Читать книгу Children of the Master - Andrew Marr, Andrew Marr - Страница 11

I don’t know what charisma is. Nobody does. But it comes from God, and it makes power tolerable.

The Master

Caroline Elizabeth Phillips’s seemingly effortless success in life had been based on two things. The most important was her irresistible likeability. Whenever she walked into a room, whether it be the lounge bar of a pub or, later on, a dreary, low-ceilinged political meeting room, the temperature rose. People who had been down in the dumps found themselves smiling; misery-gutses discovered they just wanted to be liked. This, apparently, was charisma. She’d had it since she was a toddler. She was the kind of small child whose hair every adult wanted to ruffle. She smiled, they smiled back. Easy. Sometimes she almost glowed. Yet her father, Thomas Phillips, was a dourly forgettable man of business. People struggled to remember his name even if they were closely related to him. Her mother, Simone, was sharp-tongued and energetic, but, like her husband, essentially bland – bland with lemon sauce. Between them they had produced a source of light. It was as surprising as if two affable Burgundian peasants had given birth to a saint, complete with spangled wings, or as if a pair of Brummie shopkeepers had spawned a multi-coloured dragon. Of course you’d have to know the family to understand just how extraordinary it was. In photographs, Caro looked pretty enough, but not remarkable. In the flesh, her oat-coloured radiance entranced everyone lucky enough to come across her.

Caro disapproved of the word ‘lesbian’. ‘For one thing, it denotes an islander, it’s inappropriately geographical … And beyond that, people make assumptions,’ she had told her mother (who certainly did). ‘They think they know what music I like, my political opinions, how I decorate my house. They think lesbians are driven by sex, and have “pashes”. Lesbians wear lesbian clothes, and eat lesbian food, and watch gloomy Nordic lesbian films about gloomy Nordic lesbians. Well, if even part of that’s true, then I’m not a lesbian. I’m an old-fashioned, friendly, meat-eating, Christian woman who happens to love other women. Not even that. An other woman.’

That other woman, Angela, had been known as ‘Pep’ when Caro first met her – tall, dark, and only just a teenager. Pep stood for pepperoni, which stood for pizza, which stood for pizza-face. Angela had suffered from relatively mild acne. That was the kind of humour their school specialised in.

To a visitor, this school looked warm, even cosy. Based around a 1930s country house in Sussex, originally constructed for a shipbuilding tycoon, it had many acres of games pitches, and modern outbuildings. Queen Eleanor’s prepared the daughters of wealthy commuters for Russell Group universities. From the outside, it might have been a spa resort or an affluent golf club. The main building had a pleasantly arts-and-crafts feel to it; with its long, sloped roofs, high chimneys and cream pebbledash, it spoke of a conservative-minded, late-in-the-day architectural admirer of Ruskin and Morris. ‘Pleasant’ was a word that was often used of it. Just like Sussex itself, Queen Eleanor’s was … pleasant.

But behind the fresh cream paint and the well-kept hedges, the school was not what it appeared. Its pupils were mostly sturdy, normal, healthy-looking girls with their hair in clasps, their gleaming metal orthodontics and their knees the colour of turnips. But there is nothing on this small green planet as dangerous and terrifying as English schoolgirls in packs. On the surface, serge and cheesecloth. Below it, claws and fangs, the splash of blood and the muffled squeal. Girls left this lovely school prepared to throw themselves into abusive relationships or starve themselves to death, or if they’d done pretty well, settled for decades of dogged, surreptitious alcoholism. A girl might come to Queen Eleanor’s with a straight back and a clear eye; she would be lucky to leave without slouching – hating herself, curled up, sarcastic. Emotional survival in this pleasant – so, so pleasant – place, with its choir which did Purcell, and its glossy, neatly-lettered rolls of honour, was harder than in the drab council estates of Ayrshire.

