The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  Eustace asked her to go for a walk with him, and for a number of Sunday afternoons they would walk demurely along the lanes and over the fields, sometimes to the village of the country church and ragged mausoleum, and the peeping-tom tombs. Soon they held hands.

  He talked always about books and sprang about on his toes with delight when he found that she was well-read, and she was warmed through with gratitude, for it was the first time anyone had noticed. He began to kiss her soon. She had been kissed before, often, at sweaty school dances and was becoming good at it. Eustace was not adept. He kept his eyes open throughout, looking over her shoulder, often breaking off to point out a feature of the landscape above her ear. He kissed her as if he was writing it all down. The air Eustace breathed, every leaf, every twig and hedgerow was, she discovered, an index for literary allusion. ‘Oh!’ he would cry, breaking away from her. ‘Come quickly. Look at this little glade.’ She felt Dorothy to brother William, never his woman. But it was new.

  And she admired him. His perfect French, his Cambridge scholarship, his voice without a trace of Yorkshire in it, his excellent hands, and his belief in her. To please him, she read more and more, found herself discussing, analysing. She adored his astonished eyes when she told him she had read the whole of Shakespeare and that, no, she had never seen a play. She had read Shakespeare in the public park on Saturday afternoons, which were her father’s drinking times, though she didn’t tell Eustace that. She wrapped herself up in his admiration. She even managed to subdue the recent regret that he never laughed. He could titter and sort of hiss through his teeth, but he was a stranger to the guffaw. Hetty had not yet grown out of the guffaw.

  And she had to stop herself imagining what he would look like in the nude. His Army uniform lay in thick folds over what might well be a concave stomach. He never ate anything. He pecked like a bird.

  But he was interested in religion, and so was she, and he loved music and so (she found through him) did she. They attended Church together, which delighted her mother, and he sang like an angel. At the Church porch the blunderbuss of a rowdy vicar pumped Eustace’s ethereal hand up and down, with commendation.

  To keep him, she flung herself into work and found that she could almost inhabit, almost become, Eustace. As she wrote and read, it was Eustace’s passion and precision that began to appear in her essays, Eustace’s intelligent choice of source material and criticism that began to find its way to the public library, Miss Kipling the librarian watching her at first with disbelief, then helping her. Her handwriting became Eustace’s handwriting, minute, tight-packed, most wonderfully level. Eustace was a classicist and effortlessly now Hetty’s Latin began to flow, and, a year before she needed to, she gained the qualifications to try for a university scholarship. Eustace had changed her very nature. He had given her the chance of her life. How amazingly lucky to have found the man of her life so young. What a perfect life must lie ahead.

  But how strange that she didn’t feel happier. Why was it that in his presence Hetty had become so quiet and receptive and respectful, yet when he wasn’t there, even in her letters to him, the Hetty she knew, the true Hetty, burst forth? She reverted to her natural huge scrawl in these letters to him, aggressively left misspellings uncorrected, defiantly wrote nonsensical rubbish.

  And he corrected her spellings.

  At the beginning of Hetty’s last year at school there was a change of staff and a mad little woman with haunted eyes and blotches was appointed to teach General Studies. She took Hetty—who seemed to be her only pupil—aside to tell her that she knew nothing of early English literature. ‘It wasn’t my period,’ she said, blushing carmine at the phrase. ‘I’ll have to ask you to get up The Nonne’s Priest’s Tale by yourself. Please tell no one.’

  ‘Help!’ wrote Hetty to the Salisbury Plain, where Eustace was now counting out the King’s shillings. ‘There’s no hope now. I’ll never do it by myself in a term. Might as well not apply.’

  And back came the pages of hem-stitched excellence and an analysis of every Canterbury Tale.

  Yet how can he like me, she thought, when I can’t somehow stop myself writing to him like a shrieking ingénue? Why don’t I write like the sort of girl he really wants?

  She saw this girl: cool, elegant, bossy, brisk and cutting. A woman of experience. Why had he gone for Hetty? Because, she knew, she had been the only girl available.

