by Pet Jeffery
As I stood by Daddy's open grave on that early July day, I was dazed and confused. I ought to have been prepared for this. Daddy had been thirty-seven years older than Mummy. In the natural order of things, he should have died long before she did. But, as Daddy put it, the angels had taken Mummy when I was little. She'd been swimming in the sea, before reacting calamitously to a jelly fish sting. I've never since cared to eat either fish or jelly. Daddy's coy euphemism for death left me with a lifelong aversion to the angelic host. By what right had they snatched away my mummy? Daddy's funeral was at St Swithun's church, a building replete with carved angels; the sight of their feathered wings and bland faces knotted my stomach.
Tears of anger welled within me as the vicar spoke of the sure and certain hope of resurrection. I didn't want Daddy to rise from the grave like some vampire in a film. He needed to be alive to dote upon me. Besides, if the vicar was genuinely so confident of a resurrection, why did he use both of the words 'sure' and 'certain'? Either word would have done; both together betrayed his uncertainty. He was insulting the gravity of the occasion with his bland pap.
My impotent rage rose to a crescendo as Auntie Meg's enormous and ridiculous wide-brimmed hat obliterated my view of Daddy's grave. In a moment of petulance, I raised my hand and batted the hat away. As my blow lifted the prodigious brim, a breeze caught the headgear. The hat scudded through the air like a Hollywood flying saucer until it came to rest in the upper branches of a yew tree by the churchyard gate. My cousin May gazed at me reproachfully as I lowered my eyes. She and I were both sixteen, but her evident disapproval made her seem older than me, in spite of the fact that she wore a burgundy gymslip, school blazer and white ankle socks. I resented what I took to be her attitude. She should have deferred, if not to me, then to my chic black Chanel dress, Christian Dior stockings, and Perugia heels.
Auntie Meg, who had lost her hat, was Mummy's eldest sister; she had never approved of me but, on this occasion, contented herself with an icy glare in my direction. It was Auntie Joan who took me to task for my fit of temper; she waited until we were back at the house, and we had eaten the first round of ham sandwiches. The food had not been my choice, but ham sandwiches seem an inevitable part of a funeral; I don't like them much better than I do fish, jelly, or angels.
Whenever I encountered Auntie Joan's three daughters, they seemed suspiciously subdued. The trio comprised the red-headed Ruth aged eighteen, sixteen-year-old May, and Amy who was fourteen. Amy, at least, should have been bubbling with mischief. Instead, she was unnaturally polite. May's age was the same as mine, and she should have engaged me on fashion, and other important topics, but she remained oddly reticent. I harboured dark doubts about their mother.
"Fenella!" Auntie Joan fixed me with her fierce gaze. "I understand that you knocked your Auntie Meg's hat flying."
"No, Auntie."
This was a lie, but an admission of my fault would have been deeply humiliating. Joan repeated my words with the intonation of a question.
"No, Auntie?"
I felt that I couldn't back down. Instead, I needed to embroider my lie.
"May did it."
In part, I accused May because she had been standing at Meg's side; she was a plausible culprit. Also, my cousin's adult demeanour, in spite of her schoolwear, continued to irk me.
"Are you sure, Fenella?"
"Yes," I replied, before repeating the vicar's phrase. "Sure, and certain."
"May!" Auntie Joan bawled. "Here, this instant!"
I don't know how I'd expected Auntie Joan to react to my accusation, but her actions shocked me. She seated herself on a hallway chair and, when her daughter approached, the irate woman seized May by the upper arm. A moment later, Auntie Joan had draped my cousin over her knee. Joan lifted the hem of May's gymslip and then tugged down her daughter's knickers. The first few smacks tinted May's buttocks a delicate pink and produced yelps from the unfortunate girl.
"Fenella tells me," Auntie Joan said, as she paused in mid-chastisement, "that you knocked off Mrs Sinclair's hat."
"No, Mama. I didn't."
"Then, why should Fenella lie about it? I wouldn't have spanked her."
"I don't know, Mama."
"Pauline," Auntie Joan appealed to her passing elder sister, "did May knock off Meg's hat?"
"Quite likely she did," Auntie Pauline replied. "I couldn't see very well, but May was standing next to Meg. Of course, it might have been an accident."
Auntie Joan turned back to her sixteen-year-old daughter.
"Was it an accident, May?"
"Yes, Mama."
I suppose that May saw this as an easy escape from her spanking. If so, she miscalculated.
"So, it was you, May?" her mother accused. "You lied when you said that it wasn't you, and that is something I will not allow."
Joan's open palm struck May's bottom more furiously than before. As the slaps continued to rain upon my cousin's derriere, May's buttocks glowed an ever deeper red, and her cries grew louder as they increased in pitch. It seemed that the spanking would continue forever, but eventually it ran its course. Auntie Joan raised my cousin's knickers and lowered her gymslip hem. The girl rose unsteadily to her feet and turned to her mother with downcast eyes.
