Temples of Delight Page 3

  ‘Instruction in Catholicism,’ Jem said. ‘He became a catechumen. He was the only son of a manse in Aberdeenshire, you see.’

  ‘But wasn’t your mother a bit scared to go home?’ Alice asked. ‘I mean what with your grandfather being such a fiend?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Jem said casually. ‘My father took along a crate of best Highland whisky. My grandfather and my uncles all drank him under the table on the eve of the wedding. They sang bawdy French songs till cock-crow and then the maid found them next morning, asleep in their shoes on the parlour floor, surrounded by umpteen empty bottles of Laphroaig.’ Jem paused. ‘After the wedding my grandfather took out the razor strap,’ she said, ‘and he gave it to my father as a present.’ Alice was appalled.

  ‘But he surely didn’t mean your father to – to use it, did he?’

  Jem laughed. ‘Oh, I’m sure he did,’ she said. ‘But my father couldn’t possibly. Even slug pellets make him feel like Goebbels. He has my sisters and me collect up all the garden snails in buckets and chuck them over the wall of the Protestant graveyard.’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t!’ Alice said in delight.

  ‘He says each snail will get us off about point zero two seconds in purgatory,’ Jem said. The two girls began to move indoors upon hearing the school bell. ‘’Course, they’re probably not really married,’ Jem said casually. ‘Not in the eyes of Mother Church. Well – when you think of all that whisky within hours of the Nuptial Mass.’

  ‘You are lucky, Jem,’ Alice said, ‘to have such interesting parents!’

  Chapter 4

  Jem had gone to Alice’s school because the convent school had expelled her. This blessed severance was one for which Alice became unendingly grateful. It had occurred, Jem said, because of an orange. Not William of Orange. Just a common or garden orange.

  ‘Sister Teresa was taking our form for a singing lesson in the hall,’ Jem said. ‘When she inadvertently sat down on an orange.’

  ‘Why was there an orange in the hall?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Search me,’ Jem said. ‘But she considered it not in keeping with her vocation to have orange juice on her habit, so she demanded to know who had put it there. She kept waving her baton about in a frenzy and uttering the direst threats, but nobody owned up.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Alice.

  ‘Well, it’s a funny thing that,’ Jem said, ‘but Catholic girls will usually own up to absolutely everything. Especially to things they haven’t done.’

  ‘Oh go on,’ Alice said. ‘Who’d be so daft as all that?’

  ‘Our Lord,’ Jem said severely, ‘took upon himself all the sins of the world.’

  ‘Oh, but that’s different!’ Alice said. ‘Surely, Jem, that’s quite different?’

  ‘Well of course it’s different,’ Jem said. ‘But it does make for a sort of precedent, doesn’t it? That’s for people who like to wrap their masochism in Messianic disguises.’

  ‘What’s “masochism”?’ Alice said.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jem said, ‘the fact is that Sister Teresa went berserk.’ She took on the persona of the poor, demented nun. ‘ “If I, a woman consecrated to God, can sit on an orange,”’ Jem mimicked wonderfully, ‘ “you all shall sit on an orange”!’

  ‘Oh she didn’t!’ Alice cried in delight. ‘Oh, she never did!’

  ‘Poor woman,’ Jem said. ‘She’d never really had her marbles about her person. Not since she’d been deeply disappointed in love.’

  ‘But how do you know?’ Alice said.

  ‘In her youth,’ Jem said, ignoring the question, ‘Sister Teresa had been beloved by a merchant seaman. He had golden curls and wide blue eyes. But alas, while he was away at sea, her mother hid all his letters. Then she told poor Sister Tee that he’d been drowned in the Persian Gulf. So she shaved her head forthwith and espoused the Lord.’

  Alice was momentarily cast down by the poignant, monastic vignette. ‘That’s dreadful!’ she said. ‘What sort of a mother would do a thing like that?’

  ‘Gullibility,’ Jem said sternly, ‘is the sin of stupidity. Look at Othello. One peek at his wife’s noserag in the wrong hands and he thinks she’s been sleeping around. Anyway, the orange tapped reservoirs of dottiness in poor Sister Tee. She made us all line up from the shortest to the tallest and sit on the stupid thing. Well, I’m pretty tall, you see, so I was last. The orange had rather passed its best by the time I came along.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I refused to sit on it,’ Jem said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, she had a fit.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘What I mean is, she had a fit,’ Jem said. ‘You know. A proper epileptic fit. All frothing and twitching. She was “as one possessed by an hundred demons”.’

