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Towards the end of a summer term Rachel discovered the Jungle. You got over the wall at the bottom of the kitchen garden, where it began to be out of bounds, and waded through knee-high sorrel, nettles and dock, along the boundary hedge of Mr Morden’s property until you came to a gap in the roots of the hedge, very low down, where it was possible to crawl under. Then you doubled across his paddock (this was the most exciting part), round the pond and climbed a high board gate it was impossible to see through into a deep lane. You got out of the lane farther down by a bank with a hedge at the top (a very ‘mangy’ thin hedge), and along the back of this hedge, able to be entered at several points, was the Jungle. It was full of secret dog-paths threading between enormous tussocks of bramble, underneath the brambles there were hollow places like caves; there were hawthorns one could climb for a survey and, about the middle, a clump of elders gave out a stuffy sweetish smell. It was an absolutely neglected and wild place; nobody seemed to own it, nobody came there but tramps. Tramps, whose clothes seem to tear so much more easily than one’s own, had left little fluttering tags on the bushes, some brownish newspaper one kicked away under the brambles, a decayed old boot like a fungus and tins scarlet with rust that tilted in every direction holding rain-water. Two or three of these tins, in some fit of terrible rage, had been bashed right in.

The first time Rachel came here, alone, she squeezed along the dog-paths with her heart in her mouth and a cold and horrible feeling she was going to find a dead cat. She knew cats crept away to die, and there was a sinister probability about these bushes. It was a silent July evening, an hour before supper. Rachel had brought a book, but she did not read; she sat down under the elders and clasped her hands round her knees. She had felt a funny lurch in her imagination as she entered the Jungle, everything in it tumbled together, then shook apart again, a little altered in their relations to each other, a little changed.

At this time Rachel was fourteen; she had no best friend at the moment, there was an interim. She suffered sometimes from a constrained, bursting feeling at having to keep things so much to herself, yet when she compared critically the girls who had been her great friends with the girls who might be her great friends she couldn’t help seeing that they were very much alike. None of them any more than the others would be likely to understand … The Jungle gave her a strong feeling that here might have been the Perfect Person, and yet the Perfect Person would spoil it. She wanted it to be a thing in itself: she sat quite still and stared at the impenetrable bramble-humps.

On the last day of term Rachel travelled up in the train with a girl in a lower form called Elise Lamartine, who was going to spend the holidays riding in the New Forest. Elise had her hair cut short like a boy’s and was supposed to be fearfully good at French but otherwise stupid. She had a definite quick way of doing things and a thoughtful slow way of looking at you when they were done. Rachel found herself wishing it weren’t the holidays. She said, off-hand, as she scrambled down from the carriage into a crowd of mothers: ‘Let’s write to each other, shall we?’ and Elise, beautifully unembarrassed, said, ‘Right-o, let’s!’

During the holidays Rachel became fifteen. Her mother let down her skirts two inches, said she really wasn’t a little girl any more now and asked her to think about her career. She was asked out to tennis parties where strange young men had a hesitation about calling her anything and finally called her Miss Ritchie. Her married sister Adela promised that next summer holidays she’d have her to stay and take her to ‘boy and girl dances’. ‘Aren’t I a girl now?’ asked Rachel diffidently. ‘You oughtn’t to be a girl in that way till you’re sixteen,’ said Adela firmly.

Rachel had one terrible dream about the Jungle and woke up shivering. It was something to do with a dead body, a girl’s arm coming out from under the bushes. She tried to put the Jungle out of her mind; she never thought of it, but a few nights afterwards she was back there again, this time with some shadowy person always a little behind her who turned out to be Elise. When they came to the bush which in the first dream had covered the arm she was trying to tell Elise about it, to make sure it had been a dream, then stopped, because she knew she had committed that murder herself. She wanted to run away, but Elise came up beside her and took her arm with a great deal of affection. Rachel woke up in a gush of feeling, one of those obstinate dream-taps that won’t be turned off, that swamp one’s whole morning, sometimes one’s day. She found a letter from Elise on the breakfast-table.

Elise wrote a terrible letter, full of horses and brothers. So much that might have been felt about the New Forest did not seem to have occurred to her. Rachel was more than discouraged, she felt blank about next term. It was impossible to have a feeling for anyone who did so much and thought nothing. She slipped the letter under her plate and didn’t intend to answer it, but later on she went upstairs and wrote Elise a letter about tennis parties. ‘There has been talk,’ she wrote, ‘of my going to boy and girl dances, but I do not feel keen on them yet.’

‘Who is your great friend now?’ asked Mother, who had come in and found her writing. She put on an anxious expression whenever she spoke like this, because Rachel was a Growing Daughter.

‘Oh, no one,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m just dashing off something to one of the girls.’

‘There was Charity. What about Charity? Don’t you ever write to her now?’

‘Oh, I like her all right,’ said Rachel, who had a strong sense of propriety in these matters. ‘I just think she’s a bit affected.’ While she spoke she was wondering whether Elise would get her remove or not. Rachel was going up into IVA. It would be impossible to know anybody two forms below.

Next term, when they all came back, she found Elise had arrived in IVB (one supposed on the strength of her French), but she was being tried for the Gym Eight and spent most of her spare time practising for it. Rachel looked in at the Gym door once or twice and saw her doing things on the apparatus. When she wasn’t doing things on the apparatus Elise went about with the same rather dull girl, Joyce Fellows, she’d been going about with last term. They sat together and walked together and wrestled in the boot-room on Saturday afternoons. Whenever Rachel saw Elise looking at her or coming towards her she would look in the other direction or walk away. She realized how the holidays had been drained away by imagination, she had scarcely lived them; they had been wasted. She had a useless, hopeless dull feeling and believed herself to be homesick. By the end of the first fortnight of term she and Elise had scarcely spoken. She had not been back again to the Jungle, of whose very existence she somehow felt ashamed.

One Sunday, between breakfast and chapel, they brushed against each other going out through a door.

‘Hullo!’ said Elise.

‘Oh – hullo!’

‘Coming out?’

‘Oh – right-o,’ said Rachel, indifferent.

‘Anywhere special? I know of a tree with three apples they’ve forgotten to pick. We might go round that way and just see —’

‘Yes, we might,’ agreed Rachel. They went arm in arm.

It was early October, the day smelt of potting-sheds and scaly wet tree-trunks. They had woken to find a mist like a sea round the house; now that was being drawn up and the sun came wavering through it. The white garden-gate was pale gold and the leaves of the hedges twinkled. The mist was still clinging in sticky shreds, cobwebs, to the box-hedges, the yellow leaves on the espaliers, the lolling staggering clumps of Michaelmas daisies; like shreds of rag, Rachel thought, clinging to brambles.

Elise’s apple tree was half way down the kitchen-garden. They looked up: one of the apples was missing. Either it had fallen or some interfering idiot had succeeded in getting it down with a stone. The two others, beautifully bronze, nestled snugly into a clump of leaves about eight feet up. The girls looked round; the kitchen-garden was empty.

‘One could chuck things at them,’ said Rachel, ‘if one didn’t make too much row.’

‘I bet I could swing myself up,’ said Elise confidently. She stepped back, took a short run; jumped and gripped a branch overhead. She began to swing with her legs together, kicking the air with her toes. Every times she went higher; soon she would get her legs over that other branch, sit there, scramble up into standing position and be able to reach the apples.

‘How gymnastic we are!’ said Rachel with the sarcastic admiration which was de rigueur. Elise half-laughed, she hadn’t a breath to spare. She stuck out her underlip, measured the branch with her eye. Her Sunday frock flew back in a wisp from her waist; she wore tight black stockinette bloomers.

‘– Elise’ shrieked a voice from the gate. ‘Rachel Ritchie! Leave that tree alone – what are you doing?’

‘Nothing, Miss Smyke,’ shouted Rachel, aggrieved.

‘Well, don’t,’ said the voice, mollified. ‘And don’t potter! Chapel’s in forty minutes – don’t get your feet wet.’

Elise had stopped swinging, she hung rigid a moment, then dropped with bent knees apart. ‘Damn!’ she said naturally. Rachel said ‘dash’ herself, sometimes ‘confound’. She knew people who said ‘confound’ quite often, but she had never had a friend of her own who said ‘Damn’ before. ‘Don’t be profane,’ she said, laughing excitedly.

