Cut and Come Again

by H. E. Bates

  So the girl had no time to listen except to the voice or to think or talk except in answer to it. And the afternoon was gone and the damp moving darkness was shutting out the river and the bare fields and barer trees before she could realise it.

  ‘Fred’ll be home at six,’ Mrs. Holland said. ‘He shaves at night. So you git some hot water ready about a quarter to.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Oh! and I forgot. He allus has fish for his tea. Cod or something. Whatever he fancies. He’ll bring it. You can fry it while he’s shaving.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Don’t you go and fry that roach by mistake!’

  And Mrs. Holland, thinking again of the fish in Alice’s hand, lay back on the pillows and laughed, the heavy ripe laughter that sounded as before a trifle strange, as though she were a little mad or hysterical in the joy of fresh companionship.

  Mrs. Holland and Alice had already had a cup of tea in the bedroom. That seemed unbelievably luxurious to Alice, who for nearly five years had drunk her tea from a thermos flask in her father’s van. It brought home to her that she was very well off: five shillings a week, tea by the fire in the bedroom, Mrs. Holland so cheerful and nice, and an end at last to her father’s ironic grousing and the feeling that she was a dead weight on his hands. It gave her great satisfaction. Yet she never registered the emotion by looks or words or a change in her demeanour. She went about quietly and a trifle vaguely, almost in a trance of detachment. The light in her large flat pellucid eyes never varied. Her mouth would break into a smile, but the smile never telegraphed itself to her eyes. And so with words. She spoke, but the words never changed that expression of dumb content, that wide and in some way touching and attractive stare straight before her into space.

  And when she heard the rattling of a motor-van in the mill-yard just before six o’clock she looked suddenly up, but her expression did not change. She never showed a flicker of apprehension or surprise.

  About five minutes later Holland walked into the kitchen.

  ‘’Ullo,’ he said.

  Alice was standing at the sink, wiping the frying pan with a dishcloth. When Holland spoke and she looked round at him her eyes blinked with a momentary flash of something like surprise. Holland’s voice was very deep and it seemed to indicate that Holland himself would be physically very large and powerful.

  Then she saw that he was a little man, no taller than herself. He was little and rather stocky, without being stiff or muscular. His trousers hung loose and wide, like sacks. His overcoat, undone, was like a sack. The only unloose thing about him was his collar. It was a narrow stiff celluloid collar fixed with a patent ready-made tie. The collar was oilstained and the tie, once blue, was soaked by oil and dirt to the appearance of old crêpe. The rest of Holland was loose and careless and drooping. A bit of an old shack, Alice thought. Even his little tobacco-yellowed moustache drooped raggedly. Like his felt hat, stuck carelessly on the back of his head, it looked as though it did not belong to him.

  ‘’Ullo,’ he said. ‘You are ’ere then. I see your dad. D’ye think you’re going to like it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s right. You make yourself at ’ome.’ He had the parcel of fish under his arm and as he spoke he took it out and laid it on the kitchen table. The brown paper flapped open and Alice saw the tail-cut of a cod. She went at once to the plate-rack, took a plate and laid the fish on it.

  ‘Missus say anythink about the fish?’ Holland said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right. You fry it while I git shaved.’

  ‘I put the water on,’ she said.

  Holland took off his overcoat, then his jacket, and finally his collar and tie. Then he turned back the greasy neck-band of his shirt and began to make his shaving lather in a wooden bowl at the sink, working the brush and bowl like a pestle and mortar. Alice put the cod into the frying-pan and then the pan on the oil-stove. Then as Holland began to lather his face, Mrs. Holland called downstairs: ‘Fred. You there, Fred? Fred!’ and Holland walked across the kitchen, still lathering himself and dropping spatters of white lather on the stone flags as he went, to listen at the stairs door.

  ‘Yes, I’m ’ere, Em’ly. I’m – Eh? Oh! all right.’

  Holland turned to Alice. ‘The missus wants you a minute upstairs.’

  Alice ran upstairs, thinking of the fish. After the warm kitchen she could feel the air damper than ever. Mrs. Holland was lying down in bed and a candle in a tin holder was burning on the chest of drawers.

  ‘Oh! Alice,’ Mrs. Holland said, ‘you do all you can for Mr. Holland, won’t you? He’s had a long day.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And sponge his collar. I want him to go about decent. It won’t get done if you don’t do it.’

  ‘All right.’

  Alice went downstairs again. Sounds of Holland’s razor scraping his day-old beard and of the cod hissing in the pan filled the kitchen. She turned the cod with a fork and then took up Holland’s collar and sponged it with the wetted fringe of her pinafore. The collar came up bright and fresh as ivory, and when finally Holland had finished shaving at the sink and had put on the collar again it was as though a small miracle had been performed. Holland was middle-aged, about fifty, and looked older in the shabby overcoat and oily collar. Now, shaved and with the collar cleaned again, he looked younger than he was. He looked no longer shabby, a shack, and a bit nondescript, but rather homely and essentially decent. He had a little of the tired, rather stunted and subservient look of the working man. His flesh was coarse, with deep pores, and his greyish hair came down stiff over his forehead. His eyes were dull and a little bulging. When Alice put the fish before him he sat low over the plate, scooped up the white flakes of fish with his knife and then sucked them into his mouth. He spat out the bones. Every time he spat out a bone he drank his tea, and when his cup was empty, Alice, standing by, filled it up again.

  None of these things surprised the girl. She had never seen anyone eat except like that, with the knife, low over the plate, greedily. Her father and mother ate like it and she ate like it herself. So as she stood by the sink, waiting to fill up Holland’s cup, her eyes stared with the same abstract preoccupation as ever. They did not even change when Holland spoke, praising her:

  ‘You done this fish all right, Alice.’

  ‘Shall I git something else for you?’

  ‘Git me a bit o’ cheese. Yes, you done that fish very nice, Alice. Very nice indeed.’

  Yet, though her eyes expressed nothing, she felt a sense of reassurance, very near to comfort, at Holland’s words. It was not deep: but it was enough to counteract the strangeness of her surroundings, to help deaden the perpetual sense of the mill-race, to drive away some of the eternal dampness about the place.

  But it was not enough to drive away her tiredness. She went to bed very early, as soon as she had washed Holland’s supper things and had eaten her own supper of bread and cheese. Her room was at the back of the mill. It had not been used for a long time; its dampness rose up in a musty cloud. Then when she lit her candle and set it on the washstand she saw that the wallpaper, rotten with dampness, was peeling off and hanging in ragged petals, showing the damp-green plaster beneath. Then she took her nightgown out of her case, undressed and stood for a moment naked, her body as thin as a boy’s and her little lemon-shaped breasts barely formed, before dropping the nightgown over her shoulders. A moment later she had put out the candle and was lying in the little iron bed.

  Then, as she lay there, curling up her legs for warmth in the damp sheets, she remembered something. She had said no prayers. She got out of bed at once and knelt down by the bed and words of mechanical supplication and thankfulness began to run at once through her mind: ‘Dear Lord, bless us and keep us. Dear Lord, help me to keep my heart pure,’ little impromptu gentle prayers of which she only half-understood the meaning. And all the time she was kneeling she could hear a background of other sounds: the mill-race roaring
in the night, the wild occasional cries of birds from up the river, and the rumblings of Holland and his wife talking in their bedroom.

  And in their room Holland was saying to his wife: ‘She seems like a good gal.’

  ‘She is. I like her,’ Mrs. Holland said. ‘I think she’s all right.’

  ‘She done that fish lovely.’

  ‘Fish.’ Mrs. Holland remembered. And she told Holland of how Alice had brought up the roach in her hand, and as she told him her rather strange rich laughter broke out again and Holland laughed with her.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Mrs. Holland laughed. ‘She’s a funny thing when you come to think of it.’

  ‘As long as she’s all right,’ Holland said, ‘that’s all that matters. As long as she’s all right.’

  IV

  Alice was all right. It took less than a week for Holland to see that, although he distrusted a little Alice’s first showing with his fish. It seemed too good. He knew what servant girls could be like: all docile, punctual and anxious to please until they got the feeling of things, and then haughty and slovenly and sulky before you could turn round. He wasn’t having that sort of thing. The minute Alice was surly or had too much lip she could go. Easy get somebody else. Plenty more kids be glad of the job. So for the first few nights after Alice’s arrival he would watch her reflection in the soap-flecked shaving-mirror hanging over the sink while he scraped his beard. He watched her critically, tried to detect some flaw, some change, in her meek servitude. The mirror was a big round iron-framed concave mirror, so that Alice, as she moved slowly about with the fish-pan over the oil-stove, looked physically a little larger, and also vaguer and softer, than she really was. The mirror put flesh on her bony arms and filled out her pinafore. And looking for faults, Holland saw only this softening and magnifying of her instead. Then when he had dried the soap out of his ears and had put on the collar Alice had sponged for him he would sit down to the fish, ready to pounce on some fault in it. But the fish, like Alice, never seemed to vary. Nothing wrong with the fish. He tried bringing home different sorts of fish, untried sorts, tricky for Alice to cook; witch, whiting, sole and halibut, instead of his usual cod and hake. But it made no difference. The fish was always good. And he judged Alice by the fish: if the fish was all right Alice was all right. Upstairs, after supper, he would ask Mrs. Holland: ‘Alice all right to-day?’ and Mrs. Holland would say how quiet Alice was, or how good she was, and how kind she was, and that she couldn’t be without her for the world. ‘Well, that fish was lovely again,’ Holland would say.

