The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  ‘Now, is that so?’

  She took the road that ran along the shore, and soon became a track. After a mile or two it became a road again and she looked down on long grey sheds and a gleaming mesh of railway lines and rolling-stock—two huge yellow steam-engines all polished domes and levers—and men standing around. The day was hot and lively but the men had arranged themselves with a languor she had not seen in her life before.

  One of the men shouted at her, ‘You goin’ to Sacramento, then?’

  ‘Could I get across America to the east side?’

  ‘If you take your time. We ain’t in no hurry here. Where you from?’

  ‘Britain, England.’

  ‘What language do they talk in Britaininglan?’

  One of the men started whistling and he whistled very well. It was a new kind of tune to her. Another began singing. It was a lament of some kind, a sort of Spanish, she thought. Maybe. Maybe this was flamenco. And she walked on and on by the sidings until she reached the rising ground east where there was a turret on a knoll. She climbed this slope and walked around the turret. It had a plaque saying that it was a historic monument. It looked Norman-French, like Yorkshire. It had survived the 1922 earthquake, it said. She walked on until the road divided, upwards and downwards. Up the hill the track ran between hills of covered furze. The hill beyond was like a pudding basin. The road down the hill was the one she had arrived by, down to the sea again, but maybe she had got lost somehow, because the houses below her looked older. They were wooden and stood with their feet in the water, on props, wooden piles standing in the sea. There was a smell of fish and a man was fishing from a rock by the shore, a man with a stubble beard. A long man. He looked a villain. He took out of the water a big, lashing white fish and he yelled up to her with pleasure. She could see the hook in the fish’s face and its hating, cruel eyes and bars of ratchet teeth. ‘I gotta shark!’ he shouted, ‘I gotta god-damn shark!’ and he began to knock its head with a club on the rocks. She looked up at the furze of the higher path and then decided to go downhill towards her own silent, safe road again, and passed along it until she reached the back of Alice’s house. Looking ahead, though, she saw that Alice lived at the very end of this street of silence, and that, two or three houses beyond, the road dwindled and led up again to join the furzey moor.

  She passed Alice’s house and climbed upward, and soon the road became a track again and the furze became trees. From up here on the pudding basin you could see how the forest had been sliced apart to make the wonderful houses, and you could also see how tiny the street of wonderful houses was in relation to the great forest stretching away and away beyond, all along the edge of the ocean, mile after mile.

  For many hundreds of miles.

  She walked on, and soon the sides of the track became dense forest. Mixed trees. Very black. But here was a single car standing on the right-hand side of the track, an open, dark-blue car with dark-blue leather seats and round, silver headlamps. Somebody had left a briefcase and the keys in the ignition. But nobody was to be seen.

  The car had stopped just outside a gap in the trees and a little track led down through them. Up to the left there was a glimpse of a big house, set back among the trees of the forest, which was presumably where the car had come visiting. At the gap in the trees there was no gate, no notice saying PRIVATE, no mailbox, no house name like the houses had on Alice’s street below. The gap led only down to the shoreline. Someone must simply be visiting this house.

  She could see a track through the trees going precipitously down into the seaside forest, and she took it.

  The trees began to look old. Lieselotte started to zigzag down through them, trying to keep to the narrow path. It became quite dangerous, and she found herself scrambling and stumbling among the knobbly roots, launching herself from one tree trunk to another, arms outstretched. It was a clear track. It was used, established, important to someone. It began to lead this way and that way in parallel lines, a corniche among the gnarled, dead-coloured trees. After a time there was a shack to the side of the path, built in a cleared bit of plateau, a big wooden shack with blue curtains in the windows and funny faces painted on coloured paper against the glass. She put her hands against a window and found that she had been disrespectful, because this was not a shack but a good, large, one-storeyed timber house crammed with tables and chairs and books and children’s scattered toys, paintings and paintbrushes flung down, dirty paint-water in the jam-jars. There were papers folded into darts, and trains and aeroplanes and paper kites. There was the whole of a childhood that Lieselotte in some way knew.

  In a corner there was a German upright piano. On the piano lay a violin. On a chair reclined a guitar with ribbons. The bookshelves—she pressed her face harder against the glass—were full of old and battered childhood books, and again she seemed to know them, even though there were Disney comics everywhere, too, all over the floor, and a Mickey Mouse face hung from a wooden post. There were crumby plates everywhere, and Coca-Cola bottles.

  And there was a sagging day-bed, a paraffin stove, a rocking-chair. Everything said, ‘Come in and get me. Eat me. You don’t have to ask.’

  The half-glazed front door of the wooden house opened when you turned the knob. Lieselotte walked in. On a small table behind the door, behind a transfer screen covered with cut-outs of Transylvanian castles, dovecotes, the Kaiser, opera singers, fat blonde children garlanded with roses, was a battered-looking gramophone with a black trumpet. The record lying on its felty deck was ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’. All about the floor, like pools of black moonlight, were gramophone records. Swing. Jazz. Sinatra. Bing Crosby. Scott Joplin.

  Lieselotte shut her eyes and breathed in fast to try to seize quickly, quickly, something that had for one moment repossessed her. She thought, A smell? A sound? Or a taste, a breath in the air? A voice? I looked up somewhere at the glass of a rainbow doorknob. I was two feet high.

  But it was gone. That old room was gone. Reality was a timbered playroom in a wood in the middle of the west coast of America where they play cards and worship moon goddesses.

  She guiltily closed the door and left, carefully continuing down the steep, hairpin track. The playhouse quickly disappeared.

  But now, before her, she could see a sparkle and caught something in the air that might be the sound of the sea. She came slipping and swinging out through the last branches of the descending wood, the lower branches of the sort of feathery trees that waved about below her aunt’s front door. She found that the trees grew straight out of pale silky sand around a tiny bay below her, and had scattered sharp and short needles everywhere. The hard black needles bore no relation to the waving, febrile branches above.

  She walked out from the trees on to a little white patch of beach. The ocean sipped at the semicircle of sand methodically and gently. A seal’s black head bobbed up, only a few yards into the water, looked affronted, and disappeared. A few feet above the water a string of pelicans flopped along.

  To her right, almost on the beach, was a tree with a rope swing, a long rope swing so that you could sit on its wooden seat and swing away out over the water like a bell. In the tree, up in the branches, a boat seemed stuck. It was trim and painted and tied to a branch, so sometimes the water must come seeping in, deeper and deeper, to set it afloat. Lieselotte turned her head left, and then hung tight to the last tree in the forest she had just broken away from, because she was looking into a small oval disc about six feet from the ground. Its sides were nothing to do with a lens, but the space inside the ropes—for it was an oval of white rope, very small—showed a man to be lying. The rope-work oval medallion was one that fixed a white rope hammock tied to a forest tree on the bank. The other end of the hammock was attached to a hard, crooked beach-comber of a tree on the shore. The hammock itself was of heavy white sailcloth, and lying along it was a tall old man, a yachting cap over his eyes. His feet in brown
and white leather shoes were crossed at the ankle, his large quiet hands were crossed upon his chest over an abandoned open book, and he was asleep.

  As the sea in the teaspoon bay splashed softly and then waited, then exhaustedly splashed again, the man sighed and the book slipped. He pushed back the yachting cap and opened his eyes. He looked unspeakably sad.

  She thought, It is my father.

  The man lay still, observing her.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I think it’s private property, but there was nothing to say so. I didn’t know. I’m afraid I don’t know where I am at all.’

  ‘It is Illyria, lady,’ said the man.

  24

  At Betty Bank, after she had read Eustace’s letter of rejection of their past two years (‘I think that, after all, we are not really suited to each other’), Hetty felt light enough to fly up to the ceiling. Up to the ceiling, out of the window and over the lake. She crumpled the letter up, then smoothed it out, tore it into little bits and looked about for somewhere to put them. The Present from Maryport on the mantelpiece had a good tight lid that probably hadn’t been lifted for a generation, so she sprinkled the pieces into it and dropped the lid back. Then she took all her mother’s letters and ran downstairs with them and out of the house. The Satterleys were not about.

  She took a new path, down to the road, the one the taxi should have taken, and then continued along it until she came to a track up into the fells to the north-east. The afternoon sun, as it began to go down, was making the lake rose-coloured. After about a mile, she sat down on a stone in the bracken and looked around her. All was grey and white and pink and gold. The crags looked soft, almost fluid. They shone like the bodies of soft pink seals. She felt the smallness of the Lake District, its constriction. Such a few miles holding all this grandeur. Wordsworth had been one of the Lake District crags. Man and mountain. A pinprick, an insect on the water, sometimes, but he had ended up a crag. A crag that looked out over eternity.

  Hetty sat in the warm sunshine on Betty Top and considered eternity, and found it helpful. She sat until she became invisible to herself. I am not going to try to interpret Nature, she thought, I’ll just sit here and be part of it. The rolling pink mountains seemed to shift and stretch before her and a long silver shudder passed across the lake. She remembered Eustace saying that the Lake District mountains were not extinct volcanoes, but volcanoes resting.

  Eustace had said good things. Well, this was the end of him.

  Enraged. How could I be? I wish I’d written first. I thought I’d hurt him so if I told him. I thought he’d think he was sexless—that’s what he is, too, when I think of that boy in the rose-garden. Now, in a way, I know that he’d been finding me sexless. I wish he’d known about the soldier in the boat. He never will now. I wonder who she is? I’ll bet she’s old. I’ll bet she’s old and scrawny and desperate for it like a tortoise.

  Yet he taught me Wordsworth. He was much better than Miss Baker at school. I wouldn’t be here but for him.

  She sat looking at the landscape before her, steadily, steadily. Quite tearless. Then, as she wondered who had taken her place in Eustace’s affection, she realised in a flood all at once that she knew nothing at all about anyone or anything. Major state award to university, but she knew nothing at all.

  She watched a man and a dog walking far below beside the lake and then turn towards her into the fields. They appeared and reappeared here and there in the bracken up into the heather, then out of sight. A farmer out looking for sheep.

  There were no sheep. He wouldn’t be wandering by the lake after sheep, anyway. The man came in sight again much nearer to her, then disappeared again, and all at once the dog was upon her and jumping round her, not a sheepdog but a big soft loose-skinned labrador. He pounced and pawed her.

  She didn’t like dogs. ‘Get off, get off.’ She flung up her arms against it.

  ‘It’s all right. You’re quite safe,’ the man shouted from just below.

  She looked down and saw that it was Rupert.

  ‘Here. Heel.’

  The dog ran back to him and followed nicely.

  ‘Has he made you filthy? . . . I know you, don’t I? Yes, I do, you’re Hester Fallowes, friend of Granny.’

  She had flopped down on the grass and he sat beside her, all her mother’s unopened letters strewn about her on the grass, besmirched by the dog.

  ‘Sorry!’ he said. ‘He’s muddied your dress and he’s muddied your letters.’

  ‘They’re still in their envelopes, it’s O.K. I was just going to read them. It’s my mother. She writes rather often so I leave them till there’s a batch.’

  He looked sideways at her. He took off his cap, hung on to the dog with his other hand, put his gun down on the hillside.

  ‘I was out rabbiting,’ he said. ‘Rabbiting on. Like your mama?’

  She said nothing and did not smile.

  Then he half-put on the cap again on the back of his head. ‘I’m sorry. I’m being far too clever.’

  She thought again, What very strange eyes. Gathering up her letters, she said, ‘I’ll take them back to read at Betty Bank.’

  ‘I’d guess that privacy is not of the essence around there?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m getting plenty of work done. I’m going to University in a few weeks and I’m badly educated. I’ve pretty well only read the set books.’

  ‘I didn’t even read those.’

  ‘Where did you go, Rupert?’ (And she thought, If Ma could hear me, so easy and free: ‘Where did you go, Rupert?’—and he’s nearly thirty. She’d die with joy. She’d faint with rapture.)

  ‘The House,’ he said (Wherever was The House?). ‘For a short spell.’ Then he picked up her hand, examined the fingers one by one and kissed them. Then he dropped the hand, stood up, looked away over at the basking seals. ‘Then I tried to read Theology. A bit of a challenge for a Catholic. Bit of a drunken subject, too.’

