by H. E. Bates
The appearance of Mr Charlton, looking astonishingly healthy and brown as a chestnut, startled the Brigadier even more than that of Primrose had done. Charley had filled out a lot too. He was big, even muscular.
‘Look remarkably fit, young man,’ the Brigadier said and Pop could only think, gloomily, that appearances could be pretty deceptive. He’d begun to think there must be very grave defects in Charley. It was all of two months since Charley had had his tests and neither he nor Ma had the foggiest notion what the results were. The worst of it was Mariette looked astonishingly healthy too. It was a bad sign.
A few moments later he was shepherding everyone into the house, himself carrying the drinks tray, when the telephone rang. Soon afterwards Ma appeared at the door and called:
‘Mariette says it’s Mrs Jerebohm, wanting me. Will you talk to her? If I’m to get Oscar down and the meal cooked I can’t stand there nattering half the night.’
‘Charley,’ Pop said, ‘tot out. Give Angela and the Brigadier another snifter,’ and went into the house to answer the lisping voice of Mrs Jerebohm, who said:
‘We’d like it so awfully much if you and Mrs L could come to dinner one evening soon. Thought perhaps the 26th might be nice. It’s a Monday-awfully awkward day, I know, but we’re down for a long week-end. Hope it dove-tails with your plans? Know you’re always terrifically busy.’
Pop, thanking her, said he was pretty sure it would be all right and if it wasn’t he’d ring her back very soon. After he had said this there was a long pause from the other end of the line and he said:
‘Hullo. Still there?’
Yes, she said, she was still there.
‘Thought you’d gone. Nothing the matter?’
No, she said, nothing was the matter. She giggled briefly. It was just his voice.
‘Oh? Well, can’t help it,’ Pop said, laughing too. ‘It’s just beginning to break, that’s all.’
Mrs Jerebohm giggled again, seemingly as nervous as a puppy.
‘No, seriously, it sounds so different. Awfully different, actually. One doesn’t connect it with you.’
‘Ah! well, sorry about that,’ Pop said. ‘I’ll try to do better next time.’
It was the sort of conversation he forgot as quickly as it was made and after going back into the living-room, where the Brigadier already had a third stiff whisky in his hand, he let it go completely from his mind. He would talk to Ma about the dinner later on, probably in bed, over a final snifter.
Wearing a yellow pinafore, Angela Snow floated gaily from kitchen to living-room, helping Mariette to lay the supper table, talking as she did so in high musical overtones. This, she declared, was her idea of fun. The Brigadier, already feeling the third whisky lifting depression from him like a cloud of dark smoke, watched her going to and fro with eyes looking every moment less and less jaded. The juices of his senses had started waking as sharply as those of his mouth had done over anchovy and cheese, so that he began telling himself over and over again that she was a beautiful, beautiful creature.
Soon the delicious unbearable fragrance of roasting pheasant was filling the house. Every few minutes the Brigadier sniffed openly at it like a dog. It seemed as if a long night, a grey mixture of solitude, sandwich lunches, bone-hard apple pies and cold bacon, was at last breaking and passing him by. He hardly noticed the arrival of a fourth and then a fifth whisky and it was from the remotest ends of a waking dream that he heard Pop calling with ebullient cheerfulness to Mr Charlton:
‘Shall we have pink tonight, Charley boy? Why not? Get three or four bottles on the ice quick. Ought to go well with the pheasants, I think, don’t you?’
‘Darling, if that was champagne you were referring to I shall remain faithful to you for ever,’ Angela Snow said. ‘I adore the pink. It’s absolutely me. Quite my favourite tipple.’
The Brigadier might well have wept again except that now, by some miracle, there was nothing to weep for. Had there ever been? He simply couldn’t believe there ever had. He was beginning to feel alive again, terrifically alive. Pink champagne? By God, that took him back a thousand aching years. He was again a crazy subaltern on Indian hill-stations, lean and active as a panther: dances and parties everywhere, polo and pig-sticking, affairs with two married women running at the same time, servants everywhere as plentiful as beetles. He was the gay dog having champagne for breakfast, with a certain madness in the air, and nobody giving a damn.
