The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  There was no point in calling out goodbye.

  The predatory mother and daughter fell back in their seats, laughing as the train gathered speed way past the end of the platform, and when Hetty looked out of the window the train had rounded a bend and her mother was out of sight. She sat down, aware that the two people knew exactly what they had done. They were good-looking, well-dressed, confident and smiling. Pearls. One string each.

  Hetty waited for them to apologise for shutting her out, but the woman only smiled at her.

  ‘Valentine and I are going to a concert,’ she said.

  Hetty wondered what to say. Valentine must be the daughter. Valentine stared at her.

  ‘We have fun together,’ said the mother. ‘Tonight it’s Mozart. It was to have been Beethoven but thank goodness it’s not. It’s not the weather for Beethoven, we think.’

  Valentine did not comment. Hetty hadn’t a notion what the mother was talking about.

  ‘Great fun,’ the woman repeated. ‘Are you going far? What a mountain of luggage! Is it your first time travelling alone? Your Nanny looked quite upset.’

  ‘She is my mother,’ said Hetty, with a look that brought the woman up short as if Hetty held a gun. The woman’s face and Valentine’s became as stone. Hetty looked out of the window and said no more.

  When the pair got out, from the very corner of an eye she saw the girl glaring at her mother and on the platform turn back to give Hetty the ghost of a wave.

  Oh, Ma. Oh, Ma.

  At Carlisle I’ll buy a card for her and post it on the station. ‘Arrived safely.’ Then she’ll get it on Monday morning. Oh, Ma!

  Oh, Ma!

  But suppose she did not arrive safely? It would confuse the police. If after three weeks she did not return home, instead lying dead somewhere in a siding, tossed into bushes or in a shallow grave, her mother would show them the card and say, ‘Oh, but it can’t be Hetty! Look, we had a card. I know that she would have posted it the minute she reached her destination. At heart Hetty was [was, oh, was!] a very warm-hearted girl.’

  Death.

  A number of flashing visions. Mrs. Satterley of the farmhouse questioned by the Lake District constabulary. Eustace seeing it in the national press. Eustace writing a poem about her. Eustace’s biographer interviewing him in the years to come in Eustace’s book-lined study. The bachelor slippers, the blazing logs, the clenched pipe, the faithful dog. ‘Marriage? Ah, no. It did not come my way. Well, there was a girl once, a girl of seventeen. I was only twenty-one myself. She disappeared on a train journey to the Lake District, in 1946. Never seen again. Yes, she was the inspiration for the Hetty Poems. No, I’m afraid that even now I cannot speak . . . ’

  The train for Penrith came rolling along into Carlisle station and seemed reasonably clear of murderous faces, although so packed that she had to stand in the corridor looking into the eyes of some sweaty and none too clean Scotsmen. A ticket inspector, full of wrath, came cursing down the packed corridor. Beer was being swilled, bottle-tops removed with teeth and ex-army expertise. Everyone was smoking.

  ‘Gi’s the War,’ said a man in a demob suit and a pre-war pork-pie hat. ‘There was more laughs.’

  ‘And more grub,’ said his pal.

  Hetty fell out of the train at Newcastle dragging the sack of books behind her.

  ‘Got a body in there?’ asked the pork-pie hat, but didn’t help her lift it out.

  It was a dreary platform here, and no trains. A gormless youth sat regarding her from a seat across the line. He was eating something in the nature of an Eccles cake and the crumbs were all over him. The Idiot Boy, she thought. Would he have written that poem if— She remembered she had a picnic with her and burrowed in her handbag to retrieve it as an express from Edinburgh passed through. But then, at the first bite, her own train was signalled and everything spilled about her.

  In the carriage she tried to assemble it again and saw that the picnic consisted of a huge chocolate cake, and no knife. How on earth did her mother think—? And how had she found the marge and sugar? She must have made it weeks ago, on the quiet, and it would be stale. Why am I crying?

  ‘Grand cake,’ said the other occupant of the carriage. ‘You don’t see them sorts of things any more.’

  She thought, And so I’ll have to break a bit off for him.

  He was a ferrety farmer with a sunset complexion and a mouth that hung hungrily open exposing a single, dangling tooth.

  ‘Would you like a bit?’

  He began to cackle and she thought, Oh God! What have I said?

  He took the fragment of cake and mumbled it about around the tooth. ‘Where yer off at, lass?’

  Should she say, ‘The next station,’ and get out, and then get back in again further up the train? He smelled of drink. ‘Robinson.’

  ‘Oh, aye. Robinson, eh?’

  The train slowed.

  ‘Well, I’s gittin’ out ’ere. Good luck, then, lass.’

  Station after tiny station. Dozens of them. The train stopped and steamed and sighed and waited, and puffed on.

  It was all of a sudden the most beautiful afternoon. And, oh my! Oh, my goodness! Oh heavens—a vast, bright purple mountain.

  Nearly there. On my own.

  8

  Ray, the ex-fish- and milk-boy, had never been inside Una’s house in nearly three years and from habit did not even call for her now, after having been appointed clerk on the London and North Eastern Railway. For years he had waited in the back street astride his bike, whistling and thinking. Since his elevation he had permitted himself to wait now outside the front gate, the occasional clients of Vane Glory passing him with suspicion. Since Nagasaki he had waited, still balanced on the bike but not whistling, reading books and the daily papers. He would look up now and then at the Cleveland Hills inland, frowning. When Una came out with her bike to join him, he would fold the literature away in his bike bag and they would ride off as usual, without a word.

  Since gaining her place at Cambridge last Christmas, even before the necessary money to accept it had come through, changes had occurred in Una. In the horrible years between childhood and maturity she had not shown any physical signs of puberty: no menstruation, no spots, no stomach cramps, no bulges, no sulking, no lethargy—particularly no lethargy. When at thirteen, and even up to sixteen, her friends, Hetty particularly, had frowsted in bed at weekends till dinner-time, picked their teeth, pricked the palms of their hands with pins, drooled over lipstick advertisements and shoes, grown heavy bosoms, Una, hairless except for her head and flat-chested as the milk-boy, had remained alert and brisk, ever on the move. Though she was never seen doing much work, except in the last year by Hetty among the tombs, and never once spoke of coming examinations, her light in the attic window, observed by the grave-digger on his late-night wanderings, told another story. But, since the evening of the day of golden contentment, the day of the scholarship letter, Una had slumped.

  Una could slump. It was uncanny. She must be ill. She missed breakfast and rose at noon to loll on the horrible cat-strewn sofa, to live as it pleased her. As the summer went on, she grew for a spell morose and apart. Ray never remarked on it, Hetty and Lieselotte had now both vanished and her mother continued in her separate dream. As August drew into its second and third week Una gave the impression that she would now sleep, sleep and sleep. Sleep and die. Or wake when the time came for her to start thinking of Cambridge in October. Or to choose not to go. There was time yet.

  One morning she woke with a bad stomach ache and her bed in a mess of blood. She did not get up. For three days she seemed to release the tensions of years, bleeding and bleeding. Her mother toiled up the stairs with gin, but she said, ‘No, I wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Mrs. Vane. ‘I know best. I’m that relieved. I thought you were peculiar. I was thinking of telling a doctor.’

&n
bsp; Three days later Una felt well and triumphant and alive as never before. She lit the old greenish encrusted geyser in the lonely bathroom and had the bath of her life. Afterwards, downstairs, she found Mrs. Vane looking at the well-stacked fire which she kept at a roar even on the hottest days because of the cats.

  Una confronted the idea of not going to Cambridge as she drank tea. She analysed the concept of the felicity of getting in there. I got in, and therefore I need not go, she thought. I can’t leave Ma, can I? At length she said, ‘I might not be going, Ma. To College.’

  Mrs. Vane moved into the scullery and began to wash the salon towels. She often just hung the damp ones out in the yard and used them over again, but there was a nasty summer cold going about, and the time had come. They were threadbare and grey; but who’d use good coupons on a new towel? Most of her clients brought their own.

  ‘You mightn’t go? Oh dear.’

  ‘You can’t mean that, can you? Just “oh dear”? Did you hear, Ma?’

  ‘Oh dear and oh dear and oh dear.’

  Una bumped into Hetty’s father as she wandered about by herself on the prom one evening. His lanky figure looked romantic and young in the gloaming, but desiccated when you came near. The First World War, she thought. It may have turned him loopy, but it didn’t get at his looks. He must have been wonderful. Outside the Lobster Inn the grave-digger towered over Una and looked down on her with his bright green eyes.

  ‘Not go?’ he asked. ‘To Cambridge? Refuse the place? To what end?’

  Una flung off down by the sea. His eyes frightened her. Her genie of misery had for a second sprung from its bottle and confronted his. She was confused. She wished Hetty was here.

  ‘I’m off cycling,’ she told her mother, ‘tomorrow, with Ray—did I tell you? We’re going youth-hostelling for the weekend.’

  Her mother was eating bread and marrow jam at the kitchen table, which was covered with pages of the Daily Mail. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about, the news,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll be back Sunday night. He’s got to work on Monday.’

  ‘Staying over Saturday night? Who else is going?’

  ‘Just us, but there’ll be others when we get there.’

  ‘Well, he’s but a child. Have you read this about Germany? They’re starving. I never put much store by that American Aid. They say half the boxes are empty. D’you ever read the papers now? Once you took an interest in politics. You worked too hard at unnatural things. On the sly. Physics. Your heart was never in the progress of mankind, though your mind was. You may have burnt yourself out just as you should be rising to things like the morning star.’

  This extraordinary speech was the longest Una remembered her mother ever having made.

  Mrs. Vane gazed at the leathery ivy growing across the window, blowflies droning. A wasp or two near the jamb. She continued, ‘You could wash that window rather than go flaunting off on bikes. Now you’re a mature woman.’

  Her daughter’s silhouette, the spikes of singed hair standing up around it like a tousled halo, was still. In all the years of their struggle together, Mrs. Vane had never suggested housework. Una was too clever for chores.

  ‘It’s O.K., Mum. There are separate dormitories. I know what I’m doing. I’ll wash the windows when I get back.’

  ‘I do not pry,’ said Mrs. Vane, ‘I say not one word,’ and she began to sing, ‘I’ll Gather Lilacs.’

  ‘He’s a child, I dare say. He’s never conversed with me. Now I shall say something. I shall say it once. Then I shall never say it more. Don’t you think you could do a bit better? Than him?’

  Una said nothing.

  ‘After all, you’re going to the University of Cambridge. You might even decide to be a doctor. Doctors have to be careful who they marry. Your father made that mistake.’

  ‘He did not!’ Una slid from the table and circled her mother’s chair as if she would pounce. And embrace her. But it hadn’t come to that. ‘My Cambridge friends, if I have any, would never meet him.’

  ‘But when you invite them here, to stay in your home, then they would.’

  A pan of mutton bones boiled over on the stove. A cat yowled and fled.

  ‘Ma,’ she said very early the next day. ‘I’m going now.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I told you. Off biking. I’m all packed. He’s calling for me. He’s probably sitting at the front gate now.’

  Sorrow shadowed Mrs. Vane’s gypsy face. ‘He has never rung the bell and faced me,’ she said. ‘Not since he was delivering fish at the back.’

  ‘I’ve got to go, Ma, or I’ll never go. What about when I’m at College? You’ll have to do without me then.’

  ‘I’m working that out. I might close the salon and start a cattery. I thought you weren’t going to College?’ She paused. ‘And what about rations?’ she cried, as Una pushed the bright, ticking bike down the hall.

  ‘I’ve got some.’

  ‘And money?’

  ‘I only need six shillings, and Ray’s got it.’

  ‘You would never take money—’

  ‘Bye, then, Ma.’

