The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  ‘Don’t upset yourself now, Mutti. All’s past. We’re doing right to have her. We’re not finished. And she’s a Jewish girl.’

  11

  As Hetty came staggering out at Robinson Halt station with her unwieldy luggage, she looked about the surrounding mountains and hills for the taxi she had been assured would be waiting to take her to Betty Bank and there it was, but surrounded by several forceful-looking people in the process of hiring it. A lumpish oaf of a driver was in charge, and seemed to be negotiating deals. It was a broken-down conveyance, and the only one in sight.

  The other candidates for the ride were large and taciturn, wearing shorts and bearing packs. They were being ungenerous with their vocabulary, but also unbending.

  ‘Two pun,’ Hetty heard. ‘That’s t’price. Tek’t or leave’t.’

  Heads muttered together.

  ‘Thee an’ all?’ asked the driver. ‘Where til? Oh aye, I heared tell. That’s Betty Bank. Beyond Robinson. Aye, I can tek five.’

  Everyone climbed in. Nobody spoke. Hetty thought that the Lake District must be greatly changed since Wordsworth’s day. They were silent folk in the poems, but not belligerent. The war must have changed them.

  Not that anyone can have suffered anything up here, she thought, they never had a single bomb. Wordsworth had never had a bomb either, she thought, though he must have had some nasty memories of the French Revolution. They couldn’t get him home, he was so taken up with it. But his manners never suffered, she thought, he was always a courteous man.

  Inside the taxi it was very cramped, with five rucksacks, a suitcase and five people. Hetty’s pack full of books was twice the size of any of the others’, and the cumbersome shape of it seemed to be causing her fellow passengers to look thoughtful.

  ‘You climbin’ with yon thing?’

  ‘No. No, I’m studying.’

  ‘Yer off toward Grasmere? Well, yer off course here.’

  ‘I know. I’m going to a guest-house. To do some reading.’

  The information was lugubriously received. They shifted their great feet about in their great boots.

  ‘Yer ’ere.’

  The boy had stopped his taxi in a lane where nothing was to be perceived on either side except fields. They had driven scarcely a mile.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s a guest-house. Called Betty Bank.’

  ‘It’s yon.’

  ‘But there’s nothing here.’

  ‘There is. Up yonder. Through yon yat. Straight on, turn right, throught trees. Saves yer two mile.’

  She clambered out.

  ‘Two pun.’

  ‘But we’ve come no distance. I’ve got luggage.’

  ‘Two pun.’

  The other four sat staring, face forward. She thought, They’ll be travelling free now.

  ‘It was to be two pounds between the five of us.’

  ‘They’s goin’ on. It’s two pun each.’

  She handed him, slowly, two one-pound notes.

  ‘A tip’s usual,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t afford it.’

  The rotten little car drove away down the lane, not one head turning, and she was alone. Though the station was not very far behind her, there was not a sound. Two trains a day, and hers the last. There was not a car, not a cart, not a bike, not a person about in the fields.

  She anchored her rucksack against her backbone with care and tightened the straps over her shoulders, and then had to take it all off again to throw it ahead of her over a gate. She heaved it on once more, picked up her suitcase and started crunching up the steep field, which was silver stubble decorated with slanted prickly stooks of corn, tied with twine. There was a dark hole within each long stook, and she thought of sliding off the book-bag from her shoulders and thrusting it inside a stook until she could return tomorrow with a wheelbarrow, or something. She had no idea how near or far she was from Betty Bank. And so she toiled on.

  The steely field ended. There was another hedge, another stile. The stile was narrow and high, and took time to negotiate with suitcase and bag. The second field, like the first, had no path crossing it and was freshly ploughed. It seemed an indignity to sully the furrows but she could see no alternative, and she stepped across them, trying to step lightly on a neat, straight line. Looking back, she saw her footmarks winding up the field behind her like machine-gun fire, or as if some splashy hippopotamus had lately passed. At the high top of this second great field the woods began, oak and beech just starting to turn from green to pale rose-madder and rust. Gold gorse bushes stood along the edge of the woods in a long barrier and she had to wander up and down until at last she found a thin place she could struggle through. In front of her now was a green alley running straight upwards again to a ridge.

