by H. E. Bates
The girl, only four or five yards away, was looking straight ahead.
‘Cooked?’ the ladies said. ‘One eats it cooked of course?’
‘Like asparagus,’ he said. ‘With sauce.’
‘Strange how one never comes across it.’
‘It’s eaten more in France,’ he said.
As he spoke the girl came level with him and he stepped aside to let her pass. He thought how extraordinarily beautiful she looked and he was moved by an intolerable impulse to touch her hand as she went by. For a moment it obliterated everything. He felt he had never wanted anything in his entire life quite so much as that. It filled him with a painful, blinding sort of hunger and there was nothing he could do.
‘Well, thank you, Mr Fitzgerald,’ the ladies said. ‘It is Mr Fitzgerald, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘We were not certain. We know your wife much better of course.’
He did not speak again. Wandering vaguely back into the crowd, across the lawn, he was aware simply, with dry and lacerating emptiness, that the girl had gone.
When the last car had driven away he walked upstairs to his room. It was dark and he felt he did not want a light. But as he came along the landing a door opened, a shaft of light pounced across the stairs, and he saw Cordelia waiting there in her dressing gown.
‘Good night,’ he said.
The house was hot and stale. Suddenly he did not want to be in it any longer. He turned to go downstairs.
‘I must say she’s very beautiful,’ Cordelia said.
‘Is there any need to talk about it?’
‘I think we ought to talk about it.’
‘I don’t see why,’ he said. ‘I’m going down for a drink.’
As he reached the top of the stairs, Cordelia said:
‘I want to talk about it. Now.’
‘Oh?’
With astonishing and unexpected directness she said:
‘The whole district is stiff with gossip. There has been dirty, evil, rotten gossip.’
‘They’re not happy unless they have a little gossip,’ he said.
‘Happy!’ she said. ‘It’s nice the way you talk about happy.’
‘I didn’t want to talk at all,’ he said.
He had not stopped walking down the stairs. Now, halfway down, he heard her scurrying after him, her voice bitterly running too in a series of leaf-like whispers:
‘You might at least have the decency to stand still while I say something!’
‘All right,’ he said. He had reached the foot of the stairs. He could hear the two maids washing glasses in the kitchen. ‘I’ll stand still.’
‘Not here,’ she said. ‘Not here.’
He unlocked the cellarette on the sideboard and found the whisky. With the decanter in one hand and a glass in the other he walked to the door.
Out in the narrow courtyard the scent of late summer, heavy and intoxicating with tobacco flowers, was so delicious that he walked for ten or fifteen yards, breathing fresh sweet air, before he realized she was following him.
‘If you’d have the decency to stand still a minute I could say what I have to say.’
‘I’m standing still.’ He mocked her with an arresting flick of the decanter. ‘One minute.’
‘What I want to say won’t take a minute,’ she said.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Splendid.’
Always there was the same niggling, pointless, wearisome row after parties. He did not want to listen. There could be no point in listening. He remembered suddenly, for no reason at all, the old ladies who had not heard of artichokes. They were the sort of idiotic, suburban, boring people she knew.
It was so monstrously stupid that he began laughing.
‘I don’t think it’s any time for laughing.’
‘No? There were two ladies who had never heard of artichokes,’ he said. ‘Your friends. Damn funny.’
‘Awfully funny.’
For a moment they were both tensely silent; and then she said:
‘If the joke is over I want to talk about the cottage. The one at Sandchurch. By the sea.’
‘Good God, why?’
‘I’m going to live there,’ she said. ‘You’re going to give it me,’
Vaguely, at last, he began to understand what it was she had wished to speak about. A few early stars were pricking the clear darkness across the park, above coast-like undulation of trees, and he watched them, fascinated, incredulous at what he heard.
‘You always get what you want,’ she said. ‘You always have done. In time.’
He did not speak.
‘That’s the way you were brought up,’ she said. ‘All you had to do was to scream long enough and they gave it you.’ She stopped and then went on: ‘I don’t think you’re selfish. You’re just not aware of other people.’
The tobacco-plants, pale and ghost-like under the wall of the house, were almost the only things that had survived, with any freshness, the long blistering heat of summer. He took a slow deep breath and held the sweetness of them in his mouth.
‘Well, you’ve got this,’ she said. ‘You wanted it all summer and now you’ve got it.’
Her generosity seemed to call for some sort of remark, but he could think of nothing; and she said:
‘All I want is the cottage and a little place and enough to live on.’
‘I think that’s more than fair.’
‘I’m not trying to be fair,’ she said. ‘But you can’t go on without love, can you? It’s silly to go on without love.’
For a very long time, he thought, there had never been any question of love. That, above all, had never intruded.
‘Once there’s no love,’ she said, ‘it’s the end.’
Well then, he thought, thank God there was no love. The stars over the dark line of trees were growing brighter every moment, flashing crystal green in the hot September sky. To the right of the big house, in the hollow, reflections of fire filled the darkness, and he remembered there were hop-pickers camping there. It was lovely weather for the hopping.
In a flat voice Cordelia said:
‘I apologize about the party. The girl I mean. It was not vindictive.’
‘No?’
‘I didn’t even know her name till this week. I didn’t even believe she existed. I had to invite her to make sure.’
Well, that was decent, he thought. And really without rancour.
‘I had to know her name, after all,’ she said. ‘I have to name her –’
For a moment it occurred to him that she was going to cry. He thought he heard her sniff in the darkness, but it might have been her shoe grating dry gravel as she turned to go. It did not strike him as curious that she did not say good night. But he said good night himself, and afterwards, as she walked away, thank you.
Later, for some time, he walked about the garden, deliciously breathing the deep scent of tobacco flowers. How wonderfully they had done all summer, he thought, how marvellously they had stood the drought where other things had failed. The sky was full of stars. An owl called with fluffy notes across the park. He walked up and down the garden, thinking. He thought of the girl, the yellow dress, her brown arms in the long black gloves, the little room, the long matchless summer and of how, at last, because of it, he was going to be free. Curious that his own key, in his own gate, in his own park, on that first evening, had begun it all.
When he went to bed he fancied he heard Cordelia crying in her room. But he was not sure; and he did not stop to see. Women cried for the oddest things – sometimes for pleasure; but mostly you never knew why.
7
When he drove across the park the following evening it was still very hot and the peat land fires were still smouldering, raising smoke that hung about in thin blue-brown clouds.
He had come up to the house a little earlier than usual, and when he reached the room in the top of the house the girl was not there. He felt suddenly more than worried. He felt once again the gnawi
ng misery of the notion that she would let him down.
For a short time he sat on the bed, trying patiently to wait for her. It was unbearably hot in the little shut-up room and he found himself sweating. It was a sweat of anxiety, touched by fear and aggravated by sun; and after ten minutes or so he could not bear it any longer.
He went downstairs, through the empty airless house and out into the front courtyard of withered grass and weeds to look for her. He walked once round the house and stood looking vainly down the long avenue, past the ruined army huts and drifts of premature shrivelled chestnut leaves, dead and brown on the road.
‘Sir?’ a voice said. ‘Excuse me, sir?’
He turned and, in a moment of sharp annoyance, saw Medhurst, touching his cap as he came from behind the army huts.
‘What do you want?’ he said. ‘How did you know I was here?’
‘I saw the car, sir.’
‘What are you doing sneaking about the house here?’
‘I wanted a word with you, sir,’ Medhurst said. ‘It was about the water.’
God, he thought, the water again. Always the water. He remembered with revulsion and annoyance the fetid hut, the naked unwashed baby. If you gave them water, Good God, they hadn’t the faintest notion in hell what it was for.
‘Well, what about the water? You made any use of it yet?’
‘No, sir,’ Medhurst said. ‘We got none to use. We had none to use this three weeks.’
‘You mean the well has packed up?’
‘Dry as a bone, sir.’
‘Then why the hell didn’t you speak of it before? Why didn’t you speak to Captain Fawcett?’
‘I spoke to Captain Fawcett, sir. We been having water carted down there. It wasn’t that, sir –’
‘Then what are you cribbing about?’ There was too much sir, too much lying and hedging, too much shiftiness. ‘What are you driving at?’
‘I can’t stand another winter there, sir. We had a terrible winter and a terrible summer. The place is not fit for pigs, sir –’
He wanted to laugh; his voice broke in his throat, dryly. Impotent fury, another recollection of the ghastly unwashed hut, the little place that had been so pretty in his boyhood and was now nothing but a monstrous and sordid slum under the hazel trees: all of it clotted his tongue so that not a syllable of either laughter or fury or protest came.
‘That’s about as plain as I can put it, sir. I can’t stand another winter –’
Where was the girl? he thought. For God’s sake, where had she got to? He almost shouted:
‘I’ve no time to go into this now. You must come down to the office. You must see me there.’
Grimly, scowling, and yet somehow smoothly and terribly polite, Medhurst said:
‘I’ve worked for you and your father since I was thirteen –’
‘Then very probably it’s time you worked for someone else.’
‘If that’s the way you look at it, sir –’
‘It is the way I look at it.’ He was tired, impotently, wretchedly, miserably tired, and said: ‘Good Christ, man, you can hear, I hope, can’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Fitzgerald turned to walk away and saw at last, far down the avenue, under the chestnut trees, the girl walking towards him. A stab of excitement and gladness whipped through his throat and he was really not listening when Medhurst said:
‘I want to get this straight, sir.’
‘Straight?’ he said. There was a new sort of insolence in the air nowadays; there was not one of them that wasn’t at heart, he thought, a damn bolshevik. ‘How do you mean straight?’
‘You mean I’m to go, sir?’
‘I do. You see Fawcett in the morning and Fawcett will fix you up.’
‘You bloody well ought to be shot, sir,’ Medhurst said. ‘That’s what you bloody well ought to be.’
Fitzgerald walked away. Nothing annoyed him more than passages of insolent and rowdy argument with disgruntled employees on the estate. He kept an agent for that. He walked on imperviously, as if indifferently; and at last, as he reached the stone steps of the house-front, he heard from Medhurst a cold low yell:
‘You ought to be shot. And there’s one or two as’d be glad to do it. Me, for one! –’
He did not turn or glance or utter a word in answer as he pushed open the door and went inside the house.
He was still standing there, just inside, in the deserted empty entrance hall, with its scarred and ruined panels, when the girl ran up the steps.
He felt now that he could hardly wait for her. As she swung open the door and came inside he pressed her back against it, kissing her mouth hard and for a long time. Hunger, a curious dry loneliness, an ache not at all unlike fear, held him rigid.
‘I thought you were not coming. I had the most awful feeling –’
‘Am I late? I’ve been busy. I tried not to be.’
He was bursting to tell of Cordelia, and said:
‘Shall we go up?’
‘I really mustn’t stay long –’
‘Not another party?’ he said. Gladness that she had now arrived broke the small amusing irony about yesterday. ‘Surely not a party?’
‘Poor man,’ she said, and laughed. ‘The look on your face.’ Her laugh was nothing more than a few light chuckles low in her throat. ‘As if I were never going to speak to you again.’
‘That’s what I felt,’ he said.
Upstairs, in the little room, she lay fully-dressed on the bed. He sat on the end of it, looking at her, his heart crowded with a new and extraordinary tenderness. He thought of her as she had looked at the party, in the yellow dress. There, in the garden, in the yellow dress, the long black gloves and the big hat that shut him away, she had woken in him these first startling, almost frightening impulses of new feeling. Queer that in that moment, held as it were behind a barrier set up by the two owl-like ladies talking of artichokes, in the moment when he could not touch her at all, he should have been first troubled by this uneasy, startling hunger of wanting her so much.
‘I’ve something to tell you,’ he said. What was it Cordelia had said about love? It was no use without love –’
‘Tell on,’ she said.
Outside, in the long dead forest of grass, he fancied he heard the dry shufflings of the peacock: the wandering dainty ghost that had trailed about there behind the house all summer.
‘Cordelia is going to let me go.’
The girl, staring upwards, seemed to be listening to the peacock too.
‘It was really why she invited you,’ he said.
‘Why me?’
Her voice seemed to be echoed in the peacock’s dry rustlings through dead grass.
‘I think it was the yellow dress that did it,’ he said. ‘I think you scored quite a victory in the yellow dress.’
She did not answer. Her quietness was so strangely rapt and withdrawn and cool that it briefly occurred to him that she did not think there had, in fact, been any victory.
He lay down beside her on the bed.
‘Say something, please. Say something,’ he said.
On evenings in May and June, when they had first come there, the clamorous chorus of birds and warm late evenings, just before darkness, and even after darkness, had been wonderful. Now summer had killed all bird-sound except the delicate stalking of the peacock: an irritating haunting sort of a whisper in the ruined garden, in a world that was like an old and dusty vacuum.
‘I love you: that’s what,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know?’ Tenderly he tried to turn her face to him and found it withdrawn and rigid. ‘Don’t you know? You love me too, don’t you?’
‘No,’
He felt himself savagely hit between the eyes as if by a black and sickening flash of flame.
‘God –’ As he began to speak he hardly heard her, in turn, talking quietly, almost as if to herself, as she stared through the balcony window at the hot September sky:
‘It’s why I was late to-nig
ht. I’ve been packing.’
‘Packing? – for God’s sake?’
‘I’m going on Wednesday,’ she said. ‘The day after tomorrow.’
He sucked dry dusty air through his mouth, ejecting it again in odd dead words:
‘But all summer’ – stupidly and incoherently he searched for words of argument – ‘after all that’s happened – the things we’ve done.’
‘You never mentioned love,’ she said. ‘You never talked about it.’
‘But how can you say? It’s a thing that gets hold of you. It gets down inside you. You can’t say what you want it to be. How can you say?’
‘You wanted it to be fun,’ she said. ‘That’s what you said.’
Suddenly, bitterly hurt, he had nothing to say. He was crushed by a dark complexity of emotions. He was not used to such complexity. His body was held rigid, in bloodless paralysis, and outside in the garden the damnable, infuriating rustle of the peacock was the only sound that broke the air.
‘I ought to go,’ she said.
She moved as if to get up; but in an unbearable impulse to touch her, to hold her down there on the bed, he ran his hands across her neck and breasts, and she said:
‘I warned you what it might be. I warned you long ago.’
A terrible and dull soreness, like a bruise, seemed to drag downward across his chest.
‘It’s been wonderful and I’ve loved the house,’ she said. ‘I’ve loved everything. But everything comes to an end. I loved everything but it has to come to an end.’
He felt beaten about by emotions that were so baffling and complex that they made him feel ridiculous. It was cruelly stupid that in agony a man could feel ridiculous.
‘Let me get up now,’ she said. She moved her long body quietly away from him on the bed.
‘May I kiss you?’
‘You know you may.’ She was suddenly cool and withdrawn and shut away, as she had been that first evening he had brought her there: the evening she had called him ‘Careless man’ as he clumsily broke the camellia flowers.
He kissed her for the last time. He wanted the kiss to flame against her mouth with the love he could not express in words; but her mouth in its responses was dry and cool, and the kiss was dry too, utterly removed from the molten complicated agony that raged inside him. He wanted to break away from the long supple body, exquisite more than ever now, always so beautiful and so obliging and so like summer, and let the agony release itself in a scream telling her that he could not bear it and that she did not understand.
