Cotter's England

by Christina Stead

  He flushed, "I'm going to see she drinks farewell with me. She told me what was wrong with her was starvation. Every time she's had a fair wage you've argued her out of it. I owe her reparation. It's that adolescent idea of sacrifice, self immolation you have: you're a proselytizing masochist."

  "I'm afraid you can't shrug this one off, Tom. No, chick. This is one case you can't flatter yourself you're curing with an anecdote and a glass of Beaujolais. You can't cure an incurable malady with that technique. This time you've met your match who doesn't care for your formulas. You're struggling with the Angel of Death himself," said Nellie through her cigarette.

  "I wouldn't mention that name so lightly if I were you," said Tom; "he's the only deity we're sure exists: we know him by his works."

  "You can't mend broken hearts with a callous joke," said Nellie.

  Nellie ran about the garden picking up things, looking like a freebooter on a desert isle, rakish, raffish, uneasy, masterful, dissolute. At ten in the morning she had already crooked the elbow. When Eliza came, she walked straight through to the back, a little red hat on her round flushed face, and in a bursting summer suit. Nellie with one arm on her hip, waved to her and, tossing her head, stalked into the house.

  "How happy Nellie is, acting cock of the walk," said Tom.

  Eliza told him everything. Nell was so down about George's absence that she felt she had to give a party before she went off to the Labour Party conference. Nellie did not want George to know. George was such a nagging puritan about liquor and futi and so hard on the purse strings that Nellie couldn't have a real party with him in the house.

  "So I shall be king of the May," said Tom with a poky little smile.

  Eliza got up to go inside to help. She went to a rose bush that struggled through a mass of vine and picked a flower which she threw to him. He put it over his ear.

  "Now you are king of the May."

  "You'll see me wear it."

  His sister called Eliza. He picked a book out of his pocket and went on reading it. It was Belchamber by Howard O. Sturgis. He liked it. And the author did embroidery. That reminded him of Constantine Ilger. He knew life was not conventional and he liked any author who noticed it, too. Ilger was no Sturgis; but he had remarkable qualities which Marion had known how to uncover. And Marion had given him, Tom, courage and belief in himself.

  The guests began to come from their work. Some would not be free till the next day. They were all working women. Of them all, only Eliza and Nellie's friend Flo, from Bridgehead, were born in real poverty. There were one or two others he knew slightly whom he didn't like at all, Nellie's rough gang, women of forty or thereabouts, all hard workers, but too tough, even depraved and licentious, who lived like disorderly men. They gave Tom scarcely a glance. Nellie was gay, accommodating, even a little obsequious to some. Good-hearted Nellie! The mother of every stray cat. In her brave bohemian democracy she allowed no questions of morality. Tom dragged a canvas stretcher out of the shed and put it under the trees.

  The women sat round talking in the front room or helped themselves to things in the kitchen. They had all brought food and drink. Tom was not regretted, he saw, when he went out to the pub. There was a pub not far away; expensive, but it was worth it. The favorite drink there was gin in beer; and there were some really old fellows who came in regularly for it. Tom liked to see bent old men having some fun, getting a little unsteady. It always went to their heads; they got their money's worth. Tom sat on his bench with his beer and watched them for quite a time. When he re-entered the house, the women all looked as if he had broken in on a board meeting.

  "Have a good time," he said as he passed on his way to the kitchen.

  They stared at him without appreciation. Even Nellie said nothing and stared. He felt like Uncle Simon.

  "But I'm no Simon. Not even for Nell," said he to himself, seeing years ahead in a moment, George lost, Nell aging, the cynical, aging women.

  "So it will have to be Blackstone and I'll get a responsibility up there; and Nell will realize she can't be so scatter-brained."

  He got something to eat and went to the door of the front room to say to Nell that he was tired and going to bed on the stretcher in the bicycle shed. No one took any notice of him. He undressed in the bicycle shed and put on his overcoat to read a bit in the kitchen. When one of them came out, he retired for the night. He lay for a long time looking at the slightly veiled sky. It was the first night of full moon; there was a chip off it yet. The moon had a great significance for him, which he did not understand. He would be watching the third night of full moon from some Blackstone window or hummock. A new life. He had seen Blackstone in war days. In winter it was the worst place in England, leaving out Wales; black, wild, open land, low young forests, winds rushing across, the bitter east wind making them all "bluenoses."

