Wendy, Janet whispered as we huddled together in the back of the taxi on the way to school, squashed into a corner by a girl mountain smelling of sweat and peppermints. Such a pretty name.
Whats yours?
Janet. Janet Treevor.
I like Janet, I said, not wanting to be outdone in politeness.
I hate it. Its so plain.
Shame we cant swap.
I felt her breath on my cheek, felt her body shaking. I couldnt hear anything, because of the noise the other girls were making and the sound of the engine. But I knew what Janet was doing. She was giggling.
So thats how it started, Janet and me. It was January, the Lent Term, and we were the only new children in our year. All the other new children had come in September and had already made friends. It was natural that Janet and I should have been thrown together. But I dont know why we became friends. Janet was no more like me than my mother was. But in her case our case the differences brought us together rather than drove us apart.
Hillgard House was a late-eighteenth-century house in the depths of the Herefordshire countryside. The nearest village was two miles away. The teaching was appalling, the food was often barely edible. When it rained heavily they put half a dozen buckets to catch the drips in the dormitories on the top floor where the servants bedrooms had been, and you would go to sleep hearing the gentle plop-plip-plop as the water fell.
The headmistress was called Miss Esk, and she and her brother, the Captain, lived in the south wing of the house. There were carpets there, and fires, and sometimes when the windows were open you could hear the sound of music. The Esks had their own housekeeper who kept herself apart from and superior to the schools domestic staff. The Captain was rarely seen. We understood that he had suffered from a mysterious wound in the Great War and had never fully recovered. The senior girls used to speculate about the nature of this wound. When I was older, I gained considerable respect by suggesting he had been castrated.
We were always hungry at Hillgard House. It was wartime, as Miss Esk reminded us so often. This meant that we could not expect the luxuries of peace, though we could not help but notice that Miss Esk seemed to have most of them. I think now that the Esks made a fortune during the war: The school was considered to be in a relatively safe area, remote from the risks of both bombing raids and a possible invasion. Many of the girls fathers were in the services. Few parents had the time and inclination to check the pastoral and educational standards of the school. They wanted their daughters to be safe, and so in a sense we were.
Janet and I never liked the place but we grew used to it. As far as I was concerned, it had three points in its favour. No one could have a more loyal friend than Janet. Because of the war, and because of the Esks incompetence, we were left alone a great deal of the time. And finally there was the library.
It was a tall, thin room which overlooked a lank shrubbery at the northern end of the house. Shelves ran round all the walls. There was a marble fireplace, its grate concealed beneath a deep mound of soot. The shelves were only half full, but you never quite knew what you would find there. In that respect it was like the Cathedral Library in Rosington.
During the five years that we were there, Janet must have read, or at least looked at, every volume there. She read Ivanhoe and The Origin of Species. She picked her way through the collected works of Pope and bound copies of Punch. I had my education at second hand, through Janet.
In our final year, she found a copy of Justine by the Marquis de Sade in French, bound in calf leather, the pages spotted with damp like an old mans hand concealed in a large brown envelope behind the collected sermons of Bishop Berkeley. Janet read French easily it was the sort of accomplishment you seemed to acquire almost by osmosis in her family and we spent a week in the summer term picking our way through the book, which was boring but sometimes made us laugh.
In our first few terms, people used to laugh at us. Janet was small and delicate like one of those china figures in the glass-fronted cabinet in Miss Esks sitting room. I was always clumsy. In those days I wore glasses, and my feet and hands seemed too large for me. Janet could wear the same blouse for days and it would seem white and crisp from beginning to end, from the moment she took it from her drawer to the moment she put it in the laundry basket. As for me, every time I picked up a cup of tea I seemed to spill half of it over me.
My mother thought Hillgard House would make me a lady. My father thought it would get me out of the way for most of the year. He was right and she was wrong. We didnt learn to be young ladies at Hillgard House we learnt to be little savages in a jungle presided over by the Esks, remote predators.
3
I had never known a family like Janets. Perhaps they didnt breed people like the Treevors in Bradford.
