Harriet Said

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘You see I’ve read so many books now which just tell a story that I begin more and more to go after style, rather than dramatic content.’

  ‘Really,’ said my mother. Her eyes looked at Harriet with wonder and admiration. The beautiful smooth skin of her cheeks and brow, roughened a little by the sun, glowed rosily as she held out her hand for Harriet’s cup.

  ‘You see,’ the wonder child continued wickedly, ‘in this book you had style and content very finely mixed, but I could have done with less.’

  ‘Stuff,’ I wanted to shout rudely. It distressed me that Harriet was baiting my mother so. I was pleased to hear in Harriet’s voice the slightly flat vowels and nasal intonations of the neighbourhood. It made her a little less perfect, a little more common-seeming. I studied her minutely to find more flaws, this time physical ones. But the bland face with its arched brows and small dry mouth was so dear and familiar to me that I no longer saw it clearly, however much I tried.

  Even as I looked at the thin child’s body with its bony hips and spine, so oddly at variance with the clever meticulous mind that flourished plump and powerful within, Harriet looked at me and smiled. She seemed to say, ‘Yes, you know and I know, but no one else.’

  Frances, who was leaning on the gate, suddenly cowered sideways and put her arms up helplessly as if to avoid a blow. A sound as of a cat mewing came from her lips as she spun round to face us, head grotesquely on one side. She screamed once, sharply. Mother ran down the path making small sounds of distress, arms held wide. Frances backed away from her, screaming thinly and uniformly; arms stuck out in front of her as if in supplication, she crouched against the gate, evading the passionate circlet of arms that my mother held out like a garland for her head. It seemed an age before Frances was aware of anything but her pain. Through her own tears my mother asked, ‘But what is it, darling … tell Mummy what it is.’

  It was difficult to distinguish the words through the sharp intakes of breath.

  ‘A thing in my ear … in my head.’

  ‘It must have been a wasp,’ said Harriet. ‘It must have stung her.’

  We took her indoors and my mother telephoned the doctor. She sat with Frances on her knee, cradling the shocked child in her arms, till he should come.

  Harriet and I went out into the field at the back of the house. I felt I was choking. It had been so sudden, so violent. We climbed the bank that led to the Trail. The Trail was a long mound of earth built to separate the field in half, planted with trees and thorn bushes. On one side were the rows of houses with their ordered unremarkable gardens, on the other the wire netted compounds spread with sand, belonging to the farm. They housed pigs, hens and rabbits. When we were younger, too small to go to the shore, we had struggled along the Trail every evening after tea, making believe that we were escaping across the frontier, leading a line of grateful soldiers. Harriet led the way, and as before I had become aware how small in reality the Norman church was in the blurred woods, so now the trail dwindled and shrank into a trivial line of twisted trees. We came out among the blackberry bushes at the far end of the field and Harriet lay down in the yellow grass and shut her eyes. I sat a little way off and looked for ants in the soil. Poplars swayed elegantly with insect tattered leaves under the high white sky; a blade of grass swung in the breeze and filled the world. Presently Harriet said, ‘That was horrible. That was so degrading.’

  She sat up and leaned on one elbow to look at me. The park-keeper nearby rode his electric mowing machine over the already prim grass. The noise of the engine was like a bee humming with purpose.

  ‘It’s something as tiny and devastating as an insect that we need to humble the Tsar,’ Harriet said. She sat up and crossed her legs. On her cheek, where her fist had pressed, was a red mark. It looked like a blow that had been dealt in anger.

  ‘To humble the Tsar,’ I repeated stupidly. ‘I thought you had forgotten all about that.’

  There was a long silence in the field. In the silence there was a warning. It was in the air and the poplars and the earth beneath me, and it was swollen out by the steady insistent note of the grass mower as it turned in a wide circle and rode in our direction. Nearer and nearer it came until I was deafened by the sound of it. And just as it seemed as if I would cry out, the mower wheeled and started back up the park, the noise of its engine receding and dying away, and Harriet, the mark on her face faded now, bent her head on its thin neck and looked at the earth.

  ‘Something really subtle,’ she said, ‘If you understand me.’