  In spring and summer motoring through the brecklands and forest lands it looked perhaps the finest place in England, broad rolling lands, long forested valleys and tops. The eye roved over grasslands, rushlands, heaths, preserves. They rushed through his mind now, and the great cloud fields. And not far away, the North Sea breaking into and crumbling the cliffs. Black flashing storms, the lowings and bellowings of the old sanded forest, the whistling and hooning of nameless birds, the lonesome moons, the weird fifteen-foot stone dwellers of the Old Priory, soft grassy slopes on which lovers lay, the humblest of workers by day, ecstatics by night. There were mounds everywhere on the plain: no one knew what they meant. There were remains of a Roman Road, a barrow; rivers and marshes full of fish. You had to be careful motoring on account of the pheasants, quail, rabbits, sitting out in full view quite undisturbed or running through tufts.

  "I can be happy there, too, I am just an ordinary man. You can't be vain and arrogant there. It's like slipping into healing waters, pine-waters, cold and fleshy, rich-smelling, from which you come out feeling strong. The secret of joy is to be nobody."

  In spite of wondering about what little room he'd get, for the present one was unsatisfactory, and how he'd manage with his various responsibilities on the salary, whether he'd be able to live in another town, buy a bike, sell his car, he soon fell asleep and was glad of the fresh air on his skin. He did not hear anything all night.

  In the morning, Nellie was exhausted but devilishly gay, as the mood sometimes took her, and kept teasing him about his sleeping: a little anxiously perhaps.

  "Sleeping like the dead all night. We called you for some brandy, didn't you hear?"

  He hadn't heard and he didn't think he'd been called, either.

  The women got up at various times and lounged round the house in careless undress, except one, called by her surname of Hardcast, who wore a business suit all the time, and Caroline in a cream blouse and dark blue slacks. He stared at her: his jaw dropped.

  "Are you ill?"

  "I didn't sleep. I haven't slept for three whole nights. Yet I feel quite lively."

  "Oh, everyone sleeps without knowing it."

  "No, I couldn't."

  She looked it.

  Nellie darted sharp glances at them when they were talking, twisting her beak and tufted head all the time.

  "And did we keep you awake, pet?" she said to Caroline. "We stayed up a bit late carousing, I'm afraid, like a pack of adolescents, stealing a night out."

  "No, I didn't hear you," said Caroline distantly. Nellie looked at her anxiously.

  "That's like Nell," thought Tom; "so very tough in her own opinion: but as soon as anyone's cold to her, she can't take it."

  He was a little annoyed with Caroline, even in her illness, for being unfriendly to his sister. Nellie worried about her like a foolish mother. It was true she had cost her a few jobs: that was Nell's idea of what was right and wrong.

  Caroline had slept in the back attic, not much more than a box-room, with a low ceiling, a half-sized square-paned window looking out over the back yard. Nellie had drunk too much perhaps. She was in an overriding humor. She kept dashi
ng in and out, teasing. She was hard to take in such a mood.

  The girl did not want any lunch with them and went out to sit on the grass patch with Tom.

  "I've never felt so calm," she said. "I can't sleep and it's as if that's what I've been craving. I manage to get up to go to work. While I'm riding in the bus I look at the others and think, How will I get to be like them: have so little and keep going? Going up the street I feel like collapsing between each step. I see young men like me, too: workmen. They put a foot forward, the body doesn't follow in the ordinary way but it comes forward afterwards. I'm finished."

  "When you suffer, you think, I wish I could go back to that moment when it started, I would know how to choose. But what would you choose?"

  She didn't hear him. She went on playing with a blade of grass. Her cheeks were thin and glowing, the skin on her neck was drooping: there were gray hairs. Her eyes had fallen into hollows. She looked up and he once more looked through their transparent lenses into her mind. He felt her feebleness, nervous incoherence, himself gave up the ghost for her. At this moment, an idea he had about her slipped loose from him. They knew they were thinking of the same evil thing: he suspected her of depravity, she suspected him of being his sister's accomplice. She drew back and looked meanly, personally accusing.

