The watercress girl, p.2
The Watercress Girl, page 2
‘Sar’ Ann.’
‘Which one is Sar’ Ann?’
‘Now mek out you don’ know which one Sar’ Ann is,’ his grandfather said, and then tickled the flank of the pony with the end of the plaited whip—he always wanted to plait reeds like that himself but he could never make them tight enough—so that the brown rumps, shorn and groomed for summer, quivered like firm round jellies.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen her,’ he said.
‘You seen her at Uncle Arth’s,’ his grandfather said. ‘Mek out you don’t remember that, and you see her a time or two at Jenny’s.’ He pronounced it Jinny, but even then the boy could not remember who Jinny was and he knew his grandfather wouldn’t tell him until he remembered who Sar’ Ann was and perhaps not even after that.
He tried for some moments longer to recall what Sar’ Ann was like and remembered presently a square old lady in a pork-pie lace cap and a sort of bib of black jet beads on a large frontal expanse of shining satin. Her eyes were watering. She sat on the threshold of a house that smelled of apples and wax polish. She was in the sun, with a lace-pillow and bone bobbins in a blue and ivory fan on her knees. She was making lace and her hands were covered with big raised veins like the leaves of cabbages when you turned them upside down. He was sure that this was Sar’ Ann. He remembered how she had touched his hands with her big cold cabbagy ones and said she would fetch him a cheese-cake, or if he would rather have it a piece of toffee, from the cupboard in her kitchen. She said the toffee was rather sugary and that made him say he preferred the cheese-cake, but his grandfather said:
‘Now don’t you git up. He’s ettin’ from morn to night now. His eyes are bigger’n his belly. You jis sit still,’ and he felt he would cry because he was so fond of cheese-cake and because he could hardly bear his disappointment.
‘She’s the one who wanted to give me cheese-cake,’ he said, ‘isn’t she?’
‘No, she ain’t,’ his grandfather said. ‘That’s your Aunt Turvey.’
‘Then is she the one who’s married to Uncle Arth? Up the high steps?’ he said.
‘Uncle Arth ain’t married,’ his grandfather said. ‘That’s jis the widder-woman who looks after him.’
His Uncle Arth was always in a night-shirt, with a black scarf round his head. He lived in bed all the time. His eyes were very red. Inside him, so his grandfather said, was a stone and the stone couldn’t go up or down but was fixed, his grandfather said, in his kitney, and it was growing all the time.
The stone was an awful nightmare to him, the boy. How big was it? What sort of stone was it? he would say, a stone in the kitney?
‘Like a pibble,’ his grandfather said. ‘Hard as a pibble. And very like as big as a thresh’s egg. Very like bigger’n that by now. Very like as big as a magpie’s.’
‘How did it get there?’
‘You’re arstin’ on me now,’ his grandfather said. ‘It’d be a puzzle to know. But it got there. And there it is. Stuck in his kitney.’
‘Has anybody ever seen it?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Then if nobody’s ever seen it how do they know it’s there?’
‘Lean forward,’ his grandfather said. ‘We’re gittin’ to Long Leys hill. Lean forward, else the shafts’ll poke through the sky.’
It was when they climbed slowly up the long wide hill, already white with the dust of early summer, that he became aware of the beans in flower and the skylarks singing so loftily above them. The scent of beans came in soft waves of wonderful sweetness. He saw the flowers on the grey sunlit stalks like swarms of white, dark-throated bees. The hawthorn flower was nearly over and was turning pink wherever it remained. The singing of the skylarks lifted the sky upward, farther and farther, loftier and loftier, and the sun made the blue of it clear and blinding. He felt that all summer was pouring down the hill, between ditches of rising meadowsweet, to meet him. The cold quivering days of coltsfoot flower, the icy-sunny days of racing cloud-shadow over drying ploughland, the dark-white days of April hail, were all behind him, and he was thirsty with summer dust and his face was hot in the sun.
‘You ain’t recollected her yit, have you?’ his grandfather said.
They were at the top of the hill now and below them, in its yellow meadows, he could see the river winding away in broad and shining curves. He knew that that river was at the end of the earth; that the meadows, and with them the big woods of oak and hornbeam and their fading dusty spangles of flower, were another world.
