Lowewood Academy

What a difference just a few weeks can make!

The start of this term had been pretty miserable all in all. Gabby was so down about how stuff had gone wrong with our cousin Josh, then I’d fallen in with Leon Barwick and everything had blown up spectacularly at the soirée. The aftermath of our break-up and facing the Prefects’ Council had left me feeling more miserable and isolated than just about any time previously since I’d been at Lowewood.

I guess I retreated from the world at that point. Well, mentally at least. It’s kinda hard to retreat successfully when you’re at boarding school! In fact, five minutes’ peace and quiet is a rare luxury. But still, it was pretty obvious that my usual pattern of behaviour changed. I hid away in my room, or else the library or, even better, an empty classroom, during my free time. I shunned my usual haunts, the common room and sports pavilion, and I guess I shunned my mates too. All the shit that had happened had left me feeling…wounded…and I don’t just mean the rainbow of stripes and bruises with which I was branded during this period. Everything had gone so incredibly wrong, including my own judgement regarding so many things. And my confidence just drained away…

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Standing outside Elizabeth Somerton’s door, I tried to psych myself up to knock.  To explain.  To hope she’d take it as a pleasant surprise and not a reason to up-end me over her desk.  I didn’t hold out too much hope, as poor Jessica’s best friend, after the debacle at the Soiree, she’d been in a foul mood, taking athletics yesterday she’d had half the squad running laps for ‘lack of focus’.  Claudia and Leon had unsurprisingly been missing- with the Prefects Council hanging over them, and what the gossips are saying about them, I’m not surprised.

I thought of Chloe Lansbury lying facedown on her bed in tears, vivid tawse marks below the shiny new Lowewood lycra she’d been so proud of and felt another wave of guilt- I could have prevented this.  She and Lily Peverill had barely spoken to me since I’d admitted to failing to come forward for the rowing team, except to push just how badly their training was going with Abigail Edwardes in the boat.

Chloe had been hysterical after today’s race with Headington, one of the top rowing schools and I felt awful.  Abigail had ‘caught a crab’ and got her blade stuck under the water, Lowewood had gone down by two lengths and then she’d done the worst thing an athlete could do- given up.  Lowewood had suffered a humiliating loss, Reverend Jenkins had tawsed the entire crew once they got back to school and announced that they would not be competing in any further competitions this summer.

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“I’m totally serious darling, this is exactly what you need right now.  Trust me.”

I passed Jess a generous measure of daddy’s finest Bombay Sapphire (he’d never miss it!) and slimline tonic, squeezing her shoulder with my free hand before going to retrieve my own from the bar – aka the window ledge in my study!  I hated to see my best friend so down, although I could certainly understand her black mood since half term.  The disappointment of not winning the Oxford scholarship still lay clearly upon her, the wreckage of a long-held dream.  We’d get the pieces picked up, and find a way to rebuild them: of that I was certain.  But it would take time.  During the interim, what Jess needed most was support, friends – and the distraction of a new challenge.  Something to take her mind as far away from stuffy academia and life’s bitter unfairness as possible; away from the claustrophobia of endless study and back out into world beyond.  Where the wind whipped, the clouds scudded, the trees bent back their newly-bared branches to the elements and the figure of a neat man clad incongruously in clerical garb could often be heard bellowing downstream at dawn.

Yes, I was sure I knew where Jess could rediscover her self-belief: on the River Lowe.  I wanted her to come and row with me.

Predictably she took more convincing than I did!

“I hate sport!” she muttered petulantly into her glass.  “You know I do.”

“Yes darling, so you tell me frequently!” I smiled back.  “But your record does rather betray you, you know.  After five years of hiding your light under a bushel, you ended up with team Colours in both netball and athletics last year – without even meaning to!  Obviously that’s down to my good influence!”

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