  And gradually he saw that he had no need for suspicion. No need to be hard on the kid. She was all right. Leave the kid alone. Let her go on her own sweet way. Not interfere with her. And so he swung round, from the suspicious attitude to one almost of solicitude. Didn’t cost no more to be nice to the kid than it did to be miserable. ‘Well, Alice, how’s Alice?’ The tone of his evening greeting became warmer, a little facetious, more friendly. ‘That’s right, Alice. Nice to be back home in the dry, Alice.’ In the mornings, coming downstairs he had to pass her bedroom door. He would knock on it to wake her. He got up in darkness, running downstairs in his stockinged feet, with his jacket and collar and tie slung over his arm. And pausing at Alice’s door he would say ‘Quart’ t’ seven, Alice. You gittin’ up, Alice?’ Chinks of candlelight round and under the door-frame, or her sleepy voice, would tell him if she were getting up. If the room were in darkness and she did not answer he would knock and call again. ‘Time to git up, Alice. Alice!’ One morning the room was dark and she did not answer at all. He knocked harder again, hard enough to drown any sleepy answer she might have given. Then, hearing nothing and seeing nothing, he opened the door.

  At the very moment he opened the door Alice was bending over the washstand, with a match in her hands, lighting her candle. ‘Oh! Sorry, Alice, I din’t hear you.’ In the moment taken to speak the words Holland saw the girl’s open nightgown, and then her breasts, more than ever like two lemons in the yellow candlelight. The light shone straight down on them, the deep shadow of her lower body heightening their shape and colour, and they looked for a moment like the breasts of a larger and more mature girl than Holland fancied Alice to be.

  As he went downstairs in the winter darkness he kept seeing the mirage of Alice’s breasts in the candlelight. He was excited. A memory of Mrs. Holland’s large dropsical body threw the young girl’s breasts into tender relief. And time seemed to sharpen the comparison. He saw Alice bending over the candle, her nightgown undone, at recurrent intervals throughout the day. Then in the evening, looking at her reflection in the shaving-mirror, the magnifying effect of the mirror magnified his excitement. And upstairs he forgot to ask if Alice was all right.

  In the morning he was awake a little earlier than usual. The morning was still like night. Black mist shut out the river. He went along the dark landing and tapped at Alice’s door. When there was no answer he tapped again and called, but nothing happened. Then he put his hand on the latch and pressed it. The door opened. He was so surprised that he did not know for a moment what to do. He was in his shirt and trousers, with the celluloid collar and patent tie and jacket in his hand, and no shoes on his feet.

  He stood for a moment by the bed and then he stretched out his hand and shook Alice. She did not wake. Then he put his hand on her chest and let it rest there. He could feel the breasts unexpectedly soft and alive, through the nightgown. He touched one and then the other.

  Suddenly Alice woke.

  ‘All right, Alice. Time to git up, that’s all,’ Holland said. ‘I was trying to wake you.’

  V

  ‘I ’spect you want to git home week-ends, don’t you, Alice?’ Mrs. Holland said.

  Alice had been at the mill almost a week. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

  ‘Well, we reckoned you’d like to go home a’ Sundays, anyway. Don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Well, you go home this week, and then see. Only it means cold dinner for Fred a’ Sundays if you go.’

  So after breakfast on Sunday morning Alice walked across the flat valley and went home. The gas-tarred house, the end one of a row on the edge of the town, seemed cramped and a little strange after the big rooms at the mill and the bare empty fields and the river.

  ‘Well, how d’ye like it?’ Hartop said.

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Don’t feel homesick?’

  ‘No, I don’t mind.’

  Alice laid her five shillings on the table. ‘That’s my five shillings,’ she said. ‘Next Sunday I ain’t coming. What shall I do about the money?’

  ‘You better send it,’ Hartop said. ‘It ain’t no good to you there if you keep it, is it? No shops, is they?’

  ‘I don’t know. I ain’t been out.’

  ‘Well, you send it.’ Then suddenly Hartop changed his mind. ‘No, I’ll tell you what. You keep it and we’ll call for it a’ Friday. We can come round that way.’

  ‘All right,’ Alice said.

  ‘If you ain’t coming home,’ Mrs. Hartop said, ‘you’d better take a clean nightgown. And I’ll bring another Friday.’

  And so she walked back across the valley in the November dusk with the nightgown wrapped in brown paper under her arm, and on Friday Hartop stopped the motor-van outside the mill and she went out to him with the five shillings Holland had left on the table that morning. ‘I see your dad about the money, Alice. That’s all right.’ And as she stood by the van answering in her flat voice the questions her father and mother put to her, Hartop put his hand in his pocket and said:

  ‘Like orange, Alice?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, please.’

  Hartop put the orange into her hand. ‘Only mind,’ he said. ‘It’s tacked. It’s just a bit rotten on the side there.’ He leaned out of the driver’s seat and pointed out the soft bluish rotten patch on the orange skin. ‘It’s all right. It ain’t gone much.’

  ‘You gittin’ on all rig
ht, Alice?’ Mrs. Hartop said. She spoke from the gloom of the van seat. Alice could just see her vague clay-coloured face.

  ‘Yes. I’m all right.’

  ‘See you a’ Friday again then.’

  Hartop let off the brake and the van moved away simultaneously as Alice moved away across the mill-yard between the piles of derelict iron. Raw half-mist from the river was coming across the yard in sodden swirls and Alice, frozen, half-ran into the house. Then, in the kitchen, she sat by the fire with her skirt drawn up above her knees, to warm herself.

  She was still sitting like that, with her skirt drawn up to her thighs and her hands outstretched to the fire and the orange in her lap, when Holland came in.

  ‘Hullo, Alice,’ he said genially. ‘I should git on top o’ the fire if I was you.’

  Alice, wretched with the cold, which seemed to have settled inside her, scarcely answered. She sat there for almost a full minute longer, trying to warm her legs, before getting up to cook Holland’s fish. All the time she sat there Holland was looking at her legs, with the skirt pulled up away from them. The knees and the slim thighs were rounded and soft, and the knees and the legs themselves a rosy flame-colour in the firelight. Holland felt a sudden agitation as he gazed at them.

  Then abruptly Alice got up to cook the fish, and the vision of her rose-coloured legs vanished. But Holland, shaving before the mirror, could still see in his mind the soft firelight on Alice’s knees. And the mirror, as before, seemed to magnify Alice’s vague form as it moved about the kitchen, putting some flesh on her body. Then when Holland sat down to his fish Alice again sat down before the fire and he saw her pull her skirt above her knees again as though he did not exist. And all through the meal he sat looking at her. Then suddenly he got tired of merely looking at her. He wanted to be closer to her. ‘Alice, come and ’ave a drop o’ tea,’ he said. ‘Pour yourself a cup out. Come on. You look starved.’ The orange Hartop had given Alice lay on the table, and the girl pointed to it. ‘I’m going to have that orange,’ she said. Holland picked up the orange. ‘All right, only you want summat. Here, I’m going to throw it.’ He threw the orange. It fell into Alice’s lap. And it seemed to Holland that its fall drew her dress a little higher above her knees. He got up. ‘Never hurt you, did I, Alice?’ he said. He ran his hands over her shoulders and arms, and then over her thighs and knees. Her knees were beautifully warm, like hard warm apples. ‘You’re starved though. Your knees are like ice.’ He began to rub her hands a little with his own, and the girl, her flat expression never changing, let him do it. She felt his fingers harsh on her bloodless hands and then on her shoulders. ‘Your chest ain’t cold, is it?’ Holland said. ‘You don’t want to git cold in your chest.’ He was feeling her chest, above the breasts. The girl shook her head. ‘Sure?’ Holland said. He kept his hands on her chest. ‘You put something on when you go out to that van again. If you git cold on your chest …’ And as he was speaking his hands moved down until they covered her breasts. They were so small that he could hold them in his hands. ‘Don’t want to git cold in them, do you?’ he said. ‘In your nellies?’ She stared at him abstractedly, not knowing the word, wondering what he meant. Then suddenly he was squeezing her breasts, in a bungling effort of tenderness. The motion hurt her. ‘Come on, Alice, come on. I shan’t do nothing. Let’s have a look at you, Alice. I don’t want to do nothing, Alice. All right. I don’t want to hurt you. Undo your dress, Alice.’ And the girl, mechanically, to his astonishment, put her hands to the buttons. As they came undone he put his hands on her chest and then on her bare breasts in clumsy and agitated efforts to caress her. She sat rigid, staring, not fully understanding. Every time Holland squeezed her he hurt her. But the mute and fixed look on her face and the grey flat as though motionless stare in her eyes never changed. She listened only vaguely to what Holland said.