The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  Her mother had been lying there, looking languid, not herself at all, but had later burst into Hetty’s bedroom, saying, ‘You don’t understand, you beastly little thing.’ The following Sunday the vicar had not preached on morality as usual, but on the complex character of the Japanese.

  So much for Christian love, thought Hetty, and it’s no wonder I’ve not liked the idea of the other kind.

  She had buried this awful memory until this instant. So much for Mother Church. Yet something of Christian love that didn’t make you sick about sex she had seen in Rupert, and all she could think of was being with him again.

  There was no further sign, however. No sign of Patsie either. No ride on Rupert’s horse, no further gesture from the Hall. As to that, why should there be? She’d been asked over to meet them because of Hilda Fletcher, that was all, and more than a paying guest at a nearby farmhouse might expect. It had all been false. By the following weekend even Mrs. Satterley had forgotten the subject of the Hall and the dangers of Rupert. To Mr. Satterley Hetty’s relationship with Rupert was no subject at all.

  It was the beginning of the second week of September now, the straw all stacked, grouse-shooting at full strength, rowan berries blazing in the lane and the suspicion of ‘Back-End’ in the still, blue air over the mountains. Holiday people were disappearing and during the week Hetty was now the only guest at Betty Bank, and it was not fully booked sometimes even at the weekends. One day Hetty realised that this was the date when her school would be beginning the new term, and felt strange. She wondered who’d been made Head Girl. Would I have been if I’d stayed on and tried for Cambridge next year? I wonder who has my desk. Then she thought, How pathetic—I’ve left. It’s over, and thank goodness.

  Hetty ate always now in the flagstoned kitchen with the Satterleys, the kettle swinging from its chain, the row of painted tea caddies along the high mantelpiece, the cattle-cake calendar dangling from a nail on a beam, with only four pages left. The kitchen door was still left standing open on to the yard, for it was going to stay warm this autumn. A hen would appear now and then on the worn sandstone step, and put its beak round the doorpost to make enquiries. Each evening, after six o’clock supper, Hetty helped Mrs. Satterley wash up, wiping each fat cup round and round, setting it down on the pink stone. Then Mrs. Satterley would walk with the tin basin to the door and fling the washing-up water in a sparkling sheet at the hens, who would scream and run. The sour-sweet smell of the midden floated in and the sun went down behind the orchard. The apple trees were small and knobbly, silver-leafed, and all the little apples took the colour of the red sky.

  ‘No rain again tomorrow,’ said Mr. Satterley, ‘but the oats is in. Never been such an early year as ’46. We’ll remember it. It was the rain did it, June and July.’

  ‘You’d not have been harvesting tomorrow, oats in or out,’ said his wife: ‘it’s Sunday.’

  ‘Aye, well,’ he said. ‘Now then, Hester, will you be coming to Meeting?’

  ‘She might prefer Church,’ said Mrs. Satterley, who did, though she only went at Christmas and Harvest Festival.

  The next morning Hetty walked in silence along the lane to the Quaker Meeting with Mr. Satterley. The lane was a darker, deader green now than when it had first enclosed her with her load of luggage, and there was a yellow branch here and there in the ash trees, and berries shining nearer the ground. Skeletons of willowherb and thistles floated off tufts of silver silk as if sheep had been leaving gleanings. There were some wonderful brambles.

  ‘I’ll send Lizzie with a basin tomorrow,’ said Mr. Satterley.

  Hetty wondered why he couldn’t bring a basin here himself, and rather bravely said so.

  ‘Woman’s work,’ he said. ‘I’d never ask Lizzie to muck out a byre.’

  ‘I’ll come for the brambles,’ she said.

  ‘You have your lessons.’

  ‘No. I’d like to. Really.’

  Round the bend in the lane the table was gone. You could see where it had stood from the four tufts of darker grass that had grown up round its legs. No chair. No provender. No jam-jar. No book. Hetty felt unaccountably sad.

  They walked along in the ruts between the last of the summer flowers and the hum of insects. A red squirrel watched them neurotically from a tree.

  ‘The table’s gone.’

