The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  Nobody spoke for a time, glad to be still alive.

  They ran out along the treeless Solway plain and began to go through mining villages, each a long street of narrow houses like side-on matchboxes painted different colours. A chapel, a bus stop, a smithy, a shop to each place. Children, very dirty, sat in the gutters. Poor women, their clothes in holes, leaned against their doorposts. There was grit in the air, grey washing on lines, but, all around, fields of almost luminous green under a huge sky.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ said Hetty.

  ‘Well, it’s not romantic any more, thank God. You get cloyed in the Lakes. Well, I suppose the castle is romantic in its way.’

  ‘No, it’s just old,’ said Rupert. ‘It’s pretty ugly really. A heap of pink stones. Looks like a decaying orchid.’

  ‘With Nanny all alone in the dungeons,’ said Patsie, and he laughed and touched Patsie’s knee.

  ‘But just you wait till you see the wonderful tennis court, Hetty-Hester,’ he said. ‘Here we are.’

  They were all at once in a small eighteenth-century market town full of pubs and people. Inn signs swung. There was a market cross, a great many poor small shops. It felt far away, not English, hard, set apart. Hetty thought, I’m going further and further away; it’s further than London here. There’s nobody knows me here, nor ever will. There was a shop with faded, curled-up greetings cards in the window, and a post-box on the street outside. Men leaned against a wall, smoking. They wore spotted scarves round their neck. They had black eyes and dark, almost reddish skin and high cheekbones. They looked at the car distastefully.

  ‘Could you stop?’ said Hetty.

  ‘Stop? Don’t stop here. We’re persona non grata. They’re out-of-work miners.’

  ‘I want to buy some cards,’ and she jumped out and ran into the post office, where on the counter she found some coloured picture postcards of what must be Rupert’s castle. It did look like a dead pink flower. She wrote one to Una and one to Lieselotte via the Stonehouses, saying PLEASE FORWARD; and then, after she’d bought stamps and stuck them on, she wrote one to her mother: ‘Just arriving and having a wonderful time. Sorry for everything. I love you. Home soon. Hetty.’ She put them in the box outside. Two languid miners watched her, not standing aside.

  ‘Oh sorry,’ she said. ‘Excuse me.’

  They seemed to glare, but one said, ‘Now then, you’re all right, marra.’

  ‘You were bloody ages,’ Patsie said, starting the car again. ‘Picture postcards? You haven’t seen the place yet.’

  At the end of the street stood a green mound and on top of it a tumbling sandstone pile. One end of it seemed to be missing. There was a part of the town around the foot of the mound that had obviously been built hundreds of years ago from tumbled stones above. ‘My rose-red ruin,’ said Rupert, ‘half as old as time. The Romans built it, the Normans pulled it down and tried again. People have been trying to get rid of it ever since, or improve it, but if ever a place was haunted, this one is haunted.’

  ‘Why do you keep it, Rupert dear?’ asked Patsie. ‘As the Irishman said of the dying dog.’

  ‘Shut up being cruel about dogs,’ said Mabel.

  ‘I shall present it to the Order,’ he said. ‘Though they’d be fools to take it.’

  Round the hump they drove, a full half mile, and then through red sandstone gates and up a weedy drive.

  The gravel of crumbled, pink sandstone had stained several yards of the banks around. The grass, the flowers, looked thick with rust. At the top stood high broken castle walls with a tired house growing out of the side of one of them. It had an important Norman doorway and rows of sandstone mullions. There was a coat of arms with the top corner missing, but the rest of the house had given up trying, like an old broke courtesan hanging on to her last French hat. Hetty thought that it was the nastiest house she’d ever seen.

  ‘Do we go and see Nanny first, or play tennis?’

  ‘It’s going to rain,’ said Rupert. ‘So, tennis.’

  ‘D’you want to go inside first, Hetty? There’s a loo on the ground floor. Dump your bag. Mabel and I’ll get the net up. The court’s in the keep.’ Patsie was dragging the net from the car, and then the rackets. ‘It’s clouding over already.’

  Inside the front door was a square hall, a dirty marble floor and a Jacobean staircase. And silence. She found the WC, which was ancient and decorated inside the cracked bowl with garlands of grey flowers. There was an overhead chain and rusty cistern and the toilet paper was squares of newspaper threaded on a string. It’s like a bus station in the middle of the war, she thought. She went out into the hall and sat on the bottom step of the staircase to do up her gym shoes.

  The hall was dim and suddenly became much dimmer as, low in the sky, clouds dragged themselves over from the west. A wind was blowing. It began to bang about the house. Hetty felt the huge weight of the sandstone ruins above her head and thought, I could have been back home by now. Her mother would have made a chocolate cake and had the trolley all laid. She’d have had it all ready this morning, before she came to the station to meet her.

  She saw her mother’s face reading the wire saying Tuesday. She couldn’t have got the letter yet. No. Surely not. Not yet. It’ll be all right. I’ll send another letter. She’ll get the card tomorrow—or Monday.

  I don’t like it here. I don’t like them and I detest Mabel, she thought. I’m scared of Rupert. Patsie only asked me so I could make up a four at tennis. She told Rupert to ask me, just to get me here to get Mabel out of their way. It’s a most horrible town and a beastly house, and I’m here for two nights. Oh, please God don’t let me have to stay two nights. Please God! Why did I come? Why did I think I had to? Please, God.

  She went out looking for the tennis court and heard the others calling somewhere up in the weedy ruins, and she climbed up some broken steps that lay crooked in the grass, and found the keep.

  A tennis court was marked out there. The new net was almost in place. There were no sides around the court, which was bounded by the high broken towers that seemed to lean inwards all around it. They were like the rubbery petals of some prehistoric flower. A poisonous flower, she thought.

  ‘You must lose a lot of balls,’ she said. (I must try to be calm.)

  ‘Thousands,’ said Rupert. ‘They fall as rain on the townsfolk below. Who resell them in the marketplace.’ He smiled slowly, appreciatively, at her. She couldn’t help looking up at him and they stood, looking at each other as if they were alone.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Mabel. She was scarcely four feet high and square as a box. Her mouth was set now, turned down at the corners, her brow like thunder. She is a monster of a child, thought Hetty. Patsie across the net was bouncing a ball up and down between her racket and the ground, and the ball was becoming dirty pink. She had tied back her black and yellow hair and now smiled over at Rupert. ‘Your very last game,’ she said, and looked sly. She watched the tennis ball again. Bounce, bounce, bounce.

  They began to play and Hetty understood why she was partnering Mabel. Mabel played like a tank engine, like a professional, like a small muscular man. Her solid arm swung back, the ball swung away from it with the force of the hammer of a bronze bell. The ball flew an inch above the net, touched the ground and spurted, invisible and out of reach. Only occasionally could Rupert hit it back and Patsie didn’t even try.

  ‘We’re on form today,’ he said, ‘Mabel the fable.’

  Hetty stood idle. Blinking. ‘I needn’t be here,’ she said.

  Mabel gave her a black, Olympian glance. ‘Now you see what I am,’ it said. ‘Now you know who I am,’ and her lips curled with pride.

  But the better Mabel played, the less she seemed to be enjoying it. A game ended. Then another game. No one but Mabel had gained one point. Mabel twirled her racket and stood staring at it, waiting for the next kill. Then she bashed her service
right at Rupert, where it bounced and hit him in the eye.

  ‘Could you just let up a bit, Mabel?’

  ‘He won’t be playing again for ages,’ said Patsie. ‘Not now. He certainly won’t, with one eye.’

  ‘And it’s not being a lot of fun for Hetty,’ said Rupert. He walked over, one eye closed, and stood by Hetty. Then he hugged her and rocked her.

  She felt, This is joy! Oh God, how marvellous! Yet it was not. It was fright.

  Mabel returned from some evil country, looked around at everyone and said, ‘Oh. Sorry. Got carried away.’

  ‘You’re not in the Public School Championship now,’ said Patsie, ‘though you do look just about butch enough.’

  Mabel began to cry, and, crying, picked up one last ball and bashed it against the side of the peel tower. It flew high above Patsie’s head and disappeared over the top of the masonry and out of sight, somewhere loosening a stone that sent up a puff of pink smoke.

  ‘Last day in the old home,’ said Rupert.

