The River Read online

  Bea raised her head. ‘I suppose he is,’ said Bea, and she added uncertainly, ‘Bother.’

  ‘Yes. Bother,’ said Harriet. ‘Bother! Bother! Bother!’

  ‘We must have a quiet winter this year,’ Mother had said. ‘The world is too unhappy for anything else. There are hurt men and women, and children dying of hunger …’

  ‘Oh, Mother!’ said Harriet, wriggling.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mother firmly, ‘think of Captain John.’

  ‘I don’t want to think of Captain John,’ said Harriet with a feeling of fixed hard naughtiness. ‘Why should there be a Captain John?’ she asked angrily. ‘Or if there must be, why should he want to come here?’

  Captain John had come because he had to try to pick up again the threads of living and of earning his living. He had been a prisoner of war and escaped, only to go for more than a year to hospital. He had been tortured in the prison camp, but he was wounded before he went there. He was a young man, or had been a young man, but now his stiff grey face was any age; he had a stiff body, one leg was amputated at the hip, and he had a heavy artificial one that made him more jerky still. The children were warned to be careful of what they said to him. He eschewed grown-ups, but he seemed to like to come into the nursery. Why does he, wondered Harriet. What does he want? He seemed to want something. To be hungry. For what? At first he liked Victoria best, and this was surprising to Harriet because Victoria treated him in a matter-of-fact, off-hand way, that was shocking.

  ‘You mustn’t, Victoria,’ Harriet told her. ‘Captain John was so brave. He stayed there in the battle until his leg was shot off.’

  Victoria’s brown eyes rested thoughtfully on Captain John. ‘Why didn’t he stay until the other leg was shot off?’ she asked.

  But he still seemed to like Victoria best.

  ‘Did Victoria ask him to come tonight?’ said Harriet now. ‘Or did Mother?’

  There was a silence, and then: ‘No one asked him,’ said Bea. ‘He asked me.’

  ‘Asked you?’ said Harriet. ‘But …’ She had thought that grown-up people did not ask for things.

  ‘He seemed to want to come,’ said Bea.

  Harriet stared across the table, but all she could see of Bea’s face was her forehead and the withdrawn sealed look of her lids as she studied her book. The shadow of her ribbon made a mark of shadow, like a moth, on her cheek. She had withdrawn even further into herself than usual.

  Harriet’s river was a great slowly flowing mile-wide river between banks of mud and white sand, with fields flat to the horizon, jute fields and rice fields under a blue weight of sky. ‘If there is any space in me,’ Harriet said, when she was grown up, ‘it is from that sky.’

  The river emptied itself, through the delta, into the Bay of Bengal, its final sea. There was life in and over its flowing; an indigenous life of fish, of crocodiles and of porpoises that somersaulted in and out of the water, their hides grey and bronze and bubble-blue in the sun; rafts of water hyacinths floated on it and flowered in the spring. There was a traffic life on the river; there were black-funnelled, paddle-wheeled mail steamers that sent waves against the bank and other steamers towing flat jute barges; there were country boats, wicker on wooden hulls, that had eyes painted on their prows and sets of tattered sails to put up in the wind; there were fishing boats, crescents lying in the water, and there were fishermen with baskets, wading in the shallows on skinny black legs, throwing fine small nets that brought up finger-length fishes shining in the mesh. The fish were part of the traffic, and each part was animated by a purpose of its own, and the river bore them all down on its flow.

  The small town was sunk in the even tenor of Bengali life, surrounded by fields and villages and this slow river. It had mango groves and water tanks, and one main street with a bazaar, a mosque with a white dome and a temple with pillars and a silver roof, the silver made of hammered-out kerosene tins.

  Harriet and the children knew the bazaar intimately; they knew the kite shop where they bought paper kites and sheets of thin exquisite bright paper; they knew the shops where a curious mixture was sold of Indian cigarettes and betel nut, pan, done up in leaf bundles, and coloured pyjama strings and soda water; they knew the grain shops and the spice shops and the sweet shops with their smell of cooking sugar and ghee, and the bangle shops, and the cloth shop where bolts of cloth showed inviting patterns of feather and scallop prints, and the children’s dresses, pressed flat like paper dresses, hung and swung from the shop fronts.

