The Song of the Wren

by H. E. Bates

  All of a sudden he felt impotent with anger and started to push past her on the stairs.

  ‘Who is she?’ she suddenly said. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about my life. It’s my own, see? My own. And I’ll do what I like with it.’

  ‘Oh? Take my advice and put a lock and key on it.’

  ‘When I want your advice I’ll bloody ask for it.’

  ‘I daresay. I daresay.’

  ‘And I’ll tell you summat else. I’ll damn well get my own back on you one day. God help me, I will. I promise you that.’

  ‘Promise? Like the promise you made about taking me out for a bit o’ dinner. Nothing much come o’ that, did it?’

  ‘I got things to do! I’m busy. I got things to do.’

  ‘So I noticed. So I see.’

  ‘I’ll take you out one day, don’t fret. I’ll take you out one day.’

  ‘Not now you won’t. I’ll take myself.’

  ‘Mister Jackson?’

  Three mornings later he was coming home with a heavy load of chestnut poles he had been to buy from a man named Williams over the far side of the hill. His horse was almost winded as it drew slowly up to the gate, which to his annoyance was shut. He thought at once of trespassers. He hated trespassers. But then it annoyed him still more when he actually saw a trespasser leaning against the upright beam of his shelter, smoking a cigarette: a man of thirty or so, in a duffle coat, sleek as a ferret and with eyes of the same searching brightness and of a tobacco-brown colour, matching the smart trilby hat he was wearing, cocked slightly over his right ear.

  ‘Stan’ still.’ His word of command to the horse was brusque and his manner as he walked across to the shelter was slightly hostile. ‘You know you’re trespassin’?’

  ‘Sorry, mate. No harm meant.’

  The trespasser blew smoke coolly.

  ‘Summat I can do for you?’ Spile Jackson said.

  ‘Cigarette?’ A smart silver cigarette case flashed in the morning air. ‘Bit nippy this morning.’

  ‘No, thanks. I never use ’em. Like a pipe.’

  The trespasser helped himself to another cigarette and slowly, with cool deliberation, lit it from the first and then blew a long cloud of smoke, casually.

  ‘I said summat I can do for you? Want some spiles or summat?’

  ‘I saw your old lady. That is your old lady, ain’t it–her in the cottage down the road?’

  ‘That’s her.’

  ‘She said she didn’t think you’d be all that long. I said I hoped not, because I’d got urgent bit o’ business with you.’

  ‘Urgent bit of – What sort o’ business.’

  ‘Well, I tell you.’ The trespasser drew deeply at the cigarette, inhaled and then blew smoke in a series of slow, calculated clouds. ‘It’s like this.’

  Growing more hostile every second, Spile Jackson waited some moments before speaking.

  ‘Business? Wi’ me? I never seen you before in my life.’

  ‘No, but you been seeing my wife, haven’t you?’

  ‘Your who?’

  ‘Wife, mate. The old trouble-and-strife. Don’t tell me you forgot her already.’

  Even in the already chill morning air, sharp from an easterly wind, Spile Jackson felt himself go colder.

  ‘Yeh, that’s her. Wife. Been buying her clothes too, I hear. That right?’

  The line of Spile Jackson’s mouth hardened, looking like the dark scar of an old wound.

  ‘Fur coat an’ all, eh? Musta cost a tidy few nicker, that. Canadian squirrel.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Oh! I seen it, mate, I seen it. Congratulations. Very good taste. Very nice.’

  ‘She never said she was married.’

  ‘Couple of hundred nicker I’d say. So she never told you? Bit careless. Well, I expect it slipped her mind.’

  ‘How do I know—’

  ‘Well, I don’t carry the old marriage lines about with me, mate, if that’s what you mean. But take it from me, she’s spliced to me all right. And has been for ten year and more.’

  The trespasser knocked ash from the end of his cigarette with the tip of his little finger.

  ‘Fur coat, night-dresses, party frock, undies, stockings – you must be made o’ money, mate. Or else you got some plan.’

  ‘Plan?’

  ‘Don’t you know there’s a word for this sort of thing? No? Enticement.’

