Honour Thy Father

by Lesley Glaister

  We stopped. ‘Now what?’ I asked. I could not see how we could get the things, the frogs or anything else, without bending down, and we couldn’t do that without getting our sleeves wet. Isaac stood looking uncertain for a minute. Then suddenly he splashed his way out.

  ‘I’ll have to get my things off,’ he said, pulling off his shirt.

  ‘You can’t do that!’ I gasped.

  ‘Oh can’t I?’ he said. He hitched his trouser legs up tighter round his thighs and waded back in. He caught my hand again. His chest was very thin and white, I could see all his ribs and his veins under his almost transparent skin. He grinned and began to say something when suddenly Aggie came hurrying round from the front of the house. ‘Quick, get out of there! Father’s home!’

  ‘Father?’ I said. It was so unlikely that he would arrive at this time of day that it took a moment to register.

  ‘Get out of there quickly!’ Aggie said urgently, ‘and you,’ she looked at Isaac, ‘better get out of sight.’

  But it was too late. Father had followed Agatha round the side of the house. He’d seen me with my skirt all tucked up to show my legs. He’d seen Isaac with half his clothes off holding my hand. I was so shocked I could not even let him go. I just stood dumbly clasping Isaac’s hand until he wrenched it away himself. Father didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. Agatha slunk past him back to the house, and after throwing me a blackly threatening look, Father turned on his heel and followed. Isaac leapt out of the water and struggled into his shirt.

  From the house we could hear an explosion of voices. Isaac stood looking at me helplessly. ‘I’ll have to go,’ he said. His face had turned very white so that his freckles stood out darkly.

  ‘Let me come … you can’t leave me,’ I wailed. I grabbed his arm, knowing this was absurd, but I just wanted to hang onto him then, just hang on and run away with my eyes screwed up tight, just run away and never come back.

  ‘Don’t be so daft,’ said Isaac. ‘You don’t want any more trouble do you? I’m getting out of here.’ He pulled his arm away from me. ‘That’ll be all right. Don’t fret,’ he said. He patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. ‘See you soon,’ he said, and darted off, off like a frightened rabbit round the front of the house, and safely away.

  I untucked my skirts and rubbed them over my wet itchy legs. I stood looking at the place where Isaac had been a moment before, and then I felt a cold weight on my leg. I forced myself to look, and then I screamed. I screamed and screamed although the sound would not come at first. There was a thing on my thigh, a huge grey green thing shiny and speckled. I could not move. I did not dare move my leg. I just stood and I screamed and I screamed. I wanted Isaac to come back, but it was Mother who appeared first. The thing was just hanging on my leg, pulsing and swelling.

  Mother saw at once what the matter was, and scooped me up in her arms. ‘It’s all right,’ she said softly, ‘it’s just a leech. We’ll soon get it off you.’

  Agatha followed behind saying, ‘I know what to do. I’ll do it shall I? I know what to do. I’ll get it off,’ dancing around us.

  Mother sat me on the kitchen table. ‘Will you get out of the way, Agatha!’ she snapped, for Agatha was all over the place in her excitement. Mother shoved the poker in the stove, and I started to cry.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Agatha, ‘it won’t burn you. You just have to touch the leech with it and it lets go. You can’t cut it off or it leaves its suckers in you!’

  ‘Will you be quiet, Agatha!’ said Mother, for this information only made me cry louder, but even in my terrified condition I registered this scolding of Agatha on my behalf, and saved it up to remember.

  Father stood looking grimly down during this performance, and Mrs Howgego looked at me kindly but dared not speak.

  ‘Don’t cry, Milly pet,’ said Mother. ‘Just hold still.’ She took the glowing poker from the fire and then I shut my eyes as she touched the leech which let go at once and fell onto the floor, a shrivelling blood-gorged lump.

  There was a momentary pause, everyone looking at the dying leech which leaked my blood onto the clean floor; and then I began to shudder and sob again; and Mother to comfort, and the twins to bawl, and Father to shout at Mrs Howgego.

  ‘Get out of my house!’ he shouted. I saw his face flash red and there were bubbles of spit on his lips. ‘Get out of here, you whore. And keep your filthy urchins away from my daughters!’