‘Take holt o’ the reins a minute,’ his grandfather said. He put on the brake a notch and the brake shoes scraped on the metal tyres. The boy held the thin smooth reins lightly between his fingers, the way he had been taught to do. He sat forward on the high horse-hair cushions and looked down the long black tramlines of the dead level reins to the brown pony’s ears and felt himself, for one moment, high on the hill, to be floating in air, level with all the skylarks above the fields below.
‘I’ll jis git me bacca going,’ his grandfather said. ‘We’ll be there in about a quartern of hour. You keep holt on her steady.’
He wanted to say to his grandfather that that was a funny word, quartern; his schoolteacher never used that word; and then as he turned he saw the brown, red-veined face softened by the first pulls of tobacco. All the mystery of it was dissolved in a blue sweet cloud. Then his grandfather began coughing because the bacca, he said, had gone down wrong way and was tiddling his gills. His eyes were wet from coughing and he was laughing and saying:
‘You know who she is. She’s the one with the specs like glarneys.’
Then he knew. She was a little woman, he remembered clearly now, with enormous spy-glass spectacles. They were thick and round like the marbles he played with. She was always whisking about like a clean starched napkin. He had seen her at Uncle Arth’s and she had jolted Uncle Arth about the bed with a terrible lack of mercy as she re-made his pillows, smacking them with her lightning hands as if they were disobedient bottoms. The colossal spectacles gave the eyes a terrible look of magnification. They wobbled sometimes like masses of pale floating frog-spawn. He did not like her; he was held in the spawn-like hypnotism of the eyes and dared not speak. She had a voice like a jackdaw’s which pecked and mocked at everybody with nasty jabs. He knew that he had got her mixed up somehow and he said:
‘I thought the one with the glass eye was Aunt Prunes.’
‘Prudence!’ his grandfather said. ‘They’re sisters. She’s the young ’un, Prudence.’ He spat in a long liquid line, with off-hand care, over the side of the trap. ‘Prunes?—that was funny. How’d you come to git holt o’ that?’
‘I thought everybody else called her Prunes.’
‘Oh! You did, simly? Well, it’s Prudence. Prudence—that’s her proper name.’
Simly was another funny word. He would never understand that word. That was another word his schoolteacher never used.
‘Is she the one with the moustache?’
‘God alive,’ the man said. ‘Don’t you say moustache. You’ll git me hung if you say moustache. That’s your Aunt Prudence you’re talking about. Females don’t have moustaches—you know that.’
He knew better than that because Aunt Prunes had a moustache. She was a female and it was quite a long moustache and she had, what was more, a few whiskers on the central part of her chin.
‘Why doesn’t she shave it off?’ he said.
‘You watch what you’re doing,’ his grandfather said. ‘You’ll have us in the duck-pond.’
‘How do you spell it?’ he said. ‘Her name—Prunes?’
‘Here, you gimme holt o’ the reins now,’ his grandfather said. ‘We’ll be there in five ticks of a donkey’s tail.’
His grandfather took the reins and let the brake off, and in a minute the pony was trotting and they were in a world of high green reeds and grey drooping willows by the river.
‘Is it the house near the spinney?’ he said.
‘That’s it,’ his grandfather said. ‘The little ’un with the big chimney.’
He was glad he remembered the house correctly: not because he had ever seen it but because his grandfather always described it with natural familiarity, as if taking it for granted that he had seen it. He was glad too about Aunt Prunes. It was very hard to get everyone right. There were so many of them, Aunt Prunes and Sar’ Ann and Aunt Turvey and Uncle Arth and Jenny and Uncle Ben Newton, who kept a pub, and Uncle Olly, who was a fat man with short black leggings exactly like polished bottles. His grandfather would speak of these people as if they were playmates who had always been in his life and were to be taken for granted naturally and substantially like himself. They were all very old, terribly old, and he never knew, even afterwards, if they were ordinary aunts or uncles or great ones or only cousins some stage removed.
The little house had two rooms downstairs with polished red bricks for floors and white glass vases of dried reeds from the river on the mantelpiece. His grandfather and Aunt Prunes and Sar’ Ann and himself had dinner in the room where the stove was, and there were big dishes of potatoes, mashed with thick white butter sauce. Before dinner he sat in the other room with his grandfather and Aunt Prunes and looked at a large leather book called Sunday at Home, a prize Aunt Prunes had won at Bible Class, a book in which there were sandwiched, between steel-cuts of men in frock coats and sailors in sailing ships and ladies in black bonnets, pressings of dried flowers thin as tissue from the meadows and the riverside. His contemplation of the flat golden transparencies of buttercup and the starry eyes of bull-daisy and the woolly feathers of grass and reed was ravaged continually by the voice of Sar’ Ann, the jackdaw, pecking and jabbing from the kitchen:
‘There’s something there to keep you quiet. That’s a nice book, that is. You can look at that all afternoon.’
‘You tell me,’ Aunt Prunes said softly, ‘when you want another.’
He liked Aunt Prunes. She was quiet and tender. The moustache, far from being forbidding, brushed him with friendly softness, and the little room was so hot with sun and cooking that there were beads of sweat on the whiskers which he made the mistake of thinking, for some time, were drops of the cowslip wine she was drinking. His grandfather had several glasses of cowslip wine and at the third or fourth of them he took off his coat and collar.
At the same time Aunt Prunes bent down and took the book away from him and said:
‘You can take off your coat too. That’s it. That’s better. Do you want to go anywhere?’
‘Not yet.’
‘When you do it’s down the garden and behind the elderberry tree.’ Her eyes were a modest brown colour, the same colour as her moustache, and there were many wrinkles about them as she smiled. He could smell the sweetish breath, like the yeast his grandmother used for baking, of the fresh wine on her lips, and she said:
‘What would you like to do this afternoon? Tell me what you’d like to do.’
‘Read this book.’
‘I mean really.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You do what you like,’ she said. ‘You go down to the back-brook or in the garden or into the spinney and find snails or sticklebacks or whatever you like.’
She smiled delicately, creating thousands of wrinkles, and then from the kitchen Sar’ Ann screeched:
‘I’m dishing up in two minutes, you boozers. You’d guzzle there till bulls’-noon if I’d let you.’
Bulls’-noon was another word, another strange queer thing he did not understand.
For dinner they had Yorkshire pudding straight out of the pan and on to the plate, all by itself, as the opening course. Sometimes his grandfather slid slices of the creamy yellow pudding into his mouth on the end of his knife and said he remembered the days when all pudding was eaten first and you had your plate turned upside down, so that you could turn it over when the meat came. Sar’ Ann said she remembered that too and she said they were the days and she didn’t care what anybody said. People were happier. They didn’t have so much of everything but they were happier. He saw Aunt Prunes give a little dry grin whenever Sar’ Ann went jabbing on and once he thought he saw her wink at his grandfather. All the time the door of the little room was open so that he could see into the garden with its white pinks and stocks and purple iris flags and now and then he could hear the cuckoo, sometimes near, sometimes far off across the meadows, and many blackbirds singing in endless call and answer in the oak-trees at the end of the garden, where rhubarb and elderberry were in foaming flower together.
‘You can hear nightingales too,’ Aunt Prunes said. ‘Would you like more pudding? You can have more pudding if you want it.’
But his grandfather said again that his eyes were always bigger than his belly and the pudding was put away. ‘Ets like a thacker,’ his grandfather said and Aunt Prunes said, ‘Let him eat then. I like to see boys eat. It does your heart good,’ and she smiled and gave him cloudy piles of white potatoes and white sauce from a blue china boat and thin slices of rich beef with blood running out and washing against the shores of his potatoes like the little waves of a delicate pink sea.
‘How’s Nance and Granny Houghton?’ Sar’ Ann said, and his grandfather said they were fair-to-mid and suddenly there was great talk of relatives, of grown-ups, of people he did not know, of Charley and a man he thought was named Uncle Fuggles and Cathy and Aunt Em and Maude Rose and two people called Liz and Herbert from Bank Top. His grandfather, who had begun the meal with three or four glasses of cowslip wine and a glass of beer, now helped himself to another glass of beer and then dropped gravy down his waistcoat. Aunt Prunes had beer too and her eyes began to look warm and sleepy and beautifully content.
