“Oh Mother! Did you put in my Christmas cards?”
“Yes, lovey. Do not flap.”
Alda’s spirits began to sink as they left behind the extended, straggling village street that was Sillingham and passed the railway bridge and the ugly new cottages on the road leading to Froggatt. She thought of Pagets, encircled by a barrier of bushy bronze oaks whose green trunks enclosed mysterious shadows. There was a feeling of protection there, yet a sense of light, of freedom and movement, too, of air blowing through widely spaced branches; but here, all was low and damp. She was extremely susceptible to dreary surroundings and bad weather, but she seldom realised what was depressing her spirits, and her only method of raising them was to seize upon whatever could be delighted in and delight in it slightly more than was natural. “All Alda’s geese are swans,” her sisters said indulgently, and her husband sometimes called her The Golden Goose. She was now preparing to delight in the view from Pine Cottage.
Their arrival was made more cheerful than she had anticipated by Mr. Bolliver’s good nature in carrying all the luggage, including Jenny’s Masai spear, across to the cottage for them, the children joyfully expanding the small jokes which arose every other minute and assisting him to deposit the heavier cases upstairs. While he was thus employed Alda hurried out to the cellar and saw with relief that the coal had arrived. There was also a pile of freshly-chopped wood. How kind of someone, she thought, and hastily filled a scuttle with coal and her skirt with billets and went into the parlour.
“Mother, the groceries have come. All our rations and a lot of lovely soap. The tradespeople seem very reliable round here,” called Jenny from the back door.
“Digestive biscuits. Goody!” from Louise.
“Meg doesn’t want a biksit.”
“Charmed, I’m sure. All the more for us.”
“That’s the lot,” smiled Mr. Bolliver at the parlour door, thinking that this was the nicest lot he had so far delivered at Pine Cottage. How many he had set down at that gate full of hope and strength! and how many he had called for three months later! broken in mind and body and cursing their landlady as he drove them away.
When he had been paid and had driven off, Alda knelt before the fire, now burning strongly but heatlessly in the cold air, and gazed with unwonted pensiveness into the flames. Overhead, the children could be heard dragging their possessions out of the suitcases and putting them away in carefully chosen places from which she would afterwards have to remove and rearrange them.
She glanced round the room. Dim grey light came in between the scanty curtains and showed a grubby pink cushion, a row of tattered paper novels and other books in such dirty covers that she decided then and there to lock them out of the children’s reach, a steel engraving of a mythological figure weeping in a grove. The air smelled of staleness and old carpets. Save for the distant sound made by the children and the fluttering of the fire, all was silent.
Alda had been homeless for so long that she had almost ceased to grieve (or so she told herself) for the elegant yet homely double-fronted house in the old quarter of Ironborough which she and Ronald had been carefully, lovingly filling with furniture and books. Home, for her, was now wherever Ronald and the children and she herself could gather together in front of a fire or about a table, and sometimes she congratulated herself that she was not tied to a house, a routine and a neighbourhood as her married sisters were, but whenever circumstance compelled the family to pull up its shallow roots and move on, she felt their homelessness keenly for a week or so, until those roots had re-established themselves. At Pagets they had struck into deeper and richer soil than any they had so far discovered, and this afternoon Alda was not cheerful.
She jumped up and ran to the children, leaving the fire beginning to warm the room. I’ll soon have you down and packed away in a cupboard, she vowed, grimacing in passing at a print, executed in strong reds and browns, of four bald old men smoking churchwarden pipes amidst some hounds in an inn parlour. Ruskin himself, in the chapter on Late Venetian Grotesque, never in his worst nightmares imagined art sinking to such bathos. Yet beside it hung a Victorian water-colour of an Italian lake surrounded by mountains, painted in harmless clear blues and framed in broad gold, that she liked and resolved should stay there. Her fancy leaned towards whatever was pretty and immediately enjoyable, and some years previously Ronald had quietly, with amusement, abandoned his attempts to alter his Golden Goose’s taste.