‘Glad to see you’re perking up, General,’ Ma said as she passed him with two deep glass dishes of strawberries, each containing half a dozen pounds. ‘Got your glass topped up?’
‘Splendid,’ the Brigadier said. ‘Splendid. Absolutely splendid.’
‘Don’t spoil your appetite, though, will you?’ she said. ‘Supper’ll only be ten minutes or so.’
The Brigadier found it suddenly impossible to believe how swiftly the evening had gone. The time had whipped along like prairie fire. He took his watch out of his breast pocket and discovered it to be already eight o’clock. Spoil his appetite? He could have eaten horses.
Ma had cooked two brace of pheasants, together with chipolata sausages, thin game chips, potatoes creamed with fresh cream and the first Brussels sprouts with chestnuts. Brimming boats of gravy and bread sauce came to table as Pop started to carve the birds, the breasts of which crumbled under the knife as softly as fresh-baked bread.
‘Tot the champagne out, Charley boy,’ Pop said. ‘And what about you, General? Which part of the bird for you? Leg or bosom?’
The Brigadier immediately confessed to a preference for bosom and a moment later found his eye roving warmly across the table, in the direction of Angela Snow, who met the gaze full-faced and unflushed, though with not quite the elegant composure she always wore. This started his juices flowing again and with a brief peremptory bark he found himself suddenly on his feet, champagne glass waving.
‘To our hostess. I give you a blessing, madam. And honour. And glory. And long, long health –’.
The unaccustomed extravagance of the Brigadier’s words trailed off, unfinished. Everybody rose and drank to Ma. The Brigadier then declared that the pink champagne was terrific and immediately crouched with eager reverence over his plate, the edges of which were only barely visible, a thin embroidered line of white enclosing a whole rich field of game, vegetables, sauce, and gravy.
Somewhere in the middle of a second helping of pheasant he heard Pop recalling his telephone conversation with Mrs Jerebohm.
‘Wants us to go to dinner on the 26th,’ Pop said. ‘I said I thought it was all right.’
‘Having staff trouble, I hear,’ the Brigadier said.
‘Oh?’ Ma said. ‘The women’ll all come back in the winter.’
‘Has to do the cooking herself, I understand.’
‘Well, that won’t hurt her, will it?’ Ma said. ‘If she likes good food she’ll like cooking it. Same as I do.’
‘I can only say’ the Brigadier said, gazing solemnly into the winking depths of his glass, ‘that if the dinner she gives you is one tenth as delectable as this-no, one thousandth part as delectable-then you will be feeding on manna and the milk of paradise –’.
Once again the extravagant words floated away. With them went the piled plates of the first course, carried out by Mariette and Angela Snow, who brought back bowls of strawberries and cream to replace them.
Soon the strawberries lay on the Brigadier’s plate like fat fresh red rosebuds, dewed white with sugar. The visionary sherry-coloured figure of Angela Snow came to pour the thickest yellow cream on them, her voluptuous bare forearm brushing his hand. Then as she went away to take her place at the table a sudden spasm of double vision made him see two of her: a pair of tall golden twins of disturbing elegance who actually waved hands at him and said:
‘You’re doing fine, Brigadier, my sweet. Does my heart good to see you. This afternoon I thought you were for the coal-hole.’
What on earth she meant by the coal-hole he
didn’t know and cared even less. He only knew he was doing fine. The strawberries were simply magnificent; they came straight from the lap of the gods. Only the gods could send strawberries like that, in October, to be washed down by champagne, and soon he was eating a second dishful, then a third.
‘The General’s away,’ Ma kept saying with cheerful peals of laughter, ‘the General’s away.’
Then a renewed and stronger bout of double vision made him miscount all the heads at the table. The twins and Victoria were already in bed, leaving eight people eating. But now sometimes he was counting sixteen heads, then eighteen, then twenty, all of them dancing round the table like figures in a chorus. Behind diem the television set glimmered a ghastly green and Pop’s extravagant glass and chromium cocktail cabinet shimmered up and down like some impossible garish organ at a fair.
It was to these figures that he found himself saying hearty and newly extravagant farewells just after eleven o’clock, the brace of newly shot pheasants in his hand.
