ said Eileen.
‘Maybe,’ I said, mentally crossing my fingers, ‘I got the names wrong. Weren’t they the science and history mistresses?’ I looked around their faces. ‘No?’
My ploy worked, as I had thought it would, for who can resist the chance to correct another’s mistakes, especially when that other is an elder and better? They filled the air with all the information I needed, babbling and chirruping over one another like a family of day-old chicks squabbling in their dust bath and, concentrating hard, I caught it all.
The science mistress had been a Miss Bell (called Tinker, affectionately by the girls) who had departed two years ago. Miss Taylor the history mistress, mystifyingly referred to as The Maid, had gone with her; and a Miss Blair, who had taken the girls for gym and music, had left just before an important hockey match.
‘And of course, dear Fräulein Fielding, who died at Christmas time,’ said Sally, her eyes misting. ‘She was the most marvellous Latin scholar, Miss Gilver. Not like old Plumface who just translates battle after battle and makes us draw tables of verbs.’
‘Miss Fielding died just this last Christmas?’ I said.
‘Golly no, two years since,’ said Sally. ‘And a half. And no one left when she was here. Misses Taylor and Bell were pals of old.’
I was rather disappointed in the selection of names – I had been hoping for something more prominent upon which to hang the next part of my ruse, but I did my best, walking to chapel alongside Miss Lovage, the art mistress.
‘The girls seem very fond of you all,’ I said, to start things off. Miss Lovage raised her striking profile to an even more glamorous angle, whether from pride in her girls’ fondness or the better to sniff the sea air I could not say. ‘They seem terribly to miss Miss Fielding and Miss Blair.’ The imposing chin came down a bit at that and Miss Lovage turned to look at me.
‘Miss Blair?’ she said.
‘I wondered if it could possibly be the same Miss Blair I know from my own schooldays,’ I said. ‘At St Leonards. Over twenty years ago now. A little Irishwoman with flame-red hair?’ Of course I had not been to school at St Leonards or anywhere else for that matter and the flame-haired Irishwoman was my own invention, but once again it worked for me.
‘Can’t be,’ said Miss Lovage. ‘Emily Blair was Scotch and Amazonian and what hair she let grow on her head was mouse. Did you say the girls loved her? Who have you been talking to?’
‘Ohh…’ I said.
‘My girls – the painters and sculptors – hated all that. Endless hockey all winter and cricket, if you can believe it, in the summer term. Cricket!’
‘That does seem a little odd,’ I said. We were nearing the church now and I plunged on before we should arrive and have the conversation cut off by song and prayer. ‘Odd too to find a Scotswoman with a yen for cricket. I wonder if she gets the chance where she is now.’ I paused but nothing came out of Miss Lovage’s ruby-red painted lips. ‘Do you know where she moved on to?’ I said but, as usual, the direct question shut the conversation down like a slammed door. Miss Lovage merely stared at me down her dramatic nose and then threw her dramatic scarf back around her neck with a gesture (dramatic, of course) presumably meant to brush me and my question away. I was not, however, to be so easily brushed.
‘Or perhaps she didn’t take up another position?’ I said. ‘If she left in the rush she seems to have…’
‘You are remarkably inquisitive about your fellow man,’ said Miss Lovage.
‘Inquisitiveness is rather to be encouraged, though, wouldn’t you say?’ I replied. ‘As a schoolmistress and a shaper of young minds, one would expect you to be all for it.’
‘A mind which enquires into Life and celebrates Beauty,’ said Miss Lovage, ‘is greatly to be encouraged, of course. But the quotidian minutiae of strangers’ lives has never enthralled me.’
She sounded, as Donald and Teddy say, as though she had swallowed a dictionary.
‘Miss Blair was hardly a stranger to you,’ I insisted, ‘and although she and I did not overlap, as a new mistress where she was an old one, I’m naturally interested in what became of her.’
‘What do you mean “new mistress”?’ said Miss Lovage, quite forgetting to drawl and letting her face fall into its natural lines, without arched eyebrows or stretched neck. ‘Miss Shanks said a French mistress of impeccable pedigree had arrived from the agency.’
‘Oh, she did,’ I said. ‘Incredible pedigree, really. But haven’t you heard? Miss Lipscott is gone. I’m taking over English for her.’ Miss Lovage reared backwards like an adder about to strike. ‘For a while anyway,’ I said.
‘But how can you switch from French to English?’ she said. ‘Which are you?’
‘Oh, I’m a…’ I sought desperately for some phrase other than that – jack of all trades – which had sprung to my mind. ‘I’m a generalist, Miss Lovage.’
‘This is an outrage,’ Miss Lovage said, rather rudely to say the least. ‘Excuse me, Miss Gilver. I must speak to the headmistress right away.’