Cotter's England

by Christina Stead

  "You haven't my courage but you can lean on me. I'm your friend, your true friend. I know now that you never had a friend. I am going through everything with you, all the bitterness, the black path of ashes, where the air's unbreathable and you're suffocating—"

  Where would it end? The air was becoming unbreathable, filling with the smoke of Nellie's endless cigarettes; ash lay on the bed and pillows, it fell on Caroline's face and hair. Caroline brushed it away, Nellie leaning closer to brush her hair, dropped more ash. Once Nellie hung over the bed, her turnip head down to the floor, while she choked in spasms. But the night wore through and Nellie was wrestling still with her; for everything she said came back to the one thing, to face her loneliness bravely, not seeking pitiable expedients, to listen to the words from a true tongue, not the despicable lies and sensual fantasies of vain, depraved inconstant men, "the shameful expedient, a man's plaything. They made the world; and you believe in them? A woman knows what is in your heart and is your true sister and friend. With them is death, with me your friend is understanding at last, release, a bright morning, the first bright morning of your life." And gradually it began to come out, the story of Venna and the satanic world she had seen. "I'll tell you all—you must know everything."

  When morning came, Nellie lay on her back on the bed smoking and listening to the first birds. Caroline lay face downwards with her arms under her, all about her her loose long hair.

  "Are you asleep?" enquired Nellie at length.

  After a time, Caroline muttered, "Yes, I will die. You are right. That's the thing. You've torn the world away from me. There's nothing else."

  Nellie was incapable of saying anything, her face shining with the light of a planet. She asked in an intense low tone, controlling her excitement, "Will you die for me, Caroline? Because you understand death through me? It would be a great triumph. It would set me on my path. Your life would go along with me in me. Have you a great passion for me, Caroline? Will you do what I say? What I need is the confidence your beautiful sacrifice would give me. Then I would be the thing I am meant to be, the great leader—some saw in me. When I was a child, they saw it in me. My brother believed in me then; he knew he had nothing and I had the power. But he wandered away from me, inconstant and incredulous. But you believe. If you made the sacrifice I would look straight in the face of my destiny. Sacrifice, the blood of one dear and devoted—"

  Caroline turned on her side away from her friend and looked outwards into the room without any thought in her face. Nellie, short of complete victory, became restless. She changed her clothes, made breakfast and brought it in. Caroline pushed it away. Nellie looked at her, left her to herself except occasionally to ask her questions in a low tone as if to a sleeper.

  Caroline said suddenly, "I must go to work. I'm not going to let them down."

  "But you're sick, you're feverish."

  "You didn't care about that."

  "Eh, love! I'll be your slave. Well, go then, but come home here. But you'll come then, Caroline," she said with a sudden pang. "You'll surely not run into the traps and ambushes again."

  "Yes, all places are the same: why not here?"

  Nellie kept murmuring anxiously and watching her; and in the end they both went off to work at the same time. Caroline had a pale glaring face, but there were many pale skinny anxious staring faces in the city going to work; and the same sort of faces sprinkled among those waiting on the benches in the outer room of the housing office. And all day, when she could hardly read or write, she heard their terrible stories, "two children, my husband and I in one room, and one child tubercular, I make two tents out of sheets to close in the children's cots"; she listened, with bent and burning head and it was just as if she saw these things for the first time.

  "In a way Nellie is right; it's what I'm going through myself for the first time—if I'm to live to sixty, seventy and only then find out something for the first time, mistaken all my life, ignorant—"

  When she got out of the office, Tom was there.

  "I couldn't believe it when my sister said you had gone to work. I'm taking you straight home. I just got back. When I heard I drove here."

  "I promised Nellie not to see you again. But I must get home somehow."

  He said nothing.

  "I must get home, I must get into bed."

  "I must take care of you."

  "That's what Nellie says. I think it's a put-up job between you. I've always suspected it. You work hand in hand."

  He listened in silence to her ramblings, and at last said, "None of this is true and I ought not to leave you there; but I'm stumped. I can't take you to Blackstone now."

