Cotter's England (38 page)

"O.K. Nellie: will you try to hang on at least till George finds you something over there? And whatever you think, I want you to go. They'll look after your health over there: they do. I'm not happy about you."

She cried, "I'll make no promises, this side or that. I'll not compromise my honor. I've been speaking my idea all my life; I wouldn't go back now; that would give the lie to my life. My life's my pride. I told that to Robert Peebles: Fleet Street couldn't buy my principles with money or threats and he can't with cant. And neither can they—the socialist bureaucrats, a nationload of Robert Peebles. Man is free. That's what I'm for."

Tom said, "Well, be careful for my sake."

"Ah, bless you Tom; but even for you I wouldn't eat my words."

"I wouldn't know what to think of you if you did. It wouldn't be Nellie."

She kissed him, "Bless you! You believe in me. I'd be lost without you. There's only one like you. I don't know why when Nature found this pattern, she didn't keep on making them that way."

His face turned pink. But now Nellie had no more time for talk. She was excited about the party. Women were coming. There were some women George had never allowed in the house. He was a very prejudiced man and all was black and white to him. She had a lot of messages for Tom to do before she was ready. He was to clean up the back yard. Eliza was coming to help today and tomorrow but not staying the night. She kept making sure that Tom was going early on Sunday evening: "I wouldn't have room for you, pet," she came out with. "You'll be nice and fresh for work on Monday morning."

"And I won't be able to clink glasses with Caroline," said he laughing.

She turned black at that and he did not make any more jokes. She got over it and came running back to him because she wanted him for a message.

"You aren't losing anything here, Tom," she urged. "You'll be coming down to us every weekend. There's nothing to do in a place like that. But stay away two weekends while I'm away at the conference. I'll be looking for you, chick; three weeks from today."

"Am I to stay in Blackstone two weekends?" said Tom in a burst of laughter.

"But it'll keep you straight, Tom. We can have a grand old talk when I come back."

"Well, I don't like to leave all my London women," he teased, "I don't think Blackstone women can be as good."

She pursed up her face. He laughed.

"Aye, lad, but there's too much bitter truth in it."

He picked up a few things, then sat in the back yard quietly looking at the tree tops, house-backs, the back of the Cooks' little house. At the half moon there had been three or four beautiful days and they had had perfect weather since, cloudless skies except for the geometric clouds made by airmen: the night skies, fields of daisies, with the searchlights deepening them, exploring upwards. There was an old tall yew tree not far away which stood up in the evenings, in sharp darkness. The little budding and flowering bushes in the neighboring yards were soft and light: the smells of earth, grass and flowers streamed through wall chinks and breaks. The time would be pleasant at Ilger's orchard: like other years. He began humming, reflecting and scribbling on an envelope. The country would be beautiful soon. It would not perhaps be so bad, except that a lonely country summer was painful and he always felt nervous about a new job: there were always problems and they had to be met in a haphazard way. He had conquered such things so far, but he always wondered about the next time. If he did not find company in Blackstone, he could go to King's Lynn on the weekends, or even Bury or Cambridge. He didn't know about spending all that money coming to London. He wanted to keep a little stock of money for family emergencies: he was the man of the family. He smiled. "Sir, I said, I'm Thomas Cotter—" The orotund old pub voice came to him, one single strain on the afternoon air. "Now you say, Sir, you don't need life insurance, but just let me tell you of a thing that happened this week. Now Sir, I was on the road to Berwick—" the simple flamboyant life streamed past him, on another track. There he sat, waiting for the next thing in his life, prepared not to be surprised at anything.

Nellie hurried…

N
ELLIE
HURRIED
about, telephoned. Nellie had various reasons why Mrs. McMahon could not come and Eliza had to go to friends. Camilla, she explained, was in a somber mood, depressed. Mrs. McMahon, bless her honest heart, could not be trusted nor asked not to mention to George, whom she adored, about the party.

"How is Caroline?"

She was in a very bad way.

Tom went out and came back with four bottles of wine.

"Stirrup cup," said he. "I'm going to split these with Eliza, Caroline and you: it's my contribution. It'll cheer me up on the train to be a bit dizzy."

"I'm afraid you've got her wrong, pet: Caroline doesn't want to see you. She told me that."

He flushed, "I'm going to see she drinks farewell with me. She told me what was wrong with her was starvation. Every time she's had a fair wage you've argued her out of it. I owe her reparation. It's that adolescent idea of sacrifice, self immolation you have: you're a proselytizing masochist."

"I'm afraid you can't shrug this one off, Tom. No, chick. This is one case you can't flatter yourself you're curing with an anecdote and a glass of Beaujolais. You can't cure an incurable malady with that technique. This time you've met your match who doesn't care for your formulas. You're struggling with the Angel of Death himself," said Nellie through her cigarette.

"I wouldn't mention that name so lightly if I were you," said Tom; "he's the only deity we're sure exists: we know him by his works."

"You can't mend broken hearts with a callous joke," said Nellie.

Nellie ran about the garden picking up things, looking like a freebooter on a desert isle, rakish, raffish, uneasy, masterful, dissolute. At ten in the morning she had already crooked the elbow. When Eliza came, she walked straight through to the back, a little red hat on her round flushed face, and in a bursting summer suit. Nellie with one arm on her hip, waved to her and, tossing her head, stalked into the house.

"How happy Nellie is, acting cock of the walk," said Tom.

Eliza told him everything. Nell was so down about George's absence that she felt she had to give a party before she went off to the Labour Party conference. Nellie did not want George to know. George was such a nagging puritan about liquor and futi and so hard on the purse strings that Nellie couldn't have a real party with him in the house.

"So I shall be king of the May," said Tom with a poky little smile.

Eliza got up to go inside to help. She went to a rose bush that struggled through a mass of vine and picked a flower which she threw to him. He put it over his ear.

"Now you are king of the May."

"You'll see me wear it."

His sister called Eliza. He picked a book out of his pocket and went on reading it. It was
Belchamber
by Howard O. Sturgis. He liked it. And the author did embroidery. That reminded him of Constantine Ilger. He knew life was not conventional and he liked any author who noticed it, too. Ilger was no Sturgis; but he had remarkable qualities which Marion had known how to uncover. And Marion had given him, Tom, courage and belief in himself.

The guests began to come from their work. Some would not be free till the next day. They were all working women. Of them all, only Eliza and Nellie's friend Flo, from Bridgehead, were born in real poverty. There were one or two others he knew slightly whom he didn't like at all, Nellie's rough gang, women of forty or thereabouts, all hard workers, but too tough, even depraved and licentious, who lived like disorderly men. They gave Tom scarcely a glance. Nellie was gay, accommodating, even a little obsequious to some. Good-hearted Nellie! The mother of every stray cat. In her brave bohemian democracy she allowed no questions of morality. Tom dragged a canvas stretcher out of the shed and put it under the trees.

The women sat round talking in the front room or helped themselves to things in the kitchen. They had all brought food and drink. Tom was not regretted, he saw, when he went out to the pub. There was a pub not far away; expensive, but it was worth it. The favorite drink there was gin in beer; and there were some really old fellows who came in regularly for it. Tom liked to see bent old men having some fun, getting a little unsteady. It always went to their heads; they got their money's worth. Tom sat on his bench with his beer and watched them for quite a time. When he re-entered the house, the women all looked as if he had broken in on a board meeting.

"Have a good time," he said as he passed on his way to the kitchen.

They stared at him without appreciation. Even Nellie said nothing and stared. He felt like Uncle Simon.

"But I'm no Simon. Not even for Nell," said he to himself, seeing years ahead in a moment, George lost, Nell aging, the cynical, aging women.

"So it will have to be Blackstone and I'll get a responsibility up there; and Nell will realize she can't be so scatter-brained."

He got something to eat and went to the door of the front room to say to Nell that he was tired and going to bed on the stretcher in the bicycle shed. No one took any notice of him. He undressed in the bicycle shed and put on his overcoat to read a bit in the kitchen. When one of them came out, he retired for the night. He lay for a long time looking at the slightly veiled sky. It was the first night of full moon; there was a chip off it yet. The moon had a great significance for him, which he did not understand. He would be watching the third night of full moon from some Blackstone window or hummock. A new life. He had seen Blackstone in war days. In winter it was the worst place in England, leaving out Wales; black, wild, open land, low young forests, winds rushing across, the bitter east wind making them all "bluenoses."

