The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  I hope I didn’t annoy you too much. I should really have liked to send you some sweets (what was the chocolate cake like for the train?) but they are still so hard to get unless you pull strings and as you know I hate doing this because of your father’s position in the Church. Well, I’m sure I’ve said all this before and much more, and I expect you haven’t even read my other letters. I know I make you very impatient. But now that you have been there for some days (four and a quarter!) I thought that perhaps I might be allowed.

  Not that there is very much news. Mrs. Baxter is full of excitement because she has been given three bananas. She’s a good soul. She says that she would send one to you, but for the difficulties of packing. She says that though there is the odd banana about now, there won’t be any in the Lake District on account of the distance from the sea (your father thinks she is confusing them with fish). I’m afraid that she has a very queer look at present and I do think that she should go down to the surgery and have her blood pressure seen to, but you can’t say so. In the café this morning before she came in I said as much to Joyce Dobson, who by the way has given me a tea-towel for you to take to College. She often goes to London and she says she’ll take you to the theatre with her nice sister Ada who’s a little retarded. What good friends I have. I think she’s being so kind because I kept ‘open house’ all through the War, which gave her a chance of getting closer to the vicar, who has been such a help to her. I’m glad I insisted on having everyone in all the time in spite of your father who always finds everyone so lacking. But people are very understanding about him. Joyce Dobson, by the way, is looking very yellow again. It’s a shame she never married, she is a jewel, but men are a little afraid of her, she has that tall, elegant figure you seldom see around here. Of course her arm will never be right—it is still in a bandage.

  Oh, yes, in the café I met Hilda and Dorothy who had dropped in on their way back from a walk by the sea. They are finding retirement a great burden. They asked me to walk home with them past Bidewell. Do you know, in all these years I’ve never been inside their house? They don’t entertain. We were always in the Guide Hall. They were shocked when I told them so, and they showed me all over it—that great tall house, five storeys just for the two of them now that all their airmen have gone. Dorothy says she wonders now how she managed, all that running about looking for pies. Of course neither of them can cook. I remember round the camp fire! Isn’t it lovely to think that Hilda Fletcher was first my Guide Captain and then yours! All those years later! But you and I will always know how to make bread and how to lay and light a fire. It is instinctive to you and me. Not even Hitler could have taken this knowledge from us.

  Hilda and Dorothy look exactly the same as when I was eighteen. They’ve been in that house now for over forty years. They keep to the one bedroom. They had to move in together in 1940 when the fifteen airmen came and they say they’ve got used to it. It’s like school, they say. They have group photographs of their schooldays above their beds. There are two beds. Your father was keen to know—he is incorrigible. And balanced on the photographs are their old school caps with the badges showing. There are Guide Camp photographs all over the walls—they are quite sepia—and I saw myself, the Patrol Leader of the Flamingos, with proficiency awards all down my arm to the cuff. Such happy days. We had no idea about the awfulness of the war in the trenches going on and on in France, exactly then—I do remember how many more women than men there were in the streets, though, in 1918, and the dreadfully grim faces. I’d forgotten I had such a fat rope of hair all down my back, but they remembered it. They said it was a ‘rich chestnut’! It’s so nice to go where people like you and remember you when young. It’s very rare. The Lonsdale is all talk. I don’t care what anybody says about them, they are two lovely, loving women and I only wish they weren’t finding the stairs so difficult. Little Dorothy looks flushed, to me, and she’s putting on a lot of weight, I’d say dangerously. Hilda of course is marvellous. She looks like a crane (the bird) though she eats very little because of the Hiatus Hernia. I said, ‘There’s no war effort now, Hilda. You should eat when you can,’ but she said, ‘We all think far too much of our stomachs. We discuss nothing but food,’ and she looked quite sharply at Dorothy I thought. I suppose there must be friction there sometimes. Your father used to say that without friction there can be no warmth. (Oh, I wish he still said clever things like that!) And they are nice women. I do hope when you go to College that you’ll meet some nice men.

