Even at a glance I could tell that the faculty of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy had one thing in common: They were all dead serious. There was no frivolity: no laughter and no lipstick.
Even as they ate, they spoke quietly to one another as if they were a panel of grave judges with all the weight of justice on their shoulders.
Could one of them be a murderess?
As a simple exercise, I set myself to deduce their teaching specialties.
The woman at the far right, with short steel-gray hair, was almost certainly the French mistress. She had that Cupid’s-bow mouth with the raised corner and peculiar but slight twist of the outer nostril that can come only from speaking French from the cradle. No Englishwoman could ever possibly form those shapes with her mouth while talking. I knew that from my own close observation of Mrs. Lennox—Chantelle Lennox—who lived next door to the vicarage in Bishop’s Lacey, and who had been brought back to England as a sort of war trophy by her husband, Norman.
She was from Montmartre, pronounced through the nose.
Next at the table was a hatchet-faced individual with high cheekbones and an air of solitude about her, who seemed to exist in her own aura, almost as if she were surrounded by an invisible bell jar.
Sad, I thought. Lonely and unpopular.
My first thought was that, judging by her face alone, this should be Mildred Bannerman, the acquitted mariticide. (A useful word meaning “husband killer” that Daffy had taught me: a word unknown, it would appear, not only to the shrillest of the tabloid newspapers, but even to The Times.)
But no—just yesterday I had seen a schoolgirl photo of Miss Bannerman in the Old Girls’ Gallery. She could not possibly have aged into such a hard-looking creature.
My eyes moved on along the table, and there, on Miss Fawlthorne’s right, sat a sweet-faced pixie: the youngest teacher of the lot—was this the girl from the photograph? She appeared still not much more than my sister Feely’s age, which was eighteen.
She must be older than she looks, I thought.
Not wanting to stare, I watched her from the corner of my eye, reveling in the very thought of breakfasting with a killer. Mildred Bannerman—at last!
The others were unremarkable: a mere assortment of noses and chins, eyes and ears plucked from a sack and tossed together at random.
“Welcome to Bods,” said a voice at my ear.
It was the girl whose hand I had shaken on the stair.
“Van Arque,” she said. “We’ve already met. I’ve been more or less put in charge of you until you’re on the rolls. I’m a monitress, by the way.”
She looked slowly round the room as if she were keeping an eye out for predators. Satisfied for the moment that we were safe, she turned her attention back to me. “Say, you don’t have a cigarette on you by any chance?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t smoke. Are you allowed to? In here?”
Van Arque made a honking noise through her nose. “Of course not. We use the third-floor kybo.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The kybo. The bog house. The four-flusher. The holy tabernacle—”
“The crapper, you mean,” I said.
“The crapper! Ha! That’s a good one!” she hooted, choking on her porridge.
She was seized with a spasm of coughing and her face grew red. Her hands flew to her throat. Her breathing had become a loud, wheezing gurgle.
I knew instantly that some mass of the glutinous stuff had lodged in Van Arque’s windpipe—and that she was in real danger.
Her face was already darkening.
I leapt to my feet and began pounding her furiously on the back—with the flat of my hand, at first, and then with both fists.
I couldn’t help noticing that everyone round us—even the faculty—seemed stuck to their chairs. No one, besides me, had moved a muscle. The room had gone silent.
Suddenly—and unexpectedly—Van Arque coughed up a disgusting clot of porridge and spat it noisily out onto the floor.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She was now sucking in great, grateful breaths of fresh air, her shoulders heaving. Her color was improving by the second.
She grimaced.
“No,” she croaked, “but I must go on … It’s trad. Monitresses are not allowed to be ill.”
I looked at her in disbelief. Was she joking?
“If we catch so much as a sniffle, they put us to death.”
She could see I didn’t believe her.
“It’s true,” she whispered. “They have an abattoir. There’s a secret door behind a cupboard in the infirmary.”
“With bloody meat hooks hanging from the ceiling,” I said, catching on.
Practical jokers can recognize one another as easily as bees from the same hive. Van Arque and I had far more in common than I had realized.
“Exactly!” she said. “Meat hooks and racks of butcher’s knives. And they feed the mulch to the chickens.”
“Or what’s left of it after making the porridge,” I said, shoving a large spoonful of the stuff into my mouth and chewing it with relish.
Van Arque sucked in a breath and her eyes went as big as saucers. “Oohhh!” she said. “How disgusting!” and I knew that I had made an impression.
Van Arque picked up a table napkin and gave my mouth a couple of dabs, as if I were dribbling porridge.
“Shhh!” she said, covering her own mouth as she faked a small additional cough. “Druce is watching us. She reads lips.”
Much as I wanted to brag about my own achievements in that department, I made a quick decision to keep a few tricks up my sleeve. It is sometimes better to let science be thought magic.
Two tables away, the large girl who had elbowed her neighbor in the ribs—this must be Druce—was staring openly.
She was the only person in the hall looking at us. Everyone else was studiously looking away, as Anglicans invariably do when faced with group embarrassment. It was a trait I had noticed even as a child, which, as nearly as I could puzzle out, was somehow connected with the famous ostrich-and-sand reaction. Roman Catholics, by contrast, would have been clambering over one another for a front-row seat.
“Let’s get out of here,” Van Arque said. “I need some fresh air. Come on. We’ve got a few minutes before the next bell.”
As we pushed back our chairs, I turned deliberately toward Druce and, as if I were talking to Van Arque, clearly pronounced the word “flap-dragon.”
It was my favorite word from Shakespeare: not as long as “Honorificabilitudinitatibus,” which preceded it in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but enough of a workout to let Druce know that when it came to lip-reading, she was not dealing with someone who was wet behind the ears.