‘Not really. I mean, they get a stipend, I think that’s the word. Like an allowance. But it’s pegged to local wages so I don’t think it’s much. That’s not the point for them though – it’s like a religious thing for them, their version of sadqa.’
As she spoke we rounded the little station house, where a blue minibus was waiting, a woman in a skirt and jacket standing by the door with a clipboard.
‘Hello, girls,’ she said to Thea and Kate. ‘Had a good summer?’
‘Yes, thanks, Miss Rourke,’ Kate said. ‘This is Fatima and Isa. We met them on the train.’
‘Fatima …?’ Miss Rourke’s pen travelled down the list.
‘Qureshy,’ Fatima said. ‘That’s Q, U, R –’
‘Got it,’ Miss Rourke said briskly, ticking off a name. ‘And you must be Isa Wilde.’
She pronounced it ‘Izza’ but I only nodded meekly.
‘Am I saying it right?’
‘Actually it’s to rhyme with nicer.’
Miss Rourke made no comment, but noted something on her page, and then took our cases and slung them in the back of the minibus and then we climbed in, one after the other.
‘Swing the door shut,’ Miss Rourke said over her shoulder, and Fatima seized the door handle and rattled it closed. Then we were off, bumping out of the rutted car park, and down a deep-carved lane towards the sea.
Thea and Kate chatted away at the back of the van, while Fatima and I sat nervously, side by side, trying to look like this was something we did every day.
‘Have you boarded before?’ I said quietly to Fatima. She shook her head.
‘No. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to come here to be honest, I was well up for going to Pakistan with my parents, but Mum wouldn’t have it. How about you?’
‘First time too,’ I said. ‘Have you visited Salten?’
‘Yeah, I came down at the end of last year when Mum and Dad were looking at places. What did you think of it?’
‘I – I’ve not been. There wasn’t time.’
It was a fait accompli by the time Dad told me, too late for open days and visits. If Fatima thought this was strange, she didn’t betray her feelings.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It looks – OK, now don’t get me wrong, cos this is going to sound awful, but it looks a bit like a very classy prison.’
I smothered a smile and nodded. I knew what she meant, I’d seen the pictures in the brochure and there was something slightly prison-like about the photos – the big rectangular white frontage facing the sea, the miles of iron railings. The photograph on the cover of the prospectus showed an exterior that was almost painfully austere, the mathematically precise proportions accentuated, rather than relieved, by four slightly absurd little turrets, one at each corner, as though the architect had had last-minute doubts about his vision, and had stuck them on as an afterthought, in some attempt to lessen the severity of the facade. Ivy, or even just some lichen, might have softened the corners of the place, but I guessed that nothing much would survive such a windswept location.
‘Do you think we’ll get a choice who we’re with? The bedrooms, I mean?’ I said. It was a question that had been preoccupying me since London. Fatima shrugged.
‘I don’t know. I doubt it, I mean can you imagine the mayhem if everyone was milling around picking mates? I think we’ll just get assigned someone.’
I nodded again. I’d read the prospectus carefully on this point, as I was used to privacy at home and had been dismayed that Salten didn’t offer girls their own room until the sixth form. Fourth and fifth years shared with one other girl. At least it wasn’t dormitories, like the years below.
We fell into silence after that, Fatima reading a Stephen King novel, and me looking out of the window at the salt marshes flashing past, the wide expanses of water, the heaped dykes and snaking ditches, and then the sand dunes that flanked the coast road, feeling the minibus buffeted by the wind off the sea.
We slowed as we approached a bend in the coast road, and I saw Miss Rourke indicate, and then we turned sharply into the long white-pebbled drive that led up to the school.
It’s funny, now that Salten House is so graven on my memory, to remember there was a time when it was strange to me, but that day I sat, quite silent in the minibus, as we wound our way up the drive in the wake of a Mercedes and Bentley up ahead, just taking it all in.
There was the wide, white facade, eye-hurtingly bright against the blue of the sky, just as I had seen on the cover of the brochure, its severity only underlined by the regimented gleaming squares of windows that dotted the building at precisely regular intervals, and the black shapes of fire escapes crawling up the sides and twining the towers like industrial ivy. There were the hockey pitches and tennis courts, stretching away into the distance, and the miles of paddock, petering away into the salt marshes behind the school.
As we drew closer, I saw that the black front doors were open wide, and my overwhelming impression was of a bevy of girls of all shapes and sizes running hither and thither, screaming at each other, hugging parents, high-fiving friends, greeting teachers.
The minibus stopped and Miss Rourke handed Fatima and me over to another teacher she introduced as Miss Farquharson-Jim (or possibly, Miss Farquharson, Gym). Thea and Kate melted into the crowd and Fatima and I found ourselves subsumed into the shrieking mass of girls checking lists on the noticeboard and exclaiming over placements and teams, depositing trunks and cases, comparing the contents of tuck boxes and new haircuts.
‘It’s quite unusual for us to have two new girls in the fifth,’ Miss Farquharson was saying, her voice rising effortlessly over the clamour as she led the way into a tall panelled hallway with a curving staircase. ‘Normally we try to mix and match new girls with old hands, but for various reasons we’ve ended up putting you both together.’ She consulted her list. ‘You’re in … Tower 2B. Connie –’ She grabbed a younger girl bashing another over the head with a badminton racket. ‘Connie, could you show Fatima and Isa to Tower 2B? Take them past the buttery so they know where to come for lunch afterwards. Girls, lunch is at 1 p.m. sharp. There will be a bell but it only gives you five minutes’ warning so I suggest you start off as soon as you hear it as it’s quite a walk from the towers. Connie will show you where to go.’
Fatima and I both nodded, a little dazed by the sheer volume of the echoing voices, and lugged our cases after the departing Connie, who was already disappearing into the throng.
‘You can’t normally use the main entrance,’ she said over her shoulder as we followed her, weaving and threading through groups of girls, and ducking down a passageway at the back of the hall. ‘Only on the first day of each term, and if you’re an Hon.’