Thursday Evening — Frances
Venice — the Doge’s Palace, St Mark’s Square — I could almost feel the warm stone and smell the air. Indulging the sensation I sipped the ice-cold Frascati, sunk further into my new Italian sofa and allowed Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to continue the illusion. And then the telephone rang, the Venetian palazzi crumbled away and my elbow sent the wineglass skidding across the room.
Shit, I heard myself say and as always felt somewhat stupid swearing into an empty room, swearing at all. I picked up the phone and recognizing Dan’s voice suddenly remembered it was Charlotte’s alibi night.
‘Dan! How nice, just a minute, let me turn down the music.’ Having not expected the call to come I was completely unprepared for it and after the brief conversation decided that Dan had probably known none of it was true but had played his part just as I had mine. The ‘in the bath’ bit had sounded rather thin but I felt it unlikely he would call back and earnestly hoped not. Dan and I had never really got on but I didn’t particularly want to have to tell him lies in finding answers to the sort of questions he might ask in a second call. I didn’t want to become involved in the Dan end of it. It’s always difficult when friends’ marriages break up, as Charlotte’s surely would and should, although at one time I had come to accept that maybe they did suit one another after all; Charlotte’s taste for drama, Dan’s hearty dullness, the one balancing the other.
It had, though, been a delightful relief to find that Charlotte had not changed in spite of the years of uneventful married life. It was just as if she had been in hibernation for a time and then re-emerged with the old characteristics and personality which had made me want her as ‘best friend’ in our first term together at school.
Charlotte had been the first girl in the class to have a crush on one of the more senior girls. The first to say she was in love with a boy.
At the beginning of that first term we had been rivals. We had formed our separate opposing camps in the class, the serious and the stupid. Mine was the serious group, seen as stupid, of course, by Charlotte’s gang, who were just as serious about being stupid: anyone could be serious but it took brains to be cleverly stupid. In fact neither camp achieved anything very impressive as far as the rest of the school was concerned and by the end of the term Charlotte and I had ditched our respective followers and formed our own exclusive alliance.
Together we went through all the intense phases of growing up, although I think Charlotte maybe suffered more, felt more, as even then I suppose I was already becoming a spectator in life.
We joined the Girl Guides so that we could go camping together and spent the best week of our lives tying endless knots, standing on parade in a field full of cow pats, our badges gleaming, our fingers black with Brasso. We cooked sausages and sang unintelligible Maori songs round the campfire. It rained every night and our tent leaked but the dampness added a wonderful pioneering mustiness to the smell of being under canvas. At dawn we went deer-stalking through stinging nettles but the discomfort and pain made it all the more worthwhile.
We counted the days and weeks in our blue diaries until the next camp but it was all quite different. We had both grown a lot during the intervening term and as the tallest girls in the company were allocated latrine duty. But we did not really mind and lumped the heavy metal containers across to a far corner of the field with a sense of stoical martyrdom which set us apart from the other girls, who treated us with a curious mixture of envy and respect. It seemed we could make anything desirable; that was our secret, and the latrine duty paid off handsomely when halfway through the week a group of Boy Scouts pitched camp in the adjoining field.
Captain, whose withered arm had made her hostile to men, immediately decreed that the piece of ground between the latrines and the far corner where Charlotte and I had to lump, was out of bounds to the rest of the company. The effect was to make the Scout camp, which otherwise would have been a matter of indifference to the Guides, a source of great interest and speculation.
Charlotte and I never caught more than a glimpse of the boys but were fiercely questioned by the others each time we came back from the far corner.
The boys, who were Rovers, seemed old to be Scouts and our overactive imaginations created an aura of sinister intrigue around their presence.
‘I think they are undergoing special training. Probably something to do with the Foreign Office,’ Charlotte told the girls who shared our tent. Her father sometimes visited the Foreign Office, she revealed, but instinctively we didn’t ask why or what went on there. Nobody wanted to risk spoiling the thrilling mystery laid before us. We listened with awe, faces white and wide-eyed in Charlotte’s torchlight.
‘We mustn’t tell anyone. They’re probably training to be spies in Her Majesty’s Secret Service,’ she went on. We had a strong sense of honour to Queen and Country. The Guide promise, recited through trembling lips in front of the District Commissioner, had moved us deeply.
