Dale Other People

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-917092-17-3
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten

It is summer in small town Havenport. Protected from the world by her devoted mother, fifteen-year-old June is content and completely self-absorbed. Her biggest concern is where she will be holidaying this year. When June's father reappears after twelve years in Australia, she is thrust abruptly into a different life: new house, town, school. She soon suspects that she does not know the full story about her father, and when she meets Tony Townsend, he and his London life suddenly promise a glamorous and alluring alternative . . . Other People is a compelling coming-of-age novel, told with Dale's trademark wit, observation and canny dissection of relationships.

Celia Dale was born in 1912 and was once a secretary to Rumer Godden, and also worked as a publisher's advisor and a book reviewer. Her first novel, The Least of These, was published in 1943, and she went on to write twelve others, among them A Helping Hand, Sheep's Clothing and A Spring of Love. She won the 1986 Crime Writers' Association Veuve Cliquot Short Story Award for 'Lines of Communication', which appears in her only short story collection, A Personal Call and Other Stories. She died in 2011.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dale, Celia

Leseproben

ONE

THE SCHOOL VERSION ended at a gallop. They had cut Malvolio’s last scene (too cruel) and most of Fabian, so that the play ended with the general joining of hands and the cast lining up behind Frances, stocky in her cap and bells, for ‘The rain it raineth every day’. To June this was always almost more than she could bear. Frances was a creep but her voice really was pretty and the plaintive tune, the strange half-mad words closing the rich, scented hysteria of the end-of-term play, made June want to cry – but honestly, tears brimmed her blue-rimmed lids and if she’d had to utter one of her speeches again she couldn’t have done it for the lump in her throat, not even if Sir Larry himself had asked her.

Then the curtains swished together and all the audience clapped like mad, for even if their own ewe lambs weren’t in it a lot of the parents seemed to have more team spirit, more sense of unity (‘Jervis’s is a Unity, girls; we are all members one of another’, see Miss Chatham’s end-of-term speech this year, last year, amen) than the pupils. If Jervis’s High School for Girls didn’t rank quite with Roedean it was only because at Jervis’s you didn’t pay fees – at least, that was how a lot of the parents seemed to feel, and there they all were out in the hall beyond the footlights, clapping away and showing team spirit and some of them, like Mum, making the palms of their hands sting with genuine pride because up there on the stage, encased in archaic and awkward costumes, masked in greasepaint on which sweat beads were standing, were in fact their own daughters, their ewe lambs.

As the curtains ebbed and flowed a smell of canvas, cloth and the cloying perspiration of girls came mildly over the footlights as far as the first row or two of seats. Miss Chatham and her staff had long ceased to notice it, fathers and the few brothers who had been coerced into coming wrinkled their inward noses, mothers ignored it. The girls themselves, squeezing hands as they curtsied (or bowed, if playing male roles – preserve the reality, preserve the reality!) staring outward now through the light to find the parents, the clan, the buttressing personal applause, grew slightly drunk on their own bouquet. Bubbles of hysteria, checked only by the astringent notes of God save the Queen, rose within the unnatural bottles of heavy gowns, tights, wimples, burst and foamed backstage after the final curtain. Their voices rose to parrot-house strength, they hugged each other, breathing each other’s smell, someone fell against a piece of scenery and it fell on somebody’s head, someone was in tears, the stage manager and stage hands pushed about crying ‘Clear the stage, please – oh, do get off!’ and gradually, still entwined, still chattering or in tears, still half out of their own bodies and blossoming in the maturity of men and women, wombs and tosspots, horns and cuckolds (bowdlerised but not excised) and in the heady beauty of language never at other times heard, not even now totally comprehended, they dispersed to the three dressing rooms and reluctantly, as slowly as possible, put off their costumes and came back into the world.

Parents were still dotted about the hall among chairs now pushed awry, talking to other parents or to members of the staff, when June came through the passdoor, and she saw with the little thump of the heart she could never control at contact with authority that Miss Chatham was in conversation with Mum down at the far end of the front row. Miss Chatham was tall and regal, Mum was short and unremarkable, yet they were alike in their composure as they stood together. Miss Chatham was talking and Mum was listening and on both their faces was respect and friendliness, which perhaps might not remain if they noticed June had left some make-up on her eyelids and mouth. Still, she would risk it; the pain of relinquishing her other, glamorous self with the tights and tunic of Sebastian had been lessened by keeping the blue eyelids that gave her fledgling face a mystery and depth one could not normally display when one was fifteen and at Jervis’s – although of course it was all right to use a little lipstick (natural colour only, one of the awful girls in 6B had come to school with pale mauve lips and been sent home).

