by H. E. Bates
Then it returned to her shoes. For some reason it was impossible to explain he was oppressed with a nagging uneasiness, a certain sadness, about the shoes.
Nearly ten minutes later she came slowly back through the wood, carrying the two washed white cups. Now and then he noticed that she half-stopped and looked down into one of the cups, but it was not until she was actually in the hut again that he could see what was there.
‘Look what I found,’ she said.
‘Wild strawberries,’ he said. ‘They grow up here on the chalk a lot. Thousands.’
‘Have one?’
‘You eat ’em.’
She poured the wild strawberries, about two dozen of them, into her hand. She started to pick them up one by one in her fingers and put them into her mouth. Then she laughed, her eyes brightening with the taste of them, and suddenly put her mouth to her hand, sucking them up in a single mouthful.
‘Scrumptious. Marvellous.’
The berries, soft and dark and overripe with the heat of August, burst with brilliant juice on her lips. She laughed again, sucking at a drop or two of juice as it ran down her chin.
In a moment his handkerchief was out.
‘Here, wipe it on mine,’ he said. ‘Save yours. It don’t matter.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Nothing worse than strawberry stain.’
The stain of strawberry juice and lipstick made crimson blotches on his handkerchief, almost as if her lips had been bleeding.
‘What’s the time?’ she said. ‘I must fly. Miss’ll start creating.’
To his surprise it was nearly half-past five.
‘I’ll get hung,’ she said.
As she looked round the hut, hastily picking up her handbag from where she had left it on the bench, he found himself assailed for the second time by the sad uneasiness about her shoes.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘about your shoes—’
‘What about them?’
‘I thought if you were coming this way again,’ he said. Shyness spread a glaze across his eyes, leaving them bonier, whiter than ever. ‘I could – well, I could bring the last up here – it wouldn’t take long – I got the leather and things – I mend all ourn—’
‘All right. What about Sunday?’ she said. ‘I get off Sundays.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘What time? Two o’clock?’
‘Say four.’
He stood for some minutes watching her climb up the track white in its dark tunnel of hazel and blackthorn boughs, but it was not until some time after she had disappeared that he started shouting after her.
‘Your coat!’ he called. ‘Your coat. You forgot your coat again.’
Two hundred yards or so up the hillside he caught sight of her leaning by a gate, resting after the steep climb, laughing to herself.
‘Squirrels,’ she was saying. ‘If you can believe it. Squirrels. My God, squirrels.’
‘You frightened them,’ he said. ‘They heard you coming.’
In the silence of the hazy, oppressive Sunday afternoon he sat feeding the squirrels when she came down the track, hatless, in a cheap short-sleeved peach-coloured dress, still wearing the shoes he had promised to mend.
‘Sit down,’ he said ‘No – not on the floor. Sit on the box. You’ll spoil your dress.’
‘My one and only,’ she said. ‘My Sunday best. Take a good look at it, you’ll never see another one like this, I tell you.’
She lifted her arms slightly, showing off the dress for a moment or two before she sat down. He could see that everywhere the dress was a shade too small for her. It drew too tightly across her breasts and hips. It also seemed an inch or two short in the skirt. The short sleeves were creased skin-tight across the white upper arms.
‘About time I had a new one,’ she said. ‘Some hope, though.’
‘I brought the leather and stuff,’ he said.
She started to kick off her shoes.
‘Time they went to the rummage too,’ she said. ‘Or the rag-bag.’
Once again, as he took the shoes in his hands and started to strip off the worn soles, he was oppressed by uneasiness about them. It was bad that a girl should have to walk about in shoes like that.
‘I’ll do the best I can with ’em,’ he said. ‘They won’t do you much longer, though.’
‘Don’t tell me.’
‘This the only pair you got?’
‘These and one more pair I keep for dancing.’
He tossed into his mouth a handful of tacks rather as she had tossed the handful of strawberries into hers. It kept him silent for some minutes as he sat with the iron last between his knees, paring the new sole to shape and tacking it down.
‘Do you dance?’ she said.
With the tacks in his mouth he was unable to speak and he simply shook his head.
‘Never?’
He shook his head again.
‘What? – you mean never? – really never?’
He shook his head again.
‘Can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Can’t believe you’ve never put your arms round a woman and had a flip round. That the truth? Really?’
He was glad of the tacks in his mouth. They saved him from telling her a still more incredible, more astonishing truth: that he had never even had a woman in his arms at all.
After that she sat quiet for some time, hands locked over one knee, rocking it slightly backwards and forwards as she watched him work at the shoes.
His own hands were muscular and hairy. They were good hands. It was only the nails, black and chipped, the cuticles split like celluloid, that gave them any sort of unsightliness and now she sat still longer in silence, staring at them, partly as if fascinated, partly as if wanting to trim them, file them down and clean the blackness away.
In this silence a solitary squirrel came down from the trees and started to nibble at the bread he had thrown across the threshold among the withered primrose roots and fallen leaves. She failed to see it at first. Sitting partly with her back to it, watching his hands, she was unaware of it crouching there like a small grey toy, nibbling at the bread held in front of its face, quivering, half-frightened, until it was joined by another, and then a third.
