by H. E. Bates
For a long time during tea we did not talk about Bradshaw. The sister had a fair, plain, rather aristocratic face, with pale golden eyebrows and eyes that had a steadfast hostility. She was older than Bradshaw, I felt, by about eight or nine years. She was conscious that she was not very good-looking. It was not only easy to see that she did not like men, but it was still easier to see that she wanted men to like her and had not succeeded. So she sat rather aloof from me, pretending not to watch, but watching, pretending not to care, but caring very much for what I had to say.
‘I’m afraid there’s not much for tea,’ she said. ‘Not very lavish. I know what you men are.’
Suddenly the mother spoke.
‘How long have you been on the station?’ she said.
She was rather tall and thin, her face and hair both quite colourless. She had high cheek-bones and wore gold pince-nez on a gold chain, but she kept them mostly in her hands, opening and shutting the glasses with her long, cold, colourless fingers.
‘Three months,’ I said.
‘Then you were there when Roger had the accident with the tail-wing.’
I sat trying to remember.
‘He told us how he was standing by the tail-wing of a ’plane and how it swung round and hit him. It gashed his forehead. Another fraction of an inch and it would have been his temple.’
‘Yes, oh, yes,’ I said.
I still sat trying to remember. All I could remember was a time when we were arguing with a man in a snack bar and how he said: ‘I’m asking you where the bloody R. A. F. was at Dunkirk? Go on I’m asking you,’ and how Bradshaw, who was not very sober either, seized a fork from the snack counter and struck him across the forehead.
I did not think either the mother or sister knew about this. Bradshaw often got into violent temper with dead-beats.
‘You can’t be too careful near aircraft,’ I said.
At this moment there was a whining from outside the French windows, on the terrace. I looked up and saw a big cream collie breathing a grey cloud against the glass.
‘It’s Caesar,’ the mother said. ‘Let him in.’
The sister got up, opened the window, and let in a delicate and excitable dog who lashed his tail against the chintz chairs and the leg of the tea-table.
‘It’s really Roger’s dog,’ the mother said.
‘He loved animals,’ the sister said. ‘He’d never see one hurt. He’d never kill anything or see anything killed. Do you remember how he cried, Mother, when Ranger had to be killed? He hated the thought of anything being killed.’
I did not say anything; it was simply that I did not know this Bradshaw. The Bradshaw I knew had killed a great many people. His job was night intrusion; he had shot up a great many trains, cannon-gunned many aerodromes. He had taken ruthless delight in attacking small ships. I had never thought of him as having been sensitive about killing things, and if he seemed to place less value on human life than apparently he had placed on the lives of dogs you could excuse him this because he was, after all, very young. At the time of Munich he was sixteen; he could not have understood or cared very much about what was going on. At nineteen he had begun to kill things.
My tea got cold in my cup, and Mrs Bradshaw asked if she could pour out some more. I gave her my cup and she put the milk into the cup very slowly, and then sat with a lump of sugar poised between the tongs. I knew that the time was coming when she was going to ask me if Bradshaw was really dead.
But it was not she who asked, after all, but the sister.
‘I know you’ll think this is foolish,’ she said. ‘But I don’t believe Roger is dead. In fact, I know he isn’t. I know.’
There was nothing I could say. I knew that Bradshaw was very dead. He had gone out in a full moon with a very good pilot, Sergeant Thompson, over Northern France, on intruder patrol. It was so light that you could see the lines of the railway tracks running like silver piles across the flat countryside road as Bradshaw went down to machine-gun a north-bound train. Thompson saw him hit the telegraph post and burst into flame. After this, Thompson went down very low himself and circled over the tracks, looking out, but there was no one beside the burning ’plane.
Bradshaw was very dead and I had liked him. The tea was quite cold now as I sipped it. It was hard to say why we had liked each other. He was quite mad and had a violent temper and no values at all; in the evenings after the day’s operations one of the things he liked to do most was to drive fast in the darkness down to an hotel by the sea. He drove very fast going down, never slowing up at cross-roads, often jumping traffic lights, behaving most of the time as if the car were an aircraft and the road simply the sky; and he drove even faster coming back. He had already shot down three by night and two by day, and he began to have some of that aristocratic arrogance that the fighter-boy often acquires after success. He was something of the hero. The hotel was a place for drinking: the darkness was the place to take a girl. He liked the kind of girl his mother and his sister probably did not really believe existed: big blonde girls with cherry-squash lips and short fur coats that they kept undone as they leaned loosely on the bar. He treated them all as if they had no identity except the identity of ripe flesh; he gave them nothing of what was inside of himself, no thought, no emotion, no consideration, and there was only one who ever got under his skin. She was a big shrewd girl, older than himself, who decided she wanted to possess him because he was fresh, aristocratic, and a fighter. She wanted something like a permanent attachment. Because of this he decided not to see her again. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘you lead me to expect you want to go steady, and then all you want is a date just when you fancy it. I’ve a damn good mind to write to your mother and tell just what sort of son she’s got.’ I was waiting by the car in the darkness outside the hotel as the argument went on, and I heard his voice beseeching her almost hysterically in answer: ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please. My God, don’t do that. Do what you like, but don’t do that. Please don’t!’