‘Ah, here’s June.’ Miss Chatham smiled permission to advance.

‘Good evening, Miss Chatham. Hullo, Mum.’

‘Hullo, dear. What a lovely show it was.’

‘And as far as I could see,’ said Miss Chatham, ‘there were no mishaps.’

‘I couldn’t get my sword back in the scabbard.’

‘I didn’t notice, dear. You’ve left some blue on your eyelids, if you’ve got a hankie.’

‘I was just telling your mother how pleased we have been with your progress this term. I think, Mrs Baxter, she’s almost certain of O-Level passes in every subject next year if she’s able to keep on working steadily – except perhaps Geography. For some reason Geography,’ she smiled at the girl, ‘fails to strike a chord in June’s bosom.’

Geography! Wiping some of the make-up off her eyelids with a handkerchief, June sneered at Geography. Rainfalls and crops and mountains – who cared about that? She smiled diffidently, lowering her head so that the two flat wings of fair hair concealed the corners of her mouth, where the smile would not have deceived Miss Chatham.

Miss Chatham was not deceived. ‘Still, the shores of Illyria are all that interest us tonight, aren’t they?’ she said, and without change of voice or expression conveyed, with no diminution of regard, an intimation of dismissal. At her back were gathering a clump of parents, like sheep seeking courage to bolt through a gateway. ‘You spoke your lines splendidly, June. I hope you’re not too excited to sleep. There will be a lot of heavy eyes at Dismissal tomorrow, I’m afraid.’

Turning slightly, she enabled the new group to advance (they belonged to a Second Former who hung back, unwilling to support her parents’ obstinate bravado in seeking speech with the Headmistress) and June and her mother to withdraw. The hall was fairly empty now and there was no one whom Mrs Baxter knew more than to smile to, while the girls, absorbed into their family groups, ignored each other.

June and her mother went out onto the main steps. Twilight had only just gone and the distant chill of the sea was beginning to creep up on the summer air.

‘Do your blazer up, dear, the wind’s cold.’

On the dark tarmac drive between the rose bushes June clasped her hands round her mother’s arm. They were almost the same height, the girl slight with a swansdown fairness, the woman thickset, quiet.

‘Was I good, Mum? Did you like me?’

‘I thought you were lovely.’

‘Could you hear me? Miss Garth always keeps on about speaking up, speaking out, throw your voice to the back of the hall …’ She imitated the English mistress, drawing herself up, jutting her chin and her small breasts in a mimicry that made her mother laugh. ‘What did you think of Maureen? She was Malvolio. Did you think she was good? Her hair kept coming out under her wig, did you notice? I hate wigs, I’m glad I didn’t have to wear one.’ She tossed her hair and gave a skip.

‘Don’t drag on my arm, dear. I thought you all took your parts splendidly.’

‘They gave Malvolio to Maureen because of her accent. She’s ever such a good actress but she’s got a real Hampshire accent, did you notice? They try and do that with all the accents, you know, give them the clowns or the common parts. I’d hate to have an accent and be tied to always playing that sort of part. Think of never being able to play Juliet!’ It was a serious thought and they walked to the bus stop in silence. How did you know if you had an accent? Did Maureen know or did she think she was given Malvolio simply because she was good at it? Had June herself got an accent without knowing it? She could imitate Julie Andrews doing The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain on the My Fair Lady record so that she couldn’t tell the difference. But perhaps someone else could? Had Mum got an accent, because if Mum had, then probably June had too?

‘What’s for supper, Mum?’ she asked, in order to hear her mother speak.

‘I could make you an omelette. Or there’s baked beans. Or I could open a tin of ravioli.’

‘Ravioli.’ Mum had no accent that June could discern, just a quiet ordinary sort of voice, not quite like Miss Chatham’s but ordinary. So June’s must be ordinary too, so that was all right. Of course it was all right or she wouldn’t have been given the part of Sebastian.

The bus did not go through the centre of the town but round the streets where people actually lived, away from the holidaymakers, hotels and fairy lights of the Marine Gardens and the Hippodrome. Here behind hedges and rose trees grown lush in the moist mild air were houses and villas and bungalows...