Cut and Come Again (8 page)

‘Pte. Albert Holland, 94167, B Company, Fifth Battalion 1st Rifles, British Army of Occupation, Cologne, Germany.'

And then Mrs. Holland would begin, talking according to her mood: ‘I must say, Albert, I feel a good lot better. I have not had a touch for a long while.' Or: ‘I don't seem to get on at all somehow. The doctor comes every week and says I got to stop here. Glad to say though things are well with your Dad and trade is good and he is only waiting for you to come home and go in with him. There is a good trade now in old motors. Your Dad is very good to me I must say and so is Alice. I wonder when you will be home. Alice is writing this.'

All through the winter Alice wrote the letters. They seemed always to be the same letters, slightly changed, only endlessly repeated. Writing the letters seemed to bring her closer to Mrs. Holland. ‘I'm sure I don't know what I should do without you, Alice.' Mrs. Holland trusted her implicitly, could see no wrong in her. And it seemed to Alice as if she came to know the soldier too, since she not only wrote the letters which went to him but read those which came in return.

‘Dear Mum, it is very cold here and I can't say I shall be very sorry when I get back to see you. Last Sunday we …'

It seemed almost as if the letters were written to her. And though she read them without imagination, flatly, they gave her a kind of pleasure. She looked forward to their arrival. She shared Mrs. Holland's anxiety when they did not come. ‘It seems funny about Albert, he ain't writ this week.' And they would sit together in the bedroom, in the short winter afternoons, and talk of him, and wonder.

Or rather Mrs. Holland talked. Alice simply listened, her large grey eyes very still with their expression of lost attentiveness.

VII

She began to be sick in the early mornings without knowing what was happening to her. It was almost spring. The floods were lessening and vanishing and there was a new light on the river and the grass. The half-cut osier-bed shone in the sun like red corn, the bark varnished with light copper. She could dimly feel the change in the life about her: the new light, the longer days, thrushes singing in the willows above the mill-water in the evenings, the sun warm on her face in the afternoons.

But there was no change in her own life. Or if there was a change she did not feel it. There was no change in Mrs. Holland's attitude to her and in her own to Mrs. Holland. And only once was there a change in her attitude to Holland himself. After the first touch of sickness she could not face him. The life had gone out of her. ‘I ain't well,' she kept saying to Holland.
‘I ain't well.' For the first time he went into a rage with her. ‘It ain't been a week since you said that afore! Come on. Christ! You ain't goin' to start that game.' He tried to put his arms round her. She struggled a little, tried to push him away. And suddenly he hit her. The blow struck her on the shoulder, just above the heart. It knocked her silly for a moment and she staggered about the room, then sat on the sofa, dazed. Then as she sat there the room was suddenly plunged into darkness. It was as though she had fainted. Then she saw that it was only Holland. He had put out the lamp.

After that she never protested. She became more than ever static, a neutral part of the act in which Holland was always the aggressor. There was nothing in it for her. It was over quickly, a savage interlude in the tranquil day-after-day unaltered life of Mrs. Holland and herself. It was as regular almost as the sponging of Holland's collar and the cooking of his fish, or as the Friday visit of her mother and father with the van.

‘How gittin' on? You don't look amiss. You look as if you're fillin' out a bit.' Or ‘This is five and six! Is he rised you? Mother, he give her a rise. Well, well, that's all right, that is. That's good, a rise so soon. You be a good gal and you won't hurt.' And finally: ‘Well, we s'll ha' to git on. Be dark else,' and the van would move away.

She was certainly plumper: a slight gentle filling of her breasts and her face were the only signs of physical change in her. She herself scarcely noticed them; until standing one day in the loft, gazing across the valley, holding the corn-bowl pressed against her, she could feel the bowl's roundness hard against the hardening roundness of her belly. Then she could feel something
wrong with herself for the first time. And she stood arrested, scared. She felt large and heavy. What was the matter with her? She stood in a perplexity of fear. And finally she put the corn-bowl on the loft-floor and then undid her clothes and looked at herself. She was round and hard and shiny. Then she opened the neck of her dress. Her breasts were no longer like little hard pointed lemons, but like half-blown roses. She put her hand under them, and under each breast, half in fear and half in amazement, and lifted them gently. They seemed suddenly as if they would fall if she did not hold them. What was it? Why hadn't she noticed it? Then she had suddenly something like an inspiration. It was Mrs. Holland's complaint. She had caught it. Her body had the same swollen shiny look about it. She could see it clearly enough. She had caught the dropsy from Mrs. Holland.