  The vicar’s been having a bad time with a tooth. Your father’s been rather better the last few days, more ‘with it’. He’s been wandering round to see Una and her mother, I understand, though I can’t think why, it’s such a dirty place. He says Una’s hair has gone very peculiar, like heather on the moors when they burn it in autumn.

  Well, nothing has happened and I suppose we should be thankful. ‘Dear God, I thank Thee that nothing has happened today and I pray that nothing will happen tomorrow.’ I am a bit muzzy and I am on some new tablets. I do think of you, almost all the time, and I’m sending you some sanitary towels by the parcel post as I don’t think you took any and you’ll need them next week. The Lake District should be looking very nice at this time of the year and I’m told by Mrs. Stonehouse—she stayed there, recommended of course by Hilda Fletcher—that Mrs. Satterley is very nice too. I took the bus to the Stonehouses’, my breathing being so bad, lately.

  By the way, it is true what you heard. Lieselotte has been taken away somewhere by a Jewish rehabilitation organisation and it is very upsetting. She hasn’t written. I don’t know what has happened to manners, to natural gratitude. All those years!

  With so very much love, Mummy.

  PS: Mrs. Quarendon’s dog has died, so perhaps you could send her a card? Number 247 Corporation Road.

  XX—don’t be cross with me. I’m so proud of you. You know how hard it is for me to show my feelings,

  Mummy.

  PPS: I’m just getting your father off to the chiropodist!

  Hetty read this letter sitting on a bench in the high farm garden after breakfast, a week into her stay. The slops were being dealt with upstairs. On her lap were other letters in her mother’s attractive, even writing, still unopened, delivered an hour ago. The day was deliriously beautiful, the mountains violet, the grass a technicolour green. The scarf of milky mist was moving lightly above the lake. The sun was already hot and the stone flank of the house she leant against was warm. Beside the pump, Mr. Satterley unhurriedly washed out milk pails and the cows were coming crackling down the yard looking sideways at her, in a troop. Their eyes were tender. She closed her own and a cow came up and nuzzled her with a wet nose. She yelped.

  ‘It’ll never hurt thee,’ said Mr. Satterley. ‘How’s work going, then?’

  ‘Oh, pretty boring.’

  ‘D’you ’ave to do it? What are you reading all day at present?’

  ‘At the moment it’s Thomas Carlyle.’

  ‘Aye—a nasty bit of work, him.’

  ‘Is he? I never thought.’

  ‘A sour man. Keep off him. He’s disregarded now, any road. Now, Hester, don’t waste this day. Don’t sit to your book. Get out. “A minute now may give us more Than years of toiling reason”. That’s your Wordsworth. That’s ’is instructions. Aye, and he was a solitary man. Why don’t you tek off downt’ lane, and on away roundt’ lake, like t’other ones as comes?’

  ‘They’re just sightseers. And they’re old, and they go round in a mob. And, anyway, I have to work. I got this scholarship just by accident.’

  ‘You’re being too grateful, Hester. I’d say the College was lucky to get you, and you’re bonny with it. Now then, shut up that atheist this morning, walk down our lane, past Meeting House and Ursula’s hole int’ hedge, turn the hairpin and you’re atop yon lake. Get off now. Be tea-time the weather’ll be gone. This variety of mist says it’s calling back later.’
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  So she put the letter in her pocket and set off. She watched her legs walking along in their lisle stockings with darned ladders, her feet in the lace-up gym shoes. She brooded about trousers and boots. She was passionate for some boots, but boots were expensive beyond desire. She’d not been able to keep her mind off boots lately. Past and Present was all boots, boots.

  Wasn’t it men, or sexual deviants, who were supposed to be weird about boots? Boot fetishists? She wonder about Hilda and Dorothy; they certainly liked marching. Well, Hilda did. Dorothy bounced. Oh, why am I thinking about these frowsty women? Will I never get away from my mother’s world?

  She liked watching men march. It was horrible being stirred by such a thing: the films of marching German troops, that terrible music. It made you tingle. It was wonderful, watching British troops marching and singing, half satirical, half near weeping. You wanted to weep yourself, hearing British soldiers sing, to run and kiss them. Sardonic, cynical, wise English soldiers. You couldn’t imagine Eustace marching, though. Maybe they’d let him off it in the Pay Corps. Her father said Eustace couldn’t even walk, he floated. He hung in the air like a Botticelli angel. He was all ether. Her mother had said once that it was possible that Eustace suffered from haemorrhoids and they were very nasty things and not to be laughed at, and her father had then cried out, ‘Ye gods!’

