Harriet Said by Beryl Bainbridge

Author:Beryl Bainbridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2016-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

11

Harriet’s father saw the Tsar in the city with his arm in a sling. Harriet said perhaps he had only sprained it when he jumped from the window, and it was probably not a serious injury. She offered to call on Mrs Biggs but I said it was unwise to go so soon after the adventure in the garden.

We talked at length about the evening I had been locked in the church with the Tsar, but she did not say she had closed the door. We wrote in the diary that we had been mysteriously imprisoned by persons unknown, but I knew it was Harriet. I wanted to ask her if it was part of the plan but I was afraid she might call me stupid. She told me her father had said the Tsar usually crossed the river on the ferry boat on a Wednesday to visit the firm’s other factory.

‘We’ll go tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We’ll tell them we’re going to the museum and they’ll be delighted.’

‘He mightn’t go after all, not if his arm is bad.’

‘We’ll go anyway.’

We travelled on a morning train. I was made to wear my school uniform but Harriet said it slimmed me down anyway. We went on a tram to the docks, bouncing up and down on the wooden seats. The landing stage was littered with papers and refuse and old men in white mufflers sat on benches and stared out to sea. We sat beside them for a time waiting for the boat to come in, trying to adopt just such an attitude of forgetfulness and isolation, but we were too alive. They did not look directly at anything, not even at the gulls that circled and screamed above the oily stretch of water. Harriet said they had the view imprinted on their eyes long ago, and only thought of distant things connected with the landscape.

An old man on a bench further along began to whistle between his teeth, tapping his stick on the ground. When the red-red-robin goes bob-bob-bobbing a-long … A row of thin knees jerked up and down, a row of polished boots clumped in time to the tune. Any moment now, I thought, Harriet would fling arms wide and sing the words at the top of her voice. She was probably only waiting for a tired chorus of old women in shawls and tattered skirts to dance over the stones, massive bosoms a-bobbing, before she began. Seagulls flashed white wings in the sun, flying across the tin roof of the pier. The hands of the clocks that indicated the time of arrival of boats from Birkenhead and Wallasey moved jerkily into place. A woman with a pink face and yellow cardigan leaned against the rail. ‘Red-red-robin,’ sang Harriet loudly, stamping both feet and leaning out over the bench to smile at the row of old men. The whistling stopped, knees stiffened, boots rested heavily on the stones; the row of small eyes stared unresisting into the sun.

We sat there for two hours, waiting for the Tsar, watching each passenger patiently and carefully.

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