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I

A Ford motor-van, old and repainted green with Jos. Hartop, greengrocer, rabbits, scratched in streaky white lettering on a flattened-out biscuit tin nailed to the side, was slowly travelling across a high treeless stretch of country in squally November half-darkness. Rain hailed on the windscreen and periodically swished like a sea-wave on the sheaves of pink Chrysanthemums strung on the van roof. Jos. Hartop was driving: a thin angular man, starved-faced. He seemed to occupy almost all the seat, sprawling awkwardly; so that his wife and their daughter Alice sat squeezed up, the girl with her arms flat as though ironed against her side, her thin legs pressed tight together into the size of one. The Hartops’ faces seemed moulded in clay and in the light from the van-lamps were a flat swede-colour. Like the man, the two women were thin, with a screwed-up thinness that made them look both hard and frightened. Hartop drove with great caution, grasping the wheel tightly, braking hard at the bends, is big yellowish eyes fixed ahead, protuberantly, with vigilance and fear. His hands, visible in the faint dashboard light, were marked on the backs with dark smears of dried rabbits’ blood. The van fussed and rattled, the Chrysanthemums always swishing, rain-soaked, in the sudden high wind-squalls. And the two women sat in a state of silent apprehension, their bodies not moving except to lurch with the van, their clayish faces continuously intent, almost scared, in the lamp-gloom. And after some time Hartop gave a slight start, and then drew the van to the roadside and stopped it.

‘Hear anything drop?’ he said. ‘I thought I heard something.’

‘It’s the wind,’ the woman said. ‘I can hear it all the time.’

‘No, something dropped.’

They sat listening. But the engine still ticked, and they could hear nothing beyond it but the wind and rain squalling in the dead grass along the roadside.

‘Alice, you git out,’ Hartop said.

The girl began to move herself almost before he had spoken.

‘Git out and see if you can see anything.’

Alice stepped across her mother’s legs, groped with blind instinct for the step, and then got out. It was raining furiously. The darkness seemed solid with rain.

‘See anything?’ Hartop said.

‘No.’

‘Eh? What? Can’t hear.’

‘No!’

Hartop leaned across his wife and shouted: ‘Go back a bit and see what it was.’ The woman moved to protest, but Hartop was already speaking again: ‘Go back a bit and see what it was. Something dropped. We’ll stop at Drake’s Turn. You’ll catch up. I know something dropped.’

‘It’s the back-board,’ the woman said. ‘I can hear it all the time. Jolting.’

‘No, it ain’t. Something dropped.’

He let in the clutch as he was speaking and the van began to move away.

Soon, to Alice, it seemed to be moving very rapidly. In the rain and the darkness all she could see was the tail-light, smoothly receding. She watched it for a moment and then began to walk back along the road. The wind was behind her; but repeatedly it seemed to veer and smash her, with the rain, full in the face. She walked without hurrying. She seemed to accept the journey as she accepted the rain and her father’s words, quite stoically. She walked in the middle of the road, looking directly ahead, as though she had a long journey before her. She could see nothing.

And then, after a time, she stumbled against something in the road. She stooped and picked up a bunch of pink Chrysanthemums. She gave them a single shake. The flower-odour and the rain seemed to be released together, and then she began to walk back with them along the road. It was as though the Chrysanthemums were what she had expected to find above all things. She showed no surprise.

Before very long she could see the red tail-light of the van again. It was stationary. She could see also the lights of houses, little squares of yellow which the recurrent rain on her lashes transformed into sudden stars.

When she reached the van the back-board had been unhooked. Her mother was weighing out potatoes. An oil lamp hung from the van roof, and again the faces of the girl and her mother had the appearance of swede-coloured clay, only the girl’s bleaker than before.

‘What was it?’ Mrs Hartop said.

The girl laid the flowers on the back-board. ‘Only a bunch of chrysanthemums.’

Hartop himself appeared at the very moment she was speaking.

‘Only?’ he said, ‘Only? What d’ye mean by only? Eh? Might have been a sack of potatoes. Just as well. Only! What next?’

Alice stood mute. Her pose and her face meant nothing, had no quality except a complete lack of all surprise: as though she had expected her father to speak like that. Then Hartop raised his voice:

‘Well, don’t stand there! Do something. Go on. Go on! Go and see who wants a bunch o’ chrysanthemums. Move yourself!’

Alice obeyed at once. She picked up the flowers, walked away and vanished, all without a word or a change of that expression of unsurprised serenity.

But she was back in a moment. She began to say that there were chrysanthemums in the gardens of all the houses. Her voice was flat. It was like a pressed flower, a flat faint impression of a voice. And it seemed suddenly to madden her father:

‘All right, all right. Christ, all right. Leave it.’

He seized the scale-pan of potatoes and then walked away himself. Without a word the girl and her mother chained and hooked up the back-board, climbed up into the driving seat, and sat there with the old intent apprehension, staring through the rain-beaded windscreen, until the woman spoke in a voice of religious negation, with a kind of empty gentleness:

‘You must do what your father tells you.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said.

Before they could speak again Hartop returned, and in a moment the van was travelling on.

When it stopped again the same solitary row of house-lights as before seemed to appear on the roadside and the Hartops seemed to go through the same ritual of action: the woman unhooking the back-board, the man relighting the oil lamp, and then the girl and the woman going off in the rain to the backways of the houses. And always, as they returned to the van, Hartop grousing, nagging:

‘Why the ’el! don’t you speak up? Nothing? Well, say it then, say it!’

Finally the girl took a vegetable marrow from the skips of potatoes and oranges and onions, carried it to the houses and then returned with it, and Hartop flew into a fresh rage:

‘I’d let ’em eat it if I was you, let ’em eat it. Take the whole bloody show and let ’em sample. Go on. I’m finished. I jack up. I’ve had a packet. I jack up.’

He slammed down the scale-pan, extinguished the oil lamp, began to chain up the back-board. On the two women his rage had not even the slightest effect. Moving about in the rain, slowly, they were like two shabby ducks, his rage rolling off the silent backs of their minds like water.

And then the engine, chilled by the driving rain, refused to start. Furious, Hartop gave mad jerks at the starting handle. Nothing happened. The two women, silently staring through the windscreen, never moved. They might even have been in another world, asleep or dead.

Swinging viciously at the starting handle Hartop shouted: ‘When I swing, shove that little switch forward. Forward! Christ. Forward! I never seen anything to touch it. Never. Forward! Now try. Can’t you bloody well hear?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then act like it. God, they say there’s no peace for the wicked. Forward!’

Then when the engine spluttered, fired, and at last was revolving and the van travelling on and the women were able to hear again, Hartop kept repeating the words in a kind of comforting refrain. No peace for the wicked. No bloody peace at all. He’d had enough. Just about bellyful. What with one thing — Christ, what was the use of talking to folks who were deaf and dumb? Jack up. Better by half to jack up. Bung in. No darn peace for the wicked.

And suddenly, listening gloomily to him, the woman realized that the road was strange to her. She saw trees, then turns and gates and hedges that she did not know.

‘Jos, where are we going?’ she said.

Hartop was silent. The mystery comforted him. And when at last he stopped the van and switched off the engine it gave him great satisfaction to prolong the mystery, to get down from the van and disappear without a word.

Free of his presence, the two women came to life. Alice half rose from the seat and shook her mackintosh and skirt and said, ‘Where have we stopped?’ Mrs Hartop was looking out of the side window, peering with eyes screwed-up. She could see nothing. The world outside, cut off by blackness and rain, was strange and unknown. Then when Mrs Hartop sat down again the old state of negation and silence returned for a moment until Alice spoke. It seemed to Alice that she could hear something, a new sound, quite apart from the squalling of wind and rain; a deeper sound, quieter, and more distant.

The two women listened. Then they could hear the sound distinctly, continuously, a roar of water.

Suddenly Mrs Hartop remembered. ‘It’s the mill,’ she said. She got up to look through the window again. ‘We’ve stopped at Holland’s Mill.’ She sat down slowly. ‘What’s he stopped here for? What’ve we — ?’

