‘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.’
‘What’s yours?’
‘Janet. Janet Treevor.’
‘I like Janet,’ I said, not wanting to be outdone in politeness.
‘I hate it. It’s so plain.’
‘Shame we can’t swap.’
I felt her breath on my cheek, felt her body shaking. I couldn’t 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 that’s 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 don’t 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 school’s 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 man’s 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 Esk’s 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 didn’t learn to be young ladies at Hillgard House – we learnt to be little savages in a jungle presided over by the Esks, remote predators.
I had never known a family like Janet’s. Perhaps they didn’t 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 Janet’s 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. Janet’s 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 needn’t 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 can’t imagine mine, either.’
‘It’s horrible.’
‘Do you think they did it with the light on?’
‘They’d need to see what they were doing, wouldn’t they?’
‘Yes, but just think what they’d 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.
‘They’re so handsome,’ she said, ‘so beautiful.’