The Well by Elizabeth Jolley Page A

that hostel and … and she’s got a job, the typing job.’
    â€˜Well,’ Hester said, ‘that’s as it should be. She couldn’t go back to the convent at her age.’ She was trying to be very sensible. ‘And it’s very good that she’s been given the chance. There’s nothing to cry about, now is there!’
    â€˜Sometimes,’ Katherine sobbed, ‘I wish for, wish for …’
    â€˜Company of your own age?’ Hester, trying again, was hiding the fact that she was very much shaken, ‘It’s very natural that you should wish for young people and especially for, for Joanna,’ the name came out in an artificial tone, ‘since you grew up together and must feel like, feel, feel – feel – like sisters – almost.’ Even as she spoke Hester felt a kind of petulance. She had no idea that Katherine was not perfectly content. She felt increasingly a mixture of hurt and annoyance as well as fear. This friendship carried a threat; things read about in newspapers. She wished that the girl had tried to escape and been caught and kept in with her sentence doubled. ‘Good Behaviour,’ Joanna had written in her little pink letter, ‘what a laugh! Here I am out before time, but.’ The writing paper was wickedly innocent. Hester would have liked to screw it up into a tight ball and burn it. Annoyance made her tremble. Hadn’t she, Hester Harper, grown up entirely with her grandmother and her father and a few farm workers for company. Apart from the time when Hilde Herzfeld was there and the two years at the boarding school she had spent all her life on the farm. Why then, the bitter voice inside her persisted, was Katherine so ungrateful. She, Hester, was sure she was doing everything possible to make a happy life for Katherine, a happy life, she thought, for them both. Suddenly she felt terribly unhappy and afraid that her anger would show itself. Her head throbbed; she hoped she was not going to have one of her bad headaches. She wondered if all the affection had been purely on her side. Restraining herself, for she would have liked to shake Katherine, she put an arm round the girl’s shoulders.
    â€˜Come along!’ she said as cheerfully as she could. ‘If you don’t mind sharing your bedroom, as we don’t have much space here, why don’t you answer your letter now and invite Joanna for a few days or a week. Yes, perhaps a week? Would that make you happy?’ Hester was aware that her voice was self conscious and gruff. As she spoke she wished she was not saying the things she was saying. Immediately she pictured the two girls endlessly together, perhaps laughing about her behind her back; talking in low voices in their room at night – with the door closed so that she would hear their voices, intimate, with little bursts of mirth and affection from which she would be excluded. The week would be unbearably long, but she had said it now.
    â€˜Oh Miss Harper, dear!’ Katherine exclaimed. ‘Oh could I?’
    â€˜Yes, yes of course Kathy,’ Hester said. ‘I insist you write at this moment.’ A kind of wisdom invaded her and she felt grateful to herself that she had had the sense to suggest inviting only one girl. ‘I, of course,’ she said, ‘will pay the return train fare and we can drive to town to meet the train.’
    â€˜Oh thank you Miss Harper, dear! How simple it all sounds when you talk about it.’ Katherine, not realizing that Hester was thinking in terms of a ticket valid for one week only, leaned her flushed face against Hester’s stiff black sleeve. Thank you Miss Harper, dear.’ She had stopped crying at once. Hester did not need to pat her shoulder and say, ‘there there’ over and over again. She did pat the shoulder, awkwardly, once and, reaching for her stick, she struggled to her feet. The low sofa made the struggle necessary.