by H. E. Bates
As they went downstairs he thought it best that they should sit in the parlour. It was never used, but it seemed right. That, too, smelled airless and dead, the air stale with sun-warmed dust. On the mantelpiece stood a pair of pink glass vases filled with stalks of brown bullrushes that many years before had been gathered by his mother from the pond. If you touched them they crumbled into fine brown dust. Behind the vases hung a mirror that twisted the reflection of the faces that looked into it, and immediately in front of it stood a white marble clock that did not go. It had always seemed to him a nice clean little parlour and at Christmas-time, when he brought in logs for the fire, it was warm and pleasant. But now he was not happy. He began to realize at last that the honesty of the girl, if it were really the kind of honesty he hoped and thought it was, must make her at last get up and go out of the dead, airless, dusty little parlour and not come back again.
From the moment when, down in the town, he had seen her come out of the house, hatless, her fair hair brushed smooth and her three-quarter-length navy coat unbuttoned so that her cream frock showed tight over her rather big body, he had been nervous. Now, as he sat on the chair near the window and watched the evening light streaming across the room, making her blonde skin seem fairer than ever and her light hair even lighter in tone, he felt sick because of the sense of growing failure. Perhaps he should have told Emmett. Together they might have cleaned the place up a bit. He thought suddenly of his mother, slipshod, rooted in old careless ways, and he felt that the place belonged to and smelled of the dead.
‘Well, I don’t know what you think,’ he said. ‘I know it ain’t over-smart. But I’m so short-handed.’
She did not speak.
‘It ain’t a very big farm,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it ain’t so big as you thought it’d be.’
She was not looking at him, but she seemed to be listening, as though perhaps she was impressed not so much by what he was saying as by the simple, anxious tone of his voice.
‘Well,’ she said at last, and then she stopped.
He felt he knew what she was going to say, and before she could speak again he began to talk quite quickly. He said, ‘I got a little money. I don’t want you to think I ain’t. Mum left sixty-odd pound and there’s some of it still in sovereigns and some more in old War Savings Certificates. Then I got thirty or forty in the bank. I ain’t touched that for a good while. Then Emmett owes me seventy-odd. I don’t want you to think I ain’t got nothing, see? I can pay. I’ll pay twenty-five shillings.’
‘Who’s Emmett?’
‘He takes my milk.’
‘He owes all that? Seventy-odd for milk?’
‘Yeh. Allus owes like that.’
‘Always?’ she said. ‘You let him?’
‘Yeh,’ he said. ‘You see, I ain’t very much good at figures.’
She did not speak. She sat with her face resting on one hand, looking at the pattern of the cheap grey lino on the floor. The skin of her hands and face and neck was creamy and warm and she had fine golden hairs on the backs of her rather broad hands. He knew now that whether she came or not something must happen. He felt tightened up inside himself, tense and yet unsteady because he liked her.
‘You see, I can’t do it all myself,’ he said. ‘Cooking and washing-up and cleaning. I can’t do it. That’s why the place looks so bad. It wants a thorough doin’. It ain’t had one since Mum died.’
‘Got any sisters?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘Any aunts or anybody?’
‘No. Well, I got an aunt and a cousin over at Stanstead. But they never come near.’
‘Nobody at all?’
‘Nobody,’ he said.
She seemed to think it over a little longer, still with her face in her hands and her eyes on the floor. ‘Things’d have to be changed,’ she said at last, ‘if I came.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know they’d have to be changed. Changed a lot. I know.’
‘All right.’ She got up at last and ran her hands down the front of her body, smoothing her dress. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘As long as you know.’
It still seemed unreal to him when she arrived next day, carrying a suitcase. She came by bus as far as the turnpike and he picked her up there in the car and drove her across the field-track between stone walls that were golden-crested now with stonecrop in flower. She asked him at the house what time he reckoned for dinner, and he said: ‘Any time. I gen’lly have it standing up. In my hands,’ and she said: ‘You get on with whatever it is you’re doing and I’ll call you when it’s ready.’
He still had fifteen rows to hoe in the mangel field and he spent the rest of the morning there. About noon, on normal days, he went back to the house and cut himself a lump of bread and cheese and boiled a kettle on the Valor for tea. Sometimes he spread Worcester sauce on the bread. The paper didn’t come till Emmett brought it in the afternoons. All he could do when it came was look at the pictures and while eating there was nothing for him to do but stare into space, absently breaking bits of bread for the two black cats that rubbed against his boots.
Today when he went into the kitchen, not waiting for her to call, he saw that something had happened. The girl was not there. The Valor had been cleaned and polished and was standing in a different place, near the window. Two chairs had been brought in from the parlour and in the centre of the kitchen stood the parlour table, a round, walnut pedestal, laid with a white cloth. He was still staring at it when she came into the room.
‘The worm’s in the leg,’ she said. ‘Bad. I thought we’d better use it.’
‘Yeh, but how’d you move it?’
‘The top comes off. Is bacon and eggs all right for your dinner? It’s all I could find.’
‘Yeh, yeh.’
‘When does the butcher call? And we’re almost out of bread.’
‘They don’t neither of ’em come. They won’t bring the vans across the fields.’
‘You mean nobody comes? Butcher, baker, grocer—nobody?’
‘Emmett brings everything,’ he said. ‘Paper, bread, grocery, meat when I want it. Stuff from the station.’
‘Emmett must be wonderful,’ she said.
They sat at the table and ate the bacon and eggs she had cooked. The food was good and rich and fatty, so that he could dip his bread in the plate. She was wearing a blue pinafore without sleeves and her bare upper arms were strong and white. They did not talk much. She said she was sorry there was no pudding, but tomorrow she would make him one. Today it was clearing up the place that worried her. What pudding did he like?
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s bin a middlin’ long wild since I tasted a bake pudden.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘As long as you don’t go saying it’s not like your mother used to make.’
‘Mum?’ he said. ‘She couldn’ cook. Onion clangers, that’s what we used to live on.’
‘Will you come back for your tea?’ she said.
‘I don’t know as I care,’ he said, ‘either one way or th’ other.’
‘Well, I do,’ she said. ‘I got work here.’ She stretched her arms back over her head, as if a little tired. ‘But I’ll get your tea if you want it. And when you want it. You’re the boss.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right. About five.’
He went back to the mangel field, pushing his hat back on his head as he hoed. All afternoon the sweat stood clear on his forehead, but he hoed without really thinking or feeling the heat. He was thinking of the pedestal table. She had moved it by herself, without asking him; which meant that she was not only strong but independent. He kept thinking, too, of her bare, white arms spread on the tablecloth, and the way she leaned back and stretched her arms over her head and said there was work to do, pulling her dress like smooth skin over her tightened breasts. She was a strong, good-looking girl all right, and in time, when the place was straight inside, she would come out and help him in the fields.
As he walked back to th
e farm, about five in the afternoon, the heat was moist and windless and the hens were lying silent in dust pools under the walnut tree. He noticed that the windows of the house were wide open. Emmett’s milk van stood in the shade of the barn and he could hear now and then the clank of a milk bucket inside the barn. He stood still a minute. The sun stabbed down on the crown of his head and he was wondering if he should go first into the barn or into the house, when suddenly he thought that he heard voices.
When he went inside the barn it seemed blindingly dark for a moment after the hard, bright sun. But after a second or two he saw that Emmett had finished milking. The bubbles were still fresh and blue on the rim of milk in the buckets, and there was a white splash or two among the dark-green dung on the floor.
He stood still for a moment, not seeing anyone and not hearing the voices. Then the voices began again. They came now from the door of the barn and he walked across towards it.
‘Hullo,’ Emmett said. ‘I’m talking to Edna. You never told me you were getting help.’
‘No.’
He was looking at the girl. She was standing in the bright sunlight of the doorway with bare arms folded, smiling.
‘She’s just been asking me how long since the place seen a coat o’ paint,’ Emmett said. ‘I tell her I can’t remember no farther back than the Boer War.’
Emmett laughed and the girl laughed too. It was a strong, clear laugh, and it seemed to sweep clearly through the thick air of the small farmyard.
‘We bin saying,’ Emmett said, ‘it’d pay you to spend a pound or two havin’ th’ outside painted afore another winter.’
‘The rain’s been coming in my bedroom,’ the girl said. ‘It must have been coming in for months. It’s only because the place has never been turned out it’s never been noticed. I moved a chest of drawers this afternoon, and there it was. Paper peeling off the walls, floorboards rotten. It’s in a terrible state. It’ll only get worse.’
‘Yeh,’ Tom said. ‘Yeh.’
‘People are silly about property,’ the girl said. ‘They think it takes care of itself. And then one day the house falls down.’
‘That’s right,’ Emmett said. ‘Ten or twenty quid spent on this place’d be as good as puttin’ money in the bank.’
‘Well,’ the girl said, ‘tea’s ready. You’d better come in.’
She unfolded her arms and walked out of the barn, careless and cool and easy, as if she had been doing the same thing every afternoon of her life. Tom followed her, and as they crossed the yard Emmett called out: ‘If there’s anything you want bringing up from Milton, only be too glad,’ and the girl half-turned to call back: ‘I’ve got a list written out. That’s what I came to ask you. I’d be glad of them tomorrow.’
As they sat down to tea in the kitchen Tom noticed that the bricks of the floor shone red. For years they had been the colour of earth, and sacks had been laid down to take the dirt of incoming feet. Now the bricks were washed and the sacks gone, and he could smell the cleanliness of the place and feel air moving in at the open window.
‘Here’s a list of the things I want,’ the girl said. ‘Do you want to see them?’ She held out the list, written on a torn envelope.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. If you want ’em, it’s all right.’
‘It’ll come to money, that’s all,’ the girl said.
‘I’ll git it afore Emmett goes,’ he said.
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t. Emmett can pay and get receipts and I’ll settle with him. Oh! and who’s your grocer?’
‘Mum allus went Co-Op,’ he said. ‘But they give up calling.’
‘Never mind. And where’s your oil? I’m down to a pint. Don’t you buy it in quantity?’
‘No. I do git run out every once in a while.’
‘Well, why don’t you buy it in quantity? A hundred gallons a time or something? I know it’s cheaper like that.’
‘A hundred gallons?’ he said.
‘Well, why not? You could buy your flour that way, too. Up here where nobody calls much you want your stuff in quantity.’
‘I never thought o’ that,’ he said. He pondered a moment. ‘Yeh, I remember once when I was a kid it snowed for three or four days and nobody come near. We run out o’ flour and never had no bread.’
‘There you are,’ she said.
She took his empty cup and poured more tea. It was good and strong and sweet. There were good thick slices of bread and raspberry jam. He liked things sweet, and it was as if she knew.
‘Another thing,’ she said. ‘About that bedroom. I can sleep there for a bit, but something’ll have to be done. It’ll cost money, but it’ll be worth it.’
‘I daresay I could do it myself,’ he said.
‘I daresay you could,’ she said, ‘but I daresay you’re not going to. There’s a month’s work in this place if there’s a minute.’
‘Yeh, that’s right.’
‘Burning the paint off. Window sashes mended. New paper.’
‘Yeh.’
‘If I were you I’d see to it right away. Unless you want me to?’
‘You,’ he said. ‘You. I trust you.’
That night he lay in bed and heard a cuckoo still calling in the June dusk across the woods, deepening the warm silence, but now he was aware also of other sounds. It was strange to feel the presence of another person in the house, to hear the movements of the girl as she walked across the old loose floorboards of the room next to his own. He lay listening to these sounds and thinking of her bare, strong arms, her laugh, the calm confidence of her voice and the way she moved. He thought again of the pedestal table and the clean red floor and the oil and the way she wanted the house done. He saw how natural and sensible all these changes were, and he wondered why he had never noticed them. He wondered, too, why a girl of that calm and sensible disposition had decided to come out to a house that she knew was old and ill-kept and had never been painted for years, where the baker and the butcher had ceased calling and where even in summer you never saw a new face to break the loneliness, and the silver-weed and bindweed and chicory grew so thick on the track across the fields that by high summer the wheel-marks were overgrown. He was not troubled but on the contrary glad that she had come; he was set wondering only because she looked like a girl who could have got some other kind of a job, a good, decent town job, with gas to cook by and handy shops and pavements and people. It did not occur to him that perhaps she had come for the very opposite sort of reason: because she was tired of people and pavements, or because she wanted loneliness, or because solitude and work and new surroundings would cover up and perhaps in time obliterate something she did not want to remember.
He could not get used to the idea of her sleeping there in the house, so close to him, and he lay awake for a long time. Finally he went off into a heavy sleep, and when he woke the cuckoo was calling again.
To his surprise it was already six o’clock. He got up, went down the dark carpetless stairs, carrying his jacket and his boots in his hands. The girl was in the kitchen, wearing a white pinafore, her hair brushed. She said: ‘Good morning,’ and ‘Your shaving water’s hot. In the sink.’
‘I reckon to shave o’ nights,’ he said.
‘Oh, well!’ she said, ‘use it for washing. How many eggs do you like? I’m boiling them.’
‘Two,’ he said. ‘Two’ll do.’
‘I like mine soft,’ she said. ‘What about you?’
‘It don’t matter. I like ’em either way.’
‘They’re better for you soft,’ she said.
He ran his hands over the bristles of his face. They were very thick and tough and he felt frowsy. He was embarrassed and, deciding to shave, wondered if she noticed it. After the shave he felt better and he knew that she did notice it. He was bewildered because of it, because she looked at him and because of the eggs, the hot water, and the thought of being waited on.
‘Where are you going to be today?’ she said.
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‘I got a job on the hay-mower,’ he said. ‘Just in the shed.’
‘That’s all right—so long as I know where you are. I might want a hand moving a few things.’
He remained bewildered all morning, slightly on edge, waiting for her to call him. She did not call, and when at last he went in to dinner he discovered that she had turned the furniture of his bedroom completely round and had carried the mattress downstairs to air in the sun. ‘I didn’t want to bother you,’ she said.
Emmett came early that afternoon. It was only a little after two o’clock when he drove the three-wheeler into the yard and parked it under the walnut tre. The girl, hearing the brakes, came out of the house, drying her arms on her pinafore, calling: ‘You brought my things, Mr. Emmett?’
‘There they are,’ Emmett said. ‘Pretty nigh a load on ’em.’
‘Did you get everything? Got the receipts?’
‘Everything except the carpet soap. I’ll git that tomorrow. Yeh, I got the receipts. Make a hole in four pound.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll check them off as I take them in.’
‘I’d better take the flour in for you,’ Emmett said. ‘There’s half a hunderd.’
Emmett unloaded the sack of flour and carried it on his back into the house. The girl took packages, bars of soap, candles, jam, vinegar, bread, meat, making two or three journeys. She paused at last to ask Emmett about oil, and Emmett said: ‘Th’ oil’s comin’ up separate. Fifty gallon on it. Be up sarfnoon.’
