Crusoe's Daughter

by Jane Gardam

  ‘Oh dear me, Charlotte,’ said Aunt Frances. ‘We’re very helpless, I’m afraid. We can’t light a fire. Could you help us, Charlotte? Isn’t there some method of making the paper into twists?’

  But there she sat.

  ‘Come along now,’ Aunt Mary swung round from the kettle and the grate with a sooty mark on her face but impressive— remembering herself Sister of Burns. ‘Charlotte, we need you, I’m afraid. We need a fire so that we can make you a cup of tea.’

  A pin fell from Charlotte’s head into her lap, but there she sat.

  Aunt Frances was in the pantry, peeping about under bowls and gauze covers, looking for soup. ‘You need hot soup, dear Charlotte,’ she said. ‘I expect you’ve some nice soup here somewhere . . . There’s always soup,’ she said to us, bewildered, coming back in, ‘always.’

  If I had been alone with Charlotte then, I suppose that things might not have gone as they did. I might have touched her. I hated touching her but I just might have done. I might even have hugged her, although she was, even in her best clothes, so very greasy.

  And yet I might. I went and hung over the back of her rocking-chair instead and began to tip it gently forward and back. ‘No, Polly,’ Aunt Mary said, and Mrs Woods came in.

  Except for the Sunday coffee, Mrs Woods never entered the kitchen and she stood blinking now. Snow was falling again outside but today it hardly lightened the room. The stone floor looked leaden and unswept, the rag-rugs grubby and unshaken. The range was cold. No singing of the kettle or clank of the tin clock on the shelf, no kitchen noises.

  ‘Tea is late,’ announced Mrs Woods. ‘What is Charlotte about?’

  ‘Shush,’ said Aunt Frances. ‘Shush.’

  ‘Certainly not. The funeral is over. Charlotte has been sitting about in her coat for two hours. Charlotte is a Christian woman. It is her duty to rejoice and continue in her path. Light the fire, Charlotte, and bring us our tea.’

  ‘Charlotte!’ she said, and banged her stick on the flags and Charlotte blinked behind her glasses and turned her head and got up.

  ‘That’s better. Quickly now. Polly, go with Charlotte and chop some sticks. She’ll show you. Get the fire going and set a pan of water on it. Then set about the supper with her. There’s yesterday’s mutton-bone. It is Friday but I think we may have a dispensation from fish tonight. In the midst of death we are in life. Stanley has reached a better world.’

  Then Charlotte got up and walked over to the kitchen door and got hold of the latch that Stanley had for so long manhandled. She looked at the draining-board, and then she took off Mrs Wood’s crêpe and folded it and put it down where she had been used to put the sixpences. She looked at it.

  Then she said to Mrs Woods, ‘And who’d bed thee? Who’d ever give thee a bairn? Who’d ever want to bed thee? And what bairn’d ever want thee? What man’d look at thee—a desolate, withered, frosted crow.’

  Then she went out of the back door and we never saw her again.

  In the swirling and gasping and fainting about that followed I had the picture of my two aunts looking at each other quickly and hard and then looking away, printed on my retina like the black sun after you have stared the real sun in the face. There was a sort of muffled moaning and I was alone in the kitchen. The baize door silenced all beyond it and the snow silenced all outside. I sat down on the cold fender and then in time left the kitchen and walked tiptoe, tiptoe, along the clacking tiles to the hall. The house might have been empty. I sat down at Grandfather Younghusband’s desk in the near dark.

  Huge leather top, double glass-and-brass inkstand, papiermaché pen-tray picked out in mother-of-pearl, blotter which had supported the great manuscripts of the Collected Sermons, The Folklore of the North Yorkshire Moors and Thirty Years for Christ in Danby Wiske; the signed photograph of the last but six, Archbishop of York, another of a steel and jet woman filled with wadding—my grandmother; and the brown-pink smudge that was the cheap photograph of my mother.

  I looked at this. Such a tiny woman. There am I lying on her lap, ten months old. The lap is small. I am large and fat and floppy. Look at the fragile bird-bones in my mother’s head, the deep eye sockets, lovely tight-drawn-back and piled-up hair. What a romantic dress she’s wearing with the lace around the shoulders, and the rose. She sits with a foreign landscape all about her—peaks and clouds and misty lakes.