Elise stood ruefully brushing the moss from her hands ‘Damn’s not profane,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s nothing to do with God.’ She took Rachel’s arm again, they strolled towards the end of the kitchen-garden. ‘Are you getting confirmed next term?’

‘I think I am. Are you?’

‘I suppose I am. Religion’s very much in our family, you see. We were Huguenots.’

‘Oh, I always wondered. Is that why you’re called —

‘– Elise? Yes, it’s in our family. Don’t you like it?’

‘Oh, I like it … But I don’t think it suits you. It’s such a silky delicate kind of a girlish name. You, you’re too —’ She broke off; there were people you couldn’t talk to about themselves without a confused, excited, rather flustered feeling. Some personalities felt so much more personal. ‘You ought to have some rather quick hard name. Jean or Pamela … or perhaps Margaret – not Marguerite.’

Elise was not listening. ‘I ought to have been a boy,’ she said in a matter-of-fact, convinced voice. She rolled a sleeve back. ‘Feel my muscle! Watch it – look!’

‘I say, Elise. I know of a rather queer place. It’s near here, I discovered it. I call it the Jungle, just to distinguish it from other places. I don’t mean it’s a bit exciting or anything,’ she said rapidly, ‘it’s probably rather dirty; tramps come there. But it is rather what I used to call “secret”.’ She was kicking a potato down the path before her, and she laughed as she spoke. Lately she had avoided the word ‘secret’. Once, at the end of a visit, she had shown a friend called Charity a ‘secret place’ in their garden at home, and Charity had laughed to the others about it when they were all back at school.

‘Which way?’

‘Over the wall – you don’t mind getting your legs stung?’

The nettles and docks were rank-smelling and heavy with dew. One was hampered by Sunday clothes; they tucked their skirts inside their bloomers and waded through. ‘It’s a good thing,’ said Rachel, ‘we’ve got black stockings that don’t show the wet. Brown are the limit, people can see a high-water mark.’ The wet grass in Mr Morden’s paddock squashed and twanged, it clung like wet snakes as they ran, cutting their ankles. She pulled up panting in the lane below. ‘Sure you’re keen?’ said Rachel. ‘There may be blackberries.’

When they came to the Jungle she pushed in ahead of Elise, parting the brambles recklessly. She didn’t mind now if she did find a dead cat: it would be almost a relief. She didn’t look round to see what Elise was doing or seemed to be thinking. They were down in a hollow, it was mistier here and an early morning silence remained. A robin darted out of a bush ahead of her. It was an even better place than she had remembered; she wished she had come here alone. It was silly to mix up people and thoughts. Here was the place where the dead girl’s arm, blue-white, had come out from under the bushes. Here was the place where Elise, in the later dream, had come up and touched her so queerly. Here were the rags of her first visit still clinging, blacker and limper … the same boot —

‘Like a nice boot?’ she said facetiously.

Elise came up behind her, noisily kicking at one of the tins. ‘This is an awfully good place,’ she said. ‘Wish I’d found it.’

‘It isn’t half bad,’ said Rachel, looking about her casually.

‘Do you like this sort of thing – coming here?’

‘I bring a book,’ said Rachel defensively.

‘Oh, that would spoil it. I should come here and make camp fires. I should like to come here and go to sleep. Let’s come here together one Saturday and do both.’

‘I think sleeping’s dull,’ said Rachel surprised.

‘I love it,’ exclaimed Elise, hugging herself luxuriously. ‘I can go to sleep like a dog. If wet wouldn’t show too much on the back of my dress I’d lie down and go to sleep here now.’

‘My dear – how extraordinary!’

‘Is it?’ said Elise, indifferent. ‘Then I suppose I’m an extraordinary person.’ She had stopped in front of a bush; there were a few blackberries, not very good ones; just like a compact, thick boy in her black tights she was sprawling over the great pouffe of brambles, standing on one foot, balancing herself with the other, reaching out in all directions. But for that way she had of sometimes looking towards one, blank with an inside thoughtfulness, one couldn’t believe she had a life of her own apart from her arms and legs. Rachel angrily doubted it; she crouched beside the bush and began eating ripe and unripe blackberries indiscriminately and quickly. ‘I am a very ordinary person,’ she said aggressively, to see what would come of it. She wondered if Elise had a notion what she was really like.