“It’s raining,” announced Jenny, glancing up from the confusion of possessions spread about the floor in the biggest bedroom, and Alda looked out of the window and saw some distant wooden structures already half-hidden in weeping mist.
“Those are chickens’ houses,” said Louise, who had followed her to the window and stood looking out with an arm about her mother’s waist. “Look, you can see the chickens walking about.”
“A man in a sack did come and gib them their tea,” put in Meg, who was busy untidying a box of hair ribbons. “Meg did see him.”
“When can we have our tea, Mother?” sighed Louise. “I could peck a bit.”
“Could you peck a bit, my lovey? Well, you shall. Let’s just put some of these things away and then we’ll have tea. Toasted buns and butter!”
They worked until the light failed, filling drawers with shabby little clothes and rolling mattresses down the stairs, with shouts of laughter, to air by the parlour fire. Jenny was really helpful, for she inherited her mother’s impatient energy tempered by an organising capacity handed down from her paternal grandmother; Louise dropped things and went off into daydreams, and Meg bustled off on explorations, returning at intervals with reports, usually of an alarming nature, about the house and its contents.
“May we have it in front of the fire, Mums darling?” asked Jenny, lifting a crimson face from toasting the buns.
“Of course. Oh dear, if only father were here … never mind. The time will soon pass. Come along, Meg; Louise, come and warm those frog-hands. There! now let’s be cosy.”
Firelight, and curtains drawn against the rain and deepening twilight, and four laughing faces, framed in hair as palely golden as the flames. The mean, tastelessly furnished room is hidden in kind shadows; they play over the ceiling and bow and waver as if dancing an accompaniment to the story Alda reads aloud. Five hundred miles away, the father driving through a dark, sighing forest of pines in Oldenburg imagines that group gathered about the fire, as he has so often seen it, and amidst the black night and the dreary confusion of the journey, he smiles.
(… The mighty George Eliot once commented with acerbity upon those readers who “demand adultery, murder and ermine tippets on every page,” and we ourselves, confronted whenever we open a volume of contemporary fiction by explosions, lust, perversion and despair in every line, join our feeble voice to hers. Though often tempted to show that we, too, know all about That—yes, and That, to say nothing of the Anglo-Saxon Words (all nine of them) we refuse to be bounced into writing what we do not enjoy writing. Our themes are gentle, it is true, but
We do but sing because we must
And pipe but as the linnets do,
and our final decision is that enough is going on everywhere without our starting in.)
After a game of Rush Hour, and baths which were necessarily scanty because of the short commons in fuel, Alda put her family to bed in the chilly, unfamiliar rooms and left them to fall asleep as quickly as excitement would permit, while she herself went round the house looking for tramps, burglars and lunatics (of escaped prisoners from the German camp six miles away, or deserters from the American Army still lurking in the woods, she did not think until later that evening).
She opened cupboards, glanced into the large cold pantry, and shone her torch into a closet filled with chipped crockery and yellow newspapers by the kitchen door: then, satisfied that nobody lurked there and smiling to herself, she went into the now comfortably warm parlour and sat down beside the fire prepared to enjoy a peaceful hour or
so before going to bed.
It was almost eight. She had wound the ugly little clock on the mantelpiece and its loud hasty tick—a vulgar sound if ever there were one—now filled the silence. She could hear the rain falling steadily outside, and occasionally a car going past on the Froggatt road. As she picked up the knitting which she preferred to reading, she glanced round the room for the second time that day and decided that when she had packed away quite half of the pictures and ornaments, those dull pink walls and that threadbare carpet would look less offensive; but oh! if only the room had had clean white matting and apricot distemper!
The fire settled itself lower into the tiny basket grate, the clock ticked sharply, quickly. Alda’s needles flew skilfully in the intricacies of a jumper for Louise and her thoughts flew to Germany. She had been working and dreaming for perhaps half an hour, when there sounded a loud, single knock at the front door.
She stopped knitting, and turned her head in the direction of the summons, and her eyes opened a little wider. She was not a nervous woman, but at that moment she did realise that she was alone with three children in a cottage a quarter of a mile across the fields from the nearest house, and that if she opened the front door to that knock, there was no reason why—whoever was there—should not come in.
She waited, her knitting resting in her lap. Rain drove against the window, the fire gave forth its faint sounds. The knock was not repeated.
But she did not find this reassuring. Was the intruder waiting at the door? or, worse still, prowling noiselessly about the house—perhaps even now peering into the room through that gap in the curtains? She forced herself to glance at the window and of course nothing was there; no white face half-revealed, no hand pressed menacingly against the pane.
Suddenly she got up, dropped her work on the chair, and hurried down the passage. She did listen, it must be admitted, just for a moment before she actually turned the catch of the front door, but when she did so it was without hesitation.
The rainy moonlit sky, vast and vacant, looked down at her; cold and sweet, the wet air blew against her face. No one was there, and across the fields, sheeted with fresh pools, shone reassuringly the lights of the farm.
She took a lengthy look all about her. A sixty-foot ash tree stood up in the wind, sighing steadily, and she could hear the pines at the back of the house sighing too; their sound was like the sea’s sound, the sea fifteen miles away across the black, turfy downs. Suddenly, something made her glance down at her feet, and there, neatly arranged upon the doorstep, was a pile of books.
“Oh, how kind!” Alda exclaimed, and stooped to examine them, not realising that the unknown might have put them there as a lure to engross her while creeping up to bash her on the head.
She had just read the title of the first one, In Touch with the Transcendent, and had time to experience dismay, before a gust of rain blew in over herself and the books and she shut the door.
Back in the parlour she put them on the table and finished her inspection. The titles were:
With Rod and Gun in Jugoslavia; Foch, Man of Orléans; In Touch with the Transcendent; Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant; To Haiti in a Ketch.
In Touch with the Transcendent, a volume of vaguely religious essays, was the most worn of the five, and was clearly a favourite with its owner, but Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant also bore traces of frequent use. It was not easy to conjure up a personality who should delight in both works, and when Alda went up to bed an hour later she had got no further than the conviction that he was good-natured, eccentric, and a man.
4
AT BREAKFAST THE next morning Jenny and Louise instantly assumed that the unknown was a spy, and worked out an elaborate plan by which he could be identified and trapped, while Meg methodically worked her way through a large bowl of cereal and milk, glancing continually from one animated face to another.
The subject kept them absorbed until breakfast was over and before them—long, rainy and dull—stretched the day. The irregular nature of their lives during the war had never permitted Jenny and Louise to acquire the sense of order and routine which is alleged to play such an important and valuable part in a child’s upbringing, and Alda herself was no routine-lover; the impromptu picnic, the unheralded treat, were what she enjoyed, and her housekeeping was slapdash and cheerful. She was well fitted to bring up children (who do not miss routine and order if they have security and love) and her daughters, with imaginations kept in play by the many home-diversions provided by an ingenious mother, were happy children.
They each had a paint-box; there was the hoard of old Best-way and Weldon’s Fashion Books that travelled round with the family for colouring and cutting out; there was Louise’s box of dolls’ clothes and the unfailing interest to be obtained from swapping them with those in Jenny’s box; there were books (two of Louise’s favourites were Bessie in the Mountains, a pious mid-nineteenth-century American story, and By Order of Queen Maud, a Late Victorian tale in which the highly exhibitionist heroine ended up as a cripple for life, just to learn her); and finally, all three owned raincoats and sound rubber boots. This meant that they were made free of the pleasures of an English winter; if all else failed to amuse, they could go for a walk.
Alda knew that bread, vegetables and groceries would be brought to her door, and she reckoned that it would not be necessary to shop in the village more than twice a week. There was, therefore, no sound excuse, after she and Jenny had whisked through the washing-up and sketchily made the beds, for going out.