Then she seemed to remember something else. Whatever it was seemed to subdue her again, sealing over her little break of loquacity, making her silent once more. But now her silence had a new quality. It was very near anxiety. She would look quickly at Alice and then quickly away again.

‘Is there any tea left?’ Alice said.

Mrs Hartop bent down at once and looked under the seat. She took out a thermos flask two tea-cups and an orange. Then Alice held the cups while her mother filled them with milky tea. Then Mrs Hartop peeled and quartered the orange and they ate and drank, warming their fingers on the tea-cups.

They were wiping their juice-covered fingers and putting away the tea-cups when Hartop returned. He climbed into the cab, slammed the door, and sat down.

‘What you been to Hollands’ for?’ the woman said.

Hartop pressed the self—starter. It buzzed, but the engine was silent. The two women waited. Then Hartop spoke.

‘Alice,’ he said, ‘you start in service at Hollands’ Monday morning. His wife’s bad. He told me last Wednesday he wanted a gal about to help. Five shillin’ a week and all found.’

‘Jos!’

But the noise of the self-starter and then the engine firing drowned what the women had to say. And as the van moved on she and Alice sat in silence, without a sound of protest or aquiescence, staring at the rain.

II

At night, though so near, Alice had seen nothing of the mill, not even a light. On Monday morning, from across the flat and almost treeless meadows, she could see it clearly. It was a very white three-storeyed building, the whitewash dazzling, almost incandescent, against the wintry fields in the morning sunshine.

Going along the little by-roads across the valley she felt extraordinarily alone, yet not lonely. She felt saved from loneliness by her little leather bag; there was comfort in the mere changing of it from hand to hand. The bag contained her work-apron and her nightgown, and she carried it close to her side as she walked slowly along, not thinking. ‘You start in good time,’ Hartop had said to her, ‘and go steady on. The walk’ll do you good.’ It was about five miles to the mill, and she walked as though in obedience to the echo of her father’s command. She had a constant feeling of sharp expectancy, not quite apprehension, every time she looked up and saw the mill. But the feeling never resolved itself into thought. She felt also a slight relief. She had never been, by herself, so far from home. And every now and then she found herself looking back, seeing the house she had left behind, the blank side-wall gas-tarred, the wooden shack in the back-yard where Hartop kept the motor-van, the kitchen where she and her mother bunched the chrysanthemums or sorted the oranges. It seemed strange not to be doing those things: she had sorted oranges and had bunched whatever flowers were in season for as long as she could remember. She had done it all without question, with instinctive obedience. Now, suddenly, she was to do something else. And whatever it was she knew without thinking that she must do it with the same unprotesting obedience. That was right. She had been brought up to it. It was going to be a relief to her father, a help. Things were bad and her going might better them. And then — five shillings a week. She thought of that with recurrent spasms of wonder and incredulity. Could it be true? The question crossed her mind more often than her bag crossed from hand to hand, until it was mechanical and unconscious also.

She was still thinking of it when she rapped at the back door of the mill. The yard was deserted. She could hear no sound of life at all except the mill-race. She knocked again. And then, this time, as she stood waiting, she looked at the yard more closely. It was a chaos of derelict things. Everything was derelict: derelict machinery, old iron, derelict motor cars, bedsteads, wire, barrows, binders, perambulators, tractors, bicycles, corrugated iron. The junk was piled up in a wild heap in the space between the mill-race and the backwater. Iron had fallen into the water. Rusty, indefinable skeletons of it had washed up against the bank-reeds. She saw rust and iron everywhere, and when something made her look up to the mill-windows she saw there the rusted fly-wheels and crane-arms of the mill machinery, the whitewashed wall stained as though with rusty reflections of it.

When she rapped on the door again, harder, flakes of rust, little reddish wafers, were shaken off the knocker. She stared at the door as she waited. Her eyes were large, colourless, fixed in vague penetration. She seemed to be listening with them. They were responsive to sound. And they remained still, as though of glass, when she heard nothing.

