The Divines Read online

  Dedication

  For Tom and Iris

  Epigraph

  γνῶθι σ᾽εαυτόν

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Gerry Lake looked like a bird with a broken wing—something small and green and feathered, lying there in the middle of the lawn—a budgerigar. One of her knees was bent, the back of her hand cast across her brow in the closing moment of a routine. Very dramatic. Typical Gerry. Her tights were ripped, her plumes ruffled, sequins scattered, her ice skates landed beside her on the grass.

  The younger years thought it was part of our dares. A joke. A prank.

  “Marvelous,” they called out, clapping.

  They hung out of dorm windows in pajamas and smoked, waiting for the punch line.

  After a while we crawled from our various hiding places: the bushes, the boiler house, the ha-ha, the groundskeeper’s shed, the vestry, the orchard, the gym. Cloaked and hooded, as tradition dictated, our dresses slashed at the seam, barefoot.

  We formed a circle around Gerry like a coven.

  Gerry was in her leotard, of course, her ponytail still rolled in its neatly gelled bun. Hand across her forehead in that pantomime pose. Woe is me! Playing dead. By then we were sick of the endless tantrums and sulking, her door-slamming histrionics, the crying wolf.

  No one thought to call an ambulance or alert our housemistress.

  In our defense, there wasn’t a drop of blood.

  “Very funny, Geraldine,” we said, arms crossed beneath our cloaks, our voices high and clipped.

  We looked at her doll-like limbs, her tiny feet and small nose, flicking up at the end like a ski jump. The blue and gold glitter she wore in the rink, smudged down each cheek. Damp confetti. Instead of the sullen pout we’d come to expect from Gerry, her mouth was an open hole. She stared up at her window, uncharacteristically quiet. A budgie who’d flown into glass. Near her skates was a hairpin, a good luck charm she wore during competitions, a forget-me-not sprig made from fake sapphires, cheap and gaudy, snapped in half.

  Later, when Gerry was front-page news, journalists hiding in all the bushes, some of us speculated she’d done it on purpose. Out of spite. To spoil our fun. All that time on the ice had given her a thirst for the spotlight. It was just like Gerry to cause a scene. She was an attention seeker, a spoilt brat, prone to telling tales. Gerry’s nickname back then, one of many, was the Poison Dwarf.

  We rolled our eyes, yawned loudly.

  Feathers fluttered in the breeze.

  Some of us noticed, for the first time, the clump of ivy in her fist.

  The unusual bend to one knee.

  The dark circle that had surfaced between her thighs like ink on our blotters, creeping slowly across her leotard gusset.

  “For goodness’ sake. Get up,” we said, less confident now.

  We nudged her with bare feet. Giggled self-consciously.

  “Gerry?”

  Our cloaks—thick black wool—were suddenly heavy. Our torn summer dresses, tattered and thin. Toes numb with cold. Our brown lace-ups, strung from the weeping cedar, twisted in the wind, clacking their heels. Strange what one remembers, even now, after all this time. Our housemistress, for example, careening across the lawn, bellowing like a cow. The blue flashing lights, the backboard, the neck brace. The handful of hostile locals already standing watch by the gate. The way, sheepishly, we picked up Gerry’s broken hairpin from the grass and hovered near the gurney, despite the obvious annoyance of the paramedics, one of them a man in a turban, who stared frostily at our shredded uniforms, the cloaks, the hoods. How, as they wheeled her away, a cortege of us filed behind the stretcher carrying her good luck charm. Some of the small gold leaves were bent, a gem lost during the fall.

  “Here,” we said.

  Gerry’s hands and shoulders were strapped to a board, her chin jutting up above a thick white cervical collar, a chorister’s ruff, beatific looking, completely quiet.

  How her body stiffened.

  Her nostrils flared.

  “All right, girls, that’s enough.”

  We shuffled back, still holding the pin.

  And finally, our last memory of Gerry Lake, so unlike the pictures in the Sunday papers—Gerry beaming on the ice, hugging a trophy, a plastic doll with a beauty pageant smile—our last glimpse as the ambulance doors swung shut. Her fists crumpled into small white balls, her face distorted, lips pulled tight, exposing the fangs she normally tried to hide.

  1

  I am Divine.

  My mother was Divine and her mother before that, which isn’t uncommon. Though that was at a time when being Divine meant something; it had cachet, as my mother still likes to brag; it opened doors, got you places. Though it’s hard to see specifically where being Divine ever got her, other than married. Perhaps I’m missing the point.

  I haven’t spoken to another Divine for fourteen years, maybe more, despite there being ample online opportunities these days to reconnect with my former peers should I so wish. I don’t. Every Christmas and Easter I fly back to England to visit my mother, who, in her sixties now, keeps backdated copies of our Old Girls’ newsletter for me in her downstairs loo, next to Country Living. Births, deaths, marriages, the rare athletic achievement, horses for sale, and, of course, reunions. Endless reunions. Not one of which I have attended. Until, as a newlywed, I take my husband on an impromptu detour from our honeymoon destination, veering off the dual carriageway so unexpectedly at the road sign that he thinks for a heart-stopping moment I might have morning sickness.

