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

clumsiness had suddenly transformed itself into dazzling beauty, and Clara, her especial friend, was added a year later when her breasts grew. And then there was the odd case of Janice Young, who was, if anyone ever was, the doomed and unalterable scapegoat – she was not pretty, she was not clever, she was not good at games, and yet, during her fifteenth year, she managed to make herself acceptable as one of the inner ring. The inner ring itself could never quite understand her arrival there, and concluded finally that she made it through sheer cheek. She was irrepressible, shameless, brazen; she ran after the boys, and the boys, to the amazement of the other girls, meekly succumbed, and took her out, and bought her presents. She talked about her boyfriends in a tone of most frightful, spine-chilling, whimsy determination, and they took it. She threatened them, she menaced them, and one day in this vein she would marry one of them. She was not to be resisted. And Rosie, Susan, Heather, Katie, Clara and Isabel could not resist her either; they let her join them, weakly, unable to refuse such primitive intention. They showed, from time to time, a faint suspicious desire to force her to provide her non-existent credentials, but every time, just as their forces gathered for the attack, she would produce out of her hat some new and dazzling boyfriend, all ready to pay tribute to her elusive powers.
    Clara felt herself to be extremely fortunate in her membership of this group, and the insecurity of Janice’s position in it fortified her, for she knew herself to be more secure, less irritating, less tactless in every way than Janice. So she was especially kind to Janice. She was also rather surprised by the way in which she took her own newly
acquired charms, for she was almost as determined as Janice to make the best of herself, and she had more to make the best of. Some of the girls – and even, oddly enough, the dashing, heavy-lipped, inviting Susan – were a little nervous about their developing selves, and a little alarmed by their own powers. Clara, on the other hand, was not at all alarmed. She did her best to stimulate a constant flow of love letters, and found the collecting of admirers a very satisfying pastime.
    The chief scene for amorous exchange was the entrance to the boys’ swimming baths, for the girls had no baths of their own, and were obliged to use those of their brother school for their weekly afternoon’s lesson; here, on the steps, small red messenger boys would collect, proffering envelopes from their elders. The girls enjoyed their swimming lessons, titillated by the well-known fact that some of the more daring boys used to watch them changing through an easily accessible sky light. This well-known fact was somehow never discussed in public by the girls, for public admission of it would have destroyed and inhibited its oddly private thrill, and would have shamed the vain ones into cowering in their cubicles, as the timid and modest already did. As it was, such girls as fancied themselves would leave their cubicle doors open, in the hope that tantalizing glimpses of leg and breast and buttock might be seen through the high and smoky glass, and once Clara, taking advantage of the convention that they were unobserved, walked the whole length of the changing room draped only from the waist down by a small towel, on the pretext of borrowing a safety pin. The other girls, knowing quite well that she had done it for the benefit of one Geoffrey A. Machin, were shocked and admiring, but the convention restrained them from expressing either shock or admiration. On another famous occasion, Clara, stark naked, drying herself in her cubicle, caught sight of her own image in the wet tiled floor: ‘Good God,’ she cried out, ‘just look at me, how weird I look from underneath,’ and all the girls had cried out, ‘Ssh, ssh, Clara, somebody might be listening.’
    ‘Whoever could be listening?’ cried Clara