‘No, you’re not,’ said Elise, ‘you’re probably clever. How old are you?’

‘I was fifteen in August. How old —’

‘I shall be fifteen in March. Still, it’s awful to think you’re a whole form cleverer than I am.’

‘I’m not clever,’ said Rachel quickly.

Elise laughed. ‘One queer thing,’ she said, ‘about being clever is that clever people are ashamed of it … Look what worms some of these brains here are – I say, if I eat any more of them I shall be sick. They’re not a bit nice really, they’re all seed, but I never can help eating things, can you?’

‘Never,’ said Rachel. ‘At home I often used to eat three helpings – I mean of things like éclairs or pheasant or treacle tart – our cook makes it awfully well. I don’t now that I have started staying up to late dinner. That makes an awful difference to what one eats in a day, helpings apart.’

‘I’d never eat three helpings because of my muscles. I mean to keep awfully strong, not get flabby like women do. I know all the things men don’t eat when they’re in training. Do you?’

‘No. Do you stay up to late dinner?’

‘We don’t have late dinner,’ said Elise scornfully. ‘We have supper and I’ve stayed up to that ever since I was eight.’

Elise’s people must be very eccentric.

They were seen coming breathless across the garden twenty minutes late for chapel and found Miss Smyke at the door with a flaming sword. ‘What did I say?’ asked Miss Smyke, rhetorical. ‘What did I tell you? It’s no use going into chapel now,’ she said spitefully (as though they would want to). ‘They’re at the Te Deum. Go up and change your stockings and stay in your dormitories till you’re sent for.’ She turned and went back into chapel, looking satisfied and religious.

Being punished together was intimate; they felt welded. They were punished more severely than usual because of Elise, who had a certain way with her under-lip … She had a way with her head, too, that reminded Rachel of a defiant heroic person about to be shot. It didn’t come out, mercifully, that they had broken bounds; the Jungle remained unmenaced. They were ordered apart for the rest of the day (which sealed them as ‘great friends’) and Rachel, usually humiliated by punishment, went about feeling clever and daring. On Monday evening she kept a place beside her for Elise at supper, but after some time saw Elise come in arm in arm with Joyce Fellows and sit down at another table. She looked away. After supper Elise said, ‘I say, why didn’t you come? Joyce and I were keeping a place for you.’

Term went on, and it was all rather difficult and interesting. Rachel was a snob; she liked her friends to be rather distinguished, she didn’t like being ‘ordered about’ by a girl in a lower form. That was what it amounted to; Elise never took much trouble about one, her down-right manner was peremptory: when she said, ‘Let’s —’ it meant (and sounded like), ‘You can if you like: I’m going to.’ Whenever they did things together it ended in trouble; Rachel began to wish Elise wouldn’t stick out her lip at people like Casabianca and look down her nose. Mistresses spoke scornfully about ‘Going about with the younger ones’. They never asked her to ‘influence’ Elise, which showed that they knew. IVB seemed a long way down the school, yet Elise would swagger ahead of one along passages and throw back, without even looking: ‘Buck up: do come on!’ Then there was Joyce Fellows; a silly, blank-faced, rather unhappy ‘entourage’.

One evening in prep Charity did a drawing on a page of her notebook, tore it out and passed it across to Rachel. It was called ‘Jacob (Rachel’s Rajah)’, and was a picture of Elise in trousers hanging upside down from a beam in the gym roof and saying, in a balloon from her mouth, ‘Buck up, come here, I’m waiting.’ Rachel couldn’t climb ropes and hadn’t a good head when she did get to the top of things, so this was unkind. The name was stupid but the drawing was rather clever. Rachel showed it to Elise at supper and Elise turned scarlet and said, ‘What a darned silly fool!’ She hadn’t much sense of humour about herself.

The next evening there was a drawing of a figure like two tennis balls lying on Charity’s desk. (Charity’s figure was beginning to develop feminine curves at an alarming rate.) Charity looked, laughed and picked the drawing up with the very tips of her finger and thumb. ‘Of course I don’t mind this,’ she said, ‘but I suppose you know your beastly little common friend has no business in our form-room?’

