The Goose Girl and Other Stories (2 page)

How, I asked, did she come to give it a name like Lydia?

The schoolmaster showed me a register of the village children. About half of them had been christened simply enough: Thomas and James and Mary, Ellen and Jean and William and David, and a few of the girls had clumsy feminine transformations of masculine names such as Williamina and Davidina and—like Lydia's mother—Thomasina. But the rest were a fancy array of Corals and Dereks, Stellas and Audreys, and so forth. ‘Their mothers take a fancy to names they've seen on the films or in a magazine,' he said. ‘They don't suit our island surnames, but they produce, I suppose, the same effect in the house as a piece of new wallpaper or a set of new curtains. They seem bright and cheerful.'

A moment later he said, ‘When are you going to see the Norquoys? They know who you are, and they're expecting you. But they won't ask you to come, they'll just wait.'

‘It's not easy,' I said.

‘It won't be as difficult as you think. They won't show any emotion, you needn't be afraid of that.'

‘I'm thinking of myself,' I answered.

I waited another ten days, and then, one Saturday morning, I went to town—four thousand inhabitants and a little red cathedral—and managed to get a bottle of whisky. I arrived at the Norquoys' about six o'clock, and though I hadn't told them I was coming, they seemed to be expecting me. News travels quickly here, and even a man's intentions become public property as soon as he has realised them himself, and sometimes before. So I sat down to a mighty farmhouse tea in the kitchen, and no one said a word about Jim. They asked me what I thought of the islands, and where I belonged to, and if my parents were still alive, and they all laughed when I mistook a young sister of John Norquoy's wife for one of his daughters. There were ten or a dozen people at table, and I had to be told very carefully who they all were, and they thought it a great joke when I couldn't remember. But no one mentioned Jim.

After tea John Norquoy took me out to see the animals. He had a couple of fine young Clydesdales, a small herd of black-polled cattle, a great surly white boar, and a few score of sheep on hill pasture. We walked in his fields for a couple of hours, and still no word of Jim. But when we came back to the farm he led me into the ben-room; a peat fire had been lighted in it, and going through the passage where I had hung my waterproof I took my bottle out of the pocket. Norquoy paid no attention to it when I set it down, but went to a little table in the window where another bottle, the same brand as my own, stood on a tray with glasses and a jug of water. He poured a couple of deep drams and said, ‘It was very good of you to write about Jim in the way you did. We're most grateful to you, and we're glad to see you here. If you're thinking of staying, there's a bed for you whenever you want it.'

I took my drink before I answered, and then, slowly and little by little, I told him about Jim, and about the war, and what it means to go through five or six battles with the same friend beside you, and then to lose him in the last one. I realised, in an hour or two, that I was playing the bereaved brother myself, but couldn't help it by then. Mrs Norquoy came in, and their eldest boy, and her sister that I had taken for Norquoy's daughter, and then two or three neighbours. I went on talking, and they listened. I got most of the load off my mind, and if they didn't realise, by the end of it all, that Jim had been a soldier, well, it wasn't my fault. And every word I spoke was the simple truth. But when I got up to go Mrs Norquoy said,
‘We're peaceful folk here, Mr Tyndall, and Jim was one of us. How he endured all that fighting I just can't understand.' It wasn't till a few days later, when I remembered her words, that I began to realise how much they had disliked what I had been telling them. They were peaceful folk, and they didn't approve of war.

But at the time I wasn't in the mood to catch a fine shade of meaning. Both bottles were empty, and I had had a lot more than my share. John Norquoy drank moderately and showed no sign of having drunk at all. He had listened carefully, with little change of expression, and the questions he asked showed that he was following and remembering all I said. But he made no comments on my story. One of the neighbours liked his whisky well enough, but carried it as solemnly as a cask. I was the only one who seemed to have taken any benefit from what we had been doing, and Norquoy insisted on coming with me as far as the main road. I was walking well enough, but talking too much by then, and I told him—without difficulty—what I had been waiting for the strength to tell. I got rid of the guilt on my mind.