  ‘Aye, she takes it in around now. There’s not the call by late September. The walkers is mostly gone home and the summer’s done.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say that.’

  He looked at her, pleased. ‘Come on now, Hetty, you’ve plenty summers left to come.’

  ‘There’ll never be another summer like this one,’ she said. She had a fantasy of Rupert suddenly appearing round the next bend.

  ‘Thou’st happy here?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Well, it’s been like arriving somewhere at last.’

  ‘Getting away from home?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Is home not to thy liking?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not that.’

  ‘You mean, you’re not going to say it’s that to me, and that is only right. But I hear there’s sadness at home?’

  ‘My mother’s lovely,’ she said (and thought, She’s awful, too). ‘And so’s my father. But he’s on the Somme. All the time.’

  ‘Aye, well—here’st’ Meeting House.’

  They sat in the silence, Hetty wondering how you learn to say prayers just sitting, not even thinking, and, hardest of all, thinking without words.

  This will be no good at all, she thought, and opened her eyes on the five or six Quakers sitting at peace, faces upturned, eyes shut. One old man had a beard like a snowball. One of the women wore a black dress with a brooch at the throat and a sort of white bonnet. They’re antiques, thought Hetty. Not one of them went through the First War. Not one of them was as brave as Pa.

  I should have gone to Church, she thought. I might have seen him there. They’ll all sit in the family pew up in the chancel, like in the eighteenth century— Oh, no, they won’t, they’re all Catholics. They’ll be in that Chapel with the broken windows. One thing, none of them’d be seen dead in here.

  The door of the Meeting House opened suddenly with a push and a groan showing a slice of gold light from the garden, and the sullen child, Mabel, came in, glaring about her. She closed the door and sat on the nearest bench. She seemed a resentful disturbance to the silence, but then, after a minute, the silence took charge again.

  Trying out religions, thought Hetty. I did that round her age, mostly to get at Mother. She looks old, somehow. Older than eleven. She looks older than Patsie, and she wasn’t in a prison camp.

  Some people are always in prison, she thought. She was surprised at herself. She listened to the silent words. It was not exactly a thought, it was a statement. It had been offered to her. It held the conviction that you sometimes find in dreams. It had been announced, and it must be what the Quakers call a ‘leading’. She stood up and said, ‘Some people are always in prison.’

  The silence thickened and the words were absorbed into the room. Nobody looked at her. Nobody moved. She thought, Crikey, I’ve testified in a Quaker Meeting the first time I’ve ever been to one! Whatever’ll Mr. Satterley think?

  They’ll think I’m aggressive. Pushy. Like Patsie. Mr. Satterley knows I’m not a Quaker. The only Quakers I know are the Stonehouses, and I don’t know much about them, except they seem pretty dull. They’re like two glasses of cold water, really. Though I suppose that’s O.K.

  She thought of Church at home. The solemn, booming hymns, the ghastly vicar, the wonderful words and the mystery of the Sacrament. Oh God, I don’t know where I am. I know nothing. She sat with bowed head and felt tears come.

  Nobody else testified, and at the end of the hour they all stirred and swayed a little and shook hands with one another, and the woman in the white cap went ou
t to put the kettle on. Mr. Satterley said, ‘Stay for your tea, now, Hetty, but I’ve got to get back to a sick animal,’ and Hetty said, ‘Oh, I’d like to come home now too.’

  A minute or two later they were walking back along the lane, and she heard thumping feet behind them.

  ‘Now then, Mabel,’ said Mr. Satterley. ‘All right?’

  Mabel fell into step beside them and looked up at Hetty intently.

  ‘Hallo,’ said Hetty.

  Mabel mumbled something and marched alongside. When the site of the invisible table came into view, she broke away and humped herself off through the hole in the hedge, without saying goodbye, or another word.

  ‘Yon’s a sad lass,’ said Mr. Satterley. ‘Ugly duckling.’

  ‘Mabel at Meeting?’ asked Mrs. Satterley over the roast beef.

  ‘Aye. All be herself. She looked in a rare old paddy, poor throstle.’

  ‘Well, it’s Patsie. And that Rupert. Nobody normal couldn’t but be unsettled over there.’

