Cotter's England

by Christina Stead

  "Only for a little while."

  She asked him what he did.

  He got up from his chair, stood near her, leaning slightly forward, spread out his arms a little from his body and began to look straight at her, smiling a deep smile. To her surprise, he seemed to grow upwards and outwards and she felt herself smiling, drawn towards him. His hands and face seemed larger and a feeling of happiness spread through her. He sat down and she began to tremble.

  "It is there; but I have to develop it. Marion wanted me to go to India to learn. She said I could be of great use to sick people."

  They were sitting quietly by the gas fire, not saying much, a little bored and laughing a little about raffling off the furniture in the dingy room, when there was a discussion downstairs and they heard Nellie's voice. She ran upstairs and burst open the door, looking at them both with a terrible accusing face.

  "I knew you were here, Tom. I saw the car downstairs."

  "Well, I am here. You were right."

  "You must take us all home. I have a room for Caroline. She can't stay here with that harpy. I've explained it to Mrs. Hatchard and I've paid her. Get your things together, Caroline, and come home and I'll look after you."

  "Caroline is too tired."

  "Caroline promised me to come. She wants to come with me."

  "Very well," said Tom.

  When he got them home, with the bags, he said he would take Eliza Cook out for a drink. Nellie had not spoken a word to him during the drive and did not speak now.

  Tom said, "I'll be back in the early hours of the morning. Don't wait up for me or wonder where I am."

  Nellie was pale with rage, speechless; but when Tom clapped the front door to, she flung herself into Caroline's arms and burst into a raucous sobbing.

  "It's too much for me, Caroline."

  Presently she said that her life was like struggling over a stony hill, stubbing her feet, where the stones were people: that was the Philistine world. Robert Peebles had rejected her article outright. She needed Caroline above all. She kept Caroline up very late talking. George had told her he could not sleep in the house; not only was it that she didn't seem able to sleep at night, but roamed about in the dark hours; it was also her coughing and smoking.

  "And that's love for you, Caroline. What the men mean by love is routine and comfort."

  Caroline slept at last, in the back room. Tom came home later still and slept late.

  When Nellie got home, on her late night a few days later, Tom was waiting up for her. He had received a firm answer from the plastics factory at Blackstone in Norfolk and was to go up there the following week.

  "So I won't be a burden to you any longer than next week.

  Isn't it time, Nellie, you wrote to George and told him he must come home, or you get a week off and go down to Bob's. You look bad, Nellie."

  She looked ragged and devitalized; she was dirty and uncombed.

  "I don't know. Things are too hard for me, Tom. The damn worthless bugger ought to be home but I don't know what will bring him. I want to disgrace myself and cry all day long."

  Tom said he'd take her to Bob's farm the next day, which was Saturday. They could pick up some drinks and food somewhere. But she refused to go there. She wanted to ride into the country and he said he would take her.

  "I've got to be here, see someone who's on the danger list. The consolation is George's with Bob, the dear old elf," said Nellie.

  Tom said nothing.

  She continued nervously, "I want to talk to you about Bridgehead. The poor helpless pets are there depending on us. I can't send much now. Couldn't you get a job and stay at home, Tom? It would keep you out of temptation."

  "I couldn't Nellie."

  "I'd feel easier, pet."

  "No, Nellie."

  "Where did you spend the morning, Tom?"

  "With Camilla, the Italian goddess."

  "Did you see Caroline? Was she home?"

  "I don't know. I didn't see her," he said sharply.

  "Be careful of her, Tom. She's such a sensitive, naïve, sweet girl. She couldn't take any more of that. She's off men. She needs a rest cure. Don't flirt with her. She's honest. She's too serious. She can be hurt."

  "You take a dim view of me, Nellie."

  "Eh, pet, I don't blame you with the seasoned women; but you don't know what you're doing, playing with the sensitive plants."

  "Thanks."

  "Eh, Tom; we don't always calculate the costs."

  "No."

  "And Camilla, too, Tom. She's had a terrible lesson. She married in haste and now she's feeling her way; always the wrong man. Loneliness is a terrible blindness."

