The Darling Buds of May

by H. E. Bates

  6

  When Pop got home the following evening he found Miss Pilchester waiting in the yard.

  ‘Isn’t it absolutely ghastly?’ Miss Pilchester said.

  The evening seemed warmer than ever, but Miss Pilchester was wearing a thick thorn-proof skirt of cabbage green and a cable-stitch woollen cardigan to match. Pop did not ask her what was absolutely ghastly and she did not offer to tell him either.

  There was no need. Everything to Edith Pilchester was always absolutely ghastly. She lived alone and kept numbers of laying hens. The hens were absolutely ghastly, and so, even worse, was living alone. It was absolutely impossible to get any help in the house, in the garden, or with the hens. She couldn’t afford to run a car because of taxes and the price of petrol and oil and servicing and repairs. She could just afford a solitary hack of her own, but she couldn’t afford a groom. It was all absolutely ghastly. Before the war she had kept a little maid in the house, a man in the garden, and a groom-cum-chauffeur-cum-cook who was an absolute treasure in all sorts of ways, including bringing her early morning tea and hot whisky last thing at night in bed. Now all of them had gone and she could hardly afford the whisky. It was absolutely ghastly. Everybody went out to work in the fields at strawberry picking, cherry picking, plum picking, apple picking, bean picking, hop picking, or at the canning factories in the town, earning mountains more money than they knew what to do with and in any case more than she could pay. It was all absolutely ghastly.

  One of the results of everything being so absolutely ghastly was that Miss Pilchester, who was a fortyish, slightly moustached brunette shaped like a bolster, threw herself into an amazing number of projects with an energy quite ferocious, desperately trying to put the whole ghastly business to rights again. Prowling from committee to committee, charity to charity, bazaar to bazaar, she was like some restless, thirsty lioness seeking prey.

  ‘Hot again, ain’t it?’ Pop said.

  ‘Absolutely ghastly.’

  When Pop suggested that Miss Pilchester should come into the house and have a drink and cool off a bit Miss Pilchester said no thanks, not for the moment, it was absolutely ghastly. She thought they ought to do the field; there wasn’t much time left, thanks to that bounder Fortescue letting them down at the last moment and the committee, with the exception of the Brigadier, having been very nearly as bad. The whole thing was simply too ghastly.

  Over in the meadow the grass had been cut and baled during the day. Big fragrant cotton-reels of hay lay scattered everywhere between the house and the river. Only a white and yellow fringe of moon-daisy and buttercup remained standing at the edges, pretty as a ruffle under the hedgerows of hawthorn, rising honey-suckle, and wild rose.

  ‘Damn good field, Larkin,’ Miss Pilchester said. ‘No doubt about that. Just the job.’

  She surveyed it with critical, organizing eye, seeing on it a vision of jumps, judges’ tents, showrings, beer tents, and horses. It was awfully decent of Larkin to do it, she said, otherwise everything would have been an absolute shambles.

  ‘Always like to oblige,’ Pop said and laughed in cheerful fashion.

  Miss Pilchester laughed too. One of the things she always liked about Larkin was the man’s inexhaustible cheerfulness. Friendly chap.

  ‘What about the carpark though?’ she said. ‘That’s always another nightmare.’

  ‘Use the other field,’ Pop said. ‘Next door. The little ’un. Simple.’

  Swallows were flying high above the meadows and the river, swooping in the blue hot sky, and Miss Pilchester might almost have been one of them in the quick, darting glances of gratitude she gave to Pop.

  ‘All yours,’ Pop said. ‘Come and go just as you like. Any time.’

  Another thing Miss Pilchester liked about Pop was the terrific easy generosity of the chap. Good sport. She had once been casually kissed by Pop at a Christmas village social, in some game or other, and the experience, for her at least, had been something more than that of two pairs of lips briefly meeting. It gave you the same feeling, she thought, as smelling bruised spring grass, or new-mown hay, for the first time.

  ‘All we want then is a fine day,’ Miss Pilchester said. ‘If it’s wet it’ll be absolutely ghastly.’

  ‘Can’t control the tap water I’m afraid,’ Pop said and laughed again, at the same time remarking how thirsty he was. ‘Might put something in it, though, if you feel like it now. Drop o’ gin? Drop o’ whisky? Glass o’ port?’

