style="font-size:15px;"> Death is outside life but it alters it: it leaves a hole in the fabric of things which those who are left behind try to repair. Perhaps it is because of this we are minded to feast at funerals and it is said that certain children are conceived on the eve of a departure, lest the separation of the partners be permanent. When in ancient stories heroes die, the first thing their comrades do, having made due observances to the gods, is sit and eat. Then they travel on, challenging, with their frail vitality, the large enigma of non-being.
When Miss Garnet’s friend Harriet died, Miss Garnet decided to spend six months abroad. For Miss Garnet, who was certainly past child-bearing years and had lost the only person she ever ate with, the decision to travel was a bold one. Her expeditions abroad had been few and for the most part tinged with apprehension. As a young woman straight from college she had volunteered, while teaching the Hundred Years’ War, to take a school party to Crécy. On that occasion she had become flustered when, behind her back but audibly, the boys had mocked her accent and had intimated (none too subtly) that she had brought them to France in order to forge a liaison with the large, sweating, white-faced coach driver.
‘Mademoiselle from Armentières,’ they had sung hilariously in the back of the coach. ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières. Hasn’t had sex for forty years!’ And as she had attempted to convey to the coach driver the time she considered it prudent to start back for Calais, wildly and suggestively they had chorused, ‘Inky pinky parley vous!’
The experience had left its mark on Miss Garnet’s teaching as well as on her memory. Essentially a shy person, her impulses towards cordiality with her pupils, never strong in the first place, were dealt a blow. She withdrew, acquired a reputation for strictness, even severity, and in time became the kind of teacher who, if not loved, was at least respected. Even latterly, when in terms of pupils’ taunts Mademoiselle From Armentières would be considered very small beer, no member of Miss Garnet’s classes ever thought publicly to express a view about her intimate life.
Julia Garnet and Harriet Josephs had lived together for more than thirty years. Harriet had answered Julia’s advertisement in the National Union of Teachers’ monthly journal. ‘Quiet, professional female sought to share small West London flat. No smokers. No pets.’
Harriet had been, in fact, the only person to respond to the advertisement, which had not prevented Julia from giving her what her friend later described as ‘a toughish interview’. ‘Honestly,’ Harriet had used to say, on the few occasions when together they had entertained friends, ‘it was worse than the time I tried to get into the Civil Service!’
Generally Harriet had laughed loudly at this point in a way her flat-mate had found irritating. Now Miss Garnet found she missed the laugh just as she missed Stella, Harriet’s cat. The prohibition against pets had been relaxed seven years earlier when late one night after choir-practice Harriet had been followed from the station by Stella. Stella, then an anonymous black kitten with a white-starred throat, had waited all night on the stairs outside the front door of their fourth-floor flat, whereupon, on finding her, the soft-hearted Harriet had fed the kitten milk. After that, as Julia had observed, there was ‘no getting rid of the animal’.
Alongside the two school teachers Stella had grown into an elderly and affectionate creature but it was Harriet to whom the cat had remained attached. Two days after they had both retired (they had arranged the events to coincide in order, Harriet had suggested, that the New Year could see them setting off on ‘new feet’) Julia returned from the shops to find her companion, apparently asleep, stretched out upon the sofa, her romantic novel face down on the carpet. Later, after the doctor and then the undertaker had been, Stella disappeared. Julia had placed milk outside first the flat door and then, worry making her brave the neighbours’ ridicule, downstairs by the main entrance to the block. The milk she left outside was certainly drunk but after a few days she was forced to accept that it was not Stella drinking the milk but, more likely, the urban fox who had been seen rootling in the communal dustbins.
Perhaps it was not just the loss of Stella, but also her incompetence in the face of it–so soon after losing Harriet–which finally determined Miss Garnet’s abrupt decision. She and Harriet had made plans–or rather Harriet had–for it must be said that, of the two, she was the more given to planning. (‘Flighty’ was sometimes her companion’s name for Harriet’s tendency to cut out advertisements from the Observer for trips to faraway and exotic places.) Harriet’s (now permanent) flight had rendered the plans pointless; a kind of numbness had dulled Miss Garnet’s usual caution and she found herself, before she was quite aware what was happening, calling in on one of the numerous local estate agents which had sprung up in her locality.
‘No worries, Mrs Garnet, we’ll be able to rent this, easy,’ the young man with the too-short haircut and the fluorescent mobile phone had said.
‘Miss Garnet, it’s Miss,’ she had explained, anxious not to accept a title to which she felt she had never managed to rise. (There had never been any question of Miss Garnet being a Ms: her great-aunt had had some association with Christabel Pankhurst and the connection, however loose, with the famous suffragette had strengthened Miss Garnet’s views on the misplaced priorities of modern feminism.)
‘Miss, I’m sorry,’ the young man had said, trying not to laugh at the poor old bird. He’d heard from Mrs Barry, the caretaker, that there had been another old girl living with her who had just died. Probably lezzies, he thought.
Miss Garnet was not a lesbian, any more than Harriet Josephs had been, although both women had grown aware that that is what people sometimes assumed of them.
‘It is very vexing,’ Harriet had said once, when a widowed friend had opined that Jane Austen might have been gay, ‘to be considered homosexual just because one hasn’t been lucky enough to marry.’
‘Or foolish enough,’ Julia had added. But privately she believed Harriet was right. It would have been a piece of luck to have been loved by a man enough to have been his wife. She had been asked once for a kiss, at the end-of-term party at the school where she had taught History for thirty-five years. The request had come from a man who, late in life, had felt it was his vocation to teach and had come, for his probationary year, to St Barnabas and St James, where Miss Garnet had risen to the position of Head of the History Department. But he had been asked to leave after he had been observed hanging around the fifth-form girls’ lockers after Games. Julia, who had regretted not obliging with the kiss, wept secretly into her handkerchief on hearing of Mr Kenton’s departure. Later she plucked up courage to write to him, with news about the radical modern play he had been directing. Mr Maguire, Head of English, had had to take over–and in Miss Garnet’s view the play had suffered as a consequence. Timidly, she had communicated this thought to the departed Mr Kenton but the letter had been returned with ‘NOT KNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS’ printed on the outside. Miss Garnet had found herself rather relieved and had silently shredded her single attempt at seduction into the rubbish bin.
‘Where you off to then?’ the young estate agent had asked, after they had agreed the terms on which the flat was to be let (no smoking, and no pets–out of respect to Stella).
Perhaps it was the young man’s obvious indifference which acted as a catalyst to the surprising form she found her answer taking–for she had not, in fact, yet formulated in her mind where she might go, should the flat prove acceptable for letting to Messrs Brown & Noble.
Across Miss Garnet’s memory paraded the several coloured advertisements for far-flung places which, along with some magazine cuttings concerning unsuitable hair dye, she had cleared from Harriet’s oak bureau and which (steeling herself a little) she had recently placed in the dustbin. One advertisement had been for a cruise around the Adriatic Sea, visiting cities of historical interest. The most famous of these now flashed savingly
