The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  ‘I’m trying not to think yet. Not about tomorrow. Not even about today.’

  ‘What are the creepy noises, Une? Elizabethan rats? They’re in here somewhere.’

  She went across to the stove, which stood attached by tubes to a deep glass case, like a jeweller’s counter.

  ‘Oh, crikey!’ she said. ‘Oh, my God! Look! It’s eggs. Hundreds of eggs and things are coming out of them.’

  He sprang across the room. There was a sort of holding of breath within the case and then in a corner something yellow, alert and fluffy was present. Another egg broke in two nearby, and a beak followed by a small bundle came out of it. Other unseen beaks were tapping.

  ‘They’re incubating eggs!’ she said. ‘In here. The guest-room. Think of it. It’s the craziest thing yet. The mad aristocracy.’

  ‘They’re not weird,’ said Ray the Bolshevik. ‘That old guy was all right and the old woman got things done.’ He was watching life begin. ‘Hey, they’re cute, Une. They’re great. Aren’t they a miracle?’

  ‘Ray, you don’t think they’re a sort of . . . omen?’

  ‘Omen?’

  ‘I mean . . . Miss Kipling warned me about it. You know . . . getting pregnant before Cambridge.’

  ‘I’m not silly.’

  ‘I’m scared, Ray. I didn’t care last night. Now I do.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. And hell—I went to Timothy White’s.’

  ‘Boots are better known.’

  ‘Boots are Roman Catholic.’

  ‘Oh, Ray—not in Shields East? You didn’t go to the Timothy White’s in Shields East? Everyone’ll know. It’ll be round the Lonsdale. Oh no!’

  ‘D’you think I’m an imbecile? I went to the Middlesbrough branch. I’d an hour between trains.’

  ‘Did you go in your Guard’s uniform?’

  ‘Whatever’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He looked sternly at her, but then they started laughing. They laughed and held tight to each other and soon were back in bed, Timothy White’s, the Lady Anne, Mrs. Fallowes, Hetty and Miss Kipling all forgotten. Inside the warm glass frame the little noises went on and chickens opened their eyes to the world, like the flowers of the forest.

  ‘Please?’ Hetty begged as they reached the hospital. It was the middle of the night. Not a car in the car park; hardly a light in the squalid old building. ‘Oh, please,’ she asked pitifully. ‘Let me go in alone.’

  ‘We’ll just take you as far as the ward door,’ said Hilda.

  ‘D’you know where to go?’

  ‘We brought your father up this afternoon. Mabel, I think you should stay in the car with Dorothy.’

  ‘I’m coming with Hetty.’

  ‘Hetty prefers to see her mother by herself. I’m sure you must understand that.’

  ‘No,’ said Mabel.

  They trooped, dazed, into the hospital, in the middle of the night, and at the swing-doors of the ward were stopped by the Archangel Michael, with blazing eyes.

  ‘Whatever is this? I cannot have my ward disturbed at this time of night. This is an outrage. The Red Cross has no place here, not while I am in charge.’

  ‘It is for Mrs. Fallowes. Her daughter has travelled two hundred miles.’

  ‘Then she must go home to bed and come back in the morning. Mrs. Fallowes must not be disturbed. She is asleep. It is vital.’

  Behind the Sister’s head-dress, down either side of the ward, were two rows of iron bedsteads and upon each lay a neatly arranged patient, like a rolled-up pancake. In the middle of the ward was a big coke stove with a chimney going up through the roof and a ruffian was proceeding down the ward from the other end towards it. He was hissing and grumbling as he tramped along in his boots, with a hod of coke on his shoulder. He scraped back the metal lid of the stove, dropped it with a clang, and the coke thundered in, some of it scattering about on the floor.

  ‘This is like Sebastopol,’ said Fletcher.

  ‘I must have quiet!’ roared the sister.

  ‘I shall report you,’ said Fletcher. ‘There was nothing like this at Arras.’

  ‘Is this a relative, then?’ asked the Sister, looking at Mabel, and blanching a little.

  ‘I’m a lot of people’s relative,’ said Mabel. ‘But Hetty must see her mother. Now.’

  ‘Every one of you should be turned out,’ said the Sister, ‘and I shall call for the night porters’; but a sad small voice was heard calling from down the ward.

  ‘Hetty? Is that Hetty? It can’t be Hetty! Oh, so you did get home! Oh, I hope you didn’t come back specially. They shouldn’t have told you. Whatever time is it?’

  Hetty stared the Sister in the eye. ‘Please?’

  ‘Well, very well. The rest of you must go. One minute only. Your mother is to have complete rest. The next few days are critical. You must never tell anyone. It is half-past midnight.’

  ‘I’ll just be sitting here,’ said Mabel, bringing forward a chair from the Sister’s office. ‘To see Hetty back to the car.’

  ‘Then I shall go back to Dorothy,’ said Miss Fletcher, and Hetty moved down the ward in the direction of her mother’s voice.

  At first she did not recognise the woman on the bed and thought there must be a mistake. It was a thin, small person and one side of her face was different from the other. It was an old woman, one eye closed, the other open and wildly excited. One arm lay still, the other was raised from the elbow, its fingers questing the air.

  ‘Oh, Mum. Oh, Mum!’ She knelt by the bed and laid her face against her mother’s cheek. ‘Was it the letter?’

  ‘They won’t let me read my letters. I think they’re on the bed-table. Read it to me, Hester.’

  She could see the letter standing unopened among other letters and she reached for it and put it in her pocket.

  ‘Well, tomorrow, then. Keep it, dear. I keep all your letters. I’ve kept everything you’ve ever written, even your first little essays. Read it to me tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll write you lots more.’

  ‘Well, of course you will. From College. I know you will. I just have to get over the next few days.’

  ‘Oh, Ma!’

  ‘Did you have a nice time?’

  ‘Oh, I wish I’d stayed at home.’ Hetty sat up and looked into her mother’s face. She didn’t seem there. Even the voice was different.

  ‘Oh, this would have happened anyway, dear,’ came the croaky whisper. ‘I felt it coming along. Such queer surges. Very like poor Mrs. Black, you know, and Ada Fisher.’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘I can’t feel anything down this side, Hetty. Hetty, let your father go his way.’

  ‘What d’you mean? He always did.’

  ‘Hetty. Remember, you have to go your way, too.’

  ‘Go?’

  ‘To College. Promise me you’ll go to College, whatever happens.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. But I can’t do without you, Ma.’

  ‘You’ll never be without me.’

  ‘Mum, I don’t want to go home tonight without you.’

  Feet were coming across the ward. A patient coughed and coughed, and another one moaned.

  ‘I quite like hospital, dear. Everybody’s so kind.’ The one rolling eye was looking over Hetty’s head. ‘And who is this?’

  ‘Mabel, will you go!’

  ‘Who is she, dear? What a funny little person. What a very nice smile.’

  ‘You simply must go now,’ said the Sister, her shoes sounding like galloping horses crossing the floor. ‘I have to insist on perfect quiet. You must leave your mother now.’

  After another moment or two, kissing her, nuzzling her, trying to embrace her, Hester left the bedside.

  Three steps away her mother gave a little cry.

  ‘Mum?’


  ‘There’s a cake in the green tin.’

  29

  The day of the funeral there was the inevitable north-east wind off the sea, but light streamed over the sands and the town and to the hills inland, bathing the crematorium in glory. There had been an earlier service in Church, but nobody had tolled the bell. The smiling, enigmatic grave-digger had been quite ready to do so, but the vicar had vetoed it as inappropriate in the widower.

  Afterwards, at the wake, the sun shone into every corner of Kitty Fallowes’s house, lighting places which had grown dusty the past fortnight, and which she would never have countenanced. It shone on brasses and mirrors and pictures and clocks, and the calendar of the Holy Land, which nobody had moved on to October (The Garden of Gethsemane). It shone on the gate-leg table, inherited, and polished for two centuries with beeswax. Crowds were present. There were affectionate greetings and desperate laughter and a few people sitting silent. Hetty ran among everybody like a bride, trying to make everyone comfortable. Her father had come to the church but then disappeared. No one knew where he was. Una and her mother had surprised the town by taking charge of the tea and Mrs. Vane was being rather noisy in the kitchen with the kettles and the washing-up. The vicar passed through. His Anglo-Catholic cloak with the silver chain swirled. Someone else had taken the service as there was a meeting of the town council that day and the vicar was a councillor. It was being said that he could have sent apologies to the council. Hetty caught his wretched glance before he swirled away.

