by H. E. Bates
‘Of course not.’ I knew George as a gayish sort of man with strong hunting instincts where girls were concerned and I added: ‘You’d just better buckle on your armour all the same.’
‘Oh! George is as harmless as a worm. I’ve danced with him before.’
‘Worm? I’ve always heard he was something of a scorpion.’
‘Oh! not George. You’re as safe as houses with George.’
I suppose I ought to have experienced some slight pang of jealousy as she went off to waltz with George but, again perhaps because of that urgent and recurrent recollection of Tina, I felt not the slightest twinge of one.
Instead I took the opportunity of going outside for a breath or two of night air. The dance was being held at one of those big old manor houses converted into a road-house and the gardens of it stretched away towards a river. I was afterwards to have more than ordinary cause to remember that river but that night I simply stood under a great chestnut tree – almost all its blossom had fallen and lay underneath it like scattered snow in the lights of the house – and breathed the warm early summer air. There was none of the malice of May in that evening and even the stars, everywhere visible in crowds beyond the tips of a big row of poplar spires, looked warm.
And again it was of Tina, not Christie, that I thought as I stood in solitary contemplation of the night sky. All men, I suppose, dream at some time or other of being kissed by a strange woman, only to wake up, empty lipped, at the supreme climax of its excitement. And now it began to be like this with Tina. That impulsive kiss of hers began to assume far more than the mere pleasure of an exquisite surprise. It too became a dark dream from which I had been rudely snatched away, a haunting myth that gave as much pain as pleasure because it seemed, really, never to have happened.
But the night still had yet another surprise for me. When I got back to the dance floor and found Christie again I said:
‘It’s a simply marvellous warm night. Should we walk home across the meadows?’
‘But it must be all of two miles.’
‘There’s a footpath. It comes out at that old stone bridge. I know the way. How did the waltz go?’
‘Lovely. You weren’t jealous, were you, because I danced with George?’
‘Not a scrap.’
For fully a quarter of a minute those large golden eyes of hers held me in gentle and slightly mocking reproach.
‘That, I think,’ she said, ‘was not very flattering.’
I apologised and said that, of course, it wasn’t. Typically thoughtless of me.
‘I wouldn’t have said you were thoughtless.’
‘Oh! well, it doesn’t matter. Shall we walk back across the meadows?’
‘If you think you know the way.’
‘We’ll navigate by the stars.’
As it turned out it wasn’t necessary, as we started to walk home just after midnight, to navigate by the stars. The footpath was clear in the light of them. As we walked I put my arm round her waist, my hand under her right breast. We didn’t talk very much but after about five minutes, half way across the first meadow, I stopped and kissed her.
In my mistaken belief that she was, after all, unimpassioned, a mere girlish meringue at once cool and sweet, I made the kiss of, as I thought, appropriate lightness. To my infinite surprise she responded with an amazing and mature tenacity, at the same time lifting one of my hands deliberately to her breast. An instant later I was suddenly aware that she was all vibration. I began trembling myself and all of a sudden, in a dynamically charged moment that even Tina couldn’t have matched, we half-fell, half-stumbled to the ground.
How long we lay there I haven’t the remotest idea; but some long time later she extracted herself from my embrace and then folded her body like a big warm quilt over mine, her bare breasts against my face.
‘I have,’ she said, ‘something to tell you.’
‘Oh! God, not now. Words, words – please – not words.’
‘I’ve been wanting to tell you all evening but I didn’t want to spoil it.’
‘Spoil it! And you choose a moment like this. God, is it so important?’
‘Of course it is. Otherwise I wouldn’t tell you. Listen.’
‘You expect a man to listen in an attitude like this?’
‘Listen.’
It isn’t all that easy to listen, rationally at any rate, when you are being held in a dark meadow, on a warm May night, by a lioness you hitherto thought was tame and is now disturbingly, passionately transfigured; but somehow, in that whirl of emotion, I listened and I heard her say:
‘I’m going away.’
