Fremlin With No Crying

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31300-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 164 Seiten

'Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith, Celia Fremlin wrote psychological thrillers that changed the landscape of crime fiction for ever: her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating - and quite horribly chilling.' Andrew Taylor With No Crying (1980), Celia Fremlin's eleventh novel, tells of Miranda, a daydreaming fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who has encouraged a boy to seduce her and is glad to find herself pregnant, but then bitterly resentful when her parents talk her into an abortion. She pads up her stomach, runs away from home, and finds refuge in a squat where her new housemates await the newborn keenly. How, though, can Miranda save face? 'An acute piece of social observation, psychological insight, and intuitive sympathy that makes for a very satisfying read... Quite brilliant, nicely understated, and tantalisingly real.' Hampstead & Highgate Express

Celia Fremlin (1914-2009) was born in Kent and spent her childhood in Hertfordshire, before studying at Oxford (whilst working as a charwoman). During World War Two, she served as an air-raid warden before becoming involved with the Mass Observation Project, collaborating on a study of women workers, War Factory. In 1942 she married Elia Goller, moved to Hampstead and had three children. In 1968, their youngest daughter committed suicide aged 19; a month later, her husband also killed himself. In the wake of these tragedies, Fremlin briefly relocated to Geneva. In 1985, she married Leslie Minchin, with whom she lived until his death in 1999. Over four decades, Fremlin wrote sixteen celebrated novels - including the classic summer holiday seaside mystery Uncle Paul (1959) - one book of poetry and three story collections. Her debut The Hours Before Dawnwon the Edgar Award in 1960.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fremlin, Celia

Leseproben

CHAPTER II

IT WAS MAY when it had all begun, one of the loveliest Mays in living memory. For Miranda Field and her friend Sharon Whittaker, it looked like being the best summer term ever. Already enjoying many of the Upper School privileges—a coffee-machine, for instance, and free periods for private study—they were nevertheless not yet properly in the grip of exams. O-levels were still a full year away and casting only the faintest of barely-noticeable shadows across the golden months intervening. In this timeless unrepeatable interlude between childhood and the burdens of preparing for an adult career, it seemed downright ungrateful—almost a sin, really—to be working at all hard, and so Miranda and Sharon (clever girls anyway, to whom the school work came easily) nudged and whispered their way through the sunlit, easy-going lessons, and spent the long, delicious hours of “private study” lying in the long grass that bordered the playing fields, giggling, imagining and egging one another on into being in love.

To an observer (if such there had been) looking down on them through the great white heads of cow parsley, and listening to the rapturous whispered confidences borne on the soft, sweet-scented airs of spring, it might have seemed that they were merely in love with love.

And perhaps they were. But what of it? There is nothing “mere” about this kind of love, especially if you are not quite fifteen and drunk with the returning sun. And in any case, they had each of them, according to her questing fancy, given to this abstract passion a temporary incarnation and a name from among the remote and inaccessible sixth-formers at the top of the school. Thus Sharon was madly, hopelessly in love with the school cricket captain, one Gordon Hargreaves, tall and fair, lithe as a whip, and as brilliant at work as he was at games; while Miranda, not to be outdone, had succeeded in working herself into a delicious state of unrequited passion for the Secretary of the Sixth Form Chess Club, a dark, saturnine youth with shining almond-shaped eyes and black, springy hair lifting from his scalp as if blown by some eternal wind. His name was Trevor Marks, and he played the zither as well as chess; and sometimes Miranda, catching the faint, distant twang of the instrument through the windows of the Sixth Form Common Room, would almost faint for joy standing out there on the gravel path in the sunshine, the books for whatever class she was on her way to clasped ecstatically against her pounding heart.

The joy of it was beyond belief; and while the magical springtime burgeoned towards summer, and branches heavy with may looped low above their giggling heads, they would whisper low to one another about the latest crop of wonders. How Gordon the cricket captain had been glimpsed putting his cycling-clips on and mounting his bicycle yesterday afternoon just by the school gate; or how Trevor (Miranda’s one) had almost collided with her as he raced down the steps of the Science Block, evidently late for something.

