Power Play

“That Rachel Lee.”

Ann saw the expression on Tyler’s face and realised that he liked Rachel no more than she did herself.

“What’s up?” she asked him curiously. “What you got against her?”

“Her mother was a murderer,” Tyler told her.

No one in the tribe had talked about Rachel’s mother, but they all knew the story, and Ann’s eyes widened in malicious glee. She had always known there was something odd about Rachel Lee. Just wait until she told the others at school about her! At that moment Tyler moved more determinedly against her, pushing up her skirt and pulling down her pants with one experienced movement, and Rachel was forgotten…but not for long.

Rachel knew the moment she walked into the schoolyard that something was wrong. Her senses, always attuned to danger, alerted her to the menacing quality of the silence engulfing her the moment she walked into the tarmacadam yard, but she looked neither to the right nor to the left as she walked past the silent huddles of watchers.

Ann Watts waited until Rachel drew level with her before launching her first salvo.

“Whose mother’s a murderer, then?” she sang out, swiftly followed by her friends, as they picked up the taunting chorus and rang it across the schoolyard.

By now Rachel knew the story of her conception, but she still felt sensitive about it, and about the cloud hanging over her birth. She lashed out instinctively and her open palm caught the side of Ann Watts’ nose, and almost instantly blood spurted from it.

Almost as though the scent of blood drew them like hounds to a fox, the schoolyard was in an uproar. It took four teachers to separate the seething mass of bodies, and when they dragged Rachel out from beneath her attackers, she had a broken collarbone and three cracked ribs.

Despite questioning from her teachers and from the police Rachel refused to say what had caused the fight. The police constable was only young—he had recently been moved into the area from Cumbria and he was finding the brooding violence of the valley difficult to take. There was poverty where he came from too, but it was a different sort of poverty from this, just as his people were a different sort of people. Privately he felt sorry for the little gypsy girl, but his expression betrayed nothing of this when he questioned her. She looked very forlorn and alone in the starched hospital bed, and he suspected that the nurses weren’t any kinder to her than her peers had been.

It was after her stay in hospital that things began to change for Rachel. She saw the change in her grandmother almost from the moment she came out. Naomi had aged, but more than that, there were new lines on her face that could have only been put there by pain. For the first time in her life Rachel knew the terrible fear of being all alone. What would happen to her if her grandmother should die? The tribe didn’t want her.

Would she have to go into a home? Rachel knew very little about these institutions other than the fact that they were held over the heads of hapless gypsy children as a threat of what could happen to them if they misbehaved. Somehow in Rachel’s mind, children’s homes had become confused with prison, and she thought of being sent away to one of them as a form of punishment.

Every day she saw her grandmother fade away a little more. Sometimes when she thought no one was watching her Naomi massaged the outside of her breast. She was in deep pain, Rachel knew that. She also knew that her grandmother had to drink some of the special poppy drug she made to help her sleep at night.

Rachel was frightened, but as with everything else she learned to lock the fear up inside her.

Naomi knew that her time was short. There was pain inside her that ate into her, a gnawing, bitter pain that was destroying her from within. The pain came from the lump she had discovered in her breast, she knew that. She was going to die, and when she did what would become of Rachel?

Winter came and the tribe was once again in the far north, not camping in the tranquil valley on the MacGregor lands this time, but on a barren piece of waste ground outside a small town.

Where once they had commanded a certain amount of respect and fear, gypsies were now almost consistently reviled. The townspeople called them “dirty thieves”, and Rachel was more conscious than ever of the way others looked at them. She had never felt more alien and alone. There was no one she could turn to. Naomi was dying, but Rachel still doggedly hoped that somehow her beloved grandmother would grow well and strong again.

She spent hours searching for special herbs that were supposed to have magic properties to heal her. She saved the choicest pieces of meat for her, but none of it did any good; Naomi was dying.