That was our last camp and the spies in the next field were soon forgotten. Boys took on a new fascination which dawned uncomprehendingly when the school started to build a new gymnasium. We found ourselves drawn to the makeshift wire fencing which surrounded the building site. Charlotte and I would go there at break, along with half the school, hanging about, feigning disinterest but within sight of the muscular labourers. But, like Captain, the headmistress (Reverend Mother as the school was a convent) quickly made an out of bounds rule to restore order and dignity.
If nature had confined me to conformity, in Charlotte it stirred rebellion and she then embarked upon the pattern of behaviour which was eventually to cause her expulsion from the school.
She discovered a route behind the tennis courts which, although it meant making a hole in the hedge, led round to the far side of the building site. I refused to go with her but felt an odd combination of disapproval and admiration as I kept watch by the hole. I couldn’t really understand Charlotte’s determination to break the rule. It seemed an unnecessary risk, even silly, and yet I envied her spirit and the sense of loyalty inspired by the cave-duty filled me with an emotional tingle. I was also aware of a new superiority in refusing to join Charlotte in this foolish adventure but thrilled none the less, as if by proxy. Added to all this was the sensation of what she was about being vaguely unwholesome, although I can see now it was not so much the force of nature but more the rebel without a cause, and understood by Charlotte no more than it was by me.
‘What was it like?’ I asked her, in a semi-interested, ungenerous tone, when she reappeared at the other side of the hole.
‘Deva!’ she said breathlessly, seeming not to notice the attitude I had attempted to adopt. Most things were ‘deva’ that term. It was our word, short for devastating.
‘Really?’ I said, forgetting my stance of indifference.
‘Honestly. There was this man, he came over to speak to me. He was just dreamy, Fran, dreamy,’ she said as I picked the twigs and leaves off her navy cardigan.
‘What did he say to you then?’ I asked, trying to regain a certain air of disapproval.
‘Well, I couldn’t understand everything he said. I think he was foreign. He kept calling me Colleen.’
‘You didn’t tell him your real name, did you?’ I enquired anxiously, foreseeing the possible danger of being found out.
‘No, I thought I’d keep him guessing,’ she replied in an offhand manner and then, as if she had been saving the best bit, added in the same tone: ‘He’s asked me to meet him tonight.’
‘You’re not going to, are you?’ I said, dismay preventing me from sounding as impressed as perhaps I might.
‘Why not?’ Charlotte demanded tetchily.
‘I just don’t think you should,’ I retorted with an innate sense of what was proper and what was not.
‘Well I haven’t made up my mind yet,’ she wavered.
We walked back past the tennis courts to where the rest of the school was taking its break.
‘Why is virginity so important to men?’ Charlotte asked abruptly as we went into the cloakroom.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, trying to sound equally matter of fact but chilled by what might lie behind the question. ‘All men want to marry virgins, I know that.’
‘But what happens to the girls that aren’t and how do men know, I mean, you could have an accident or something, you know, slip on a fence or playing hockey.’ The notion seemed to trouble her.
‘I don’t think that would count.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Charlotte, really I don’t. Why do you want to know?’ I had to ask, fearful that something terrible had taken place beyond the hole in the hedge.
‘The man asked me if I was a virgin,’ she answered simply.
My blood ran cold.
‘He sounds horrid, this man. Rude and horrid. You won’t go tonight, will you?’ I pleaded.
‘I suppose not,’ she conceded, adding, as if to retrieve a little of the romance in the exploit, ‘although being a foreigner he perhaps didn’t know quite what he was saying.’
Instinctively I felt that he had, but said no more. Charlotte, however, needed further to satisfy herself that meeting the man would be a mistake: ‘They do tend to be vulgar, foreigners, but I suppose it’s not their fault. It’s the way they’re brought up, belching after dinner and that sort of thing.’
Fairly confident that Charlotte would not keep to the assignation I thought no more about it until the following day when Reverend Mother told everyone to remain in the hall after morning assembly as she had a serious question to ask the school. It had come to her notice that the hedge behind the tennis courts had been badly damaged and if any of the girls were responsible she asked them to obey their consciences and own up.
The hall went dreadfully silent. Everyone’s eyes were on Reverend Mother, the inference of guilt infecting the entire school. The nun, her pale, solemn face scanning the rows of girls, waited. I dared not look at Charlotte for fear of incriminating her but then I felt a sudden movement beside me and saw that her arm had gone up, stiff and straight above the heads of the other girls. My own arm followed and I glanced at Charlotte who was staring ahead with a glazed look of stubborn rebellion.
