Virginia Fly is Drowning Read online

  Virginia Fly is Drowning

  ANGELA HUTH

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 1

  Virginia Fly was raped, in her mind, on average twice a week. These imaginings came at no particular time of day: she was never prepared for them and yet never surprised by them. They vanished as quickly as they came, and left her with no ill effects. One moment there would be this glorious vision of a man’s hand running down the length of her body, causing the kind of shiver down her spine that sent her fingers automatically to do up the three buttons of her cardigan, and the next minute she would hear herself saying, with admirable calm,

  ‘Miranda, I think it’s your turn to wipe the blackboard.’

  The real dreams, however, the night-time dreams, were another matter. These clung to her in the morning. Fragments of vivid scenes chafed her mind while she struggled to concentrate on the subject in hand. They soured her day.

  This Friday had been one of those blighted days. The man with the black moustache – he seemed to be becoming one of the regulars – had torn at her flesh and uttered curses, or war cries, or screams of passion – she could not precisely decipher which – in a language she did not understand. Then he had left her on a cold slab of mud at the edge of a lake. There someone shook her and she half woke.

  ‘Help me up! I’m so cold.’ She could see in her mind the picture of herself, still, black hole of a mouth moving, muddy hair lashing across her face as she writhed about searching for elusive warmth.

  ‘There, there. All your bedclothes off again.’ Her mother was chivvying about the room, pecking at the curtains with her neat little wrinkled hands – snip, snip, and the daylight bulged in, flat and grey. ‘Your father and I such tidy sleepers, too. Breakfast’s on the table.’

  Breakfast was on the table every morning by the time Mrs Fly came to wake her daughter. It was one of Mrs Fly’s little ways – little ‘standards’ as she called them. Virginia was such a clever girl, always had been, all those scholarships in art and what-not, but there were some things a mother was always better at, weren’t there, and no daughter should ever forget them. Mrs Fly may not have possessed much of an intellect, as she would be the first proudly to admit, but she scored where Virginia was weak – around the house. And every morning the small private triumph of breakfast being on the table, before Virginia was even awake, never lost its sweetness. The small pleasures of life, as Mrs Fly often repeated to Ted, were the ones that counted for her. Virginia, who was always referring to one poet or another, once said Wordsworth put it rather well. Something about little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love, although in the case of Mrs Fly they were hardly nameless and never allowed to be forgotten.

  While Mrs Fly revelled in life’s small pleasures, her husband Ted was content with more average ones. Indeed he was obsessed by life’s averages and struggled daily to keep close to them. He sat now at his bowl of cereal and boiled egg – a nice average breakfast – reading the Daily Mirror, soon to pass on to the Daily Mail, so as to get a balanced view of the news. He looked up when his daughter came into the room. A sallow girl, he thought, privately. Not one to make the best of herself. Why did she always have to scrape her hair back in that way, and couldn’t someone tell her to rouge her cheeks? She wore a long brown cardigan, flecked with rust, over a matching brown skirt. Drab, thought Mr Fly, hating the disloyalty in his own heart. He supposed they were the right sort of things to wear as a teacher, but he liked a bright colour himself, and Virginia was never very bright, even when she went out with the professor.

  ‘You look like the end of a bad summer,’ he said, fondly. ‘Bad dreams?’

  ‘I knew we shouldn’t have had that cheese last night,’ said Mrs Fly, chipping away at her egg in a way that both her husband and daughter found maddening. ‘You know what cheese does to Virginia. It never has agreed with her.’

  Virginia’s mouth tightened, as it always did when she hadn’t the energy to disagree. Her father noticed and quickly returned to reading his paper. His sensitivities were somewhat above average when it came to bristling atmospheres, and he didn’t like them. There had been quite a lot in this house, lately, too.

  Mrs Fly only noticed that her daughter was unusually quiet.

