by Jane Gardam
‘I’m a student.’
‘Foreign, are you? What’s the accent?’
‘I’ve come down from Yorkshire.’
‘You don’t talk like it. D’you want to come out for a drink?’
She said she had to go back to her family, and left.
It was an amazement, an impossibility, this freedom. Nobody in the world knew where she was. Nowhere in the throng, anywhere in North Kensington, was there a living soul who had seen her before, or would ever see her again. She had sixteen-and-elevenpence in the world, and no bed to sleep on. She walked on and on.
The sun was baking Bayswater. Ducks ripped the surface of the Serpentine. She saw a rabbit nibbling in the grass. A rabbit. Young men and women, some of them in uniform and the uniform unbuttoned, lay out together on the grass side by side, and a little black eighteenth-century coach went by, the two black horses clinking silver harnesses. A driver sat up on the box, with whip and top hat. A monkey-person in knee breeches was up behind.
High above the road at Hyde Park Corner there soon appeared a bronze chariot, twice life-size, drawn by prancing horses. They appeared to be in terror, about to fall over the marble edge of a high triumphal arch. A bronze angel had alighted on the chariot, holding a laurel wreath and an orb. A tiny bronze boy sat on one of the chariot poles, and the chariot was piled high with bronze weapons of war. Living soldiers were climbing all over this mighty quadriga.
‘Look,’ said someone. ‘They’re taking down the air raid siren. It’s on the block beneath the chariot.’
‘What is it?’ asked Lieselotte.
‘It’s the angel of peace,’ a man said. ‘The Wellington Arch. It was put up just before the First War.’
‘That wasn’t very good timing.’
‘No. Well it will be O.K. now. There won’t be another one in our lifetime.’
On she tramped. All thoughts of Yorkshire were gone. She had closed the door on childhood and on everywhere in the world but here. This was a city. She was a city dweller. She knew such things. In such a city she would always live.
That evening Mr. and Mrs. Feldman and Lieselotte sat eating from a cache of German sausage in Mrs. Feldman’s secret larder, on their knees among the figurines. From a rickety gas refrigerator on long, sexy legs Mr. Feldman brought a bottle of Liebfraumilch. He said, ‘We are glad not only of your help, Lieselotte, but of your company.’ Mrs. Feldman said, ‘I’ll make you a dress if you like. They say the winter brocades are coming in again at Harvey Nichols. I’d go and choose a nice length for you myself if it wasn’t for my feet. A length of nice maroon. You’d suit a maroon. You’ll be needing some dresses for your College balls.’
13
The enormous six o’clock meal provided by Mrs. Satterley was followed by an equally enormous breakfast at seven o’clock next morning. Hetty, who had no watch, was down too soon.
No one was about. She had slept well and for ten hours. Last evening she had slid from the supper-table to walk around the farm for a while, wondering whether to go farther. Apart from walking back along the lane again she could only have climbed up or down the steep wood or fields, and she felt she had had enough of both. Most certainly enough of the lane.
She sidled off to bed, loud conversation and laughter coming in tuneless waves from the parlour below. Two middle-aged couples from Sunderland with Mrs. Satterley holding forth to them.
She might as well get started on the reading list. She toppled out all the books on the bed and looked around for the light, but found no switch. There was no electricity. But never mind; there’d be a lamp. Wordsworth and Co. had managed by lamplight. She wondered whether Coleridge had been able to read his newsprint wallpaper by lamplight. He probably knew it by heart. He stayed long in his bed, poor Coleridge. She saw his huge, top-heavy figure flung down across a patchwork quilt, his glorious eyes half an inch from local weddings, sheep sales, auctions, agistments, grass-lettings, the Maid of Buttermere—groaning in the lamplight with his terrible constipation.
But at Betty Bank there did not seem to be a bedroom lamp, only a single candle in a blue tin candlestick in a cupboard beside a box of Swan Vestas matches.
She arranged the books in a stack on the floor, as there was nowhere else to put them, lit the candle and set it beside them, sat herself on the floor and began to make out a reading scheme.
Dullest first. Get them over with. The candle cast most of the room into darkness, blotting the fading light from the window and the lustre from the lake, illuminating the whiteness of the bed sheets and bolster, and the gilded mirror with its sombre message. It had little effect on the printed page of Areopagitica. The long day rolled across her mind. It seemed a different period of her life when the train from Shields East had this morning trundled past her father examining leeks on his allotment. Was it today, the shoving-aside by the dreadful mother and daughter who found Beethoven unsuitable in warm weather? Her mother’s little feet in the poor shoes, the old zip-bag— Stop! No! Oh Ma, Ma— No!
Morning is the time for the brain. This day had gone on long enough. She’d start Milton tomorrow. Or maybe Thomas Carlyle. At seven-thirty A.M. Promptissimo, she would begin, and read till midday and then all through the afternoon. Every single day.
She undressed, climbed on to the bed, blew out the candle, and sank down and down in the feathers. She waited to float into sleep.
They’ll be talking about me at home, she thought, and felt a pang of purest love.
Then she remembered her mother’s letter unopened under the bed, written last week, probably while she was in the same room with her. Well, it was marvellous to be so loved, of course it was, but there was something devious. She’d heard her mother’s clear nice voice: ‘But I wanted to be sure there’d be a letter waiting for you. Oh dear! I’ve made another mistake, I suppose.’ Oh God, will she never let go? Won’t she ever release me? Oh, Ma, forgive me for whatever it is I’ve done—being like you, I suppose, full of sin, though I don’t honestly think I’ve had much of a chance of it. And I’m not like you, I’m like Pa. Oh, you’re always ahead of me, Ma. And you must have given Eustace the address and I bet he never asked for it. Oh, how dare you do that!
I will not forgive her—so there’s a sin. Good—I will never forgive her for getting into my love-life. She’ll damn well have to wait for an answer to her letter now. I won’t even read it. I’ll chuck it. I know every word of it without opening it anyway. I’ll write to Adelaide Kipling, not to her. That’ll hurt her.
And so she slept and woke to a warm still morning of white fog so dense that she could see only a few yards beyond the window frame.
Hetty dressed and walked out upon the slippery flagstones of the terrace beside the farmyard but could not see the grass or the currant bushes. She had to feel her way about. Around the cow-byre were jostling shadows, let out from milking. They bumped against one another, swung about, shied off from her as they loomed towards her out of the mist. A man carrying three milk pails in two hands, two and one, came by, but did not speak. If he nodded, she could not tell. He passed into the mist beyond.
Soaked through by the mist, she went back into Betty Bank and found that she was alone in the room for breakfast, but wordlessly and at once a vat of brown porridge was slapped in front of her. It had a crust you could cut with a spoon, like bread poultice, but under Mrs. Satterley’s eye she found herself unable to say that she detested porridge, even with cream, though there was a great jug of that. The porridge was followed by about half a pound of bacon and two eggs. A mighty teapot was lowered on to the middle of the table, the pot muffled round with a red woollen tea-cosy in the shape of a Victorian crinoline. The torso of a very small painted effigy of a señorita poked up through the top.
‘My daughter knits them.’
‘Oh, how nice. I don’t think I could—’
‘Eat up. You have to find your lunch, you know. It’s u
sual to clear off the full day for walking.’
Hetty escaped at last, bloated with food, and met the bus conductors cackling down the stairs joking about the fog. ‘Whatever can we do in this? We’ll have to play cards.’ Hetty slithered by unsociably, wondering whether she was meant to make her bed before she started work.
The room was as dark as on the previous evening, the fog thick up against the pane. The morning’s washing water had been brought up in a jug while she was in the garden and she washed her face and hands. The water was soft as silk. The soap made the bowl into a pond sealed over with white suds. She had managed not to use the chamber-pot—she had found a bush last night and an earth closet in a little wooden house by the byre before breakfast this morning—but the room had a sleazy look. She patted the bed tidy, moved the desk and chair, laid out Milton and Thomas Carlyle side by side upon the desk and sat down.
In the way of such brisk intention at this time of the morning, and full of porridge and bacon, she felt suddenly very tired. Tired, dispirited and bored. Nobody else in the school had worked these two years past as she had worked. Nobody else who’d passed the tests, finished the course, run the race, had had to. The passion to succeed, to please Eustace, to impress the Lonsdale Café, and, yes, to enchant her mother and flatten the monstrous vicar, had driven her on.
She had done it. And she was sick of it. She had written and memorised and read herself out. She cared no whit for Thomas Carlyle or for anyone—not for Shakespeare even, though she might think again if she ever got to see a play. She was being nothing but a show-off coming here, ‘because of Wordsworth’. Imagine Wordsworth’s view of her, sitting here in the mist, far from a woman’s duty. Who gave a damn for any of them now, the ‘Lake Poets’, since the Bomb? Europe in ruins? Why hadn’t she chosen Politics? The Lake District was for grannies.
She put her head down on her arms on the desk and, on a blast of wind, in flew Mrs. Satterley bearing brooms and buckets.
‘Slops?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Yer slops. I want yer slops.’ She seized the china basin of sudsy water and tipped it into the enamel bucket. ‘That’s where that goes,’ she said. Then she stretched her arm under the bed for the shaming—though untouched—chamber-pot, slammed it back again and thundered away.
‘Leave that bed,’ she called. ‘I’ll see to that.’
Hetty opened Areopagitica and read: ‘A speech of Mr. John Milton for the liberty of the unlicensed printing, to the Parliament of England (1644). They who to states and governors of the Commonwealth direct their speech . . . ’
Difficult, this . . . ‘the very attempt of this address once made, and the thought of whom it hath recourse to, hath got the power within me to a passion, far more welcome than incidental to a preface . . . ’
Aha. Freedom of speech. French revolution. Wordsworth again.
She saw the table in the lane, the book, face-down, the extraordinary directions within. ‘Open the woman’s legs’. She read on. This country’s liberty. He puts that scented lust and stuff in its place. Yet the table stood there in her head.
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image: but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life . . .
Yes, if life were all books, it would be easy, thought she. That’s what I’ve been after, maybe.
Sounds from below, across the farmyard. Farmers whistling dogs in the mist. Long, loud halloos and lilting notes, a bit like Spain. For Whom the Bell Tolls. I suppose like Spain. Spanish music on the wireless, the click of castanets. Heartbreaking wails. Will I ever go to Spain? The vicar says we must never go while Franco lives. Will I ever go anywhere except the Lake District? Oh Lord, I’m going to sleep and it’s only half-past eight. Free speech. Areopagitica. Spain. Hitler—
Crash. Mrs. Satterley was now carrying a carpet sweeper and a bouquet of cleaning cloths. ‘Now then, I’ll have to ask you out of here. It’s time to do the room.’
‘Oh, but, actually, it’s quite all right. It’s all perfect. So clean. And I have to work. I said I had to work every morning. I put it in the letter.’
‘The rest of us works all day.’
‘Yes, but this is reading and making notes. For College. I’m sure I said. The brain’s best in the morning.’
‘A good brain’d tek itself outside on a morning like this one.’
Hetty saw that a golden light had now plastered itself against the window frame and was beginning to fill the white room.
‘Fog’s away. You get on out there and off down lakeside. Why is this room clean? Because it’s done every day. Every morning, first thing. Away you go now. I’ll be no time at all.’
On the flagged terrace the mist had rolled away but it still lay like a woollen mat lapping the edges of the farmyard and as she looked it began to rise towards her. Then she was inside it, cold and wet; then with a flourish it rose away above her, and the coloured landscape and the lake of black water were spread below. At a red sandstone water pump the man who had passed her earlier in the mist was washing out milk pails in a pink sandstone trough. He smiled at her and nodded.
