‘An Hon?’ I echoed.
‘On the Honour roll. It means heads of house … heads of teams … prefects … that sort of thing. You’ll know if you get there. If in doubt, don’t use that door. It’s annoying because it’s the quickest way back from the beach and the hockey pitches, but it’s not worth the telling-off.’ She ducked without warning through another doorway and pointed up a long stone-flagged corridor. ‘That’s the buttery, up the end there. They don’t open the doors until one but don’t be late, it’s a scrum to get a place. Are you really in Tower 2?’
There seemed no answer to this, but Fatima spoke for both of us.
‘That’s what the woman said.’
‘Lucky you,’ Connie said enviously. ‘The towers are the best rooms, everyone knows that.’ She didn’t elaborate on why, just pushed on a door in the panelling and began power-walking up a flight of narrow dark stairs hidden behind. I was panting, trying to keep up, and Fatima’s case was banging with every step. ‘Come on,’ Connie said impatiently. ‘I promised Letitia I’d meet her before lunch and I won’t have time at this rate.’
I nodded again, rather grimly this time, and pulled my case up another flight and along a landing.
At last we were at a door that said Tower 2 and Connie stopped.
‘Do you mind if I leave you here? You can’t go wrong, just head up and there’s only two rooms, A and B. You’re B.’
‘No probs,’ Fatima said rather faintly, and Connie disappeared without further discussion, like a rabbit going to ground, leaving Fatima and me rather breathless and nonplussed.
‘Well, that was confusing,’ Fatima said, after she’d gone. ‘Fuck knows how we’ll find our way back to the butlery.’
‘Buttery, I think it was,’ I said automatically, and then bit my lip, but Fatima didn’t seem to have noticed, or at any rate, she hadn’t taken offence at the correction.
‘Shall we?’ she said, opening the door to the tower. I nodded, and she stood back and made a mock bow. ‘After you …’
I looked inside. Another staircase, this time a spiral one, disappeared upwards, and I sighed, and grasped the handle of my case more firmly. I was going to be very fit, if breakfast entailed the reverse of this every day.
The first door we passed turned out to be a bathroom – sinks, two toilet stalls and what looked like a bath cubicle – and we pushed on upwards. At the second landing there was another door. This one simply said ‘B’ on it. I looked down at Fatima, on the spiral stairs below me, and raised an eyebrow.
‘What do you think?’
‘Go for it,’ Fatima said cheerfully, and I knocked. No sound came from within, and I pushed cautiously at the door, and entered.
Inside was a surprisingly nice room, fitted into the curving wall of the tower. Two windows looked out, north to the marshes and west over the miles of playing fields and the coastal road, and I realised we must be in the rear left-hand corner of the building. Below us smaller outbuildings were scattered, some of which I recognised from the prospectus – the science wing, the physical education block. Under each window was a narrow metal-framed bed, made up with plain white sheets and a red blanket over each foot. There was a wooden bedside locker, and between the two windows, two longer lockers, not quite wide enough to be described as wardrobes. I. Wilde, said a printed label on one of the lockers. F. Qureshy said the other.
‘At least we can’t fight over beds,’ Fatima said. She heaved her case up onto the one next to the locker marked with her name. ‘Very organised.’
I was just studying the pack on the desk by the door, promin-ent on which was the ‘Student–School contract – to be signed by all girls and handed in to Miss Weatherby’, when an impossibly jarring, jangling sound rang out, echoing horribly loudly in the corridor outside.
Fatima jumped, visibly as startled as I was, and turned to me.
‘What the fuck was that? Don’t tell me we’re going to get that every time there’s a meal?’
‘I guess so.’ I found my heart was beating rapidly with the shock of the noise. ‘Bloody hell. Do you think we’ll get used to it?’
‘Probably not, but I guess we’d better start back, hadn’t we? I doubt we’re going to find that butter place in five minutes.’
I nodded, and opened the door to the corridor to try to retrace our steps. Hearing footsteps from above, I looked up, hoping we might be able to follow these strangers to the dinner hall.
But the legs that I saw descending the stone spiral stairs were long, very long, and unmistakably familiar. In fact I had watched those legs being swathed in distinctly non-regulation stockings just a few hours earlier.
‘Well, well, well,’ said a voice, and I saw Thea, followed closely by Kate, round the bottom of the spiral. ‘Guess who’s in Tower 2B. It looks like we might be having some fun this year, doesn’t it?’
‘SO YOU REALLY don’t drink anymore?’ Kate says to Fatima, as she refills my glass, and then her own. Her face in the lamplight as she looks up at Fatima is quizzical, her eyebrows quirked in something not quite a frown, and faintly interrogative. ‘Like … at all?’
Fatima nods and pushes her plate away.
‘Like, at all. It’s part of the deal, innit?’ She rolls her eyes at her own phrasing.
‘Do you miss it?’ I ask. ‘Drinking, I mean.’
Fatima takes a sip from the lemonade she brought with her from the car, and then shrugs.
‘Honestly? Not really. I mean, yes, I remember how fun it was sometimes, and the taste of a gin and tonic and all that. But it’s not like –’
She stops. I think I know what she was about to say. It wasn’t like alcohol had been an unmixed blessing. Maybe without it, we wouldn’t have made some of the mistakes we had.
‘I’m happy like this,’ she says at last. ‘I’m in a good place. And it makes things easier in some ways. You know … driving … being pregnant. It’s not such a big deal, stopping.’
I take a sip of the red wine, watching the way it glints in the low lights strung from the ceiling, thinking of Freya sleeping just above our heads, and the alcohol filtering through my blood into my milk.
‘I try to keep a lid on it,’ I say. ‘For Freya. I mean, I’ll have a glass or two, but that’s it, while I’m still feeding her. But I’m not going to lie, it was bloody tough not drinking at all for nine months. The only thing that got me through it was thinking of the bottle of Pouilly-Fumé in the fridge for afterwards.’
‘Nine months.’ Kate swirls the wine thoughtfully in her glass. ‘It’s years since I’ve gone even nine days without a drink. But you don’t smoke any more, do you, Isa? That’s quite an achievement.’
I smile.
‘Yeah, I gave up when I met Owen and I’ve been pretty good on that. But that’s it – I can’t cope with cutting out more than one vice at a time. You were lucky you never started,’ I add to Fatima.