The Stargazers by Harriet Evans

Author:Harriet Evans [Evans, Harriet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

Part Three

1954

Chapter Eleven

December 1954

‘Lorna, you stand here. Anne? Are you in? Well, you’re there, then. Judy, next to Anne.’

Susan Cowper stood back on one slim leg, considering. I sat beside her, perched on Miss Trubshawe’s desk. In front of me were two straight lines of girls, facing each other. They were ‘the guard’.

It was ten days before Christmas. Whorls of ice lined the inside of the casement windows. Haresfield had once been a home of an earl, and it was considered a tremendous rag to say, ‘Gosh, I’m frightfully hot – someone open a window! How did the nuns bear this heat!’

At first Vic and I thought we were missing some vital component of the joke, before realising that there was no joke to get. Haresfield was that sort of place – it took a few weeks before you realised the jokes weren’t funny, the girls weren’t clever or interesting, the staff wasn’t dedicated or particularly bright. Everything was third or fourth rate.

Now Susan Cowper pointed at the tallest girl, and jerked her head to one side. ‘Diana, can you budge up that way? Give Margaret and Anne some more room. I say, do hurry. Lorna, Judy? Come on, do. Where’s Monica? Let’s get on with it, shall we? Miss Trubshawe will be back to collect the dusters soon.’

‘Susan,’ Anne said, timidly, ‘Judy and I have to go in a min. It’s the final rehearsal for the carol concert.’

‘Oh, I am so sorry,’ said Susan, her hands flying to her cheeks. (Susan Cowper had been told, by one of the new queen’s ladies-in-waiting, no less, that she had elegant hands. Discretion, as she often reminded us, meant she was unable to disclose where or when this encounter had taken place, but also meant she took every opportunity to display her hands thereafter, doing things like ostentatiously hugging the water jug, sliding her hands around it, before lifting it up and passing it down the table at lunch. ‘It’s like she’s having a passionate affair with a jug,’ Vic had hissed to me, and I’d laughed, and got into trouble for laughing.) ‘So sorry, Anne.’ She banged a duster from the board hard down onto the teacher’s desk. Clouds of purplish-grey dust flew into the air. Monica started coughing, but otherwise there was silence.

‘You don’t care, it would seem, that Sarah Fox threatens everything about the school and that which we hold dear? You think carols are more important. So go, Anne. And you too, Judy.’

‘Susan, I don’t want to. I really don’t. It’s only that the Old Dear said if I was late a-again I’d have to sit in front of Founder’s tonight, Susan, and I can’t –’ Anne’s eyes were huge, and she shivered in the freezing chill of the dimly lit room. The other girls said nothing; they knew what had happened the time Caroline Powell had been late for Evensong and had to spend the night in front of Founder’s. The school had to call her parents when she was taken to the cottage hospital four days later with pneumonia.

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