The evening had been great, he kept saying, swinging the pheasants about with grand gestures. Absolutely great. Straight from the gods. He kissed Ma several times on both cheeks and clasped Pop and Charley with tremendous fervour by the hand. After this he kissed both Primrose and Mariette, saying with unaccustomed gravity, followed by a sudden belch, that Ma and Pop were a million times blessed.
‘A million times. A million times. Ten million times.’
Still swinging the pheasants, he started to climb into Angela Snow’s car and then paused to give several pleasurable barks in final farewell.
‘By God, Larkin, I must say you know how to live!’ he said. ‘I’ll say that for you. I’ll say you damn well know how to live.’
Once again he started to swing the pheasants madly about his head and Pop treated him to a sudden clout of affectionate farewell plumb in the middle of the back. The gesture pitched him violently forward and through the open door of the car, unlocking fresh barks of laughter, in which Ma and Angela Snow joined ringingly.
‘Sleep well, General!’ Ma called. ‘Sleep well!’
‘Sleep be damned!’ the Brigadier said. He waved a majestic hand from the car window, splendidly reckless, eyebrows martially bristling. ‘Shan’t sleep a damn wink all night! Shan’t go home till morning!’
Pop said that was the spirit and urged him not to do anything he wouldn’t do. The Brigadier yelled ‘Bingo!’, exclaiming loudly that he wanted to kiss Ma again.
‘Must kiss Ma!’ he said. ‘Got to kiss Ma. Never sleep if I don’t kiss Ma.’
Pop again said that this was the stuff and urged Ma to come forward and give the Brigadier a real snorter, one of her specials.
Ma immediately did so, fastening her lips full on the Brigadier’s mouth with powerful suction. The Brigadier, half-suffocated, made a rapid imaginative ascent skyward, unable to breathe.
Then Angela Snow called: ‘Here, what about me? What have I done? What about this little girl?’ so that Pop, not quite knowing at once whether it was his services that were being called for or those of the Brigadier, simply decided that it must be his own and proceeded to give Angela Snow three minutes of silent and undivided attention on the other side of the car.
Pop, who didn’t believe in doing things at any time by halves, felt quite prepared to prolong things even further, but even Angela Snow thought there were limits and finally struggled out of the embrace gasping for air, as if half-drowned.
‘One for the road?’ Pop said. ‘Come on, one more for the road.’
‘One more like that and I shall be away. There’ll be absolutely no holding me.’
‘I’m away already!’ the Brigadier said. By God, he was too. He had never known sensations like it. Not, at any rate, for a long time. He was sailing heavenwards on imaginary clouds of bliss. There was no stopping him.
‘Got your pecker up all right now, haven’t you?’ Ma said. ‘Not down in the dumps now, are you?’
Not only was his pecker up, the Brigadier thought. Everything else was.
‘Good-bye, darlings,’ Angela Snow called at last to the Larkins. ‘Farewell, my lambs. Bless you both ten thousand times. And the same number of the sweetest thanks.’
The Brigadier, not quite fully conscious, felt himself being driven away into a night voluptuous with stars, the goodbyes still sounding behind him like a peal of bells. Soon afterwards, with a reckless hand, he was grasping Angela Snow somewhere in the region of a smooth upper thigh and to his very great surprise found there was no whisper of protest in answer.
‘Must come into the cottage and have a nip of brandy before you go,’ he said, ‘eh? Let’s broach a keg. Bingo?’
‘Bingo,’ Angela Snow said. ‘You have absolutely the sweetest ideas. I’m dying for a nip.’
Angela, still recoiling slightly from the velvet impact of Pop’s long-drawn kiss, felt half light-headed herself as she stopped the car at the cottage, got out, and stood for some minutes waiting for the Brigadier to find his latchkey. All the time he was still swinging the pheasants about with careless gestures.
‘Got it.’ Key in one hand, pheasants in the other, the Brigadier groped gaily to the cottage door. It was a bit tricky here, she heard him explaining as she followed, and heard him trip on a step. ‘Got to find the lights. Should be a torch somewhere.’
The door of the little cottage opened straight into the living room and the Brigadier, unlocking the door, went inside, unsteadily groping.
