The Mistressclass by Michèle Roberts

Author:Michèle Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

PART 9

Memories both sustain and torment me, dear master. Memories of that first year Emily and I were pupils together at your school.

When you looked in at the door the dormitory seemed to stretch away into infinite space. It was filled with floaty lengths of pale cotton like rustling wings. These were the curtains surrounding the boarders’ beds. In the daytime pulled back and furled neatly, to open the bed, the chair and the tiny chest of drawers to Madame’s inspection, and at night flurried round each pupil as she got undressed, knelt to say her prayers, climbed in between the sheets.

From the door, in the daytime, the dormitory was clean, silent, spacious. At mid-morning a forbidden space, unreachable as heaven, hovering at the top of three curving flights of stairs. Pretending not to know you, that you never went in there, that it was untouchable and untouched. At night it was crowded with bodies like a railway station, people in a waiting-room giving up all hope of their train’s arrival, flinging themselves down anywhere to pass out. The school was a machine that turned out nice jeunes filles and the dormitory combed them into rows, ready for next day’s grind and push. The white cotton veil around your bed separated your dreams from those of your companions on either side. Groans and murmurs as girls restlessly dozed; the smell of soap, urine, sweaty armpits and feet; and your self nearly extinguished by the weight of so many other sleepers pressing in all around you.

Madame Heger gave Emily and me cubicles next to one another, at the far end. If I awoke in the night I listened for my sister’s breathing close to mine. I knew immediately if she had left her bed and gone wandering. The air sagged empty. I would pull on my dressing-gown, thrust my feet into slippers, and pursue her into the dark. She might come to harm. The dormitory door creaked open under my fearful hand. I fled softly down the shadowy corridor, in and out of shafts of moonlight piercing the uncurtained windows, my felt soles sliding on the tiled floor. She might be in the classroom, hunting for a book, or strolling in the oratory, flicking her fingernail over the carved backs of prie-dieux, or in the kitchen, foraging in the larder for leftover supper scraps. If I found her I could join her. That was her rule for that game. Once, we climbed out of a skylight onto the flat edge of the roof, perched swinging our legs above the gutters, shared filched slices of redcurrant tart. Emily liked to pretend, sometimes, that we were still ten years old. Why not? Girls and boys come out to play the moon doth shine as bright as day.

We stole extra time for ourselves to persuade each other that we were somehow special, that we did matter. Too many girls in that school, uniform in drab dark dresses and white collars, like nuns, and we wanted to stand out, for one another at least.

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