Cut and Come Again by H.E. Bates Page A

day.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜And sponge his collar. I want him to go about decent. It won’t get done if you don’t do it.’
    â€˜All right.’
    Alice went downstairs again. Sounds of Holland’s razor scraping his day-old beard and of the cod hissing in the pan filled the kitchen. She turned the cod with a fork and then took up Holland’s collar and sponged it with the wetted fringe of her pinafore. The collar came up bright and fresh as ivory, and when finally Holland had finished shaving at the sink and had put on the collar again it was as though a small miracle had been performed. Holland was middle-aged, about fifty, and looked older in the shabby overcoat and oily collar. Now, shaved and with the collar cleaned again, he looked younger than he was. He looked no longer shabby, a shack, and a bit nondescript, but rather homely and essentially decent. He had a little of the tired, rather stunted and subservient look of the working man. His flesh was coarse, with deep pores, and his greyish hair came down stiff over his forehead. His eyes were dull and a little bulging. When Alice put the fish before him he sat low over the plate, scooped up the white flakes of fish with his knife and then sucked them into his mouth. He spat out the bones. Every time he spat out a bone he drank his tea, and when his cup was empty, Alice, standing by, filled it up again.
    None of these things surprised the girl. She had never seen anyone eat except like that, with the knife, low over the plate, greedily. Her father and motherate like it and she ate like it herself. So as she stood by the sink, waiting to fill up Holland’s cup, her eyes stared with the same abstract preoccupation as ever. They did not even change when Holland spoke, praising her:
    â€˜You done this fish all right, Alice.’
    â€˜Shall I git something else for you?’
    â€˜Git me a bit o’ cheese. Yes, you done that fish very nice, Alice. Very nice indeed.’
    Yet, though her eyes expressed nothing, she felt a sense of reassurance, very near to comfort, at Holland’s words. It was not deep: but it was enough to counteract the strangeness of her surroundings, to help deaden the perpetual sense of the mill-race, to drive away some of the eternal dampness about the place.
    But it was not enough to drive away her tiredness. She went to bed very early, as soon as she had washed Holland’s supper things and had eaten her own supper of bread and cheese. Her room was at the back of the mill. It had not been used for a long time; its dampness rose up in a musty cloud. Then when she lit her candle and set it on the washstand she saw that the wallpaper, rotten with dampness, was peeling off and hanging in ragged petals, showing the damp-green plaster beneath. Then she took her nightgown out of her case, undressed and stood for a moment naked, her body as thin as a boy’s and her little lemon-shaped breasts barely formed, before dropping the nightgown over her shoulders. A moment later she had put out the candle and was lying in the little iron bed.
    Then, as she lay there, curling up her legs for warmth in the damp sheets, she remembered something. She had said no prayers. She got out of bed at once and knelt down by the bed and words of mechanicalsupplication and thankfulness began to run at once through her mind: ‘Dear Lord, bless us and keep us. Dear Lord, help me to keep my heart pure,’ little impromptu gentle prayers of which she only half-understood the meaning. And all the time she was kneeling she could hear a background of other sounds: the mill-race roaring in the night, the wild occasional cries of birds from up the river, and the rumblings of Holland and his wife talking in their bedroom.
    And in their room Holland was saying to his wife: ‘She seems like a good gal.’
    â€˜She is. I like her,’ Mrs. Holland said. ‘I think she’s all right.’
    â€˜She done that fish