Harriet Said

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Moments passed as the harsh light penetrated deeper into the room. The carpet under my feet became a lighter grey, drab flowers struggled outward in a tangled pattern across its surface; the piano, which in the darkness had filled the room, shrivelled at my back and was unimportant.

  ‘I think,’ said the Tsar, ‘we had better all have some coffee.’

  He stood still, arms slack against his sides, thin hands idle. Finally he coughed, a small dry sound that reassured him, and went out into the hall leaving the door open. When the light was first switched on and the Tsar exposed so foolishly, I had not dared smile. Now, alone, I did not want to smile. It did not seem very funny.

  If he had scrambled at once to his feet, face comic in dismay, I would have laughed. But to lie there quite still in front of Harriet, head rearing like a tortoise, lined face so grieved and sad, had spoiled the scene. I felt I should have comforted him so that he need not have lain on the floor for Harriet to laugh at him. It was my fault and I felt guilty.

  Harriet came into the room with Mr Hind. Her anger was gone; she smiled kindly at me and leaned against the mantelpiece.

  ‘You should see upstairs,’ she told me. ‘Why, there’s two rooms full of boxes filled with postcards and things, all scattered over the floors.’

  ‘Two rooms … how wonderful. Are there really, Mr Hind?’ I did not look at him and he did not reply.

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it, Douglas?’

  Evidently Harriet had been very harsh with Mr Hind, and was now willing to forgive him. He drooped in his armchair by the grate, face sullen. All his charm had deserted him, his moustache lay heavily and without life across his lip.

  ‘Yes,’ he said shortly.

  Harriet said, ‘And we found a telegram sent to Mrs Biggs on her wedding day. “Wishing you every happiness today and always, Meg and Wilfred.” Didn’t we, Douglas?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Hind.

  He seemed suddenly to be very sorry for Mrs Biggs. He crossed his legs and swung a resentful foot.

  ‘I read the other day,’ said Harriet, looking at me seriously, ‘about a woman who collected elephants. She only managed twelve, but think how fortunate we are that it’s only postcards for Mrs Biggs.’

  She looked at Mr Hind innocently. If Mr Hind did not respond soon the evening would be a farce.

  ‘I also read somewhere,’ she continued, ‘about a man who had a passion for collecting egg shells. He planted things in them.’

  ‘What things?’ I asked, feeling smothered by the laughter inside me.

  ‘Just things,’ said Harriet sternly, and added, ‘mostly herbs, I gather.’

  Mr Hind looked at her without understanding. He relented and laughed briefly. He thought no doubt that Harriet was an odd girl, pale with anger one moment and talking nonsense the next. Mr Hind did not matter, however; he was a shallow man and insensitive. It was the Tsar who must be amused and won over.

  ‘I’ll just see if I can help Mr Biggs with the coffee.’ I walked quickly out into the hall and shut the door. The Tsar stood smoking a cigarette in the kitchen. He looked tidy, clean, and matter-of-fact. He had brushed his hair carefully and I thought he had washed his face. Pale smoke drifted across his eyes as he exhaled, so that I could not see his expression.

  ‘I don’t think Harriet meant to laugh.’

  I stopped, not knowing how to make it sound convincing. ‘I don’t think she laughed because it was funny, Mr Biggs. It’s just she gets angry sometimes.’

  The Tsar took two blue cups from a shelf above my head, then another two, and found saucers for them. He arranged them neatly on a black tray painted with golden dragons, and opened a cupboard by the door.

  ‘Don’t worry about my feelings, my dear.’ His back was to me as he said it, and his voice sounded cold, as if the light, that had so savagely been switched on, had in some way hardened him and drained away his weakness.

  ‘It’s you I’m concerned about. You and Harriet.’

  He lifted down a green bowl carefully and turned and placed it on the Chinese tray.

  ‘There … all ready I think.’

  In the sitting-room he poured coffee and handed cups to Harriet and Mr Hind without embarrassment. I thought it strange that he was so at ease until I remembered the night Harriet and I had seen him on the couch, and all the other nights there must have been that I did not know about but could imagine. Harriet sat up straight in her chair, her eyes bright, two round dabs of colour on her pale cheeks. She did not look at the Tsar.