‘What a moment to tell me!’
‘Don’t sound so tragic.’
‘But where? When? You mean for good?’
She suddenly laughed gaily, in the true Davenport way, and said:
‘Oh! good gracious, no. Just for a couple of weeks. On holiday. Liz Davidson has an aunt who keeps a boarding house down at Brighton. You know Liz – she works with me. We can stay for practically nothing – it’s too good to miss—’
‘Oh! Christie, don’t go, don’t go. For God’s sake don’t go. Not after this.’
‘Of course I shall go.’
‘God,’ I said, ‘I’ll hate you if you go.’
An instant later she was on her feet, hands furiously struggling to straighten the front of her dress. It was the first and only time I ever saw her in a temper, almost a rage, and I was just preparing myself for a blast of words that would banish me for ever when suddenly her hand accidentally caught at her necklace. The string broke. There was a little explosive tinkle as the pearls scattered over her bare breasts and down the primrose dance frock, both inside and outside, to the grass below.
A moment later we were lying on the ground again, helpless with laughter.
Three evenings later I went round to the little café, having at last remembered Christie’s bracelet. Again Mrs Davenport was alone behind the counter and again, I thought, she wore that slightly sad, slightly distant air.
‘Oh! the bracelet – she hoped you’d bring it in before she went away.’
A pang of disappointment nipped sharply at my heart, so that for a moment I hadn’t anything to say. Finally I apologised and then explained that I’d been to London for a couple of days, half in the hope of getting another job.
‘And did you?’
I said I hadn’t and that if the truth had to be told, I hadn’t tried very hard.
‘I think she was disappointed you didn’t come in. I’m afraid Tina isn’t here either and Sophie’s upstairs, scribbling away at letters. She’s great on sending for catalogues, our Sophie. They arrive by the cart-load. So I’m afraid there’s only dull old me to talk to.’
She then asked me if I’d like a coffee and having said I would I leaned my elbows on the counter and said:
‘I didn’t think Christie was going for another week. As a matter of fact I half-thought that it was you who’d have gone away.’
‘What on earth made you think that?’
‘Your scheme. Have you done anything about it?’
She at once confessed she hadn’t. She didn’t really know why, except that she’d been rather extra busy for the last several days. Her voice was vague. A listlessness in her dark eyes accentuated, as it so often did, that lack of inspiration I so often found in her. Even when she poured out two cups of coffee it was with an air so absent and purposeless that finally she lost her grip on what she was doing and let the second cup brim completely over.
‘Sorry. Clumsy of me.’ She slowly poured the spilt coffee from the saucer into another cup, pushed the sugar-basin across the counter and wiped her hands across her apron. At no time had I seen her look less like the mother of those three so different, dazzling beauties. ‘No, I’ve slept on it a good bit, but I can’t somehow make up my mind.’
‘What do the girls say?’
Oh! she hadn’t told the girls. She hadn’t said a word to them. In fact I was th
e only living soul she’d spoken to.
‘And why did you tell me?’
It was somehow easier to tell a – she seemed, I thought, about to use the word stranger, but after a brief pause she went on and said simply a person outside the family. And a man too. It was altogether easier, somehow, to confide in a man.
‘It sounds to me like a golden opportunity,’ I said. ‘What holds you back?’
‘Oh! me. Just me. I simply need a thorough good push.’
‘Just the inspiration.’
‘Inspiration?’ She gave a short, completely mirthless laugh and cast an equally sombre look round the café and said: ‘Here? Inspiration? You can see it growing up the walls, can’t you? Like thick red roses.’
Hitherto she had been merely lifeless, vague, distant, disenchanted or just shabbily sad, but never bitter. Now the sentence about thick red roses was bitter: so bitter that it prompted me to say:
‘Remember the trap? Well, I’ve got out of it.’
‘Oh! yes, I’m good at giving advice. To other people I just lack the urge to give it to myself.’
‘Oh! go!’ I suddenly said. ‘Stand not upon the order of your going but go at once! Before it’s too late!—’
No doubt this sounded a little over-dramatic but I really meant it as the verbal equivalent of shaking her. For several moments she looked extraordinarily startled. There was actually a flash of light in her eyes and for a second or two I thought that, like Christie, she was about to turn on me in anger. Nothing of the kind happened and in a few moments she was her distant, disenchanted self again.
‘Of course you’re quite right,’ she said. ‘I know that. And I’ll tell you this. If I ever do make the plunge it’ll be because of what you’ve just said.’
I was just beginning to nurse an uneasy feeling of embarrassment about all this when suddenly Sophie came into the café, dressed in an emerald green woollen jumper and a darker skirt, carrying a handful of letters. There was already a touch of dusk in the air and that brilliant tiger-lily head of hers glowed in the shadowy recesses of the café like a torch. Against the huddled figure of her mother, bent over the coffee cup, she looked like a goddess, more outrageously beautiful than Christie, more alarming than Tina, so that my blood started bumping and dancing. I suppose I’d seen her standing there in the café fifty times or more but that dusky late May evening it was incredibly as if I were seeing her for the first time.
‘Oh! it’s you. I wondered who was talking. I thought you’d deserted us.’
‘That,’ I said, ‘I shall never do.’
She laughed with the typical Davenport gaiety, slightly mockingly.
‘Doesn’t he know how to say the right things? It’s a pity you didn’t save that for Christie. It might have been a bit of comfort for her.’
‘You’d better look out,’ Mrs Davenport said, actually smiling at me. ‘She’s in one of those moods. She’ll tease the life out of you.’
‘In which case,’ I said, ‘I’d better go. May I post your letters?’
‘No. Thanks all the same. If you’re going I’ll walk as far as the post with you. That is if the strain of a Davenport companion isn’t too much for you.’
This, I realised, was a reference to Christie, whom it would appear I had deserted, and once again came the warning from Mrs Davenport to watch my step. Sophie was in one of those merciless moods.
After saying good night to Mrs Davenport, Sophie and I started walking through the churchyard. The lilacs were all over now but in the breathless dusk a huge late magnolia held a thousand ethereal candles against the funereal column of an Irish yew. We stopped for a moment or two to gaze at it, Sophie’s head like fire against the pure crowd of blossom, and then we walked on.
‘I can’t think why you always walk so fast,’ she suddenly said. ‘You stride out as if you haven’t a minute to live. Now slow down.’ She caught at my arm. ‘There’s no hurry, is there? We’ve got all the time in the world.’
She was quite right. There was no hurry; we had all the time in the world; and slowly we walked through the churchyard and out into the market square beyond. Behind us the church clock chimed four quarters and then struck nine and as Sophie dropped her letters into the pillar box on the corner of the square I said:
‘Are you going straight back or—’
‘It all depends if I hear of any fascinating alternatives.’
‘And which form would you prefer them to take?’
If she could banter, so could I. It might well be difficult to keep up with the spirited flash and change of the mind that lay behind the restless sepia-green eyes but that too was a pursuit also fascinating.
‘Walk as far as the river?’
‘Ah! you’ve got the river on your mind again.’
‘Again? I don’t know what you mean.’
‘You know what I mean.’
Abruptly, and I thought prudently, I changed the subject.
‘Did Christie arrive safely?’
‘If it isn’t the river it’s Christie. I suppose they go together.’
‘Brighton’s nice. I went there twice as a boy.’
‘Christie says so too. We had a card. She says I should go down for the day.’
‘And will you?’
‘If I could get an escort.’
‘I’ll escort. Decently.’
‘And I, I suppose,’ she said, ‘will play the dear, dear gooseberry.’
In this sharp, light-hearted fashion we bantered our way towards the river, Sophie sometimes innocently inconsequent, sometimes a creature of complex maturity, and I all the time not knowing, in my own peculiar innocence, that I was about to make a new discovery about her: namely that she was not only very beautiful but, in the nicest sort of way, the most tormenting and beautiful liar.
Just as in the physical presence of Christie I had found myself uneasily in spirit with Tina, so in the presence of Sophie I now found myself thrown back, as it were, into the arms of Christie. There was no accident in this. Sophie was determined that I should; it was her avowed intention to torment me.
We had reached the bridge over the river and were standing in one of its triangular stone recesses, gazing down at a strong current foaming through the arches, the dark water full of stars, when all at once she said, with the most casual innocence:
‘I heard all about Saturday.’
For a moment I didn’t know whether to be shocked, annoyed or merely dismayed, but one thing was quite certain: I was once again lying in the meadow with Christie, kissing her splendid breasts in the cool air of early morning, and the recollection of it was all highly disturbing.
‘All about Saturday?’
‘Well, all that really mattered. You know, all the best bits.’
‘I’m very glad to hear it. I wouldn’t want you to miss a thing.’
‘It must have been pretty terrific. I mean the way Christie described it.’
‘Good God, you don’t mean – look, haven’t you sisters any secrets from each other?’
‘Oh! don’t sound so innocent.’
‘I am not,’ I said, ‘trying to be innocent. But after all there are certain things—’
Immediately she threw back her lovely tiger-lily head and laughed mockingly into my face, her white teeth glistening.
‘Anyone might think,’ she said, ‘that you were the only person who’d ever made love.’
She had been leaning on the parapet by the bridge, elbows crooked, and now she suddenly turned and gave me a look of searching warmth that couldn’t be construed as anything but the most ardent invitation to kiss her. I promptly moved forward to do so, only to find her two hands squarely pressed against my chest, keeping me away.
‘Oh! no you don’t.’
‘Don’t you want to be kissed?’
‘I’m not sure. I’ll think about it.’
‘Kissing,’ I said, ‘is not something you think about. You do it. On impulse. And it’s very nice. Sometimes.’
‘An
d what was “sometimes” supposed to mean?’
‘You can hardly judge the quality of a kiss if you’re not even given the chance of testing it,’ I said, ‘can you?’
She could apparently think of nothing to say in answer to this remark and I got some momentary satisfaction out of feeling that the exchanges had, so far, been fairly even; but suddenly, in a flashing change of subject, she was again ahead of me.
‘I suppose you know that she’s really in love with a man named Bill Cartwright?’
‘And who is she?’
‘Christie.’
I must confess I felt rather sick. There was in fact not the slightest need to have done so, since the remark about Bill Cartwright was, as I later discovered from Christie, merely another charming, blatant lie. Nor was the implied suggestion that she was a frequent lover herself any nearer the truth; she had up to that time never made love in her life, except in the deep, dark recesses of her mind.
‘You don’t seem to be terribly jealous about it,’ she suddenly said.
‘Am I supposed to be jealous?’
‘Well, I should have thought it was a perfectly natural thing for a man who’s in love with her.’
‘Who said I was in love with her?’
‘Well, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not sure. Perhaps I prefer someone else.’
‘And who, might one ask, would she be?’
‘That,’ I said, ‘would be telling.’
She leaned back against the bridge, deliberately arching her body, so that the curves of it were thrown forward, tightened.
‘Oh! you do fancy yourself, don’t you? First you get Tina on the hop. Then it’s Christie. Now it’s some mystery woman you’ve found.’
Suddenly, in the middle of all this nonsense – I don’t know why, perhaps it arose in some way from the deep suspense of the night air about the dark river, where a white patch or two of mist had started to gather – I was troubled by the strange thought I sometimes had about her: that that flower-like loveliness of hers was somehow uneasy, fragile, doomed to impermanence. It made me for a second or two rather sad and then she said:
‘What is she like? Some raging beauty I expect? Do I know her?’
‘Ravishing. Oh! yes, you do.’
