The River Read online

  ‘What is an episode?’

  ‘It really means an incident … between two acts.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Call it an incident, a happening. With each new happening, perhaps with each person we meet if they are important to us, we must either be born again, or die a little bit; big deaths and little ones, big and little births.’

  ‘I should think it would be better to go on being born, than to die all the time,’ said Harriet.

  ‘If we can,’ said Captain John, ‘but it takes a bit of doing. It is called growing, Harriet, and it is often painful and difficult. On the whole, it is very much easier to die.’

  ‘But you didn’t,’ said Harriet.

  ‘I just managed not to, but I am no criterion,’ said Captain John.

  ‘What is a criterion?’ asked Harriet, and before he could answer, she asked, ‘Who is it who is important to you, Captain John?’

  ‘Never you mind,’ and he stood up and stretched himself. ‘Do you think you could leave me alone now like a good girl?’

  Harriet went along to the jetty and sat down in her usual place. ‘I wish he had told me,’ she said. She hung her feet down above the water; they were still bare, and she had still, so far, not had hookworm. Wriggling her toes to feel the dust between them, she wondered, all at once, how she, Harriet, appeared to Captain John. Then she wondered, more truthfully, if he ever saw her at all. ‘But he said that about my eyes,’ argued Harriet. ‘Yes, he said they had flecks in them,’ but if that were in derision or admiration she did not know. She thought again of the way she had seen him looking at Bea when they lit the lamps for Diwali. They had been on the roof, in the darkness, and the point of light from each lamp lit a circle round itself but was not strong enough to lighten the whole roof darkness. Anyone bending over a lamp was suddenly illumined and Bea, bending to shift the oil round a wick, was lit, her shoulders, her neck, the line of her face, and her hair; she was gilded, and as she moved the oil she looked up at Valerie and laughed at what Valerie was saying. Harriet had noticed that Captain John had stood there, lost, and the oil in the lamp he held ran over the edge on to the floor and Valerie scolded him. ‘Yes, he looks at Bea,’ said Harriet mournfully.

  She wished her big toe could reach the water. The river current gurgled against the poles of the jetty; its traffic floated down and Harriet watched it lazily, while her mind left that part of Captain John’s idea and thought of the other. You are born with each new big thing that happens. I don’t quite understand that, thought Harriet.

  A boat floated down laden with bright red pots: then a boat laden with nothing at all; then a launch from up-river; Harriet noted its black funnel, blue-banded, and its white and red hull: From Brentford’s, she thought, the ‘Sprite’. On its deck sat a large lady dressed in white. Mrs Milligan, Harriet identified her without a flicker of interest. How few, how very, very few people are important, she thought, and lazily she began to think over the people who were important for her. Father-Mother-Bea-Bogey-Victoria. That was automatic, and she did not realize that, as she said their names, she did not think of them at all. Nan? Her hesitation made her think of Nan. No, not Nan, thought Harriet as she watched a police motor boat, with the police flag almost touching the wash at its stern as it went by; the rolling wave behind it presently came in broken rifts to hit the jetty where she was sitting. Anyone else? thought Harriet. Of course, children were not expected to have many people, but however she circumscribed herself, her thoughts came back to the question she wanted to ask. Captain John? asked Harriet at last, and she answered as she had to answer because it was the truth, How can he be important for me? It is Bea he likes. At first we thought it was Victoria, but it is Bea he is interested in.

  A porpoise came down, turning slowly over and over in midstream with a beautiful easy armchair rhythmical motion that lulled Harriet. She rubbed her back against the post and picked at her finger lump with her hand. Oh well, thought Harriet comfortably, I shall meet heaps of people when I am older, when I am famous. Heaps of things are going to happen to me.

  A whirr and a splash made her jump so that she almost fell off the jetty. A kingfisher had struck from a branch above her. Now it sat on a post with the fish still bending and jerking in its beak. The poor fish had been placidly, happily, swimming and feeding somewhere under the jetty, and then, out of its element, from another, it had been seized and carried off. And swallowed, thought Harriet regretfully, watching it disappear.