The spring that Rachel was fifteen they stopped off in the north for the Whitsuntide fairs again. Ann Watts was still at school, but now she was in her last year. Last year’s plumpness had given way to unsightly fat, and she eyed Rachel with spite and bitchiness when she arrived at school.

“I see the gypos are back,” she sneered, giving Rachel a wide berth. “I thought I could smell something bad!”

Blotting out the laughs and jeers, Rachel held her head high and walked into the classroom. She loved the deep tranquillity of its silence almost as much as she hated her fellow pupils. Inside her something was yearning desperately for knowledge, but her lessons were so fragmented that in all her years of schooling she had learned almost nothing.

To the teachers she was just another gypsy brat, who would be gone before she could learn anything worth knowing. She could read and write and add up simple columns of figures, which in a school like the one she was in now was as much as many of their pupils would achieve by the time they were ready to leave.

They had been back in the valley for almost a week when one afternoon Rachel was struck by the knowledge that Naomi needed her. When the class stood up and the teacher left, Rachel darted out after him, taking the short cut to the gypsy camp, along the canal tow path. She ran all the way, and arrived out of breath and scared out of her wits. This was the first time she had felt for herself the power that ran so strongly in the women of her family.

As she had known she would, she found her grandmother close to death. Naomi recognised her, and forced away her pain for long enough to take her hand. She had spent many hours worrying about this child, this changeling who was neither Romany nor gorgio.

Pulling Rachel close to her so that she could whisper in her ear, she told her where she had hidden the small amount of money she had managed to scrape together since she had realised she was ill. She had saved the money with one purpose only in mind, and now she told Rachel what she was to do.

“You must leave here now, before…before I die. You must pretend that you are older than your years. You must get yourself a job and live as a gorgio would, Rachel. The Romany way of life is not for you, and I do not want you to become any man’s whore. Remember always that my spirit goes with you.”

Hot tears fell on her cold hands as she pushed Rachel away from her. Rachel was losing the only person on earth who cared about her, but if she stayed the tribe would reject her, and the school authorities would come and she would be put in a home. Naomi was right…she had to leave.

Alternately shivering and crying, Rachel found the small store of money. She bent down to kiss Naomi’s cheek and murmured the secret Romany words of farewell. She would not be here to see her grandmother’s funeral pyre; she would not be here to wish her spirit well.

Naomi opened her eyes and saw the indecision on her grandchild’s face. Summoning the last of her strength, she took Rachel’s hand in hers. “Go now…go with my blessing, my child…Go now.”

From the moment she had learned to read Rachel had realised that it was education that was the only escape route from poverty, and now she was drawn as countless thousands of others had been drawn before her to the gilded spires of Oxford.

She had passed through the town many times with the tribe. She knew from her reading what it was…but in her ignorance she knew nothing of the taboos and rituals it represented; just as strong and damning as those of her own people.

Rachel reached Oxford in the late summer of 1977, when she was just short of her seventeenth birthday. She travelled mainly on foot, using the ancient Romany paths, carefully eking out the money her grandmother had given her by taking casual work along the way—mostly on farms, but always taking care to choose a farm where she could be sure of being taken under the wing of the farmer’s wife. Rachel had learned enough about the male sex in her short life to make her wary of putting herself into any man’s powers. She still remembered the hated sensation of being touched by male hands, and it was a man who had led to her mother’s rejection by her people. Men of any age were to be avoided.

By the time she reached Oxford she had added to her small hoard of money and had two hundred pounds tucked away in the leather bag she had tied to the inside of her skirt. Her clothes were in rags, too short, too skimpy, augmented here and there by the odd cast-off given to her by kind-hearted farmers’ wives who had taken pity on her.

Where once their pity would have offended her, now she accepted it with a brief smile, because Rachel was realising for the first time in her life the power of freedom. Oh, she missed her grandmother, but she didn’t miss the oppressive disapproval of the tribe, which she was only just beginning to recognise for what it was; nor did she miss the contempt and dislike of the people in whose towns they stayed. Here in the country it was different—she was different, because she no longer wore the hated tag of “gypsy”.