  ‘Drunken?’

  ‘Yes. We got through a lot of wine. Vat upon vat. And other things we did—seems a very long time ago. I did a year and a half in the war. I must be nearly ten years older than you.’

  ‘You can’t be!’

  ‘Yes. I am twenty-eight. So they tell me. I don’t do a lot of anything at present.’

  ‘You remembered how old I am.’

  ‘Of course. And I remember there was considerable discussion about it at Ursula’s horrible party. I had to speak to her about it. Told her she never looks at anyone, just into her own worried silly head. It’s the worst of manners. I told her that next year you will be an extremely beautiful woman and won’t be bothered with any of us. Didn’t she try to send you off with Mabel? Playing hopscotch?’

  ‘Oh never mind. It was all right.’

  ‘It wasn’t,’ he said. ‘It was a put-down. She was trying to keep you away from me. She’s not in the least stupid.’

  ‘I wasn’t in the least likely to be swept off my feet,’ said Hetty. ‘I’d heard of you before.’

  ‘That I am a Lothario? Or that I am vitriol and ashes?’

  She thought, What play’s Lothario in? ‘It was just—’ she said. ‘Rupert—who is Fergus?’

  ‘None of your business or anyone else’s. He was my cousin and he is dead.’ He paused. ‘Lock yourself inside your childhood. I must go, the dog’s bored.’

  He made off up the fell behind her and she did not look round. After a time she heard him shooting. Great cracks echoed across the evening and although she knew he was somewhere above her and behind, the shots seemed in front of her and all around, bouncing and wailing across the mountains over the lake as if he was lord of the world. The sun faded and it grew cold. ‘Back-End,’ she thought. End of summer. Back home again.

  I don’t like him, she thought, in exactly the same way that I don’t like the conceited Patsie, but
he’s worse because he makes you feel you know him utterly and he knows you. And he watches and despises you. I wish Eustace had seen him kiss my fingers.

  Her mother’s letters lay all together around her feet, but it was nearly dark now. They were patterned with labrador paws. With sadness and reproof. I’ll read them inside, she thought, and went back to Betty Bank.

  In the bedroom, the Present from Maryport regarding her from the fireplace, she arranged her mother’s letters by postmark and read them through. On and on they went. The same people and their boring misfortunes, the same pathetic physical woes. Mrs. Someone’s grandchild had had a seizure and somebody else’s cleaning woman had frightful ingrowing warts on the soles of her feet. The vicar was not quite himself and had had a turn in the pulpit, and Mrs. Baxter had run up to him with smelling salts. Her father was ‘just the same as ever, perhaps rather sadder, though goodness knows why but we have to bear our crosses’. Una had been off youth-hostelling with that rather nice boy.

  When she reached the last letter Hetty sat up rigid, and stared at it. ‘Oh my darling,’ it began, ‘my dear darling, I must come to you! And Brenda of all people! Brenda Flange! Oh, Hetty, that great coarse animal.’

  Hetty turned to look at the door, wishing she could lock it lest someone should come in and see her shame.

  My darling—I have had a letter from him and, of course, or so one hopes, so have you. In the letter to me he even suggested bringing her here! For coffee! (Does he know how little coffee we have I wonder, probably not when you think how much of it he’s drunk in this house all last year.) Your father was wonderful. Immediately, immediately on reading the letter, the same sort of letter as always in his nasty little mean writing, your father said, ‘Coming here today? Get your coat on Kitty, we are going out to lunch.’

  And, do you know, we did! We went to the Lobster Inn and although it was whalemeat which I can’t manage and I had to have the cod which was rather a disappointment because it’s all we ever have at home these days, I was touched. He’s never taken me out since the war. While we were out he and Brenda—I can hardly write her name—did come round. Hilda and Dorothy saw them on our step. They said that Eustace’s ‘companion’ was very big indeed and had legs like dumb-bells made worse by being in army stockings—he met her of course at the camp where she was ‘catering’. But it is not for me to tell you what you must know.