Cut and Come Again (7 page)

And gradually he saw that he had no need for suspicion. No need to be hard on the kid. She was all right. Leave the kid alone. Let her go on her own sweet way. Not interfere with her. And so he swung round, from the suspicious attitude to one almost of solicitude. Didn't cost no more to be nice to the kid
than it did to be miserable. ‘Well, Alice, how's Alice?' The tone of his evening greeting became warmer, a little facetious, more friendly. ‘That's right, Alice. Nice to be back home in the dry, Alice.' In the mornings, coming downstairs he had to pass her bedroom door. He would knock on it to wake her. He got up in darkness, running downstairs in his stockinged feet, with his jacket and collar and tie slung over his arm. And pausing at Alice's door he would say ‘Quart' t' seven, Alice. You gittin' up, Alice?' Chinks of candlelight round and under the door-frame, or her sleepy voice, would tell him if she were getting up. If the room were in darkness and she did not answer he would knock and call again. ‘Time to git up, Alice. Alice!' One morning the room was dark and she did not answer at all. He knocked harder again, hard enough to drown any sleepy answer she might have given. Then, hearing nothing and seeing nothing, he opened the door.

At the very moment he opened the door Alice was bending over the washstand, with a match in her hands, lighting her candle. ‘Oh! Sorry, Alice, I din't hear you.' In the moment taken to speak the words Holland saw the girl's open nightgown, and then her breasts, more than ever like two lemons in the yellow candlelight. The light shone straight down on them, the deep shadow of her lower body heightening their shape and colour, and they looked for a moment like the breasts of a larger and more mature girl than Holland fancied Alice to be.

As he went downstairs in the winter darkness he kept seeing the mirage of Alice's breasts in the candlelight. He was excited. A memory of Mrs. Holland's large dropsical body threw the young girl's breasts into tender relief. And time seemed to sharpen the
comparison. He saw Alice bending over the candle, her nightgown undone, at recurrent intervals throughout the day. Then in the evening, looking at her reflection in the shaving-mirror, the magnifying effect of the mirror magnified his excitement. And upstairs he forgot to ask if Alice was all right.

In the morning he was awake a little earlier than usual. The morning was still like night. Black mist shut out the river. He went along the dark landing and tapped at Alice's door. When there was no answer he tapped again and called, but nothing happened. Then he put his hand on the latch and pressed it. The door opened. He was so surprised that he did not know for a moment what to do. He was in his shirt and trousers, with the celluloid collar and patent tie and jacket in his hand, and no shoes on his feet.

He stood for a moment by the bed and then he stretched out his hand and shook Alice. She did not wake. Then he put his hand on her chest and let it rest there. He could feel the breasts unexpectedly soft and alive, through the nightgown. He touched one and then the other.

Suddenly Alice woke.

‘All right, Alice. Time to git up, that's all,' Holland said. ‘I was trying to wake you.'

V

‘I 'spect you want to git home week-ends, don't you, Alice?' Mrs. Holland said.

Alice had been at the mill almost a week. ‘I don't mind,' she said.

‘Well, we reckoned you'd like to go home a' Sundays, anyway. Don't you?'

‘I don't mind.'

‘Well, you go home this week, and then see. Only it means cold dinner for Fred a' Sundays if you go.'

So after breakfast on Sunday morning Alice walked across the flat valley and went home. The gas-tarred house, the end one of a row on the edge of the town, seemed cramped and a little strange after the big rooms at the mill and the bare empty fields and the river.

‘Well, how d'ye like it?' Hartop said.

‘It's all right.'

‘Don't feel homesick?'

‘No, I don't mind.'

Alice laid her five shillings on the table. ‘That's my five shillings,' she said. ‘Next Sunday I ain't coming. What shall I do about the money?'

‘You better send it,' Hartop said. ‘It ain't no good to you there if you keep it, is it? No shops, is they?'

‘I don't know. I ain't been out.'

‘Well, you send it.' Then suddenly Hartop changed his mind. ‘No, I'll tell you what. You keep it and we'll call for it a' Friday. We can come round that way.'

‘All right,' Alice said.

‘If you ain't coming home,' Mrs. Hartop said, ‘you'd better take a clean nightgown. And I'll bring another Friday.'

