Harriet Said

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Progressively it became less of a joy when the girl would say, as one had, ‘It’s so hard to be good now, isn’t it? Mummy says it will be much easier when I’m grown up.’ I thought of the sins of my childhood; the hats lost on train journeys, the gloves left behind in church, the refusal to go on a message. I thought of the things I had done since, things that Harriet and I did not consider strange, but that would rank as enormities to this girl … and my mother. Harriet told me that in other lands, in other cultures, in other times, both past and in the future, we would not be thought abnormal, but it did not help. I was separated from my mother by an invisible wall, a wall of amyl, that had become no longer hypothetical. Never again to share little jokes with her, to sit in the garden peacefully waiting for the apples to ripen and summer to bloom.

  Harriet stood up in the field and stretched her body, arms above her head.

  ‘Your mother’s calling … tea I think.’

  ‘Coming, Mother,’ I shouted.

  We climbed the fence and walked down the garden towards my smiling mother. She told me to fetch deck-chairs from the green-house. Through the glass I spied on them both, Harriet at my mother’s feet, looking up winningly into her face. The smell in the green-house assumed shape and colour; the stuffy green of the tomato plants, the bursting splitting red of the fruit, the pale grey odour of last year’s mint hanging from a nail above the door. I was too warm, too indolent to bother any more about Mrs Biggs. If she came and told my mother stories and Mother suffered, it was not I that was to blame. But when I looked through the glass and saw her sitting there so happy on her scarlet deck-chair, she was my best beloved and I wished she need not suffer.

  ‘Hurry up!’ she called.

  She asked me to sit on the deck-chair but I wouldn’t. I sat on the grass and drank my tea. Harriet did as she was asked and chatted eagerly for my benefit. To cover my silence.

  ‘Yes, I’m specialising in maths now.’ She looked fully into my mother’s eyes. ‘Of course, it’s only a means to an end, I’m more interested in science you know.’

  A wasp hovered erratically above the lupins, turned suspended in the air, and spun buzzing to the fallen apples beneath the flower.

  Harriet was saying, ‘We saw Mr Biggs last night. He looked ill, we thought. Didn’t we?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, perhaps a little pale … but I hardly know him.’

  ‘I thought you used to be great pals.’ My mother refilled my cup, her eyes kind and loving. ‘You got a card from him once.’

  ‘Did I?’ I looked at Harriet but she avoided my gaze.

  Sometimes in a mood of contentment and affection I confided things to my mother. Usually I had reason to regret it.

  Harriet was carefully putting her tea-leaves in the grass. She looked up and said slowly, ‘You never told me … you must have quite a collection by now.’

  ‘A collection of what?’

  ‘Cards, dear,’ she said.

  ‘From Mr Biggs?’ My mother was puzzled.

  ‘Oh, don’t be daft, Harriet.’ Crossly I pinched her leg and scowled at her.

  ‘I always remember,’ Harriet continued, ‘the ones you received from Rome and Naples and all points north.’

  My mother was looking at her and then at me.

  ‘I do think you should shut up, I do think you might.’

  ‘Perhaps I got it wrong,’ said Harriet contritely. ‘Perhaps it was someone else.’

  After a little pause she went on, ‘I do remember you got one once from Mrs Biggs.’

  I very nearly laughed at the absurdity of the lie.

  ‘I met her at the station the day she was posting it,’ Harriet spoke severely, ‘And she said—was it Berks or Barks?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought’—Mother was thinking of the Italians—‘that Mrs Biggs would send you a card.’

  It was beyond me now. I relaxed and let Harriet extricate me as best she could, seeing my mother’s face as if through a curtain of gauze. I saw her opening her small mouth primly and beautifully, but I heard no sound in the garden. A cloud began to roll softly towards the sun; the lupin beds already were cold and shut off from the light; the grass a little way down the garden faded while I watched.

  The shadow crept steadily up the lawn, extinguishing the roses, the holly bush, the apple tree beside the fence. Only Mother and Harriet lingered, glowing in a corner of light; then they too wavered, struggled with invisible shutters, and turned grey. I waited. The cloud disintegrated in the sky, the grass brightened and Harriet enveloped herself in the warmth again.

  The back gate loudly closed; the small figure of Frances pushed its way through the privet hedge.

  ‘Don’t,’ called Mother. ‘Walk round, dear.’

  But Frances was already coming sideways up the lawn, trailing her coat along the ground.

  ‘Hallo, Harriet,’ she said politely, and stood leaning against my mother’s knees.

  I could see the next-door neighbour looking through the kitchen window into our garden. We must have made a charming group. Tea on the lawn, the mother surrounded by children, the clear voices. At least we looked real. Even if Harriet and I were alien it could not show.

  ‘Let’s take a photograph,’ my mother said. ‘I’ve a new film in the dining-room drawer.’

  ‘I’ll get it.’ Frances was running down the garden.

  At the privet hedge she swerved and ran along the rockery to the concrete path. Her face appeared at the kitchen window. ‘Thought I was going through the hedge, didn’t you, Mummy?’

  My mother smiled indulgently and Harriet and I smiled too with relief.

  When we sat on the grass, Frances between us, I hoped for a moment the camera would not work.

  ‘Look up, Frances.’ My mother waited and the shutter clicked.

  What if the film exposed not three children in the sun, but one between two spectres, wearing childish smiles. Faces that crumbled like bread in the fingers, and showed a fearful disintegration. Harriet wanted to take a photograph of mother and myself, but I said no, so she placed Frances between my mother’s knees and looked professionally at the group.

  ‘Put your arm round her neck,’ she told Frances.

  Here at least would be a record of all that was true and good and beautiful.

  When the photographing was finished Frances knelt on the grass beside me, putting her arms round my neck, and rubbing her face against mine.

  ‘There’s a fair on at Bumpy field tomorrow, isn’t there? There’s roundabouts and a menagerie, isn’t there? Please take me, please.’

  My mother looked pleadingly at me and then at Harriet.

  ‘Do take her with you, she does so want to go. It will only be for half an hour.’

  ‘And then I shall have to leave and bring her back I suppose.’

  I was angry too quickly. A fierce irritation caused me to shake Frances away from me.

  The more kindly and generously my mother looked at me, the more irritated I grew.

  ‘It’s so stupid. Just because you won’t take her yourself, I have to. Why can’t she be more self-contained. I don’t beg always to be with other people.’

  ‘But you’ve Harriet.’ Frances began to cry desperately, sobbing terribly on the grass, her whole body given to sudden grief.

  Harriet said, ‘Thank you for the tea, I must be going now. We’ll take you to the fair, don’t cry, Frances.’

  My mother looked gratefully at her, but still she didn’t reproach me.

  At the gate Harriet watched me almost with distaste.

  ‘Why do you get so illogical? It’s so ugly when you allow them to disturb you.’

  I must have looked very close to despair at this, for she added in her society voice, ‘Rise above it, dear … rise above it.’

  ‘Are we going to the shore tonight?’ I asked.

  Three high-bosomed women in hard bowler hats, sitting penguin-shaped on three fleshy horses, appeared at the corner of the lane. Massive and leisurely they passed
our gate, filling the lane with tweed jackets and cello thighs.

  Harriet looked at the group thoughtfully. ‘No, I’ve something special to do tonight. I’ll tell you tomorrow.’

  She began to walk unhurriedly away from me, her sandals making no sound on the road; in the garden at the back of the house, Frances, her grief forgotten, could be heard screaming with laughter.

  7

  Harriet went directly home to her father.

  He was a tall man, very morose, possessing a fierce sense of justice and great sentimentality. To hear Roses of Picardy or Silver Threads Among the Gold filled him with emotion. He would talk constantly to Harriet with immense nostalgia of his youth and his brother William. His childhood it would seem had been a hard one. ‘The cruelty of those days,’ he was fond of saying, ‘the ignorance.’ It was therefore surprising to us that any misdemeanour on Harriet’s part, however slight, brought instant physical chastisement.