For a time she was a little frightened. She lay in bed at night and touched herself, and wondered. Then it passed off. She went back into the old state of unemotional neutrality. Then the sickness began to get less severe; she went for whole days without it; and finally it ceased altogether. Then there were days when the heaviness of her breasts and belly seemed a mythical thing, when she did not think of it. And she would think that the sickness and the heaviness were passing off together, things dependent on each other.

By the late spring she felt that it was all right, that she had nothing to fear. Summer was coming. She would be better in summer. Everybody was better in the summer.

Even Mrs. Holland seemed better. But it was not the spring weather or the coming of summer that made her so, but the letters from Germany. ‘I won't
say too much, Mum, in case. But very like we shall be home afore the end of this year.'

‘I believe I could git up, Alice, if he come home. I believe I could. I should like to be up,' Mrs. Holland would say. ‘I believe I could.'

And often, in the middle of peeling potatoes or scrubbing the kitchen bricks, Alice would hear Mrs. Holland calling her. And when she went up it would be, ‘Alice, you git the middle bedroom ready. In case Albert comes,' or ‘See if you can find Albert's fishing-tackle. It'll be in the shed or else the loft. He'll want it,' or ‘Tell Fred when he comes home I want him to git a ham. A whole 'un. In case.' And always the last flickering desire: ‘If I knowed when he was coming I'd git up. I believe I
could
git up.'

But weeks passed, and nothing happened. Midsummer came, and all along the river the willow-leaves drooped or turned, green and silver, in the summer sun and the summer wind. And the hot still days were almost as uneventful and empty as the brief damp days of winter.

Then one afternoon in July Alice, standing in the loft and gazing through the dusted windows, saw a soldier coming up the road. He was carrying a white kitbag and he walked on rather splayed flat feet.

She ran down the loft steps and across the dump-yard and up into Mrs. Holland's bedroom.

‘Albert's come!'

Mrs. Holland sat straight up in bed, as though by a miracle, trembling.

‘Get me out, quick, let me get something on. Get me out. I want to be out for when he comes. Get me out.'

The girl took the weight of the big woman as she half slid out of bed, Mrs. Holland's great breasts
falling out of her nightgown, Alice thinking all the time, ‘I ain't got it as bad as her, not half as bad. Mine are little side of hers. Mine are little.' She had never realised how big Mrs. Holland was. And she had never seen her so distressed – distressed by joy and anticipation and her own sickness. Tears were flowing from her eyes. Alice struggled with her desperately. But she had scarcely put on her old red woollen dressing-jacket and helped her to a chair before there was a shout:

‘Mum!'

Alice was at the head of the stairs before the second shout came. She could see the soldier in the passage below looking up. His tunic collar was unbuttoned and thrown back from his sun-red neck.

‘Where's mum?'

‘Up here.'

Albert came upstairs. Alice had expected a young man, very young. Albert seemed about thirty-five, perhaps older. His flat feet, splayed out, and his dark loose moustache gave him a slightly old-fashioned countrified look, a little stupid. He was very like Holland himself. His eyes bulged, the whites glassy.

‘Where is she?' he said.

‘In the bedroom,' Alice said. ‘In there.'

Albert went past her and along the landing without another word, scarcely looking at her. Alice could smell his sweat, the pungent sweat-soaked smell of khaki, as he went by. In another moment she heard Mrs. Holland's cries of delight and his voice in answer.

