by H. E. Bates
‘It was not a painful thing. It was one of those happy releases.’
I said I understood. I did not really understand, and she said:
‘What I really wanted to ask you about was dancing. Do you care for dancing?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘We thought it would be nice for her if you would take her dancing. The skating was such a tremendous success in every way. We thought too if you had friends – when the autumn comes you could begin to make up parties.’
I said I should love to do that and she smiled. Like a person in an obstacle race she had floundered through her traps and hazards and difficulties and had begun to emerge, triumphant, on the other side.
‘What about your friends?’
I stood thinking. I could hear the startling artillery noises of lily seeds shooting into the hot breathless Sunday air, and my thoughts seemed something like them, brittle and scattered and difficult to collect.
‘We have tickets for the Red Cross Ball at Nenborough in September,’ she said. ‘They’re rather expensive but you needn’t worry about that. On the other hand there are your friends – what about your friends?’
I thought of Tom Holland, and I said perhaps Tom Holland and his sister, Nancy, might come. I had not seen them all summer.
‘Holland? Who are they? – are they nice people?’ And then she remembered: ‘Oh! the farmers – Will Holland – it’s one of our farms, of course it is. The mother is such a delicate-looking person – like egg-shell –’
I thought for a moment of saying something about Mrs Holland having twelve children – the family was big and spaced-out and fair-haired, so that for a long time I had never been able to tell if the elder sons were brothers or uncles or fathers to the younger generation, Tom and Nancy, the children of my own age – but she was too quick for me:
‘I’m sure they would be nice. What I call a real Evensford family. A real yeoman family – there aren’t many of them left. Who else is there?’
I thought for a moment and then said:
‘Alex Sanderson.’
‘Who is he?’ she said.
‘His father is in leather,’ I said.
She thought, too, and said:
‘Not that heavy Baptist family who got involved in some sort of profiteering scandal during the war? Didn’t the father and one of the sons get sentences –’
‘Not that family,’ I said. Evensford was full of Sandersons. Like leather they were everywhere, branching out, making money, dedicating chapel foundation stones, strong in Rotarian and golfing and Masonic and bridge-playing circles, living in red gabled villas having conservatories filled with scarlet geranium and drawing-rooms with Tudor radio sets. Their wives began by being sleek and good looking and ended up, in a few years, wadded with corsets that revealed pimpled suspender buttons, frothy with fox furs whose bony skulls were chained under chins of mauve-powdered flesh, healthy and puffed and in a rubbery way voluptuous.
But every family has a branch that does not run to rule; and Robert Sanderson, Alex’s father, had married a girl of taste who came from somewhere in the West country. She was dark and compact, with a small bright-eyed head, like a blackbird’s. She wore earrings that made her look slightly foreign and immensely distinguished and always young, and as the years went by she did not grow fat. Her figure kept a wonderful tautness and Alex once said to me: ‘My God, I barged into the bedroom and saw my mother dressing. She’s like a girl.’ She was one of those women who develop, in the late forties, an elegance and a gaiety, an almost impulsive re-firing of youth that is more beautiful than youthfulness. I had kissed her once in a party game at the Sanderson house, in one of those room-to-room scrambles where people rush out of light into darkness and disappear into pantries and hat-stands, and I remember how I pecked at her mouth as we passed on the dark stairs. For a second or two she held me back with slender fingers, laughing delicately against my ear: ‘You can do better than that, surely – try again. Come on, once more.’
There was nothing in bad taste about it; it was a little moment of impetuous gaiety that I daresay she forgot, three minutes later, over the pineapple trifle downstairs. It was real and warm and delightful and infectious: and all of it, including her looks, her deep black hair and eyelashes and her delicate hands, she had given to Alex, who was not merely like her in looks and ways and a tendency to sudden and affectionate impulsiveness but closer to her, I often thought, than his father. So much so that he even brought her, sometimes, to dances.
I could not explain all this to Miss Bertie, but I said:
‘This is quite a different family. Only cousins or something to the others.’
