A Snake in the Mouth

One of the naive assumptions behind single-sex schooling is that separating pupils along the gender binary removes the ‘problem’ of sexuality. At least, that’s how it was when I was a pupil at a small, rural all-girls’ school in the late 90s and early 2000s. It’s also the case at the school in which K Patrick’s 2023 debut Mrs. S is set. The novel tells the story of a queer age-gap relationship between two members of staff at an all-girls’ boarding school, and though the time period is not specified it feels like the past, like the way British education felt under the oppressiveness of Section 28. One of the most devastating moments of homophobia in the novel is one of the quietest, and it’s when the eponymous character reveals that she, too, makes that naive assumption. Mrs S assumes that the same-sex environment enables girls to become the best versions of themselves—“unless,” as the narrator points out, “that version is a lesbian.”¹

But there’s plenty of build up before we get to this point. This is a story about desire, and the way we invent its objects, even when we’re in their presence. The narrator is a 22-year-old Australian butch lesbian, working as Matron in a boarding school made famous by its association with an unnamed “dead author”. Other characters, from the Housemistress to The Girls, are named only in terms of their role in the school—apart from Mr S, the headmaster, and Mrs S, his spectacular wife. She’s gorgeous and magnificent, a paragon of authoritative and confident femininity, the stuff of so many queer and questioning women’s fantasies. Gillian Anderson in a really nice cashmere jumper is the model for the character, as Patrick playfully confesses in an interview on Literary Friction.²

I listened to the interview before I read the book, so I wasn’t expecting the story to be quite such a slow burn. Patrick says they set out to write a “horny lesbian novel”, and that they began the process by writing the first sex scene, set in a church. However, for the reader, there are around 190 pages of slow and sweaty yearning to get through before we actually reach it. The strange and stifling atmosphere of the school during a heat wave is reflected in prose that’s simultaneously explicit and evasive, and a glance through the Goodreads reviews confirms that it’s a divisive style. Joanna Briscoe’s review in The Guardian suggests that it might be more suited to a shorter form, and I wondered this myself once or twice while reading.

But by the end I found I was totally convinced by Patrick’s decisions about pace. Mrs. S isn’t just a story of a lesbian affair, after all, of hot sex in churches during summer thunderstorms. Patrick takes the time to depict, also, the gradual development of a friendship between the narrator and the Housemistress, another masc-presenting lesbian. There’s admiration and warmth between them without sexual attraction. They appreciate each other’s style, and tacitly acknowledge the language of each other’s bodies, in a world that’s angry at being ‘fooled’ by them, and wants to police them. For all that this novel is clearly set a few decades back, these are pressing contemporary concerns. Patrick’s pacing gives space to show the constant observations, both erotic and anxious, that form a substantial part of queer experience, the attempt to ascertain others’ sexualities but also their potentially dangerous prejudices.

While the relationship between the narrator and Mrs S takes place in the isolated, privileged, particular world of the boarding school, the friendship with the Housemistress and the experience of lesbian identity is concerned with the world outside, and the threats it contains. Early on, in the local pub, the narrator is misgendered and flirted with by a drunk woman who is shocked and apologetic when she hears the narrator’s voice and realises her mistake.³ Later on, in the same pub but this time with the Housemistress, the presence of homophobia is more explicit and widespread among the patrons. This paves the way for a menacing scene in a taxi to a gay bar in the next town. Patrick depicts precisely the fear and powerlessness any queer person might experience having been clocked by someone who isn’t necessarily safe to be around; they overlay this with the complex and dangerous gender dynamics between a man and two masculine lesbians. The driver waits after dropping off the narrator and the Housemistress: “All he wants, I feel him reasoning through the car window, is to understand.”⁴ He wants to see where they’re going, but the Housemistress knows that they have to wait till he leaves them alone.

