Crystal Jeans - The Inverts

October 1922, St Vincent’s School for Girls

Bettina’s only friend at school was Margueritte Finch, a French-born, Welsh-raised daughter of a nobleman father and prima-donna mother. Margueritte had framed photographs of her mother dating from the turn of the century, before marriage and child-rearing and all that fluff, and the woman was, thought Bettina, absolutely ravishing, with full, pouting lips and smoky black eyes. Though God knew what she looked like these days, after shooting out seven children. Margueritte often talked about her mother, usually disdainfully – ‘Honestly, she can be so pretentious and dizzy; she walks about in the garden at midnight all dreamy-eyed like some kind of Titania, it makes me want to vomit’ – but sometimes with reluctant praise, since she’d been a liberal mother who ‘pretty much let me run free to do as I wished’. Bettina, having a similar sort of mother (and also a Welsh father), found she had a lot to talk about with Margueritte (or Margo, as she called her) and often their conversations would be a battle of one-upmanship to see who had the most lenient mother, and consequently, the wildest childhood stories.

Margo boasted that when she was fourteen she’d filched two bottles of her father’s Bordeaux and gone off by herself camping in the woods, where she’d stayed for two days and one night, completely roughing it like a regular Huck Finn, and what’s more, had shared the wine with a most sensual and dashing man – an Irish conscientious objector – hiding out in the woods, and what’s more, she’d let him kiss her, but only kiss her, she wasn’t a tart or anything – ‘so get that idea out of your head’, and by the way, he had the most uncommonly clear blue eyes and his stubble felt just exquisite, so perfectly manly, and what’s more, she’d returned home after all this and her mother hadn’t batted an eyelid, probably because she was too preoccupied with her own debauched affair with the local magistrate. ‘So I got off scot-free and clean as a whistle, as they say.’

Bettina supposed that parts of this story might be true – perhaps Margo had indeed gone camping by herself, but only for a few hours, surely, and the business with the conscientious objector, well, perhaps she’d seen a man somewhere in the woods and had let her fancy run wild. But the fourteen-year-old daughter of a nobleman roughing it for two days and a night without attracting a search party – inconceivable. Nice try all the same.

In return Bettina told some embellished stories of her own. The night that Bart had kissed her, for example: she turned Bart into the gardener (Italian and tanned) and the pavilion into her mother’s rose arbour. It was late in the afternoon and her mother had been just around the corner – quite literally, she was mere steps away, talking to the chauffeur – and as a result the kiss was rushed and hurried and he’d grabbed her in such a passion that she’d found bruises about her body later. Aware that this story, with the bronzed Italian gardener and rose arbour, was sounding like the silly romantic fiction it was, Bettina quickly added some grounding details in order to imitate realism – the gardener had onion breath (as Bart had had) and their teeth clashed quite awkwardly. ‘I actually didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I might.’ What was more realistic, after all, than dissolved dreams?

Margo leaned forward with flushed cheeks and huge eyes and whispered, ‘Did he get a stiff-on?’ And Bettina rolled her eyes as if Margo was the biggest simpleton ever to walk the King’s Isles and said, ‘Of course he did!’ She didn’t know for sure what a ‘stiff-on’ was. She guessed it was related to a ‘cock-stand’. But actually, she didn’t entirely understand what that was either. She imagined the penis stiffening in a downwards direction like the third leg of a camera tripod. One day she was going to ask Bart all about it.

Margueritte was a pale, plump girl with black hair down to her hips, which she wore in a thick, perfect plait. She had the tiniest yet poutiest mouth, brown-black eyes framed by thick, innocent eyebrows and no cheekbones to speak of. No wrists either – her forearms were as chubby as a toddler’s, swallowing any trace of bone, ending in tiny doll’s hands. Bettina thought she looked like a fat, young Theda Bara – well, that wasn’t entirely fair, to call her fat. She was soft and ample. To cuddle up to all that flesh would probably feel divine. Such thoughts as this came to her mind as objective, almost scientific conclusions. They were the thoughts she imagined a future father-in-law might have on behalf of his son, a sort of sizing-up. Bettina’s gaze was often drawn to Margo’s bosom, which was considerable, and again, she would imagine the future husband finding satisfaction with the pliant, squishy handfuls. Entirely objective.

They were sitting on Margo’s bed, sharing a box of Turkish delight that her mother had sent to her, alongside a new set of stays, two pairs of stockings and a packet of Harrods stem-ginger biscuits. It was a four-bed room which Margo shared with Dionysus, a sinister-eyed daughter of bohemian parents who collected her toenail clippings in a heart-shaped locket and posted suffragette literature around school; Daphne, a shy, almost mute girl; and a tall, mousey girl who Bettina found so dull that she’d never bothered to learn her name. This four-bed set-up was the privilege of the upper-school girls; previously, they’d had to share a twenty-bed dorm. Many nights, Bettina had fallen asleep to the sounds of blanket-muffled sobs and desperate, whispered prayers; some of the girls had been spoiled senseless by kind governesses and indulgent mothers, and coming here to unsweetened lumpy porridge, slapped knuckles and exhausting monotony was a cruel awakening. This was a girls’ school which prided itself on being just like a boys’ school. But whereas a boy might benefit from this hardening-up, especially one keen on entering the Forces or a cut-throat trade, it was entirely wasted on a girl, thought Bettina, who would only go on to get married and have babies, so what was the bloody point?

‘What makes you think marriage and procreation don’t require some sort of hardening of spirit?’ Venetia had said once, in reply to this argument. ‘In fact, I think I’d rather a year in the trenches over twelve hours of childbirth.’ Jonathan had dropped his spoon into his pudding bowl with a clatter and glared at his mother, before standing up and storming out of the room. ‘I don’t know what makes him think he has a monopoly on suffering,’ said Venetia. ‘After all, women die in childbirth all the time. You don’t see us having tantrums about it at the dinner table.’ Monty grinned at Bettina: ‘There’s that famous hardening of spirit!’

Bettina and Margo had the room to themselves; Daphne, Dionysus, Boring Nameless Girl and the rest of the upper school were playing hockey outside. Margo was excused from any physical activity on account of her chronic asthma and Bettina had complained of severe menstrual pains to get out of playing. Margo was lying on the bed, one cheek bulging with a large cube of Turkish delight – her customary way of consuming them was first to nibble off the pistachio slivers and then store the chunk, hamster-like, between teeth and cheek, letting it slowly dissolve. Bettina lay next to her, her head resting on Margo’s shoulder. She could hear the yells and collisions of the hockey players outside.

‘Do you think you’ll marry Jasper?’ she said. Jasper was Margo’s sometime beau at home. He was twenty-one and stupid to the point of idiocy, apparently; but, being the son of a baron and set to inherit a humongous estate in Surrey, he was a tasty prospect. Also he was good-looking, which helped – said Margo – to distract from his puny intellect.