But the fire burned cheerfully in the kitchen and three heads were bent placidly (even Meg, who was too young for painting, was temporarily entertained in watching) over the painting books. Alda went across to the window and looked out; green, wet, fresh and empty the fields stretched away to the brown woods. She felt the raindrops on her face and the suck of wet mud at her boots and the cold crystal scatter of water over her hand as she pulled at a late blackberry; she could taste its soft rotten sweetness on her tongue. I’ll go over to the farm, she decided, and see what happens about letters and milk. She had received an impression that the Hoadleys did not want to be friendly but there was no harm in asking.
When she came down in her oilskins, Meg was sitting on the floor.
“Just getting on me boots,” she explained. “Meg will go with mudder.”
“Oh now, Meg darling, you can’t come this time, it’s pouring with rain,” exclaimed Alda impatiently, wild to be off. “You stay here goodly with Jenny and Weez.”
“Meg doesn’t want to.”
“We don’t particularly want you, goodness knows,” said Jenny, without looking up from her work.
“I should think not, indeed,” from Louise.
“Dwell, if vey don’t want me and you don’t want me, what shall I do?” roared Meg, bursting into tears and standing up with one boot off and one on. “Oh, oh, oh, what shall I do?”
“Put your silly ass boot on and come with me,” said Alda crossly and gaily, snatching her up and pulling on the boot. “Oh, for goodness’ sake don’t make that noise!”
A few minutes later she was splashing across the meadow with the rain driving in her face and the laughing Meg on her back. A raised track strengthened by flints led from the cottage to the farm, but in parts it had been broken away and deeply worn down by the passage of hay wains and herds of cows, and in these places the pools were inches deep, while on either side extended quagmires. Alda would have preferred to enjoy this wet day by herself, but Meg’s weight felt pleasant upon her shoulders and she liked the clasp of the little hands round her throat.
Keats said that poetry should steal upon the senses. Even so, Naylor’s Farm stole upon Alda’s eyes. At one moment she was plodding along the track, moving her wet eyelashes to free them from the raindrops, while ahead of her lay a group of barns and sheds built of tarred weatherboarding and thatched with ancient straw that had changed in the course of years from gold to silver; the next moment, she had passed the buildings,
and the farm (whose upper storey alone had been visible from the track) lay before her in a hollow. And what had been a pleasant country landscape was transformed.
It looks like the end of somewhere, she thought vaguely, lifting her hand again to wipe the rain from her eyes, and yet it is not shut in. How very beautiful.
There was nothing special or solemn in the scene: it was only that the guardian group of elms was perfectly shaped, and that a sheet of water brimmed between herself and the low, rose-red farmhouse so that the building seemed rising from a lake. Rose-vines, on which masses of withered white blossoms and even a few living ones lingered, overgrew porch and windows; how sheltered the place must be! the gentlest possible slopes and folds in the surrounding meadows enclosed it and made it remote rather than lonely. A low wall of the same rosy brick surrounded the tangled garden, threaded by a narrow brick path; there was not much attempt at flower growing and the place seemed a little neglected, gradually settling into this hollow among the fields, where throughout the years the pond had gathered and white ducks sailed in the rain.
Having walked round the water, Alda pushed open the faded wooden gate and went up the path. After she had used the creaking knocker, she let Meg slip to the ground and stood gazing away at the endless gentle folds of meadow, the farm buildings and the disturbed grey sky. There were no signs of life until a man in a brown uniform came out of a shed with a sack over his head and a sullen face under it; she recognised the blue-eyed Italian of the woods, but though he glanced in her direction he made no reply to her pleasant “good morning” and disappeared among the buildings towards the back of the farmhouse. At that moment the door opened.
“Yes?” said the young woman who stood there, unsmiling under a coquettish turban, with a duster in one hand. “Oh—good morning,” recognising her.
“Good morning, Mrs. Hoadley. I hope I’m not disturbing you. Can you tell me what happens about letters here? Does the postman come or do we have to fetch them?”