‘I will walk away now,’ I told myself fiercely. ‘I will walk away now.’
The Tsar said musingly, ‘It must be getting late. We’d better go our separate ways.’
I said good night. I said it so normally I surprised myself. We parted at the cross-roads near the Canon’s house; the Tsar to go down the avenue of pines towards the railway crossing, and I across the fields to the station. I waited under the lamp until he turned and waved his trilby hat in farewell, a dark figure whose dancing days were over. Then I began to run home, shouting out loudly in the empty field, ‘God bless me, Harriet … come home.’
5
Harriet came home two days later. She whistled outside our house and sat on the wall farther down the road. I was so pleased to see her I did not notice how withdrawn she was. I looked at her clever face with joy and told her about the Tsar, and she listened kicking the wall with thin legs and rubbing her arms all the time.
They were sunburned and the skin was peeling. I waited for her shout of surprise, expecting her to jump off the wall and hop about the lane, but she just sat there rubbing her arms.
‘He said’—surely she would look at me now—‘he said that he and I should go to Bordeaux to fetch a barrel of wine for the winter.’
Harriet said ‘Oh’ politely and looked down at her body complacently. I was silent.
A man was mowing the lawn opposite; he walked neatly up and down. The blossoms on the mock-almond trees behind the wall drooped a little and fluttered in the breeze. A petal fell curled tight on Harriet’s neck, and she shook herself quickly.
‘I met a boy in Wales,’ she said. ‘He’s nineteen.’
I was embarrassed; yet I wanted to ask her questions. It was only fair; I had told her everything about the Tsar, though of course that was funny. It was meant to be comic, so I laughed.
Harriet got down from the wall very carefully, and began to walk up the lane to her house.
‘Please, Harriet.’ I tried to catch hold of her arm. ‘Please, Harriet, what’s wrong?’
‘I just want to be quiet … It’s so hot.’
I stopped helpless, watching her walk away, and climbed back on the wall again. If she looked round she would see how hurt I was, so I hung my head dejectedly, but when I finally looked up she had gone. After tea I went upstairs and washed my face, and dabbed some of Mother’s powder on my cheeks; but it made my face look grey almost, so I rubbed it off on the towel.
I looked so different from the frail way I felt. A noble nose and a pale bold mouth, robust limbs and crinkly hair. My mother had it permanently waved every year, and because I ran about energetically it hung messily over my forehead making me look sullen. It also smelled when it rained. I thought I looked lumpy and middle-aged, but I smiled resourcefully and said, ‘God bless me and make me beautiful,’ and combed my hair with care.
Harriet was in her bedroom; she saw me from the window and came down to open the front door.
‘Hallo, you.’ She smiled. The small irregular teeth showed. She was all pleasantness.
‘Come on up.’ She led the way upstairs to the small dark bedroom. We sat on the floor, Harriet leaning against the bed and rubbing her sunburned arms.
‘What’s all this about the Tsar?’ she asked.
I told her the story all over again, but left out the bit about the wine. It was too good a thing to risk telling Harriet in her present state.
Now Harriet understood the importance of my news; she lay on the floor encouragingly, kicking her legs in the air. I was so triumphant I forgot her earlier mood and described the sallow neck beneath the collar.
Harriet’s voice rose higher. ‘It’s probably dead white after that bit. Like something under a stone. You see it in the summer always when men open their shirts, and they’re grey underneath.’
We both shuddered and Harriet raised her arms victoriously. ‘That’s the colour to be, burnt all over,’ and she sat up and rubbed them. I wished she had not said that. She knew I was never anything but white. Even when the sun was so hot, Harriet was a deep brown, I stayed white.
Harriet knelt upright, drew out a box from under the dresser, opened it and handed me the diary. ‘We’ve neglected it,’ she said as I took it. ‘I’ve lots to write about.’
While she found a pencil I looked at the last entry. ‘We have both read D. H. Lawrence’s Lost Girl,’ I had written. ‘We find it very fine and imagine Italians make good lovers.’
Harriet gave me the pencil and lay on the floor again.
‘Put, “She has been away in Wales”.’
I began to write and kept my face averted, trying to be neat and quick at the same time.
‘She has been away in Wales. What next?’