  Miss Pilchester darted towards Pop another rapid, swallow-like glance of approval, half-affectionate, half-grateful, her eyes so momentarily absorbed in the baldish, perky profile with its dark side-linings that she quite forgot to say that anything was absolutely ghastly.

  Back in the yard a van from the bacon factory had just delivered all of Pop’s two pigs – he had decided after all that one would be gone almost before you could wink – except the four sides and two hams, which had been left for curing. In the kitchen, Ma, now a white-aproned expansive butcheress, was busy trimming several score pounds of pork and pork offal; cheerful as ever she stowed it away in the new deep-freeze. As Pop put his head through the kitchen door he was confronted by a bloodstained mountain of legs, loins, heads, chitterlings, and trotters and the sight gave him enormous pleasure. Ma said:

  ‘Dr Leagrave’s in the sitting-room: I said you wouldn’t be long.’

  ‘Come to see Mariette?’

  ‘No, pipe down, you loony. Nobody knows anything about that. No: just on his way back from the golf course. Just passing.’

  ‘Thirsty, I expect,’ Pop said. ‘Still, just the job – we can get him to run the rule over Mister Charlton.’

  In the sitting room Pop introduced Miss Pilchester to Dr Leagrave, who was a heavyish man in his fifties, rather red-necked in a Teutonic sort of way, and completely bald. The doctor, who played a good deal of golf as a pretence of getting exercise and keeping his weight down, though in reality preferring the comforts of the clubhouse, remarked that it was warmish. Miss Pilchester said it was absolutely ghastly and flopped into an easy chair with the grace of a cow.

  Television was on, out of natural habit, and the programme was one of opera, the composer being a man named Wagner, of whom Pop had never heard. Pop gave the screen a cursory, whipping glance – the programmes were never much catch Tuesdays – and wondered if everybody on it had gone stark, staring mad.

  It was a relief to turn to drinks and Miss Pilchester:

  ‘Now, Miss Pilchester. Edith.’ Miss Pilchester bloomed softly, smiling as Pop called her Edith. ‘What shall it be? Drop o’ whisky? Drop o’ gin? Drop o’ Guinness? I can make you a cocktail.’

  Miss Pilchester said she thought cocktails were absolutely ghastly. ‘No, whisky for me. And soda please.’

  Dr Leagrave chose the same. Pop, in brief thought over the cocktail galleon, wondered if he should mix himself a real snorter, such as a Rolls-Royce or a Chauffeur, but finally decided to have his favourite Dragon’s Blood with lime.

  ‘Your day off, doc?’ he said.

  Dr Leagrave thanked God it was and took his whisky with uncertain but eager hands.

  ‘It must be absolutely ghastly in this heat,’ Miss Pilchester said, ‘sick-visiting and all that.’

  ‘Not that so much,’ the doctor said. ‘Trouble is it’s a nice fine evening. By now my waiting room’ll be as jam-packed as a cinema with Lolla showing.’

  Sipping whisky, an astonished Miss Pilchester asked why that should be and got the answer not from Dr Leagrave, but from Pop, himself as quick as a swallow:

  ‘Ain’t got nothing better to do. That’s why.’

  ‘Hit it plumb on the head,’ the doctor said.

  ‘You mean it makes a difference?’ Miss Pilchester said, ‘what the weather is?’

  ‘More perfick the wevver,’ Pop said, ‘the more they roll up. You told me that once afore, didn’t you, doc?’

  The doctor said indeed he had.

  ‘Absolutely ghastly,’ Miss Pilc
hester said.

  ‘Fast becoming a nation of hypochondriacs,’ the doctor said, and Pop looked so suddenly startled at yet another word he had never even heard on television that he couldn’t speak. That was the second within a few days. ‘Pill-takers. Drug-takers.’

  ‘Ghastly.’

  ‘Then there are young doctors,’ Dr Leagrave said, now launching on a tried and favourite theme, ‘men of not very great experience, who are prescribing a hundred, two hundred, capsules of new and highly expensive drugs to patients who take two and put the rest into the kitchen cupboard.’

  ‘Ghastly.’

  With something like venom Dr Leagrave finished his whisky, his seventh since six o’clock, and said it was no wonder the country was on its beam-ends. Miss Pilchester warmly agreed and Pop took away the doctor’s empty glass to fill it up again, at the same time glancing at the television screen, unable to make any sense whatever of a single note or gesture coming out of it.

