I felt admiration for the way she spoke, the calm refusal to be blackmailed into submissiveness by parental grief. Where I would have broken down and begged for forgiveness, Harriet reasoned sensibly.
‘Who told Mrs Biggs it was us?’ she asked. ‘Did she recognise my voice?’
‘Mr Biggs caught a glimpse of your face, and persuaded Mrs Biggs not to inform the police. He also found this in the garden next morning.’
The notebook lay on the sideboard face down.
‘I see,’ said Harriet, picking up the book and handing it to me.
I took it, and held it to me guiltily.
Harriet’s mother looked at me. ‘I don’t suppose,’ she said cruelly, ‘your mother would be very proud of the episode.’
Only the fact that Harriet was in the room stopped me from going down on my knees and begging her to be lenient.
‘No,’ I stammered wretchedly, ‘I’m sorry.’
Disgusted, Harriet turned away, and there I might have stayed for ever, unable to move from the room, dejected and at a loss in front of her mother, if she had not said to me, ‘You’d better run along home, dear.’ She hesitated. ‘I should be glad, dear, if you didn’t say anything at home about tonight—he’s not been well you know, dear. He has a lot of trouble with his stomach.’
Harriet cried impatiently, ‘Oh stop making excuses. She wouldn’t dare mention tonight, and if she did, what does it matter? It’s so absurd.’
‘You don’t think he’ll come round to our house do you?’ I could not help myself.
Harriet flung her arms above her head despairingly.
‘You two—you’re a pair, aren’t you? He’s not been well you know—it’s his stomach—you don’t think he’ll come to our house?’ She mimicked us cruelly, looking down on us with disgust.
I had so much in common with her mother; but she would be comforted by Harriet—after I had gone. Harriet would sit at her feet and put her arms round her and tell her not to take it so hard. I felt ashamed at my selfishness. Poor little woman. How would she go to bed? How could she go into the sulky bedroom and lie down beside the muttering man with his face swollen with anger? Perhaps she would stay by the fire all night with Harriet, discussing me, saying how cowardly and deceitful I was, how stout, how I could never tell the truth. I resolved to go away, not just away to school in a few weeks’ time, but away for ever so that Harriet would be sorry.
‘Good night.’
‘Good night,’ said Harriet grudgingly. ‘Better leave it for a day or two. I’ll see you on the shore some time.’
‘All right.’
I went out of the back door and ran down the path in the dark almost sobbing. I leaned on the cherry tree that grew against the garage and listened to the loud beating of my heart. I rubbed my cheek across the slender trunk of the tree and whispered over and over, ‘I can’t bear it, I can’t, I can’t bear it.’
I wanted to see Harriet just once more before I went away. I walked on tip-toe along the path and stood at the side of the window. I was reminded of the night we had spied on the Tsar; it was another thing to remember this long summer by, an endless peering through secret windows.
Harriet’s mother sat on her chair by the fire reading the evening paper. The wireless was quite loud and she had put fresh coal in the grate. Her face was screwed up in concentration over the newsprint. Her mouth bulged slightly as she chewed a sweet. Harriet was not there.
I leaned against the wall and thought it over. If you were very unhappy you could not possibly eat sweets. I felt sure I could not. And if Harriet really loved her mother she would be with her; if her mother needed her.
I went round the house to Harriet’s room at the front. Her light was on, but the curtains were drawn across the windows. Three people of one flesh, all alone in separate rooms, one chewing sweets and reading the evening paper, one chanting out his tom-tom message of doom, and the third motionless on her bed, dry eyes wide open under the electric light.
It began to rain as I stood there keeping watch over Harriet. That was it, I would stay here all night and never move.
Harriet pulled back the curtains and opened the window. She leaned on the sill and stared out into the garden. I did not know what to do. She wanted to be alone, she was glad I had gone home. I could sense in the shadowed inclination of her head and neck that she fancied herself unseen and solitary. Greatly daring, I whispered, ‘Harriet … it’s me … Harriet.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m going away, Harriet.’
‘I should hope so. You’ll catch your death there … it’s raining.’
So miserable was I that I had forgotten the rain. How could she be so cruel as to misunderstand?
‘I mean I’m going away for good, Harriet.’
In my anxiety to make her understand I stepped on to the flower-bed under her window and peered up at her.
‘Oh, you fool,’ Harriet half said, half cried. ‘And mind the plants. He’ll be furious. You’re trampling all over them.’
She withdrew into the room and shut the window. The curtains with finality closed once more.
I stood in the rain and wished her in hell.
Victor Sylvester was still conducting foxtrots on the wireless. Bending my neck I stretched out my arm and went quick, quick, slow across the lawn. Then I got down on my knees in the grass and brushed the top soil of the flower-bed in case her father should be furious. I wished I could erase my love for Harriet as easily as my footprints. I spoke seriously to myself on the way home, resolving to be more adult in my emotions. I felt exhausted, as if I had run for miles in a high wind.
10
On Sunday evening I met Harriet outside the Cottage Hospital. I had said nothing to my parents who, working laboriously in the garden, hardly seemed to notice when I fetched my coat and walked out of the gate. Harriet had telephoned me after tea, and told me she had thought of a good plan to help me get over my love for the Tsar. I felt that I did not want to get over it, such a strange mixture of pain and pleasure it gave me, but I could not tell her so.
As we walked to the woods she told me what she had decided. First, I must put my meetings with the Tsar on a more regular basis. No more going down to the sea, as we did now, in the hope of meeting. I must arrange times and places with him.
‘But, Harriet,’ I protested weakly, ‘he may not want it.’ The fields along the cinder path swayed in rhythm, as the wind moved over the tops of grasses. Trees, fields, and hedges fluttered in one circular regular spasm, and were still.
‘Also you must get him to kiss you again,’ said Harriet, walking steadily, paying no attention to my interruption. It sounded very simple. I was not afraid of the Tsar any more, but there was a difference between that and actually thrusting myself on him. I shook my head and wondered what was wrong. The woods seemed smaller and blacker, the church tower breaking through the pines, tiny and ineffectual. Time was when the whole earth lay buried beneath the blue trees, and the tower split the clouds with a fist of iron.
‘Mrs Biggs usually goes away for a few days in the summer to see her sister,’ Harriet was saying. ‘You must find out when, and we’ll call on the Tsar at his house.’
She had told me before that Mrs Biggs’s sister had a backward child. The sister took drugs to stop the child from growing in her, and it tore her body when it slid with monstrous head on to the rubber sheet. That was what Harriet said. Would Mrs Biggs sit listening to Children’s Hour, idiot child on her lap?
But Harriet was too serious. It was different from the first evening she had come home from Wales, when we swayed giddily to meet the Tsar waiting under the silver-painted lamp-post.
The lane was empty as we turned the corner by the Canon’s house; high tunnel of broad elms motionless beneath the sky, the light filtering white and radiant between the still leaves. We climbed the wall into the graveyard and stood ankle deep in the black ivy, creeper stems of wine-red coursing the earth like veins. Pale shoots of beech
fluttered against the fence, small leaves fanned out precisely.
‘What if he doesn’t come?’ I asked Harriet, walking away through the tangle of grass and ivy towards the church. She tossed her head, jerking the colourless plaits of hair about her ears, and shouted:
‘He will, dear. He must.’
She was always so sure now. As if returned from Wales surging with power and knowledge, she straddled the summer days like a colossus, carrying me with her.
The Canon kept the key of the church under the hair mat in the porch. We used it whenever we liked; sometimes we had picnics when it rained and sat in the pews eating sandwiches, and other times we took refuge there from the streams of city children that screamed and ran about the woods on holidays. The Canon had surprised us once delivering loud sermons from the pulpit, but Harriet had charmed him with her ambition, newly discovered for his benefit, of becoming a missionary and carrying the word of God to foreign lands. He called her the Constant Nymph, lisping the words in his babyish voice honeyed with sentimentality.
Harriet bent down and felt for the key under the mat. A fine cloud of white sand puffed out across the stones as the mat flapped back into place. She turned the key in the lock, and pushed the massive door inwards, and stepped inside. Dust spiralled upwards in the sunlight that shone through the stained windows. Harriet stood beside the stone christening font, holding an imaginary baby in her arms.
‘I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Mother, the Tsar,’ she chanted, looking to the doorway where I stood, watching my face curiously. I smiled uneasily, feeling unbearably hot in my school coat of navy blue.
‘Are you going to wait here? It’s so hot, Harriet.’
She joined me at the door, folding brown arms across her chest, and peered into the lane. A man rode by on his bicycle, trilby hat bobbing grotesquely above the church wall. It looked like a distorted bird limping horizontally among the trees. ‘Hallo!’ he shouted, to someone in the lane.
‘It’s him,’ said Harriet, holding my arm with fierce fingers. ‘I’m sure it’s him.’
I thought of how Thomas Becket had run into some church, and flung himself across the altar in order to escape the hired assassins, and wanted to do the same; but Harriet held tight to my arm and I could not move. It was awful just to stand there, smiling widely while he walked up the path, anchored together against him. He smiled too from the gate, hands fumbling on the catch, gazing with awkward intensity at the graves bordering the path. He had to smile at us twice, and look away, before he finally reached us.
‘Hallo?’
‘Hallo, Tsar?’
He whirled his hat between his fingers, avoiding our eyes. I thought he must feel ashamed, creeping away down the lane to meet such cruel friends. It was very difficult to know what to do now. Harriet just stood there in the porch, eyes turned to the sky, ignoring us both.
I said, ‘I’m sorry about the other night. It was only a joke.’ I wished I hadn’t mentioned it. He might wonder how long we had watched through the window.
‘She was a bit difficult,’ he said, watching Harriet almost humbly. ‘I had to tell her it was you. She would have called the police.’
For a moment I wondered if it was Harriet he loved, the way he looked at her over my head.
Then he said:
‘Harriet, I want to talk to you.’
She turned to look at him, tongue curling out a little beneath her lips.
‘All right.’ She spoke to me commandingly. ‘Go away, ‘I’ll call you later when we’ve finished.’
I hoped he would tell me I might remain, but he hardly glanced at me, hat twirling relentlessly in his hands.
I walked a little way between the graves, and sat down under the trees with my back to the porch. It was very quiet. He was telling her he thought me stout and large. He wanted to tell her what happened on the couch was meaningless. He was saying, ‘She’s unintelligent, but you understand,’ placing thankful arms about her neck.
In despair I stood up, trying to be brave. I would stand behind them mutely. Just this once I would not be afraid. My eyes would not betray dislike or pain, only a gentle sadness that would for once outweigh the solid cheerfulness of my body.
Suddenly Harriet ran out on to the path in front of me. I stopped in surprise, so quick was the movement. Then I was filled with disproportionate fear, as if I had lit a match and dropped it in the grass, seeing in the small flame a whole world afire before I trod it underfoot. There was such fury in the headlong flight of her body over the grass that I could not call out. Astride the wall she turned and faced me accusingly, then dropped into the lane. I could not be sure whether she was in earnest or not. It could be that it was an elaborate way of leaving me alone with the Tsar, and that even now she was walking calmly and with great satisfaction over the fields towards home.
The porch was empty, the huge door half closed against me. I called softly, ‘Mr Biggs,’ pausing for a moment outside. ‘Are you there?’ I had to call him Mr Biggs, though it sounded comical. ‘Mr Biggs, Mr Biggs! Is it true that your ribs, are as thin as the bark on the trees?’ Harriet’s rhyme jingled senselessly up and down in my brain. The Tsar sat facing the altar, back bent, head sunk forward on his chest. It would be so easy to slip out silently into the graveyard, and run thankfully over the fields. Only the thought of Harriet’s anger made me move hesitatingly towards him. It was like a play I had seen, where a man had failed terribly in business. The daughter, home from expensive school, stood helplessly beside him, wishing to touch his arm and tell him she did not care about leaving school, but frightened of the hopeless face he would turn to her.
‘Mr Biggs.’
The face of the Tsar, when he did look at me, was so normal and ordinarily thoughtful, that I stared at him with disbelief. I fought the desire to call him Father, and said nervously, ‘What was the matter with Harriet?’
‘I’m not sure, child. I think I told her the truth.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I said she had an evil mind.’
I was appalled. I wanted to shout, ‘I love Harriet. She’s brave and true and beautiful,’ but the words stuck in my throat. Instead, I said:
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘I know. You haven’t an evil mind.’
It was so unlike what I had imagined. He was telling me that I was the good, the wonderful one. Harriet so thin, so brown in the sun, so like I wanted to be, was the outcast. I could not love him after all if he hated Harriet. If I loved him when he thought Harriet evil, then I could not love her. How could one be evil who walked every day the lane to the sea, and breathed the air from the pines? And if Harriet was in truth evil, then I was, and so was the Tsar.
‘Why is she evil?’
‘She’ll perhaps tell you herself.’
The sun had gone behind the trees, leaving the church dark and no longer warm; the rows of pews rose up out of the stone floor like the headstones in the graveyard outside. The Tsar made no move, but sat there gently rubbing his hands, warming himself.
I began to grow tired of the scene.
‘I had better go now,’ I said, staring down the church to the altar now in shadow. He did not move in his seat, only bowed his head as if in acquiescence, and then suddenly, belatedly.
‘Don’t go.’
I fidgeted unhappily, scraping my nails along the polished wood by his head, unsure of what I should do.
‘Why?’ I said. I meant it to be knowledgable and flirtatious, the way Harriet’s mother used it, but it sounded childish, a cry in the dark.
‘Why?’ he said, mimicking my voice unkindly, petulantly mouthing the word. My eyes filled with tears. I swallowed quickly, wondering if he disliked me. The tears were not for that reason; it was the darkness and the lost echoes of our voices in the darkness, and the black shapes of trees outside the high windows, that made me want to dry. If I creased my face upwards in a grief-stricken smile, and wailed between clenched teeth a long-drawn-out w
ail of sadness down the church, then I could cry. As it was I could only stand there silently, the tears unshed and almost gone. If he did not want me to go, why did he not talk to me, or at least look at me? In this dim light shadows would create wonders in my round, full face. I imagined I looked pale and ethereal, hair smudged about my head, eyes shining with faint tears.
When he did look at me, and said softly in his amused dry voice, ‘What a tragic little Muse,’ it was almost as if I sat bare-footed in the sand, hearing the Italian say ‘Dirty Little Angel’.
What was a Muse? A thoughtful person, or a Greek goddess singing siren songs on the rocks above the sea? It was a beautiful, beautiful word. ‘What a tragic little Muse,’ I told Harriet tenderly, in my mind.
It was so clumsy an action when he stood up and placed his arms round me, that I had to close my eyes tight and cling to the words to keep the beauty there.
‘Please,’ I said unhappily, hating the sour smell of skin against my cheek. ‘Please let me go.’
He dropped his arms at once, standing back and smoothing his hair in a gesture of weariness. It was so dark I could not see his face clearly, only the outline of his hand placating the thin hair. I began to feel light-hearted and sure of myself, saying over and over again, ‘I’m sure it’s terribly late. I’m sure it is. It must be terribly late, Tsar.’
Anxious and relieved to be going I pulled at the big door, now closed against the churchyard. I could not open it.
‘The door won’t open, Mr Biggs.’ I felt afraid, conscious now that it really was late.
He turned the iron ring beneath the lock, and pulled backwards strongly, then placed his shoulder to the dark wood and heaved outward. But it would not open. Speechless I waited, praying desperately that it would move. The thought that Harriet might have come silently back and locked the door, gathered strength in my mind.
‘It’s locked,’ I cried, I know it’s locked.’
I clung to him with fear, holding his hands to my cheek, trying to ease the terror that stormed in me. It seemed as if the whole summer had been lived between the two extremes of joy and fear, and both were unbearable. I was not angry with Harriet, for I might some time, for some explicable reason, act in the same way. But I was angry, within my fear, at the circumstances that turned such simple natural things—like doors locking or time passing—into events of magnitude and worry. I could not imagine what peace the Tsar must feel at not always having to think of the hour or the place, of being answerable only to himself. I forgot until he spoke, that Mrs Biggs for him took the place of my mother.
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