"It helped the intervals, I assure you."
"Didn't you want to see Othello?"
"Not us! We were dying to go to Irma Ireland's new film-Flaming Barriers. It sounds very sultry but actually, I believe, it's just a good clean forest fire. But my parents' idea of a night out is the theatre and a box of chocolates for the intervals. We couldn't disappoint the old dears."
"Did they like it?"
"Oh, they loved it. They spent the whole of supper talking about it."
"You're a fine pair to call anyone 'heathen, " Lucy observed.
"Come to tea with the Seniors this afternoon," Beau said.
Lucy said hastily that she was going out to tea.
Beau eyed her guilty face with something like amusement, but Innes said soberly: "We should have asked you before. You are not going away before the Dem., are you?"
"Not if I can help it."
"Then will you come to tea with the Seniors next Sunday?"
"Thank you. If I am here I should be delighted."
"My lesson in manners," said Beau.
They stood there on the gravel looking up at her, smiling. That was how she always remembered them afterwards. Standing there in the sunlight, easy and graceful; secure in their belief in the world's rightness and in their trust in each other. Untouched by doubt or blemish. Taking it for granted that the warm gravel under their feet was lasting earth, and not the precipice edge of disaster.
It was the five-minute bell that roused them. As they moved away, Miss Lux came into the room behind, looking grimmer than Lucy had ever seen her.
"I can't imagine why I'm here," she said. "If I had thought in time I wouldn't be taking part in this God-forsaken farce at all."
Lucy said that that was exactly what she herself had been thinking.
"I suppose there has been no word of Miss Hodge having a change of heart?"
"Not as far as I know. I'm afraid it isn't likely."
"What a pity we didn't all go out to lunch. If Miss Hodge had to call Rouse's name from a completely deserted table, College would at least be aware that we had no part in this travesty."
"If you didn't have to mark yourself 'out' on the slate before eleven, I would go now, but I haven't the nerve."
"Oh well, perhaps we can do something with our expressions to convey that we consider the whole thing just a bad smell."
It's the being there to countenance it she minds, thought Lucy; while I just want to run away from unpleasantness like a child. Not for the first time, she wished she was a more admirable character.
Madame Lefevre came floating in wearing a cocoa-brown silk affair that was shot with a metallic blue in the high-lights; which made her look more than ever like some exotic kind of dragon-fly. It was partly those enormous headlamps of eyes, of course; like some close-up of an insect in half-remembered Nature «shorts»; the eyes and the thin brown body, so angular yet so graceful. Madame, having got over her immediate rage, had, it seemed, recovered her detached contempt for the human species, and was regarding the situation with malicious if slightly enjoyable distaste.
"Never having attended a wake," she said, "I look forward with interest to the performance today."
"You are a ghoul," Lux said; but without feeling, as if she were too depressed to care greatly. "Haven't you done anything to alter her mind?"
"Oh, yes, I have wrestled with the Powers of Darkness. Wrestled very mightily. Also very cogently, may I say. With example and precept. Who was it who was condemned to push an enormous stone up a hill for ever? Extraordinary how appropriate these mythological fancies still are. I wonder if a ballet of Punishments would be any good? Sweeping out stables, and so forth. To Bach, perhaps. Though Bach is not very inspirational, choreographically speaking. And a great many people rise up and call one damned, of course, if one uses him."
"Oh, stop it," Lux said. "We are going to connive at an abomination and you speculate about choreography!"
"My good, if too earnest, Catherine, you must learn to take life as it comes, and to withdraw yourself from what you cannot alter. As the Chinese so rightly advise: When rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it. We connive at an abomination, as you so exquisitely put it. True. But as intelligent human beings we concern ourselves with the by-products of the action. It will be interesting to see how, for instance, the little Innes reacts to the stimulus. Will the shock be a mortal one, will it galvanise her into action, or will it send her into crazy throes of galvanic activity that has no meaning?"
"Damn your metaphors. You are talking nonsense-and you know it. It is someone else's rape we are invited to countenance; and as far as I know there is nothing in the history of philosophy, Chinese or otherwise, to recommend that."
"Rape?" said Froken, coming in followed by her mother. "Who is going to be raped?"
"Innes," Lux said dryly.
"Oh." The twinkle died out of Froken's eye, leaving it cold and pale. "Yes," she said, reflectively. "Yes."
Fru Gustavsen's round "Mrs Noah" face looked troubled. She looked from one to another, as if hoping for some gleam of assurance, some suggestion that the problem was capable of being resolved. She came over to Lucy in the window-seat, ducked her head in a sharp Good-morning, and said in German:
"You know about this thing the Principal does? My daughter is very angry. Very angry my daughter is. Not since she was a little girl have I seen her so angry. It is very bad what they do? You think so too?"
"Yes, I'm afraid I do."
"Miss Hodge is a very good woman. I admire her very much. But when a good woman makes a mistake it is apt to be much worse than a bad woman's mistake. More colossal. It is a pity."
It was a great pity, Lucy agreed.
The door opened and Henrietta came in, with a nervous Wragg in tow. Henrietta appeared serene, if a little more stately than usual (or than circumstances demanded) but Wragg cast a placatory smile round the gathering as if pleading with them to be all girls together and look on the bright side. Their close-hedged antagonism dismayed her, and she sent an appealing glance at Madame, whose dogsbody she normally was. But Madame's wide sardonic gaze was fixed on Henrietta.
Henrietta wished them all good morning (she had breakfasted in her own room) and she had timed her entrance very neatly, for before her greeting was finished, the murmur of the distant gong made the moment one for action, not conversation.
"It is time for us to go down, I think," Henrietta said, and led the way out.
Madame rolled her eye at Lux in admiration of this piece of generalship, and fell in behind.
"A wake indeed!" Lux said to Lucy as they went downstairs.
"It feels more like Fotheringay."
The demure silence waiting them in the dining-room seemed to Lucy's heightened imagination to be charged with expectation, and certainly during the meal College seemed to be more excited than she had ever seen it. The babble of conversation deepened to a roar, so that Henrietta, coming-to between her busy gobbling of the meat course and her expectation of the pudding, sent a message by Wragg to Beau, asking that College should contain themselves.
For a little they were circumspect, but soon they forgot and the talk and laughter rose again.
"They are excited to have Examinations Week over," Henrietta said indulgently, and let them be.
This was her only contribution to conversation-she never did converse while eating-but Wragg served up brave little platitudes at regular intervals, looking from one to the other of the shut faces round the table hopefully, like a terrier which has brought a bone to lay at one's feet. One could almost see her tail wag. Wragg was to be the innocent means of execution, the passive knife in the guillotine, and she felt her position and was tacitly apologising for it. Oh, for Pete's sake, she seemed to be saying, I'm only the Junior Gymnast in this set-up, it's not my fault that I have to tag along in her rear; what do you expect me to do? — tell her to announce the damned thing herself?