  ‘Golly!’ Alice said.

  ‘Well, after that, Mother Superior telephoned my parents,’ Jem said. ‘She got through to Daddy in the summerhouse.’

  ‘Has he got a phone in the summerhouse?’ Alice asked.

  ‘ ’Course he has,’ Jem said. ‘A cordless telephone. You know. Anyway, he came up at once, but unfortunately he refused to be horrified. I’m afraid he faced the whole incident with rather inappropriate levity.’

  ‘With what?’ Alice said.

  ‘He burst out laughing,’ Jem said. ‘And just when Mother Superior was in her fullest flow on the Imitation of Christ. She’d put the orange in front of him on a silver platter, you see. And there it was, all sort of ravaged and oozy. Next thing I knew was we were both out, bag and baggage. Banished from paradise for ever and for aye.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound too much like paradise,’ Alice said doubtfully, but the gravity of the sentence impressed her none the less. Jem shook it off bravely.

  ‘Daddy took me to a restaurant,’ Jem said. ‘We ate fillet steak in béarnaise sauce and all he said was, “Well Jemsie, I suppose those villainous Protestants will have to educate you from now on. Heaven help me, they’re even more expensive.”’

  ‘And your mother?’ Alice said. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Oh, not much,’ Jem said vaguely. ‘She’s too much the demon Gaulish child-whacker to bother with verbiage at such moments.’

  Chapter 5

  Alice always knew that she owed her education to Jem. Until the coming of Jem there had simply been those books which you wanted to read and those books which you got made to read. It was this very dichotomy at the heart of things which had caused Miss Trotter to introduce the Silent Reading Hour in the first place. The headmistress had uncovered a regrettable fondness among her girls for Agatha Christie and Sue Barton. She had even whispered hoarsely in the Assembly Hall that ‘certain gels’ had been observed reading what she called ‘comic papers and Christmas annuals’.

  Claire Crouchley’s desk had always been well supplied with ‘comic papers and Christmas annuals’ in the form of Bunty and Diane. She had been in the habit of lending these out to her classmates in the library periods, but after the Head’s purification programme, she was obliged to stow them in her schoolbag and lend them out only in the breaks. It was from watching Jem read Claire’s girls’ papers that Alice had acquired her first taste for literary analysis.

  Jem, Alice observed, read these works with great enjoyment, but there was something in the manner of her doing so which gave her the air of an anthropologist embarking upon a new field study.

  ‘It’s interesting,’ Jem would say, flicking through the cheap, absorbent pages. ‘There’s always a ballerina being struck down by paralysing illness. That’s until some pioneering young doctor appears – all of three pages later – with his bag full of surgical tricks and his head full of wedding bells.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said, ‘that’s right.’

  ‘The ballerina alternates with a gymnast,’ Jem said, ‘who is forever being foiled by a half-crazed rival in league with a foreigner. The foreigner always gets a foothold in the school through the Modern Languages Department – or through the Ancillary Services.’


  ‘Anne what?’ Alice asked.

  ‘The villains always scream Red Menace,’ Jem said. ‘Or else they’re proles.’

  ‘There’s a demon dinner lady in this one I’m reading,’ Alice said.

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve read that one,’ Jem said. ‘She’s plotting against the new self-service dinner alternative. The editorial board is obviously trying to relocate “Gothic Horror” in the comprehensive school. Wouldn’t you say it was inconsistent with the genre – Breeze-Block Gothic?’

  Alice loved the way Jem talked, even when she couldn’t understand half of what Jem said. It was infectious the way Jem grooved on words.

  It was because Jem possessed so much of what Alice thought of as ‘culture’ – and because she had crossed it in equal measure with street wisdom – that Alice was able to discover all sorts of previously unsampled joys. Jem, within the week, had devised a fool-proof system for manoeuvring herself and Alice invisibly on and off the school premises in the lunch hour – an accomplishment which resulted in the girls spending many blissful, liberated hours window-shopping in the town centre, or idling pleasantly in coffee bars. And then, for a period of two successive Wednesdays, Jem demonstrated for Alice with what delightful ease one could absent oneself from the ‘special’ afternoon assemblies. One simply marked a little time in the sixth-form toilets before heading out for the sound-proofed cubicles off the music room.

