dreamlike than ever. They were all boys here, rows of boys, some leaning forward writing busily, some leaning back on two legs of their chairs looking anything but busy. There was not a girl in the room.
“Nobody there,” said the teacher, and clapped the door shut again.
She looked at him wonderingly. For some reason, she knew him enormously well. Every line of his bristly head, his bird-like face and his thin, angry body were known to her exactly. She felt drawn to him. But she was afraid of him too. She knew he was always impatient and nearly always angry. A name for him came to her. They called him Himself.
Himself rounded on the class, glowering. “May I remind you, Howard, that mens means the mind, and mensa means a table? But I expect in your case the two things are the same. No, no. Don’t scratch your head, boy. You’ll get splinters.”
The boy Howard seemed untroubled by the glower and the roar of Himself. “Not to worry, sir,” he said comfortingly. “I don’t think splinters are catching.”
“Fifteen all,” murmured someone at the back of the room. This caused a good deal of not-quite-hidden laughter.
She found she knew Howard too. He had a round, bright-eyed face like an otter’s. In fact, most of the boys at the desks were people she had seen before. She knew names: Shepperson, Greer II, Jenkins, Matchworth-Keyes, Filbert, Wrenn and Stinker-Tinker, to name just the front row. But she was beginning to think this was not her class after all. There should have been girls. And this was probably a Latin lesson. She had never learnt Latin.
I think I’d better go, she said apologetically to Himself.
“A test tomorrow on the Third Declension,” said Himself. “Make a note in your rough books.”
He had not heard her. To judge from the way everyone was behaving, no one could see her or hear her. She might just as well not have been there. Maybe that was not such a bad thing. Very much ashamed of her embarrassing mistake, she leant into the door and was in the corridor again, hearing Himself still, dimly, from behind the door.
Puzzling about how she knew everyone in that strange class so well, she wandered on. And, because she was not trying to remember where to go, she found herself going very certainly in a definite direction – downstairs, past a room with rows of tables, past a shiny door which gusted out smells of cooked cabbage and washing-up liquid, into a dark wooden hall with a green-covered door at the end of it. The green was the felty kind of cloth you find on billiard tables. She knew that door well. She suddenly wanted badly to be on the other side of it.
Before she got there, a lady came quickly through the shiny door, which bumped loudly and let out a gust of old gravy smell to join the smell of cooked cabbage. The lady hurried to a side table and picked up a pile of papers there, frowning. She was a majestic lady with a clear strong face. Her frown was a tired one. A bright blue eye between the frown and the straight nose stared at the papers. Fair hair was looped into a low, heavy bun on her head.
“Ugh!” she said at the papers. She looked like an avenging angel who had already had a long fight with the devil. All the same, the papers should have withered and turned black. The bodiless person in the corridor felt yearning admiration for this angel lady. She knew they called her Phyllis.
Under the frown, Phyllis said wearily, “Your father’s told you, I’ve told you. How many times have you been told to stay behind the green door, Sally?”
Warmth and comfort and pleasure swelled, as huge and swift as the balloon of panic had swelled earlier. Mother had seen her. Mother knew her. Mother knew who she was. She was Sally. Of course she was Sally. Everything was all right, even though she had gone and done an awful thing and interrupted Father while he was teaching. It was true she should have been on the other side of the green door. Coming into School was quite forbidden. Sally – yes, she was sure she was Sally – stood guiltily by the green door, wondering how to explain as Phyllis turned her blue eyes and tired frown towards her.
The blue eyes narrowed her way, and widened, as if Phyllis had suddenly focused on a distant hill. The frown vanished, and came back, deeper, making two little ditches at the top of Phyllis’s straight nose.
“Funny,” said Phyllis. “I could have sworn—” Her creamy face became reddish in the darkness. The words turned to mere moving of the lips. Phyllis twitched her shoulders and turned away uncomfortably.
Sally – she must be Sally, if Phyllis had said so – was astonished to find that other people besides herself could get embarrassed when they thought they were all alone. That embarrassed her. It was even worse to realise that Phyllis could not see her after all. Sally – she knew she was Sally now – turned and plunged desperately through the green door. She went so fiercely that the door actually lifted inwards an inch or so, and bumped back into place. Sally thought that Phyllis turned and stared at it as she went.
Beyond the door was the right place. First, a stone-flagged passage, which was chilly now and freezing in winter, where four coathooks held a mound of many coats. The open door at the end led to the room called the kitchen, also stone-flagged, but warmed by the sun that rippled in through the apple trees outside.
It was in its usual mess, Sally saw wearily. Books, newspapers and bread and jam were cast in heaps on the table. Someone had spilt milk on the floor. Sally longed to lift the front page of one of the newspapers out of the butter, but she was not sure she would be able to. She wondered whose turn it had been to do the washing-up. She could see a mountain of white school china sticking up out of the sink.
Well, this time I can’t do it, she was saying, when she saw what she took for a hideous dwarf standing on the draining board.
The dwarf had a tangle of dark hair and was wearing what seemed to be a bright green sack. The sack stuck out so far in front that Sally thought the dwarf was hugely fat at first, until she saw its long skinny arms propped on the edge of the sink. The dwarf was leaning forward, propped on its arms, so that a sharp white nose smeared with freckles stuck out from among the tangled hair, and so did two large front teeth. From between those teeth came a jet of water, squirting on to the white crockery in the sink. The dwarf appeared to have tied two knots in the front of its tangled hair to make way for the jet of water.
The dwarf squirted solemnly until the mouthful of water was used up. Then it relieved Sally’s funny vague mind considerably by standing up on the draining board. Two skinny legs with immense knobs for knees unfolded from under the green sack, making the dwarf about the right height for a small ten-year-old. Some of the bulge in front of the sack had been those knees, but quite a large bulge still remained. Fenella – she knew its name was Fenella now – took another mouthful of water from a mug in her hand and tried the effect of squirting the crockery from higher up. The jet of water hit a cup and sprayed off on to the floor.
That’s no way to do the washing-up, Fenella! Sally cried out. And what have you tied your hair in two knots for?
There was no sound, no sound at all, except the gentle hissing of Fenella’s spray on the cup and the floor, and the mild buzzing of flies round the table.
No one can hear me! Sally thought. What shall I do?
But Fenella said, “Look at this, Sally.” The white face, the freckles and two large shrewd eyes under the knots of hair turned Sally’s way. “Oh, I forgot,” said Fenella. “She’s not here.” At that, Fenella raised her sharp nose and her voice too and bellowed, “Charlotte – Cart! Cart, come and see this!” Fenella had the loudest possible voice. The window rattled and the flies stopped buzzing.
“Shut
