The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  So that when Rupert came round the pillar of the saloon, two glasses in the fingers of one hand and a wine bottle swinging from another, she was unprepared, for she saw a face that had seen everything there was to see, and knew it. Curiosity had died in him. His manners were perfect but his expectations were nil. Nearly thirty—he’s an old man, she thought. How old he looks too, with his shoulders all hunched up behind his head and his thin arms. How terribly skinny he is.

  As he smiled at her and came forward she thought, But pretty marvellous eyes. There was a faint flicker of amusement in them, then it was gone. How exhausted he looks, she thought. It’s an effort even to speak to me. And she almost said, Oh, it’s all right, you don’t have to talk to me. I’m just going.

  But of course he said, ‘Hallo. So glad you were able to join us. I’m Rupert and do please tell me your name, because I think I heard Ursula making a mess of it.’

  She thought, How pale he is. His face is not an English face; it is like a Spaniard or something. He’s out of another landscape. How black his eyes. He is very wonderful. And mysterious and clever. And he will never look at me. He is the man the other girl gets. Oh, he’ll cause havoc always.

  Then she thought, What do I mean, ‘get’? Do I want him? Or any man? What is it about this ancient stooping totally beautiful creature with his cheekbones and his despising look behind the smile? Is it love, then? At first sight? I am in terrible clothes.

  To her enormous surprise, one of the willowy creatures to whom she had been previously introduced now came drifting up and stood between her and Rupert and said, ‘Hallo again. I was just wondering if you might be interested in a point-to-point this autumn? Didn’t I meet you earlier on the Kyle of Lochalsh?’

  ‘Oh. No. No, you couldn’t have done. I’ve never been to a point-to-point.’

  ‘Would you think of letting me take you to one?’

  ‘Well, I’m going away. To London. To the University. I don’t live near here at all.’

  ‘Oh, rotten show,’ he said and moved off.

  Rupert’s face was dark with disdain. He was looking at her bulky feet and Joyce Dobson’s skirt, and her beastly bosom sticking out.

  ‘Lord Fitzurse,’ she said to the kind old man, ‘I must go now. Thank you so much for inviting me.’

  ‘Good of you to come. Meant to ask about that cow at Betty Bank. Now then, who shall see you home?’

  Rupert looked at her for a moment, then moved away. Funny little Mabel reappeared and said she’d come as far as the gap in the trees.

  There was no sign of Lady Fitzurse. Across the glassy spaces of the lovely room in the darkening evening she saw Rupert go nonchalantly up to Patsie, who was lounging around on the tartan sofa talking to someone. Without looking round she stretched out her arm towards Rupert’s wine bottle, and Rupert filled it to the brim, and stayed standing near.

  Yet as she said goodbye to Mabel, passed through the hedge and into the lane, squelching in her gym shoes, Hetty knew that she hadn’t seen the last of Rupert. Not at all. This was new knowledge—the knowledge that she could wait.

  19

  Of course, having thought of the party for most of the night, she was certain it was Rupert’s arrival she heard downstairs the next morning when there came the knock on the kitchen door and Mrs. Satterley’s cries below, and her heart thundered.

  And then the terrifying words, ‘Hetty? Yes, I’ll just see. She’s very busy, you know. We don’t disturb her in the mornings. She’s off to College—I think it’s Oxford College—in October. She was sent here for some peace—there’s something amiss at home, to do with her father—’

  ‘Hallo. I’m here.’ Anything but hear more. ‘It’s all right. I’m not busy.’

  ‘A friend for you.’

  Hetty regarded herself in the moralising mirror, combed her hair one way and then another, looked at her Tangee lipstick, apricot-rose, smeared some on, licked it off again, went downstairs; and found Patsie sprawled about on the kitchen table.

  ‘Hi,’ said the horse-girl.

  ‘Oh, hallo.’

  Silence.

  She’s terribly thin, thought Hetty. We’re all pretty thin now, but she’s ridiculous. What strange hair. Like straw stalks with a black parting. Awful skin, when you look at it. It’s all make-up, as Ma says. Not much in the way of eyelashes. Why does she give you the idea that she’s beautiful?

