page break

Chapter Twenty-Two
Carly

Carly never looked now at her glory-box, but it was neither destroyed nor taken away, and she never wore any of the soft folded things which she had embroidered with such patience that they seemed like parts of herself—green, primrose and pale blue crêpe de Chine appendages, with Richelieu work, wreaths of lazy-daisies or cross-stitch designs. Several Christmases ago, everybody had stopped giving her cups and saucers, crêpe de Chine odds and ends, ‘for your box, Carly’; everybody except a few of her girl friends, who had gone away to live in other places, and didn't know that Trevor's ‘understanding’ with Carly was over and done with.

She pressed her forehead against her bedroom window, wrinkling it till she looked like a marmoset. At the moment she was thinking not of Trevor, but of Kirsty Blake. Kirsty was her best girl friend, tall and thoughtful (though capable of a good laugh) and rather religious, in a scared way; very much under her mother's thumb. Often Kirsty and she had talked about going into an Anglican Sisterhood together.

Kirsty was out there, directly opposite, beyond the mist which hung grey and strange over the cemetery. Carly had a snapshot in her album showing all the wreaths propped up, and neatly labelled, ‘Kirsty's grave.’ Dead-and-buried. It had all become quite normal. Death was queer until people started to hop round taking measurements—so much for a nice concrete railing, so much for a nice wreath from the office, so much for a nice china wreath under glass, so much for a nice In Memoriam, to be kept up every year in the evening paper. Poor old Kirsty, people said: Do you remember how she used to—and then, suddenly, you don't remember, neither the favourite colour nor the favourite kind of sundae, nor the screamingly funny thing Kirsty came out with at the staff picnic. The face, like the little yellow O of light at the end of a tunnel, slips quite away.

Three tragic things, thought Carly; they say things always happen in threes. Trevor; then Kirsty; and then Eliza. At the thought of Eliza, the little curtain dropped down over her mind, as it had at school when any of the other children mentioned something that Augusta page 216 would think dreadful. Children who talk about such things, said Augusta, are horrible children, you must never play with them. You can't touch pitch and not be defiled.

Your sister has been ill and had a nervous breakdown. That was all. Now Eliza was away down in the South Island, getting less terribly, leaf-like thin, less vague about the eyes. She wasn't often talked about, but Carly knew her mother worried. John—except for the fact that one of his daughters had been ill, and he was sorry for her, Carly didn't think Eliza entered his mind once a month. Almost instantly he had retreated into his world of books, which grew and grew about him until squares and oblongs in brown-paper covers had completely conquered his little blue bedroom. And the others were young: Augusta knew, Carly guessed and wouldn't let herself look the guess straight in the eye, nobody else even questioned.

She hoped desperately that Eliza wouldn't come back and live in the house—live under this roof; this although, when Eliza had been so terribly ill, it was Carly who took her the only things she would eat, those Peek Frean animal biscuits. That Simone girl, whom they had always disliked, was in the room, but when Carly put the tin of biscuits into Eliza's hands, she sat up all of a sudden, and said smiling, ‘Hullo, Carly—hullo, Simone.’ And the Simone girl said, ‘Darling, how beautifully white and clear your skin's gone—now you only need to lose those last few freckles from your nose, and you'll be quite good-looking.’ Cat, Carly thought, green-eyed cat. Afterwards she had learned that the Simone girl had pleurisy quite badly when she came up on the train to see Eliza, and was sick for weeks, so it must have been brave of her. Just the same, Carly couldn't stand her. Kirsty's grave eyes, smiling somewhere behind the china wreaths, comforted her from the thought of girls with green eyes, who suddenly struck out, or just stared! Whom she did not understand.

Not here, not to be a mystery under this roof, and one that in time their mother couldn't help jabbing with her tongue. That would be awful. But one day, Carly thought, something might just come to pass, and you could run back into waiting, desolate love, into the empty playroom at Calver Street, with the packing-case doll's-house standing in the middle of the Chinese matting. Perhaps not until you were dead, like Kirsty, tall Kirsty with the glowing eyes. In life it was by no means safe to talk.

And now she had a hard thing to tell her mother. And in spite of Trevor Sinjohn and her many girl friends (Carly made girl friends easily, but they all got married and had babies), if it had fallen to her to say which one must die, Trevor, or any other of the Hannays, page 217 or her friends and their white woollen babies, she would unhesitatingly have saved Augusta and let the rest go.

She went out into the kitchen. Augusta was lying on the settee, with her feet up. She had fallen asleep over the evening paper, her mouth was just open, and she snored slightly, occasional, pathetic snores, ghosts of weariness. Her magnificent auburn hair was brindled, her body looked heavy and shapeless. Carly knew her mother had been through the change of life. That, and Eliza, and Dad's not keeping his promotion. The many queer, potentially dangerous things that happened to the body and mind of a woman, even if she stayed always respectable!

Augusta awoke wearily. ‘Eh? Eh? What is it?’ The kitchen was nearly dark. Carly slipped down to her old Kaffir squat beside the settee.

‘Mum, I've got something to tell you.’

‘Eh? Eh?’ Then into Augusta's heavy body came back the spirit of dignity and command which made her Carly's wonderful mother. She said quite gently, ‘You've something to tell me? What is it, child?’

‘Mum, I've given up my job at the office. I've given in my notice.’ Carly's body stiffened, waiting for Augusta to grow angry. Augusta sat up.

‘You've what? Three pounds a week. You must be mad, Carly. Unless—it's not Trevor again?’

‘Oh, Mum. No, it's nothing to do with him. I'm not going to marry, ever, you know that. It's something quite different.’

Augusta's voice became small, almost inaudible. She asked, ‘Carly, you're not in any sort of trouble?’ and Carly saw that her freckled hands were clutching the front of her dress.

‘No, no. It's—ever since Kirsty died, I've been wanting to, Mother. When she was dying, she said the nurses were angels. It was almost the last thing she said to me. I wanted to be a nurse. I put my name down, months ago, but I didn't want to tell anyone until they'd accepted me.’

‘Fifteen shillings a week, instead of three pounds—and you'll start among girls years younger than yourself, you're twenty-four. And how do you think you're going to stand up to operations—you, that went out and fainted in the wash-house when I had my toe lanced? I tell you, you're raving mad.’

‘Not operations, Mum. I'm going to be a maternity nurse. I'm going into St Beth's.’ Carly added, ‘I like babies. I think I'd be quite a good nurse with babies.’ For a moment they didn't speak. Carly's mind filled with a procession of white woollen babies. Oh, isn't he darling? The fingers, too teeny. Yes, Betty, of course I'll be godmother. Pink page 218 ribbons for a girl, blue for a boy. When they're born they weigh seven pounds and a bit. One candle on top of a white cake. Sweet talc powder smell—did they, then? Did they? Sally Meade suckling her baby girl, an operation which first made Carly feel shy, then developed into a lovely, laughing freedom, the very gayest thing she ever knew. Sally's baby was born five months after her marriage, but I didn't care, he's a little love. The man had married Sally, which made it all right.

Augusta, her voice harsh and heavy with pain, said, ‘It won't be so easy as you think, my lady. I suppose you realize you'll have to sleep away from home?’

‘I know. I hate that part of it. But I had to do it.’ Looking down at the girl's head bowed in the dusk, Augusta both understood and failed to understand. Carly, the best of the bunch.… She still loved Eliza, in a dim way she even sympathized, and thought Eliza queerly beautiful—so long as Eliza and her secret weren't at home. As her child Eliza was lost and done with. The younger two were still her own, but unexplored yet; somehow another generation, remote and brittle. But her first child, the good, obedient one, who had done no more real wrong than if she had never left the cradle! A few childish fibs and tempers, a few tears; otherwise, Carly was her own still.

The first ten years of a girl's youth, she thought, the beautiful first ten years, that ought to be such fun, go on loving something in trousers. Mine did. There's no man so rotten he won't find some woman to coddle him. And after that, what's left? Physical and emotional wrecks, little ghosts.

‘You don't know what you're doing, Carly. You're giving up a good job, three pounds a week. If you saved, you could be home to England. Why, when I was your age, and with no more education than a servant girl, I'd worked my way half round the world.’ It was no use. Carly didn't want England, she wanted the nearest thing to the baby Trevor Sinjohn hadn't condescended to give her. Augusta's voice dragged, a child-bearing voice. Augusta's voice went with child, and the name of the child was resignation.

‘Giving up a good job… jobs aren't so easy to get, when you're twenty-four.’

But Carly was winged, confident.

‘I know I'll be happy, Mum. I'd love to nurse the babies.’

‘First the babies have to get there,’ grimly prophesied Augusta. But during the next fortnight Carly was happy. Her office gave her a lovely attaché-case, and she sat making caps and aprons, running them up on the old hand-machine, nearly past its time, which had made her first frocks. She tried them on before her mirror, humming:

page 219

’Mid the war's great curse
Stands the Red Cross Nurse,
She's the rose of No Man's land,

one of the ballads still in vogue when the boys and girls used to group singing around Laloma's piano. Augusta thought she looked still a child, a brown-haired wisp of a creature who'd never get on. Carly in the nights, a little scared, clenched her hands. Not a blank alley: not the dreadful, dusty loneliness of going for ever into Mr Shorter's office, waiting, note-book in hand, while her dry voice rapped out answers to letters that didn't matter, that became, if you looked at them in a certain light, quite, quite insane. Now she would have to do with life, not with dust.

She went to St Beth's in a taxicab, waving wildly through the back window. Augusta's thoughts ran about like mice as she padded around the kitchen, getting ready a stew for John, Sandra and Kitch. A good job—three pounds a week. She'll never stand up to it, poor little scrap. That dirty swine.… Oh, if I'd only been a man, if your father had only thrashed him. Lost your promotion, lost your promotion, lost your promotion. You had to make a fool of yourself, showing the Bosses how smart you were, and now look at you. Eliza—no. Not to be talked about. She used to be such a dear little girl, always smiling. Jean Ingelow's poem: ‘I had a nestful once of my own, ah, happy, happy I.’ But you can't encourage girls to hang about, they ought to be married. Tramwaymen, road-workers. Tom, Dick and Harry. John, we're not going down to that slum. You've dragged us here, but my children aren't going to that school. At least he's a gentleman. Carly's Johannesburg gentleman.…

The steam of the stew became fragrant with onions, boiled tender, cut-up bits of herbs, sage, sprinkled parsley and marjoram, which she had grown herself. She did not dislike these things. The world was all right, grubbing in the garden gave her a sort of freedom which made up for the stiff crackle of her knee-joints when she rose. But it was when every thought and feeling in your body became tied up with somebody else—and it did, of course, however practical you tried to make yourself. Life was a long waiting for the right dream, the right person, to come in at the door. And that happened to be the Kingdom of Heaven.

Turning the gas low under the saucepan, Augusta went to the settee, put her feet up and closed her eyes. Disked against the lids she saw bracken, clear and brown, around the white house in England, the house like a Greek cross. Winds ran nibbling at the fern, there was a page 220 great tree, a copper beech. Her face relaxed in lines of weariness, her mouth opened a little. Sun came through the window, and spun a cobweb of red-gold over her old hair. To the alert yet drowsy things in her kitchen, the flames popping under the saucepan, the motes of dusty light, the three-years-old calendar with a blue-robed, non-Hebraic Madonna and Child, she was an old woman. They had known her for ages, they were safe in her hands. But it was not an old woman who lifted up her naked, enchanted face from the fern beneath the copper beech tree, whose leaves were still Jesus-mild with the newness of their sap, and had not yet hardened into rims of colour. Not an old woman, only a girl with red hair, teaching the copper beech tree its way into spring.

Carly didn't know where to put her hands, they felt so enormous. She clasped them behind her back, slipped them into the pockets of her apron, and still they moved about, twisting. A voice called, ‘Nurse, Nurse,’ and she looked with frightened eyes at the only other uniformed girl in the long shiny hall. A Sister in blue came running out.

‘Nurse—Nurse Hannay; you're to go into the theatre at once.’ She whisked away. Carly stood petrified.

‘Hurry up, and don't drop anything.’ The other girl's voice was friendly. Carly asked her, ‘Will—will there be a baby?’

‘Oh, no. An elephant. Go on, there's nothing to be scared of.’

She was standing alone; there were other figures, a probationer nurse, a Sister, and a woman with grossly congested body and face, but none of them seemed real at all. The Sister told her to do things, and she obeyed, with her mind ticking. ‘You mustn't drop anything—mustn't drop anything.’ The tick got larger and larger. The woman's knees sprawled out, and Carly focused her face, a blind, tormented face, torn in two every time it quacked. She thought, ‘Oh, why ever don't they give her chloroform? Why don't they call the doctor?’ But they worked on, like machines. Their uniform might have been white aluminium paint. Purple face, grotesque in white hard light, crying out inanely, ‘Oh, I can't bear it. Nursie dear, Nursie dear, I can't bear it.’ And having to, because there was no pity.

At last they funnelled chloroform over that gasping face, and the cries ceased. What went on didn't escape from the mechanical horror. ‘Hold that—pass that towel, quick.’ Things were thrust in and out of Carly's enormous hands. Carly was holding a baby, a new baby. Her mind ran back to Kitch, red and new in his cradle. She had seen him the first night, when Eliza and Sandra didn't even know; scarlet and puckered, but such a dear little boy, not like this.

The Sister turned from the unconscious woman, stared at the baby. page 221 Her eyebrows frowned. Carly's voice came thin and weak, as if she were the patient.

‘Is the baby all right?’

‘Of course it isn't all right,’ said the Sister impatiently. ‘The mother's almost an idiot. What do they expect?’ She went on working, in a pattern of scarlet and white. Carly said to the other nurse, ‘Please take it—please take it.’ She felt a desperate sickness rushing behind her chest, and called out loud. The Sister's voice pecked furiously at her. ‘Nurse Hannay, stop that at once.’ Carly lay on the floor.

‘I can't help it,’ she thought, getting into the taxicab next morning. ‘I've failed, I'll never be any different, and I can't help it. I can't possibly stay there.’ The monkey-lines of worry across her forehead and under her eyes were so deep and dark that she looked dirty. It seemed mad to her, horrible, that every single person in the world had been born.

A good many of them, said the Sister, are feeble-minded. Often their babies are illegitimate. And we don't call in the doctor unless it's absolutely necessary, or give them chloroform too early. It's better to leave it to Nature.

She got out of the cab a little way from Laloma, and wandered along by the side of the road. Broom-bushes touched her, and she saw how the dark pods, turning brown, were twisted and split to show neat little rows of seeds, ever so pretty. Fly far away.…

White woollen babies; some girls had them as early as sixteen. She herself, if Trevor Sinjohn hadn't broken off the understanding, might have had a baby by now. All her girl friends did. She accepted the position mutely; they were right, she was wrong. It was right to be hideously tortured, like that woman on the high flat bed, so that in a little while you can say, ‘Oh, isn't he a duck? Look at the little creases on his wrists—that one means lots of money. Doesn't he look sweet, in his little blue bonnet?’

Not right, of course, for your baby to be like that one. Or dead, and unmentionable, into the bargain. Carly began to cry a little, slow, quiet tears for all the wrong babies in the world. And she hadn't the courage or the strength to help them, she could only stand there crying.

There's something wrong, she thought, with all our family. We take things too hard, and we're too ignorant. It's ignorant to love so much, and in this wasted way. And we fight, instead of trying to save one another. It didn't matter, it didn't matter, about Dad's losing his promotion. It didn't matter even about Eliza.…The cold steady tears were an exhaustion as well as a relief. She stood below the gates of page 222 Laloma, sunlight heaping on her hair like white ashes. She still had Augusta left. Augusta at first sight would be angry because Carly had given up her job, her good, safe job, and couldn't even keep this new one. She might have a dreadfully hard time finding another job. At twenty-four you have to work harder for it than at eighteen. You had to put on lipstick, and dazzle, and then…

Agnes down in the strong-room at Kirsty's first office, with Mr O'Keefe. You could hear from upstairs the girl's high, silly laugh, the man's voice low and urgent.

That woman on the high hard bed.

But I'll be quiet and do everything, she thought; mother really does love me and want me. She'll be wild, but that's only because she's afraid for us. In a while she'll get used to it, and I'll answer every advertisement, and go to shorthand classes at Tec.

Augusta opened the door. Carly barely heard her ‘There—what did I tell you?’ Through the rain of her tears she clutched at her mother. There was a tiny panic in her heart as she thought, ‘Some day, mother might die. Then I'll be all alone.’

‘Stop that crying. Pull yourself together. Do you want a doctor's bill, on top of everything else. Stop… poor old darling.…’

It won't be for a very long time that mother dies, thought Carly. Not for ages. Perhaps I'll be dead first; I might easily get run over. Kirsty died long before her mother.

She sobbed still, but she was content. All the love she had could be buried away in her mother, just as it was in Calver Street, before Kitch was there in his cradle. Augusta said, ‘I'll put a match under the soup. You do look a drowned rat. It beats me how I came to have such children. I suppose you all take after your father.’

Carly's Johannesburg gentleman gave her one look, and disowned her. No, he said, I'm afraid not, Carlotta. You're too soft. I wouldn't be likely to have a softy for my daughter, would I now? Softness is far from aristocratic.

She didn't want him any more. She couldn't quite stop crying, but she was sure she'd be perfectly happy so long as she had her mother.