‘Put, “I have been here alone”.’ Harriet’s voice was muffled against the carpet. ‘And that you have become more intimate with the Tsar.’ It was always Harriet who dictated the diary, but it was in my writing in case her mother discovered it. ‘She might read something of mine,’ Harriet had explained, ‘but not if it was strange handwriting.’ We never mentioned names and everyone had a pseudonym, to be the more safe.
‘She,’ Harriet said, ‘has made an illuminating discovery. She has met a boy of nineteen … no.’ Harriet sat up. ‘Put “a man” instead, don’t put the age. “He has yellow hair and is devoid of humour, but she found him very interesting”.’
She stood up and combed her hair at the dressing table, peering at her face and leaning her elbows on the dresser top to get a closer view.
‘Look,’ she bade me. ‘Look at my bottom lip, its bruised.’
Before I could look she turned hurriedly away and began to dictate with her back to me.
‘Her lip is bruised. It is a queer brown colour and swollen from underneath where he kissed her. He made her face rough too.’
I wrote it all down and felt dismayed at the sentences. Not that the diary contained no other such passages, but Harriet was taking pleasure in dictating and telling me simultaneously. Always before we had both discussed things to go in the diary, analysed emotions, looked in the dictionary for suitable words, and fashioned the paragraphs sentence by sentence.
‘We’ve got to be scientific,’ Harriet had said. ‘Otherwise we’ll find it merely smutty on reading.’
‘Go on,’ I said, anxious to hear more.
‘We lay down in a field near a farmhouse one day …’
I could not look up, I held the pencil so tight my fingers ached.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘He kissed me and hurt my mouth, then he put his hand on my neck and …’ She broke off quickly and turned. ‘Oh, give it to me, I’ll write it.’
I could only sit there watching her scribble across the page, a deep frown of concentration on her face, her bottom lip slightly swollen. When she had finished she shut the book, placed it in the box and thrust it under the dresser. Seeing my face she said kindly, ‘You can read it next time. Don’t worry, it’s nothing really. Let’s go down to the sea.’
‘Yes,’ I said miserably, and waited for her to apply lipstick.
Harriet was a year older than I but looked much younger, with plaits fastened round her head. I was thirteen but I looked ancient beside Harriet, with my permed hair and plump body. Harriet never wore hats except sometimes an old straw panama when it rained. My spirits returned as we walked down the lane. I clutched at Harriet and laughed nervously. ‘Don’t laugh, he’ll be there, he always is, just you see. Oh, don’t laugh.’
Harriet haughtily turned her face to the sky and said in her special society voice, ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, dear.’
And while we laughed and swayed down the lane we caught sight of the Tsar leaning against the lamp by the Canon’s fence, head craned forward on the thin discoloured neck, hat in hand.
‘Now, now,’ said Harriet busily approaching him. ‘What’s all this. Can’t have followers, you know.’
‘Oh Harriet, really,’ I said watching the Tsar’s amused con
temptuous face.
Harriet and the Tsar walked together, and I followed a little way behind them through the trees. Now and then I heard the Tsar say, ‘And you think so?’, and saw Harriet shake her head vehemently. I hoped they were talking about me but suddenly Harriet broke away from the path and jumped to swing on a branch, and shouted, red in the face, ‘He’s nineteen.’
I stopped and looked up at her in disbelief. Her feet clear of the ground threatened to kick me over.
‘Move,’ she ordered. ‘Go on, move.’
She pushed at my chest with both feet and I stumbled and fell backward. Harriet let go of the branch and stood over me, her dress rumpled, one plait beginning to slide from its position, her face defiant.
‘I told you to move, I did warn you.’ She held out her hand but I just lay there refusing to look at her.
‘Well, all right, sulk.’ She stood undecided. ‘When you feel more sensible I’ll be near the tadpole pools.’
I sat up then and watched her go, brushing pine-needles from my frock dejectedly.
‘She’s a hot-tempered girl.’ The Tsar squatted on his haunches a little distance from me, and swung his hat between his knees.
I wanted to tell him he didn’t know what he was talking about; that he ought to have learnt more about people than to say she was hot-tempered.
Instead I stood up and rubbed the side of my leg patterned with pine-needles, and looked down at him balanced on his heels like a dancer. Perhaps not so old after all, even if he wasn’t nineteen like the boy in Wales.
