by Weldon, Fay
‘You were perverted, weren’t you. It upsets her.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘Don’t pretend. You’re just disgusting. Sneaky and sly.’
Hilda went to bed early, up the stairs in brown lace-up brogues, yellow prefect’s sash making a sack of her navy pleated tunic. She was nineteen. Her sallowness had disappeared: her skin had a smooth yellow-to-pink glow: her waist was slender: her receding chin made her mouth pouty and provocative: her eyes were clear, steady and censorious. Her life was passed in a female world, bounded by examinations: whole weeks would pass in which she would talk only to women. Even the tram conductors were female now: the men passed in noisy clumps of uniform, vulgar, frightening, leaving a litter of gum wrapping and beer bottles behind. Soon Hilda would go to University on a scholarship, and her life would open out. People assured her it would.
Hilda did not know what was to be done with Patricia, but did not doubt the arrival of some sudden event, for good or ill, probably ill, which would make the consideration immaterial.
Hilda stopped visiting her mother, on the recommendation of the funny farm staff. In the early days of her confinement, Lucy’s rage and spite had been directed against Patricia – later it came to focus upon Hilda as well, and could be felt as uncomfortable even through the cool shell of the elder daughter’s part-acquired, part-native indifference.
Pattie went to visit the Reverend Allbright. She called at the back door, as seemed natural, and not, as in earlier days, at the front. She found him in the kitchen, with his new young wife, making wine. The house smelt warm and sweet, as was his life. He had married one of his young parishioners, a girl with downcast almond eyes, and a sensual mouth, and a devout nature. She would kneel naked by the marital bed, saying her prayers until he could bear it no longer and flung himself upon her, tumbling her over face downwards on the bed. He felt God would understand. God can be worshipped anywhere, the Reverend Allbright avowed, in Sunday sermon after Sunday sermon. In a night bomber (so long as it belonged to the Allied forces), in a submarine (likewise), in a Scouts’ Hall (where services were now held, since the church had been bombed out) or in the marital bed. The congregation joined in shaking their fists at a vengeful sky, from which destruction raged; they were united in love and hate. The birthrate soared.
‘My mother’s in a strait-jacket,’ said Pattie, to the Allbrights. They sat her down to help make wine. Now she too was stripping petals from dandelions; her fingers were already dyed yellowy-green. No amount of washing, even with the strong, grainy, wartime soap, would remove the discolouration: only time would help it. Pattie, yellow-fingered.
‘She has to be,’ said the Reverend Allbright, ‘for her own safety, and that of other people.’
‘But she can’t be in one for ever. A person can’t live in a strait-jacket.’
The Reverend Allbright suspected that if the staff of the asylum had anything to do with it, they would.
‘Poor soul,’ put in the new Mrs Allbright, with the easy pity of the young for the old. ‘My husband –’ and with what pride she used the term – ‘used to visit regularly, but his visits did seem to upset her. They said it was better for him to stay away.’
Both the Allbrights were bare-armed: while Mrs Allbright stirred the bruised dandelion petals in warm water, Mr Allbright added golden syrup from a height, for the delight of seeing it fall. How bright-eyed they seemed: how happily arrived at the place they ought to be.
Mr Allbright’s children by his first marriage were still away at boarding school. Consideration both for their safety and for his new wife’s peace of mind had led him to taking this step. The eldest Allbright was only a few years younger than the new Mrs Allbright, a fact which rendered Mr Allbright uneasy in his daughter’s presence.
‘We must abide by the decision of the staff,’ said Mr Allbright.
‘After all, they are the experts.’
‘I think she’s in a strait-jacket to save them trouble,’ observed Pattie.
‘That’s a wicked un-Christian thing to say, Patricia,’ said Mr Allbright.
Mrs Allbright laughed. ‘Why should she say Christian things if she’s Jewish. You are ridiculous, Stephen.’
‘Hush,’ said Mr Allbright.
‘Shouldn’t I have said anything? I’m sorry.’
Confused and pink, she stirred the sweet, warm brew. He was angry, so she made matters worse.
‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t say what’s true,’ she persisted. ‘It can’t be anything new to Pattie, after all. Is it?’
Pattie shook her head, although it was indeed new.
