by Jane Gardam
‘I liked it being cold up there in that room as I read. The room was full of him. Electric. You know how he was? Electric. Oh—so tidy! I never seen a pencil not set straight. His books all graded along the bed-shelf and on the ledge and on his floor on newspapers and little slips of paper for dividers and on his table all his exercise books right back from school and through college. Oh he was a wonderful scholar, his writing that neat and clever-looking. Well, we never could think where he could have come from, Paul. No more could his teachers. Latin was nothing to him. French he could write as fast as English, all the little marks this way and that way, neat as print. I’se seen him up there writing Latin as young as twelve, freezing with his ears turned rainbow. I knitted him a cap once, but I don’t recollect him wearing it. I would take him up his supper when his father wasn’t by. His father’d say, If he can’t come to table he does without. He wouldn’t let him have a lamp, neither, with the price of lamp-oil. I’ve known him have a lamp under the clothes up there when he was still at school—for his homework. It’s a wonder he wasn’t cinders. Yet he was always lucky, Paul, till now. He seemed charmed. Lately his father was proud of him and he could do what he liked. Didn’t even expect him to help with the farm work—well he weren’t much advantage when he did, dreaming about. Paul was a mystery to his father, and to many another, but he’s properly mourned—not like your poor person.’
I had walked from the Zeits’ Daimler, praying and thinking of dresses, and up to Mrs Woods’s bedroom, to find Alice turning from the bed.
‘When, when?’
‘Now. It must have been just now. I was up with her at breakfast. She had some breakfast. She’s dead.’
‘She can’t be—’ I wouldn’t look. I had never seen anyone dead. ‘How do you know?’
‘Look.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You can and should. Stay here. I’ll go for the doctor. Take her prayer-book. Read some prayers will you?’
‘I can’t.’
‘Very well then, go downstairs. Get yourself a hot drink. I’ll be back when I can.’ She was out of the room.
I paced about the house then and Mrs Woods was everywhere. She stood on the stairs, she sat in the chair by the ferns, she peered round the study door with her knitting, her walking-stick tapped across the coloured tiles; she gave commands at the kitchen door. When I looked out of the windows there she was, huddled over her hot-water-bottle, scurrying over the marsh to church. In the dining-room she sat glaring at a child with her nose level with the forks. Outside my bedroom she whispered on the landing and out in the yard she was looking down from between the net curtains of the staircase window, holding one of them back on a finger. In the end my feet took me to the one place she was not, her bedroom, where a nothing lay under the cotton counterpane—a nothing with a young face, quite gentle and pretty, and the room calm.
‘Now just go through to the dairy,’ said Paul Treece’s mother, ‘and on the stone you’ll see pork sausages. We’ll fry them for the chicken on the fire. The bread sauce is at the bottom of the oven and there’ll be room. The plum pudding’s well away. There’s room for another pan. It’s a fine pow-sowdy. I’se not my usual self this year. Most-times I’se brisker. Maybe it’s soon to be bothering with Christmas, but Paul wouldn’t have wanted us overcome.’
‘Why did you choose to write to me out of all the other people? Didn’t you tell the other people?’
‘No. Some seems to have known. There’ve been some messages. None of his letters—they sent them back to me from France with his things—even his fountain and his photographs and his brushes—none of his letters from other folks was so homely as yours. Being from famous people I suppose they couldn’t be. Very dignified they mostly was, as if to someone lower, but time would have changed that. When I comes to your letters, thinks I, here’s a quaint-spoken, old-fashioned girl and fond of Paul.’
‘Yes, I was.’
‘And like to have married him.’
‘Well,—’
‘I thought, “I dare say out of all the grand ones she’d have been the lucky one. All she had to do, this one, thinks I, was play her cards right and she could have had him.” He’d tell’t me of you.’
‘Oh—did he?’
‘He’d tell’t me of others—ladies and sirs and Bells and Wolves, this and that. Says I, “Paul, they’re all foreigners to me. However you keep up with them I’ll never know. Moneywise alone it can’t be easy, with only the scholarship.” I didn’t ever like the way he was stopping with first one and then another, not giving back a penny. That’s another thing I couldn’t think where it came from. It’s not like our family. I kept it from his father. I went by myself to his college for the graduation, long since. His father might have drawn attention to hisself—not liking south-country folk, them not ever doing any work.’
‘Did you meet his friends at Cambridge, Mrs Treece?’
‘Not so many. They were stand-offish I dare say. I looked for thee, Polly Flint, or one like thee. One that loved Paul.’
‘Oh, I didn’t—’
‘Say no more. I can tell. When I read the letters I said, “She’s the one I want about me now.”’
She had forgotten the potatoes and let her hand holding the little worn triangle of knife drop to her lap among the peelings. She looked at the fire. I said, ‘Let me finish,’ and took the things from her. ‘Sit still. I’ll see to it’—I, who was hopeless and hadn’t cooked a potato in my life.
Then the door opened and Paul’s father and brother came in from feeding calves, carrying buckets, and stamped snow off themselves, clattered and called about, paying us no attention. They kicked the dogs into a corner and Paul’s father stuck his wet cap up between a sagging black beam and the ceiling to dry. Paul’s brother slapped the dirty bucket under the sink ready for us to wash up after our dinner. Their boots left pools about the patches of linoleum which were so sparse on the cold slabs that the floor seemed to be occasionally painted with dim flowers and leaves and squirls and bare in patches, like the traces of an antique pavement.
We sat to dinner quietly. There was a rough black settle covered in a pattern of red birds. There was not much of a cloth on the table, shreddy linen, but very clean. We drank from mugs not glasses. The knives and forks were poor and crooked but shining. The pudding was served with a queer plain sauce like starch. ‘It’s a good pudding,’ said Paul’s brother, shovelling it in. ‘It’s a grand pudding.’ ‘It’s carrot and potato,’ said his mother. ‘There’s plenty currants in it,’ said the brother, looking defensive, watching me for disgust.
After dinner the farmer took off his boots and heaved himself on to a high wooden meal-chest at the back of the kitchen and fell asleep. His feet, pointing at the ceiling, were in socks as thick as chain-mail. Mrs Treece and I washed the dishes and then the animal-buckets at the sink and the brother Laurie sat at the fire, grinding branches into it from the stick-corner until the sparks flew. At length he leaned back and slept too.
What had Paul done on Christmas afternoons? I thought of him reading Yeats in the cold bedroom, writing careful letters to the famous, poetry of his own.
‘Do you go to church ever at Christmas, Mrs Treece?’
‘No. We never bother. Only harvest festivals.’
‘We’re very religious where I live.’
‘Well, some it suits. The parson’s been over about Paul. Not that he knew what to say for all the practice he’s had. Eleven in Paul’s carriage from this parish sets off for France, and nine of them dead in a week. What could he say, if ever? What it’s for’s beyond me. I make no pretence of understanding. I’ll go up now to change my dress.’
I sat opposite the sleeping brother. He was short and thick-set with huge hands, hanging loose between his open thighs, his head flung back and sideways, his hair soft and young. His coarse trousers were rolled up and his stockings like his father’s had big darns in them which were beautiful. He lay heavy and still, uncaring and unaware of me or
any stranger. A year younger than Paul, this boy and he must have been babies together playing on this rag-rug, learning to speak with the same country accent, before Paul unlearned it again, going together to the same village school. Paul had never mentioned Laurie.
Laurie’s eyelashes were like Paul’s. His ears were usual. He had a nicer mouth—a sleepy, hungry mouth with the lower lip fuller than the top one. Looking at the mouth I began to think about Laurie.
‘What ist?’ he said, waking up. ‘It’s goin’ on dark. It’s bare three o’clock. Canst thou mek tea?’
‘Yes. I’ll make tea. Shouldn’t we wait for your mother?’
‘She’ll bide. She’ll be sleeping maybe. She’s slept little. It’s in yon caddy.’
He pointed up to a red tin with the King and Queen looking out from it in patchy gold on the chimney-piece. It was so high that I had to stretch even standing on the fender, and he watched me and did not help. I found the teapot and warmed it and threw the slops out of the kitchen door as I’d seen his mother do and some of them blew in at me again. Then I poured the water from the huge kettle on the chain over the fire—it needed two hands—and then set the teapot on top of the copper-lid to stand. Laurie said, ‘That’s a good lass. Thas’t not a bad lass.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You and Paul was sweet-hearting, then?’
‘Well—’
‘He’d never had one. Tell truth, I never thowt he would. He was missing in that direction.’
‘Did you—were you quite close?’
‘Aye, under the year.’
‘I meant close. Close friends?’
‘I could never make him out. Aye, we was friends. Did you have a ring from him?’
‘Oh no. Nothing like that.’
‘You knew he was from farming people?’
‘Oh yes. I told him I’d love to live on a farm.’
‘You did, did you? What made you think that?’
‘I don’t know. I’m telling the truth though.’
‘Have you changed your tune now?’
‘No.’
‘D’you know we works twelve hours a day all week and never a holiday? My mam walks eight miles to a shop to save a penny on the bus—and she’s scrubbed this floor for twenty years, not being money for a hired girl—and her a boarding-school girl herself when she was young. Well born. She’s an old woman now at forty-nine. We never get an egg—they go to be sold. Most of last year it was potatoes, potatoes. You’re rich, aren’t you?’
‘No. I haven’t any money except a little bit I was left and a house.’
‘A house is rich—and that dress is rich. This house in’t our own. We’s tenants. We could be thrown out tomorrow. Paul would have come rich, mind, you could see.’
‘Why did he go to the army so soon, Laurie? He didn’t have to.’
‘Christ knows.’
‘You won’t?’
‘Not required and won’t be. I’ll be reserved occupation. Catch me, anyway.’
‘I suppose Paul went for his country.’
‘My country needs me in it.’
He leaned forward soon and took my hand and watched me, and his hand began to tighten. Then the old man stirred on the kist-top and Mrs Treece came in without her apron, pleased to see the pot of tea.
‘Could you not stay longer?’ she said at the New Year. ‘We’s got used to you. You’ve brought comfort.’
‘Aye, you’ve done that,’ said the farmer, surprising everyone, ‘you’ve brought some comfort.’ The simple words seemed to surprise the speaker too. For the first time in the brave house I felt near tears.
‘Why not stop on?’ Laurie was watching me carry down my bag and the big parcels of Paul’s papers and books which his parents had quite fiercely said were mine. He watched me wrap myself up in gloves and scarves and lift up my things into the cart behind him. ‘I can’t. There’s too much to do at home. Alice is all alone.’
‘You’ll come again mind?’
‘Thank you very much.’ (I knew I never could.)
‘I’ll drive you then.’
We squatted side by side in the front of the cart drawn by the brown cart-horse. I kept Paul’s box of papers between us, and watched over the bundles of books tied together with hairy twine. The floor of the cart was caked with old dried mud and between the cracks in it I watched the rough road go by between the long hedges up the hill. The high wheels went wobbling round—they had once been painted red and yellow and must have looked like a carnival, when Paul was a baby. A daily fairground. I saw the baby watching the coloured wheels turn and the red shoots of the hedges all about them.
Laurie let me get down from the car alone and then passed me all the things and some butter and eggs wrapped in oily paper. He watched me go with the old station-master helping me up the station yard and I waved goodbye and stood in the waiting room stamping my feet and looking out at the miles of snowy fell.
The sun shone. The station stove made a clinking and dropping of coals and there was a louder clinking and xylophonic dropping of water outside, for all along the pretty carved edges of the station buildings the icicles were melting. Then I could hear the train coming.
As I gathered my things together again, Laurie suddenly appeared and took my bag from me with a funny sideways, sly-look, not speaking and I thought, Good gracious, after all he’s shy.
I opened the carriage window and he looked up at me and said ‘If you was to sell that house you could come here and live. Think on. Think on now. I’ll say nothing further.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘I’d not have thowt to fetch up with a woman of Paul’s, mind. Seems we wasn’t so different after all.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘What say then? Think on?’
I said nothing and he began to hop and run by the train. He had anxious, over-bright eyes. I saw Paul in him now so clearly for a moment that my own eyes filled properly with tears and this time the tears fell. For I knew that Laurie and the Treeces were not for me.
‘It’s grand here in spring and summer,’ he called. ‘You’d like that. The lambs and that. And harvest time. It’s a grand country. I’d not leave it.’
He’d think later I was a strange girl, crying, never answering him, though he’d not think of me for very long.
The most famous heart-stopping incident in Robinson Crusoe is, of course, the foot-print, yet it was never to me the most terrifying. A glorious idea, with no known parallel in fiction, as simple and splendid as the idea of the book itself, at once an astounding and completely credible sight.
Yet I was always slightly disappointed by it—that it was just a print, not Friday’s print as everybody has come to think. Just the print of some quite anonymous foot, probably crunched up on a later occasion around the cannibal fires.
Secondly it had always seemed disappointing that years had to pass by before any living foot followed the promise of the print of one—even though the casual lapse of time is consistent with Defoe’s unhurried pace, his grandly confident unrolling of the years.
But much more frightening seems to me to be another occasion: when Crusoe, after his first foray in his home-made canoe, gets shipwrecked again on an unknown part of his island and hears his own voice calling out his name.
‘Robin, Robin, Robin Crusoe, poor Robin Crusoe! Where are you, Robin Crusoe? Where are you? Where have you been?’
(His parrot.)
‘However, even though I knew it was my parrot, and that indeed it could be nobody else, it was a good while before I could compose myself. First I imagined how the creature had got thither, and then how he should just keep about the place, and nowhere else. But . . . I got it over and . . . he . . . continued talking to me, “Poor Robin Crusoe! and how did I come here? and where had I been?” just as if he had been overjoyed to see me again: and so I carried him along with me.’
Would Alice have kept about the place, I wondered, coming home from my own foray to the farm, a
way from my island? There was really no reason for it. Whyever should she stay now in the great yellow house out on the marsh, all alone with me? There was other work to be got with the war. Soon she would be able to make twice—four times—the money. And she was only about my own age. There was no purpose in her staying to wait on me there, as there was no purpose in my own life there, either, come to that. Or anywhere.
What I was to do with my life now I hadn’t the least idea.
And if my life at the yellow house was odd—and dull and lonely except for my books—how much worse it must be for Alice. She had never given much sign of liking any of us particularly and I knew that I had never been a real friend to her, not seeming to know quite how to begin. Yet she had toiled and slaved and nursed and cooked for us and seen to my clothes and cared about my new mysterious life at the Zeits. My last week there had made her eyes sparkle when I told her of all the glamours. I had still of course not told her that these glamours were done and I shamefully rejected, treated as a dismissed servant, as we would never, never, have treated her.
I had begun to be a little afraid of Alice, I realised, as I walked home over the marsh with as many of my belongings as I could carry from Paul Treece’s farm. I wasn’t sure exactly how I should feel if I found a dead house and a letter of farewell from her lying on the hall-table.
Perhaps a freedom?
But the chimneys of the yellow house smoked, and as I walked in with my butter and eggs and bundles of poems, there she stood, saying, ‘Well, you’re back. Praise be. I wondered if you’d stop. I’d half a fancy they’d seduce you away—and then where’d we be?