Cotter's England

by Christina Stead

  Nellie said impatiently, "Aye, that's very well. I honor you for your good feelings, lad; but what sticks in my throat is they knew the truth and no one there took you into their confidence, when they all knew."

  "I see it all as you do; but I don't care."

  She continued to reason and upbraid. He was thinking of his past and did not hear her at first. She persisted, trying to get some words from him that would ease her torment for the night; and they spent a long time yet, this night, smoking together and going over things.

  She kept saying, "You see, Tom, you couldn't die for a woman like that, just a rag and a bone and a hank of hair."

  "It's strange how things can be dead, a thing like hair. She is dead; and I don't grasp it."

  "She's got you where she wants you. I'm sick of it, lad."

  "Why are you jealous of her, now she's dead?" said Tom looking into her strange face, snowy with fatigue and spite, the rapacious beak, the winking eyebrows, the wrinkled forehead which he admired and loved.

  "She isn't dead; it's the vampire mind of her still alive, still at you. She'll kill you yet."

  "I wouldn't care if she did. I hope she does."

  "Perhaps it would be better than lying about dreaming, living a tatter existence, a nobody's man. I've no patience with you, you're no brother of mine. You're a silly coot running after women's skirts with your tongue hanging out: my patience is gone. And talking a lot of tripe to Camilla when her heart's breaking."

  He looked at her with surprised interest, "What tripe?"

  "Adventures and sex and such flimflam. I'm ashamed of you. Teasing a poor woman who doesn't want to hear your trifling trash."

  "What tripe about sex?" enquired Tom.

  Nellie was embarrassed, "You talked about sex to her."

  "I did not."

  "I want you to leave her alone. She's a friend of mine. I don't want her confused and troubled by your confessions and nonsense. She's in trouble now, between two or three men, each one wanting his own profit. There's only one thing for her, to leave the men alone. I wanted you to discuss suicide and death with her, because she's on that lonely road herself and I'll think the less of you if you've hurt her seriousness."

  Tom smiled, "She was glad of a day out, like any other woman in the house."

  "And I've got another bone to pick with you."

  He laughed.

  "You went over to see Caroline."

  "I'm glad I did. I said I'd look for another room for her. That's an evil-smelling slum you found for her."

  "But it's near here and she can come here for advice and for a little sincere talk," said Nellie.

  "Who is that old stone woman? She said she was from Cornwall. I think she's the last sister of the Cornish giants. I'm going to have a look round tomorrow."

  "That's Ma Hatchard. Did ye have trouble with her, pet?"

  "No, she fell for me. She's twice my size. She told me her second husband died by falling downstairs. I looked up and I could just see her at the top tossing him down with one hand, a thin fistful of skin and bone—like me."

  He laughed his childish laugh, "Oh, I'm persona grata there. But I'll snatch Caroline from the fee-fi-fo-fum. I'll have a look tomorrow."

  Nellie sighed, "A change of room won't help, Tom. The girl's a born victim. And she worries and gnaws and tears at herself with introspection; she can't face the truth."

  Tom said, Well, he'd go and look; and he was taking the girl out in the evening.

  No, said Nellie, she thought Tom ought to get out of town, go to Bob Bobsey's, anywhere. There were too many temptations here.

  "No, Nellie, I'm all right here for the while. I'm going out tomorrow and I'll buy a bottle of wine for Caroline and we'll sample it and have a talk at Ma Hatchard's and then see how it works out."

  "That's childish."

  "What we all need is a good bottle of wine and a good steak, that's all. She's hungry. Camilla's hungry. There are a lot of half-fed people about; that accounts for their troubles. They think it's misery, despair; it's not enough food and fun."

  "That's crass materialism."

  "That wine's due for slaughter tomorrow night. I'm just going to find out how merry we can be, three candidates for the Exit, according to you. I know a hard-boiled egg can cure the everlasting cold, a bottle of wine the miseries. You're right. We have something to say to each other. Life! Let it come!"