‘I see.’ I thought she seemed dubious and reserved and not satisfied. We turned and began to walk back. The sun stabbed down on the back of my neck and I suddenly wondered it Lydia dare try again the Sunday trick of making herself sick. Then Miss Bertie said:
‘I don’t want her mixed up in that awful sort of golfing-Rotarian rubbish that always goes on in towns like Evensford.’
‘Alex hates golf,’ I said. ‘He’s never liked sport. He doesn’t even swim. He’s all for music and that sort of thing – he’s a gay and friendly fellow. I think you’d like him.’
‘What sort of girls does he know?’
She said it almost tartly, with a touch of wry catechism.
‘He doesn’t like them if they don’t dance well,’ I said. ‘If he can’t get one that dances well he’ll bring his mother.’
It was that remark that seemed to change her; she seemed suddenly happier about all I had said.
‘Do you suppose it would bore his mother to come along and keep an eye on you young people sometimes?’
‘She’d love it. She loves young people. She’s young herself,’ I said.
The last of whatever fears had troubled her suddenly vanished – I could tell it by the way she lifted her face all at once and caught, in deep lip-closed breaths, all the honeyed drenching odour of lime and lily and pure heat that rose from the stilled gardens – and as we came back to the terraces of white yucca bells she smiled.
‘It’s very sweet of you to do all this, and I hope you don’t mind.’ Before I could answer I saw her look towards the house. ‘Oh! they’re ready and waiting for me.’ I looked too and saw Lydia, standing side by side with Miss Juliana against the french windows on the terrace, slowly drawing on her long white gloves for church.
‘Have we been long? Shall we be late?’ Miss Bertie called. ‘I’ve nothing to do but put on my gloves and hat.’
She trotted bumpily into the house. Miss Juliana, who was holding a buttonhole of a single Maréchal Niel rose sprigged with fans of maidenhair, followed her through the french windows a moment later, calling:
‘You need a pin for your buttonhole, dear –’
I stood looking at Lydia. Something, about the long white gloves, about the gap of smooth supple flesh above the elbow between the gloves and the sleeve of white silk, filled me with sickness. A wave of pure nausea, a swamping ache of wanting to touch her, ebbed over me, quivering centrally down through my body. I thought of the hot Sunday evening in the room with the great brass bedstead and I knew that she was thinking of it too. There was a curious voluptuous primness about the Sundayfied white gloves, leaving their gap of white flesh, that was more startling than if I’d seen her naked, and in a flat voice that I knew she was flattening purposely she said:
‘Where are you going? What are you going to do?’
‘I was going –’
‘Go home and write to me,’ she said. ‘Please darling. Ill have a letter in the morning then. Tell me you love me and tell me what Auntie Bertie said.’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Where were you going really?’ she said.
‘To see Tom Holland,’ I said. ‘I was going to –’
‘Who’s he?’ she said.
‘He’s the boy we met skating,’ I said, but once again, I think for the third time, she did not remember.
/> ‘Write to me,’ she said. ‘You will, won’t you?’ All she felt for me was fused into bright and narrowed eyes shining back at me in full sunlight. ‘If you don’t I shan’t love you.’
‘I’ll write,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you everything in a letter.’
Two minutes later the Daimler drove away from the front door and down the avenue, under the too-sweet dripping limes. I walked home across the park and wrote to Lydia, trying to tell her, in phrases that were warm and clogged and indecisive, how much I loved her. Then I walked across the fields to Busketts farm and saw the Hollands for the first time that summer, telling Tom what had happened and what I wanted him to do.
‘Love,’ they teased me. ‘That’s how it is – that’s what. Nobody has seen him all summer. Love,’ they laughed at me, ‘now we know –’
In this way began the autumn and winter when we first took Lydia dancing: myself and Alex Sanderson, who knew all the girls; Tom Holland, who knew none of them and was too shy to know; Tom’s sister Nancy, and Mrs Sanderson, with her elegant vivacious manners, her affection and experience, and her eyes like a bird’s.
And also a man named Blackie Johnson.
Part Two
Chapter One
The weather was very beautiful that autumn when we first began dancing. The valley seemed always to be dreamy with light mists, sometimes a smoke-straw colour, sometimes pale amber-rose, that broke into October days of tender fly-drowsy sunshine. We used to go to the dances in an old black Chrysler limousine with a glass division and occasional seats at the back that I hired, in the first place and almost by chance, from Johnson’s garage down beyond the station.
Johnson was a tall craggy man of old fashioned Gothic appearance with a voice like a crow. He wore narrow trousers that fitted his legs like black gloves and a flat black-peaked chauffeur’s cap that scotched on the left side of his grey head like an oily frying-pan. When the wagonette-and-brake business began to fail under pressure of the internal combustion engine, about 1912, Johnson took gradually to cars, but I thought the conversion left him with a sort of bemused and lingering regret. You rarely saw him unless he was chewing a straw, nor could I ever quite rid myself of the idea that the old slow plushy limousine would break suddenly into trotting and that if it did so Johnson would know very well how to deal with such a situation. Perhaps that is why we liked it so much. Certainly we liked Johnson, who treated us with something of the leisured respect of an old coachman and tucked us up, after dances, with thick chequered and velvety coach rugs, so that we would come home warm and snoozy and wonderfully intimate and fugged up, like six people half-asleep in a big, crawling hearse-like bed.
Perhaps another reason why we travelled in such slow easy comfort was that Johnson did funeral arrangements too. When I first went down to order the taxi – it was purely by chance that I did so because Alex Sanderson’s Humber, in which we were to have travelled, had blown a gasket that day and would not have been ready in time – the yard behind the garage was still full of horse-cabs, station flies, a landau, a number of black horse-hearses and two old yellow wagonettes with copper-and-brass carriage lamps and shining mudguards picked out with scarlet lines. The old world had not quite departed. There were still black horses in the stables in the backyards and only two cars, and a single hand petrol-pump, in the yard at the front. But these were signs of the times. One of the station flies had a wheel off and Johnson’s first car, an old brass-lamped Schneider, a beautiful high ornate affair I always felt ought to have played fairground tunes out of its elegant sloping-bonnet grille, lay already cast aside under a cart-shed, spattered white with the droppings of house martins that had built above it that summer.
Another sign of the times was Blackie, Johnson’s son.
That day when I walked into the yard to order the taxi Old Johnson had gone down to Nenborough to meet an express and it was Blackie, lying half under the Chrysler limousine in the yard, who dealt with me.
‘Yes, mister?’ he said.
I told him I wanted to order the car.
‘Yeh?’ he said. He did not come out from under the car. ‘When for?’
‘Tonight,’ I said.
‘How many?’
‘Six,’ I said.
He still did not come out from under the car and I could not see his face. I could see only the big pack of chest muscles, hairy and brown and oiled, heaving themselves as he shifted to new positions under the axle.
‘Where to?’ he said. ‘What time?’
I told him. The chest muscles heaved and the legs lifted, pushing him farther under the car. He did not speak again for more than a minute and somehow, I don’t know why, I began to get an ugly, disconcerting impression of someone disliking me.
Then he said: ‘What time back?’ and again I told him and again he did not come out from under the car. His shirt was undone as far as the trouser-top and I remember standing there looking down at the big rippling belly-muscles cramping and heaving themselves above the stiffened thighs, and all the time, I still did not know why, disliking them as if they had been his face, and all the time feeling that queer ugly sensation of counter-hatred.
He started to repeat, after a moment or two, what I had said to him. His voice gave the effect, somehow, of being forced through a narrow tube.
‘Six people, nine o’clock, back at three,’ he said. He hit the wrench, under the car, against the leaf of a spring, and I heard him draw stringy phlegm, nasally and then down through the mouth, before hacking it out in spit.
‘Well, you’ll be unlucky, mister,’ he said.
He might just as well have slung the wrench at me. I still hadn’t seen his face but all the time, somehow, the impression of being hated grew on me. I didn’t like the way he called me ‘mister’ – perhaps it had something to do with that – and I didn’t like the way he held conversation, as it were, at long range. It was that which made me stoop down, at last, and glare under the car, seeing his face, and his eyes especially, for the first time. It was a remarkably dark, swarthy, partially flattened face, with a heavy crop of oiled black hair. In a way it was a handsome face and the eyes, contrasting with the blackness of hair and eyebrows, were a most surprising brilliant blue.
‘What’s up?’ I said. ‘Car in dock?’
‘Well, it looks like it, mister, don’t it?’ he said.
I asked him if he hadn’t another car, and he said, rolling half over on his belly, away from me:
‘No.’
‘Won’t this be ready in time?’
‘No.’
‘What about coming down again this afternoon,’ I said. ‘Any chance you’ll have it done?’
‘No.’
Taxis were not very easy to get in Evensford in those days; taxis and places to eat – the young raw town seemed, for some reason, to regard them suspiciously.
‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘I don’t mind coming down again.’
I saw his body muscles squirm, giving a faintly perceptible sort of leer.
‘How many more times’ve I gotta tell you the car won’t be ready, mister?’
‘All right,’ I said.
I stood up and he reached out a long black hand for another tool.
‘Sorry you can’t oblige,’ I said.
I walked past the old Schneider under its cart-shed of martin’s nests, past the old wagonettes and station flies and hearses, and into the street. I was walking blind with anger when I suddenly came to myself and saw, driving into the garage front, old Johnson in his other car.
He stopped the car and spoke in his friendly craggy way through the window.
‘You wanna look where you’re gooin’, Muster Richardson,’ he said. He always called me muster, in the old, now almost forgotten Evensford way. He had several bad teeth that showed up, tobacco-brown, when he grinned. ‘Is there anythink I can do for you?’
‘I wanted a car,’ I said. ‘But your man says it’s no go. It’s for young Miss Aspen and myself and –’
�
�Man?’ he said. ‘That’s Blackie.’
He stopped the engine and got out of the car. ‘You come along o’ me,’ he said, – men of his generation used to talk with a droll, rolling, soothing softness of accent that has almost gone now – ‘we’ll see if we can git y’ fixed up.’ He walked a yard or two before me on thin horse-bowed legs and shouted:
‘Blackie!’
And Blackie came out from under the car.
‘How long you gooin’ a-be on the spring?’ Johnson said.
‘Job to say.’
‘There’s a gentleman here wants a car for tonight,’ he said, but Blackie looked at me and did not say a word.
‘Thought you’d git done be midday,’ Johnson said.
Blackie wiped an oil-rag over his hands and then across his chest and then put it into his hip pocket. Now, when he stood up, I could see how thick and tall he was, the big packed muscles of his chest sewn tight and hard and curved like a blown football.
‘All right, if you say so,’ he said.
‘I do say so.’
‘All right, you say so.’
There was something absolutely firm and quiet and final as a clenched fist about Old Johnson at that moment that I liked very much. He said, ‘Yes, and when I say so, I say so. Get that into your thick head,’ and once again Blackie did not say a word. ‘You come on into the office, Muster Richardson,’ old Johnson said, ‘and I’ll book it down.’
In the dusty pine-panelled office, hung with advertisements for Michelin tyres and oil and pictures of ladies in veils travelling in open coupés, I watched him put on his steel-rimmed spectacles and wet his pencil with his tongue and then take down the times and places at which I wanted him to call. As he stood writing I had a sensation of uneasiness about something and said:
‘Will you be driving, Mr Johnson? or Blackie?’
‘I’ll tek you meself,’ he said. ‘Him? Nothing ain’t fast enough for him. Motorbike hog.’
He closed his order book and took off his spectacles. ‘Git ’isself killed afore he’s much older. Does a bit o’ racing.’ He sighed – I think he must have seen how, clear and inescapable, the forces of change were bearing down on the place and himself and the ways he cherished, but I thought he had wonderfully likeable and craggy stubbornness as he stood staring out of the window, saying at last: ‘All right, Muster Richardson, I’ll pick you and Miss Aspen up at nine o’clock. Don’t you worry – you enjoy yourselves and come back when you’re ready.’