Afternoon, cuckoo-drowsy, very still and full of sun, seemed to thicken like a web about him long before the meal was over. He thought with dread of the quietness when all of them would be asleep and he himself in the little room with a big boring book and its rustling transparencies of faded flowers. He knew what it was to try to move in the world of grown-up sleep. The whisper of the thinnest page would wake them. Night was the time for sleeping and it was one of the mysteries of life that people could also sleep by day, in chairs, in summertime, in mouth-open attitudes, and with snorting noises and legs suddenly jumping like the legs of horses when the flies were bad.
Then to his joy Aunt Prunes remembered and said:
‘You know what I said. You run into the garden and have a look in the spinney for nests. Go down as far as the back-brook if you like.’
‘That’s it,’ his grandfather said. ‘You’ll very like see a moor-hen’s or a coot’s or summat down there. Else a pike or summat. Used to be a rare place for pike, a-layin’ there a-top o’ the water——’
‘Don’t you git falling in,’ Sar’ Ann said. ‘Don’t you git them feet wet. Don’t you git them gooseberries—they’ll give you belly-ache summat chronic——’
‘You bring me some flowers,’ Aunt Prunes said. ‘Eh?—how’s that? You stay a long time, as long as you like, and bring me some flowers.’
There were no nests in the spinney except a pigeon’s high up in a hazel-tree that was too thin to climb. He was not quite sure about the song of a nightingale. He knew the blackbird’s, full and rich and dark like the bird itself and deep like the summer shadow of the closing wood, and with the voices of thrushes the blackbirds’ song filled all the wood with bell-sounds and belling echoes.
Beyond the wood the day was clear and hot. The grass was high to his knees and the ground, falling away, was marshy in places, with mounds of sedge, as it ran down towards the back-brook and the river. He walked with his eyes on the ground, partly because of oozy holes among the sedge, partly because he hoped to see the brown ring of a moor-hen’s nest in the marshier places.
It was because of his way of walking that he did not see, for some time, a girl standing up to her knees in red-ochre mud, among half-floating beds of dark-green cresses. But suddenly he lifted his head and saw her standing there, bare-legged and bare-armed, staring at him as if she had been watching him for a long time. Her brown osier cress-basket was like a two-bushel measure and was slung over her shoulder with a strap.
‘You don’t live here,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Do you?’
‘Over there,’ she said. ‘In that house.’
‘Which house?’ He could not see a house.
‘You come here and you can see it,’ she said.
When he had picked his way through tufts of sedge to where she was standing in the bed of cresses he still could not see a house, either about the wood or across the meadows on the rising ground beyond.
‘You can see the chimney smoking,’ she said.
‘It’s not a house. It’s a hut,’ he said.
‘That’s where we live.’
‘All the time?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re sinking in.’
The toes of his boots were slowly drowning in red-ochre water.
‘If you’re coming out here you’d better take your shoes and stockings off,’ she said.
A moment or two later his bare feet were cool in the water. She was gathering cresses quickly, cutting them off with an old shoe-knife, leaving young sprigs and trailing skeins of white root behind. She was older than himself, nine or ten, he thought, and her hair hung ribbonless and uncombed, a brown colour, rather like the colour of the basket, down her back.
‘Can I gather?’ he said, and she said, yes, if he knew what brook-lime was.
‘I know brook-lime,’ he said. ‘Everybody knows brook-lime.’
‘Then which is it? Show me which it is. Which is brook-lime?’
That was almost as bad, he thought, as being nagged by Sar’ Ann. The idea that he did not know brook-lime from cress seemed to him a terrible insult and a pain. He snatched up a piece in irritation but it did not break and came up instead from the mud-depths in a long rope of dripping red-black slime, spattering his shirt and trousers.
She laughed at this and he laughed too. Her voice, he thought, sounded cracked, as if she were hoarse from shouting or a cold. The sound of it carried a long way. He heard it crack over the meadows and the river with a coarse broken sort of screech that was like the slitting of rag in the deep oppressive afternoon.