  Along the lane, beneath the trees. The table was bare today and sopped with dew. She wrote ‘Hester Fallowes’ in the dew. This table is getting at me, she thought. Some symbol of something, some metaphor. It has, somewhere, an algebraic meaning. Una should be here. Oh God, I wish Una were here! She walked regretfully, all round the table, thinking of Una, and then marched on. It’s Alice in Wonderland here, she thought. In a minute there’ll be a white rabbit.

  There was not, but around the next bend in the lane someone was seated head-on to Hetty, on a big white horse.

  The horse was standing still, cropping the grassy centre of the lane, and on its back a tall thin girl was watching Hetty coming towards her. It was as if she had reined in the horse, turned and was waiting. The girl was smiling and as Hetty came near she saw a mouth full of very small square teeth, like a baby’s. Hetty did not care for her.

  Hetty came up to the horse and stepped into the hedge to the side of it and the girl looked her up and down, then jerked at the horse’s head. Hetty thought, I’d better say something, but the girl clicked her pearly teeth and trotted off past her.

  If that’s Ursula, thought Hetty, I can see exactly where they’d be without her. A lot better off.

  She walked on and on. And on. And on. She had long passed the place where she had come into the lane from the cornfield on her arrival, and it wound on, never varying, a level, shadowy, compulsive trail from an old dream, scarcely remembered. Nobody passed and nobody followed.

  On and on. The woods were silent. The sun shone through the trees only in spots and blobs. She felt herself living inside a gold parcel. Outside was universal joy; inside, the endless, pointless journey.

  And loneliness, she thought, though you mustn’t say that. ‘You’re never alone, because of God. The everlasting arms,’ Mum had said. Hetty thought of the stacked bodies of Belsen.

  A stone wall was rearing into life now to her left, growing slowly until it was taller than she was, and in it there soon stood a tall door and nailed to it a small notice printed neatly with the words ‘QUAKER MEETING HOUSE. All welcome. Key at Mrs. Allason’s’.

  There was no sign of Mrs. Allason’s, nor of any dwelling. The door latch was a nice one with a dip in it like a metal pansy petal and, when Hetty pressed it, the door opened without a key. She pushed and saw a flagstoned path running between two carefully mown squares of lawn. Two wooden benches stood on the lawns, which were bordered with flowers. The tall, narrow Meeting House windows regarded her from either side of a front door.

  Hetty tried this door and it opened into a room with tiers of benches around three sides of it and a table in the middle holding a Bible and a vase without flowers. The long windows were clear and clean, reflecting the tops of the trees in the lane. Hetty sat down on one of the benches and soon the silence, a stored silence, became very pleasing.

  Then she got up again and walked about, found an ante-room in the back, where there was an earth-closet that smelled sweet, a stone shelf with cups and saucers, the cups turned upside-down, the handles all one way, a clean tea-towel, a shelf of devotional books and a notice-board with notices of coming events. Monthly Meeting. Meetings for Worship. Meetings for Sufferings. All weird. All alien. Yet she did not feel an interloper. She felt, most strangely, at home.

  She left the building, looking over her shoulder for a moment, wishing to thank somebody. Then she carefully closed the door of the Meeting House, crossed the small garden and closed the door in the wall, again carefully, behind her.

  In the lane outside, the girl and the horse stood as if they had been waiting for her; the girl still smiling, but the horse now looking more impatient, tossing its head up and down and shaking it, as if it wanted to be off. The angular great girl was keeping the horse on a tight rein. Hetty, suddenly scared, cold from the coolness of the Meeting House, knew that she must be the first to speak or something would be lost.

  ‘I suppose you’re Ursula,’ she said.

  ‘Ursula! Whatever do you know about Ursula?’

  They examined each other and Hetty saw the girl considering her gym shoes and the skirt that had been Joyce Dobson’s.

