by Jane Gardam
‘There’s been a great bombardment here,’ she said. ‘Hartlepool—and dozens dead.’
She was wearing a most unlikely hat, like a long felt bluebell stuck with a painted fish-bone pin, and she had a hand on her hip and was smoking a cigarette. ‘Butter and eggs,’ I said, looking away. ‘Such nice people, Alice. Did you have a happy Christmas? It’s good to be back,’ and I knew as I spoke just why I was frightened of her.
‘Yes I see. That’s a good thing then,’ she said, examining the parcel.
It was my own voice using my own words.
She was in charge—and had probably been in charge, though I had not known it, for ages. Gone long ago were the wisps, the grubby sharp face and the big skivvy aprons. How long since I’d seen them? Alice was her own woman and had been so at least since the day of Mrs Woods’s death when she had turned from the bed and ordered me what to do.
But when I got used to the change I liked it.
And I clung now quite desperately to my island. I went nicely about, day after day, industrious in the yellow house, behaving like the soul of serenity. The house needed a lot of looking after. Even in the midst of war, at that time it was not so strange for a woman to give her life to a house.
Also, I invented work. I had kept the schoolroom habit of sitting at a desk surrounded by books each day for years and now, with Paul Treece’s things about me too and his manuscripts, I began to write myself, starting, of course, with Robinson Crusoe, which I decided to translate into German.
It was a totally pointless exercise but demanding in its way and I took pleasure in the pile of glossy exercise books I bought and in my clear handwriting covering the pages. I wrote page-numbers in red ink and underlined in green. Then as time passed I discovered the satisfaction of footnotes. These I also wrote in red with an inked black line between text and note. There was a vast amount of double underlining.
I translated for four hours each morning, the translation was fast, but its transference to the page I tried to make so beautiful that it was very slow, and soon I was as abstracted as a monk at a Book of Hours or a child with his first crayons.
After lunch I often worked at The Poultice MSS which I copied out and arranged in order. Nearly all was poetry—pastoral, direct. There was some love-poetry—alarmingly passionate. Strawberries and nipples. It made me thoughtful. Rather shocked. There was a series of poems about some simple but very confident girl who lived inside her head and drove men mad. It seems that she was very desirable but as far as I could make out, half asleep. He had said that he knew a lot of girls.
Some of the poems were strong and witty and there was a lovely fortitude in them which reminded me of Robinson Crusoe and I began to see that under the mud of France there was dust that might have become of great account.
Then, in the evenings, I read. There had been some critical works in Paul Treece’s library and they interested me, being the first modern ones I had seen. While it seemed to be an extremely arrogant way of getting into print I think that they may have been the start in me of a greater organisation of my ideas. This was a sort of physic.
I made notes about everything. Whenever my mind and heart began to stir I made notes more feverishly, meticulously still and uselessly for the demon at my back was not Paul. It was of course still Theo.
But no letter had come from him. No message had come from any Zeit. No card, no word, no whisper, no local gossip. His face, at first I blotted out with hurt and shock, helped by seeing another kind of suffering—the raw suffering—at the farm. Now however it kept returning, surprising me at aimless moments—on closing a book, or looking up quickly at the tap of the acorn on a blind-cord in the wind. Often I heard the Zeit pony and trap at the door and looked out at an empty road.
Since the winter night, lying there with him, I had not been able to walk on the sand-hills and would take a huge half circle round them to the town, and the soldiers guarding the camp, and the sick in the old convalescent home watched me. I heard one soldier say once, ‘Is she a bit peculiar that woman in that house?’ and in Boagey’s Son and Nephew a loud lady said to old Mr Box, ‘Whatever happened to that young Miss Flint? She was wanting a bit, wasn’t she? Slow?’
But I was still there. No recluse. Not seeking solitude to weep in. It was only the sand-hills I couldn’t face.
Sometimes I tried to talk to the people I met on the marsh. The convalescents were no longer the Warrenby poor our soup had failed to cure, but the wounded shipped from France and the North-East ports and distributed about. They lay out in the convalescent home, such as could, under grit-brown blankets in crowded rows. Some sat in the sandy blowy grounds staring. Others wandered the marsh, wooden and apart. It was they who turned from me when I came near.