  "You think that in her blindness she's feeling for me?" he said with teasing vanity.

  He had her beaten. She could never stand a direct hit.

  "Where is Caroline now?" Tom pursued.

  "She's all right, Tom. She's about the same. The heart's bruised. She's not made for this world, not your world, Tom."

  "She has grit. She'll get over it. We're jellies that survive anything. She was happy with me."

  Nellie cried out, "What are you monkeying about for, Tom? I know you. You've got nothing to offer but your own selfish pleasure. You like to pry into souls, show them fool's gold, sell them the sideshows, upset my work."

  He said seriously, "Nellie, what work is it you think you're doing?"

  "Truth not lies. What are you trying to put into my mouth?"

  He laughed.

  "I like to see you get into a flap. You're so transparent, Nell. You've got just a little twisted spittling spider thread of sympathy and you try to dangle a whole human being on it."

  He said this in the croon they used at home.

  He continued, "You don't know any more about Camilla or Eliza or Caroline than you know about Tibet, but you'll never admit it. And if you introspected with them for a hundred years you'd never know anything about them. For it's you, Nell. It isn't them. They don't care for death and the lonely road. And neither do you. It's just your spellbinding; but you'll get nowhere with it. And you shouldn't. You don't know—Nell, it's just as if some evil spirit, some demon were speaking out of your mouth. Those aren't your words; and you don't know what work you're at."

  She tossed her head-feathers, the strings of hair and turban and the long earrings, the thin scarf, her bony flying arms; she poked her face, the mere rind of a face, here and there.

  "It isn't me nor for me, pet. I'm trying to free them from themselves; that's the only freedom. Then their problems will be over. It's you who want them to live in the world of illusion. I want to free them by truth. Death is the end. What is the use of these tawdry loves, as you call them, and such? Aren't they always disappointed? Doesn't that prove that it's shameful degrading nonsense. It's nonsense they sell them so they won't look straight ahead and see where it is all leading."

  "That we are all going to die, is news from nowhere. Is that your great truth?"

  "My great truth is freedom from illusion, from lies, deceptions, from hypocrisy, from all those shameful loves, the opium of the heart. I want them to come to me and learn, come to me; I can teach them that there is only one way, and they must find it in pain, but I can help."

  He crooned, "And so you dabble in their lives as if their lives were puddles, just to cool off your emotions a bit, Nell; and you talk about death and moonshine the way the old man used to talk about poltergeists and bodiless footsteps; just to get an audience. And one of these days you'll bitterly regret it, because I know you. You don't mean an ounce of harm by it; you don't know what you're saying. You're just trying to get a lot of personal influence so that you can see yourself having a big wailing at your funeral and a big piece in the papers." He laughed kindly.

  She continued her flurry, snapped, "Eh, sweetheart, I'm afraid time will prove you a false prophet. It's not my funeral but Caroline's I'm worried about. She thinks she can't escape from her loneliness. It's the bloody men, Tom. It was like the morni
ng of the world, she says; I trusted him. He's only a human being like myself; no more trustworthy than myself. So the victim forgives the executioner. And it makes me smile to think that it would mean nothing to him if I died; she says that. Tom, it's unbearable. That's a crazy wicked obsession, I keep telling her, to be thinking of extinction when you haven't first unraveled the secret of life. I talk to her every night—aye, I've been over, when you've been running out after your temptations. We're friends, let's think this thing over, face it, get to know it, find out what it is in yourself that courts misery, makes you fail with humanity, it must be something in you, not in them—"

  "Every night? You went over every night to nag her? Where is she now? In the attic? I'm going to her when we get back."

  She ignored him: she said savagely, "Men with dead hearts don't want you, I said. Live with the living, live with me. Confide in your friend. She doesn't sleep. You can sleep if you want to, I said. It's a damn insult to me to be howling at night for the love of dead men who've rejected you. That's the way to make a new one in the company of the lost. With me you'll never be lost."

  "Do you really think you have the power? It's unlucky to call on powers: they come. That's no philosophy of consolation. Do you remember the Indian boy? In Bridgehead? One of Jago's circle. He was attracted by Jago's scraps of philosophy."