‘Anyway,’ said Mrs Allbright, ‘there’s nothing wrong with being a Jew. I’m sorry for them, that’s all, because Jehovah seems such a fierce God to have, compared to Jesus, but I don’t look down at them one bit. And I know you don’t, either, Stephen. You always wanted to have a Jewish quota at the golf-club; you thought healthy outdoor exercise would do them good, though I can’t say it seemed to help the one they did have, who ran off with the waitress.’
‘Hush,’ said Mr Allbright, and added, ‘in any case it’s neither here nor there since the Army has now taken over the course and the tanks are ruining the greens altogether.’
But it was no use. No one was listening.
Mrs Allbright had her pretty yellow-stained hand to her mouth.
‘My father,’ said Pattie, flatly. ‘You mean my father was a Jew and ran off with a waitress?’
‘Idiot,’ said Mr Allbright to Mrs Allbright. He was to say it to her many times in years to come, and she grew not only to believe him but not to mind him saying it. But this time tears sprang to her eyes. Mr Allbright watched and marvelled. The first Mrs Allbright had never wept; never had to. All the same she had died young. One tear fell into the dandelion wine, and he feared lest the addition of salt might interfere with the delicate fermentation process. ‘He married her according to the laws of his religion and the law of the land. He left your mother and yourselves provided for.’
Pattie left.
‘She asked for bread and you gave her stones,’ said Mrs Allbright, staring at her husband, pink-eyed, red-rimmed, flushed. Wisely, he poured what was left of the golden syrup over her to cheer her up, and the resultant stickiness of both of them was the cause of much joy and marital merriment. The Reverend Allbright felt he had regained his childhood, which the first time round had not been up to much, but now was rapturous, innocent and amazing. He was obliged, if only for cleanliness and comfort’s sake, and in a spirit of remorse, to suck the stickiness from her every crevice.
‘You can’t look after everyone in the world, I suppose,’ observed Mrs Allbright, forgivingly, naked, splay-legged and golden on the floor. ‘Let alone half-mad, half-Jewish, half-grown parishioners who never even go to church.’ He blocked her mouth, astonishingly, before she could voice any more uncharitable thoughts and thus imperil her soul.
Such acts were unthinkable, unimaginable; except they happened, and once they had happened could happen again, at any rate when imports of golden syrup allowed. The dandelion wine was excellent. Sweet and powerful, quite unharmed by Mrs Allbright’s occasional tear, and popular with parishioners young and old.
Pattie did not tell Hilda what she had found out. Perhaps, in any case, Hilda knew already. She hid the sharpest kitchen knives, however, away from Hilda, afraid of what she was not quite sure.
Her mother’s madness, she now perceived, lay in her telling of the truth. But was it madness? If a mother shrieked Jewess, bastard, pervert at her own daughter, and all these things were true, then she might be accused of unmaternal conduct, but hardly madness.
Pattie lay on her bed at night, and thought of kisses, mother’s, father’s, Louise Gaynor’s, anyone’s. She lay still, hands neatly folded over her smooth midriff. Pattie had a white, clear skin. Who will ever marry me, Pattie wondered. Who would ever want to? Jewess, bastard, pervert. Daughter of a mad mother: insanity in the blood, running strong. See it even in Hilda’s eyes: in
her own now, reflected back from the Reverend Allbright’s.
The American servicemen were in Brighton. Local girls came in from towns along the coast to meet them. They laughed, drank, cuddled and kissed; more, even, in the bushes at the bottom of 109 Holden Road where the garden abutted the pub alley. The fence palings were so rotted that a well-shod service foot would easily collapse them, and often did. Pattie watched from her window. Knickers off, hands in, trousers down, whispers and giggles, pant and heave, in and out. Sometimes money changed hands: sometimes addresses. Sex! The force at the heart of the universe. It hardly seemed sufficiently important.
10
It was not until September that Mr Robinson the children’s officer arrived, knocking at the front door. The knocker was stiff with disuse – visitors seldom came to the house. The brass door-furniture, so beloved by Lucy in the days of her youth and sanity, had not been cleaned since Judith’s dismissal. Paint and plaster peeled and flaked; last year’s leaves mouldered in the corners of steps: grubs scuttered away at the fall of Mr Robinson’s brown boots.