  ‘No letter from Charlie again to-day, then?’ she said, fingering a pile of dull-looking letters beside her own plate. Another of her regular little scores was over the post. No letter for Virginia, one up to her. Though in a way, to be honest, she would have liked Charlie to write more regularly. His letters seemed to cheer Virginia.

  ‘I had one only Friday, if you remember.’ Virginia was cool.

  ‘So you did. And then of course the posts from America. You know what they are.’

  ‘When you’ve been writing to someone for twelve years, Mother, you don’t worry if the letters aren’t as regular as they once were. You trust each other. Besides, there’s not much point in his writing too often at the moment. He’ll be able to tell me all the news, soon.’

  Mrs Fly put down the cup of tea she had just picked up.

  ‘He’s coming over? After all these years? You could knock me down with a feather. Ted, did you hear that? Charlie’s coming over. When did he tell you? Why didn’t you tell us before?’ Virginia’s secrecy always puzzled Mrs Fly.

  ‘Last letter,’ said Virginia. ‘He’ll be here in a couple of months. A hotel near Piccadilly Circus, he’s staying at.’

  ‘That’s nice and central,’ approved Mrs Fly. ‘Trust an American to find something in the middle of things and he’s never even set foot in London. That’s why the Americans are the nation they are, I think.’

  ‘Well, that’s something to look forward to.’ Mr Fly smiled at his daughter.

  ‘Quite,’ said Virginia.

  Later, in the cold November classroom, she settled her pupils down to painting sunsets. Sunsets always kept them quiet, and she was in no mood for questions. She sat at her high, old-fashioned desk, her buttocks comfortable in the dips carved out for them in the wooden chair, and doodled with a red pencil. She had to clear her mind. Charlie was coming and that was good. She would try to think of Charlie. She knew what he looked like only from the Graduation Day picture he sent her twelve years ago; a rather small, blunt face with the kind of regular features that make you wonder why their regularity isn’t more handsome: crew-cut hair, rather large ears, friendly grin. When they had first become penfriends they had written cautiously to each other. I went into Croydon this afternoon, Virginia remembered writing in the early days, and saw a marvellous film. She would go on to describe it in much detail, urging him to see it if ever it reached Utah. Nowadays she wrote in a more shorthand way. London yesterday. London Philharmonic at the Festival Hall, Chinese food with my professor afterwards. She had grown to confide in him – that is, she told him all she did, apologising often for the lack of adventure, but her thoughts she kept to herself.

  Over the years she had received hundreds of letters from Charlie in his dreadful handwriting, green ink, thin airmail paper that made reading practically impossible. Unlike her he had soon developed into a great confessor, but like most indulgent confessors he lacked that intrinsic humour which makes confessions on a grand scale tolerable, and often of late Virginia found his letters quite dull, and would skip several paragraphs.

  She had kept the news of Friday’s letter from her parents because it had in fact caused her something of a shock. For years Charlie had been threatening to
come to England, but each time the plan had evaporated. Virginia had always found herself disappointed, but for the last two years a curious relief, when the plans failed, had overcome her disappointment. She wanted to meet him, and yet she wanted not to be disillusioned by him. In her present mood she was happy to postpone the meeting for years, so when he had written saying the ticket was booked, the hotel was booked, and even a couple of theatres were booked (and I’m hoping for a nice steak and kidney pie afterwards in Leicester Square), she had felt a momentary clamminess about the hands. Still, that was only the first reaction. By now she was quite calm, and even looking forward to it. It should be a happy two weeks. They had so much in common, so much to discuss: through their countless airmail communications they had grown to know each other well.

  Virginia looked up from her doodling to the bent heads of her pupils. They were a good class. She was fond of them.

  Her eyes travelled round the room: the steamed-up windows, the big brown radiator that cackled so loud a protest if you turned its heat up that everyone settled for a lukewarm compromise; the lump of old man’s beard in a milk bottle that Jemima White had brought Virginia from the woods – Charlie, she thought. Perhaps, with Charlie.