Only now was she coming to realise that she was free; that she had the power to choose what she would be. The farms where she stopped off to work thought she was just another of the itinerant band of teenagers who spent their summers working in the fields; gypsies didn’t travel alone, and her skin was pale enough, her hair dark red enough for her not to be picked out immediately as a member of the Romany people.

She was willing to work hard and she was consequently awarded respect by the farmers’ wives who employed her. Rachel didn’t mind what kind of work she was asked to do, just so long as it didn’t bring her into too much contact with any male members of the households where she stopped, and that too was a point in her favour. Several times she was asked to stay on, but she was slowly coming to realise that there might be more for her in life than the drudgery of such menial tasks.

At one farm where she stayed in prosperous Cheshire she was allowed to sleep in a room which had once belonged to the now adult daughter of the family, and this room came complete with its own television. Several members of the gypsy tribe had had television, of course, but her grandmother had not been among them, and Rachel spent her free time absorbing information via this new source like a desert soaking up rain. She watched all manner of programmes—education, political, cartoons, American cops-and-robbers series, and everything she saw only confirmed to her that there was another form of life out there.

She remembered how her grandmother had always told her that education was the key that unlocked many doors, and how she had believed her. But how could she get the sort of education she needed? Because now Rachel had a goal. She wanted to be like the women she saw on television, polished, glamorous…loved. How did they get like that? They were like no women she had ever seen before, with their long blonde hair and their pretty faces—and their clothes.

Up until now as far as Rachel was concerned clothes had simply been something she had worn to protect her body from the weather, but now she was seeing girls wearing pretty clothes, and she ached to wear them herself.

When she wasn’t working she spent more time than she had ever done before exploring the various towns she passed through on her way south. She stared in through shop windows and watched…and soon she had plucked up the courage to walk in through the plate glass doors of one of the stores. If the girl who served her was shocked by the state of the clothes she was wearing, or surprised that Rachel didn’t even know her own size, she kept it to herself.

Rachel spent her money carefully. She knew exactly how she wanted to look. When she came out of the store she caught sight of herself by accident in a plate glass window, and froze, shocked by this new image of herself. She no longer looked different—poor. She looked just like everyone else.

She turned her head to make sure. All around her young girls dressed in the timeless uniform of the young strolled, flirted and laughed, and she was now one of them. She stared down at her jean-clad legs—her grandmother hadn’t approved of girls wearing any form of trousers—then touched the soft fabric of her new T-shirt. The feel of clean new fabric beneath her fingertips was sensuously pleasing. It felt good to know that no one had ever worn these clothes before her, that they were hers and hers alone.

By the time she reached Oxford Rachel had lost all but the faintest tinge of her Romany accent, and she had also removed her gypsy earrings. She was dressed just like any other teenager, and wore her new-found confidence like a patina of pleasure.

Oxford drew her like a magnet. She had seen a programme on television about it, and that had increased her yearning to be there.

She arrived just before the start of the Michaelmas term, and the town was almost empty of students; the bicycles that later would fill the narrow streets were few and far between, and the pubs and discos that later would be the haunt of the young were almost empty. During the long summer recess Oxford belonged to its inhabitants and its tourists—American in the main, come to stroll among the colleges, and examine the quaintness of this ancient seat of learning.

Rachel found a job easily enough in one of the hotels, but the pay wasn’t as good as it had been on the farm, and the work was hard. The majority of the other chambermaids were foreign; an Irish girl with an accent so thick that Rachel could barely understand it made friendly overtures towards her, and by the end of the first week she was beginning to feel she was settling in.

When she complained to Bernadette about the poorness of her wage the Irish girl grinned at her.

“Well, why don’t you do what I do? Get yourself a job in one of the pubs in the evening? They’re looking for someone at the place where I work. I could take you along and introduce you if you like?”

Rachel agreed. Although the hotel provided its chambermaids with board and food, the meals they were served were very meagre indeed, and she was almost constantly hungry.