And so she walked back across the valley in the November dusk with the nightgown wrapped in brown paper under her arm, and on Friday Hartop stopped the motor-van outside the mill and she went out to him with the five shillings Holland had left on the table that morning. ‘I see your dad about the money, Alice. That's all right.' And as she stood by the van answering in her flat voice the questions her father and mother put to her, Hartop put his hand in his pocket and said:

‘Like orange, Alice?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Yes, please.'

Hartop put the orange into her hand. ‘Only mind,' he said. ‘It's tacked. It's just a bit rotten on the side there.' He leaned out of the driver's seat and pointed out the soft bluish rotten patch on the orange skin. ‘It's all right. It ain't gone much.'

‘You gittin' on all right, Alice?' Mrs. Hartop said. She spoke from the gloom of the van seat. Alice could just see her vague clay-coloured face.

‘Yes. I'm all right.'

‘See you a' Friday again then.'

Hartop let off the brake and the van moved away simultaneously as Alice moved away across the mill-yard between the piles of derelict iron. Raw half-mist from the river was coming across the yard in sodden swirls and Alice, frozen, half-ran into the house. Then, in the kitchen, she sat by the fire with her skirt drawn up above her knees, to warm herself.

She was still sitting like that, with her skirt drawn up to her thighs and her hands outstretched to the fire and the orange in her lap, when Holland came in.

‘Hullo, Alice,' he said genially. ‘I should git on top o' the fire if I was you.'

Alice, wretched with the cold, which seemed to have settled inside her, scarcely answered. She sat there for almost a full minute longer, trying to warm her legs, before getting up to cook Holland's fish. All the time she sat there Holland was looking at her legs, with the skirt pulled up away from them. The knees and the slim thighs were rounded and soft, and the knees and the legs themselves a rosy flame-colour in the firelight. Holland felt a sudden agitation as he gazed at them.

Then abruptly Alice got up to cook the fish, and the
vision of her rose-coloured legs vanished. But Holland, shaving before the mirror, could still see in his mind the soft firelight on Alice's knees. And the mirror, as before, seemed to magnify Alice's vague form as it moved about the kitchen, putting some flesh on her body. Then when Holland sat down to his fish Alice again sat down before the fire and he saw her pull her skirt above her knees again as though he did not exist. And all through the meal he sat looking at her. Then suddenly he got tired of merely looking at her. He wanted to be closer to her. ‘Alice, come and 'ave a drop o' tea,' he said. ‘Pour yourself a cup out. Come on. You look starved.' The orange Hartop had given Alice lay on the table, and the girl pointed to it. ‘I'm going to have that orange,' she said. Holland picked up the orange. ‘All right, only you want summat. Here, I'm going to throw it.' He threw the orange. It fell into Alice's lap. And it seemed to Holland that its fall drew her dress a little higher above her knees. He got up. ‘Never hurt you, did I, Alice?' he said. He ran his hands over her shoulders and arms, and then over her thighs and knees. Her knees were beautifully warm, like hard warm apples. ‘You're starved though. Your knees are like ice.' He began to rub her hands a little with his own, and the girl, her flat expression never changing, let him do it. She felt his fingers harsh on her bloodless hands and then on her shoulders. ‘Your chest ain't cold, is it?' Holland said. ‘You don't want to git cold in your chest.' He was feeling her chest, above the breasts. The girl shook her head. ‘Sure?' Holland said. He kept his hands on her chest. ‘You put something on when you go out to that van again. If you git cold on your chest …' And as he was speaking his hands moved down until they covered her breasts. They were so small that he could
hold them in his hands. ‘Don't want to git cold in
them
, do you?' he said. ‘In your nellies?' She stared at him abstractedly, not knowing the word, wondering what he meant. Then suddenly he was squeezing her breasts, in a bungling effort of tenderness. The motion hurt her. ‘Come on, Alice, come on. I shan't do nothing. Let's have a look at you, Alice. I don't want to do nothing, Alice. All right. I don't want to hurt you. Undo your dress, Alice.' And the girl, mechanically, to his astonishment, put her hands to the buttons. As they came undone he put his hands on her chest and then on her bare breasts in clumsy and agitated efforts to caress her. She sat rigid, staring, not fully understanding. Every time Holland squeezed her he hurt her. But the mute and fixed look on her face and the grey flat as though motionless stare in her eyes never changed. She listened only vaguely to what Holland said.