As he saw each of the three squirrels arrive one by one, out of the corner of his eye, he held his breath. He wanted to see how many would come down altogether and share the bread he had thrown. He was half-afraid she would speak or move and frighten them away.
When suddenly she did move he shot out his hand quickly and touched her. His hand closed over the two hands locked across her knee. It was so sudden that she started violently.
Then she turned her head and saw the squirrels. They were seven or eight yards from where she was sitting. In the hazy afternoon, somewhere behind them, the stream was running so thinly after days of heat that it made no sound even when it fell over ledges of rock into the fields beyond.
Against this soundless background of haze the squirrels sat like little grey ghosts that had come out of graves, from haunts somewhere among the dead primrose roots, to play.
He knew that at the slightest breath of sound they would be gone and he sat feeling in his jacket pocket for another chunk or two of bread.
Finally he pressed a crust against her hand. She opened her fingers and took it. A second later she threw it, brushing her hand against the skirt of her dress so that it made a rustling sound. The bread fell short and a moment later every squirrel had gone, swallowed up in leaves.
‘Oh, look! – there, I’ve frightened them.’
‘They don’t know you. That’s all.’
She turned on him eyes wide with almost apologetic wonder.
‘And I thought you were fooling!’
‘Me? About what?’
‘The squirrels. When you said the other day they came down and—’
‘Didn’t believe me?’
‘I thought you were telling the tale,’ she said. ‘I’ve been told some good tales in my time.’
&nbs
p; ‘Yes?’
‘And believed them too.’
By the time he had finished the shoes he had also explained all about the squirrels: how they had been coming for years, how there had first been red ones, then only grey ones, and once the single, rare white one that he could only suppose someone had shot. He liked it when the young ones came. He was able to draw them slowly into his confidence until they were timid no longer and became his friends. He missed them on days when they didn’t come. He missed then in the hard winters.
‘How many do you suppose you’ve got here altogether?’
‘Scores,’ he said. ‘Hundreds perhaps. No keepers here. Nobody to shoot ’em.’
‘Don’t they do harm?’
‘No more ‘n people.’
He turned the shoes over at last and let her see the new, clean soles.
‘Best job I can make,’ he said. ‘Still, they’ll do you for a week or two.’
‘Week or two? They’ll have to last me till I find a new pair hanging on the Christmas tree. What do I owe you for these?’
‘Owe?’
‘The ready,’ she said. ‘The do-ray-me, as they call it. These’d cost me ten bob at the snob’s.’
‘Don’t owe me nothing.’
She smiled, blue eyes exceptionally friendly.
‘Thanks. I won’t forget that,’ she said. She actually turned the shoes over and over, admiring them, saying how beautiful they were; and finally she touched his hand. ‘I’ll remember. I’ll pay you back some day.’
‘And if you want your dancing shoes doing I’ll—’
‘Dancing,’ she said, laughing. ‘I can’t believe a grown man like you has never been dancing.’
The following day, when his mother sat in the shelter while he chewed in silence at his meat and many potatoes, she picked out with swift squirrel eyes a few scraps of leather, a few heads of tacks, that had fallen among the shavings of chestnut bark.
She looked too at the place where she had seen the grey coat hanging.
‘Somebody bin for the coat?’
‘Ah.’
‘Who’d it belong to?’
‘Gone when I got up here one morning.’
‘Oh? Some gyppo I’ll bet. Some diddecoy.’
She had noticed too the stains of crimson, strawberries and lipstick, on a handkerchief she had washed that morning. That was a strange thing, she thought; she was puzzled to account for that; then she noticed another thing.
‘Don’t your pipe draw no sense today?’
‘Draws all right. Why?’
‘You ain’t smoking it.’
He neither answered nor looked at her.
She in turn fixed him with little nimble eyes that held him sharply, almost fiercely, in distrust.
‘Time you got a padlock on this place,’ she said. ‘You never know who comes prowling about up here. Afore so long you’ll start losing things.’ Every Wednesday and Sunday afternoon as the autumn went on, the girl walked down the chalk track to the woodland, always wearing one of the same two dresses, the grey-blue one on week-days, the cheap too-small, too-tight peach one on Sundays, and always the same pair of shoes.
He spoke once or twice of mending the dancing shoes and in turn she spoke again of dancing.
‘Time to mend ’em when I get the chance to wear ’em out,’ she said. ‘Fat chance I’ll get though.’
Sometimes she also spoke of ‘Miss’ and ‘Sir’: those meanies, those tyrants, those slave-drivers who kept her at it night and day, cooking, scrubbing, washing dishes, cleaning shoes, so gracious with their one bath a week, their few hours of freedom on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons.
This picture of her endlessly slaving for others moved him to angry discontent.
‘Why do you stand for it?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you get out and go?’
‘Go?’ she said. ‘Go where? I’ll bet you don’t believe that was my last ten bob I showed you that afternoon.’
He confessed he’d never been able to believe it was.
‘Cut my throat,’ she said. ‘Honest. That was my last ten bob.’
