Charlotte Sometimes Read online

  “Would it matter if I went outside in the garden for a bit?” she asked Elizabeth, who she thought might be less inquisitive than the rest.

  “Goodness, whatever do you want to go out now for?” asked the sharp-eared Vanessa.

  “I’ll come with you if you like,” Susannah offered kindly.

  “No, it’s all right, thank you, honestly.”

  “Of course she wants to go alone,” said Vanessa. “Charlotte never wants to do anything with anyone else.”

  “I want to be alone,” cried Elizabeth, suddenly jumping about the room and chanting it—“I want to be a-l-o-n-e, want to be a-l-o-n-e”—giggling loudly in between, disconcerting Charlotte, who was not yet used to her sudden turns from silence into buffoonery. But in the disapproving attention this drew from both Janet and Vanessa, she was able, quietly, to escape outside.

  She did not feel comfortable till a wall of shrubs hid her from the eyes of the school buildings, when immediately there rushed hard into her a most curiously wild kind of happiness that made her tremble, yet sharpened her mind inside.

  The September sun was marmalade color on the brick wall that divided garden from river, reminding her of home, of Aviary Hall. Though why, she wondered, should remembering home make you so happy one time, so miserable another? A wren sounded nearby—its sharp song ending in a clocklike buzz. Another one answered it farther off. Charlotte sang, too, under her breath, wanting to sing louder but not daring to, letting herself out instead in a series of leaps and gallops, more suited, she thought, to someone of Emily’s age, but exciting, an untying and unloosening, too.

  The thickening bushes slowed her down at last. She crept tentatively among them, expecting to find herself in a cave of leaves and twigs, but emerged instead into the strangest kind of garden, very overgrown. All its trees and bushes were curiously shaped and colored; little flattened trees with twisted branches and red and feathery leaves, the redness too pink to be merely an autumn color; coppery bushes with long leaves, others with sprays of round leaves widely spaced, all seeming to absorb the sun’s warmth and light and reflect it back again. Set among them was a pond of thick black water half covered in lily leaves, the midges wavering over it in a cloud, and dragonflies flicking like little helicopters. There was a bridge very steeply humped, many slats and railings gone, the rest showing faded and blistered remains of a dark pink paint. On the far side of it, leaning on one of the only firm-looking pieces of rail, there stood, staring at the water, a tall, fair girl.

  Charlotte stepped back at once seeing her, reluctant to explain herself, especially to a senior girl as this one seemed. She was uncertain in any case whether she should be here or not, whether it was out of bounds. But the layer of leaves and twigs from the bushes spat beneath her feet, and the tall, fair girl turned round.

  “Hello,” she said. “It’s Charlotte, isn’t it?” It was Sarah. Her voice sounded much nearer than the bridge looked. Perhaps in the late slanted sunlight the lake gave merely an illusion of size.

  “Wait a minute, will you? I’m just coming.” Sarah was with Charlotte quickly, just half a dozen steps it seemed from the center of the bridge, including the leap she had to make over its gaping holes.

  “Well, how is it going?” she asked, flicking scraps of paint from her dark blue skirt, looking at Charlotte in an intent and curious way.

  “Very well, thank you,” replied Charlotte uncertainly. Someone whose expression was so hard to interpret was not someone to make you feel at ease, especially when they stared at you as hard, as strangely, as Sarah did. Charlotte’s head prickled, the midges having begun to bite. It was a relief almost when an airplane buried them in sound, making talk impossible.

  “It’s supposed to be Japanese, this garden,” said Sarah abruptly when silence fell once more. “No one has touched it for years, of course.”

  She hesitated. “Come on, we ought to go or you’ll be late for prep.” Again Charlotte had the feeling there was something she wanted to say, other than what she actually did.

  Sarah knew the path out of the garden, and they went along it, but without hurry. It was almost the first time since she had come to school that Charlotte had been alone with someone other than Susannah or Emily, and there came over her a sudden huge longing to tell Sarah, tell her about what was happening. She half stopped, opened her mouth, turned toward Sarah, but the sight of that remote pale face checked her. She could have spoken to air perhaps, but not now to anyone she was looking at.

