The summer term at St. Uncumba’s was almost bearable. Although the weather was always cool because of the sea breeze, the monotone grey dispersed and sky and water vied with each other in subtleties of blue and green. There was no more hockey, and you only had to play cricket if you showed promise. Otherwise there was tennis and swimming. Janet played tennis with her usual ineptitude, but because it was not a team game no one minded, except Cynthia, who would become exasperated and then furious and start hitting very fast and very accurate balls at Janet and the game would end. They swam in a huge natural pool among the rocks; the tide swept in twice daily and flooded it, bringing marine exotica, and not always removing them as it withdrew. Janet lost her pleasure in swimming here after meeting a six-foot eel with goggling eyes. On sunny days when they went riding they wore their swimming costumes under their jodhpurs and Aertex shirts; they would gallop along the wet shining sands and then take the saddles off and swim the horses. This was marvellous. The horses trod warily into the shallows; they picked their feet up high and skipped sideways at the little waves. Then as they waded deeper they arched their necks and snorted, pushing their muzzles into the green swell. Their flanks grew wet and slippery. And suddenly with a wild forward lurch they gave themselves to the sea, wantonly plunging, surging, and wallowing. The billows washed into Janet’s face, the wind took her breath, she clung to the mane, elemental air and water, terror and ecstasy. She could die like this and never know the difference, horsed on the sightless couriers of the air.
One day Cynthia announced that she was going swimming in the sea. At the time they were returning from their Sunday afternoon walk, in crocodile as usual, marching along the shore road. On one side lay the dunes, crowned in spiky marram grass, on the other the lonely shards and splinters of the ancient cathedral. The roar of the strong wind almost drowned the distant peals of bells. “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Janet. “It’s freezing cold and the waves are all going in different directions. You’ll be sucked under and that’ll be the end of you. Not that I care, but I’ll get the blame.” “Shut up, you drip.” Cynthia twisted her wrist. “Come on, quick now, into the dunes.” Hopelessly Janet scurried after her; the sand blew into her eyes, her hat floated off down the beach. Gasping and choking, she retrieved it and crouched in the comfortless grasses. Before her lay the flotsam and jetsam of the retreating tide. The sea was swollen and evil. Only Cynthia could want to bathe at such a stupid time. It was like swimming on New Year’s Day or across the Channel, which of course was exactly what she would have in her pin-sized mind. Why couldn’t she just swim to Germany and be done with it? Germany would suit Cynthia very well, she reflected, watching the blonde athletic figure strike through the waves, turning her head from side to side in the absurd mechanical manner demanded by the crawl. Janet herself only floated or did breast stroke, keeping her head upright, well out of the water, and moving very slowly but, she believed, with a certain stately poise.
Suddenly she saw that Cynthia was not alone. Coasting and rolling, a couple of waves farther out, were two round, bobbing heads. As Cynthia turned and swam along the surge of her wave so they swam along theirs, heads turned towards her, great dark eyes gleaming with merriment through the spume. A pair of seals were having sport with Cynthia, parodying her movements, coming in closer. Janet leapt to her feet and ran to the water’s edge; she waved and pointed and shouted into the wind. Cynthia swam powerfully shorewards and strode scowling and dripping out of the water. “What’s the matter? Is someone coming?” she demanded, shaking herself like a dog so that freezing droplets flew all over Janet. “Two seals were swimming with you. Look!” They stared out at the sea. The seals were gone, there was nothing but the whelming deep. “You just made it up, didn’t you, to get me out of the water?” Janet ignored her. They tramped back to the boarding house in angry silence, mitigated for Janet by the prodigy she had seen and Cynthia had not seen.
Chapter Nine
After that summer term all terms merged in Janet’s mind. She had tried St. Uncumba’s in every season, months without end, fogs impenetrable, cold, windy sunlight — and she found it wanting, wanting in human kindness, in vision, in apprehension of the glories of the world. But the raw, sheer edge of her misery was blunted; she had learnt to cope, even to survive, by deviousness, by reading, and, as always, by day-dreaming. She saw other, younger girls become the persecuted quarry; although she was sometimes troubled by a perverse impulse to join their tormentors she never did so. Her reason for this was not honourable; it was simply disdain. She believed that she moved on a higher plane, beyond spite, beyond compromise. She had found a French word, mesquin; this she applied silently and liberally to the preoccupations of others. Her heart was hardened. Leafing through a magazine one day, her eye was caught by a photograph. For a moment, she took it to be a frieze from a Greek vase, nymphs and cupidons stepping through a graceful pastoral. Then she read the caption. It had been taken by a German war photographer and it showed Jewesses and their infants on their way to the gas chambers. Soon afterwards she came upon John Hersey’s account of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She could no longer have faith in God or man. She transferred any religious impulse which might yet linger within her to the Greek gods, who did not even pretend to care especially for humanity or to value its efforts and aspirations, being far too busy with their own competing plots, feuds, and passions. Now when she prayed she stood in darkness, beneath the moon, and repeated her message three times, with rigidly clenched fists and unwinking stare, forcing all her strength upwards to the chilly disc or crescent which sometimes glanced slyly back at her, sometimes reeled drunkenly off into the torn clouds. She was in retreat from the world, in a state of numb and impotent horror. Francis told her that she was a boring monolith, concentred all in self. He was right, she thought, but she knew no way of expressing her state in words, no way of escaping her carapace. The lonely call of an owl, which once had thrilled her, now pierced her with apprehension. Man’s inhumanity to man and beast dominated a world of vicious anarchy and disgrace. Only the trees and hills and the night sky held to their orderly beauty: “O look upon the starry firmament.” She found an astronomical globe and took it to her room; she sat on the floor studying it and she wept. She did not know why she was weeping.