  There was only one road. It was built high among the fields so that the monsoon floods would not cover it; it went through villages and sprawling bazaars, and over humpbacked bridges, past bullock carts and walking people and an occasional car. It stretched across country, with the flat Bengal plain rolling to the horizon and clumps of villages, built up like the road, in mounds of mango, banana and coconut trees. Soon the bauhinia tress would bud along the road, their flowers white and curved like shells. Now the fields were dry, but each side of the road was water left from the flood that covered the plain in the rains; it showed under the floating patches of water hyacinth, and kingfishers, with a flash of brilliant blue, whirred up and settled on the telegraph wires, showing their russet breasts.

  The river came into view from the road, its width showing only a line of the further bank, its near bank broken with buildings and patches of bazaar and high walls and corrugated-iron warehouses and mill chimneys. Small boats, covered in wicker-work cowls, put out from one bank to ferry across to the other. In boats like that the children went fishing for pearls. The pearls were sunset river pearls, but it was the divers, not the children, who found them; the children could not get their hooks to go deep enough; the divers dived naked to the riverbed.

  The children lived in the Big House of the Works. The Works were spread away from the bazaar along the river with the firm’s houses and gardens on the further side. The life of every family is conditioned by the work of its elders; think of a doctor’s house, or a writer’s, a musician’s or a missionary’s. It is necessary for the whole family to live in the conditions that such work brings; for these children it was jute.

  The jute grew in the fields; they knew all its processes: from the seed which their father germinated and experimented with at the Government Farm, through its young growth, when they could not ride their ponies across country, to the reaping and steeping in the water along the road, in dykes along the fields, when its stench would hang over the whole land. They saw it come in on country boats, on bullock carts, into the Works and the piles of it lying in the sheds for carding and cleaning and grading, while the great presses went up and down and the bales were tumbled out of them, silky and flaxen with a strong jute smell. They saw it go away to the steamers; the steamers and flats were piled high with it and took it down the river to the mills of Calcutta.

  The sound of the Works came over the wall: the noise of trucks running on their tracks, wagons pushed by hand by brown, sweating coolies, of the presses working and of machinery and the sound of bellows and iron on iron from the foundry, and the clang of the weighing points, the shouting of the tally clerks, the bumping down of the bales and always the regular puff of escaping steam, puff-wait-puff; it was like a pulse in the background of the children’s lives. In the inner dimness of the press-rooms was the sheen of the press-tubes, of brass locks, going down with the pale shining heaps of jute that came up again as bales. There was a smell there of jute dust and coal, steam and hot oil and human sweat, that was one of the accompanying smells of their childhood, like the smell of cess and incense and frying ghee in the bazaar and of honey from the mustard and radish flowers when they were out in the fields, and in season, the stench of steeping jute. There were thousands of coolies in the Works, though they were as impersonal as ants to the children. (Bogey used to eat ants to make him wise.) In the concrete-built, double-floored offices there were scores of clerks, babus, in white muslin shirts and dhoties; the children used sometimes to go with
their mother to visit the babus’ wives and they were given coconut shredded with sugar and ‘sandesh’, a toffee stuck with silver paper. The firm had its own fleet of launches, called after Indian birds: the ‘Osprey’, the ‘Hoopoe’, the ‘Oriole’, the ‘Cormorant’, the ‘Snipe’; each had its own crew. There were porters or peons, with yellow turbans and staves to guard the gates.

  Beyond the Works was the White House, where the Senior Assistant lived, and the Red House where the Junior Assistants all lived together, and the Little House where the Engineer lived. They stood in their own gardens beside the Big House garden.

  Other firms were scattered up and down the river, and to them assistants came, young men from England and Scotland, usually from Scotland, even from Greece, who came out raw and young to learn the trade and ended up as magnates. Later on, they married, and too often, Father said, their wives ended up as magnums.

