Bilgewater by Jane Gardam Read Free Book Online Page A

that I hadn’t actually started
Ulysses
yet. “I don’t actually understand what its—”
    â€œYou won’t at the end of it either,” he said, “But I expect you’ll love the bit about stuff coming out of his sister’s navel.” He went in through the door and then bobbed out again and his face was worse than usual— CONTUSED and ferocious.
    â€œAnd there’s a lovely long bit about someone pushing on the lavatory. All he’s thinking about while he’s—Oh dear old Thomas Hardy,” he yelled, and I could hear his horrible laughing all through the garden and up our stairs and into Paula’s sitting room which was empty, and the Mrs. Thing of the moment had forgotten to get me any tea.
    Â 
    Now whether it was
Ulysses
or not—and I don’t think it was because I never did get through it—Uncle Pen had got it into his head that I was dreaming about it, and should have a shot at the A Levels a year early.
    I had done a lot of extra work with my father in the holidays and when I took the A levels and got top grades there was a great confabulation between Pen and Puffy and father and Paula, and letters were written to Miss Bex and my Headmistress. Miss Bex who as I have said has never liked me at all asked me to stay back after school one day for a little talk and I discovered that someone—Uncle Pen again I should think—had murmured the idea that I might get in to Cambridge. Miss Bex told me of the idea as if it had been her own, offering it to me as if it had been a great big sticky chocolate. She sat back brightly to watch me lick my chops.
    I examined the chocolate thoughtfully and then said I would have to take it home to father. She began to slap papers about on her desk, disappointed. She had wanted me to be excited and grateful. I couldn’t see why I should be. For years and years Miss Bex, who taught English, had made me feel a fool. For years and years it had been Miss Bex who had missed me out going round the class reading because she thought I was educationally sub-normal. The A levels must have surprised her, but she had never said so—never said, “Well done.”
    â€œI think I ought to say,” she called to me as I gathered my books up to set off home, “that I am
not
very confident. It seems to me to be a very—
ambitious
idea.”
    Â 
    So it did to me. It seemed the most astounding idea. I hadn’t really got used to the face that I wasn’t dim and I had never even considered any university let alone Oxbridge in my life. I suppose it is another example of my queerness that I had never thought about after school at all. If vague thoughts of it ever obtruded I had damped them down fast, with the help of the memory of Miss Bex’s familiarly exasperated face.
    â€œThe General Paper would be the trouble,” said father when I told him.
    â€œCan I get help with that?” I asked. “Isn’t it some sort of essay thing?”
    â€œEnglish,” said Paula, putting down a tea tray. “Could you sign this for Boakes’s boil pills, William?”
    â€œNo, no Paula. No, no.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œWell the reading. The body of reading.”
    â€œShe reads all right now.”
    â€œI am not deaf,” I said, “I am here. I am in your presence.”
    â€œThere are all the years she didn’t. No, no. Too much to make up.” But I could see as he pushed the signed medical form back to Paula and at her earnest look back at him that he felt excited and I suddenly saw all the anxiety they must have had about me all the long years when I couldn’t tell a b from a d: the worry that there was something wrong with me. All Paula’s evenings reading to me came back, and the memory of her unshakeable faith—whatever the secret notes from staff I had had to carry back from school, saying ought I not to be assessed by psychologists or the