by Nina Bawden
Janet, seated before the empty fireplace, was in tears. Alice remained where Auntie had seen her, at the window. Her face was scarlet and her hair disarranged. Unable to hear, Auntie sensed her anger, a solid force barring her from the room. Like an actress in a silent film, Alice mouthed, gesticulated: Auntie shrank back before the violence of feeling that came from her.
She closed the door softly and retreated up the stairs. She could not face a scene, she was too old, too tired. Besides there was no need. Hilary was certainly on her way home. Why otherwise, should she have climbed the cliff?
By the time she was safe in her own room, Auntie was convinced there was nothing further that she could have done.
The cliffs stretched for five miles between Henstable and the next town along the coast. They were not part of Henstable like the Downs which were maintained at the ratepayer’s expense and they had a bleak, forsaken look. They were, however, a favourite walk with the stouter of the town’s ageing population and during the thirties, a dying and prosperous fishmonger who had quarrelled with his wife and saw no reason why she should live, after his death, in a manner to which his disposition did not entitle her, had provided the money for the building of five shelters on the cliff, one at each milestone.
When Hilary reached the top of the cliff, she went into the seaward side of one of these shelters and saw, through the glass partition, a middle-aged couple eating a sandwich lunch on the other side.
Her hunger became intolerable. She walked round the shelter and confronted the couple. “Could I have something to eat?” she asked. “I’m hungry.”
They stared at her with bulging, unbelieving eyes. The man’s face grew very red and his neck seemed to swell above his coat collar.
“Whatever next,” he shouted. “Whatever next? Damned impertinence.” Little specks of foam appeared on his lips. “Get along with you,” he commanded in a strangled, military voice, “or I’ll call the police.”
Shame immobilised her. She stared with wide eyes, expecting him to rise from his seat and strike her. Then she turned and stumbled away. His voice pursued her, borne by the wind.
“You can say what you like, Myrtle. It’s none of our business, none of our business at all.”
Hilary ran inland, away from that terrible voice, into the fields where the sharp, wheat stubble pricked at her ankles and drew blood.
At the beginning of the second field, beyond the ditch, she came to the pipes. The pipes were a relict of a building project that had been abandoned when it became clear that this part of the cliff was being slowly swallowed by the sea. They were about fifteen feet long and made of cast iron. There was a large, official notice saying that anyone who removed or tampered with them would be prosecuted by Order.
She began to jump up and down on the pipes, singing in a loud defiant voice. Once or twice, she laughed out loud in an affected manner to show the man in the shelter that she didn’t care. Then she forgot about him and decided to crawl through a pipe. This was an exciting and dangerous business because once you were properly inside a pipe, there was no retreat. It was impossible to turn round and difficult to go backwards. She selected her pipe and wriggled into it head foremost. The metal was cold against her skin and smelt of damp and rust.
She was half-way along when the circle of light at the end was blotted out. She lay, trembling and shaking, in utter darkness. Then, perhaps because her fear was too great to be borne, she accepted her destiny. On her elbows and knees, she moved forward into darkness.
When the light returned as suddenly as it had vanished, her faith was vindicated. She wriggled to the end of the pipe and poked out her head. The whiteness of the sunlight made her blink and it was some seconds before she saw, about two feet away from her and on a level with her eyes, the skirt of a black coat and a heavy, misshapen boot.
She remained quite still, her hands gripping the cold edge of the pipe. She was not surprised. She even gave a small nod of satisfaction as if to say: this is what I expected, after all. She had already met Him twice. If He were really the Devil, they had not been chance encounters. They had been written in her stars. A spring of gladness rose within her. There was no more need to be afraid. Confidently, she raised her eyes and smiled in welcome.
“To think that this should happen, to-day of all days,” said Alice. “As if we hadn’t enough to worry about.” She added, sweepingly, “How typical of you.”
It was hardly fair. Janet smarted beneath the injustice of it.
“It’s my letter. You had no right to read it.”
