by H. E. Bates
‘You great fool-jabey!’ his mother said. ‘Sit down! –’
‘Got to find something to tempt Miss Aspen,’ Harry said. ‘Eh, Mister Richardson? – Mister Richardson knows, don’t you, Mister Richardson? – like to be tempted, don’t they?’
Harry gave me a grave wink, and his mother called that if he didn’t sit down she’d warm his backside, big as he was, and all of us laughed again. One of the elder sisters began to say how Harry had always been the fool of the family and another said he’d never grow up. Mr Holland sat eating without a word, grasping a piece of celery as large as a ham-bone in one hand and a wedge of cheese cake in the other. The celery cracked and crunched and Mrs Holland shouted over her shoulder that if Harry didn’t keep his fingers out of the pantry she’d burn him. Even Nancy, who had begun by being correct and formal as a window-model, in order I suppose to impress on Lydia some idea that they were as good as she was, began trying not to laugh into a squeezed lace handkerchief.
When Harry came out of the kitchen with an unplucked wild duck on a dish George, the elder brother, put his head down and started shrieking into his plate.
‘Our Harry, you big wet thing,’ Edith said, and Mrs Holland got up, tears running down her face, and began beating him about the shoulders.
When Harry started running round the room the duck did a lively stiffish dance on the plate. The blows from Mrs Holland went thumping into Harry’s back. The duck with a rubbery brilliant leap sprang into the air. Mr Holland sat transfixed, celery and cake suspended, and Harry, trying to catch the duck, dropped the dish instead.
‘You great fool!’ Mrs Holland said and picked up the dish, unbroken. Harry dived again for the duck and Mrs Holland – I see clearly now why, more like a little hawk than any eggshell, she was really the soul and master of the house – hit him squarely on the back of the head with the dish. It was the sort of smart playful tap that breaks things more easily than more substantial blows and the dish snapped into two pieces.
‘It won’t hurt him!’ we shouted. ‘It’s hard! – it can stand it! Hard as iron,’ we said, ‘he’ll never feel it!’ and Mrs Holland said ‘He’ll feel it next time, I’ll warrant,’ and chased him from the parlour into the kitchen, where we could hear her, in some final scuffle of motherly horse-play, giggling like a girl.
‘Loves it! Just as bad,’ we said. ‘Makes him worse! –’
‘I remember the time she poured milk down his neck – I’ll never forget that time,’ George said, and only Nancy looked embarrassed, murmuring something about a bad example and how lucky it was that Arthur’s children were not there.
When it was all over Mrs Holland sat at the head of the table again, trying to pat solemnity into her bright laughing violet eyes with a fresh and respectable handkerchief still folded into a square.
‘I don’t know what you think of your first visit to Busketts, Miss Aspen,’ she said, and before Lydia could answer Harry said, with the old solemnity:
‘Good Lord, hasn’t she heard of us? – the Holland circus? I thought everybody in Evensford had heard of us. Me – at any rate –’
‘She hasn’t been in Evensford so very long yet,’ Nancy said.
‘Well, now show that Busketts can behave,’ Mrs Holland said, and Harry said, gravely:
‘She should come at Christmas – that’s a time – will you come at Christmas, Miss Aspen?’ he begged her.
‘Oh! perhaps,’ Lydia said. She laughed, and I could see that she was happy and liked it all. ‘It’s a nice name, Busketts – it’s very English and very like you.’
Nancy saw her chance and said:
‘It’s really French. That’s where it comes from.’
‘I never understood that,’ her father said. ‘I never heard of that.’
‘It’s a corruption,’ Nancy said. ‘It’s the same word as bosky – there was probably a wood here once –’
‘There’s wood here now!’ Tom said. He tapped the top of Harry’s head so that we all began laughing again. ‘Ah! that’s wood if you like. That’s wood.’
‘In the French it’s probably bosquet – and you get another word, bocage, meaning a sort of wooded place, too –’
‘Harry again!’ we said. ‘Wooded place –’
‘Now we know,’ Tom said. ‘All this time we wondered – so that’s it, wooded place.’
‘Good old Harry,’ we said ‘Busketts for wood! Plenty of wood. A good wooded place.’