  "Yes," she said sulkily, mumbling her cigarette.

  "He talked about death all the time and do you remember what happened?"

  "No, pet, I don't."

  "You do remember, Nell. You had got us separated by then, Estelle and me. I was sleeping in a cot in the same room and Estelle had adopted that fellow, that returned soldier who couldn't get a job, a misfit. He had no room and we had him sleeping on the floor; then he found a place and went. His name was Bob, Robert.

  "One night after he'd gone, when I was dead tired, I woke up to hear Estelle dreaming and calling out, 'Bob! Bob!' She had had a nightmare. She saw Bob in flames. 'He's burning!' she said to me. It took me a long time to get her calm. As it happened, that same night someone else, that Indian boy, was burned to death in the house he had just moved into in Bridgehead. You remember, he had money and we all went to his place to eat and drink. He bought records and food just to make friends. But he couldn't make friends, he was too miserable. The evening would start off gay; we'd be there singing and dancing; and it would gradually get quieter and quieter, with him giving us the food and then standing there, quiet and miserable. He spent all his money on us; and he moved to a cheaper place; and in the end he moved to a condemned house they were trying to get the people out of. They let him a top room secretly. The man on the ground floor used to booze. He came in and upset a lamp and the place went up in a few minutes. Right at the end they heard someone screaming. The Indian boy was standing right on the roof calling and shouting and before anyone could do anything, the roof fell in and he fell backwards."

  Tom put his hand over his eyes, took them away, looked at her with his large globular china blue eyes, shining and staring, "You used to talk death with him, Nellie; isn't that where you got this black stuff? You should never have brought her here."

  "She needs me. I'll cure her. I made her promise to give up that office job. Otherwise, we might see another bout of sheep's-eyes."

  Tom was aghast. Throwing up jobs was one of Nellie's own ways of purifying herself.

  Nellie answered him, "You judge too fast and you judge by yourself. You wheedle and coax. I don't. I have something to say; it is to make them see the truth as it is. It's given to me to see the truth."

  "What is the truth then? I'd like to know myself!"

  "Ah, lad, but you won't face it. It's like asking for a foothold in quicksand. Under you it's bottomless, but you keep afloat because you're a feather. You have no real heart; you can't despair."

  "Is that all? To despair? You don't despair."

  "We're all different. We go by different paths." She seemed serious. He lighted another cigarette, threw himself back and smoked upwards.

  "She's too honest, Nell. You oughtn't to play with her."

  "It wasn't me," she said in a deep voice.

  "Leave her alone. She'll get out of it. We all do."

  "She didn't want to get out of it. She wanted to understand. She sent me a cry for help."

  He murmured, "Day and night she cried on me, Fair Helen of Kirk-connell Lea."

  "I had to go, pet. It was an emotional morass. She was getting confused and taking false steps and ready to sink in. When I got her back here from Roseland, I thought she was safe. That fellow with his phony book on housing."

  "How do you know it was phony?"

  She yelped, "Can you help the workingman living in the slums with a book? It's the landlords! They're glad to see your books and your commissions. Nothing will be done if there are enough books. It's the penpushers justifying themselves with a bit of type; me name's there as a champion of the down-and-outers. So I explained it to her: it's no good. What you're doing is useless. It's hopeless. It's getting nowhere. And that fellow tearing her the other way. And she took that and took his bloody flirtation and thought, I'm guilty, I'm not good enough for a man who writes a book. I can't bear it: ah, the poor waif. I got her out of that mess and at once here some humbugging man starts in again and she can't understand it. She asks me advice. You can't take it again, pet, I said. You'll never take it again. So on my advice she promised to quit the job."

  "You're succeeding better than I thought," said Tom.

  "What do you mean by that?" asked Nellie sharply.

  He began in their horrible croon, "However fast she makes connections with real things, and real people, you cut them away one by one, and soon the whole spider web will be adrift."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "I'm talking about the soul you're saving. Where did you get the idea that you could save souls?"