  “Just to have a look,” I say. “It won’t take long.”

  A trip down memory lane, then we’ll be on our way.

  I crawl our rental car round the Oxfordshire town, circling closer to where I remember my former school once stood, folding forward over the steering wheel, trying to get my bearings. This is harder than I think it will be. Nothing is as I remember it. Most of the grounds have been flattened. The gym is gone, the maths block, the redbrick science labs, everything except those buildings deemed to hold significant historic value—the Old Hall and a couple of boarding houses, subdivided into flats for young professionals. I park outside the chapel, which is now, by the looks of things, a private dental practice. My husband of two days is bemused. Keen to get some miles under our belt on the long drive to Scotland, he hadn’t factored this pit stop into his calculations.

  “This is it?” />
  “Give me half an hour,” I say, squeezing his hand.

  I point him in the direction of the White Horse. When he is gone, I walk into the dentist’s, slipping past a young receptionist into the sanctuary-cum-waiting room, repainted a minty orthodontic green. I sit for some time listening to the ominous clinks and skirls and high metallic whines of the hygienist at work. Along the nave, cubicles have been fashioned from low movable walls decorated with huge toothy faces of smiling children. The wooden bench I am sitting on looks like, perhaps even is, the exact pew that the robed altar servers slumped on during our Sunday service, obscured by puffs of incense. The organ pipes are still in situ, way back up in the balcony behind the choir stalls, which seem quite small, barely room for a handful of girls. On the immovable stone pulpit where Fat Fran, my headmistress of six years, made her daily proclamations, a series of dental brochures, women’s magazines, food and lifestyle glossies have been stacked, some of which, at one time or another over my career, I have contributed to. I rest my head against stone and look up at the arched ceiling. It is very surreal, the dental nurses padding in and out of the vestry in their soft-soled shoes like nuns. Everything so familiar yet nothing quite as it was.

  Behind my head is a sequence of very narrow and long stained-glass windows reaching all the way to the beams. What shocks me as I sit there is that—unless I actually sit up and twist my neck to look—I can’t remember what they depict, not even if you put a gun to my head. I spent the entirety of my adolescence facing those windows, staring at them every single morning for close to five years, Saturdays excepted, and don’t remember a single detail, not one saint or disciple or even the big man himself, which only goes to show the astonishing depths of teenage self-obsession. Or maybe, more accurately, it says something about me back then. Or my memory of my school days, selective at best.

  As I am sitting on the pew a patient comes out of a booth, her jaw clamped down on wadding, her hand holding her cheek. Unsteady on her high heels, dazed, she is guided to a spot next to me. A dental assistant goes to retrieve something important, a prescription perhaps, and the patient’s eyes roam around the arched ceiling and the fluted ironwork. It is an unnerving setting for a dental practice—the angels and the pulpit and stained glass—perhaps she thinks she is hallucinating. Blood catenates slowly from her empty socket down the gauze in her hand. We are probably the same age. She could have been a King Edmund. She stares vacantly at the neon exit sign as if she is waiting to be collected. Above the vestry door is the Divine school motto carved into a rectangle of wood.

  memor amici

  Remember friends.

  “Ha,” I snort out loud.

  The patient slowly turns towards me, medicated, her hand still firmly pressed against her cheek. She blinks.

  I try to swallow it down, doubling over, in the grip of the kind of stifled laughter that catches you off guard, leaping up your throat during somber moments: funerals, sermons, your fiancé’s art show opening.

  My shoulders shake and the pew judders. The patient stands up suddenly, her handbag falling to the floor, its contents spilling.

  “Shit, I’m terribly sorry.” I see her lipstick rolling towards the lectern. “Sorry, sorry.”

  I put a fist to my chest and thump it. Swallow.

  “Sorry.”

  I scramble to pick up her bag, holding it out to her.

  “This used to be a school,” I blurt, just to say something. “St. John the Divine.”

  The poor woman’s numbed head nods slightly, taking her purse. She looks down at a message illuminated on her phone and then over her shoulder at the door, checking for her lift. I assume she isn’t allowed to drive.

  “The private school,” I keep going. “The one that shut down; it was in the papers a long time ago, remember? There was a scandal.”

  She stares at my face as if I am slowly coming into focus. Enough years have passed for me not to sound completely Divine. I have lived abroad on and off, my accent is sometimes hard to identify, but still, she looks me up and down and her eyes flash. She knows.

  “Yeah,” she says. As she talks her wadding unplugs momentarily, exposing ghoulish bloody gums. “And? My mum worked in the kitchen.” She thumbs behind us in the direction of the old refectory. “Sixteen years scrubbing fucking pans, if you must know.”

  The right side of the woman’s lip is drooping; her speech has a drunken slur.

  “Bunch of stuck-up fucking toffs.”

  She plugs the gauze back in, clamps back down on it, waiting to see what I’ll say next. She’s right, of course. But what does she expect me to do, defend my honor, wrestle her to the floor?