  She plodded and climbed, stopping once to slide off the swaying books, to drag them along behind her through the grass. It was very hot. No birds sang in the beeches. Where the hell am I? thought Hetty.

  Emerging from the trees, she found that the grassy alley she had walked between them came out upon a wider, grassy lane that crossed in front of her, left and right. The track continued up through more woods ahead. The wide lane, left and right, was overhung with bigger trees. There was a ridge of grass down the middle of it, and wild flowers and ferns on either side.

  ‘So I turn right, do I? Well, so he said.’

  And she turned right, now embracing the great muddy pack of books in her arms, the suitcase hanging below, painfully, from her thumbs. The lane became narrower and more shadowy but, as it wound on and on, it widened again, the trees thinned and late afternoon sun shone levelly through them, splashing the lane with light.

  Quite soon there appeared, standing alone in the middle of the lane, a long trestle table and a chair. They stood not across the lane as barricade, but sideways on, as if expecting people to file past, as at a frontier post. There was grass in tufts about the ankles of this furniture. The table was spread with a very old, worn length of oilcloth patterned with blue flowers, on top of which lay, facedown, a paperback book and, beside it, a jam-jar half full of money. There were several pennies, many shillings and sixpences and at least two half-crowns.

  Hetty regarded the table. There seemed no possible way that it could have come here. It was a heavy thing and the track had clearly not been made for motors. There were no cart ruts. Hetty imagined two hefty men, one walking backwards, each carrying a table-end along the lane that wound both in front and behind the table, on and on. On and on. It had clearly been there for a very long time. The legs were bleached and warped, the oilcloth split and stained. The stains were reddish as if they might have been blood.

  Hetty felt, as she stood in the silence, that it was necessary for her to be severe with this table, to accost it in some way, to confront its idiocy this idiotic afternoon. She heaved up the rucksack and rested it on the table, which swayed a little with the jolt. Then she picked up the face-down book, opened at a particular page.

  The book was called The Perfumed Garden. She remembered a Scented Garden, about a nasty child from India who had been made delightful when confronted by the wonders of Nature; a book which she had never found convincing, a book— No! Wait a minute. Not Scented, but Secret. That was The Secret Garden.

  This book, it appeared, was also some sort of whimsy about the East, and so the owner of it changed in Hetty’s mind from a nice toothy schoolteacher on her holidays, reliving her childhood, to a William Morris type in a floppy dress and wedges of hair, smelling a lily. Somehow neither woman would have been a surprise sitting in this lane. Hetty flicked about through the book, and wondered now whether it had been written by a man. She read—

  Wow!

  Ker-ist!

  Unbelievable!

  She slapped the book down on the table on its face, gathered her luggage and thundered along the lane, almost running.
>
  At the lane’s curve she looked back, expecting to see nothing. She had dreamed it all.

  But there stood the table and chair.

  As she looked back at them the trees through the length and depth of the wood suddenly tossed about. There was a rushing of wind and more bright rays of sunlight blazed through the trees above the lane, like torchlight. She saw that the trees of the higher wood grew in only a narrow strip, and on both sides, ahead of her, they were now thinning all the time. Back behind her, though, she could still see the table in the shadowy part of the lane; just make out the pages of the book, riffling about.

  Around the next bend there stood to her right, on the lower slope of trees, the backs of some stone buildings and a small white gate. There was nothing to say that this was Betty Bank but she went round some bushes, and a grindstone standing in nettles, and came upon a flagstoned terrace with marguerites and hollyhocks and a black-and-white sheepdog lying looking at her. It wagged its tail and appeared to be interested.

  Beyond and below lay all the fields she had climbed, the corn stooks now each with its own shadow, the wind agitating the saplings growing in all the hedges.

  With her back to the dog and Hetty, on the farm flagstones, stood a woman with the broadest back Hetty had ever seen, crisscrossed by white apron bands fastened to her skirt with big linen buttons. The skirt was long, but rucked up over her haunches to reveal the backs of knees the size of pork knuckle, and feet in huge black clogs. She was surveying the road from the railway station, which stood directly below the farm, and quite remarkably close.

  ‘You never! Up them fields . . . Never! He never sent you! Two pound? I’ll see to him. I’ll fettle him. Mark Watson. It’s the war. We never knew of exploitation before the war, never. He’ll have tekken two pound from each of t’others. Ten pound! And he knew the taxi was booked for you: I sent instructions. He’d think you’d be from town and senseless, and never tell me. You never carried them great things?

  ‘And what a climb! Are you fashed? Now here—come on. Yer dinner’s ready. I was out lookin’ to see ift train was late, and yet I knew it wasn’t, for I heared it an hour since, but now and then there comes one you don’t expect. We used to have the odd munitions go by in the dark of night and that confused us, likely. We didn’t care for it, never knowing when one would tek it into its head to blow up. Sparks flying out oft funnel, well, they were brave drivers and all ought to have the VCs, but now there’s just the two for passengers. Well, I saw that taxi standing waiting. You can see it now. It’s back. He’ll have tekken on t’others over yonder for climbing and not wanting to loophole over here ont way. Disgusting! Here’s your bedroom now—small, but look at the view. Ewer and basin and the gentleman under the bed. Wash your face and come right down on. Six o’clock sharp’s supper-time and seven o’clock o’ morning’s breakfast, and you find your own, midday.’

  Find? thought Hetty. Find?

  Where? Out along the hedgerows? Blackberries? Catch a rabbit? There’d been no mention of finding, in the letters. She was always hungry at lunch-time. There were certainly no shops. What do you do with water in the basin after you’ve washed in it—chuck it out of the window? No, there was a queer bucket with a basketwork handle. Awful.

  She looked under the bed and saw a giant chamber-pot shining clean and painted with medallions and rose garlands, like the ewer and basin. She’d never use it. Think of the woman coming in to carry it out! Wherever did they take it? Did they fling it on the fields?

  And there were a lot of people here. She could hear them. A crowd of voices. The other guests talking downstairs. The walls were thin. You’d be able to hear everything in the night.

  Her bedroom walls were papered with rosebuds, the paper peeling away at the corners. It must be damp in winter.

  The fireplace was painted shiny black and looked as if it had never seen a flame. There was a fan of white paper in the grate and on the mantelpiece two rose-pink candlesticks, but no candles, a pot with a spike for rings and another one with letters of gold saying ‘A Present from Maryport’. Over the fireplace was a looking-glass painted almost all over with clusters of violets, and the words ‘Thy Will be Done’. The bed was high as a barrage balloon, puffed up with feathers in the mattress. There was an upright chair and a small desk to read at. She’d asked for that.

  On the desk were two letters—one of course from her mother, the postmark a week ago, naturally, to be sure of being on time. The other envelope showed the familiar hand of Eustace. Her mother must have sent him the address, unasked.

  Hetty flung both letters to the floor and went down to supper, opening the dining-room door on a well-behaved expectant silence. Several people who looked like bus conductors and their wives. And here was Mrs. Satterley again, now ladling out stew.

  12

  Lieselotte was listening for the swish of the sea and the quiet movements of the house at Shields West, Mrs. Stonehouse preparing breakfast in the bright and antiseptic kitchen. The air seemed thick today, the darkness extraordinary for summer. It was stuffy and very hot.

  She opened her eyes on to what seemed to be an underground furniture store and an unaccustomed high window that looked on to a line of stumps of area railings. Across this window, people’s legs kept passing.

  She was lying on a Victorian sofa fit only for a bonfire, and on a shelf near her face nymphs and shepherds, brandishing garlands and carrying lambs, smiled and danced good-humouredly in a chorus line.

  Lieselotte arose and crept about. She found the beribboned wash-place and something of a towel. She found her case and rootled in it for a sponge-bag. She washed in cold water and dressed in the clean and folded clothes that Mrs. Stonehouse had sent with her. Nobody was to be seen or heard, but a tin teapot on a hob was warm, and so she poured some of the stewed tea into a pink and gold cup with a handle like the neck of a swan. She walked over to the now-unbarred front door.

  A blaze of London heat and light struck down on her and she saw, at the top of the steps on the pavement, her new landlord seated in a basket chair, embracing the morning air of Notting Hill. He wore a panama hat, splintered grey with age. His face was lifted to the sun and he was holding in his hands some very grubby ration books.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Good day. My wife is not yet about. Now that we have retired from the business she has a tendency to sleep late.’

  ‘I didn’t see her anywhere.’

  ‘Oh, she’s there. We are like birds. We perch as we can.’

  ‘I was thinking,’ said Lieselotte, ‘that there must be somewhere I should be going to register myself, or something. For rations and so on, if I’m to be here until the second week in October.’

  ‘Quite so. And perhaps you would kindly take charge of our ration books too. If we can present three books together to the shops there will be greater notice taken. Such meat we have been offered! The last chops had eight-inch shanks to one bite at the top. All the weight was in the bone.’

  The books were hardly marked inside and very out of date.

  ‘But you don’t seem to have been eating anything.’

  ‘The shops are at a distance. Our legs are not good. But we have good friends. There is a small delicatessen . . . ’ His voice trailed away.

  ‘Do you . . . ’ Lieselotte seemed to hear an ancestor, a thousand ancestors, speak from within, ‘Mr. Feldman, do you use your clothing coupons?’

  He removed his hat and examined the faded silk ribbon inside.

  ‘Clothes we have almost forgotten. Mrs. Feldman is very resourceful with the packaging materials we have about us. My hat I should miss. Vienna, 1928. D’you see the label? This could never be replaced. Otherwise—would you be able to find a use for our clothing coupons?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Half-a-crown each? Off the record?’ A quick glance.

  ‘I could buy only seven at the moment. Until my grant
comes through.’

  ‘Very good. On account.’

  ‘Well, first of all,’ she said, feeling at ease, ‘give me your ration books and tell me how to get to the town hall. And the delicatessen.’

  The streets of Notting Hill, filthy and tall and red, were terrifyingly crowded after Yorkshire. Ragged children with dirty faces yelled and played about the pavements, unshod. Every house was a rooming-house, unpainted, unloved. There were gaps in almost every street where the bombs had sliced them apart and left the ghosts of rooms, fireplaces and picture rails, here and there, fifty feet up, a picture hanging on a nail, staircases leading up floor after floor and then away into space, a curtain still hanging at a dizzy broken window. Notices embroidered with barbed wire were nailed across doors barred diagonally with planks that teetered above what had once been basements now filled with the rubble that had descended on back gardens where blackcurrant bushes sprouted like trees among wild flowers, sour wild privet, forests of willowherb, even bracken. A child kicked a ball high in the air and everyone around him watched it fall down and down into one such place, and at once half a dozen children squeezed and wriggled through the wire and jumped into the wilderness, the pipes and cisterns and water tanks and gas mains. The girls and the timid boys looked on. A little boy near Lieselotte was watching her. He said, ‘Eight was killed in there—four was in our class. We saw ’em all—legs and arms and that. T’riffic.’

  She found the town hall, queued for hours, left it with more documents to fill in, walked on, walked on. She came to a huge, bald park almost covered in Army huts, the noise of London humming round. The park became another park, where men and women in good clothes and affected voices walked and talked and called to their expensive dogs. There were people on horseback in bowler hats and breeches; and blossoming babies in antique chariots pushed by tired old women with haughty faces and blue veils floating behind them. A shop called The Moo-Cow Milk Bar looked clean, and she went in and sat on a high stool and ate a bun with cress in it and cream-cheese like Lanolin. It was very nice. She ordered a glass of milk—it was deliciously cold—and a man came in and sat on the stool near her and said, ‘Hallo, where you from?’