The Temple House Vanishing Page 4

  I wanted to answer back, to be ironic and amusing. But I didn’t have the shoes.

  She looked at me for another few seconds, as if she expected me to respond with something, anything. Instead I just stared at her, in what I hoped was a cold and dismissive manner. Then I checked my watch. And looked at her again.

  ‘I know you might think this isn’t a big deal, but it actually is. It has been noted by Sister Ignatius. She keeps a list,’ she said.

  She was irritated with me now. And I felt sort of glad, as well as uneasy.

  ‘Yes, I understand. We just forgot to pack them,’ I replied finally, shrugging my shoulders.

  I wanted her to feel as if she had overreacted and, as a result, was vaguely ridiculous. Like her stridency had been wasted on me.

  ‘You know in Japan,’ I said, leaning forward in my seat, ‘they take their shoes off before entering a building. Maybe that’s something we could think of instead? Not only would we be creating less clutter by having to store more and more shoes, we would be reducing the chance of infection and the spread of bacteria.’

  I noticed an ugly, creeping redness on her white neck. And I felt guilty and unsure then.

  ‘Do you expect us to walk around barefoot?’ she said, her voice now raised. ‘We reduce dirt by having shoes that are not worn outside, that’s the whole point of indoor shoes.’

  ‘I still think there might be some merit in the thought. I know there is a student council, I might propose it as an idea. I really do want to get involved in the school. We also can learn so much from other cultures, don’t you think?’

  She abruptly got up from her seat then and indicated that I do the same. We walked to the door where she turned towards me.

  ‘You know, it’s like a family here. We all know each other; our mothers, aunts, sisters were at school here too. We have a way of doing things.’

  I looked at her but there was nothing more to say, so I began to walk through the door.

  The harsh, shrill sound of the bell rang above my head.

  ‘Louisa,’ she called after me.

  I turned back.

  ‘We see everything, we know everything,’ she said.

  Her eyes were pale now, like pebbles bleached on a white shore. I felt suddenly cold.

  We looked at each other in silence for a second before a river of girls poured out of the room beside us and carried me off in their noisy midst towards the stairs.

  I descended into a fog of unease. I perhaps should not have answered back as I did. I felt her judgement, her pity of me. But the need to defend myself, to be ready to be hostile, ran close to the surface. I was as good as them; I had proved that in getting the scholarship. Or so I thought.

  I sensed a sharp pain behind my eyes, a headache brewing. I didn’t notice Victoria, who stood on the last step. I hadn’t seen her since the art class the afternoon before. Her arms were folded across her chest, her books forming some kind of a bodily defence. She touched my arm as I passed her. I jumped slightly in surprise.

  ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ she said, before adding quickly, and taking her hand away, ‘Do you know what time you have Library at?’

  I briefly looked down at my arm, where her hand had been.

  ‘I think it’s Thursday at four; I haven’t had it this week so far, why?’ I answered, still distracted by the conversation with Helen.

  ‘Oh, I just wondered if you were in mine or theirs,’ she said vaguely, squinting slightly.

  I wanted to ask who was she referring to but figured if I paused for long enough she would answer it herself. I noticed the marks of three piercings in one of her ears, the holes almost closed up. Her hands were covered in ink, words I couldn’t read properly. She was even more beautiful close up, her face elfin-like, the dark eyebrows slanting upwards. The sense of a question again.

  ‘You’ll have Ignatius on duty; enjoy that, she sees everything. Though I did manage to slip a Virginia Woolf book into my bag last year.’

  I wondered if I made her nervous. She fiddled with her books and then her hair as she spoke. I would have been nervous too, but the misery of my encounter with Helen had left me deflated, which perhaps mistakenly led me to appear numb and cool. It was the only positive I could take from the last ten minutes.

  ‘Which one?’ I said.

  ‘To the Lighthouse. I checked the lending slip at the front and since 1975 only two people have taken it out. Can you believe that? It’s a hardback and all. A bunch of cretins really.’

  She was willing me to smile. It felt like a favour she asked of me. I wasn’t ready, though. I trusted no one.

  ‘Couldn’t you just have borrowed it? Been the official third person with taste to take it out?’ I asked.

  I could hear myself adapting my voice to hers. The archness of it.

  ‘Yes, I suppose,’ she said, ‘but I felt like it needed rescuing, not just reading. I am obsessed with the Bloomsbury set at the moment. I want to wear more tweed, or a kimono possibly, and smoke very thin cigarettes. I am going to be a writer, or failing that, a muse.’

  Her problems were different to mine.

  ‘Where are you headed now?’ she asked.

  ‘I have to borrow some indoor shoes from Lost and Found,’ I responded. ‘I forgot mine.’

  She ignored my answer completely.

  ‘What do you like to read?’ she asked, leaning towards me.

  There was the sound of a nun clapping her hands together somewhere in the house and then the voices of the choir. Followed by the sound of a badly tuned violin.

  Her question seemed strangely childlike and innocent. Like when you were little and someone would ask you your favourite colour.

  ‘Beckett,’ I said, unable to remember a single one of his plays or books in that instant.

  She looked thoughtful then, her head tilted upwards slightly.

  ‘I thought it might be something like that,’ she said. ‘I can always tell. I thought it could be Jane Austen, but when you chose the skull I knew it wasn’t. I’m glad it’s not. I have a stash of books under my bed, you can borrow some. I have Malone Dies, I have underlined all the parts I like.’

  ‘Don’t you like Jane Austen?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh I do, it’s just they are all into her,’ she rolled her eyes, ‘and I wouldn’t mind but it’s for the wrong reasons, like the romance. They don’t even see how black her humour is. She is dark and angry. As dark as the Brontës and not as mad, though none of them notice.’

  She spoke to me as if she had never before met anyone as interesting, as if this conversation could only be had by us. Her eyes light and inviting.

  I had to smile then. The charm of her was seductive.

  ‘Anyway, you will be with the Maidens in Library, not me. Pity,’ she said finally, starting to walk by me up the stairs.

  ‘Who are the Maidens?’ I asked.

  She turned back and smiled.

  ‘The princesses, the Vestal Virgins, the paragons of virtue and all things ideal.’ Then she added, ‘By the way, if you have time on Friday, after art class, Mr Lavelle lets some of us stay on later.’

  She looked sharp and mischievous.

  My heart rose. The air lighter, brighter suddenly.

  ‘You chose the skull,’ she said as she continued walking slowly up the stairs.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, willing her to be impressed with me.

  ‘I am writing about the heart; I am determined to avoid all clichés,’ she replied, disappearing into the coloured light of the Maiden’s Chamber.

  I had to know her. It was fate, I decided.

  We had prayers that night in the Hall before supper. All the teachers sat on the stage and Sister Ignatius and Sister Frances led us in another decade of the rosary. After this was completed, there was a further set of prayers for the repose of the soul of Sister Josephine, the dead nun. Her funeral was to be the next day down the country, in the town she had left when she was eighteen. The prayers were followed by a shor
t speech of gratitude to the parents of one of the first years who had donated money to the school. The girl in question went up on the stage and shook hands and did a sort of bow in front of the rest of us. I suspected she had a room with sea views. And a pony.

  From where I was standing I could see Mr Lavelle. I noticed he had chosen to sit beside our French teacher. He had his arm stretched out behind her, along the length of her chair. She looked cool and elegant and I thought that maybe they were a couple and that their future children would be attractive and artistic.

  Helen got up to speak then. She flicked her long hair behind her shoulders, smiled at Sister Ignatius and then turned to her audience.

  ‘Temple House is a school of great honour,’ she began, then paused, ‘with a long history of charitable works.

  ‘Tonight we welcome those students who are here at the gift and bequest of our kind donors and the board of governors. We speak honestly when we say, you have been given an opportunity that many would envy.’ She paused again and looked around the room as if searching for the handful of lucky, marked-out scholarship kids.

  ‘And we hope that very soon you will also come to feel as we do about the school. It is truly a great privilege for me to be your head girl this year, something I am not embarrassed to say I have long aspired to be.’

  I smiled at this.

  ‘Please know I am here as a friend, to help you make the transition to this, our world,’ she put her hand up to her heart as she said this.

  She flushed then and Sister Ignatius stood up and gripped her arm. She descended the steps at the side of the stage and the blonde prefects walked over to her. With their arms around her, they escorted her back to the rest of us. As if she had achieved something special and needed care and reverence. I looked at Mr Lavelle, suspecting he too might sense the ridiculous in it, but he was staring at Helen as she retreated back into the crowd. And he looked serious.

  There were two long tables laid out at the end of the Hall and after prayers we sat down for a meal. The food was served by three women dressed in lime-green housecoats, with white hats and hair nets. No one thanked them as they filled the plates, so I didn’t when they served me. Invisibility is repaid with invisibility. Everyone was still ignoring me, except Helen, who I could see whispering to the prefect beside her, after which they both stared at me.

  Victoria was on the opposite side of the table, a few seats down. She held her chin in one hand, wasn’t eating much or talking to anyone either. With her other hand she was building a mountain with her potatoes and then dragging her fork through it to make a pattern. Someone passed her a note and for a second she looked up from her plate, read it, and then caught my eye. We stared at each other, not smiling. An acknowledgement. As we did so I noticed she crumpled the note in her hand and shoved it into her pocket.

  My indoor shoes were pinching me, and I kept thinking that the person who had them before me might have had some kind of a skin disease which was silently being transmitted to me. The other girls at the table talked about a skirt Miss Clement was wearing that they were sure came from Paris. I asked if anyone knew how I could get involved in the school newspaper. They acted like they didn’t hear me.

  When dinner finally ended we were directed down the long, dimly lit corridor to the church. A strong, thick smell of incense hit me as we stood in line outside, waiting for the younger classes to come out through the heavy door. Victoria squeezed in beside me. Tapping me on the shoulder and without speaking, she handed me the crumpled-up note. It read, ‘Louisa is a cheap SLUT.’ We didn’t speak for a second but looked at each other and I felt gratitude towards her. Like the heavy sense of unease was lifting or being shared. It was always better to know, rather than just suspect, what others thought of you.

  ‘Why?’ I said, looking into her eyes.

  She shook her head before responding, ‘Why not? Think of it as the welcome Helen spoke about.’

  Her words did not contain pity, but a challenge. As if Helen, the school, life even, all were things to vanquish. And we might do this together.

  The heavy door of the church creaked open and we walked into the shadows.

  Chapter Seven

  I didn’t see Victoria the next day, Wednesday. We had no classes together. I worked that evening on my skull essay, determined to try and impress her and Mr Lavelle with my nascent nihilism. I wrote until it was dark, all manner of disgust at vanity, at flesh and blood, seeping on to the pages. I was making a case for the soul. The only thing that lasted. The thing that was eternal. The words in the secret note Victoria had shown me were the rhythm I wrote to.

  Body. Slut.

  We fill our lives with trinkets, thoughts, lovers, art to distract us from the reality that lies underneath. The end that waits for us all. The skull is the manifestation not just of death, but the illusions we create around it. Our lives.

  Alice didn’t mind me working late; she had a torch and was reading a biology textbook in bed. She wanted to be a doctor. It runs in the family, she had said to me. And I thought, what runs in mine?

  My mother had written a letter. I was only gone two days and would be home on Friday but this hadn’t put her off. She said everyone on the road was asking after me. One neighbour was praying things would work out for me. I should have seen it as kindness but didn’t. She then wrote about the move; the van would be coming early on Saturday morning. She was going. I tore the letter up into small pieces after I finished reading and dropped it in the bin. It was my old life; I didn’t belong there any more. They had dismantled it anyway.

