Free Bilgewater by Jane Gardam Page A

D’Urbervilles. I expect she comes from a different part of Dorset. Life is awful for her all right, fate and doom are in control, yet she’s all for doing something about it—not praying or accepting. Doing. You wouldn’t catch Paula lying down on Stonehenge and waiting for the police. She’d be getting down to the headwork, packing suitcases, buying a single ticket into the heart of the madding crowd.
    â€œIs this world a
blighted
star?”
    â€œIt is so. Now then let’s see about new bloinds.”
    â€œFool Terrapin,” I said. “Brave Jack Rose.”
    And in this tremendous activity of the evening I clean forgot the telephone call.

C HAPTER 7
    G race Gathering was there at school all right on the following Monday. She was the first thing to be seen in prayers. The great gold head towered above the wide sea of ordinary heads some rows in front of me. It was, I saw, in a row of fifth formers. She must have been put down in the O level lot. Funny not to have got O levels at that age but perhaps she was younger than she seemed.
    There were a few other large, older girls in that form as it happened and Grace Gathering was standing beside a curvaceous brown-skinned one called Beryl Something who had a bad reputation and didn’t do much in the way of washing. She had long slit eyes. The distinguishing feature of Beryl Something was that for more years than you could count, probably from the moment she had arrived at the school there had been boys on motor bikes hanging round the school gates to take her home.
    On the other side of Grace there was another girl I couldn’t stand either called Aileen Sykes. “Aileen” just suited her. Fancy a parent choosing Aileen when there was no law against Eileen! Most names ending in leen are pretty (not Maureen or Doreen) but
Ail
een! She had a terribly old, wizened face and was undersized, neatly proportioned and dimity and terribly self-possessed. Ten times an hour she would yawn and look out of the window as if everything were too much for her. To look at her you would think that the minute she was out of school she passed into a sort of boudoir existence of levées and minuets and dishes of tay and a bit of fingering on the harpsichord. I don’t think she can have done really as she lived in Pearson Street where all our Mrs. Things came from and one of our Mrs. Things had known her mother and said there were blacklocks in the Sykses’ cake tins. There was the odd motor bike at the gate for Aileen Sykes too, and sometimes quite a cluster of quite presentable objets d’art astride them. Aileen spoke authoritatively about the lavender walk in the park and the phases of the moon. One Thursday evening I heard dear Uncle HB say “Who is Aileen Sykes?” and I thought, Oh heavens no! Not
her
now! but it turned out that someone in his extra English set had carved AILEEN SYKES an inch deep in a new teak desk and filled it up with indelible ink. “Quite a sensible sort of feller usually, too.”
    Grace stood between these sirens and I watched what happened all around. Nudging, whispering, “Hey—there she is. That girl last week in Hamlet,” etc. I thought, goodness, I’d better tell her to keep away from those two. She’ll get a terrible reputation, and as we all began to file out after the notices I tried to catch her eye. Her form filed past before mine and had to pass the end of the row where I was standing.
    She looked at me. She had a sleepy, cat-like half smile on her face. She stared right through me and drifted on.
    Funny, I thought.
    At Break I went looking for her.
    Â 
    â€œHullo,” I said. She was with the other two and had taken some finding. It was past the end of the lovely warm summer but there was still a second crop of hay on the playing fields scratched up into mounds along the far end of them. The playing fields ended in cliff, and the haycocks were outlined against