  Spile Jackson was silent. His vocabulary did not include the word enticement.

  ‘Yeh, that’s it. Enticement. See, a bloke’s wife is his property. Just like his house or his car or what have you. So if another bloke entices her away from him it’s sort of stealing like. See? You get the old trouble-and-strife nicked, so you’re entitled to damages.’

  ‘Damages?’

  ‘Damages, mate. The old do-ray-me. You take the wife-snatcher to court, all legal like, and he’s got to cough up, see? How much? Well, depends on what the court thinks. Smart bit o’ stuff, good cook an’ all that – they might say a thousand. Perhaps only five hundred. Perhaps more.’

  Spile Jackson simply stood staring at the earth.

  ‘Course it’s better if it don’t go to court. I mean you got solicitors’ fees an’ all that. They soon mount up. So if it gets to court it’s liable to be all that much tougher on the old pocket. See? Better to keep it outa court. Settle it private like.’

  The trespasser again took out his silver cigarette case and again lit a cigarette from the glowing end of another.

  ‘You likely to be here tomorrow?’

  ‘I might be.’

  ‘Only I tell you for why. She’s coming back home with me the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘Home? Where’s that?’

  ‘London. Mile End Road.’ The trespasser actually laughed. ‘Don’t look so worried, mate. Nothing to worry about. I’m not the mean sort. Fact is I’d let you off light. I reckon she’s worth a thousand. But I’m easy. I’ll settle for five hundred.’

  Again Spile Jackson did nothing but stare down at the earth.

  ‘Well, gotta go now, mate. See you tomorrow? Same time, sort of? Good. Then we can settle it.’ The trespasser actually laughed again. ‘Cheery-bye.’

  For a very long time Spile Jackson stood staring at the earth. He was thinking of the glad rags, of dancing and the light of a fire in the night. He was thinking of feet in the waters of a summer stream. He was thinking of the fur coat and how the naked body underneath it had been sometimes warm, sometimes cold. He was thinking too of the squirrels, all the dead squirrels, the squirrels that were there no longer.

  And now and then he also found himself thinking of the box under the bed.

  Next morning, as usual, he started to work, cutting spiles. But soon the hand that held the axe and was commonly so precisely accurate with it started quavering as if with a sort of palsy and he found himself fumbling stroke after stroke with it.

  After a time, about half-past ten, he gave it up and started walking. He walked slowly up the track to where, at the extreme crest of the hill, it joined the main hard road running east to west. He walked eastwards. Half a mile farther on he came to the pub where, as it seemed, a life-time ago, he and the girl had had drinks together and she, gay with sudden life, had taught him a few steps of dancing in the street outside.

  He went into the bar.

  ‘Mild and bitter.’ He paused. ‘No, I won’t. Make it whisky.’

  It wasn’t often that he drank whisky. But today the inside of himself was a quavering husk, dry and cold and bloodlessly empty. When the whisky had driven a spear of warmth into this husk he ordered a second and then, warmed still further, a third. A moment or two of indecision about a fourth was finally ended by his saying:

  ‘Better make it a double. I can’t get myself more’n half bloody warm this morning somehow.’

  As he staggered back down the track, through the leafless wood, his head felt fiery. Once he paused and struck his hand with great force against t
he trunk of a beech, as if it were an adversary he hated and, like the girl and the trespasser, was responsible for all the complicated agonies of his being cheated.

  It was almost midday when he arrived at his triangular piece of woodland. The gate was shut. The trespasser, sitting on a chopping block, was coolly, serenely smoking.

  ‘Morning, morning. Nice morning. Nippy again though.’

  Spile Jackson’s axe lay where he had dropped it, a yard or two from the chopping block. He picked it up, at the same time staggering slightly, and across the trespasser’s face whipped a flash of fear. It disappeared at once when Spile Jackson threw the axe into the shelter.

  ‘Began to think you was never coming. I waited an hour or more and then I thought you must be down at the cottage. So I went down and your old lady was there. She was in a rare old two-an’-eight.’

  ‘Two-an’-eight?’