Nancy did not know quite what to do about this nonsense. She sat for some time afterwards taking the plums carefully from a piece of cheese-curd, pushing them, in finicky embarrassment, to the side of her plate. When she had carefully removed them all there was not much left of the cheese-curd, and Harry said, in a sly way:
‘Some time, never. Probably never.’
‘Oh phoo! to you,’ she said. ‘You never miss a chance, do you?’
‘Now, now,’ her mother said. ‘You two.’
All the time Mr Holland crunched celery in steady crackling bites, in crisp splinterings, like the crushing of match-boxes.
When tea was over the four of us, Tom and Nancy, Lydia and myself, stood in the garden. Warm in the sun, leaves were turning on the apricot trees along the limestone walls and one tree of pears, half-fruit, half-leaf, burnt like a fiery, bronzy column on the lawn.
‘What would you like to do?’ Tom said.
‘Didn’t you say you’d shoot wild duck?’ Lydia said.
‘Oh! no,’ he said. ‘Did I? Not today.’
‘It’s Sunday,’ Nancy said. ‘Nobody’s supposed to shoot on Sundays. It’s a rule. Let’s walk.’
‘Oh! I looked forward to that!’ – Lydia turned up to Tom the flashing, disarming mouth – ‘couldn’t we? I wanted to see you shoot – you two. We could, couldn’t we?’
‘Well, nobody does on Sundays,’ Tom said. ‘Dad doesn’t like it – nobody really does on Sundays –’
‘Oh! Tom,’ she said.
That was the second time – the first had been when she skated and fell against him on the ice – that I saw a flat, almost frozen immobility spread so completely over his face that I knew he could not see her. She had never called him Tom before. Twice or three times she had not even remembered his name. His transfixion was not only of pure shyness. He had a look of being partially stunned.
By this time Nancy had walked away a yard or two and I said: ‘Oh! get the gun, Tom. You’ll see a jackdaw or a maggy or something,’ and the words brought him out of himself so that he turned and went back into the house to fetch the gun.
‘I thought the duck on the plate was so funny,’ Lydia said. ‘And the way she hit him –’
‘Killing,’ I said.
‘I didn’t think it was very funny,’ Nancy said.
‘Oh killing,’ I said.
We walked across the meadows that slope away, south-westward, at Busketts, to the brook that finally finds its way through Evensford, flowing there through culverts that are always thick and scummy, except at flood-time, with floating fish-and-chip papers and the oily dust of streets. Up in the meadows and along the brook, where it winds through Busketts, a long marshy segment of the old pure country remains. Iron-brown bogs of sedge and belts of fawn-feathered reed grow about islands of sallow that are gold-crested in spring. A good number of wild duck collect to feed there and often a few snipe that go whistling across cold twilights on winter afternoons. We used to fish there, Tom and myself, and I remember how once, as boys, we caught a good roach there, under a pink crabtree out of season, with a piece of marmalade pudding his mother had given him, and how we toasted the roach on a fire of sticks and ate the remainder of the pudding with it for bread. It was a favourite place of ours and if ever I arrived at Busketts and Tom could not be found somebody would always say ‘Try the brook – he’s probably fallen in it again.’ I had fallen in it several times myself and the curious thing is that I liked falling in.
‘This is the place we found the violets,’ Nancy said. We wer
e passing the small triangular spinney where, in summer, butterfly orchis grew. ‘Let’s stop and look – there might be some – Tom, stop with us.’
‘You two stop,’ Lydia said.
I did not want to go into spinneys with Nancy and I leaned against the fence while she climbed in and looked for violets. There were no violets and presently she came back.
‘It’s perfectly true about bosquet and Busketts and the wood,’ she said, ‘I looked it up in the Dictionary of Place Names. This is probably the last piece of all the woodland.’
‘It could be middle English,’ I said. ‘Bosky. It means drunk too.’
‘Oh! you’re clever, aren’t you?’ she said.
A sudden shot came from the meadow below us. I felt uneasy and we went down, two minutes later, to find Tom reloading after firing a second shot at a straggling formation of rooks loping across from the high fields where the stubbles were still not ploughed.
Tom had missed with both barrels, and once more he stood there with the paralysed frozen look on his face.
‘I never like Sunday shooting,’ Nancy said. For the first time I agreed with her. I did not like it either. ‘Let’s get watercress,’ she said. ‘There ought to be beautiful watercress.’
‘Tom’s going to shoot me a duck,’ Lydia said. ‘Aren’t you, Tom?’
Tom nodded. Blindly, with the pale-blue eyes fixed somewhere on distances beyond the brook, he began to walk with Lydia across the field. Dew was beginning to fall already in a pure white nap on the grass, and Nancy said:
‘Let’s go back. It’ll be dark by the time you get there.’
The four of us went down the field. I remember making a few pointless remarks about legality. Some rain had fallen during the previous night and the lower strip of marsh was wet and muddy. We picked our way over sedge islands that gave way to red-brown pools of brackish water. A few old nests of moorhens remained here and there about the empty sedge and at last a heron, ghostly and straggling and yet climbing fast, rose from a reeded water-hole and flapped away.
Lydia gave a short throaty, metallic yell, not really a scream, but a sort of command, saying ‘Fire at it, Tom! Hit it – kill it!’ and Tom fired, missing again with two barrels.
The second barrel disturbed, in a wheeling, dark blue cloud, perhaps twenty or thirty duck that had gathered on the far end of the marsh. It was all over, I thought, as I saw them rise and circle and climb and circle again, and I was glad. But it was not quite over. In a painful moment Lydia turned on him sharply, in that peremptory commanding way that simply made me angry but that had on Tom only a more stunning and stupefying effect.
‘You promised – you said you could. Didn’t you, Tom, didn’t you?’
Then, in the most confused moment of his awful stupefaction, she smiled. I know now – though I did not know then – how much that sudden sweetness of hers affected him. Her face sprang with delightful friendliness and she took his arm. I knew then that one day he would shoot ducks for her, by the million if necessary. He would shoot wild geese or herons or swans or whatever she wanted. He would in fact, do anything for her, perhaps almost without the grasp of full consciousness, if only she asked him and asked him long enough, with that particular insistence of hers and that particular smile.
I walked back with Nancy. Perhaps I have not been fair with Nancy. But if I was peremptory and impatient with her it was not only out of vanity but because I had grown beyond whatever she may have felt there had been between us. I wished, very often afterwards, that I had been fairer, less unreasonable, less obtusely self-centred towards her than I was that day. But I was not; I liked to show how proud I was, how vain and how clever, and even to give her, now and then, a touch of pain; I liked to wound her by taunting her, obliquely, with my having risen beyond her simplicity into a world that I thought was golden and lofty and too complicated for her to understand. It was very stupid; but I could not tell, then, what was going to happen and how great, as someone has said, the confusion of simplicity can be. But long afterwards she said to me:
‘If you’d hit me that day it couldn’t have hurt more and it might have been better. Then Tom would have hit you and the other might not have happened.’
Perhaps the most curious thing of all is that, all that autumn, nothing did happen. Lydia had nothing for Tom, and over and over again she would display only that cool and surprised indifference of hers when I mentioned his name. He was there; but for all she seemed to care he was a doll wrapped away in a nursery cupboard, forgotten.
And in this way we danced to Christmas.
Christmas came with a touch of snow that transfigured Evensford as I loved to see it transfigured, with a pencilling of unendurable delicacy on the streets of grey-red houses, and most lovely of all on the bare trees about Busketts and the park.
There were many dances that year and the nights were black and frosty. We drove from place to place in the big limousine, tucked under the many rugs old Johnson brought for us, and every night through the old year we were very happy with each other and very gay. Old Johnson always brought the car early to fetch us, steady and decent and gentle as an old lady, and we always had plenty of time to get to the places where we danced, up and down the river.
But on the night of New Year’s Eve the car was not early. It did not come at nine o’clock, as we had asked for it. As I stood at the gate of the park with Lydia, waiting for it, the air was compressed and cold, darting into my nostrils with freezing stabs. The road was dark with patches of bitter ice, where irregular pools had frozen in hollow places.
‘You’re so wonderful when things go wrong,’ Lydia said. ‘You’re absolutely comic when things don’t go smoothly. You start stamping up and down.’
‘Old Johnson is never late,’ I said. ‘There must have been an accident.’
‘I don’t suppose there has been,’ she said, ‘and in any case stamping your feet wouldn’t help it.’ Then she laughed at me again and said:
‘Anyway isn’t that the car? Isn’t that something coming now?’
A car came very fast round the long bend of the park wall, dipping and raising its headlights. It made a long, skewing swerve across patches of dark ice, brakes whistling, and then screamed to a stop beside us. The door flew open at the back, and Alex pushed his head out to say:
‘Murder. Hop in.’
‘What made you so late?’ I said, and then I looked at the driving seat. At the wheel was Blackie.
‘Hang on to your hair,’ Alex said and the car roared off with a skid of back tyres, throwing me on the floor. I groped about on all fours for a few moments and everybody laughed. The car was travelling so fast that I could not get balance enough to stand up and suddenly the entire chassis of Johnson’s respectable old limousine seemed to take to air, lifting me bodily in a horrible jerk so that I struck my head on the roof and at once fell back on the floor again, dazed.
I was so dazed that I was not even angry. When I recovered Alex and Tom pulled me back on the seat. There was some distanglement of bodies and Alex said:
‘This is a damn nightmare – no rugs, nothing – God, we’ll be lucky if we see another year –’
‘Not long now,’ Tom said. I noticed Nancy and Mrs Sanderson were both very quiet. We were travelling beyond the last houses of the town at something between fifty and sixty and in that old high chassis it seemed like nearer eighty or ninety. I could hear the exhaust roaring hoarsely behind us and now and then a skidding scrunch as we lashed through ice-pools.
As we did a switchback over the last brook-bridge that marks the end of the town I turned to see Mrs Sanderson holding her handkerchief to her mouth, looking very pale. After the blow on the head I felt stunned and sick myself, and Nancy said:
‘Tom, tell him to slow down. Mrs Sanderson feels queer already –’
‘This is bloody impossible,’ Alex said.
He pushed the glass partition back and said:
‘Steady her down a bit, Johnson –’
‘You want to get there, don’t you?’ Blackie said. I saw him full face as he turned completely round to answer. He had one hand on the wheel and he was driving, as it were, out of the back of his head.
‘We want to get there,’ Alex said, ‘all in one piece.’
‘You’ll get there.’
‘Steady her down – there’s a lady feels ill.’
‘Where’s old Johnson?’ I said.
‘He broke his arm,’ Blackie said. The whites of his eyes were remarkably prominent. They flashed in the dash-board light as he flung his head round at us. ‘It’s New Year’s Eve. We only got one driver – I got seven jobs on and only one pair of hands and one car. I’m late now –’
We went over a long section of ice that did not break under us, and the car curled in a sickening slide.
‘Here – that’s enough,’ Alex said. ‘Slow her down!’ Nancy began to clasp Mrs Sanderson, who was either weeping or trying not to be sick into her handkerchief. Lydia had not spoken a word. ‘Slow her down – stop her!’ Alex said.
Blackie pushed back the glass partition with a flick of his hand and then I heard the hoarse rising roar of the exhaust as he put his foot down.
‘Oh! Please,’ Nancy said.
I could hear Mrs Sanderson suppressing sickness with small moans.
‘This isn’t what we pay for,’ I said and anger leapt out at last through my own dazed mind. ‘Let me get at the damn’ window –’ And then Lydia spoke for the first time.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said.
She leaned forward and opened the window. She put her head through the aperture to the driving seat, so far that Blackie must have felt the warmth of her mouth on his neck.
‘Stop the car,’ she said.
I could hear her voice, level, slightly imperious, not angry or even rising, but with that particular compelling throatiness that always sounded, really, much older than herself.
‘That’s it – stop it,’ she said.
In twenty yards Blackie stopped the car. I noticed he did not speak at all or even turn his head.
Mrs Sanderson moaned a little with relief. Tom said something about getting things organized properly now, and then Lydia opened the door of the car.
