? SIX ?
VAN ARQUE WAS WAITING at the bottom of the stairs. Had she been listening at the door?
“Jumbo wants to see you,” she said.
“Jumbo?”
“The head girl. Her name’s June Bowles, actually, but you must always call her Jumbo, or she’ll have your eyeballs for earrings.”
“I see,” I said.
“You darn well won’t if she does it!” Van Arque cackled, clapping her hands together with animated joy, as if she had just made the world’s greatest witticism.
“What does she want to see me about?”
“You’ll see.”
All these “sees” were having a nauseating effect on me. In fact I was becoming positively “see-sick.”
“She’s in Florence Nightingale,” Van Arque said, jabbing with a forefinger at the ceiling, so up the stairs we trudged—the same stairs I had just come down.
It was like living on a treadmill.
Florence Nightingale was at the far end of Athena Wing. The various wings at Miss Bodycote’s, I was to learn, were named after goddesses, the rooms after heroines, the houses after female saints, and the WCs after defunct royalty.
“She’s in Boadicea,” meant that the person in question was communing with nature in the little closet behind the kitchen, while Anne of Cleves and Jane Seymour were two of the loos on the upper floors.
Florence Nightingale turned out to be a rather grand study that overlooked the hockey field.
Van Arque knocked and entered without waiting for an invitation.
“Here she is, Jumbo,” she said. “The new girl. Her name is de Luce—Flavia.”
Jumbo turned slowly away from the window, waving a hand idly to disperse the few wisps of tobacco smoke that still hung in the air. The room reeked of the stuff.
Diana Dors in a tunic, was my first thought.
Jumbo was what the cinema magazines would have called breathtakingly gorgeous. She was tall, blond, and statuesque in the way that Britannia is statuesque.
Carved in marble is what I mean. Cool … calculating … and perhaps a little cruel.
I was awash in impressions, some of them favorable—others not so.
“Cigarette?” the sculpture asked, offering me a pack of Sweet Caporals.
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m trying to give them up.”
It was an excuse I had used before, and it seemed to work.
“Good for you.” She smiled. “It’s a revolting habit.”
She selected another for herself, setting fire to it with ceremonial flourishes of a small silver lighter that looked like a miniature Aladdin’s lamp, and inhaling deeply.
“Vile,” she said again, the word issuing from her mouth in a cloud of acrid smoke.
She looked for a moment like a Norse goddess: or perhaps one of the Four Winds pictured in the corners of the ancient maps, puffing a cold blue blast from the Pole.
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!”
For an instant I was transported back to Buckshaw, sitting in the drawing room with Father, Feely, and Daffy, listening to King Lear on the BBC Home Service during one of our compulsory wireless nights.
And then, just as quickly, I was returned to Miss Bodycote’s.
It was disconcerting. My head was spinning, and it wasn’t just from the cigarette smoke.
“Catch her, Van Arque!”
Those were the last words I heard.
I was crumbling.
Into a deep, hollow, and horribly echoing well.