The River Page 8

  ‘Bea, does it show you are getting old?’

  ‘Does what? I do wish, Harry, you wouldn’t think in between the things you say. As Valerie says, how do you expect us to understand?’

  Bea was cross, but Harriet persisted.

  ‘What are the signs of getting old – like us?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Lots of things I expect,’ answered Bea wearily. ‘Do you want to know now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Growing up, of course—’

  ‘Growing pains?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘I suppose so. Learning more. Being more with Mother and less with Nan; not liking playing so much, nor pretending; understanding things more and feeling them longer; wearing liberty bodices; and oh, yes,’ said Bea, ‘I remember when we came down from Darjeeling this year, finding everything had grown far more little than I expected. When I went away it all seemed so big. When I came back, it was little; and I suppose,’ said Bea slowly, ‘being friends with Captain John has made me old.’

  I am not so far behind all that, thought Harriet to herself.

  Soon after that conversation with Bea, that talking of growing, Mother sent for them.

  ‘Harriet and Bea. Mother wants to speak to you – in her room.’

  ‘What about?’ said Bea instantly and suspicious.

  ‘She didn’t tell me,’ said Nan smoothly.

  ‘But Nan knows,’ said Harriet to Bea. Bea shrugged her shoulders.

  It was January. The Christmas holidays were over and life had entered on the second lap of the cold weather. Lessons had begun. The begonia venustra creeper in the garden and along the front of the house was out in orange-keyed flowers. The cork tree had its full spread of blossom. There was, all day long, a smell of honey in the garden and of honey in the fields where the mustard was in flower. It was still cool; there were still cold morning mists that blew over the garden at dawn and gathered on the river. The excitement was all over. Life had settled to its tenor. Harriet’s story, with other happenings, had lost its point of interest and been fined down by the passing of the days until now the family took it for granted.

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ said Mother. ‘I think you are old enough to have this talk with me.’

  Harriet, as a matter of fact, was not at all old that morning. She looked down, as she sat, at her brown scratched knees with their sprinkling of golden hairs, and at the shortness of her green-and-white checked gingham dress. The dress bore all the stains and marks of that morning’s experiences: papaya-juice-from-breakfast-Prussian-blue-from-painting-the-Sea-of-Azov-a-little-torn-hole-from-climbing-trees-a-long-mark-from-falling-down-while-chasing-Bogey-on-the-dewy-lawn.

  Mother was looking at the dress too. ‘What have you been doing, Harriet?’

  Harriet hung her head. ‘Playing.’

  ‘A big girl like you! Perhaps you had better not stay,’ said Mother. ‘Perhaps you are not old enough. I will talk to Bea.’

  Bea sat with a stony face, her shoulders hunched. She said nothing.

  ‘Oh, Mother, please let me stay. I am old enough, really I am. It is only sometimes, when I play with Bogey. Mother, let me stay.’

  Mother looked at Bea and Bea looked resentfully at the floor. Mother sighed. ‘Well,’ she said with another glance at Bea, ‘perhaps you had better stay.’

  Then there was complete silence, with only the regular steam puff from the Works and the steady sound of the river.

  ‘You are getting to be big girls now,’ said Mother.

  Another silence. Bea sat stiff, withdrawn as far as she could be. Harriet began to be agog.

  ‘Every day you grow a little more,’ said Mother.

  ‘Willy-nilly,’ said Harriet suddenly.

  Bea shot an angry glance at her from under her eyebrows, but Mother smiled. ‘Yes, exactly,’ she said. ‘Willy-nilly. Soon, sooner than we guess perhaps, you, will become women.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we will,’ said Harriet.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mother, ‘I have never asked you how much you both know about – life.’

  ‘Life?’ asked Harriet puzzled.

  ‘Babies being born,’ said Bea shortly, breathing through her nose.

  ‘Everything,’ said Harriet with certainty.

  ‘Not only babies,’ said Mother, and waited. Then she asked, ‘You, Bea?’

  ‘A little,’ said Bea reluctantly.

  ‘Well—’ said Mother. She sighed again. ‘We had better begin from the beginning … You know it is the women who bear the babies, carry them in their bodies – as I am doing.’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ said Harriet, and she and Bea both averted their eyes from Mother.

