‘What ain’t?’
‘Nothink,’ said Pearl.
And then it was strange. Pearl’s face swelled. It was red and bursting. It was going to cry. This made it different, now that it was a matter of sides. There was no second thought on the kitchen steps, you were on the side of the Pearl.
Tom Wilcocks pulled an ugly, winking face.
Ah well, he said, he would go and clean the harness now.
His feet slopped loose inside his big boots.
‘Why did you cry, Pearl?’ asked Fanny.
Pearl slapped the water in the tin basin.
‘Stop tormentin’ me,’ she said. ‘’S none of your business. That’s why.’
Such things were important and mysterious. They happened, and you had to accept. The face of Pearl that just could not be read. Her thick face swelled and cried. She chewed the corner of her handkerchief, on damp afternoons, when windows sweated, and the dogs crouched in the yard, their thin tails tucked between their naked legs.
Oh, they were long, the long wet afternoons. They did not close till five, when Tom Wilcocks brought the pails of milk. He walked across the yard, and the rain had wet his hair. It was plastered black.
‘Let us go down to the flat and pick mushrooms, it is the weather,’ Theodora said on a day of rain.
‘Yes, yes,’ cried Fanny.
It was the weather, it was the time, when the long, sharp golden sword sliced the watery sky, and steam rose from cow dung. The air was heavy and gentle as the breath of cows. Their blue tongues licked, slapped at the brown rocks of salt.
‘Let us go behind the cow bails,’ Fanny said. ‘That is a place we have not thought of before. And there are sure to be mushrooms. It is just what they like.’
Behind the bails where the nettles were, which the rain had feathered, there was not so much a smell of cows as of nettles and of crushed earth. It was still and green behind the bails. Also a little frightening. The air began to choke the throat. The drops on the nettles hung suspended. And Tom Wilcocks and Pearl Brawne.
‘What do you want?’ asked Pearl.
Or she hissed. She hissed like a white and golden goose disturbed on its eggs beside the creek.
‘We are looking for mushrooms,’ said Theodora, right into Pearl’s hissing face.
Sticks broke. Under Tom’s feet. He was thinking where to put his hands.
‘You run along,’ said Pearl. ‘There ain’t no mushrooms here.’
And now you could see some strange and palpitating thing had taken place, unknown, or by accident, in Pearl’s blouse. Pearl had burst, pinker than any split mushroom, white-cleft. Pearl’s front was open. It was terrible and strange. And the terror and strangeness mounted. It took you. You had to laugh.
‘Oooh,’ said Fanny’s voice.
You began to point, you began to sing.
‘Tom Wilcocks and Pearl Brawne! Tom Wilcocks and Pearl Brawne!’ the voices of the Goodmans sang, but thin, and changed, and metallic.
Tom Wilcocks laughed through his nose. He turned his face aside and spat.
‘You’re a pair of bold little girls,’ cried Pearl. ‘I hate you.’
You could see now that she really did. Hate was in the upstanding heads of nettles, and the wet, black, crushed earth.
It was time to go.
What had happened was put away, turned over, and left. Only once, Fanny had begun to giggle.
‘What is it?’ Theodora asked.
‘Pearl Brawne lost her buttons,’ Fanny giggled and sang. ‘In the nettles. In the nettles.’
But Theodora did not wish to pursue this theme. She walked away. She would not think, or only a little. For the group behind the cow bails had a great spreading shadow, which grew and grew, it was difficult to ignore. On the lustier, gustier days, cloud and hill and the sinuous movement of the creek reminded. Tom and Pearl were astride the world. Tom’s laugh was thick and thoughtful, in the yard, behind the twisted hawthorn, or holding in his hands blunt eels that he had pulled struggling out of the creek. Tom’s laugh would not come right out of his mouth, it lay just behind his lips, and his eyes were half closed. Sometimes Theodora saw Tom’s face very clearly, right down to the dark, glistening hairs that sprouted from his nose. Or the face of Pearl, recoiling in disgust from young birds, that Theodora brought to touch. But Pearl stroked the swallows’ eggs, and where her blouse dipped down there were two little speckles like the speckles on an egg.
Cloud bred cloud on heavy afternoons, where Theodora walked. The water in the creek was brown and warm. Frogs brooded, and magpies flew low. Light yawned out of the hins, and from the yellow thickets of the gorse, Theodora stood and let the water lip her legs. She could just hear. Now light and water lay smoothly together. She took off her clothes. She would lie in the water. And soon her thin brown body was the shallow, browner water. She would not think. She would drift. As still as a stick. And as thin. But on the water circles widen and cut. If Pearl Brawne took off her clothes, Theodora said, and lay in the water, the hills would move, she is fine as a big white rose, and I am a stick. If it is good to be a stick, said Theodora, it is better to be a big white rose.
Not long after this what happened, happened.
It was Sunday in the dining-room. The table blazed. And Father was carving mutton with the big knife. Sunday always filled the dining-room, and the dining-table never looked so shiny, nor so round. Week days were thin days, by comparison, thinly scattered with cold meat. Watching Father carve the mutton it was like somebody with music, someone with a ’cello in his hands. Father loved to carve the joint. It was his pride. Sunday was like this. It continued all along.
‘Take the joint to the kitchen, Pearl,’ said Father, ‘and keep it warm for you girls.’
‘Yes, Mr Goodman,’ Pearl said.
But this was where it happened. Pearl fell down. Between the table and the door Pearl Brawne fell, and there never was such a harvest, such a falling gold. Pearl lay on the carpet with the leg of mutton, and gravy on her face. What had happened was immense.
‘Pearl, Pearl,’ cried Fanny. ‘Dear Pearl! What has happened? Pearl is dead!’
And then Father was helping Pearl, who still had spots of gravy on her face.
‘It is nothing,’ said Mother. ‘Fanny, sit in your place. Do not fuss over Pearl. It is nothing,’ she repeated.
Mother was very calm and straight, even though Sunday lay in pieces in the dining-room. And when Pearl had gone to the kitchen, she looked at Father and said, ‘I thought as much.’
And her rings flashed.
You knew that Mother had decided, what Gertie Stepper would have called, the fate of Pearl. But it was deeper than this. Now whole mirrors rippled and walls stirred. There was a general throbbing. You could put in your hand and touch the heart.
So Pearl Brawne was to leave. She cried. She looked lumpy in her hat. She said, ‘Yous would never understand.’
Tom Wilcocks had already gone.
‘Where is Tom?’ Fanny asked.
‘Tom has gone,’ said Gertie Stepper.
‘Why?’ asked Fanny.
But Gertie only said, ‘Because.’
Soon it was all over, even the last gust of Pearl in the kitchen before she left. She cried enough to burst her seams, and outside, the cart waited with her things.
Afterwards the house continued to stir with the great mystery that had taken place. There was always a great deal that never got explained.
‘I would like to know,’ said Theodora, ‘I would like to know everything.’
Steam rose from the sheets, for it was ironing time.
‘There’s a lot that isn’t for little girls,’ said Gertie Stepper.