The Drying Rooms - Chapter Twenty One

I Thee Wed

‘She once hid under that barn. She crawled under it, into its darkness’

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Audio version of Chapter Twenty One

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It is sunny and a little group of us are standing on one of the scrappy strips of grass between the vegetable patches. Clumpy furrows pock-marked with feathery carrot tops and limp potato leaves.

Extract from Maudie:

Maudie was clutching a bunch of forget-me-nots.

Jonty, the best footballer in the class, was standing next to her.

‘Do you Maudie take the hand of your lawful husband?’ said Buzz in a slow sing-song voice.

Buzz had a band of white cardboard round her neck. It was her turn to be the vicar.

‘I do,’ said Maudie. She took Jonty’s hand and squeezed it softly.

She couldn’t believe her luck. Jonty had proposed that morning!

‘Do you Jonty take the hand of your lawful wife?’ intoned Buzz.

To Maudie’s disappointment, Jonty removed his hand.

‘Isn’t it — I thee wed?’ he said.

Bruce, the Best Man, chimed in, ‘It’s I thee wed and then you kiss.”

‘No, we don’t!’ said Jonty.

Maudie shot a glance at Buzz.

‘Yes, you do!’ shouted Buzz, ‘And I’m the vicar!’

The vegetable patches were near a large barn which stood on stone mushrooms. The barn was where we wove rugs and made wicker waste paper baskets.

She still has hers. She looks at it now. It contains a tangled clutch of her hair (a fading trophy of her youth), an empty packet of heart control pills and a crumpled tissue. A question occurs. For the first time! Why does this waste paper basket still exist?

She made it between the ages of 8 and 12. That she knows. She would have given it to her parents. That she assumes. So, despite the fact that British embassies had standard issue waste paper baskets, did they have it shipped from embassy to embassy? And if they did, what does that mean? Not much. Nevertheless, a surge of sentimentality bubbles up. It fills her with a moment of parental love that feels close to self-pity, an emotion that she finds repulsive yet she can’t resist its pull.

She once hid under that barn. She crawled under it, into its darkness, her heart palpitating. She was hiding from a gang of bullies. Or was it a game? It doesn’t feel like a game. Why were they coming to get her? She can’t remember, but she can conjure its cold murkiness, the rough stone of the support, the mulchy smell.

Digging up vegetables was an activity supervised by a teacher, maybe even Mr T, the teacher she called The Beast in her poem about hating maths, even though she didn’t actually hate Mr T. She slightly adored him; he had a beard and wore glasses like John Lennon’s.

Digging up vegetables must have been part of the progressive schooling. And it has nothing to do with Cruel Matron. She has no place in the memory. But it’s repetitive and strong because there is a detail still remembered in her body. It’s sometimes reactivated when she is gardening. The memory is a moment: her foot pushing hard down on a digging fork and it hitting a stone. A jarring metallic reverberation, followed by the heaviness of a potato hanging from a root-thread connected to a speared clod of earth. The delicacy of the thread and the weight of the potato sent a shudder of dissonance through her, like chalk on a blackboard.

The weddings feel like a long unsupervised Sunday afternoon. Full of light and friendship. What we’re doing is naughty, but fun.

Fun but also serious. Marriage was a commitment. Or so she always thought until, sixty years later, she got an unexpected email from one of the nice boys (now 68): ‘I recall getting married to you. That highlight of school life was soon downgraded when you went through the same ceremony with someone else the following day.’

Who was the someone else? Was it R? She remembers marrying R. It was serious. He carved a bust of her out of expanded polystyrene. Did he propose to her or she to him? She can’t remember. But, looking back, she has questions, and they disturb her. She finds them difficult to face. Who was being kind to whom? She always thought it was her to him. Kindness? Or more showing off that she had chosen to champion him? A badge she fears she wore with self-assured pride. She’s ashamed now. Ashamed of the sense that she was bestowing on him the gift of her innately superior (and much sought after) love.

But maybe her vulnerabilities were more transparent than she likes to think. Maybe he was the one being kind. Or maybe — most likely — her over-wrought obsessive rewinding has made it all much more complicated than it actually was.

R was deaf. He had a big putty-pink hearing aid and glasses with thick transparent plastic frames. And his movements were ungainly. They never kissed. Not tongues, anyway. (And the school grounds held plenty of hidden spots to experience the first taste of boys’ tongues).

So here’s a question? Did she, behind the scenes, to entertain her friends, imitate his voice – his hypernasal soft-palatey voice? She can’t answer her own question but she fears she did — otherwise why would she be asking the question?

R was a day boy. He invited her to his home. She remembers sitting on the carpeted floor of his bedroom with the warm smell of baking cake wafting up from the kitchen where his welcoming mum was preparing a slap-up tea, and she remembers feeling that she was in his sanctuary, his special place. They played happily in that real bedroom in his real home. He had a pile of comics. Like the other girls, her favourite comics were Bunty and Judy. R had tons of them. And —joy of joys— he had a collection of Sindy dolls, with different outfits. A boy playing with Sindy dolls! This was gossip gold dust. But she remembers an instinct to protect him. Particularly from the boys. She knew she had been allowed into his domain of trust, and she wasn’t going to betray it.

Or did I betray him? I’m sure I wouldn’t have told the boys. But did I tell the girls? Yes, probably. It would have been an uncontainable cross-your-heart-and-hope-to-die secret.

The dorms were humming with secrets. Delicious secrets; betrayed secrets; counter secrets; revoked secrets and secrets fraught with the remorse of divulgence. The burning need and subsequent guilt of telling a family secret was the worst anguish. Bringing home into the dorm was perilous.

She still experiences the burden of secrets, contiguous with the torment of the unsaid.

And then comes the thought —maybe, unlike her, R didn’t view his Sindy dolls as a secret. Maybe he had the strength of character to consider it open-source information.

R died in 2023. She read an obituary, written by another of the nice boys, also a day boy.

But the word nice attaches itself to not just the day boys, but to many of the other boys too: her clan — the boarders.

She sees the boys as somehow happier than the girls. She sees them charging about with happy-go-lucky grins and bruised knees.

Or is this just tropey nonsense? Probably. But there was one big difference between the boys and the girls. The boys’ surrogate mother wasn’t Cruel Matron. They were looked after by Kind Matron, with her comforting, slightly scatty smile and her soft wispy hair, untidily scooped up into a bun. The boys could sleep more easily in their beds.

From R’s obituary, it’s clear he had good friends at school and he must have enjoyed at least some of his time there because she learnt that he gave back to the school as an adult. This is a relief to her. She wishes she had met him again in adult life. She’s pretty sure she would have still liked him; she thinks they would have got on. She wishes she had been able to say to him, ‘I’m sorry if I was a virtue-signalling little show-off. I didn’t just marry you because you were deaf, you know.’ Had this conversation taken place, she wishes his response might have been, ‘You weren’t like that at all! You were lovely. I was madly in love with you. Don’t you remember, I carved your likeness out of expanded polystyrene?’ She imagines them having a good laugh about that.

And she imagines her going on to tell him that the smell of his lovely mum’s cake and sitting on the floor of his bedroom reading Bunty together and playing with his Sindy dolls has always stayed with her as a warm, safe and happy memory.

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