  I looked helplessly at Mrs Howgego and I saw that her lovely face had changed. Her smiling mouth had shrunk to a mean and tatty buttonhole. Her eyes were chips of ice. She picked up her basket. ‘Goodbye Phyllida,’ she said. ‘Goodbye Agatha and Milly.’ I could see her natural gentility then, I could see it in the way she looked so dignified beside our flushed and furious father, as she turned and lifted Davey onto her hip and grabbed the hand of wide-eyed Bobby, and swept them away.

  It was ages before I saw Isaac again. That day hurt Mother. It sent her tumbling downwards in a sad and silent spiral. There were no more songs or rhymes. She did not want to speak of that day. She would not answer my questions. I did not understand. Father had forbidden that whore, Mrs Howgego, to visit: Mother pined for Mrs Howgego, the saint. She would not explain. Her face grew pinched, and streaks of grey appeared quite suddenly in the dark of her hair. Her little thought frown became permanent and other lines creased her face.

  Father told Mother never to let the girls near those scabby beggars again; never to let that slut, me, out of the house.

  ‘But she’s only ten, Charles! She’s a child!’

  ‘She knows what’s what. You can see it in her eyes. Any daughter of yours …’

  No. I did not understand. I knew I had done something bad. It was awful, it was to do with Isaac. But nothing I had done was that bad, was it? There was all that muddiness and slime and wet. There was Isaac’s frail skin with the blue veins showing through. And there was the leech. I was a little slut and not to be trusted, that’s all I understood. Though what a slut was, I was not certain.

  Mother crumpled when he said words like that, like slut and whore and bastard, she sagged with a weight I did not understand. All I did understand was that I had done something terrible and that I had made things worse for my mother. I had heard her say, once, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Candida,’ but now there was no more Mrs Howgego. Mother had lost the will to disobey. She lost her will to do anything much. She became so quiet that it was a surprise to hear her voice. She even let herself get dirty, neglected her hair so that it grew wild and tangled. She lost her clean soapy smell. Was stale.

  Agatha and I were quiet too. We were frightened but we could not speak to Mother. It was hard even to speak to each other. Too frightening, for what could we do? We simply got on with it. We looked after the twins almost entirely. Mother would not feed them any more and they were soon weaned, seemed grateful to forget her thin grey milk, and thrived and grew happier and fatter. They were soon creeping about in need of constant watchfulness. Mother hardly looked at them, except to grab and hug them fiercely now and then, tears standing in her eyes. Agatha and I did almost everything: the cleaning, the washing, the cooking. We were only little girls, but we learned to do it all. Agatha milked the cow and fed the hens and cleared the garden. How did Agatha know just what to do? I’ve never understood that. How did she know what to do about the leech? And you’d never guess, now, to look at her, useless article that she is.

  Father stopped coming home. What was there to come home for? Though we tried, Aggie and I, the house was never as much a home as it had been before the time when Ellenanesther were born. That was when it all went wrong. It all went wrong. And Mother died in late October when the sky was dark by tea-time; when it had been raining for a week; when the house was cold and grimy; when Father hadn’t been home for almost a month. She simply went out and never came back. She kissed us before she left. She said she loved us, and that we must forgive her. She said we must try and understand. And th
en she went out into the dark and the rain, and she never returned.

  Aggie and I sat up all that night waiting for her to come back. We kept the fire burning, and a kettle of water on the stove ready to make her tea, ready for her to wash herself with. We put her slippers on the hearth to warm, but I didn’t really think we would ever see her again. It was as if she had been leaving us for a long time, becoming thinner and paler and further away.

