The River Page 5

  Harriet had reached the cork tree. By standing very quietly under it, she could hear the woodpeckers tap-tapping on it far above her head. She put her head back and looked through the break in the branches and their canopy to the sky, and as she looked, the clouds, and the grey line with a stone daisy that was the parapet of the house, and the tall tree itself, seemed to tilt gently backwards. That is the world turning, thought Harriet. It gave her a large feeling to see the tilt of the world. Clouds, house, tree, lawns, river, Harriet, were borne slowly backwards as the world turned, but the tree remained upright, steady, rising into the sky, spreading its branches that were coming into bud. Under Harriet’s feet, where she stood among the red lilies, its roots went deep into the earth, down down into the pit of the earth. ‘I believe,’ said Harriet, ‘I believe that this is the middle of the world. That I am standing in the middle of the middle of the world, and this tree is that tree, the axis tree, like the one in the story. It goes right through the earth. It goes up and up.’

  She put her hand on the tree and she thought she was drawn up into its height as if she were soaring out of the earth. Her ears seemed to sing. She had the feeling of soaring, then she came back to stand at the foot of the tree, her hand on the bark, and she began to write a new poem in her head.

  It took her a long time, walking on the lawn, pacing the paths, coming back to the tree, to finish it. She finished it in her head, then she felt for her book that was in the waistband of her dress, and her pencil that she kept in her stocking, and wrote the poem down.

  When she looked at it, it did not look like any of her poems. She read it aloud. It did not sound like any of her poems. ‘It is not like any poem I ever read,’ she said doubtfully. ‘It can’t be good,’ and immediately she had the feeling that it was good. It felt alive, as she did. She felt alive and curiously powerful, and full of what seemed to her a glory.

  She glanced round. She could see Victoria’s head rising and dipping by the swing, but it was no good reading poems to Victoria. Bea was out riding, she did not know where Bogey was, and every adult was always busy before breakfast. Then, as she stood puzzled under the cork tree, Captain John came limping up the jetty and across the lawn towards her.

  ‘Hallo,’ said Captain John.

  ‘Hallo,’ said Harriet, considering him.

  ‘I have been across the river.’

  ‘Bea has gone riding,’ said Harriet. She looked up at him. ‘Captain John,’ she said, and stopped.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I—’ said Harriet slowly, and then easily it tumbled out. ‘I have written a poem. It is – either very bad – I expect it is bad, or else it is good. It is so new, I don’t know.’

  ‘Show me,’ said Captain John, and put out his hand. Harriet gave him the poem and he began to read it.

  She had not expected he would read it aloud, quite naturally and unselfconsciously as he was doing, and prickings of acute shyness ran over her until she found that she was soothed, allayed, delighted by the sound of her own words:

  ‘This tree, my tree, is the pole of the world …’

  When he had finished it he looked at Harriet. Then he looked at the poem.

  ‘Did you write this?’ he asked. ‘By yourself?’

  Harriet nodded. She could not speak.

  ‘Nobody helped you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Harriet indignantly.

  ‘But it is good!’

  Waves of bright-eyed satisfaction chased through Harriet’s every vein. He looked at her as if he had not properly seen her before.

  ‘It – felt good … for me,’ said Harriet huskily.

  ‘I didn’t know you wrote poems.’

  ‘I – I do,’ said Harriet. She had to bend her head down. She moved the toe of her shoe along the edge of a root. The silence went on and on. She could hear the woodpeckers again, tap, tap, tap.

  ‘Har-ree!’

  That was Bogey.

  ‘Har-ree!’ She raised her head.

  ‘He-ah!’

  Bogey came chasing round the corner of the house, past Victoria, past the swing.

  ‘Here, Boge. I am here.’

  ‘We are going to make bricks,’ announced Bogey, ‘’n bake them in a n’oven, ’n build a tank for fishes. I have found some lovely mud. It is a little bit smelly, but you needn’t mind. Come on, Harry.’

  The gate opened and Bea came trotting up the drive on the white pony, Pearl. Bogey ran off and Harriet sped after him.

