by H. E. Bates
She stopped; she drank and stared into her glass. She had always seemed to me a woman of such poise and self-possession that now, when she looked uncertain and troubled, it was doubly striking. For a moment she looked extraordinarily like Alex, drawn and strained and knotted up in one of his moods of entanglement and disentanglement, and then she said:
‘Is it true you asked her to marry you and she said no?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Anyway, what’s once or twice in our rough island story? What’s once between friends? –’
‘I didn’t know a thing about this until Alex told me,’ she said. ‘You mean you’re going to ask her again?’
‘Why not?’ I said. Perhaps I thought that I ought to express myself in terms that were casual and adult. ‘I think women probably like being asked several times. It makes them feel desirable and flattered.’
It was that sentence which seemed to disconcert her, I thought, more than all the rest. She suddenly drank the rest of her champagne and stood up.
‘Let’s go outside,’ she said.
She gave me her arm and we went outside. In the courtyard – it was one of those centralized courtyards of grass, enclosed on three sides by the house and on the fourth by a balustrade, beyond which steps led to the garden – the night was very warm, almost hot, with molten stars. I remembered that it was midsummer. She put one of her hands affectionately on mine as we walked up and down.
We stopped at last and leaned on the balustrade. From the house I could hear once again the starry sounds of strings, climbing away on scales into darkness.
‘Look,’ Mrs Sanderson said, ‘I’m going to say something that will probably hurt you terribly –’
‘I don’t think you could possibly hurt me,’ I said. I smiled, and I did not think she could.
‘I think Alex is going to ask her,’ she said.
For some seconds I stood there laughing. It seemed to me like a piece of perfect midsummer madness that Alex, inconsistent, excitable, charmingly unreliable, and volatile, should ask any girl to marry him.
‘Is it funny? Don’t you think he’s serious?’ she said.
‘Of course not. He never is.’
She stood staring across dark summer fields, apparently thinking before she spoke again.
‘He didn’t come to bed last night,’ she said. ‘He took the hammock and stayed at the bottom of the garden all night, under the apple trees.’
‘There’s no better cure for love than a good hammock.’ I said.
‘Oh! please,’ she said. She laughed very briefly. ‘If that’s all you think of my worries about you we’d better go back again.’
I said I thought so too, and I turned to go.
‘One moment,’ she said. She caught my hand and drew me back to her.
‘You’re not to speak of this to Alex,’ she said.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘In any case he wouldn’t remember.’
‘I must say I hope not,’ she said. She smiled and then, very suddenly, but not clumsily, she kissed me on the lips. ‘You were very sweet about it. I don’t like to see people hurt and I’m glad you weren’t.’
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘It’s midsummer and everybody expects a little madness.’
That conversation with Mrs Sanderson amused and elated me; it seemed to me to belong to the mood that had made Nancy stop the car and cry out that the great lighted house, rising in isolation across dark fields, was like an island sighted from a ship at sea.
When I went back into the house through the two large central rooms for Lydia she was not there; and nor, I noticed after a time, was Alex. I remember how that amused me too. The thought of Alex offering Lydia a proposal went through me with such amused swiftness that I actually caught myself laughing out loud, and I then heard a voice behind me saying:
‘You might share your jokes occasionally. Even if you can’t share yourself. What’s so dreadfully funny?’
Nancy stood there and I said: ‘Some day I’ll tell you. Where’s Lydia?’
‘Oh don’t worry. I’ve been keeping an eye on her for you,’ she said. ‘She’s outside.’
‘I must find her,’ I said. Then as I moved away she called after me:
‘And not alone either. In case you’d like to know.’
‘That’s what’s so funny,’ I said.
When I walked outside, through the courtyard, and then along the opposite, southern wing of the house, it was some time before I recognized, along a path, beyond the garden lights strung about pergolas of roses, the colour of Lydia’s dress. It was the same pale mauve dress she had worn at her birthday party.
‘Lydia,’ I said, ‘is that you?’
She stood up suddenly. I think I had some sort of irresponsible idea of teasing her about Alex and I remember being very amused for three or four seconds longer by the idea of Alex making his proposal out there, in an aura of midsummer madness and starlight and roses. Then I saw that it was not Alex with her, but Blackie.
I stopped on the path. I had never been angry with her before – annoyed sometimes, very near anger, cut by spasms of miserable vexation and sometimes profoundly bewildered and profoundly hurt, but never more. Now I was blackened by a rush of anger that went through me like a blast of flame. I felt for a second or two extinguished by it; I could not see. I made some sort of blinded turn on the path, everything inside me acrid and seared and blackened out, and began to go back.
I heard her running after me. I did not stop and she called, quite quietly:
‘Please. Not like that. Don’t go. Not like that, please.’
She ran the last five or six steps, catching up with me. She called me several times by name. Level with me at last, she stood in front of me and said:
‘There’s no reason at all to run away like that. That’s silly.’
I did not answer.
‘Just come back with me.’
I did not answer.
‘I’m simply talking a little business with Blackie,’ she said. ‘That’s all. He needs help –’
‘So do we all,’ I said.
‘If you’re going to take that impossible, childish, jealous attitude there’s no point in explaining,’ she said, ‘is there? Not that we need to explain –’
‘We?’ I said. ‘We?’
‘Yes, Mr Richardson,’ Blackie said. ‘We.’
The three of us stood there on the path. I knew in my heart that I was behaving with terrible foolishness; I had an idiotic idea that she had somehow finally rejected me in favour of Blackie. In blind anger I lashed out and seized on this and made it an excuse to yell:
‘I don’t know what the bloody hell you have to do with this anyway.’
‘It was just business.’ His voice was quite restrained and decent and quiet.
‘Oh! yes, oh! yes, oh! yes,’ I said.
‘Miss Aspen was kind enough to offer some help,’ he said. ‘She offered it yesterday and I said I would think it over and give my answer –’
‘In the dark, in the garden, in the bloody romantic summer night?’
‘I don’t think that’s quite fair, Mr Richardson,’ he said, and I cut back:
‘Who’s talking about being fair?’
‘Quite obviously not you,’ she said, and in a new blind rush of anger I turned on her and half-shouted:
‘Anyone would think the offer was terribly secret or something. Anyone would think you’d asked him to marry you.’
‘And supposing I had?’
I shouted ‘And have you?’ and she said:
‘Even if I had it could be no possible concern of yours.’
I turned and walked furiously up the path. All the spell of the evening receded, smothered in waves of galling blackness. In the monstrous confusion and pain I blundered into the house and came at once on Alex.
‘Good God, you stand there like death,’ he said.
‘I’m going,’ I said. ‘I’m walking home.’
‘Now look, now look,’ he said. ‘A drink i
s all you need. What’s happened now?’
With incredible and inexcusable stupidity I said:
‘Lydia’s in the garden with Blackie. I found them there. She talked about marrying him –’
He stood motionless, his face very white. In a few momentously idiotic sentences I had hurt him more than I had been hurt myself. His lips began groping for words which eventually he found with sickening quietness:
‘That couldn’t be true, could it? That simply couldn’t be true.’
‘Why couldn’t it?’ I said. ‘You said yourself you saw it coming on –’
‘Good God,’ he said. ‘It couldn’t be true.’
‘I heard her say it myself,’ I said.
He did not speak again. I listened to the band thumping and drumming in the other room. A few moments later we stood at the refreshment bar and a man with a cheerful orange moustache, of the type of army major, said:
‘Damn good anchovy toast. Just whipped a fresh lot up from somewhere,’ and I saw Alex take a piece and crush it into his mouth.
I took one too. A savage salty rawness of anchovy over sweet wine seared my tongue and I choked a little as I heard a voice behind me say:
‘So this is where you are.’
The voice of Nancy seemed to me, at that moment, smug in its arched restraint. She said in a lecturing sort of way how gentlemanly and how like us it was to leave everybody flat. I felt my impossible anger against Lydia turn still more impossibly towards her. The joy that had been on everything finally died completely. And then perhaps because neither of us said anything she said:
‘You’re a pair. One is as bad as the other. You’re big in conceit and little in everything else –’
‘I’m going, Alex,’ I said. ‘Good night.’
‘Now look,’ Alex said. ‘You know what I told you. That’s a bad habit of yours. Walking out –’
‘Oh! let him go,’ Nancy said.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Alex will dance with you.’ I felt inside me a final festering of monstrous bitterness. ‘My dancing days are over.’
I suddenly turned, looked past her and walked out.
Alex did not follow me. I walked through the courtyard and then on through the grassy freshness of fields. The coach lamps were still burning on the side posts of the open gates. Once I looked back at the house and there, exactly as before, it was ship-like and splendid on a dark sea of pasture. It looked not only beautiful and comforting an inviolable but also – during the war a regiment of paratroops succeeded waves of death-watch infantry battalions as its occupants, leaving it finally gutted and scarred and empty, and now it is a home for delinquent girls – as if it must remain like that for ever.
Out on the road I felt calmer; the night air was beautiful, silent, and still warm. A few cars passed me and once, about a mile on towards the river, one of them drew up beside me and the man with the joyful orange moustache put his head out of the window and said: ‘Any more for the jolly old Skylark?’ and I was aware of a mass of penguin dress fronts entangled by coloured skeins of girls. I thanked them and refused. There was much laughter. ‘Lover of the open air!’ the orange moustache said. ‘Home, James –’
I did not feel like a lover of anything, least of all myself, that night; but if anything was remotely worth loving it was possibly the open air. It was already morning as I came down to the river. White summer mists in flat powdery pockets lay here and there on broad curves of water. I sat on the bridge, a narrow, hunch-backed bridge built of stone with triangular bays down either side of it, and stared down at the river. A few fish were rising even then and I could hear an occasional fishlike flap of water against the buttresses. Two meadows away a night goods train came slowly clanking out of the half-dark countryside, halting finally by a signal, blowing steam. The signal against it did not change and all at once the steam was shut off, leaving nothing but a great stillness after the echoes had died away, meadow folded damply into meadow across miles of windless summer night air.
Out of this stillness I heard, eventually, the noise of a car. It seemed to be coming rather fast. I stood in one of the triangular bridge bays to let it pass. It came out of the fading morning darkness over the hump-back, pulling up with a squeal of brakes on the crest of the bridge.
Alex was riding on the foot-board. He let out a zipping yell, more like a cheer, as he saw me standing there.
‘Good old boy! The lost is found – hop on! You’ll find it cooler on the dashboard.’
From inside the car there was a strained silence of five sober faces as Alex fell off the car and embraced me drunkenly.
‘Hop on! – thought we’d lost you – everybody said you’d take the Cotteshall road – good old boy, come on!’
‘I’m walking,’ I said.
‘You said that before – that’s damn silly.’
‘I’m walking,’ I said.
With gay, tipsy arms Alex tried to drag the coat off my back.
‘Hop in – jolly good old boy – glad we found you –’
At this moment the back window of the car went down.
‘Please get in.’ It was Mrs Sanderson’s voice, cool, restrained, deadly sober. ‘I think we’ve all had enough of this. You’ve had us worried stiff.’
‘I don’t see why,’ I said.
She waited. The train whistled across the meadow.
‘Are you coming?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘It’s not like you to be stubborn,’ she said. Then I saw Nancy lean forward and say:
‘Of course it’s like him to be stubborn. It’s exactly like him. He’s the stubbornest person in the world when he sets his mind to a thing.’
Four or five yards down the bridge Alex struck an attitude, one foot on the triangular step of the bay, the other on the low parapet. ‘The boy stood on the burning deck –!’
‘If you’re not coming I think we’d better go,’ Mrs Sanderson said. ‘Are you coming?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Leave him,’ Nancy said. ‘He’ll get over it. He’s in one of those moods. He thinks he’s too good for us all.’
‘Clever of you to recognize it at last,’ I said.
After this witless remark Mrs Sanderson wound up the window. For one prolonged moment, before Blackie revved up his engine, I hated everything. I hated myself, I hated the yelling fatuity of Alex’s pose on the bridge parapet; I hated the cold sober faces in the taxi; I hated the voice of Nancy telling me the truth about myself. The train tooted its whistle across the meadow. I hated it all and I wanted to go on in loneliness, alone.
At this moment the front window of the car went down.
‘Won’t you come?’
It was Lydia speaking. Her voice was very soft; she had not spoken to me in that soft, fond way for a long time.
‘No,’ I said.
‘I wish you would,’ she said. ‘It would be better.’
I could hear her voice coming with a deep disturbance of tenderness from the depth of her throat. I caught a glimpse of the upper part of her dress, pale mauve in the dash-light. From the bridge Alex yelled something incomprehensible but exactly as if she and I were alone she took no notice of it and simply said: ‘It would make me very happy – in fact it would make all of us very happy –’
I did not answer. I knew that I had taken up a position I could not sustain. It seemed to me I heard someone, Nancy I thought, crying in the back of the car. But I only stood stubborn, transfixed, hateful while Lydia said:
‘For the last time. Please.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s one thing I’ll do though – I’ll give you the chance of getting out and walking with me.’
‘I can’t do that,’ she said.
In answer I made another witless remark, born out of my impossible attitude: ‘There’s no such word as can’t – you could –’
‘It so happens I don’t want to,’ she said. The weeping of someone in the back of the car became, in that moment, my own weeping, cruel,
private, lonely, desolate inside me. ‘I’ve made up my mind about it. It’s all made up. I don’t suppose you understand it and I don’t blame you. But that’s how it is – so please will you –’
She never finished speaking that sentence, Alex slipped at that moment on the parapet, yelling as he did so. I heard the scrape of his dance shoes on stone. I turned just in time to see him slipping down on his buttocks over the bridge. It seemed like the action of a man who had simply grown tired of standing and was going to sit down. For one second he actually did sit down – and then his body straightened out and fell.
‘Alex!’ I yelled. ‘Alex –’
I heard him strike his head on the upper arch of the bridge as he fell. His white evening scarf fell off. The splash of his body striking the water was flat and uncontrolled. When I ran forward I saw him float down, under the arch, downstream, to the other side.
Some seconds later I saw Tom poised for a moment in his white dress shirt on the bridge. I heard Nancy scream: ‘I knew something would happen – I knew it would –’ and then she shrieked incoherently, running pointlessly up and down.
This shriek was answered, exactly like an echo, by the train waiting for its signal across the meadow. Then I saw Blackie running. I jumped the end parapet of the bridge, landing on the tow-path, and began running too. From there I saw Blackie dive. For a few moments I heard two bodies swimming without seeing them. Then I saw two pairs of detached white sleeves thrashing dark water between islands of reeds and I heard Tom yelling what sounded like:
‘Just where you are – just there – mind the weed –’
Suddenly all my latent childhood terror of the river came back. I saw Tom come up and dive again. Then Blackie dived. I could not see Alex. On the bridge Nancy kept running up and down, hysterical, until Lydia and Mrs Sanderson caught her and made her quiet. Beyond them a faint light began to appear in the sky. The arches of the bridge were ovals of paling grey.
At last Tom came up. Nancy saw him and began screaming his name. ‘Tom! Tom! Tom! T – om –!’ in a long wail of terror. I saw him shake his thick wet blond hair, roping it back with his hands. He trod water. No one else appeared on the water and suddenly he went thrashing over, perpendicular, in another dive. Then across the fields the train tooted its whistle again and the sound of it woke me and I began to run down the tow-path.
