The Well (6 page)

‘And now the little corset,' Hester said crashing a drum roll on the bass notes, hitting several at once. Turning from the pages of the music at which she peered closely because of her short sight she smiled with approval at Kathy's practised contortions.

They enjoyed the evening thoroughly. Hester, though she scarcely admitted it, found that she looked forward to evenings of this sort and, in particular, to Katherine's dancing.

Between them they developed a capacity for pleasure. Their life was all pleasure. The yard was well stocked with poultry. Hester declared often that she never felt so comfortable as when a sack of laying pellets, in the back of the old station wagon, slipped and pressed against the seat as if offering to support her in the small of her back. Sometimes this reassurance caused her to give a little half-hidden sigh. She liked poultry she said because they did not require anyone to supply a life for them as dogs and people did. ‘Poultry,' she said, ‘enjoy your company if you're prepared to give it, but if you don't want to bother you can just throw them their food and forget about them.' She went on to say that it did not do to spoil farm animals. ‘Take cats,' she said, ‘cats need to be treated fairly but it's a mistake to make a fuss of them.' They now had three thin but heavily built cats of a greyish colour. All had characteristic tabby rings patterning their dusty fur. The cats were not encouraged to come into the house.

Sometimes Hester sat with the poultry noticing in her mind which bird would be the best to knock off next for a good meal. With the shiny toe of her black orthopaedic boot she stroked a nearby cat and narrowed her eyes in the direction of an exceptionally greedy and plump white duck. She maintained that a little personal notice did not do any harm and that it was possible to encourage eggs from hens and ducks at times when they seemed lonely or depressed.

Both women were very fond of roast duck and usually ate one between them once a week.

The delightful thing about Katherine was that she grabbed life with both hands. She wanted all the life as she saw it in films. She wanted adventure and Hester was drawn into this wanting. It took many forms, one of them being having everything that money can buy. Advertisements everywhere, in magazines and especially at the cinema, told Katherine that, if only she had this or that, perfect happiness would be hers. Hester's common sense deserted her quite often and, without meaning to be, she was taken in.

They collected innumerable cookery books. The more exotic titles attracted them and they enjoyed selecting dishes that contained things they did not have in the house. Hester who, in previous years, would never have made an extra trip to town if she found she had forgotten something now made journeys when some small item was required. Paprika for instance or a small quantity of soft brown sugar. They spent hours preparing piquant orange and plum sauces for roast ducklings. Hester, coating the succulent servings with a remarkable glaze, felt that she was doing justice to the creatures she had reared. They made variations on salad dressings with thinly sliced avocado pears, crushed garlic and black olives. Hester's favourite book of recipes was called
My Friend The Garlic Crusher
.

The wood stove had an excellent oven. When the potatoes, roasted in their jackets, were carried to the table, golden brown, soaked in butter and decorated with chopped chives, Hester declared in that famous old cliché that they were out of this world. She even imitated, not very well, Katherine's American accent. Their simple little dinners were often a work of art. They developed too the habit of having a glass of champagne each with their sodden cornflakes at breakfast.

Between them, Hester because of her lame leg mainly giving orders, they made the little garden. The imagined vegetable plot, the little lawns and the two borders, one each, with flowers and attractive weeds, came to life.

Sometimes, though not very often they thought about the outside world. They, feeling that they had eaten too heavily would walk a little way along the overgrown track in order to digest their big meal and then, coming indoors, Hester would write one or two small cheques to send to worthy organizations who were preventing the populations of poverty-stricken countries from starving to death. On these occasions, acting on Hester's instructions, Katherine would bring several armfuls of clothes from their respective bedrooms and spread them on the sofa and the chairs and then they would go over the clothes trying to decide which things they no longer wanted. This was difficult to do for as soon as Katherine said her pink dress was really out of fashion and too childish now Hester would cry, ‘But darling Kathy! Not your little pink! I remember so clearly the day we chose it. You must keep it always! For ever!' And when Hester, with a flamboyant gesture, gathered into a cardboard box whole heaps of her own garments Katherine wept and said that Miss Harper would surely freeze in the winter, wasn't it all her good woollens she was giving away. Some hours would pass like this and, in the end, tired but triumphant, they would reach a decision which satisfied them both and a smallish parcel would be made of some unwanted articles of clothing to be sent to the Home which was how Katherine always spoke of the Orphanage. The dinner dishes, cold and greasy, remained on the table and in the kitchen sink till the next morning. Any dish which proved too disgusting to clean was simply carried outside and pushed through the hole in the rotting corrugated-iron cover of the well.