  "Caroline doesn't want any artificial moods. She's getting used with me to facing life without cosmetics. I've just had a fight getting her to see the truth of a miserable flirtation that's breaking her down. I can't understand it. Any shameful hope with a man! But I've got her to admit it has no future; and I won't see an honest girl spoiled. I won't have you either with your artificial tricks tampering with my work."

  "What work is that?"

  She was bitterly silent.

  He laughed.

  "Poor old Nell! Go and harrow someone else's feelings. Go and have a good time. I'd like to sleep. I drove three hundred miles today."

  She turned back and sprang up, "I know your game. I know what you're up to. I despise you, Tom Cotter."

  He was suddenly dashed, "Do you despise me? No, don't do that, Nellie."

  "Leave the girl alone, Tom. She's innocent. She's been tampered with by this office flirt who's got the women after him. He plays with her and throws her a sop and then turns her off; and then takes her on again and she can't understand the cruelty. He can't mean it, she says: he's so good. You're not to play around with her. I'm trying to protect her from the hopeless bitterness; the dead sea fruit he's got for her. The wickedness, the falseness, lies and scoundrelism! Why? Why do they do it? Oh, the poor women."

  He glanced at her wild worn face, "All right, Nellie!"

  He heard for a while the rush of words and then he slept. She had gone when he opened his eyes. He turned so that he could look at the sky through the open skylight. He looked at the stars as they wheeled and like a child, he smiled at them. He felt blissful.

  She was lying on the bottom steps of the top flight, exhausted with her struggle; and trying to collect her ideas for the struggles that awaited her, she had fallen asleep. George, Caroline, the woman in Southwark, Johnny, Camilla and many others, too, that no one here knew about, all going wrong; and Tom too, the gliding, smiling man. She went to bed at last, after roaming the house silently, the smell of her cigarette going into every room, so that wakers knew she was there. She could not sleep. In the morning's mail had been a letter from Bob. Bob wanted George to stay at the cottage because he had promised to paint it for her, dig a garden, make slip; and there was great talk about a chicken run. They had got permission. Bob thought she might sell eggs. She ought to try here first, before they emigrated. At last, Nellie threw herself as she was on the divan in the front room and between smoking and coughing, slept a bit.

  Nellie got…

  NELLIE GOT up early, washed hastily at the kitchen sink, and went striding over to Ma Hatchard's two streets away. She and the landlady had hated each other at sight. Mrs. Hatchard was in her fifties, like a tree trunk lightning struck, gray, powerful, thick, with a creased face, thin white hair, wearing a very long gray or blue dress with a narrow belt and a small white collar. Her eyes were sea blue. She behaved mannishly, in her strength; except when, vivacious with some tidbit of scandal, she put on a new little flowered hat and high heels and hurried off to neighbors she had known in the bombing, neighbors who for the most part lived in temporary dwellings on a bombed-out site. Hovering in the background of her dark street-level rooms was a good-looking but pale and tired young woman, who appeared to sleep in Mrs. Hatchard's quarters. Ma Hatchard herself slept in a remarkable four-poster bed with canopy and curtains, which reared itself against the back wall, so that the room looked like a stage. Ma Hatchard was fond of cats. She had saved cats from hunger and death during the War and subsequent national starvation; her house, unwashed, unpainted with broken leaking walls and crumbling stairs covered wi
th coconut matting smelled of human and cat urine. But though there were no fastenings on windows or doors and the bedclothes were patched and gray with bad washing, she had fixed her lodgers' rooms up completely, with each a little oven and stove, and good lights, each item on a separate meter. The meters ate up the pennies, sixpences and shillings. There was a regular rake-off for the landlady on each meter.

  It was in the best room, the large front room on the first floor upstairs, that Caroline lived; a shabby and dirty room, but cheaper than most to be found and "clean"; that is, free of insect pests. Caroline was deeply ashamed of living in such dirt.