What about the families? Powerful men who knew about the world – barristers, accountants, company directors – sent their daughters there. In due course, later on, they would idly wonder why little Sarah, Penelope or Tessa had become so sullen, so thin and so uncommunicative on the family’s annual skiing holiday to Val-d’Isère. What had happened to the once-easy conversations around the breakfast table? Once in a while, a particularly bold father might clear his throat and ask Julietta or Tamara whether she was happy. In response he’d be confronted by a face as white as a sealed envelope, or a shrug of skeletal shoulders. He would rarely press the point: Queen Eleanor’s sent its platoons of damaged young women to Oxford, Cambridge and the cream of foreign universities. It attracted the offspring of television celebrities, and it was the most successful sporting girls’ school in the Home Counties: its hockey team thrashed the London day schools, and it had one of the best girls’ football teams in England. It was a school parents boasted of; but to thrive there, you needed not only to be pretty, but to have a poisonous tongue and a hide like an armoured personnel carrier. Suicide attempts were not unknown, though none had recently been successful when Caroline Phillips, long-limbed and handsome, glowing with self-confidence, had been dropped off by her nervous parents and left with two large suitcases to unpack.

She, and they, had expected a dormitory, but by that time the girls got their own bedrooms, although bathrooms were shared. Trying to forget the empty feeling in her tummy as the family Audi turned and headed back down the school driveway, Caro had just begun laying out the lilac-striped shirts, the blue skirts and endless pairs of white socks when suddenly her door was shoved open by a pack of hunting girls, smelling of tobacco and peppermint. She was shoved down onto the bed, her cases upended on the floor, and she was subjected to an hour of relentless questioning – boys; fit brothers; bleeding yet? Did she do herself? Ciggies; pills; any spare cash?

Humiliated but dry-eyed, she survived. Before they’d left she had handed over the £60 her father had said should last her the whole term, and a small box containing a pair of earrings, just given to her by her mother as a starting-school present.

‘We are the bitches, we are the witches. Make us rich and never snitch, or we’ll cut your throat, no hitches,’ Farola Ponsonby and Africa Crewe chanted as they left her.

Caro wondered whether her looks and her ability on the hockey pitch might not, after all, be enough to protect her. She carefully refolded her clothes and put them away. She pulled out the framed photographs of her parents and her brother. And she put them away too.

It was several days later, while playing table tennis, that Caro first noticed Pep. Pep was very tall, very thin, freckled, with intense dark eyes and cascades of black hair. And yes, there was some acne. The thinness was not unusual at Queen Eleanor’s – even the teachers joked that each year was divided into A and B streams, anorexia or bulimia. But the intensity of Pep’s stare was extraordinary. The moment their eyes met, Pep looked away again, but Caro felt an instant, completely unfamiliar shudder.

The two girls soon struck up a friendship based on reading, cheerfully incompetent hockey and music. They hung around together. In year four, Caroline put an arm around Pep’s bony back. In year five, Pep returned her kiss; her mouth smelled of peppermint, and their tongues touched. By then they were leaders in the school Christian Union, and were an admired, deferred-to couple. At Queen Eleanor’s this was hardly exceptional. The school had a long-established Sapphic reputation, and at a time in British history when lesbianism was going mainstream, this caused barely a ripple among the parents. To have a gay daughter was, for a dull executive on the London commute, chic.

As for the staff, they had plenty of other things to worry about. Caroline and Pep were among the girls who had developed to a fine art the communal destruction of teachers. One of them might begin to hum, in a high tone, in the middle of a lesson. Another would pick up the hum, and it would spread around the class. As soon as the teacher pounced in one direction, the noise billowed up from another. Group punishments had no effect. There is nothing half as frightening and destructive as a group of middle-class English girls intent on mischief, and Queen Eleanor’s was not alone in being unable to cope.

The high mistress, the chief uncoper, was a large-bosomed, horse-faced woman whose greatest talent was her inability to see what was going on in front of her nose. Everything about the school was marvellous. Her girls were marvellous. She was lucky in her marvellous staff. She had surrendered long ago. She walked the corridors with a glassy, painted grin, in a bubble of invincible optimism. It so chanced that idiot opti-mism, an inability to see looming disaster on every side, was a considerable skill in the Britain of her time. She could have run anything – a lousy, malodorous hospital; a violent, drug-infested prison; a tax-squandering, inept government department. In each case her smile would have been as bright, her self-confidence as intact, and her calmness hugely reassuring to all who worked for her. Everything would have been splendid.

So there was, as far as the high mistress was concerned, no ‘mucking around’ at Queen Eleanor’s. Once, and once only, she had been persuaded by a newspaper article of the need to give the girls a lecture. But all her glossy circumlocutions had made this entirely pointless: the younger girls had no idea what she meant by ‘skulking in dark corners’, and the older ones had simply tittered. Anyway, the teaching staff were almost unanimous that the alternative – insanitary, dangerous and occasionally life-wrecking ‘messing about’ with boys – was worse. As the deputy head once remarked, ‘I’m so old I can remember when the girls who kneeled were the pious ones.’

By the time they were in the upper sixth, of course, Caro and Pep had fallen out, and were barely speaking. Caroline’s charisma meant that she was constantly surrounded by admirers – sporty girls, musical girls, oddball girls. Pep, meanwhile, embracing her frizzy, black-eyed eccentricity, had plunged into darker places, cutting and ‘restricting’ and reading far too deeply.

The day came when Caroline’s parents were called in for the ‘What next?’ conversation with the headmistress.

‘Caroline is exceptionally talented. She will do exceedingly well. She has done marvellously here and we have done marvellously with her. But we cannot quite decide, just at this moment, at what, exactly, dear Caroline will excel.’

Her mother asked what sort of careers Queen Eleanor’s girls tended to pursue.

‘In the old days, it was all public service – the Foreign Office, the army, and so on. But …’ Her voice faded away. This was a hard one. In the Queen Eleanor’s Chronicle she had become a past headmistress of the art of euphemism. Patti Vidal, undoubtedly the stupidest girl the school had ever known, had become a glamour model, largely famous for her hindquarters. Few of Patti’s films could be referred to by name, never mind seen, by decent people. ‘Actress’, the headmistress had written firmly. ‘Royal Shakespeare Company, etc.’ Amy Brewer and Madelyn Strindberg, from the following year, were currently serving time in a Singaporean prison after a few exciting months as drugs mules. ‘Working in international pharmaceuticals’ appeared against their names. Lorraine Gatto, who had been a senior prefect, had apparently now opened a dungeon off Sloane Square, complete with whipping bench, nipple clamps, a suspendable cage and other useful gadgets. The headmistress had thought long and hard about Lorraine – such an obliging girl – before writing the single word ‘Rehabilitation’.

But, faced with these transparently pleasant and intelligent parents, she hesitated. ‘Many of our girls these days go into entertainment – film, television, music, that kind of thing – and others do charity work. But Caroline is especially gifted. Everybody wants to be her friend, you see. She sings like a bullfrog and dances like a cow, but she lights up a room.’

‘You’re not suggesting she just waits around to find some chap to marry, I hope,’ her mother said.

‘Absolutely not. With the spread of pre-nups and so forth, we no longer recommend marriage. No. The extraordinary thing about Caroline is that people believe her. I think she needs to do something quite big, perhaps something in public life.’

‘Politics? She says she’d like to read politics at Edinburgh.’

‘You know, I was thinking more of banking. I think she’s too nice, too straightforward, for politics,’ said the headmistress.

She had rarely ever said anything as nice about any girl to her parents; but on this occasion she was dead wrong. Caroline was perfect for politics.

Pep’s parents, who had adopted her as a young child, never actually turned up to see the headmistress. There was no need. Their girl was utterly determined on a religious vocation. Her mum and dad joked that she’d become a nun. They were spared that. Angela studied theology at Sheffield, and after a year travelling in South America, she returned determined for ordination as a priest in the Church of England. Since they had left Queen Eleanor’s, Caroline and Angela had completely lost touch.