After the fashion of the young, Hilda and Pattie cleaned what was beneath their eyes, but seldom went searching for dust or decay. They washed the dirty cups, but not the shelves where the cups were kept. They made beds, they even washed sheets: but they never turned a mattress or shook a blanket. They turned their eyes resolutely away from peripheral grime and grease, and focused on their books, their homework, or, on the good days, on the heavens and higher thoughts. Their noses had grown accustomed to the smell of the cats which came in through the broken scullery window to get out of the cold or away from the noise of aerial warfare; and to the stale water in the flower vases, where last autumn’s chrysanthemum stems had long ago rotted away to slime: and to dry rot, wet rot, woodworm, decomposing bins and decay.
Mr Robinson’s eyes and nose were fresh to such sights and smells: they made him doubt the soothing reports on the Parker sisters from both school and clergyman, which sat thick upon his clip-board and had allowed him to delay his visit.
‘The girls,’ the head-mistress wrote, ‘seem to do better with no parents than many do with two. Patricia is quiet, neat, well-behaved and will get a good School Certificate: Hilda is of course our very valuable head girl, and is much respected by the other pupils.’
Pupils, it is true, certainly fell silent when Hilda approached. She seldom smiled: her eyes glittered: the black braid with its embossed metal bars now hung almost to her waist, and clanked against the buckle of her money-belt: Head Girl, House Captain, the engravings read: and descending, Hockey, Latin, English, French, Geography, Religious Knowledge, Deportment – there seemed no end to Hilda’s accomplishments. She meted out punishment liberally if erratically. She might give twenty lines or 2000 for the same offence: she invented crimes. She had designated the second peg to the left of the cloakroom door as one which for some reason must be kept free of hats and coats, and would give a detention to anyone who used it: and once compelled a third year girl, a certain Audrey Denver, to stand on her head in the playground until she fainted for the sin of having brown laces in black shoes. Then she kept the entire third year in after school until whoever had done it owned up. But done what? Nobody was quite sure: nobody owned up: and Hilda went home in the middle of the detention anyway. The staff seemed unaware of their head girl’s eccentricity: on the contrary, the head-mistress enthused about her capacity for keeping order, and the general lack of silliness in the school since her appointment. It was as if a certain implicit insanity in the school, dressing its burgeoning female adolescents in collars, ties, boaters and blazers; having them learn classics while the walls around them collapsed, and play netball on playgrounds increasingly pitted by falling shrapnel, had become explicit in Hilda.
Since her appointment as head girl, Hilda had been unusually pale, and her eyes dark, shiny and troubled. But she had been more talkative and confiding than usual: she would keep Pattie up until the early hours, talking about the third year girls, remarking on how like rats they were, scuttling here and there, carrying diseases, secretly watching Hilda and sending each other messages concerning her. Hilda went over and over the same ground: it was as if some gramophone record in her head had stuck. Pattie almost came to believe her. Audrey Denver certainly had a sharp little face, and red eyes due (she said) to chronic conjunctivitis: it was perfectly possible that the one black shoe lace and one brown was a signal of some kind and that standing her on her head would cross the connections and scramble the lines between the rat armies, before worse befall; and all was known.
Anything, Pattie thought increasingly, was possible.
Mr Robinson, standing on the doorstep, was real enough. Was he? He wore his brother’s brown boots, his uncle’s pin-striped suit, his deceased father’s trilby, frayed along the brim, and chewed by his wife’s dog, but not discarded. Since clothes rationing, people had ceased to be so readily identifiable as themselves. They were an amalgam of past and present, family and friends. The identity card, carried compulsorily on the person, was almost as reassuring to the individual as it was to the State.
This is who and what I am.
Mr Robinson made brisk arrangements for Patricia to be boarded out, and for Hilda to stay where she was until it was time for her to go to Oxford. She had won her scholarship to Somerville. The school had clapped and clapped, to Hilda’s distress, for all she heard was the noise of a million rat feet, scuttering, dancing, all together. Hilda was prudent and kept the rats well out of her scholarship essays. To write about them was to give them more power: to speak about them weakened them. Lucy, visited by Pattie, and told of Hilda’s success, merely looked blank. There were now three women in the padded cell. They sat in strait-jackets, like three nodding Chinamen on a mantelpiece ornament, in a stench of urine.
