The River Page 6

  Her tears fell into the dust and it mingled with the tears on her face. When she came out Nan said she was not fit to be seen, and made her have her tea in the nursery.

  ‘I warned you,’ said Nan.

  Harriet hunched her shoulders.

  ‘If I were you,’ said Nan, ‘I should keep to playing with Bogey.’

  ‘I am too big to play with Bogey,’ said Harriet angrily.

  ‘You are too small for Captain John,’ said Nan.

  More and more Harriet was thrust with Bogey, and this meant, usually, being alone. Whatever she started to do with Bogey, he eventually and cheerfully left her alone. After a few minutes, she would look up, and there would be no Bogey.

  They were beginning to find that out in lessons. Bogey had just started lessons. ‘He really must learn to read,’ said Mother. ‘It is disgraceful, at his age, not to be able to read.’

  Why had no one taught him to read before? Because he defied them completely. Yet he was not naughty. He was perfectly docile.

  ‘M.A.T. Bogey?’

  ‘Mat.’

  ‘F.A.T. Bogey?’

  ‘Fat.’

  ‘C.A.T. Bogey?’

  ‘Cat.’

  ‘R.A.T. Bogey?’

  ‘Sailor’ and Bogey was entirely absent. Nor could they get him back.

  ‘Why did the Ancient Britons find it so hard to make their boats, Bogey?’

  ‘Because they had to make the inside bigger than the outside,’ said Bogey gravely, his eyes on the sky.

  He was not capable of being made to feel guilty, like Harriet, who knew she dreamed. He simply removed himself, and they were tired of the chase long before he was caught.

  ‘One day you will have to learn to read,’ said Harriet. ‘Imagine a man who couldn’t go to the office, nor sign letters, nor read newspapers.’

  ‘I am not going to be any of those men,’ said Bogey. ‘I am not ready to learn to read.’

  ‘You can’t always do what you like, you know,’ said Harriet, who was still feeling sore and angry.

  ‘I can,’ said Bogey. ‘I always do.’ That was true. He always did, and if he found trouble he kept it to himself. Once he fell down the back stairs and broke his front teeth. He never told anyone till Nan saw his swollen lips. Once he set his sock alight when he was cooking on a secret fire. He put out the sock and tied a rag on the burn. He never told. It was of no use. Bogey was no companion. Harriet still needed Bea. She could not, in any ultimate move, do without Bea. Bea still had to be her mentor, her help and her confidante, her guide and her public opinion. She tried to bid for her attention; or now, better than Bea, Captain John.

  She painted a picture; it was of a lotus on blue water, and when it was done, looking at it critically, she could see that it was nothing like a lotus, it was more like a pig in bluish mud. She did not show that to Bea. ‘I am not a painting person,’ said Harriet. ‘I am a writer,’ and she tried for a little while to recapture the status of the poem she had written under the cork tree; she wrote a book, at least the beginnings of a book, and it kept her happy for some days. Then she showed it to Bea, who had not any great desire to look at it.

  And they had four children, read the reluctant Bea, called Olive, Bice, Emerald and Spinach, all green as grass and slimy.

  ‘Queer children!’ commented Bea.

  ‘This is a book about frogs,’ said Harriet huffily.

  ‘Well, you should say so.’

  ‘You are supposed to understand that from reading the book.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t,’ said Bea.

  It was no good. This was a thoroughly tiresome time, and Harriet could not do anything with it.

  It was nearly Christmas. ‘It must be a quiet Christmas,’ said Mother, as she had said about the winter. ‘A quiet Christmas, and you must be content with little presents.’

  The war again, thought Harriet angrily. She wanted Christmas to have its full panoply, she wanted the right to be happy and excited without this horrible onus of caring about other people, the hungry children, the wounded soldiers, the women left without husbands and fathers. ‘And even if there isn’t a war, it is just the same,’ she said. ‘There are always hurt people and starved people, and beaten people and misery.’

  ‘And there are always the people who don’t care,’ said Bea.

  ‘Well, I care really. I have to,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Of course you care,’ said Captain John, and he smiled kindly at her. Now Harriet came to think of it, he did not often smile, and when he did … Why, he most often smiles at me, thought Harriet dazzled. Not at Bea, nor Victoria; at me, at something I say or do. It is as if he couldn’t help smiling then. Yes, I am the one who makes him smile.

  ‘Do you ever feel you want to fight again, Captain John?’ asked Valerie.

  ‘No,’ said Captain John curtly.

  ‘When I am grown up,’ said Harriet, ‘I am not going to fight in wars. I am going to fight the people who make wars.’

  ‘Is that any better?’ asked Bea. ‘Everyone seems to be always fighting and fighting, and it doesn’t do any good. If I were a man, I should be one of those people who say they won’t fight.’

  ‘I wonder if you would,’ said Captain John.

  ‘Why, didn’t you?’ asked Bea. It was seldom she asked a point-blank question, especially of Captain John, and he answered it with the seriousness it deserved.

  ‘I wanted to … but I couldn’t trust myself.’

  ‘How – not?’ asked Harriet, puzzled, ‘if you wanted to.’

  ‘At the last pinch,’ said Captain John, ‘at the last pinch I think I should have been angry and fought to save myself – and it is no use unless you can go through that last pinch.’

  They did not understand.

  ‘But what good does it do?’ asked Bea. ‘Fighting?’

  ‘Well, that is not the only point,’ said Captain John slowly.

  ‘Why not? What other point could there be?’

  ‘It is something,’ he said, ‘to believe enough to die for that belief. Perhaps it is more than something, perhaps it is everything – to – aspire – to try.’

  ‘Yes,’ breathed Harriet. ‘Like martyrs.’

  ‘I think the martyrs were stupid,’ said Bea. ‘I think soldiers are too. Fighting is stupid.’

  ‘Perhaps it is,’ said Captain John. ‘But perhaps that is neither here nor there. Perhaps the thing is, to believe.’

  ‘And get killed for it?’

  ‘If necessary.’

  ‘I think so,’ said Harriet. ‘If I were brave enough … only I wouldn’t be,’ she said. ‘But I believe in things.’

  ‘Oh you!’ said Valerie. ‘You will believe in anything.’

  ‘That is better than believing in nothing,’ said Captain John.

  ‘Is it?’ said Bea.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Bea.

  ‘I do,’ said Captain John.

  Harriet stared at them. They were quarrelling.

  They had been having tea in the garden, in fact Victoria, who ate inordinately, had still not finished and Nan was pouring out more milk for her. Harriet had left the table early and come to stand under the cork tree, listening to the woodpeckers, while she decided what she would do with the rest of the afternoon. Bea came after her, Captain John came after Bea and Valerie had brought a chair for Captain John. Valerie’s fussing and homage annoyed him. It was true it took him ages to lower himself on to the grass, but it is better to let him take ages than to notice him, thought Harriet, and now, he held on to the chair and deliberately let himself down to sit with them on the grass.

  Harriet began to build a fence of twigs. Somewhere, in the distance, she could hear Bogey hallooing. Bea sat with her legs curled under her, sitting sideways into her white skirts that were patterned with a pattern of old rose stencillings. Harriet’s dress was the same, except that it was patterned with China blue; that difference changed its whole character, it looked merely crisp and
fresh, while Bea’s … ‘looks like … poetry,’ said Harriet. Why are some colours filled with poetry and others not? ‘Why can’t I choose my clothes?’ she had said to Mother. ‘Why can’t I wear what I like?’ ‘Now Harriet,’ began Mother, ‘you are very nicely and suitably dressed …’ Harriet sighed.

  The quarrel was continuing.

  ‘Your ideas are so … unsteady,’ said Bea to Captain John. Once more they were like two children, or two grown-ups, and that isn’t Bea’s word, thought Harriet. She learnt that from Father. ‘So … unsteady,’ said Bea.

  ‘Are they?’ said Captain John. ‘Once they were burningly steady.’

  That silenced Bea and moved Harriet. She stopped her play with the twigs and put her hand on his knee. It was the knee of his artificial leg, but he seemed to feel it. ‘Won’t they ever be again?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘No. I don’t think they will,’ he said, looking down at her hand. It was a little dusty from the twigs, but he did not tell her to take it away.