A look of pious satisfaction passed over the Reverend Mother’s face and she dismissed the assembly.
We were sent for during the morning, an undeniable sense of martyred injustice burning in my breast, and Charlotte, well, it was hard to tell.
‘It was my fault. Frances didn’t do anything,’ she blurted out as soon as we were in Reverend Mother’s study.
Reverend Mother, who wore a look of sin-weary sadness, rested her grey eyes on Charlotte and saw that she was telling the truth. I mumbled a protest and felt strangely cheated but there was not a lot I could say.
‘I know where you went, Charlotte,’ Reverend Mother began quite kindly, ‘but why did you do it?’
There was a pause and Reverend Mother repeated the question. ‘Why did you do it?’
‘I suppose I wanted something to happen,’ Charlotte said, sounding somewhat bewildered by her own answer.
The simplicity of her explanation seemed to exasperate Reverend Mother and what happened was that Charlotte was sent to the chapel for the rest of the day, although as a non-Catholic she did not have a sufficiently developed sense of sin to benefit from the cleansing process laid before her. But out of sin came glory. The friendship between Charlotte and me was set for life, that I had wanted to share the guilt and she had refused to allow it. It turned out to be one of those great and rare touching moments cemented in memory and cherished in heart for ever more, although never to be exposed or even mentioned again.
More immediately, life went back to uneventful normality for the rest of the term.
Just before Christmas Charlotte and I went shopping together one Saturday morning to buy presents for our families and each other. For my birthday Charlotte had bought me a tiny bear, a lucky mascot, and for hers I had given a blue plastic pencil case. For Christmas we bought one another lipsticks and mascara blocks, the lipsticks a lurid orange, the mascara navy blue.
Over the Christmas holiday we spent hours in each other’s bedrooms practising with the make-up and listening to Radio Luxembourg’s crackling heralding of a new era. Charlotte had been given a one-pound postal order by an elderly aunt and bought her first two records, one by the Beach Boys and the Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’, which had just been released.
We began to despise the Guide movement but were too frightened of Captain to leave. I had been made a patrol leader, while Charlotte had not, which presented a problem as the slight was too great to ignore and although I was really rather proud of the new position bestowed upon me felt duty-bound to decry its importance and desirability at every opportunity. Secretly, I suspected Captain’s failure to recognize Charlotte’s leadership qualities had something to do with the mascara (my own attempts with the blue block had never been in evidence outside my bedroom as the wretched stuff made my eyes water terribly).
In the first week of the new year it was decided that the older Guides and Scouts should redecorate the Scout hut which both our groups used for meetings, although on different nights. With my new position of responsibility, which, in spite of all the decrying, had engendered a rather nauseating, priggish sense of duty and maturity, I felt there was a great deal of worthwhile purpose in the exercise. Charlotte, on the other hand, suffering from a touch of teenage sloth and the inexplicable misery of growing up, remembered that she was allergic to the smell of paint and pettishly brought a bottle of milk the first day which she poured into a bowl, explaining obtusely that it was the only antidote and in some obscure way supposed to soak up the fumes. Still treading carefully, I sympathized, but privately wondered whether it was the allergy or the cure that was psychological and then felt guiltily mean for the thought.
Whichever way it was, Charlotte forgot to bring the milk the next day and never mentioned feeling sick. The Scouts, who although none of them knew it, were some of the same boys who had been training as spies the previous summer, were much bigger and better than could have been hoped. It took most of the week to paint the hut, longer perhaps than might have been expected, but by Friday afternoon it was done although the sense of achievement was rather spoilt by the frustration of nothing having happened to continue the association. We hung about the hut, ostensibly admiring our efforts and checking for any bits we might have missed, and then Charlotte suddenly announced that we should have a party to celebrate and invited everyone to come to her place the next evening.
‘It’s all right,’ she told me on the way home, ‘my parents are going to stay with their friends in the country this weekend. I’ll tell them I don’t want to go.’
‘Do you think they’ll let you stay by yourself?’ I asked.
‘I’ll tell them that you’re going to spend the night. You will, won’t you?’
‘Of course,’ I said, a little uneasily. I had no idea what was expected of one at a party.
I don’t think Charlotte had either but somehow she had a notion of how it should be and that the chief requisite was an equal number of boys and girls.
