‘Um,’ I had said in desperation, ‘translate the next thirty lines, girls.’
‘Thirty, Miss Gilver?’ they had groaned as one.
I glanced at the gobbledygook stretching down the page.
‘All right, twenty,’ I said. ‘And keep very quiet, on your honour, please. I’ve just got to slip out and see Miss Shanks about something.’
Thankfully she was not out on the cliff in her underclothes leading a class in callisthenics, or marking worn linen in a cupboard somewhere – I had not forgotten that she was a matron at heart (indeed, perhaps it explained why she was such a very peculiar headmistress, in a way) – but was sitting quietly in her study with fat ledgers open before her.
‘Fielding always used to take care of the accounts,’ she said, slamming a ledger shut with a sharp smack and a puff of dust. ‘It’s Greek to me.’
‘School Certificate papers, Miss Shanks,’ I said. ‘I shall need to have a look at them if I’m to know what the girls should be swotting up – I mean, studying. And if I’m to be quite sure that I’m all set to mark them too.’ I tried to make this second consideration sound very airy.
‘Of course, of course,’ said Miss Shanks. She stood and went over to a picture on her wall – an unfeasibly highly coloured print of cattle standing knee deep in a loch with glowering mountains behind them – unhooked it and set about opening the safe it was hiding with the largest of the bristling bunch of keys she wore at her belt.
‘Now then, now then,’ she said, stirring the papers inside the safe’s modest chamber with perfect unconcern for their disarrangement. ‘School Cert English…’ She plucked a pale green sheet from amongst the mess she had made. ‘And you might as well take the Higher Cert paper too, while you’re at it.’ A pale pink sheet joined the other. ‘Bob’s your uncle and Fanny’s your aunt.’ She lifted a knee to stop a small pile of letters from cascading out of the safe door onto the floor and managed to pin two or three to the wall. I shot forward and retrieved the rest. I shuffled them back into a bundle and exchanged them for the exam papers. Miss Shanks grinned at me, threw the letters back inside and closed the safe door with a clang.
‘And when do you need the papers for the other forms?’ I said.
‘Oh, there’s a whiley yet,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Exams start in late June – along with the hay fever, you know. If we leave the doors open to the rose gardens half the wee souls have sneezing fits and if we shut them there’s always one or two take to fainting. The examination hall was a ballroom, you know; faces due south, and was never meant to be used during the day.’
‘Well, I’d better get back to my girls,’ I said. ‘Thank you for the papers. I assure you I’ll keep them very safe and return them very soon.’
‘Och, hang on to them if it’ll help,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I’m sure I can trust you with a wee question paper or two, Miss Gilver.’ She gave me quite the most twinkling, glittering look I had yet seen from amongst her collection. ‘Oh, and while we’re on the fifth form – I want you to keep an eye on Clothilde Simmons. She seems a very bright girl. Might be worth some extra tutoring.’
‘Has she just joined the school?’ I said, puzzled as to how a girl could have reached the fifth form and only now be tapped as a scholar.
‘No, she’s been with us since she was an eleven-year-old with scraped knees and a lollipop,’ Miss Shanks said. ‘She’s been hiding her light under a bushel, that’s all. Naughty child!’
When I took in the jotters at the end of the hour I paid particular note to that of Clothilde Simmons, but could not see in the laboured and much rubbed-out and rewritten translation – all fifteen lines of it, since Clothilde was one of the handful who did not make it through to the end – any particular glow of brilliance. And leafing back through the pages that Fleur had marked I saw a great deal of red pencil and a progression of solid Bs and Cs. Perhaps she was a whizz at chemistry or something quite removed from English literature, hence Miss Shanks’s prod about the coaching to round her out and tempt a university to give her a place there.
Piers Plowman, happily, was the low tide of that long first day. After lunch the lower sixth took to Macbeth with an almost unseemly relish, begging and pleading to be the witches, auditioning from their seats with much cackling and hunching of their lithe young forms into the twisted shapes of crones over a cauldron. Needless to say, Rob Roy was greeted by the second form like the Young Pretender arriving from across the sea: one girl threw Silas Marner into the air and shouted hurrah at the news that she need not read another word of it, and only the fact that she caught the book again, firmly, by its cloth covers and did not so much as crease a page saved me from delivering a lecture about the sanctity of the printed word in general and school property in particular.
Still, by the time three o’clock came – for such was the surprisingly early hour at which the St Columba’s girls broke off from their short day of study and flooded back out into the grounds to take up their extra-curricular lolling – my head was awash with new names and old stories and my ears rang with piping voices clamouring ‘Miss Gilver, Miss Gilver’ so that the only thing for it was to take myself off all alone into the sea air and try to walk myself back to my own quiet thoughts and some semblance of tranquillity.
Besides, I had still not seen the cliff top along which Rosa Aldo, her fancy man, Cissie and Willie all had strolled on that fateful evening and from which Constable Reid was so sure No. 5 had tumbled, the cliff top which also led to Low Merrick Farm and the inhospitable farmer’s wife who lived there. I was not sure I could summon the courage to follow Alec up its drive – for I, unlike him, could not vault a gate at a pinch – nor was I so conceited as to think I might find a clue at the castle that others had missed, but I could not help looking carefully at my feet and around the gorse and grass as I went along, with the ruin in view and the sound of the wheeling gulls replacing the girls’ voices with their even more insistent cries.
Of course, there was nothing to be found: cigarette ends and flattened places in what Cissie had called ‘the dips’, corroborating her tale of courting couples holing up there; a few scuffed patches at the edge of the path which might have been places where someone lost her footing and fell, but might have been a hundred other things besides, and all more likely. There were no broken gorse branches where a murderer might have crouched, uncomfortably but discreetly, until a victim appeared; and there was nothing of any interest stashed anywhere either, just endless discarded sweet wrappers and matches, orange peels and apple cores as well as the grubby flags of wool which accumulate wherever sheep and gorse share a breezy headland and the equal weight (it always seems to me) of string and twine and sacking which farmers shed like snake skins in the course of their day.
At Dunskey Castle, I sheltered from the wind long enough to add my budget of match and cigarette end to the trove and then contemplated the journey back again. As is so often the case (but not often enough to inure one to the shock of it), turning around and facing the other way put the sun painfully in my eyes instead of comfortingly at my back. It set the wind against me too, making my nose run and my eyes water; gusting behind me, it had seemed a pleasant helping hand, urging me along. I sniffed, pulled my hat down harder over my forehead and looked about myself. There was Low Merrick Farm, a few fields over, just beyond a little railway bridge, and I knew that where there is a railway bridge (not to mention a farm) there must be a road. I had no desire, anyway, to scramble back over the tracks as I had had to do on my outward journey; although the trains, as Alec attested, were slow and few, the average passenger’s wishes regarding speed and frequency are not those of a trespasser upon the lines and Hugh would never forgive me for being killed in such an unnecessary and bothersome (to the railway company) fashion. His sympathies whenever he heard of a body – be it human or bovine – falling onto a line were always firmly with the upset driver and delayed travellers, and there was nothing to spare for the flattened departed.