  "I won't let you hurt me again. I won't suffer any more. I don't believe in you or in her or in anyone. Are there just vultures and ravens?"

  Nellie had made an excuse and come home early. When she saw them she was speechless with rage and would not look at Tom, took the girl upstairs herself.

  "I'll be back to have a talk with you, Nellie," said Tom.

  But when Nellie got the girl upstairs, she flung herself into her arms and burst into a loud sobbing, "It's too much for me, Caroline. I do me best. I wish I could go with you, make a death pact and out. But there's something burning in me won't let me. And I haven't the strength for what the flame tells me to do."

  Presently she became calmer and told Caroline her troubles at work; and she went on denouncing and fighting against other, darker, unnamed beings who hated her, friends who had turned against her.

  "Oh, I thank my stars that I have found you."

  Caroline sat listening and shivering.

  "I need you, Caroline, above all: now that I have found you; now that I can give you what I need to give, a pure and lovely thing."

  Caroline, fully dressed, rolled on to the bed and seemed to be asleep.

  Nellie who had no notions of sick-nursing, went out and left her there, for she had heard Eliza come in from work. They made a pot of tea and sat long over it; and Nellie quieter now, murmured about her troubles to Eliza. There was a conspiracy at the office to get rid of her. The doctor had come round again and after a short examination, said she must try to get to the country.

  "I kept me peace, for I respect the unselfish souls who give up their lives to the sick but I know the thought had been put in his head by Robert Peebles, to pay me out because I wouldn't attend his classes on theory. I would not. It's against me principles."

  She spluttered, threw away her wet cigarette and started another and said quietly, "He says he thought I had an ulcer on me lung; but it's the asthma. It's just asthma. I told him me old Uncle was a martyr to it. And he said I was to watch it and not smoke or drink. But I don't know what color life would be without that? But, Eliza, if it's the asthma, why do I have this pain? There's a pain there, sometimes, like a knife. I think to myself, The old surgeon death is there cutting away at me without an anaesthetic. So I'm glad to know it's only the asthma. I can live to eighty with the asthma, eighty and more."

  Eliza wrote that night to George.

  Tom, later, sleepless, in his bedroom thought much about Caroline and about Nellie. He was very much touched by her appeal to his purity and chastity. He shed tears. He now for the first time saw that she had always wanted to protect his innocence, after she had ignorantly destroyed it, in the Jago time. She had appealed to him often enough, condemned him too; but he had never seen that she meant it, she honored him for his strangeness; and he thought that it showed how pure she was.

  Wasn't she deeply wounded, shocked by all the wantonness she saw? She campaigned against it, but he had thought it an eccentricity; now he saw she was a simple-hearted priestess. She believed she was protecting women. He had often wanted to believe that Nellie was good-hearted and honest; now it seemed she was. The rest was the braggadocio she so dearly loved: "the old man over again." Nellie had passions for a great many things. She could not consider a thing without passion, for and against; yet none of these things was her true p
assion. For instance, her passion about the working class; it was true in its way but she melted into it all kinds of incompatible ideas. Then he thought she was in danger of dying for, or going to jail for, or becoming a total ruin for things which had nothing to do with what she thought was socialism. To her it was all one: those who disagreed with her on any count at all in this sacred miscellany were her enemies and enemies of the working class. People understood her passion and weakness, and were patient with her: but she never knew that. She felt herself a conqueror: or if she failed, groaned at the bitter struggle.

  Tom had gone round with her on some assignments, sometimes to meetings. It was she who was the pitiful waif, the stray, the strange elf, all the things she saw in others. Nellie at a meeting of working women, for example, cut a grotesque figure. In a green peaked cap with cock's feathers, in boots lined with lamb's wool against the cold and hardness of the streets and stairs she had to tramp, a muffler round her starved and diseased throat, some old dress she felt easy in, her bodice loose either so that she could cough more easily or because she thought a tight figure bourgeois, something of the sort, her perpetual cigarette, her terrible stoop and lunging stride—there was not one woman there of the hard-pressed working sort, who looked anything like her or who understood her: and her weary old reporter's drawl, her perpetual outlandish chick, pet, sweetheart, and northern affectations, set her apart, a draggled peacock in a serious busy barnyard.

  Tom went around and watched the proceedings; the meetings interested him a little. He thought she was a good reporter; he admired her courage. Still he knew there was something wrong and that she would get into a smash-up some day, any day. She didn't know what she was doing; she admired everything she did. There was something missing in her; she lacked self-criticism. She was always talking about introspection by which she meant drool; and confession, by which she meant spinning interesting lies, or sifting out people's secrets. To her that was truth: that was what she meant by truth. She had a horror and suspicion of naked fact. It seemed to her it lacked humanity: she felt that someone selfish was extracting a profit from things when he talked about facts; that he was trying to blind you and lie to you.

  When Tom looked at her he felt his heart growing large and full of regret and lament. Poor Nellie, reckless, wrong-headed and long ago led astray. It was a very good thing, an unlooked for bit of luck that she had met and married George, so strong and whole. She was unprincipled, though she didn't know it; George was a rock. She was very slowly changing, though bad old habits combined with starvation, stimulants and disease and early old age, meant that she could not change much. She had met George in youth, but then the glamour of Pop Cotter had been too strong. If she had had a strong upstanding brother, thought Tom, a big chunk of brother, she would have retreated a little more and admired him, been more marriageable: as it was, she had to wait till Pop Cotter was half dead before the great light shining on her face and blinding her to other men waned. It was only then she could run after George enough to fascinate him. Poor Nellie! "If George leaves her there will be nobody but me!" thought Tom. He wasn't anxious to be left with her. He was a very poor man and would never, having Estelle to support, and sending money up home, see his way clear. He supposed he could marry a woman with money, but he was too independent for that. He was already a little cold to the idea of marrying Caroline. It did not mean much to him: and he did not want to hurt Nellie too much. He must look for a working girl.

  One Saturday morning when, having traveled on a night train, he came in for breakfast, Tom found that Nellie had invited a number of friends for a party for Caroline.

  "I've taken your advice, Tom: I thought some company and a drink might cheer her up. You had better go back to Blackstone tomorrow afternoon. I thought, chick, you might take poor Eliza to the station with you. She'll be here tomorrow and she's fond of you lad; she'd like to cheer you on your way and you can have the stirrup cup at Liverpool Street with her."

  "What do I want to take Eliza Cook to the station for?" he said with annoyance, for the stirrup cup was a custom of Nellie and himself.

  "Ah, well, you're safe with her, at any rate," said Nellie; screwing up her face and pretending to give herself away with a smirk.

  "If you'd stop conspiring, Nellie, you'd find that things would work out just the same: you always walk a hundred miles to get to the next corner."

  She smirked again at this tribute to her cleverness.

  "It's a pity, lad, you didn't walk a hundred miles or so to get home; for if you'd your job in Bridgehead, we both could stop worrying."

  "Yes, you fancy if I was there, I'd never get a chance to get a wife again," he said without bitterness; just for the pleasure of showing her he knew her. He continued, "As a matter of fact, I'm glad I'm away from you all, because I'm afraid you're going to lose your job any day now and I don't want me to be here. If George sees you ripe for the dole, he'll have to come and look after you. If I'm here, he'll pile the responsibility on Tom."

  "They can't get a better journalist than me, they can't do without me, darling. They've tried a whole row of petty-bourgeois intellectuals and hacks who are so far into the groove they're writing with mud and they know I'm a damned good newspaper woman."

  "O.K. Nellie: will you try to hang on at least till George finds you something over there? And whatever you think, I want you to go. They'll look after your health over there: they do. I'm not happy about you."

  She cried, "I'll make no promises, this side or that. I'll not compromise my honor. I've been speaking my idea all my life; I wouldn't go back now; that would give the lie to my life. My life's my pride. I told that to Robert Peebles: Fleet Street couldn't buy my principles with money or threats and he can't with cant. And neither can they—the socialist bureaucrats, a nationload of Robert Peebles. Man is free. That's what I'm for."

  Tom said, "Well, be careful for my sake."

  "Ah, bless you Tom; but even for you I wouldn't eat my words."

  "I wouldn't know what to think of you if you did. It wouldn't be Nellie."

  She kissed him, "Bless you! You believe in me. I'd be lost without you. There's only one like you. I don't know why when Nature found this pattern, she didn't keep on making them that way."

  His face turned pink. But now Nellie had no more time for talk. She was excited about the party. Women were coming. There were some women George had never allowed in the house. He was a very prejudiced man and all was black and white to him. She had a lot of messages for Tom to do before she was ready. He was to clean up the back yard. Eliza was coming to help today and tomorrow but not staying the night. She kept making sure that Tom was going early on Sunday evening: "I wouldn't have room for you, pet," she came out with. "You'll be nice and fresh for work on Monday morning."

  "And I won't be able to clink glasses with Caroline," said he laughing.

  She turned black at that and he did not make any more jokes. She got over it and came running back to him because she wanted him for a message.

  "You aren't losing anything here, Tom," she urged. "You'll be coming down to us every weekend. There's nothing to do in a place like that. But stay away two weekends while I'm away at the conference. I'll be looking for you, chick; three weeks from today."

  "Am I to stay in Blackstone two weekends?" said Tom in a burst of laughter.

  "But it'll keep you straight, Tom. We can have a grand old talk when I come back."

  "Well, I don't like to leave all my London women," he teased, "I don't think Blackstone women can be as good."

  She pursed up her face. He laughed.

  "Aye, lad, but there's too much bitter truth in it."

  He picked up a few things, then sat in the back yard quietly looking at the tree tops, house-backs, the back of the Cooks' little house. At the half moon there had been three or four beautiful days and they had had perfect weather since, cloudless skies except for the geometric clouds made by airmen: the night skies, fields of daisies, with the searchlights deepe
ning them, exploring upwards. There was an old tall yew tree not far away which stood up in the evenings, in sharp darkness. The little budding and flowering bushes in the neighboring yards were soft and light: the smells of earth, grass and flowers streamed through wall chinks and breaks. The time would be pleasant at Ilger's orchard: like other years. He began humming, reflecting and scribbling on an envelope. The country would be beautiful soon. It would not perhaps be so bad, except that a lonely country summer was painful and he always felt nervous about a new job: there were always problems and they had to be met in a haphazard way. He had conquered such things so far, but he always wondered about the next time. If he did not find company in Blackstone, he could go to King's Lynn on the weekends, or even Bury or Cambridge. He didn't know about spending all that money coming to London. He wanted to keep a little stock of money for family emergencies: he was the man of the family. He smiled. "Sir, I said, I'm Thomas Cotter—" The orotund old pub voice came to him, one single strain on the afternoon air. "Now you say, Sir, you don't need life insurance, but just let me tell you of a thing that happened this week. Now Sir, I was on the road to Berwick—" the simple flamboyant life streamed past him, on another track. There he sat, waiting for the next thing in his life, prepared not to be surprised at anything.

  Nellie hurried…

  NELLIE HURRIED about, telephoned. Nellie had various reasons why Mrs. McMahon could not come and Eliza had to go to friends. Camilla, she explained, was in a somber mood, depressed. Mrs. McMahon, bless her honest heart, could not be trusted nor asked not to mention to George, whom she adored, about the party.

  "How is Caroline?"

  She was in a very bad way.

  Tom went out and came back with four bottles of wine.

  "Stirrup cup," said he. "I'm going to split these with Eliza, Caroline and you: it's my contribution. It'll cheer me up on the train to be a bit dizzy."

  "I'm afraid you've got her wrong, pet: Caroline doesn't want to see you. She told me that."