"Do you always bring your own cakes to Sunday tea?"
"Oh, no, this is in your honour."
Nash, sitting on her other side, laughed. "What you see before you, Miss Pym, is a collection of skeletons out of cupboards. There is no physical training student who is not a Secret Eater."
"There has been no moment in my whole college career, my dears, when I wasn't sick with hunger. Only shame makes me stop eating at breakfast, and half an hour afterwards I'm hungry enough to eat the horse in the gym."
"That is why our only crime is-" Rouse was beginning, when Stewart kicked her so hard in the back that she almost fell forward.
"We have spread our dreams under your feet," mocked Nash, covering Rouse's broken sentence. "And a fine rich carpet of carbohydrate they are, to be sure."
"We also had a solemn conclave as to whether we ought to dress for you," said Dakers, cutting up chocolate sandwich for the others and unaware that there had been any gaffe in the offing. "But we decided that you didn't look very particular." As this raised a laugh, she added hastily, "In the very nicest sense, I mean. We thought you would like us as we are."
They were wearing all sorts of garments; as the taste of the wearer or the need of the moment dictated. Some were in shorts, some in blue linen games tunics, some in washing-silk dresses of suitably pastel shades. There were no flowered silks; Desterro was taking tea with the nuns of a convent in Larborough.
"Besides," said Gage, who looked like a Dutch doll and who was the dark head that appeared at a courtyard window at five-thirty yesterday morning and prayed someone to throw something at Thomas and so put a period to the wails of Dakers, "besides, much as we would like to do you honour, Miss Pym, every moment counts with our finals so oppressively near. Even a quick-change artist like a P.T. Senior needs five full minutes to achieve Sunday-bests, and by accepting us in our rags you have contributed"-she paused to count the gathering and do some mental arithmetic-"you have contributed one hour and twenty minutes to the sum of human knowledge."
"You can subtract my five minutes from that, my dear," said Dakers, licking a protuberant piece of butter-icing into safety with an expert tongue. "I've spent the whole afternoon doing the cortex of the brain, and the only result is a firm conviction that I personally haven't got a cortex."
"You must have a cortex," said Campbell, the literal-minded Scot, in a Glasgow drawl like syrup sliding from a spoon. But no one took any notice of this contribution to the obvious.
"Personally," said O'Donnell, "I think the vilest part of physiology are the villi. Imagine drawing cross-sections of something that has seven different parts and is less than a twentieth of an inch high!"
"But do you have to know the human structure in such detail?" asked Lucy.
"On Tuesday morning we do," said the Thomas who slept. "After that we can forget it for the rest of our lives."
Lucy, remembering the Monday morning visit to the gymnasium which she had promised herself, wondered if physical work ceased during Final Examinations week. Oh, no, they assured her. Not with the Dem. only a fortnight ahead. The Demonstration, she was given to understand, ranked only a short head behind Final Examinations as a hazard.
"All our parents come," said one of the Disciples, "and-"
"The parents of all of us, she means," put in a fellow Disciple.
"— and people from rival colleges, and all the-"
"All the civic swells of Larborough," put in a third. It seemed that when one Disciple burst into speech the others followed automatically.
"And all the County big-wigs," finished the fourth.
"It's murder," said the first, summing it up for them.
"I like the Dem.," said Rouse. And again that odd silence fell.
Not inimical. Merely detached. Their eyes went to her, and came away again, expressionlessly. No one commented on what she had said. Their indifference left her marooned in the moment.
"I think it's fun to show people what we can do," she added, a hint of defence in her tone.
They let that pass too. Never before had Lucy met that negative English silence in its full perfection; in its full cruelty. Her own edges began to curl up in sympathy.
But Rouse was less easily shrivelled. She was eyeing the plates before her, and putting out her hand for something to eat. "Is there any tea left in the pot?" she asked.
Nash bent forward to the big brown pot, and Stewart took up the talk from where the Disciples had left it.
"What really is murder is waiting to see what you pull out of the Post lottery."
"Post?" said Lucy. "You mean jobs? But why a lottery? You know what you apply for, surely?"
"Very few of us need to apply," Nash explained, pouring very black tea. "There are usually enough applications from schools to go round. Places that have had Leys gymnasts before just write to Miss Hodge when they have a vacancy and ask her to recommend someone. If it happens to be a very senior or responsible post, she may offer it to some Old Student who wants a change. But normally the vacancies are filled from Leaving Students."
"And a very fine bargain they get," said a Disciple.
"No one works so hard as a First-Poster does," said a second.
"For less money," supplemented a third.
"Or with a better grace," said a fourth.
"So you see," Stewart said, "the most agonising moment of the whole term is when you are summoned to Miss Hodge's room and told what your fate is going to be."
"Or when your train is pulling out of Larborough and you haven't been summoned at all!" suggested Thomas, who evidently had visions of being engulfed, jobless, by her native mountains again.
Nash sat back on her heels and smiled at Lucy. "It is not nearly as grim as it sounds. Quite a few of us are provided for already and so are not in the competition at all. Hasselt, for instance, is going back to South Africa to work there. And the Disciples en masse have chosen medical work."
"We are going to start a clinic in Manchester," explained one.
"A very rheumaticky place."
"Full of deformities."
"And brass"-supplemented the other three automatically.
Nash smiled benevolently on them. "And I am going back to my old school as Games Coach. And the Nut-and Desterro, of course, doesn't want a post. So there aren't so many of us to find places for."
"I won't even be qualified if I don't go back to the liver pretty soon," Thomas said, her beady brown eyes blinking in the sun. "What a way to spend a summer evening."
They shifted their positions lazily, as if in protest, and fell to chatter again. But the reminder pricked them, and one by one they began to gather up their belongings and depart, trailing slowly across the sunlit grass like disconsolate children. Until presently Lucy found herself alone with the smell of the roses, and the murmur of insects, and the hot shimmer of the sunlit garden.
For half an hour she sat, in great beatitude, watching the slow shadow of the tree creep out from her feet. Then Desterro came back from Larborough; strolling slowly up the drive with a Rue de la Paix elegance that was odd after Lucy's hour of tumbled youth at tea. She saw Miss Pym, and changed her direction.
"Well," she said, "did you have a profitable afternoon?"
"I wasn't looking for profit," said Lucy, faintly tart. "It was one of the happiest afternoons I have ever spent."
The Nut Tart stood contemplating her.
"I think you are a very nice person," she said irrelevantly, and moved away, leisurely, to the house.