She was drowned in desolation.
She wrote a letter to Hector and Vera every Sunday morning before church; she told them what a wonderful time she was having, what a lot of new friends she had made; she described a game in which she had shot the winning goal. She made it all sound as like Malory Towers as she could. Hector was unimpressed; to her surprise he wrote back saying that she hadn’t been sent to St. Uncumba’s to be like Hilary Dibdin; he would like to hear about her work. Apart from maths, work was easy, so easy that it bored her. She had done it all before, years before, and in the case of Latin and French, many years before. No one else did Greek; she had her lessons alone and these were a pleasure. They also enabled her to miss needlework. She could hardly believe that people could spend eighty minutes hemming what she called dishcloths and they called tea towels, when they might be roistering and revelling through the Attic world. Soon she was to start reading Euripides’ Medea; soon they were to start making cotton knickers.
At half-term Janet was moved up a year and lessons became more interesting. Now she had an excuse for her friendless state: you made a best friend from your own house and your own year during your first term and you stayed together for the rest of your schooldays, a married couple. Naturally everyone in her new form had already paired off. Her status was altered too. Instead of being mad, as in mentally disabled, she became mad, as in mad professor. Girls began to ask her for help with their prep. They were obliged to smile when they did this. She no longer had to give up her chocolate bar; her neat pigtails were earned by a few adroit French sentences. Her feeling of numbness receded. One day as she sat alone on her side of the tea table and looked at the row of complacent unfriendly faces opposite her, framed by the window and the billowing sea beyond, she imagined a great octopus emerging from the waters and floundering up the cliff. In through the window it would burst, fling its tentacles around their necks, and tow them all off, wiping the sly grins off their faces, back to the depths whence it came. She began to laugh. “So what’s the joke, Janet?” “Nothing,” she said, and then, with a new daring, “Nothing you would understand.”
She became aware that there were one or two other girls who were nearly as unpopular as herself. There was Ellen, a tiny, stunted creature who suffered from severe eczema and had to wear bandages which covered her arms and legs and neck. She scratched constantly and gave off a faint odour of putrefaction. Her life was a misery. Janet reflected that Raymond Dibdin would doubtless have wanted to shoot her. She thought of him with hatred; besides everything else, he had ruined Hallowe’en for her. Rhona had seen him being taken to the ambulance. “His head was all swollen up; he looked like a whopping great turnip lantern,” she told Janet. Fortunately, at St. Uncumba’s Hallowe’en was not celebrated, for it was an evil, pagan ritual. Instead they lit an enormous bonfire on Guy Fawkes night and burned a human effigy. How they cheered and clapped as the guy smouldered, blazed up and sagged forward, collapsing inwards, horribly real. “It’s always an anxious moment, waiting for him to catch,” confided the housemistress. Janet watched the figures around the fire. Squat in their winter boots and heavy coats and scarves, they looked like peasants from a Breughel painting; they were intent, mesmerised by the flames, by the pitiful burning figure. A mob, she thought, mob violence. She remembered the organ stop which was called Vox Populi. She wanted none of it.
She saw Ellen’s glimmering, bandaged form away in the outer darkness; she was coughing and wheezing in the smoke, for she also suffered from asthma. “Ellen doesn’t seem well,” she said in responsible tones to Miss Smith. “May I take her indoors?” “Of course, Janet,” beamed the housemistress. “What a thoughtful girl you are.” Janet could scarcely believe it was so easy to escape. Ellen could scarcely believe that someone had bothered about her plight. Clutching Janet’s sleeve, she spluttered her way to the study room. Janet sat down firmly and opened her book. Ellen crouched over her inhaler in front of the gas fire. Every now and then Janet looked up and found Ellen gazing at her, eyes moist with gratitude. Oh God, she thought, I hope she doesn’t want me to be her friend. Ellen had an official friend, a brutal hockey fanatic named Cynthia, the only other leftover new girl. Cynthia called Ellen “Smellen.” Janet felt a monstrous urge to be unkind to Ellen, to obliterate that gratitude and establish her aloofness; but she knew that this would bring her to the level of the other girls; she would be one of the mob. Twitching with irritation, she bestowed a vague, non-committal smile on Ellen and plunged back into her book. A few days later Ellen’s parents removed her from the school; it was too much for her frail constitution.
This meant a worse fate for Janet. She and Cynthia were now forced into unholy union, a union which was to last for four more years. Cynthia was very good at games and very bad at lessons; Janet was the opposite. Each despised the other’s abilities and let her know it. They had nothing in common save their mutual scorn. In grim silence they walked to school together through the windy streets, Janet panting to keep up. On the way back Cynthia would sing at the top of her voice and spin about like a dervish, squealing, her cloak whirling around her, to attract the attention of the grammar-school boys as they meandered homewards; she was happy because the day’s work was over. Janet scuttled along, with downcast eyes; her pigtails slapped her about the face. She dreaded the long cold evening, prep, charity knitting, the gleaming white walls of the dormitory where other girls huddled companionably together in their cubicles, giggling over their diaries. She tried to read, tried to sleep, and yearned for Auchnasaugh.