  ‘Come home with us,’ said Una. ‘Go on—leave them all. Just come.’

  But Hetty was Kitty’s daughter and had to stay until the last one had gone. She stayed alone in the house that night, in her own bed.

  The Lonsdale group met up the next morning and the sun still shone, on and on. Mrs. Lonsdale had moved their table a little apart from the others so that they could talk privately. She herself was still in her black from the funeral with even more gold chains, but the friends of the deceased were in everyday attire again, their black gloves back in tissue paper in various chests of drawers.

  They talked. To meet and not talk was not in them.

  ‘There’s not one of them,’ Hetty’s father had always said, ‘that can come into a room without saying something,’ and Kitty had always said, ‘That is not kind, Malcolm.’

  Beneath the chatter today, however, there was a sense of uneasiness, as if waiting for an honoured guest who they knew would not turn up. They stirred their coffee and dropped little saccharine tablets into it.

  ‘Will she go, d’you think? It’s next week, isn’t it? She could never leave her father so soon.’

  ‘I’d think she could get permission to arrive late.’

  ‘I don’t think Malcolm Fallowes cares one way or the other. I was in just before the funeral, and do you know what he was doing? Spreading a little tray cloth on the table, one of those she used to embroider with lazy-daisies, and setting out a knife and fork on it. One. And one spoon and one glass and one pepper-pot and a salt. Just for himself. “I’ll be fine on my own,” he said. “Fine,” he said! I don’t know where Hetty was. Away in that churchyard, someone said, where they all used to do their exam revision. Morbid, really. And not anything to do with Kitty. Malcolm Fallowes seemed quite jovial—but, of course, he’s an actor. I always thought he was an actor.’

  ‘As to jovial, what about Hetty?’

  ‘Shameful, if you really want to know! Shameful. You’d have thought it was a wedding party. Mind, she was always deep. Not an open girl, though she was all smiles. She doesn’t give a thing away—which reminds me, Kitty always promised me that print of the Malvern Hills where we went with the Mothers’ Union.’

  ‘It looks like Hetty and Malcolm have always wanted to get free. And Kitty doted on them. She doted on them both,’ said Mrs. Pile.

  ‘There were plenty of wreaths. My word. Did you take a look? There was a nice one from that officer. He was there, you know, at the funeral. I saw him talking to Hetty a minute. Yes, on his own. I think that the other girl didn’t work out. And did you see that Ray sitting at the back with Una and Mrs. Vane in gold earrings with that smart woman? She reminded me of someone, in that bandana-style scarf. And a lovely black costume. You know, that officer let Hetty down.’

  ‘I wonder how he knew about the death, then?’

  ‘They put it in the Telegraph. Malcolm Fallowes is well-connected. However left-wing they are, they always put it in the Telegraph, these intellectuals. Well, he’s right away from them all now, I don’t know why he bothered. I don’t think he will even miss her, he’s so peculiar.’

  ‘There are many who will,’ said Dorothy. She had left Hilda holding a handkerchief against her mouth and nose, staring at the sea.

  ‘Those were Ellison’s pies,’ said Ada Fisher. ‘At the wake.’

  ‘Of course they were Ellison’s pies. The most beautiful pies. They saw us all through the war, Ellison’s pies. Two of their great long pies.’

  ‘They say that Ellison’s wouldn’t take a penny for them.’

  ‘Ellison’s are top-notch people,’ said Mrs. Brownley. They sat on. They were unwilling to go.

  ‘D’you know,’ said Joyce Dobson, ‘I believe Kitty baked that sponge herself. I could always tell a sponge of hers.’

  ‘She never did! Oh, but that’s dreadful. I know she always had everything planned ahead, but . . . it’s awful really. Eating her sponge.’

  ‘It wasn’t as fresh as usual,’ said Vera Robertson.

  ‘Well, I am afraid there’s one thing I won’t forget, and it’s made a difference to me. The way Hetty was so bright. I didn’t care for it at all,’ said Mrs. Stevens. ‘She might at least have pretended to be upset—I mean, for our sakes.’

