§ 10
Mrs. Weston said: “Jus’ look at your hair! You’ve bin larking abeaout, I darebebound.”
Catherine did not contradict her. “Larking about” was a punishable misdemeanour.
“Everybody was larking about,” she put in, irrelevantly.
“You’re a disgrace,” continued Mrs. Weston, equally irrelevantly. Then as an afterthought: “Larking about with the boys, I daresay....”
Catherine did not reply.
“Well, you’re going to have a sound thrashing, that’s all, so you may as well know.... I’m about sick of your hooligan ways....”
Catherine went white. She was not afraid of a sound thrashing (they were not very fearsome things when you got used to them); it was the atmosphere of strained expectancy that was almost intolerable. She went whiter when her mother said:
“Have your supper first.... There’s some cold rice pudding....”
She ate in silence. Her mother was rushing in and out of the scullery preparing her father’s supper. In the middle of all this her father entered. He was tired and hoarse after the evening’s effort. He noticed the strained atmosphere. He said to Catherine:
“What’s the matter, Cathie?”
Mrs. Weston began to talk very fast and very harshly. Her voice was like the sudden rending of a strip of calico.
“She’s bin behaving herself badly again, that’s what’s amiss with her.... Larking about all this evening, she was. A regular disgrace. I tell you, I’m not going to put up with it. She’s going to get a sound thrashing to teach her to remember....”
Simultaneously Mrs. Weston planked down a plate of greens and vegetables in front of her husband. He attacked them nervously.
“It’s not good enough,” he said, after a pause, with the air of being vaguely reproachful against nobody in particular, “I tell you it’s not good enough.... I don’t know why these things should happen. It’s not as if she was a little girl....”
That was all he said.
The sound thrashing began soon afterwards. It was an extremely unscientific battery of slaps, in which Catherine dodged as best she could amongst the crowded furniture of the kitchen. Once she lurched against the table and knocked over the vinegar-bottle.
“I wish you wouldn’t ...” began Mr. Weston, and then stopped and continued eating.
After some moments of this gymnastic display both parties were hot and flushed with exertion, and the finale began when Mrs. Weston opened the door of the lobby and manœuvred Catherine out of the kitchen.
“Off you go,” she said. “Straight to bed ... str-h-aight to b-bed....”
The chase proceeded upstairs. Mrs. Weston’s stertorous breathing and heavy footfalls were the most conspicuous sounds.... A few seconds afterwards a loud banging of an upstairs door announced that hostilities were over.
In her tiny back bedroom Catherine sat down on a chair for breath. She was not physically hurt; in her “larking about” with boys and girls of her own age she had often paused for breath like this, and at such times there had been joy in her heart even when there had been pain in her body. But now she was conscious only of profound indignity. Her father’s vague protest echoed in her memory: “It’s not as if she were a little girl....”
She undressed and got into bed. It was quite dark, and she felt acutely miserable. Far away the pumping engine at the water-works whispered, as it always did at night-time, “Chug-chug ... chug-chug ... chug-chug-chug....” Ten, twelve years had passed since she had counted the five knobs on the brass rail of the bed. She was growing up, out of a child into a girl. She was not growing up without faults: she knew that. The worst trait in her was temper ... she would have to conquer that. She must learn self-control....
From below came the old familiar sound of her father taking off his boots and dumping them under the sofa. “H-rooch-flop ... h’rooch-flop.” ... That sound was bound up with all her memories of childhood.
Ten minutes later there came a cautious tap at her door, and her father entered in an intermediate stage of attire. He lit a candle clumsily and shone it down upon her. She did not move. He prodded her with his thumb in a vague, experimental way. She made no reply, though her eyes were wide open and staring into his.
“I say, Cathie,” he began, vaguely and nervously, “you’ve bin misbehaving, I’m told.... It’s too bad, you know.... Come now ... be a good girl and go to sleep.”
Pause.
Then: “Kiss me.”
It was the first time for many years that he had asked for such a thing. With no apparent reason at all the tears welled up into her eyes, tears that she had hidden since her tenth birthday.
She was just about to raise her head to meet his when a drop of liquid candle grease fell on her bare arm. The sharp, unexpected pain made her a prey to a sudden gust of tempestuous emotion....
“Oh, go away,” she muttered angrily, “don’t come bothering me ... I’m tired....” She crouched down beneath the bedclothes with her face turned away from him.
Mr. Weston retired a little sheepishly.
“Oh, well,” he said, “if you’re going to be sulky ... I suppose....”
When he had gone she cried as she had never cried before, and all because she had spurned his proffered reconciliation. From the other side of the thin partition that separated the two rooms, she could hear the sharp “plock” as her father wrenched his collar off the stud, and the steady nasal monotone of her mother’s voice. She could not discern any words, but from the vicious way in which her father kept stumbling up against things she guessed that they were quarrelling....