Cotter's England (31 page)

"Are ye, ye devil?" said Nellie, frowning and flushing. "I won't have ye pulling my leg, now stop it." She sprang up. "Now listen to me, George. You're not going to keep playing fast and loose with me. Your Ragazza is lucky she got away, but where you're going you'll soon be playing round with another. I won't have it. You all cause tragedy. All of you. You're a race of satanic inventions set on women. Do you know what is the matter with Caroline? She's sick of heartache, she's sick of loneliness, she's sick of a man, or of men, just as surely as a poor pitiful waif of a street girl."

"He dropped her?" enquired George. "Some men are fools."

"Of course, he was a cruel bloody tease; they all are. I know the trouble and the suffering, but what words can be used to communicate with the soul in agony? She thought she was loved. Love is a word I hate because of the way it's mauled. The man was a coquette, George, and she wasn't. The coquettes are happy people. They can live bluffly in a hard world and they're hard. But she is so soft and gentle as a lamb. Aye, I am tender with her; and so I am with your sweet, sainted Eliza; that woman, George, you don't appreciate her, she's full of hope like the morning star—"

George's face opened with astonishment; then "Haw-haw-haw," he began, "Eliza's maybe like the planet Mars, but the morning star—"

"You don't appreciate her, George, she's a sweet angel, and she is angelically soft to Caroline, we all are, all the women." Her voice dropped. She said sadly, "She can't see who are her friends. She has been twisted. Our voices don't reach her mind. She is unable to love anyone after all but herself and that makes her untrue to mankind: it's a frightful thing," her voice rose now, "to put your faith in a heartless man!"

"Pip!" said George. "I'm going back to bed. If we're going into this!"

"You stay here! You stay here! What have you done to this Italian girl? You don't know. Caroline could not believe at first. Yes, but not to me, she thinks: they don't know.
But wha could think sae o' Tarn Glenn?
She wrote poems: who cared about them? She just heard no, no, no, on every side, and at first for years she couldn't believe she was cheated, betrayed, turned down and laughed at by cruel calculating coquettes. For what is all mankind but coquettes when you're looking for simple human affection? Some, when they find out what you want, turn rascal and call in others to see the fun, sticking pins into a human heart; it makes them angry to see someone simply suffering and they try to beat the heart and kill it some way or another."

"Ugh," said George, "I did nothing with the Italian girl. I've told you the truth. I not only respected her, she stopped me. She may have been a simple girl but she looked like a goddess."

"And where is she now? What is she thinking now?"

"How do I know?" roared George.

Nellie sneered, "So Caroline couldn't catch her rascal and her heart's dead in a world of rascals."

"I thought she was a bit—twisted—" said George; "a neurotic."

"She'll be better than all of us. Because she'll see through it. I'll cure her."

"Poppycock! That's slush," said George.

"You won't believe! Believe in suffering, George; believe!" Nellie put up her bony arms and bony wrists and wiped her wet face. She cursed, lit another cigarette and went into an insupportable spasm of coughing. She leaned over the bed, flinging her arms and legs and head about and at length got up gasping.

"Excuse me, pet," said she, as soon as she caught her breath, "I'm sorry, pet, smoke and tea went the wrong way. I feel low myself, George pet. Wherever you go someone wants something from you. The bourgeois and the Philistines trampling on your feelings and labeling you. Life's a hard thing, an abomination. There's no hope in it. It's a great, seamy, crusted face looking up at you from underneath, you can't get away from it because you're treading on it, you need it to live on and you're treading on it, and whenever you look you see the great face with the lips; you hurry away to another spot and you see the great eyes neither animal nor human unwinking and you are afraid just the same to walk everywhere on the face of life. You wonder where there's a place for you on the face that's so watchful and whose thoughts you don't know. You strain to find out one of its thoughts, but it has nothing but an awful thinking about the good and the evil and it judges you. In a way the Philistines are closer to it than me, because they are glad to judge you too, and if they understand you it's with a hard knife to your brain. Ah, George," she said, "you're my judge! It's the things you say to me that count and nothing else. I turn my back on them all. What have I got to hold me here? Supposing I am predestined to commit a crime! You can save me. If you take me with you now, you are judging me, you let me off, you see. We don't know what has us in its hand. They are all rascals here. I haven't a friend. Let me follow you like Ruth. Put up with the ould wife. Perhaps she's your punishment. 'Instead of the cross, the albatross about his neck they hung.' Perhaps you committed a crime once, some poor girl died, you didn't even know it and I was your punishment. Take me with you George! I hate England. Take me away from it. Don't throw my life away. Don't put on the black cap when you look at me. I beg ye pet; can you turn me down?"