For a long time our friendship was something that belonged to school alone. Our lives at home were something separate. I know that I was ashamed of mine. I imagined Janets family to be lordly, beautiful, refined. I knew they would be startlingly intelligent, just as Janet was. Her father was serving in the army, but before the war he had lectured about literature and written for newspapers. Janets mother had a high-powered job in a government department. I never found out exactly what she did but it must have been something to do with translating she was fluent in French, German and Russian and had a working knowledge of several other languages.
In the summer of 1944 the Treevors rented a cottage near Stratford for a fortnight. Janet asked if I would like to join them. My mother was very excited because I was mixing with nice people.
I was almost ill with apprehension. In fact I neednt have worried. Mr and Mrs Treevor spent most of the holiday working in a bedroom which they appropriated as a study, or visiting friends in the area. John Treevor was a thin man with a large nose and a bulging forehead. At the time I assumed the bulge was needed to contain the extra brain cells. Occasionally he patted Janet on the head and once he asked me if I was enjoying myself but did not wait to hear my answer.
I remember Mrs Treevor better because she explained the facts of life to us. Janet and I had watched a litter of kittens being born at the farm next door. Janet asked her mother whether humans ever had four at a time. This led to a concise lecture on sex, pregnancy and childbirth. Mrs Treevor talked to us as if we were students and the subject were mathematics. I dared not look at her face while she was talking, and I felt myself blushing.
Later, in the darkness of our shared bedroom, Janet said, Can you imagine how they ?
No. I cant imagine mine, either.
Its horrible.
Do you think they did it with the light on?
Theyd need to see what they were doing, wouldnt they?
Yes, but just think what theyd have looked like.
A moment afterwards Mrs Treevor banged on the partition wall to stop us laughing so loudly.
After Christmas that year, Janet came to stay with me at Harewood Drive for a whole week. She and my mother liked each other on sight. She thought my father was sad and kind. She even liked my dead brothers. She would stare at the photographs of Howard and Peter, one by one, lingering especially at the ones of them looking heroic in their uniforms.
A moment afterwards Mrs Treevor banged on the partition wall to stop us laughing so loudly.
After Christmas that year, Janet came to stay with me at Harewood Drive for a whole week. She and my mother liked each other on sight. She thought my father was sad and kind. She even liked my dead brothers. She would stare at the photographs of Howard and Peter, one by one, lingering especially at the ones of them looking heroic in their uniforms.
Theyre so handsome, she said, so beautiful.
And so dead, I pointed out.
In those days, the possibility of death was on everyones minds. At school, fathers and brothers died. Their sisters and daughters were sent to see matron and given cups of cocoa and scrambled eggs on toast. The deaths of Howard and Peter, even though they had happened before my arrival at Hillgard House, gave me something of a cachet because they had been twins and had died so close together.
To tell the truth, I was jealous when Janet admired my doomed brothers, but I was never jealous of the friendship between Janet and my mother. It was not something that excluded me. In a sense it got me off the hook. When Janet was staying with us, I didnt have to feel guilty.
During that first visit, my mother made Janet a dress, using precious pre-war material shed been hoarding since 1939. I remember the three of us in the little sewing room on the first floor. I was sitting on the floor reading a book. Every now and then I glanced up at them. I can still see my mother with pins in her mouth kneeling by Janet, and Janet stretching her arms above her head like a ballet dancer and revolving slowly. Their faces were rapt and solemn as though they were in church.
Janet and I shared dreams. In winter we sometimes slept together, huddled close to conserve every scrap of warmth. We pooled information about proscribed subjects, such as periods and male genitalia. We practised being in love. We took it in turns at being the man. We waltzed across the floor of the library, humming the Blue Danube. We exchanged lingering kisses with lips damped shut, mimicking what we had observed in the cinema. We made up conversations.
Has anyone ever told you what beautiful eyes you have?
Youre very kind but really you shouldnt say such things.
Ive never felt like this with anyone else.
Nor have I. Isnt the moon lovely tonight?
Not as lovely as you.
And so on. Nowadays people would suggest there was a lesbian component to our relationship. But there wasnt. We were playing at being grown up.
