The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  Darling, please take comfort. She always looked a very male sort of girl to me, and Eustace always had a bit of the ‘green carnation’ about him. (That terrible Oscar Wilde business.) I’ll say no more. You are so utterly feminine, dear. Oh, and you’ll be home on Saturday. Your letter came. I have crossed off every single day you’ve been away on the kitchen calendar. It will be so exciting. Things are very slow here without you to tell things to (by the way I may just be out on Saturday as I have another appointment at the surgery, I have a gathered thumb). I long to hear, when we have you here again, that you’ve met some really nice boys in the Lake District, but don’t despair if you haven’t because there are going to be hundreds and hundreds of them running after you at College. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re not married and in a home of your own in a couple of years’ time. Lots of girls don’t finish at College, and I always thought at heart you are a natural girl and not a bluestocking. The vicar thinks so, too. We don’t listen to what your father says, bless him.

  I’ve been quite dizzy again since I received the letter from Eustace. I’ve been put on stronger tablets (the same ones as Mrs. Ainsworth). News about Eustace’s engagement has got all round the Lonsdale somehow, but certainly not through me. Everyone is so sorry for you, dear.

  I shall write tomorrow again, but this is just to say I think of you all the time and send you my very great sympathy, darling. It’s really dreadful being a woman, isn’t it?

  Mummy.

  An hour later, a couple of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets noted and memorised, Hetty went briskly downstairs for supper and saw three big dead rabbits lying on the back-kitchen stone, their big eyes dull, their fur matted with blood, their paws outstretched as if they were running still. An envelope was propped against them addressed to Hester Fallowes.

  By the range was the omniscient back of Mrs. Satterley.

  ‘For me?’

  ‘The rabbits is for the pot.’

  ‘The note?’

  ‘So it says. I didn’t see ’im come, I was int’ dairy. He gave a wave to Mr. Satterley from t’ gate.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Do you think I’d read it?’

  The note said: ‘I wish to talk to you. I shall be in the Meeting House. Come at once. As soon as you’ve had supper. I need you. I shall stay there till nine. It will not be locked.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Just chitter-chatter.’

  They sat to supper and afterwards Hester took her time helping to clear up. She watched the sharp brass pointer of the grandfather clock almost static across the face of the rosy-painted moon. She hung about. She sat on the fender. She waited for nine to strike.

  I will not be commanded, she thought. As I will not be pitied or manipulated.

  All the while she saw the black eyes and the dark look. She thought of him sitting there in the Meeting House along the lane.

  At a quarter-past nine she said she was just going out for a bit to get some air and, before there could be any comment about it, slid out of Betty Bank into the dark. By the time she reached the high protecting wall of the Meeting House she guessed it must be half-past nine.

  I do the thing there is no point in doing, she thought. I suppose it’s fear. Or madness.

  Inside, the Meeting House was as still as it always was. She sat down, near the door. Not a mouse stirred. Not a board creaked. There was no blur of white upon the table to suggest a note—‘I waited until nine.’

  Hetty sat on, bewildered by her lunacy in coming only when she knew she was too late. She longed to cry. ‘But I will not, I will not.’

  She sat for an eternity and the moon shone in through the long window, across the benches and the plain, plain table, where she saw that a book was lying. It was The Perfumed Garden.

  She dropped it quickly. Then she longed to take it up again and stroke it, hide it under her coat, take it home. She sat on, listening for him to come back.

  Quite soon she heard the door in the wall around the Meeting House open and close and footsteps come lightly down the path.

  He is here. He knows that I am here. He reads my mind though I can’t read it myself. He knows me. If he wants to make love to me, so be it. He is the most marvellous creature I have ever met, will ever meet. He will be everything to me for ever.

  The door opened and a little torch swung quickly here and there and someone stepped inside. It was the old woman with the bonnet and the long black dress. ‘Hallo?’ she said. ‘Hallo there. Who is it? You. From Betty Bank. I’m sorry—I’m just locking up. I come every night though I don’t think there’s any need. The duty pleases me and I enjoy the walk from the post office and up through the fields. If you are wanting silence, then let me leave the keys and you can put them under the stone by the gate.’

