The Goose Girl and Other Stories (4 page)

She was ten years younger than I and a good head shorter, but her words came like the smack of an open hand on my face, palm and knuckles, this way and that, and I stepped back, muttering some limp excuse, and got into my lorry again.

I brought her some oranges at night, that I'd bought from a sailor, and we said no more about it. But two or three days passed before she asked me to read to her again, and then for another six or seven weeks we were calm and happy, though the loft was a cold place to sleep in, and sometimes when the moon shone through the sky-light I woke up to see the rafters and their black shadows, and thought for a moment or two that I was still in the Army, making the best of it in a deserted farmhouse, and once I stretched out my arm to feel if Jim was beside me.

About the middle of February I began to worry about arrangements
for her lying-in. Or, to put it more accurately, to worry because no arrangements had been made. I talked with the old woman, who wouldn't listen to me, or wouldn't listen seriously, but I didn't say anything to Lydia in case I should upset her again. And then, before we had come to any decision, I got a telegram from Edinburgh to say that my father had had a stroke, and would I come at once. Archie, my elder brother, was with some Government commission in Washington, and Alastair, the younger, was still in the Army in Rangoon. I didn't want to go, I had never got on well with my father, but the old woman said that if he died without seeing me I would be saddled with regret, like a heavy curse on me, for all the days of my life, and Lydia was plainly shocked, as if by the sight of some fearful wickedness, when I said that he could die as happily by himself as with me holding his hand. So, after a day of argument, I went to Edinburgh, and for a week my mother and I were uncomfortable in each other's presence, and my father slowly recovered. I had been wrong when I said that he wouldn't want to hold my hand. He did. I sat by his bedside for two or three hours every day, and sometimes, with a lot of difficulty, he managed to speak a few words. I was glad, then, that I had done what Lydia wanted. One day my mother told me that he meant to give me a present, and when I went upstairs he smiled and pointed to a leather case that lay on a chair beside him. It was his favourite gun, a fine piece by Holland, far too good for a man who lived in a cottage and drove a lorry for the County Council.

I said good-bye to them in a hurry when a letter came from Lydia to say that she had given birth to a daughter the day after I left her. ‘I am very well and so is she,' she wrote, ‘and I didn't want to disturb you with my news when you had so much to harass you already. But now, if your father is no longer in danger, I hope you will be able to come home again.'

I said good-bye, but I didn't leave them for another fortnight. My father had a second stroke, and while I was sitting in the train and waiting for it to start, my sister came running along the platform, looking for me, to tell me I mustn't go. He lived for more than a week, but never regained proper consciousness, and then I waited for the funeral. I read Lydia's letter again and again, and two others that she wrote, both of which were full of news about the child. ‘I think she may be the most beautiful baby in the world,' she said.

In my mind, when I saw her, there was no doubt at all. She had the perfection of a doll that some dead sculptor—a sculptor too great to be alive in this world—had carved in love from a rosy-veined alabaster. She was very small, and perfect. She was sleeping, and
I had a monstrous fear that she might never wake. I put out my hand to touch her, but Lydia caught my wrist and shook her head. ‘Let her sleep.'

I made no mention of something I found, a day or so after my return, for I couldn't be certain, then, that there was any meaning in it, and if there was I didn't want to think about it. The sight of it, in the grass, struck deep into my mind like a forester's wedge that splits the fibres of a tree, and for a minute or two I stood trembling. But there was no sense in it, and I didn't want to curse myself with a madman's doubt. I wanted to be at peace, and dote upon the child, so I denied the meaning of it and let it drown in the daily ebb and flow, the tidal waters of common life. It sank into the darker parts of my mind like a body into the deep sea with a sack of coal lashed to its ankles, as I had seen a sailor buried once. Committed to the deep, as they said.

