towards her mouth to mime puking. Poppy, all long legs and freckled arms, hunched her shoulders, hiding giggles. Mrs Ruthven shifted her weight–she had one leg shorter than the other, and wore a special shoe with a built-up sole–and continued, oblivious:
‘The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm …’
We were doing the Romantic poets this term, and I thought Wordsworth was dull, sometimes too difficult to understand but mostly just plain wet. But Blake’s short lines stuck inside your head, and throbbed there, even if you weren’t always sure what they meant.
‘… has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.’
Mrs Ruthven swivelled back to the class, pivoting on her platform shoe. ‘What’s this about, Trish Klein?’
She had seen, after all.
‘Sex, Mrs Ruthven.’ Trish was wearing her most innocent expression.
Mrs Ruthven sighed. She was one of the younger teachers, which meant none of us was yet scared of her. She was our form teacher as well, and she was learning fast that it was a mistake to be too pally.
‘Earthly love, yes, but what else?’
Silence. Everybody looked down at their book in case she picked on them.
‘What were we talking about last week?’ She surveyed the rows of blank faces. We were still at the age where we thought poetry was something to learn by heart, not something to discuss. ‘Didn’t I say you couldn’t separate the Romantics from the political and industrial upheavals that were going on around them? You could see the rose as literally sick, poisoned by the industrial revolution. It’s a metaphor that works on many levels. How else do we know Blake was interested in the industrial revolution?’
No one else was going to answer, so I stuck my hand up. ‘“Dark satanic mills”?’
‘Very good, Katie. The poem we looked at last week, the one you know as a hymn. “Jerusalem”. “And did those feet in ancient time …” Blake is harking back to an earlier, more innocent age, before man scarred the landscape. He called his poems “Songs of Innocence and Experience”, didn’t he?’
Poppy and Trish were passing notes to each other now under their desks. Poppy’s parents had got back last night from Scotland: they’d promised Poppy she could ask some friends round at the weekend. Of course Poppy had invited me; but I wasn’t the one she consulted over the rest of the guest list.
‘Blake lived in London, but what would he have found if he had come to Green Down? Because we live, remember, on top of one of the first great industrial landscapes of the eighteenth century.’ Mrs Ruthven was struggling. The mascara had run under her eyes. Her sentences kept going up at the end, as if she was afraid we would argue with her. ‘The underground quarries, remember?’
The bell went, stranding her in mid-sentence. There was the usual banging of desk lids as everyone scrambled to get out of the classroom and down to lunch to bag the best tables.
‘Katie,’ said Mrs Ruthven, as I got to my feet. ‘A word.’
I could see Poppy and Trish already among the crowd at the doorway, pushing and shoving. They didn’t even glance back to check where I was.
‘Yes, Mrs Ruthven?’
She looked out of the window again, waiting until the last straggler made it through the door and we were alone. The platform shoe tapped sternly on the parquet.
‘Things aren’t going too well this term, are they, Katie?’
I felt heat flame my neck and cheeks. ‘Mrs Ruthven?’
‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. You’re one of the best pupils in the year, but no one would know that from your marks lately.’
‘Sorry, Mrs Ruthven.’
‘As your form teacher, I’m concerned when other teachers start talking about you as a pupil who’s–well, not failing, but failing to live up to her promise. Maths in particular, and you’ll need that if you want to study sciences … Are you finding it harder? Is there something you don’t understand?’
‘No.’ I wouldn’t have dared confess even if there had been. ‘Really. I understand it all.’
‘So what’s your explanation? Have you found it hard to catch up after being ill last term?’
I looked at my feet. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Is everything all right at home?’
‘Fine.’ I glanced desperately towards the door, trying to think of something else to say. ‘Really, everything’s fine.’
‘Well, I expect better. Maybe I should have a word with your father.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll try harder. Really.’
Mrs Ruthven set her lips like the line under a sum, and looked sorrowfully at me. I thought she was going to say something else, but instead she picked up her briefcase and limped out of the door.
I hadn’t lied. I did understand the maths. And things were as they always had been at home. But there didn’t seem to be much time for homework, these lighter evenings. Trish and Poppy were in no hurry to get home after school. But Trish always sailed through everything, and if she didn’t, no one seemed to be bothered, the way my dad would be.
The wood-panelled dining-hall, with its reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, was as noisy as an aviary. Girls perched on every bench, giggling, shrieking and clattering cutlery. There were no spaces left at the table where Trish and Poppy were sitting.
‘Couldn’t you have saved me a place?’
‘Sorry,’ said Poppy. ‘Pauline Jagger made us move up when her friends got here.’
I could see a space on a table at the other end of the room, under Rossetti’s The Beloved. It was full of girls from the year above, none of whom I knew. I squeezed on to the end of the bench, feeling miserable. Resentfully the older girls shuffled along to make room. Across the hall, Poppy and Trish were laughing about something, their heads together.
I bent my head to my plate.
At break-times we were allowed on to the sports field, if we kept to the edge and didn’t scar the turf. I caught up with Trish and Poppy on their way there. We usually made for a spot near the tennis courts where there was a grassy bank under the trees. We’d come to think of it as ours.
‘Piss off,’ said Trish, to a group of nine-year-olds, who were playing some sort of Queen of the Castle game. They scattered, trying to pretend that that was the next stage of the game anyway.
It was a hot, heavy afternoon, threatening rain. The horse-chestnuts round the sports
