Crusoe's Daughter

by Jane Gardam

  ‘Please,’ I said in the silence, ‘I simply can’t.’

  ‘We could of course, Polly, order you to come.’

  ‘Please—’

  ‘My dear of course you’ll come,’ said Aunt Frances.

  ‘She must come, and Father Pocock must speak to her afterwards,’ said Mrs Woods. The tight veil of her morning hat had left diamonds all over her cheeks and these always lasted as far as the duff. Today they were looking very deeply ingrained under a flush such as I’d not seen before. ‘This of course is because she is not Confirmed.’

  ‘I can’t come,’ I said to Aunt Frances sadly. If we had been alone I would have told her then about the angel. ‘I’ve a feeling—’

  ‘You are ill,’ said Aunt Mary, and Mrs Woods perked up.

  ‘No. I’m not. It’s just—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The eleven o’clock all seemed so—’

  ‘This morning was a little—long,’ said Aunt Frances.

  ‘No it all seemed so—I felt that I was being told that it was—well a bit of a waste of time.’

  ‘Felt told?’

  ‘Yes. That it was all—stupid, somehow.’

  ‘Stupid!’

  ‘Yes. All the dreary people dirging away. And the sad music. On such a lovely day. I’ve wanted to say for ages—.’

  ‘Polly!’

  ‘That awful giant crucifix with the dead body and the blood-drips all carved in wood. And that ghastly face with the thorns all hung over one eye.’

  ‘Go to your room.’

  I went, and Aunt Mary followed. ‘You are to stay here until supper-time. After Evensong I will speak to Father Pocock.’

  When she was gone there was a pause and then a creak in the passage and then Charlotte came in. I knew she had been listening downstairs—she often listened at the dining-room door. She said, ‘Well, you’ve done it. Whatever’s got into you?’ and sat down on the end of my bed which sank beneath her. She scratched her thighs through her apron and regarded her fat feet and flexed them. She had not sat on my bed before. She felt that my rebellion had drawn us closer and I felt frightened a little.

  ‘You don’t look so well,’ she said. ‘Peaky. You’re blue under the eyes. D’you want a drop of something?’

  ‘No thank you, Charlotte.’

  ‘Drop of gin.’

  ‘Gin?’

  ‘I keep a drop for my bad times. Wait on.’

  She brought me an inch and a half of clear-looking water in a tumbler. ‘Knock it down,’ she said, so I did and gave a yell and began coughing until I thought I’d die. ‘It’s awful. It’s poison. Is it a punishment?’

  ‘Punishment? It is not. Who’d do you favours? My word—punishment.’

  Warmth was tearing about inside me. I lay still. Joyful heat sprang down my veins until even my fingers and toes were delighted. ‘Oh my! Charlotte!’ I said.

  ‘Nothing like it. Go to sleep.’ She went off with the empty glass. At the door she said, ‘Are you right?’

  ‘Yes. Much better. I had a pain.’

  ‘Thought as much. Why didn’t you tell them?’

  ‘It wasn’t the pain. It was the angel. I saw an angel on the marsh.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘It told me—well, that I can’t go on with them. With church and so on. It’s silly. Now.’

  ‘The angel said this, then?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘I’d angel it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d angel it. The idea! Go on, you must. You’re twelve. As I must at near forty. Beggars can’t choose. You mind your step. It’s fine for angels.’

  ‘But I don’t believe in it. All the—oh please never tell them, but—all the church. I’ve found out you see. It’s acting lies to go on. I have acted lies, Charlotte. For years and years.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to act lies more. What harm’s it do? You’ll never change them downstairs. Act along with them, poor souls. It’s least return. You can’t break with them at twelve. All they’ve got’s God—and you.’

  When she’d gone I drifted into a haze of gin, and thought about it. I knew that I did not like Charlotte. I knew that there was something she kept hidden and hostile inside her. At the same time I knew—though how?—that she had known a world outside Oversands, a bad uncertain complex knockabout world and the one I wanted.

