The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (16 page)

A fortnight later he called again as usual, knocking in his timid way and waiting for an answer. But when the door opened he got for a moment the impression that it had been answered by a stranger.

This impression, which went stabbing through his mind like a needle, was gone almost at once, and he saw that the stranger was Katie. He saw with astonishment a clear, unmistakable thing before his eyes. In her absence Katie had grown up. She was some inches taller, but he saw more than that. She stood very erect,
her young, newly-formed breasts pushing against her frock, and it seemed to him that she looked at him with eyes that had in them a kind of sulky hostility. The one thing about her that had not changed was her hair: it had the same shining blondeness, but now against the dark self-conscious eyes it seemed doubly beautiful and striking.

He was so affected by this transition in the girl that as he came into the house he felt as if something were waiting to explode behind his shyness. He wanted to talk about it, to remark to Mrs. Armitage how suddenly and unmistakably Katie had grown up. But he could not say anything and gradually his great sense of astonishment was repressed and folded away, to become in turn part of his shyness, to become as time went on something that he could not speak about or reveal.

But that afternoon he found himself forced to face the change in the girl in other ways. It was time, Mrs. Armitage said, that Katie wore some sort of support. She believed in support early; there was nothing like it, she always held, for starting a good figure.

‘Besides, she's going to leave school, and start to work.'

‘Work?' Mr. Penfold said. ‘Why, what work, where?'

‘She's going to work down in Denton,' she said, ‘in
Chapman's office. She starts next week. Yes, she's starting to work.'

‘Well,' Mr. Penfold said. ‘It doesn't seem five minutes since she was a baby.'

As he said this, Mr. Penfold looked up at the girl, who was standing in the room, her back against a high dresser, her arms folded behind her. He smiled, half expecting her to smile back, but he saw on her face only the new-born, adolescent resentment, not yet hostility, to what he suddenly felt was a foolish remark. Her direct, sulky stare brought all his own self-consciousness rushing to the surface, and he felt strangely, miserably foolish.

He turned hurriedly to the things on the table, and was immediately faced with a new problem. It was very rare that he carried such lines as belts or brassières and in fact corsetry was rather out of his line, and he knew that he had nothing suitable for the girl. ‘But I could run the tape round her and bring some over special tomorrow.'

‘Well, that would do as well,' Mrs. Armitage said. ‘Katie, let Mr. Penfold run the tape over you.'

Mr. Penfold produced the tape-measure from his pocket and unrolled it in his hands, but before he could do anything the girl sprung away from the dresser and went swiftly out of the room.

‘Well!' Mrs. Armitage said. ‘Well! And that's how
she's been ever since she got back. Too big to be spoke to, too big to do anything. And now throwing her weight about. Well!'

‘It's all right,' Mr. Penfold said. ‘Leave her alone. Shall I bring some sizes over tomorrow and she can try them on?'

‘I don't know,' Mrs. Armitage said. ‘I'm sure I don't know. Perhaps we'd better go down to Lee and Porters and go up into the ladies' department and get it there.'

‘All right,' Mr. Penfold said.

‘Seems they grow up to be ladies while your back's turned.'

The girl did not come into the room again, and later Mr. Penfold took away with him the startling impression of her sudden transition and the still more startling impression of her exit from the room. Whenever he thought of the two things he was filled with a sense of her beauty and rebellion. He was aware of the presence in her of moods and attributes which he had never foreseen in the child who had once sat on his knee, listening to his watch as it chimed the hours like a little bell.

When he called at the house again, a fortnight later, Katie was not there. Mrs. Armitage looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and said, ‘She'll be here very shortly. She gets home about half past five. Sometimes six.'

‘Does she like it?'

‘You better ask her!' Mrs. Armitage said. ‘I can't get a word out of her whether she likes it or not. She's got that proud she won't tell you anything.'

Mr. Penfold did not know what to say. Proud? It was a strange thing to be angry about. He sat down at the table as usual and Mrs. Armitage gave him a cup of tea. And then, about half an hour later, he heard the door open and shut and the footsteps of the girl going upstairs.

‘That's her,' Mrs. Armitage said. ‘One time o' day you couldn't horsewhip her into washing her hands before she sat down to table. Now she finicks about with them for hours.'

Once again Mr. Penfold did not say anything. He lingered over his tea with even more diffidence than usual, partly because the egg that Mrs. Armitage had set before him seemed suddenly distasteful, partly because he wanted to remain in the room until the girl herself came down. In this mood of uncertainty, in which there was also a strange feeling of suspense, he let his tea grow cold, drinking it without quite knowing what he was doing.

The cup was actually at his lips when the girl came in, proud and silent and very soft-moving, so that she slipped into her chair, opposite him, as soundlessly as a soft blonde cat. He bade her good-evening, the tea
still cold on his lips, and she answered him in a low voice. He saw at once that she had grown still more and that the transition from childhood to adolescence, just begun when he had seen her last, was now complete. Every movement and lack of movement now was mutinous with the self-conscious sense of her own beauty, so that he felt his own sense of surprise grow and change into a kind of absent-minded wonder, the cold tea-cup still in his hands and still foolishly suspended midway between his lips and the table, until he abruptly realized it and set it down with a clatter against the spoon.

A moment later he got up from the table and made some excuse about going. He knew that he could not sit there at the table with the girl any longer without something happening: something momentous or foolish or even, to his way of thinking, something terrible. He went out into the warm early September evening with a feeling very like fear uppermost in his heart. He did not know what he had to be afraid about; he was not even sure that what he felt was fear. But like fear the emotion propelled him forward, deeply disquieted, uncertain. That evening it still seemed like summer, with delicate fingers of honeysuckle outspread in the hedges, and the sun flat and warm and golden on the bright renewed September grass. The papers were saying that it was the finest September for
many years, but now all at once he realized that he felt its beauty keenly not just because it was splendid weather but because it was emotionally linked with the beauty of the girl. He saw in the straw-gold colour of the honeysuckle the exact shade of her hair reproduced with fearful and lovely fidelity. The honeysuckle floated dreamily by him as he cycled past and in the same way he felt his dreamy thoughts about her run past him and gather in the distance, too numerous and diffident and troubled to catch.

From this moment he went on thinking of her, as it were, from a distance. He called at the house every other Thursday, not as if nothing had happened but in the hope that as time went on something would happen. Sometimes he saw the girl, but always with her mother; sometimes she was late from the office. More often than not he never spoke to her. She continued to remain mutinous and cool, her lips richly defiant, her young breasts rapidly growing ripe, to be carried soon with a new and conscious air of voluptuousness. In her presence he felt shyer than ever: shy, painfully inexperienced and sometimes foolish, the girl old and mature and fixed in beautiful contempt above him.

It was not until three years later that he suddenly found himself alone with her one evening. He had been held up by a puncture three miles away late in
the afternoon and had mended it himself on the roadside. It was almost seven o'clock when he got to the house. He knocked shyly on the door as usual, and waited, and it was the girl herself who came in answer.

‘Oh! it's Mr. Penfold,' she said. ‘Come in.'

He went into the house. It was November and the milk-globed lamp was alight on the table. The light shone upward into the girl's blonde face and on her bright blue jumper and on her bare smooth arms and hands. But it was not only the beauty of her body, in the milky lamplight, that struck him. There was something else. There was a change in her voice and manner.

A moment later he knew the reason. ‘Is your mother in?' he said.

‘No,' the girl said. ‘She thought you couldn't be coming. She waited till six and now she's gone down to the village.'

Her voice was amazingly friendly and free of all the old mutinous reserve. He had not time to understand it before in a warm, eager way she asked him if he would like some tea. He excused himself by saying it was too late but she said no, a place had been left for him and all she had to do was boil the kettle.

His astonishment at this change in her manner was tremendous. He felt as if he were speaking to her for the first time. He sat and warmed himself by the fire
while waiting for the tea and then, as she began to pour it out, the curve of her bare arm clean as marble in the lamplight, he saw that she had brought two cups.

Yes, she said, she would have a cup with him, and if he didn't mind she was a bit cold and she would have it sitting on the rug. Before he knew what to say she curled herself up between a chair and the fender, her legs shining with the silvery-pink of ripe oat-straw in the firelight, her breasts drawn up under the close blue wool whenever she turned to look up at him. Then the reason for her prolonged strained attitude began gradually to be clear to him. He did not know what began it, but they began to talk about money. He was saying that the business was there if only the money was behind it. But he was finding money very tight. It had been tight all that year. ‘Not that I'm grumbling. I've saved and taken care of what I have had,' he said, ‘only it's difficult to go on putting it by if you don't have it coming in.'

When she spoke there was a flash of the old rebellion in her voice. ‘Yes, and it would puzzle you still more to save if you never had any to save,' she said.

For a moment he did not grasp her meaning. Then it all began to come out, as if she had waited for a long time for a moment like this. She began to talk in a rapid, emotional voice, telling him her troubles. She had been at work for three years now and she was still
being carried about by her mother. She worked with other girls who had freedom, took some part of their wages as a right, and had fun in the evenings. She had no money and no fun. All of her money went back to her mother, to be doled back in sixpences when she asked for it, to be sparingly saved in a penny-bank and, once saved, never touched again. All that the girl asked was a little freedom, some fun, a dance or two, an evening out once in a while. ‘That's all I want,' she said passionately. ‘That's all I want. I want fun. That's all. And all the time she wants to keep me locked in a glass case.'

Mr. Penfold listened without knowing what to say, the tea once again growing cold in his hands. The girl would be about nineteen now and it grieved him deeply to see her reaching out for something, for happiness and fun, and not getting it.

He looked down at her a moment later and saw that she was crying. He found himself almost glad of her tears, which now saved him from the painful necessity of talking. He let her cry for a few moments and then put his hands lightly on her shoulders. It was the first time he had touched her. She did not move but, as though unaware of him, cried quietly and immovably into her hands. He wanted to move his own hands and grasp her tightly and in that way express the sympathy and affection he felt for her, but for what seemed a long
time he could not overcome his shyness. At last he did overcome it and very gently moved his hands across her shoulders and partially embraced her.

They were sitting like this when Mrs. Armitage suddenly burst into the room, almost as if she had been standing outside in the kitchen, listening. Mr. Penfold hastily sat back in his chair and said that Katie was getting him some tea.

‘Funny way of getting tea,' Mrs. Armitage said.

He went away shortly afterwards, without speaking again to the girl and without another word being said about her or about what Mrs. Armitage had seen.

But when he called, a fortnight later, he knew that something had happened. That day he purposely changed his route, not arriving till six o'clock, but the girl was not there and it seemed to him that the atmosphere of the house was strange. He felt that the hostility that had so long been the girl's had for some reason suddenly been transferred to her mother. The table was not laid for tea and Mrs. Armitage's hat and gloves and Mr. Penfold's weekly payment book were on the table. No, she didn't want anything. No, there was nothing at all, and she was sorry but she had to go out in a hurry now.

‘Where's Katie?' he said.

She looked at him with frank hostility and he knew that she was blaming him for something.

‘Katie?' she said. ‘Katie's started to live in lodgings in Denton. She's been worrying about it long enough and now she's got her way.'

‘Oh,' he said. He did not know what to say. It came to him that it was a very strange, sudden decision. There must be a reason for such an abrupt change of attitude. Suddenly he looked at Mrs. Armitage. Her dark eyes were fixed on him with clear rebellious resentment and he knew then that the reason was himself. He knew that, prompted by some bitter, narrow sense of jealousy, she had taken the girl away from him.

‘Will there be anything next time?' he said. It was all he could think to say. He had never said it in fifteen years.