  I stayed sitting at the desk, doodling on the page. I couldn’t be homesick, there was no home to miss. I thought of my earliest memory. I was standing in our small garden and saying over and over, ‘I am Louisa.’ Twirling and twirling, the tall concrete walls closing in, until I fell over. Repeating it again, and again, as if there was a danger that I might forget.

  A soft knock on the door broke my thoughts. It was Sister Ignatius. She looked like a phantom in the dim light of the hall, even more powdered and white than in daylight.

  ‘Your light,’ she said. ‘Off.’

  She turned away before I could answer and disappeared into the gloom. Alice shook her head at me, like I was an amateur, and put her torch down.

  I got into bed but couldn’t sleep. There was a strong wind outside and if I held my breath I could almost hear the waves against the cliffs. Alice began to snore lightly. The sash windows didn’t close properly and every now and then there was a whistling sound through the gaps. I got up to see if I could close them more fully, pulling the curtains aside. As I looked out the window I saw Mr Lavelle was walking through the kitchen garden, a long coat pulled around him. A cigarette glowing in his hand and sparking in the breeze. He must have been working late in the summer house. He looked up briefly and for an instant I thought maybe I should wave but then he was gone.

  The next morning we had choir practice before breakfast. I saw Victoria sitting alone on a low bench at the side of the stage. She smiled at me and I felt relief. She moved over and I sat beside her. We said nothing for a minute. The nun who led the choir hadn’t arrived yet and the students were talking loudly, standing around. One girl was doing another’s hair. Their friends had gathered together and gave shrieks of approval when it was finished. Someone else played a slow and stuttering version of ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano that had been dragged into the middle of the Hall.

  ‘Sometimes I think I despise everyone and everything,’ Victoria said suddenly.

  I turned to stare at her profile. She was biting her lip again, her chin resting on her hands.

  I wanted to say something profound, moving. Tell her I felt the same.

  But the words wouldn’t come.

  ‘I prefer Mrs Dalloway,’ I said, thinking about our conversation on the stairs, and wanting to reach out to her in the only way I knew.

  ‘Me too,’ she replied, slowly turning to look at me.

  She didn�
�t smile, but her face was open. A stray hint of light in her eyes.

  I had that sense of recognition, again, like when I first saw her in the summer house. An unfurling inside of me.

  And very imperceptibly, something changed between us.

  After art class on that first Friday, Mr Lavelle asked if Victoria and I would help him. I blushed when he said my name as I was gathering my things together. I could feel the others staring. Victoria looked triumphant and was smiling at Mr Lavelle. He wanted us to see the swimming hole as he planned for the class to do some landscape painting before winter set in and he thought it would make a good venue, though he needed to check first if we could make it there in one piece. And also how we might carry our art supplies.

  The light was low as he led us through the trees. I vaguely heard Victoria somewhere behind me say that it was like the perfect autumn afternoon one reads of in a poem, where the trees are laden with ripe fruit and you catch the smell of leaves burning in a bonfire in the next field. Mr Lavelle laughed when she said this. But she was right. The ground beneath our feet was like a carpet, soft and springy, with pine needles, ferns and even some fallen chestnuts. I felt like collecting them in my pocket but decided against it. That was something the old me would have done. Leaving them to dry on the kitchen windowsill at home. I felt like home was very far away now, and I was only five days in.

  We were walking to the swimming hole, an abandoned outdoor pool that had been cut into the side of the cliff. To reach it we had to go through the small forest at the back of the summer house, the one Alice and I could see from our room. As we made our way through the woods, every now and then we would pass a tree that had fallen over and was leaning somewhat companionably on another. We had to bend and climb through or over them. I remember thinking it was like a kind of paradise, so full and abundant with sounds and smells. The enchanted wood. Even though the leaves were starting to yellow and curl on some of the trees. And we walked on decay and were breathing in the slow rot of summer’s once dense foliage.

  Mr Lavelle walked ahead of me. He was wearing the same light blue shirt from the other day, but before we left the summer house when art class finished, he had pulled on a navy jumper with brown suede patches on the elbows. His neck was tanned and when the wind blew his hair I noticed that it was much darker underneath.