  ‘Oh, no. No, thanks. I have to go back now.’

  ‘For one moment I thought it was last year and you were Mrs. Stonehouse.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Oh, she was a visitor. She sometimes came here in the dark. Sometimes I think she sat here with a friend.’

  ‘I must go.’

  ‘Is this your book?’

  ‘Oh, no. No. It isn’t. It was here already.’

  ‘Someone must have forgotten to put it back.’ She put The Perfumed Garden on the shelf between The Journals of George Fox and A Book of Quaker Saints, where it was later found, to considerable surprise.

  At breakfast next day there was another note. It mentioned no tryst but said only: ‘We are going away for the weekend, Patsie, Mabel and I, to my hovel on the Solway. Would you think of coming too? Saturday morning. Please say that you will. Rupert.’

  Mr. Satterley came in from milking and they began their breakfast.

  ‘He wants me to go with them to somewhere on the Solway.’

  ‘That’s to his own place. It’s a castle. It’s down the south-west by the sea.’

  ‘He says for the weekend and Patsie and Mabel will be there.’

  ‘I understood that was the day you’d be leaving us. Home to your mother. You’ve stayed extra already.’

  ‘Yes . . . ’

  ‘None of my business, of course.’

  They all ate their porridge.

  Mr. Satterley, in time, noticed a feeling in the air. ‘Is something amiss?’

  ‘She’s invited to the castle. By Rupert. Well, she knows what I think.’

  ‘But what’s wrong with him?’ Hester shouted. She banged down her knife and fork. ‘Nobody tells me.’

  Mr. Satterley looked at her. His face held the unworried depth of peace of the old cradle Quaker. He said, ‘There is a lot right with him.’

  ‘Then mayn’t I go?’

  ‘It is not for us to say.’

  ‘It’s my opinion you should ask your parents,’ said Mrs. Satterley.

  ‘If you’d seen the letter my mother’s just sent me . . . ’ Hetty yelled, jumping up, then bursting into tears. She ran to her room and slammed the door, ‘so you could hear it over Saddleback’, Mrs. Satterley said later, though she had gone on drinking her tea.

  Mr. Satterley said, ‘All that could happen is she’d find out he could never be serious.’

  ‘At eighteen that can be bad enough,’ said Mrs. Satterley, ‘especially for Hetty.’

  Dear Mother,

  I’ve just read your letter. I am sorry, but I can’t be doing with it. How dare you think that I care about pathetic Eustace. Can’t you see beyond your silly bloody head and your ghastly friends’ silly bloody heads in the Lonsdale Café? I only kept seeing him because I knew he made you feel good, being the type you used to know before the first war, a real old left-over creep. None of my friends would go near him. Poor Brenda, he’s all she’ll ever get. Of course he was soppy over you. All these vaguely homosexual men go for old women. He was terrible. Pa tho
ught so but he didn’t want to upset you since he can’t offer romance himself, or anything else because of the war, which you never even noticed going on. That’s the only reason Pa and I put up with him—you feeling so thrilled by him.

  And how dare you tell your friends! Of course you told the Lonsdale. I’ll be getting bottles of grapefruit any minute. And the vicar! You can’t have had the self-control not to tell the vicar. You have no reticence. Everything I tell you or have ever told you is immediately all over the town. Why is Pa so peculiar? Because you have no real fidelity to him and he can therefore tell you nothing. Because he has had to give his married life to the Lonsdale and the vicar—and you, Ma. There. I have told you.

  You and your imaginary illnesses and psychosomatic complaints. Your ignorance. Your patronising of women’s education. Your fear of me being a ‘bluestocking’, when you don’t know the meaning of the word. You don’t know what my education means to me. Its first purpose is to get me away from you. Do you think I want to end up like you? Unable to do anything but bake cakes—cakes you are too obsequious to let even your vile friends buy?

  I’m staying on here. Sorry about the calendar. You’ll have to turn the page over. From ‘The Wilderness’ to ‘The Sea of Galilee, Sudden Storm’. You don’t even know where the Sea of Galilee is, which country it’s in. I’m going away on Saturday instead of coming home. I’m going for the weekend with a man I’ve met here. He has his own castle. I’ll send you a postcard.

  Don’t ever write to me like that again about my private life.

  Yrs, Hester Fallowes.

  ‘I’m going to the post,’ she shouted. ‘Down to the station.’

  ‘It won’t go till tomorrow,’ Mrs. Satterley shouted back. ‘Can it not wait for the postie? He’ll put it in his bag here.’

  ‘I want it in the post now.’

  She ran without a jersey into the near-dark, along the lane, passing through the invisible table, the quick way through the woods. At the point where she had staggered out of the cornfield over a month ago, the cornfield now bare of stooks, she found Mabel sitting on a stile chewing a bit of binder-twine.

  Mabel got off the fence and walked beside her down the field.

  ‘I’m only going to the post,’ said Hester, springing furiously ahead. Mabel lumbered behind her.

  At the lower lane Hetty stopped, looked both ways and then made off to the right.

  ‘It’s along here. To the left. You post it at the shop, but it’ll be shut.’

  Hetty swung round and marched left. Mabel marched behind her.

  ‘Are you coming on Saturday?’ Mabel called. She had a growling voice, low and resentful.

  ‘Yes, I am. Could you be quiet? I’m thinking about something.’

  ‘Is it about what’s in the letter?’

  ‘I’m telling them at home. Yes. That I’ve been invited. I suppose you don’t want me to come.’

  ‘I do want you to come,’ Mabel said, tramping up alongside and walking in step. She was a four-square, stocky, unsmiling girl. A drag. ‘If you don’t come I’ll be all alone with Patsie and Rupert,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you like that?’

  ‘I hate them.’

  ‘But they’re your cousins.’

  ‘We’re sort of cousins. We’re all some sort of cousins in that house. They think I’m a slug. Do you play tennis?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t in a team or anything.’

  ‘There’s a tennis court at the castle. Have you said yes? I’ll tell them yes if you like.’

  Hetty as she marched had been thinking more and more about the letter. She found that she wasn’t letting herself recall exactly what it said. Here it was in her fingertips as she walked along.

  They came upon the village shop that had no village. There was a post-box in the wall saying: FIRST POST TOMORROW, 9 O’CLOCK.

  ‘It always says tomorrow, nine o’clock, but it’s always after four.’

  ‘Do you write a lot of letters, then, Mabel?’

  ‘What else is there to do here? I do have friends at my school, you know, but Caversham’s too far for most of them to come up here. We write letters to each other, yes. School starts next week. Are you coming on Saturday?’

  ‘It was Rupert who asked me.’

  ‘Oh, Rupert will ask you, all right.’

  ‘Nobody thinks much of Rupert, I notice.’

  ‘No. He messes people up. He’s mysterious. I’m telling you ̵ though I shouldn’t because I’ll be spoiling it for him—he’s terribly good and terribly bad, is Rupert. But, look, I want you to come.’

  ‘Why? Why do you like me?’

  ‘Because you said you’d come and play with the puppies. I just like you,’ and she came up and leaned against Hetty and breathed on her with a bubble-gum breath.

  She’s like a dog, Hetty thought. I hate dogs. Oh, not another weirdo. She could get as heavy as Eustace with his long turkey-neck. She thought of ludicrous bold Brenda. Then of her mother and kiss-kiss in the kitchen. Oh God! Once she and her mother had laughed together. They would have laughed together once about Eustace and Brenda. Her mother would have loved to hear and talk all about Mabel and the others here. Oh, they had talked and chatted so much once. Oh, I wish I was a child again.