Suppose they had actually collided, Miranda rapturously surmised, her eyes half-closed against the incredible blueness of the sky: suppose he had knocked her right to the bottom, and had then kneeled by her, white-faced with concern, his hand on her breast to make sure her heart was still beating…. And then again (for fair’s fair, and Sharon was entitled to her turn) suppose that, mounting his bicycle, Gordon Hargreaves had caught sight of Sharon, her newly-washed hair lapping almost to her waist, and had paused for a moment to wonder who she was, and why he’d never noticed her before? Leaning his bicycle carefully and deliberately against the fence, suppose he’d strolled towards her, with a look of growing wonder in his laughing blue eyes…

Supposing … supposing …! It was no wonder that the actual experiences of the supposedly-luckier girls who had real-life, flesh-and-blood boy friends, seemed tame indeed in comparison, not to say depressing. Listening, on Monday mornings, to the variegated setbacks and traumas endured over the weekend by their ostensibly more fortunate classmates—the tales of telephone calls that never came; of dates that ended in tears and recriminations; of being kept waiting; of being stood-up; of being kissed “like that”, and of not being kissed “like that”; of unloving words and of uncouth behaviour; of being taller than him and looking like a pair of Charlies walking along together—listening to all this, Miranda and Sharon could hardly help, sometimes, giving way to a deep, secret conviction of their own superior good fortune.

Because, of course, there was no way in which their loved ones could fail them in this sort of distressing fashion—or indeed in any fashion. Since neither Gordon the cricket captain nor Trevor the chess champion had ever spoken to either of the girls, or were even aware of their existence, there was absolutely no way in which they could let them down. No way in which they could slight them, neglect them, be unfaithful to them or even (God forbid!) bore them.

*

There is something in human nature which cannot leave well alone, which is somehow impelled to interfere, to provoke change, in no matter how blissful and ideal a situation. Thus it was with Miranda and Sharon, the precipitating factor in their case being the school dance, billed to take place at the end of May, on the last Friday before half-term.

Naturally enough, the occasion seemed, in prospect, to present unprecedented opportunities to anyone in the throes of undeclared and unrequited love. For the dance was one of the few occasions in the school year when the normal barriers of hierarchy, age and status could be expected to break down, and it would actually become possible for a fourth-former to walk up to a top prefect and say—Well, say something, anyway …

What they would say, when and how they would summon up the courage to say it, required quite a bit of advance planning, and in the end they settled for a scheme both simple and ingenious: each girl, at some time during the evening, was to walk boldly up to the other one’s beloved and offer to introduce him to “my friend”. The idea seemed to both of them a brilliant one, and very nearly foolproof, for this way each girl only risked a snub from the boy she wasn’t in love with, and so suicide would be unnecessary.

Simple enough in conception, the plan proved by no means so easy of execution. The difficulties surged in upon them in a blast of noise and heat and colour the moment they set foot in the big hall where the dance was being held. Somehow they hadn’t quite envisaged all this crush… all this din. Even to find their unsuspecting prey would be a mammoth task; and as for waiting around for an appropriate moment—“Not while he’s talking to someone,” they’d promised each other beforehand, “and not if he looks busy… or preoccupied… or in a hurry”—such niceties would clearly have to go by the board. They’d be lucky if they even got a glimpse of their respective victims, either of them.

Still, they weren’t the sort of girls to give up easily. Twice… thrice… they prowled the length and breadth of the dance hall, peering ferociously into the undergrowth of bright dresses and swaying bodies; and it was only when, after a few more turns, they decided to give themselves a breather out in the cool of the corridor, that suddenly it all happened. All at once the swing doors at the far end burst apart at the impact of a fresh band of revellers, and almost without warning Miranda found herself less than a yard from her friend’s beloved as he hurried past with an ice-cream cone in each hand.

There was no escape. It had happened: and only now did Miranda realise how deeply she’d been counting on the probability that it wouldn’t. She felt her mouth go dry, and her knees shook, even though he wasn’t the one she was in love with.

“Would you like to meet my friend, Sharon Whittaker?” she blurted out. He stopped at once, looking a bit surprised, but smiling down at her amiably enough.

“Sorry, love—” he gestured apologetically with the near-side ice-cream, “Later on—d’you mind?” and with another vague gesture of distracted goodwill, he disappeared through the door into the crowded dance hall, and vanished from their sight.

Well, at least he hadn’t snubbed her. He’d been nice enough, it hadn’t been a disaster; but on the other hand you couldn’t call it a success, either. Disappointing, especially for Sharon.

Still, he might come back. His words had vaguely implied something of the kind, had they not? For a while, the two conspirators hung about in the doorway, their eyes darting this way and that among the crowd, bright and intent as blackbirds watching for worms.

But he didn’t come; and presently, when they began to realise it was hopeless, it became necessary to apply their minds to the next item on the agenda—Trevor Marks. It was Sharon who must stick her neck out this time, and see if she could do better on Miranda’s behalf than Miranda had on hers.

Systematically she set about her task, working her way back and forth across the packed dance floor, quartering the ground, with Miranda like a gun dog close on her heels.

It didn’t take so long this time. Within a very few minutes they had their quarry cornered, and proceeded, with a fine display of averted eyes and calculated unconcern, to close...