  I wonder what the other fishes think? thought Harriet, but then, that was the same with any dying; one person was seized and taken away. But what does it feel like if that comes right plumb in the middle of your family? She could not think of it, it seemed impossible and yet she had just seen it happen. Things do happen, she told herself, but she was lulled again with the sound of the river running in her ears. Those were fishes, Harriet told herself comfortably. Only fishes.

  There was no sign of the splash. The river ran steadily where it had been. ‘There you see … Anything can happen, anything, and whatever happens the other fishes just go on wriggling and swimming and feeding because they have to,’ said Harriet. ‘It, the river, has to go on.’ Whatever happened, a fish’s death, a wreck, storm, sun, the river assimilated it all. The far bank showed as a line across the river, a line of fields, a clump of trees by the temple, and, further away, the walls and roofs and chimney and jetty of Valerie’s father’s works. I wonder what he thinks about dying; Captain John, not Valerie’s father, thought Harriet idly. I wonder if he thinks the same as he thinks about being born, if he really thinks you could die over and over again. Goodness, thought Harriet, I nearly died just now when I nearly fell off the jetty. I would die if I saw that cobra! But what Captain John meant was deeper than that. Harriet suspected that, but her mind was now too lazy, too happy, to explore.

  Sometimes, in the night, Harriet thought about death. She thought about Father and Mother dying, or Nan, who was really very old; then she would hastily wake Bea to comfort her.

  When Ram Prasad’s wife died, she was carried on a string bed to the river and put on a pyre and burned. Afterwards her ashes were thrown on the water. Bogey and Harriet went to look, though they knew without being told that Mother would not have allowed them.

  ‘Did you mind it?’ Harriet asked Bogey afterwards.

  ‘Mind what?’

  ‘The burning.’

  ‘It looked just like burning to me.’

  It had. The pyre was well alight when they arrived, hiding themselves behind a brick kiln on the edge of the burning ghat so that even Ram Prasad should not see them.

  ‘I didn’t like the smell,’ said Harriet. ‘Did you see them throw her ashes in the river?’

  ‘I wasn’t looking,’ said Bogey, ‘there was a frog …’ His mind went off on the thought of the frog, but after a while he said, ‘No, I didn’t mind.’

  ‘Nor did I,’ said Harriet. She had not seen the body, only those ashes, and they did not seem to be anything to do with a person who had lived and walked and talked and eaten food and played with her baby and laughed. No, it had been, up to now, birds like the kingfisher, and animals like the livestock of the nursery, guinea-pigs and rabbits and kittens, that had given Harriet her glimpses of birth and death.

  Nan said if you were good you died and went to heaven. ‘To Paradise.’ Mother, not so certainly, halfheartedly, lent some support to that. Nan was quite certain.

  ‘To eternal rest,’ said Nan, looking at the swellings her bunions made in her shoes. ‘To have wings like the angels,’ said Nan, as she toiled upstairs with the washing.

  Harriet had seen heaven on the films, but it was a Hindu heaven in an Indian film, Krishna playing his flute in a garden of roses and dancing girls. The Mohammedan heaven? She was not sure about that. She asked Father what Buddhists did when they died; he took down a book and read to her about a drop sliding into the crystal sea and being lost. She asked Mother, and Mother pointed out that Harriet
knew already that Jesus rose from the dead; some people, she added, believed that you came back over and over again, to live another life each time. ‘A better life,’ said Mother.

  ‘Goodness, how good you must be in the end,’ said Harriet.

  That was the idea, Mother thought, and if you were not good, she went on to say, you came back as something lower.

  ‘Like?’

  ‘An animal. An insect. A flea,’ said Mother, smiling.

  I should rather like to be a flea, thought Harriet, thinking of herself as a gay acrobatic jumping flea, but Bogey, who did not like to be labelled good or bad, was bored with the idea. ‘I should rather have done with it,’ said Bogey.

  All these thoughts seemed like cracks in the wholeness of Harriet’s unconsciousness. It had cracked before, of course, but now she was growing rapaciously.

  The winter drew on. Day succeeded day, and ended and went out of sight and was gone. There are such lots of days, thought Harriet, but not more than there are drops of water in the river.

