To Run Across the Sea Read Online Free Page B

shoulders, pretty in a way but with a vapid expression, and burdened with a nasal and moaning Essex accent—could ever hope to imitate her cousin.
    A few days after this conversation Dorothea cut several inches from Jane’s lifeless hair, tidied up her fingernails and took her to Woodford for an interview with Mrs Amos, headmistress of Gladben’s Hall. She had found Mrs Amos formidable, a woman in her sixties she would have said, smooth-skinned, immaculate and precise. She was unnerved by the combination of Mrs Amos’s penetrating stare, and her almost excessively sympathetic manner. All in all, there was something spiderish about her. ‘But there you are,’ Dorothea said. ‘She gets the results.’
    Dorothea had an excellent memory and in describing the interview seemed to be repeating the conversation word by word. Jane, she said, was at her worst; fidgeting, embarrassed and tongue-tied. ‘She couldn’t have been more stupid,’ Dorothea said.
    ‘I want to know all about you,’ Mrs Amos had said. ‘Are you a sporty girl? Does music appeal to you, or do you like to curl up with a book?’
    But Jane just sat there and looked blank, Dorothea explained. ‘She wouldn’t utter. She wouldn’t even look Mrs Amos in the face. There was a picture on the wall of a German battleship going down after some battle—was it the Battle of the Plate?—and she was hypnotised by it. “I’m sorry,” I said to Mrs Amos. “It’s just her nerves. It’ll pass in a minute.” I have to say Mrs Amos was very understanding. Full marks to her for that. She asked Jane what she wanted to do with her life and Jane told her she didn’t know, and Mrs Amos said that was quite normal at her age, most young people didn’t. She seemed to be trying to draw Jane out,’ Dorothea said, ‘but Jane was terribly negative. When Mrs Amos asked her what she did in the evening she said she looked at the telly. She didn’t have any favourite programme, she told her. She just watched anything that happened to be on. It was all the same to her. Otherwise she went down to the bus shelter. That’s what the kids do when there’s nothing on the box. They just sit there and talk. Don’t ask me what about.’
    ‘So what was the outcome of it all?’ I asked her.
    ‘You won’t believe this,’ Dorothea said. ‘She was accepted.’
    ‘That’s really tremendous news,’ I said. ‘You’re over the worst hurdle. You must be very happy, and relieved.’
    She was, and was worried now only about how she was going to come up with the money. But I was curious to know what was taught at this school beside charm.
    ‘Well,’ Dorothea said, ‘that comes into it, but there’s much more to it than that. I’ll tell you exactly what Mrs Amos said to me. She said, “Here we introduce them to pride. Often when a girl first comes to us she has no ego, and therefore no personality and we set out to change that. When she leaves us we expect her to be full of herself, and that in a woman is the open sesame to success.”’
    With the coming of spring there were great changes in the neighbourhood. The Americans decided to expand their Effingham base, doubling their military personnel and building accommodation for families brought in on long-term postings. Once again, as it had been back in the forties, there were Americans everywhere. These by all accounts were smartly uniformed, outstandingly polite young soldiers, and local men who had sucked in humility with their mothers’ milk were often amazed to be addressed as ‘sir’.
    The village began to smarten up. Essex had been discovered by the frontiersmen from London who paid dearly for arriving late on the scene. Charmers End, which nobody would pay £5,000 for when I moved in, was expected to fetch at least five times that sum by the time my lease ran out. A half-dozen rather sombre-looking lath-and-plaster Jacobean buildings were snapped up in and around the village. The newcomers stripped away plaster to