The Song of the Wren

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Yes,’ he said and her lips were stained with purple.

  He found it difficult to re-open the subject of her name and at last said instead:

  ‘Your mother didn’t appear at lunch, I noticed. I hope she isn’t unwell.’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry about her,’ she said and in her voice there was a note of indifference that bordered closely on contempt.

  Then, after half an hour of talking trivialities and sipping coffee, she suddenly said:

  ‘I think after all I’ll lie in the sun. It seems a pity not to enjoy it. Will you excuse me while I go and put on my sun-suit?’

  She went into the hotel and came back after ten minutes or so wearing a pure white two-piece sun-suit and then proceeded to lie in one of the long chairs the hotel provided, face uplifted to the sun.

  The perfection of her figure captivated him deeply. Her breasts were taut and deep. Her bare navel was like some small exquisite snail shell. Her entire body was tanned to a golden even brown.

  ‘You are marvellously tanned,’ he said.

  ‘Oh! I work hard at it.’

  ‘So you should. A figure like that deserves it.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m glad you approve.’

  She shut her eyes. Then after lying in that supine position for twenty minutes or so she suddenly sat up, produced a bottle of sun lotion from her handbag and began to oil her arms, legs and thighs until they glistened in the sun.

  ‘Now I must cook on the other side,’ she said. ‘Would you care to do my back?’

  ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure.’

  Slowly, caressively, he oiled her back and shoulders and then the backs of her thighs. At the first touch of his palm on her thighs she gave a great sigh, half turned her face and gave him a long slow look that was itself caressive.

  ‘I hope I’m not bungling it,’ he said.

  ‘You are quite expert.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And very gentle.’

  He swept his hand down the full stretch of her right leg and she responded by saying:

  ‘It’s really very nice finding someone like you here. The last time I was here the place was full of stuffed dummies. All Germans. All heel-clicking and bowing and on parade and bridge-playing – bah!’

  ‘Oh! you have been before? Well, they are still here.’

  ‘What a difference there is between the English and the Germans.’

  ‘A million miles.’

  ‘Do you find anything Germanic in me?’

  ‘Not a shred. To me you look pure English.’

  ‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that.’

  It seemed a good moment in which to renew the subject of her mother and he said:

  ‘I don’t quite understand about your mother. Why is her name Hauptman and yours—’

  ‘She and my father were not married.’

  ‘I am sorry I embarrassed you.’

  ‘Oh! it doesn’t embarrass me.’

  ‘But your name should still be Hauptman.’

  ‘I prefer my father’s name.’

  Again he was mystified and again decided to drop the subject. She had different views:

  ‘He was a journalist. He worked in Munich before the war. And then—’

  She broke off and slowly turned her entire body and lay on her back.

  ‘What were you going to say?’ he said.

  ‘Oh! she killed him. That’s all.’

  ‘She what?’

  ‘You can put a little more on my front now if you like,’ she said and again she gave him a long caressive smile. ‘Have you been flirting with her? My mother I mean.’

  ‘I think we’ve been quite good friends.’

  ‘She’s a widow, don’t forget. Widows have needs.’

  He laughed. ‘For a moment I thought you said weeds.’

  ‘No, no. Deep, deep needs.’

  He brushed his hands across her shoulders and then centrally across her body. The gold-brown glistening of her skin in the full brilliance of the afternoon sun captivated him to such an extent that he was totally unprepared for the shadow that suddenly fell across it.

  He turned his head to see Mrs Hauptman standing full in the path of the sun.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt your labours, but you promised to take me for a drive at four o’clock.’

  Suddenly he knew that he was in a trap. He was impotent either to argue or deny. To his intense annoyance Mrs Hauptman actually smiled and said:

  ‘I’ve been waiting on the terrace. It’s already ten past now.’

  ‘I’ll just wash my hands.’

  Half savagely, baffled, without another word, he strode into the hotel.

  As he and Mrs Hauptman drove along the opposite shore of the lake it was his turn to be wrapped into a withdrawn, darkly stubborn mood.

  ‘You are very quiet this afternoon.’

  ‘There are times when I like being quiet.’

  Mrs Hauptman gave a short provocative laugh.

  ‘What has that daughter of mine been saying to you? I should have warned you that she is a great liar.’

  ‘You might also have warned me that she is very attractive.’

  ‘It took you no time at all to discover that.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘She is an impossible man-hunter. She has been in love with fifty men – well, I say in love—’

  The scorn in her voice was sharp and acid.

  ‘Would you care to stop for some tea?’ he said.

  No, she wouldn’t, she said. But there was another, smaller lake some few kilometres farther on – she had seen it once before and would now like to see it once again.

  It took them another twenty minutes to drive to the smaller lake. Sheltered by miniature hills everywhere dotted about with dark candles of cypress it had a depth of translucent blue as clear as glass in the warm afternoon sun.

  After he had stopped the car by the lakeside Mrs Hauptman’s first act was to take off the white cardigan she was wearing. Underneath it she had on a blouse of daffodil yellow silk and it seemed not without significance that it was cut rather low at the neck.

  ‘Yes, she leaves a trail of broken hearts behind her wherever she goes, that girl.’

