The Fabulous Mrs. V.

by H. E. Bates

  I suppose too there is much, perhaps even more, to be said for pink, tubby little men like my Uncle Freddie, who always look like round fat radishes. Uncle Freddie never gets up for breakfast; he takes it in bed, with The Times and two other newspapers, at ten o’clock. At twelve he dresses, takes a walking stick, strolls two hundred yards to The Duke of Marlborough, drinks two whiskies, chats about the weather and walks home for lunch at one o’clock. At two o’clock Aunt Leonora insists on his having a zizz. Very occasionally, when he wakes up, he plays golf or goes fishing, but not if it’s too hot or too windy or too wet or too cold. While he rests, Aunt Leonora, who adores more than anything brisk, healthy exercise in the fresh air, bicycles to the library, changes his books for him and hurries back so that he shan’t be unduly idle between tea, for which she always serves two kinds of bread-and-butter, three of cake and scones and four of home-made jam, and supper-time. After supper she busies herself with essential tasks like pickling eggs or drying flowers for winter while Uncle Freddie drops into a doze from which she finally wakes him with a glass of red-currant wine, mulled in winter, and a homemade ginger biscuit.

  How nice it must be to be mistaken for a trespassing cow and thence to achieve, with neither mastery nor struggle all your purposes—not the least of which must be the long quiet zizz, under a shady apple tree, on warm summer afternoons.

  The Diamond Hair-pin

  For some weeks after he had first found the hair-pin on the wooden seat in the park Tom Wakeling kept it wrapped up in tissue paper in a table drawer at his lodgings. It was a perfectly ordinary hair-pin, though perhaps rather longer than usual, except that it carried with it, for a time, a strong scent of carnations.

  A few strands of dark hair were still clinging to it when he first picked it up and it was they, together with the scent of carnations, that made him start wondering, at first casually and then so deeply that it became an obsession, what sort of woman had left it there.

  Soon he was going back to sit on the same park seat every evening after his work in the drawing office was over. The seat was on the bank of a small lake where flocks of mallard, various other ornamental ducks, a few swan-necked geese and occasional sea-gulls fought and dived for scraps of food thrown in by visitors.

  He liked to throw pieces of bread to the birds himself and as he sat there breaking it up in his fingers he also looked very ordinary: shy, scrubby-haired, his skin rather pasty, his eyes seemingly short-focussed, as if from long hours of concentration over the drawing board. His hands were in fact the only features about him that were at all unusual. The fingers were long and narrow and very white. Because of his work they were immaculately kept, every inch of them so unblemished that they too, like the hair-pin, might have been wrapped up at night in tissue paper and carefully laid away.

  The obsession with the hair-pin got hold of him slowly but, having taken hold, soon had him locked in hopeless entrancement. A more communicative person might have told himself that girls didn’t wear hair-pins like that any longer. Old ladies did, however, and it therefore naturally followed that nobody more exciting than an old lady throwing bread to the ducks could have lost the pin—it simply wasn’t worth bothering about anyway.

  But a mind as cautious, withdrawn and self-centred as his couldn’t relinquish facts so easily. Just as he drew lines on a sheet of paper with minutest accuracy so he microscopically scrutinised the facts. And the facts were that old ladies didn’t have black hair and, unless he was much mistaken, didn’t use the scent of carnations either. It seemed patently obvious to him that an altogether younger, more exciting and possibly provocative person had dropped the pin from her hair.

  It was after nearly a month of this cautious and earnest speculation that the impossibly idiotic notion of advertising the hair-pin in a newspaper first came to him—except that to his sort of mind the idea seemed neither idiotic nor impossible. When he came to measure the facts it was clearly no more unusual than four-fifths of the things people expounded in the personal columns of newspapers every day—the heart cries for loved ones to come home, the pleas for stray cats, pet mice and budgerigars to be returned to their heart-broken owners, the rewards offered for the recovery of lost trifles, the universal promise that, at last, all was forgiven.