Rachel’s cheeks burnt. It wouldn’t have mattered a bit if the drawing had been clever, but Elise couldn’t draw for toffee: it was just silly and vulgar. ‘I don’t know why you should think it was you,’ she said, ‘but if the cap fits —’

Later she rounded on Elise. ‘If you did want to score off Charity you might have invented a cleverer way.’

‘I don’t pretend to be clever,’ said Elise.

‘I’d never have shown you the Jacob one if I’d thought you were going to be such a silly serious ass,’ stormed Rachel.

Elise stared with her wide-open pale grey eyes that had, this moment, something alert behind them that wasn’t her brain. ‘You knew that wouldn’t be my idea of a funny joke,’ she said, ‘didn’t you?’

Rachel hesitated. Elise, with tight lips, made a scornful little laughing sound in her nose.

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Rachel, ‘I didn’t think it mattered showing you what all my friends in my form think. You know you have got into a fearfully bossy way with everybody.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Elise. ‘I don’t s’pose you do either. What do you mean by “everybody”? I never take any notice of anybody unless I happen to like them, and if they think I’m bossy I can’t help it. It’s not me who’s bossy, but other people who are sloppy?’

‘Do you think I’m sloppy?’

‘Yes, you are rather sloppy sometimes.’

It was at supper, a dreadful place to begin a conversation of this sort. Rachel and Elise had to remain side by side, staring at the plates of the girls opposite, biting off and slowly masticating large mouthfuls of bread-and-jam. Then Rachel half-choked over a mouthful, turned away quickly and flung herself into the conversation of two girls on the other side. They all three talked ‘shop’ about algebra prep. Elise just sat on there, perfectly natural and disconcertingly close. When Rachel peeped round she did not notice. She sat badly, as always, her head hunched forward between her shoulders, and Rachel knew her lip was out and had a feeling that she was smiling. When grace was over they pushed back their chairs and bolted out in different directions. Out in the hall everybody was crowding up to the noticeboard. Rachel turned away and went into the classroom and sat at her desk. When the others had gone she came out and looked at the notice-board. The lists for the next match were up and Elise was in the Lacrosse Eleven.

The last Sunday but one, in the afternoon, Rachel went back to the Jungle. It was December, goldenly fine; the trees were pink in the afternoon light, rooks circled, grass was crisp in the shadows from last night’s frost. She had started out in an overcoat with a muffler up to her nose and rabbit-skin gloves, but soon she untwisted the muffler and stuffed the gloves into her pocket. The lovely thin air seemed to have turned warmer; her breath went lightly and clearly away through it. The wall, the hedge, the gate of the paddock gave her a bruised feeling.

She stumbled across the paddock, tripping up on the long ends of her muffler, with her unbuttoned overcoat flapping against her legs. ‘It will be a good end to this kind of a term,’ she thought. ‘If Mr Morden catches me.’

It really hadn’t been much of a term. She hadn’t worked, she hadn’t been a success at anything, she hadn’t made anyone like her. The others in IVA had been nice to her since she ‘came back’, but they forgot her unintentionally; they had got into the way of doing things together in twos and threes since the beginning of term and she got left out – naturally. She felt lonely, aimless, absolutely inferior; she tried a lot of new ways of doing her hair, designed a black velvet dress for herself and looked forward to going home. She brought names, Charity’s and the other girls’, rather unnaturally into her letters so that Mother shouldn’t suspect she was being a failure. She felt so sick for Elise that she prayed to be hit by a ball on the head every time she went out to Lacrosse.

Elise had the most wonderfully natural way of not seeing one. She said ‘Sorry’ when she bumped into one in the passage, shared a hymn-book in chapel when they found themselves side by side, and when she caught up and passed one going out to the playing-field side-glanced indifferently as though one were one of the seniors. She had got her colours after her third match; no one under fifteen had ever got their colours before. All the important people were taking her up and talking about her. IVA agreed that they would not have minded, they’d have been glad, if she’d only been humble and nice to begin with and not such an absolutely complacent pig. They never talked about her in front of Rachel and Rachel never mentioned her.

