They hated her, she thought: two girls who day by day had worked beside her in the kitchen, to whom she had taught useful skills. A boy had come and stood beside her in the sunshine and she had offered him a chocolate. He had complained of a pain, and she had pointed out that he must make his complaint to the headmaster, since that was the rule. She had explained as well that corporal punishment was part of the curriculum at Milton Grange. The boy was dead. The girls who hated her would drag her husband’s boarding-school through the mud.
She heard the voice of Sergeant Wall saying that the girls, one of them hysterical but calming down, the other insolent, were out to make trouble. He’d tried to reason with them, but they hadn’t even listened.
The girls had been in Milton Grange for two and a half months. She remembered the day they had arrived together, carrying cardboard suitcases. They’d come before that to be interviewed, and she’d walked them round the house, explaining about the school. She remembered saying in passing that once a year, at the end of every July, a Conservative fete was held, traditionally now, in the gardens. They hadn’t seemed much interested.
‘I’ve built this place up,’ she heard her husband say. ‘Month by month, year by year. It was a chicken farm when I bought it, Beade, and now I suppose it’ll be a chicken farm again.’
She left the kitchen and walked along the kitchen passage and up the uncarpeted back stairs. She knocked on the door of their room. They called out together, saying she should come in. They were both packing their belongings into their cardboard suitcases, smoking fresh cigarettes. Barbara appeared to have recovered.
She tried to explain to them. No one knew yet, she said, why Wraggett had died. He’d had a heart attack most probably, like Mr Beade said. It was a terrible thing to have happened.
The girls continued to pack, not listening to her. They folded garments or pressed them, unfolded, into their suitcases.
‘My husband’s built the place up. Month by month, year by year, for seventeen years he has built it up.’
‘The boys are waiting for their tea,’ said Dympna. ‘Mrs Digby-Hunter, you’d better prick the sausages.’
‘Forget our wages,’ said Barbara, and laughed in a way that was not hysterical.
‘My husband –’
‘Your husband,’ said Dympna, ‘derives sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on children. So does Beade. They are queer men.’
‘Your husband,’ said Barbara, ‘will be jailed. He’ll go to prison with a sack over his head so that he won’t have to see the disgust on people’s faces. Isn’t that true, Mrs Digby-Hunter?’
‘My husband –’
‘Filth,’ said Dympna.
She sat down on the edge of a bed and watched the two girls packing. She imagined the dead body in the bedroom that was never used, and then she imagined Sergeant Wall and Mr Beade and her husband in the kitchen, waiting for the school doctor to arrive, knowing that it didn’t much matter what cause he offered for the death if these two girls were allowed to have their way.
‘Why do you hate me?’ she asked, quite calmly.
Neither replied. They went on packing and while they packed she talked, in desperation. She tried to speak the truth about Milton Grange, as she saw the truth, but they kept interrupting her. The bruises didn’t show on the boys because the bruises were inflicted in an expert way, but sometimes hair was actually pulled out of the boys’ scalps, small bunches of hair, she must have noticed that. She had noticed no such thing. ‘Corporal punishment,’ she began to say, but Barbara held out hairs that had been wrenched from the head of a boy called Bridle. She had found them in a wastepaper basket; Bridle had said they were his and had shown her the place they’d come from. She returned the hairs to a plastic bag that once had contained stockings. The hairs would be photographed, Barbara said; they would appear on the front page of a Sunday newspaper. They’d be side by side with the ex-headmaster, his head hidden beneath a sack, and Mr Beade skulking behind his beard. Milton Grange, turreted baronial, part ivy-clad, would be examined by Sunday readers as a torture chamber. And in the garden, beneath the beech trees, a man would photograph the deck-chair where a woman had slept while violence and death occurred. She and her husband might one day appear in a waxworks, and Mr Beade, too; a man who, like her husband, derived sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on children.
‘You are doing this for profit,’ she protested, trying to smile, to win them from the error of their ways.
‘Yes,’ they said together, and then confessed, sharing the conversation, that they had often considered telephoning a Sunday newspaper to say they had a story to tell. They had kept the hairs in the plastic bag because they’d had that in mind; in every detail they knew what they were going to say.
‘You’re making money out of –’
‘Yes,’ said Dympna. ‘You’ve kept us short, Mrs Digby-Hunter.’
She saw their hatred of her in their faces and heard it in both their voices; like a vapour, it hung about the room.
‘Why do you hate me?’ she asked again.
They laughed, not answering, as though an answer wasn’t necessary.
She remembered, although just now she didn’t wish to, the clergyman who had kissed her with passion after a dance in a church hall, the dampness of his lips, his body pressed into hers. The smell of his clothes came back to her, across thirty years, seeming familiar because it had come before. She might have borne his children in some rectory somewhere. Would they have hated her then?
Underclothes, dresses, lipsticks, Woolworth’s jewellery, unframed photo graphs of male singing stars were jumbled together in the two cardboard suitcases. The girls moved about the room, picking up their belongings, while Mrs Digby-Hunter, in greater misery than she had ever before experienced, watched them from the edge of the bed. How could human creatures be so cruel? How could they speak to her about being a figure in a waxworks tableau when she had done nothing at all? How could they so callously propose to tell lies to a newspaper about her husband and Mr Beade when the boy who had so tragically died was still warm with the memory of life?
She watched them, two girls so young that they were not yet fully developed. They had talked about her. In this room, night after night, they had wondered about her, and in the end had hated her. Had they said in their nightly gossiping that since the day of her marriage she had lived like a statue with another statue?
It was all her fault, she suddenly thought: Milton Grange would be a chicken farm again, her husband would be examined by a psychiatrist in a prison, she would live in a single room. It was all her fault. In twenty-nine years it had taken violence and death to make sense of facts that were as terrible.
The girls were saying they’d catch a bus on the main road. Without looking at her or addressing her again they left the bedroom they had shared. She heard their footsteps on the back stairs, and Dympna’s voice asking Barbara if she was all right now and Barbara saying she was. A white slug, the girl had called her, a fat white slug.
She did not leave the room. She remained sitting on the edge of the bed, unable to think. Her husband’s face appeared in her mind, with its well-kept moustache and shrewd-seeming dark eyes, a face in the bedroom of a Welsh hotel on the night of her wedding-day. She saw herself weeping, as she had not wept then. In a confused way she saw herself on that occasion and on others, protesting, shaking her head, not smiling.
‘I’m leaving the army for a step-ladder firm,’ he said to her, and she struck his face with her hands, tormented by the absurdity of what he said. She cried out in anger that she had married an army officer, not a step-ladder salesman who was after her father’s money. She wept again when ridiculously he told her that he intended to spend his days filling machines full of powdered coffee. He had failed her, she shrilled at him, that night in the Welsh hotel and he had failed her ever since. In front of boys, she accused him of ill-treating those who had been placed in his care. If ever it happened again, she threatened, the police would be sent for. She turned to the boys and ordered them to run about the gardens for a while. It was ludicrous that they should be cooped up while the sun shone, it was ludicrous that they should strive so painfully simply to pass an examination into some school or other. She banged a desk with her hand after the boys had gone, she spat out words at him: they’d all be in the Sunday papers, she said, if he wasn’t careful, and she added that she herself would leave Milton Grange for ever unless he pursued a gentler course with the boys who were sent to him, unless he at once dismissed the ill-mannered Mr Beade, who was clearly a sinister man.