‘You’re my grandchild, aren’t you,’ said Lucy to Pattie. ‘I am such a very old woman.’
Her face, wiped of all care, seemed like that of a child’s. Perhaps she was getting better?
Hilda was.
Hilda packed Pat’s belongings into a damp cardboard suitcase, and made a special journey to the chemist for a farewell gift of rat poison.
‘They’re very cunning,’ she said. ‘Do be careful.’
But Hilda’s colour was returning: she slept well, early and late: the sharp little teeth had stopped gnawing away in her mind. She seemed slightly bewildered by her own gift to her departing sister, and subsidised it with a pound or so of ripe blackberries from the brambles which now overgrew the garden. (Butt & Sons had agreed to put the house on the market, but no one came forward to buy.)
And so, in October, Pattie left 109 Holden Road, bound for the sea-front, and the more suitable and cheerful home the children’s department had found her. She carried a cardboard suitcase in one hand, and a paper bag of blackberries in the other. Her hair was short, ordinary and curly: her face round, ordinary, and not so much innocent as expressionless. Her smile, however, was frequent, if automatic, and used both to ward off attack and give herself time to think. She looked well bred and well brought up, as Lucy would have wished – but of course was neither. She was sixteen. She wore Lucy’s old tweed coat, cut down to three-quarter length (it was in fact the very coat in which Lucy had eloped, so disastrously, with Benjamin, but Pattie did not know that. It was merely to her, a coat which had hung on a peg for years, and from which a cloud of moths arose when anyone brushed past, making Hilda’s eyes anxious and suspicious, as if moths were part of the rats’ greater plan. Hilda had attacked it first with scissors: Pattie had neatened up the jagged edges and turned up an uneven hem with bodging stitches.) Beneath the coat she wore her school uniform. Pattie seldom wore anything but her school uniform: white blouse, striped tie, navy gym-slip sponged and pressed weekly, until the pleats were paper thin and the serge shiny, black stockings, the holes darned out, and stout brown shoes. The suitcase contained her school books and papers, a single dress, spotted red and white, some underwear
, rather grey and held together by safety pins and black cotton stitching, a thick flannel nightie or so, and three pairs of smart brown and red shoes, as used by lady golfers, donated to her by the children’s department.
It seemed enough. Even in those early days Pattie knew that all you really need take with you anywhere is yourself: the rest is clutter, and the world will, or should, provide it. A confident and self-righteous view – if a selfish one. Hilda on the other hand, more of her time, felt the need for possessions: liked to be surrounded by objects which reflected her self, her state of mind, however cluttered and wayward that might be. She had recently started to collect things: old birds’ nests, complete with withered fledglings, awkwardly shaped stones, scraps of torn fabric, twisted driftwood from the beach – the little meaningful objects which the world kept tossing up at her feet. She would deride Pattie for her philistinism, when her lip puckered with distaste and she failed to see the significance.
‘Look at the shapes, Pattie. If you have eyes to see, look at the shapes! If you have any understanding of art, then this is art. But of course you haven’t; how could you?’
Sensitive Hilda, pretty Pattie; as Lucy had defined them long ago.
Now Pattie turned the corner towards the sea-front, and left Hilda behind, and her spirits rose.
‘Everything is meant,’ she thought. ‘Everything is planned. That was my punishment, and now it is over.’
A strong wind caught the wave tops on the other side of the esplanade and beat her about with bitter foam, stinging her lips: as if to deny the sentiment. Hilda would certainly have assumed that that was the meaning of the event.
Miss Leonard taught English at Pattie’s school. She lived alone above what had been a popular furniture shop, but was now empty of stock, and was boarded up by means of a row of assorted doors battened together with railway sleepers. Miss Leonard was comfortable and solitary up above, and refused to be driven out of her house by the exigencies of war, which she regarded as a male pastime. She had also, so far, stood out against requisitioning orders and billeting officers, until now Mr Robinson had prevailed upon her to take in a motherless and homeless girl child.