She got the job in Bernadette’s pub. The manager was a plump cheerful man in his late forties, with two girls of his own who were away at university, and his wife kept a stern eye on the more flirtatious of the barmaids.

Rachel felt happier than she had ever been in her life, but when she shyly asked Bernadette if she knew how she might go about joining a library, the Irish girl filled the dormitory they shared with the other chambermaids with her rollicking laugh.

“Joining a library, is it, you’re wanting? Well, sure there’s a fine thing! Oi’m thinking that a pretty girl like you can get all the learning she wants from the men…”

Bernadette was a flirt, Rachel had quickly realised that, but she hadn’t realised until now how great a gap yawned between them. For the first time since she had left them she felt homesick for the tribe. They were, after all, her people.

When Bernadette asked her if she wanted to go to a disco she refused.

“Ah well, suit yourself, then…I’m sure I don’t mind having all the boys to meself.” Bernadette tossed her dark hair as she walked out, and Rachel knew she had offended her.

Fortunately Bernadette had a mercurial temper and a kind heart, and by morning she was her normal friendly self, chatting animatedly to Rachel about the boy she had met the previous evening, as they worked.

“Keep away from Number Ten,” she warned Rachel. “Helga…you know, the German girl, she was telling me that when she went in this morning he came out of his bathroom stark naked and asked her if she’d mind giving him a rub down! Dirty old man, he’s fifty if he’s a day…and married. I mind he’s stayed here before with his wife…”

All the chambermaids gossiped, although Rachel tended to keep herself aloof. She wasn’t used to such friendliness, and she treated it with caution, half expecting them to change and turn on her, unable to forget what she had suffered during her schooldays, but now she was different, now she wasn’t a despised gypo but simply another young woman like themselves.

The seventies were a good time to be young; the world was full of optimism, and youth was petted and fêted by all. To be young was to hold the world in the palm of your hand. Rachel was constantly meeting other young people who, like herself, cherished their freedom, but who, unlike her, had travelled the world. They came into the pub in their faded jeans, carrying their backpacks, the men thin and bearded, their girlfriends long-haired and kohl-eyed, drinking beer while they told their tales of Kathmandu, and worshipping at the feet of the great ashrams. Everyone who was anyone was into meditation; Rachel read the magazines left behind by the guests and learned that she was living in an almost magical era.

As the summer heat faded into autumn, and mists began to hang over the river in the early morning sunlight, Oxford gradually began to stir back to life. Students arrived in dribs and drabs, trickling back into the town; life began to stir beneath the somnolence of the summer, as the tourists left to make way for the undergraduates.

By the beginning of Michaelmas term life in the town had changed, its pulse hard and heady. Bernadette was delighted.

“Now we’ll see some foine young men,” she promised Rachel one morning as they finished their work. “You wait and see!”

It was impossible not to respond to the surge of excitement beating through the air. Rachel felt it in her own thudding pulse. The crisp tang of late summer with its nostalgic undertones of autumn hung on the air. Almost every night the pub was full of young men in shabby jeans or corduroy trousers, University scarves wrapped round their necks, their long hair brushing their shoulders. They talked with a multitude of accents, but almost always in the same studiedly throwaway fashion; they were the cream, the jeunesse dorée, and they knew it.

In some of the staider colleges it was still necessary to have permission to run a motorcar, and so the traditional bicycles were very much in use. Rachel had to run across the road to avoid being knocked down by one of them one evening as she hurried to work. Behind her she heard a great shout and then a crash, and turning round she saw a tangle of jean-clad legs and bicycle wheels.

Instinctively she started to walk away, until a plaintive voice halted her.

“I say, don’t go and leave me here! I might have broken my leg…”

His voice was cultivated and teasing: the voice of a male used to being courted and flattered. As she turned her head to look back at him Rachel caught the blond flash of his hair. She hesitated.