Before he could speak again she turned on him the wide blue eyes that were always so brilliant in the shadow of the wood and so lively and quick in comparison with his own and said:
‘And to think I had eighty-seven quid saved up. All ready.’
‘All ready? For what?’
‘He took it. Walked out with every penny of it. Took all my clothes. All my shoes. Every stitch. Everything except that dress and the shoes I was wearing that day I left the coat here.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Fellow I was going to marry,’ she said. ‘Saved up for two years. Eighty-seven quid. I kept it under the bed. Like you told me your ma does.’
He pondered on these fresh acts of meanness and betrayal with growing antagonism together with a touch of pity.
‘I bet you did a bit of wondering about me that day, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘Wondered how I got myself into a state like that? Well – that was it. That’s how it was.’
‘Where’d he go?’
‘Thin air. Did a bunk. He was sharp all right. Didn’t call him Needle Johnson for nothing. He was a needle all right.’
She laughed, her voice unembittered but dry.
‘I don’t bear him any grudge though. What’s the use? The money’s gone – bet your life on that.’
‘It was your money though.’
‘I’ll save up again. Take me a few years though. Squeeze twelve bob a week if I’m lucky. Take me a few years.’
Later, on a warm September Sunday afternoon, she suddenly stood up with a mixture of irritation and disgust, turning quickly round, showing off the too-tight peach-coloured dress in the brilliant lowering angle of sun.
‘I’m getting pretty tired and ashamed of this dress though. Look at it. Look where I split it under the arm here this afternoon, putting it on.’
She raised her right arm. He saw the white underflesh of it naked as far as the shadow of the armpit. He saw the rip in the peach-coloured sleeve that she had hurriedly sewn up and the flesh pressing tighter than ever against the seam.
‘Can’t go on like this much longer. I’ll bust out of it. How I’ll get another I’m blessed if I know – but I got to get one soon, somehow.’
‘How much’d new one cost?’
‘Get one for four or five pounds,’ she said. ‘Perhaps three or four.’
‘I’ll lend you the money if you like.’
‘Good lord. You don’t mean it?’
Her hands sprang up to his face. ‘You don’t really mean it?’
‘Mean it – yes. You say what you want.’
‘Oh! I could kiss you. You’re so nice I could kiss you.’
A moment later she did in fact kiss him. He was so dumbfounded by the sudden sensation of her mouth against his own that the kiss had prolonged itself for some time before she realized that he was still standing with arms dead loose, as if paralysed, at his sides.
Then she drew her mouth away. After that she took his hands and lifted his arms and steered them upwards as if he were a child being taught some simple elementary action for the first time.
‘Put them round me,’ she said. ‘That’s what I’m for. Go on. Put them round me.’
His hands groped about her body with strained timidity, trembling.
‘Closer than that. I can’t feel you.’
The big hands suddenly expanded themselves across the entire soft width of her back, feeling the dress smooth and tight as the skin underneath it. Then she laughed, putting her mouth up to his face a second time.
‘That’s better. That’s a bit more like it. I can feel you now.’
When he spoke again his voice was choking.
‘I’ll bring the money Wednesday.’
After that she stood biting her lower lip in thought. For a second or two the pressure drew the blood away from it. Then he saw it racing and flushing back again.
‘If you brought
it Tuesday I might buy the dress Wednesday afternoon. If you didn’t bring it till Wednesday I wouldn’t be able to get the dress on Thursday because that’s early closing day.’
‘I’ll bring it Tuesday,’ he said. ‘What time?’
‘About ten o’clock. I could slip out then.’
It was past one o’clock on Tuesday night before he came down from the top of the hill, through the tunnel of blackthorn, now thick with ripening sloes, after seeing her home. She had kissed him over and over again in the shelter, lying with him on a heap of chestnut shavings, at the same time telling him how grateful she was, or how good he was or how understanding.
‘What colour dress shall I buy?’
‘Blue.’
‘Why blue? Do you like blue all that much?’
In answer he spoke with solemn, direct simplicity.
‘It matches your eyes.’
‘I could have yellow to match my hair.’
‘Blue,’ he said. ‘You have blue. It suits you.’
She laughed in the darkness, the laugh sharp and sudden, so that in the wood outside a bird, startled at roost, made a short flapping echo in answer.
‘You always want your girls to wear blue?’
‘You’re the first one. Ever.’
‘The first? Go on – the first? – Don’t believe you.’
He spoke again with that same painfully solemn simplicity.
‘You said you’d never say that again,’ he said. ‘You said you’d always believe me.’
‘Oh! I will. Promise. I’ll always believe you.’
When he finally got home his mother was still in the kitchen, sitting at the table, under the lamplight, spectacles on, elbows pinning down a newspaper she had read through half a dozen times.
‘Bin a-poachin’ or summat?’
‘More like after one. Like you said.’
‘Pity you didn’t take your gun then,’ she said, ‘and shoot whoever it was.’
‘You’re fast enough wanting to shoot people,’ he said. ‘You got to see ’em first.’
She didn’t bother to look at him. With distrustful, squinting, microscopic eyes she stared at the newspaper, her voice level and cryptic.
