‘Spring!’ said another. I took this to be a Christian name.
‘It’s affectionately meant,’ said Spring. She was an attractive girl of honey-coloured skin and thick honey-coloured hair, with a broad grin revealing a zigzag of pure-white bottom teeth. ‘On account of how the late and otherwise lamented Fräulein Fielding was such a one for salad. I’m surprised we don’t all have twitching noses.’
‘German mistress?’ I hazarded.
‘Head,’ said Spring. ‘Well, joint head. And Latin.’
‘She wasn’t really a Fräulein at all,’ said the other girl, a dashing beauty of statuesque proportions with ruddy cheeks and striking pale blue eyes. ‘I’m Eileen, by the way. It’s just that her name was Fielding and what with the Froebel method and all that…’
‘One must give one’s mistresses nicknames,’ I said, ‘I quite understand.’
‘Miss Gilver…?’ said a third. ‘What did your last girls call you?’
‘Katie!’ said Eileen. Katie flashed a devilish smile with a dip in the middle and gave a throaty laugh. If I really were the French mistress I should have to watch out for this one.
‘They called me Goody Gilver,’ I said, ‘because I hardly ever give out prep and I very often give out chocolates.’
‘Really?’ said a fourth girl, with a sweet heart-shaped face and a dark red bob.
‘No, of course not, Sally,’ said Katie. ‘She’s teasing us.’ And the look she gave me showed that she was thinking exactly what I had been thinking: need to watch this one.
‘What a pity,’ said a rather sophisticated-looking girl at the end of our little group. She had the poise of an artist’s model and a profile any artist would kill to sketch. ‘Stella,’ she said, indicating herself with a curl of her hand. ‘If you could have substituted cigarettes for the chocolates we might have been great friends.’ Her cut-glass voice swooped dramatically down on the word ‘great’ in a way that snagged on my memory and something too about the way she looked was familiar.
‘Stella…?’ I said.
‘Rowe-Issing,’ she drawled.
‘Oh, right,’ said Eileen. ‘Rendall.’
‘Warren,’ said Spring.
‘Madden,’ said Sally. ‘Sally Madden. And Katie Howard.’
I was barely listening as the introductions went on, so surprised was I. The Rowe-Issings were friends of ours, or acquaintances anyway – some of our very grandest connections, in fact, always invited to everything and seldom accepting – and it was the echo of her mother Candide’s face in her own which had made young Stella so familiar to me. I looked around the dining hall again. If Basil and Candide were sending their girls here it must be quite an outfit – the odd little headmistress notwithstanding.
‘How long has your old French mistress been gone?’ I asked Eileen. She seemed, of all of them, the best combination of common sense and eagerness to please.
‘Just four days,’ Eileen said. ‘We’ve been reading a play with Hammy – Miss Shanks, I mean – but we’re thrilled you’re here now. In time to help us with our exam prep.’
I hoped my smile was not too sickly. Pearl Lipscott had told me on the telephone the day before that St Columba’s went in for university places for its girls but I had not followed the thought through to its conclusion: that to get into a university one had to pass examinations (even though the fast-approaching end of Donald’s brush with education had been hastened by his tendency to treat three-hour exams like bear attacks through which one had only to sit perfectly still and keep breathing). The tin lid was firmly pressed on any plan to keep this subterfuge going.
As to the hard fact that Eileen’s answer had provided along with the little fright, four days was welcome news in a way, since it meant that I could not have stopped Fleur from bolting if I had set off in a fast car the minute Pearl had engaged me.
‘Exams aside, though,’ Spring was saying, ‘old Pretty-vicar is no loss. She had a mean streak when crossed and it was getting worse.’
‘Ill-bred,’ said Stella in that same drawling tone. ‘Badly brought up anyway.’
I could not help smarting for poor Fleur. She was a little spoiled, it was true, and I had heard her being catty, but I would never have accused her of a mean streak and I could not imagine what she had done to be saddled with ‘Pretty-vicar’. Even without knowing what it meant, it sounded beastly enough to have made me cry if someone used it as my nickname. I hoped briefly that Goody Gilver stuck, before reminding myself once again that my schoolmistress life would be over after pudding.
At the moment we were still on meat and potatoes and I shovelled it in as though gardening, but I noticed that the girls – at least the more elegant ones – picked and scowled and grumbled as all schoolgirls ever have always done.
‘And where did she go?’ I asked, choosing Sally this time to fix with my nearest approximation of a schoolmistress’s stare (wishing I had half-spectacles to stare over). ‘Rather inconsiderate of her to leave at this stage of the summer term, eh?’
Sally frowned a little and smiled a little, unsure what to make of this woman who did not shush their own gossiping but rather joined in.
‘She was called home to care for a relation who’d been taken ill,’ she said. ‘That’s what Ham-miss Shanks said anyway.’
‘That’s what Ham-miss Shanks always says,’ said Katie. ‘The relations of our mistresses aren’t a very stalwart lot. How many have we mislaid now?’
‘Well, science and history,’ said Eileen. She leaned back to let a maid take her dinner plate away and then leaned forward sniffing deeply as another replaced it with a pudding bowl. ‘Steamed chocolate and coconut, yum. And Latin, of course.’
‘And music and PE – although that was just one – and now French,’ said Katie, all the devilish sparkle in her face replaced with a frown. ‘It sounds quite a crowd when you say them together that way.’
‘And no one ever sees them go,’ said Spring in sepulchral tones.
‘They just vanish,’ said Stella, ‘leaving no signs of their passing.’
‘Except,’ said Katie, ‘for the deep tracks of their heels where they were dragged across the earth to the-’
‘Who’s left?’ I said, belatedly realising that no schoolmistress in her wits would sit and listen to such impertinent nonsense. ‘I certainly can’t teach you history and Latin. If Miss Shanks wanted a good all-rounder she ought to have made it clear to the agency. Well, well, we shall just have to see.’
Of course, with this little outburst I was paving the way for a swift retreat back to Alec at the pub but the girls were not listening to me. They were glancing at one another as though the respective totals of mistresses departed and mistresses remaining had only just occurred to them for the first time.
‘I shall mention it to my father when I write on Sunday,’ said Stella Rowe-Issing. ‘It’s too bad, really, considering the fees she rakes in. The Fräulein would never have stood for it.’
‘She’d have said Nein in the strongest terms,’ said Spring, making the rest of them giggle again. ‘Nein! Ich es… What’s refuse to countenance?’
‘Something nicht,’ said Stella. ‘Such a dull language and so ugly.’
There was indeed coffee in a staffroom as I had hoped (once the girls got to making up German words and giggling there was no return to sensible conversation and I left them to it). The serving maid collected me after pudding and led me most solicitously through the corridors to a corner room on the ground floor which had probably started life as a business room – terribly masculine and panelled in walnut to within an inch of its life – but was now the haven of the mistresses and their retreat from the grey-and-yellow hordes.
Despite the wave of departures which the girls had related to me, there was still a good handful of mistresses in there, sitting around in what were quite clearly their personal little upholstered empires, each with a table drawn up close at the side and each of these tables bearing evidence of its owner’s habits and concerns. Miss Shanks’s winged velvet had a lumpy patchwork rug thrown over it and more patches and batting escaping from a cloth bag on the papier-mâché table top. She did not, however, sit down and start stitching, but stumped off to a decanter of port warming by the fire, after pointing me into a low bergère tub chair (which creaked a little but was more comfortable than many bergère chairs I have encountered in my time) and introducing me to a Miss Christopher, a little woodland creature of a maths mistress, and a Miss Barclay, an out-and-out geography mistress of a geography mistress, with tight curls scraped into a crinkled bun, wire-rimmed spectacles and a collar and tie, who were perched at either end of a hard-looking empire sofa in yellow pleated silk with a buffer of exercise books delineating the border halfway along its length.