  ‘Oh, come on back, Mabel,’ he shouted, for Mabel now had thrown her racket on the ground and was away, stamping through the keep and out of sight, running furiously back into the house.

  ‘She is what is known as our little problem,’ said Rupert.

  ‘She is a little shit,’ said Patsie. ‘The purest poison.’

  ‘I’ll go after her,’ said Hetty.

  ‘No. Please don’t. We’re hardly started.’

  ‘It’s going to rain. I’ll go after her.’

  She picked up Mabel’s racket—a most beautiful red and cream Slazenger—and ran after Mabel into the house.

  ‘Where are you? Mabel?’

  There was no answer and so she walked about, opening doors. There was a melancholy dining room with a dozen chairs standing about, an unloved mahogany table, a black marble chimneypiece with a gold clock standing under a glass bell. Another room was cluttered with gilt chairs with broken claw feet and dirty blood-red silk brocade. The kitchens were slaty caves of silence, taps dripping somewhere out of sight in ice-cold sculleries.

  She went everywhere, upstairs, into all the bedrooms, into fungoid bathrooms where lead bathtubs on feet were stained seaweed-green in long smears beneath the taps. Spotted deep-sea mirrors. At a bend of the stairs was the marble bust of a man in a marble wig with little eyes. Like Rupert? There were portraits of similar people along the walls, dark eyes in luminous skin, but all too dirty to be properly seen. An attic staircase led to empty attics. Maids’ rooms with no traces of maids. Not a chair, not an iron bedstead. Pink dust only. Rain rattled hard against the windows now. Back again she went, down the main staircase, where the wind through all manner of holes and gimmels was making blinds and even some of the paintings tap, tap, tap.

  Then she heard coal being flung on a fire, and voices rise and fall, and stop. At the end of the half-landing a door stood partly open and Hetty pushed it and went in, to find Mabel, streaked with coal dust, heaving a bucket about. Across the fireplace was sitting an old woman with her feet in a tub of hot water. She was playing patience, a cigarette at a card-sharper’s angle growing long ash. Hetty thought of how she had wanted to tell her mother about the old family Nanny of the great house.

  The old creature sniffed and looked at Hetty with half-closed eyes, through the cigarette smoke, and the ash fell into the foot bath. Mabel paid no attention to Hetty in the doorway but wiped her face clean of coal with the back of her hand and then walked round and arranged a shawl about the old woman’s shoulders.

  ‘So what’s this?’ The old woman peered through smoke.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Hetty, not knowing why she should be.

  ‘This is Nanny. I want to talk to her.’

  ‘Now then, introduce me, darlin’, and let me apologise for me feet. It’s the damp. Hot water and mustard, nothing unpleasant.’

  ‘Yes. I see.’

  ‘The only hope, dear, incarcerated out here. And what’s your name?’

  ‘She’s Hetty.’

  ‘Well, now, sit down and we’ll have a hand of cards.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t play cards.’

  ‘Well, that’s a shame. It’s a blunder. Now Mabel’s very good, she could teach you lovely. Are the others on their way up, do you happen to know? I’m not just an ornament in this house, though they tend to forget it since I stopped smacking their little bottoms.’

  ‘Rupert came specially,’ said Mabel, ‘to say goodbye.’

  ‘Let’s see if he remembers me now he’s here. It’s long enough.’

  Downstairs a door slammed and a telephone began to ring in long jangly chimes. Soon it stopped.

  Hetty said, ‘Excuse me. Are you on the phone here?’

  ‘And so we are, me darlin’.’

  ‘Oh. Oh—please. I should so like to use the phone. Could I ring Miss Fletcher? Mabel? Please. It’s the nearest phone to my home. Do you know the number?’

  ‘Who is she? Oh yes, I know. No. I don’t know the number. But Granny has it at home. We could ring Granny for it, if you like.’

  ‘Oh, do you think I could? Or—oh, please—I could ring Directory Enquiries. I’ve not talked to anybody at home for over a month.’

  ‘Why do you want to ring Miss Fletcher?’

  ‘Just to make sure my mother knows when I’ll be home. On Tuesday. I’ve made a bit of a muddle. Oh—and to send love!’

  Patsie’s light voice came floating up the stairs, and she came slinking in, hair now hanging sexily against her shoulder.

  ‘Hi, Nanny. Feet bad?’

  ‘They’s a torment from bloody hell. Who was that, then, Patsie duck?’

  ‘No one. Wrong number. Someone wanting to speak to a Miss Fallowes, so I told her to look again.’

  ‘I am Miss Fallowes,’ said Hetty. ‘I am Hester Fallowes. Who rang?’

  ‘Some bit of egg and cress called Una Vane. Very forceful, she was. I said to think again and goodbye. Oh! Are you called Fallowes, Hetty?’

  ‘I don’t believe you, Patsie,’ said Hetty with a great voice that turned everyone to waxwork. ‘There is absolutely, indisputably no way in the world,’ she said, ‘that Una could know I am here. There is no way. It is impossible. You’ve had an hallucination. It must be a call for someone else and it came through by some sort of . . . oh, I don’t know. Una doesn’t even know my address at Betty Bank.’

  ‘Well, now, my duck, let’s face it,’ said Nanny, lifting out a greyish foot and shaking it dry, ‘this is not what you’d call a usual house. Thing go on in this house we try not to think about. The soldiers had it in the war. Their hairs turned white overnight. And some of them strapping great land-girls packed and left when they saw the Roman legions drawn up out on the front lawn by the keep, only their top halves, not their feet. Their feet will be under the ground. It’s rubbled up higher since Julius Caesar. Well, there’ve been soldiers here in a lot of wars. I should know, stuck here all alone with my rosary. There’s a lot of nasty— And there’s them that attract them. They can’t help it. There’s some attract the dark,’ she said, looking at Hetty.

  ‘Look,’ said Hetty. ‘I don’t attract the dark. I don’t believe in the dark. I am Hester Fallowes, and my friend is Una Vane and she cannot, cannot, have telephoned here.’

  Everyone looked at Patsie, and Patsie smiled, showing her little square teeth, and then Rupert came in and everyone but Hetty turned towards him.

  27

  Miss Kipling left Una in the reference room, thinking about Lieselotte. She walked to the desk. Then she returned. ‘Una, I think it is true. I think that Liese has imagined the fairy-godmother element, but I think that most of it has a basis. Even though she may have been going to films.’

  ‘It does sound like a film,’ said Una. ‘I expect you get infected with them in California, but it’s amazing Lieselotte did. She had no
imagination at all. And she was always so serious.’

  ‘Well, dear, there’s absolutely no chance of her coming home, I’m afraid. There would be formalities. Legal considerations. And the visa—it would have been given for a minimum of three months, I’m sure. I remember when we went to Chile. I and my Communist friend. Do you suppose it is true that she hasn’t informed Girton? That is very lax. Very lax. The College will not be pleased. She could not get back in time now—not unless she knew someone very high up in the system.’

  ‘Well, she ought to come back. She must have been mad.’

  ‘She agrees with you, Una. Will you tell me if you hear any more?’

  ‘Well, I’m going away on Saturday on my bike. To the Lakes.’

  ‘Isn’t Hetty about there somewhere?’

  ‘Somewhere, I’m not sure where—Betty Something. Betty Bank. I’m just going youth-hostelling.’

  Miss Kipling stood in the doorway. ‘Is this to be in company with the railway employee?’

  ‘Could I go and get my library tickets back, please? I’ll need them next vacation. I probably shan’t see you again till then, so thanks so much.’ Una came up to the reference room door to get by, but Miss Kipling stood her ground. ‘You’ve made me so much better-read,’ said Una. ‘Especially the Jung and Freud.’

  ‘Una, are you going away with Ray?’

  ‘Yes, I am. I did before. My mother let me.’

  ‘Oh, do be careful, child.’

  ‘I’m sorry. This is my choice, Miss Kipling. I’m nearly eighteen.’

  ‘It could wreck you. It could finish you. You could get pregnant. You don’t know a thing.’

  Mrs. Brownley, who was listening round the Romantic Fiction, padded quietly nearer, into Modern Poetry, and listened harder.

  ‘I do beg you not to risk your time at Cambridge. Una, Cambridge is what women had to fight and fight to get. It is the time we all look back on as the cream of our life. As Lieselotte says.’

  ‘I’m not going with an innocent,’ said Una, scarlet and furious.