  But when she reached the corner of the house she stopped and turned so fast that the short skirt of her dress whirled round her. She stood in the shadow of the poinsettias and looked back at Bea and Captain John. She saw how Captain John went up and put his hand on the pony’s neck and then how Bea let him help her off as if she were a grown-up, not a child. Harriet stood, frowning a little by the poinsettias, then slowly she walked away to look at Bogey’s mud.

  Now Harriet began to think a great deal about Captain John.

  What was wrong with him? Something was wrong. There was that emptiness in his eyes. Though he was loosed, among people again, he was not like other people, and he knew it. ‘But he was strong enough not to die,’ argued Harriet. He was strong enough to bear the unbearable pain, and the prison camp, and to escape, and to live in the hospital through all those operations when no one expected him to live, and to go on working every day with his troublesome wound and the weight of his leg. He could joke about it; he could be kind to Victoria, and in the same way to Nan; he could understand her, Harriet: he had this … ‘this reverent,’ said Harriet, wrinkling her brow to get the exact word, ‘this reverent feeling for Bea’; and even someone as young as Harriet could sense he was no common thinker. There was no one she could talk to like Captain John. ‘And he ought to talk to me,’ said Harriet. ‘When he talks to me he looks quite strong and rested. He doesn’t when he talks to Bea.’

  ‘You can’t talk to her, can you?’ she asked him.

  ‘No,’ he said irritably. ‘She is too confoundedly polite.’ That was the first time Harriet had ever heard a word against politeness, but she saw immediately that it was true.

  But it was not Bea who was wrong with Captain John. It was something in him, himself. ‘Or not in him,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ said Nan.

  ‘But I want to do something for him.’

  ‘You can pray for him.’

  ‘Oh Nan!’

  ‘You can,’ said Nan certainly, and then she added, as a warning, ‘and, Harriet, you are not to do anything else.’

  But Harriet, being Harriet, did, and was snubbed.

  She went away with his snub stinging in her, into the Secret Hole, where she sat down on her box, in the darkest shade. She sat holding her knees in her arms, her face turned down on them, and the stinging passed into a peculiar hurt. ‘I – I hate him,’ said Harriet, with clenched teeth.

  Ayah came presently and found her. ‘What is it, Harry Baba? What is it, Harriet Rajah?’

  ‘I have a pain,’ said Harriet, she did not know what else to call it.

  Ayah began to rub her legs, though the pain, of course, was not in her legs. Harriet had had pains in her legs and arms recently that Nan called ‘growing pains’. Now she felt as if she were being stretched to hold this one. This was not exactly a pain, though it hurt. It ached, but it was not like the ache she had had with dysentery, it was not sore, and it was not like toothache, that awful toothache she had when her tooth fell out. Analysing her pain, it began to go away, and she immediately forgot what it had been like.

  Every family has its milestones; the first teeth come and the first teeth go; there is the first short hair-cut, the first braces, the first number one shoes, the first birthday in double figures. Events happen, too, which change families and family relations, and sometimes, often, one member is struck at more than another. Now, this feeling of pain, of hurt, had come to Harriet. This winter strange things seemed to be happening to her, eventful things.
She felt herself growing and growing as she sat there in the gloom of the Secret Hole.

  But soon she had regained her halcyon insouciance.

  ‘Har-ee!’

  ‘He-ah.’

  ‘Get the scissors quick. Ram Prasad says the goldfish should have a worm and here is a worm, Harry. Cut him into bits, quick.’

  ‘Harriet,’ said Bogey, as they fed the fish. ‘What do you think, Harry? The cobra comes out into our side of the garden now.’

  ‘Bogey!’ said Harriet appalled. ‘Have you seen it?’

  Bogey nodded. His face was illumined.

  ‘Wha – what is it like?’

  ‘It is lovely. It slithers.’

  ‘Ugh!’ said Harriet, and she asked, ‘How did you make it come?’

  ‘I did what they did. I put down saucers of milk.’

  ‘Ugh!’ said Harriet. ‘Oh Bogey!’ and a quiver of sense, an antenna, lifted and pointed. ‘Now I ought to tell Father. It is in the garden now.’

  ‘But it is hardly ever in it,’ said Bogey, earnestly. ‘You can’t say it is, Harriet. It lives the other side of the tree. That is where its hole is. It hardly ever comes out. Sometimes I watch for ages n’ages and it doesn’t come.’