The child grew quickly, and at six months she was like an Italian picture of a cherub, her head covered with small tight curls, paler than gold, and eyes the colour of a hare-bell. The old woman said she could understand already every word we said, and neither Lydia nor I was very serious about contradicting her. For we all thought of her in a way that I can't suppose is usual even in the fondest of parents. It wasn't only with pride of possession and a flood of affection whenever we looked at her, but with a kind of glee that never grew stale or sour in the remembrance of its excess.

In May I gave up my job but told the Road Surveyor that I should be glad to have it again in October. He wasn't too favourably disposed to my plans at first, but I had served him well; he was a fisherman himself and knew the compulsion of it, so after a little argument he agreed to let me go and take me back again when autumn came. I painted my boat, put my rod together, and had a week's fine sport before the first of the summer visitors arrived. Then, for three or four days a week till September, I watched my patrons fish, and calculated by the end of September that my own average, on the intervening days, was about as good as the best of theirs. But I fished longer hours than they did, and the price of trout was still high.

Sometimes I used to wake up at night, with Lydia beside me, and see the darkness about us like the mouth of a huge engulfing fear. I had no right to be so happy. No one had such a right. It was like oil on the top step, it was like a German white flag with a sniper lying beside it, it was like a spider telegraphing
Walk-into-my-parlour
over his lethal gossamer. I would lie in the darkness, open-eyed, for perhaps an hour, drenched in fear, but in the morning, waking and turning to
Lydia, and then playing with the child for half an hour, my happiness would come back like the returning tide. I couldn't help it. They were both so beautiful.

Once, when the child was about fifteen months old, I woke in the first phase of one of my frightened moods, and saw her standing up at the end of her crib. She had taken off her nightgown and she was poised with her head tilted up, her arms out and her hands resting on the side-rails of the crib as if she were addressing a public meeting; or facing her judges, unafraid. There was a late moon that night, and though the window was small there was light in the room. But that wasn't the light that irradiated the child. Her light, unless I'm the simple victim of some cuckoo-born delusion, came from within. Now Lydia's body, on that first morning when I saw her throwing the gander out of doors, was gleaming like mother-of-pearl, or a pearl on velvet, with a light of its own; but never since then had I seen her better than a milky white.—As white as milk and as smooth as curds, but not with that radiance.—Yet now the child, naked in the darkness, was gleaming with such a light. It was no brighter than the moonlight dimmed by white curtains, but it wasn't in the overflow of moonlight she was shining. It was in a light of her own.

I slipped out of bed, quietly so as not to waken Lydia, and said to the child, ‘You'll catch cold, standing up like that. You ought to be asleep.' She looked at me for a moment, as if surprised to see me there, and then twined her arms round my neck and kissed me. I put on her nightgown and obediently she slid down between the blankets.

A year went by and part of another. I came, I suppose, to take my good fortune for granted, and my happiness perhaps lost something of its fine edge and became a rounder contentment. Time, when I look back, seems to have gone very quickly and as smoothly as the water curving over a weir in a polished flow without break or interruption. We were on friendly terms with our neighbours, I saw the Norquoys and the schoolmaster every week or two, and gradually I came to think of the islands as my own place, my proper environment in which I had become an accepted part. But my real life was lived on the old woman's croft, at home. My senses were livelier there, my feelings more profound, my consciousness of life more widely awake.

The old woman could work as well as a man. She could plough and harrow, and between us, when harvest came, we cut and bound and stacked four acres of oats. Lydia looked after the poultry, and singled turnips, took her fork to hayfield and harvest, as well as doing housework and tending the child. We were rarely idle and often our work was hard, though I don't remember that we found it unduly hard
because we did it all in our own time, and we had no master to drive us or reproach us or thank us. I couldn't spend so much time fishing as I had done when I first lived there, but I enjoyed working on the land so long as it wasn't continual work.

In the winter months, when I drove a lorry again, I used to read in the evenings. Both Lydia and her mother liked the tales of adventure best. I had some other books, by Jane Austen and Dickens and Galsworthy, that I had never read myself, but we didn't care for them. It was a tale of far-off lands, with the noise of a dangerously running sea, or the thud of a sword going stiffly home, the crack of a rifle, that the women liked. There was something fierce in them, an appetite for deeds, that couldn't show itself in their ordinary life, but was there all the time and came out of hiding a little when I read to them. But domestic scenes, and comedy and conversation, bored them.