At first she had thought it better not to tell her parents about the party but when I arrived on the Saturday morning she decided to broach the possibility of a few friends coming round, without actually using the word ‘party’ which seemed to have overtones of noise and mess which might not help our case. Surprisingly, her mother seemed to think it a good idea although I gained the impression she was relieved Charlotte had not been planning something more dangerous. Coffee bars were the big worry and forbidden territory for both of us. A boy both families knew had been in the local dive when it was raided by police searching for drugs. He’d been caught disposing of a purple heart in his coffee cup.
Charlotte’s parents left for the country and we skipped about the big flat, delighted with our freedom, no longer marred by any real deception. There were four bedrooms but we decided it would be fun to share a bed and more cosy, besides, there would be lots to talk about after the party.
By half past six we were sitting in the lounge, a jar of twiglets and three bowls of crisps dotted round the room, untouched to preserve our orange lipstick. Charlotte also had her eyelashes heavily blued but I had given up the unequal struggle, preferring a clear view of the world.
‘I’m not going to wear any shoes,’ Charlotte said, kicking off her flat brown slip-ons. ‘The other girls are bound to have heels.’ I had a pair of black Italian moccasins and thought it better to remain complete. Removing shoes seemed somehow suggestive, although suggestive of what I was not entirely certain.
The ‘other girls’ were to be two other Guides, both older than us, although not much, and a girlfriend of one of the Rover Scouts we had not met. At half past seven the two Guides arrived, both wearing heels and looking strikingly different out of uniform.
We all sat down, still eschewing the crisps and Twiglets with genteel restraint, and listened to ‘She Loves You’ three times in succession. By eight o’clock the room had fallen into an expectant silence. By half past things were getting desperate. Nobody arrived this late for a party, did they? And then, at twenty to nine the doorbell rang.
The lounge, which was a large room, too large a few seconds earlier, suddenly seemed to contract as the boys, who appeared devastatingly grown up in their Saturday night clothes, fell into the room. One of them had two enormous cans of beer which he set down on the table and immediately began to open, calling for glasses as the first can exploded a spray of beer on to the ceiling. A loud roar of approval came from the others, none of whom seemed to have noticed us girls, watching on, rendered quite dumb by the overwhelming jollity of it all.
‘Let’s have some music!’ one of the boys, the tallest and best-looking apart from a rash of spots on his neck, said to the room in general.
Charlotte, who I could see had been wondering whether beer left a permanent stain, hastened to put on the Beach Boys. It was all much better than we could have hoped although there were six boys and only five girls which presented a somewhat insurmountable problem.
The tall boy who had wanted the music asked me to dance and two more quickly followed his lead and asked the other Guides. The boy who had brought his girlfriend had settled in a large armchair with a glass of beer in his hand and the girl on his knee.
Charlotte was now the only girl not partnered, a situation of which I was as conscious as she had to be. I ached for her, felt guilty for being partnered myself and even more so for the beastly sensation of triumph, although I didn’t like the boy whose clammy palm oozed over mine.
The Beach Boys ended and Charlotte went to put ‘She Loves You’ on the turntable, an ill-disguised look of fed-upness across her orange lips. I was at a loss to know what to do for the best, relinquish my partner and chat to Charlotte or carry on jigging about and adopt an expression of boredom to make having a boy to dance with seem of little importance. I tried to imagine which I would prefer if I were in Charlotte’s place and decided on a compromise; I’d have one more dance with clammy and look bored and then give it a rest.
At the end of ‘She Loves You’ I went over to Charlotte who pulled me out of the room in a conspicuous attempt at being non-conspicuous about it.
‘God, what a load of drips,’ she said in the hallway. ‘How can we get rid of them?’
The lounge door reopened as she spoke and one of the boys asked where he could find the lavatory. Charlotte flashed her blue lashes at him and pointed out the direction.
Hope seemed to have been revived by this first piece of direct communication. None of us had ever spoken directly to one another, when we were painting the hut or even as the dancing had begun when it had been a case of grabbing rather than speaking. When the boy came out of the lavatory we followed him back into the lounge.
Things got going after that. Somebody turned out the main lights and as the Beach Boys went back and forth on the surf a sort of free-for-all took place with a lot of inept groping and giggling. In the half-light I saw Charlotte locked in an awkward clinch with the boy I had danced with and a moment later a screwed-up pair of lips were pressed up against one side of mine, having slightly missed their target.
Everybody lay on the floor then, muffled yelps and protests and the squeaky wet sound of adolescent snogging taking over as the Beach Boys made their final surge over the wavy turntable.
My new partner, a blond boy and one of the two that had not danced earlier had, until now, worn a serious expression, slightly aloof, almost disdainful. At close quarters this had changed. His breathing had become alarmingly fast and heavy and the new-look of discomposure about his face was quite off-putting. I closed my eyes so as not to see this but only succeeded in becoming more aware of what he was doing to the rest of my body. I didn’t like it. It felt rude, added to which the floor was beginning to feel uncomfortable and the whole business somehow unseemly. One side of my jumper was being badly pulled out of shape and instinct told me that it would be dangerous to allow my partner’s hand to penetrate my vest, although why it should be and how it might lead to ‘going the whole way’ in a room full of people, I had not rationalized. In fact, how exactly ‘going the whole way’ was actually achieved I was not entirely certain, the convent having omitted to include the more basic details of reproduction in the biology curriculum.
The floor, it seemed, was proving a problem for some of the others and two couples left the room. Seizing upon this precedent, my partner leapt up, indicating that we too should vacate the lounge and search out somewhere better to experiment with passion. In the hallway we met Charlotte and her boy. She and I glanced at one another, expressionless, full of adult impassivity, but as soon as she and her partner had disappeared into one of the bedrooms I told mine that I wanted to return to the lounge. Bedrooms were bad form and asking for trouble.
Later, when everyone else had gone home, the same sense of decorum made me feel rather ashamed of telling Charlotte what had happened in the lounge. Rodney, my partner, who had said very little, was not really all that nice, I had decided, although I did not tell Charlotte this, only about the way he had eventually kissed me latterly, which had been revolting. He had kept trying to push his tongue into my mouth as if he meant to choke me. This, however, I ascribed to passion and therefore did not mention how revolted I had been. Lying side by side in Charlotte’s bed we each wanted the other to believe in the romance of those kisses, the soul-delivering, lofty desire of their intent. Gordon, Charlotte said, had kissed her in much the same fashion and they had been very comfortable on the bed, her bed that we were lying in at that moment, she murmured with a tinge of romantic reverie.
The evening had been a great adventure and yet I had not really enjoyed it. Charlotte, I felt, was more in tune with such goings on, more eager to find the hot side of life and give herself over to whatever promised to be a new experience. To me the jumper-pulling and mouth-searching had amounted to an unnecessary encounter, and I felt a little sad to have made this discovery while Charlotte apparently had been transported to a higher plane of existence; although perhaps not entirely. Later on she again asked me for details.
‘But how far did you let him go?’ she persisted.
‘Just kissing, really,’ I said. ‘That was far enough.’
‘Not enough to get pregnant, then?’ The question was earnest.
‘No, I don’t think so. In fact, I’m sure not,’ I said, beginning to worry what she might tell me in a moment.
‘They say you can get pregnant if you go to the lavatory after a man’s been there. Do you suppose that’s one of the reasons men and women always have separate ones?’ She sounded worried herself.
‘But they don’t at home,’ I pointed out.
‘Oh, that’s different,’ she said obscurely, and that was the end of it. It was an illogical, late-night worry and she kept it to herself.
The innocuous little party turned out to become one of those events in life which take on greater significance than might have been supposed. The word quickly got round that Charlotte had organized an orgy. The boys, who had been quite amazed and probably shocked by the availability of bedrooms, could not be expected to appreciate the degree of naivety which had allowed them such access. Charlotte’s notoriety was assured.
That such ignorance was possible in the early sixties seems hard to believe now but Charlotte and I grew up in the days when parents dealt with sex education, if they dealt at all, by offering their daughters booklets about banana flies. And schools, certainly the sort we attended, were still in the dark ages.
In the week that followed the party Charlotte and I were invited to the cinema by Gordon and Rodney. I accepted because I could not think of an adequate excuse to refuse and looked forward to the outing with dull dread and concern that there might be a repeat performance of gauche passion with all its inherent discomfort.
Gordon and Rodney met us outside and with awkward attempts at nonchalance extracted boxes of chocolates from their pockets which they shoved in our direction. A certain amount of confusion was created by these offerings as Charlotte and I felt it only polite to eat our way through them during the film, thus keeping our mouths full and unapproachable. The boys maybe thought this a deliberate ploy on our part but the possibility did not occur to us at the time and in the post mortem that followed we were worried about our undesirability, especially as Gordon and Rodney had selected seats in the back row where we understood nobody was expected to watch the film. However, the next week we were again invited to go to the cinema although this time I did refuse. I simply couldn’t eat Rodney’s chocolates or worry about him not trying to kiss me when I didn’t even want to breathe the same air.
