Read Online Jerusalem the Golden by Margaret Drabble - Free Book Online

a third of the objects laid on the table, by regulation, were not used during the course of any single meal, and yet their function was certainly not one of gracious adornment. There was a particular slop basin that Clara regarded with particular dislike. It was decorated with purple tulips, and it was hardly ever used, for Mrs Maugham was not unaware that it was something of an anachronism. And yet, every meal time, it stood there. To Clara, it was always painfully conspicuous, an indictment of a way of life; she knew nothing of the history of slop basins, or of the society that evolved them and their joyless name, but the sight of one affected her like some shameful family secret. In no other household had she ever seen a slop basin, and she hated to see an eccentricity erected into a symbol of the traditionally correct.
    As so often happened, she deliberated too long about the introduction of her own affairs, and when she finally found the courage to speak, she chose a bad moment. She waited until tea time, and listened in silence while Mrs Maugham recounted her adventures with Mrs Hanney to the rest of the family: they were received in silence by Alan, Arthur and her father, who did not waste their speech. Then Clara, into the lull that accompanied the pouring of tea, said sullenly,
    ‘I saw the headmistress today. About what to do next year. I’m going to do French.’
    Her mother poured the last cup of tea, stirred it vigorously, picked up her slice of bread and butter, took a mouthful, chewed it, and then, ‘Suit yourself,’ she said.

3
    Long before she left school, Clara discovered that whatever negligent indifference might greet her in the bosom of her family, she was capable of arousing strife in breasts other than those of Miss Haines and Mrs Hill. The bosomy metaphor is appropriate, for Clara developed young, to the astonishment of her contemporaries, who had convinced themselves that sexual and intellectual precocity never coincided. Clara regarded her own development with unreserved satisfaction, for she knew that it promised well. By the time she was fifteen, her stock in the school rose enormously by virtue of the fact that she was a constant recipient of billets-doux from the boys of the neighbouring Grammar School. The girls in her class, who had hitherto regarded her as relatively plain, and as a non-starter in the fashion stakes, with no notion of how to twist a school beret or hitch a school skirt, quickly reconsidered their assessment of her, and she found herself elected to an honorary membership of the fastest, smartest, slickest coterie. She was naturally gratified by this change of front, and drew the appropriate moral – the possession of big breasts, like the possession of a tendency to acquire good examination results, implies power.
    She never came to take her membership quite for granted: she had admired the in-people for too long ever to feel herself to be truly one of them. Most of them had been in from the start, born survivors, born leaders: amongst these lucky few were numbered Rosie Lane, an athletic, pretty, small-faced girl whose father owned a large grocer’s, and whose primal popularity had been cheaply purchased by the judicious distribution of dried apricots and jelly cubes, which the girls devoured whole. Another was Susan Berkley, a bossy,
self-willed creature, whose natural vigour went, as adolescence progressed, the natural way. Then there were Heather and Katie, inseparable friends, who bolstered each other by their mutual devotion; never had they known a moment’s shame of friendlessness, never had they had to look for a partner in dancing or in gym, never had they walked alone from classroom to classroom, and their confidence overflowed and imposed itself upon all beholders. These four, in Clara’s year, were the hard core of self-satisfied splendour, and to them others had been added. Isabel Marshall had been added at the age of fourteen, when her gawky, bony