‘So is that what they were doing in there?’ she asked.
‘Well, it wouldn’t be accurate to say they were doing that, because two women are physically incapable of that. But they were in sexual union, if you like.’
‘I bloody well don’t like! What were they doing exactly?’
‘Exactly? Oh, I don’t know. This story has been passed around the family’s men like an old dog-bone – who knows what’s been added and embellished? The version I heard, or overheard, since I was indeed eavesdropping on my cousins’ private conversation, the version I heard was that the two women were quite naked on the bed and one was gifting the other with – well, I believe I’ve already mentioned it. “The licking of the rose petals”, as the Kama Sutra puts it.’
Bettina was silent for a while. ‘Look, you’re going to have to spell it out for me. I have no idea what the rose petals signify. Don’t make fun of me.’
Margo pointed down at her crotch. ‘The labia minora. Look in a mirror one day, why don’t you? She was licking my great-aunt’s—’
‘Urgh! Yuck! Vile. Just vile. Oh, it makes me shudder.’
‘I know,’ said Margo. ‘I don’t even like to think of it.’
‘How did the brother react?’
Margo laughed again. ‘Apparently he said, “You sick mad wench, how will I ever unsee this?”’
‘How will I ever unimagine it?’ said Bettina. In her mind she saw a woman with short hair. An ugly woman – she’d have to be ugly. Yellow-toothed like some horrible matron. Would she have large breasts? How grotesque – a woman with short hair, dressed as a man, with a fat pair of breasts straining at the fabric of her waistcoat. Horrid.
The two girls lay quiet, their breathing loud in the spartan room, every small movement or sound amplified. Bettina, for some curious reason, was suddenly afraid to move, and her head now felt too heavy on Margo’s shoulder, her breath too forceful against her collarbone. She closed her eyes and tried to control her breathing, to soften it. She listened to the sound outside of birds singing and girls running and grunting and wooden sticks hitting other wooden sticks. Their own silence started to feel too heavy, too conspicuous, like a drowsy fug in the air.
‘Margo,’ she whispered, and now that the silence had been broken, so had the paralysing spell.
‘Hmm?’
‘Can I tell you a secret?’
‘Please do.’
‘You’ve got to swear not to tell,’ said Bettina, ‘because otherwise I’ll be in the absolute worst trouble.’
‘Come off it,’ said Margo. ‘I’ve just let you in on my family’s most guarded, ugly secret. Well, one of them.’
‘The thing is, my friend Bart – you remember Bart, I’ve told you all about him. Last week he sent me a bottle of brandy and a case of cigarettes and I’ve got them hidden in the boiler room.’
Margo sat up with a jerk, dislodging Bettina’s head. ‘Bettina! You dark horse!’
‘Well, Bart is the dark horse really. It was him who—’
‘How did it get past The Barren One?’
The Barren One was Miss Cameron, the house mistress (so called because she was so averse to children that it was highly conceivable she ovulated sand). It was rumoured that she checked all packages the girls received. So as to avoid precisely this sort of thing. Probably not true, Bettina thought, but you never knew – some of the women here at St Vincent’s were complete psychopaths.
She shook her head, bewildered. ‘Maybe she was too busy sacrificing tiny infants to—’
Margo bounded off the bed with explosive excitement. ‘Well, why are we wasting our time here, stuffing sweets and gossiping like a pair of ole fishwives?’
‘You want to – now?’
‘Does the Pope wear a hat?’
Bettina stared at Margo’s face, trying to think of a witty comeback. But she could think of nothing, and besides, the opportunity had passed, so she got off the bed, took her friend’s hand and together they left the room and began the exhilarating slow creep through the school’s narrow passages.
The boiler room had a dark, heavy air, even when brightly lit. Black mould spread up the whitewashed walls, forming curious patterns, and the last time Bettina had been down here, to hide the drink and cigs, she’d sat on an old wonky piano stool, chin in hands and elbows on knees, trying to find shapes in the mould as one finds shapes in clouds (it was always dragons, continents and old men’s faces).
When, at thirteen, she’d first started at St Vincent’s (reluctantly, of course, and only because her father refused to submit to her year-long campaign of passive-aggressive resistance), the older students – all bitches – gleefully passed down the inevitable ghost stories, claiming that St Vincent’s was well-known to be haunted, had in fact attracted spiritualists and macabre loners from all over the world on thrill-seeking and fact-gathering pilgrimages. The boiler room, they said, was the most malignant place in the whole building, the source of all the paranormal energy and telekinetic phenomena (Bettina had no idea what ‘telekinetic’ meant, and wasn’t about to ask), and home to the Black Nun. The Black Nun had died in a fire in the boiler room some ninety years ago, back when the school was a sanatorium for the criminally insane (it never was, Monty told her later – it had been a great manor house belonging to a Norwegian whoremonger who frittered away his whole estate on opium, tarts and lavish orgies), and some nights, even now, her ghost could be seen gliding silently and footlessly along the corridors.
Only now did she understand the reason for this story. The necessity of it.
When she crept down to the boiler room that first time after receiving Bart’s package there were countless traces of previous visitations – chocolate wrappers, pen ink, lipstick-kissed napkins, even a discarded pair of woollen knickers with dried blood on them. This was the place, she realised, where the older girls went to escape the oppressive prim cloud that hung over them; a place of cautious freedom. In one corner, concealed behind a dusty pile of broken musical instruments (on top of which a stringless, scratched harp was placed, leaning precariously) was an empty wine bottle – a dessert wine of the sort her parents served with plum pudding – and poked into the cracks of the wall’s plaster next to the hot boiler tank were a few squashed cigarette ends.
She hid her own items with neurotic care. She also collected the cigarette stubs and various other leftovers and dropped them inside the tubed hollow of a rolled-up rug.
‘Rather funky smelling in here,’ said Margo, pulling a face like a fine lady wandering through a fish market.
‘My most humble apologies,’ said Bettina. ‘Would you rather I set out a chaise longue for you in the headmaster’s office, on which you can enjoy our contraband items?’
‘Oh, shush,’ said Margot, smiling. ‘I am merely making a comment. I wasn’t expecting the Ritz.’
There was a dented violin missing three strings in the pile of broken instruments. Bettina gently lifted it so as not to disturb the intricate structure, and there underneath was the bottle and cigarettes Bart had sent. She presented them to Margo with a self-conscious ‘ta-da!’ and Margo clapped her hands.
‘My father has this,’ she said, looking at the bottle. ‘It’s supposed to be good.’
‘Have you ever tried it?’ said Bettina.
‘No. I’ve never had the inclination.’
‘You mean you’ve never drunk?’
‘Of course I have. Wine and port and so forth at dinner parties. In moderation, bien entendu. But never men’s drink. I imagine it’s ghastly.’