Netty went cheerfully home to tea, a little after Sid.
And there was Jess Oakes sitting with Sid in front of the television set. Netty went into the kitchen, to her mother.
“Here you are,” said Mrs. Barr. “You can take all the teas in.” She was loading a tray.
“When did she come?” asked Netty.
“With Sid. Sid said she was your friend.” Netty said nothing. “She’s a lot older than you are, Netty.”
“She’s exactly my age. So she says.”
“Well, I suppose with that face and that figure—or that no figure-she could be any age. Any age.”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Barr looked thoughtfully at Netty, put down the bread knife she still held, and with decision set her hands on her hips. “Netty!”
“Yes?”
“I don’t care what age she is, I like your friends better washed than that.”
Netty gaped at her mother.
“She smells,” said Mrs. Barr. “I don’t say it’s unwashed body; I don’t say it’s unwashed clothes—although I don’t think much of hers. All I know is she smells nasty.”
“Rotty,” said Netty under her breath.
“Don’t bring her again,” said Mrs. Barr crisply.
Netty took the tea tray in to the other two. In the semidark they all munched and sipped while they watched the TV serial. But Netty was watching Jess Oakes. The girl only seemed to munch and sip; she ate nothing, drank nothing.
A friend called for Sid, and he went out. Mrs. Barr looked in to ask if the girls wanted more tea; Netty said no. When her mother had gone, Netty turned off the television and switched on the light. She faced Jess Oakes. “What do you want?”
The girl’s green glance slid away from Netty. “No harm. To know something.”
“What?”
“The way home.”
Netty did not ask where she had been living, or why she was lost, or any other commonsense questions. They weren’t the right questions, she knew. She just said savagely, “I wish I knew what was going on inside your head, Jess Oakes.”
Jess Oakes laughed almost aloud, as though Netty had said something really amusing. She reached out her hand and touched Netty, for the first time; her touch was cool, damp. “You shall,” she said. “You shall.”
And where was Netty now? If she were asleep and dreaming, the falling asleep had been very sudden, at the merest touch of a cool, damp hand. But certainly Netty must be dreaming. …
She dreamed that she was in a strange room filled with a greenish light that seemed partly to come in through two windows, of curious shape, set together rather low down at one side. The walls and ceilings of this chamber were continuous, as in a dome, all curved. There was nothing inside the dome-shaped chamber except the greenish light, of a curious intensity, and Netty. For some reason Netty wanted to look out of the two windows, but she knew that before she could do that, something was required of her. In her dreaming state, she was not at first sure what this was, except that it was tall—very tall—and green. Of course, green: green in spring and summer, and softly singing to itself with leaves; in autumn, yellow and brown and red, and its leaves falling. In winter, leafless. A tree, a forest tree, a tree of the forest, a tree of Epping Forest. A tree, a hundred trees, a thousand trees, a choice of all the trees of Epping Forest. She had been to the forest; she was older than Sid, and therefore she knew the direction in which the forest lay, the direction in which one would have to go to reach the forest. Her knowledge of the forest and its whereabouts was in the green-glowing room, and it passed from her in that room and became someone else’s knowledge, too. …
Now Netty knew that she was free to look out of the windows of the room. Their frames were curiously curved; there was not glass in them, but some other greenish gray substance. She approached the windows; she looked through them; and she saw into the Barrs’ sitting room, and she saw Netty Barr sitting in her chair by the television set, huddled in sudden sleep.
She saw herself apart from herself, and she cried out in terror, so that she woke, and she was sitting in her chair, and the girl who called herself Jess Oakes was staring at her with her gray-green eyes, smiling.
“Thank you,” said Jess Oakes. “Now I know all I need to know.” She got up, unmistakably to go. “Good-bye.”
She went out of the sitting room, leaving the door open; Netty heard her go out of the front door, leaving that open, too. The doors began to bang in a wind that had risen. The front gate banged as well.