  And he, unsmiling, talked a little to Mr Hind about business, and did not look directly at any of us.

  Harriet tried to salvage something from the evening, but she sounded dispirited and I could only lean back in my chair and balance the coffee cup on my knee and feel hopeless.

  When Harriet finally stood up in the small room and, raising her arms above her head in an unconscious gesture of surrender, said, ‘We must go, it’s very late,’ Mr Hind sprang to his feet almost with relief and said he would see us to the door.

  The two men were now alert once more; they were impatient for us to leave them. They had both drawn away from us and it was not only the scene of an hour earlier that had caused the withdrawal. Even if Harriet had not switched on the light and stood laughing in the doorway they would have been anxious for us to leave. The effort of appearing young and in sympathy with us was beginning to show.

  The Tsar said good night to me at the door. He did not wait to see us go through the gate. The door shut and they must have turned the hall light off immediately because I stumbled a little in the darkness and jostled against Harriet.

  ‘Be careful,’ she snapped.

  ‘You shouldn’t have laughed at him like that.’

  ‘I know. It was that stupid bugger Hind. I can’t bear—’

  ‘What was wrong with him then?’

  ‘—men like that. Honest, when you think he’s married and bringing up children it makes you despair. He’s a cretin.’

  ‘I thought you liked him.’

  At the corner of the lane she said briskly, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Good night.’

  Nothing more, no chat, no questions.

  I began to wonder if it was deliberate, the way she no longer discussed things with me. Maybe she was letting me go. She still had to point me in the required direction but she was no longer holding my hand. I did not think I liked it.

  13

  In the morning my mother asked me to go over the line for a loaf of bread. Harriet was leaning on her gate. ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot I want you to write in the diary. I’ve been thinking all night.’

  Seeing the expression on my face, she added, ‘It’s all right. The little woman’s gone to have her hair done.’

  ‘What have you been thinking about?’

  ‘Lots of things.’

  In her room I opened the diary and she said, ‘We have been to have coffee with the man and his friend, and he deliberately made himself an object of pity and ridicule. He lay weeping on the floor and did not try to hide himself. When she laughed at him to punish him he became strong and gratified. This is not good.’ The words were in ink; they could not be rubbed out, unless I tore a page from the book and burnt it. I felt ashamed.

  Weakly I tried to argue with her. ‘It seems so cruel, Harriet. I’m sure he wasn’t glad to be laughed at. We can’t be sure. You’ve said often and often that there are dozens of reasons for people behaving in a certain way, and that one person dare not presume to know which reason is the most likely. You’ve said that, haven’t you?’ Harriet closed her eyes and leaned her head against the side of the bed. For a moment I feared she was not going to talk to me, that she was in one of her superior moods. But quite soon she opened her eyes and looked at my worried face.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have. But just sometimes I know what the real reason is. You’ll just have to accept that.’

  ‘But, Harriet, it doesn’t sound right.’

  I ru
bbed the back of my hand over the page I had written and shook my head hopelessly: ‘It sounds all wrong. It’s not what I felt.’

  I felt warm suddenly and almost happy. Harriet and I were talking together again as we had last summer and all the summers before. She was not racing on ahead making me feel heavy and stupid. She said kindly, seriously:

  ‘If it sounds all wrong it’s because of the way it’s written, not what it means. All the best parts in the book were written years ago when we didn’t know the proper names for things. We are limited now by knowing how to express ourselves. It sounds worse perhaps, but we can’t go back.’

  ‘If we put “There was a piano in the room”,’ I said, ‘and that we drank whisky, it would sound more real.’

  ‘But the whisky and the piano wasn’t real,’ cried Harriet. She sat up and stared at me fiercely, her under lip thrust outward. She clenched her hands so tight the knuckles whitened.

  ‘Don’t you see—only the Tsar was real and his weeping at your feet.’