And hearing nothing she walked across the yard. Beyond the piles of rusted iron a sluice tore down past the mill-wall on a glacier of green slime. She stooped and peered down over the stone parapet at the water. Beyond the sluice a line of willows were shedding their last leaves, and the leaves came floating down the current like little yellow fish. She watched them come and surge through the grating, and then vanish under the water-arch. Then, watching the fish-like leaves, she saw a real fish, dead, caught in the rusted grating, thrown there by the force of descending water. Then she saw another, and another. Her eyes registered no surprise. She walked round the parapet, and then, leaning over and stretching, she picked up one of the fish. It was cold, and very stiff, like a fish of celluloid, and its eyes were like her own, round and glassy. Then she walked along the path, still holding the fish and occasionally looking at it. The path circled the mill-pond and vanished, farther on, into a bed of osiers. The mill-pond was covered in duck-weed, the green crust split into blackness here and there by chance currents of wind or water. The osiers were leafless, but quite still in the windless air. And standing still, she looked at the tall osiers for a moment, her eyes reflecting their stillness and the strange persistent absence of all sound.

And then suddenly she heard a sound. It came from the osiers. A shout:

‘You lookin’ for Mus’ Holland?’

She saw a man’s face in the osiers. She called back to it: ‘Yes.’

‘He ain’t there.’

She could think of nothing to say.

‘If you want anythink, go in. She’s there. A-bed.’ A shirt-sleeve waved and vanished. ‘Not that door. It’s locked. Round the other side.’

She walked back along the path, by the sluice and the machinery and so past the door and the mill-race to the far side of the house. A stretch of grass, once a lawn and now no more than a waste of dead grass and sedge, went down to the back-water from what she saw now was the front door.

At the door she paused for a moment. Why was the front door open and not the back? Then she saw why. Pushing open the door she saw that it had no lock; only the rusty skeleton pattern of it remained imprinted on the brown sun-scorched paint.

Inside, she stood still in the brick-flagged passage. It seemed extraordinarily cold; the damp coldness of the river air seemed to have saturated the place.

Finally she walked along the passage. Her lace-up boots were heavy on the bricks, setting up a clatter of echoes. When she stopped her eyes were a little wider and almost white in the lightless passage. And again, as outside, they registered the quietness of the place, until it was broken by a voice:

‘Somebody there? Who is it?’ The voice came from upstairs. ‘Who is it?’

‘Me.’

A silence. Alice stood still, listening with wide eyes. Then the voice again:

‘Who is it?’

‘Me. Alice.’

Another silence, and then:

‘Come up.’ It was a light voice, unaggressive, almost friendly. ‘Come upstairs.’

The girl obeyed at once. The wooden stairs were steep and carpetless. She tramped up them. The banister, against which she rubbed her sleeve, was misted over with winter wetness. She could smell the dampness everywhere. It seemed to rise and follow her.

On the top stairs she halted. ‘In the end bedroom,’ the voice called. She went at once along the wide half-light landing in the direction of the voice. The panelled doors had at one time been painted white and blue, but now the white was blue and the blue the colour of greenish water. The doors had old-fashioned latches of iron and when she lifted the end latch she could feel the first thin leaf of rust on it ready to crumble and fall. She hesitated a moment before touching the latch, but as she stood there the voice called again and she opened the door.

Then, when she walked into the bedroom, she was almost surprised. She had expected to see Mrs Holland in bed. But the woman was kneeling on the floor, by the fireplace. She was in her nightgown. The gown had come unbuttoned and Alice could see Mrs Holland’s drooping breasts. They were curiously swollen, as though by pregnancy or some dropsical complaint. The girl saw that Mrs Holland was trying to light a fire. Faint acrid paper-smoke hung about the room and stung her eyes. She could hear the tin-crackle of burnt paper. There was no flame. The smoke rose up the chimney and then, in a moment, puthered down again, the paper burning with little running sparks that extinguished themselves and then ran on again.

‘I’m Alice,’ the girl said. ‘Alice Hartop.’