For a black minute or two, splashing through the shallows of Comacchio, I had been glad when Jim was killed. Glad it was he and not I whom death had taken, for we knew, both of us, that our luck was too good to last, and one or the other must go before the end. And when I saw it was Jim I was glad, and the guilt of it had lain on me ever since. Norquoy said nothing that I can remember, though I think he tried to comfort me and I know that he wanted to take me home. But I wouldn't let him.

Soon after we had said good night it came into my head that I would like to take a look at the goose girl's house. Lydia's, I mean. The last time I had seen her she had been driving her whole flock, fifteen or sixteen of them with the great gander in front like a drum-major, past a big shallow pool in the stream, where the cattle came to drink, and the whole procession had been reflected in the calm water as if to make a picture. To see her like that, in a picture, had made her more real—or am I talking nonsense? Ideal may be the word, not real. Anyone who's fit to be a teacher could tell you, and tell you the difference between them, but I'm not sure myself. But whatever the word should be, I looked at her on the other bank of the stream; she was wearing an old yellow jersey and a dirty white skirt and her legs were bare among the meadowsweet, and I looked at her reflection in the picture, and that night I dreamt of her, and in my dream she was trying to tell me something, but I couldn't hear her.

So I turned off the main road towards her mother's house, and
before I got there I realised how drunk I was. I'm not trying to excuse myself, but the whisky had been mixed with a lot of emotion, and as the result of one coming in and the other going out my knees were beginning to buckle, and when I came to the cottage I had one hunger only, and that was for sleep. There was a south-easterly breeze blowing, chill in the middle of the night, and to get into shelter I clambered over the garden wall, and the softness of the dug soil on the other side seemed very comfortable. I fell asleep under the currant-bushes, and what woke me was Lydia's screaming and the clattering of the gander's wings as she threw it out of the house.

Well, after I'd seen the bird go marching off, and disappear downstream, I went round, as I said before, to the lee-side of the cartshed and smoked a cigarette. I had been lying on the packet and they were pretty flat, but I rolled one into shape again, and while I smoked I thought, and came to a conclusion.

I fingered my chin, and it was smooth enough. I had shaved about five o'clock the afternoon before. I felt fresh and well. Sleeping on the ground had done me no harm, for I had grown used to that, and the night had been mild. My clothes were damp with dew and soiled with earth, but I took off my coat and shook it, and cleaned myselffairly well with some cut grass. Then I went down to the stream, and kneeling on the bank I washed my face and rinsed my mouth, and drank a few handfuls of water.

The door, the unlocked door, opened easily enough and I made no noise going in. I stood in a little passage with some old coats hanging on the opposite wall, and an uncarpeted wooden stair before me that led to a loft. To the right there was a door into the kitchen, where the old woman slept in a box-bed, and to the left was the ben-room with a closet on the inner side where Lydia slept. The ben-room door was closed with a latch, or a sneck, as they call it here, and my hand was steady. I opened the door without a sound, but only two or three inches, and looked in.

Lydia had put on a long white nightgown, an old-fashioned garment with coarse lace at the neck, and she was sitting at the north window, the one that opens into the yard. She held a looking-glass in both hands, and was staring at her reflection. Her right cheek—the one I could see—was pink.

She jumped up with a gasp of fear, a hoarse little noise, when I went in, and faced me with the looking-glass held to her breast like a shield. ‘What do you want?' she asked, but her voice was quiet.

I closed the door behind me and said, ‘If you had asked me that a week ago, I couldn't have answered you. I might have
said
Everything
or
Nothing
. I didn't know. But that was a week ago.'

‘What does that matter to me?' she asked. ‘Why have you come here?'

‘Because now,' I said, ‘I do know.'

‘You have no right to come into my room,' she whispered.

‘I want you to marry me,' I said. ‘I want a wife.'

She flushed and asked me, ‘Why do you think you can find one here?'

Then I told her, or tried to tell her, why nothing had any force or weight in my mind, after seeing her as I had seen her that morning, but to live with her in the love of a man for his wife, in the love of possession without term or hindrance. She turned pale, then red again, when I said that I had seen her wrestling with the gander, and tried to push me out. But I caught her by the wrists, and spoke as a man will when he is wooing, in fumbling and broken words, of her beauty and the worship I would give her. Fiercely, but in a voice as low as a whisper still, she cried, ‘I want no one's worship!'