  ‘Does Ram Prasad know?’

  ‘No,’ said Bogey absently. ‘I don’t touch it, Harry.’ He added gently to himself so that even Harriet did not hear, his eyes bright and dreaming, ‘I only poke it with a little bit of stick.’

  Harriet was really too interested in herself to think about the cobra. She was hurt again. She was often hurt now. Things hurt her that would not have hurt her before, that she would have skimmed over without noticing. She was different. She was altogether puzzled, and on the afternoon of the second day she went to talk to Bea.

  Bea was reading.

  ‘Bea.’

  Bea looked up. Her book was one of those books of Valerie’s, The Girls Own Annual or The Rose Book for Girls, books that Harriet was not addicted to. Harriet liked The Orange Fairy Book and Arabian Nights. Or did she? Did she like anything? ‘Bea,’ she said, and Bea looked up but kept her finger on her place to let Harriet know that the interruption was to be only temporary, and Harriet, with Bea in that mood, could not talk about the nebulous things she had come to talk of. She had to think of something else, something important, if only to rivet Bea’s attention.

  She said, ‘I have lumps.’

  ‘Lumps?’ asked Bea.

  ‘Yes. On my chest. You know, my two chests, like swellings, and they hurt.’

  ‘Those are your two little new breasts,’ said Bea, and went on reading.

  ‘Mine? But … I am too young.’ Harriet shrank back into her frock. ‘I am far too young,’ she said, shocked.

  ‘You can’t be or they wouldn’t come,’ said Bea reasonably. ‘They don’t come until you are ready.’

  That was interesting. Harriet looked down, inside her frock, at her chest. Her frock was of blue cotton and the light on her skin was therefore blue as well; her chest no longer had a plain bow; its topography had altered to two soft warm swellings, and in between them the skin was wonderfully tender, fine and silken. ‘It is pretty,’ said Harriet, looking down inside her frock. ‘And my veins are blue. It isn’t only the light.’ That skin, those veins were older than Harriet. They were the sign of a woman. She was visibly growing. Were these signs something only for girls? she wondered, and she tried to think of something male which was a counterpart, a visible growth, like this, and she could only think of stags, of the antlers of a stag. ‘I hurt rather like a stag,’ she said. ‘Like a stag’s new antlers hurt. Have you got them, Bea?’

  ‘What? Antlers?’

  ‘Breasts.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bea shortly.

  ‘I never noticed them.’

  ‘You never notice anything that isn’t yourself,’ said Bea, which was largely true, though lately Harriet was noticing in this new acute way.

  ‘Bea.’

  ‘Do go away, Harry. I want to read.’

  ‘But I want to talk … about you, Bea.’

  ‘I hate talking about me.’

  How odd, thought Harriet, who loved above all things to talk about herself.

  It was true. Bea had slipped off from Harriet and a space was widening between them. They were still officially ‘the big ones’, while Bogey and Victoria were ‘the little ones’, but like most labels, these were not true. Harriet, if she played at all, played with Bogey nowadays, and the truth was, that the completeness went out of their play if Bea played too. ‘Not in the doing games,’ said Harriet to herself. ‘She can still play those: rounders, and flying kites and “animal-mineral-vegetable”.’ They played rounders on the lawn with the young men from the Red House after a Sunday tea that had plum cake and chocolate tarts; for Harriet it always meant running when she was too full to run, Bogey had a curious inability to grasp what he was doing, Victoria was allowed to play by courtesy, but Bea really played, gracefully and competently. She was good at the game of flying kites too; that was, flying paper kites off the roof with strings glassed with ground glass, when you challenged other unknown kites, crossed strings with them and tried to cut them adrift; your kite wore a bob on its tail for every kite it cut. ‘Animal-mineral-vegetable’ was agony to Harriet, because she inevitably forgot in the middle and let her mind go off cantering free in questions of its own: What-would-I-feel-like-if-I-were-vegetable-scarlet-flower-flesh-or-if-I-were-silver-or-tin-with-tin-fingers-and-tin-toes-and-little-tin-ears-and-tin-hair? She saw her hair flashing with curls of shining tinfoil and, of course, she lost her place and Father called her a dunce. Bea was never a dunce at this, but she could not play ‘being’ games any more; being Rowena or a Cavalier, or Arabs or highwaymen or pirates, or even Minnehaha. Bea was still not bad as Minnehaha, not bad, but not really Minnehaha; it seemed she could not be anything but Bea just at present; and now … ‘Am I going to be like this too?’ asked Harriet.

  As Bea grew into being only Bea, she grew mysteriously better-looking. She grew beautiful.

  ‘What a beautiful child,’ people said when they saw her.

  Harriet and Bogey went behind a bush to discuss whether or not they would tell this to Bea.

  ‘We don’t want to make her conceited,’ said Harriet and she did not know herself why she said that.

  ‘Oh, tell her. Tell her. Tell her,’ begged Bogey.

  When they told Bea she did not become conceited. She seemed simply to take it as her due and to be unmoved by it, in a way that made Harriet feel breathless.

  Now, as Bea was reading, Harriet took a long firm view of her. Over the edge of the bright blue-bound book, Harriet was impressed again by the withdrawn look on Bea’s face, by its shape, oval and clear, with the clear modellings of the cheekbones under their soft skin, her straight small nose, and the fine lines of her eyebrows; as she read, looking down, her lashes were spread, fine and curled, along her lids, and her dark hair fell on to her shoulders. Round her neck, on a black ribbon, she was wearing a carved ivory rose, tinted pink; her skin was tinted in exactly the same way, pink on ivory.

  Harriet went away and looked at herself in the glass.

  ‘What are you doing, Harriet?’ said Mother.

  ‘I am wondering if I am as beautiful as Bea,’ said Harriet.

  ‘You have a little face full of character,’ said Mother kindly, ‘and you have nice eyes and hair.’

  That means I am not, thought Harriet. She could see for herself that her face looked pink and commonplace after Bea’s; it was speckled with freckles, it had a large nose, green-brown speckly eyes under tawny eyebrows, and something tawny and rampant in her hair. It is more like Bogey’s face, thought Harriet. But no, it is not even as nice as Bogey’s. Bogey has such dear little bones. He is more like Bea, really. No, mine is nothing, nothing at all, like hers.

  ‘Why do I want to be pretty suddenly?’ asked Harriet, and she did not know. Certainly she had never bothered about it before, but then she had never bo
thered about anything very much. What is the matter with me? thought Harriet. Why do I keep on having these … cracks? Why is everything suddenly so funny?

  She was unhappy again in rifts, in, as she called them, cracks: for ten minutes, or for a minute only, or for a whole half hour. ‘It isn’t fair,’ said Harriet in a temper, ‘for a family not to be the same. To be half ugly and half pretty, to grow up at different times,’ complained Harriet. With all she felt, and truly felt, another part of her was watching and found it interesting. She watched herself when she went to brood in the Secret Hole, when she went to sit on the jetty or under the cork tree. ‘I give up,’ said Harriet crossly, but the other part of her was far too interested to give up.

  Meanwhile she was separating from Bea. Bea had passed into a kind of upper society with Valerie or Captain John. Harriet used to overhear them talking; she listened, not to Valerie of course, but to Captain John.

  ‘What is the name of those flowers?’ He was always asking Bea the names of flowers. He did not appear to be able to remember any for himself, or to know the commonest flower names. He went on asking them. I believe he likes doing it, thought Harriet, and she marvelled that Bea never lost patience or let him know she knew he was pretending.

  ‘What is the name of those flowers?’

  ‘Petunias,’ said Bea.

  He bent down to smell one. ‘They remind me of you,’ he said to Bea. ‘No, you remind me of them, one of those purple ones,’ he said, ‘or a white one.’

  Bea took it with the same calmness, almost with primness, but Harriet was dizzy. They are both behaving like grown-up people, she thought indignantly, or they are both behaving like children. Why? And then Captain John turned and said, ‘Why don’t you go away and play, Harriet. Don’t tag on to me all the time.’

  Harriet became scarlet to the tips of her ears. ‘I don’t … tag,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘I was only here, that is all,’ and she rushed away, up the side stairs to the Secret Hole and cast herself down on the floor. ‘I hate him. I hate him,’ said Harriet, again, crying into the floor.