She stared fixedly at the big woman sitting there with her nightgown unbuttoned and a burnt match in her hands and her long pigtail of brown hair falling forward over her shoulders almost to the depths of her breasts. Her very largeness, her soft dropsical largeness, and the colour of that thick pigtail were somehow comforting. They were in keeping with the voice she had heard, the voice which spoke to her quite tenderly again now:

‘I’m so glad you’ve come, Alice, I am so glad.’

‘Am I late?’ Alice said. ‘I walked.’

Then she stopped. Mrs Holland had burst out laughing. The girl stood vacant, at a loss, her mouth fallen open. The woman gathered her nightgown in her hands and held it tight against her breasts, as though she feared that the laughter might suddenly flow out of them like milk. And the girl stared until the woman could speak:

‘In your hand! Look, look. In your hand. Look!’

Then Alice saw. She still had the fish in her hand. She was clutching it like a little silver-scaled purse.

‘Ohdear! ohdear!’ she said. She spoke the words as one word: a single word of unsurprised comment on the unconscious folly of her own act. Even as she said it Mrs Holland burst out laughing again. And as before the laughter seemed as if it must burst liquidly or fall and run over her breasts and hands and her nightgown. The girl had never heard such laughter. It was far stranger than the fish in her own hand. It was almost too strange. It had a strangeness that was only a shade removed from hysteria, and only a little further from inanity. ‘She’s a bit funny,’ the girl thought. And almost simultaneously Mrs Holland echoed her thought:

‘Oh! Alice, you’re funny.’ The flow of laughter lessened and then dried up. ‘Oh, you are funny.’

To Alice that seemed incomprehensible. If anybody was funny it was Mrs Holland, laughing in that rich, almost mad voice. So she continued to stare. She still had the fish in her hand. It added to her manner of uncomprehending vacancy.

Then suddenly a change came over her. She saw Mrs Holland shiver and this brought back at once her sense of almost subservient duty.

‘Hadn’t you better get dressed and let me light the fire?’ she said.

‘I can’t get dressed. I’ve got to get back into bed.’

‘Well, you get back. You’re shivering.’

‘Help me.’

Alice put down her bag on the bedroom floor and laid the fish on top of it. Mrs Holland tried at the same moment to get up. She straightened herself until she was kneeling upright. Then she tried to raise herself. She clutched the bedrail. Her fat, almost transparent-fleshed fingers would not close. They were like thick sausages, fat jointless lengths of flesh which could not bend. And there she remained in her helplessness, until Alice put her arms about her and took the weight of her body.

‘Yes, Alice, you’ll have to help me. I can’t do it myself any longer. You’ll have to help me.’

Gradually Alice got her back to bed. And Alice, as she helped her, could feel the curious swollen texture of Mrs Holland’s flesh. The distended breasts fell out of her unbuttoned nightgown, her heavy thighs lumbered their weight against her own, by contrast so weak and thin and straight. And then when Mrs Holland was in bed, at last, propped up by pillows, Alice had time to look at her face. It had that same heavy water-blown brightness of flesh under the eyes and in the cheeks and in the soft parts of the neck. The gentle dark brown eyes were sick. They looked out with a kind of gentle sick envy on Alice’s young movements as she straightened the bed-clothes and then cleaned the fireplace and finally as she laid and lighted the fire itself.

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 mantel-piece. 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 sea-gulls, 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 taters? You’ll find the onions in the shed, Alice. The oil-man calls to-day, 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 oil-man 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!’

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 the 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 showed no 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, and rather stocky, without being stiff or muscular. His trousers hung loose and wide, like sacks. His overcoat, undone, was also 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 oil-stained and the tie, once blue, was soaked by oil and dirt to the appearance of old crépe. 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 e’re 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 tired, rather stunted and subservient look. 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 fried 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 little 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.

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 stepped 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 easily 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 spiderwebs, 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 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 returned 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:

‘Pte Albert Holland, 94167, B Company, Fifth Battalion lst 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, 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 implicity, 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 once 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. Mid-summer 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 hen-house 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.

‘Don’t you wanna come?’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Well, you git ready.’