  As soon as he had poured the doctor’s whisky he decided to switch the sound off. He couldn’t bear to switch the picture off in case something should come on, like pygmies or football or chorus girls, which he liked. In consequence the screen became a pallid mime of open-mouthed puppets singing silently.

  ‘By the way, doc,’ he said, ‘we got a young friend of ours staying here who’s bad a-bed and wuss up. Think you could have a look at him?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ the doctor said. ‘Not another pill-addict, I hope.’

  ‘Lumbago,’ Pop said.

  ‘Ghastly,’ Miss Pilchester said. ‘I get it. I sympathize.’

  Pop said he would try to find Mr Charlton and started to go out of the room, remembering as he did so the kitchen piled with pork.

  ‘Nice piece o’ pork for you when you go, doc,’ he said. ‘How about that? You too, Edith. Like chitterlings?’ Pop laughed in his infectious, rousing fashion. ‘How about a nice piece o’ pig’s liver and a basin o’ chitterlings?’

  Miss Pilchester, who had not yet been reduced to eating chitterlings, nevertheless laughed too. Always made you feel happy, that man, she thought. When Pop came back with a rather hesitant but sun-scorched Mr Charlton, red-faced from a second day in the strawberry fields and more ravenously hungry than he had ever been in his life, the doctor was just saying to Edith Pilchester, again with a sort of evangelical, venomous uncertainty:

  ‘This county alone is spending over a million a year on drugs! This one county –’

  ‘Here’s our young friend,’ Pop said. ‘Friend of Mariette’s. Mister Charlton. Been very poorly.’

  ‘Well,’ the doctor said, ‘perhaps we can have a look at you.’ He glanced uncertainly round at Miss Pilchester. ‘Is there somewhere –’

  ‘Upstairs,’ Pop said. ‘I’ll lead the way.’

  Mr Charlton followed Pop and Dr Leagrave upstairs. On the landing Pop paused to whisper confidentially to the doctor that there would be a whole leg of pork if he wanted it; he hadn’t very well been able to say it in front of Edith – the doc would understand?

  The doctor, swaying a little, said he understood, and Pop opened the first door on the landing without knocking.

  ‘This’ll do,’ he said. ‘Mariette’s room.’

  Fortunately the room was empty and presently Mr Charlton, stripped to the waist, found himself lying face downwards on Mariette’s bed, his sensations very like those he had experienced when the geese had entwined their necks about his legs, when he had worn Mariette’s pyjamas and when, in utter ecstasy, he had breathed the fragrance of gardenia for the first time. The hot room was thick and intoxicating with that same deep, torturing fragrance now.

  The doctor, who had not bothered to fetch his bag from the car, pressed his fingers gently into Mr Charlton’s lumbar region.

  ‘Much pain?’

  Mr Charlton confessed that he had no pain whatever. A day in the strawberry fields had in fact improved him so much, both physically and mentally, that he had actually spotted the double twist Poll and Lil were going to work on him almost before they had started.

  ‘Comes and goes? That it?’

  ‘Sort of like that.’

  ‘Suppose you’d like to go on sick benefit for a couple of weeks?’

  To the doctor’s astonishment Mr Charlton said no, he didn’t think so. He was, though he didn’t say so, having a wonderful time in the strawberry field. He was earning money. If he went on sick benefit he wouldn’t earn any money and he wouldn’t have half the fun. He was learning to use his loaf.

  ‘Well,’ the doctor said, ‘try to keep out of draughts when you’re hot.’ He laughed briefly, swayed tipsily, and thought of how perhaps it would be possible to snatch another quick one downstairs before he took the leg of pork and went home. ‘And avoid lying in wet grasses.’

  Some time after the doctor had gone Pop wrapped up two pounds of loin of pork, about a pound of liver, and a pair of pig’s trotters and said that, if Edith was ready, he would run her home. Edith Pilchester, charmed with three whiskies more than she usually had in a week, and enough food to last her until Sunday, was more than ready and completely forgot, for the second time, to say how absolutely ghastly anything was.

  ‘Got a Rolls now,’ Pop said.

  Miss Pilchester confessed she had seen it in the yard.

  ‘I said to myself it couldn’t be yours.’

  In the yard, Pop spent some time, with touches of imperial pride, showing Miss Pilchester the Rolls’s burnished monograms, the silver vases for flowers, and the speaking tube.

  ‘If you’d like to sit in the back,’ he said, ‘you can say things down the tube to me. Orders and all that.’

  ‘I don’t want to sit in the back,’ Miss Pilchester said. ‘Not on your life. I want to sit in the front with you.’

  As they drove along Pop demonstrated first the town horn, the sweet one, then the country, the snarl. Miss Pilchester enjoyed this but said, ‘Not so fast. I don’t like driving so fast,’ remembering that she lived less than a mile away. Accordingly Pop slowed down, driving with one hand and with the other half-caressing, half-pinching Miss Pilchester’s knee. Since she wore only loose lisle stockings this, he found, was not half so delicious an experience as pinching Ma, who wore nylons and very tight ones at that, but to Miss Pilchester it seemed to be a source of palpitating pleasure.

  She again became like a swallow, darting nervous, rapid glances.

  A few minutes later the Rolls drew up at Bonny Banks, Miss Pilchester’s cottage, tiny, thatched, and low-pitched, which she had converted out of a fallen down cow-byre in pre-war days, when things were cheap. Creosoted beams and a gimcrack front door studded with what appeared to be rusty horseshoe nails were designed to give the little loaf-shaped house an appearance of Tudor antiquity or of having come out of a fairy tale. But in the evening light, after the hot day, its garden ill-kept, the lawn unmown, the paths a flourish of dandelions, the rosebeds pitted with dust-baths made by escaping hens, it looked shabby even by comparison with Pop’s paradise.

  Miss Pilchester begged Pop over and over again not to look at it. It was simply ghastly, absolutely ghastly.

  ‘You’ll come in for a moment though, won’t you?’

  Pop had always wanted to see the inside of Miss Pilchester’s cottage but when he groped his way through the kitchen, which smelt stale from unwashed dishes, and into a living room as dark and cramped as a bolt-hole, even he was surprised. A flock of sheep might well have passed through the place an hour before. Bits of wool – raw, unwashed sheep’s wool – lay everywhere. It was one of Miss Pilchester’s hobbies to gather wool from field and hedgerow and on long winter’s nights clean, spin, and wind it for making into socks and jumpers, which she dyed in subdued rough shades with lichen.

  ‘Do take a pew if you can find room, won’t you?’

  It was difficult, if not impossible, to find a pew. Miss Pilchester hastily removed a basin of eggs, a half-finished jumpers, two skeins of wool, The Times, a sewing basket, some grey underwear
, and an unplucked brown fowl from various chairs.

  ‘Sit you down. I’ll have a drink for you in a jiff. Don’t mind anything. I’ll just find a plate for the pork and then get some glasses.’

  Remains of a boiled egg, a cup of cocoa, and a burnt raspberry tart, the left-overs either of breakfast or lunch, or both, lay scattered about the table. Miss Pilchester gathered up egg and cocoa, dropped the shell into the cocoa and then upset the resulting mess into the raspberry tart.

  Some seconds later she was calling from the kitchen:

  ‘Absolutely ghastly having no help. But nobody does, do they? Only Professor Fane.’

  Fane, a professor of physics, with some distinguished degrees, including foreign ones, used the house next door as a weekend cottage only, coming down on Friday evenings to be bullied for three whole days by an ex-naval artificer and his wife, acting as chauffeur and cook, who borrowed the car all day on Sundays to visit other naval men by the sea or watch dirt-track racing on the hills. The professor spent most of the time in a ten-by-six attic under the roof, listening to Bach and Beethoven, while the ex-artificer and his wife used the drawing room downstairs watching the television set that the professor had had to install in order to get them to stay in the house at all.

  ‘He’s lucky,’ Miss Pilchester called. ‘I can’t get a soul.’

  She was looking in various cupboards for a bottle of whisky, which she knew was there. It wasn’t there and it was some moments before she found it tucked away behind another pile of underclothes, a basket of clothes pegs, and a vegetable marrow left over from last year.

  An inch of whisky lay in the bottom and Miss Pilchester remembered she had not bought another bottle since she had had a cold at Easter, over six weeks before.