  Dorothy said she was going home now to Hilda, and she rose quickly from the table and walked back the promenade way, thinking of campfires before the First World War, of knots and bandaging and songs of Empire. How between the wars in the Guide Hall all the little girls had made promises to God and the King beneath the Union Jack, and she thought of Kitty’s sweet smile and her plait of chestnut hair.

  30

  Hetty found herself somehow living with the Stonehouses a couple of days after the funeral, and coming down the stairs on the third morning she called out, ‘Oh, please stop. Don’t iron for me, Mrs. Stonehouse. You’re so kind, but don’t iron for me. You see, I can’t go. I can’t go to College.’

  ‘I see.’ Mrs. Stonehouse lifted the heavy iron filled with a bar of hot clinker. These old irons saved electricity and ironed so smooth and well. She looked at the base of it, intently. ‘But I think that you promised your mother?’

  ‘I did. But she meant the opposite. She must have done. She was asking too much. It’s too soon. She would have realised, if she’d been well.’

  ‘Yes. It is very soon. Have you told Una?’

  ‘No. I’ll go round now.’

  ‘I think she is coming here, to see you. I’ve laid your breakfasts!’

  ‘I couldn’t eat anything. I haven’t eaten anything yet. I can’t, until I’ve told Una.’

  ‘I expect you have already told your father?’

  ‘I don’t think that he would take it in at present. He says he’s going away somewhere. To someone we’ve never heard of. To do with the First War. I think it’s a . . . female.’

  ‘Look, Hester. If so, what is there for you here?’

  ‘Oh, to go on living. As Mother did.’

  ‘That is what she always prayed you wouldn’t do.’

  ‘That’s what she said. Subconsciously she knew she was living the right way. She wanted me to marry locally and . . . well, just live. Well, you have, Mrs. Stonehouse. You never wanted to go away.’

  ‘Here is Una,’ said Mrs. Stonehouse, looking out of the window with her big pale eyes.

  Una came swinging
round into the neat seaside garden on her bike with her hair in a strange lump over one ear.

  ‘It’s a hair-piece,’ she said. ‘Mum’s latest. Hetty, she wants to give you a perm.’

  ‘Oh, thanks. That’s O.K. No.’

  ‘“For London”, she says.’

  ‘No. Una. I’ve something to say.’

  Mrs. Stonehouse set down the Ovaltine.

  ‘If it’s that you won’t go, forget it,’ said Una. ‘I’ve been and got our rail tickets, through Ray.’

  ‘I’ll pay you back. Look . . . could we go out somewhere?’

  They walked the wide sands, looking at starfish in pools.

  ‘I’ve something to tell you, Una. I wrote my mother a terrible letter. At first I thought it was what must have given her the stroke, but when I got to the hospital the letter was there by the bed, unopened, and so I took it and burned it, even the envelope.’

  ‘Well, that was wonderful. You must have been so thankful. So relieved.’

  ‘Yes. But now I’m wondering. I’m wondering if it maybe had been opened and then stuck down again. She knew me, you see. I’ll never know, because I burned it. I didn’t look at the flap. The ward was so dark, I couldn’t have seen.’

  ‘Of course it hadn’t been opened.’

  ‘She said it hadn’t. But that was funny. Why did she bother to tell me she hadn’t opened any of her letters?’

  ‘Of course she hadn’t.’

  ‘I don’t know. She was looking sort of . . . forgiving. And . . . ’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Well, sort of triumphant, too. Almost—it’s an awful thing to say, but almost—complacent. As if she’d had something enormous to forgive and forget. Sort of pleased with herself for being able to, almost, dupe me. Get the better of me.’

  ‘Oh, come on. You know they said she could hardly see anything by then.’

  ‘She could. She saw Mabel.’

  ‘Hetty, stop it. This is morbid guilt.’

  ‘I’ll never know. I’ll never know. Una, I’ll never know.’

  ‘Well, frankly, I don’t think it matters,’ said Una on the dunes. ‘She knew you. You were always sounding off at her like that, and it never lasted. I bet you sent a postcard ten minutes later apologising. She knew you loved her.’