She went upstairs at once, taking off her apron as she went, in mute obedience.

Earlier, Albert had said to Mrs Holland: ‘Don’t seem right that kid never goes nowhere. How’d it be if I took her down Nenweald for hour?’

‘It’s a long way. How’re you going?’

‘Walk. That ain’t far.’

‘What d’ye want to go down Nenweald for?’ A little sick petulant jealousy crept into Mrs Holland’s voice. ‘Why don’t you stop here?’

‘I want some nails. I thought I’d take the kid down for hour. She can drop in and see her folks while I git the nails.’

‘Her folks don’t live at Nenweald. They live at Drake’s End.’

‘Well, don’t matter. Hour out’ll do her good.’

And in the early evening Albert and Alice walked across the meadow paths into Nenweald. The sun was still hot and Albert, dressed up in a hard hat and a blue serge suit and a stand-up collar, walked slowly, with grave flat-footed deliberation. The pace suited Alice. She felt strangely heavy; her body seemed burdened down. She could feel her breasts, damp with heat, hanging heavily down under her cotton dress. In the bedroom, changing her clothes, she could not help looking at herself. The dropsy seemed to be getting worse. It was beyond her. And she could feel the tightly swollen nipples of her breasts rubbing against the rather coarse cotton of her dress.

But she did not think of it much. Apart from the heaviness of her body she felt strong and well. And the country was new to her, the fields strange and the river wider than she had ever dreamed.

It was the river, for some reason, which struck her most. ‘Don’t it git big?’ she said. ‘Ain’t it wide?’

‘Wide,’ Albert said. ‘You want to see the Rhine. This is only a brook.’ And he went on to tell her of the Rhine. ‘Take you quarter of hour to walk across. And all up the banks you see Jerry’s grapes. Growing like twitch. And big boats on the river, steamers. I tell you. That’s the sort o’ river. You ought to see it. Like to see a river like that, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah, it’s a long way off. A thousand miles near enough.’

Alice did not speak.

‘You ain’t been a sight away from here, I bet, ’ave you?’ Albert said.

‘No.’

‘How far?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What place? What’s the farthest place you bin?’

‘I don’t know. I went Bedford once.’

‘How far’s that? About ten miles, ain’t it?’

‘I don’t know. It seemed a long way.’

And gradually they grew much nearer to each other, almost intimate. The barriers of restraint between them were broken down by Albert’s talk about the Rhine, the Germans, the war, his funny or terrible experiences. Listening, Alice forgot herself. Her eyes listened with the old absorbed unemotional look, but in reality with new feelings of wonder behind them. In Nenweald she followed Albert through the streets, waited for him while he bought the nails or dived down into underground places or looked at comic picture post-cards outside cheap stationers. They walked through the Saturday market, Albert staring at the sweet stalls and the caged birds, Alice at the drapery and the fruit stalls, remembering her old life at home again as she caught the rich half-rotten fruit smells, seeing herself in the kitchen at home, with her mother, hearing the rustle of Spanish paper softly torn from endless oranges in the kitchen candlelight.

Neither of them talked much. They talked even less as they walked home. Albert had bought a bag of peardrops and they sucked them in silence as they walked along by the darkening river. And in silence Alice remembered herself again: could feel the burden of her body, the heavy swing of her breasts against her dress. She walked in a state of wonder at herself, at Albert, at the unbelievable Rhine, at the evening in the town.

It was a happiness that even Mrs Holland’s sudden jealousy could not destroy or even touch.

Suddenly Mrs Holland had changed. ‘Where’s that Alice! Alice! Alice! Why don’t you come when I call you? Now just liven yourself, Alice, and git that bedroom ready. You’re gettin’ fat and lazy, Alice. You ain’t the girl you used to be. Git on, git on, do. Don’t stand staring.’ Alice, sackcloth apron bundled loosely round her, her hair rat-tailed about her face, could only stare in reply and then quietly leave the bedroom. ‘And here!’ Mrs Holland would call her back. ‘Come here. You ain’t bin talking to Albert, ‘ave you? He’s got summat else to do ’sides talk to you. You leave Albert to ’isself. And now git on. Bustle about and git some o’ that fat off ’

The jealousy, beginning with mere petulancy, then rising to reprimand, rose to abuse at last.

