Wouldn’t Delphi love this? She could make them special riding outfits. That trouser suit would have a use after all.
‘Thank you,’ she remembered to say. Her sadness had flipped in the air like a pancake and had now flopped back to fill the pan. Her eyes met Miss Lott’s and she smiled back. The connection surged between them, the meeting of two kindred spirits. Natalie knew she didn’t have to say another word, because the Principal had heard and understood every thought that had just flitted through her mind.
The very high plain dive
By springing out and not downward the diver keeps control in the air and avoids turning over and striking the water with her back.
Natalie walked past the gymnasium just as the local children filed in. She smiled as warmly as she could, meeting their eyes, her hands clear of their perch on her hips, clasping them instead in front of her skirt. But each child, dressed in baggy hand-me-down shorts and shirts, bowed their heads at the sight of her as they cantered past in silence to line up on the mats.
She seemed to terrify the locals, no matter how amiable she tried to be.
If they knew she’d been dismissed they mightn’t be so reverential. Having slept on it, she’d decided not to heed Lacey’s request that she leave quickly and quietly.
She glimpsed the gymnasium through the double doors to say farewell. It had been a ballroom before the building was bought and transformed by Madame Forsberg. The chandelier’s crystals dripped down from the ceiling and rose incongruously above the suede-skinned vaulting horse and its splayed wooden legs.
The equipment had been pioneered here in Britain. These children were privileged to have the chance to use it. The juxtaposition of the chandelier and the equipment gave her a sense that the old way was losing out to the new. Only she was out of touch; this wasn’t new any more.
Miss Hollands, a physical woman with strong thighs, hands clasped behind her back, looked away from Natalie as soon as she came upon her in the corridor and went straight into the gymnasium, blew her whistle and set the children to scale the ropes. So the staff already know. News travels fast. She hesitated at the glass in the door. The children pulled themselves up the rope with grimaces that revealed a mess of teeth, the yellow-hued adult ones too large in contrast to their snub noses and porcelain jaws. Miss Hollands still didn’t look her way.
Despite what she and Delphi felt about the college’s exclusivity, they did good work to improve the health of the local children. The schools could never afford equipment like this.
Down the corridor and out of the French doors, she came to the front lawn where students were setting up for Clinic.
New to the college this term, Miss Ford stood at ease at the edge of the lawn. She supervised the girls as they prepared to deliver remedial physiotherapy to unwell children from the neighbouring villages. Miss Ford didn’t acknowledge Natalie’s presence either. Her voice a deep murmur as she instructed Joan Mason on how to manipulate the lower leg of a local girl of about eight, who lay on her back on top of a white bed sheet. The empty cage of her callipers to her side, she squinted up at the sky as Joan pressed the pads of her fingers along the girl’s shin.
‘It looks like we’ll be blessed with a lovely day.’ Natalie tilted her face up towards the sun. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and it was really beginning to feel as if winter were firmly behind them and spring was finding its feet.
‘It does.’ Miss Ford’s deep voice was clipped.
‘Good work, Mason,’ Natalie added.
As Joan lowered the girl’s leg and lifted the other up straight, Natalie looked behind her at the balcony of Miss Lott’s living room. The doors were open again and the curtains flitted about in the breeze, as if nothing had changed.
Joan had set the girl’s right foot back down and Miss Ford squatted to her knees to help ease the metal cage back on. Then together they raised the girl to standing.
Joan had a gentle touch, Natalie thought. The young girl hobbled back across the lawn to her mother to calls of encouragement from Joan. That call to nurture others was something that couldn’t be taught.
Miss Ford remained silent, her head twitching to check out of the corner of her eye whether Natalie had gone. She decided that she ought to oblige her and push on.
*
‘Ahem.’ Natalie waited. She stood in Margaret’s narrow study room between the desk and bed. The room was so ordered as to be unloved. It looked nothing more than a place for the girl to rest her head. Just her pile of novels and sketchpad out on the desk, no signs of study. Nothing to suggest she had tried to make the place homely at all.
A skeleton on a stand, for anatomy studies, at the head of the bed, had its palms splayed outward as if to welcome the company.
Margaret, lying on her back, snapped her eyes shut as soon as Natalie loomed over her.
‘Shouldn’t you be helping at Clinic?’
Margaret reopened her eyes.
‘I’m resting.’ She addressed the ceiling as she spoke. ‘I heard you’d been dismissed.’ She arched an eyebrow and turned her attention to Natalie to gauge her reaction.
She didn’t want to talk about it with the girl and so she ignored her and pulled the chair out from the desk, turned it to face the bed and sat down.
‘You did very well at the display last night. Stopped Lord Lacey in his tracks and showed your parents a side to you that they didn’t know existed.’
‘They laughed at me today about Mummy’s headscarf and Daddy’s tatty old suit.’
‘The other girls?’
‘Who else?’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t just go to the river to dream and read, you know. I go to get away from them. They’re impenetrable if you don’t fit in.’
‘I know.’
‘No you don’t,’ Margaret snapped.
‘The more you hide from them, the harder it will be.’ Margaret tugged at her white sheet and pulled it close. ‘I think I’d really prefer it if you were to sit up while I spoke with you.’
‘I don’t have to do as you say any more.’ Despite saying this, Margaret still heaved herself up on her arms and propped her pillow against the bare wall. Her chin-length waves were tangled and she still wore her gymslip from the morning’s drills, Natalie noticed.
‘If you applied yourself like you did last night,’ Natalie said, leaning in to look plainly at the face that she hid behind her hair, ‘you could have your pick of friends. They’re competitive; they can’t resist a winner.’
‘But I’m not the competitive sort. I’m not their sort at all. The longer I’m here the more I see that I don’t suit boundaries and rules. The freedom Mother gave me was a gift, not a punishment. But I do so love the sport. I know I’m good at it…’
‘Miss Wilkins. The way I see it is this: you’re here, like it or not, until the end of the year, at the very least. You bring so much to the college – why not take something from it too? You’re a talented diver, swimmer, batswoman… I could go on. I think you should show them that a whimsical actor’s daughter with talent is more at home at this college than a disciplined baron’s daughter with none.’
‘Perhaps.’
Natalie smiled. She had got through to Margaret; she’d seen it in her face.
‘You ought to be worrying about yourself, not me.’
‘I’ll be all right. I have been here a long time. One might say this is just the challenge I need.’ At least I sound confident. I have no idea what I will do once I leave these grounds. ‘And I have