  "Do you think someone has taken advantage of you?" Tom asked involuntarily.

  She shrank back farther and he could see that for her he was convicted. Her interpretation was that he and Nell, not to mention the others, had taken advantage of her loneliness, nervous collapse, for an abomination of their own. Shrunk like old age, she looked at him with contempt too.

  "What you think is not so!" said Tom.

  She turned her eyes away. Then she looked back and said, low, hurriedly, "I'm alone in the world and I've agreed to everything Nellie wants, and I've lost my sense of honor: she can't want any more than that, so I've given everything and what have I to give anyone else? She's taken everything from me. I've ruined myself."

  "Would it help you if I made her talk to you? I'll talk to her."

  "You must never mention it. Never. You will be the only one to understand. I'm getting old, I'm weak, I'm like the things at Stonehenge that frightened you. I am bad, lost. She wants it."

  She again gave him a dark look, indignant.

  "Not you, Caroline."

  "The others must do the work. I can't."

  The light wind played with her wasting hair. Tom went inside and said to Nellie that there was something very wrong with Caroline. Her depression and inanition were not normal.

  The women were sitting in the front room eating and drinking, smoking.

  "You talk her into bed, Tom, you're good at that," said Nellie.

  Tom was filling a glass, stopped with the bottle poised, looked at Nellie enquiringly.

  "But what does he do when he gets her there?" said their friend Flo, a short, handsome, plump woman with white arms.

  Tom picked up two glasses and a bottle.

  "Tom's the darling of the middle-aged women;" said Nellie: "he smiles shyly and deprecatingly and buys them bull's-eyes."

  "The only bull's-eyes they'll get from him," said one of the others.

  Flo sat easily, smiling at him: she liked him: but she was altogether under Nellie's thumb.

  Tom went out to Caroline. Nellie entered into a roistering mood. She came to the door and blackguarded him, ordering him to come in. He came in. Nellie then went to Caroline and very roughly ordered her to come in, too. She gave Nellie a strange look, but Nellie took no notice, picked up the things, came in cursing; what did she mean turning down all her guests? What was the new phase? She didn't like masochism. Was she superior to them all? She could drink with Tom? Then she could drink with them. She had been respecting Caroline's feelings and now she found out it was a ladylike pet. None of that here, it wouldn't go. Tom was shocked and acquiescent. He had never known Nellie like this: she was rough and ready as a tart. Was there a woman of that sort among the women? He eyed them. Nellie would do anything in her rough, bohemian democracy: she would never make herself out superior to other people. Once she had lived in a prostitutes' hotel. All the girls were prostitutes. She was very friendly with one.

  There was some rough joking going on to which he listened half-surprised, half-amused. He did not believe women could be really rough. "You can take a horse to water but you cannot make him drink," said Flo to Tom; it was a rough joke.

  "Don't take any notice of the hags," said Hardcast, the woman in the business suit, in a loud dry voice. It was the first time she had looked at him. Tom was eating, his wind-roughened lank red face bent over his plate. Hardcast always sat stiffly about with a long-distance look; never facing people, riding sidesaddle. She had black hair plastered down. She was head of a very big, city office. She was in a position to take bread from people's mouths. Some of the women there were her subordinates. Nellie had once been one of them.

  "Tom doesn't mind: he's used to our style of humor," said Flo. "I suffered enough from him and Nell when we were children. They'd always be running ahead, leaving me behind and throwing back smart cracks over their shoulders. They thought they ran Bridgehead in those days."

  "I never said anything unkind to you," protested Nellie shaking her topknot eagerly.

  "Everyone did. You gave me a sense of inferiority."

  "Didn't I work to get you out of Bridgehead?" cried Nellie indignantly; "you owe it to me!"

  "I came of myself," said Flo in an easy-going style. She was very untidy, but her chalk-blue angora sweater blazed round her beautiful arms and neck; her greasy black hair framed a fine white forehead. She was an attractive slut, uneasy when she washed. She had a good nose and missed the numerous familiar scents from her own body.

