She told only her two best friends at school (and they were sworn to secrecy) that Edward had won custody of her during the divorce. This was because her mother had, shockingly, deserted the marital home. Ruth preferred the rest not to know that her parents were divorced, because it made her feel slightly ashamed. The fact that her father was a respectable country solicitor, and had been decorated in the war, had endeared him to the judge, while Iris’s desertion had prejudiced things against her. Edward had insisted that Ruth spend Christmas every year with him, where they were always joined by his own parents, but otherwise he was magnanimous in allowing his daughter time with her mother: they would divide her equally between them, he said. It hadn’t worked out like that. Ruth did know one or two other girls at school whose parents had divorced, although not anyone in her actual form. So far as she knew, these other girls lived with their mothers. She realised that there was something not quite right about not living with hers, as if Iris were slightly shoddy.
She had to acknowledge privately that Iris was becoming rather eccentric. Her hair was longer than the other mothers’ and she hardly ever wore any pins to contain it: she had given up wearing a hat. Perhaps it had been living abroad which had made her abandon such conventions. She only wore gloves in the dead of winter now, and she never put on any face powder: her face was shiny. And the awful thing was that Iris having the baby did make Ruth feel guiltily put off her mother. Iris was thirty-six, practically geriatric! It was one thing to remarry, but producing a baby was quite another. It wasn’t quite respectable. It meant that Iris still did It, a thought too embarrassing to countenance. Or anyway had done It less than a year before, although not of course since: nobody could be that revolting. It probably wasn’t even possible, biologically. And the worst thing was that everyone at school would know, when their mothers and fathers probably hadn’t done It for years and years.
‘Funny, isn’t it?’ Iris had said, half to herself, when she was giving Jamie his eleven o’clock bottle in the breakfast room one morning. ‘First I had to get married because I was going to have a baby, and then this time I had to have a baby, because I’d got married.’
‘Mummy!’ said Ruth, shocked. ‘You’ve never said that before.’
‘Haven’t I? Oh, sorry, darling. It doesn’t mean one wasn’t simply thrilled when you appeared. We both were.’
‘But d’you mean to say you were actually having a baby when you and Daddy got married?’ Ruth could feel herself flushing with the horror of it.
‘Well, yes. But I mean it was quite early on. One wasn’t monstrously fat or anything. I had such a pretty dress for the registry office: silk crepe, in a sort of oyster colour. I don’t know what happened to it. Must have got lost during the war.’
‘Is that why there aren’t any photographs from the wedding, because you were pregnant?’
‘Don’t say pregnant, darling, it’s so coarse.’
‘But is it?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Iris. ‘There just wasn’t anyone there with a camera, that’s all. But it was all tremendous fun, on the day.’
‘But that means that I’m illegitimate, practically,’ said Ruth, tears gathering.
‘Don’t be silly, darling. Someone either is illegitimate or they aren’t. You can’t be a bit illegitimate, I mean. And you’re not. So there’s nothing to get upset about.’
The thing Ruth liked best about school was the choir. Singing solo wasn’t nearly as good, because it didn’t give you the same sensation; a solo only came from your throat and then out of your mouth, the breath made shallow, even quavery, by nerves. But choral singing went through your whole body, reverberating in your ribcage. With choral singing it was as if you and all the other people you were singing with were one instrument, like the pipes on an organ. A choir was really an orchestra made of voices. When she sang, Ruth sometimes felt a rush of joy, like an extra lung full of happiness instead of breath inside her chest.
There was a feeling she’d sometimes had, out of doors, when she got to the top of the Malvern Hills and there were skylarks dipping above her head, or a lonely kestrel wheeling below. It was an apprehension that she was no different from the cropped grass and the rock beneath it, and the birds, and even their shadows flitting across the hillside. This feeling came sometimes at the river-bathing place across the orchard from her father’s house, when dragonflies touched the surface of the water beside her, their veined, transparent wings catching the colours of light, like soap bubbles. Sometimes the cows would pause to look down from the opposite bank, munching, and she would all of a sudden feel as though she had become invisible, had simply evaporated into the silky greenish water and the cows’ hot breath and the summer air. She could not predict when the feeling would come, but when it did it made her slightly giddy, this sense that she was just another living speck on the surface of the earth. Less than herself, and yet more. This sensation generally happened when she was on her own, yet what it brought was an overwhelming sense that she was not alone after all. When the whole choir was singing well it could feel the same.
Singing was the main reason Ruth decided to stay on at school after her School Certificates. If she stayed on for Higher School Cert., her teacher had told her, she might be able to get into a music school. She knew she wasn’t good enough to become a soloist, either at the piano or the voice, and anyway her ambition did not extend so far. But she also knew she would have to earn her own living somehow. Perhaps she could teach music and continue to sing in a choir for pleasure. She did not know what she might do otherwise. Her father had offered to find someone – another solicitor, or the friend who owned the local auction house – to take her on as an office clerk, but she wanted to get to London if she could.
There were advantages to being in the upper school: she did not have to share a dormitory any more but had a room all to herself. She enjoyed certain privileges, such as being allowed to walk into the town when lessons finished in the afternoons; and, the greatest luxury, having two baths a week, instead of the one permitted to the younger girls. The room next to hers was occupied by an older girl called Verity Longden, who would be leaving in the summer. She was tall, with skin so pale as to be almost transparent, almost as if it might tear. Her eyelashes were very straight and fair, and thick, like the bristles on a toothbrush, and she had big, bony hands that always looked chapped. Ruth could not tell whether Verity was very plain or rather beautiful, but trying to decide one way or the other made her stare at her whenever she had the chance. Verity was a Roman Catholic, one of only a handful at the school. The Catholics walked to Mass every Sunday and when they came back to school afterwards they remained slightly set apart, at least until the lunch bell sounded, as if they were holier or more important than the rest. Verity seemed especially solemn. She was generally rather a serious girl, certainly never giggly. Something about the curve of her mouth, though, suggested a sense of humour.
One Saturday afternoon, just before autumn half term, Ruth knocked on Verity’s door and asked if she’d like to come for a walk. They had barely said more than two or three sentences to each other, but they were neighbours, they might as well be cordial. And anyway, all Ruth’s friends were out on exeat, or rehearsing for the school play.
‘There’s a hotel over in Colwall where we could get a cup of tea if you want to go that far? Otherwise we could just go up to the tearooms at the well, what d’you think?’ Ruth asked her, as they began their climb. Since Verity was older – and, as it were, the guest – it seemed proper to let her decide things.
‘I think Colwall,’ she said, as if it were a matter of some gravity.
‘It’s rather a dismal place, I’m afraid, what my mother calls a brown Windsor. But I love that side of the hills. The view’s
