bad?
Every morning after First Quarter Marina and the other West Street girls rush back to the house to check for letters. West Street is just outside the school grounds, reached via a narrow passage beside Bute House. It is not a house in its own right, but a place in which female quasi-members of the boys’ houses live. It was once part of a terrace, now partitioned like an experiment for mice, and Marina has failed to make the slightest sense of the labyrinth. Whenever she ventures to the upper floors, the double staircases foil her. She has endless dreams of being lost.
There are no mullioned dormitories or coats of arms here, no crested oars draped with football socks, no miasma of Paco Rabanne. West Street is clean, and vigorously air-freshened. There is a kitchenette, floral curtains, doilies. The fire doors are decorated with posters of kittens in hammocks, thoughtful bears. The carpet is dusky pink. And there is a matron, Mrs Long, whose twin passions for Benson & Hedges and her flatulent Dandie Dinmont terrier, Anthony, sit uneasily with her stringent domestic expectations. Other girls receive constant correspondence: brotherly post from agricultural colleges; cheery catch-ups from their mothers about puppies and their fathers’ business trips; invitations to charity fashion shows. They all have thousands of people at other schools in common and read out bits of letters: ‘Jamie – no, silly, Stowe Jamie – says we have to go to the Gatecrasher Ball.’ The only girls who keep their correspondence private are the recipients of love letters, like the eye-linered and patchoulied Simonetta Bruce, to whom Marina has taken a fierce dislike.
And Marina herself. How could she show her post? This is her total so far: one forwarded membership reminder for the Puffin Club; one grumpy eight-page letter from Ursula Persky, her best friend at Ealing Girls’, tucked inside a Hamlet programme from yet another school trip to Stratford; a single postcard from her mother saying not much; and one of Rozsi’s brown paper packages.
How she loves these parcels. How she hates them. This one contains sponge fingers, a leaflet about childhood illnesses, unsolicited lo-calorie sweetener, a bank-bag of fresh ten pences for the pay phone, a Tatler from Mrs Dobos and a short letter: ‘Hallo darling don’t you want a lovly hair cut? Tell me I ask Krystof any time he helps you. Sorry you are not siting next to me. I try to send beter letter soon.’ Unlike Ildi, who fills exercise books with vocabulary and old diaries with informative facts (‘ Raphael died on his 37 birthday. Crucifiction [sic] early picture (about 20 years). A bit provincial (see fluttering ribbons) . Best in the figure of Christ. Painted for a convent ’), Rozsi is not comfortable with writing, at least in English. Her handwriting suits Hungarian better. Last term she sent Marina a sewing kit which must have been hers; when Marina ran to the bathroom with it and opened the lid, an old browned piece of lined paper fell out. The smell of the flat has faded from it, but she still has the paper: a few meaningless accented words, written in pencil, too full of possible momentous secrets to throw away.
She keeps having premonitions that harm is coming to them. Since Combe, or was it before, she cannot stop expecting it, attempting to prevent it, knowing that nothing she does will be enough. The fear that she will contaminate them is much stronger this term. Simonetta ‘Slutter’ Bruce has the room next to Marina’s, and her music and loud laughter infest everything Marina owns. Although she is an Upper, and is best friends with a girl in School House so is often elsewhere, the smell of her Players and Rive Gauche means that she always seems present: a force for bad. Apparently, she has had sex in Divvers; her mother is dead, or at least divorced. Two days into the new term Marina is using her jumper sleeves to open doors which Simonetta might have touched. She
Every morning after First Quarter Marina and the other West Street girls rush back to the house to check for letters. West Street is just outside the school grounds, reached via a narrow passage beside Bute House. It is not a house in its own right, but a place in which female quasi-members of the boys’ houses live. It was once part of a terrace, now partitioned like an experiment for mice, and Marina has failed to make the slightest sense of the labyrinth. Whenever she ventures to the upper floors, the double staircases foil her. She has endless dreams of being lost.
There are no mullioned dormitories or coats of arms here, no crested oars draped with football socks, no miasma of Paco Rabanne. West Street is clean, and vigorously air-freshened. There is a kitchenette, floral curtains, doilies. The fire doors are decorated with posters of kittens in hammocks, thoughtful bears. The carpet is dusky pink. And there is a matron, Mrs Long, whose twin passions for Benson & Hedges and her flatulent Dandie Dinmont terrier, Anthony, sit uneasily with her stringent domestic expectations. Other girls receive constant correspondence: brotherly post from agricultural colleges; cheery catch-ups from their mothers about puppies and their fathers’ business trips; invitations to charity fashion shows. They all have thousands of people at other schools in common and read out bits of letters: ‘Jamie – no, silly, Stowe Jamie – says we have to go to the Gatecrasher Ball.’ The only girls who keep their correspondence private are the recipients of love letters, like the eye-linered and patchoulied Simonetta Bruce, to whom Marina has taken a fierce dislike.
And Marina herself. How could she show her post? This is her total so far: one forwarded membership reminder for the Puffin Club; one grumpy eight-page letter from Ursula Persky, her best friend at Ealing Girls’, tucked inside a Hamlet programme from yet another school trip to Stratford; a single postcard from her mother saying not much; and one of Rozsi’s brown paper packages.
How she loves these parcels. How she hates them. This one contains sponge fingers, a leaflet about childhood illnesses, unsolicited lo-calorie sweetener, a bank-bag of fresh ten pences for the pay phone, a Tatler from Mrs Dobos and a short letter: ‘Hallo darling don’t you want a lovly hair cut? Tell me I ask Krystof any time he helps you. Sorry you are not siting next to me. I try to send beter letter soon.’ Unlike Ildi, who fills exercise books with vocabulary and old diaries with informative facts (‘ Raphael died on his 37 birthday. Crucifiction [sic] early picture (about 20 years). A bit provincial (see fluttering ribbons) . Best in the figure of Christ. Painted for a convent ’), Rozsi is not comfortable with writing, at least in English. Her handwriting suits Hungarian better. Last term she sent Marina a sewing kit which must have been hers; when Marina ran to the bathroom with it and opened the lid, an old browned piece of lined paper fell out. The smell of the flat has faded from it, but she still has the paper: a few meaningless accented words, written in pencil, too full of possible momentous secrets to throw away.
She keeps having premonitions that harm is coming to them. Since Combe, or was it before, she cannot stop expecting it, attempting to prevent it, knowing that nothing she does will be enough. The fear that she will contaminate them is much stronger this term. Simonetta ‘Slutter’ Bruce has the room next to Marina’s, and her music and loud laughter infest everything Marina owns. Although she is an Upper, and is best friends with a girl in School House so is often elsewhere, the smell of her Players and Rive Gauche means that she always seems present: a force for bad. Apparently, she has had sex in Divvers; her mother is dead, or at least divorced. Two days into the new term Marina is using her jumper sleeves to open doors which Simonetta might have touched. She
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