  Nellie mumbled quickly, "It's no such thing. I need someone of me own, Tom. Where is George and where is Bob? They're saving their own souls and you too, Tom. Ye all have no hearts. It makes me sick and shudder, to see the selfish striving. It's so patent. I have a friend I've been with tonight. There I found understanding; but she's cured of the world, the cruel mean hearts, the bloodsuckers and flesh-eaters. You'll never know what she knows and I see it through her eyes, through love—a friend's love. Her heart is one wound and the world's bleeding to death through her: that's how she feels. And Tom, I must have someone; I can't face it. And she clings to me, Caroline. She believes in me and I'm the only one. I can save her from what no other sees. She's such a credulous loving child. Say the word love to her and she loves. Ah, chick, death's the end of that road, through the fens and the brambles. It's a lonely road, sweetheart; with stumbling footsteps; and if there's despair and disbelief in you, you'll stray off sooner or later into the—"

  "Stop it!" shouted Tom.

  She hid an ungleeful smile. Her face was very pale, strained. Her small eyes moved about under the narrow lids as if searching for something.

  She said amiably, though, "What's the matter, pet. Can't you take it? No, I can't get through to you now. But I make her take it, face it. Aye, she's braver than you are. Women are. And she'll be able to face it when she sees where she is, the fen mists all around and the bog of death—"

  She paused, no longer interested, and lighted another cigarette.

  Tom said, "Do you remember, Cush, when you got Estelle and me apart, you left us?"

  "You're talking rubbish, Tom."

  "You went to that hotel in Wales. You got a job there for you and one for Peggy. You made her come out of Bridgehead."

  "Aye. She was desperately seeking a way out."

  "She was going to dances like other girls. She had boys."

  "Never, never! She never cared for those things. It was another sort of hunger. And I brought her out to see the world a bit, to understand. Perhaps I made a mistake. Some are too fragile."

  "You got her into a
hotel among the men, the travelers, the waiters, and she got into trouble. You meant well; and it always ends in misery. Whenever you dabble in soul-saving, you get someone into trouble. I know why, Nellie. You have a loving heart. It isn't enough."

  The next afternoon, a Saturday, he took Nellie for a drive. They had taken a long rising road and were high above the Vale of Aylesbury, which, under a faint vapor, rolled away right and left before them. The road was on a rampart of earth and above it rose an almost naked mound.

  Nellie said, "Let's stop here. Let's go up there and get the real fresh wind."

  A fair cool breeze was blowing and hissing in the grass tufts.

  "It'll be bad for you, Nellie. You shouldn't overexert yourself."

  "I'll be fine, chick. Just help me up. Let's sit on top of the world, like we used to on the moors. You always said, I can breathe now. I like to be with you, darling. There's no one like you. You're restful. You help me to believe in things. Ah, darling, it's hard at times. The road is rough."

  He held on to her, pulled her upwards.

  "Take it easy, Nell."

  She had to stop several times; her breath came rasping. She coughed and held her chest while she laughed and protested, "I'll be all right, pet; I'll make it."

  He said they never should have come up. They sat down.

  She gasped and hawked and said, "Those chimneys spoil the view: see the smoke going into the fresh air!"

  "No chimneys and I'd have no work," said Tom.

  "Come on, tell me the gossip, Tom."

  "What gossip? Nothing ever happens to me."

  She said laughing, blowing her cigarette smoke away, "Ah, ye devill Come chick, let's have your news, don't tease! Tell it in your own deprecating style, at the rate of one hint a half-hour, to be tiresome. Come, what did you do last night, chick?"

  "I saw Eliza. We all went to the pub."

  "They are a damn dreary lot." She looked restlessly here and there.

  "Well, here you are Nellie, on top of the world."

  Said she, musing, "I've come a long way. My life's been an unusual story. In a sense it is clear-cut. The five ages, aye. My childhood up to fourteen when I was a sad serious child, very conscious of my shortcomings and the feeling of guilt. That's salutary. Then fifteen when I realized the world and myself in it. Then my work in London and the provinces when I brought you all down, out of it, to get into reality; and perhaps I'm guilty. And then George."