Somewhere in the background of our lives, the war dragged on and finally ended. I dont remember being frightened, only bored by it. I suppose peace came as a relief. In memory, though, everything at Hillgard House went on much as before. The school was its own dreary little world. Rationing continued, and if anything was worse than it had been during the war. One winter the snow and ice were so bad the school was cut off for days.
Our last term was the summer of 1948. We exchanged presents a ring I had found in a dusty box on top of my mothers wardrobe, and a brooch Janets godmother had given her as a christening present. We swore we would always be friends. A few days later, term ended. Everything changed.
Janet went to a crammer in London because the Treevors had finally woken up to the fact that Hillgard House was not an ideal academic preparation for university. I went home to Harewood Drive, helped my mother about the house and worked a few hours a week in my fathers shop. There are times in my life when I have been more unhappy and more afraid than I was then, but Ive never tasted such dreariness.
The only part I enjoyed was helping in the shop. At least I was doing something useful and met other people. Sometimes I dealt with customers but usually my father kept me in the back, working on the accounts or tidying the stock. I learned how to smoke in the yard behind the shop.
I got drunk for the first time at a tennis club dance. On the same evening a boy named Angus tried to seduce me in the groundsmans shed. It was the sort of seduction thats the next best thing to rape. I punched him and made his nose bleed. He dropped his hip flask, which had lured me into the shed with him. I ran back to the lights and the music. I saw him a little later. His upper lip was swollen and there was blood on his white shirtfront.
Went out to the gents, I heard him telling the club secretary. Managed to walk into the door.
The club secretary laughed and glanced in my direction. I wondered if I was meant to hear, I wondered if the secretary knew, if all this had been planned.
It was a way of life that seemed to have no end. Janet wrote to me regularly and we saw each other once or twice a year. But the old intimacy was gone. She was at university now and had other friends and other interests.
Why dont you go to university? she asked as we were having tea at a café in the High on one of my visits to Oxford.
I shrugged and lit a cigarette. I dont want to. Anyway, my father wouldnt let me. He thinks its unnatural for women to have an education.
Surely hed let you do something?
Such as?
Well, what do you want to do?
I watched myself blowing smoke out of my nostrils in the mirror behind Janets head and hoped I looked sophisticated. I said, I dont know what I want.
That was the real trouble. Boredom saps the will. It makes you feel you no longer have the power to choose. All I could see was the present stretching indefinitely into the future.
But two months later everything changed. My father died. And three weeks after that, on the 19th July 1952, I met Henry Appleyard.
4
Memory bathes the past in a glow of inevitability. Its tempting to assume that the past could only have happened in the way it did, that this event could only have been followed by that event and in the order they happened. If that were true, of course, nothing would be our fault.
But of course it isnt true. I didnt have to marry Henry. I didnt have to leave him. And I didnt have to go and stay with Janet at the Dark Hostelry.
During her last year at Oxford, Janet decided that after she had taken her degree she would go to London and try to find work as a translator. Her mothers contacts might be able to help her. She told me about it over another cup of tea, this time in her cell-like room at St Hildas.
Is it what you want to do?
Its all I can do.
Couldnt you stay here and do research?
Ill be lucky if I scrape a third. Im not academic, Wendy. I feel I dont really belong here. As if I got in by false pretences.
I shrugged, envious of what she had been offered and refused. I suppose there are lots of lovely young men in London as well as Oxford.
Yes. I suppose so.
Men liked Janet because she was beautiful. She didnt say much to them either so they could talk to their hearts content and show off to her. But she went out of her way to avoid them. Janet wanted Sir Galahad, not a spotty undergraduate from Christchurch with an MG. In the end, she compromised as we all do. She didnt get Sir Galahad and she didnt get the spotty undergraduate with the MG. Instead she got the Reverend David Byfield.
Early in 1952 he came over to Oxford for a couple of days to do some work in the Bodleian. He was writing a book reinterpreting the work of St Thomas Aquinas in terms of modern theology. Thats where he and Janet saw each other, in the library. It was, Janet said, love at first sight. He looked at me and I simply knew.