  I kept silent and nodded my head. She was wrong, she must be. All very well to say the piano wasn’t real when she had not lain across it. Perhaps she had not understood what I meant. I tried to think of other instances in the book, experiences we had written about that sounded real, but I couldn’t.

  I looked at Harriet’s hands as they lay in her lap and saw thankfully they were loose and inert.

  ‘I often think,’ she said quietly, looking at her idle hands, ‘that we’ve passed the best bit in ourselves.’

  She looked at me almost pleadingly.

  ‘I mean we’ll never be as good or clever as we have been. We start going back again now.’

  I wished Harriet would not tell me such things. I had such belief in her and faith, that whatever she told me I accepted utterly, and most of the things she made me believe nowadays were painful. It seemed dreadful that at thirteen I had reached my best, that I could never be any better.

  ‘But you said it would be wonderful when we were older. You promised that we’d be full of truth with all the experiences, and see beautiful things. You promised, Harriet.’

  But all the time I felt it was true. I would never be better than I had been, all my life.

  Harriet began to laugh, but affectionately.

  ‘You look so sad, as if you hadn’t known it all the time. Who’s going to have a pony after the war?’

  I had to laugh. That was a great joke. During the war our parents had told us, ‘After the war I’ll buy you a pony. The war had been over a long time now and the ponies had never been mentioned again. It was because our parents wanted to believe everything was going to be all right that they had promised such a thing. And now, whenever we yearned, half-unbelievingly, after the unattainable, we teased ourselves and used the mythical pony as a symbol of all impossible things.

  ‘Go home,’ said Harriet, closing the diary. ‘Your mum will only carry on if you don’t get the loaf.’

  After all the rain, the little square of grass in front of the house was green; the poor sandy soil in the borders appeared healthily black and moist. It was good for roses and lupins and Sweet Williams as long as my father bought tons of manure from the farm. During the war we had grown potatoes at the back, carrots too, and he had made an air-raid shelter where now the roses climbed. Harriet said it was pathetic, a hole in the ground with a lid of tin. Like going to sea in a matchbox. There was a shelter in the back field for all the houses, but my mother said not very nice people went there, so in the end we stayed under the mahogany table in the front-room. Everyone went to the farm for manure to grow their roses in the sand. Even so if my father heard a horse going down the lane he would run out with a bucket and spade and scrape up the dung. All the gardens sprouted flowers ringed with black droppings, alive with flies. My mother in her gardening gloves hovered over the blooms, bare legs blue-veined in the calf and wasted. Sometimes she wore an old straw hat, but this afternoon the sun shone on her dry hair and burnt her neck.

  I lay on the front porch, stretched out on the red-brick tiles. Frances swung on the gate and sang loudly. A small dog from the house opposite trotted over the road and sniffed at her feet. She stooped down to touch him and he leapt sideways and paddled back to his side of the road, nose to the hot surface, tail quivering and agitated. He climbed the low bank into the copse of elms before the farm, and crashed noisily down into the darkness and coolness of the foxgloves and nettles. Frances sang on, stomach pressed to the top of the gate, riding the structure like a wooden horse, patting an imaginary nose as she galloped across the deserted plains.

  Behind my closed eyes I relived the evening spent with the Tsar. I led up to it carefully, deliberately postponing the moment I most wanted to remember. I waited for Harriet to get up from her chair and leave the room; in slow motion I slid sideways along the piano stool and offered my mouth to the Tsar. And just as I felt I was remembering most vividly, and the feeling of warmth was just within my reach, I opened my eyes and saw my mother sitting back on her heels in the grass, wiping her hot face with a clumsy glove.

  ‘It’s so hot,’ she told me, satisfied. For a moment her eyes looked coldly at me as if she read my thoughts, and in my confusion I buried my head in my arms and mumbled it was too hot.

  ‘Why don’t you read a book?’ she asked me relentlessly. ‘Get a deck-chair from the greenhouse and sit in the shade.’

  ‘No, I’m all right here.’

  ‘You’re too big to be lying about like that. I do wish you’d sit up properly.’

  She meant I was too fat to loll about in the sun like a white worm. I wondered what she would say if I told her this. I sat up and folded my heavy legs under me and avoided her gaze. ‘That’s better, dear.’

