by H. E. Bates
Parker opened the door slightly and looked in. ‘Was wondering where you were,’ he said.
‘I’m just changing,’ she said.
He saw the attaché case open on the bed.
‘Ain’t goin’ nowheres, are you?’ he said.
‘Oh! I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. I get worried.’
‘Worried?’ he said. He came into the bedroom. ‘Here, what’s this?’
‘Well, it’s Albert,’ she said. ‘It’s Albert.’ She began quickly brushing her hair as if she were nervous, almost a little distracted. ‘When people start prowling about with guns I think it’s time I got back home –’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t do that.’
He came over to her and put his arms across her bare shoulders, clumsily. He began to seem a little distracted too, troubled by the thought of losing her.
‘God, no,’ he said. ‘Don’t do that, Dulcie, you can’t do that.’
‘I can if Albert says so.’
She gave her hair a long deep casual stroke with the brush. That summer, for the first time in her life, she had found time to spend on her hair, and now it brushed out into a thick black fringe that fell over his hands. As she tossed it back again, the dark hair falling over her white plump shoulder, her big breast was strained upward. In a tortured and clumsy way he struggled for a few moments to thrust himself nearer her body, and she pushed him away.
‘Here, steady, we’re not married.’
‘I don’t want you to go –’
‘Yes, but people prowling about with guns. Besides,’ she said suddenly, ‘you ain’t paid me –’
‘I know. I’ll pay,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay.’
‘You keep saying that.’
‘I’ll pay,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay to-night. I’ll git it after supper.’
‘All of it?’
‘Yeh,’ he said. ‘Yeh. All on it. I’ll pay.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘You git it after supper. I’ll reckon how much it is.’
She brushed her hair once again with long, casual, and now almost contemptuous swinging of the brush; she brought it down in a black arch over her sun-brown face, tossed it away again, bringing up the arch of her plump white shoulder.
‘Don’t look so miserable,’ she said. ‘I ain’t gone yet.’
‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want you to go.’
After supper he got up from the table, looking round with troubled rabbity eyes.
‘You want me to pay you now?’
‘I could do with it,’ she said.
‘How much d’ye reckon it’ll be?’
‘I don’t know exactly. I got it all down somewheres,’ she said, ‘in my room. You git the money. I’ll be up there. It ain’t so much.’
She spoke casually, off-hand, as if now, after all, the money did not matter. She looked at his furtive face and she saw that he was past being troubled and was almost frightened. Then she recalled his face as she had seen it in the market, making his deals, unrelaxed and relentless, the face of a dumb fox, and it almost surprised her to see now, at last, how excruciating the change in him was.
She went up to her room. She did not look at the little book. Instead she lay full length on the bed, listening, looking at the blue August evening sky, turning the figure in the book over and over in her mind: twenty-one pounds five-and-six, twenty-one pounds five-and-six, twenty-one –
All this time she could hear Parker lumbering in the attic above her head. She had never been up to the attic. A little flight of wooden steps led up to it and the door was always locked. What was up there she did not know but she felt that perhaps soon, now, there would be ways of knowing. She could persuade Parker, perhaps, to tell her what was there. Twenty-one pounds – did it matter what was in the little book? Did it matter to a pound, one way or another? Twenty-four pounds, twenty-seven? Need Parker know? She stared dreaming at the August sky, still quivering with the heat of the day, and decided that Parker need never know.
When at last he came down from the attic and she heard him shuffling in the corridor outside she called:
‘You can come in. I found out what it was.’
She turned her face in the bed and looked at him.
‘Gettin’ lazy, aren’t I?’
She gave a long deep sigh, as if against the heat and tiredness of the day, and spread out her plump bare arms across the bed. He stood looking at her for some moments, attracted and bewildered, tortured between the visual image of her lying there, of the dark-haired supine body relaxed as if waiting for him, and the hard and painfully difficult thought that now he must pay her what he owed.
Suddenly all his tortured thought seemed to resolve itself. He came forward another pace or two and began to make trembling and clumsy efforts to touch her.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘this won’t get the money paid –’
Once again he was human and tender.
‘I want you,’ he said. His hands were beginning to tremble violently. ‘I want you – I can’t git on without you –’
‘You keep all on, don’t you? Mind my dress.’
‘Dulcie,’ he said. ‘God –’
‘Mind my dress then. And don’t call me Dulcie. My name’s Dulcima.’
‘Dulcima,’ he said quietly. ‘Dulcima.’
He ran his hands about her relaxed soft throat and shoulders, trembling, seeking with gestures of great clumsiness to express what he felt and what he wanted.
‘Here, I thought you came to pay me the money,’ she said.
‘I did. So I did. I got it.’
‘Put it on the wash-stand then,’ she said. He seemed to hesitate. ‘Go on –’
She lingered on the words and something about them seemed to inflame him, so that he moved almost blindly as he groped about, taking the money from his trousers’ pocket. ‘How much?’ he said. ‘How much?’