  I dozed and woke to the face of Aunt Frances looking down miserably at me. ‘Come down, dear,’ she said. ‘We’ve sent for Father Pocock now instead of after Evensong. He wants to have a little talk with you.’

  ‘I can’t.’ I shut my eyes.

  ‘Polly, please.’ But I lay still and imagined the angel, huge, untroubled as he rose off the far roof-top and stood supreme in the fat clouds, smiling.

  Aunt Mary and Mrs Woods came next, together. Mrs Woods as usual with her face a little turned away and keeping over near the door.

  ‘Polly, at once please,’ said Aunt Mary in her very rare Commander of Burns voice. ‘Whatever do you smell of? Come along.’

  ‘I’ve a pain.’

  ‘You have not!’ said Mrs Woods, her face flushing again the alarming red through the African sallow. ‘Father Pocock is being kept waiting. A child to keep Father Pocock waiting!’

  ‘This is presumably the mother,’ she added, to the wall.

  I looked at them both as the angel’s ankle-wings and golden soles passed up into the clouds, staining them for a moment with radiance. Then I smiled at Mrs Woods, for I was suddenly unaccountably happy and quite without a sense of sin. And she did look so ridiculously dreadful.

  I rolled sideways out of the bed—I was in all my clothes—and said, ‘Oh well, all right then Mrs Woods, I’m coming,’ and tumbled upright onto the white sheepskin-rug and found that blood was pouring all down my legs.

  I don’t know which of the three of us was more frightened. Mrs Woods was suddenly not with us any more. Aunt Mary in her nurse’s drapes drew herself up to the height of the ceiling and said, ‘I shall get Frances,’ and vanished, too, and I stood drunk and shaking and thinking of the crucifixion. ‘I’m bleeding to death,’ I said to Aunt Frances as she tiptoed in. ‘No, no dear, you’re not,’ she said. ‘I’ll get Charlotte.’

  So I wrapped myself in a sheet and huddled on the rug and lay down and heard my teeth chattering. I rocked myself and I caught the mandarin watching me. I knew that it was wrong that he should see. I hid my face in my knees.

  But when I looked up again he was still staring with distaste so I crawled to his shelf to put him away out of sight and dropped him on the black hearth stone and he smashed to pieces.

  Charlotte arrived with bandage things, looking important, and made the bed with fresh sheets and said, ‘Well, it’s a fine set-on, this. I wonder whatever they’re telling the parson? I’ve had to take them all in a tray of sherry. Two o’clock in the afternoon! I suppose they’ll say you’re ill.’

  ‘I am ill, Charlotte. I’m dying. There’ll have to be a doctor.’ I could hear my teeth knocking about in my jaw.

  ‘Can I go back to bed? I’ve broken the mandarin.’

  ‘I see that. But you’re not dying. Don’t you honestly know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘About growing up?’

  ‘Only about being Confirmed. Is it because I won’t be Confirmed?’

  ‘No. It happens to everyone. Christians too. But it’s happened to you young.’

  ‘Everyone? To everyone? To good people? To Father Pocock?’

  ‘Not to men. To women.’

  ‘All women? To you?’

  ‘All women. Even to them downstairs once over, poor old faggots.’

  I forgot that I was bleeding to death.

  ‘Charlotte! Shut up.’

  ‘You shut up yourself,’ she said, ‘great lady. If you want to know what’s up with you get back into bed and I’ll tell you,’ and she began to go about the room picking up the shattered mandarin, rolling up the terrible shame of the sheepskin
rug as she gave me her version of our common female doom. I listened with horror, not only at the obscenity she was telling me but because it was she who had been chosen to tell me; and because she knew the shock it was and that she was enjoying herself enormously and would enjoy the retelling in the Evensong gallery even more. ‘Now’, I thought, ‘I shall always hate her and now she will always despise me.’ I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep.

  She crept to the door at last and uttered the last foulness. ‘Keep yourself nice and warm now. At these times. That’s my way anyhow. Nice and warm. Don’t wash yourself too much and never take a bath. You’re a lady now. Keep well wrapped up. I know I do.’