  Sarah, however, stopped suddenly. Gazing straight in front of her, still without turning to Charlotte, she said quickly, determinedly, “My mother told me to be kind to you, Charlotte, if you came.”

  “Your mother!” said Charlotte, amazed. “But I don’t know your mother.” In case that sounded rude, as if she meant she would hate to know her, she added less emphatically. “At least I don’t think I do.”

  Sarah turned her head and gazed at Charlotte with unmoving eyes. She smiled a little even. “I don’t think she knows you either. She never said that. She just told me that if a girl called Charlotte Makepeace came to school, I was to be kind to her. She’s never told me to be kind to anyone else.”

  •

  That evening Susannah asked Charlotte to be her best friend. No one had ever asked her this before, and though certain she did not really want to be Susannah’s best friend, she was touched and pleased by it. And she did not know how to refuse without being unkind. In the end, she answered yes, but she was so busy thinking about what Sarah had said to her in the afternoon that she forgot to mention Susannah when she wrote to Clare in the pink-covered exercise book.

  Chapter 7

  CHARLOTTE had barely fallen asleep when a whistle penetrated her dream, shrilling on and on, though she shook her head and groaned to make it stop.

  She opened her eyes at last to find everything still dark.

  “Wake up, Clare,” someone was saying. “Wake up at once!”

  The darkness hid all differences, so she could not tell at first when or where she was.

  “Wake up,” insisted the figure beside her bed, shaking her, prodding with her voice. “Wake up, Clare,” it went on repeating until gradually Charlotte began to realize that the name called was Clare not Charlotte.

  “What’s the time?” she asked sleepily. “What’s the matter?”

  “Air-raid alarm. Hurry up.” Nurse Gregory was brisk. “Quickly, find your dressing gown.”

  Charlotte and Emily were sent into the passage, now only dimly lit, were swept into a tide of girls in dressing gowns, sleepy looking, their voices hushed, their slippers whispering on linoleum, with none of the daytime clatter and noise. It was hard to tell voices from feet as they slipped downstairs, along more passages to the gymnasium. They lined up in rows beneath the eyes of Miss Bite, who wore a dressing gown and had her hair in a thick braid down her back.

  The gym looked bleak, was meanly lit. The clustered ropes made shadows near the ceiling like huge upturned spiders, swaying a little now and then, though there seemed to be no wind below where Charlotte stood. Perhaps so many people breathing made them move, she thought, watching the shadow spiders, watching the two shadow stripes above the parallel bars bend and dart. One wall of the gym was more thickly striped by the wall bars and their shadows alternately. When the lights moved, so did they, and the wooden bars looked no more solid to the eye than the shadows behind them on the wall.

  It made an expectancy for her, a fear. The war had never frightened Charlotte much before—to her surprise, for she had thought you always would be frightened in a war—but it frightened her now. Would planes really come? Would bombs really fall on them? Nothing happened, though; Miss Bite read the registers class by class, the buzz of names and answers not echoing from the roof so much as disappearing slowly, melting like the sounds in a vaulted church. Charlotte was lulled by it. Dazed and sleepy still, she felt she floated high above everyone. She could not remember whether to listen for Makepeace or Moby, so
failed to answer any name at all till prodded by Emily when Moby had been called three times.

  “Yes . . . yes, Miss Bowser,” she called, confusedly, and could not understand the giggles round.

  Would bombs really fall? Would they fall on her, she went on wondering, less and less urgently. Miss Bite closed the registers with a snap at last and announced a false alarm after all, a practice only for the real thing, blowing a whistle herself for the all clear to send them shuffling disconsolately, disappointedly even, back to bed.

  They were forbidden still to talk. But when no one was looking, Bunty crept up to Emily and hissed disgustedly what a cheat it was, how in a real raid they would have had cocoa and biscuits and stayed downstairs much longer, listening to stories and singing funny songs.

  “I wish it had been real,” Emily said longingly afterwards as she and Charlotte lay awake. “It sounds such awful fun. Bunty saw a plane shot down once. She wasn’t supposed to look out, but she did. It was like a little red flame falling. I wish I could see one, too. There weren’t any air raids where Aunt Dolly lived.”

  “I wouldn’t want to,” said Charlotte, for there would have been people inside the little red flame, and it might have fallen on the school, on them.

  “Oh, you’re feeble, just like Clare. I don’t suppose I’ll see one now anyway. Bunty’s father says the war will end quite soon, she says.”

  Later, she said sleepily, “Didn’t Miss Bite look funny in a dressing gown and with that silly braid like a little girl? Do you know her slipper fell off once when she got down off the platform, and I saw her bare toes.”

  “I don’t suppose they were so much different from anyone else’s toes,” said Charlotte. But Emily went on giggling till she fell asleep.

  •

  In the morning Charlotte still felt confused, and her head ached after the interrupted night. She sat for some time in the preparation class trying to sort out what work she had to do, but even then did not remember she had to learn a poem for Miss Bowser’s poetry class on Monday morning. She had two detentions in the afternoon, for an arithmetic exercise as well as the forgotten Latin exercise, and went to bed that night so tired that she could scarcely speak, quite forgetting again to tell Clare about Susannah being her best friend.

  When she woke the next day, it was raining. The cedar tree gave rain a different, special sound, a kind of hiss and bounce, which mingled with the other sounds, some soft, some clear, of its pouring, dripping, running. The drenched earth outside smelled clean and bold.

  Clare’s diary was placed as usual between the Bible and the prayerbook. Charlotte read then what she had been expecting to read for days and did not know what she felt about it, whether she was pleased or sad.

  “Miss Bite called me in to see her. We’re to move on Friday. The people are called Chisel-Brown. Friday is my day here in 1918, so that is all right.”

  Emily was still asleep. Charlotte felt extraordinarily fond of her. If the Mobys moved on Friday and Emily was right about the bed being the reason for Clare and her changing about, she would see her only for two days more and then never, never again.

  A little while later it occurred to her that even for Sunday she had been lying awake some considerable time. Surely the bell should be ringing soon? She prodded at Emily, who was beginning to wake of her own accord, grunting, sighing, humping up the bedclothes.

  “Emily. Emily. Isn’t it very late? Isn’t it time for the bell?”

  “No, it isn’t. Don’t you remember we’ve an extra hour?” Emily sounded extremely cross, not living up to the softness Charlotte had been feeling toward her.

  “How do you mean, an extra hour?”

  “Oh, it’s you. I thought it was Clare. Don’t they do that with you any more, put the clocks on for summertime and then back in the autumn?”

  “Oh yes, but not yet.”

  “Well, they’ve done it here, and you’ve wakened me up for nothing, bother you.”

  “You were beginning to wake up already.”

  “No, I wasn’t. I was fast asleep.”

  Charlotte let it go. She did not feel like an argument this morning.

  •

  The next morning Vanessa had to shake her awake, for she had had one hour’s less sleep than usual, two hours less than the night before. All the rest of that week there continued this curious affair of nights longer and shorter than usual, alternately—the effect quite as disconcerting as it would be suddenly to find yourself walking on legs of different length, or seeing with quite different-sighted eyes.

  Charlotte always seemed to be sleepy. She wished she could make up for the shorter nights by extra sleep on the longer nights, but never succeeded, lying awake instead each early morning for what seemed hours, listening to Emily’s even breathing, and thinking thoughts about what might happen, which she would have preferred not to have time to think. After each shorter night, on the other hand, Vanessa or one of the other girls continued having to shake her out of sleep.

  Probably her sleepiness and consequent confusion were part of the reason why everything began to look impossibly wrong. Disaster seemed inevitable when Monday came. It was the morning of Miss Bowser’s poetry class, and only five minutes before it was due to start, Charlotte realized that she had forgotten to learn a poem for it. There was no time now. She could only hope she would not be asked to recite.

  Unfortunately, Miss Bowser chose this day to test her new girls—just Charlotte and Susannah in their class. Susannah had her name called first and stood up, giggling, to recite Tennyson’s “Brook,” each word in it given the same weight as the one before and the one after, each line plodded out in procession, sounding more like a wheel than water.