“Come on…it was your fault I fell off, you know. I haven’t ridden one of these damn things for years, and when I saw you…pretty girls oughtn’t to be allowed to cross the roads in front of learner bicycle riders!”

He had called her pretty, and immediately Rachel stiffened, but there had been none of the hated near-violence and dislike in his voice that she had heard from the other men.

Caution urged her to walk away, but something deeper, stronger, and much more potent, urged her to stay. Slowly she walked towards him and watched him disentangle himself from his bicycle. He was tall, over six foot, with shoulder-length fair hair, and the bluest eyes Rachel had ever seen. They were the sort of eyes that always seemed to be full of light and laughter. He was laughing now, grinning ruefully as he brushed himself down.

“Damn! I think I’ve twisted my front wheel. That’ll teach me to look at pretty girls!” He moved and then winced, taking his weight off his left foot. “I seem to have twisted my ankle as well. My rooms aren’t far from here…If you give me a hand I should be able to make it to them without too much difficulty.”

At any other time Rachel would have found his assumption that she would automatically agree to help him off putting, but for some reason she found herself responding to his smile and walking towards him.

“If I could just put my arm round your shoulders…”

His arm was muscular but thin, and she could smell the scent of his body mingling with the oily odour of wool from his sweater. He smiled at her, his teeth white in the tanned darkness of his face. For some reason she almost wanted to reach out and touch him. Shocked by her own reaction, Rachel dragged her gaze away.

He was like no other boy or man she had ever known. There was an aura about him that she could feel herself responding to. She looked at his hand, cupped round the ball of her shoulder. His fingers were long, the nails well cared for.

“Cat got your tongue?” he demanded with another grin.

Rachel shook her head. He was going to make her late for work, but recklessly she didn’t care.

He said it was only a little way to his rooms, but in actual fact it was half a mile. Rachel gazed up in reverence at the ancient buildings of his college. She had explored them all during the summer recess, combining her walks through their hallowed grounds with knowledge she had gained from the books she had borrowed from the library. It had been the publican’s wife who had come to the rescue and shown her how to join the library, and now she touched the weathered stone as they rounded the corner of the building and entered the enclosed quadrangle.

“Tom Quad,” her companion told her cheerfully, glancing sideways at her.

Rachel only smiled. She knew all about the history of Christ Church College; that it had first been commissioned by Cardinal Wolsey, four years before he fell from Henry VIII’s grace. Christopher Wren had added the Tower over Wolsey’s gate, in 1682, and Rachel glanced up towards it automatically, just as Great Tom, the bell, tolled its curfew.

“Bang on time as usual! Come on, my rooms are up here.”

His weight was beginning to make her shoulder ache, but it never occurred to Rachel to refuse to go with him. During the summer recess she had learned to parry the flirtatious remarks of the pub’s patrons, but both Bernadette and the landlord’s wife had warned her that Oxford’s students could be remarkably persistent.

“You’d think they’d have better things to do with their time than spending it trying to get you into bed with them,” Bernadette sniffed disdainfully.

It was from Bernadette and the other girls at the hotel that Rachel had gradually learned to be a little more worldly. Now when she worked she often hummed the latest pop tune. She wore make-up—something her grandmother had always disapproved of, and she was gradually adopting the manners and fashions of her peers.

For the first time in her life she felt that she was actually accepted on equal terms with her peers, and she liked that feeling, but Rachel was by nature cautious. When the other girls disappeared for the evening with flurried giggles, and didn’t appear until the following morning, Rachel listened to their whispered confidences about the boys they had been out with, but when anyone tried to date her she kept them firmly at bay. She wasn’t interested in boyfriends and romance; there wasn’t time in her life for them. She had so much to do; coming to Oxford had opened her eyes to all that was missing from her life.

These students who flocked through Oxford’s streets would one day go out into the world and become people of eminence, secure and respected. The bitterness of her childhood haunted her and Rachel was determined to make herself inviolate. The only way she could do that was by achieving financial security.