The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [26]
“Girls,” she said mildly, “ . . . detention.”
If such a thing were to happen to me, I thought, I would die, but the next morning I saw Drummond laughing with another girl as she knotted her tie. I was staring at her in amazement when Ross sidled up. “Got an eyeful last night, didn’t you?” she said.
“Why doesn’t she report you?”
Ross grabbed my wrist and bent my arm behind my back. “What do you think happened to Montrose?” she demanded.
The following day Drummond was in charge of taking me to feed the pigs. We carried the buckets of scraps across the small stream at the back of the school and past the tennis courts. Just beyond was an enclosure with five pigs. They rushed over, grunting, as we emptied the slops into their trough. Drummond jumped back, but I leaned across the fence to scratch their woody skin. They were the nicest beings I had met at Claypoole.
Walking back to the kitchen, I asked Drummond why she didn’t report the girls.
“What for?” she said, eyebrows raised.
“For taking off your clothes, tickling you.”
“It’s all in fun.” She swung the empty bucket. “They didn’t hurt me.”
“But”—I did not know how to voice the shame that must surely accompany such an attack—“they held you down. They took off your bra.”
“Look,” said Drummond, “there’s a rabbit. My foster parents kept rabbits. Did yours keep anything?”
“No,” I said.
The rabbit twitched its nose and hopped away. If only I had a friend, I thought, just one, the school would not be so bad. We would hide in the library and build secret huts and visit the pigs. Among the girls I had met so far there seemed no possibilities, but perhaps next term another working girl, close to my age, would join the school. Clinging to this prospect, I followed Drummond across the bridge. Only much later did I understand that my arrival at Claypoole had coincided with the great tide of changes sweeping postwar Britain: attitudes to children were shifting; the British Empire was dwindling; working girls were already hard to come by.
chapter eight
Every weekday at Claypoole began with assembly in the library. While the teachers sat along one wall, the girls lined up by class to sing a hymn, listen to a lesson, say the Lord’s Prayer, and hear any announcements. Miss Bryant presided over the occasion from a dais at the front; at the back, beneath a portrait of Lord Minto, the music teacher, or one of her senior pupils, played the piano. The whole affair took less than ten minutes, except for those unfortunate days when Mr. Waugh strode in just as we said amen and delivered an impromptu sermon. Afterwards, if his duties permitted, he would visit a class. I had been at the school for a fortnight when he flung open the door of Primary 7.
Scripture, like arithmetic, was a subject where I felt confident. I knew the Gospels thoroughly and was acquainted with Genesis and Job. On the day of Mr. Waugh’s visit we were studying the parable of the talents. A master, going on a journey, gives ten talents to one servant, five to another, and one to a third. The first two servants invest and multiply their talents; the third buries his single coin for safekeeping. When the master returns he praises the first two and, to my fury, scolds the third and takes away his talent. My uncle had claimed that the parable was not about money but about the gifts we’d each been given—whether for recognising a willow-warbler, or baking a Victoria sponge—and about how not using them was a sin. Still I argued that the third servant was just following instructions, protecting his master’s property; the other servants, with more talents, could afford to take risks. My uncle had quoted me in his sermon.
We stood while Mr. Waugh offered another lengthy prayer. Then he asked a girl in the second row to read the parable. As Kendall stumbled through the verses, I watched the veins in his nose swell and the buttons of his jacket