In spring and summer motoring through the brecklands and forest lands it looked perhaps the finest place in England, broad rolling lands, long forested valleys and tops. The eye roved over grasslands, rushlands, heaths, preserves. They rushed through his mind now, and the great cloud fields. And not far away, the North Sea breaking into and crumbling the cliffs. Black flashing storms, the lowings and bellowings of the old sanded forest, the whistling and hooning of nameless birds, the lonesome moons, the weird fifteen-foot stone dwellers of the Old Priory, soft grassy slopes on which lovers lay, the humblest of workers by day, ecstatics by night. There were mounds everywhere on the plain: no one knew what they meant. There were remains of a Roman Road, a barrow; rivers and marshes full of fish. You had to be careful motoring on account of the pheasants, quail, rabbits, sitting out in full view quite undisturbed or running through tufts.

"I can be happy there, too, I am just an ordinary man. You can't be vain and arrogant there. It's like slipping into healing waters, pine-waters, cold and fleshy, rich-smelling, from which you come out feeling strong. The secret of joy is to be nobody."

In spite of wondering about what little room he'd get, for the present one was unsatisfactory, and how he'd manage with his various responsibilities on the salary, whether he'd be able to live in another town, buy a bike, sell his car, he soon fell asleep and was glad of the fresh air on his skin. He did not hear anything all night.

In the morning, Nellie was exhausted but devilishly gay, as the mood sometimes took her, and kept teasing him about his sleeping: a little anxiously perhaps.

"Sleeping like the dead all night. We called you for some brandy, didn't you hear?"

He hadn't heard and he didn't think he'd been called, either.

The women got up at various times and lounged round the house in careless undress, except one, called by her surname of Hardcast, who wore a business suit all the time, and Caroline in a cream blouse and dark blue slacks. He stared at her: his jaw dropped.

"Are you ill?"

"I didn't sleep. I haven't slept for three whole nights. Yet I feel quite lively."

"Oh, everyone sleeps without knowing it."

"No, I couldn't."

She looked it.

Nellie darted sharp glances at them when they were talking, twisting her beak and tufted head all the time.

"And did we keep you awake, pet?" she said to Caroline. "We stayed up a bit late carousing, I'm afraid, like a pack of adolescents, stealing a night out."

"No, I didn't hear you," said Caroline distantly. Nellie looked at her anxiously.

"That's like Nell," thought Tom; "so very tough in her own opinion: but as soon as anyone's cold to her, she can't take it."

He was a little annoyed with Caroline, even in her illness, for being unfriendly to his sister. Nellie worried about her like a foolish mother. It was true she had cost her a few jobs: that was Nell's idea of what was right and wrong.

Caroline had slept in the back attic, not much more than a box-room, with a low ceiling, a half-sized square-paned window looking out over the back yard. Nellie had drunk too much perhaps. She was in an overriding humor. She kept dashing in and out, teasing. She was hard to take in such a mood.

The girl did not want any lunch with them and went out to sit on the grass patch with Tom.

"I've never felt so calm," she said. "I can't sleep and it's as if that's what I've been craving. I manage to get up to go to work. While I'm riding in the bus I look at the others and think, How will I get to be like them: have so little and keep going? Going up the street I feel like collapsing between each step. I see young men like me, too: workmen. They put a foot forward, the body doesn't follow in the ordinary way but it comes forward afterwards. I'm finished."

"When you suffer, you think, I wish I could go back to that moment when it started, I would know how to choose. But what would you choose?"

She didn't hear him. She went on playing with a blade of grass. Her cheeks were thin and glowing, the skin on her neck was drooping: there were gray hairs. Her eyes had fallen into hollows. She looked up and he once more looked through their transparent lenses into her mind. He felt her feebleness, nervous incoherence, himself gave up the ghost for her. At this moment, an idea he had about her slipped loose from him. They knew they were thinking of the same evil thing: he suspected her of depravity, she suspected him of being his sister's accomplice. She drew back and looked meanly, personally accusing.