I set my cup on the table and Mrs Bradshaw, slightly inclining her head again, asked if I would like more tea. I said no, thank you, and I saw her take a long deep breath, her face growing suddenly rigid with the effort of what she had to say.
‘It’s the uncertainty,’ she said, ‘the awful uncertainty.’
Suddenly I felt it was hypocrisy, and in a sense a betrayal of him, not to tell her he was dead.
‘There is no uncertainty.’ I tried to tell her tenderly and quietly what I knew. ‘He was seen to crash. We know. He was seen by a very experienced pilot who couldn’t be mistaken.’
‘Why couldn’t he have been mistaken?’ The sister’s voice was suddenly very hard and hostile. ‘Why not?’
‘Because it was a full moon. The pilot was very experienced. He circled and searched until he couldn’t stay any longer.’
‘But he’s only human. He could make a mistake.’
‘I don’t think he could.’
‘You think! But you don’t know, do you?’ she said. ‘You don’t know! You don’t know!’
‘We do know,’ I said. ‘So far as humanly possible.’
‘Then you don’t know, do you? Not finally. Not absolutely. Not finally.’
‘Well—’
‘No! But I know. I know in here.’ She put her hand on her chest and clenched her thin fingers and tapped her chest with them. ‘In here, that’s what I know, and I shall always know. I shall always know because I always have known. I always have known because I knew him better than anyone ever did. But I always shall know.’
‘Dorothy,’ the mother said, ‘Dorothy.’
‘I can’t take that from you,’ I said.
‘I’m glad you think that,’ she said bitterly. ‘I’m glad, I’m glad you grant me that.’ She stood up. She was very excited now and she could not have known how much she was trembling. ‘And I know something else.’
‘Dorothy, Dorothy,’ the mother said.
‘I know it was wrong for him to be doing what he w
as doing. He was young and clean and decent and he hated killing. He did it because he had to, not because he liked it. He wasn’t like that. He was just a clean, decent, honest boy. You never saw him cry when his dog died, did you? No! But I did! I did, and I know! I know!’
She began to go out of the room just before she finished speaking, and the mother sat staring silently at the tea-table after she had gone.
‘I’m very sorry,’ I said.
The mother did not speak. Very slowly she began to pack one saucer on top of another, and then the plates and the cups and the spoons together. The noise of the crockery was harsh in the silence left by the upraised voice of the sister. I waited a little longer, watching the mother and now thinking again of Bradshaw. I was not thinking of him now as the wild person he was in the evening at the hotel by the sea, with his drinking and his arrogance and the blondes; or as he was when he was afraid that someone would reveal him to his mother; or as he was when the newspaper printed him as a night-fighter hero with eyes that saw in the dark; or as he was as his sister knew him, decent and brotherly and very much the product of his class, coming home on leave to behave as the clean and virgin idol of youth who cried over the death of a dog.
I was trying to think of him as he was when alone, flying by night, when no one could see his face or guess his thoughts; when he was by himself, someone apart, too young to have lived very much, too preoccupied with the question of killing and being killed, to be oppressed by any obligations about the lives of others. But it was no use thinking any longer.
‘I think I must go,’ I said.
Mrs Bradshaw got up. The pince-nez swung on the gold chain.
‘It is very kind of you to have come,’ she said. ‘I appreciate it. It is very kind.’
‘Not at all.’
‘I’ll walk with you as far as the gate,’ she said.
We walked out of the French windows and along the gravel path of the house, towards the gate at the end of the garden. Our feet made a loud noise on the gravel. The sky was grey with cloud and it was already twilight under the lime trees by the path.
‘The days are getting very short,’ she said.
We stood at the gate for a moment to say good-bye. Yes, the days were getting short. There were no leaves on the limes. From this time forward we should notice the darkness much more each day.
‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘You have been very kind.’ We shook hands. Her hand was very cold and I said goodbye.
‘You knew him very well, didn’t you?’ she said.
‘In a way quite well,’ I said.
She looked away from me, slightly lifting her face, looking up through the bare trees towards the empty sky, and then spoke quite slowly.
‘I sometimes think,’ she said, ‘I never knew him at all.’
A Note on the Author
H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.
Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.
His first novel, The Two Sisters (1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.
During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym ‘Flying Officer X’. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain (1947) and The Jacaranda Tree (1949) and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword (1950). Other well-known novels include Love for Lydia (1952) and The Feast of July (1954).
His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with The Darling Buds of May in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success.
Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being The Purple Plain (1947) starring Gregory Peck, and The Triple Echo (1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.
H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.
Discover other books by H. E. Bates published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/hebates.
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First published in Great Britain in 1976 by Michael Joseph Ltd
This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Reader
‘The Mad Woman’ first published in Great Britain in 1934 by Lovat Dickson’s Magazine
‘From This Time Forward’ first published in Great Britain in 1943 by Hutchinson
Copyright © 1934, 1943, 1976 Evensford Productions Limited
The moral right of the author is asserted.
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eISBN: 9781448215317
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