  But there is a crease down the middle of them. It is not a foreign place, it is a photographer’s back-cloth in Liverpool. The lace, Aunt Frances has said, would have been draped around her from his property box and the rose is cloth. Outside the studio is the Liverpool lodging-house, the smelly landing and the awful plumbing: money running short and still no letter from the Captain. No work—she was a teacher, but unable to teach because of me.

  Vigorous Polly. My mother is exhausted. She is the little sister who has always been made much of. Mary and Fanny’s plaything. A school-teacher before she married. A wonderful teacher, they all said. But the baby is too much for her, in black Liverpool, all by herself. She can hardly hold it, laid out on her knee. She isn’t even looking at it.

  Her eyes appeal instead to the photographer—‘Why have I got this great ungainly thing?’ she says. ‘I never wanted it. I am a child myself. Why does the blood have to start running down the legs?’

  I heard voices at last outside the study door. Dead Emma’s sisters coming downstairs after putting Mrs Woods to bed. Whispering.

  Aunt Frances: ‘Don’t. She can’t help it. It’s because Polly heard.’

  Aunt Mary: ‘It’s not that. Agnes would have found it terrible whoever had heard. Even I. Even you.’

  Aunt Frances: ‘Polly—would she understand?’

  Aunt Mary: ‘Of course not.’

  Aunt Frances: ‘Did Polly understand about Stanley?’

  A pause. A rattling about in the umbrella-stand. Aunt Frances said, ‘We should have taken him. It was wrong to take in the mother and not the son. They should have stayed together. We divided them.’

  ‘The sister was a good woman. She made no differences. Stanley liked Charlotte. He never doubted she was his aunt. And it meant he could live in a family.’

  “What a family.’

  ‘Of his class. With a man about. Boys need a man about.’

  ‘Drunk all day in bed.’

  ‘Stanley and Charlotte saw each other every week of their lives. And she had sinned, Frances.’

  ‘Oh—sinned.’

  ‘Sinned.’

  ‘I must go and find Charlotte.’

  ‘You must not. She’ll be back with her sister. There’s still sickness in that house. You’ll carry it back with you again. Haven’t we had enough?’

  Aunt Frances: ‘Where will she get anything? Any work?’

  Aunt Mary: ‘I’ll speak to someone. The nuns. I shan’t of course be able to give a very good account of her. I shall have to pray about whether I am to conceal the outburst.’

  Aunt Frances: ‘The boy was her own. We took him from her. Where is Polly?’

  Aunt Mary: ‘In her bedroom. No. We put things right, if there was ever any wrong, when we took in Polly. We saved a child in Polly. I’m going to Father Pocock. Look—Father’s door is open. Shut it.’

  The study-door was pulled half-shut, but I could still hear them.

  ‘Father can’t hear us, Mary.’

  ‘Thank God. Thank God.’

  ‘For glory’s—D’you think nothing of this sort happened on the Yorkshire moors? Haven’t you read his folk-lore book? I’ve often wondered about Mother if you want to know. Emma was nothing like either of us and she came when Father was almost a fossil. And Polly’s like none of us either. But Father and Mother would never have separated a mother and child. Never, whatever else went on.’

  ‘Father was a saint.’

  ‘However can we know?’

  ‘Frances, shut Father’s door. He is out of reach. We can expect no message from him. He was a man of God.’

  The stud
y-door was then properly shut, the vestibule-door, the front-door shut, and through the study-window I saw Aunt Mary go gliding by round the side of the house, the white bow at a frenzied angle. It was almost completely dark in the study now and Grandfather’s portrait a blank. I looked to where Robinson Crusoe stood upon the shelf and thought of that straightforward, strong and sexless man sitting alone in the sunshine. How easy and beautiful life had been for him.

  It is usually just fancy when you say that someone ‘changed from that moment’. When a change starts is a matter for the angels, and even they may disagree. Historians can never be certain of anything. Dates as we know are meaningless. The Great War ‘began’ in 1914 and the world ‘changed’. But when did the change really begin? With a student who by chance was sitting in a café when the Archduke’s carriage turned down a sidestreet by mistake?

  Long, long before.

  And so with people. Often the intention is definable—the moment when we say, ‘From now on I shall do this, do that.’ But the change itself proceeds waveringly—and of course often does not proceed at all.

  But changes—huge changes—do take place, and in spite of the libraries of Freudian evidence to the contrary, the deep stamp of past years and even of dreams can be eradicated, washed away, and new people can emerge: and it will be a bad day for novels when this is not so.