  ‘Patsie never came for our ride,’ said Hetty. It had not been mentioned before.

  Mrs. Satterley looked reticent and displeased. ‘Likely she forgot. It’s a rare flathery family. All owert’ place, as they say. No food but Chinese all the years has starved her brains.’

  ‘Mabel wasn’t in China.’

  ‘Now then,’ said Mrs. Satterley briskly, ‘this grand day, are you really going again to them books? I’m never easy to see you working on a Sunday.’ Perhaps she noticed Hetty’s look of despair, for then she said, ‘Oh dear me, is it homesickness? Or is it boredom?’

  ‘Well, I have never been homesick in my life,’ said Hetty. ‘I was thrilled when you said I could stay on longer and Ma was O.K. about it, so I haven’t felt guilty. And if it was boredom I’d not be here, would I?’

  Of all times, home on a Sunday afternoon was worst. Her mother, wearied by two church services, at eight and eleven o’clock, Eucharist both times, and a sermon, and by somehow managing to cook a dinner of roast meat, two kinds of potato, gravy and white sauce, Yorkshire puddings, steamed pudding and custard and perhaps a semolina on the side—the only real meal of the week—usually went to bed. Her father disappeared into his greenhouse, where a row of wellington boots each held a bottle of beer.

  Later in the afternoon Hetty could hear him singing and conversing with his tomatoes or chrysanthemums. There had been nothing for her to do, since she wasn’t supposed to go far from home throughout most of the war in case of the sirens. Nothing to do but homework.

  It was Eustace who last year had rescued her. The front doorbell would ring after Sunday dinner and there he’d be in his uniform and his nice smile, and they would walk and talk and look at glades and he would say lovely things to her.

  She began now to think about Eustace, and to remember the first excitement of him. Apart from the way he wore his beret, he was really rather beautiful. And he was brilliant. And he was a man and not a schoolboy; he could have been all of twenty-five, to look at him. He had rescued her from the hell of Sunday afternoons. He had rescued her from prison. And he had loved her. He had told her so, twice. He’d back-pedalled a bit later, but at sixteen she had been loved. And he had got her into a London College. The least she could do now was try to tell him how much he had meant to her. She would read all his letters, now, this minute—he hadn’t written for nearly a fortnight, come to think of it. She gave a sigh of pleasure and decision.

  Mrs. Satterley flicked the tea-towel over the wooden rack on the kitchen ceiling to dry and took up the bowl of dish-water. ‘So, must you really go to them books?’

  ‘Here, I’ll do that,’ said Hetty and took the basin from her to throw the water at the hens. She laughed as they ran about in a squally fluster. ‘They must be fairly stupid,’ she said. ‘A douche of cold water three times a day and they always look surprised.’

  ‘They’ve short memories,’ said Mr. Satterley. ‘They’re like people. Not like cows.’ He was looking pleased to see her laughing and she knew he was thinking of what she’d stood up and said in Meeting. He was thinking, She’s not in prison now. This is much better.

  ‘So, would you not like to go off walking now?’ he said. ‘You’ve years for the reading and you’ll not be doing any other come October.’

  ‘I’ll write a few letters first,’ she said.

  ‘And maybe open a few?’ said Mrs. Satterley.

  Hetty set off up the stairs with their red and blue Turkey carpet and shiny brass rods, past the artificial lupins in a jar made from a painted baked-beans tin standing on a lace doily, into her white room. The sheets and walls were blue-white in the shadows, the stiff lace curtains white as the white of an egg, tied back with stiff blue tapes. The blue and white and green of Beatrix Potter mountains shone through the window.

  I’m happy, she thought.

  ‘And write to your mother, too,’ shouted up Mrs. Satterley.

  ‘I will.’

  But first, Eustace. She scooped all his letters from beside the chamber-pot under the bed and arranged them on the desk in date order. They were all very solid, except the last one. The last one was quite light.

  Start with that, she decided. All the rest will be English Literature.