  I have a dream that I am Mother sometimes on the worst nights of all. It is a dream I struggle to wake from. It is worse than the dreams about Father. The rain is cold and merciless in my dream, it pelts needle-sharp into my face. My coat is soaked, my hat, my lovely London hat disintegrates and a paper pansy falls off and catches in the crook of my elbow before falling into the mud. I just wish I could be in London, I wish fiercely that I could be there in all the noise and warmth, the bustle and friendliness of it, for here there is nothing. Only unfriendly darkness, a flat and empty nothing, only rain, only cold. I rush forward through a streaming void. Oh that would be the thing! To run there, to run away, to run and run and leave this cold bleak nothing of a place and find a way back. I can sing. I can sing. I can. I could find my way back. I could. Oh yes I could. But behind me there is that other thing. Behind me is a house full of draughts, full of mouths I should be feeding, mouths I should be causing to smile. That house is a big draughty box packed with guilt. Oh I love them but I cannot be doing with it any more, any of it. I cannot. When those twins were born I started to die and I’ve been dying from the outside inwards ever since. And now there’s just a tiny streak, just a sliver, a living core inside this cold body. I cannot go on. There is so little of me left, such a meagre shred of me inside this cold woman’s body.

  Sometimes the wind that blows for miles, that blows round and through the house, through the doors and windows, blows through me too. Inside I billow and bloat, there is a great empty space, like the inside of a church and in the centre there is a candle. One small lighted candle, its flame flapping feebly in the wind. It has stayed alight so far, that little flame, but it cannot for ever. And now the wind drives needles of rain into my face, into my eyes.

  I am so cold, so small and cold – and here is the dyke. It is a seam of deepness that threads the shallow muddiness of it all. Blacker than the ground, than the sky; richer than the air that carries such a thin slanting of rain, such a meagre spiteful wetness.

  My feet have carried me here and now they have gone. There is a numbness beyond coldness. My feet have disappeared and my hands, and my cheeks too have numbed away, and my lips, and my hair is thick and wet and heavy as weed. Frozen. I never want to thaw. I could not bear the pain of it. I am here. I am beside the black rush of water, carried here by feet I no longer own. The wind is roaring, a base beast, a greedy monotonous beast that spits in my eyes. The water is the place. The dyke. The water is the only place to get away, to fill my ears, to stop the sound, the roaring and the pricking, to wash away the rest of the feeling.

  And then I have to wake. I have to wake or else the water the taste of water fills my mouth and I have to fight, to struggle up out of it, out of the cruel drowning flood of dream.

  And it is only a dream. I am not Mother. I do not know. It is only that someone saw her stumbling forward one terrible night. He shouted but she did not hear. It was only that they found the pansy from her hat, from her lovely hat, all wet and muddy near the edge.

  Sometimes, in the night, Agatha sleepwalks. There is something in the sound of her footfalls, a sort of smoothness unlike her normal stiff gait, that tells me she is asleep. Sometimes it is only in her room that she walks. There is a gliding, light and ghost-like, and then the creak as she returns to bed.

  But sometimes she comes down the stairs, past my door, past Ellenanesther’s doors and down to the kitchen. I don’t know what she does in the kitchen. I do not follow. I am frightened of a sleeping woman walking about in the house, a sleeping woman with God knows what going on behind her blank eyes. This house is a mad house, with Agatha fast asleep, but pacing, pacing; with Ellenanesther’s muttering vibrating through the walls; with that moaning from the cellar. Only some nights this happens. At other times it is quiet, and whether we sleep or no there is an air of restfulness in the house. But tonight … tonight Aggie is moving up there, but not sleepwalking. She is moving the furniture. Yes she is! The bitch. There she goes … a heavy thing – her bed? Where she gets the strength from I don’t know. One of these days you’ll come through the floor, Agatha. No, the house will not stand much more of it. Surely, the house cannot stand it, this constant movement. The crack in my ceiling is longer, surely it is, is wider. Can Aggie never be still?

  Tonight my mind is restless too. I do not think that I will sleep tonight. I dare not sleep. There is the constant thrumming of the rain and the other noises of the night. The sounds of the cats hunting and the occasional scream of their victims; the wet squeaky scritch-scratching of branches on the windows; Agatha moving about; Ellenanesther muttering; George groaning. This house is like the inside of my skull, tumbled and unstill, unrested. The worst things will not rest tonight. Will not.

  I have a good memory, a sight better than Agatha’s, but I cannot recall clearly the days that followed the night that Mother went away. Father came back and was grim, and did not talk to us. We had to listen at doors and we pieced together the bits. Someone brought Father a damp and muddy scrap, a purple paper scrap of pansy from her lovely hat. Someone saw her rushing forward, and they shouted but she did not hear.