  Oh—the awful dead kisses!

  When Eustace had been drafted to Salisbury Plain he had had to leave behind at a local watchmaker’s a watch strap that was being repaired, and he had asked her to collect it for him. After she had collected it she wore it. She wore it every day. She wore it at school and in bed. It was broad, black hard leather, an unlikely possession for Eustace, and it made her somehow see him with new eyes. The watch strap was the only thing about Eustace that gave her any sort of thrill, and she fastened it painfully tight around her wrist. She had no idea why.

  ‘Have you hurt your wrist?’ asked Una.

  Hetty smiled.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Oh, I just met him somewhere.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Oh, nothing special.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘It’s . . . Eustace, actually.’

  ‘Eustace!’

  But, unbelievable to Una, Hetty hadn’t laughed.

  Hetty kept the watch strap on her wrist all the time and at night in bed held it against her face. The leather smelled male. Somehow Eustace had not smelled male. He’d smelled of Wright’s Coal Tar soap. She buttoned the strap under the cuff of her school shirt. Una, who noticed all things and commented never, began to drift away.

  Una, this final year, had taken up with a sharp-faced boy from the fish shop who belonged to a cycle club, and also with a gigantic girl called Brenda Flange, who had Amazonian shoulders and thighs. The three of them were to be seen together most Sundays, out and about on their racing bikes. Una seemed not to need to do any work, and Brenda had given up trying since her mother had gone off with someone in the ARP.

  Una and Brenda cycled about the empty lanes and up into the hills, Ray the fish-boy at first pedalling behind them, then coming up alongside, elbowing Brenda away, and soon taking the lead. What he thought of Brenda was anyone’s guess, for, like Una, he was economical with words. The trio once passed Hetty and Eustace finger-tip touching in the lane to the mausoleum and Brenda let out a great ‘Yoo-hoo!’ Una and the fish-boy kept their faces forward and passed in a glitter of spokes. Eustace, who had been discussing the Dream of the Rood, leapt a hedge to avoid the chippings.

  ‘You don’t know them, do you, Hetty?’

  ‘She’s my best friend.’

  ‘The Boadicea?’

  ‘No. Not the Boadicea.’

  ‘What a creature. Rather glorious. My word! A bronze.’

  ‘Una—the other one—is my friend.’

  ‘She looked like an owl with legs.’

  ‘Owls do have legs.’

  ‘I mean with quite inordinate legs.’

  There followed a lot about the place of owls in art and literature.

  After these Sunday walkings-out, even once for a whole weekend of his leave, Eustace began to visit Hetty’s family and sleep in the attic room that had once been the maid’s and looked over Mr. Fallowes’s vegetable allotment, which adjourned the graveyard. The evenings of these visits, all sitting listening to the wireless, had been interminable. Sometimes, if the film were serious, Eustace and Hetty would go to the pictures together on the Saturday night and sit in the one-and-nines, Eustace paying. All Hetty’s school friends, each in some boy’s arms, were along the back row in the double seats—though never Una. Sometimes Eustace and Hetty walked back home to Hetty’s house by the sea behind its rolls of barbed wire. She tried not to think of the daft days when she’d run home by the back streets eatin
g chips out of a greasy bag with Una. She missed Una.

  A year later, Brenda Flange at a Domestic Science establishment in the south of England studying Army Catering, and Ray the fish-boy much busier now with a job on the railways, and Eustace away, Una and Hetty had got together again; and this last summer, school soon to vanish for ever, they had revised their various subjects in the churchyard. Today, in homage to the place, they had come back to it again to lie among the placid tombs, and with the added distinction of Lieselotte sitting with them, steadily knitting, Lieselotte who had always been too alarming, too mysterious and too brilliant to be anybody’s friend. They felt themselves this afternoon to be Lieselotte’s intellectual equals. They felt the equals of Einstein this hot and throbbing day.