  She was on the jetty again. Very often now she went to watch the river. It flowed down in negroid peace, in sun, in green strong water. Harriet, now she was growing from a little girl into a big one, was beginning to sense its peace. ‘It comes from a source,’ said Harriet, who learnt geography. ‘From very far away, from a trickle from a spring, no one knows where exactly, or perhaps they do know; it doesn’t matter. It is going to something far bigger than itself, though it, itself, looks big enough. It is going to the sea,’ said Harriet, ‘and nothing will stop it. Nothing stops days, or rivers,’ said Harriet with certainty.

  Then the guinea-pig, Bathsheba, died.

  The children had several scores of guinea-pigs and they used to play shepherds with them, driving guinea-pig flocks over the lawn. One of the original stock was Bathsheba, an old white guinea-pig, who belonged to Harriet. One day, Harriet found her, lying limp, as if she were asleep, in a corner of the cage. When Harriet picked her up, she did not feel limp, but curiously stiff and resilient and her fur felt hard. ‘She is dead, I think,’ said Harriet, but she was still not quite sure what dead was. She did not take Bathsheba into Nan or Mother or anyone in the house; she carried her down the garden and out of the gate and into the Red House to find Captain John, but all the assistants were out except one, Mr Corsie, lying ill in bed with dysentery.

  ‘May I come in, Mr Corsie?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Wh’t is it ye want?’ asked Mr Corsie without enthusiasm. He was feeling ill.

  ‘Please – is this dead?’ asked Harriet, offering Bathsheba for inspection.

  ‘Ugh! Take it away, oot o’heer,’ cried Mr Corsie.

  ‘Is it – ugh?’ asked Harriet, doubtfully.

  ‘Dae ye no heer me?’ asked Mr Corsie. ‘Take it oot. Or I’ll tell yeer Pa.’

  ‘But – is it dead?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Daid as a doornail. Take it away. Good Lorrd! It is stinkin’.’

  Harriet immediately dropped Bathsheba on the floor.

  That night she was worried.

  ‘Bea.’

  ‘Sssh.’

  ‘Bea.’

  ‘What is it, Harriet? I am asleep.’

  ‘Bea, when we are dead, do we go … like Bathsheba?’

  ‘How did she go?’ asked Bea, yawning.

  ‘Stiff. Hard. Stinking,’ said Harriet tearfully.

  ‘Yes, I suppose we do,’ said Bea, who was sleepy. ‘That is called a corpse.’

  Harriet shivered, all over her skin, under the bedclothes.

  ‘Bea.’

  Silence.

  ‘Bea.’

  No answer.

  ‘Bea. Bea. BEA!’

  ‘Oh, Harriet! I am asleep, What is it?’

  ‘Bea. I don’t want to.’

  ‘Don’t want to what?’

  ‘Be a corpse.’

  ‘But you are not,’ said Bea, practically.

  ‘But I shall be,’ said Harriet, and she began to cry.

  ‘Don’t you think you could wait till you are,’ said Bea. ‘I am so sleepy, Harriet.’ Then as the fact of Harriet’s sobs was borne in upon her, she said, more gently, ‘Couldn’t you wait till the morning, Harry?’

  ‘No. No. I can’t,’ sobbed Harriet. ‘I am frightened, Bea. I can’t get the feeling of Bathsheba off my hands. I am frightened, Bea.’

  ‘Don’t cry,’ said Bea, kindly. She sat up in bed, and by the veranda light Harriet could see her shoulders in her white yoked nightgown, and the fall of her dark hair. ‘Don’t cry, Harry. It isn’t anything to cry about. I am sure it is not.’

  The sound of her normal little voice was comforting to Harriet, until she thought that Bea too must die, dark hair, voice and all. ‘Then I shall never hear her voice again,’ cried Harriet silently, ‘and Mother must die, and Nan, and Nan is old and must die quite soon.’

  ‘Why isn’t it something to cry about?’ cried Harriet bitterly, aloud.

  ‘Oh, Harry. You ask too many questions.’

  ‘Yes, but … Don’t you ever think about dying, Bea?’

  ‘Well, yes I do,’ said Bea.

  ‘Then what do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘It is hard to know what I think,’ said Bea’s small voice out of the darkness. ‘But I know a few things.’

  ‘Wh-what do you know?’ quavered Harriet, and she said suspiciously, ‘Nan and Mother and Ram Prasad tell us things about heaven and Jesus and Bhramo, but they don’t really know.’