  She liked to do helpful jobs for him. Filling the watering can when he ill-humouredly worked in the garden, finding his cigarettes for him when he mislaid them; taking a certain satisfaction in thus soothing his irritable mind.

  Though he was strict about her school work, and displeased if she fell back a place in her form, he was relaxed in other respects. She could in summer stay out long after it was dark, go swimming in the salt sea off the Point, where the soldiers splashed every morning and the nuns from the convent shyly billowed out over the sheeted water of an evening, and he even allowed her to go without breakfast if she wished.

  Harriet had made tea for her father, her mother being in town that afternoon, and told him about Frances wanting me to take her to the fair. She said I had shouted at my mother and quite lost control. Her father said, nodding his head wisely, ‘I used to be the same myself; it’s all part of the process of wanting to do without guidance and control. I remember I told my mother once, and she was a very hasty woman, that she ought not to rely on me to entertain William. “Mother,” I said, “William must realise I’m almost a man and learn to stay with you.” I was eighteen and been out working for four years, but she gave me a blow across the head with her hand that made me shout. I can feel it now. But she was right you know.’

  Harriet pretended to agree with him, and waited till he had come to the end of his reminiscences. Then she said casually she had heard Mr Biggs was ill.

  Her father was immediately alarmed, fearing that his Saturday round of golf was in jeopardy.

  ‘Run round and see if it’s anything serious,’ he told her. ‘And find out if he’ll be well enough for Saturday.’

  Harriet, pleased with her strategy, wheeled her mother’s bicycle out of the shed, and rode to Timothy Street.

  The Tsar’s house was a large Victorian-fronted building, with overgrown gardens back and front. The front gate was large and solid, painted black and so tall it was impossible to see over. Though it was summer and not yet six o’clock there was a light in the front room, and one curtain was drawn a quarter of the way across the large windows; this and the row of thick holly bushes made the light necessary. It was such a neglected house, dark and well made, unlike the houses we lived in, strung like cherry-stones along the lane, that Harriet expected the door to swing open on its hinges without human help. While she was waiting curiously for this to happen, voices were raised in argument somewhere in the house. For a moment she thought her lie had become truth, that Mrs Biggs was quarrelling with the Tsar come home ill from work. Then she realised it was the wireless and lifting the knocker firmly rapped it against the door.

  Mrs Biggs, in fawn cardigan and sandals, like those we wore, opened the door, heaving it backwards and staring full at Harriet.

  She led her with one hand down the hall, the other to her lips.

  ‘Silence,’ she whispered. ‘It’s such a good play.’

  Like characters before the Tabs in a pantomime, tiptoeing across the stage to fill in a difficult transformation scene, they entered the front-room.

  Harriet sat on the sofa, knees close together, Mrs Biggs in an armchair by the fire leaning forward, giving her whole attention to the radio. The clock on the mantelpiece said half past five, and listening for a moment to the sense of the words spoken, Harriet realised it was Children’s Hour.

  The room as she later described it, was heavy and cumbersome with furniture. A huge Welsh dresser against the wall, with a mirror panel partly screened by plates in blue and gold; a sideboard near the window with a statue on its top, brandishing a sword and with one feminine breast rakishly exposed. What made the statue command attention, said Harriet, was not its size which was formidable, but the statue’s nipple which was tipped with scarlet. The rest of the room was dark and very warm. Gradually, as Harriet later described it, between Mrs Biggs and herself grew a hedge of green ivy. She saw through the leaves the mouth of the Tsar’s wife open giddily as she sat listening to a children’s entertainment. Her hands in her lap closed idly and heavily, in and out, sleep-laden like a red-rusted weed in the sea.

  The face of Mrs Biggs was large and dry; light-coloured eyes set flat in her head, grey thick hair rolled up above her ears and neck.

  ‘Have you had tea, dear?’ she asked when the programme came to an end.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  Mrs Biggs stood up and poked the fire with a brass curtain rod; as she leant forward Harriet could see on the calves of her legs strong black hairs. She was watching Harriet through the mirror above the fireplace.

  Harriet who was fond of assuming the character expected of her in certain different houses, now became the large girl at the Christmas party, arms crossed over a growing chest, her eyes wide open and greedy.

  ‘Father sent me to ask if Mr Biggs will be calling for him as usual this Saturday. He’d heard that he wasn’t well.’

  Mrs Biggs received this last piece of news with less surprise than expected.

  ‘Oh, he’ll be able to play golf all right. There’s nothing wrong with him that I know of.’

  Her eyes strayed to the small table by the lamp, with its array of bottles and syphon.

  ‘A little self-control would be a help.’

  Harriet began to hate Mrs Biggs, sitting there untidily in a stained cardigan, talking of self-control.

  ‘He’s weak,’ said Mrs Biggs, as if to excuse herself. ‘His mother told me as much years ago, but somehow you don’t pay attention to that sort of thing when you’re young.’

  She reached up and took a silver-framed photograph down from the mantelpiece and handed it to Harriet.

  ‘Look at that!’

  It was a young face, rather smooth and old-fashioned, with oiled hair brushed well back.

  ‘It’s Mr Biggs,” said Harriet. ‘I never knew he wore spectacles.’

  ‘He became vainer as he grew older. Strains his eyes all the time, but won’t wear glasses.’ Her face began to change in expression; she wanted Harriet to go now. Her eyes darkened with impatience, her hands fidgeted in her lap. But Harriet would not go. She told me, ‘I knew she wanted me to go, and that made it so that I couldn’t.’

  Stubbornly she held the photograph and tried to see some faint trace in it of the Tsar we knew. She was aware of Mrs Biggs, restless and suddenly tired in her armchair by the fire; voices in the lane outside made the room isolated and withdrawn.

  Looking up suddenly at Mrs Biggs, she was aware of an expression half formed in the woman’s light eyes, something of cunning or sadness that was wholly unconscious.

  ‘How’s that little friend of yours?’ Mrs Biggs asked. ‘The stout one. Getting on all right at that school?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. I think so.’

  Harriet stood up, placed the young Tsar on the mantelpiece and turned to go. In the hall it was cool; the door into the garden opened to show the pale washed sky; the holly bush near the porch quivered, stabbing green leaves upwards in the warm air. Mrs Biggs waited till Harriet had successfully manoeuvred her bicycle out into the road; she gave a smal
l, not unfriendly smile, and stepped into the house. Then she shut the door.

  It was the following night when, Frances between us, we walked to Bumpy field, that Harriet told me of her visit to the house of the Tsar.

  We had to be very careful in case Frances repeated what she heard but, as she ran ahead every few moments in her excitement to reach the fair, we felt there was little danger of her understanding such disjointed conversation as ours.

  ‘I wish,’ I said kindly to Harriet, ‘I had seen the photograph.’

  I did not mean it, for though I considered Harriet brave and clever I almost hated her for prising Mrs Biggs open in that way. I imagined the woman’s heart laid bare, the cancerous growth of bitterness dissected coldly; as for the photograph, why that was no more the Tsar than I was the frail golden girl I dreamed of being.

  Harriet laughed suddenly. ‘She called you stout, you know. “Your stout friend” she said.’

  I was suddenly afraid lest Mrs Biggs should describe me so to the Tsar. He may not have noticed it before, and then aware of his wife’s remark turn slowly to me one day under the church porch, saying, ‘You are stout, aren’t you?’

  Frances ran back again to meet us, hopping on one leg and holding with both hands to my arm.

  ‘You can hear the music,’ she said.

  A little way past the paper shop and between a row of cottages lay Bumpy field, circled with noise and military bands.