  "I have a lot of the dog in me," she always said; "I like to find my way about my own house by smell. I like to smell my own children. It's healthy and natural. I feel twice the woman. Besides, I'm not strong enough to keep things clean."

  Her skirt, slipping from her waist and without a fastening, gaped showing a white hip. She sat next to Tom who glanced at her flesh appreciatively and smiled at what she said. Then he began talking to the woman on his other hand, Binnie, a soft plump reddish woman about thirty-eight, dressed carelessly but in a city style, with tossed well-kept hair. She was a rover, had been all over Europe, visited every danger spot, had lovers there, probably gone there to pick up lovers. She was energetic, headed committees, made speeches, had a number of children, wrote books, spoke languages, met statesmen, gave parties, introduced one circle to another and showed no sign of it at present when she was like an effusive, garrulous, top-heavy girl.

  "Tell me how you do it," she said to Tom.

  "Do what?"

  "Make the women dance, what's the tune?"

  "I do nothing."

  "Is that it?"

  He laughed.

  "Perhaps that's it," she said lifting her voice with a slight domineering affected accent.

  "We know he does nothing," said Nellie who with sharp, jealous, glances followed every word of the conversation.

  "He flirts, that's enough," said Flo eating big dollops of pie. "He's the darndest flirt I ever met. The playboy of the Western World. Look at the footlights facet"

  "A glitter like a Woolworth ring," said Hardcast, looking out of the window.

  "Is that your mother's?" asked Binnie rudely of Hardcast, who wore a heavy gold wedding ring.

  "My grandmother's, my mother had it," said Hardcast: "my grandmother wanted her to go into a convent."

  "Better a mother than a mother superior," said Binnie.

  This coarse joke made the women nervous. Binnie began to talk about the health of her children with Tom.

  "Don't you ever miss children?" said one of the women teasing, to Tom.

  "I have a child," said Tom. "I had one when I was twenty-one years old."

  "A summer with but one rose," said the same woman.

  Tom
was angry.

  "Leave him alone," said Nellie, who was watching everything.

  "I bet you're happy now, surrounded by seven women," said the same tease.

  Tom looked at the seventh woman longingly. She was a startling creature, flat and slender, with flaxen hair that she wore in an unbecoming but surprising style. She was elegant, in a plain Paris silk suit of yellow, stitched in white. Her eyelashes, eyebrows and the skin-hairs were pale. The light bathed her, soaked through her. She kept an unnatural stillness and coolness, sat in a sunny spot when she could, or lay on what golden, yellow, white, mustard, ocher lounges and cushions she could find. She was not saying anything, but knitting. She ate little and dry, at least when in public. She was knitting men's socks of thin natural wool, in a variety of fine stitches. Tom could not keep his eyes off them.

  "I think I know something about knitting," he said, rising and drawing nearer. "But I've never seen anyone like you. Why don't you go in for these national knitting prizes?"

  "I shouldn't care for that," she said in a sharp chiming voice.

  "Stop flirting in your corner," called Nellie.

  "I'm not flirting," said the yellow girl, Marilyn.

  "Where are you from?" she asked Tom.

  "Upstairs," said Tom, laughing.

  "Bridgehead? What's it like? Would I like it?"

  "In autumn, about October, just before Guy Fawkes Day it's all dark at eight, quite dark. There are a few boys and girls playing quietly round the few street lamps like moths, the rest dark, no lights, all have retreated to the back fire for high tea, curtains are drawn tight across the windows. Go down the back ways and you'll see a bright stream of light through the crack of the back gate and hear the yard being scrubbed. The air is sickening, you're right in an aerial coal seam, a slowly blowing, vaguely stirring mist of coal: and the next day will be rain. In the meantime you can see the stars through a ceiling of about ten feet of coal mist."

  "Don't let him put you off," cried Nell impatiently, "it's a grand old town, it's our home. It's our mother, we owe everything to it: and they think hardly of us for deserting it. We're very proud of Bridgehead."