Someone to Hold

She slept eventually after washing her face and turning her pillow and straightening and smoothing out the bedcovers, though it was a fitful slumber punctuated by brief wakeful starts during which she struggled to remember where she was. After she woke up in the morning and washed and dressed, she was faced again with the question of what she was going to do with herself all day. She did not even know—she had not asked—if she was entitled to go to the dining room for breakfast. She considered walking up to the Royal Crescent to explain herself in person to her grandmother and Abby, but there was a light drizzle falling from a leaden sky, she could see through her window, and it looked blustery and cheerless out there. Besides, what more could she say than what she had written? She would see them next week and the family too when they arrived. She would not refuse to see any of them. That would be churlish.

She rearranged her belongings in the drawers and on the hooks—there was just enough room if she kept her toiletries crowded onto the washstand and put her book and writing things on the table. She set her empty bags by the door. She would ask Roger if there was some storage space where she could keep them. And there, that had taken all of twenty minutes, maybe less.

She fetched a pile of books from the schoolroom and spent a while going through them and deciding which would be most suitable to read aloud next week. It was a bit of a tricky decision, as the stories would need to appeal to both boys and girls and to children of all ages. Yet last week she had chosen quite randomly, and everything she read had been well received. She was probably overpreparing. But what else was she to do? She made a written list of what she wanted to teach next week—it was a formidably long list—and spent some time racking her brain for ideas on how to go about it. Her mind remained stubbornly blank. This past week she had taught with almost no preparation or forethought, yet everything had proceeded reasonably well, if a little chaotically. But how could she risk using the same method next week?

She frowned in thought at a sudden memory. What exactly had he said yesterday? You are an abject failure. The children are not mute in your presence. And they are learning and enjoying themselves and liking you. He had been grinning when he said it—something a gentleman would never do—and looking disturbingly handsome and attractive in the process. Oh, and virile too. Attractive? That was a word not usually in her vocabulary. Virile never was. They were somehow not genteel words. They were a little vulgar. She really did not want to think of any man as attractive—or virile. But he had been telling her that she was not a failure while apparently saying she was.

Camille sighed aloud. Oh, this was all hopelessly complicated, and it was still not even the middle of the morning. Goodness, she ought to have gone for breakfast. Surely her rent included meals. Her room was seeming smaller and more dreary with every passing moment. It was time to step out and explore her new home. Or was it her home? Did the fact that she was renting a room entitle her to wander about the whole building at will? But she could not remain confined to this space one moment longer. It would seem too much like cowering, and she had done that for too long at Grandmama’s. She was now the newly invented, newly confident Camille Westcott, was she not?

No one looked aghast as she strolled about. No one went running for Miss Ford. The home hummed with the sounds of young voices and laughter and a few wails of indignation or distress. It was a large building—three sizable three-story homes knocked into one—and had retained much of the elegance the individual houses must have had when first built. It was also pleasingly decorated with light paintwork and curtains pulled back from the windows and bright cushions that lent an air of general cheerfulness. This was no gloomy institution, as she had realized during the tour Miss Ford had given her soon after her arrival in Bath.

The living accommodations consisted of cozy dormitories on the upper floors for five or six children, and each had an accompanying living room with chairs and tables and cushions and a few playthings. The idea was to give each group of children some sense of home and family, Camille supposed. And each group had its own set of housemothers, who offered them as close a sense of family as was possible under the circumstances. It was the housemothers who cared for the children all day and night when they were not at school, and supervised their play and took them for walks on nonschool days. There were a few smaller rooms on the ground floor, presumably for visitors, in addition to the schoolroom and dining room. A few children played quietly together now in one of them. Most, however, were congregated in the large common room or playroom, it being too wet for them to go outside into the walled garden at the back to play. Altogether it was not an entirely unpleasant home situation for the forty or so children who lived here.

Camille nodded at the housemothers who were supervising there and hovered uncertainly in the doorway. But three of her younger pupils wanted to introduce her to their family of rag dolls, and then two others, a boy and a girl, wanted her to see the tower they had built of wooden cubes Roger had carved and painted for them. Two boys were knitting under the eagle eye of Winifred Hamlin, who was working on her own strip too, already about eighteen inches long and seemingly without a flaw. The boys called Camille over to show her how much progress they had made since yesterday.

There were two infants in separate cots. One, a baby of perhaps four or five months, was playing happily with his toes and waving his arms in excitement whenever an adult or one of the children bent over him to tickle his chin and talk baby talk to him. The other, maybe a month or two older, lay on her back and sobbed quietly and refused to be entertained or consoled.