  ‘I think they are all wrong,’ said Bea severely. ‘Mine are not things like that. They are more simple things.’ And she added, as if this had only just occurred to her, ‘More sensible things.’

  ‘Wh-what sort of th-things?’

  ‘This,’ said Bea. ‘When anything, anybody, is dead, like Bathsheba, it is dead. The life, the breath, the … the warm in it, is gone.’

  ‘Nan calls it the spirit.’

  ‘The spirit then,’ said Bea. ‘I call it the “warm”, but the spirit or the warm is gone.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harriet. ‘Yes. It was gone out of Bathsheba.’

  ‘The body is left behind,’ said Bea, ‘and what happens to it? It goes bad.’

  ‘Don’t!’ said Harriet, and shuddered.

  ‘You can’t keep a body …’

  ‘Except mummies and those Rajahs who are pickled in honey,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Then I think,’ said Bea, and she contradicted herself. ‘Then I know that it isn’t meant to go on. It is useless. The body isn’t any use any more.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Harriet.

  ‘But the other, the warm, has gone. It doesn’t stay and go bad. So I think,’ said Bea, ‘that it is of some use. That it has gone to something, somewhere.’

  ‘But where?’ asked Harriet. ‘Where?’

  ‘You ask too many questions, Harry,’ said Bea.

  ‘I wonder what Captain John thinks,’ said Harriet in despair.

  ‘Captain John?’

  ‘Yes. He would think something,’ said Harriet, and her curiosity got the better of her sense, and she said, ‘What do you feel like with Captain John, Bea?’

  Bea immediately lay down again. Harriet knew she would not tell.

  But, as silence settled, Harriet felt obscurely comforted. Why? Bea had not said much, but Harriet felt strengthened. She kept her head under the bedclothes for a little while and then found she was perfectly well able to come out, and she lay calmly, looking through her mosquito net at the starlight that fell dimly between the columns of the verandah, and listening to the puff-wait-puff of steam from the works and the ever-flowing gurgling of the river. I will learn more about it as I grow, she thought comfortably. Living and dying and being born, like Captain John said, she yawned. She naturally supposed that that growing was still a great way off.

  She tried to remember the names of the stars as she lay, and she thought how much longer stars and things like trees and rocks went on than people: Mountains and islands and sands, she thought, and man-made things a
s well; songs and pictures and rare vases and poems. ‘Things are the thing,’ said Harriet sleepily, and then a thought came like a spear from one of those stars, but real, truthful. It had occurred to her that she, Harriet, might possibly, one day, if she were good enough, have some small part in that. One of my poems might still be alive in, thought Harriet, say, AD 4000. It might. I don’t say it will, but it might. I should be like the Chinese poets, she thought dizzily. Or like Keats or Shakespeare, she thought, and she was filled with a sense of her own responsibility. That was a new sensation for Harriet. She was not given to responsibility and it gave her a feeling, more serious, more humble, than she had ever known. ‘I must work,’ said Harriet earnestly. ‘I must work and work and work.’ Like Queen Victoria, she thought. I will be good. I will be good.

  Saw roses wide that comforted her heart

  And saw their cr-im-son … but it was somehow not interesting. She gave a huge yawn, the poem grew fuddled, and she was asleep.

  Next morning, when she went out before breakfast and stood on the jetty, she wondered what all the fuss had been about. Now she felt she had no need to stand there staring at the river, watching it flow, when it was such a glorious morning in the garden. ‘What was I fussing about last night?’ she asked. She was filled with such buoyancy of living, of happiness, that she could not stay still any longer; she had to move away, walking up and down the paths, beside the creeper screens, under the turrets of roses, touching the flowers, knocking the dew off them, letting the boughs touch her and spring back, until she came to the cork tree.

  It was early. The garden shone. The cold weather light lay on the paths and unfolded across the green of the lawns and through the trees. There was brighter green in the wings of the flycatchers and in the flight of parakeets that flew in front of her and across the river.

  Victoria came down the steps. She did not see Harriet. She had some straw under her arm and she was dragging a rug after her. Harriet knew what she was going to do; she was going to make a house. At the moment Victoria was like a snail, she always had a house attached to her somewhere. Now, dragging the rug over the dew and the gravel, she went away round the corner towards the swing.