Charlotte could not understand my refusal just as I could not her enthusiasm to accept. Gordon, I thought, was as awful and boring as Rodney and I made the mistake of telling her so. There was the suggestion of our first rift but after Charlotte’s next date with Gordon she told me how she had noticed him surreptitiously breathe into his hand and sniff before he went to kiss her goodnight. Instantly she went off him and over the next couple of weeks was completely overwhelmed and obsessed by a revulsion which barely allowed his existence.
After that, boyfriends went into abeyance for some time. We decided to be scholarly and started Latin and Greek, but Charlotte did not take to the classics. She was good at art but that did not count for a great deal in the eyes of the school. She was also quite a good tennis player but the convent was not particularly sporty. She began to see herself as a misfit and complained that she should be so and yet it seemed as if she deliberately sought to be different from everyone else. Her school work was clever and highly original but not geared to passing exams. She was talked about a great deal and either admired or denigrated and in the difficult position of being both a conformist and her friend I found myself adopting an outward attitude of condescending tolerance.
And then everything started to change and Charlotte became different and special in a most wretched way. Her legs and arms developed nasty bruises and one day she came to school with a black eye. She did not explain it, even to me, and something in her manner, touchy and brittle, made it impossible to ask. For once in her life she desperately wanted to be like the rest of us, ordinary, safe and unmolested.
If she had known the cause of her father’s sudden change of temperament, his morose moods and sudden, inexplicable, violent rages, she might have been able to confide in me. A dying father would have been inexorably poignant and the grief quite justifiably shared. But as it was she did not know that he was ill and found his outbursts not only terrifying but shameful.
And so she said nothing for a while and continued to smart with hurt pride and intense resentment each time it happened. Her mother, who refused to recognize the illness because she could not bring herself to accept its inevitable consequences, made light of the ‘smackings’ and constantly told Charlotte to ‘cheer up and forget about it’, but there was a sad quiescent preoccupation in her manner which frightened Charlotte and made her feel lonely and miserable to a degree that the memory of that awful time remained vivid and raw even years later when she eventually told me how it had been.
As the tumour grew and the headaches got worse her father became less and less coherent. Charlotte realized that he was going mad and felt bitterly ashamed of him. The illness, although she did not know it as such, dragged on and took its toll on her school work. She began to lose the ability to concentrate and the will to do so. ‘Uncooperative and lazy’ the form teacher wrote at the end of her report; she opened it in the cloakroom at morning break on the last day of term and contrived to make the comment illegible by tampering with the mistress’s writing.
School was to finish at lunchtime after a special end of term mass in the chapel. Charlotte and I sat together at the back while the largely unintelligible Latin phrases spoken by the priest drifted over our heads. As a Catholic I accepted the service with a sense of routine awe and waited for the moment when I would have to get up and walk down the aisle to receive communion. That was the best bit. I was no longer fooled, but there was comfort and a sense of belonging in taking the bread, which I never chewed before swallowing. After all, one never knew. There was still a degree of mystery.
The moment came and I got up but it was not until I was more than halfway along the aisle I realized Charlotte had followed. An involuntary sense of outrage, inherited through centuries, filled me with shocked amazement as she knelt down beside me and the priest advanced on us. I saw her accept the bread and almost spluttered when the priest popped the next piece into my own gaping mouth.
Charlotte could not explain her great presumption to the Reverend Mother. She was expelled from the school. During the holidays her father died. The convent never knew but no doubt the nuns prayed for Charlotte. The ways of righteousness. The next term I was put up a year and no longer associated with our previous class. There was no one to talk to about Charlotte and anyway the shame of what had happened seemed better forgotten. I felt piously loyal and protective in not mentioning it or her to anyone.
With the benefit of hindsight and agnosticism I still feel pangs of guilt and indignation when I think of the episode. The nuns should have been told about Charlotte’s father. It might have made a difference, although how I am not sure. Charlotte had already left, the course set, but could it have been changed? And now Dan. Supposedly I was being loyal and protective again, or was I? Perhaps he, like the nuns, had a right to be told and unlike them a chance to retrieve the situation.