The Step-Daughter of Time

I cannot abide hagiography; so having flounced and snorted through The Daughter of Time forty years ago, I put aside Josephine Tey until this week.

What I’ve missed!

Just to get my ear attuned to her, I read an early one, A Shilling for Candles, and found it deliciously witty.  Twenties theatrical gossip—divine!

Then I looked round for another romp.

I’d seen Miss Pym Disposes compared with Gaudy Night, so I read that next.  Oh boy.  Gaudy Night is a romance, a harmony arising from disturbance; Miss Pym Disposes is an excruciating tragedy arising out of idyll.  I was shattered.

Miss Pym once taught French to fourth-formers; but inherited a little money and retired early.  In retirement, she wrote a best-selling book on psychology, and is now something of a literary lion.  As such, she’s been invited to the Leys Physical Training College to lecture the girls.   (Josephine Tey both studied and taught at such a school, which turned out not only gym teachers and athletic coaches, but physiotherapists.)  Being idle by nature, she’s inclined to turn the obligation down; but she owes the headmistress, Miss Hodge, a debt of gratitude:  when they were at school, the older girl saved her from bullying (they’d found out that Lucy Pym was christened Laetitia).

So Miss Pym goes up there, expecting to go back at once (that bell at 5:30 am!  that trampling!); but falls in love with the place, and stays on and on.  She loves being with girls, loves their energy and instress.  As well as round characters, wittily observed, they are for her Hesperides.  Their garden is enchanted.

Tey almost never uses the girls' first names, or even "Miss So-and-So."  Like soldiers, they're all known by their last names—Innes, Dakers—or by nicknames.  The Nut Tart.  Tuppence Ha’penny.  The beautiful and lordly Nash is known as Beau.

The legendary school vacuum cleaner is called The Abhorrence.

And at first it’s played as comedy of manners, with an undertone of sexuality and the macabre:  the irrepressible Dakers bursting in on Miss Pym in her bath; a small girl bundling George the skeleton (he at least has a name) in pieces down the hall, to hang him up before he’s missed.

But everyone at Leys is stressed out:  their finals are coming, and they must be perfect both in theory and performance.  Remember, they must qualify as therapists as well as gymnasts; they take a heavy load of science courses.  And their anxiety, at first a shadow on the sunlit meadows, darkens intolerably.

Three of the many girls drive the story.


Rouse is ferociously ambitious, smugly toadying, freckled, a terrific athlete and terrible at book work.  She works like a dog but doesn't get it.

A glorious post has come up at Arlinghurst (so that’s where Jo Walton got it!), the "girls' Eton."  The headmistress has not yet spoken, but gossip has got out, and the school can talk of nothing else.  Of course it will go to the brilliant Innes.  Who else?

As a favor to the overworked staff, Miss Pym invigilates a physiology exam.  She catches Rouse trying to cheat:  nothing overt, but she's clutching a crumpled handkerchief in her left hand, and she doesn't have a cold.  Her look of innocence is unmistakable.  Pym doesn't want to upset the others by questioning her--this is where I started swearing at the book.  Of course, she bloody well should have stopped the little toad after the exam and insisted on searching her.  But no.  By keeping a sharp eye, she makes sure that Rouse sweats bullets and consults nothing.

And then afterward, on the way to the village, Miss Pym finds a tiny little lost address book, the size of a postage stamp, crammed with useful notes on physiology.  She tells herself that she's a visitor to the school, that she doesn't want to make trouble, that it could have been just someone's study notes, that it could have been anyone's, that after all, Rouse didn't actually use it--and she fucking well destroys it.  Which destroys this world.

By now I'm hopping up and down and howling.

This is Thomas bloody Hardy, only worse.

Innes has let herself dream, and is going around in a transfigured glow.

So the results are posted.  Innes is easily first in the class.  To everyone's surprise, Rouse has done very well indeed, except on that last exam, in which she's barely scraped a pass.

And the headmistress gives Rouse the precious post.  By now the entire faculty is hopping up and down and howling.  But no, Miss Hodge is adamant.  She doesn't like Innes's stand-offishness.  She doesn't like her snobbery.  She distrusts brilliance.  Her sympathy is all with the plodders of this world, the plain girls, the triers.  Miss Pym tries to explain about the cheating, but all she does is damage her friendship with Miss Hodge.  The evidence is gone.

Innes is shattered.

Rouse has been practicing gymnastics alone at dawn.  Everyone knows this.  She's lost her nerve on the balance beam--stress--and her teacher has ordered an extra half-hour of work.  On the morning of the Demonstration (their graduation performance), she doesn't come down to breakfast, and is found at last on the floor of the gymnasium with a fractured skull.  The pin of the balance beam has inexplicably worked its way out.

Except the ubiquitous Miss Pym couldn't sleep and was there before her, and found a little silver shoe ornament lying on the floor.  From a dance class?  But the gym is vacuumed every night.

Rouse dies.

Innes gets reversion of the Arlinghurst job.  She going around looking like something from Dante.

The inquest rules it Death by Misadventure.

At a dorm party, on the last night before the school breaks up, Miss Pym sees Innes wearing pumps.  One of them is missing an ornament.  That is what she's been trying not to think of.  All night, she tosses and turns.  She tells herself that she must go to the police with her evidence; but she can't bring herself to do it.  She keeps thinking of Innes hanged.  She thinks of her brilliance, of the work she could do; of her threadbare, cultured, loving parents; of Nash bereaved.  Finally at dawn, she knocks on Innes's door and shows her the evidence.  Innes is distraught and confesses.  Pym tells her that she ought to turn her in, but she can't.  Innes says she'll do anything to atone.  If only Miss Pym won't turn her in, she'll sacrifice herself, give up every hope she's ever had.  She's already given up the Arlinghurst job, and now she'll go back to her unloved stifling town and work in her father's clinic.  Miss Pym doesn't ask her to, but she puts it in writing and she signs.

Everyone's gone except Nash.  Nash and Innes had been going hiking in Norway together as a celebration, but that's off now.  Their friendship is not what it was, Miss Pym thinks.  In her omnicompetent way, Nash helps Miss Pym pack.  This ought to be a comic scene (there have been many awkward parting presents from the girls), and superficially it is.  Nash goes through all the cupboards to make sure nothing's left behind, and at the back of a drawer she finds the little silver rosette.  Miss Pym can't bring herself to keep it; she can't very well throw it away.  Oh, that's from my shoe, says Nash.  I'd been wondering where it got to.

I couldn't sleep afterward.

My take is that Nash did it for Innes and Innes is going to the stake for her.  And that the martyrdom is driving them apart.  It was written in her iconography; for Tey, portraiture is truth, and if she’s painted Innes as a martyr, that’s her fate.  If Innes herself had done it, she'd confess at once.  If Nash did it, she did it to go back to yesterday, that bright dawn with their unblemished and expectant future.  But Innes can’t go back; she can’t accept the tomorrow Nash has bought for her at such a price.  Nash thinks she’s throwing it away.
   
I told this to sovay and she said, “So, basically, it's Heavenly Creatures with better education.”

Dear goddesses, it is.  Without the hysteria.  And just as harrowing.

Beyond that, there’s the tragedy of Miss Pym’s meddling.   If she hadn’t decided to play detective—In Nine Tailors, the detective is unwittingly the murderer, an ourobourean plot.  In this, Pym’s choices at the crucial switchpoints—not to intervening, to intervene—drive the tragedy.  God disposes.  And she’s playing him.

Thank you for reading this.  I needed the catharsis.
And now I’m going to cheer myself up with To Love and Be Wise.  I hear it’s astonishing.

Nine