Cut and Come Again (6 page)

And then when her eyes had satisfied themselves Mrs. Holland began to talk again, to ask questions.

‘How old are you, Alice?'

‘Seventeen.'

‘Would you rather be here with me than at home?'

‘I don't mind.'

‘Don't you like it at home?'

‘I don't mind.'

‘Is the fire all right?'

‘Yes.'

‘When you've done the grate will you go down and git the taters ready?'

‘Yes.'

‘It's cold mutton. Like cold mutton, Alice?'

‘I don't mind.'

Then, in turn, the girl had a question herself.

‘Why ain't the mill going?' she asked.

‘The mill? The mill ain't been going for ten years.'

‘What's all that iron?'

‘That's the scrap. What Fred buys and sells. That's his trade. The mill ain't been worked since his father died. That's been ten year. Fred's out all day buying up iron like that, and selling it. Most of it he never touches, but what he don't sell straight off comes back here. He's gone off this morning. He won't be back till night-time. You'll have to get his tea when he comes back.'

‘I see.'

‘You must do all you can for him. I ain't much good to him now.'

‘I see.'

‘You can come up again when you've done the taters.'

Downstairs Alice found the potatoes in a wet mould-green sack and stood at the sink and pared them. The kitchen window looked out on the mill-stream. The water foamed and eddied and kept up a gentle bubbling roar against the wet stone walls outside. The water-smell was everywhere. From the window she could see across the flat valley: bare willow branches against bare sky, and between them the bare water.

Then as she finished the potatoes she saw the time by the blue tin alarum clock standing on the high
smoke-stained mantelpiece. It was past eleven. Time seemed to have flown by her faster than the water was flowing under the window.

III

It seemed to flow faster than ever as the day went on. Darkness began to settle over the river and the valley in the middle afternoon: damp, still November darkness preceded by an hour of watery half-light. From Mrs. Holland's bedroom Alice watched the willow trees, dark and skeleton-like, the only objects raised up above the flat fields, hanging half-dissolved by the winter mist, then utterly dissolved by the winter darkness. The afternoon was very still; the mist moved and thickened without wind. She could hear nothing but the mill-race, the everlasting almost mournful machine-like roar of perpetual water, and then, high above it, shrieking, the solitary cries of seagulls, more mournful even than the monotone of water. They were sounds she had heard all day, but had heard unconsciously. She had had no time for listening, except to Mrs. Holland's voice calling downstairs its friendly advice and desires through the open bedroom door: ‘Alice, have you put the salt in the potatoes? You'll find the onions in the shed, Alice. The oil-man calls today, ask him to leave the usual. When you've washed up you can bring the paper up, Alice, and read bits out to me for five minutes. Has the oilman been? Alice, I want you a minute, I want you.' So it had gone on all day. And the girl, gradually, began to like Mrs. Holland; and the woman, in turn, seemed to be transported into a state of new and stranger volatility by Alice's presence. She was garrulous
with joy. ‘I've been lonely. Since I've been bad I ain't seen nobody, only Fred, one week's end to another. And the doctor. It's been about as much as I could stan'.' And the static, large-eyed, quiet presence of the girl seemed to comfort her extraordinarily. She had someone to confide in at last. ‘I ain't had nobody I could say a word to. Nobody. And nobody to do nothing for me. I had to wet the bed one day. I was so weak I couldn't get out. That's what made Fred speak to your dad. I couldn't go on no longer.'

So the girl had no time to listen except to the voice or to think or talk except in answer to it. And the afternoon was gone and the damp moving darkness was shutting out the river and the bare fields and barer trees before she could realise it.

‘Fred'll be home at six,' Mrs. Holland said. ‘He shaves at night. So you git some hot water ready about a quarter to.'

‘All right.'

‘Oh! and I forgot. He allus has fish for his tea. Cod or something. Whatever he fancies. He'll bring it. You can fry it while he's shaving.'

‘All right.'

‘Don't you go and fry that roach by mistake!'

And Mrs. Holland, thinking again of the fish in Alice's hand, lay back on the pillows and laughed, the heavy ripe laughter that sounded as before a trifle strange, as though she were a little mad or hysterical in the joy of fresh companionship.

Mrs. Holland and Alice had already had a cup of tea in the bedroom. That seemed unbelievably luxurious to Alice, who for nearly five years had drunk her tea from a thermos flask in her father's van. It brought home to her that she was very well off: five shillings a week, tea by the fire in the bedroom, Mrs. Holland so
cheerful and nice, and an end at last to her father's ironic grousing and the feeling that she was a dead weight on his hands. It gave her great satisfaction. Yet she never registered the emotion by looks or words or a change in her demeanour. She went about quietly and a trifle vaguely, almost in a trance of detachment. The light in her large flat pellucid eyes never varied. Her mouth would break into a smile, but the smile never telegraphed itself to her eyes. And so with words. She spoke, but the words never changed that expression of dumb content, that wide and in some way touching and attractive stare straight before her into space.

And when she heard the rattling of a motor-van in the mill-yard just before six o'clock she looked suddenly up, but her expression did not change. She never showed a flicker of apprehension or surprise.

About five minutes later Holland walked into the kitchen.

‘'Ullo,' he said.

Alice was standing at the sink, wiping the frying pan with a dishcloth. When Holland spoke and she looked round at him her eyes blinked with a momentary flash of something like surprise. Holland's voice was very deep and it seemed to indicate that Holland himself would be physically very large and powerful.

Then she saw that he was a little man, no taller than herself. He was little and rather stocky, without being stiff or muscular. His trousers hung loose and wide, like sacks. His overcoat, undone, was like a sack. The only unloose thing about him was his collar. It was a narrow stiff celluloid collar fixed with a patent ready-made tie. The collar was oilstained and the tie, once blue, was soaked by oil and dirt to the appearance of old
crêpe
. The rest of Holland was loose and careless
and drooping. A bit of an old shack, Alice thought. Even his little tobacco-yellowed moustache drooped raggedly. Like his felt hat, stuck carelessly on the back of his head, it looked as though it did not belong to him.

‘'Ullo,' he said. ‘You
are
'ere then. I see your dad. D'ye think you're going to like it?'

‘Yes.'

‘That's right. You make yourself at 'ome.' He had the parcel of fish under his arm and as he spoke he took it out and laid it on the kitchen table. The brown paper flapped open and Alice saw the tail-cut of a cod. She went at once to the plate-rack, took a plate and laid the fish on it.

‘Missus say anythink about the fish?' Holland said.

‘Yes.'

‘All right. You fry it while I git shaved.'

‘I put the water on,' she said.

Holland took off his overcoat, then his jacket, and finally his collar and tie. Then he turned back the greasy neck-band of his shirt and began to make his shaving lather in a wooden bowl at the sink, working the brush and bowl like a pestle and mortar. Alice put the cod into the frying-pan and then the pan on the oil-stove. Then as Holland began to lather his face, Mrs. Holland called downstairs: ‘Fred. You there, Fred? Fred!' and Holland walked across the kitchen, still lathering himself and dropping spatters of white lather on the stone flags as he went, to listen at the stairs door.

‘Yes, I'm 'ere, Em'ly. I'm – Eh? Oh! all right.'

Holland turned to Alice. ‘The missus wants you a minute upstairs.'

Alice ran upstairs, thinking of the fish. After the warm kitchen she could feel the air damper than ever.
Mrs. Holland was lying down in bed and a candle in a tin holder was burning on the chest of drawers.

‘Oh! Alice,' Mrs. Holland said, ‘you do all you can for Mr. Holland, won't you? He's had a long day.'

‘Yes.'

‘And sponge his collar. I want him to go about decent. It won't get done if you don't do it.'

‘All right.'

Alice went downstairs again. Sounds of Holland's razor scraping his day-old beard and of the cod hissing in the pan filled the kitchen. She turned the cod with a fork and then took up Holland's collar and sponged it with the wetted fringe of her pinafore. The collar came up bright and fresh as ivory, and when finally Holland had finished shaving at the sink and had put on the collar again it was as though a small miracle had been performed. Holland was middle-aged, about fifty, and looked older in the shabby overcoat and oily collar. Now, shaved and with the collar cleaned again, he looked younger than he was. He looked no longer shabby, a shack, and a bit nondescript, but rather homely and essentially decent. He had a little of the tired, rather stunted and subservient look of the working man. His flesh was coarse, with deep pores, and his greyish hair came down stiff over his forehead. His eyes were dull and a little bulging. When Alice put the fish before him he sat low over the plate, scooped up the white flakes of fish with his knife and then sucked them into his mouth. He spat out the bones. Every time he spat out a bone he drank his tea, and when his cup was empty, Alice, standing by, filled it up again.