  But, by God, she’s overstepped her territory. Does she think I’m still a child now? No. She has tried to inhabit my soul, live my adult life, experience everything I experience, experience my love affairs: a vile, unforgivable liberty. An immaturity, a lack of taste that cannot be forgiven in a mother.

  ‘You’ve gone red-hot,’ said Mabel, leaning close. ‘You’re angry. What is it? What is it, Hester?’

  ‘You don’t ask your elders what they’re thinking.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then I’m not surprised you’re not popular You ought to learn finesse.’

  ‘What’s finesse?’

  Hetty remembered that Mabel was eleven years old. ‘I don’t know where you were brought up,’ she said, tossing the letter in the box in the wall with a flick, ‘but you haven’t many social graces.’

  ‘In China,’ said Mabel.

  ‘Oh? Oh, goodness, were you in prison too?’

  ‘No. Ma brought me home before the war. She left Patsie with Daddy. My father went in the Army—he went off fighting and left Patsie.’

  ‘So Patsie was in the camp alone?’

  ‘Oh, she ran the place. It wasn’t a torture place, it was only a camp. She ran the PT classes even though she was a kid. Well, I don’t know what else happened to her. She never speaks to me. Maybe she blames me for Mother coming home. I wasn’t much to go home for.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Mabel. It’s, you know, like a film to me. I’m glad you had your grandparents.’

  ‘Yes. Grandpa’s all right. And Grandma’s not the fool she makes herself out to be.’

  By the time they had begun to climb back up the denuded cornfield it was completely dark. You would not have guessed the ring of high mountains. Mabel led the way into the lane again and they trudged along.

  ‘This lane, I don’t like it,’ said Mabel.

  ‘No. It’s a bit scary.’

  ‘Could I hold your hand?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly.’

  But they held hands like children until a light began to show, swinging towards them, lighting the black branches of the unceasing trees. A rackety car was coming.

  ‘There couldn’t be a car along here,’ said Hetty.

  ‘It’ll be Ursula,’ said Mabel. ‘She’ll be out looking for me.’

  The person who was not the fool she pretended to be stopped her green car two feet from them and they jumped to either side of the headlamps.

  ‘Mabel? Mabel? Wherever have you been? Whoever are you with? Oh yes, the Satterley girl. Well, thank goodness for that. You know you’re n
ot meant to go off like this. What were you sulking about? I don’t know. We’ve been worried to death. We will not have these moods.’

  Ursula climbed carefully out of the car and ran and hopped like a woodland animal towards Mabel and put her arms round her.

  ‘Now, thank you so much, Valentine.’

  ‘Valentine?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, dear. You remind me of someone we know called Valentine. I can’t think who she is now, but she’s a girl with a charming mother. Everything connects together somehow, you know. Hilda Fletcher tells me your mother is one of the sweetest people she knows.’

  ‘Granny, come on.’ Mabel led Ursula back to the car. ‘Can I drive home?’

  ‘Yes, of course, dear. Off we go. Can you manage to walk home, dear . . . er . . . ? It’s hard to turn the car. We can get back only if we drive on, if you see what I mean. Mabel’s a wonderful driver.’

  ‘So, you’re coming?’ Mabel’s face was heavy, chin on the edge of the rolled-down window. ‘Please will you come?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Thank you,’ said Hetty. ‘I’ll have to. I have sent the letter.’

  She tried now to walk lightly along the lane, back to Betty Bank, as the car roared off behind her in the dark. She whistled. She kept her eyes upon the pale blob in the darkness ahead that surely must be the farm gate that led to the kind Satterleys, her books, the lamplight and the kitchen fire. She kept her mind off the letter.

  It was time I asserted myself. It will make a difference. She’ll realise now that I can’t just be pushed around and discussed with all her friends.

  ‘It had to be,’ she told herself in bed. ‘And soon.’

  Then she got out of bed and said her prayers in the way she scarcely ever did now, at the bedside, down on her knees. She prayed specially for her mother, and began to weep.