  “That’s enough, Sue. Well done,” said Miss Bowser. “Sit down now.” She was quite different from the other headmistress, solemn, old-fashioned, remote Miss Bite. She was tall, smart, and stoutish and wore pink-rimmed spectacles and pink lipstick and usually suits of tweed. She had a jolly smile, inviting confidence. “Just because I’m headmistress, don’t be afraid of me,” it seemed to say. But because she was the headmistress, most people were afraid. Neither Janet nor Vanessa spoke in her classes unless invited to, though they shouted all the time in most other ones.

  “Well now, Charlotte,” she asked encouragingly. “What have you got for us? Eh?”

  Charlotte climbed reluctantly to her feet. During Susannah’s poem she had remembered, with relief, “Horatius at the Bridge,” and repeated the verses over in her head. She began in a rush.

  “Lars Porsena of Clusium . . .”

  “Give us the title first please, dear,” said Miss Bowser. “We all like to hear the title first, you know.”

  “Horatius at the Bridge,” began Charlotte again, less fast, but very loud, louder indeed than she had meant, so she lowered her voice almost to a whisper for the first line of the poem.

  “Lars Porsena of Clusium,

  By the Nine Gods he swore . . .”

  Miss Bowser was looking at her, still smiling. Charlotte gazed past at the blackboard, which had the date written on it beautifully, in two colors.

  “That the great House of Tarquin . . .”

  Miss Bowser broke in. “Do you have your book, Charlotte, the one I asked you to choose a poem from?”

  Charlotte nodded. It lay on her desk—A New Anthology for the Middle School.

  “Do you mind showing me your poem there?”

  Charlotte felt suddenly afraid; taking the book, she searched with some hopefulness still through the index of first lines. But there was no sign of “Lars Porsena of Clusium.” Hurriedly she turned to the index of titles, leafing the pages over to find “Horatius at the Bridge.” There was no sign of that either. Miss Bowser watched her, smiling all the time, the smile trapped to her face now, not jolly any more. She was touching her pink smile with pink-painted finger-nails. Charlotte had begun to leaf through the book itself, hoping, still hoping, but more and more hopelessly.

  “Hav
e you found it yet, Charlotte?” Miss Bowser inquired.

  “No . . . no, I haven’t,” replied Charlotte, blushing and trembling.

  “That doesn’t surprise me, dear,” said Miss Bowser, “since it is not in the book.” She paused impressively. She put both her hands down on the teaching desk and leaned forward over them, angled like a figurehead of a ship, as hefty, as stern. She was not smiling now.

  “I suppose, Charlotte, that was a poem you learned at your last school and were hoping to palm off on stupid Miss Bowser as this week’s work?” This was so nearly true—if also miles off in a way Miss Bowser could never have guessed—that Charlotte had no defense. She stood miserably, almost in tears, lifting one hand to push back her hair and feeling her face grow hotter and hotter.

  “I’m nothing like as stupid as that, you know, Charlotte. Am I, girls?”

  “No, Miss Bowser,” they chorused, all eyes on her, but creeping now and then slyly to Charlotte, with sympathy or enjoyment or disapproval.

  Miss Bowser took fire. She could take it, evangelistically, on almost anything from moral standards to lost property or untidy cloakrooms, guiding her voice as skillfully as most people guide motorcars.

  “You have been very lazy, Charlotte, very deceitful, very stupid. I don’t like any of these things. I don’t like the laziness of work not done. I don’t like the deceit that tries to disguise such laziness. I don’t like the stupidity you have shown, Charlotte, in trying to disguise both laziness and deceit.

  “You are one of the oldest in this class, you know, and you came to us with good reports. But now I hear only bad reports of you; work forgotten, work slackly done. I hear you had no less than two detentions on Saturday, which for a new girl is a disgrace. What is more, I hear you are unfriendly, do not join in and take part with the other girls, and that is something we do not like in this school. You let yourself down by this behavior, you know, Charlotte. You let your class down; you let me down; you let the school down. I think you’d better learn the poem on page 79 that begins, ‘When the British Warrior Queen, Bleeding from the Roman Rods . . .’ since you seem to like the Romans. I’ll hear you recite it tomorrow afternoon after lunch.”