‘Just because I’m in bed you think you can do so you like. Great slommacking thing. Lazy ain’t in it. Git on, do!’

And in the evenings:

‘Fred, that Alice’ll drive me crazy.’

‘What’s up?’ Holland’s fear would leap up, taking the form of anger too. ‘What’s she bin doing? Been saying anything?’

‘Fat, slommacking thing. I reckon she hangs round our Albert. She don’t seem right, staring and slommacking about. She looks half silly.’

‘I’ll say summat to her. That fish ain’t very grand o’ nights sometimes.’

‘You can say what you like. But she won’t hear you. If she does she’ll make out she don’t. That’s her all over. Makes out she don’t hear. But she hears all right.’

And so Holland attacked her:

‘You better liven yourself up. See? Act as if you was sharp. And Christ, you ain’t bin saying nothing, ’ave you? Not to her?’

‘No.’

‘Not to nobody?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t you say a damn word. That’s over. We had a bit o’ fun and now it’s finished with. See that?’

‘Yes.’ Vaguely she wondered what he meant by fun.

‘Well then, git on. Go on, gal, git on. Git on! God save the King, you make my blood boil. Git on!’

The change in their attitude was beyond her: so far beyond her that it created no change in her attitude to them. She went about as she had always done, very quietly, with large-eyed complacency, doing the dirty work, watching Albert, staring at the meadows, her eyes eternally expressionless. It was as though nothing could change her.

Then Albert said, ‘How about if we go down Nenweald again Saturday? I got to go down.’

She remembered Mrs Holland, stared at Albert and said nothing.

‘You git ready about five,’ Albert said. ‘Do you good to git out once in a while. You don’t git out half enough.’ He paused, looking at her mute face. ‘Don’t you want a come?’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘All right. You be ready.’

Then, hearing of it, Mrs Holland flew into a temper of jealousy:

‘You’d take a blessed gal out but you wouldn’t stay with me, would you? Not you. Away all this time, and now when you’re home again you don’t come near me.’

‘All right, all right. I thought’d do the kid good, that’s all.’

‘That’s all you think about. Folks’ll think you’re kidnappin’!’

‘Ain’t nothing to do with it. Only taking the kid out for an hour.’

‘Hour! Last Saturday you’d gone about four!’

‘All right,’ Albert said, ‘we won’t go. It don’t matter.’

Mrs Holland broke down and began to weep on the pillow.

‘I don’t want a stop you,’ she said. ‘You can go. It don’t matter to me. I can stop here be meself. You can go.’

And in the end they went. As before they walked through the meadows, Albert dressed up and hot, Alice feeling her body under her thin clothes as moist and warm as a sweating apple with the heat. In Nenweald they did the same things as before, took the same time, talked scarcely at all, and then walked back again in the summer twilight, sucking the peardrops Albert had bought

The warm air lingered along by the river. The water and the air and the sky were all breathless. The sky was a soft green-lemon colour, clear, sunless and starless. ‘It’s goin’ to be a scorcher again tomorrow,’ Albert said.

Alice said nothing. They walked slowly, a little apart decorously. Albert opened the towpath gates, let Alice through, and then splay-footed after her. They were like some countrified old fashioned couple half-afraid of each other.

Then Albert, after holding open a towpath gate and letting Alice pass, could not fasten the catch. He fumbled with the gate, lifted it, and did not shut it for about a minute. When he walked on again Alice was some distance ahead. Albert could see her plainly. Her pale washed-out dress was clear in the half-light. Albert walked on after her. Then he was struck all of a sudden by the way she walked. She was walking thickly, clumsily, not exactly as though she were tired, but heavily, as though she had iron weights in her shoes.

Albert caught up with her. ‘You all right, Alice?’ he said.

‘I’m all right.’

‘Ain’t bin too much for you? I see you walking a bit lame like.’

