The Brides of Solomon

by Geoffrey Household

  I was lunching alone in a Soho restaurant—a pleasant little place, expensive only if you wish it to be, without any uniformed porter outside the door or any chromium plate inside. It runs to lace curtains and red plush seats round the wall. At least they give the old-fashioned impression of red plush.

  Across the room to my left a man and a girl were sitting at a corner table, close enough for me to watch them, not so close that I could hear what they were saying. There appeared to be some eighteen or twenty years between their ages. The fellow looked as if he spent a couple of hours at his barber twice a week, perfecting the he of his grey hair and smoothing the wrinkles out of his distinguished skin. He might have been a quack doctor pretending to be a fashionable surgeon, or an unsuccessful actor modelling himself upon a matinée idol of thirty years ago, or a movie producer trying to resemble the illustration of a diplomat in a woman’s magazine. All which was certain was pretence.

  His manner was intolerably affected. It did not fit his maturity or his quiet and luxurious clothes. He kept fidgeting with his glasses, putting them on to read the menu, taking them off to show he did not need them, putting them on again to regard waiters and customers with a faintly defiant patronage. He was determined to impress us all, and especially his companion, that there could be nothing wrong with a world in which he talked and existed.

  The girl with him seemed as resentful as I of his affectations. She showed no interest in the delicately feminine meal which he ordered for her. She made no reply, or the shortest, to his remarks. His conversation, continually restarted, was so forcedly gallant in approach and so emptily bright in delivery that perhaps no reply was demanded.

  She was disillusioned to a point of utter demoralisation. She had not even bothered to put powder and lipstick on her pale, heavy face. I could see it was not used to such deprivation. In the evening, with a little patience, it must have recovered some most attractive remains of youth. She stared in front of her, giving me the impression that she would as soon be dead as play the game of conversation any longer. She might have been trying to cut him, his presence and his memory right out of her life. He was something she had once treasured and simply could not bear any more.

  I ruled out at once all the normal relationships between two generations. Even if he were godfather or family solicitor and the lunch a boring duty, there would be an occasional smile, some sort of flirtation with the harmless old friend, however tiresome. Conjecture worried away at the problem. When alone and expansive, one insists on entertaining oneself with fantasies, but they must be logical enough to entertain a companion if he or she were there.

  His wife or divorced wife, then? No, there was not even a resentful intimacy. So I fitted her into my possible world as a young woman who had been too fascinated by all that profile and perfection and had discovered, after a week or a month of both of them, that there was little else. I wondered if he kept putting on and taking off his glasses when he wore pyjamas.

  Much as I loathed that artificial middle-aged man, I could not help feeling—when my bottle was empty and my speculations more charitable—that she was taking too seriously her weariness of him, whatever the reasons for it. After all, the fellow had his qualities. He was behaving for his public as if there was nothing wrong whatever; and that was bitterly hard to do by the side of a person whose only contribution had been a short speech of exasperation, unless the pattern into which she was rolling innumerable bread pills had some significance.

  He offered her a liqueur. She refused it. He took a brandy himself and lit a cigar. He looked at me. On my side of the room the restaurant had thinned, and I had become his only audience. There’s nothing wrong, his eyes said to me, nothing which cant he put right in time. He was determined to ignore the irrevocable disaster. By ignoring it, it ceased to exist. A typical reaction of the desperate male.

  He paid his bill and fussed gallantly over her gloves and bag. While he was taking his hat from the attendant, she, too, seemed to accept me as a public. She shrugged her shoulders at me—or made some other disloyal little gesture—as much as to ask how the devil a girl was supposed to stand things for ever.

  I left the restaurant. An hour later those two had faded from all but an occasional memory. My imaginative world had died for its creator, and it had no right to live again, to collide with our common world, to muddle itself with justice.