  And Hetty was clearing the decks. She had decided to chuck Eustace.

  She had discovered he had been writing all the time to her mother.

  Long, long letters, fifteen words to the line, saying what a wonderful woman her mother was. Hetty had found the wad of letters in the familiar midget hand, lying among her mother’s winceyette underclothes and lavender bags in the drawers where she was looking on the sly for her mother’s Bear Brand stockings. The letters were all about her mother’s heroes—and of course Eustace’s heroes—Archbishop Temple and Christina Rossetti, C. S. Lewis and The Problem of Pain. Just before he left the house at the end of his last visit she had come upon Eustace holding her mother in his arms by the kitchen table with the calendar of the Via Dolorosa behind them on the wall. The kisses were only the usual tight little red-lipped pecks, but her mother was looking delighted.

  Well, that’s that, thought Hetty.

  ‘That feller gone, then?’ asked the grave-digger that night. ‘Can’t say I’m sorry.’

  ‘She owes him such a very great deal,’ said Kitty Fallowes, rosy and smiling.

  ‘She should take that thing off her wrist.’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘The thong thing she’s got under her cuff.’

  ‘I forgot it,’ said Hetty. ‘And I am present. I am among you. I may be addressed directly.’

  ‘Oh, darling, but he’ll need it! He asked me about it. How could you come to forget?’

  ‘Thong thing,’ said Hetty, undoing it, throwing it across the table. ‘It’s all yours. He’s all yours. You can send it back.’

  ‘That would be quite wrong, Hetty. He’ll want to hear from you.’

  ‘No. I’ve started to feel sick when I think of him. With you. In the kitchen.’

  ‘Whatever can you mean, “in the kitchen”?’

  ‘He made me feel sick,’ said Mr. Fallowes, ‘all over the house.’

  2

  And so you’ll soon be off, then?’ Mr. Fallowes said, the morning of the day they all went to lie among the tombs, the most glorious day of Hetty’s life. Years ahead, when other days had overtaken it, she still felt the glow that almost brought tears in the goldness of summer sunlight, or saw a thick envelope and headed notepaper with her name on it or a blaze of snapdragons in a July flower-bed, or remembered a wide-open front door, her mother singing as she prepared the breakfast in the kitchen at the back.

  Hetty had been hanging about on the front doorstep for several mornings now at eight o’clock. The polished brass doorknob, bell, letterbox, clean sitting-room curtains. The bees in the lilies. A salty breeze from the sand-hills.

  Here came the postman, his loud voice calling.

  ‘Hetty—letter from London.’

  ‘I’ve got it,’ she shouted, ‘I’ve won it. The scholarship!’ and she looked up into the gold dangles of the laburnum trees and thought: Oh, Eustace!

  A crash from the kitchen and her mother on the step beside her. ‘Oh, oh! You must run and tell your father. Oh—he’s in the churchyard finishing Mary Bottomley’s. Oh, I must get my coat.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to congratulate . . . ?’ But Hetty let the sentence slide, examining intently the soft leaves of the laburnum tree, its olive-green trunk. Kids shouted along the street.

  I’ve done it!

  Her mother was running about inside the house and came out again wearing coat and hat, giving little whoops and screams. ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘But where are you going?’

  ‘I must tell Mrs. Tallentyre. We’ll see about her Linda now! Then we’ll have a cup of tea and you must write to Eustace. He knew you’d do it! You must go in and write at once.’

  Hetty wandered to the churchyard and said to the grave-digger, ‘I’ve done it, Pa.’

  The toes of her old tennis shoes stood at the grave’s lip on the level of her father’s chin. He leaned on his half-moon spade, his back against the little beech ladder he needed to get in and out. ‘You’ve won the money?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Hamlet?’ he asked.

  ‘I said I’d won it, Pa.’

  ‘And I said Hamlet. The grave-diggers?’

  ‘Hamlet had nothing to do with it. Will you listen to me!’

  ‘I’m asking you the names of the grave-diggers in Hamlet, you who will shortly be giving three years of your life to English Language and Literature.’