She went down on her knees, hobbled the short space across the floor and coming up between his knees, and taking his hands, with her queer ugly, fascinating face twisted into laughs and sobs, she looked up, kissing his hands. "Forgive me, George, I'm a damn histrionic bugger, I'm a bloody groveling fool, can ye leave your poor old wife?"

George bent down and lifted her up. He kissed her with tears in his eyes. "Of all the strange, queer, phoney fakes in the world," he cried, "I've surely got the prize. I'll try and get you a place there, Nellie. What makes you think I wouldn't? I don't know what all that means, your line; but I suppose it means something. Do you know what time it is? Now hustle round and get me some breakfast. You'll have to make your mind up on one thing! You'll have to learn to live without tea, tea, tea!"

"Eh, bless you, my darling," said Nellie; "there's nothing like a man for sanity. You set me straight. I'd go whirling wild without you. No one can hold me. I need you. It's been dreadful George without you, a disease. I've had the married moans but it's cured now. Wait till Eliza comes in. I'll tell her her George is a wonderful man. What a family! I love ye, pet. You'll never get another woman, George, to be such a fool about you."

George stretched himself out on the couch downstairs and began taking off the rest of his clothes. As soon as Nellie went to work he fell asleep, and slept heavily. When he awakened Eliza was there, back from work and George mentioned that Nellie seemed very anxious to get abroad, he would never have thought it of her. And Eliza too, he found, had changed her opinion, she thought Nellie should join him in Geneva. George scratched his head when by himself. He had looked forward to his freedom but he had been sure that Nellie preferred England. He went on with his final plans and thought to himself that he would wait until he got settled into his job, when he would see things very differently. He would try to send money to Nellie, though that was a thing he hated to do, for he always imagined it as flying up to Bridgehead into Peggy's ever thickening roll.

Within a week he had left for Geneva. Nellie weeping and Eliza cheerful, saw him off at the airport. Eliza went back to her work; Nellie went home.

Camilla was sewing long lined curtains for a West End customer. Nellie sat with her. She had got her job back at the paper, though the office doctor had told her to get outdoor work, if she could. "It's only me bronchitis, doctor," were Nellie's words; "if you can't stand a bit of bronchitis, you can't be British." So she told Camilla now; and continued, "I'm afraid that with my figure I'm like the old advert of the fisherman with the cod on his back; that's me, man and cod together; and the codliver oil they want inside me. But I'm no invalid."

She sighed, jigged her cigarette, took a drink and continued, "My brother warned me that if I don't reform, read the beauty hints, get a perm and follow the fads, George will leave me. Do you see the nail varnish? I put it on for the airport. The first time, Camilla. I'm ashamed of what I'm doing for the man. And George says he's grateful to my brother. That's an example of the male trades-union, for they don't care for each other. No. Different types."

"And Tom's not like you."

Nellie sighed. "Eh, no darling, I'm afraid very different. He's a drifter, a ne'er-do-weel, a bit of a troglodyte, crabbed, sour; not like me. Good nature's my weak spot. Camilla, do you advise me to get a perm? Me hair's so brittle and thin from me bronchitis. But Tom says I must."

"Well, try one, once."

She sighed.

"Eh, I know. George insisted. But I don't get much pleasure out of looking like a fashionplate. In the marrow of me bones, I don't appreciate the compliments. I feel petty-bourgeois. I feel more myself in an old pair of pants a bit stiff with dirt. And it'd do George good to wear the same. Do you know, that when we're in bed in the act of love, I know that George is glad that we're pressing his pants underneath the mattress at the same time. Eh, the man with his political ambitions. Eliza saw me in Fleet Street the other day with a pair of gloves. It's for George, I said. Eh, darling, marriage is an incurable disease. Once you're bitten you carry the marks of it to your grave."

"You're both very sturdy: is it the Scots character in you?" asked Camilla.

"Well, I'm only half Scots. I came down here to conquer the capital and the capital conquered me and George too. And they with their soft still nice ways, make me feel odd man out and I think I cut a dash in Fleet Street; but perhaps they're just tolerating a Johnny Raw."

"I don't believe it. They need red blood."

"Ah, darling, that's kind. What I have done, I have done. I led the men out of Smithfield the day of the strike, me at their head. Come on, boys, I said, make up your minds, I'll take you out. And I did. And I got the men out at Covent Garden, one time I went there to report their discontent. Why do you dither? Make up your minds, I said, behave like your own masters. And they went out. I lost a Fleet Street job over that."

"Most journalists are not so downright."

"What I've got in me is something different."

She put her arms akimbo and began to flutter in her brilliant jaunty way, "And George is of that opinion, too; though I don't deserve it. They had hopes of me in Bridgehead. We'll hear of you, Nellie, said me boy friend and loved one, Solomon—he died and I left the place; I couldn't tolerate it—but down here I was out of me element. In Bridgehead they still ask, What is Nellie Cotter doing? But here they notice nobody. Everyone brings his wares to hawk in the capital. So I was not much more than a poor beachcomber, marooned, when George gallantly rescued me out of the street. Ah-ah, if he ever abandoned me, and I think it, I shudder and think it—if he did, I could never forget that, nor have anything for him but love and gratitude. I often feared it. I said to myself, If he leaves me, if this is my brief summer, come the winter, I'll go and find a sandy island, stick me toes in the sand and write me book. It will be about a golden man; for at least there is one. I wish that he were here. I do wish it. I would flatter him to his heart's content. And he would find it but the bare bones of truth. Here he's away. I hinny and honey. When he's here I give him the rounds of the kitchen. The ceiling fell down twice, up there, in the very middle of a row. It's my fault though. He's so easy to arouse and I get a kick out of it. And that's why he left Eliza."

"Do you know what he told me, Nellie? About you."

"Come on, love, tell me. What did he say, the beggar? Come tell me. Ah, don't tease me."

Camilla laughed, "He said he never read poetry as a boy, he thought it eyewash, not for the working class, bourgeois weakness, even the Revolt of Islam, the first and only poem he read."

"Well, Shelley was a millionaire and a gentleman and went to Oxford. It is not for us! The poets are not us, Camilla! They are talking to themselves. No, but what did he say?"

"He said, When I fell for Nellie and it was spring, I saw the trees and the leaves on them for the first time. I said, Is it for me? The trees were just hanging out their little green rags. I saw a young thin tree over the edge of the rock dancing. I thought; I know what love is! I didn't know I didn't know! I couldn't forget it. And I imagined a tall, thin tree with thin branches and this tall, strong man underneath it, looking up into the branches with his sky-blue eyes."

"His sky-blue eyes! Just that."

She got up and kissed Camilla.

"To think he has it in him. And won't tell me."

Eliza was home on Wednesday afternoon for a half-holiday. She was doing Nellie's washing and ironing, Nellie having no time at all for herself. In mid-afternoon she made tea and called Camilla from her workroom to share it. Camilla said that she had not known at first that Eliza was George's first wife.

"There's no point in mentioning it: I'm not his wife now. And I respect Nellie. She's a grand woman."

Eliza said they were all from the same setting, knew each other as children.

"I've known Cooks all my life, his Ma and his brothers and sisters; and they're as they were before, living in Bridgehead back-to-backs and spending the weekends at the races and owing money to the little clothing clubs. But George had it in him. He was a choirboy till thirteen, then he read something and became an atheist. He joined the union, the party, the county library, evening classes, anything that was going, to get some polish; and then he went into the navy not so much for love of the sea as to get some education while getting pay. I know he's a bright man. I don't blame him. Now I'm fair, fat and fifty myself and I worked, but I didn't study and so I didn't get on much. I'm blaming no one but myself. You must study. He needed one like Nellie. She used to spend all her afternoons in the library at one time when she was about sixteen. You've no idea how they've changed from the Bridgehead lad and lass they were. They've changed each other, too. You should have seen her up there when she was fifteen and sixteen. She left school because it wasn't life she said. Some of us like George and me were at our jobs. Tom was still at school. She got big money, it seemed to us then, writing little bits for a paper; it seemed marvelous to us, her interviewing the nobs. She stood everyone drinks, she bought food, handed out cigarettes and beer. She was there spending her money, making a great show which impressed the youngsters; and others, too, were impressed, I can tell you. There was a man Solomon and others, political types, who expected big things of her. We'll hear from Nellie Cotter, they used to say. I wasn't close to the Cotters then; but I'd see her in real silk blouses and flashing a big sapphire ring she used to pawn every Wednesday when the pay was gone. She was rowdy with opinions she got out of books, perhaps; but for us they were her own; and she never agreed, always disagreed; and she put over her opinions with a lot of them, who were impressed. I didn't know. I did my work. She was not my type. But she made a big splash; and the youngsters there were so ignorant; and wanting to get out of it. She got in touch with Jago's circle and took others in. That was a pity. She was different then, bony and ugly and wild as a streetboy, ripping out the dirty oaths, with a great charm coming into the drawn lines of her face. Eigh, but that was away above our heads. It was George brought learning into our home." She laughed, "With tomatoes and salad. He taught us to eat them. It was bacon and egg and dripping and the Sunday roast with us and that was all. And they thought it was unmanly and foreign of George, I can tell you, the salad; and I didna like it myself—but I ate it for love."