  I have never since set eyes on that immaculate pretender, but his pale young woman I met again. She was no longer emotionally dead—at any rate in outward appearance—and her make-up was now vivid and in need of repair. The swing door of a pub just off the Charing Cross Road catapulted her at me. The place was only a hundred yards from the restaurant where I had first seen her. That fringe of theatre-land may have been her world, though she had probably no professional status, theatrical or other. To judge by her accent and what was left of her bearing, I should say that she had a small income of her own, and that she belonged by right to Knightsbridge but found drinking in Soho more to her taste.

  She clung to me for physical support and addressed me as Ronnie. Then, talking fast and heartily to herself as much as to me, she said that of course I wasn’t Ron: I was the man who had stared at her when she was having lunch with her father.

  Father and daughter. That was a relationship I had dismissed at once. The age difference did not seem enough, and the manner was all wrong. A woman can show contempt for her father or anger, but not that bored, hopeless indifference with which she treats a stupid and unwanted lover.

  I repeated vaguely the word father, recalling the man of pretences, so nervously eager to persuade the restaurant and her that they were two people of distinction who had every right to draw attention to themselves.

  ‘He is on the stage?’ I asked.

  ‘Stage? Hell, no! Government contractor, all dressed up to impress the beak! He had just bailed me out that morning. He’ll never let anyone see he’s ashamed of me, Ron. I’ll say that for the old fool.’

  Eggs as Ain’t

  MRS SWALLOP had been working her twenty-acre holding single-handed ever since Tom Swallop was killed in the Boer War when she was seventeen years old and a six-months’ bride. He left her his scrap of freehold land, no child, and apparently so pleasant a memory that she preferred to live with it rather than change her status.

  Her farm—if you can call it a farm—was up at the end of a grass track: a patch of cultivation in a dry bottom surrounded by the thorn and bracken on the slopes, and well fenced except for short stretches of queer material such as old bedsprings and rusty sheets of corrugated iron. It had a name on the map, but no one for ten miles round ever called it anything but Noah’s Ark.

  The birds and animals were not, however, in biblical couples. Mrs Swallop stocked her land with breeding females, for she had her own ways of encouraging them. There were two enormous turkey hens, a goose, a saddle-backed sow, a flock of undisciplined chickens, a black cow, a black nanny-goat and a big black cat who was fierce as a watch-dog when she had kittens. The only representative of the male sex was a buck rabbit who attended to the comfort of several prolific does.

  She was a bright and cleanly old body—so far as one can be when farming alone—but her dress and her ways were odd. She might be wearing an old tweed skirt below an upper half swathed in sacking, or a new purple jersey with a horse blanket for a skirt. She had a black moustache, and she used to whisper under it to her animals.

  Mrs Swallop would whisper for her neighbours, too, if she liked them; so they were always ready to lend her a male when she turned up driving one of her females in front of her, or pushing it, squawking, in the large dilapidated perambulator which was her only farm transport. If there were anything else in the bottom of the pram, such as eggs or cream, they would buy it from her by some careful method which would not draw the attention of Percy Crott.

  Those were the days just after the war when farmers were making a lot more money than now. On the other hand they had to put up wi
th fellows like Crott. He had been a village schoolmaster till one of his fourteen-year-olds sent him to hospital; and when he came out he got a job in the Ministry of Food. How he rose to be an inspector, no one ever discovered—for all he knew about food were the regulations to prevent the public eating it. He had a blotchy pink face as smooth as a pig’s, with a nasty little mouth in the middle of it and a round chin which he used to stick out when he was speaking—like one of those business men who are so proud of their faces that they put their pictures in the advertisements in spite of the sales they must lose.

  Crott could never catch the big farmers who generally obeyed the law, and had a dozen inspector-proof ways of covering themselves up when they didn’t. If he wanted to bring a neighbour before the courts and make an example of him, he went for the little man who was sure to be breaking regulations because he had no time to read them. And he made a dead set at Mrs Swallop because she built a breeding hutch for the rabbits out of all the pamphlets and government forms which the postman brought her. Those rabbits fairly flourished under the welfare state, but when Percy Crott saw the hutch he said it was a scandal, and carried on as if Mrs Swallop had built it out of a stack of bibles.

  All the same, it was difficult to find an offence by which he could put her out of business. She had no books or accounts—for she insisted that she could not write—and old Trancard was always ready to tell any lie for her. Crott’s only hope was to catch her red-handed selling eggs to the public.

  Trancard took a very friendly interest in the old lady, for his sheep-run surrounded her land on the north and east, and the luck he had with the lambing was marvellous. He guessed what Percy Crott was up to when he saw him hiding behind a hedge and counting Mrs Swallop’s birds. So he persuaded her to turn over a new leaf, and register herself as a Poultry Producer.

  ‘It won’t give ’ee no trouble at all, missus,’ he told her. ‘I’m a licensed packer, and you hand over your eggs to me for grading and packing, and get paid by the government at fifty shillings for ten dozen. But what you must not do, missus, is to sell ’em to anyone who ain’t licensed. And if that young Crott catches you at it, you’ll fetch up before the beaks.’

  ‘I don’t want no more of ’is papers,’ Mrs Swallop answered.

  ‘Ain’t no papers, not to speak of, me dear! You delivers your eggs to me whenever you happens to be passing, and along comes the money and your National Poultry Food regular. If you mixes it up with a bit of barley, which maybe I can find for ’ee, the hens won’t hardly know what they’re eatin’. Oh, it’s all as easy as kiss your ’and, missus, begging your pardon,’ he said.

  Trancard was obviously making money out of his fine flock of Rhode Island Reds, so Mrs Swallop decided to take his advice. While there was plenty she wouldn’t understand, there was nothing she couldn’t once she got her lips moving silently round the problem. She collected another score of hens, one by one wherever a bird caught her eye, and a shocking lot of mixed breeds they were; but she soon had them in the pink of condition and laying up and down the hedgerows as fast as if they had been their orderly sisters in Trancard’s deep litter house.

  When Mrs Swallop came up with her third load of eggs, six inches deep in the bottom of the pram, Trancard graded them and gave two dozen back to her. They were too small or too crooked.

  ‘And what must I do wi’ ’em, mister?’ she asked.

  ‘Do what you likes with ’em. The government don’t want ’em.’

  ‘They be all egg inside,’ she said.

  ‘But the public won’t buy ’em in the shops, missus.’

  ‘Can I sell ’em,’ she asked, ‘without that young Grott comin’ up after me wi’ the constable?’

  ‘No, you can’t. Not to say sellin’ ’em as is sellin’ ’em. But you can give ’em away, and I’ll tell ’ee where. And that’s Mr Buckfast up at The Bull, with all his guests wanting two fried eggs to their breakfasts when he can’t hardly give ’em one. He’ll take all you can give ’im, and it wouldn’t surprise me if ’e was to pay you at seventy bob instead of the fifty we gets from the government. But ’e won’t be paying you for eggs, mind, but for carrots or such-like.’

  Mrs Swallop leaned against the gate-post, calculating in so fast a whisper that she couldn’t keep listening to herself; so she fell into a sort of trance, and old Trancard had to take her up to the house and bring her round with a glass of port.

  ‘And there’s no point in you bringing eggs as ain’t legal eggs up to me for grading,’ he said, when he had given her an arm back to the pram. ‘You know an egg as ain’t when you sees it as well as I do. But don’t you go giving away an egg that’s an egg within the meaning of the Order, because it’s not worth the risk.’

  Next week it was all over the district that Mrs Swallop had another male to keep the buck rabbit company. He was a black Leghorn cock of a fine laying strain, with a certificate to prove it; but his breast-bone was twisted over to one side like a plough-share, so that when he stretched out his neck to crow he had to spread his tail the other way to balance himself. Mrs Swallop, naturally enough, did not have to pay a penny for him, though she may have done some little favour to the bees in passing.

  In spite of his looks the hens took to this young cripple, as females will. And Mrs Swallop groomed his tail feathers and whispered to him and stuffed him with National Poultry Food till the old buck was so jealous that he set about him and got a spur down his ear-hole before they could be separated.

  When spring came, Mrs Swallop was not delivering anything like the proper number of eggs, in spite of the fact that she and the black Leghorn between them had raised her flock to nearly a hundred birds, most of them laying pullets of her own breeding. Trancard went down to her holding to see if he could help at all, and a repulsive sight the yard was for a careful farmer. He stared at those miscoloured, lopsided, sinister-looking freak pullets, and went purple in the face with the pressure of all he did not like to say.

  ‘Why, what’s wrong wi’ ’em?’ she asked him.

  ‘Missus,’ he said, ‘there’s everything wrong with ’em. But if they’re yourn, they’re laying—and that young Crott has been up, lookin’ at me books.’

  Mrs Swallop gave him a sly smile under her moustache, with a twitch of the lips that must have enchanted Tom Swallop fifty years before.

  ‘Don’t ’ee worry over me, me dear,’ she said.

  But Trancard did worry. He knew Mrs Swallop was making a mysterious profit. So did Percy Crott. She had had her fences repaired, and a pipe laid to the spring where she got her water instead of old lengths of rusty gutter stopped with clay. And there was nothing to account for all the eggs in town, especially at The Bull, except the visits of Mrs Swallop’s pram.

  Crott timed it nicely. He watched Mrs Swallop deliver a parcel of eggs—which should have been all she produced—to Trancard, and he let her go down to the town with her pram. Then he took his government car and the local cop from behind the haystack where he had parked the pair of them, and drove into Trancard’s yard and asked to see the books.

  Old Trancard tried to muddle him by passing off some of his own eggs as Mrs Swallop’s. The cop did his best to help. But the ink was hardly dry in the book, and there was no getting away from the figures. Mrs Swallop had delivered only two dozen eggs that morning, and nothing else for a week.

  ‘She’ll be on her way to The Bull now, constable,’ said Percy Crott, pushing him into the car.

  He started to drive slowly down the hill so as to reach the hotel about the same time as Mrs Swallop. All Trancard could do was to rumble behind in a tractor wondering how Mrs Swallop could ever pay the fifty pounds or so which the beaks would have to fine her, and whether they would give her six months if she didn’t.

  When they stopped in front of The Bull, Percy Crott and the constable nipped round into the backyard, with Trancard a second or two behind them trying to look as if he had just called to return the empties. There was Mrs Swallop talking to Buckfast, t
he proprietor.

  ‘Madam,’ asked the inspector, ‘what have you got in that perambulator?’

  ‘Nothing but eggs, sir. Nothing at all,’ she answered, pretending she was frightened of the cop.

  ‘And were you thinking of selling them?’

  ‘No, she weren’t,’ Buckfast told him pretty sharply. ‘She was giving them to me. And it’s legal.’

  ‘Uncommonly kind of her!’ said Percy Crott in a sarcastic way, and he whipped the cover off the pram.

  It was stuffed with eggs. And not one of them was fairly oval. There were eggs which might have been fat white sausages, and round eggs and oblongs and lozenges, and pear-shaped eggs and eggs with a twist like a gibbous moon with round points.

  Inspector Crott pushed them aside with the tips of his fingers as if they were something the dog had been rolling in. They were all the same quality right down to the bottom of the pram.

  ‘Don’t your hens lay anything fit for human consumption?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sir,’ she told him, ‘they don’t. A poor old woman can’t afford good ’ens like you gentlemen.’

  Then Buckfast was taken with a fit of the sniggers, and old Trancard slapped his breeches and grinned at Mrs Swallop as if she were the knowingest farmer in all the county.

  ‘Damme if she ain’t been breeding for rejects!’ he roared. ‘Damme, and I tried to tell ’er how to run fowls! I tell you, Mr Percy Crott, that if only she ’ad a cock with a face like yourn, them ’ens would lay eggs and bacon, and burst out laughin’ when they turned their ’eads round to look at what they ’ad done,’ he said.

  Letter to a Sister

  DEAREST CONCHITA,

  You will have had my telegram that I am in Lima. I could not have stayed another day on that ship. I had to leave it.

  Do not let Mama be worried. As we all told her, it is perfectly correct in these days for an unmarried woman to travel alone. No one showed me the slightest disrespect.