  She invited no friend there but Nellie. She was afraid of Mrs. Hatchard.

  Ma Hatchard let Nellie in without a word. Nellie flung past and ran up the stairs three at a time, with a gay halloo.

  "Are you there, love?"

  She flung herself down on the armchair with her leg over it and began raging about her brother. How could Tom still go round making experiments with human beings? There was a stormy, seeking time in Bridgehead many years before when they were roaming looking for the road out. "Some people called it Bohemia." That was all right for young people. It was all despair, stupidity and selfishness if they looked homewards. So they looked outwards and saw depression, the dole, the fourth winter of unemployment, many homes broken up, children wandering for work all over England. They had found the answer, she and Tom; but it had formed them differently.

  "I struggled out of it; but he never did. He's remained an adolescent and he's killed souls with his purposeful evasiveness. He's dangerous. I'm warning you. You want to be very sure of yourself to cope with him. It was a bad time, a time of many solutions. There was corruption. Tom and I were in all that corruption together. He's no good."

  "But Tom is so gentle and good and so gay," said the young woman.

  Nellie said bitterly, "Aye, he's an angel—a gilded angel with rotting wings." She flung herself down and hid her face on the chairback, "I've come for ye. He'll pull the wool over your eyes; he's the spirit of mischief. He'll take you away from me."

  "Oh, how can you say that? I know what you've done for me. You've befriended me; and I was so lonely."

  "There's no standing water with friendship; it's turn your back on me or come forward and be my real friend. There's no other way. It's me or him. Life or death. He's coming here! I know his tricks. He'll catch a poor bloody innocent like you. And why haven't you trusted me? It should be all right between us, I shouldn't have to worry, after all I've done for you. But you shilly-shally. You married a weak man and you hadn't the backbone to stand by your mistake. You got led astray like a Woolworth miss in Roseland. You fell for that bugger in the office. I know you. I have no faith in you. You have no character. You won't look into yourself and see what you are. You won't confess to what's wrong."

  "I know Alan has been strange. I don't understand all he does. I have been very unhappy, very. He was so good to me. I went over everything a hundred times. Why should he be unkind to me? I loved him; he asked me and I told him. I do love him. I always will. Would it be love if I became angry with him the first time he hurt me?"

  "I pity you. I pity you from the bottom of my heart. I pity you living in fairy stories like a child. If you even think you love him, I pity you. And you'll be easy game for a prinking thing, a smirking toy like Tom. He'll sing you a song and tell you a tale and you'll go straight to the mountebank and forget everything I've told you and been to you."

  "I don't understand you. Why are you so upset?"

  Caroline was uneasy at Nellie's pain. Couldn't they all be friends? Nellie loved Tom, Caroline liked them both. No, no, said Nellie; she had to choose. The ways lay at right angles. Caroline was puzzled and very uneasy at the misery and passion she saw in Nellie.

  Nellie was downright, "He has no need of you. He can do nothing for you and I can do everything. He can't offer you friendship, love or any such thing. He's coming over to play cat's cradle with your feelings. If you knew my wild loneliness, Caroline, you'd come to your senses."

  "But I thought you had so many friends."

  Nellie muttered, "Not one that understands me. In you I thought I had found the perfect understanding. Oh, Caroline, for someone to talk to, to talk into the heart and leave it there and feel peace."

  Nellie talked in this distracted way for some time, when they both had to go to work. Nellie went along with Caroline to the station, begging her to be true to her, not to be taken in by the "pink and white illusionist."

  "I'm warning you. It will end badly. He can only harm women."

  Nellie bought the morning papers, sat on a bench till it was time for the pubs to open and presently went downtown to work.

