No Talking after Lights by Angela Lambert

actually.’
    Their sandals scrunched across the gravel. Secretly they were excited. This was a drama, and they were the first to know about it. Apart from the thief, of course.
    â€˜Old Ma B doesn’t want me to say anything about it yet. Our best hope is to lie low and watch.’
    â€˜Who do
you
suppose it is?’
    â€˜Haven’t a clue. Could be Gogs. She’s in your dorm.’
    â€˜She’s always writing secret letters after lights and things.’
    â€˜Well, watch her, OK? That’s your job. Watch her.Who else? Has anybody got a grudge against Anne? Her pen’s missing.’
    â€˜I thought she’d lost it.’
    â€˜Well, perhaps. Or perhaps someone’s pinched it.’
    â€˜She’s got a Parker 51. Like Gogs.’
    â€˜And hang on to all
our
things. I’ll be livid if anything of ours gets pinched.’
    The twins joined hands and ran back to their form-room, their short white socks flashing, their bunches bobbing stubbily.
    The summer days became warmer, started earlier and ended later. The school settled into its disciplined routine and even Constance found herself adapting, despite herself, to the pattern of days divided into forty-minute sections. The teachers began to emerge from anonymity and assemble themselves as distinct figures, those she liked and those who liked her. They ceased to be merely ‘grown-ups’ among a crowd of hostile girls. In the first week of term she had learned to recognize their faces and put names to them, then to identify their handwriting, and finally she was able to anticipate what a lesson would be like - who was strict and made you sit still and keep quiet; who let you muck about; who gave generous marks and who jumped on every weeny mistake or untidiness. The English mistress, Miss Worthrop, was her favourite, and not just because she praised Constance’s work and encouraged her to read. She suggested it was time to move on from animal classics and stories of happy families to more rewarding books like
Jane Eyre
and
Wuthering Heights
. Constance devoured these in greedy gulps.
    â€˜I envy you,’ Miss Worthrop had said, ‘reading
Jane Eyre
for the first time. Don’t forget to tell me what you think of it.’
    Serious but with shining eyes, Constance had told her.
    â€˜And did they write any other books?’ she had asked.
    â€˜Quite a lot, yes. But you may find them a bit difficult for the time being.’
    Constance, to prove her wrong, had started
The Professor
, and found that Miss Worthrop was right; the story seemed turgid by comparison. But it didn’t stop her reading. She dived into books as though entering another world, one in which she could blot out her loneliness. She could forget her surroundings more easily in the pages of a book than in becoming a tree. Tree-ness was becoming harder to achieve. She was no longer simply instinctive, able to tune in to anything at will. Instead she browsed in the school library; she read
Pride and Prejudice, Sohrab and Rustum
, and
Salome
, as Miss Worthrop had recommended, but also the
Herries Chronicle
and Mazo de la Roche,
Peter Abelard
and Georgette Heyer, and
Green Dolphin Country
by Elizabeth Goudge, which she loved. She devoured them all, following them like pageants, incorporating them into her mental furniture. She no longer hung around the junior common-room, or bothered to go up to the pets’ shed in the hope of being asked to join in a game. She spent her evenings sitting under, or in, a tree, looking up from her book to see wild rabbits venturing out in the early dusk or the seniors frowning over their mottled brown revision files as they crammed for their imminent exams.
    From a perch above their heads she would hear snatches of conversation as people passed below: ‘Promise you won’t split?’ and ‘Cross your heart and hope to die and I’ll tell you who
I
think …’ She learned that she was a