  22

  Lieselotte sat in her bedroom in the white house beside the Pacific Ocean. The room did not look at the sea but at the rock wall between the back wall of the house and the window, the wall completely covered by rich ferns and trails of yellow ivy. A face looked in on her from among the greenery. It watched her all the time. It was the face of a half-naked goddess, dancing and holding on her shoulder the crescent moon. Lieselotte was grateful to have been released to her room away from the huge, watchful ocean that menaced most of the other rooms, but she was not altogether at ease with the goddess.

  She had been now with the aunt in Belvedere for nearly a week. The first peculiar state of her mind was past but she was still unable to accept that she was neither dead nor dreaming.

  That first afternoon, after the four porcelain women had finished their Bridge, she was shown the kitchen, her bathroom and her bedroom against the rock by the minimally younger woman who had first greeted her. She had been told that the door of her bedroom must at all times be left open in case her aunt should call on her for something during the night. ‘You will have no domestic duties,’ said Mame (‘Now, I am Mame.’) ‘and here is my telephone number in case you need me. The cleaner comes early in the morning, and the cook, but you will do the marketing. It is less than two miles to the shops and you will be given your own transport.’

  ‘Transport?’

  ‘There’s to be a dinky little car.’

  ‘But I can’t drive.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll get you some lessons. Until you can drive, we’ll get them to deliver. Now, you’ll be in charge of her clothes, just washing and pressing. Underclothing and scarves, handkerchiefs and washing and stretching her gloves. The rest goes once or twice a week to the automatic cleaners. Do you play Bridge? We play every afternoon and twice Saturdays. You could make up a four sometime and let one of us off. I guess I could do with seeing to my own life now and then. Though this is between ourselves.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t play.’

  ‘Oh? Well, she’ll get you some lessons. Her standard is good-to-excellent but she can be a poisonous partner. Wouldn’t you know? C’mon!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t been introduced to her yet.’

  They returned to the great white room. The other helmeted pair had disappeared and the fourth woman, the great aunt herself, was seated staring out through the glass wall.

  ‘D’you have my carffee?’ she asked the sea. She was a tiny skin-and-bone woman with giant blue eyes. On her finger was a gold and amethyst ring, the size of a purple sugar lump. On her feet were fuchsia-pink silk slippers.

  ‘Alice, she’s here. D
’you remember? Lieselotte has arrived. From Britain.’

  ‘I don’t turn easy,’ said Alice. ‘Come on rouaand and stand in front of me. My!!’

  ‘Guten Tag, Tante Alice,’ said Lieselotte.

  ‘Well, my! Let’s just stick to English, huh? My German’s before the Prussian War.’ She stared at Lieselotte a long time and coffee was brought, one cup on a black tray with a bowl of sugar and a jug of cream. ‘From Hamburg?’ said Alice. ‘All that way—and by your own self.’

  ‘I have lived in England for six years.’

  ‘England? Now who were you with in England—Leonard?’

  ‘The family is dead,’ said Lieselotte. ‘I never heard of Leonard.’

  ‘No loss. But why did he never write about you?’

  ‘Leonard’s dead, Alice,’ said Mame, pouring cream on top of the coffee and putting the cup to Alice’s lips. ‘He died that first war. You remember if you try.’

  ‘I get muddled. Give that cup in my hand. D’you play Bridge?’

  ‘I’m going now,’ said Mame. ‘Alice, are you listening? I’m going. Can you get her to bed, Lotte?’ She was watching Lieselotte all the time.

  ‘I don’t know. I could try.’

  ‘D’you want me to show you? She don’t walk good. C’mon, I’ll show you where things are.’

  Alice’s bedroom had a bed of satinwood with bottles and jars around it in clusters, like minarets. There were flowers on little shelves, leathery orchids and lilies. There was a knock-out, funeral smell.

  ‘Here’s the nightdress. Now she has to have her padded panties. She eats nothing. Just a bite of jello or a little sandwich. She’s crazy for peanut butter but never let her even see a nut or she’ll choke. Don’t forget her hair. It goes on a stand.’

  ‘A stand?’

  ‘A stand for the hair to stand on.’

  ‘Oh yes. I see. I think.’

  ‘You have looked after old people before, haven’t you? I’m sure you have. Weren’t you looking after some old people in London?’