  But when he came to frame the advertisement—he would put it in an evening paper, he thought; it was the sort of thing that might catch the eye of a girl going home on a bus or a train—it wasn’t so easy. He had to admit that Found: one black hair-pin. Owner please communicate Box No. X sounded pretty pointless. The only possible explanation a lot of people would find for it was that it was a message in some sort of code. If might be anything from an agreed signal between crooks that a bank was ripe for picking or a communication of immense secrecy between lovers.

  Whatever interpretation people might put on it he was perfectly sure that he would get numbers of useless and stupid replies. And he didn’t want that; he was perfectly serious about it all. He had even built up in the more cautious recesses of his mind an image of the sort of girl who had lost the pin. To him there was nothing strange about that; nor was there anything strange in nursing the hope that one day, somewhere, somehow, in some miraculous sort of way, he might meet her. A delightful experience might come out of it.

  Even so he grasped the necessity of making his advertisement more specific and, if possible, more tempting. And finally he made it so and put it in the evening paper.

  Found: Adelaide Park, evening of June 26, one diamond hair-pin. Owner please communicate earliest possible Box No. X.

  He got only three replies. One was from a lady, clearly elderly and acidly irate, who reminded him tersely of the penalties of stealing by finding and why hadn’t he advertised before? She didn’t claim the pin. The second was from a firm of city jewellers who said that in their experience diamond hair-pins were of such rarity that they would consider it a great favour if they might have the privilege of inspecting this one.

  The third was from a person named Aimée Vibert. She wrote to him in a rather laboured, long-lettered script on dark blue paper. She too, he thought, was evidently living in lodgings, since her address was c/o Miss A. Winter. She wrote:

  ‘You do not describe the pin with any detail but I myself am sure it is the one I lost six months ago and have never seen since. It was given to me by my aunt for my fifteenth birthday just before the war.’

  He was pleased about this letter, which he read over and over again before deciding how to answer it. It not only told him that his correspondent had an elegant-sounding, rather exciting foreign name, but also roughly how old she was. His calculations put her at thirty-five or thirty-six, a year or two younger than he was. He eventually wrote back:

  ‘If you could spare the time to meet me I would be happy to bring the pin along so that you can identify it. Would it suit you to meet me in the park, say at 7 o’clock on Thursday, at the seat where I found the pin? It is the third seat along from the little kiosk on the north side of the lake. I shall be wearing a grey charcoal suit and in all probability will be carrying a paper-bag of bread which I shall bring for the birds.’

  She replied to this, on the same kind of unusually dark blue paper:

  ‘I am afraid I am not able to manage to meet you earlier than half-past seven, as my companion, Miss Winter, likes us to eat at half-past six. Otherwise I look forward to meeting you and making your acquaintance. Please don’t forget the pin. It is rather precious to me.’

  After he had read this second letter several times he suddenly held it to his nose, sniffing it in the hope of smelling carnations, but the paper gave off no scent of anything at all.

  Half an hour before he was due to meet her rain began to fall in the lightest of summer showers. The fragrance of rain on dust filled the park as he walked across it under an umbrella, carrying the paper bag of scraps of bread and biscuit which he had saved from his tea.

  Although the rain stopped a few minutes before half past seven the park
seat was wet, so that he couldn’t sit down. Instead he rolled up his umbrella, leaned on it at the edge of the lake and started to feed the ducks with scraps of food. He seemed to do this with an air of great casualness, though in reality the palms of his long hands were as wet as if he had held them out in the rain.

  At a quarter to eight she was standing there beside him and he was sure at once that she was foreign. She had straight light brown hair cut short and a sallow complexion that made her look as if she had been shut away somewhere for a long time. She was extremely plain but an extraordinary transparency in the eyes gave them a brilliance that made up for all lack of colour. She was astonishingly thin too and was wearing one of those stone-grey mackintoshes that have shoulder-flaps that protrude like ears, so that it looked several sizes too large for her.

  ‘I’m Tom Wakeling. I suppose you could be the lady who has come about the hair-pin?’

  ‘Yes. That is so.’ She spoke very formally, in a hopeless sort of voice, with a marked accent. ‘Good evening.’

  ‘Good evening.’

  He instinctively made as if to shake hands but succeeded only in rattling the scraps of food in the paper bag.

  ‘I’m sorry it rained,’ he said.

  ‘I am sorry, too.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s made the seats wet.’

  ‘I’m afraid it has.’

  ‘I think the kiosk is still open. Perhaps we could sit there.’

  ‘Perhaps we could.’

  ‘They have fairly good coffee.’ He threw a few desperate scraps of food into the lake. The ducks, mostly mallards, fanned about them madly and from across the water three gulls swept like pairs of flying scissors. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

  ‘I think it may be a good idea. Thank you.’

  The seats at the kiosk were under indigo blue umbrellas and had kept dry. The colour of the umbrellas reminded him of the note-paper she used. In some extraordinary way the diffusion of it in the rather dull evening air made her face seem to shrink and become plainer and thinner than ever.

  While waiting for the coffee to arrive he said several times that he hoped it wouldn’t rain again. She said she hoped so too. He said, several times also, that he liked feeding the ducks. It was his favourite place along here, even in winter. He was always coming here. It whiled away the time.

  All the time he was dreading the moment when she would ask about the pin, which he hadn’t brought with him and never would and as soon as the coffee arrived he passed the sugar to her and said in an effort to be casual:

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘I am from Austria.’

  ‘Ah! Vienna. I have never been there.’

  ‘I am from near Linz. Not Vienna.’

  ‘Have you been in England long?’

  ‘Nearly one year.’

  The evening sun was actually breaking through the clouds by now, making vapour rise from the lake edge. The ducks were paddling about in a light cloud of steam and as he watched them he started to ponder on the name Vibert. It sounded rather more French than German, he thought.

  ‘Do you pronounce Vibert to rhyme with bear or with hurt?’ he said.

  Perhaps it was the very clumsiness or silliness of this that made her seem suddenly ill-at-ease. She didn’t answer for some seconds and he said:

  ‘I only asked because it seemed rather like a French name.’

  ‘Oh! yes. That is so. My father was French. His mother was named Aimée.’

  Slowly sipping his coffee, he started to have fresh thoughts about the name.

  ‘In a funny sort of way,’ he said, ‘I seem to have heard your name before.’

  ‘Sometimes it is happening like that.’

  ‘Aimée Vibert,’ he started to say, ‘it sort of—’

  ‘Truly speaking my father was not really French. He came to Austria as a boy. He was brought up there. He even could hardly speak French.’

  Most of the time she fixed a hopeless stare on the lake, more than half hiding her face every time she lifted the coffee cup to it with both hands. He was still too shy to watch her very closely but whenever he did so he felt the once provocative image of a dark-haired woman carrying the scent of carnations in her hair grow fainter and fainter.

  After an especially long silence he once again became scared that she would ask about the pin and he said:

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I hope to be children’s nurse.’

  ‘Hope? Is it so difficult?’

  ‘To find the right family is difficult. I myself am from a good family.’

  ‘So naturally—’

  ‘Naturally. After all it is not in every family that the mother gives her daughter a diamond hair-pin for a birthday—’

  He felt his insides turn sick and sour at this pointed mention of the pin but even in this spasm of physical misery he managed to say:

  ‘I thought it was your aunt gave it to you?’

  ‘Yes: that is so. My mother gave me one and my aunt the other. They were a pair, you see.’

  ‘I see. Would you like some more coffee?’

  ‘I think so. Please.’

  After he had fetched fresh cups of coffee from the kiosk he felt his dread about the pin increasing. At the same time he was whipped by curiosity to know what her own pin looked like and if she had brought it with her.

  ‘No. I have not brought it this time.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I felt I had to see what you were like first.’