Her shocked voice reduced a principle to a smug, school-girl standard of values that was easy to dismiss.
“No right?” Alice was trembling from head to foot.
She had had a difficult day and was spoiling for a row. Her own fears for Hilary’s safety had, initially, been diminished by Mrs. Peacock’s prophecies of doom. These had grown momently more theatrical: listening to her, Alice had been forced into a position of unnatural calm. There was no real need to worry. It was absurd to make a fuss, impossible to see Hilary as a tragic victim. The child liked to be the centre of attention: she was bound to return, in search of an audience, if for no other reason, as soon as her temper had subsided.
By lunch-time, however, when there was still no sign of her, Alice was forced to admit that the matter was more serious than she had allowed herself to believe. Nagged by a feeling of guilt, she telephoned Charles.
He asked her when Hilary had gone out and when she told him, said, “You’ve left it long enough, haven’t you?”
“I thought she’d come back.” She was aware of the weakness of her excuse.
His anxiety made him hit out at her. “You’ve never cared a damn about the child.”
“Oh, Charles” She was caught off balance by the unfairness of this remark. She said, in a sad, indignant voice, “Am I such a bad mother?” and waited, confidently, for his swift denial.
It did not come. “Sometimes I think you are,” he said nastily and replaced the receiver.
Alice could not bear criticism. Now, she took Charles’s unkindness more seriously than it had perhaps been intended. She plunged into an abyss of self-hatred and despair. She had neglected Hilary, she was a failure as a mother. Her handsome face took on a downcast, mutinous expression that was remarkably like her daughter’s.
To occupy herself, she began to tidy the drawers in the dining-room. She found Aubrey’s letter crumpled among the table napkins. Ordinarily, she would not have read it but, at this moment, wallowing as she was in her own vileness, she felt a driving desire to degenerate further. She was a wicked woman, Charles had as good as told her so, why should she stop at reading a private letter?
She read it. The prose was more pretentious than passionate: clearly, it had been written primarily as a literary exercise. But to Alice’s distressed mind, the implications seemed clear enough. As she read, she was filled with a painful, rising excitement.
“I worship your mind as dearly as I worship your body… As for Milly, why should my soaring love be confined just because once, long ago, I promised a silly, stupid girl to love and cherish her? There was nothing solemn about that promise, either. It was made in a registry office in a dreary provincial town. Milly wept with her hands folded over her big belly because she was not being sacrificed in a white dress and orange blossom. Her mother wept with shame. There was no gladness, no champagne. Nothing but beer and lamentation. I felt trapped—lonely and afraid in a world I had not made. Can such a sordid ceremony be valid?”
Alice smiled briefly at the absurd, almost legal crispness of the last sentence. Then, crumpling the pages in her hand, her own feelings of guilt were transposed into outraged anger. She had tried so hard to be a mother to this motherless girl and this was how she was rewarded. She saw her spasmodic kindness, her good intentions, as a whole-hearted devotion. Throughout lunch, she watched her stepdaughter with smouldering dislike. She could barely wait to confront her with her ingratitude.
Now she repeated, “No right? Your father and I are responsible for you. Sometimes responsibility means doing something that may not be in the best of taste.”
“It was none of your business.” Janet answered her primly. As often happened when she was nervous, her mouth tightened into a mulish sneer. Alice had always found this a peculiarly ugly and unloveable habit: it was associated, for her, with endless scenes of childish temper.
“Do you really think it is none of my business when you behave like a tart?” Seeing the immediate horror in the girl’s eyes, her righteous anger mounted. “Is it none of my business when you break up some poor woman’s marriage? You think you’re clever, don’t you, my girl. Hiding behind that girlish innocence. Sweet seventeen! No one would believe it of you, would they? I must say, you took me in.”
Alice’s face was crimson. Her arms made violent, meaningless gestures, strands of hair escaped from their carefully moulded braids.
