‘Her sisters?’ said Miss Lovage. ‘News to me she had sisters.’
‘And didn’t she go home?’ said Miss Barclay. ‘To take care of some sick relation?’
‘I think these “sisters” are pulling your leg, Miss Gilver,’ said Miss Christopher.
It was my turn now to stare around at them. Even the girls hadn’t swallowed the stories of one sick relation after another; surely the mistresses did not really believe it?
‘She was fine,’ said Miss Barclay. ‘Just the same as ever.’
‘But can you be sure?’ I asked. ‘You all seem to spend such a lot of time alone in your rooms. Would you know?’
‘We saw Miss Lipscott at every meal, and she was in her classroom all day every day,’ said Miss Barclay. ‘She was quite fine.’
‘And what about the evenings?’ I asked. ‘Did you see her then? Did she sit in the staffroom with you?’
‘We are very busy women,’ said Miss Christopher. ‘We sit in the staffroom when we can but we all have work to do. And none of us nursemaids the rest.’ She had rolled up a piece of bread into a sort of pad and now proceeded to wipe the egg yolk and bacon fat from her plate with it. She popped the little piece of bread into her mouth and chewed it resolutely. When she had swallowed she washed it down with a swig of tea. She really did have the worst table manners I could remember seeing.
‘Have you considered, Miss Gilver,’ she went on, ‘that Miss Lipscott’s sisters are simply stringing you along? They knew what she was and how she lived, but they would rather not know, and so they wring their hands and call her their baby sister and ask – wide-eyed – for explanations.’
‘What can you mean?’ I said. She was spot-on about Pearl and Aurora’s habit of singing tra-la-la and looking the other way rather than face troubling facts head-on, but I was lost as to specifics.
‘Miss Lipscott was a funny one, and getting funnier,’ said Miss Christopher. ‘A great wanderer in the night, always taking off on solitary walks, never wanting any company, never saying where she was going or where she’d been. And so relentlessly gloomy! An oddball and no loss. Tell her precious sisters that.’
‘Wandering in the night?’ I said. ‘You mean sleepwalking?’
‘I mean slipping out after supper and hoping no one noticed,’ said Miss Christopher. She had a particular way of drawing her double chin back into her neck and turning her mouth down at the corners. It was impressive as a means of conveying disapproval, but if she had ever seen it in her mirror she would not have done it again.
‘And yet Miss Fielding and Miss Shanks had no concerns about her with the girls?’ I said. ‘She sounds not to be a suitable example to them at all.’
‘We told you what a collector of lame ducks Miss Fielding was,’ said Miss Barclay.
‘Speak for yourself, Dorothy!’ said Miss Christopher, chuckling again. Miss Barclay, realising what she had said, tittered too. Miss Lovage merely looked pained, and Miss Glennie did a fair impersonation of someone who has looked out of a train window, realised that she was hurtling along the wrong line and was plotting how soon she could get off again.
Miss Christopher wiped her lips and glanced at her wristwatch.
‘Well, ladies,’ she said. ‘As you know, I like to have a good hour to myself before the lesson bell so I’ll bid you all good morning.’ She dropped her napkin onto her plate – not the discourtesy to the laundry maid it might have been had she not wiped up so assiduously with that piece of bread – and left the room.
‘What time do lessons start then?’ said Miss Glennie.
‘Nine thirty sharp,’ said Miss Barclay.
‘As late as that!’ Miss Glennie said before she could help herself, then she bit her lip and gave an awkward smile. It is never the done thing for a new girl to find fault with established routine, I supposed. Secretly, though, I agreed with her. Leaving the girls lolling around aimless until half past nine in the morning seemed rather decadent (and all of a piece with the heated pool and the cocoa). Still, it gave me time to do something useful beforehand.
All was quiet at the little wooden shack on the harbourside, the door locked, the blind drawn down and a cardboard sign proclaiming that not until noon would Aldo’s be open again. I stepped around the side and threaded my way along the narrow alley, then I let myself in at the gate to the yard. If Joe was going to serve fried fish and chips to the masses at noon he would be here already, peeling his potatoes and stirring his batter mixture.
Sure enough, when I squinted in the back door, which was standing open and unobscured by any washing today, I could see him on his stool with the pail at his feet and the knife in his hand, but he was stock still.
‘Mr Aldo?’ I said, stepping inside. He started violently, sending the bucket of water whirling across the floor.
‘Sorry!’ I burst out, flailing after the pail and getting fairly well soaked for my trouble.
‘I sorry,’ said Joe. ‘I lost in my thoughts today.’
I set the pail down firmly on the linoleum again and brushed the worst of the water from the front of my skirt.
‘Sit,’ said Joe. ‘Good to see you. Very lonely here since Friday.’
‘Yes, well, that’s what I came about really,’ I said. ‘I spoke to Sabbatina. She’s lonely too. Very unhappy. I think it would do her good to come down the hill and spend some time with you.’
‘Sabbatina is lonely?’ said Joe. ‘Up in her school with all her friends?’
Only a fiend would have told him about the little space between his daughter and the other eleven girls at her dinner table.
‘Well, sad, anyway,’ I said. ‘I know what you said about her staying away in case your wife came home again, but now that she knows she needs her father’s comfort. You could comfort one another, couldn’t you?’
‘Sabbatina knows?’ he said.
‘I thought you told her.’ I could see from his expression though that I was mistaken. ‘Yes, she knows. Perhaps her mother telephoned to the school as well as to you?’
Joe stared at me for a long time before answering.
‘Perhaps,’ he said. He was nodding slowly and I very much hoped that he was not about to start bawling again.
‘I wish my wife not leave me,’ he said at last. ‘I wish I saw her and her man friend that night when she go walking. I and not this stranger. I knock his head from his neck. I kick him over ten fields with my boot and then my wife is still here with me and my carissima Sabbatina not sad like now.’
It was my turn for silent nodding. He was beginning to whip himself up and I did not know how to stop him.
‘Did he even try? This one who watches and sees and says nothing to me? Did he say, “Signora Aldo, why are you here with that man who is not the good Giuseppe?” Hah? No! Why he not speak up – one man for another man? Or why he not come to me and tell me – one man to another man?’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t a man. It was a girl.’
‘Hmph!’ said Joe, emphatically if perplexingly. ‘So. A girl. A bad girl to be walking outside when the night is dark, no? And a bad wicked girl who will come in here and laugh at me with her friends.’
‘I don’t think so, Mr Aldo,’ I said. ‘She’s a nice sort of girl, really, despite the walks. She works for the police sergeant’s wife and the boy she does the walking with is the constable. Couldn’t be more respectable, really.’
‘Hmph,’ said Joe again. Then he cocked his head. ‘Here is come my potatoes,’ he said and as he spoke a boy in an apron appeared in the yard, struggling under the weight of a sack which looked to be full of pig-iron from its lumpy shape and the trouble he was having with it.
‘There ye go, Mr Aldo,’ he said, letting the sack drop onto the kitchen floor and straightening. ‘One or two wee tatties for ye!’ He stretched his neck first to one side and then to the other and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Joe Aldo leapt to his feet and pressed a coin into the other hand, thanking the boy.