  ‘All of a tizz-was. Couldn’t make head nor tail of her. Kept rabbiting on about calling the police – burglars been in or something. Couldn’t make sense of her.’ The trespasser performed his favourite little act of lighting one cigarette from another, and then deeply, almost luxuriously, blew slow, heavy clouds of smoke. ‘Thought any more about that little matter?’

  ‘I thought about it.’

  ‘Favourable, I hope?’

  ‘I got the money.’

  ‘Five hundred?’

  ‘Five hundred.’

  ‘And cheap at the price. Sensible man, sensible man.’

  The money was in an old chocolate box in the shelter. Spile Jackson went to get it and then came back with the box in one hand his axe in the other. The whisky had given his normally bony eyes a wild look and once or twice he swung the axe like a club as he walked.

  ‘Here, careful with that thing. You might do somebody a bit of harm with that.’

  ‘Know what? I could cut a flea in half with that axe. Yeh, a flea.’ The eyes flared with dangerous glints of light. ‘Clean in half. Now here’s your money. Now git off my place. Git off I tell you! Else you might be that flea.’

  The trespasser grabbed the old chocolate box, made for the gate he had carefully closed and then, not bothering to open it, climbed swiftly over the top.

  Spile Jackson waited for some ten minutes, alone, before picking up the axe. Then he opened the gate, shut it carefully behind him and started to walk, still staggering slightly, down the hill.

  In the kitchen of the house his mother was making pastry, rolling it out on the table with a rolling pin. He said no word. She had nothing to say either and it was necessary to hit her only once with the axe, with ferocious accuracy, before she fell bloodily to the floor, the rolling pin clattering after her, bloody too.

  After that he found an old newspaper and wrapped the axe in it. Then he started the walk in to town.

  When he finally got to the police station he went in. The duty sergeant, busy at a desk with some papers, looked up and said:

  ‘Morning sir. Something I can do for you?’

  Spile Jackson paused for fully half a minute. The wild light in the eyes had died by now. The old dry, sightless bony look was back. His mouth was dry too.

  ‘I just killed my mother,’ he said at last. He laid the blood-stained axe, in its blood-stained newspaper, on the sergeant’s desk. ‘Could I have a drink of water?’

  The Tiger Moth

  On that first meeting with her she looked, he thought, exactly like a moth: a brown moth, brown-haired, brown-eyed, wearing a plain brown shantung dress. Like a moth too she looked placid, innocuous, soft, rather sleepy, with no hint whatever of the moth’s reputed capacity for corruption.

  At the time he was a navigator on Lancaster bombers, halfway through his second tour. A stray piece of shrapnel had sliced his knee-cap on a flak-cursed night over Hamburg eight months before, causing him to limp a little. It also sometimes pained him considerably: not, as is often the case with old wounds, when the weather was damp and chilly but when it was humid, thundery or very hot.

  This and the glazed weariness of his eyes made him look several years older than he was. Long constant night strain had also caused his mouth to grow thin. It was more like a badly-healed steel-cut scar on his face than a mouth: an old wound itself on a young body.

  It was also a humid, hot, thundery night when he first saw her sitting on a bar stool as he limped into a pub called The Blue Boar, his leg paining him a little, some ten miles inland from the Norfolk coast. She appeared to be drinking, modestly and innocuously, what looked like gin-and-tonic and he in turn ordered from the landlady, Mrs Forbes, half a bitter. At that stage of the war beer was very liable to dry up late in the evening of a long hot day and he was unsurprised at Mrs Forbes’ answer:

  ‘Sorry, Mr Williamson, there isn’t a drop left on the premises. I couldn’t give a mouse a mouthful.’

  ‘Blast, I’ve been drinking that half pint for the last hour or more.’

  ‘Terribly sorry. I’ll tell you what I’ve got though – two portions of cold salmon. Very nice. And cucumber. I held it back because I thought you and Mr Thomas might come in.’

  ‘Mr Thomas is on duty. Well, it’s some compensation. Anything in the way of wine to go with it?’

  ‘All I’ve got is a Graves. It’s fairly dry.’

  ‘Good. I’ll have half a bottle.’

  ‘Sorry again, Mr Williamson. I’ve only bottles.’