Well, this good easy life continued—it wasn't physical ease that characterised it, not in those northern winters, but we were all contented—till the child was in her third year, and then one summer day when there fell a flat calm and the loch lay like a mirror, pocked with rising trout, but not one that would look at a fly, I came ashore at midday and on the road a little way past the house I saw five carts standing, three of them loaded with peat and two empty. The loaded ones, coming home from the hill, were John Norquoy's, and the horses between their shafts stood motionless, with drooping heads, their shoulders dark with sweat. The empty carts belonged to a neighbour of his who had started earlier and was on his way back to the hill for a second load. His horses were restless, tossing their heads and pecking at the road with steel-shod hooves. But their drivers paid no attention to them. John Norquoy and two others were squatting on their heels, on the road, and two were leaning against the nearest cart, and in the midst of them, her hands behind her back like a girl reciting poetry at a village prize-giving, was the child. She was talking, and they were listening.

I waited for a little while, some forty yards away, but none of them turned a head in my direction, and when I went up and spoke to them, some looked sheepish and embarrassed, but John Norquoy, still on his heels, said to me, ‘I could wish you had stayed away and not interrupted us. It's a real diversion, listening to her.'

I picked the child up and asked her, ‘What were you talking about?'

‘I was telling them a story,' she said, and when I set her on my shoulder she turned and cried to them, ‘Good-bye now!'

I don't fully know why, but this small incident annoyed me at the time of it and worried me later. I told Lydia and her mother what I had seen, and said they would have to take better care of the child, for I wasn't going to have her grow up to believe she must always be the centre of attention. I didn't like to see a child showing-off, I said. ‘Perhaps,' I went on, ‘we ourselves are to blame, for we've always made much of her—too much, I dare say—and let her see that we're proud of her. But we'll have to change our ways if they're going to have a bad effect.'

‘We could change our ways a dozen times without changing her,' said Lydia.

‘That's nonsense,' I said. ‘A child is the product, very largely, of what she's taught. I used to be a teacher myself—'

The old woman interrupted me with a cackle of laughter. ‘It would take more than you,' she said, ‘to make an ordinary bairn out of that one.'

Then I lost my temper, and for the first time we had a proper quarrel. We had had differences of opinion before, and sometimes grown hot about them, but this was different. Now we grew bitter and said things to each other that were meant to hurt, and did. The argument didn't last long, but at night, when Lydia and I were alone, it flared up again. It was she who began it, this time, and when I saw that she was bent on making trouble—her face put on its fierce and narrow look, her lips were hard—I smacked her soundly on the side of her head, and before she could recover I laid her across my knee and gave her an old-fashioned beating with a slipper.

A week or two passed before she forgave me. Or, perhaps, before she openly forgave me. I knew her fairly well by that time, and I don't think she bore a grudge against me for the beating, but because she didn't want to admit defeat she maintained an appearance of hostility till the affair could be regarded as a drawn battle. Then for a week or two we were in love again with a new fervour.

It was towards the end of February, a few days before the child's third birthday, that the gander came back, and I realised that fear of his return, an unregarded but persistent fear, like the white wound-scar on my leg that I never thought of unless I was tired or there came a hard frost, had always been with me.

There had been a heavy snow, piled into great drifts by a strong wind, and for a few days work on the roads came to a stop and I had a winter holiday. The sun came out, the sky cleared to a thin bright blue, and the land lay still as death under a flawless white surface that gave to every little hill and hollow the suavity of ancient sculpture.
The loch within a fringe of crackling ice, a darker blue than the sky, was framed in white, and a few swans like small ice-floes swarm in a narrow bay. On land there was nothing stirring, and the smoke rose straight from the chimneys of diminished houses.