  Mrs Howgego came but Father would not let her near. She stood outside and there were tears in her eyes, and Isaac was with her and his hair was combed and he was looking down and kicking at the dirt, embarrassed, but Father would not let them in. She went away at last and she took with her the heavy basket full of things she’d brought for us. Isaac looked back and I think he saw my face at the upstairs window. I think he must have done, and I think he smiled. I wanted to open the window and jump out and go home with them, and live with them and be a Howgego. But I did not. I just sat there in my mourning dress and watched them grow tiny, watched them disappear.

  After Mother, there was the time when we still went to church with Father, the time when he would rub our heads before he went away: ‘Stay away from the dyke,’ he’d say. How long that time lasted I am uncertain. It was a long time, long enough for Agatha to grow into a young woman who preened in front of an old mirror, who dreamed of being adored, but was too haughty even to look at any of the young men in the congregation. It was long enough for Ellenanesther to grow from fat babies into strange pretty girls for whom nothing much existed except each other. It was years. They were uneasy and strange years. Father was seldom at home and we were very much alone. After that time when he would not let her in, Mrs Howgego did not come back. I wished and wished that she would, and that Isaac would, just turn up one day, but I did not dare go to them and then the longer it was, the longer the time went on, the more impossible it seemed. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of a boy that might have been Isaac, nearby, a flicker of a boy that might have been only one of my own wishes, or might have been Isaac, but I could never be sure.

  It was years. That time went on for years. There was nothing we wanted for, but company. We had clothes and food, and Father brought books for us, instructive books, that told us to count our blessings and honour our father and keep ourselves clean and ladylike.

  After the time of Aggie’s curse, there was Isaac again for me, of course, and Mrs Howgego began to call again. And there were other people sometimes, of course there were. There was Sara Gotobed who brought the groceries when Father was so seldom home. Once or twice people called, lost people, or people walking about looking for work who found our house and knocked, and we would sometimes open the door, and sometimes not. For Father frightened us. He told us such things about other people, town people, and how they were such thieves and cheats, and how they preyed on girls alone, and terrible stories, so th
at although we longed for company we were afraid of it too.

  And there was the summer when our second cousin came to call. Father had no family, he said, but Mother said it was not that. He had family but he had estranged himself she said, and he would not talk of it. But our second cousin came to call, with his friend. It was a summer evening and the sky was aswoop with swallows and there were bats, and one almost tangled in my hair … and the friend held my arm, Roger his name was, he held my arm with his strong soldier’s hand, his hand that had held a gun brushed against the side of my breast. And it was my knee he touched inside my skirt. Not Agatha’s.

  I should have married Isaac. I would have been Mrs Howgego, old Mrs Howgego now, and my grandchildren would come to call. I blame Agatha. No. Father was to blame … but still I feel angry with Agatha.

  It was the war that changed things, set everything askew. Here there was little sign of it. It had nothing to do with us, so far away. We read about it in Father’s newspapers when he came home, and of course Isaac was full of it. He couldn’t wait to get away and be a part of it. To be a hero. But Mr Howgego died just before the outbreak of war, and Ben and Abel went to France, so Isaac had to stay at home and help provide for his mother and the youngsters.

  He grew up in those years, oh yes he did. I did too, of course. I started my bleeding, my curse, and it was not such a drama as Aggie’s had been. How Aggie loves a drama! All her life what she’s really lacked has been an audience. My grown-upness was not such a shock. It was not such a serious thing as Aggie’s had seemed. I felt no different. I was still a girl, still the same Milly, still enjoyed doing the same things. Once it had started I went outside and tried them all: I climbed trees, and hunted frogs and threw apples at the barn and it felt just the same to me. There was nothing magical. I didn’t feel closer to Agatha or Mrs Howgego. It was just another chore to deal with. The grown-upness did come, but gradually. It was not to do with the bleeding, or with the stealthy swelling of my breasts. It was to do with worry and longing and nostalgia and hope; and to do with the change of my feelings towards Isaac. And, though I say I’m grown-up, there is still a part of this old woman that is nine years old, that still hears with terror Mother’s cries on the afternoon of Ellenanesther’s birth. There is still part of me that longs to bury my face in my mother’s hair and feel her hold me tight, make everything all right.