  ‘I think they will,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Valerie,’ said Bea getting up, ‘come and practise,’ and she and Valerie walked away, arm-in-arm, linked together. Presently the not-quite-synchronized sounds of their new duet came down to the garden from upstairs. Harriet looked down at the grass because she knew that Captain John cared. The silence, broken only by the duet, grew too long.

  ‘You shouldn’t care,’ said Harriet severely, speaking into the grass. ‘You are a man and she is a little girl.’

  ‘If I were ninety and she were nine, or the other way round, it would be all the same,’ said Captain John. She could hear him breathing.

  ‘Do you – love her?’ asked Harriet, digging with her finger in the grass.

  ‘Yes and no,’ said Captain John. ‘Never mind, Harriet,’ and he added, ‘There are some things you understand better than Bea,’ and he said, speaking lightly, ‘We can’t change her.’

  That was true. Bea would not change. Under her charm and softness she was adamant, and people never guessed how adamant she was because she was resilient. ‘I expect you find Harriet the difficult one,’ they said to Nan, and Nan shook her head and pursed her lips. With the deadly knowledge that old servants have, Nan could have told a thing or two of Bea, though she never did. ‘Bea is by far, far, the most difficult,’ was all that Nan would say.

  ‘She knitted more Red Cross scarves than any of us,’ said Harriet now, and then she added truthfully, ‘But it was because she wanted to be the best at knitting,’ but she did not say that aloud because after all Bea was as good a sister as could be expected.

  She tilted her head and looked up through the branches of the cork tree to see the clouds moving and the house and tree tilting back against the clouds.

  ‘Funny,’ said Harriet to herself. ‘The world goes on turning, and it has all these troubles in it.’ She looked down the garden to the tea-table, where Victoria still sat. Horrible-wounds-and-milk-and-bread-and-butter-and-loving-and-quarrelling-and-wars. What was a quarrel but a little war? And there were wars all over the world. They have even come in here, thought Harriet, looking at the big stone house that was her home. But, thought Harriet, this is the world.

  The sound of playing had stopped and there was no sign of Valerie and Bea. That probably meant they had gone up on the roof; the roof was a favourite place for walking or pacing; its flatness and its four parapets like walls were restful; there you could not see anything but the sky and the hawks circling and a few bright dots of paper kites. If you climbed up on the parapet, of course, you saw the whole wide vista of the land: town-river-boats-trees-works-Ram-Prasad’s-little-house-by-the-gate-the-faraway-temple-another-temple-across-the-river, thought Harriet. Climbing up on the parapet was forbidden, but she and Bogey climbed.

  Every family has something, when it has left home, that is for it a symbol of home, that, for it, for ever afterwards, brings home back. It may be a glimpse of the dappled flank of a rocking-horse, a certain pattern of curtain, of firelight shining on a brass fender, of light on the rim of a plate; it may be a saying, sweet or sharp, like: ‘It will only end in tears.’ ‘Do you think I am made of money?’ ‘It is six of one and half a dozen of the other’; it may be a song or a sound; the sound of a lawn-mower, or the swish of water, or of birds singing at dawn; it may be a custom (every family has different customs), or a taste: of a special pudding or burnt treacle tart or dripping toast; or it may be scent or a smell: of flowers, or furniture polish or cooking, toffee or sausages, or saffron bread or onions or boiling jam. These symbols are all that are left of that lost world in our new one. There was no knowing what would remain afterwards of hers for Harriet.

  Being European in India, the flavour of Harriet’s home was naturally different from most; it was not entirely European, it was not entirely Indian; it was a mixture of both. The house was a large oblong of grey stucco, flat-roofed, its parapet ornamented with those improbable daisies. The river ran past its garden and the tree rose high in front of its serpentine drive.

  It was a double-floored house, with long verandahs. The rooms were all high, cavernous, stone-floored and whitewashed; shaded by the verandahs, they were always dim, though the end rooms had green-shuttered windows. For nine months of the year electric fans moved the upper air. They did not at first appear the kind of rooms that made a home, but Harriet’s home was a peculiarly pleasant place.

  On the ground floor was the dining-room, red-floored, pillared, with large pictures in large frames, reproductions of Gainsboroughs, Reynolds and Romneys. The dining-table was oval and capable of taking extra leaves; at night it had an embroidered cloth and pink-shaded candelabra above its bowl of roses or pink sandwich creeper; those candles always woke excitement in Harriet. There was also a barrel, hooped with brass, that had once held salt meat on a sailing ship; now it was used for drinks and the children could just manage to raise the lid and all of them, often, had small secret swigs. There was the high chair that even Victoria had outgrown, and there were Father’s silver cups, won by his charger Maxim when he was a younger man in the Bengal Volunteer Horse; there, too, were all the children’s christening mugs.

  On one side of the dining-room was Father’s room; it had his desk, papers, cupboards, his two guns, the telephone and Sally’s, his fox-terrier’s, basket. At the other end of the house on the ground floor was the double nursery with its battered furniture, the children’s own personal bookshelves and small wicker armchairs and the Millais pictures that had been in Mother’s nursery. Nan’s bed, Bogey’s and Victoria’s cot were at the back of the room in a row and there was an ironing-board where the iron seemed perpetually heated. Nan’s red lamp burnt in front of the holy picture over her chest of drawers; she always kept a sprig of jasmine in her vase. The guinea-pigs’ cage, the rocking-horse and the scooters that no one ever touched, were out on the verandah.

  Upstairs was Mother’s bedroom where she and Father slept and where anything private and serious in the family was discussed: ‘talks’, and what Mother called ‘reasoning’ and whippings; temperatures were taken there, the doctor examined throats and chests and ears and stomachs. Harriet, Bogey and Victoria had all been born in that bedroom.

  Next door was Harriet’s and Bea’s room and their two white beds from which they talked at night; next door to that again was the drawing-room.

  The drawing-room was always confused for Harriet; there were so many things in it, both objects and happenings, that she could never remember it exactly. It was a large room and one end of it was left almost bare, with its green floor holding only the piano and the music rack and a tiger skin with a snarling head on the wall. The other end of the drawing-room was furnished very thoroughly with chairs and couches, bookcases and a cabinet, a fireseat and, in the centre, a low brass tea-table on carved wooden legs. The tea caddy was tortoiseshell and very old; it stood on the mantelpiece with the Worcester cups and a tiny Dresden china cup that belonged to Bogey. Harriet never knew why it should belong to Boge
y. Mother’s writing-table held a pile of account books, and notes, and catalogues. There was a sweet-pea chintz on the chairs and real sweet peas in bowls, or else sweet sultans and gypsophila, or else, when it was getting hot, vases of tuberoses. There were small rubbed leather books that were sets of the classics, Scott and Thackeray and Dickens, and there was a scrapbook made for Harriet’s grandmother when she was a child. The cabinet held a compendium of games.

  The house had three staircases, a main one of dark wood, a side one painted white under which was the Secret Hole, and a back one for the servants which the children were not allowed to use, though Bogey and Harriet used it. Double flights of stone steps led from the downstairs veranda into the garden at the front of the house. The kitchen and the servants’ quarters were outside, and there were stables, a washerman’s yard, an electric-light-machine shed, a garage, and the porter’s, Ram Prasad’s, house beside the gate.

  ‘It is more comfortable than anywhere on earth,’ Harriet would have said of her home. It had fitted her like her own skin, but just lately she had come to see it more critically and more clearly. ‘Is it that I am getting old?’ wondered Harriet. ‘I am getting old, look at my little breasts. Or is it Valerie and Captain John?’ And she added honestly, ‘It is something to do with knowing Valerie and Captain John.’

  Certainly, since she had known them, everything in the house had been thrown into sharper focus, but then they, particularly Captain John, had coincided in a curious way with her growing up. Had she grown up because of them? She could not tell, but she knew now, for instance, that her parents had not as much money as Valerie’s. Her eyes had been opened to contrasts: Valerie’s clothes and their own home-made handed-down dresses; Nan and Valerie’s travelling governess; Harriet’s family had no car, they had only one child’s pony. ‘When the cradles fill,’ said Harriet’s father, ‘the stables empty.’ Of course we do have a lot of children, thought Harriet, but we have no Persian rugs, no wine at dinner, no ice cream, and when we go for picnics we don’t have a basket with plates and cups and everything to match. ‘Yes. I suppose we are poor,’ said Harriet. ‘Compared to Valerie … we haven’t been anywhere, and we don’t know anything at all.’