  After the departure of Charlotte, Aunt Frances changed, and the moment was as precise as a birth and as astonishing and as complete. A plumpish woman, conciliatory, with a face that always nodded and smiled agreement or kept whispers of discord to another room, became, all at once, brisk, energetic, unflinching. Her physical appearance changed. She grew thin. Her body became more defined under its clothes. The clothes changed, seemed to be cut tighter and made from stiffer stuff. Frogging like a soldier’s appeared across her day-dresses and her soft foulards for tea-parties looked almost tailored. Her dress-maker suits which had always looked rather too big and hemmy disappeared and she wore tailor-made coats of tweed. Roses vanished from her summer straws and the spectacles which she had kept semi-secretly in the floppy bag that went about with her (that went too) she kept all day upon her nose.

  She began to go out a great deal, to take up church work of her own. She even ‘took on a District’ which meant that she and I carried large quantities of soup about a number of streets at the Works—and the streets were indeed at the Works—deep in among their furnaces: back-to-back rows of gritty, filthy houses, with women standing on their doorsteps watching us walk along, scratching the backs of their folded arms or their heavy dull hair; tired landladies of eight or ten men who slept in shifts in their tiny back bedrooms, and often drank every penny of the rent.

  The new Aunt Frances strode into these houses dispensing medicine and advice as well as soup, even over the medicine she did not consult Aunt Mary. She took sweets for the children, old clothes, her own old picture-books, our left-overs of cake and biscuits and stews in jars. She never spoke of these visits at the yellow house, even to me after we were home. Often as we came back we passed Lady Vipont from The Hall in her semi-holy uniform sliding past us in her motor car, a maid beside the chauffeur with other soup-cans on her knee, but neither did Aunt Frances speak of this, nor of any other new acquaintances, and brought a face to the dining-table full of private thoughts. Fortunately for us, for Aunt Frances would probably have been the only one of us able to take on the management of the yellow house after Charlotte, we now had the Vicar’s Alice to look after us.

  For the day of the departure of Charlotte did not end with the revelations through the study door. When at last that night I had crept out of the study, cold and sick, I had found Aunt Frances still seated out in the hall, under the great crucifix Grandfather Younghusband had brought home from his Italian honeymoon, upon an upright chair.

  ‘Oh Polly!’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘Oh Polly. Oh my dear!’

  We looked at each other and she covered her face.

  ‘Your aunt and I are wicked women. We are Dives to Charlotte’s Lazarus.’

  ‘You couldn’t be Dives, Aunt Frances—not you. You’d never leave somebody starving at gates. And you gave him a penny, often.’

  ‘So cruel,’ said the chrysalis Aunt Frances.

  ‘But Aunt Mary and Mrs Woods must have thought about it and worked it all out for a long long time—prayed to do right?’

  ‘No. They make decisions so fast. I wasn’t consulted, oh, I should so have liked some children in this house.’

  ‘Aunt Frances, do you like Mrs Woods?’

  The chrysalis looked frightened.

  ‘Why does she have to live here?’

  ‘She has always been very fond of us, Polly. Could you light the lamps? She has no money, you know. She was left in penury. Now we’ll see if we can boil a little pan of water on the drawing-room fire. We might make some tea or warm some milk. Aunt Mary will soon be back.’

  ‘Could I tell you something?’

  ‘Well anything, dear.’

  ‘It’s—Aunt, could I go away? I want to. All the time, I didn’t know until now. I think it’s father having being a sailor.’

  ‘But wherever could you go at thirteen?’

  ‘Anywhere. To sea if I could. I know I’m lucky. To be living here. I do love you, Aunt Frances, but—’

  ‘But we are your family. You are our sister’s child.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Your mother was very—young.’

  ‘You can’t call people ages.’

  For a flicker she looked sharp. The chrysalis was beginning to thin.

  ‘Emma’s age never changed. She was always young. As a child she was genuinely young of course: very full of life.’

  ‘But I’m young and I’m empty of life. I just am. I sit thinking about myself all the time. I can’t—sort of ever forget myself and how I have to be. All the hymn-words spring up and the Collects, Creeds and Epistles. There doesn’t seem anything else.’

  ‘Oh there is, dear.’