“I thought butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. To think we trusted you, we thought we’d brought you up to behave decently. Did you never think of the disgrace to us. Suppose you had had a baby?”
Distantly, through the mists of excitement that enveloped her, Alice was aware of her own voice shouting in the strident vowels of her childhood and of Janet’s wide, stricken eyes. The girl had sunk down on to a hassock and her eyes seemed to grow larger and larger as if they would devour her face.
“You didn’t think of that, did you? Or are you still pretending that babies come in the doctor’s little black bag?”
Janet went on staring with her huge, dark, stupid eyes. She opened her mouth and no sound came out of it. Finally she murmured, with great effort and in a voice so low that Alice could barely hear it, some form of denial.
Alice tossed her head contemptuously. “Are you trying to tell me that you’re still a virgin?”
The brutality of the scene had defeated Janet utterly. The word “virgin” was the final straw: it was a word that had always embarrassed her beyond measure. She covered her face with her hands and wept bitterly. To Alice, her tears seemed an admission of guilt. To some extent, they satisfied and calmed her.
Faintly touched with shame, she pulled Janet’s hands away from her streaming eyes and offered her a cigarette. Janet lit it with shaking hand and puffed at it helplessly. They were both silent, weakened with emotion. They avoided each other’s eyes.
The front door opened and closed. Auntie had entered the house unnoticed by either of them but now, in the silence they recognised Charles’s footsteps. Janet threw her cigarette away and bowed her head. Alice put one hand to her disordered hair.
“Has she come back?”
“No…”
Charles looked at his wife and daughter. He said cautiously, scenting trouble, “What’s the matter?”
Janet, raising her head, stared at him mutely with suffering eyes. Alice moved towards her with a guilty, protective air.
“It’s nothing. A bit of trouble. Nothing important…”
She looked, with her hair tumbling round her face and her cheeks glowing with colour, like a great, golden barmaid. Charles was touched, both by her dishevelled appearance and also by her obvious desire to protect Janet.
He said coldly to his daughter. “Really, Janet, I’m ashamed of you. You are thoroughly selfish. We’re nearly out of our minds about Hilary and you make a scene. How could you?”
Janet became very pale. Outwardly a dull, insignificant girl, she was inwardly jealous and obscurely passionate. She longed, above all things, to be first with those she loved. When it became apparent that she was not—and she was quick to see a slight—she was given to sudden, ungovernable rages. Quite irrationally, she saw her father’s reproof as evidence that she came second to Hilary in his affections. This, curiously, distressed her more than Alice’s attack had done.
“What about me?” she cried. “Don’t I matter? It’s nothing but Hilary, Hilary—I’m sick of the sound of her name. She’s a little beast, she stole my letter.” Her voice was savage and desolate and childish. “You don’t love me.” She ran from the room. They heard the front door slam.
Alice smiled wanly at her husband. “Oh, dear …”
He returned her smile sheepishly and, overcome by a tumult of emotions, she sat down heavily and burst into tears. He went to her and patted her heaving back suspiciously: it was a long time since she had wept in front of him.
“What are we going to do?” she asked, drawing away from his touch, humiliated because he had seen her tears.
He answered her with false cheerfulness. “I’ve been to the police, they’re looking for her. But there’s not so much need to worry as we thought. They caught the man this morning. At least she’s in no danger from him.”
The man looked at Hilary and thought: what pretty hair. Bright and shining like the firelight on polished copper.
He could remember far back, farther than most people and his memories were clear. His mind was full of pictures like a photograph album.
He remembered the day when he lay in his crib and stretched out his hands to the copper pan that hung beside the range oven. It was polished and shining with the red-gold flames dancing in the heart of it. He wanted it. He spoke his first, ugly, guttural word.
His grandmother gave him the copper pan to play with. It was cold and cruel to touch. He cried and threw the pan away. His grandmother spoke to him gently, rubbed the pan with her apron and hung it back on its hook where he could look at it.