‘Stand still,’ he urged her. ‘I’ll have a light in a couple of jiffs.’
Suddenly he turned and, in the darkness, ran full against her. A powerful recollection of Ma’s divinely transcendent kiss bolted through him in such a disturbing wave that a second later he was urgently embracing her.
The sudden force of it made him drop the brace of pheasants and trip. Angela Snow, caught off-guard, tripped too and they both fell over, the Brigadier backwards, across the hearthrug.
Dazed for a moment, he found it impossible to get up. Then he realized, flat on the floor, that he didn’t want to get up. He told himself that only a fool would want to get up. The silk of Angela Snow’s dress spread across him in a delicious canopy and finally he put up a hand and started touching, then stroking, her bare left shoulder.
It might have been a signal for Angela Snow to get up too but to his delighted surprise she, apparently, didn’t want to get up either. This prompted him to start stroking the other shoulder and a second later, in response, he heard her give a series of quiet, thrilling moans.
‘Heavenly,’ she told him. ‘Keep on. Just between the shoulders. That’s it. Just there.’
Great God, the Brigadier thought. He stroked rapidly.
‘Slower, slower,’ she said. ‘Slower, please. Round and round. Slowly. That’s it. Heavenly.’
A moment later, with sudden abandon, the Brigadier grasped the zip of her dress and pulled it with a single stroke down her back. In response she kissed him full on the mouth, more softly and tenderly than Ma had done but still with the instantaneous effect as of veins of fire lighting up all over his body.
Something about this electrifying sensation made him say, when the kiss was over:
‘By Jove, the Larkins know how to do it, don’t they? By Jove, they know how.’
‘And they’re not the only ones.’
The Brigadier, urged on, began to think that nothing could stop him now and presently he was caressing her shoulders again and unhooking the clip of her brassière.
‘Round and round,’ he heard her murmur. ‘That’s it. Round and round. Oh! that’s heavenly. How did you find my weak spot? And so soon?’
The Brigadier hadn’t the faintest notion. He was only aware of the entire evening flowering into madness.
‘By Jove, I could lie here all night’ he said. ‘I could see the stars out. I don’t want to go to bed, do you?’
‘Oh! no?’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’
Half way up the stairs the Brigadier, at the en
d of an evening of revolutionary sensations, none of which he had experienced for a generation, felt yet another one rise up, out of the darkness to greet him.
Without warning five of Pop’s whiskies, ten glasses of pink champagne and several large brandies joined their powerful forces. One moment he was grasping at the bare voluptuous shoulders of Angela Snow; the next he was sitting on the stairs, at more or less the same place where his sister had sat herself down and left him in final solitude, and passed out swiftly and quietly, without a sigh.
When he came to himself again he was alone, fully dressed, on the bed. The autumn dawn was just breaking and in the middle of it a huge and spectacular planet was shining, winking white as it rose.
5
A week later Ma was sure the long, hot summer was at an end. The nights and mornings, she said, had begun to strike very parky. The last of the strawberries were finished; there was frost in the air. She had begun to feel very cold across her back in bed of a night, so that she was glad to tuck up closer to Pop, and already by day she was sometimes glad to wear two jumpers, one salmon, one violet, instead of none at all.
‘Think I’ll slip my mink stole on when we go to the Jerebohms tonight,’ she said.
And by eight o’clock, when she got out of the Rolls outside the big oak front door of Gore Court, she was very glad she had. A cold, gusty, leaf-ridden wind was beating in from the west. Twigs of turkey oak and branches of conifer were flying everywhere.
‘I’m duck-skin all across my back already,’ Ma said. ‘You feel it worse after a hot summer. I hope it’ll be warm inside.’
Pop, who had taken the precaution of having three Red Bulls laced with double tots of gin before coming out, said he hoped so too and pulled the big brass bell-knob at the side of the front door.
A clanging like that of a muffin bell echoed through the house, very far away, as if at the end of cavernous corridors. For the space of two or three minutes nobody answered it and presently Pop pulled the bell-knob again. By this time rain was spitting in the wind and Ma said she was freezing to death already. Pop said he wasn’t all that hot himself but that was how it was with these enormous houses. The servants always lived half a mile away.
