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

lovely.’
    â€˜Fish.’ Mrs. Holland remembered. And she told Holland of how Alice had brought up the roach in her hand, and as she told him her rather strange rich laughter broke out again and Holland laughed with her.
    â€˜Oh dear,’ Mrs. Holland laughed. ‘She’s a funny thing when you come to think of it.’
    â€˜As long as she’s all right,’ Holland said, ‘that’s all that matters. As long as she’s all right.’
    IV
    Alice was all right. It took less than a week for Holland to see that, although he distrusted a little Alice’s first showing with his fish. It seemed too good. He knew what servant girls could be like: all docile, punctual and anxious to please until they got the feeling of things, and then haughty and slovenly and sulky before you could turn round. He wasn’t having that sort of thing. The minute Alice was surly or had toomuch lip she could go. Easy get somebody else. Plenty more kids be glad of the job. So for the first few nights after Alice’s arrival he would watch her reflection in the soap-flecked shaving-mirror hanging over the sink while he scraped his beard. He watched her critically, tried to detect some flaw, some change, in her meek servitude. The mirror was a big round iron-framed concave mirror, so that Alice, as she moved slowly about with the fish-pan over the oil-stove, looked physically a little larger, and also vaguer and softer, than she really was. The mirror put flesh on her bony arms and filled out her pinafore. And looking for faults, Holland saw only this softening and magnifying of her instead. Then when he had dried the soap out of his ears and had put on the collar Alice had sponged for him he would sit down to the fish, ready to pounce on some fault in it. But the fish, like Alice, never seemed to vary. Nothing wrong with the fish. He tried bringing home different sorts of fish, untried sorts, tricky for Alice to cook; witch, whiting, sole and halibut, instead of his usual cod and hake. But it made no difference. The fish was always good. And he judged Alice by the fish: if the fish was all right Alice was all right. Upstairs, after supper, he would ask Mrs. Holland: ‘Alice all right to-day?’ and Mrs. Holland would say how quiet Alice was, or how good she was, and how kind she was, and that she couldn’t be without her for the world. ‘Well, that fish was lovely again,’ Holland would say.
    And gradually he saw that he had no need for suspicion. No need to be hard on the kid. She was all right. Leave the kid alone. Let her go on her own sweet way. Not interfere with her. And so he swung round, from the suspicious attitude to one almost of solicitude. Didn’t cost no more to be nice to the kidthan it did to be miserable. ‘Well, Alice, how’s Alice?’ The tone of his evening greeting became warmer, a little facetious, more friendly. ‘That’s right, Alice. Nice to be back home in the dry, Alice.’ In the mornings, coming downstairs he had to pass her bedroom door. He would knock on it to wake her. He got up in darkness, running downstairs in his stockinged feet, with his jacket and collar and tie slung over his arm. And pausing at Alice’s door he would say ‘Quart’ t’ seven, Alice. You gittin’ up, Alice?’ Chinks of candlelight round and under the door-frame, or her sleepy voice, would tell him if she were getting up. If the room were in darkness and she did not answer he would knock and call again. ‘Time to git up, Alice. Alice!’ One morning the room was dark and she did not answer at all. He knocked harder again, hard enough to drown any sleepy answer she might have given. Then, hearing nothing and seeing nothing, he opened the door.
    At the very moment he opened the door Alice was bending over the washstand, with a match in her hands, lighting her candle. ‘Oh! Sorry, Alice, I din’t hear you.’ In the moment