Welcome to part 22!
Can't believe I've written so much and still only covered nine months! But then, as Di said on my last update:Quote:
Has it really only been a week since Meg took the photographs? I think the CS and Mary must be in their own time zone as they manage to fit so much in to a week.
Yes, we're still only three weeks into the Spring term and only three days have passed since Linda's accident.....“Nancy, why don’t you and Kathie come over for Mitagessen one day this week and the three of us can have a good chat, afterwards. A lot of things have got in the way recently of any really serious discussion about how Kathie is doing, and she herself has seemed reluctant to approach me. Maybe it’s time I pushed a little. After all, she’s been there nearly five months now – only a term and a half left. I need to know that she’s going to be ready for the Headship over there. It’s a big responsibility, as you yourself know.”
Nancy agreed, with some relief, for she was aware that Kathie needed a lot more than she herself could give her. Maybe, now she had calmed down, Kathie would be more willing to listen to Hilda and learn from her. She knew that Kathie had it in her to be a superb Headmistress, but that wouldn’t happen if she didn’t learn to control her wilful and unreasonable jealousy, a jealousy that was so unlike her usual sunniness but one that had been driving a sharp wedge between the two of them.
They set a date, then rang off, Nancy to go and find Kathie, Hilda to make her way to the Study to wait for the twins' parents, and both women were deep in thought.
Hilda sat at her desk with a sigh that was almost a groan. She opened her prayer book at the day’s readings, but found it impossible to concentrate. Now she was alone, with only her thoughts for company, the great tearing grief which had overwhelmed her as she cradled the dying ‘Anita’ in her arms the night before was back in full force, dimming her eyes and squeezing her heart in a vice-like grip. In that desperate moment on the dais a door had slammed shut in her heart, a vain and foolish hope had been clubbed to death – and in the stark light of morning she had to face this new truth down and accept what it meant for her.
The only one who would understand was Kate Stuart – though Matey’s own undimmed sorrow for her sister might give that good lady some inkling. But it was something Hilda knew she could never bring herself to discuss with Gwynneth. Their walls were too high, too unyielding. They had broken through in several places just recently, but thirty years of containment were not easily dissolved. Only with Mother Abbess could she let go and reveal her soul, discuss once more the deluded, insane thoughts she had been harbouring for months - but which were now gone, suddenly and completely. Leaving her totally undone!
She had tried to explain herself in the letter but she had the feeling she hadn’t done a very good job. Maybe the next time they spoke on the phone…. Meanwhile, somehow, she had to take back the reins of the school, lead them all away from the near-tragedy of Linda Stone’s accident, away from Meg’s bullying of Ellie, away from the younger girls’ lack of respect for the prefects. She had to lead them forward into some semblance of normality – while she herself was once more drowning in this new and savage phase of her grief for Nell. At least, that would be what Kate Stuart would call it – a phase, as there had been so many other phases, each of which had felled her in unexpected ways.
Why now, Lord?
She recalled some words of Proust. How very true they were! We do not receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
The door bell rang with a suddenness that brought her back to herself and the Study with a great start. Looking down, she saw she had pushed her Daily Office away from her and right across the desk, as though it repelled her. There was worse! In her hands she held the ragged shreds of a photograph – a small photograph of a smiling Nell which she had kept tucked inside the prayer book. There were other torn fragments strewn over the surface of the desk.
She stared down in utter horror. Was she going mad? How could she commit such wanton destruction and have no awareness of doing it? She dropped the mangled remains and buried her face in her hands, trying desperately to recall Kate Stuart’s words to her at the beginning of the Christmas holidays, before she had even met Ellie:
At the moment, Nell is more important to you than anything else on earth. There will be moments when you lose all sense of where you are or what you are doing. You will be lost in your own lonely, empty world. When you return to this world, time will have passed but you will have no recollection of it or of what you did in those lost moments. Accept it. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t feel you’re losing your mind. Grief is an alien land and forces alien behaviour on even the most self-controlled people.
I can’t allow myself to be lost, Mother. I have a job to do, a job which requires my total mental and physical presence. Anyway, there was none of this when Mother died, or James.
How do you know?
Ah!
It might not have happened in just the same way as you’re finding now. But there was an alien land when you were thirteen and lost your mother – a land of unaccustomed bitterness and bad behaviour, a land where you were not the girl you had been or the girl you would become. When you lost James, though…. I’m not sure. Maybe it was just too big for you. You were still so young and so didn’t just lose a person, you lost the whole of the long future you had planned together, lost the children you might have had and the home you would have made. Yet you seemed to be able to block all that out with almost ruthless tenacity. God alone knows what that did to you….
He probably does know, Mother - and sighs with exasperation. I know myself, now, what it did to me, but it needed you to open my eyes, to break me, so that earlier pain could emerge from where I had hidden it.
It can never be blocked forever, not without warping one’s character – look at my own experience! Your grief for both your mother and for James leapt out of their hiding places in one fell swoop last September and joined your intense sorrow and longing for Nell, knocking you completely sideways. Just remember, child – even this, too, will pass, eventually. Or the worst ot it will, anyway. Meanwhile, don’t beat yourself up about it. Go with the flow.
Go with the flow? No! She took a deep breath and raised her head, her face grimly determined. She couldn’t afford such moments of dislocation. She had a job to do, as she had said – but now she also had someone to love. Ellie needed her guardian whole and entire, not some weak approximation of her. Somehow, she had to find the strength to fight against this new phase, caused by what what had happened the night before and what it had done to her. She couldn’t allow it to take her back to those first, desolate weeks of her grief, when all she had wanted was to follow Nell to wherever she had gone. Such weakness…..
The door bell rang again -
It's odd how he's the one who's taken over, as I thought it would be the mum, though she does shine a little later on!
*gulp* - since I wrote about Nancy culling the stories from the girls, just after Hilda returned to school from her first visit to the convent. (It can all be found nearly at the bottom of Part 2 in the archives) 
But thank you for wanting more. Here you are.....