Saint Valentine is impartial in his favours, and not only the young and beautiful were kept busy opening their cards this morning. Miranda as usual had a drawer of her wardrobe filled with lace-trimmed pledges of affection, although Baby Jonnie’s home-grown cupid and row of pencilled kisses, addressed from Queensland in her father’s large loving hand, held pride of place on the marble mantelpiece. Edith Horton, plain as a frog, had smugly accounted for at least eleven, and even little Miss Lumley had produced at the breakfast table a card with a bilious looking dove bearing the inscription I ADORE THEE EVER. A statement presumably coming from the drab unspeakable brother who had called on his sister last term. Who else, reasoned the budding girls, would adore the myopic junior governess, eternally garbed in brown serge and flat-heeled shoes?
‘He is fond of her,’ said Miranda, ever charitable. ‘I saw them kissing goodbye at the hall door.’
‘But darling Miranda – Reg Lumley is such a dreary creature!’ laughed Irma, characteristically shaking out blue-black curls and idly wondering why the school straw hat was so unbecoming. Radiantly lovely at seventeen, the little heiress was without personal vanity or pride of possession. She loved people and things to be beautiful, and pinned a bunch of wildflowers into her coat with as much pleasure as a breathtaking diamond brooch. Sometimes just to look at Miranda’s calm oval face and straight corn-yellow hair gave her a sharp little stab of pleasure. Darling Miranda now gazing dreamily out at the sunlit garden. ‘What a wonderful day! I can hardly wait to get out into the country!’
‘Listen to her, girls! Anyone would think that Appleyard College was in the Melbourne slums!’
‘Forests,’ said Miranda, ‘with ferns and birds . . . like we have at home.’ ‘And spiders,’ Marion said. ‘I only wish someone had sent me a map of the Hanging Rock for a Valentine, I could have taken it to the picnic.’ Irma was forever being struck by the extraordinary notions of Marion Quade and now wanted to know whoever wanted to look at maps at a picnic?
‘I do,’ Marion truthfully said. ‘I always like to know exactly where I am.’ Reputed to have mastered Long Division in the cradle, Marion Quade had spent the greater part of her seventeen years in the relentless pursuit of knowledge. Small wonder that with her thin intelligent features, sensitive nose that appeared to be always on the scent of something long awaited and sought, and thin swift legs, she had come to resemble a greyhound.
The girls began discussing their Valentines. ‘Somebody had the nerve to send Miss McCraw a card on squared paper, covered with little sums,’ said Rosamund. Actually this card had been the inspired gesture of Irish Tom, egged on by Minnie the housemaid, for a lark. The forty-five-year-old purveyor of higher mathematics to the senior girls had received it with dry approval, figures in the eyes of Greta McCraw being a good deal more acceptable than roses and forget-me-nots. The very sight of a sheet of paper dotted over with numerals gave her a secret joy; a sense of power, knowing how with a stroke or two of a pencil they could be sorted out, divided, multiplied, re-arranged to miraculous new conclusions. Tom’s Valentine, though he never knew it, was a success. His choice for Minnie was a bleeding heart embedded in roses and obviously in the last stages of a fatal disease. Minnie was enchanted, as was Mademoiselle with an old French print of a solitary rose. Thus Saint Valentine reminded the inmates of Appleyard College of the colour and variety of love.
Mademoiselle de Poitiers, who taught dancing and French conversation and attended to the boarders’ wardrobes, was bustling about in a fever of delighted anticipation. Like her charges she wore a simple muslin dress in which she contrived to look elegant by the addition of a wide ribbon belt and shady straw hat. Only a few years older than some of the senior boarders, she was equally enchanted at the prospect of escaping from the suffocating routine of the College for a whole long summer day, and ran here and there amongst the girls assembling for a final roll call on the front verandah.
‘Depêchez-vous, mes enfants, depêchez-vous. Tais-toi, Irma,’ chirped the light canary voice of Mademoiselle, for whom la petite Irma could do no wrong. The girl’s voluptuous little breasts, her dimples, full red lips, naughty black eyes and glossy black ringlets, were a continual source of aesthetic pleasure. Sometimes in the dingy schoolroom the Frenchwoman, brought up amongst the great European galleries, would look up from her desk and see her against a background of cherries and pineapples, cherubs and golden flagons, surrounded by elegant young men in velvets and satins. . . . ‘Tais-toi, Irma . . . Miss McCraw vient d’arriver.’ A gaunt female figure in a puce-coloured pelisse was emerging from the outdoor ‘dunnie’, an earth-closet reached by a secluded path edged with begonias. The governess walked at her usual measured pace, uninhibited as Royalty, and with an almost royal dignity. Nobody had ever seen her in a hurry, or without her steel rimmed spectacles.
Greta McCraw had undertaken to take on picnic duty today, assisted by Mademoiselle, purely as a matter of conscience. A brilliant mathematician – far too brilliant for her poorly paid job at the College – she would have given a five pound note to have spent this precious holiday, no matter how fine, shut up in her room with that fascinating new treatise on the Calculus. A tall woman with dry ochre skin and coarse greying hair perched like an untidy bird’s nest on top of her head, she had remained oblivious to the vagaries of the Australian scene despite a residence of thirty years. Climate meant nothing, nor fashion, nor the never ending miles of gum trees and dry yellow grass, of which she was hardly more aware than of the mists and mountains of her native Scotland, as a girl. The boarders, used to her outlandish wardrobe, were no longer amused, and her choice for today’s picnic went without comment – the well known church-going toque and black laced boots, together with the puce-coloured pelisse, in which her bony frame took on the proportions of one of her own Euclidian triangles, and a pair of rather shabby puce kid gloves.
Mademoiselle, on the other hand, as an admired arbiter of fashion, was minutely examined and passed with honours, down to the turquoise ring and white silk gloves. ‘Although,’ said Blanche, ‘I’m surprised at her letting Edith go out in those larky blue ribbons. Whatever is Edith looking at over there?’ A pasty-faced fourteen-year-old with the contours of an overstuffed bolster was standing a few feet away, staring up at the window of a room on the first floor. Miranda tossed back her straight corn-coloured hair, smiling and waving at a pale little pointed face looking dejectedly down at the animated scene below. ‘It’s not fair,’ said Irma, waving and smiling too, ‘after all the child is only thirteen. I never thought Mrs A. would be so mean.’
Miranda sighed: ‘Poor little Sara – she wanted so much to go to the picnic.’
Failure to recite ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ yesterday had condemned the child Sara Waybourne to solitary confinement upstairs. Later, she would pass the sweet summer afternoon in the empty schoolroom, committing the hated masterpiece to memory. The College was already, despite its brief existence, quite famed for its discipline, deportment and mastery of English literature.
Now an immense purposeful figure was swimming and billowing in grey silk taffeta on to the tiled and colonnaded verandah, like a galleon in full sail. On the gently heaving bosom, a cameo portrait of a gentleman in side whiskers, framed in garnets and gold, rose and fell in tune with the pumping of the powerful lungs encased in a fortress of steel busks and stiff grey calico. ‘Good morning, girls,’ boomed the gracious plummy voice, specially imported from Kensington.