  But Una hung about the vestibule. It was a fine old house. There was an inner door, half-glazed, with a pattern of ferns and birds in the glass. ‘A real doctor’s house’, her mother had called it. But so big. Far too big to keep clean.

  ‘Bye, then, Ma.’

  Mrs. Vane sat on, her eyes on the kitchen table, her plump hand smoothing the photographs of famished German children. Una hung in the vestibule until she was sure her mother wasn’t coming out to wave her off.

  Ray did not turn as she came down the path but folded his paper away and began to arrange his feet under the pedal straps. ‘Yer ready, then?’

  She said, ‘Yep.’

  Mounted side by side, heads down, rear ends up, the two skinny figures rode their bikes away. Only once did Ray call to her, signalling the turning they should take for the hills before the one-in-three corkscrew bank that led up on to the moors. He didn’t look back to see if she followed.

  Halfway up the bank she had to get off and push, but Ray surged forward, standing at last doggedly upright on the pedals as he rode out of sight, far out on the moor. There was still some morning mist from the bright dew that was making the fields seem to run with green milk. When she reached the heather, sheep were sleeping here and there about the road, which was warmer to lie on than the hard heather to either side. Twice they nearly toppled her. Another, unknown animal flashed across, almost under her front wheel, an orange streak. She tottered. The mist suddenly rose with a single swirl of its skirts and revealed the map of fields below and the heather above them, to every horizon, raspberry-red. The road across shone silver, and the air smelled of fresh laundry.

  She free-wheeled for miles down the next long curling hill, swinging her legs, gulping the lovely air; then, pulling herself together, she dragged her fingers against the brakes and came flying round the final bend where the trees began. Over the stone bridge she flew and found Ray perched up on the wall by the pub, smoking a Woodbine.

  ‘Great run,’ he said.

  She pulled herself up beside him and he lit a Woodbine for her.

  ‘What she say, then? Your Ma?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Us? Tekking off for the night?’

  ‘Not much. But she minded.’

  ‘What you say?’

  ‘I said there’d be a lot of others. In the hostel. And it’s not as if we’d be alone.’

  ‘There’s not many ever at High Dubbs,’ he said. ‘Not after the school holiders.’

  ‘I said there’d be separate dormitories.’ She didn’t look at his face as she said it, but at their four feet hanging down in a row from the wall. He had small feet, like a kid’s.

  He was like a kid. He’s only doing this to prove h
e’s not, she thought. He’s just using me. Afterwards he’ll boast he’s done it. With a College girl. He looks fifteen.

  Ray jumped off the wall and looked up at her. ‘You can go back if you like. It’s still a fair way to High Dubbs and it’s afternoon already. Go on back if you want. Yer know t’ way back. I’m not telling you.’

  She thought of the return to Vane Glory alone. Her mother complaisant. Complaisant rather than relieved. No greeting, as there had been no farewell. No kiss. Her mother never kissed. Her teasing and cunning laughter. Cruel. She heard again her father crying in the night. I have never, never felt this about my mother before, she thought.

  ‘I’m not going back now,’ she said, and in a moment they were away through the village, up the hill and out of it again on the other side of the river, and up to the more open moor.

  Una was now keeping up with him. She began to sweat deliciously in the hot sunshine and as sweat trickled down her back she began to laugh. She rode faster, overtook him, and he wagged his head at her in commendation as she flew by.

  She noticed that he was now smiling, and her heart thumped. Nobody could say he hadn’t a handsome face. And she laughed aloud.

  His face was a man’s face. A working man’s face. She was going away with a working man, and his legs were beautiful and strong.

  The wide moor spread wider. Plateau on plateau opened in front of her, with long, navy-blue pencilled horizons retreating before her as they covered the miles to come. Now it was she who was leading the way.

  9

  Mr. Fallowes on his rainy allotment listened to the train taking his wife and daughter away to Darlington but did not look up to watch it rock by. The leeks looked spindly, yellowish. He gave them up, and was soon pedalling along on his very heavy old bicycle beside the sea towards Shields West, and the Stonehouses. He stopped en route to look over the wall of Vane Glory for a while.