None of these things surprised the girl. She had never seen anyone eat except like that, with the knife, low over the plate, greedily. Her father and mother
ate like it and she ate like it herself. So as she stood by the sink, waiting to fill up Holland's cup, her eyes stared with the same abstract preoccupation as ever. They did not even change when Holland spoke, praising her:

‘You done this fish all right, Alice.'

‘Shall I git something else for you?'

‘Git me a bit o' cheese. Yes, you done that fish very nice, Alice. Very nice indeed.'

Yet, though her eyes expressed nothing, she felt a sense of reassurance, very near to comfort, at Holland's words. It was not deep: but it was enough to counteract the strangeness of her surroundings, to help deaden the perpetual sense of the mill-race, to drive away some of the eternal dampness about the place.

But it was not enough to drive away her tiredness. She went to bed very early, as soon as she had washed Holland's supper things and had eaten her own supper of bread and cheese. Her room was at the back of the mill. It had not been used for a long time; its dampness rose up in a musty cloud. Then when she lit her candle and set it on the washstand she saw that the wallpaper, rotten with dampness, was peeling off and hanging in ragged petals, showing the damp-green plaster beneath. Then she took her nightgown out of her case, undressed and stood for a moment naked, her body as thin as a boy's and her little lemon-shaped breasts barely formed, before dropping the nightgown over her shoulders. A moment later she had put out the candle and was lying in the little iron bed.

Then, as she lay there, curling up her legs for warmth in the damp sheets, she remembered something. She had said no prayers. She got out of bed at once and knelt down by the bed and words of mechanical
supplication and thankfulness began to run at once through her mind: ‘Dear Lord, bless us and keep us. Dear Lord, help me to keep my heart pure,' little impromptu gentle prayers of which she only half-understood the meaning. And all the time she was kneeling she could hear a background of other sounds: the mill-race roaring in the night, the wild occasional cries of birds from up the river, and the rumblings of Holland and his wife talking in their bedroom.

And in their room Holland was saying to his wife: ‘She seems like a good gal.'

‘She is. I like her,' Mrs. Holland said. ‘I think she's all right.'

‘She done that fish lovely.'

‘Fish.' Mrs. Holland remembered. And she told Holland of how Alice had brought up the roach in her hand, and as she told him her rather strange rich laughter broke out again and Holland laughed with her.

‘Oh dear,' Mrs. Holland laughed. ‘She's a funny thing when you come to think of it.'

‘As long as she's all right,' Holland said, ‘that's all that matters. As long as she's all right.'

IV

Alice was all right. It took less than a week for Holland to see that, although he distrusted a little Alice's first showing with his fish. It seemed too good. He knew what servant girls could be like: all docile, punctual and anxious to please until they got the feeling of things, and then haughty and slovenly and sulky before you could turn round. He wasn't having that sort of thing. The minute Alice was surly or had too
much lip she could go. Easy get somebody else. Plenty more kids be glad of the job. So for the first few nights after Alice's arrival he would watch her reflection in the soap-flecked shaving-mirror hanging over the sink while he scraped his beard. He watched her critically, tried to detect some flaw, some change, in her meek servitude. The mirror was a big round iron-framed concave mirror, so that Alice, as she moved slowly about with the fish-pan over the oil-stove, looked physically a little larger, and also vaguer and softer, than she really was. The mirror put flesh on her bony arms and filled out her pinafore. And looking for faults, Holland saw only this softening and magnifying of her instead. Then when he had dried the soap out of his ears and had put on the collar Alice had sponged for him he would sit down to the fish, ready to pounce on some fault in it. But the fish, like Alice, never seemed to vary. Nothing wrong with the fish. He tried bringing home different sorts of fish, untried sorts, tricky for Alice to cook; witch, whiting, sole and halibut, instead of his usual cod and hake. But it made no difference. The fish was always good. And he judged Alice by the fish: if the fish was all right Alice was all right. Upstairs, after supper, he would ask Mrs. Holland: ‘Alice all right to-day?' and Mrs. Holland would say how quiet Alice was, or how good she was, and how kind she was, and that she couldn't be without her for the world. ‘Well, that fish was lovely again,' Holland would say.