  I was surprised to see out of the window that a drunken fight was taking place, out in a narrow street—sailors, screeching women, policemen. Dirty people crowding to look down out of opposite windows. It all faded.

  ‘I’d like to know about it. I did once I think.’

  She looked puzzled and then said, ‘Yes, I know. I never did.’

  The milk swelled up to the top of the pan and poured insolently over the drawing room coals.

  ‘What a fearful smell,’ came Aunt Mary’s voice from the hall.

  ‘Oh please be good,’ said the chrysalis, thickening up again.

  ‘There must be more than being good.’

  ‘How like Emma.’

  ‘It is dull.’

  ‘It is very wicked,’ said Aunt Frances, sounding uncertain, ‘to find life dull. It is we who are dull by bringing to life insufficient light. Father Pocock—Polly, if you would only consider being Con—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just for the Instruction. The Theology. To learn of the eternal ecstasy waiting for the redeemed—’ her voice was hollow, it echoed like the bell at church; I felt that she was listening to it without confidence—‘and he could give you an hour or so of Latin—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I have here’, said Aunt Mary sweeping in, ‘Father Pocock’s Alice. She is lent to us. What a good, good man! Oh dear there is milk on the fire-irons—even the coals in the scuttle. Alice just take away the soiled pieces of coal to the kitchen, please, with the pan and then bring a cloth to the hearth. The milk on the coal is unsightly. What is this, Polly?’

  ‘I tell Polly that she should not find life dull.’

  ‘Indeed no. Most certainly not. After today. But at least the day is nearly over now and we have Alice. At least temporarily. Soon there will be a nice fire in the kitchen again.’

  ‘I will go with her,’ said Aunt Frances. ‘She shall start properly with proper help and she shall sleep in the
spare room at first—yes—until Charlotte’s room is ready for her!’

  As Aunt Frances stepped into the light in her new vigour Mrs Woods receded further into shadow. Aunt Mary stayed in her twilight and I was kept so busy with my new duties that I had no time to see myself in any light at all. The music-lessons dwindled as Aunt Frances spent more and more time with the nuns at the Chaplaincy of The Rood, but the French and German were piled on hard—especially the German. For two days of the week only German conversation was allowed—German which Aunt Frances could not speak. This I soon understood was so that Mrs Woods might make a bond with me—or rather so that she could feel that she had me in bond. But Aunt Frances did not notice and my German days she simply spent away from home. And so passed two years.

  Then one day a second metamorphosis took place at breakfast-time—though like the Great War we later saw the long and clanking chain that had made its way right up to the table-leg. Mrs Woods came into the room one evening quite lavender with cold from her walk home from the Celebration of the Holy Innocents and said, ‘So Father Pocock is leaving us!’ and Aunt Frances fainted clean away.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know. I thought everyone must know. I had no intention of causing shocks,’ said Mrs Woods. Her chest was going up and down. The lavender had turned to two flushed marks on her ivory cheek-bones and a smudge of purple round the mouth.

  For it seemed that Aunt Frances—and nobody had ever dreamed of it, though (a clank from the table-leg) I did seem to remember some things Charlotte had half-said when I was a child—that Aunt Frances and Mr Pocock had been deeply concerned with one another for many years.

  Looking back, I remembered the familiar silhouette of the two of them together, sometimes on the marsh, Mr Pocock accompanying her half-way home from the weekday service; and the dress and brooch for the Thursday tea; but as the Thursday tea had been the only social engagement of the week the brooch had never seemed to us unbridled. Only perhaps in one or two silences in the drawing-room when I had come in unexpectedly—I had always of course knocked; I thought that they had probably been saying some prayers—and in the way that Father Pocock always ignored Aunt Frances at the church-porch at his public greasy handshaking, had there been anything out of the common. Aunt Frances until Stanley’s death had often been ignored, and if she did anything un-ignorable, Mrs Woods had at once set her straight about it. The sound of these intense, feverish settings-right upon the stairs as the two women went up their separate ways to bed had been an agony to me for years. When the voices were raised sufficiently to hear words, I had often gone down beneath the bed-clothes, not at all knowing why, and once when things became too much even for the eiderdown and three blankets to muffle I had run along the landing pretending a visit to the bathroom and passed Aunt Frances, flushed, standing up four-square to Mrs Woods, who was looking at her with what seemed hatred and banging her stick on the rug until the sea-asters and arrow-grasses trembled in their oil-green bowl.