From that moment she began to live in a changed world. Albert's coming cut her off at once from Mrs. Holland; she was pushed aside like an old love by a new. But she was prepared for that. Not consciously, but by intuition, she had seen that it must come, that
Albert would usurp her place. So she had no surprise when Mrs. Holland scarcely called for her all day, had no time to talk to her except of Albert, and never asked her to sit and read to her in the bedroom as she had always done in the past. She was prepared for all that. What she was not prepared for at all was to be cut off from Holland himself too. It had not occurred to her that in the evenings Albert might sit in the kitchen, that there might be no lying on the sofa, no putting out of the light, no doing as Holland wanted.

She was so unprepared for it that for a week she could not believe it. Her incredulity made her quieter than ever. All the time she was waiting for Holland to do something: to come to her secretly, into her bedroom, anywhere, and go on as he had always done. But nothing happened. For a week Holland was quiet too. He did not speak to her. Every evening Alice fried a double quantity of fish for Holland and Albert, and after tea the two men sat in the kitchen and talked, or walked through the osier-bed to the meadows and talked there. Holland scarcely spoke to her. They were scarcely ever alone together. Albert was an everlasting presence, walking about aimlessly, putteeless, his splayed feet shuffling on the bricks, stolid, comfortable, not speaking much.

And finally when Holland did speak to her it was with the old words: ‘Don't you say nothing! See?' But now there was not only fear in the words, but anger. ‘You say half a damn word and I'll break your neck. See? I'll smash you. That's over. Done with. Don't you say a damn word! See?'

The words, contrary to their effect of old, no longer perturbed or perplexed her. She was relieved, glad. It was all over. No more putting out the lamp, lying there waiting for Holland. No more pain.

VIII

Outwardly she seemed incapable of pain, even of emotion at all. She moved about with the same constant large-eyed quietness as ever, as though she were not thinking or were incapable of thought. Her eyes were remarkable in their everlasting expression of mute steadfastness, the same wintry grey light in them as always, an unreflective, almost lifeless kind of light.

And Albert noticed it. It struck him as funny. She would stare at him across the kitchen, dishcloth in hand, in a state of dumb absorption, as though he were some entrancing boy of her own age. But there was no joy in her eyes, no emotion at all, nothing. It was the same when, after a week's rest, Albert began to repair the chicken-coop beyond the dumps of old iron. Alice would come out twice a day, once with a cup of tea in the morning, once when she fed the hens in the early afternoon, and stand and watch him. She hardly ever spoke. She only moved to set down the tea-cup on a box or scatter the corn on the ground. And standing there, hatless, in the hot sunlight, staring, her lips gently parted, she looked as though she were entranced by Albert. All the time Albert, in khaki trousers, grey army shirt, a cloth civilian cap, and a fag-end always half burning his straggling moustache, moved about with stolid countrified deliberation. He was about as entrancing as an old shoe. He never dressed up, never went anywhere. When he drank, his moustache acted as a sponge, soaking up a little tea, and Albert took second little drinks from it, sucking it in. Sometimes he announced, ‘I don't know as I shan't go down Nenweald for half hour and look round,' but further than that it never went. He would fish in the mill-stream
instead, dig in the ruined garden, search among the rusty iron dumps for a hinge or a bolt, something he needed for the hen-house. In the low valley the July heat was damp and stifling, the willows still above the still water, the sunlight like brass. The windless heat and the stillness seemed to stretch away infinitely. And finally Albert carried the wood for the new henhouse into the shade of a big cherry-tree that grew between the river and the house, and sawed and hammered in the cherry-tree shade all day. And from the kitchen Alice could see him. She stood at the sink, scraping potatoes or washing dishes, and watched him. She did it unconsciously. Albert was the only new thing in the square of landscape seen from the window. She had nothing else to watch. The view was even smaller than in winter time, since summer had filled the cherry-boughs, and the tall river-reeds had shut out half the world.

It went on like this for almost a month, Albert tidying up the garden and remaking the hen-house, Alice watching him. Until finally Albert said to her one day:

‘Don't you ever git out nowhere?'

‘No.'

‘Don't you want to git out?'

‘I don't mind.'

The old answer: and it was the same answer she gave him, when, two days later, on a Saturday, he said to her: ‘I'm a-going down Nenweald for hour. You git ready and come as well. Go on. You git ready.'

She stood still for a moment, staring, not quite grasping it all.