‘Come on, Tsar,’ I said. ‘Let’s find Harriet.’
But he only rocked a little where he crouched and looked at me with light eyes.
‘I want to tell you something.’
‘What? I want to find Harriet.’
The Tsar stood up and came close to me, and I turned in the direction Harriet had gone and saw the sun had drawn level with the trees and circled them with flames.
Please God (I could feel the Tsar’s hand on my shoulder) please God send Harriet. Then I turned to face the tiger. So dingy he was with his sallow skin and thin hair brushed carefully back. For all his elegance, and graceful walk, the delicate way he moved his head, indefinably he lacked youth. Later I was to remember the stillness in the woods, the evening in an avenue of light between the tree trunks, and the Tsar with his hand on my shoulder. I did not know I loved him then, because as Harriet wrote later in the diary, we had a long way to go before we reached the point of love.
The Tsar moved himself worriedly and took my fingers between his own. ‘No, no,’ he said under the pines, as if he had read my thoughts, ‘No, child, no,’ and with a sudden clumsy movement pulled my head against his shoulder. I stood there awkwardly straddled, not daring to ease myself away, but turning my face gently to gaze along the avenue of light. He stood back so suddenly I almost stumbled, and he walked away shouting in his high amused voice, ‘Harriet, where art thou?’
Harriet told me afterwards she had seen it all, and that I looked most uncomfortable, but when we reached the edge of the trees she was sitting a long way down the slope with her back to us. Her plaits hung about her ears, she sat without shoes, the bony feet curled under the sand. She looked cold all over.
I sat down beside her and nudged her arm but she would not look at me. The Tsar stood above us; we could hear him breathing heavily from the effort of the climb. I wanted to shout, to laugh, to roll in the sand; anything to throw off the awful weighty responsibility I felt. Always before the feeling had been occasioned by Harriet, by something she had made me do. The time she had borrowed the hand-cart from Mr Redman and wheeled me up and down the lane crying, ‘Bring out your dead,’ I had lain crushed and embarrassed with pain. I had smiled and shown my splendid teeth, clutching tight to the side of the barrow and wishing to die. But that had come to an end when we put the cart back in the garage. The Tsar would not be so easily disposed of; and the putting away in the end would be up to me, not Harriet.
When we wrote in the diary later that night, Harriet told me to use a new page so that I should not see what she had written earlier about the boy in the field. What she had dictated about the Tsar seemed to both of us inarticulate. But it was so difficult.
I wrote …
The Tsar tried to kiss me, I think; but nothing happened. She hid behind the sandhills and thought I looked very uncomfortable. I should have stood closer, then I would not have felt so foolish.
Then Harriet told me to write the bit about love, and how we had not tasted everything yet. Before she shut me out in the garden I held the door open, whispering in case her mother overheard.
‘What haven’t we tasted yet?’
‘Oh many things. You wait.’
Then her mother joined us on the step, talking pleasantly and emptily. Harriet put an arm round her waist and looked fondly at her, but it was unconvincing. We both tried very hard to give our parents love, and security, but they were too demanding.
I said good night, and walked home down the lane pointing my feet at every step, craning my neck the better to see the stars.
6
‘I ask you dear,’ said Harriet rolling over on to her stomach, holding her plait up to the sunlight. ‘Is it likely that a woman would admit to being jealous of a girl of thirteen?’
‘I suppose not.’ I sounded unconvinced. ‘But supposing she did admit it and came round to our house to see Mother. Think of the row there’d be.’
Harriet lay still and serious. ‘You could always say Mrs Biggs was perverted. After all, it’s a nasty thing to imply.’
‘But Mother,’ I insisted. ‘She’s hardly forgotten the Italians yet.’
‘Good Lord,’ Harriet sat up amazed. ‘That was years ago. We may have been precocious but it was innocent enough.’ She looked round the field. ‘Wasn’t it?’
I tried to think what innocence meant and failed.
‘I don’t know if we were ever innocent.’ I hoped I sounded casual in case we became embarrassed and pedantic.
‘Well, we felt daring the time we met the prisoners.’ Harriet was annoyed. ‘We were awfully scared. That’s innocence. Why, you said you didn’t want to go the second time, and I went alone and said you were ill. What happened to you?’
