The Fledgeling Page 9

  ‘But what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘It’s better that you don’t know. I don’t want to get you mixed up in this. No. Be a good girl and don’t ask me—and forget that you’ve seen him. You must. Will you?’

  ‘Mrs. Collins,’ said the girl earnestly, ‘do think carefully what you’re doing. It’s aiding and abetting a deserter.’

  ‘So what?’ retorted the old woman. ‘I gave them Len, didn’t I? And I’ve sent this chicken-livered boy back twice. If I send him back again he’ll only run away again as soon as he’s released from jail. He gets longer and longer sentences—harsh savage sentences—and so it’ll go on. It makes me frantic that no one sees the stupidity of it. The boy’s got no guts! His brother had them all. Neil’s been fashioned without any—he couldn’t kill a fly—I’ve found him taking endless trouble to save a spider or a bee. If he’s got guts he hasn’t found them yet. And he’s Len’s brother. Isn’t it strange?’

  ‘Your granddaughter—does she know he’s back?’

  ‘Yes. Who d’you think fixed him up in those clothes but her? She’s his twin—they’re as alike as a pair of vases—one of them chipped. She loves Neil with a passionate intensity that frightens me. She feels what he does—suffers what he does—and can’t bear that he must endure what she is spared. She attacked me violently this morning—almost threatened me that if I don’t help him this time she’ll go away with him—and leave me.’

  ‘But she’s married. She must leave her twin to his own life—they are no longer children.’

  ‘What’s the use of you or I thinking that? I tell you that no one but twins can understand this extraordinary sympathy—this terrible bond—as if they share one mind, one soul. I tell Charlie the same thing. He’s jealous of Neil—horribly and unjustly jealous—but what can I do? It’s always been the same.’

  ‘I think you’d be helping them both if you sent your grandson back, Mrs. Collins. It’s your duty.’

  ‘I’ m too old to be told what is my duty any longer. I must decide that for myself now. What matters now is you, Miss Rhodes. Are you going to forget what you’ve seen by chance this afternoon?’

  The girl stared at the old woman. The enigmatic look was back there again—the faintly derisive look which said, ‘I don’t really care what you say or think. I’ve lived so long that I can put things into so much better perspective than you can, my girl.’ It disconcerted her again, so that she faltered a little as she answered. ‘I shall have to think it over, Mrs. Collins. . . .’

  Not a flicker on the impassive old face showed the anguish underneath it. She could hear the chinking of crockery in the kitchenette. I know he’s listening . . . he must be, the grandmother thought, and she called softly, ‘Neil, Neil—where’s that cup of tea?’ That he had been listening was proved by the way his eyes went straight to the girl’s face. He had a dish towel over one arm and she was struck by the fact that for a moment she had thought it was Nona coming in. ‘Miss Rhodes . . . is she going to give me away?’ he blurted out, his face paling at the very thought of it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said his grandmother tersely.

  ‘Are you?’ asked Neil, and the girl could not withstand the urgent anguished demand in his face.

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ she faltered.

  ‘Get Miss Rhodes a cup of tea,’ said his grandmother quietly.

  ‘I really think I’d better be going—I’ve three more visits to make,’ she said again.

  ‘Leave them be. They won’t miss you. . . .’

  She was angry with the girl and wanted to hurt her, and as she saw the colour flood the small face, she said quickly, ‘No, that’s not true. They will miss you—as I’d do now if you didn’t come. I mustn’t keep you.’

  ‘I wrote to my mother and asked her if I could bring you down to see the garden,’ she said. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Thank you.’ There was no enthusiasm in the reply and Alison Rhodes was piqued. The old woman had been so interested in her mother’s garden. She had told her about the rock gardens, the water-garden with the little bridge and the stepping-stones, the rose gardens and the long herbaceous borders. It’s this wretched boy, she thought angrily. Just as I was getting somewhere with her at last, he must come crawling home like this. He’s utterly selfish and worthless. . . . He ought to go back and learn his lesson. . . .

  ‘Is there anything you especially need?’ she asked perfunctorily, picking up her notebook and gloves.

  ‘Only a brand-new body instead of this rotting old carcase,’ was the grim answer.