  ‘A bottle it shall be then. Meanwhile, if the gin hasn’t run out I’ll have a very large pink gin.’

  Suddenly, by a sort of sixth sense, he became aware that the woman in brown was intently listening. The placid moth-like body suddenly seemed alive with acutely raised antennae. He at once felt curiously uneasy. He was irritated by an impression that she wasn’t merely listening, but that she was actually eavesdropping on his very thoughts.

  For some minute or two longer she neither moved nor gave the slightest flicker of a glance in his direction. Then his pink gin came and as he lifted the glass, pursing his lips with some eagerness, she suddenly said:

  ‘I’m afraid it’s all my fault. I drank the last of the beer.’

  ‘Very wise.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have done it if I’d have known you were that thirsty.’

  ‘If you’d have listened hard you’d have heard my tongue panting.’

  She laughed and the sound came from deep in her throat, belying for the first time her outward moth-like placidity.

  Presently he was buying her another drink and as she raised her glass he said:

  ‘You wouldn’t, I take it, be averse to a little cold salmon?’

  ‘Far from averse. Thank you.’

  ‘And cucumber? I read a story once where someone said that when you eat cucumber there’s a taste of spring in your mouth.’

  She laughed again, deep from the throat.

  ‘And also summer?’

  ‘And also, I suppose, summer.’

  After a fourth drink Mrs Forbes disappeared into a room behind the bar, coming back after a minute or two to say:

  ‘It’s all ready now, Mr Williamson, if you are. You can have raspberries afterwards if you’d like. But no cream.’

  ‘My favourite fruit. Good show.’

  The window of the little back dining-room looked out on a field of oats, pink-stalked with approaching ripeness. As he slowly ate his salmon and drank his wine he found himself looking at it with a certain half-dreamy solemnity, knowing he would frequently recall it as an expression of some sort of sanity in a world crazy with flak and sour with glycol the next time he flew.

  ‘Far away?’ she said and he said yes, he was far away.

  It was typical of her, as he later was to discover, not to ask where.

  ‘Well, not too far,’ he said. ‘Just the field of oats.’

  And what was so special, she asked, about a field of oats?

  ‘Hellish precious. Hard to explain.’

  How did he mean? she said.

  ‘When you do a lot of – well, all I
know is they’re damn beautiful.’

  She rested her fork on the edge of her plate and he noticed for the first time that she was wearing no wedding ring. He immediately changed the subject.

  ‘Are you in one of the services?’ he said.

  No, she said, she was teaching literature and history in St. Anne’s High School for Girls. They had been evacuated from London to a mansion called Clifton Court. Did he know it?

  ‘I see it from the air. Sounds pretty dull though. Still, fun and gossip in the common-room I’ve no doubt.’

  No, she was free of all that, she said, thank God. She’d managed to buy a small cottage of her own.

  ‘Sounds cosy. Perhaps I might invite myself over some time?’

  ‘The garden’s a mass of weeds.’

  This enigmatic answer of hers had the effect of changing his interest into a certain excitement. Four pink gins and two or three glasses of wine had already given his vision some haziness and he now found himself looking at her rather as he had looked at the field of oats, seeing her with a distant rosiness.

  ‘Cottage far away?’

  About a mile down the road, she said.

  ‘What about running you home? I’ve got a gallon of juice in the old banger.’

  Well, she said, she wasn’t sure about that—

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re shy.’

  Not exactly, she said, but she supposed it would sound stiffish or something if she said it was all so sudden?

  ‘It has to be. Tomorrow night I’ll most likely be on duty. And perhaps the night after that. Sorry if it sounds like the old line.’

  She said nothing. A few moments later Mrs Forbes came to clear away the fish plates and cutlery and to bring in the raspberries in round blue willow-pattern dishes. There was just a dusting of sugar on the raspberries and they looked pretty against the blue.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘you haven’t told me your name.’

  ‘Craxton. Felicia Craxton.’

  ‘Felicia. Uncommon name. I like that. Suits you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She gave him an idling, tantalising smile.

  ‘Feminine of Felix, I suppose. Felix, Felicia – no, perhaps better not pursue that. God, the raspberries are good.’