For some years Hester had regularly sent money to the family of a needy child rescuing it from starvation and, apparently, her cheques were educating it. Sometimes she tried to remember how long this had been going on. The child, she thought it was a boy, in some far-away country, sent little letters and photographs at intervals through an organization distributing the funds.

One day sitting in the chunky little Toyota outside the post office in town Hester, rifling eagerly through her mail which consisted mainly of bills and advertisements, tore open an envelope containing another little letter and a photograph. As though struck for the first time by an enlightening thought she said, ‘You know, Katherine, I declare it's all of ten years since I took on this boy, I would have preferred a girl naturally, and look at this photograph, he is still the same size as he was ten years ago. Also his handwriting has not changed.' She peered with a disagreeable expression at the contents of the letter. ‘I shall not send any more money,' she said. ‘He should be old enough now to be earning his own living.'

After their dinner that night Hester, who had been brooding, relented and, loosening the hooks on her ample skirts, she limped to the dresser where, with her scratchy pen, she wrote out a cheque. ‘Put this in an envelope, Kathy,' she said. ‘The letter and the photograph could well be from a younger brother or sister. They all look alike don't they and they have such enormous families, these deprived people.' Katherine did as she was told insisting that Miss Harper was truly the most generous person she had ever known.

‘Trewly Miss Harper, dear,' she crooned, ‘the mostest generous person Ah ever done knowed, yew trewly air!'

Later in the evening noticing that Katherine seemed very quiet, subdued even, Hester, looking up from her sewing, asked her what the matter was. Was she not feeling well, she wanted to know. When Katherine did not answer but simply bent lower over her own sewing, Hester patted the sofa. ‘Come and sit by me,' she said, ‘and tell me what the matter is.' She moved along to make more room. She thought she could see tears on Katherine's cheeks, and now they were sitting close she saw and felt them. She brushed Katherine's hair back from her face with a clumsy but tenderly intended movement.

Not used to keeping anything back from Miss Harper, Katherine confessed that she had not shown the letter she received that morning. Miss Harper, she said, had been busy with her own mail and she had kept her letter hidden. It was from Joanna who was now out. It was not prison really, Katherine explained, only a place to get better from ‘what she'd been taking Miss Harper, dear, she's the sweetest most lovely person Miss Harper, dear, I know you'd love her.'

‘Was there anything in with the letter?' Hester, wanting to know, was unrestrained and direct.

Katherine was shocked. ‘Oh no Miss Harper, dear,' she said. She pulled the little childish pink pages out of her pocket. ‘Here it is, of course you can read it Miss Harper, dear.'

Hester did not take long to read the letter, the handwriting was so big there were not many words on the page. It seemed that Joanna was wanting more than anything in the whole world to see Katherine. A whole page of kisses and hugs endorsed this apparently innocent wish. Katherine watching Miss Harper read began to cry again.

‘For heaven's sake! Katherine there's nothing to cry about,' Hester said, trying not to let her voice show that the letter caused her to feel threatened and afraid.

‘But,' Katherine sobbed, ‘I, I hope you won't mind, Miss Harper, dear, I want to see Joanna too. Only we're so far away from each other. As you see she's got a place to live … in that hostel and … and she's got a job, the typing job.'

‘Well,' Hester said, ‘that's as it should be. She couldn't go back to the convent at her age.' She was trying to be very sensible. ‘And it's very good that she's been given the chance. There's nothing to cry about, now is there!'

‘Sometimes,' Katherine sobbed, ‘I wish for, wish for …'

‘Company of your own age?' Hester, trying again, was hiding the fact that she was very much shaken, ‘It's very natural that you should wish for young people and especially for, for Joanna,' the name came out in an artificial tone, ‘since you grew up together and must feel like, feel, feel – feel – like sisters – almost.' Even as she spoke Hester felt a kind of petulance. She had no idea that Katherine was not perfectly content. She felt increasingly a mixture of hurt and annoyance as well as fear. This friendship carried a threat; things read about in newspapers. She wished that the girl had tried to escape and been caught and kept in with her sentence doubled. ‘Good Behaviour,' Joanna had written in her little pink letter, ‘what a laugh! Here I am out before time, but.' The writing paper was wickedly innocent. Hester would have liked to screw it up into a tight ball and burn it. Annoyance made her tremble. Hadn't she, Hester Harper, grown up entirely with her grandmother and her father and a few farm workers for company. Apart from the time when Hilde Herzfeld was there and the two years at the boarding school she had spent all her life on the farm. Why then, the bitter voice inside her persisted, was Katherine so ungrateful. She, Hester, was sure she was doing everything possible to make a happy life for Katherine, a happy life, she thought, for them both. Suddenly she felt terribly unhappy and afraid that her anger would show itself. Her head throbbed; she hoped she was not going to have one of her bad headaches. She wondered if all the affection had been purely on her side. Restraining herself, for she would have liked to shake Katherine, she put an arm round the girl's shoulders.

‘Come along!' she said as cheerfully as she could. ‘If you don't mind sharing your bedroom, as we don't have much space here, why don't you answer your letter now and invite Joanna for a few days or a week. Yes, perhaps a week? Would that make you happy?' Hester was aware that her voice was self conscious and gruff. As she spoke she wished she was not saying the things she was saying. Immediately she pictured the two girls endlessly together, perhaps laughing about her behind her back; talking in low voices in their room at night – with the door closed so that she would hear their voices, intimate, with little bursts of mirth and affection from which she would be excluded. The week would be unbearably long, but she had said it now.

‘Oh Miss Harper, dear!' Katherine exclaimed. ‘Oh could I?'

‘Yes, yes of course Kathy,' Hester said. ‘I insist you write at this moment.' A kind of wisdom invaded her and she felt grateful to herself that she had had the sense to suggest inviting only one girl. ‘I, of course,' she said, ‘will pay the return train fare and we can drive to town to meet the train.'

‘Oh thank you Miss Harper, dear! How simple it all sounds when you talk about it.' Katherine, not realizing that Hester was thinking in terms of a ticket valid for one week only, leaned her flushed face against Hester's stiff black sleeve. Thank you Miss Harper, dear.' She had stopped crying at once. Hester did not need to pat her shoulder and say, ‘there there' over and over again. She did pat the shoulder, awkwardly, once and, reaching for her stick, she struggled to her feet. The low sofa made the struggle necessary. Usually she sat on an upright wooden chair.

In the kitchen Hester, conscious of her shaking hands, failed to light the primus stove even at a second attempt and the kitchen was filled with kerosene fumes. Katherine, at once, took over the lighting of the stove in a most natural way either not noticing or pretending not to notice. Hester leaned against the door post and watched with Katherine as the blue flames roared under the little tin kettle they used when they wanted tea in a hurry.

During the night Hester, who felt very tired, was wakeful. It seemed to her that after sleeping heavily she was no longer able to sleep and her right arm felt numb. She recalled, as she lay awake trying to feel confident that she was able to move her arm and that it was only pins and needles because of lying on the arm while she was asleep, that she had been very tired lately. Her other knee had seemed weak and at times when she was stepping up a step it almost seemed as if the knee on her good leg was not able to take the weight thrown on to it because of the weakness and awkwardness of the lame leg. She wondered if she could have had a mild stroke. This thought was so alarming, the thought of Katherine all alone and herself unable to speak or to move, that she raised herself up and getting out of bed she walked as firmly as she could about her small bedroom. There was no sound from Katherine's little room opposite.