  Alison Rhodes could not bring herself to speak to the youth busying himself with the tea. She felt no pity for him. Ail her compassion was for the old woman on whom this burden must fall. ‘Don’t get up,’ she said quickly, ‘I’ll let myself out—your grandson had better not go near the door. . . .’

  But Mrs. Collins had risen and stood stiffly by the chair. Something hostile had sprung up between the two women suddenly, so that their glances, as they met, measured and appraised one another. What is she going to do? each asked of the other, as they shook hands politely.

  ‘Here’s the tea,’ said Neil, coming in with a plate of biscuits balanced on his arm and the teapot in his hand . . . and was relieved to see the visitor slipping out of the door. They heard her start up the engine of her small car; it started easily and she drove off quietly. From the window below street level, everything appeared elevated and distorted. They watched the car move away with the same ease and efficiency which marked all Miss Rhodes’ movements. When the last sound of it had died away, Neil said agitatedly, ‘What’ll she do? I didn’t like her. Will she go and split on me? Will she? She may drive straight to the police station now. . . . ’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said his grandmother. ‘It’s a thousand pities that she saw you. How could you be so stupid as to fall in like that? What were you doing? Listening, I suppose.’

  He nodded. ‘I woke up from an awful dream and heard voices. I had to know who it was in here with you.’

  ‘Curiosity killed the cat. It may well have put paid to your escape.’

  ‘You don’t think she will really go to the police?’

  ‘I don’t know what she’ll do. She brought this in with her.’ She held out the Investiture letter, and she knew from his face that he felt keenly the fact that it had arrived on the same day as he had. He was sensitive—perceptive—as a woman is, she thought. He is imaginative, too—that’s why he suffers so.

  He looked up slowly now. ‘You must feel pretty bad about this—and me coming home like this. Len was always brave. . . .’he said chokily.

  ‘Brave people know fear too, but they overcome it. Can’t you, boy, can’t you?’

  Amongst the fallen masonry, the tall grass and the fire-weed, the children were playing on the bombed-site. They were playing hide-and-seek. The sun made long slanting shadows which in the dark corners of the former houses were mysterious and compelling. They were a little afraid of the deepest ruins, the foundations of the building, which had once been a block of flats. The barbed wire put up to keep them away from the place was no obstacle to their adventurous spirits.

  Linda and Cissie, hand in hand, were in one of the darkest corners hiding their eyes and counting a hundred before they called ‘Coo-ee’ and went to look for those who were hiding. ‘Ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three, ninety-four, ninety-five . . . Ooh! look, Linda, there’s a man!’

  Cissie clutched the bigger girl nervously. Linda, conscientiously keeping her eyes shut until she reached the century, gabbled through the last numbers and opened them. Yes, there, where Cissie was pointing, was a man—and what was more, he was a soldier. He lay there in the shadows almost hidden in the thick long grass. He was dark—and his eyes were looking right at them. There was something menacing and threatening in that glance, although he was smiling, and Linda drew back and pulled Cissie more closely to her. They stood there staring at the man and he at them. He was yo
ung—but big, and his skin was brown and sunburned. His hair was dark and thick and there were bits of grass in it from where he had been lying. He didn’t move, but still looking at them, he said, ‘What are you staring at? Haven’t you ever seen a man before?’

  The little girls giggled and remained dumb. From all around them came the voices of the impatient hidden friends, faint coo-ees to assist the seekers in their search.

  ‘Go on—get hunting again,’ said the man roughly, ‘You haven’t seen me—I’m hidden too. Understand? You never saw me. Get me?’

  Linda nodded. Her throat was closed suddenly. She couldn’t look away from the man—there was something so strange and compelling in his dark eyes.

  ‘You’re a pretty little girl—I wouldn’t like anything to happen to you—so you keep your little mouth shut . . . see? You haven’t seen me. Got it?’ Linda nodded again. ‘And nor has she. . . .’ pointing to Cissie. ‘You keep her mouth shut, too—get it?’

  Linda nodded. She stood poised now for flight. She’d been told about men—never to let them touch her. This one caught hold of her bare leg now and gave it a vicious pinch. . . . ‘That’s just to keep you remembering . . . now beat it.’ The pinch hurt, but the child was too alarmed to cry. She seized Cissie’s hand tightly, and pulling her roughly away, tried to raise her voice to cry ‘Coo-ee—Coming . . .’ in answer to the more impatient cries of those she should be seeking . . . but no words would come. She gave a sound which was a strangled gulp and turning, fled, dragging the fat Cissie with her.

  CHAPTER VIII

  NONA, harassed and distraught over Neil, could not bring herself to go straight back to the grocery store after telephoning Charlie. She found herself wandering towards the river. The street emerged on to an especially sordid scene. It was low tide and the house-boats showed their draggled muddy bottoms, and on the slimy mud where the tide had receded was an unpleasant collection of discarded objects—old tins, a hat, a bicycle wheel and something that looked uncommonly like the carcase of a cat. Sickened, she turned away in disgust to a group of swans and began throwing pieces of her sandwiches to them. There was one swan smaller and more timid than any of his fellows. He got nothing. Every time she tried to coax him near enough to take a piece of bread the stronger birds chased him away. He’s like Neil, she thought wretchedly, he doesn’t stand a chance with these toughs. They were dirty too, their white beauty sullied and muddied. Everything was soiled and stale.

  Neil . . . what was going to be done about Neil? If only Len had not been killed. She had still not got over the shock of his death and the fact that the whole basis of the family’s stability had gone with him. She could still hear the anger and scorn in Charlie’s voice . . . he had said flatly that he would not help. Perhaps Gran could persuade him. Gran admired Charlie, she liked his strength, his gruff rough ways. But she knew that things were not right between them. How was he to be got away if Charlie would not help? He doesn’t know pity . . . he’s never needed to, she thought. It’s all been straightforward for him. What he wants he takes by sheer brute force. In spite of the physical tie between them she felt that they were inevitably growing apart. Apart. Her grandmother had used that word. She was aghast at the old woman’s perception. I lie in his arms, my skin next to his skin, my heart beating to his beats, striving for deliverance—escape from it all—and yet we’re strangers really. I don’t know what he thinks, what he seeks in me except perhaps this same terrible delight and release. And when that has gone? They say it goes. What then? Does he wonder about me as I do about him? Does he wake afterwards and look at me as I do at him and say to myself, What am I doing lying with this man? Why just this one? Does he lie with other women when he’s away on those long runs, three or four nights a week?

  Why had Neil chosen just this time to come home? Things had been getting a little easier. After that last time Neil came back Charlie didn’t speak to me for weeks. He took me in silence, in monosyllables . . . outraging me . . . degrading me. And yet I can’t deny myself or him. If this awful thing between us is love then I love him . . . I love him. And I want his child . . . but he won’t agree. Every time Nona begged to have a child, Charlie’s answer was always the same—‘Wait until we get to Australia!’ She wanted a child terribly—how Charlie felt she wasn’t sure. He was good with children, but had no patience and little tenderness. He laughed at her fantasies, her imagination, just as he laughed at Neil. But he was capable of tenderness; she had learned that herself, as had her grandmother when in great pain. He seldom came back from a long distance trip without bringing the old woman something.

  But Neil didn’t like Charlie Kent. Charlie, he said, was too rough and too crude for Nonie—he wasn’t good enough for her.

  Mary, the family’s young friend who had been at school with the twins, had tried to console him. She had been fond of Neil, and Nonie had thought for a time that perhaps it would be the making of her twin. If he were engaged to Mary, surely it would make all the difference to his wretchedness during his National Service. But it hadn’t worked out that way. Something had gone wrong between Neil and Mary just as it was now going wrong between her and Charlie. Mary had gone to live with a fat, balding, middle-aged car dealer who had taken a fancy to her. She had got tired of Neil’s sordid troubles in the Army.

  Nona’s love for her twin wasn’t in the least like anything she felt for anyone else. It was an anguished tenderness. She not only loved Neil, she suffered his pain, his misery, his humiliation, was tormented by his agonised indecisions and bewilderments. She had two lives, was two persons, she lived in him as he did in her—or was it that she and Neil had really only one life between them? She was him and whether she liked it or not that weak frightened side of him was her too. Why had she been able to overcome it and he not? Why had the distribution of such qualities been so uneven when all the external basic similarities were shared by them both?

  Charlie, good-natured and generous when it suited him, had a violent, jealous nature. He was jealous not only of men but of everyone—of Mary, of Joan, of Len, of her grandmother, for taking so much of her time, but most of all it was jealousy of Neil, her twin, which was tearing them apart. ‘Your feeble shadow, your weak-kneed identical . . .’ he would call Neil contemptuously, although he knew that he hurt her terribly by doing so.

  Before they had been married he hadn’t said these things, even if he had thought them. That was one of the horrible things about marriage. Nona had discussed it with her grandmother. ‘If you girls would only realise that marriage means scrubbing your own steps for nothing instead of other people’s for money, you’d think twice before you did it,’ was the old woman’s acid comment. ‘It’s the fact that he need not pay you for what you do for him that makes a man think he’s entitled to say and do what he likes.’

  It was Len who had persuaded her to marry. He had always said that Neil would never do anything until his twin was married and he was forced to manage without her. Len had been Charlie Kent’s friend.

  Charlie had immediately made it clear that he had no intention of taking Len’s place in the home. He hated responsibilities, especially if they were not of his own making. He wanted to get to Australia, and nothing else interested him. He was blunt and tough, never promising anything which he couldn’t carry out, never boasting anything which he couldn’t achieve. He would get to Australia all right—even if he went alone. Nonie had no illusions about that. Sometimes she wondered if the fact that she had a well-to-do aunt in Australia, who was willing to give them a start out there, had had something to do with his impatience to marry her. Did he really love her? She tormented herself with the question sometimes. Or was he tired of her already.

  The clock struck two. She would be late again at the store but she felt that she didn’t care as she retraced her steps back there. It was hot and airless in the midday warmth, and the smell of the food sickened her. On edge and nervous, her mind in that small sombre room with the papered door behind her grandmother’s bed,
she could neither keep her attention on her work nor find her usual gay retorts to the manager’s bullying. At his third sarcastic remark on her lack of attention to the customers, she shouted, ‘I’m leaving, I’m packing in—a week from tomorrow.’

  She shouted it across the shop and over the heads of the open-mouthed customers waiting to be served. They loved it. What! One of the young chits saucing that dirty old manager.

  ‘Notice accepted, Miss Collins—or rather, Mrs. Kent,’ said that gentleman—using Nona’s married name sarcastically. ‘But for this week you’ll kindly carry out your duties.’

  ‘Nonie, you don’t mean it?’ Joan was aghast. The work was hard, the floor of stone, the draught from the ever-open door something frightful, but they had fun and the pay was not too bad, and although old Dirty could be sharp-tongued and mean, he was quick to forget. A girl might have a much worse job, and Nonie had said that she liked it.

  ‘I’m going to work in a library in a big store,’ said Nonie casually. ‘Been trying to make up my mind to give notice for weeks. I’m sick of ham and bacon and butter and of making sandwiches and rolls for the empty-bellied. I love books—I’ve always wanted to work in a library.’

  ‘I think that’s wonderful—however did you hear of it?’

  ‘Miss Rhodes—she’s a social worker who comes to see my grandmother—she put in a word for me. I passed my G.C.E., you know. It’s a pity for me to be serving bacon and butter when I passed that. But this is near home—and now I’m married that means a lot.’

  ‘Miss Collins, will you kindly stop chattering and get on with your work. If you’ve no customers there are all those shelves to be cleaned and dressed. Go down in the cellar and start bringing up some tins; we’re very low on soups and vegetables.’

  Nonie went down to the dark dirty cellar and began taking tins from the cases. Sitting down on a packing-case she lit a cigarette and studied her long slim legs. It had taken all her control not to have shouted something at old Dirty. He knew perfectly well that it was not her job to fetch up tins for the shelves. Wally did that—and old Pete. Neither of them was ever there. Pete and old Dirty were forever placing a shilling here and a half-crown there, and it was old Pete who went out to give them to the shoemaker who ran a small bookmaker’s business. Young Wally with his round red face and goggling eyes was always at the bank or delivering goods on his bicycle. She could not get Neil out of her mind. She felt frantic with anxiety whenever she thought of him.