  The idea of Charlotte. These bits of cloth. Where did she put hers? Oh unspeakable. Were they in the bag with the crusts? The house achieved its Sunday afternoon silence and I suppose I must have sunk into some sort of unconsciousness, too.

  When I woke it seemed many days later, though the sun was still at afternoon. I was feeling very well—wide awake and tough and quite unlike myself. Perhaps I was still drunk. ‘Angels,’ I thought. ‘Blood. It’s dreams.’

  ‘It didn’t happen,’ I thought, ‘any of it,’ and I went to the bathroom and noisily, with the door open, I filled the iron bath to the top from both taps. At that time of day it was almost cold but I undressed and jumped in. Still silence in the house, though I splashed tremendously. Sherry perhaps—and shock. I dried myself and left my clothes all over the floor, tied a towel about me and went back to my room and put on a completely new set—everything of the best, topping it all off with my velvet Christmas dress and indoor pumps rather than the stygian boots. I sang a bit and made plenty of noise going down the stairs and getting into my coat in the hall. I pulled down a wool tam-o-shanter over my head, arranged my pigtails over each shoulder and marched into the study. Canon Younghusband’s eyebrows seemed to rise and fall as I pulled a great fat edition off one of his shelves, for no book was meant to leave his shrine, let alone the house—or indeed even the shelf it was on if it was a Sunday and it was a novel.

  The book was Robinson Crusoe, a book that I knew very well. Today it was going where it and I would feel at home. I pushed it inside the front of my coat and set off, giving both inner and outer door a slam, for the wide sea-shore.

  The wind was tremendous over the dunes but the beach was in full sunlight and I walked fast and then ran and then walked again until I began to be aware of my fingers and toes again after the bath.

  The aches and pains of the past few days had gone and I felt springy. Rather pleased with myself. I considered my body and that it was taking decisions by itself as it must have done, and my mother’s must have done when it got born, as presumably it would when I died. I felt excited. There was much less to fuss about in life than I had thought. The big things it seemed were to be taken out of my hands.

  I wanted to kiss someone.

  Robinson Crusoe hard against my chest, I climbed the seawall and jumped down and began to run across the huge white beach. The wind battered me, the sun shone on me and the sea was far away with a silver line along the edge of it. The horizon was broken, so broken and curved that it seemed strange it had taken everyone so long to know that the world was round—smoke then ship came sailing towards me, ship then smoke went sailing away.

  But, perhaps we had always known really. Perhaps in some aspect of us, we all know everything. Perhaps in some sort of memory I had even known this business of the blood. Perhaps everything is arranged.

  The bay disappeared in the direction of the fishermen’s cottages and mist, and in the other direction it stretched to the Works standing along the estuary like a line of ironclads. Steam drifted from them in plumes and turned into cream and purple clouds which took charge of the sky. The Works were ‘a disgrace’, said Mrs Woods, ‘against nature’, but Aunt Mary said there would be starvation here without them. Aunt Frances said that they made for our wonderful sunsets. I thought only that they were a marvel.

  The chimneys of them now stood out against the dropping sun and I sat down in the middle of the beach on some dry sea-weed and dug my heels into it and opened Robinson Crusoe. ‘Evil,’ I read, as I had read before—

  EVIL

  I am cast upon a horrible deso-

  late island, void of all hope of recovery. I am singled out and

  separated, as it were, from all the world to be miserable.

  but

  GOOD

  . . . I am alive and not drowned

  . . . I am singled out . . . to be spared from death, and He that miraculously saved me from death can deliver me from this condition.

  ‘I am singled out’. ‘Separated’. Years of solemn sermons floating scarcely listened to over my head came floating back, striking warning chords. Pride. Beware Pride—But I always had felt separated, singled out. It was why she’d gone for me so in Wales. Why she’d thrown the chip-pan and hit me. Got me out of bed and screamed at me. ‘Watching me all the time,’ she had said, ‘you in your separate place.’ Then she would hug me.

  I blinked then at the beautiful page of Robinson Crusoe because I had only just remembered the chip-pan and the screaming. That page would always now be her great face. I must be right. Somewhere inside we do know everything about ourselves. There is no real forgetting. Perhaps we know somewhere, too, about all that is to come.

