by H. E. Bates
‘I’ve a feeling the summer is going to be wonderful,’ he said. ‘Wonderful fun.’
‘I think so too,’ she said.
5
It did not strike him as curious, afterwards, whenever they met in the small room at the top of the empty house, sun-drenched and stifling as summer settled into weeks of heat, that she did not mention love.
It was certainly, people were saying, the most wonderful summer for years. This, they said, was what you called a summer. You knew, with such a summer, where you were. Day unfolded after day, hot and tranquil, settled under blue soft skies, into distances shortened and trembling under heat haze. In the garden a rapid luxuriance of nettle and thistle and yellow ragwort sprang up, with thickets of wild rose and frothy elder, to choke what had once been paths and beds and lawns between the crumbling walls. On the house the snow-broken magnolia lifted immense copper-green leaves centrally filled by buds of solid waxy cream. A pale bluish fire sprang from the tips of cedar branches. Across the park the great limes were early in flower and down across the meadows the hay was early too.
The girl did not speak of love; and perhaps, if he had noticed it, he would not have thought it extraordinary, since he did not speak of it either. But occasionally, as he waited for her in the wilderness of weeds and briar at the back of the house, and she was a little late, merely perhaps ten minutes or so, he experienced once again an uneasy stab of disappointment, a scratching edge of doubt that she would let him down. But that too did not trouble him again once she arrived.
All summer, continually, she spoke instead about the house. She would lie dreamily on the bed and reproach him in the gentlest terms about its emptiness. She would apply to it the word she never applied to him and which he, in turn, was not for some long time to apply to her.
‘Oh! I love this house. I love it. I can’t understand –’ She did not tire, all summer, of the fabrication of that one particular dream: of how she would open the house, burn the briars, see the lawns once again smooth and short, the peacock trailing across fresh bright grass, the roses tied to the house-wall, the camellias given light and care. ‘If you only opened it for the summer. A little of it. A room or two –’
‘But good God,’ he would say. ‘It would cost a mint. Twenty or thirty thousand pounds.’
‘Would it ruin you?’
‘My dear child, I’m a business man.’
‘Would it ruin you? Why do you want money?’
That, he told himself, was a question people often asked when they had none themselves. It always bored him to try to answer it.
‘How much do you suppose you have?’ she said. ‘Altogether?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Marvellous man,’ she said. Her teasing had behind it, sometimes, a touch of shrewdness: exact rather than hard. ‘First he doesn’t know he has camellias in his garden. Then it’s peacocks. Now it’s money.’
‘Well, I won’t say I couldn’t guess –’
‘All right: guess,’ she said.
‘My father left a quarter of a million,’ he said. ‘I suppose if you count the farm and the stock and the house and the hop-business and so on there’s probably the same again. Perhaps more.’
‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ she said.
‘No?’
His turn to be a little teasing now, he thought. Strange how people took that attitude; curious how they could feel that money, in great lumps, became negative.
Or was she probing? he thought. Trying to size the chances up? That, ten years ago, was what Cordelia had done. In his stupidity he had not seen it and now her teeth were in and he could not get them out.
Unexpectedly she said:
‘It doesn’t mean anything to me, I mean. What can you do with it every night? Look at it? You can’t even count it.’
‘Like a good old-fashioned miser,’ he said. ‘No. But I have it to look at. In things. In the land. In the grass.’
She smiled. It was already full summer, almost the middle of July, and the last of the hay, drying sweetly along the meadows, filled the air as it blew in through the balcony window with its delicious sun-ripe breath. Was there anything more wonderful than that?
‘You and your grass,’ she said. ‘You’re a grass god – that’s what you are.’
‘I’ve got fifteen hundred acres of it. That’s true.’
‘You’ve got everything.’
No: not everything, he thought. Not quite. He was struck by thoughts of Cordelia: ever-present, the leech, the bloodsucker who would not let go.
‘Some things you can’t buy,’ he said.
‘Oh! nonsense. You can buy anything. You know perfectly well.’
‘Not the things Cordelia won’t give.’
‘Oh! damn Cordelia,’ she said. ‘Damn wives. Don’t bore me with wives.’
‘Wives are never so important as when they bore you –’
She sighed, stretching her body on the bed, giving a voluptuous twist of her long full legs, pressing herself down into it with the softness of a bird settling down on a nest.
‘I don’t want to be a wife,’ she said. ‘I’m free. I’m something you can have for nothing: for the fun of it –’
Something about the way she said this, casual and clipped and thrown away, went through his body like flame. In a flash, briefly extinguished, like a stab of heart-burn, it jolted him: steely and brutally sudden and withdrawn, leaving in its place a painful emptiness.
At the time he did not understand it. He was simply shaken by its unexpectedness. Almost immediately he felt he wanted to take her and hold her simply and quietly there where she lay. He pressed his mouth against her face. Out in the garden and beyond it there was hardly a sound of summer. The land had been drugged, almost stunned, by a week of continuous heat; the nightingales had finished singing and with them the cuckoos and almost every other bird but a few monotonous piping yellow hammers chipping away in the stifling heat of hay-filled afternoons. It was such wonderful weather, people said, marvellous weather indeed, perfect: magnificent for things like garden parties and games and flower shows. You felt so safe; you could plan things, as you so rarely could in England, weeks and weeks ahead.
She had been lying in the sun a good deal all summer, mostly half out on the balcony of the little room, so that now her body had taken on something of the colour of tawny-golden hay. They had come to an arrangement by which she had the key of the house too. In that way she could let herself in and wait for him.
And each time he wondered, as he climbed up through the deserted airless house, with its spidery sun-woven shabbiness, its army blisters and its scars of decay, whether she would be there: whether by some chance she would let him down.
And each time she was there; she did not let him down. Each time he climbed the stairs with a heart beating a little faster but without a conscious touch of anxiety. It was just something, the very faintest wonder, hardly even a doubt, as to whether she would be there, whether she would fail.
Earlier in the summer he had had the happy thought, one evening, of bringing up a picnic basket of drinks, a few bottles of champagne, and a box of biscuits. He was late coming down from town sometimes: business, a board meeting, an irritating slow-motion session with one of his men, who could not explain in twenty minutes what he himself could have explained in three, a session with Fawcett about estate matters, a train not on time. And on these occasions he had his doubts in reverse: not that she would not have arrived, but that she would have been, grown bored and have gone.
But that too never happened. She was always quite happy to lie there waiting: the champagne ready in one of the old fire-buckets but never opened; reading or asleep or half-asleep, her body growing deeper brown, a pure corn-colour, as July turned to August and the splendid dry heat carried on into September.
What was it she had called him? A grass god? Well, in a way it was true. In a way perhaps that explained him. But it was she, really, who was much more like a goddess. She was
like the composite figure of all the long summer. She had been just so perfect and delicious, so changeless and dependable, and always so beautiful, ever since that lovely evening he had first met her when the oaks were breaking into flower and the nightingales were in song above the bluebells and both of them had agreed, quite truthfully as it turned out, that the summer would be fun.
But suddenly, for him, the summer was not fun.
6
He came back on a hot September afternoon from a day in London and drove round the estate, as he often did, before going home. It was so hot that he stopped and took off his city coat and hat as he drove the car across the park and through the lanes. September had come in with a lovely spell of high tranquil skies, blue and hot as July: so that everywhere people were saying that they could not remember such a summer. There were others who said it reminded them of another summer, when all the ponds had dried, or another summer, when there were corn-fires everywhere, or still another year when, even in England, cattle had to be killed for want of water. It seemed, they said, as if it would never end.
On the higher farms, where land was inclined to sandiness and there were stretches of pine-heath and bracken with birch-trees, he saw water-carts at work across the fields that day. The pine-heath developed, lower down, into a stretch of common land, rippled purple now with heather. The soil was a good six-foot depth of peat there. He had never been able to do anything with it; and that afternoon he saw that it was on fire.
As he stopped the car and got out to stand and look at it, one of his men came along the road, riding a bicycle. He stopped too and touched his cap.
‘The peat’s alight again, sir,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘That’ll burn like that for weeks, sir. No putting it out.’
‘No.’
‘I recollect ’21, sir. It burned then. It burned half the summer. The fire keeps running underground.’
‘That’s the trouble,’ he said.
‘That is, sir. You think you got it out but you never have. It’s always there. Burning down where you can’t see it.’
He did not answer this time. Together he and his man watched for a moment or two longer the smoke trailing slowly across purple-brown islands of bracken and heather, blackened by veins of creeping flameless fire; and then the man got on his bicycle and rode away, calling back:
‘That’s goin’ to be pretty serious soon, sir, if we don’t get no rain.’
Presently, when he drove on, he found that it was really too hot, after a longish day in the city, to drive very far, and he turned the car for home. The man was right; it was pretty serious, he thought. Across the huge expanse of park and field there was not a blade of green; his land was a series of parched dust-brown chess squares encased by withering hedges. Summer had driven with its own fire deep into grass roots everywhere, giving pasture the look of being killed. He knew, of course, that it was not killed; he knew grass better than that. Grass was an amazingly eternal thing, quite indestructible, and would come again, with a shower or two, miraculously.
He drove home. Through tiredness, perhaps through the exceptional heat, he felt irritated by the sound of voices coming from the garden, over the high wall, as he put the car away.
It was only as he began to go towards the house, carrying his hat and coat over his arm, that he realized that the house, the garden and even the former pigsty summer-house were full of people. Fifty or sixty people were there: grinning, talking, sucking at glasses. Too late he remembered his wife’s party.
‘There you are!’ people called to him. ‘How was town? Exhausting?’
He wandered into the garden with a glass of gin in his hand. The lawn was full of a drinking, gaping, parrot-like chorus. He could not see his pergolas of late fading roses for a barricade of hats.
Out of it all came his wife, moving towards him with the swift persistence of a blue silk leech. He moved to avoid her but she came on, whispering between her teeth.
‘Amazing how you always manage to forget.’
Frigidly, tired, he apologized: ‘I had to call at the estate office. I’m sorry.’
‘Well for God’s sake circulate now you’re here.’
‘I thought it was your party,’ he said. ‘Your friends.’
She gave him a curious fleeting malignant shadow of a grin that he did not understand for some moments afterwards.
‘Some of your friends are here too,’ she said.
She moved away, holding her glass well above the line of her face as she squirmed across the party-crushed lawn. It might have been a touch of triumph about something, but he was too tired to give it a second’s further thought.
He wandered to where, at the end of the lawn, the first rose-purple michaelmas daisies drooped like tired feathers among bronzy gold and scarlet dahlias in the heat. The garden was going to pot, he thought, absolutely and completely to pot; and after people had called to him for the fifth or sixth time ‘Hullo, Fitzgerald. How was town? Pretty grim I expect?’ he decided his obligations were all fulfilled.
There was time to have one more drink before he got the car out and drove across the park to where, as always, the girl would be waiting.
But suddenly, out of the crowd of parrot-heads and hats and glasses, he saw her actually there, on the lawn, not thirty feet away, watching him.
He felt himself go cold, drained of reaction. He could not move. He could not even lift his glass to his mouth. For more than a minute he simply stood staring at her, stunned and cold and without thought.
She was wearing a dress of pale yellow with a narrow black belt and long black gloves. Yellow was her favourite colour. Now it seemed to make her look taller than ever. The waist of the dress was rather high, and her long beautiful legs seemed to give the whole of her body a wonderfully elegant and elevated slenderness. Nothing she could have worn, he thought, could have thrown her so much into relief against the crowd of gabbling sucking faces.
Recovering a little, he looked across the lawn and raised his glass to her. It seemed to him that she looked deliberately away.
For the second time he felt himself go cold. He was shot through by a ridiculous and paralysing thought that she was never going to speak to him again. Always, at the back of his mind, there had been the notion that somehow, one day, for perhaps the most trivial of reasons, she would let him down. Now it came back.
It was not until he had lifted his glass to her a second time and she had looked away again, avoiding him completely, that he felt the full bleak pain of it. She was there, but suddenly she did not want him. He felt himself turn sick. He looked at her again, and again she turned away. She was wearing a large lacy transparent hat that matched her dress. Black yellow-stamened flowers were clustered on one side of it and the soft brim came down and touched her shoulders. And finally and completely, as she turned her back, the hat shut him away.
He went back into the house, stopping to get himself another drink from a tray in the hall. Always, at parties, he felt himself to be a stranger in his own house. People like beetles crawled about the place, admiring glass and furniture, gabbling, shouting to make themselves heard.
‘How does the drought affect you?’ someone said, and he found himself in a corner with his local rector, a man with a face like a knobbed and polished club.
For some moments he exchanged absent-minded hopes and pleasantries about the prospect of rain.
‘We are offering prayers,’ the rector said.
‘Are you?’ he said.
He excused himself and went to get a third drink. Draining it down, he knew suddenly that he was being quite ridiculous, that he was behaving like a fool. It was perfectly obvious that she could not possibly speak to him there. Only an idiot could have failed to see that; or that she was behaving in the only possible and sensible way.
‘Your wife has a genius for parties,’ someone said. ‘They are always terrific.’
With a stab of anger he remembered Cordelia. Malignant, leech-li
ke, draining Cordelia. For the first time his mind was clear. Cordelia with the genius for parties, Cordelia with the nice notion of inviting the girl: stupid of him not to have seen that it was all Cordelia.
Out in the garden, as she passed him, Cordelia smiled. Its infuriating slightness seemed to propel him blindly to the far side of the lawn. He searched vainly for the yellow dress. The party was thinning out a little and now people began to come to him and shake hands, to thank him and say good-bye.
‘You must thank my wife,’ he said. ‘She’s the genius who does these things.’
He walked beyond the pergola to where, in the vegetable patch, a few people were walking apart from the crowd. Here two tall prop-like maiden ladies poked with grey silk parasols at the cracked earth across which even weeds were blue and flaccid with drought.
‘We do not understand the vegetables with the purple flowers,’ they said to him. ‘They are new to us.’
‘Artichokes.’
‘Oh! no, surely. They grow underground.’
‘There are two kinds,’ he said.
‘How extraordinary, how interesting.’
Suddenly, from behind high half-withered rows of flowerless beans, he saw the flash of the yellow hat and dress.
‘But does one eat them?’ the ladies said.
‘One eats the top.’
The girl, with the woman he took to be her sister, was coming up the path. He stared straight at her. His body was shot through with a single quivering start of pain as he saw the long slender legs moving under the yellow dress; he saw the taut full breasts, through the thin summery material, quivering slightly as she walked. He tried for a moment or two to fix the dark elongated eyes, but they did not look at him.
‘How does one eat it?’ the ladies asked. ‘It is like a thistle.’
‘One eats it at an earlier stage,’ he said.