We don’t find out how the Housemistress acquired this instinct. Patrick doesn’t portray any hate crimes in this novel. But the chilling sense of threat is maintained throughout and contrasted effectively with the experience of Mrs S, a character blissfully cushioned from homophobia by her heterosexual marriage and isolated, privileged world. In her life, the only danger is apparently from the thorns of the roses she cultivates with an odd combination of determination and indifference. From her position of power and safety she’s able to reciprocate the narrator’s desire, and when the sex scenes finally arrive, they’re worth the wait. They’re beautifully written, necessarily detailed, expressive of freedom and release, full of honesty and passion. In this way, they reminded me of The Safekeep, which I found similarly well-written in its erotic tension. Patrick isn’t afraid to present lesbian sex in joyful detail, depicting the nuance and complexity of the dildos the protagonist uses, and the shifting sexual roles that mark the freedom, fluidity, and transformative power of a queer relationship.

The detail is deliberate, and considered, as Patrick explains:

as a queer writer it feels like you’re bumping up against this limit of language, and in sex writing it feels like a real opportunity to move past that … writing about it gives you a chance to learn something new about language.⁵

This is such an exciting and optimistic perspective, and an invitation to other queer writers to feel the limits of language as an invitation for creativity, not a restriction, or a rejection. Patrick takes this invitation seriously, not just in the choreography of the sex scenes but in the specific use of the language of female homosexuality. In my all-girls’ school the word ‘lesbian’ was a vicious insult; Patrick’s narrator is “[f]orever in love with the word. Lesbian. The slow sexuality of it, a snake in the mouth.”⁶

It is a lovely word. It can also feel like a commitment, one that Mrs S doesn’t want to make. The first time the narrator says it to her, she knows it’ll be significant, that it’ll take some bravery. “This word, lesbian, finally between us. Its bruising success.”⁷ Still, Mrs S hesitates to say it, but the narrator waits for her to do so, refusing to make the conversation too easy. Mrs S tells the story of her first lesbian experience—“you’re not my first”, she says to the narrator, perhaps in an attempt to wrest back some power—but she’s still several steps behind. There is so much she doesn’t understand.

This is actually quite sad, and it’s depicted compassionately by Patrick, without judgement. Mrs S has formed her whole character around the idea that she’s empathetic, understanding, and, through this, in possession of a lot of power within the school. But once her sexual relationship with the narrator has begun, her limitations are gradually, sensitively exposed. She has a simplistic grasp of the narrator’s preference for wearing a binder, thinking it’s about being “more like a man”⁸—it’s the first time in the book I was disappointed with her, the first time the erotic mystique began to break down and reveal a woman who has shrunk herself down in order to perform total heterosexuality, with all its “cosy violence”.⁹

The second time I felt this mystique breaking down was when the narrator tells Mrs S she’s caught two girls kissing. She hopes Mrs S will perhaps laugh kindly about it, find it sweet and romantic, but instead we discover that she holds that homophobic assumption I mentioned at the beginning of this post. I found this reaction devastating and disappointing and so sad—sad for all of them. And I also admired the plotting, here, the climactic moment of quiet betrayal that’s foreshadowed adeptly by depicting Mrs S as a woman limited by ego, by her own insistence that she understands, when she in fact does not.

I recalled a moving interview¹⁰ with Cynthia Erivo, in which she talks about her decision to come out publicly as queer:

I just wanted more space in my brain, in my body, in my mind, and the only way you can do that is if you stop hiding parts of yourself that actually aid who you are as a creative being, and I felt like keeping that under a lid and not sharing it was taking up so much energy.

Women like Mrs S, who are unable or unwilling to make the simple fact of their queerness a part of their public-facing identity, may never know what kind of energy and freedom they are denying themselves. I finished the novel hoping the narrator would leave the school with renewed courage and capacity, and eventually find a fellow lesbian to love who isn't afraid of the word, isn't afraid to hold that snake in her mouth. But I was sad to leave Mrs S to her cashmere and gold, her limited empathy, her authority in a small and shrinking world. I wish she, and women like her, could find the courage to be truly seen.