  ‘It isn’t my intention to fall in love with her, if that’s what you’re getting at.’

  ‘Love? She doesn’t know the meaning of the word.’

  She rested her head on the car seat and held him for fully a minute in a long earnest gaze.

  ‘You haven’t kissed me today.’

  He proceeded to kiss her. There was no sort of ardour in it and she was quick to notice it and drew her lips away.

  ‘You are a different person today,’ she said.

  ‘One can’t always be the same.’

  She slipped a little lower into the car seat, so that the upper curve of her breasts was revealed.

  ‘You caressed my breasts the other day. When a woman allows that she naturally—’

  She broke off and suddenly he was provoked into an extraordinary sensation. It was compound of anger and a great desire to hurt her. With an almost violent gesture he kissed her again, at the same time unbuttoning her blouse.

  The instant his hands touched her body he was aware of yet another extraordinary sensation. It was that he was back on the other lakeside, with the girl, and that it was she he was kissing and not her mother.

  For the next two days he was never alone with the girl. Whenever he chanced to meet her on the hotel terrace, in the garden or in the public rooms Mrs Hauptman, as if by some uncanny instinct, appeared too.

  On the evening of the third day he went out, about ten o’clock, to post some letters. The night was exceptionally warm and balmy, the air full of the heavy perfume of some tree whose flowers were invisible in the darkness.

  ‘I thought you’d completely deserted me.’

  The voice of the girl was not much more than a whisper. She was sitting on a wooden seat at the very edge of the
lakeside. A few rowing boats were moored below, utterly motionless in the windless air.

  ‘It’s difficult to escape from a glass case,’ he said.

  ‘Except by breaking the glass.’

  He sat down on the seat beside her. The air was so warm that she had slipped off her white woollen cardigan and draped it round her shoulders.

  ‘I wanted to ask you something,’ he said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘You said an extraordinary thing about your mother that day I first met you. That she killed your father.’

  ‘Oh! I didn’t mean that she shot him or anything so dramatic. It was far more subtle than that.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you something else too. If you hate her so much why do you come all the way from Munich to be with her?’

  ‘It’s more satisfying to be near the object you hate.’

  He found it hard to make anything of this remark and was silent for some time. Then he said:

  ‘Tell me about your father.’

  ‘Let’s walk, shall we?’

  They walked for perhaps a quarter of a mile along the lake until eventually they came to another seat, under a huge flowerless magnolia tree. The great thick-leaved branches of this tree acted as a dark barrier, shutting out all sound except the minutest lappings of infinitely small waves breaking on the stones of the lake shore below. It also hid all but a few low stars, scattered like golden seed in the gaps between the mountains.

  ‘Perhaps you’d rather not talk about your father.’

  ‘I think I told you he was a journalist. Working for a London paper. It seems he was very gay. But then, in the thirties, all Munich was very gay. Nobody did much work. They drank much wine, much beer and talked a lot in cafés. Nobody had much money. They didn’t need much. There’s a story about my father that one Christmas he asked to borrow ten marks from his landlady. She lent it to him and he immediately gave her back five marks as a Christmas present. Now you get what sort of man he was.’

  ‘Attractive to your mother, of course, and Herr Hauptman?’

  ‘Professor Hauptman. Bio-chemical research. An eighteen hour a day man, worshipping at the laboratory altar. Could you blame her, after all?’

  ‘Hardly. The gay, debonair, wine-bibbing young journalist. Café society.’

  ‘Wrong. He had a pair of ears sharper than a fox’s. He wasn’t merely a good journalist. He had a knack of listening to history before it was made.’

  Again he had to confess that he didn’t quite understand.

  ‘He had a thousand contacts. His ears did the rest. Result – he was able to prophesy, step by step, the Hitler pattern. The Saar, Sudetenland, Danzig, Czechoslovakia, Austria, France – even England. It all went home to London in dispatches.’

  ‘And not a damn soul took the slightest notice.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Not the first time it’s happened, I suppose. There’s a fire in the basement and somebody is having a cocktail party upstairs. “Isn’t that smoke I smell?” someone says. “Smoke, my foot. It’s the gin burning your tonsils.” Nero all over again.’

  He laughed. She was quiet.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what else?’

  ‘He predicted the start of war almost to the day. Almost to the hour.’

  ‘And powerless to do anything about it.’

  ‘Wrong again. He decided to go back to London and say, plain and straight as he could, what he’d merely written before. That was in August 1939. And then all hell broke loose.’

  ‘In August? I thought it didn’t break until September.’

  ‘My mother found she was pregnant.’

  It was his turn to be quiet now. In a long silence he listened to the small waves breaking gently on the shore below, like low voices in pointless conversation.

  At last she said: ‘You’ve heard of feminine intuition?’

  ‘Just as I’ve heard of bread-and-butter.’

  ‘There was an infernal row. A hideous quarrel. Almost murderous. He was determined to go to London before it was too late. She was equally determined he shouldn’t.’

  ‘Feminine intuition. She had a hunch he wouldn’t come back.’

  ‘It’s naturally in any woman’s mind. In such circumstances.’