  Tea was brought and the three sat down to it at the kitchen table. It was a rainy morning and quantities of clothes were hanging from the overhead pulley-airer like a poulterer’s shop at some Dickensian Christmas time. More hung on a clothes-horse round the fire. Thick woollen shirts with linen buttons steamed, and a brindled cat and kittens lay in a cardboard box by the fender, the kittens feeding in a row like a packet of sausages. There were trays of rock-buns by the fire, cooling on the bink.

  ‘Well, each of you have a bun with this tea, then. Pass up,’ said Mrs. Satterley.

  ‘How d’you do it? Where d’ you get it?’ said Patsie. ‘Everyone wants to know.’

  ‘Management,’ she said. ‘It’s lodgers’ ration books.’

  ‘No. You’re a fiddler.’

  ‘Oh, to be sure, don’t I look the part?’

  ‘No, you don’t, Mrs. S. I’ll say that.’

  ‘Have another.’

  ‘I can’t. My stomach’s still too small. It’s too soon.’

  ‘Lucky for you,’ said Mrs. Satterley, stroking her great dome. ‘Never mind, Hetty will. We’re building Hetty up. She’ll not look bad be time she goes home. Look at her hip-bones still sticking out, though. Like doorknobs.’

  ‘You could get a job as a model with hip-bones like that,’ said the horse-girl. ‘I’ve gone too far.’

  ‘Have you shrunk?’ asked Hetty.

  ‘Yes. I was in a camp. In China. Only a DP camp—no real hardships.’ She took cigarettes from her pocket and offered them round loose in her hand. ‘Cheaper than in packets,’ she said. ‘Buy them in fives. They get a bit bent.’

  ‘Never been able to tek to it,’ said Mrs. Satterley.

  Hetty hesitated but the cigarettes were put back in the pocket.

  ‘Well, what I’m here for,’ said Patsie, ‘is d’you want to come for a ride? There’s Rupert’s horse doing nothing. He went away this morning, so it’ll be standing around getting fat till he deigns to come back.’

  ‘Gone?’

  Patsie gave a yell of laughter. ‘Your voice is hollow with doom. Hey-day and hey-nonny-no. Not again, Mrs. Satterley! It’s obscene the way everyone falls for Rupert. He must have some secret smell or something, like a saint. Everyone falls.’

  ‘That’ll do,’ said Mrs. Satterley, fiercely, ‘Hetty has a boyfriend already. There’s letters and letters coming here for her every day, army issue, postmarked Salisbury Plain.’

  Patsie looked Hetty languidly over from crown to gym shoes.

  ‘Oh, well, that’s all right, then. Rupert’s coming back next week— Oh my, the sun’s come out again! You ought to smile more often!’

  Hetty, who had been shot through first with loss and then with delirious joy, now blushed with rage. And then she found herself smiling after all.

  Raindrops dazzled along the window-sash and sunlight turned the kitchen fire from red and black to something pale and silver. The skinny cat got up and shook off the sausage kittens, cuffing one of them about. They squirmed and scratched on the newspaper in the bottom of the box and turned their rosy, violin-shaped mouths up to mew. Their eyes, still shut, bulged under peanut lids. They were very new creatures. Some nasty leftovers lay bloody in the bottom of the box.

  ‘Ain’t Nature beautiful,’ said Patsie. ‘You had a decaying lamb in here last time I was round.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Mrs. Satterley. ‘The spring. We had quite a few in February but t’one you saw did die. I knew it had died w
hent’ cat started eating it. Still warm, but they know. It’s Nature. Now, what’s wrong with Hetty? Dear, oh dear, d’you want a bit of air? I’ll opent’ door. She’s gone white.’

  Patsie watched Hetty holding the door and Hetty knew it, and thought, She thinks I’m wet.

  ‘Anybody hungry would have done the same thing,’ said Patsie. ‘And thought nothing about it. You don’t know what you’d eat. Or what you’d do to get it, come to that. It’s crazy, this country: none of you starved and yet all you ever think about is eating. Grandma with that liver made me puke—sorry, Mrs. S, but we’d never have done that in the camp. There’s no one in this country suffered a thing.’

  Hetty again had nothing to say. At least Patsie didn’t know she was reading Wordsworth. Wordsworth didn’t speak much about eating the newly dead. Patsie’s eyes followed Hetty back into the room. She was weighing Hetty’s degree of ignorance, not liking it, treating it with ferocity. The cat who would eat the dead sheep. Well, thought Hetty, we shall see.

  ‘I think I’m glad I wasn’t in the camp with you,’ she said.

  ‘Yes? Interesting. I don’t suppose you can ride, can you?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Well, can you? Rupert’s horse is quite lively.’

  ‘I can,’ (she scarcely could) ‘but it depends if I want to.’

  Patsie seemed to like this. ‘You won’t need anything special,’ she said; ‘just jodhpurs, or trousers if you like.’

  ‘I haven’t any.’

  ‘I’ll find some of Mabel’s.’

  ‘No, thank you. I’ll ride in a skirt.’

  ‘And the gym shoes?’

  ‘They’re all I have.’

  ‘Oh well. O.K., then, I’ll come and get you. We’ll go round the lake and stop at the pub.’

  Mrs. Satterley said, ‘Well, I’m not sure about that, Patsie. Hetty’s not eighteen yet and Mr. Satterley wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Oh God, of course. She’s a Quaker.’

  ‘No,’ said Hetty, ‘I’m not. I was just looking. As it happened.’

  ‘O.K., then. Nine o’clock tomorrow?’ and she slid off the table, took up a couple of rock-buns and flung away across the yard, tossing her black and yellow hair.

  ‘The Honourable Patricia,’ said Mrs. Satterley, with love and displeasure. ‘Well, can you wonder? She’s been through China.’

  ‘Great for China.’

  ‘Now then, Hetty, were you ever in prison camp and saw everyone die, your mother disappeared?’

  ‘I’ll bet she was difficult, though.’

  ‘She was in hospital six months after they got her out. In Australia. Malnutrition. That’s why her hair’s gone that nasty colour, and she walks so lofty.’

  ‘Sounds like a kangaroo.’

  Mrs. Satterley did not smile. Whatever she thought of Patsie, Patsie was one of her tribe and Hetty was a foreign paying guest. Mrs. Satterley stood up and began to drive her great arms into a mound of dough. ‘Well, next week will be your last week,’ she said firmly, ‘won’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Hetty, ‘I was forgetting. You all belong together.’

  ‘I knew her before the war. As a bairn. She was canny then. She’d sit on your knee, all smiles. If her grandmother were a usual woman she’d be broken-hearted about her now, but Ursula won’t see changes. The picture she has first is the picture she keeps.’

  ‘She thought I was eleven years old.’

  ‘Then eleven you’ll remain for her.’

  ‘He—Lord Fizzle—thought I was thirty.’

  ‘Oh well. That means less than nowt. And what about Rupert? What had he to say? Now, Hetty, I say to you direct: I don’t want you to think of him. Hilda Fletcher would never forgive me. I can’t at present tell you why, for someone has made me promise. But through my life I’ve rued that people haven’t been warned when someone else sees a thing coming, just out of shyness, and I’m not shy. And there’s others I’ve warned off Rupert and never regretted it. Mrs. Stonehouse, for one.’

  ‘Mrs. Stonehouse!’

  ‘I like you enough, Hetty, to save you making a fool of yourself.’

  ‘But I hardly said a thing to Rupert. Or he to me.’

  ‘Well, then, keep it so. With luck you’ll never see him again. He is not a normal man.’

  ‘Oh, I suppose— I’m not interested. I have work to do. But I suppose what you’re trying to tell me is that he’s a homo.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A homosexual person.’

  ‘What a ridiculous—! Good gracious! Never such a thing! That’s a word never spoken in this house. And very much the reverse. I’m not at liberty to tell you because it’s a family matter. Why don’t you go and read all them unopened love-letters and forget him?’

  ‘Oh, I know! He’s got TB. Or he’s a haemophiliac, like the Czars of Russia. Too much Viking blood.’

  ‘Certainly not! Land’s sakes! He’s fit and well. He was through the RAF, which meant he had a lot of fresh air. He led a charmed life. Like a saint. I’m saying no more. He has the Distinguished Flying Cross. Not even Fergus got that.’

  ‘Who’s Fergus?’

  ‘His cousin in Scotland. A grand man. Nobody for Rupert like Fergus, nor ever will be.’

  ‘Oh, of course. They’re all Catholics! I’d forgotten. That’s it! He’s in line for being a saint, and he’s got the stigmata.’

  ‘They are Catholics, just so,’ said Mrs. Satterley. ‘The Fitzurses are cradle Catholics, always have been, but I didn’t say Rupert was a saint, and I never heard tell he had anything the matter with his eyes.’

  20

  When in the late summer of 1939 Hilda and Dorothy had driven Lieselotte crouched in the back of the car across the Vale of York and had come upon the woman in hair curlers under her railway worker’s peaked cap struggling with the gate of the level-crossing; and when little fat Dorothy had climbed out to help her, nobody had noticed that a brown-paper envelope, which Lieselotte had had with her since Hamburg and which had been handed to flustered Hilda by the woman from the refugee movement, had slipped from her lap and out of the car on to the railway line. When Hilda had driven across the line and stopped the car again to ask the way to Shields West, and the woman had said she didn’t know much because she came from Hull, it had ended in laughter. Dorothy had looked round and said that she wished she could give Lieselotte a sweet.

  What she had in fact given her in that moment was six years of anonymity and invisibility that had wrapped her around, a second blanket to tuck her in the blessed security of the Stonehouses. About twenty minutes after the car had driven on, the brown envelope had been plastered against the line by the first of many passing trains. Squashed and unrecognisable, it had found its way to the side of the track and had become a leaf of pulp in the detritus around the signal box. One day in that autumn the woman who didn’t know much had gathered the rubbish together and burned it on a bonfire, which had caused her to be reprimanded for lighting a conflagration that might alert enemy planes and cause the liquidation of the branch line between Brafferton Halt and Hutton-le-Moulds.

  So the envelope was gone. There had been other Lise Kleins from Hamburg and the exigencies of placing several thousands of other children had caused this one to disappear. She had her passport from the Kindertransport journey, which assured her of a ration book, and that was all.

  Towards the end of the war several mysterious documents had begun to arrive addressed to Lieselotte, suggesting that she might like to apply for an American visa. She had opened them in her room. Only the Stonehouses would not have asked her what they were. She herself was mystified. But, behind her closed bedroom door, she had filled out forms, taken them to school and asked two teachers to vouch for her, and returned them to the address supplied. She said nothing about them to anybody.

  She had lived on in
Shields West, knitting, working, smiling, passing into puberty with commendable calmness, her childhood bandaged over and never mentioned. She heard nothing. She knew nothing of Auschwitz. She was not told that all verifications of deaths there had been confirmed. Until the night of the chandelier in Rillington Mansions, her past might never have been.

  And so, on the first of September, 1946, the day after her great sleep, after her second Kristallnacht, she had met up with the Polish student, Carl of the twitching face, and told him that her family might be dead in the gas ovens. The Feldmans must have known, she said. Worse, the Stonehouses must have known. It was treachery.

  She had told him this as the two of them were going round the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square, which had just reopened. They were among the first visitors. Their feet echoed on the marble floors and again they stared at the pale spaces on the walls that were waiting for the treasures to come home. A narrow Bonington of Venice shone with gold light and a single vermilion blob. An amethyst sky.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll get a cup of tea.’

  ‘Didn’t the Stonehouses ever . . . bring the subject up?’

  ‘No. Quakers wait and see. They follow leadings. They weren’t led towards telling me anything. They liked me, I think. They didn’t want me to go.’

  ‘You ought to write to them. You haven’t, have you?’

  ‘I can’t. I don’t know why. It’s terrible. They are so good.’

  ‘Well, then, I’ll write. I’ll tell them you’re O.K. Look, they may not even know where you are. It’s savage of you. You were theirs for seven years.’

  ‘There’s another thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I heard Mrs. Feldman saying, “Her mother, her father, her sister, her brother . . . ”’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I never had a sister or brother.’

  ‘You don’t think there may be another Lieselotte Klein?’

  ‘Well, but there may be someone else out there. Some relative somewhere. My parents may have survived, even. They won’t know what became of me. I did actually get some papers a bit ago. About America.’