  ‘We – women have to make our bodies fit for that,’ said Mother. ‘Like a temple.’

  ‘A temple?’ asked Harriet, surprised.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mother. But still it did not seem quite certain, the idea did not quite fit.

  ‘Because you see, Harriet, the bearing of children, for the man you love, and who loves you, is very precious and sanctified work.’

  ‘Do you love Father?’ asked Harriet immediately.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mother, ‘I am glad to say I do.’

  At that small statement, typical of her mother, the conversation became suddenly and intimately true. Harriet felt a surge of love for her. She put her hand on Mother’s knee and Mother pressed her hand, but Bea still sat aloof, still as if she were angry.

  Harriet was unable to prevent herself from talking, from forcing this on.

  ‘But – having babies, doesn’t it hurt – horribly?’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ said Mother. ‘But nowadays they have so much to help you that you hardly feel the pain, at least, not very much. You needn’t be frightened. The doctors are clever.’

  ‘But – suppose there isn’t a doctor. Suppose you were caught out in – the jungle – or a desert – or there was a flood!’ said Harriet.

  ‘Oh Har-ri-et! Do let Mother go on,’ said Bea.

  ‘To get ready this temple …’ said Mother, and her voice sounded uncertain again as if she again had been thinking over how to put what she had to say, and was not sure of the result.

  ‘To make it ready, changes happen in your body, when you are beginning to be big girls.’

  ‘I know,’ said Harriet, nodding. ‘They have happened to me.’

  Mother looked surprised and Bea impatient.

  ‘You needn’t snort at me. They have,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Yes, I expect they have. You are growing, but wait, Harriet,’ said Mother. ‘Listen.’

  ‘Mother,’ broke in Bea, ‘must we talk about this now? Can’t we wait till this does happen? And must we have Harriet here?’ She glared at Harriet as if she hated her.

  And Harriet herself suddenly felt that she would prefer to postpone it, though she did not know why.

  A sound came from the river, an approaching churning with a regular pulsing of engines. It was the twelve o’clock mail steamer. The noise grew louder as it passed the house, upstream, and then grew fainter; presently there came the sound of waves, its wash slapping against the garden bank. Mother, who had seemed to waver, gathered herself again.

  ‘You can be patient for a few minutes longer,’ said Mother. ‘I shan’t keep you long. It is always better for things to be talked of plainly.’

  Bea looked as though she did not agree. ‘And,’ added Mother dryly as she watched Bea’s face, ‘it won’t do you any harm to hear this from your mother, even if you have been told it by someone else already.’

  She means Valerie, thought Harriet. Valerie has told her. Good for you, Mother, thought Harriet, refreshed to find how little of a fool her mother was.

  Mother’s eyes were resting on Bea’s head as she began to talk again. Bea bent her head so that neither of them could see her face and her fingers picked, picked at the wicker stool she sat on. Why was Bea so funny, so resentful? And now Harriet found herself wishing that Mother would not keep them there, keep Bea, at any rate,
there, to be talked at against her will.

  But Mother talked on calmly and firmly, and soon Harriet forgot to look at Bea. She was listening with all her ears.

  Mother’s voice went steadily on. Then there was a third silence.

  ‘Well!’ said Harriet. ‘Well!’

  She looked down at herself, and it was true that she was exactly as before, the same knees, the same hairiness, the dress with the same stains and marks. ‘But – I didn’t know what I was, what I am, what I am going to be,’ said Harriet. For all she knew, had known up to now, she might have been the same as Bogey. Gone, and she thought regretfully of them for a moment, gone were some pleasing vistas she had seen for herself and Bogey; running away to sea and becoming cabin boys; turning into Red Indians, I should have to be a squaw, and I don’t like squaws, thought Harriet; being an explorer, No, I suppose women are not really suitable for explorers, thought Harriet, they would be too inconvenient. And every month … like the moon and the tides … the moon brings tides to the world and the world has to have them … it can’t help its tides, and no more can I. All at once it seemed exceedingly merciless to the small Harriet, sitting on just such another wicker stool as Bea’s in Mother’s room.

  ‘I wish I were Bogey,’ said Harriet.

  ‘I know,’ said Mother. ‘I often wanted to be a boy.’

  ‘You?’ asked Harriet in surprise. ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes I,’ said Mother, ‘but it is no good, Harry. You are a girl.’

  But … I don’t think it can happen to me, thought Harriet, and aloud she said, ‘Mother, I don’t think it will …’

  ‘Will what, Harriet?’

  Bea made an impatient movement. ‘That is what she always does, thinks, and then expects you to know what she is thinking.’ It seemed to help Bea if she attacked Harriet. ‘She is a perfect little silly. Can I go, Mother?’

  ‘Bea …’ Mother began, but Harriet had to interrupt.

  ‘To me? In my body? Are you sure, Mother?’

  ‘I hate bodies,’ burst out Bea, ‘I want to go.’

  ‘Very well then, go, Bea,’ said Mother.

  After Bea had gone, Mother sat still, and once again Harriet heard her sigh, but she herself was too engrossed with herself, with being Harriet, to feel this. ‘I don’t think,’ she said, ‘that I can be – quite an ordinary woman, Mother.’

  ‘You will be the same as every woman when your turn comes,’ said Mother, ‘and so will Bea … just as you said, willy-nilly. And now,’ she said, ‘perhaps you had better go back to your playing.’

  ‘Play!’ said Harriet. ‘Play! I shall never play again.’ But she did. The same day she was chasing Bogey on the lawn again.

  In, the early afternoon, everyone rested. Father snatched an hour before he went back to the office, Mother rested monumental on her bed from two till four; Harriet and Bea read, Bogey was banished to a camp cot in Father’s room, while Victoria slept and Nan sat in her chair in the darkened nursery and sewed under the window and sometimes dozed off. It was the servants’ siesta time; even the birds were silent; even the lizards lay asleep in the sun.

  If, however, Harriet had any pressing business she did not postpone it; she left her book and slipped off her bed and no one was any the wiser. ‘I am going to rest in the Secret Hole,’ she said to Bea. She was not, but Bea nodded quietly. Then Harriet went downstairs and almost always, as she passed Father’s room, Bogey’s camp cot was likewise empty.

  This was Bogey’s supreme time for his adventures, when there was no one to see him or hinder him or even be aware of him. It was the time, too, when the garden was least disturbed, when his insects and his reptile friends were most accessible. Harriet never remembered yet getting up and finding him in bed.

  One afternoon, in late February, Harriet needed Bogey. She went downstairs to find him, but of course he was not there. She could not see him in the garden either as she stood on the verandah.

  ‘Bother,’ said Harriet, ‘I shall have to go out,’ and she went on tiptoe to the nursery to fetch her hat.

  Nan was asleep. On her lap lay a pair of Victoria’s knickers into which she was putting new buttonholes as Victoria grew too fat for the old; she still held her needle and her lips, as she slept, blew gently in and out. Harriet fetched her hat and went out.

  She could not see Bogey anywhere. ‘He is playing Going-round-the-garden-without-being-seen,’ said Harriet, annoyed, and she began to follow him over the customary tracks that only she and Bogey knew. The garden was empty, brilliant with sun. Its colour blazed at Harriet. Here, as she went between the plinth of the house and the poinsettias, their flowers, as big as plates, long-fingered, scarlet, looked into her face as she passed; she half expected to see Bogey’s face amongst them, Bogey’s face screwed up in the sun, under his shock of hair. She crept between the poinsettias and the house just as he crept, but there was no Bogey there. He was not by the morning glory screen trumpeting its blue and purple flowers in the sun, nor under the swinging orange creeper at the house corner. He was not in the bougainvillaea clumps nor anywhere near the rose turrets, nor under the jacaranda trees, nor by the tank. Harriet went into the vegetable garden between the rows of peas and white-flowering beans, and pushed through the tomato bed, malodorous with its yellow flowers, but he was not there. He was not in the stable where Pearl stood looking stupidly out of her stall, half asleep herself. Harriet stopped to pat her, to smell her warmth, but Pearl did not alter her expression at all. She only twitched her ear at a fly.

  Bogey was not behind the little midden of manure, nor in the servants’ quarters where Harriet could see forms, stretched out asleep on the string beds, under the trees and the eaves of each hut.