  ‘She could have gone with him.’

  ‘And desert the Third Reich? Mr Graham, you don’t seem to know much of what substitute there was for blood in German veins in the 1930s.’

  ‘“A paradox, a paradox. A most ingenious paradox.”’

  ‘Is that a riddle or something?’

  ‘A quotation. From an opera.’

  ‘And what exactly does it mean?’

  ‘The great ironical paradox – your mother ardent for the Third Reich, Hitler and all that. Your father seeing history before it was written. “A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox.”’

  ‘A fatal paradox.’

  Again he found himself listening to the small watery conversation of waves on the lake-shore below.

  ‘I suppose in a way,’ she said, ‘I was the cause of it all. If I hadn’t been coming it might, I suppose, have been simplified. I was the great complication. She was determined that England shouldn’t have him. But Germany would.’

  For some moments he sat in a state of bewildered disbelief, again listening to the waves talking on the shore, before asking at last if she was about to tell him that her mother had sold her father up the river.

  ‘Not quite so crude as that. He just disappeared one day, in fact the very day war started. They found him a nice secluded little place in the country.’

  ‘There are, of course, more ways of killing a cat,’ he said, ‘than choking it with custard.’

  ‘Another riddle?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, anyway, now you understand about hatred.’

  Her voice was suddenly unbearably sad. And because of its new infinite sadness it also seemed to him impossibly, unbearably young. He was moved in consequence to put his arm round her and draw her head down to his shoulder. She let it remain there, in absolute silence, scarcely seeming to breathe, for ten minutes or so.

  Finally, as if his thoughts about her unbearable youth had acted as a clue, she said:

  ‘How old are you?’

  His first answer was to brush his lips very tenderly against the side of her face; and then:

  ‘Thirty-eight.’

  She nodded. ‘I thought that.’

  ‘Something like halfway between you and your mother.’

  To his infinite astonishment she suddenly turned full face to him, her lips confronting his own within an inch or two.

  ‘Oh! no. Oh! no. You are much nearer to me. Much, much nearer.’

  A moment later she was kissing him with such profound and prolonged passion that he found himself drowned and deaf in the summer darkness.

  About ten o’clock the next morning he walked across the garden to the lakeside. Mrs Hauptman, as usual, was sketching under the stone pergola of vines, at the same time munching at the dark, sweet, perfumed grapes, skin, pip and all.

  After an exchange of formal ‘good mornings’ he stood for a while looking over her shoulder, in silence, at the sketching pad. The drawing was again of the girl, but this time lying down, supine, in her sun-suit.

  ‘Well, you don’t say anything. Do you not approve?’

  ‘It isn’t as I see her.’

  She laughed in her harsh German fashion. ‘But that’s hardly surprising. You are not I. Clearly I see things in her that you don’t.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘Perhaps she doesn’t appear beautiful enough for you.’

  What do they say? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder?’

  ‘Perhaps ugliness is also in the eye of the beholder.’

  She stiffened and had no answer. He stared again, in silence, at the drawing, unable to recognise in it a single feature of the girl he had watched in the sun-suit and had talked to late into the night.


  ‘Isn’t Trüdi down yet?’ he said at last.

  ‘I think she is still sleeping. She was very, very late last night.’

  It wasn’t difficult to divine that she knew of the previous night and he said:

  ‘Yes, I know. We sat by the lake and talked a long time.’

  ‘Very charming. And what lies did she tell you this time?’

  ‘I’m afraid I must go now. I want to walk into town to get a newspaper.’

  ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you about that girl. She’s a born liar. She started to tell lies in her cradle.’

  ‘Really? The trouble with me is that I’m a born innocent. I’ve never been able to tell lies from truth.’

  ‘With Trüdi it isn’t necessary.’

  He started to walk away. Suddenly she stopped sketching and called after him:

  ‘The day before yesterday you promised to take me for a ride. Had you forgotten?’

  ‘No, I hadn’t forgotten.’

  ‘What about this afternoon?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t this afternoon. I am going on a steamer trip.’

  ‘Alone?’

  Again it wasn’t difficult to divine that she knew the answer.

  ‘With Trüdi. It’s the long one. It goes right to Stresa and Isola Bella and so on.’

  ‘And doesn’t get back till late. I know. I’ve been. You’ll find it very boring by the end.’

  The pointlessness of the conversation made him start to walk away again. And again she stopped him.

  ‘I should like to see the dam again. You promised, remember?’

  ‘I promised.’

  ‘Then tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’ He found it impossible to resist a parting shot at the stiffish erect figure now already sketching again. ‘That is if I don’t die of boredom on the steamer.’

  ‘That, of course, is always possible.’

  The steamer, white in the sun, had a marvellously tranquillising effect on George Graham and the girl as it glided smoothly down the lake. Forests of Spanish chestnut, brown-gold, dark cypresses, oleanders in pink and red and cream drifted past and in between them lay villages of red and white and brown, themselves like clustered flotillas of boats moored at rest in the hot September afternoon.

  ‘It’s a good time for a glass of white wine,’ George Graham had said and for some long time they sat under a sun-awning on deck, drinking it, ice-cold.