The New House stood empty. Because I had never been quite alone there with Theo it was possible still for me to bear to walk in its gardens. Through the long windows of the drawing-room spindly gold chairs were stacked in heaps, abandoned presumably after the Christmas party. I could see the magnificent piano (which no Zeit had ever played) covered with a thick dust-sheet tied in at the feet and the chandeliers of ‘the best rooms’ as Mrs Zeit had called them, hanging in huge bags heavy as swarms of bees.
There was a lackadaisical care-taker. He had been the church’s sexton, ancient and sly, and I had never liked him. He used to dig the graves with an awful relish and slowly deck their walls with leaves of privet and sea-lavender held in with big black hair-pins. He would watch you at ankle level as you passed. Alice once said with rare venom, ‘I’d like to kick the face in of yon.’ ‘Bitter,’ he used to say even on pleasant days. ‘Bitter weather again, Miss Flint. I hear Mrs Woods is failing?’
At this time I seemed unable ever to get quite free of images of mortality and met the sexton everywhere, at last coming face to face with him in The New House drive where the imported orange gravel was now all hazed with green weeds.
He said, watching me, ‘They’re putting them sand-hills out of bounds. There’s young girls out there shameless with the soldiers. Going at it like tortoises. I’ve thrown water over cats for less.’
I didn’t go back to The New House after that, but often wondered about tortoises and exactly how they went at it. When my own memory of the sand-hills came to me there was no longer the lurch of pure joy as he unfastened my dress. Only tortoises.
‘Are tortoises funny?’ I asked Alice. ‘‘You know—unnatural?’
‘I don’t know as I’ve seen many outside Boagey’s Pet and Corn shop.’
‘You know—sexually peculiar?’
She gave me a queer look.
In the spring of 1916 when the slaughter of the Somme was such that each army sometimes ran out to retrieve the other’s dead, Alice and I were busy with the sexuality of tortoises. We cleaned the library, getting down the books from every shelf for the first time in memory—possibly ever—and behind a row of works of the Reverend Thomas Fuller, up against the ceiling, we found a small copy of a novel by Cleland and I took it to the window and examined it. I stayed there for a very long time.
‘Aren’t you coming to your tea, Miss Polly?’
‘Just a minute.’
‘Your supper’s ready. Whatever’ve you found?’
‘Read it,’ I said, ‘take it to your bed.’
The next morning we did not look at one another in the eye. Washing away at the shelves from the top of the steps, she said, ‘That Fanny Hill! Life’s full of surprises. I’ll say that.’
‘Did you—know all that, Alice?’
‘Aye—some of it.’ She was still servant enough not to ask whether I did.
‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know any of it. Well I knew some things. It sounds a lot better than I’d thought. D’you think people really go on like that?’
‘I’d think so. Mind, it was in History. They seemed to have enjoyed themselves more then. All the long skirts and that. Romantic. Well, exciting-like!’
‘They didn’t seem exactl
y to get in the way.’
We began to giggle and laugh. ‘Where’s the book now?’ I said. ‘I want to read it again.’
‘I’m ashamed of you, Miss Polly.’ Alice had turned a brickish colour. ‘You can’t have it till I’ve read it again.’ So we sat together in the kitchen that evening, reading bits silently then staring at each other, then dissolving with joy.
‘However did it get up there? D’you think it was the Archdeacon?’
‘Archdeacon nothing,’ said Alice. ‘Didn’t you see? It says Gertrude Younghusband, large as life on the fly-leaf. Shameless!’
‘Maybe she wrote her name in it before she’d read it?’
‘Well, she didn’t burn it up or throw it away.’
‘Alice! Gertrude Younghusband was my grandmother—the Archdeacon’s wife!’ We both went and looked long and hard at the matron in whalebone with the imperial nose on the Archdeacon’s writing-desk.
Alice began to have a great many more evenings off after this. I, less extreme, only started to teach myself to cook. Fanny Hill had cheered us and though it should have made us restless in some way in fact it made us rather calmer, and more assured, so that for the next two years until almost the end of the war we seemed to swim in rather more hopeful waters.
For the next two years.
‘For the next two years’, like Crusoe, ‘I cannot say that any extraordinary things happened to me; but I lived on in the same course, in the same posture and places, just as before.’
Then one day in 1918, Alice ran into the kitchen where I was beating something in a bowl and bread was rising rubbery white in ten tins.
‘There’s someone here.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know who.’ But she looked very wild. ‘It could be Mr Zeit.’
‘Could be?’
‘I don’t say is. Here—give us that skillet.’
I walked through to the front of the house with my sleeves still rolled up and my apron on and my hands floury. In the hall was nobody, nor in the dining room, nor in the library, nor upstairs in the drawing room. I stood in the hall before the glass again and rolled my sleeves down, wiped my hands upon the apron and took it off. Outside on the scrag end of marsh that was all that remained stood an army-green motor with driver. A man sat in the back, very old and empty-looking about the eyes, but they were still Theo’s.
‘Can you drive with me somewhere?’
It was cold. I went in for a coat. Then I sat by him in the car and saw how his hands shook like the hands of the men at the convalescent home and that he clasped them together and still they shook. When he spoke it was with long pauses between words and sometimes the words got stuck and he spluttered and gulped. I asked, ‘How long were you in France?’
‘Since you saw me.’
‘Is your leave long?’
‘It’s been long. I’m about ready to go back.’
‘Are you?’
‘Well there’s a Board next week.’
‘Aren’t we going to The New House? We’ve gone by.’
‘No. It’s full of soldiers now. It was commandeered.’
‘Yes. I heard. Where are you all? Where are we going then, Theo?’
‘Mother’s up in Newcastle. She was interned you know. For nearly two years. But she’s running the North again now.’
‘Yes, I see. I hadn’t heard.’
‘Rebecca’s in France, nursing. So is Delphi Vipont from The Hall—and fairly hopeless at it I gather. I thought we’d go to The Hall now. Bec wants me to collect some things for Delphi.’
The Hall was so much of a ruin that even the army had not wanted it. Parts of its roof had gone in, its shutters hung crooked or were gone, its drive was so choked that Theo ordered the driver to go and leave us at the gates which were overgrown, immovable, and we climbed through between one of the stone posts and the great broken hinges. We walked through the courtyard and in through the front door, stuck open under its swaying fanlight. The long stretch of rooms, one opening out of another, stood empty. Rats had eaten holes in their floors, a volcano of soot sat in each beautiful grate, the milky marble above dulled and daubed with bird-droppings. ‘It’s all to be pulled down soon,’ said Theo. ‘There’ll be nothing here. She’s too late for her keepsakes.’
We walked about. Old newspapers were stuck to the black and white of the eighteenth-century saloon, the staircase was splintered. He tried to help me up the stairs but I had to help him too, he seemed so uncertain.
His hands were so cold. In the bedroom we opened a shutter and found a four-poster bed all by itself on the bare floor still with a dark old counterpane and hung with crimson silk, each fold of the silk with a velvet edge of dust. A prie-dieu stood beside it and it all had a daunting ecclesiastical look.
‘It must have been Lady Vipont’s. She was very holy.’
Theo said, ‘Delphi must have started in that bed.’
His hands were shaking again and he sat on the window-seat. Across the window wistaria hung so thick and gnarled that the window had to be pushed hard against it to open at all. Rain fell on the green leaves, pattering, though the sun still shone through them. Large glassy drops hung on the long grey flowers. ‘I’ve thought of you every day,’ said Theo, ‘but it was thinking of someone else’s woman in another century.’
‘You sent no message. It’s been nearly four years.’
‘No.’
‘Have you written no letters? Not to anyone?’
‘Only to the parents of my men. When they die. Saying that they died bravely. I only write lies.’
‘I’ve heard nothing. Nothing. Not from any of you. You all vanished. You might all have been dead. You threw me away.’
He said, ‘I am dead. We are all dead, Polly. This country died.’
We lay down on Lady Vipont’s bed in each other’s arms until it grew dark and we said almost nothing. In the great cold house I became warm and I felt my warmth warm Theo and he held me fast. We did not make love, yet we lay as one person for hours. We lay till dark.
Before we left he said at the top of the stairs, ‘I’ll just look for something, in case—’ and went off, feeling and looking about in a room or two. ‘There’s a bit of old junk in the back of a cupboard. She wanted something from the mausoleum really.’ We passed the mausoleum all boarded up and tied round with barbed wire. ‘D’you remember in there?’ he said, ‘All pearl and pink. D’you remember that day? The hymn-books? Beccy running? You like a round flower?’
At home he said, ‘Go in quickly. Go. I’ll write this time. I promise, when I can write letters again the first will be to you. I’ll see you next leave. The war can’t be long now.’
Then he said, ‘I do love you, you know.’ But the words seemed to be very difficult to understand. We both stood considering them as if we were hearing an old primitive language.
When the car had gone I stood outside the yellow house until Alice came out and said ‘Miss? Was that Mr Zeit? I can’t think it was Mr Zeit,’ and I didn’t know what to reply.
He did write and at first quite often. The letters began to arrive three weeks later and continued for about a year. I answered every one and sent two or three extra in between.
In my letters I told him everything in the whole world so far as I understood it: about Wales, about the marsh and about the sad years when everybody prayed or died or vanished. I told him about my wish that I might be a good Christian but my certainty that I was not ready to Confirmed, about my sinful disgust at Mrs Woods and God’s answer to my prayer with her death; about my fear and awe of Alice—how I knew that she had hated looking at and touching Mrs Woods and feeding her with a cup and putting little bits or food in her awful mouth as much as I did. The lifting her. The washing of her. Yet never once had she flinched or mentioned it.
I told how I still missed Aunt Frances and of the mystery of her silence to me after she had gone away; and how I had felt at home so seldom—only in the old sexy memories of Wales, the housekeeper’s kitch
en at Thwaite and walking on that one morning with Paul Treece. I told him how sick I felt and worried because I had not liked Paul Treece’s looks, had not wanted to touch him. I told him about Virginia Woolf and the poets and famous people at Thwaite, and the memory of my father; dancing and singing the sea song; of Mr Pocock, and the table-top swimming with polish in the dining-room, so that I had looked out over a shadowed lake, with the brooding presences around its edges, like in Wordsworth’s Prelude.
I told him how my life was now divided before my lying with him on Lady Vipont’s bed, and afterwards; and I wrote how much I loved him in such a tremendous and passionate way that I often stood looking at the post-box after the letter went flop inside it, thinking, ‘Could I have written that? Could any woman ever have written so much to any man before?’ I saw his face which never told a thing, reading it and I thought, if he is killed, will all the letters go back to Mrs Zeit? Yet, I continued to tell everything, everything, as I am doing in this book, and as women are not supposed to do.
Then, thinking of what women are not supposed to do, I would go quickly away and write another letter saying yet more. About wanting him and needing to sleep with him, though I did not say sleep. Wanting, wanting, I said—and in just what ways, day and night, indoors and out, wherever he sent for me. I drew deeply on my knowledge of the novel which my grandmother had prized. I wrote unlike a granddaughter of a Victorian Archdeacon, unlike even the women in D. H. Lawrence whom Alice had taken to lately. (Well, Lawrence’s women hardly say anything.)
Had Moll Flanders, Cleopatra, Emily Brontë loved Theo Zeit they could not have told him so with more passion and with less restraint. And they were I dare say the wiser women.
Theo’s dry, short letters grew more and more difficult to read—the writing smaller and smaller, almost tormentedly careful. Then they stopped.
They stopped not after any especially naked one of mine. I thought, ‘He is killed.’ Then after two months, ‘Had he been killed I would have heard by now.’ I re-read his last letter slowly, slowly. There was no clue. I re-read all the letters then and I found that they had been nothing. I was left with nothing and I had then a great terror that I had been mad. The bed in The Hall had been fantasy. ‘Was that Mr Zeit?’ Alice had said, ‘Surely it can’t have been?’ I had dreamed it. I did not fully remember what happened. I did not remember how he got home. I had dreamed.