  She went behind the hibiscus standards, their flowers hanging pink and scarlet and yellow and cream in lantern shapes with tasselled stamens; she swung them as she passed, but nothing else stirred or shook them. She went where Bogey went, along the drain by the wall behind the bamboos whose pipe stems stood, green and bronze and canary yellow with only the sunlight filtering between them. She went stealthily along expecting Bogey to spring out on her with a cat-call any moment, but the garden was as still and blank as ever. She went into the fern-house and round the goldfish pond. Bogey was not there either.

  Out on the open lawn, the sun beat down on the grass that had a haze of its own heat, and sent off a warm dry smell. All the scents of garden mixed with it, but still the scent of the yellow Marechal-Neil roses and of the petunias and of the cork-tree flowers was distinguishable. The lawn, too, was quite empty. The whole garden was empty, and Harriet flung herself down on the grass and looked back up at the house and the tree still making their journey against the sky. Far up the hawks still went round and round in their rings. They made her dizzy. ‘I rather wish I had stayed in and had my rest,’ said Harriet, yawning. ‘I don’t know where Bogey is. He plays “Going-round-the-garden” far too well. Probably he is here, quite close to me and laughing,’ said Harriet crossly; but no, she had no feeling of Bogey being near and laughing. She had only a feeling of blankness, a complete blank. Blank, thought Harriet aridly, and yawned again. Blank.

  All at once she sat up. I believe, she thought. I believe he is waiting for that snake. I believe he is by the peepul tree.

  She did not want to go near the peepul tree; even the thought of the cobra made her spine go cold. ‘Ugh!’ said Harriet. ‘Ugh! I wish he wouldn’t. I don’t know how he can. I must tell Father. I am going to tell Father,’ said Harriet, and she jumped up and dusted the dust of the grass off her hands and knees and elbows.

  She went to the gate where the bridal creeper, over now, hung in a tangle of dried green. The gate was open a crack. That meant Ram Prasad was out. His house was empty. Harriet looked in as she passed, and saw his ‘lota’, his washing-pot, and his lantern and his green tin trunk painted with roses standing neatly under his bed; his coat hung from a peg, his cut-out pictures were pasted on the wall and in the corner, near his earth cooking-oven,
were his brass platters, his spoon and his brass drinking cup and his hookah. They were all utterly familiar to Harriet; she had seen them all hundreds of times.

  Now she had come to the space round the peepul tree. Here, where the earth was bare because of the peepul roots, there was an empty space like a courtyard edged and screened with bamboos. There was nobody there, not even the cobra; her eyes had looked at once quickly among the roots, under the bamboos, to see a dark heap, a sliding coil. There was nobody, nothing, and then the blankness ran up into the sky, her feet were clamped to the earth; she had seen something else. It was not Bogey; not the snake, but an earthenware saucer of milk lying upset and broken on the ground near a small bamboo stick and, further off, towards the bamboos, on the ground too, Bogey’s sun hat was lying by itself. ‘He has been bitten,’ said Harriet’s mind distinctly as she stood there.

  It – it came out for the milk and he touched it with a stick and it struck. It struck, and again the blankness ran into the sky into a long pause. Then close to her feet, lying on the ground, she saw Bogey’s whistle.

  With trembling legs she bent to pick it up, and as she bent, she saw him.

  He was lying in the bamboos, only a few yards away, spread starfishwise as if he had flung, or tried to fling, his arms and legs away from him; he was lying on his face, his body drawn up from his arms and legs in a small heap. ‘I see,’ said that dreadful clearness in Harriet’s mind, ‘he would do that. Try and hide in the bamboos. He would go off to hide it, not tell – and then when it hurt,’ and she knew snake bite was a terrible pain, ‘why then, I suppose he couldn’t tell. No one would hear him. There was no one near enough to hear.’

  She went towards him on shaking legs. ‘Bogey,’ she said in a voice that was a croak, ‘Bogey. Bogey.’

  She went nearer, her eyes looking in and out of the bamboos, on the ground, near him, away from him. There was nothing there. Only Bogey on his face.

  She looked down on him, at the seat of his shorts, old grey-blue linen, and at his rucked-up shirt that showed his naked back and his spine. His hands were clutched and filled with earth and bamboo bits, and his hair was dirty with them too. He must have rolled about in them, thought Harriet. Her throat grew dryer, her breath hurt, her neck was cold. ‘Bogey,’ she croaked. ‘Bogey—’