I stared at the poppies by the fence, the stiff hairy stems that wavered when the flower burst. In bud they stood fierce and firm; once wanton in the sun they flowered and grew weak. I nearly told Harriet I felt like that but it seemed too vague and sentimental. ‘I just went for a walk along the shore.’ I lay back in the grass.
‘You should have come,’ said Harriet. ‘It was interesting.’
I had read the diary so I knew it was interesting. Instead I had walked along the edge of the sea, picking up shells and rolling burst melons soggily over the sand.
The first time we had met the prisoners I had been uneasy but not frightened. Harriet had asked them questions about their families and country, and they had shown us photographs. Sedate images of brothers and mothers, and one of a girl with a cross on a chain around her neck. ‘Anna-Maria,’ the younger one pointed at the photograph. ‘Very beautiful girl … like you.’ And he smiled at Harriet. The older man was plump and short with a neat nose and tiny ears that lay flat against his head. The last time we had gone to meet them, the time Mrs Biggs saw us, Harriet told me to take the plump man away somewhere on my own.
Walking in the sun along the sand, shirt torn open, arms spread high, feet wet and cold in the sea. Sliding damp skinned over green moss, alive and moving on the rocks by the concrete hangars. Walking behind the sandhills and sitting with bare feet beside the plump Italian. He called me ‘a dirty little angel’. Adolescent tremblings, swirls of nerves gone gold. The pain of the moment, the awful uncontrolled joy; that was innocence.
I sat up in the field and said loudly, ‘Remember, Harriet, he called me a dirty little angel.’
‘Mmmm.’ Harriet face downwards in the grass was in a private dream of her own.
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We were in the field behind my house, screened from the garden where Mother sat reading a library book, by a row of tattered poplars that stood close to the fence. As the wind lifted them lightly I could see my mother’s deck-chair, and the problem of Mrs Biggs came uneasily to my mind.
“Harriet. Harriet … Listen.’
‘What?’
‘We shall have to be very careful,’ I said, lying down beside her. She turned and her breath came sweetly against my face.
‘We shall have to drop a hint now and then of seeing the Tsar on our walks, so that if Mrs Biggs does arrive our lies will seem more plausible.’
‘Very well,’ said Harriet. ‘But discreetly, just in general conversation. “Oh, I saw Mr Biggs last night, he does look ill,” or something like that.’
‘And you tell him not to speak to us in the lane.’ I warned her.
‘It does seem a little unnecessary.’ Harriet lay on her back and covered her face with her arm. ‘You’ve got nothing out of it so far.’ I felt angry with her. He had told me all his fragile history; told me of his wedding day, and his summer evenings. He had said by the tadpole pools … She’ll know I’ve been happy tonight … I could not forget that he trusted me. Aloud I said:
‘It might be best to finish the whole adventure, just not follow it up.’
But I knew I could not do that, even if Harriet allowed me. A year ago, to be called a Dirty Little Angel would have kept us going for months. Now it was not enough; more elaborate things had to be said; each new experience had to leave a more complicated tracery of sensations; to satisfy us every memory must be more desperate than the last.
In the beginning we had never searched for experience. True we didn’t follow the usual childish pursuits. We never played games or behaved like playmates, we never verbally abused each other except on occasions deliberately, to reassure our parents. It was Dodie who began it, telling us of the gay times she had known in her youth, without Papa guessing. ‘Making the friendly gesture’ she had called it. And we liked her stories, we were fascinated. We took to going for long walks over the shore, looking for people who by their chosen solitariness must have something to hide. We learnt early it was the gently resigned ones who had the most to tell; the voluble and frantic were no use. They seldom got beyond pity for themselves and at the end mouthed soft obscenities. At first Harriet was interrogator and I spectator. When she questioned adults and probed their lives I was content to listen. She said we were not to become involved, we were too young, only to learn. She said our information was a kind of training course for later life; living at second hand was our objective until we were old enough. But of late, even at school and away from Harriet’s influence, the process of analysis went on. It had become a habit: the steady search to discover the background of teachers; the singling out of girls older than myself who might add something to what I already knew.
Harriet Said Page 3