The laughter had been quiet at first, but now it was all the more obvious for being stifled: one girl had hiccups and another was practically purple. But she didn’t stop her lesson. She dealt with the note the way she always dealt with them, and that was by pretending it wasn’t there. If anything, she spoke louder. The girls carried on, passing the note from one to the next, and she carried on telling them how to make a cake in wartime.
In fact, the Second World War was over—it had been over for five years—but rationing wasn’t. Meat was rationed, butter was rationed; so were lard and margarine. Sugar was rationed. Tea was rationed. Cheese, coal, soap, sweets. All still rationed. The cuffs of her jacket were worn to thread, and her only pair of shoes was so old they squelched in rain. If she took them to be mended, she’d have no choice but to sit there in her stockings, waiting for them to be ready, so she just kept wearing them and they kept falling apart. Streets were lined with broken buildings—rooms with whole walls gone, sometimes a lightbulb left hanging or even a lavatory chain—and gardens were still turned over to useful British vegetables. Old newspapers were piled in bomb sites. Men hung around on street corners in demob suits that had once belonged to someone else, while women queued for hours to get a fatty bit of bacon. You could go miles on the bus and not see a flower. Or blue sky. What she wouldn’t give for blue sky—even that seemed rationed. People kept saying this was a new beginning, but every day was more of the same. Queues. Cold. Smog. Sometimes she felt she’d lived her entire life on scraps.
By now the note had reached the second row. Splutters. Titters. Much shaking of shoulders. She was explaining how to line a cake tin when someone nudged a girl in the front row, and the note was pushed into the hands of Wendy Thompson. Wendy was a sickly girl who had the constant look of someone expecting the worst—even if you were nice to her, she still looked terrified—so it came as a shock when she opened the note and honked. That was it. The girls were off, and this time they weren’t even trying not to. If they carried on, the whole school would hear.
Margery put down her chalk. The laughter fell away, bit by bit, as they realized she was watching. It was sink or swim, she’d been told once. Don’t try to be their friend. These girls are not your friends. There was an art teacher who’d given up after a week. “They hum,” she’d wept in the staff room, “and when I ask who is humming, they look straight at me and say, ‘No one is humming, Miss.’ You have to be half dead to work here.”
Margery stepped down from the wooden platform. She held out her hand. “Give me the note, please, Wendy.”
Wendy sat with her head bowed, like a frightened rabbit. Girls in the back row exchanged a glance. Other than that, no one moved.
“I just want to know what is so funny, Wendy. Maybe we can all enjoy the joke.”
At this point Margery had no intention of reading the note. She certainly had no intention of enjoying the joke. She was just going to open it, drop it into the bin, and after that she was going to clamber back onto the platform and finish her lesson. It was almost break time. There would be hot tea in the staff room, and a selection of biscuits.
“The note?” she said.
Wendy handed it over so slowly it would have been quicker to send it by post. “Oh, I wouldn’t, Miss,” she said quietly.
Margery took the paper. She opened it. Silence unspooled itself like ribbon.
What she had in her hand was not the usual. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t even a few words about how dull the lesson was. It was a sketch. It was a carefully executed cartoon sketch of a lumpy old woman, and this lumpy old woman was clearly Margery. The baggy suit was hers, and there was no mistaking the shoes. They were planks on the ends of two large legs—you could even see a toe poking out. Her nose the girls had done as a potato, while her hair was a mad bird’s nest. The girls had also given her a mustache—and not a stylish mustache but a short, stubby one like Hitler’s. At the top, someone had written, “The Virgin Margery!”
Margery’s breathing reversed itself. There seemed not to be enough room for the mix of hurt and anger swelling inside her. She wanted to say, she actually wanted to shout, “How dare you? I am not this woman. I am not.” But she couldn’t. Instead she kept very still, hoping for one irrational moment that the whole business would go away and never come back, if she just stayed where she was, doing absolutely nothing. Then someone giggled. Another coughed.
“Who did this?” she said. In her distress, her voice came out oddly thin. It was difficult to shape air into those exact sounds.
No reply.
But she was in this now. She threatened the class with extra homework. She said they’d miss afternoon break. She even warned she’d fetch the deputy, and everyone was terrified of the woman. One of the few times she’d ever been seen to laugh was when Margery had once shut her own skirt in the door, and got stuck. (“I’ve never seen anything so hilarious,” the deputy said afterward. “You looked like a bear in a trap.”) None of it worked. The girls sat there, resolutely silent, eyes lowered, a bit pink in the face, as the bell went for afternoon break and outside the corridors began to swell, like a river, with feet and noise. And the fact they refused to apologize or name who was responsible—not even Wendy Thompson buckled—left Margery feeling even more alone, and even more absurd. She dropped the note into the bin but it was still there. It seemed to be part of the air itself.
“This lesson is over,” she said, in what she hoped was a dignified tone. Then she picked up her handbag and left.
She was barely on the other side of the door when the laughter came. “Wendy, you champion!” the girls roared. Margery made her way past the physics lab and the history department, and she didn’t even know where she was going anymore. She just had to breathe. Girls crowded her path, barking like gulls. All she could hear was laughter. She tried the exit to the playing field but it was locked, and she couldn’t use the main door because that was for visitors only, strictly not to be used by staff. The assembly hall? No. It was filled with girls in vests and knickers, doing a wafty sort of dance with flags. She was beginning to fear she’d be stuck there forever. She passed the display of school trophies, bumped into a box of sports bibs, and almost went flying over a fire extinguisher. The staff room, she said to herself. I will be safe in the staff room.
Margery was a big woman. She knew that. And she’d let herself go over the years. She knew that, too. She’d been tall and thin when she was a girl, just like her brothers, and she also had their bright blue eyes. She’d even worn their hand-me-downs. It had been a source of pain—not so much the hand-me-downs, but definitely the height—and she’d learned to stoop at an early age. But being big, actually A Big Person, had only happened when her monthlies stopped. The weight piled on, the same as her mother, causing a pain in her hip that took her by surprise sometimes and made her limp. What she hadn’t realized was that she’d become the school joke.