‘Last night,' I said, as urgently but as softly as she spoke herself—for the old woman was sleeping only a few yards away—'Last night my mind was full of bitterness and grief. There had been little else in it for a year or more. But I emptied it, last night, and this morning you came into its emptiness and took possession. And I'm not going to live again like a man who's haunted. I'm not going to live with a ghost in my mind, with a ghost walking on my nerves as if they were a tight-rope, a ghost outside the window of my eyes and just beyond my fingers! I want reality. I want you, in my arms as well as in my mind, and I want the Church and the Law to seal you there.'

She answered nothing to that, and I went on talking, but I don't think she listened very closely, for presently she interrupted and asked me, ‘Where did the gander go?'

‘Down the burn towards the loch,' I told her.

‘That's where he came from. He came here about a month ago, and killed the old one. The gander we had before, I mean.'

‘He won't come back,' I said. ‘He's had enough of you, after the way you handled him.'

She turned to the window, the one that opens into the yard, and looked out, saying nothing. I went behind her and put my arms round her. She tried to push me away, but with no determination in her movement, and I talked some more. She listened to me now, and presently turned and faced me, and said yes.

The next morning I began my new life of work and responsibility.
I bought a boat, a heavily built, round-bellied dinghy, ten-and-a-half-foot keel and in need of paint, for £18. 1os. Two days later I took a summer visitor out fishing and made fifteen shillings for six hours' easy work. It was a good fishing loch, and there were visitors in the islands again for the first time since 1939. I could look forward to three or four days' work a week, and as trout were selling for
2s. gd.
a pound I sent home for my own rod and tackle, and did quite well on my unemployed days in addition to enjoying them. I could have done still better with night-lines and an otter at dusk and a little caution, but I like fishing too much to cheat at it.

I was still living with the schoolmaster, for £2. 1o
s.
a week, but our relations became a little cooler when his wife discovered that I was sleeping out. That didn't worry me, however, for my happiness that summer was like the moon and the stars, shining and beyond the reach of malice.

It puzzled me a little that I couldn't persuade Lydia to settle a date for the wedding, as I thought there might be a proper reason for it before long, but when I once spoke of it more seriously than usual, she said, ‘We're perfectly happy as we are. I don't see why we should bother. Not yet, at any rate. And I‘ll have to explain to mother, and she's difficult sometimes.'

‘I'll do any explaining that's necessary.'

‘No, no! You must leave that to me. You won't say anything to her, will you?'

I said I wouldn't. She asked very little of me—she never has asked much—and neither then nor now could I refuse her anything. She had made a good pretence of surrendering, but my surrender went deeper. I had become the roof and the walls within which she lived, but she was the soul of the house. I thought of Jim whenever I looked up at the Kirk hill and saw Norquoy's farm on the slope of it, but to think of him didn't make me feel guilty now. I was no longer obsessed by him, and if a new obsession had taken his place, I had no cause to grumble against it. So June and July went quickly by in that happiness and in good weather, though not settled weather, for the island skies are always changeable, till one day in mid-August, when I came ashore in a rising wind, colder than it had been for weeks, the old woman met me and without a word of greeting said, ‘You'd better come home to your tea.'

‘That's very kind of you,' I said, and pulled the boat up and took out the two trout which were all I had caught. ‘Would you like these?' I asked.

‘It's a poor return for a day's work,' she said, though they were good
fish, the better one a little over the pound, and slipped them into the pockets of the old raincoat she was wearing without a word of thanks. She had a man's cap on her head, and boots like a ploughman's. We walked along the road together, not saying much, and tea was a silent meal but a good one. She or Lydia had newly baked bere bannocks and white bannocks, there was sweet butter and salt butter, and I ate a duck's egg and the half of a stewed cock-chicken. Then, when we had finished, she said, ‘Lydia tells me that you're wanting to be married.'