His grandmother looked after him then: she had long, white hairs on her chin and her hands were soft and pulpy and crinkled and always damp. She smelt of soap and wet linen. He dozed, in the daytime, to the drip of drying clothes and the squeak of the big, wooden mangle. When his foot hurt, she held it in her hands and rocked him backwards and forwards, crooning to him in the firelight.
One day, his mother was there instead. She opened the door to the rag and bone man and he took away the copper pan with the other shiny kitchen things and the big, brass bedstead where he slept with his grandmother at night when his pain made him lonely or afraid. His mother said: who wants this old rubbish, nothing but work to keep it clean? Feeling her anger, hungry because she had not fed him, he wept sadly, his hands screwed up in front of his eyes. His mother slapped him, saying, stop snivelling, you devil’s brat, or I’ll give you something to cry for. He was terrified by her red face bending over him. He screamed for his granny in his flat, hideous voice.
His mother put a wet flannel over his face to muffle the noise and to shut out the hateful sight of him. She shook him, her sharp nails digging into his shoulders. Your granny won’t come, she said, she’s gone away for ever, dead, dead, dead, banging his head against the side of the crib.
Most of his memories were of death, of people dying and leaving him alone. He bent down and touched Hilary’s hair. His hands were reverent like the hands of a bishop at a confirmation. He felt love and the longing for love aching in his body like a wound. “Pretty, pretty,” he moaned. His hands tightened softly on the little girl’s head.
Chapter Five
“It’s all right, Auntie,” Charles bellowed across the green shaded room. “They’ve caught the man, the murderer. Sorry if I’ve disturbed your nap, but I thought you’d like to know.”
He had never quite ridden himself of the idea that if only you spoke loudly enough, Auntie would hear. Now, as she bent forward questioningly because she could not clearly see his face, he was irritated at what he suspected, occasionally and unfairly, was an affectation.
He moved closer to her and repeated his message, his lips emphasising the shape of the words.
“All right, all right,” she said pettishly. “I’m not blind yet,” adding, illogically, “I heard you the first time.”
“That’s all right, then.” He stood upright and mopped his brow. He was tired, the fright had taken it out of him. The pulses throbbed at his temples like angry little hammers.
&nb
sp; Auntie was huddled in her chair. He thought he saw her eyelids close. How easily the old fall asleep, he thought, and tip-toed to the door.
Her voice arrested him. She said, indistinctly, “I saw her you know. She must be on her way home.”
“Why didn’t you say?” he asked, surprised. Alice would be annoyed if she knew. He said, puzzled, “Where did you see her?”
There was a perceptible pause. Then, “She was on the top of the cliff. I saw her from the beach. She was quite safe. Naturally, I would have gone up after her if it had been necessary.” Her voice had a boastful ring and he grinned, hiding his mouth with his hand.
“I bet you would. What were you doing on the beach? Gathering seaweed?”
What a remarkable old creature, he thought indulgently. How many old ladies would scramble along a rough beach at nearly eighty? She must find it dull, after her active life, to be confined to an ageing body. The spirit didn’t always grow old at the same pace—hers hadn’t, anyway. She was game. She could have shinned up those cliffs if she’d really had to. He was proud of her toughness, her indomitable old age.
He chaffed her good-humouredly. “Come on, tell me what you were doing.” He became conscious of a smell of salt and seaweed. There was a garment drying by the fire. “You were paddling,” he accused delightedly, “at your age!”
She did not respond to his teasing. Her eyes were fixed on him with an unfamiliar look, sly, almost afraid, as if she had something to hide. Her hands fluttered over something in her lap. Curious, he bent forward and saw a toy sailing-boat.
“Surprise for the kids?” he asked.
She thrust the toy behind her back and glared at him. “It’s mine,” she said. “Mine.” He was taken aback by the ferocious intensity in her voice. Poor old girl, he thought, she’s going ga-ga.
“Yes,” he soothed her. “Of course it is. Did you think I wanted to take it from you?”