  ‘If you stand on the lavatory seat until you hear the first hymn,’ Jem advised, ‘then the prefects can’t spot your feet under the door. Anyway, when it comes to malingerers, they’re always much too busy scouring the third-form washrooms. They never think to police their own cabbage patch. They believe all crime takes place in the ghetto.’

  In the music room, Jem treated Alice to a recording of The Magic Flute. She extracted it from the unlocked cupboard behind the pianos where Mrs Fergusson kept all the hardware for ‘music appreciation’. It went without saying that Jem’s course in music appreciation held attractions far beyond that offered either by Mrs Fergusson, or in the assembly hall where Miss Trotter always found musical composition to be pregnant with moral instruction. (‘Well,’ she would say brightly, of the Trumpet Voluntary, or the St Matthew Passion, or The Four Seasons, ‘that inspiring piece of music serves to remind us all of the brisk yet disciplined manner in which we carry out our tasks here in the Upper School. Dismiss in single file, gels!’)

  The Magic Flute was her father’s favourite opera, Jem said.

  ‘And mine too,’ she said. ‘So you must tell me that it’s the most marvellous thing you ever did hear.’

  Alice found that it was. Something about being with Jem made one able to see things through her eyes. There was a curious, insidious, ritualistic power in the soul of the thing which Alice at first tried to resist. And it needled her that the story was so idiotic and inconsistent. It didn’t seem to make any sense.

  ‘It makes sense in the way that a dream makes sense,’ Jem said. ‘You don’t expect a dream to be “consistent”, do you? But you know that it’s very deeply to do with the nature of your being.’

  And who was Sarastro? Alice was troubled that the opera should be raising up this dubious, patriarchal child abductor and dressing him in the garb of the high priest. What was his claim upon the Temple of Wisdom and why did such marvellous, sonorous male choruses sing homage to him when he passed in his chariot drawn by lions? He had stolen the daughter of the Queen of the Night. And why did Prince Tamino change sides? And why didn’t Pamina spit in Sarastro’s eye and insist that he let her go? Her objections made Jem laugh.

  ‘Sarastro can make lions appear in the wilderness,’ she said. ‘Sarastro can produce food and wine from the forest floor. He’s got the talisman. Do you expect him to behave as if he was running the Citizens’ Advice Bureau?’

  But why, again – if this was the Temple of Wisdom and not some bogus male hangout – why, then, was it blighted by a fevered black sex maniac intent upon raping Pamina? Anyway, wasn’t it racist to have a black man for ever creeping in and out through Pamina’s windows and seething about his own ‘ugliness’? The stoned black man hadn’t been ugly when he had climbed in through the classroom windows. Nor had he been intent upon rape. He hadn’t even thought the girls pretty. Pamina is very pretty, but Monostatos thinks she’s pretty just because she’s white. What rubbish! Wouldn’t a man like that undermine the whole validity of the Temple?

  ‘The Temple will weather the failings of its inmates,’ Jem said. ‘The Temple is the failings of its inmates. But then everything is transformed in the furnace of inspiration. There are sages standing in God’s holy fire.’

  ‘What?’ Alice said, but her attention was diverted, suddenly, because right there, near the end of the opera, Papageno and his girlfriend were quite definitely stammering. They were singing a duet. ‘Pa-pa-pa-pa. Pa-pa-pa-pa. Pa-pageno. Pa-pa-geno.’

  ‘They’re stammering,’ Alice said. ‘Jem, they’re stammering.’ She was startled by the realization that she had not stammered in Jem’s company. Not once. The stammer just wasn’t there.

  In Jem’s presence, of course, truanting was not a necessary expedient for the evocation of magic. Lessons themselves became an enchantment in her company, their tedium transformed ‘in the furnace of inspiration’. Take Needle-work, for example, where Jem had at once succeeded in creating such delirious burlesque in the ironing alcove out of Miss Cummings’ idiotic insistence upon ‘allowing for growth’.