  And then a kind of double exposure happened in her mind, and over the scene of the classroom, faintly imprinted, was the cold flat landscape of her dream where the rape had taken place. In the distance, a tall branchless tree. It turned into the raised arm of a child.

  ‘Please, Miss Fly, are you all right?’

  ‘Yes thank you, Louise.’ She had always been a horribly observant child, though she couldn’t paint at all. One or two other heads were raised. Virginia felt an uncontrollable flush crawling up her cheeks. ‘Now get back to your work. It’s nearly time.’

  When school was over, Virginia decided to walk home. It was three miles, but she felt in need of the air. She put up her umbrella and set off through the suburban streets of the small town, yellowy in the late November light, and with relief turned off into the lanes. They were gloomy too, with their dull puddles and dripping hedges. Leafless trees were scratched minutely against the sky like the branches of trees on cheap calendars, and the rain thudded an irregular pattern of noise on to her umbrella. Virginia felt weary in spirit, and thought about sex.

  She had first heard about it from Caroline, her school-friend, a very advanced girl, at nine, with pin-point breasts and wavy hair. Caroline had heard about it from her brother who had heard about it from a farmer’s son. They were sitting in a tree one day, early summer, plucking petals from an illicit bunch of roses, with a view to making home-made rose water.

  ‘Bet you don’t know something I know,’ said Caroline.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Well, just something about grown-ups. Or children, for that matter.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, if a boy puts his thing into a girl, she’ll have a baby.’

  ‘Puts it where?’ There was a long pause.

  ‘Oh, almost anywhere,’ said Caroline.

  Virginia looked up from her petals, incredulous.

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘My brother. His friend has seen sheep doing it. One of them stands on its back legs, so there.’

  Caroline was pregnant at fifteen, and two years later Virginia received her first kiss from a man she met in a pub in Wales. She was on holiday there with her parents, strictly chaperoned every moment of the day. The pub was the first she’d ever been to, and no sooner had she and her mother sat down to their tomato juices than this man was upon them. He had a beautiful sing-song voice, and pale carrot hair, and he told Mrs Fly endless jokes that made her point her finger at him and say ‘Ooh, you are a one.’ When Mr Fly joined them with his light ale the man suggested he should take Virginia to the church and back – no more than a five-minute stroll. It was a fine example of Norman architecture, he said. Virginia, keen on architecture at the time, was eager. Mr and Mrs Fly agreed no harm could come, and they set off.

  Soon as they left the pub the man’s jokes dried up. To make conversation, Virginia asked his name.

  ‘Just call me Jo,’ he said, grabbing her hand and leading her into the churchyard. ‘Graves first.’

  Virginia followed him to a dusky corner of thick trees and long grass, all charcoal shadows and huge slabs of pitted stone. Jo turned to her and pinned her shoulders to a tombstone made in the shape of a cross – the cross bar was the same height as her shoulders, and she could feel a crust of moss through her thin coat behind her back. Suddenly, she knew what was going to happen. Her heart was beating very fast, and the point of Jo’s tongue was darting about the narrow slit of his mouth.

  ‘Now let’s have it, quick, darling,’ he said. ‘They said we’ve got five minutes.’

  ‘Have what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Caroline had said you lie down.

  ‘Come on. Give us a kiss for starters.’

  He snapped his mouth over hers and thrust his eel-like tongue down her throat. His breathing was somewhat impaired by the fact that his nose was buried in her cheek, and his breath came in jerky, strangled groans. Virginia opened one eye and could see the huge forest of his flaming scalp. She could feel his whole body taut, his hips seemed to be batting against hers. Suddenly, just as an unimaginable pleasure began to creep over her skin, he growled like a disturbed dog and jumped back from her.

  ‘Go on, go on,’ she heard herself saying, and leaving her arms high, parted, along the stone cross. ‘Please don’t stop.’

  ‘Five minutes up, dear.’ He glanced at his watch, voice clipped, sweat on his forehead.

