He watched her in the half-light of the electric bulbs.
“No,” he said. “It’s I who should apologize, Mrs. Shaw—it seems that I am late to this class. Have you already taken the register?”
She hesitated, then beamed. “Oh! I mean . . . well, as it happens, you are in time. I was just about to do it.”
He gestured at the rows of desks. “So may I . . . ?”
“Yes . . . oh, yes, sit anywhere. No, actually—sit down here at the front where I can keep an eye on you.”
She invested her face with the appropriate severity. He took a desk in the front row. His knees came halfway to his chin when he sat in the tiny chair. He laughed. She frowned. “Settle down.”
From the drawer of the teacher’s desk she took a pencil and the register book, blew off the dust, and opened it to the first clean page. At the top she wrote: Sparrows Class, Spring Term, 1940. She wrote Tom’s name on the first ruled line.
“Tom Shaw?”
“Present.”
“Splendid,” she said, looking at his name on the clean page. “Well, you are my first.”
April, 1940
“I’M QUITE SURE YOU’RE doing it wrong,” said Hilda, wincing as Mary dug the comb into her scalp.
“This preposterous hairdo is wrong. I’m following the instructions exactly.”
“Oh do give it here,” said Hilda, snatching American Vogue and jabbing at the illustration of Step 3. “See? It says to tease. And you are back-combing.”
“I am teasing.”
“You aren’t,” said Hilda. “And I should know.”
“Oh, do it yourself then, if you’re so good.”
Mary threw the comb onto Hilda’s dressing table, where it clattered against the china pigs she kept there. She lit a cigarette and flopped on the end of Hilda’s bed.
“All right,” said Hilda. “I’m sorry. Perhaps it just wants more lacquer.”
“I’ve used half the can already. It’s against nature.”
“You’re jealous I thought of it first.”
“Hardly, Hilda. What we see laid out in these instructions is not a hairdo. It is a folly.”
“Then it is a folly everyone’s wearing this season.”
“And therefore you suppose that officers will be attracted to it.”
“With all this hair spray, they’ll be lucky if they don’t become part of it.”
“You should carry emergency solvent, in case you need to unstick one.”
Hilda made a pleading face in the dressing-table mirror. “Don’t leave me half done like this. I look like Frankenstein’s mistress.”
“It’s an improvement.”
“Charming. Is this how you are with the children in your class?”
“Oh no, as Miss North I am sweetness and light. That’s why I have all this frustration to take out on you.”
“Have you any more pupils yet?”
“Still only four. One mongol, one cripple and two who barely speak.”
“He has done you proud, that man of yours.”
Mary stubbed out her cigarette. “It will take time. More will come once the parents realize that there isn’t to be any bombing.”
“Still, if it were me I shouldn’t bother. It seems an awful lot of trouble to go to, opening a school for the sake of four no-hopers.”
“That’s the difference between us. I want a better world, you want better hair.”
“Hardly as an end in itself. I want the hairdo so I can get a man in uniform.”
Mary sighed, stood, and picked up the comb again. Hilda smiled at her in the mirror, and Mary returned the favor. “Your face is not entirely dreadful to behold, you know,” she said, angling Hilda’s head. “You might almost pull off this look, in conditions of very low light.”
“Sadly your flaws as a friend would be visible in pitch dark.”
“You are indolent and asinine,” said Mary.
“You are obstinate and self satisfied,” said Hilda.
Mary worked as well as she could, segmenting the hair on the top of Hilda’s head into bands, front to back, and pushing each band in turn down to its roots with the comb until it developed sufficient body to bolster itself. It was rewarding work, what with gravity being such a bully and hair so plainly the underdog. Hilda’s scalp was warm and the air in her room pleasantly fogged with lacquer and cigarette smoke, while a fresh rain lashed the window and ran down the pane and caused Pimlico to warp and swim.
“And your mother?” said Hilda, after a while.
“Barely seen her in days. I had hoped to show her the school, now that I am no longer pretending, but she is too busy whoring for Father. He is set on becoming a Cabinet minister, and of course there are luncheons and functions.”
“I’d murder to have your mother. If mine has ambition then it is somewhere at the back of a drawer.”
“Yes but here is the war—don’t you see?—shaking everything up. Father’s world seems so small now. All those closed committees of men who were at school together. All the beaming wives competing. All of us daughters racing for husbands when the trap opens. Glossy fillies that we are, keeping dutifully in our lanes.”