  I watched the wind send tremendous ribbons of sand snaking the beach like whips.

  EVIL

  I am divided from mankind, a solitaire, one banished

  but

  GOOD

  I am not starved and perishing

  on a barren place, affording no

  sustenance.

  The sea’s edge ruffled up now and then in a splash. I willed the day to grow even colder and tax me a bit more.

  EVIL

  I am without any defence or

  means to resist

  but

  GOOD

  I am cast on an island where

  I see no wild beasts.

  I should have liked him, I thought, Robinson. He liked to set things straight. To put down the hopeful things. So sensible and brave. So strong and handsome. He made a huge effort at self-respect. He was a man of course, so it would be easier. He didn’t have blood pouring out of himself every four weeks until he was old. He would never feel disgusting.

  EVIL

  I have no soul to speak to or relieve me . . .

  Nobody much was about on my beach either. I saw a distant sea-coal gatherer with his hand-cart, then a far-away grasshopper sitting up on a high bicycle with small children grasshoppers following on theirs—fashionable people from the terraces, ‘people we don’t know socially’, as the aunts said. Behind them was only the sea—the long, crocodile rocks.

  The wind dropped and the beach was full of small blue scallops of light as the sun went lower in the sky, saucer-shaped dents. A million, and each one of them shone. ‘Having now brought my mind a little to relish my condition,’ I read, ‘and given over looking at the sea . . .’ and I looked up myself and saw, far away towards the works, a bouncing dark dot.

  I thought it was a bird at first, but then at once knew that it was too big. Up and down it danced on the sand, growing all the time, and soon I could hear something—perhaps just the clatter from the foundries blowing across unevenly in the wind.

  But the noise was not a clatter. It was a thudding, and quite soon it was a crying and calling. Head-on the small black triangle bounced and for seconds together seemed to get no nearer, but to be some little insistent machine or spring capering on the same spot.

  Then it was quite near and it was a pony and trap, the trap polished very smart, with graceful shafts and a basketwork body slung between high wheels. Two people sat in it, a girl and a boy, the girl holding the reins and the boy with a long arm across the seat behind her. The girl was hatless and her hair was flying. The boy was watching how she did as the pony galloped, its head stiff and sideways and white froth blo
wing round its black mouth. Under the wheels the sand splattered out from all the blue saucers of light. It was a picture of joy.

  When they came near the boy called out, ‘Woah, Hey up!’ and looked over in my direction, and called again, and the gallop slowed to a canter and then a trot and the pony made a circle and the trap came squeaking and bouncing near to me and stopped. It stopped, then started again. Stopped. Then came up within a few feet of the seaweed, crunching the sand, everyone gasping.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said the boy. ‘Are you a mermaid?’ The girl said nothing but shook her dark red hair about and fussed over the reins.

  ‘Freezing with a book,’ said the boy. He behaved like a man. He was nearly a man. He looked as if everything in the world was well known to him and followed a good set of rules, which he kept and was happy. Yet there was wariness about him too, as if perhaps all he knew had been thought out only on the outside. When he smiled he looked as if he found ridiculous things very nice and when he didn’t smile he looked serious and good. The girl who had bigger, less careful eyes and a beak of a nose looked as if she didn’t smile very often. She was examining me slowly and I saw the eyes were green. I did not like her. I also remembered her, for it was Rebecca Zeit who had burned the hymn-books.

  ‘What’s the book?’ asked the boy, looking down, tall and kind. They were far above me. I started reading again. He said, ‘Oh I’m sorry. I’m Theo Zeit. My sister, Rebecca. We’re from the new house. The one on the marsh that never gets finished. It’s to be our holiday home. The one with a tower.’

  After a while I found I had said—still looking at the book—that I was Polly Flint. From the yellow house. Oversands.

  I read

  but

  GOOD

  God hath wondrously sent . . .

  ‘We must get back,’ he said, ‘we’re fearfully late. We’re picknicking up in the rafters. Then we’ve a long way to go home.’