  There were a few other Europeans in the town: a Deputy Commissioner, Mr Marshall, and a doctor, Dr Paget. Once there had been a cantonment, but now all that was left of it was a row of graves in the small European cemetery, where grew trees with flowers like mimosa balls. One grave was of a boy, Piper John Fox, who died nearly two hundred years ago when he was fourteen years old.

  Perhaps the place and the life were alien, circumscribed, dull to the grown-ups who lived there; for the children it was their world of home. They lived in the Big House in a big garden on the river with the tall flowering cork tree by their front steps. It was their world, complete. Up to this winter it had been completely happy.

  Half of Harriet wanted to stay as a child; half wanted to be a grown-up. She often asked, ‘What shall I do when I am? What will it be like?’ She often asked the others, ‘What shall you be when you are grown up?’ It was always Harriet who started these discussions. No one else really liked them except Victoria, who was too young to know what she was, even now.

  ‘I shall be a cross red nurse when I grow up,’ said Victoria.

  ‘She means a Red Cross Nurse,’ said Nan.

  What shall I be? thought Harriet, fascinated. There seemed to her to be infinite possibilities. ‘I might be a nun,’ she said, ‘or a missionary perhaps, then I could help people. Or a doctor. It would be wonderful to be a doctor, to save people’s lives, and give your own life up.’ The vista was exciting. ‘Wonderful,’ said Harriet. ‘Wouldn’t you like that, Bea?’

  ‘No,’ said Bea. ‘I want my life for myself.’

  Harriet was too truthful to deny that she did too, and she tore herself away from the thought of being a doctor. ‘So many grown-up people seem to be nothing very much,’ she said. She was thinking of the people she knew, of Nan and Father and Mother and Dr Paget and Captain John. They are nothing important, thought Harriet, wondering. Why? They did not seem to mind. But I want to be important. I will be. ‘Perhaps I shall be a great dancer,’ she said aloud, ‘or a politician and make speeches.’

  ‘I thought you were going to be a poet,’ said Bea.

  ‘Well … I am a poet,’ said Harriet.

  ‘You will be what you are. You will have to be,’ said Nan, who was unconcernedly darning. ‘In the end everyone is what they are.’

  ‘But how shall I know?’ cried Harriet, chafing.

  ‘You will find out as you grow,’ said Nan, running her needle in and out of the sock stretched on her hand. That seemed altogether too slow for Harriet.

  ‘Bea, what will you be? An actress? Or a hospital nurse? Or a doctor? A great doctor? When you are grown up, what will you be?’

  ‘How can I tell till I get there?’ asked Bea.

  ‘But say. You must say. You must be something.’

  ‘I shall wait till I am,’ said Bea, tolerantly, ‘and then be it.’

  ‘That is a funny sort of answer,’ said Harriet, disgusted.

  ‘It is rather a good one,’ said Nan.

  Harriet found her family maddening. Father was too busy, in a general family and office way, to have any special time to spare for Harriet, or for any of them; Mother was busy, too, with the house, the family, the servants, notes and letters and lessons and accounts; and besides, she was having another baby soon and had not to be disturbed. Nan? Well, Nan was Nan, and to Harriet that was like bread, too everyday and too necessary to be regarded, though she was the staff of life. There used to be Bea, but now Bea was different; she had withdrawn from Harriet; she was quiet, altogether elderly and distant, and she had new predilections; for instance, she had made friends with Valerie from across the river, a big, hard girl, whom Harriet disliked and feared, and who switched Bea away with secrets and happenings in which Harriet had no part. She was no longer sure of Bea. Harriet would have liked to play with Bogey. Though he was much younger, she was young, too, in streaks, but Bogey played in his own Bogey way that was not at all Harriet’s. Harriet could never leave anything alone, and Bogey liked things to be alive and behave themselves in their own way. For instance, he played with lizards and grass snakes; he played armies with insects. He did not like toy soldiers. ‘They are all tin,’ he said. ‘I play soldiers with n’insecks.’

  ‘But can’t you pretend, Boge?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘No, I can’t,’ said Bogey. ‘I like live n’insecks best.’

