The Well (3 page)

Hester spent less and less time with her father who, like a character in a play, wandered about the house trying to remember where his pistols were. The old man took it into his head to read cookery books ferreting them out from the backs of cupboards and shelves where Hester hid them. It became his habit to insist that chosen dishes with complicated ingredients should be prepared for him. Sometimes, late at night, he fancied a snack which entailed hours of bending over a sink under a poor light, endless shreddings and whippings and mixings and long slow cooking requiring constant stirring and watchfulness.

Hester invented ways of escaping from her father's company. She was glad when Mr Bird came and she encouraged his visits to be more frequent and prolonged into the evenings. She was still diligent in the house and the garden. She still considered the running of the property to be of first importance but she had, with her usual truthfulness, to acknowledge privately that she was not facing the responsibility most of the time and, though she tried to be as keenly interested as she had been, she knew really that she was having to force herself. As time went by, having to nurse her ailing and often demented father, she looked for small compensations. These she found more and more in teaching Katherine and in spending pleasant hours in her company.

She treated Katherine with an affectionate though severe generosity. She did not regard herself as a mother or even as an aunt. She did not attempt to give any name to the relationship. She realized quite quickly that she was possessive. She knew she was irritable and restless during the evenings if Katherine was writing a letter to one of the girls she had grown up with at the convent. And if a letter came for Katherine she always expected to be shown the contents. She told herself it was because she was fearful for the girl's well being and harmful things, like drugs, she said to herself without understanding, might come any day in the post. After all one of the girls, Hester understood from Katherine's curious language, was doing three years at the Remand. Katherine was obviously very fond of Joanna and Hester felt guilty about her own relief that this friend was safely tucked away because of something awful she must have done; though again she had to modify this thought and understand that certain circumstances might have taken the girl to a department of rehabilitation.

They usually sat in the car outside the post office to open their letters. Katherine immediately passed over the sheets covered with round handwriting for Hester to read. The girls, she noticed, all had the same unformed or immature handwriting. They put little circles over the i's instead of dots. Often a whole page would be covered with crosses inside scrawled circles, misshapen kisses and hugs folded up into an envelope. Reassured Hester would smile and pass the pages back. She did not receive any letters herself, only bills and statements to do with the farm and requests from charities for money.

In the evenings when old Mr Harper, complaining, wanted to go over the books Hester would say, ‘Later father, tomorrow, I'm busy this evening,' and would pour him an extra large whisky.

With too many hand movements and her voice going up in a self-conscious lilt at the ends of her sentences Katherine related things to Hester about the convent. She repeated several incidents of unkindness or unfair treatment often describing the same incident over again with added details which made Hester wonder sometimes about the truth of them. But true or not it was clear that were was no privacy. The beds in the long rooms were so close together that only a small chair could fit between them; and the tables in the dining room were thick with grease, and the shower room was, ‘so shabby Miss Harper, dear, you can have no idea – the water never drained away so you had to stand in a slimy mess left by the other girls.' Some of the nuns were sweet, Katherine said, but others said things like they could smell that you had been thinking of a boy and that you would get pregnant as soon as you left the convent or go on drug trips and be taken away to be a prostitute. She used to dream, she told Hester, of being in the country. ‘I used to pretend,' she said, that I had a home of my own, a farm to go to. Every night in bed I told myself stories about my family at the farm. She smiled at Hester turning up her thin face and squinting with one eye even when the sunshine was not bright. Hester, acquainted from previous tellings, would lightly brush Katherine's thin pale hair away from her face and say, ‘Well you are in the country now, and you do live on a farm. I hope you are not disappointed.' And, picturing the bleakness, she would allow some of the hidden tenderness she felt to invade her answering smile. If the squint gave her some uneasiness she dismissed it at once.

Sometimes Hester, with increasing pleasure, told Katherine stories from her own childhood, confiding details about Hilde Herzfeld about whom she had never spoken to anyone. ‘She was a very strict teacher,' Hester enjoyed the recollection, ‘she made me write four lines of French and four lines of German every morning before breakfast. And that was in addition to the household things my grandmother expected me to do every day.'

Late at night, when they were in their separate rooms, Hester, looking through her old albums of copied-out poems and fragments of prose carefully translated and often decorated with picture postcards, saved, or drawings made either by herself or by Hilde, wondered whether she should tell the treasured things about those times in her life. If she looked back on Hilde as Katherine must see her she noticed again, in her memories, the stains in the armpits of Hilde's dresses, ‘
Ach! Ich schwitze!
', dark moist half-circles, fascinating and repelling, in the too warm stuff of which the dresses were made. Katherine with her elaborate preparations, her jars and bottles and pressure packs, her light pretty washable clothes and her scented youthful body knew nothing of these other scents. Because of things like this perhaps it would be better not to talk, better not to try to recapture something which could not exist side by side with what she had now.

She put the albums and the temporarily recalled image of Hilde's plump, often blemished, face away.

It occurred to her at night too when they had each closed their bedroom doors that Katherine, after spending an evening writing to Joanna, might go on writing to her in the privacy of her own room adding a page, or more than one, to the letter flipped to and fro with such candour in front of Hester's eyes. Hester scanning the pages of childish notepaper always said, ‘That's lovely Kathy – we'll post it next time we're in town.'

While she folded back her counterpane she found herself adding to the letter as Katherine in her extraordinary idiom might. There were the frightening details extra to the descriptions of life in the convent. These details did not worry Hester, it was only the effect they could have on Katherine that mattered. There was the time Kathy and Joanna had fallen over two nuns on a mattress in a storeroom. Perhaps there would be further reference to their actions, their nakedness, a glimpse of their feelings and Hester went even further – ‘Imagine!' she seemed to see Katherine's blue biro labouring across a fresh sheet of paper:

Hester, restless in her room, thought about Katherine private in her room with her secret letter writing. She thought that Katherine would write extra things about her, laugh about her in her extra pages to Joanna.

Hester kneeling down in the narrow space beside her bed said her prayers trying to clear her mind of unprofitable thoughts and the fear of what Joanna might send back to Kathy. Her grandmother always said to have God in your heart and Jesus on your lips when you went to sleep. Ask a Blessing, she always said, and thank Him for all you've got. If you can't drop off, go on asking and thanking till you do. She must try, she told herself, not to be afraid of the friendship.

In spite of the imaginings of the night before Hester did not need much persuasion to talk again about Hilde Herzfeld. ‘Fräulein she was really,' she said. ‘It means Miss.' She went on to say that Hilde loved to talk about the magic of mountains and about snow and about her own little bedroom at home which had a window high up under the eaves where, in spring, the swallows nested, and where she always felt she could reach out to the mountain slope and pick up a handful of snow quite simply by leaning out of the window.

There were hotels in Europe, Hester wanted to go on telling, ‘Such magnificent places, Katherine, one day I shall take you there.' She had travelled once, she said, with Fräulein Hilde. Festooned in capes and hoods and laden with trunks and baggages and packets, they had made together a sort of small Grand Tour one wonderful summer. At the hotels, Hester enjoyed remembering, everything was done to please the guests, quite elaborately at times. She remembered once a chef parading with a fanfare of trumpets and a row of prime live ducks through the hotel vestibule along a plum-coloured carpet on either side of which sat the wealthy visitors who would choose their forthcoming meal as it waddled by. Waiters stood behind every chair during the serving of afternoon tea and sang, falsetto, the correct national anthem for every guest in turn and the slices of dark fruit cake were offered with appropriate little flags piercing the moist richness. In Germany, Hester said, where they didn't know how to make tea, great trouble was taken to pour it correctly for the English from silver teapots. And for the Russians it was made with a samovar and handed to the guests in glasses cradled in little wickerwork baskets. The Russians, some of them, Hester added, held lumps of sugar between their front teeth and sucked the hot tea through the sugar. A working man's habit Miss Herzfeld had explained, rather like dipping soft white bread in coffee, but enjoyed by the rich people who, being so rich, thought they did not need to bother about manners.

‘Oh, Miss Harper, dear, it would be so beautiful to travel.' Katherine sighing, patted her sewing as if to neaten it. Hester, holding up her own work to examine the stitches with a self-critical look, assured Katherine that that was what she had in mind. She went on to say that she was sure that all hotels would be the same now. One huge concrete-and-glass affair on the harbour front on Lake Ontario would be exactly the same as one in Berlin or Singapore. Waking up in any one of these places you would never be sure which country you were in. She paused and handed Katherine the large box of chocolates they were sharing. ‘Try the truffles,' she said and then, arching her eyebrows, she said in an affected voice, ‘Oh, for the snows of yesteryear or words to that effect.' A white rose, she said, in the bathroom one night and a red one the next would not be the same as it used to be. They would still be putting flowers in bathrooms but instead of roses and carnations misted with dew there would only be imitations. ‘And everybody,' she added, freeing her teeth from a caramel, ‘everybody knows how dusty plastic flowers get.' She smiled the grim little smile reserved for such comments. ‘We'll have one more each and put the box away till later.' She held the box towards Katherine. ‘What about a creme de menthe or a cherry liqueur,' she said shaking the box, ‘but don't get it all over your sewing.' Katherine, who was, Hester knew, under the spell of a Katharine Hepburn revival (they had just seen
The African Queen
for the third time) bared her teeth in the Hepburn smile dipping her head forward then lifting it and blinking her vividly shadowed eyelids. If she had been with a man Hester would have considered her movement shamelessly flirtatious. She watched Katherine's attempts to push her cheekbones into more prominence by increasing the wideness of her smile. Hester finding the prolonged smile embarrassing and knowing the attempted provocation to be useless shook the handsome box again. ‘Come on Kate,' she said, ‘pick your choice,' adding impatiently, ‘I can't hold these all night!'

Hester found herself thinking quite often about the film. It was not just the Hepburn mannerisms which Katherine, with such ability, copied, it was the sense of real isolation which attracted her, two people entirely alone together managing to survive and even to be happy in alien surroundings. Two people entirely alone, together and happy. A certain quality Katherine had, Hester discovered, was really quite alarming. It was almost sinister. There was nothing Katherine could not copy or learn. She seemed to have all the makings of an efficient criminal. The same qualities could go towards something more positive Hester reasoned with herself, Katherine could be an excellent business woman if necessary.

Later in the evening Katherine in a makeshift boat on the kitchen floor enacted the scene where Katharine Hepburn pours away all Humphrey Bogart's whisky. Hester, who enjoyed laughing, laughed till she ached all over.

In spite of the great difference in age and background they were able to devise entertainment for themselves. Miss Herzfeld did not come often into the conversation and Katherine did not ask questions. Hester thought the reticence would have been learned in the Orphanage.

Reading aloud they changed their voices for the different characters and laughed helplessly at their mispronouncings and mistakes. Sometimes in particularly sad and moving scenes they cried, weeping real tears, and had to comfort each other for hours.

They did not encourage visitors.

It was all simple and pleasant. Three years slipped by, the passing time hardly noticed.