‘Forty pounds,’ she said. ‘Just forty. Well, all but two shilling –’
For a moment he was shattered. He had moved across to the wash-stand like a man in a coma of heavy excitement and now, for a single moment, the notion of that extraordinary figure of forty pounds seemed to wake him up. He turned on her sharply. His mouth gaped open as if, in a flash of revelation, he had seen what a fool he was.
And then he stopped. He saw that she had taken off her dress and that now she was sitting up on the bed, casually and half undressed, rolling down her stockings. He heard her say something about ‘put it in the drawer, it’ll be out of the way there’ and in blind excitement he stuffed what money he had into the drawer of the wash-stand.
When he groped back to her it was to be stricken by another troubling and this time more painful thought.
‘What about Albert?’ he said.
‘You don’t think I ever wanted Albert,’ she said, ‘do you?’
She looked past him with a long slow smile.
‘Did Albert ever –?’
‘Does it matter if he did?’ she said.
Frenziedly he reached out for her and she smiled, letting him kiss her for the first time. She held her face sideways, so that the black close eyes were fixed on the evening sky. The evening was still warm and blue and beautiful and now she seemed to see something in it that split the dark pupils for another second with yet another smile.
5
She did not go to market on the following day. ‘I’ll glean a little corn for the hens,’ she said. ‘You enjoy yourself. You’ll get on better without me.’
During the morning, when Parker had gone, she discovered, for the first time, what lay in the little attic above the steps and what, in turn, lay above that too.
Parker, the previous night, had left his working clothes in her bedroom. In the morning she had taken the key of the attic from his trousers and later he had gone away in the suit, with the black hat he always wore for market.
When she went up into the little attic she was surprised to find it empty except for a shelf on which st
ood rows of biscuit tins. At first she did not bother to look into these tins. She went up another flight of steps on to the roof above. A square balustraded platform had been built there by some previous owner who had evidently wanted the air, the stars, the sun or simply the long view, across twenty miles of valley, to the sea.
She stood for some time fascinated by this view. It opened out a world that lay below her like a map. She could see not only the fields she knew, bare and white after the heat of summer and harvest, but small chalky veins of road winding away among clotted copses of sweet chestnut, through fox-red villages and fields of dark green potatoes. She could see, five or six miles away, the square stone church tower of the market town and then, far beyond it, delicate and faint, the line of sea horizon, with a few creeping charcoal puffs that were the smoke of passing steamers. It created for her the curious and heady illusion that here, above everything, alone and on top of the world, she had never been able to see so far.
After some minutes she went down into the attic. She smiled occasionally when she thought of Parker: Parker so clever, so tight, so mean and so eager; Parker so desperate for her, so childish and so like a man. She smiled when she thought of his rushing, clumsy affection and she smiled still more when she opened the first of the biscuit tins.
In them, in many neat tied bundles of notes, Parker kept his money. There were six biscuit tins and there were even empty biscuit tins waiting to be filled.
At first she did not touch the money. Instead she went back to her bedroom. She found the money Parker had given her and she counted it. There were fifteen pounds.
As she discovered it, she smiled another curious sideways smile and then went back to the attic. She opened one of the biscuit tins and took another twenty-five pounds; and then, as an afterthought, another ten. Then she closed the biscuit tins and went downstairs.
All that day she did as she had told Parker she would: she gleaned corn for the hens from the lower wheat field. It was very hot in the white chalk cup of land below the hill and she felt the sun burn her as she worked solidly up and down with heavy movements of her thick brown legs and arms. Work and the long hot summer had taken a little flesh from her, so that her limbs were harder and smoother, without the flabbiness of the days when she had pushed the pram up the hill. Her dark eyes were keener and brighter, more penetrating and more mature. She had found more time to brush her hair and gradually it had lost its coarseness. She even thought there were times when her legs were not so ugly as before.
Once during the afternoon she looked up and there, at the foot of the hill, by the gate, she saw once again the young man with the gun, the man that Barnes had seen. He seemed to hesitate for a moment as she looked up, and then he began to walk across the field towards her.
She went on gathering corn-straw until he came up to her. He was very much taller than she was, with a big frame and a shock of thick fair hair that pushed from under his cap.
‘Beg pardon, Mrs Parker.’
‘Who are you calling Mrs Parker?’
‘Oh,’ he said. In this awkward moment he could do nothing but look away from her, fidgeting with the stock of his gun. ‘Well – I only wanted to say – I got young pheasants up in the wood there. Sometimes they get across here on your piece –’
‘If they get on here they belong here,’ she said.
‘Yes, but –’
‘He don’t like people roaming about the land. Parker don’t like it, pheasants or no pheasants.’
‘I only want to walk across once in a while,’ he said. ‘Say once a day.’
‘I think you better keep off,’ she said. ‘He don’t like it.’
‘Not if I asked him?’
‘Wouldn’t make no difference. He don’t like folks traipsing round.’
‘Would you ask him?’
‘Me?’
‘I’d be glad if you’d ask him,’ he said, ‘will you?’
‘Well, I’ll see,’ she said. ‘But for the lord’s sake don’t come on until I say. He’s funny that way. He don’t like people on here.’
‘I see. Well, thanks,’ he said and began to walk away.
Twenty yards away something seemed to occur to him and he turned and called back:
‘If you want me any time I’m up in the wood. I got a hut there. You’ll find me.’
When Parker came home about four o’clock he was less drunk than sleepy. ‘Let me take your hat and coat,’ she said. ‘You have a nap in the chair.’
She took his hat and coat and laid them in the sitting-room. After a time she looked into the hat. Sixty-five pounds, all in notes, were folded into the brim, and she took out fifteen. She laid the fifteen pounds on the kitchen table and when Parker woke up and came to the table for tea she said:
‘This is that money you give me last night. I did say fourteen, didn’t I?’
‘Yeh, yeh,’ he said. He spoke with sleepy eagerness; he remembered how, the previous night, she had clearly spoken of forty and of how he had put only fifteen, in that tense excited moment of seeing her undressing, in the wash-stand drawer. ‘Yeh, that was it, fourteen.’
‘Well you give me too much. You give me fifteen.’
‘I did?’
‘You better have a pound back,’ she said. ‘We want things right, don’t we?’
‘No, no, go on,’ he said. ‘That’s for you. You have it. You keep that.’ He smiled and leaned across the table and ran his hand briefly about her neck. ‘That’s for you. That’s for the little extras.’
She smiled too, sleepy and casual, and said, letting him caress her: ‘You like the little extras, do you?’
He was fired with small frenzies of excitement and leaned farther over and kissed her face, brown and warm from sun. She laughed and suddenly it seemed to him marvellously good and clever and satisfying to have her there, to have got away with the small deceit of the fifteen pounds, and to hear her laughing because he touched her.
‘You better get on with your tea,’ she said. ‘There’s a time and place –’
He tried roughly to smother her mouth with kisses and she said:
‘Go on with you. You’ll knock your tea over and then you’ll know about it.’
Then as he laughed and let her go, she said:
‘About this money. It’s quite a bit. I thought I’d bank it.’
‘Banks? You don’t want t’ave nothing to do with no banks,’ he said. ‘Banks ain’t no good.’
‘No?’
‘They git to know too much. They know all your business. Then the income tax git to know. I ain’t payin’ no tax if I know it – they ain’t gittin’ nothing away from me.’
‘I’ll put it in the post office,’ she said. ‘I’ll git interest.’
‘You don’t wanta do nothing with it,’ he said. ‘You keep it. You keep it where nobody can’t touch it. That’s all.’
‘Well, I’ll see,’ she said.
Suddenly, off-hand, casually, as if it were something of no great importance, she changed the subject.
‘Oh! I forgot –’ She was telling the truth now; there was no need to lie any longer when she could simply repeat the details of a straightforward circumstance – ‘that fellow with the gun – he come prowling round again to-day.’
‘Albert?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ she said. In sudden nervousness she spoke quickly. ‘He was right across the field. He sheered off through the wood before I could tell.’
‘I’ll sheer him off,’ he said. ‘Damn quick. ‘What’s he want with you now?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t think,’ she said. ‘Why don’t he leave us alone. I told him, I told him about –’
‘Told him?’ he said. ‘Told him about what?’
‘About us,’ she said. ‘About how we were. You know – about being on our own up here and all that. The two of us.’
Parker, with thoughts buzzing in his head like crazy flies, trembled with joy. He suddenly exulted in the notion that he had cheate
d Albert. At first he had simply been jealous of Albert, but now he had cheated him. It was a clever deal to have cheated Albert. It was a wonderful thing to know that Albert had been rejected.
And now, because of it, he felt more sure of Dulcima. Once or twice he had not been quite so sure. Sometimes when she had spoken of Albert it evoked in him the small, sour, disturbing thought that she was not playing straight with him, that it was really always Albert she liked most, Albert she preferred.
But now he knew that that was not so. Things were different now. Albert was finished, and it was only himself she wanted.
6
Two days later she put her money in the post office bank. She rode down to the town by bus, coming back in the afternoon with the new clean post office book in her handbag, thinking how pleasant the first figure in it was; how solid and how satisfactory and how secret; and how, in time, if she were careful and things went well, she could make this figure grow.
The bus stopped on the corner below the hill. She had to walk the last mile to the farm. In two or three days it would be September. A few late fingers of honeysuckle, pale yellow, touched with flecks of strawberry, were still flowering on the high bank above the lane and she suddenly felt an impulse to climb the bank to gather them.
From there she could see across a copse of hazel that had been cut down in springtime. Beyond it great beeches, still green, faintly brown only when scorched by sun, rose for almost a mile along the steep hillside of chalk. And as she stood there, gathering the honeysuckle, smelling it, thinking a little, she saw the young keeper walking down the path.
He saw her at the same moment and began to come down beside the hazel copse, almost as if he had been waiting for her. She saw him coming and began to behave at once as if she had not seen him, going on gathering the honeysuckle, turning her back, slowly walking away down the hill.
‘I got something I wanted to say,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
Slowly she picked off sprigs of honeysuckle, not looking at him.