  He was a very thin little boy, with thin arms and legs; his hair was cut short and his forehead showed sensitive and lumpy, while his eyes were small and brown and quick and live. He was absorbed in a completely happy and private life of his own, and though he occasionally needed Harriet, it was seldom for long. His best game was ‘going-round-the-garden-without-being-seen’, and that hid him even from her. He was always being stung or bruised or bitten, but he managed to contain his wounds as Bea did her difficulties. ‘You will get into trouble one of these days,’ said jealous, discontented Harriet, but he only smiled and she sensed that he preferred to get into his own trouble himself. It was no good. It was just not possible to play with Bogey.

  In her loneliness, Harriet was driven to adopt places; there was her cubbyhole under the stairs, and there was a place on the end of the jetty, the landing-stage by the house. Harriet liked to sit on the end of it, her legs hanging down, her back warmed with sun, her ears filled with the cool gurgling of the water against the jetty poles.

  ‘How is it a Secret Hole when it isn’t a secret and it isn’t a hole?’ Valerie asked about the Secret Hole, but it still felt secret to Harriet, though she used the jetty for her more open thoughts. The flowing water helped her thoughts to flow. She had also, though she did not yet understand about this, an affinity with the cork tree. It was her tree, as the brilliant jacaranda trees, the bamboos and the lace tangles of bridal creeper in the garden, belonged to Bea, and the tight Marechal-Neil rosebuds were Victoria’s. Why? She did not know, but she liked to go to the cork tree, she liked to look up into it and if she really wanted to hear the river, she went to listen to it there. There it was not too loud, too near, drawing Harriet, drawing her away as it did on the jetty. Under the cork tree, she could hear it running steadily, calmly and with it, always, the puff-steam-puff from the Works.

  ‘It goes on, goes on,’ said Harriet, her head against the cork tree. ‘I wonder what is going to happen to us?’ And by that she meant, of course, ‘What is going to happen to me?’

  There were ways of telling. Nan used sometimes to play charms with them. She dropped pieces of lead tinfoil into a saucepan of boiling water, and, when they were softened, she lifted them out with a spoon on to a cold plate where they hardened. Whatever shapes they made told your future.

  They played this one Sunday morning some three weeks after Diwali when Valerie had come to spend the day. Captain John, too, had limped up the drive after breakfast, and was there, sitting by Nan, his stick propped by his chair.

  He is always here, always, thought Harriet crossly. And so is Valerie. Why should they be? Haven’t they homes of their own?

  She noticed now that, when Captain John was alone with them, some of the stiffness went o
ut of his face. Sometimes he laughed and his eyes were not unlike Bogey’s, except that Bogey’s were quick and his had often a curious emptiness; but they were gentle too. Yes, he has nice eyes, Harriet admitted, but I wish he were not so jerky. ‘Why is he so jerky?’ she had asked Mother irritably. ‘Because he was hurt so badly,’ said Mother. ‘Unbearably hurt.’

  Looking at Captain John now in the light of this soft warm morning, as he bent his head down by Victoria’s, as Victoria leant against his knee, it was difficult to think of him as being unbearably hurt. Unbearably? questioned Harriet, wrinkling her forehead. What is unbearable? When I caught my nail in the railway carriage door I went mad with pain. Mad. Then why isn’t he mad? Why didn’t he die? What is it that made him live and not go mad? ‘He must be stronger than we think,’ said Harriet, looking at Captain John.

  She considered him, as he put Victoria carefully away and took the saucepan from Nan, to let Nan have a change and rest. His hands were steady now, and his face had colour from the warmth of the fire. He looked big, yes, almost strong among the children, and his hair, that was dark, patched with white, was attractive. Like a magpie, thought Harriet. Why, he is very good-looking, thought Harriet in surprise.

  She knew Nan admired him. ‘He is like a young prince,’ said Nan.

  ‘A funny kind of a prince!’ Harriet had said. ‘And he isn’t young, Nan.’

  ‘He is, poor boy.’

  ‘Oh Nan!’ said Harriet impatiently. ‘And why does he come all the time – all the time?’

  ‘Perhaps – we have something he needs,’ said Nan.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. We must pray for him. He will go on when he is ready,’ said Nan.