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CHAPTER 1
CRUSOE'S DAUGHTER
I am Polly Flint. I came to live at the yellow house when I was six years old. I stood on the steps in the wind, and the swirls of sand, and my father pulled the brass bell-knob beside the huge front door. Together we listened to the distant jangle and to footsteps padding nearer. My father did a little dance on his short legs, and whistled.
Then there followed sharp scenes of confusion and dismay. 'Shut the door. Shut the door. The sand, the sand!' and figures stood about the hall on coloured tiles.
We were not expected. My father was bringing me to live with my aunts — bleak Miss Mary, gentle Miss Frances. They were my young mother's elderly sisters. My mother was dead.
A fat maid led me away to drink tea in the kitchen and then I was led away again by the gentle aunt to a huge and vaulted chamber which must have been the little morning room. With the gentle aunt I did a jig-saw the size of a continent. I did not look up as high as the aunt's face but watched our four hands hover over the oceans of mahogany.
Now and then a door across the hall would open on incisive conversation and once a woman with a green face who carried black knitting and was dressed in black knitting came and glared round the morning room door at me. She said, 'She looks tubercular,' and put her handkerchief to her mouth and went away.
Perhaps my father stayed at the yellow house for a number of days. I remember an afternoon walking with him by the sea, dodging waves, and his figure dozing (disgracefully in the morning) in a button-back chair beside the catafalque of the drawing-room chimney-piece.
And one evening he sang. I knew that he sang very dreadfully but at the same time he danced, and I knew that he danced well — a heavy little man on dainty feet. Sailor's feet. He pirouetted and twirled about the room and Aunt Frances in a rabbity tippet played the piano. It was a sea song.
Aunt Mary sat apart. The little knitted woman retired to the other end of the room and bent to her needles in an arbour of potted ferns, and the maid coming in with coals for the fire put them down and hid her head in her apron at the singing. This I found out soon was very unlike her, for Charlotte was bland and nearly invisible. But she had once been in a choir.
I sat on a stool and knew that my father was having all these funny people on.
It was 1904 and my father died two months later on the bridge of his ship in the Irish Sea, on the coal-run to Belfast. They told me that he had rejected a place in the last life-boat and had stood in the traditional way — to attention in his merchant sea-captain's uniform — but holding and swigging a great stone bottle of gin. He had always been known as a droll man, said Aunt Frances.
The doorstep, the cold waves, the button-back chair were my only memories of my father — these and the journey that we had made together towards the yellow house. My mother had died just before I was one, and the following five years I had spent with various foster-mothers in sea-faring places where the Captain might possibly dock but more often did not. These people were hazy and the last of them the haziest of all, though she should not have been since she was a dipsomaniac who spent much of her life beneath the kitchen table. I spent much of my life on the kitchen floor, too, alongside the three or four — I think — other children in her care. I learned how not to fall in the fire and how to negotiate the locks on the larder door in order to eat. She hugged me sometimes.
Captain Flint, arriving unexpectedly one day, removed me to a first-class railway carriage (he was improvident) and in a series of these we made our way from Wales to the North East.
I remember light and shadow over pale fields — black towns, cold moors — stone walls swooping through rain and a night in what must have been a railway hotel, for there was a blackened glass roof below a window. Steam leaked up through this in spires. There were booms and echoing clanks. Fear and joy.
On the rich fur of the penultimate carriage seat, with its embroidered tray-cloth on which to rest the head — though far above my head — we sat, the Captain and I, side by side. On the rack above me was a very small suitcase. On the seat beside me was a Chinese work-box full of Chinese sewing things — my father's coming-home present: his last voyage had been long — and a scruffy doll or so, and a china mandarin.
The train lolloped between plum-coloured brick, the railway sheds of the North. Very noble. Then came high tin chimneys, centipedes of clattery trucks, serpents' nests of pipes, then mud-flats with whitish pools. There were furnaces, rolling and flapping out fire, and glimpses of diamond bars held fast in enormous fire-tongs in the heart of flames.
Out of the carriage window on the other side of the train, fields stretched out to colourless hills with a line of trees along the tops. The light showing through them made them look like loops of knitting pulled off the needles. The train rocked and my father whistled through his teeth.
The last train stopped at stations which were only wooden platforms. Gritty-faced men got on and off at these but nobody came near the first-class carriage. Whenever the train stopped it was quiet enough to hear the voices of the men talking through the carriage-walls and when they passed our window I saw sharp faces and bright eyes and heard the squeak of the battered tin tea-cans they all carried. All the men were black, but not black like the black seamen in Wales who sometimes came to the foster-mother's house and when they washed were black still. These men were only very dirty and trickly with sweat which left white marks. Those men in Wales used to throw me up in the air when I was little and catch me. Big white teeth.
The train ran out of the grit and the chimneys when the last of the men got out, and between high sand-hills. In between the sand-hills, far away, there were cold gleams of sea.
Then the Captain shared between us a huge meat pie. He took it out of an oily cardboard box and pulled it into two parts with his hands and laid the pieces carefully on the Chinese sewing box. I felt interesting contradictions in my father. 'This', he said, 'is a great pie. There are good meat pies. This is a great meat pie.'
It was Aunt Mary, the older sister, who told me he was dead, waiting very tall just inside my bedroom door until Aunt Frances had finished brushing and plaiting my hair. I don't remember the words, only the white starched bow beneath Aunt Mary's chin. Under her indoor hat her hair was silvery fair, and on her chin the bristles were silvery too. Behind her on a shelf was the Chinese work-box with the mandarin sitting on top. Its head slotted into a hole in its china shoulders and it nodded in rime to the up-and-down ribbon bow. A cold wind was blowing through the open bedroom window. A glassy, flashing, pitiless morning, the sea roaring.
I said (I think) 'Can I go out now and see the hens?' and ran past Aunt Mary into the yard. Through the diamonds of the chicken-wire the bow and the mandarin still bobbed and wagged. 'It is so,' they said. 'It has occurred. It must be borne.'
The chickens hopped on and off their perches and talked to each other in long rusty sentences and I wound my fingers about in the wire. Then Aunt Frances came and took me indoors and gave me lemon jelly on the kitchen table — in the middle of the morning. The little green-faced woman watched from the landing window as we crossed the yard.
It was the light at first that was troublesome — the light and the space of the yellow house. Light flowed in from all sides and down from the enormous sky. In Cardiff and Fishguard there had been little sky and the only light was reflected from the rainy slates of the terrace across the street.
Here the wind knocked the clouds about over the hills and the marsh and the dunes and the sea, until the house seemed to toss like a ship. I remember that I clutched on to things a good deal.
For to a head not much higher than the door-knobs, the ceilings and cornices of the yellow house might have been up in another atmosphere. The distance between the loose-tiled hall and the foot of the staircase was a landscape, and the newel-post and the banisters had to be held tight. The drawing-room was a jungle of tables and rugs and foot-stools and glass-topped cabinets, and the dining-room a terror. People sat there, silent, at great distances from one another, their mouths chewing slowly round and round. My eyes were on a level with heavy rows of forks and spoons. The knives were for giants. Doom was in the dining-room.
Solemn grace was said before and after the food, so solemn that the sun took notice and never shone in, as it did in the rest of the house, even when it could be seen outside flashing cheerfully to Jutland.
I knew I felt all this when I was six because of the height of the privet hedge outside the window, a poor thing, withered by salt. It never grew higher than three feet in all its years, but then it blocked the view.
All these early mysteries are very clear — forks and privet; and looking through the side of the glass fruit-bowl and the tapping acorns high above the blinds.
Yet I cannot at all remember the day my father went away. Perhaps I never knew it, or perhaps he went away at night after I had gone to bed. Yet I remember very clearly indeed what happened the moment he had gone.
Bowls of water were placed on the kitchen table which had first been covered with newspapers and a lump of opaque soap like rancid butter was put out, and some black liquid in a bottle and a tremendous washing of hair began. I shrieked and Charlotte rubbed and poured and swirled about and said, "Well, she can shriek, anyway,' and Mrs Woods — the knitted green woman — stood watching at the kitchen door. She said 'Work it well into the roots.'
Then, after torrents of rinsing, I had to sit with my back to the table, the hair spread all over the newspapers — Charlotte began to tug and drag a comb through it, a comb with tiny teeth, like the backbone of a fish. A dover sole. I shrieked again and said some words from Cardiff. Charlotte made a gulping noise and Mrs Woods cried out like a parrot.
'Are there any?' asked Mrs Woods. 'There baint,' said Charlotte.
'Are you sure? The Welsh are very dirty.'
'Never a one.'
'Would you know one, Charlotte?'
'Aye, I would. They're running with them down the cottages.'
Mrs Woods then went quickly away and I sat on the fender while Charlotte rubbed the hair all dry.
'It's not bad hair,' she said. 'There's that to be said. It'll be the clothes next.' I remember the clothes. They came out of dark shops far away in a black town which may have been Middlesborough. Two thin ladies made more of them, in a house built for princesses — it had a spire and was at the end of a white terrace somewhere along by the sea after a slow ride in a horse and trap.
Long, long afternoons, Aunt Frances sitting near me eating Sally Lunns, as I turned and turned about on a table and got pricked with hemming-pins. One of the sewing ladies had had complete circles of rosy paint on her cheeks and each wore a wig. Once one lady stroked me all over and purred at me like a cat when Aunt Frances was out of the room and I cried and kicked out and said the words from Wales again, and the lady went red outside the circles of paint, and that had to be the last visit.
Then, the bundles on the bed, the open clothes-presses with clean paper linings, the heavy woollen vests, the body-belts and bodices and long drawers and frilly bloomers and petticoats with harnesses over the back and flat linen buttons; and the stockings and the garters and the gaiters and the button-hooks; and the coats and the bonnets and mittens and tam-oshanters and the Sunday brimmed hat; and the shoes for the house and the shoes for the open air, and the thick wool over-stockings and the goloshes and a pair of boots that seemed weighted with lead.
Charlotte said, 'Best not fall in the marsh in them. You'll sink like an anchor.' The boots were iron black. All the other clothes were dun.
When the drawers and the press and the wardrobe were full and I was completed in all my layers like a prime onion, 'That', said Charlotte, 'is something like!'
'I think she looks very pretty,' said Aunt Frances when I was produced in the drawing-room.
'It's the best we can do,' said Mrs Woods.
Aunt Mary said nothing for she seemed to notice nothing. 'It's odd,' she said. 'I can never get very excited about clothes.' I felt that I understood. I felt uncomfortable and stout, and that there was a very great deal of me. I seemed to be looking down at a globe with two weighted sticks hanging below it. I sat on the button-back chair and swung these weights.
'Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,' I sang.
'Don't dangle yourself about, Polly,' said Mrs Woods. 'Not in those beautiful boots.' 'I've not much of a neck, have I?' I asked Charlotte, looking in the glass at bedtime — another great mound of clothes waiting on the bed to set me up for the night.
Charlotte said, 'Well, maybe it'll come.'
Not once, not once ever, after the short cries of surprise on the first morning did it ever occur to my aunts — the Miss Young-husbands was their name — that I should not be there for ever.
There was no question. I was theirs. I had arrived and should stay. Never in all the years did they suggest that they had been good to me or that there was the least need for my gratitude, or that I had in any way disturbed their lives.
Very quickly in fact I became muddled about whether I had ever lived anywhere else, and the time before the arrival on the sandy step was very cloudy. I seemed to have been born at the yellow house, delivered there neat and complete without the embarrassments and messiness of conception or birth.
The total sureness of Aunts Mary and Frances about this was so great and so calm that it spread about the yellow house, and not even Mrs Woods made any demur, not even when I was with her on her own, which I managed to avoid as much as was possible. Charlotte appeared to accept all that came her way. Life simply proceeded.
There was no mention of loving me of course, nor of any particular affection, but that was nothing, for I wouldn't have known what to do with love had it been offered. 'She is a very good child,' they said. 'What a very good little girl she is,' — and they said it in front of me, which I found very nice. After the dark, ramshackle years, to be charged with goodness was agreeable. It was like being tucked into bed, which Aunt Frances sometimes did, and sat on the end of it, too, and smiled at me and told holy stories about things called the apostles and the saints as I drank my milk. 'Not a very demonstrative child,' they said sometimes, and in front of me. 'Not at all like her mother. But that may be just as well. We could not cope with another Emma. A stolid little thing. But she is good. And considering —'
I listened and watched and began to allow myself to be taken charge of and was rather put out to find very quickly that the goodness, though a gift from God, was something I had to see after. For it appeared that I might lose it. I must hold tight to it. I must clutch at it like the newel-post of the stairs, like the string of a kite. I must examine it like my new clothes. As soon as I saw signs of wear and tear it would be well to report.
Saturdays were the time for this, after the three ladies had all been to church for their own confession. I was asked to sit by Aunt Mary in her study window and we talked of sin. I knew from the very beginning that these occasions were the only ones when she was disappointed in me, and in herself, for she saw in them her own failure. I dreaded them.
'Now Polly, is that all?'
'Yes, Aunt Mary.'
'You have really tried to remember?'
'Yes, Aunt Mary.'
'Don't kick the window-seat, Polly. Shall we sit in silence for a moment?' When we sat in silence all sorts of things welled up from long ago, but I didn't know if they were exactly about sin.
'What are you thinking, Polly?'
'Nothing, Aunt Mary.'
But I had been seeing the dipsomaniac at the old and filthy stone sink suddenly up with her skirts and peeing into a basin.
'Shall we say a prayer, Polly?'
'Yes, Aunt Mary.'
And there was the man who used to come in the afternoons and do things to her in the kitchen. Lie on the saggy couch and roll on her and spread out her legs and make noises and be cruel to her but she didn't mind.
'I want to talk about angels,' said Aunt Mary. 'You do know, don't you, that there are angels? You believe in angels?'
'Yes, Aunt Mary.'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Crusoe's Daughter"
by .
Copyright © 1985 Jane Gardam.
Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions.
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