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peep at Terrapin! At Terrapin!”
    Watery smile.
    â€œThey’d turn to stone. Like the Gorgon’s head.”
    (Giggle. Laugh.)
    Incident over. Terrapin ever after called the Gorgon’s head and my mother and I laughing about it as the years roll by. “D’you remember that night when Terrapin called you a Peeping Tom?”
    That’s what will happen to my daughter, I thought. I’ll see to that. Down on the floor I lay upon my silky exercise book for hours. After the first hour I thought, “I shall continue to lie here for ever. I shall lie here all night and I may die. No one will come.” I wetted the exercise book with tears. I felt the tears trickle down my nose side and on to the page and the ink spread, turning my ugly writing to a fuzz.
    â€œI will lie here till morning.”
    But after what seemed to be the best part of the night, in a daze I gave the most colossal sigh and heaved myself up and stretched up to shut the window. The Boys’ Dormitory windows were still wide open but dark. The Fives Court was silent. In the glimmering shadowy night I heard steps below me and saw Paula and father coming slowly through the garden, Paula still in tennis clothes white among the flowers now faded into white as well. Father’s voice was quiet and unperturbed and Paula laughed her loud nice laugh. They walked easily along together, Paula swinging her tennis racquet about, and passed out of sight. I felt a great yearning towards something or other, but slammed down my window as noisily as possible and went to bed in all my clothes.
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    The second incident was on a lovely day, too—in the summer holidays with the House empty except for us, the big front door wide open and the sunshine pouring in. Paula was out in the raspberries. I’d asked her if she’d wanted help but she had wanted to be by herself. She sings when she’s by herself, very loud and rather off-key. She knows this bothers me, try as I may not to show it, so often she goes off by herself and has a good sing when there’s no one about.
    If you remember I mentioned the swimming pool and how precious it is to me in the school holidays and how father would suddenly appear beside it as I was swimming and look at me simultaneously with Aeschylus, and, Aeschylus winning would wander away.
    This day—the summer after the Peeping Tom affair—I had decked myself in a Japanese dressing gown I had found in one of Paula’s clothes boxes. Goodness knows where it had come from but it’s as well that it was there because I had been setting off down the main stairs in just my bathing dress and I am square and thick: but something made me turn back and have a burrow about. I took off my glasses and put a pair of queer old pink high-heeled shoes with pink feathers growing out of them on my bare feet, grabbed a towel and set off. In the hall sat Boakes, reading, outside father’s study door so I was much relieved I had. As I passed I suppose he saw the feathers go by and looked up and said, “Hello. You swimming? Want to go a walk?” I said “No thank you Boakes,” because it wouldn’t be very thrilling since he would have read all the time with the end of his nose grazing the paper, and I sailed ahead to the pool. I swam about for a while and soon there was father who must have got rid of Boakes after setting him to the gate. After a few more lengths I looked up again to see that as usual he had disappeared, but that Terrapin had taken his place.
    Terrapin was a local boy but a boarder. There are many fewer boarders at father’s school than day boys and there is a long list of boys waiting to be boarders. Nowadays boarders, says Paula, all seem to come from broken homes or are in need of care and protection or are characters of exceptional depravity. You have to be pretty deserving to get in as a boarder from a distance, so you can imagine what sort of a hard case you have