LITMIR.BIZ

       A Perfect Girl

       I don’t know what charisma is. Nobody does. But it comes from God, and it makes power tolerable.

      The Master

      Caroline Elizabeth Phillips’s seemingly effortless success in life had been based on two things. The most important was her irresistible likeability. Whenever she walked into a room, whether it be the lounge bar of a pub or, later on, a dreary, low-ceilinged political meeting room, the temperature rose. People who had been down in the dumps found themselves smiling; misery-gutses discovered they just wanted to be liked. This, apparently, was charisma. She’d had it since she was a toddler. She was the kind of small child whose hair every adult wanted to ruffle. She smiled, they smiled back. Easy. Sometimes she almost glowed. Yet her father, Thomas Phillips, was a dourly forgettable man of business. People struggled to remember his name even if they were closely related to him. Her mother, Simone, was sharp-tongued and energetic, but, like her husband, essentially bland – bland with lemon sauce. Between them they had produced a source of light. It was as surprising as if two affable Burgundian peasants had given birth to a saint, complete with spangled wings, or as if a pair of Brummie shopkeepers had spawned a multi-coloured dragon. Of course you’d have to know the family to understand just how extraordinary it was. In photographs, Caro looked pretty enough, but not remarkable. In the flesh, her oat-coloured radiance entranced everyone lucky enough to come across her.

      Caro disapproved of the word ‘lesbian’. ‘For one thing, it denotes an islander, it’s inappropriately geographical … And beyond that, people make assumptions,’ she had told her mother (who certainly did). ‘They think they know what music I like, my political opinions, how I decorate my house. They think lesbians are driven by sex, and have “pashes”. Lesbians wear lesbian clothes, and eat lesbian food, and watch gloomy Nordic lesbian films about gloomy Nordic lesbians. Well, if even part of that’s true, then I’m not a lesbian. I’m an old-fashioned, friendly, meat-eating, Christian woman who happens to love other women. Not even that. An other woman.’

      That other woman, Angela, had been known as ‘Pep’ when Caro first met her – tall, dark, and only just a teenager. Pep stood for pepperoni, which stood for pizza, which stood for pizza-face. Angela had suffered from relatively mild acne. That was the kind of humour their school specialised in.

      To a visitor, this school looked warm, even cosy. Based around a 1930s country house in Sussex, originally constructed for a shipbuilding tycoon, it had many acres of games pitches, and modern outbuildings. Queen Eleanor’s prepared the daughters of wealthy commuters for Russell Group universities. From the outside, it might have been a spa resort or an affluent golf club. The main building had a pleasantly arts-and-crafts feel to it; with its long, sloped roofs, high chimneys and cream pebbledash, it spoke of a conservative-minded, late-in-the-day architectural admirer of Ruskin and Morris. ‘Pleasant’ was a word that was often used of it. Just like Sussex itself, Queen Eleanor’s was … pleasant.

      But behind the fresh cream paint and the well-kept hedges, the school was not what it appeared. Its pupils were mostly sturdy, normal, healthy-looking girls with their hair in clasps, their gleaming metal orthodontics and their knees the colour of turnips. But there is nothing on this small green planet as dangerous and terrifying as English schoolgirls in packs. On the surface, serge and cheesecloth. Below it, claws and fangs, the splash of blood and the muffled squeal. Girls left this lovely school prepared to throw themselves into abusive relationships or starve themselves to death, or if they’d done pretty well, settled for decades of dogged, surreptitious alcoholism. A girl might come to Queen Eleanor’s with a straight back and a clear eye; she would be lucky to leave without slouching – hating herself, curled up, sarcastic. Emotional survival in this pleasant – so, so pleasant – place, with its choir which did Purcell, and its glossy, neatly-lettered rolls of honour, was harder than in the drab council estates of Ayrshire.

      What about the families? Powerful men who knew about the world – barristers, accountants, company directors – sent their daughters there. In due course, later on, they would idly wonder why little Sarah, Penelope or Tessa had become so sullen, so thin and so uncommunicative on the family’s annual skiing holiday to Val-d’Isère. What had happened to the once-easy conversations around the breakfast table? Once in a while, a particularly bold father might clear his throat and ask Julietta or Tamara whether she was happy. In response he’d be confronted by a face as white as a sealed envelope, or a shrug of skeletal shoulders. He

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