Mrs. Barr came crossly out of the kitchen to complain. She saw that Netty was alone in the sitting room. “Has she gone then?”
Netty nodded, dumb.
They went into the hall together. Scattered along the hall were pieces of clothing: one gym shoe by the sitting room door, another by the coat hooks; a dingy green dress, looking like something out of a dressing-up box, by the open front door. …
Mrs. Barr ran to the front gate and looked up and down the road. No one; just old Mr. Brown on the lookout, as usual. Mrs. Barr called to him, “Have you seen anyone?”
“No. Who should I have seen?”
Mrs. Barr came back, shaken. “She can’t have gone stark naked,” she said. Then, as an afterthought: “She can’t have gone, anyway.” Then, again: “But she has gone.”
Netty was looking at the gym shoes in the hall. She could see inside one of them, and she could see a name printed there. It would not be JESS OAKES; it would be some other name. Now she would find out the true identity of the girl with the greenish eyes. She stooped, picked up the shoe, read the name: NETTY BARR.
“Those are the gym shoes you lost at school,” said Mrs. Barr. “How did she get hold of them? Why was she wearing them? What kind of a girl or a woman was she, with that smell on her? Where did she come from? And where’s she gone? Netty, you bad girl, what kind of a friend was she?”
“She wasn’t my friend,” said Netty.
“What was she then? And where’s she gone—where’s she gone?”
“I don’t know,” said Netty. “But guess.”
At the River Gates
Lots of sisters I had (said the old man), good girls, too, and one elder brother. Just the one. We were at either end of the family: the eldest, my brother, John—we always called him Beany, for some reason; then the girls, four of them; then me. I was Tiddler, and the reason for that was plain.
Our father, was a flour miller, and we lived just beside the mill. It was a water mill, built right over the river, with the mill wheel underneath. To understand what happened that wild night, all those years ago, you have to understand a bit about the working of the millstream. About a hundred yards before the river reached the mill, it divided. The upper river flowed on to power the mill, as I’ve said; the lower river, leaving the upper river through sluice gates, flowed to one side of the mill and past it; and then the upper and lower rivers joined up again well below the mill. The sluice gates could be opened or shut by the miller to let more or less water through from the upper to the lower river. You can see the use of that: the miller controlled the flow of water to power his mill; he could also draw off any floodwaters that came down.
Being a miller’s son, I can never remember not understanding that. I was a little tiddler, still at school, when my brother, Beany, began helping my father in the mill. He was as good as a man, my father said. He was strong, and he learned the feel of the grain, and he was clever with the mill machinery, and he got on with the other men in the mill—there were only ten of them, counting two carters. He understood the gates, of course, and how to get just the right head of water for the mill. And he liked it all. He liked the work he did, and the life; he liked the mill, and the river, and the long riverbank. One day he’d be the miller after my father, everyone said.
I was too young to feel jealousy about that, but I would never have felt jealousy of Beany, because Beany was the best brother you could have had. I loved and admired him more than anyone I knew or could i
magine knowing. He was very good to me. He used to take me with him when you might have thought a little boy would have been in the way. He took me with him when he went fishing, and he taught me to fish. I learned patience, then, from Beany. There were plenty of roach and dace in the river, and sometimes we caught trout or pike, and once we caught an eel, and I was first of all terrified and then screaming with excitement at the way it whipped about on the bank, but Beany held it and killed it, and my mother made it into eel pie. He knew about the fish in the river and the little creatures, too. He showed me freshwater shrimps and leeches—“Look, Tiddler, they make themselves into croquet hoops when they want to go anywhere!”—and he showed me the little underwater cottages of caddisworms. He knew where to get good watercress for Sunday tea; you could eat watercress from our river, in those days.
We had an old boat on the river, and Beany would take it upstream to inspect the banks for my father. The banks had to be kept sound; if there was a breach, it would let the water escape and reduce the water-power for the mill. Beany took Jess, our dog, with him in the boat, and he often took me. Beany was the only person I’ve ever known who could point out a kingfisher’s nest in the riverbank. He knew about birds. He once showed me a flycatcher’s nest in the brickwork below the sluice gates, just above where the water dashed and roared at its highest. Once, when we were in the boat, he pointed ahead to an otter in the water. I held on to Jess’s collar then.
It was Beany who taught me to swim. One summer it was hotter than anyone remembered, and Beany was going from the mill up to the gates to shut in more water. Jess was following him, and as Beany went, he gave me a wink, so I followed, too, although I didn’t know why. As usual, he opened the gates with the great iron spanner, almost as long in the handle as he was tall. Then he went down to the pool in the lower river, as if to see the water level there. But as he went, he was unbuttoning his flour-whitened waistcoat; by the time he reached the pool he was naked, and he dived straight in. He came up with his hair plastered over his eyes, and he called to me, “Come on, Tiddler! Just time for a swimming lesson!” Jess sat on the bank and watched us.
Jess was really my father’s dog, but she attached herself to Beany. She loved Beany. Everyone loved Beany, and he was good to everyone. Especially, as I’ve said, to me. Just sometimes he’d say, “I’m off on my own now, Tiddler,” and then I knew better than to ask to go with him. He’d go sauntering up the riverbank by himself, except for Jess at his heels. I don’t think he did anything very particular when he went off on his own. Just the river and the riverbank were happiness enough for him.
He was still not old enough to have got himself a girl, which might have changed things a bit, but he wasn’t too young to go to the war. The war broke out in 1914, when I was still a boy, and Beany went.
It was sad without Beany, but it was worse than that. I was too young to understand then, but looking back, I realize what was wrong. There was fear in the house. My parents became gloomy and somehow secret. So many young men were being killed at the front. Other families in the village had had word of a son’s death. The news came in a telegram. I overheard my parents talking of those deaths, those telegrams, although not in front of the girls or me. I saw my mother once, in the middle of the morning, kneeling by Beany’s bed, praying.
So every time Beany came home on leave, alive, we were lucky.
But when Beany came, he was different. He loved us as much, but he was different. He didn’t play with me as he used to do; he would sometimes stare at me as though he didn’t see me. When I shouted, “Beany!” and rushed at him, he would start as if he’d woken up. Then he’d smile and be good to me, almost as he used to be. But more often than he used to, he’d be off all by himself up the riverbank, with Jess at his heels. My mother, who longed to have him within her sight for every minute of his leave, used to watch him go and sigh. Once I heard her say to my father that the riverbank did Beany good, as if he were sickening for some strange disease. Once one of the girls was asking Beany about the front and the trenches, and he was telling her this and that, and we were all interested, and suddenly he stopped and said, “No. It’s hell.” And walked away alone, up the green, quiet riverbank. I suppose if one place was hell, then the other was heaven to him.
After Beany’s leaves were over, the millhouse was gloomy again, and my father had to work harder, without Beany’s help in the mill. Nowadays he had to work the gates all by himself, a thing that Beany had been taking over from him. If the gates needed working at night, my father and Beany had always gone there together. My mother hated it nowadays when my father had to go to the gates alone at night; she was afraid he’d slip and fall in the water, and although he could swim, accidents could happen to a man alone in the dark. But of course, my father wouldn’t let her come with him, or any of my sisters, and I was still considered much too young. That irked me.
Well, one season had been very dry and the river level had dropped. The gates were kept shut to get up a head of water for the mill. Then clouds began to build up heavily on the horizon, and my father said he was sure it was going to rain, but it didn’t. All day storms rumbled in the distance. In the evening the rain began. It rained steadily; my father had already been once to the gates to open the flashes. He was back at home, drying off in front of the fire. The rain still drove against the windows. My mother said, “It can’t come down worse than this.” She and my sisters were still up with my father. Even I wasn’t in bed, although I was supposed to have been. No one could have slept for the noise of the rain.