  I think about my husband, Jürgen, waiting for me in the pub. Jürgen knows how to let moments like this roll over him. He is a pacifist, not someone who can be easily provoked. Despite the fact he’s the artist in our relationship, things that make me flare up with rage don’t bother him at all. When we met I had just come out of a turbulent, itinerant period of life and, exhausted, I suppose you could say that I found his particular brand of considered quietude seductive. That was what I had fallen in love with. Lately I have been trying hard to adopt some of Jürgen’s sangfroid. Plus we are newlyweds. On our honeymoon. I don’t take the bait.

  Thankfully a bald man sticks his head around the chapel door, whistles, and gestures at the woman with his thumb. She departs, her high heels clicking sharply on the tiled floor, marching down the nave, past the vestry, and through the arched door.

  memor amici

  I wait a decent amount of time, hovering on a Communion step, then I leave as well. My husband—that word feels so exotic—is waiting for me outside, hands in his pockets, resting on the hood of the rental car, chewing slowly. I feel a burst of relief to see him standing there, solid looking and straightforward, not in the least Divine. On our first date he rolled up his sleeves at the sight of the leaking pipe in my kitchen, requesting a wrench. He is a pragmatist, a maker of lists.

  “All good?” he checks.

  I nod. I turn my back and lean against Jürgen’s chest; he loops his arms around my waist, his chin on my head, and I try to put the incident in the chapel behind me. I should never have come back. I’m embarrassed to have brought him here, to have wasted even an hour of our honeymoon on something so inconsequential. A moment of nostalgia, now gone. We gaze up at the stone statue of King Edmund in the center of the town, close to the bus stop. Five pigeons spar for space on top of his helmet, bobbing and ducking, feather elbows. They flick their shabby gray tails and shit down Edmund’s cloak. An elderly woman tugging a tartan shopping trolley shuffles past us into the market square. Traders hold bananas aloft on hooked fingers, hollering deals. Three old boys in tweed jackets stand outside the bookies smoking. I am acutely aware of how particularly English all this must seem to him, my husband, an Austrian.

  Jürgen pulls a piece of fudge from a paper bag and puts it into my mouth.

  “Okay. Big drive. Let’s go.”

  He checks the fastenings on his bike that is tethered to the boot of our rental car, and as he tugs the frame tight a bald man driving a red Mazda swerves across the road towards us and stops abruptly, blocking traffic. A window hums down, and the woman from the dentist’s leans across the bald man, actually crawling across his lap, the lower half of her face distorted, stiff with pain.

  “Hallo there,” my husband says jovially, squatting slightly, “can we help?”

  Austrians, particularly country bumpkins like him, are pathologically nice. I’ve seen him dig a car out of the snow for a stranger and drag each of our neighbor’s bins out every week without a word of thanks.

  The woman in the Mazda gives him the finger.

  She glares at me, her real target, and pokes her swollen head farther out of the window as if there is something urgent she forgot to tell me back there in the chapel, her tongue fat and lisping.

  “Cunth.”

  “Ha.” I laugh nervously. “Ha ha ha.”

>   Then she spits at me, her gob landing at my feet, and they speed off.

  So, this is the way it is. Fourteen years and nothing has changed. She is a townie. I am Divine.

  “My god,” my husband says, “Sephine, who was that?”

  Hands on his hips, he looks up the road after the Mazda.

  “Was that some kind of joke, my god?”

  “Forget it,” I say, humiliated, “let’s go.”

  I give him a gentle shove towards the car in case the banshee decides to come back. I don’t want her to jinx our honeymoon. Two days ago we were exchanging vows at the town hall, grinning at each other like imbeciles, euphoric.

  “But I don’t understand; do you know her?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  I slip my hands down his hip, taking the keys from his pocket. I unlock the rental car quickly and get behind the wheel. Jürgen sits in the passenger seat, shaking his head.

  “Was she from your school then, an old friend?”

  I start the car.

  “I don’t have any school friends.”

  He frowns, as if he’s only just found this out about me.

  “You don’t? Why not?”

  I have friends, of course, but the oldest and truest friendships I have are the ones I forged at university or soon after, when an element of choice was introduced to the selection process. Plus my husband’s friends, such as they are, though generally not their wives for some reason. Thanks to his extreme niceness, genial blue Austrian eyes, his obvious likability, Jürgen has always been the social one in our relationship. Though these days he’s just as happy to spend an evening at home, working in his studio or tinkering with his bikes. Occasionally we go to a gallery opening or drive visitors around whatever city we are living in, or meet an old editor of mine for brunch. I can count nearly all these friends on one hand. But not one of them is Divine.

  “I don’t know,” I tell him with a shrug and turn the key in the ignition. “I just don’t.”

  We break the journey in Yorkshire, spending the night in a bed-and-breakfast where we barely leave our four-poster bed. In the morning we scramble into clothes, unwashed, stumbling into the dining room moments before the end of service. The landlady, a stern matronly looking woman, reminiscent of a former housemistress of mine, stands with her hands on her hips, scowling at the clock. We slip sheepishly into our seats, trying not to laugh. Across the room two women, dressed in shorts and walking boots, barely glance up from their maps. A middle-aged man butters his mother’s toast. Next to us an elderly couple smile and raise their glasses of orange juice.