  How could I not understand her. I would have given all the power of my too imaginative mind and all the beauty of the fields and woods, not to understand her. And at last I gave in to Harriet, finally and without reservation. I wanted the Tsar to be humiliated, to cower sideways with his bird’s head held stiffly in pain and fear, so that I might finish what I had begun, return to school forgetting the summer, and think only of the next holidays that might be as they had always been.

  14

  The Tsar and I strolled under the pine trees. At first when I had met him at the bend of the lane to the sea, he had been sulky with me, withdrawn. There were, it seemed, too many memories in the woods around us for him to be anything but resentful. The blind window in the church nearby, the tadpole pools, dry now, where first we had spoken together, the sand dunes that Harriet had filled with echoes of derision—all served to accentuate his misery and render him inarticulate.

  Then it was I had the idea to go right away from our usual paths.

  ‘Let’s walk somewhere we don’t usually go,’ I told him gently, and he straightened his shoulders and said, ‘Right you are, but where?’

  ‘Through the Rhododendron Lands and up behind the rifle range.’

  For a moment he hesitated. The rifle range was out of bounds to civilians and dangerous, and it might have occurred to him that it was another trap set by Harriet. Then because even walking into a trap was preferable to this feeling of emptiness, he said:

  ‘Good, shall we start?”

  Under the trees he told me with difficulty, ‘I want you to know I regret the other night more than I can say. It’s not a question of shame, it’s more a question of shabbiness. And it wasn’t the drink.’ He faltered and looked at me quickly and away again, moistening his dry lips with his tongue.

  I wondered what part of the evening he regretted, the time when he tried to pull down my knickers or when he lay on the floor and cried. I wanted to say he need not feel shabby, that such things happened in the best-regulated families, but it seemed too light-hearted. Instead I said, ‘I know how you feel … as if something was spoilt.’ I turned my face from him and smiled, showing all my teeth. It was quite easy to bring myself to hurt him, he was such a fool.

  The smell of beech and pine mingled in the woods. We inhaled its sweetness with every breath we took. It did not seem to matter that every breath I exhaled poured forth poison and evil.

  The Tsar said, ‘As if something were spoilt … I think not. There was nothing to spoil. Harriet saw to that.’

  Always Harriet. No matter if he had told me he loved me, it was Harriet who engrossed him.

  ‘When my wife came back,’ continued the Tsar, ‘she knew you had been in the house. God knows how she knew, but she did. She stood in the doorway and looked at me and she knew. She said, “They’ve been here they have, those terrible children, they have, haven’t they?”’ He stumbled and nearly fell into one of the potholes. His voice shook with shock, ‘I didn’t tell her, but she knew.’

  ‘Why has Mrs Biggs’s sister got an idiot child?’ I asked.

  ‘Something to do with brain damage at birth,’ he said.

  ‘Has it really got a big head?’

  ‘I’ve never seen it. We’re not a close family. The birth went normally to begin with.’

  I held my breath because though I knew all about that sort of thing, I’d only read it; no one had ever spoken of it to me, before. Long before Harriet and I knew ab
out things I had read in a book the word ‘pregnant’. My mother said it meant being very ill and though I knew she was stupid, I still half believed her.

  ‘She was given gas and air to make her sleepy. In the middle of her sleepiness she heard herself singing verse after verse of “There is a Green Hill Far Away”. And when she reached the line “O dearly, dearly, has He loved,” she began to laugh.’ He looked at me to see how I was taking it.

  ‘When did they tell her the baby was funny?’ I asked. I felt pale and sick, frightened of something. No wonder the sister of Mrs Biggs laughed when she thought how dearly, dearly had He loved.

  ‘Later on, when they realised the child was hardy enough to survive.’

  ‘Why?’ I was shouting. ‘Why didn’t they kill it?’

  ‘Now, why indeed?’ He looked up at the sky above the trees. His eyes were bloodshot as if he had cried too much or smoked too much. He said, ‘I don’t know why. Some people are born blind, or deaf, or with minds warped in some way. But you can’t kill them all … you wait for famine or flood or war. After that, you believe in a Divine wisdom.’

  ‘I didn’t know you believed in God. I thought for you it was Greece and all those ancient ruins.’

  He laughed at me. He stopped walking and felt in his pocket for cigarettes. He stood with hunched shoulders while he lit one, and as he blew out smoke his thin neck reared up like a tortoise emerging from its shell.

  I had noticed before that he felt more sure of himself when he smoked. I thought it might be one of the things that hurt Mrs Biggs beyond endurance, goading her to call him weak and in need of discipline. It was a habit that would seem after years without love to epitomise the selfishness she ascribed to him. Just when she felt he was sorry that he had hurt her by his self-preoccupation, and that this once he understood and would make an effort to feel some part of what she suffered, she would turn and find him standing perhaps by the window, his hand already creeping insidiously into his jacket to reach his cigarettes, and she would know again how selfish he was, isolated behind his cloud of smoke.

  We walked on and passed the line of warning notice-boards at the edge of the dunes. Rifle shots came spasmodically like twigs breaking underfoot, but the Tsar seemed not to notice, relaxed now, talking charmingly and breathing out smoke into the evening air. The sky that had been infinitely wide and white began to darken; the light squeezed out; everything began to fade. A seagull cried out and the wind dragged its note forlornly across the beach as we dipped and rose like birds among the hillocks of sand. On a sandhill, a red flag on the end of a stick fanned out across the sky, stayed for an instant blood red, rolled slowly in the breeze and blackened.

  ‘It must be getting late,’ I shouted.

  The Tsar was already climbing the little hill and did not hear. He went on all fours up the face of the dune, his hands reaching out to grasp wildly at the tufts of grass that grew in the sand and whose dry harsh blades were like knives to the touch. I shouted again and he turned, his face small and white, the scanty hair blowing about his ears. ‘Come on,’ he shouted back. The world was so desolate and darkening that it seemed swept by violence. The sea behind me yawned, a gigantic yawn that never reached its climax. The mouth of the world opened and the rough tongue of the sea licked the shore and tried to suck us down into the depths. Above, the triumphant Tsar held the flag aloft. He shouted something, but it sounded like a moan of protest in the huge land. Firing broke out behind him. I wondered if unwittingly I had outdone Harriet in subtlety, if the ending would be the Tsar shot dead with a red flag for danger clutched in the hand.

  ‘Take care,’ I called.

  My voice sounded girlish and remote, belonging to Sunday mornings after church when we ran about under the trees and mimicked the Canon, crying, ‘Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.’

  I climbed laboriously up to the Tsar. It was lighter here; plainly I could see the row of target boards behind him.

  ‘Let’s go down there and rest.’

  He pointed below to a small valley between the targets and the dunes. His eyes watched my face for some sign of protest.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and slid downwards into the near darkness. A shot whined somewhere above us. I was glad the Tsar could not see my face or its expression. We lay in the sand and he smoked. It was cold and damp but curiosity kept me there. It was completely dark now, too dark to see my own hands, only the end of the Tsar’s cigarette sweeping in an arc from his side to his lips. I thought how I would be careful to shake the sand out of my hair before I saw my parents, how I would wake tomorrow and it would all be over.

  ‘Now,’ said the Tsar finally, as if he had been preparing all along for this moment, and flinging his dying cigarette into the night, he turned to me. He sought me in the darkness as if I was a bundle of rags, unwrapping me in layers. I thought of a picture I had seen in a book of an Egyptian king with an arched painted face of repose, and pursed my mouth primly in imitation. Minute grains of sand slid through my hair. The hard collar of his shirt hurt my chin. He did not kiss my mouth, he said nothing. There was no strength in his arms, no pressure of sand beneath me, no swinging meteorite and swift along the orbit of the moon. Pinned there raptureless, a visit to the doctor, nothing more, and a distant uneasy discomfort of mind and body as if both had been caught in a door that had shut too quickly. ‘Gerroff,’ I wanted to shout, ‘Gerroff.’ But I did not want to hurt his feelings.

  Mrs Biggs, in her sandals and her groping search after love, came alive. She breathed heavily in the darkness, whispering softly, rapidly in my ear, ‘He’s selfish, he’s so selfish. I told you so.’ And when the Tsar had completed his own uncomplicated ritual accompanied as it was by low whimpers of distress, I did not know what to do. Harriet I knew would have sworn at him and made him cry, but I could not. The truth was that I was fond of him. He was part of the small group of souls that I was responsible for, who depended on me not to hurt them: my mother, my father, Frances. It did not occur to me till later that the Tsar should feel responsible for me.

  ‘We had better go,’ I said as gently as I was able.

  He got to his feet and shrugged sand free from his clothes, not speaking. He followed me up the dune and in my mind I knew what he must look like, shambling red-eyed and slack-limbed up the shifting sand.

  I was surprised how little discomfort I felt, apart from a kind of interior bruising, and how cheerful I was. I swung my arms vigorously, rejoicing that I was young and not out of condition like he was. I almost ran in the darkness and he stumbled in my wake, breathing harshly. Once he said, ‘Stop,’ and then, ‘Not so fast,’ but I went even quicker. It would have been better I thought, with amusement, if he had been shot on the sand dune and avoided all this. It was delicious to be in the position that Harriet alone had enjoyed—to have someone meekly follow wherever I chose to go. I wanted to shout commands, to have the Tsar do tricks to satisfy my vanity. ‘Sit up and beg,’ I wanted to cry; ‘balance on your head.’ How often in the past had Harriet with imperious voice and sweetly smiling face, bidden me fasten her shoe-lace in the street. And I, scarce knowing what lay behind the innocent-seeming request, had knelt before her in the road, only to look up in the middle of my task and see her expression of gratified power. Each time she made me kneel to fasten her shoe I expected her to kick me from her, disgusted at my servility.

  I no longer cared if we were seen together, the Tsar and I. If Mrs Biggs herself had confronted us on the shore I would have wished her a pleasant good evening and continued on my way. Half-way along the shore we met Perjer, a dim shape at the edge of the water. Seeing him standing there and not knowing who he was I walked slower to allow the Tsar to catch up with me. The Tsar said in a low voice as we drew level, ‘Good night,’ and Perjer turned and thrust his face close to mine in the darkness.

  ‘Good evening. Calm evening now.’

  There was a moment of silence as if both men could not make up their minds.

  ‘It is Mr
Biggs, isn’t it?’

  ‘We’ve been miles along the shore, Mr Perjer. It’s so beautiful at this time of the evening.’

  Perjer said nothing to this. He moved closer to the Tsar. ‘I haven’t seen you and your good lady in a long time. Keeping well, is she?’

  It seemed comical to hear Mrs Biggs referred to as a good lady.

  ‘Oh yes, well enough, thank you … you all right?’

  The Tsar had tried to be formal but Perjer was a lost soul like himself. I sensed his face relaxed in the darkness. He said almost jovially:

  ‘Still on the water wagon?’

  Perjer grunted. ‘Now and then,’ he said, and grunted again.

  The conversation seemed ended. The Tsar jerked my arm with his elbow and I cleared my throat in preparation for a polite farewell.

  He said with exasperation: ‘Damn, I’ve run out of matches—got a light, Perjer?’

  ‘In my hut.’ He moved away and called into the wind, ‘Mind how you go! Careful of the wire!’

  They disappeared into the blackness. Far out to sea squares of light twinkled beneath the starless sky. The wind blew steadily above the dull breathing of the sea, as it covered the sand. The Tsar called remotely, ‘Come on, what’s the matter?’

  I walked slowly in the direction of the sound, burying my hands deep in the pockets of my coat.

  The hut was below a sandhill that hung out over it forming a second roof. Coming into the light, I blinked my eyes and heard the hum of the paraffin lamp swinging from a hook in the ceiling. There was a wood fire and a black kettle without a lid, in the embers. Perjer’s dog raised a tired head from the sand-covered floor and lay flat again. The Tsar went and sat with his back to the far wall, stretching his legs out in front of him. He dug at the dog’s ribs with his foot and sank his head lower on to his chest. I was annoyed that the Tsar was so evidently at home, that he had been here before.

  There was an upturned box behind the door, so I sat on that and kept watching Perjer. There was nothing of him in the black clothes that hung in folds on his body. The hands and wrists seemed without arms, the neck waved stemlike to support his oval head. Only the full mouth in the dark face was alive, pouting and grimacing continually. He tore a strip from a newspaper on the floor, and lighting it at the fire held it out to the Tsar who waited cigarette in hand. No one spoke in the hut; sand slithered down from somewhere above us, and a little of it poured in a fine stream through a crack in the roof. It fell on the dog’s head, who moved in his sleep and a spasm shook his ears free of it.