GOOD DAUGHTERS

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘Why can’t Daddy get a job in Suffolk?’ she demanded the moment the older couple who brought her home had departed. ‘The air is so strong! Not like the West Country air that just sends you to sleep. You know the way it always makes me drowsy.’ It was apparent to her family that she had had a splendid time and would talk of nothing but Suffolk for the next few days.

  It was not only the Suffolk air which had been splendid.

  ‘I have decided I must give up Heather,’ she said when she was showing Alice her snaps. ‘I talked it over with Derek. This is Derek, the tall one with the shrimping net. He was so understanding; he said he knew I had been trying to win Heather for God, but he thought perhaps I wasn’t quite strong enough yet, and that I might be putting a strain on my own faith. I am weak.’ Her wide green eyes were both enraptured and submissive. ‘It was wonderful to have someone realize how much help I need.’

  Alice was not sympathetic. ‘I think you would be daft to give up Heather. Why can’t you accept her as she is? She doesn’t try to change you.’

  ‘I can’t be two people like you can!’ Claire stamped her foot. ‘It’s got to be one thing or the other with me.’

  The next day Heather called, and she and Claire went for a walk. They returned two hours later. ‘We tap-danced all the way down Old Oak Common Road!’ Claire said to Alice. ‘What would Miss Blaize have thought!’ Alice wondered what Derek would have thought.

  Alice had neglected her studies during the previous week, and this evening she sat up late trying to make amends. The girls had been warned that sixth-form studies would be much more demanding than previous work, and Alice always heeded such warnings. Daphne was unconcerned, because it was not in her nature to be intimidated, and Irene had no cause for concern, being one of the most able girls in her year. Many of the girls with whom they had gone through school had now left. Alice found herself balanced between awe at the prospect of her exalted future, and regret for the past when study formed a less important part of her life. She would miss Marjorie Potter, who had one brown eye and one blue eye and was adept at writing rude verse; and Elizabeth Pitman, who fainted in the lessons she did not like and passed pleasant hours in the sick-room with Matron, whom she did like; and Valerie Pewsey, of whom it had been said that if she was still a virgin it was more by accident than design.

  These hopes and regrets, the anticipation and the anxiety, worked upon Alice and she found it difficult to relax. When she slept she had a dreadful dream. She woke so terrified that she did something she had not done for many years; she went down to her parents’ room. ‘I had a bad dream.’

  Judith came upstairs with her daughter and sat on the edge of her bed. ‘You shouldn’t have had that pickle at supper. What was it all about?’

  ‘I dreamt of Katia. She was in a railway train and she couldn’t get out. It happened once, at Shepherd’s Bush tube station; she got stuck just as the doors were closing, but I managed to pull her free. I couldn’t this time. I tried to take her hand, but I couldn’t reach her.’

  For a moment, it was as though some dark thing of the night had flown in at the window and hovered above them. Judith put her arms round her daughter and held her close. She thought angrily, ‘Why don’t they do something! That useless woman sitting in that airless house; Jacov going off to work looking so sad and helpless; Stanley writing letters no one will act upon! Why don’t they go to Germany and get her back? That’s what I would do if it were my child.’

  Alice said, ‘It was so real, Mummy. She called me.’

  Judith comforted her and then made her a cup of weak tea. ‘You mustn’t let this prey on your mind, my love.’

  For several days after the dream, Alice could think of little else. At the weekend, the young Viking, whose name was Ted Peterson, came to tea, and for a time Alice seemed better, Judith and Stanley liked him, the more so because they realized that little was involved other than Alice’s pride in having a boyfriend.

  There were three weeks to go before the beginning of term, and one of those weeks Alice was to spend on holiday with Irene and her parents. ‘Now you are to enjoy yourself and put Katia out of your mind,’ Judith said when she kissed her goodbye. Then, uncharacteristically – for she was not a woman to fill her daughters’ heads with fear – she added, ‘Be careful of strange men if you and Irene go wandering off on your own. You’re growing up now and something could happen that you aren’t prepared for. So be sensible.’

  Alice had committed Katia to God’s care. If He was supposed to have saved Faith Marriott’s bunny-rabbit, it was blasphemous to imagine that He could not save Katia. She resolved not to think about it while she was away; thinking about it after she had put it in His hands would be like Lot’s wife looking back – a failure in trust which could only have dreadful consequences.

  On the whole, the holiday was a success. At first Alice felt a little awkward. Irene’s parents were more reserved than her own mother and father, and it took her some time to realize that in their undemonstrative way the Kimberleys were a close-knit family. Mr Kimberley was a civil servant and was reputed to earn over a thousand a year. For a person of such eminence, he was a quiet man. Alice had hitherto tended to equate silence with the gentle submissiveness she found in that other quiet man of her acquaintance, Mr Immingham. A short time in Mr Kimberley’s company, however, made her realize that he was neither gentle nor submissive. His comments as he read the daily paper were not as explosive as her father’s, but were remarkable for the amount of meaning contained in a minimum of words. This economy of speech interested Alice, because it was so effective. Mrs Kimberley in contrast tended to cast about for words and to leave sentences unfinished; but she did this not in the anxious manner of poor Mrs Drummond, but with an air of rueful disdain at the inadequacy of language to convey the intricacies of thought, the finer shades of feeling. Mr Kimberley appeared to find her unfinished sentences of great interest. They were the first couple whom Alice had met who found real enjoyment in each other’s conversation.

  Alice, while feeling very gauche, was pleased to be with the Kimberleys, and they were kind to her, although she sensed at times a certain surprise at finding a fourth person in their company.

  ‘You and your parents are very close,’ she said to Irene.

  ‘Yes.’ There was regret as well as affection in the way Irene spoke of her parents. Alice could understand this. The trouble with loving one’s parents was that it made the task of breaking away from them all the more difficult, and she could see that Irene might have the greater problem here. But that was still in the future, and both had much for which to be thankful. In spite of many small dramas and daily challenges, she and Irene had had the blessings of a long, slow childhood. Their parents had not constantly nagged them into activity of one kind or another, or demanded that each moment should be accounted for. There had always been time to watch the wind shaking the leaves of a tree, sooty city smoke transformed by the rainbow colours of sunset, the flight of starlings in the winter dusk, the pattern of frost on a windowpane; all seemingly incidental, but in retrospect very dear, for in these unhurried moments the mind had been eased and fed, imagination nourished, and in future each would retain the ability to detach such moments from the knotted cares of the day.

  Alice wrote cards to her parents, to Claire and Louise, and she said she was enjoying herself. There were moments, however, during the holiday when she was subject to unreasonable panic. She did not like the door to the room which she shared with Irene to be closed; yet when she was in a very open place, walking on sand dunes, the sense of so much vacancy affected her balance, and it was all she could do to stop herself from grabbing at Irene’s arm.

  On their return, the Kimberleys took a taxi from the station. When it stopped outside her home, Alice was almost rude in her insistence that she could carry her case up the garden path. It was important that events should unfold as she had rehearsed them; the intervention of a stranger would require a re-fashioning of the moment
of arrival which it was beyond her imagination to contrive or her strength to bear. The front door was flung open, Rumpus tore into the garden and ran round and round in circles, and Claire went dashing after him. Alice was gathered in by her mother and father.

  Her father told her that Rumpus had missed her, he had gone round the house looking for her; her mother said, ‘I had to give him one of your old jumpers to lie on in his box, he wouldn’t settle at night otherwise.’ How could they keep on about Rumpus’s undoubtedly touching devotion, when it was the return of Katia which was the most important thing? Yet there was something in their greeting – not only warmth but a clinging as though they were holding her safe – which had a daunting effect on her. She pulled away ungraciously, and the distance between her and her parents was greater than it had ever been. In that moment – for it was surely no longer than a missed heartbeat – she saw the sitting-room as if it belonged to the past, like walking into one of the junior school classrooms by mistake.

  ‘Katia’s back, I expect?’ she said.

  Her mother and father looked at each other, not at her. Alice began to talk about her holiday, and they accepted the change of subject gladly. Later her mother said, spoiling her, ‘Let’s have your washing. I’ve got the copper out anyway, so I might as well do it.’ Her father went out to post a letter.

  Alice ran upstairs to the room which had once been Louise’s and was now hers. She shut the door carefully before she released her burden. At first she stood like a soldier, hands clenched at her sides, while she addressed God. ‘I hate you, I hate you!’ She left Jesus out of it, because she could not bring His name to her lips. It was God with whom she was angry. Her whole body clenched itself and she screamed, ‘I hate you!’ She had never, even as a small child, given way to such uncontrolled rage. It was not only for Katia she cried out, it was at the littleness of life, the constant spoilsporting, the damming of her natural propensity for all the things labelled forbidden. She hated the God of Crusaders who forgave you your sins though they be scarlet, the God of Sunday School who wouldn’t even know what a scarlet sin was, the God of the Winifred Clough Day School for Girls who wanted you to lay down a good harvest to be garnered by ages yet unknown but wouldn’t have you walk on the grass and would strike you dead if he found you lying on the grass when the sower was about his work, even the God of her mother and father and their mothers and fathers before them Who was faithful to the end of time and went about quietly closing all the doors to the secret places of enchantment, Him she hated, too. She hated each and every aspect of Him; He had been the most negative influence in her life, and although she could not express this in words it was all there in her cry of hate. ‘I hate you! I shall never speak to you again!’ And – which was more – she told Him He didn’t exist. And behold. He didn’t! He was gone, just as if she had opened a cupboard and given everything a good shake and a moth had flown out. She was free of Him!

  The freedom was tremendous, she felt it travel along her spine, her head was spinning with it; she went to the window and seemed to be walking on air. There was nothing inside her, she had breathed Him out of her, emptied herself of Him. She felt cleansed. The world beyond the window seemed to have been cleansed, too. For a few moments, which were the strangest, most rapturous of her life, she simply saw images without attributing anything to them, saw moving greenness shot with dazzling points of light and did not think of tree, saw swoop and fall and flutter and did not think it bird, saw black and white madly circling red laughter in a dance of crazy ecstasy with no idea of dog and girl, saw it all new as she herself had been new before her parents called her Alice.

  It didn’t last; how could it? Beside her, wings gently brushed to and fro, alternately lightening and darkening the room, moved by the same breath that stirred the greenness. She put up a hand and touched curtains. She was standing at the window of her room looking down at Shepherd’s Bush, and everything was much as it had always been. The God of her childhood had been cast off: but He was still there.

  She had thrown down a challenge which had been taken up. Or was it she who had been challenged? Was this what others meant when they talked about being saved, called? She didn’t think it could be. They made it sound so comforting, as though something had been settled once and for all. She wanted that for herself, had prayed for it, had tried to do the things which seemed to work for other people, but nothing had happened. She had been passed by. So why now, when she didn’t expect it, had certainly done nothing to deserve it? Why this?

  She had spoken in anger to God; the words might have lacked originality, but the feeling of hate had been pure, and it had been waiting a long time to burst from her. And the result had been a momentary glimpse of that other world beyond the walls of Kashmir; she had seen a place where ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt not’ were unknown, where terror and pleasure were inextricably joined, a place beyond understanding and the naming of things. And He was there, in that place on the far side of the wall, which she so desired to enter. If it hadn’t been her, she’d have said she’d had a vision.

  It wasn’t of the order of visions which strip away the old self and send a person out to minister to the outcasts or bring down a tyrant; lepers wouldn’t benefit from it, and Hitler could sleep soundly at night. It was an image glimpsed in the blink of an eyelid, and the traces would fade as quickly as those of a dream on waking. But something had been done which would not be undone. From now on she would speak to God; hesitantly, intermittently, reluctantly, fervently she would speak her anger, despair, her joy and adoration, grief and longing: the dialogue, the wrestling, the coming and going of love and hope, the ebb and flow of belief, the finding and the losing of the threads in the pattern, the exhilaration of success and the bitterness of failed expectations; these would not cease. And there would always be God, the God of now and the God beyond the God of now; unattainable, inescapable, unpredictable, suffering from a fundamental inability to obey man’s rules, who might demand of one person crucifixion, and of another that she accept the gift of life.

  Her face as she stared through the window was the face of a girl still, unfirmed and distractable, more ready for laughter than tears, but with a bewilderment in the eyes foreshadowing the questioning years to come. Although she was so shaken by Katia’s disappearance, there was a sense in which it seemed to have been foretold. Her puritan upbringing had laid much emphasis on the need for endurance in the face of injustice, fortitude in suffering and, by their very nature, the virtues commended to her implied a certain grimness in the grain of life. What she had not been prepared for, because she did not merit it, was the laying of a jewelled robe across her shoulders. There was something shocking about grace, an inexplicable quirk in God’s behaviour; the struggle to come to terms with it would be her life. But she did not see that now, was only dimly aware of a beginning.

  Her mother called that tea was ready and there were crumpets.

  The dreams about Katia recurred. Always, there was the train; but in each dream its condition deteriorated. Windows became broken and were boarded up with planks, until eventually the carriage looked more like a cattletruck than a compartment, and it was only the eyes between the cracks which revealed the presence of people inside. There came a time when the eyes seemed to watch Alice day and night. Then, there was one dream which was particularly bad, the details of which Alice was never able to call to mind, and after that the dreams ceased. This, Alice told herself, must be a good sign.

  On the last day of the holidays she went to see her grandmother, who gave her a ten-shilling note because she was going into the sixth form where she would have to work so hard. On her return Alice walked slowly along Pratts Farm Road, thinking about the more responsible life of a sixth-former.

  It was late September and the light failed a little earlier each evening, but lawnmowers had not yet been put away and there were roses in bloom in the gardens. The signs of autumn were fewer in town than in the country. Someone had lit a bonfire howe
ver, and the smoke was drifting in the direction of her home. It had the putrid smell of a bonfire on a dump where rubbish of all kinds best not investigated had been consigned to the flames. Her father would be annoyed. He was always careful to light a bonfire only when there was a southerly wind which would blow the smoke towards Shanks Alley. Alice could imagine him standing in the garden trying to work out the location of the fire preparatory to calling on the offending householder. There was someone standing on the pavement now; she recognized Jacov waiting for her at the gate of his house. The smell from the bonfire brought a memory of winter fog and the foul breath of the underground. The pitch of the street seemed suddenly precarious, and Alice edged to the shelter of the garden fences. As she came closer to Jacov, she said, ‘Any news of Katia?’

  ‘Only this.’ He held up a large envelope addressed to Katia; printed in the top righthand corner were the words: Claudette Colbert, Paramount Studios.

  ‘She might have run off with Ernst. Had you thought of that?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  The darkness was encroaching now, but the breeze blowing ashes in the sky had something of summer in it still, and the shadows fell light as a feather.

  ‘She will come back, Jacov.’ Alice put out a hand, holding to the garden gate. If she could steady herself, everything would be all right; she would come through this bad patch and find that life had settled down, orderly as it had ever been. She said, ‘After all, term begins tomorrow. She must come back.’

  Mary Hocking

  Born in London in 1921, Mary was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Girls School, Acton. During the Second World War she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) attached to the Fleet Air Arm Meteorology branch and then briefly with the Signal Section in Plymouth.

  Writing was in her blood. Juggling her work as a local government officer in Middlesex Education Department with writing, at first short stories for magazines and pieces for The Times Educational Supplement, she then had her first book, The Winter City, published in 1961.