  Caroline came out of the housing office at six o'clock and walked along briskly, thinking about catching her bus, though her head was spinning. She wondered if she would have the courage to go into a pub and have a drink, wishing she were home now, at Ma Hatchard's, so that she could begin the routine of cooking, eating, fixing her clothes. She had thought about Alan so much that she had envisaged even the most unlikely possibilities; even that he would tell her the affair was finished. I couldn't face it, she said to herself; then at once, everything can be faced. And he is too good, too kind and I am no nuisance; and he loves me. She had thought of everything, wondering very much these last few months at his strangeness. I don't know much about men. I have to learn.

  This afternoon, after talking to her in a gruff embarrassed way, chopping out his answers and questions, he had mentioned a couple that had been ejected from their one-room home and were now housed in different temporary shelters, wives and husbands separately. The wife was having a love affair with the man's closest friend. The husband couldn't grasp it and was disturbed. "He cries without stopping; he cried for three days."

  "Oh, poor man. It's overwork."

  "Yes, he was doing two jobs to try to get a home. I told him it will be all right. Temporary affairs have no meaning and don't last."

  When he said it, she knew at once what he was getting at. They talked for a while in this way and everything had two meanings. He walked to the door with her and she kissed him as she had been doing, though she noticed he drew back. A car honked at her and there was Tom waiting to take her home. She got in and sat down, quite easeful. He noticed her looks and asked if she were ill.

  "I may be, but I'm happy and free."

  "Who is happy and free?"

  They laughed.

  "Would you like a drive in the country?"

  No, she had promised Nellie to go straight home.

  "Nellie will get along all right."

  "No: I promised."

  He began to drive. She didn't know where they went; but she realized presently that Tom was talking, talking, the light voice mixing with the street sounds, birds. It stopped when the traffic stopped. He was recounting all kinds of things.

  "I'm a lonely walker. I was just thinking about something that happened last time I was in Bridgehead. There was a boy at a corner in the main road. He was in painter's overalls, new, just an apprentice, with a bucket and brush, laughing at the antics of four older painters two houses away, one on the ladder going up, splashing stuff at the others. The boy stood with things in his hand and a rag; his hair blowing like a storm of cornflakes and the rag blowing. Just then a hat came round the corner. It made three hops and it was so funny we all started to laugh; and it hopped into the boy's bucket. A man came round the corner to get his hat which was in green paint. We fished it out and we started to talk. He said, Do you know anything that is going on? He was a local Reuter's correspondent and he said he had no luck. Just the night before, there was a fire in his lodgings, which spread to a few other houses, when he was in the movies. He saw it flashed on the screen. I promised to let him know if anything happened and he gave me his address. The apprentice began to tell him things that had happened in that street. He couldn't stop talking and he kept walking away with the man. I saw them in
the distance about half a mile away. I was laughing and turning away when the door of a house opened just across the road and someone began to throw things in the roadway, a vase, then some silver, a picture; so I went the other way. One of the painters said, That is a man who cannot get away from his mother. She never let the husband out of the house; and when he died, she kept the son there. Then the painters asked me where the apprentice was. I said he was about a mile away with the Reuter's correspondent. They began to tell me things and I could hardly get home ..."

  At first there were tears in her eyes: then she fell asleep. He did not wake her up, but she woke when they stopped in front of a Hampstead pub. It was a pretty place, a terrace with benches and bushes.

  He laughed, "You say you like me to talk; and you fall asleep."

  "I thought I was in trouble; then you were talking and I saw people are living everywhere, and I was glad and I fell asleep."

  He looked at her gaily and got her drinks, chatting with everyone.

  When they got outside, he said, "To Ma Hatchard's?"

  The old woman stood in the door of her den. Tom smiled at her, a light passed over her face, she stood away without a word and let them go up.

  "You are not well, you're ill," said Tom.

  "I should be ashamed to be ill because of a love affair. I've had plenty of experience."

  Tom ran out and up several streets looking for things to eat. He bought food at last in a pub. He came back. He moved about like a cat and seemed beside himself with joy at being able to look after her.

  He told her that he thought he could cure people. People believed in him and he wanted to help them. It was a power in him sometimes, not always. Even at moments, he had been able to help Marion.