  ‘Pa. Don’t play dumb. Don’t you care? I’ve got the scholarship to London. A huge state scholarship. You won’t be charged one penny.’

  ‘Just as well. I haven’t one. Names of the grave-diggers?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Sid and Ernie. Adolf and Mussolini. Eustace got me the award, so you were wrong, and I have been a bitch to him!’

  ‘You did it yourself,’ he said and hop-skipped out of the grave and took her in his arms. ‘The grave-diggers in Hamlet have no names. They are the only people of character and dalliance in Shakespeare who do not merit names. They are as nothing. They are the dregs of the world. They are called First and Second Grave-digger.’

  ‘So what? Maybe his imagination packed in.’

  ‘They are nothing. As your father is nothing. A failure. I don’t deserve you. You will forget me now.’

  They stood embracing and Hetty thought: He always thinks of himself first. Everything comes back to himself. Self-referral is the blight of love.

  ‘Don’t you want to look at the letter, Pa?’

  He was gazing away over her head. So she supposed. Such a tall man. Lean and long. She was proud of his looks. So was he. Oh, she loved him to hold her as much as she loathed Eustace to hold her. Did Eustace represent a disappointment after her father, and was the whole thing Freud? Oh, God! She broke from her father’s haphazard arms.

  ‘I am the Third Grave-digger,’ he said. ‘I too am nameless. I am of no consequence. I shall be remembered only for my daughter.’

  ‘Don’t talk such rubbish. Anyway, I’m not disappearing. You can come and see me. It’s only a London College. You went to a better one.’

  ‘Oh, did I?’

  ‘Pa, come and see me. I’ll introduce you to my prettiest friends.’

  ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘They’ll be a scrubby lot in London. I was at Oxford, you know.’

  ‘Yes. I do know. You walked out.’

  ‘The times were out of joint. Where’s your mother?’

  They looked eye to eye and said together: ‘Just gone to tell Mrs. Tallentyre.’

  ‘And here’s the vicar,’ she said and her father jumped back down into the grave. ‘I’m off.’

  ‘Iustus. Iustus. In incipio IUSTUS. Et infinito IUSTUS. Sed in finito GRATIAS. IUSTUS HESTA MAGNIFICA,’ he sang.

  Running away down the graveyard, away from the looming vicar, Hetty was now off to Una’s house to see what had happened there. She heard her father’s confident baritone rising from the grave, half saw the darkness of the vicar peering down into it, loved her father with passion, loved his singing, lurched within because maybe she was in love with her father as never, never would she be with anyone else, gulp
ed briefly because she feared that she would never be sexually aroused in the natural way of things because of her father. Oh, he had ruined her! But he was random and innocent and mad and she was sure he’d never read King Lear. She tripped and fell at the wicket gate in the church wall and saw her mother talking to Mrs. Someone-or-other at Mrs. Someone-or-other’s gate. Heads and chins. Up and down. Their stout unbeautiful bodies.

  ‘Just heard,’ called her mother, ‘Charlotte’s nephew has done wonderfully.’ As Hetty sidled near she cried, ‘He’s going to Otley and Mrs. Bainbridge’s niece has got into Ormskirk. You are all so clever!’

  But when her mother came up to her and started to walk home with Hetty and saw her daughter’s fierce face, she began to look frightened. ‘Well, I know they aren’t like you, dear. I know Ormskirk isn’t like, well, where you’re going, London University. But it’s very nice for their mothers. And you know, Mrs. Tallentyre is very nice. She’d heard about you. Top of everybody, she said. She was so surprised, dear. Nobody knew you were clever. She’s got a present for you. It’s something to take with you. I think it’s for darning stockings.’

  That midday they had ham (forty coupons). Then they had fruit salad. They had condensed milk. It was a celebration.

  ‘I don’t know how your mother does it,’ said the vicar, who had stopped by and was licking about with a teaspoon. ‘She is a wonderful woman.’