‘Come on, Alice. You lay down. You lay down on the couch. I ain't going to hurt you, Alice. I don't want to hurt you.'

For a moment she did not move. Then she remembered, flatly, Mrs. Holland's injunction: ‘You do all you can for Mr. Holland,' and she got up and went over to the American leather couch.

‘I'll blow the lamp out,' Holland said. ‘It's all right. It's all right.'

VI

‘Don't you say nothing, Alice. Don't you go and tell nobody.'

Corn for Mrs. Holland's chickens, a wooden potato-tub of maize and another of wheat, was kept in a loft
above the mill itself, and Alice would climb the outside loft-ladder to fill the chipped enamel corn-bowl in the early winter afternoons. And standing there, with the bowl empty in her hands, or with a scattering of grain in it or the full mixture of wheat and maize, she stared and thought of the words Holland said to her almost every night. The loft windows were hung with skeins of spider-webs, and the webs in turn were powdered with pale and dark grey dust, pale flour-dust never swept away since the mill had ceased to work, and a dark mouse-coloured dust that showered constantly down from the rafters. The loft was always cold. The walls were clammy with the river damp and the windows misty with wet. But Alice always stood there in the early afternoons and stared through the dirty windows across the wet flat valley. Seagulls flew wildly above the floods that filled the meadows after rain. Strings of wild swans flew over, and sometimes came down to rest with the gulls on the waters or the islands of grass. They were the only moving things in the valley. But Alice stared at them blankly, hardly seeing them. She saw Holland instead; Holland turning out the lamp, fumbling with his trousers, getting up and relighting the lamp with a tight scared look on his face. And she turned his words over and over in her mind. ‘Don't you say nothing. Don't you say nothing. Don't you go and tell nobody.' They were words not of anger, not threatening, but of fear. But she did not see it. She turned his words slowly over and over in her mind as she might have turned a ball or an orange over and over in her hands, over and over, round and round, the surface always the same, the shape the same, for ever recurring, a circle with no end to it. She reviewed them without surprise and without malice. She never refused Holland. Once
only she said, suddenly scared: ‘I don't want to, not tonight. I don't want to.' But Holland cajoled, ‘Come on, Alice, come on. I'll give you something. Come on. I'll give y' extra sixpence with your money, Friday, Alice. Come on.'

And after standing a little while in the loft she would go down the ladder with the corn-bowl to feed the hens that were cooped up behind a rusty broken-down wire-netting pen across the yard, beyond the dumps of iron. ‘Tchka! Tchka! Tchka!' She never varied the call. ‘Tchka! Tchka!' The sound was thin and sharp in the winter air. The weedy fowls, wet-feathered, scrambled after the yellow corn as she scattered it down. She watched them for a moment, staying just so long and never any longer, and then went back into the mill, shaking the corn-dust from the bowl as she went. It was as though she were religiously pledged to a ritual. The circumstances and the day never varied. She played a minor part in a play which never changed and seemed as if it never could change. Holland got up, she got up, she cooked breakfast. Holland left. She cleaned the rooms and washed Mrs. Holland. She cooked the dinner, took half up to Mrs. Holland and ate half herself. She stood in the loft, thought of Holland's words, fed the fowls, then ceased to think of Holland. In the afternoon she read to Mrs. Holland. In the evening Holland returned. And none of it seemed to affect her. She looked exactly as she had looked when she had first walked across the valley with her bag. Her eyes were utterly unresponsive, flat, never lighting up. They only seemed if anything greyer and softer, a little fuller if possible of docility.

And there was only one thing which in any way broke the ritual; and even that was regular, a piece of
ritual itself. Every Wednesday, and again on Sunday, Mrs. Holland wrote to her son.

Or rather Alice wrote. ‘You can write better'n me. You write it. I'll tell you what to put and you put it.' So Alice sat by the bed with a penny bottle of ink, a steel pen and a tissue writing tablet, and Mrs. Holland dictated. ‘Dear Albert.' There she stopped, lying back on the pillows to think. Alice waited. The pen dried. And then Mrs. Holland would say: ‘I can't think what to put. You git th' envelope done while I'm thinking.' So Alice wrote the envelope: