by H. E. Bates
He waited, watching her face, younger and lighter and finer in tone than her mother’s as he remembered it, the hair soft and red, perhaps a tone or two darker, the throat moving with deep slow strokes in the naked cross-light from behind her.
‘Still at school?’ he said.
‘Good Lord, no. Me? I’m in the hosiery too. Only they don’t allow night shift till you’re twenty. Lord knows why.’
He was all at once afraid of talking too much; he was scared that at any moment she might remember her unanswered question and ask his name.
‘I’d better push off,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to keep you standing here.’
‘I’ll get the umbrella,’ she said.
She went into the house and pulled an umbrella from a round tin stand that stood in the passage. Suddenly he remembered what her mother had said, in that quick and flashing way of hers: ‘You’re as good as an umbrella on a rainy day,’ and then the girl said:
‘I’ll walk as far as the bridge with you. It’s letting up a bit. You can get a bus there and I can bring the umbrella back.’
‘I don’t like——’
‘Oh! that’s all right. I got nothing to do. I get bored with both of them on night shift and me sitting there waiting for bed-time. Wouldn’t you? It gives you the atmospherics—like the radio.’
She laughed as they ran out together, she holding the umbrella, into the rain, and the laugh too was much like her mother’s, but lighter and softer in tone. The rain was slacking a little and they walked with heads down against it and once he peered out from under the rim of the umbrella to see if the sky was growing lighter still across the yard.
‘Keep your head under. You’ll get soaked,’ she said. ‘It’s coming in enough as it is. This umbrella’s one of mine I had as a kid. It’s only half size.’
He crouched closer under the umbrella and found himself taking her arm. She said, ‘That’s better. That’s more like it,’ and again he felt the flame of touching her go through him exactly as it had done when he had touched Cora’s arm, cold and wet with hail under a fiery burst of sunshine on a spring day.
‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘Do you like it?’
‘I like it a lot,’ she said. ‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that why you’re running so hard to catch the bus?’
He had not realised that he was running. He had not grasped that excitement was driving him through the rain. He laughed and slackened his pace and she said:
‘The way you were going anybody would think you had to get the Manchester express.’
‘Perhaps I have.’
‘Oh! go on. Where are you going? Nowhere, are you?’
‘Nowhere particular.’
‘I knew it all the time.’
That was like her mother too: that queer thinking through the pores, the knowingness, the second sight about him. ‘I know when you’re coming round the corner. I know when you’re there.’
By the time they had reached the bridge it was raining no longer. The few peals of thunder might have been far-distant wheels of freight trains thudding heavily up slow gradients to the north. The sky beyond the black low yards was pure and empty, almost stark, a strong green-yellow, after the swift and powerful wash of rain.
She did not put the umbrella down. Its shadow almost completed the summer darkness so that when they halted and stood by the bridge he could see her face only in softened outline, under the mass of brown-red hair. Then a bus came with its glare of strange green thundery light over the crest of the bridge and she said:
‘This is your bus. This is the one you ought to get.’
‘There’s no bus. There’s no train. There’s no nothing,’ he said.
She did not speak. They let the bus go by. It flared away, leaving behind it a darkness momentarily shot with dancing fires of green that were also like broken after-reflections of the clearing, yellowing sky.
‘It’s nice being with you,’ she said. ‘Do you feel that about some people? It’s nice the first time you meet them. You feel it and you know.’
‘That’s right,’ he said.
He wanted suddenly to tell her who he was: who and why and what and all about himself. He wanted to tell her about her mother and the dream the canker had eaten and he wanted to run. He knew he ought to get out. He ought to find a little farm like Osborne’s and get work on it and save money and start again. It was getting late and he ought to find himself a bed down by the station. Then in the morning he could get out and start clear, over in another county, somewhere east, Norfolk perhaps, where he wasn’t known. Harvest was beginning and there was plenty of work on the farms.
Then he was aware of an awful loneliness. He felt sick with it. His stomach turned and was slipping out. It was the feeling he had known when they sentenced him. His stomach was black and he was alone and terribly afraid. He looked at the haunting yellow sky. He heard at the same time a train rushing down through the yards from the north and he began to say:
‘I suppose you——’
‘What?’
The express came roaring down, double-engined, crashing and flaring under the bridge. She waited for it to pass in its cloud of floating orange steam before she spoke again.
‘What was that you said?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You know what I thought you were going to say?’
‘No.’
‘I thought you were going to ask me if I’d come out with you again.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’ His entire body was beginning to shake again, so that he could hardly say:
‘No—I was going to say I wanted a drink. That’s all. I was going to say I suppose you wouldn’t have one with me.’
‘Well, of course I would,’ she said. ‘That’s easy. What could be easier than that?’
He knew that nothing could be easier than that. He waited for a moment or two longer without speaking. He looked down at her face, not very clear in the partial shadow of the umbrella, but familiar as if he had known it a long time. The train was through the yards. It was roaring now through the station, under the old closed footbridge, and behind it, in noisy flashes, the signals were lifting to red.
‘Well, what are we waiting for?’ she said.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
Still under the umbrella, they began to walk up the gradient, by smoke-blackened walls, towards the pub. She gave the umbrella a sideways lift so that, above the yards, in the fresh light of after-storm, he could see a great space of calm, rain-washed daffodil sky.
‘It’s all over,’ she said. ‘It’s fine. It’ll be hot again tomorrow.’
She closed down the umbrella. She was smiling and he could not look at her face.
‘We’d better get on,’ he said. ‘It’s nearly closing-time.’
Country Society
All the vases in Mrs Clavering’s house were filled with sprays of white forced lilac and glossy pittosporum leaves. In January the lilac was almost more expensive than she could afford. But the tall leafless sprays were very distinguished and she hoped they would not fade.
She was going to give everyone white wine to drink at the party. This was partly because she had read somewhere, in a magazine or a newspaper, that that was distinguished too; partly because at the Fanshawes’ party she had heard Captain Perigo’s wife complaining quite loudly of the stinking drinks you nowadays got out of jugs; and partly because at another party, the Luffingtons’, at the Manor, a Colonel Arber, a newcomer to the district, had started to proclaim his intention of beating things up and had done so, rowdily, on dreadful mixtures of cider and gin. That was exactly what she wanted to avoid. She did not want rowdiness and people complaining, even if they did not mean it, that the drinks you gave them were not strong enough. She thought that nowadays everyone drank too much gin. At one time gin was nothing but a washer-woman’s drink but now everyone drank it, everywhere. They tippled it down. White wine sounded s
o much more reserved and distinguished even if people did not like it so much. She thought too that it was bound to give tone to her attempt to get to know the Paul Vaulkhards. The Paul Vaulkhards, who were new to the county, had taken the house down the hill, and she understood that they were very distinguished too.
All day frost lingered on the trees. It drew a curtain of rimy branches, like chain armour, over the sky, shutting in the large oak-staired house, making it darker than ever, in isolation. It lingered in black ice pools about the road. At three o’clock the caterers’ van should have arrived; and nervously, for an hour, Mrs Clavering paced about the house, wondering where it had got to; and it was not until after four o’clock that it arrived, with dented mudguards and one tray of vol-au-vent cakes smashed into crumbs, because of a skid on the frozen hill.
The three caterers’ men grumbled and said the roads were worse than ever and that everyone ought to have chains. And then suddenly the western hill of beeches took away the last strips of frost green daylight too early, as it always did, and the fields became dark and unkindly, closing in. Mrs Clavering felt the awful country isolation extinguish immediately all hope about the party. She felt that no one would come. She became doubtful of the coldness of the white wine. There were people who had to come from considerable distances, such as the Blairs and Captain Perigo and the principal of the research college and his wife, very distinguished and important people too, who would certainly not risk it. She doubted even if the Luffingtons would risk it from the Manor. With fear and coldness she felt that the Paul Vaulkhards would not risk it. Nobody of distinction or importance would dare to risk it and she would be left with people like the dropsical Miss Hemshawe and her mother, with Miss Ireton and Miss Graves, who lived together and spun sheep-wool and dyed it into shades of porridge and pale autumnal lichen, and with the Reverend Perks and his elder brother: with those people whom Mr Clavering sometimes rudely called the hencoop tribe.
‘Because they cluck and fuss and scratch and make dirt and pull each other’s feathers out,’ Mr Clavering said.
Mrs Clavering had not succeeded in curing her husband, in thirty years, of a habit of accurate flippancy, to which he sometimes added what she felt was deliberate forgetfulness.
Mr Clavering too, like the caterers, was late coming out from his office in the town.
‘You said you would be here at four!’ she called from the first-floor landing. ‘Wherever have you been? Did you remember the pecan nuts? But they were ready! They were telephoned for! All you had to do was to pick them up from Watsons’——’
‘Nobody ate the damn things last time.’
‘Of course they ate them. They were much appreciated.’
In the hall, where Mr Clavering stood taking off his homberg hat and overcoat, the telephone rang and she called:
‘That’s the first one. Answer it! I can’t bear to——’
Mr Clavering, answering the telephone, called that it was Mrs Vaulkhard. ‘She’d like to speak to you,’ he said.
‘This is it, this is it, this is it,’ she said. In a constraint of coldness and fear she scurried downstairs and picked up the telephone, trembling, but Mrs Vaulkhard said:
‘I did not want to trouble you. Oh! it was not that. It was simply to ask you—we have my niece here. We thought it would be so nice—No: she is young. Quite young. Seventeen—could we? Would it be any kind of inconvenience?—I did not want you to think——’
With joy Mrs Clavering forgot the absence of the pecan nuts and a haunting fear that the white wine was, after all, not a suitable drink for so dark and freezing a day.
‘Well, they will come at any rate. If no one else does——’
‘Everybody will come,’ Mr Clavering said. ‘And a few you never thought of.’
‘I’m sure no one would ever think of doing that sort of thing,’ she said.
‘Everybody will be here,’ Mr Clavering said. ‘The hen-coop tribe. The horse-box tribe. The wool-spinning tribe. The medical tribe. The point-to-pointers. You didn’t ask Mrs Bonnington and Battersby by any chance, did you?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘And Freda O’Connor?’
‘Of course.’
‘Charming, very charming,’ he said.
‘I don’t know what you mean. I chose everybody very carefully.’
Mrs Bonnington, who was dark and shapely and in her thirties, kept house for a retired naval commander who amused himself by fishing and sketching in water colour; Mr Bonnington came down from somewhere at week-ends. The naval commander had a silvery piercing beard, commanding as a stiletto, and ice-blue handsome passionate eyes. Freda O’Connor, a long brown-haired hungry-looking girl with a flaunting bust that was like two full-blown poppy-heads, had left her husband and gone to live, while really preferring horses, with a Major Battersby. In a pleasant way Major Battersby, brown and shaggy and side-whiskered and untidily muscular, was rather like a large horse himself. Miss O’Connor had succeeded Mrs Battersby. In the furies of separation Mrs Battersby, a woman of broad-hipped charm who wore slacks all day, had taken refuge with Mrs Bonnington. On a horse she looked commanding and taller than she was. It seemed sometimes to Mr Clavering that Mr Bonnington arrived at week-ends simply for the purpose of seeing Mrs Battersby, later departing only to leave Mrs Bonnington free for the naval commander. He did not know. You could never be quite sure, in the country, about these complicated things and he said:
‘You didn’t invite Major Battersby too, did you?’
‘I invited all the people I thought ought to be invited. After all one has to keep up,’ she said, ‘one has to keep in——’
Mr Clavering, who would have preferred to live in town, where you could have a leisurely game of snooker or bridge in the evenings at the Invicta Club over a quiet glass of whisky, out of reach of women, gave a sigh of pain and said something about not caring whether one was up or in and then added that Mrs Clavering was wonderful.
Mrs Clavering replied that she thought Mr Clavering ought to go and change.
‘Change what?’ he said.
‘That suit of course! You’re never coming down in that suit!’
Mr Clavering, who could see nothing wrong with his suit, began to go upstairs whistling. Mrs Clavering rushed suddenly past him, remembering she had turned on the bath water. This gave him an opportunity of saying that on second thoughts he would have a quick snifter before the herd arrived, but Mrs Clavering leaned swiftly over the banisters and called:
‘No! Absolutely and utterly not. No snifters. If you want to do something useful see that the lights are switched on in the drive——’ She was bullying him with affection, and he succumbed.
Some minutes later, as he switched the lights on in the long paved drive that led under canopies of frosted beech boughs up to the front door of the house, he saw that darkness had fallen completely. The lamps set all the low weeping boughs glistening delicately under cold blue air. He stood for a moment watching the sparkling wintry lace of frosted twigs. He thought how cold and dark and isolated the garden beyond them seemed, and he thought of the billiard room of the Invicta Club, where light was coned above green warm tables in a soft silence broken only by men’s voices and the clock of snooker balls. He did not really care much for country life. The house was really too big and too expensive and too difficult to keep up; there was always the tiresome problem of servants who did not want to stay. It was only for his wife’s sake that he kept it up. He was easygoing. She was fond of it all; she liked the country society.
‘Isn’t there any gin?’ he said to the caterers’ men in the sitting-room.
‘Only the white wine, Sir,’ they told him, and he said ‘Good God! Wine?’ and then recognised that it was another idea of his wife’s designed to make the party different, to elevate and keep up its tone. He was amused by this, and decided to try a glass of the wine. It was a delicate light green in colour, and he thought it seemed insipid, all taste frozen out of it, and after drinking half
a single frosted glass he went off to grope in the dining-room cellarette for the gin, but the usual bottle was not there, and with tolerant amusement he realised his wife had probably hidden it away.
By soon after six o’clock a dozen people were standing about in stiff cold groups in the too large hall, grasping chilled glasses of wine with chilly fingers. The owl-like eyes of the dropsical, spectacled Miss Hemshawe and her mother prowled to and fro, searching all newcomers. The Reverend Perks and his elder brother arrived, looking like two pieces of scraped shin-bone with a little beef left on, red and fierce at the edges of their ears and noses. Mrs Clavering fluttered. Some conversation went on in subdued tones, and the caterers’ men advanced with trays of wine-glasses and coloured fish-bright snippets of food, eagerly seized upon by the Reverend Perks and then earnestly recommended by his brother to Miss Graves and Miss Ireton, who were clad in sheep’s wool in the form of large net-like scarves of an indeterminate shade of pink, like faded blotting paper.
Soon there was a clucking everywhere, as Mr Clavering said, of busy hens. There was even, in the clink of glasses, a sound of pecking in the air. Presently the hall began to be very full; people overflowed into the dining-room; and Mr Clavering found he could not see everybody, or keep track of everybody, at once. The wine seemed to him horribly cold and insipid and he hid his glass behind a vase of lilac without noticing what the sprays of naked blossom were.
Then his wife came to whisper with despair that it was nearly seven o’clock and that neither the Paul Vaulkhards nor the Perigos nor the Blairs had arrived.
‘All the best people arrive last,’ he said, and then looked across bubbling mole-hills of hats and heads to see Mrs Battersby standing on the threshold.
Mrs Battersby looked outraged and stunned. Her eye sockets seemed to have lost their pupils and looked like two dark empty key-holes. Mr Clavering saw that this sightless stare of dark outrage was directed at Freda O’Connor. Until that moment he had not noticed her. Now he saw that her slender skimmed figure, looking taller than ever, was bound tightly in a long skirt of black silk, with a brief bodice of white from which her bust protruded with enforced and enlarged distinction. She was talking to Colonel Arber, who was not very tall and had the advantage of not needing to alter the level of his protuberant watery eyes in order to appraise the parts of her that interested him most. Freda O’Connor looked casual and hungry and languidly, glamorously indifferent. Her body lacked the cohesive charm of Mrs Battersby’s, but it seemed instead to flame. Mrs Battersby melted away somewhere into another room. Colonel Arber took another glass of wine, holding it at the trembling level of Freda O’Connor’s bosom, and seemed as if about to speak with husky passion of something. He guffawed instead, and the conversation was of horses.