Down in the lane there were deep ruts; she walked between them on crumbling ridges. A dog was barking somewhere at Mr Morden’s, snapping bits out of the silence, then letting it heal again. The bank to the Jungle was worn slippery; Rachel pulled herself up it from root to root. The Jungle was in shadow; the grass had fallen like uncombed hair into tufts and was lightly frosted. ‘It’s nice to come back,’ said Rachel. ‘I never was really here that last time, it’s awfully nice to come back.’ She bent down, parting the brambles; the leaves were purple and blackish; some rotting brown leaves drifted off at her touch.

Coming out from the brambles, an arm was stretched over the path. ‘Not, O God, in this lonely place,’ said Rachel – ‘let there not be a body!’

She was shaken by something regularly, put up a hand to her heart with the conscious theatrical movement of extreme fear and found it thumping. The hand lay a yard ahead of her – she could have taken three steps forward and stepped on it – the thumb bent, the red, square-tipped fingers curling on to the palm.

‘Elise, is this you?’ whispered Rachel. She waited, plucking leaves from the bramble, hearing the dog bark, then went round to where Elise was lying in a valley between the brambles.

Elise lay half on her side, leaning towards the arm that was flung out. Her knees were drawn up, her other arm flung back under her head which rested, cheek down, on a pile of dead leaves as on a pillow and was wrapped up in a muffler. The muffler was slipping away from her face like a cowl. Down in the sheltered air between the bushes she was flushed by sleep and by the warmth of the muffler. She was Elise, but quenched, wiped-away, different; her mouth – generally pressed out straight in a grudging smile – slackened into a pout; thick short lashes Rachel had never noticed spread out on her cheeks. Rachel had never looked full at her without having to pass like a guard her direct look; her face now seemed defenceless. Rachel stood looking down – the only beautiful thing about Elise was the cleft in her chin. She stood till her legs ached, then shifted her balance. A twig cracked; Elise opened her eyes and looked up.

‘I told you I’d come here and sleep,’ she said.

‘Yes – isn’t it fearfully cold?’

Elise poked up her head, looked round and lay back again, stretching luxuriously. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I feel stuffyish. Have you just come?’

‘Yes. I’m going away again.’

‘Don’t go.’ Elise curled up her legs to make room in the valley. ‘Sit down.’

Rachel sat down.

‘Funny thing your just coming here. Have you come much?’

‘No,’ said Rachel, staring into the brambles intently as though she were watching something that had a lair inside them moving about.

‘I brought Joyce Fellows once; we came in here to smoke cigars. I hate smoking – Joyce was as sick as a cat.’

‘How beastly!’

‘Oh, I don’t suppose there’s anything left now, we covered it up. Anyhow, I shall never smoke much. It’s so bad for the wind.’

‘Oh, by the way,’ said Rachel, ‘congratulations about your colours.’

Elise, her hands clasped under her head, had been lying looking at the sky. ‘Thanks so much,’ she said, now looking at Rachel.

‘Aren’t we mad,’ said Rachel uneasily, ‘doing this in December?’

‘Why shouldn’t we if we’re warm enough? Rachel, why shouldn’t we? – Answer.’

‘It’ll be dark soon.’

‘Oh, dark in your eye!’ said Elise, ‘there’s plenty of time … I say, Rachel, I tell you a thing we might do —’

Rachel wound herself up in her muffler by way of a protest. She had a funny feeling, a dancing-about of the thoughts; she would do anything, anything. ‘’Pends what,’ she said guardedly.

‘You could turn round and round till you’re really comfy, then I could turn round and put my head on your knee, then I could go to sleep again …’

The round cropped head like a boy’s was resting on Rachel’s knees. She felt all constrained and queer; comfort was out of the question. Elise laughed once or twice, drew her knees up higher, slipped a hand under her cheek where the frieze of the overcoat tickled it.

‘All right?’ said Rachel, leaning over her.

‘Mm – mmm.’

The dog had stopped barking, the Jungle, settling down into silence, contracted a little round them, then stretched to a great deep ring of unrealness and loneliness. It was as if they were alone on a ship, drifting out …

‘Elise,’ whispered Rachel, ‘do you think we —’

But the head on her knees had grown heavy. Elise was asleep.