  ‘I reckon these shorts are big enough for both of us,’ Jem said, and she flicked out Alice’s half-made shorts invitingly. ‘Here you are, Alice. You have the left leg and I’ll have the right.’

  ‘She’ll see us,’ Alice said.

  ‘Oh come on. She can’t see round corners,’ Jem said.

  ‘It’s her glasses,’ Alice said. ‘They help her to see round everywhere.’

  ‘Only God and a periscope can see round corners,’ Jem said.

  ‘And Sarastro,’ Alice said. Jem smiled at her. In an instant they had zipped themselves into the shorts, and there they stood, like Siamese twins, tight as pin cushions and helpless with silent laughter.

  Of course Jem had been quite right as usual. Miss Cummings had been completely blind to their antics and would have remained so had not Miss Trotter happened to pass the window at that moment. She no sooner spotted them than she took a deep breath, changed colour, and surged forward into the Needlework room, carrying her bosom before her.

  ‘Remove the shorts at once!’ she boomed, and she navigated the aisle with remarkable speed, given her stately bulk. The two girls found that they could not remove the shorts. Alice picked ineffectually at the zip which had jammed on stray threads from the unfinished placket.

  ‘Remove them immediately!’ Miss Trotter commanded. The seams, though strained, refused to budge. This was hardly surprising, Alice reflected silently, since Miss Cummings had always insisted upon a run-and-fell seam of unrivalled finesse and durability.

  ‘Please, Miss Trotter, we can’t,’ she said humbly.

  ‘The fact is,’ Jem said in that fatal voice with its unwittingly insubordinate clarity, ‘the fact is that Alice Pilling and I have become completely inseparable.’

  Miss Trotter’s nostrils flared. ‘Report to my office at once!’ she said.

  The girls found that to comply with Miss Trotter’s instruction was no mean feat in the circumstances. They shuffled and hopped their way along the length of the corridor in a condition of glorious hilarity. In later years, when she remembered that gauntlet of absurdity, Alice could frankly not remember ever again having felt so completely, so girlishly happy. Even after Miss Trotter had snatched up the scissors from her desk tray and had unseamed the girls from waistband to gusset, the heady feeling had not left her. ‘The fact is,’ Jem had said, ‘that Alice Pilling and I have become completely inseparable.’ Oh, the bliss of it! To have Jem and to be so completely inseparable!

  That was the first time Alice had
ever been given a detention and her mother had required an explanation.

  ‘If you ask me,’ said Mrs Pilling, once Alice had portrayed for her the essence of the prank, ‘this “Jem” McCrail of yours sounds like a thoroughly bad influence.’ But Mrs Pilling had already decided to defuse the power of the enemy by incorporation. ‘Perhaps you would like to ask her home,’ she said.

  Chapter 6

  Jem spent her first exeat weekend at Alice’s house. It was an event to which Alice looked forward with intense pleasure. Her mother, though she had by this time become an active and thriving businesswoman, still found time to watch over the event with that protective interest crossed with managerial engineering which characterized all her doings with regard to her only child. Mrs Pilling packed a brace of pork pies, a homemade carrot cake and a large bottle of ginger beer into a saddlebag. She suggested to Alice that the girls make use of the fine summer weather to cycle along the river bank for a picnic. To this purpose she had called upon Alice’s father to overhaul the spare lady’s bicycle which normally hung unused upon a bracket fixed to the garage wall. He was engaged upon this task on the front lawn when Alice’s friend made her entrance.

  Jem came in time for lunch, looking radiant in her civvies. Her brown curls were buoyant around her temples and she wore a man’s gabardine raincoat which spoke eloquently to Alice of alternative-chic. Her large, broad feet were, as usual, clad in the old black pumps. At the gate she embraced Alice and kissed her on both cheeks, for she was wont to employ most un-English modes of salutation. Then she strode across the grass to where Mr Pilling was busy cleaning the bicycle chain. She held out her hand to him like a self-possessed adult.

  ‘Mr Pilling?’ she said, her voice falling like golden rain, ‘Jem McCrail.’

  Alice’s father, taken unawares, paused to wipe his hands hastily on one of his cleaning rags. ‘Messy things, bicycles,’ he said, and he displayed both hands by way of apology. But Jem was inexplicably delighted. She seized his right hand and shook it.