"Thank you, Mama," she said. This was clearly her expected response. "I'm very sorry."
I didn't doubt that she was sorry, and so was I, in my own way. Only afterwards did it occur to me that I should have confessed my fault at an early stage in the spanking. By the time this entered my head, it was far too late to act upon my delayed compunction. The chastisement I had caused and witnessed continued to trouble me as I boarded the Golden Arrow at Victoria a couple of days later.
I was on my way back to Crête de la colline, my Swiss finishing school. I'd left the settling of Daddy's affairs in the hands of Mr Collingwood, the solicitor. I had given no thought to how his decisions might affect me, not least in the choice of my legal guardian.
The wind that had carried away Auntie Meg's hat whipped up a heavy swell in the channel. My troubled stomach drove any other concerns from my head. From Calais, the Flèche d'Or conveyed me to Paris. En route, I spent much of the time in my berth, emerging occasionally to use the dining car or the lavatory. The Simplon Orient Express took me to Lausanne and, from there, a basic but clean local train deposited me within a taxi ride of Crête de la colline. Only on this final leg of the journey did I pay the least attention to the view: the dim shapes of distant mountains.
Rather than admire whatever the continent had to offer, I had been anxious to escape Daddy's unnaturally quiet house, further spurred by a distaste for the funeral and unease at May's spanking. There was also the matter of the play.
Six weeks before Daddy's death, I had secured the starring role in the Crête de la colline end of term play. If I was absent from the finishing school for too long a span, Madame Pernod, the dramatic arts instructress, might bestow the role upon Tamara Banks-Burton or, worse, Sofie von Trachtenberg.
Three days after my return to Switzerland, I had not managed to speak with Madame Pernod, but I hoped that I remained her stage star. The daughter of an Austrian princely house consumed most of the instructress' waking hours. Prinzessin Maria von Thun und Taxis was to start at the finishing school next term. Maria's social status was higher than that of any previous Crête de la colline pupil, and her advent evidently required much time and attention from several staff members, Madame Pernod amongst them. I had seen the princess only from a distance but, as far as I could discern, she was a teenage girl with mousy hair, remarkable only for possessing too wide a mouth. In any case, she had yet to start at the school, and was clearly ineligible to usurp my role in the play.
I sat on my bed smoking a cigarette, flicking my ash into a geranium pot taken for the purpose from the windowsill, and leafing through a magazine. A feature on stars of the silent screen engaged my attention; my precise focus was upon the beauty and style of Louise Brooks. Would her bobbed hair suit me? I rather thought that it would.
A knock on my door interrupted my consideration of this important issue. The rapping sounded as though another girl were visiting me; it was louder and less apologetic than was customary for a school maid seeking admittance.
"What ho!" I responded: the all but universal greeting of one Crête de la colline girl to another.
To my surprise and chagrin, a maid entered, in black dress, white apron and cap.
"Now, look here..." I began to remonstrate.
"Es tut mir leid, Fräulein," she began in her own language, before correcting herself. While the staff were French speakers, lower members of the school hierarchy invariably came from German speaking cantons. "I'm sorry, Miss, but Madame Dumont wishes to see you immediately."
All of the teaching and administrative staff styled themselves as Madame, but none of them appeared to have husbands; perhaps it was a courtesy title. Madame Dumont was the school principal. I groaned inwardly, not because I was reluctant to see Madame Dumont, but because such an interview would require me to wear the uniform.
Ordinarily, Crête de la colline girls wore fashionable clothes, but we had a uniform for formal occasions. A visit to Madame Dumont's study was definitely a formal occasion. I hated the uniform. It comprised a pinafore dress of blue and grey vertical stripes with a cloth tie belt in the same fabric. Underneath this monstrously childish garment, we wore a plain white short sleeved shirt. White ankle socks, shiny black Mary Jane shoes, and a straw boater completed the style nightmare. Changing into these things transformed my look from that of a sophisticated young lady to the semblance of a gauche little girl. But Madame Dumont was Madame Dumont; I could not ignore her summons, and it was unthinkable to enter her presence other than correctly attired.
"Damn!" I swore. "All right, Fraulein," I said to the maid, "you can go, now. I need to change."
"But I cannot go," she replied. "I am told to pack your things. I must stay."
I glanced at my suitcases, which I hadn't unpacked since my return from Daddy's funeral. The stupid foreigner, I concluded, didn't know the difference between packing and unpacking. It was high time the lazy trollop emptied my luggage, folded my clothes neatly into the appropriate drawers, and hung my dresses in the wardrobe.
"Of course," I said. "But you need to give me privacy while I change."
"What is this thing you wish me to give you?"
"Get out of my room," I responded slowly and clearly. "You are not to look upon me while I change my dress."
"Very well," she said. "But you must be quick. We expect..."
The remainder of her speech was in German, a language in which I'm not fluent. I recognised the word 'Bahnhof', which means railway station. As nearly as I could follow her meaning, someone or something was coming from the railway station for a purpose beyond my grasp.
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