The Exiles

blade of grass, but Phoebe usually favoured a matchstick. Maggots responded better to matchstick prodding, but it tended to wear them out faster. Phoebe’s green maggot was beginning to look very limp.
    ‘He’s nearly dead,’ said Rachel.
    ‘He’s just too hot,’ replied Phoebe. ‘Anyway, I’m fed up of this. I’m going to bury him now.’ The career of a racing maggot inevitably ended in burial. It hid the evidence. What happened to the maggots afterwards was a mystery, although Rachel and Phoebe had often tried digging them up again to find out. Perhaps they crawled away, or a bird ate them. Either would be better than their original fate on the end of a hook.
    ‘Did you put the lids back on the tins?’ called Ruth from across the garden, remembering a time when this precaution had been forgotten, and the maggots had climbed the impossibly smooth sides of the tin, and escaped all over the toolshed.
    ‘Did we?’ asked Phoebe.
    ‘Hope not,’ said Naomi as Rachel hurried away to check, ‘we could do with a bit of excitement.’
    Phoebe finished patting the earth smooth over the maggots’ graves and remarked, ‘I wish something would happen.’
    ‘Well, it won’t,’ said Ruth.
    Ruth’s gloomy conviction that It Wouldn’t was based on the fact that, so far, It Never Had. Mrs Conroy, perhaps as a result of a rather too exciting childhood of her own, had carefully chosen to marry a man of such serene good nature that it was astonishing he survived at all. It was rather sad that two people whose only ambition was a life of security and peace should have been blessed with Ruth, Naomi, Rachel and Phoebe. Certainly they had done nothing to deserve it. Ruth, Naomi, and Rachel had been welcomed to their quiet world with old-fashioned, gentle names, suitable to the natures their parents hoped they would develop. By the time that Phoebe was born, however, Mr and Mrs Conroy had become rather disillusioned. They did not give Phoebe a name that they hoped she would be like; they gave her the name they expected her to be like, for Ruth, Naomi and Rachel showed very few signs of old-fashioned gentleness. And as Phoebe grew up it became increasingly apparent that neither did she.
    Mr and Mrs Conroy didn’t own a car, wouldn’t buy a television, disliked the thought of allowing pets into an already chaotic household, and could never quite afford to go on holidays. Naturally this made things somewhat difficult for their daughters, who, partly from personal inclination and partly in self-defence, maintained a carefully fostered defiance towards the world in general and school in particular.
    ‘How awful to be you!’ a girl at school had once remarked to Naomi, on hearing for the first time of her family’s general differentness.
    ‘Awful!’ exclaimed Naomi, indignantly and untruthfully. ‘What would be awful for people like you, boring people, isn’t awful at all for people like me.’
    ‘What sort of people are you supposed to be then?’ demanded her questioner.
    ‘I am Me,’ said Naomi, ‘and you are only you.’
    Nobody was allowed to pity a Conroy girl. Depending on their latest rebellion they might be admired or feared or isolated, and such reactions were bearable, even desirable. Patronage was not. They went to frightful extremes to avoid it.
    The summer weekend drifted on, exhausting itself and its participants with non-events. Sunday afternoon ended in Sunday Tea, varied and bountiful, and prepared, as always, by Mrs Conroy alone with no help from her daughters. The evening ran its usual course. Mrs Conroy dragged her husband from under his newspaper to spray the roses, her daughters from behind their library books to finish their homework, school uniforms from under beds to be exclaimed over in horror (but nothing else), and afterwards, having found occupations for everybody but herself, sat down and watched them work.
    ‘I don’t think this day will ever end,’ she sighed.
    Rachel and Phoebe were bathed, clean-pyjamad, and got rid of.
    Naomi toiled through the dregs of her homework and was dismissed.
    Ruth escaped.
    Mr and Mrs Conroy, after a weak tea and milk chocolate biscuits, locked the doors and withdrew.

    Sunday night darkness seeped through the house.
    All day long it had hung around waiting, hunched under the stairs, reeking in the shoe cupboard, shivering in the bottom of vases. Now it was loose.
    Rachel and Phoebe slept in bunk beds packed with teddy bears, colouring books and