  She was pleased and surprised that I had half done as she wished. To appease me she asked, ‘Don’t you think my pinks have done wonderfully this year?’

  I looked at the flowers and said enthusiastically, ‘Yes, wonderfully.’

  When she turned away I should lie down again. She turned her attention to Frances. ‘Don’t make such a noise, dear.’

  But her tone was friendly this time. Love welled up in her voice, and though I could not see her face I knew it would be calm and relaxed, not hard and held in check, the lines dragging her mouth down, as when she spoke to me. Frances obediently stopped singing and smiled a charming smile at her mother. ‘You’ve made your face dirty,’ she said.

  She fingered her own cheek to show better where the dirty mark was. ‘Just there,’ she said helpfully, and climbing down from the gate came on to the green lawn and, stooping, rubbed my mother’s face with her hand. My mother put her arms about her and they knelt as if in ritual, forehead to forehead. I shut my eyes so as not to see them. And while I sat in darkness I could still see them swaying a little on the grass, a small undignified pyramid of love. I felt irritated; Frances after all was not such a very young child. It was affectation to be so trusting. When I opened my eyes it was because Frances was singing: ‘Harry-i-et is coming up the road.’

  I sat very still, pretending not to have heard, hoping a miracle would take place and Harriet who was coming up the road would dissolve into the warm air and spare me the embarrassment of seeing her.

  ‘Hallo, Harriet, isn’t it hot?’

  My mother spoke in her coldest voice. Had I been spoken to in this way I would have burst into tears of distress. Cheerfully Harriet said, ‘Hallo. I say, your garden looks beautiful.’

  She saw me sitting in the porch and waved one hand casually, continuing, ‘I believe you must have green fingers.’

  She walked along the path and studied the earth, face serious.

  ‘Father has a terrible time with the soil round here, but you seem to have no difficulty.’

  My mother struggled bitterly to preserve her displeasure. Her mouth fluttered in distress as she said, ‘My pinks have done particularly well this year I must admit.’ She capitulated utterly. ‘We haven’t seen much of you this holiday,
dear. You’ve grown taller I think.’

  I made an enormous effort to say something.

  ‘She’s not, you know. How high are you, Harriet?’

  My mother did not turn her head, and Harriet, pretending not to have heard me, bent low and dug at the soil with her fingers.

  ‘It’s the same consistency as ours. I just don’t understand it.’ She crouched over the flowers, fish-bone-thin vertebrae of her spine showing through her dress, and, humming to herself in a slow sleepy way, touched the plants with her hand, not with the fingers but with the whole palm brushing lightly across the surface of the leaves, as if she were blind. My mother gazed down at her wonderingly. A fluted giggle escaped my lips. In another moment my mother would be down on her knees amongst the pinks. The quick tears came even as I giggled. Their eyes turned to look at me, and I opened my own as wide as possible to stop the tears from falling on to my cheeks, shaming me.

  ‘I was just thinking of something I heard on the wireless,’ I explained, seeing them blur and run together in the moisture of my eye.

  We had tea on the porch. Mother wanted to sit more respectably in the back garden among the lupins and the roses, but Frances pleaded to be able to have hers in the front.

  ‘It’s full of bumblebees in the back,’ she argued, screwing up her face desperately, as if already one of the creatures hummed and worried about her head. She was terrified of bees and wasps, and at this time of the year the garden behind the house lay like a golden bowl heaped full of flowers shimmering and quivering with minute fragile life.

  So we all had tea in the front as she wished. Mother had a deck-chair. There was no room for more chairs, so we were allowed to sit on cushions at her feet. Frances, a piece of currant bread in one hand, wandered back and forth from porch to gate and gate to porch, to drink from a cup that left her mouth pale and milk-filmed. Harriet and my mother talked intimately about a book they had both read, and did little to draw me into the conversation. I was surprised that my mother had chosen from the library a book such as Harriet would like, and surprised too that my mother did not think it a strange thing for a child of thirteen to understand. Harriet said: