The Four Beauties
Page 16
The sounds troubled him. Like part of a half-remembered dream they mocked at his expanding consciousness with strange familiarity.
Finally he got up. He could no longer resist the reality of the sounds. He walked along the deck. Half way to the bows he stopped, horrified by the astounding emptiness of the deck about the wheel, stunned by an incredible illusion that the tarpaulin had been carefully folded up and laid at the head of the hatchway.
In the moment of realising that the bodies of Edison and Fat Uncle no longer lay there he realised also that the engine was running.
He stood staring down the steps of the hatchway for fully a minute before realising that the blood-stained face of the man bending over the engine was the face of Fat Uncle.
A new horror rose up in him. The impression that he was staring down at a figure spirited back from the dead was too much for his calmness. He felt his veins run sick and white again.
Almost at the same moment he heard Fat Uncle begin speaking.
‘I remembered we only put half a tank in,’ he said. The half-idiotic lips gaped upward, brown with blood. ‘No wonder we stopped.’
The boy started to answer with a series of broken phrases that made no sense with the exception of the word ‘Edison? Edison?’ which he blubbered over and over again.
With fat crooked fingers Fat Uncle waved upwards, towards the rising light.
‘He’s gone where he said he’d send you,’ he said. ‘Out there.’
For the first time the boy broke into weeping. His choking tears had nothing to do with Edison, nor with the sudden appearance of Fat Uncle, back from the dead. He was weeping at an unknown horror that seemed to be crawling up from the whitening sea, on all sides of him, in a nightmare.
The sound of his weeping brought the girl running along the deck. She too heard the sound of the engine and stopped abruptly.
‘Timi! Timi!’ she was shouting. ‘Timi!’ The sudden joy on her face woke in him fresh bursts of weeping. ‘Why do you cry? How did you make it go?’
The head of Fat Uncle rose above the top of the hatchway. And the girl, seeing it, let out her own grievous cry.
A land rose from the sea. A long serrated cockscomb of green and violet seemed to float out of the horizon under a scalding sun.
Like a caricature of a warrior scarred in battle, Fat Uncle stood grasping the wheel with enormous, aggressive hands, staring straight ahead. His face, with muscles set, no longer seemed flabby. It seemed to be contained in a metallic, greasy mask. Dark crusts of blood had congealed and dried across the forehead, heightening the yellow of the skin and giving the impression of a man wrapped in a brooding, savage frown.
The girl once dipped a bucket into the sea. She was moved to bathe the bloodstained face and started to tear a strip of cloth from her pereu; but Fat Uncle bashed into the silence of the deck with a slam of a vast hand against the wheel and a bruising cry across the white calm sea.
‘Let them stop there! Let the world see them! Let them see how he tried to kill me!’
After that the girl crouched against the side of the boat, head enclosed in the falling mass of her hair, hands flat on the rail. She stared for some hours in speechless concentration at the land enlarging with incredible slowness on the horizon while the boy, ordered by Fat Uncle, washed blood from the deck.
Now and then Fat Uncle broke into long, senseless abuse of Edison. He shouted with lunatic contempt at the evil of fate, spitting at the sea. At the end of these outbursts he struck at the wheel again with a strange mixture of pride and childishness, laughing, giggling fatly.
‘Now she’s mine! Now I’ve got her back!’ His idiot pride in the material possession of the boat made him seem more than ever swollen. ‘She was always mine! She always belonged to me.’
The boy was struck by these outbursts into a watchful awe. He tried for a long time to work out a reason for Fat Uncle’s pride in his scars. He understood the pride in the schooner, but that of the scars eluded him completely until Fat Uncle yelled:
‘You saw the fight. How did I kill him? Tell me that.’
It did not occur to the boy that this was evidence of cowardice in Fat Uncle. He heard the words with amazed bewilderment. He heard Fat Uncle give a laugh of triumph, as if actually glad that he had killed a man.
He was about to shatter this illusion by telling Fat Uncle the truth when he saw the girl, moving for the first time for some hours, slowly turn her face, pushing back her hair with both hands. The face, paralysed with fright, looked unbelievably cold in the heat of the day, frozen against the background of an ocean across which, at last, a wind was rising, cutting brief slits of foam from the crests of the long smooth swells.
‘Tell me how I killed him! I don’t remember.’ Fat Uncle struck attitudes of boldness, flinging out oil-stained contemptuous arms. ‘I remember he came up behind me – like that’ – he crouched with grotesque ape-like fury in imitation of Edison – ‘Like that he came up, didn’t he? I remember that.’ He spat again with galling, contemptuous laughter. ‘From behind! Like a rat – from behind!’
For a long time the boy nursed his dilemma, watching first the girl, then the land becoming more and more clearly defined every moment across the white-fringed sea. He could actually make out now the collar of the island’s enclosing reef and soon he could see the colour of the mountains beyond, yellow-brown at the foot, sharp emerald high up the slopes, with dark palm tufts on the shore and in between.
Once or twice he opened his mouth to speak, but the words never framed themselves. Hearing Fat Uncle laugh again, he pondered gravely, with eyes that seemed as always to be listening to half-formed sounds, on the astonishing fact that a man might be glad to kill a man. Held in a horror between truth and silence, he was troubled by a growing recollection, more bewildering to him now than when it had happened, of the girl telling him of the child inside herself and of her mystifying words:
‘There is something more than being afraid.’
These were all strange mysteries, not of his making. He could not interpret them. He could only interpret the embalming warmth of the girl’s arms in the depth of night-time, quietening him to sleep, holding him so closely that he was almost one with the other body inside her own.
That was a still stranger mystery: the child inside herself. He brooded on that until compassion and wonder held him in a trance, sightlessly.
He was woken out of it by a yell from Fat Uncle:
‘I see the gap!’ With the quaking, triumphant fingers of a man who might have made, single-handed, an uncharted voyage across cruel waters, he pointed ahead. ‘We’re nearly there! Boy, take the wheel a moment while I get below!’
The boy grasped the wheel. In the few seconds while Fat Uncle was below the girl came and stood beside him. He turned, not speaking, and looked at her sad, gentle, brooding face, wrapped in dignity. He searched it for a sign of fear and at the same moment searched his own mind for something to say to her.
A second later the engine slowed to half-speed. She smiled gravely. Without a word she put her hand on his shoulder and a moment later Fat Uncle came up on deck.
‘I’ll take her now.’ He brandished, in his ape-like, childish fashion, a pair of arms that seemed as if they were about to embrace himself. ‘I’ll take her in.’
As he moved to grasp the wheel the girl spoke quietly.
‘Let the boy take her a little farther,’ she said. ‘He deserves that. It would make him very proud to take her a little farther.’
There were still a few hundred yards to go.
‘Take her!’ Fat Uncle again waved generous, expansive arms, laughing. ‘How does she feel? How do you like her?’
As the boy, grasping the wheel, stared into hot sunlight with solemn far-seeing eyes, a strange illusion affected him. It was that the boat, though down to half-speed, was travelling faster than ever, running with flying swiftness across white-flecked water towards the steaming gap and the mountains beyond.
‘How d
oes she feel?’ Fat Uncle shouted. ‘How does she go?’
The veins of the boy ran with pride. The entire sea about him ran with wonderful whiteness. He turned swiftly to show his pride to the girl and saw that there were tears in her eyes. These tears, unfallen, imprisoned her brooding eyes with a troubled, crystalline brightness. She too was proud.
Exultantly he half-threw up his hands. A boy might travel a million miles and never see what he had seen. He might live through a million nights and never hear what he had heard. Solemnly he was glad he had been afraid with her and because of it he felt he understood, at last, her tears, her pride and above all her brooding darkness.
‘She goes like the wind!’ he shouted. ‘Like the wind!’
A Note on the Author
H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.
Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.
His first novel, The Two Sisters (1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.
During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym ‘Flying Officer X’. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain (1947) and The Jacaranda Tree (1949) and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword (1950). Other well-known novels include Love for Lydia (1952) and The Feast of July (1954).
His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with The Darling Buds of May in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success.
Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being The Purple Plain (1947) starring Gregory Peck, and The Triple Echo (1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.
H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.
Discover other books by H. E. Bates published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/hebates.
Share your reviews and comments with us via info@bloomsburyreader.com.
First published in Great Britain in 1968 by Michael Joseph
This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Reader
Copyright © 1968 Evensford Productions Ltd
The moral right of the author is asserted.
Bloomsbury Reader is an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London
WC1B 3DP
www.bloomsburyreader.com
Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing plc
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Oxford, New Delhi, New York and Sydney
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
eISBN: 9781448215287
Visit www.bloomsburyreader.com to find out more about our authors and their books.
You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can sign up for newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers.
You can also find us on Twitter @bloomsreader.