South Riding (74 page)

“I’ve found a dandelion,” shouted Alice.

“S’not. Colt’s foot,” Daisy snubbed her.

“Colt’s foot? Miss Clever. Dolt’s foot, bolt’s foot, goat’s foot.”

“Miss Clever yourself. We had it in nature object lesson. Sucks.”

“I don’t care. I knew all the time. Sucks yourself!”

Like a great building, towering above the dykes, a ship moved up to Kingsport. It seemed to be gliding silently along the next field.

“Oh!” cried Kitty. “What is it?”

“A ship.”

“A
ship
? In the
field
?”

“It’s not in the field. It’s on the river.”

“On the
river
, really?”

“Yes.”

“But I can’t see the river. Where is it? When are we going to get to the river?”

Indeed it seemed as if they could never reach it. Each time they scrambled up the side of a bank, they could see from the top a gleam of silver; they could see the scattered houses standing two by two in sturdy partnership, over the wide Dutch colony. They could see the windmills and the spire of Cold Harbour church and its clustering trees. The good expensive roads were raised on banks above the marshy land. The wide drains lay like canals, slicing the fields. Sometimes beyond the bank lay a drain and the children had to walk a mile or more seeking a bridge.

“I’m getting tired of this picnic,” sighed Kitty. “There’s a blister on my heel.”

“Let’s look. It’s nothing.”

“I’m getting hungry. When can we have some food?”

“When we get to the Leame,” Lydia insisted.

She did not like her stepmother. She was jealous. With black and bitter resentment she thought her father vile to marry again. Yet she would, all the more because of her hostility, keep her promises made to Mrs. Brimsley.

She tramped along, Lennie pick-a-back across her strong young shoulders. Mrs. Brimsley had sent them on a picnic. Very well. On a picnic they would go. She would owe her nothing willingly, not even the small debt of disobedience.

It was hard, it was maddening, that Mrs. Brimsley should be the one to whom she owed her return to Kiplington High School. Oh, she would pay her back; she would pay her back. This much at least Lydia had decided.

But how he could! How he could kiss her, mess about with her, put his arm round her on the bus, sleep with her—after mother had died, after he had killed mother—that was what Lydia could not understand.

She could not bear it.

Lydia did not want to hate her father. She knew that he was proud of her. People liked him. The little man had a gay and jolly way with him. Miss Burton had said, “You know, Lydia, you are much more like your father than you’ll acknowledge.” Sarah hadn’t seen mother moaning on the bunk, her hair round her face, crying that she was done for. Sarah hadn’t seen mother moaning among the nettles. That was what father had done. That was what men did.

Oh God, I hope he does it to Mrs. Brimsley.

Daisy was saying something.

“Now you run a bit, Lennie, along this nice grass. What, Dais?”

“Oh, you’re too dreamy. Too grand to hear
us
now
.
I was saying I suppose they’ll put me into service. I’m damned if I go.”

“You know you mustn’t say damned. What would you like to do?”

“Fly to Australia. Like Amy Johnson,” said Daisy unexpectedly, spitting out of her mouth a roll of well-chewed grass.

“I’m going to get married,” answered Alice.

“Well, Amy Johnson married, didn’t she?”

“I shan’t. I shan’t ever marry. Ooh, ups-a-daisy!” Lydia lifted Len up the steep piled bank. The highest dam they had yet encountered rose before them. “You take the basket, Dais.”

“You’ll be an old maid. Like your precious Miss Burton.”

“She’s not an old maid.”

“Well. She’s not married. And she’s getting on, isn’t she?”

“Dad says she’s a nice piece. Why does he call her a nice piece?”

The dam was covered with tall silvery grasses. It was steep and slippery. Lydia pushed Lennie to the ledge above her head, then returned for the basket.

“Oooh,” said Lennie. “It’s big.”

“What’s big?”

Lydia hauled up the basket, then scrambled herself to the top of the bank and looked.

She stood, shading her eyes, the wind whipping her bare legs, her arms, her hair, and she looked across the salt marsh and the Leame to Lincolnshire. It was here at last, the river that she knew so well from a distance, and yet had never till now approached.

A fleeting gleam of silver, the lights on a ship, a word from an old gossip—she knew the Leame all right.

But here it was at last, spread wide before her.

Immediately below the bank stretched the grey-green carpet of salt-marsh. Sea-samphire and sea-aster grew there, and the coarse puffing sea-meadow grass; here and there lay pools blinking up into the vivid blue of the sky; an overflow stream rounded into a pond, and beyond the pond lay more marsh, and beyond the marsh another, lower bank, the last rampart of the county, and beyond the bank the bold silver sweep of the Leame itself.

It was high tide. From Lincolnshire to Yorkshire the Leame filled its banks. Its waters, five miles wide, lapped against the little rivulets and indentations, sucking and gurgling. A tramp steamer went chugging out to sea, sending ripples to beat against the mud. A motor yacht, light as a bird, swished down the smooth wide water.

“Oh!” cried Lydia, and though she had always known the sea, grew aware of a new and strange exhilaration, as though she had been released from a captivity.

“Come on!” the children shouted.

They took hands, the little boy and the basket held between them, and down they slid, down to the salt marsh and across it, skipping over hummocks, slooshing in and out of water holes, racing toward the furthermost embankment, and even beyond that protruded a ledge of mud and grasses, of shiny velvet turf and bristling reeds. And there they halted, with nothing at last between them and the Lincolnshire coast but the sparkling water.

Far, far away the dim hills rose behind little houses, dolls’-sized buildings—a town, some factories, a water tower.

“Ooh. Is that Cleethorpes? I do want to see Cleethorpes!” Alice cried.

“Well, now we’re here,” said the more prosaic Daisy, “can’t say I think much to it, now we
are
here. Where’s basket?”

Lydia could withhold from them no longer the meal their prospective stepmother had provided.

They unpacked the basket and saw that Mrs. Brimsley had done them proud. Nothing that Mrs. Holly had provided had ever equalled this. Hard-boiled eggs, ham cake, cheese cakes and buns and oranges, and even a bottle of milk and a mug for Lennie. There was salt for the eggs in a screw of paper.

They’ll think this is all. They’ll forget mother, thought Lydia. They don’t know Mrs. Brimsley’s a rich widow and can afford it. She had a vague notion that if her mother had been a widow, too, she could have afforded a grand picnic like this.

“Look, my name’s on,” cried Alice. “ALICE. Written on my egg.”

“Here’s Lennie’s. We’ve all got it,” said Daisy.

And, sure enough, they had; written on every egg was a printed name.

The biggest and brownest egg was Lydia’s.

She means to get round me, the girl thought, viciously breaking the amber shell against a stone. But she could not hold her resentment. There was something in the way the picnic basket had been arranged, in the green paper serviettes wrapped round the cake and buns, in the oranges, and in the bottle of milk, so carefully wrapped and labelled “For Lennie. One dose of cow’s medicine.” She knew that Mrs. Brimsley was not only kind. She had humour. She and Dad together, they made a pair, they did.

Her mother? Well, her mother was something different. But this Mrs. Brimsley could look after the children. She would release Lydia of a burden. She would be kind to them. She had the superfluous energy which mother had lost, in her battle against poverty and dirt and nature. Mrs. Brimsley would be more fortunate. Her own days for child-bearing were over. She would give to her new family the good-humoured indulgence of a granny.

Mother wanted me to get on. She wanted me to win scholarships, Lydia thought.

The salt stuck to the glazed bluish surface of the hard-boiled white of Mrs. Brimsley’s egg.

Perhaps after all it’s not treachery—not—not forgetting mother to let Mrs. Brimsley help us.

I can always pay her back when I’ve been through college.

She held the warm brown shell of the egg in her hand.

When lunch was eaten, the children went off exploring. The tide had begun to recede. It was unveiling the long stretches of purple mud, where the men would sometimes come and spike for flatlies. Sweet-tasting fish, these, delicate as trout, the cottagers declared, but bony, so hard to eat in lamplit kitchens.

The children idled along towards the sea-coast. Eastward the land curved in a curling lip. As they went, they discovered treasures, flotsam from the tides, an old leather glove, a basket, lobster pots, a rusted frying-pan.

“Where does it all come from?”

“Up the coast. There’s a current washes it down.”

“Oh, might that be our frying-pan?”

“There’s a pineapple tin. Bet it’s what Bert brought us on Lennie’s birthday.”

“Is there a pineapple in it?”

“’Course not—silly!”

“There’s summat here. Come here, Lyd! Old clothes, like.”

“No, sacking maybe.”

“No. It’s got a boot on. It’s a——” and suddenly Alice screamed and rushed to bury her white scared face in Lydia’s velvet frock. And Lydia, peering above the frightened child, saw also what was lying half submerged in the mud, one arm floating limply along the water, its head mercifully buried in clay and weed.

“Come away, come on, Len. Come away!”

They turned then, and hurried, stumbling along the waterside, up and over the bank, across the salt marsh. They dropped Mrs. Brimsley’s basket; they ran away, away from that monstrosity mourned by wheeling sea birds that circled and screamed above it. Panting, running, sobbing, their picnic ruined, the Holly children ran.

“W
HAT
if you did quarrel?” asked Mrs. Beddows. “What if you didn’t like him? That’s no reason for insulting his dead body.”

“Oh, no. It’s not that!” Sarah cried.

“He was one of your governors. He’s having a public funeral. The coroner said it was death by misadventure. It’s only decent to go.”

They sat in Sarah’s sitting-room. Mrs. Beddows had called to tell Sarah that she must attend the funeral. As her final service to Carne she was arranging that he at least should have a worthy funeral.

Sarah crouched in the window-sill, looking out to sea.

It was here that she had watched the dawn with Robert, that night when Midge was ill.

She said:

“I don’t want to. I dislike funerals. I hate this public display about death. I don’t intend to go.”

She shut her mouth obstinately.

She looked ill; she looked haggard; she looked her full forty years. Her navy blue dress was unbecoming and hung in ugly angular lines round her thin body. The flaming brightness was fading from her rich hair. There were shrewish petulant lines round her tired mouth.

Mrs. Beddows was not at her best, either. The news of finding the body and the inquest had distressed her. She had been crying, the difficult rending tears of age; they made her head ache, they hurt her heart; and now they were threatening to harass her again.

She looked at Sarah Burton who had proved so unexpectedly difficult and she sighed with sudden defeat.

“I can’t possibly get away then,” Sarah persisted, with hurried and uncharacteristic insincerity. “If I make a precedent I shall spend all my time attending funerals. . . .”

“Oh—stop!” cried Mrs. Beddows, her patience ended. “For goodness’ sake don’t go, then. But don’t talk to me like that. Don’t you see I can’t
stand
it? I’ve had about enough.”

“I’m sorry.”

There was a pause. The two women sat silent. Mrs. Beddows licked her lips and made an effort. She spoke at last in an altered voice.

“I really came partly to talk about Midge. You know Lord Sedgmire came over a fortnight ago. We had a talk. He wants to take Midge to live with them in Shropshire.”

Again that queer hostile silence from Sarah struck her. This is too much, she thought. Haven’t I had enough to face? It’s too much.”

“So I’ve got to give notice, I suppose, of her leaving here.”

“I thought you were her guardian.”

“Yes. But I’ve got to do what I think best for the child. I don’t think it’s good for her here. There’s too much talk. I’ve sent her away now to Whitby with Sybil for a week till the funeral and all are over. She
wants
to go to the Sedgmires.”