Alice did not speak.

‘Ain’t nothing up, Alice, is there?’

Alice tried to say something, but Albert asked again: ‘Ain’t bin too hot, is it?’

‘No. It’s all right. It’s only the dropsy.’

‘The what?’

‘What your mother’s got. I reckon I catched it off her.’

‘It ain’t catchin’, is it?’

‘I don’ know. I reckon that’s what it is.’

‘You’re a bit tired, that’s all ’tis,’ Albert said. ‘Dropsy. You’re a funny kid, no mistake.’

They walked almost in silence to the mill. It was dark in the kitchen, Holland was upstairs with Mrs Holland, and Albert struck a match and lit the oil-lamp.

The burnt match fell from Albert’s fingers. And stooping to pick it up he saw Alice, standing sideways and full in the lamp-light. The curve of her pregnancy stood out clearly. Her whole body was thick and heavy with it. Albert crumbled the match in his fingers, staring at her. Then he spoke.

‘Here kid,’ he said. ‘Here.’

She looked at him.

‘What’d you say it was you got? Dropsy?’

‘Yes. I reckon that’s what it is I caught.’

‘How long you bin like it?’

‘I don’t know. It’s bin coming on a good while. All summer.’

He stared at her, not knowing what to say. All the time she stared too with the old habitual muteness.

‘Don’t you know what’s up wi’ you?’ he said.

She shook her head.

When he began to tell her she never moved a fraction. Her face was like a lump of unplastic clay in the lamplight.

‘Don’t you know who it is? Who you bin with? Who done it?’

She could not answer. It was hard for her to grapple not only with Albert’s words but with the memory of Holland’s: ‘You tell anybody and I’ll smash you. See?’

‘You better git back home,’ Albert said. ‘That’s your best place.’

‘When?’

‘Soon as you can. Git off to-morrow. You no business slaving here.’

And then again:

‘Who done it? Eh? Don’t y’ know who done it? If you know who done it he could marry you.’

‘He couldn’t marry me.’

Albert saw that the situation had significance for him.

‘You better git off to bed quick,’ he said. ‘Go on. And then be off in the morning.’

In the morning Alice was up and downstairs soon after sunlight, and the sun was well above the trees as she began to walk across the valley. She walked slowly, carrying her black case, changing it now and then from one hand to another. Binders stood in the early wheatfields covered with their tarpaulins, that were in turn covered with summer dew. It was Sunday. The world seemed empty except for herself, rooks making their way to the cornfields, and cattle in the flat valley. She walked for long periods without thinking. Then when she did think, it was not of herself or the mill or what she was doing or what was going to happen to her, but of Albert. An odd sense of tenderness rose up in her simultaneously with the picture of Albert rising up in her mind. She could not explain it. There was something singularly compassionate in Albert’s countrified solidity, his slow voice, his flat feet, his concern for her. Yet for some reason she could not explain, she could not think of him with anything like happiness. The mere remembrance of him sawing and hammering under the cherry-tree filled her with pain. It shot up in her breast like panic. ‘You better git back home.’ She could hear him saying it again and again.

And all the time she walked as though nothing had happened. Her eyes had the same dull mute complacency as ever. It was as though she were only half-awake.

When she saw the black gas-tarred side of the Hartop’s house it was about eight o’clock. She could hear the early service bell.

The sight of the house did not affect her. She went in by the yard gate, shut it carefully, and then walked across the yard to the back door.

She opened the door and stood on the threshold. Her mother and her father, in his shirt-sleeves, sat in the kitchen having breakfast. She could smell tea and bacon. Her father was sopping up his plate with bread, and seeing her he paused with the bread half to his lips. She saw the fat dripping down to the plate again. Watching it, she stood still.

‘I’ve come back,’ she said.

Suddenly the pain shot up in her again. And this time it seemed to shoot up through her heart and breast and throat and through her brain.

She did not move. Her face was flat and blank and her body static. It was only her eyes which registered the suddenness and depths of her emotions. They began to fill with tears.

It was as though they had come to life at last.