Suddenly the storm grew worse—much worse. It seemed to explode over our heads. We heard a pane of glass in the skylight over the stairs shatter with the force of it, and my sisters ran with buckets to catch the water pouring through. Oddly, my mother didn’t go to see the damage; she stayed with my father, watching him like a lynx. He was fidgeting up and down, paying no attention to the skylight, either, and suddenly he said he’d have to go up to the gates again and open everything to carry all possible floodwater into the lower river. This was what my mother had been dreading. She made a great outcry, but she knew it was no use. My father put on his tarpaulin jacket again and took his oil lamp and a thick stick—I don’t know why, nor did he, I think. Jess always hated being out in the rain, but she followed him. My mother watched him from the back door, lamenting, and urging him to be careful. A few steps from the doorway, and you couldn’t see him any longer for the driving rain.
My mother’s lingering at the back door gave me my chance. I got my boots on and an oilskin cape I had (I wasn’t a fool, even if I was little), and I whipped out of the front door and worked my way round in the shelter of the house to the back and then took the path my father had taken to the river, and made a dash for it, and caught up with my father and Jess, just as they were turning up the way toward the gates. I held on to Jess’s tail for quite a bit before my father noticed me. He was terribly angry, of course, but he didn’t want to turn back with me, and he didn’t like to send me back alone, and perhaps in his heart of hearts he was glad of a little human company on such a night. So we all three struggled up to the gates together. Just by the gates my father found me some shelter between a tree trunk and a stack of driftwood. There I crouched, with Jess to keep me company.
I was too small to help my father with the gates, but there was one thing I could do. He told me to hold his lamp so that the light shone on the gates and what he was doing. The illumination was very poor, partly because of the driving rain, but at least it was better than nothing, and anyway, my father knew those gates by heart. Perhaps he gave me the job of holding the light so that I had something to occupy my mind and keep me from being afraid.
There was plenty to be afraid of on that night of storm.
Directing what light I could onto my father also directed and concentrated my attention on him. I could see his laborious motions as he heaved the great spanner into place. Then he began to try to rack up with it, but the wind and the rain we
re so strong that I could see he was having the greatest difficulty. Once I saw him stagger sideways nearly into the blackness of the river. Then I wanted to run out from my shelter and try to help him, but he had strictly forbidden me to do any such thing, and I knew he was right.
Young as I was, I knew—it came to me as I watched him—that he couldn’t manage the gates alone in that storm. I suppose he was a man already just past the prime of his strength. The wind and the rain were beating him; the river would beat him.
I shone the light as steadily as I could and gripped Jess by the collar, and I think I prayed.
I was so frightened then that afterward, when I wasn’t frightened, I could never be sure of what I had seen, or what I thought I had seen, or what I imagined I had seen. Through the confusion of the storm I saw my father struggling and staggering, and as I peered and peered, my vision seemed to blur and to double, so that I began sometimes to see one man, sometimes two. My father seemed to have a shadow self besides himself, who steadied him, heaved with him, worked with him, and at last together they had opened the sluice gates and let the flood through.
When it was done, my father came back to where Jess and I were and leaned against the tree. He was gasping for breath and exhausted and had a look on his face that I cannot describe. From his expression I knew that he had felt the shadow with him, just as I had seen it. And Jess was agitated, too, straining against my hold, whining.
I looked past my father, and I could still see something by the sluice gates: a shadow that had separated itself from my father and lingered there. I don’t know how I could have seen it in the darkness. I don’t know. My father slowly turned and looked in the direction that he saw me looking. The shadow began to move away from the gates, away from us; it began to go up the long riverbank beyond the gates, into the darkness there. It seemed to me that the rain and the wind stilled a little as it went.
Jess wriggled from my grasp and was across the gates and up the riverbank, following the vanished shadow. I had made no move, uttered no word, but my father said to me, “Let them go!” I looked up at him, and his face was streaming with tears as well as with rain.