Читать книгу The Other Half of Augusta Hope - Joanna Glen - Страница 21

My mother and father wanted Julia and me to go on with French. But for the first year ever in our new school, Hedley Heights, we could choose Spanish in Year 9, or, if you were in the top set, you could do French and Spanish together.

Julia was not in the top set, and she chose to carry on with French. She didn’t really want to because she was in love with Diego at number 13, as I was too, but she did French (which she was awful at) because she always liked to do what my parents wanted.

‘It hurts me when they look disappointed,’ she said.

‘They’re manipulating you,’ I said.

If you wanted, as an extra, at Hedley Heights, you could also do Latin at lunchtimes. I put my name down in the first week of Year 7, which meant I would miss Cookery Club, one of its most significant attractions. In the beginning. Before I loved everything else about it.

My mother had signed us both up for Cookery Club, cooking being her thing. I’d spotted that some people assumed cooking would be my thing, by dint of me being a girl, and the best way, it seemed, to destroy that assumption would be never to learn to cook. Either in Cookery Club or in the many invitations made to me by my mother in the kitchen at number 1.

‘Oh, Augusta,’ said my mother. ‘What good will Latin be to you later on?’

‘Perhaps I will be a professor at Cambridge University,’ I said.

‘Professors at Cambridge University still need to cook,’ said my mother.

Which was a perfect example of the knack she had of entirely missing the point.

‘I don’t know what you’re planning to do with all these words you’re so keen on,’ said my mother.

‘You wait and see,’ I said.

Here I was, alone in Spanish, in Year 9, with España dancing on the air around my head, light as a fairy-sprite, like a butterfly, like the feeling of spring.

Before I could stop myself, I put up my hand and asked the teacher what the word was for sprite in Spanish. Because I couldn’t stop myself. And I didn’t want to know how to say I am called Augusta, which was clearly where we were heading.

‘Fairy or sprite – hada,’ said the teacher, but his mouth was all soft like a bean bag when he said it. I wondered if I could do that with my own mouth, soften the d to the point of collapse.

‘Or duende, I suppose,’ said the teacher, ‘which actually means spirit, except it’s untranslatable.’

Untranslatable, my ears pricked up – what a lovely, complicated thought. I saved it away for later, hoping that I was untranslatable, myself.

‘A book has just come out called Duende,’ said the teacher. ‘A book by Jason Webster – you may want to read it.’

Duende – I tried the word out on my tongue, imitating the teacher.

‘Duende,’ said the teacher, ‘is that …’

He hesitated.

‘That …’

We stared at him.

‘That moment of ecstasy.’

He stopped.

I thought of how much I wanted to find it, that thing I couldn’t find, whatever it was.