  He felt himself violently sweating again. At the same time a gull rode stridently across the lake, a fish in its mouth, screamingly pursued by two others diving in battle. He looked up and actually saw a pink fin, like a rosy arrowhead, sticking out of the long gull’s beak before the two darting pursuers drove it away across the water.

  ‘There’s a battle for you. Do you find the birds exciting?’

  ‘I really don’t know.’ Her voice sounded flat and monotonous. ‘I hadn’t thought about it.’

  ‘I do. I’m always here watching them. You never know what you’ll see. Like that fight, I mean.’

  ‘You come alone?’

  ‘Mostly.’

  ‘Haven’t you any friends?’

  ‘Not really.’

  His excruciating shyness seemed to snap a pair of clips across the lids of his eyes. He felt his eyeballs stiffen defensively as she tried to probe out yet another detail of his life:

  ‘You live alone?’

  ‘Oh! yes.’

  And then, as he sat transfixed as a butterfly on a pin, she stirred rapidly at her coffee and said:

  ‘Did you bring the pin with you?’

  ‘Well—’

  For a few desperate moments he resisted new agonies, finally pulled himself together and managed to frame a line or two he had rehearsed for most of the day:

  ‘No, I didn’t, actually. It’s being repaired. One of the diamonds became loose and dropped out. It’ll take a day or two—’

  ‘Is it the one at the top? You know, where the bend is?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s the one.’

  ‘It was always coming out,’ she said.

  He sat in the big silent trap of his own making, head down, utterly at a loss for anything to say. When after some time he looked up again he saw her completely engrossed in a dark stare across the lake. She might have been casting her mind far back to a troubled incident of some sort and it made him say:

  ‘Is Austria nice? What is it like in Austria?’

  Without any hesitation at all she said:

  ‘In winter there are great snows.’

  ‘Ah! yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Sometimes they drifted many metres up the walls of the Schloss.’

  ‘Schloss?’

  ‘The castle. Where I worked.’

  The pronunciation of the word ‘worked’ was so strange that it might well have been ‘walked’ but he had no time to ponder on this before she said hastily:

  ‘Where I
lived I mean.’

  ‘A big castle?’

  ‘Austria is full of castles. There are castles everywhere.’

  ‘I should like to go there once,’ he said. ‘But not in winter. I feel the cold a great deal and I don’t like snow.’

  ‘No? It is very beautiful.’

  ‘I prefer summer. When I think of castles I think of big pine-trees and roses growing over the walls and—’

  ‘Roses? What makes you think of roses?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said.

  Another imponderable silence fell between them like a cloud. On the edge of the lake a quarrel feathered up between a pigeon and a gull. There was a steely smacking of wings and a string of snarls from the gull’s beak. Farther out a duck stood on its head, orange feet clawing the air like the hands of a drowning swimmer.

  Merely for something to say he asked:

  ‘Is your companion from Austria too?’

  ‘My companion?’

  ‘Miss Winter, isn’t that her name?’

  ‘Oh! Anna. I didn’t quite catch. Yes, she is from Austria too.’

  ‘Is she older than you?’

  ‘Oh! no. She is the same age. The same age exactly.’

  Once again the conversation broke down. Shyness drew down the inevitable cloud under which she stared at the lake and in which he separated golden grains of sugar at the bottom of his cup with a coffee spoon.

  A sudden squawk from a gull had the effect of starting off his mind in a complete revolution. He was abruptly conscious of a marked click! in his brain, like that of a lens in a camera being set, and it made him jerk out a single word.

  ‘Roses,’ he said.

  ‘Please? What did you say?’

  The incredible plainness of her face, darkly stained by the blue of the umbrella overhead, made the sharp turn of her head excruciatingly painful. It was now as if she too had been caught in a trap.

  There was a rose, he had suddenly recalled, named Aimée Vibert. It was an old one, pure white, and his grandfather had grown it on a wall. The link connecting that wall with the Schloss far away on some Austrian mountainside whipped itself into a noose that tautened round his throat and he hardly heard her say: