by H. E. Bates
‘Come on, Alice. You lay down. You lay down on the couch. I ain’t going to hurt you, Alice. I don’t want to hurt you.’
For a moment she did not move. Then she remembered, flatly, Mrs. Holland’s injunction: ‘You do all you can for Mr. Holland,’ and she got up and went over to the American leather couch.
‘I’ll blow the lamp out,’ Holland said. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’
VI
‘Don’t you say nothing, Alice. Don’t you go and tell nobody.’
Corn for Mrs. Holland’s chickens, a wooden potato-tub of maize and another of wheat, was kept in a loft above the mill itself, and Alice would climb the outside loft-ladder to fill the chipped enamel corn-bowl in the early winter afternoons. And standing there, with the bowl empty in her hands, or with a scattering of grain in it or the full mixture of wheat and maize, she stared and thought of the words Holland said to her almost every night. The loft windows were hung with skeins of spider-webs, and the webs in turn were powdered with pale and dark grey dust, pale flour-dust never swept away since the mill had ceased to work, and a dark mouse-coloured dust that showered constantly down from the rafters. The loft was always cold. The walls were clammy with the river damp and the windows misty with wet. But Alice always stood there in the early afternoons and stared through the dirty windows across the wet flat valley. Seagulls flew wildly above the floods that filled the meadows after rain. Strings of wild swans flew over, and sometimes came down to rest with the gulls on the waters or the islands of grass. They were the only moving things in the valley. But Alice stared at them blankly, hardly seeing them. She saw Holland instead; Holland turning out the lamp, fumbling with his trousers, getting up and relighting the lamp with a tight scared look on his face. And she turned his words over and over in her mind. ‘Don’t you say nothing. Don’t you say nothing. Don’t you go and tell nobody.’ They were words not of anger, not threatening, but of fear. But she did not see it. She turned his words slowly over and over in her mind as she might have turned a ball or an orange over and over in her hands, over and over, round and round, the surface always the same, the shape the same, for ever recurring, a circle with no end to it. She reviewed them without surprise and without malice. She never refused Holland. Once only she said, suddenly scared: ‘I don’t want to, not tonight. I don’t want to.’ But Holland cajoled, ‘Come on, Alice, come on. I’ll give you something. Come on. I’ll give y’ extra sixpence with your money, Friday, Alice. Come on.’
And after standing a little while in the loft she would go down the ladder with the corn-bowl to feed the hens that were cooped up behind a rusty broken-down wire-netting pen across the yard, beyond the dumps of iron. ‘Tchka! Tchka! Tchka!’ She never varied the call. ‘Tchka! Tchka!’ The sound was thin and sharp in the winter air. The weedy fowls, wet-feathered, scrambled after the yellow corn as she scattered it down. She watched them for a moment, staying just so long and never any longer, and then went back into the mill, shaking the corn-dust from the bowl as she went. It was as though she were religiously pledged to a ritual. The circumstances and the day never varied. She played a minor part in a play which never changed and seemed as if it never could change. Holland got up, she got up, she cooked breakfast. Holland left. She cleaned the rooms and washed Mrs. Holland. She cooked the dinner, took half up to Mrs. Holland and ate half herself. She stood in the loft, thought of Holland’s words, fed the fowls, then ceased to think of Holland. In the afternoon she read to Mrs. Holland. In the evening Holland returned. And none of it seemed to affect her. She looked exactly as she had looked when she had first walked across the valley with her bag. Her eyes were utterly unresponsive, flat, never lighting up. They only seemed if anything greyer and softer, a little fuller if possible of docility.
And there was only one thing which in any way broke the ritual; and even that was regular, a piece of ritual itself. Every Wednesday, and again on Sunday, Mrs. Holland wrote to her son.
Or rather Alice wrote. ‘You can write better’n me. You write it. I’ll tell you what to put and you put it.’ So Alice sat by the bed with a penny bottle of ink, a steel pen and a tissue writing tablet, and Mrs. Holland dictated. ‘Dear Albert.’ There she stopped, lying back on the pillows to think. Alice waited. The pen dried. And then Mrs. Holland would say: ‘I can’t think what to put. You git th’ envelope done while I’m thinking.’ So Alice wrote the envelope:
‘Pte. Albert Holland, 94167, B Company, Fifth Battalion 1st Rifles, British Army of Occupation, Cologne, Germany.’
And then Mrs. Holland would begin, talking according to her mood: ‘I must say, Albert, I feel a good lot better. I have not had a touch for a long while.’ Or: ‘I don’t seem to get on at all somehow. The doctor comes every week and says I got to stop here. Glad to say though things are well with your Dad and trade is good and he is only waiting for you to come home and go in with him. There is a good trade now in old motors. Your Dad is very good to me I must say and so is Alice. I wonder when you will be home. Alice is writing this.’
All through the winter Alice wrote the letters. They seemed always to be the same letters, slightly changed, only endlessly repeated. Writing the letters seemed to bring her closer to Mrs. Holland. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what I should do without you, Alice.’ Mrs. Holland trusted her implicitly, could see no wrong in her. And it seemed to Alice as if she came to know the soldier too, since she not only wrote the letters which went to him but read those which came in return.
‘Dear Mum, it is very cold here and I can’t say I shall be very sorry when I get back to see you. Last Sunday we …’
It seemed almost as if the letters were written to her. And though she read them without imagination, flatly, they gave her a kind of pleasure. She looked forward to their arrival. She shared Mrs. Holland’s anxiety when they did not come. ‘It seems funny about Albert, he ain’t writ this week.’ And they would sit together in the bedroom, in the short winter afternoons, and talk of him, and wonder.
Or rather Mrs. Holland talked. Alice simply listened, her large grey eyes very still with their expression of lost attentiveness.
VII
She began to be sick in the early mornings without knowing what was happening to her. It was almost spring. The floods were lessening and vanishing and there was a new light on the river and the grass. The half-cut osier-bed shone in the sun like red corn, the bark varnished with light copper. She could dimly feel the change in the life about her: the new light, the longer days, thrushes singing in the willows above the mill-water in the evenings, the sun warm on her face in the afternoons.
But there was no change in her own life. Or if there was a change she did not feel it. There was no change in Mrs. Holland’s attitude to her and in her own to Mrs. Holland. And only once was there a change in her attitude to Holland himself. After the first touch of sickness she could not face him. The life had gone out of her. ‘I ain’t well,’ she kept saying to Holland. ‘I ain’t well.’ For the first time he went into a rage with her. ‘It ain’t been a week since you said that afore! Come on. Christ! You ain’t goin’ to start that game.’ He tried to put his arms round her. She struggled a little, tried to push him away. And suddenly he hit her. The blow struck her on the shoulder, just above the heart. It knocked her silly for a moment and she staggered about the room, then sat on the sofa, dazed. Then as she sat there the room was suddenly plunged into darkness. It was as though she had fainted. Then she saw that it was only Holland. He had put out the lamp.
After that she never protested. She became more than ever static, a neutral part of the act in which Holland was always the aggressor. There was nothing in it for her. It was over quickly, a savage interlude in the tranquil day-after-day unaltered life of Mrs. Holland and herself. It was as regular almost as the sponging of Holland’s collar and the cooking of his fish, or as the Friday visit of her mother and father with the van.
‘How gittin’ on? You don’t look amiss. You look as if you’re fillin’ out a bit
.’ Or ‘This is five and six! Is he rised you? Mother, he give her a rise. Well, well, that’s all right, that is. That’s good, a rise so soon. You be a good gal and you won’t hurt.’ And finally: ‘Well, we s’ll ha’ to git on. Be dark else,’ and the van would move away.
She was certainly plumper: a slight gentle filling of her breasts and her face were the only signs of physical change in her. She herself scarcely noticed them; until standing one day in the loft, gazing across the valley, holding the corn-bowl pressed against her, she could feel the bowl’s roundness hard against the hardening roundness of her belly. Then she could feel something wrong with herself for the first time. And she stood arrested, scared. She felt large and heavy. What was the matter with her? She stood in a perplexity of fear. And finally she put the corn-bowl on the loft-floor and then undid her clothes and looked at herself. She was round and hard and shiny. Then she opened the neck of her dress. Her breasts were no longer like little hard pointed lemons, but like half-blown roses. She put her hand under them, and under each breast, half in fear and half in amazement, and lifted them gently. They seemed suddenly as if they would fall if she did not hold them. What was it? Why hadn’t she noticed it? Then she had suddenly something like an inspiration. It was Mrs. Holland’s complaint. She had caught it. Her body had the same swollen shiny look about it. She could see it clearly enough. She had caught the dropsy from Mrs. Holland.
For a time she was a little frightened. She lay in bed at night and touched herself, and wondered. Then it passed off. She went back into the old state of unemotional neutrality. Then the sickness began to get less severe; she went for whole days without it; and finally it ceased altogether. Then there were days when the heaviness of her breasts and belly seemed a mythical thing, when she did not think of it. And she would think that the sickness and the heaviness were passing off together, things dependent on each other.
By the late spring she felt that it was all right, that she had nothing to fear. Summer was coming. She would be better in summer. Everybody was better in the summer.
Even Mrs. Holland seemed better. But it was not the spring weather or the coming of summer that made her so, but the letters from Germany. ‘I won’t say too much, Mum, in case. But very like we shall be home afore the end of this year.’
‘I believe I could git up, Alice, if he come home. I believe I could. I should like to be up,’ Mrs. Holland would say. ‘I believe I could.’
And often, in the middle of peeling potatoes or scrubbing the kitchen bricks, Alice would hear Mrs. Holland calling her. And when she went up it would be, ‘Alice, you git the middle bedroom ready. In case Albert comes,’ or ‘See if you can find Albert’s fishing-tackle. It’ll be in the shed or else the loft. He’ll want it,’ or ‘Tell Fred when he comes home I want him to git a ham. A whole ’un. In case.’ And always the last flickering desire: ‘If I knowed when he was coming I’d git up. I believe I could git up.’
But weeks passed, and nothing happened. Midsummer came, and all along the river the willow-leaves drooped or turned, green and silver, in the summer sun and the summer wind. And the hot still days were almost as uneventful and empty as the brief damp days of winter.
Then one afternoon in July Alice, standing in the loft and gazing through the dusted windows, saw a soldier coming up the road. He was carrying a white kitbag and he walked on rather splayed flat feet.
She ran down the loft steps and across the dump-yard and up into Mrs. Holland’s bedroom.
‘Albert’s come!’
Mrs. Holland sat straight up in bed, as though by a miracle, trembling.
‘Get me out, quick, let me get something on. Get me out. I want to be out for when he comes. Get me out.’
The girl took the weight of the big woman as she half slid out of bed, Mrs. Holland’s great breasts falling out of her nightgown, Alice thinking all the time, ‘I ain’t got it as bad as her, not half as bad. Mine are little side of hers. Mine are little.’ She had never realised how big Mrs. Holland was. And she had never seen her so distressed – distressed by joy and anticipation and her own sickness. Tears were flowing from her eyes. Alice struggled with her desperately. But she had scarcely put on her old red woollen dressing-jacket and helped her to a chair before there was a shout:
‘Mum!’
Alice was at the head of the stairs before the second shout came. She could see the soldier in the passage below looking up. His tunic collar was unbuttoned and thrown back from his sun-red neck.
‘Where’s mum?’
‘Up here.’
Albert came upstairs. Alice had expected a young man, very young. Albert seemed about thirty-five, perhaps older. His flat feet, splayed out, and his dark loose moustache gave him a slightly old-fashioned countrified look, a little stupid. He was very like Holland himself. His eyes bulged, the whites glassy.
‘Where is she?’ he said.
‘In the bedroom,’ Alice said. ‘In there.’
Albert went past her and along the landing without another word, scarcely looking at her. Alice could smell his sweat, the pungent sweat-soaked smell of khaki, as he went by. In another moment she heard Mrs. Holland’s cries of delight and his voice in answer.
From that moment she began to live in a changed world. Albert’s coming cut her off at once from Mrs. Holland; she was pushed aside like an old love by a new. But she was prepared for that. Not consciously, but by intuition, she had seen that it must come, that Albert would usurp her place. So she had no surprise when Mrs. Holland scarcely called for her all day, had no time to talk to her except of Albert, and never asked her to sit and read to her in the bedroom as she had always done in the past. She was prepared for all that. What she was not prepared for at all was to be cut off from Holland himself too. It had not occurred to her that in the evenings Albert might sit in the kitchen, that there might be no lying on the sofa, no putting out of the light, no doing as Holland wanted.
She was so unprepared for it that for a week she could not believe it. Her incredulity made her quieter than ever. All the time she was waiting for Holland to do something: to come to her secretly, into her bedroom, anywhere, and go on as he had always done. But nothing happened. For a week Holland was quiet too. He did not speak to her. Every evening Alice fried a double quantity of fish for Holland and Albert, and after tea the two men sat in the kitchen and talked, or walked through the osier-bed to the meadows and talked there. Holland scarcely spoke to her. They were scarcely ever alone together. Albert was an everlasting presence, walking about aimlessly, putteeless, his splayed feet shuffling on the bricks, stolid, comfortable, not speaking much.
And finally when Holland did speak to her it was with the old words: ‘Don’t you say nothing! See?’ But now there was not only fear in the words, but anger. ‘You say half a damn word and I’ll break your neck. See? I’ll smash you. That’s over. Done with. Don’t you say a damn word! See?’
The words, contrary to their effect of old, no longer perturbed or perplexed her. She was relieved, glad. It was all over. No more putting out the lamp, lying there waiting for Holland. No more pain.
VIII
Outwardly she seemed incapable of pain, even of emotion at all. She moved about with the same constant large-eyed quietness as ever, as though she were not thinking or were incapable of thought. Her eyes were remarkable in their everlasting expression of mute steadfastness, the same wintry grey light in them as always, an unreflective, almost lifeless kind of light.