‘Mr. Satterley.’ He shook her hand after wiping his own on a rag. ‘So thast bin put out oft house?’
‘The room’s being cleaned.’
‘Ah. She can’t be stopped. None of us’d call Elizabeth bookish. She’ll care for you in her own way.’
‘The trouble is . . . ‘ He didn’t seem what she had thought a farmer to be. He was clean and neat and calm. ‘I have come here to read. For College,’ she said. ‘I’m going at the beginning of October and I didn’t expect even to get in. I’ve never read half of what other people have.’
‘Nobody has,’ said Mr. Satterley, ‘but you’ve got years ahead. Take a short walk about now, maybe down lane. People get very attached to t’lane.’
‘I walked the lane yesterday. By accident.’
‘Yes. I heard tell.’
‘As a matter of fact [or had it been in a dream in the night?], I saw something rather queer. In the lane. It was a big table, just standing there by itself, with money on it.’
‘Oh, aye. It would be Friday yesterday, was it?’
‘Friday?’
‘She keeps table there all summer. Friday’s strawberry day, August. It’s become well known. Soft fruit later. You pay in jar. They come from far as Watermillock for her fruit and honey. Was she not there?’
‘Mrs. Satterley?’
‘No, no. A very different spirit. She leaves money about, she’s not your usual. Not wise, but it’s never abused, I’d think. She’ll be there again today with runner beans, if you’re interested. It’s all for Red Cross. If you walked on to tek a look and walked back again, your room would be righted and you could start on your lessons. There’s jam and that yonder she sells, too. Elizabeth can’t find a lot wrong with it. Honey and that.’
‘Is she—? Who is she?’
He looked surprised. ‘Well, she’s Ursula. Don’t know where we’d be without Ursula.’
When Hetty trudged along the lane and reached the table there was again nobody to be seen. There was a big pile of runner beans—rather past their best, thought the daughter of the horticultural grave-digger—several honeycombs and a large cake marked ninepence. There was an empty Gold Flake cigarette packet but no sign at all of The Perfumed Garden.
Hetty, carrying the cake and ninepence the poorer, returned to Areopagitica and sat reading until twelve o’clock, when Mrs. Satterley exploded into the room bearing a plate of ham sandwiches and a glass of milk. ‘Well, I’m sorry you saw fit to bring in a cake. People don’t usually complain of small portions here. I’ll put i
t away in t’ pantry on account of flies. And tomorrow you’d better have some clocks.’
‘Clocks?’
‘Some calls them elevenses; we call them “ten o’clocks”. It’s known as a small snack, and you could have had some this morning but you went gallivanting out.’
14
High Dubbs youth hostel could be seen from afar as a single tall chimney sticking up from the middle of the moor on the skyline, like a pencil. It was the chimney of a disused slate quarry, abandoned well before the First World War. A short row of quarrymen’s deserted brick cottages lay below it and the moorland around was still pitted and scarred by old slate cuttings. Nobody lived at High Dubbs any more and the youth hostel had been acquired long ago for almost nothing. German bombers had come trundling regularly from the east over the heather towards the industrial towns, and though there had only once been bombs on the moors, dropped by accident, during the war the hostel had been hardly used. The brick cottages out of which the youth hostel had evolved possessed one of the most spectacular views in England.
The road to it was hard to find, and unmarked on all but the oldest maps. At the outbreak of war, all signposts on the moors had been removed to confuse the invading enemy, and not yet replaced, but there had never been a signpost to High Dubbs off the moor road, the quarrymen presumably knowing where it was without one, and nobody else wanting to go there. You had to be on the watch for a place where a track slipped almost invisibly away from the road along the highest ridge to join a lower green road running away into the heather. Once it had been the single-track railway line for the slate trucks. The piles of cut slate must have stood beside the road awaiting collection, but that was more than half a century ago. Now the slate, the trucks that carried them, the lines they had run on, all had vanished.