  Virginia let her arms drop to her sides. She felt very cold.

  ‘Nice piece of architecture,’ said the man, turning towards the church tower and sounding jokey again. Virginia followed him back to the pub with shaking knees.

  Some six years after that incident, Mrs Fly attempted to tell her twenty-three-year-old daughter the facts of life. By that time, Virginia’s actual experience was only increased by one further kiss, from the village organist after a multiple christening, and one old finger running down her thigh in the tube – but she did at least know the facts. Caroline had three children by now and spared no details of their conceptions, attempted conceptions and the great climaxes of their births.

  Mrs Fly knew none of this and braced herself for her duty one night when Ted was at the Rotary Club.

  She took great pains to see that the whole evening was normal, that Virginia wouldn’t guess anything was up. After a supper of macaroni cheese and baked apples, Mrs Fly took position in her favourite tweed armchair by the fire, and armed herself with a dishcloth full of holes to darn. Virginia, tired after a trying day at school, sprawled in the opposite armchair with Sons and Lovers. She hoped her mother didn’t want to have one of her conversations.

  ‘Virginia?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You are a bookworm. – Oh, don’t let me bother you if you want to read.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Virginia put the book down.

  ‘It’s just that – well, I thought we ought to have a little talk.’

  ‘Oh? What about?’ Virginia wondered if the headmistress had been on to Mrs Fly again, like she had been last month, wondering why she was so pale.

  Mrs Fly snapped off a piece of cotton between her teeth.

  ‘Just you and me, you know.’ She paused while she threaded the needle. ‘I thought we ought to have a little talk about the facts of life.’

  ‘Oh, those.’ Virginia smiled. ‘I don’t think there’s much you need tell me about those.’ Mrs Fly gave a little jump, pricking her finger.

  ‘You don’t mean to tell me –?’

  ‘No, no. My virginity’s still intact, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘You gave me quite a little turn, for a moment. I know they all do it, these days. But, you know, when you’re a mother, you don’t quite like to think of your own daughter …’

  ‘I
suppose not,’ said Virginia. ‘Same as you don’t quite like to think of your own parents.’

  Mrs Fly looked up at her daughter with shock in her eyes, but reacted calmly. Her original plan thwarted, with gallant spontaneity she decided to change her tactics.

  ‘Well, there’s obviously no need for us to go into technicalities – you probably know more about them than I do, what with all those books they have to-day.’ She gave a small laugh. ‘No, what I’d like to talk about is more the spiritual side. Nobody talks about that so much these days.’ She wove her needle expertly in and out of the threads.

  ‘What about it?’ asked Virginia, to end a pause whose length indicated her mother had lost track.

  ‘Well, dear, how can I put it? – What I’m trying to say is this. The, er, act, shall I call it, doesn’t end when it’s over.’

  ‘Oh?’ Virginia, for once, felt herself to be scoring.

  ‘What I’d like you to know is, once you’ve experienced it, once you’ve been fulfilled, nothing is ever quite the same again.’ She looked at her daughter with unusual severity. ‘Quite dull girls have been known to radiate, once they have experienced love …’ Virginia felt a hot stone of nausea rise in her throat. ‘I mean, take your father and I. In the old days – I’ll always remember experiencing quite a little after-glow.’

  At the thought of her parents doing anything which would give them a little after-glow, Virginia got up, went to the lavatory and was very sick. It occurred to her briefly that her mother was either mad, drunk on fantasy, or had been too influenced by the romantic novels she endlessly read. Virginia knew for a fact that they never undressed in front of each other, never went into the bathroom when the other was in the bath, and turned off the television if sex came into the programme. Indeed, her own conception must have been pretty miraculous, she thought, and poured herself a small glass of neat whisky to try to abolish the loathsome thought of her parents’ bodies flailing about in the dark.

  By then Mrs Fly realised that her plan had gone wrong somewhere, and, when Virginia took her chair again, she changed the conversation to the planting out of bulbs.