  ‘I suppose you’re a Quaker,’ she said.

  ‘Whatever do you know about me?’ said Hetty.

  She walked on, faster and faster, the way she had been going before, until at length the lane began to drop down, to turn back upon itself in a long straggling hairpin and the woods behind her receded to display the open fields before and below her, and a wide hillside sloping down to the lake.

  16

  Two weeks later and three hundred and nineteen miles away, a curious chemical change was coming over Lieselotte. She was growing smaller.

  She first noticed when she fell down the area steps.

  ‘Ach, your shoes are too big for you,’ Mr. Feldman called down to her from his basket chair. ‘You can see daylight between the backs of them and your ankle, girl.’

  ‘I expect my shoes have stretched with all the walking about.’

  ‘Nein. You are small all over,’ said Mrs. Feldman, manoeuvring herself among the overstuffed settees as she held aloft a very small saucepan in which she had been boiling a very small egg.

  ‘This egg,’ she said: ‘where is the point of sending it all the way from Paraguay? And now—I must measure you all over again for the brocade.’

  ‘You are carrying less weight too,’ said Mr. Feldman.

  There was no sign of brocade in the underground apartment, nor, Lieselotte suspected, in Harvey Nichols of Knightsbridge, where it was rumoured that a roll or two was being secreted under the counter for customers of eminence like the Queen and Mrs. Churchill. (The Prime Minister’s wife, Mrs. Attlee, did not wear brocade.) Yet one day Lieselotte had arrived home from her peregrinations to find that somehow a seamstress’s table had been set up and a long swatch of some sort of red plush, very like the curtains, had been spread over it upside-down along with formidable scissors and paper patterns like an ancient papyrus. Lieselotte was now reassailed with tape-measures and declared to be losing inches in every direction.

  ‘It’s getting the right food,’ said Mrs. Feldman. ‘True kosher food with friends to provide. Resourceful friends—you see this length of cloth? And there will be trimmings and buttons and dress-absorbers and linings. We shall find them. Mr. Feldman has still a small connection with the East End mantle trade.’

  ‘A healthy diet must have been difficult for you with the Northern Quakers, Lieselotte?’

  ‘They tried very hard,’ said Lieselotte. ‘They were
good to me.’

  But she could hardly speak of the Stonehouses. In less than a month they had slipped into the past as completely as her first ten years, their faces shadows. Like childhood’s faces. (Don’t look, don’t look! Gone. Gone.) She had not yet written to them.

  As for food, food the great coagulator of the nation, the inescapable topic, Lieselotte was eating less here than ever she had done during the war. And eating at unprecedented times. Now she was never hungry. She ate with the two old people, from a little porcelain plate on a tray on her knees, and sometimes they forgot to eat at all. Frenziedly she walked the street of London all day long, from early morning, coming home still not hungry to toy with a Matzos biscuit and some tinned sardines. At the Stonehouses’ there had been three—sometimes four—knife-and-fork meals a day, pale, nourishing and good as the Stonehouses themselves: Whitby cod, tinned rice in milk, tinned spaghetti, mashed potatoes, everything white except the spam and the baked beans and the speckled national wheatmeal bread. Hetty sometimes came with a cabbage from the grave-digger. Mrs. Stonehouse had cooked the cabbage for several hours until it too had turned vaguely white. During the worst of the war there had been chances of black-market fat sometimes, but it had smelled of drains. Una’s mother had found some miniature bottles of olive oil once, in a queer shop near the sand-hills, but it had been almost congealed and nobody quite knew how to cook with it. Mrs. Fallowes had said it was used for rubbing on a tight chest. The Stonehouses, so undemonstrative in body, had spread all they had before Lieselotte, their silent declaration of love.

  ‘We had lovely fish,’ said Lieselotte. ‘The boats went out whenever they could. They were very brave, the fishermen. It was good fish.’

  ‘Only Jews know how to cook fish,’ said Mr. Feldman.

  But privately Lieselotte knew that her diminishing body was the result of something other than the snacky food and the compulsive walking, something that only compulsive walking could deaden.