When the Green Woods Laugh

by H. E. Bates

  At this point some instinct made him turn and look at Corinne Perigo, who to his considerable surprise was attacking a piece of rubbery breast of partridge with silent fury. The normally soft, sensuous lips were being bitten hard and white and for the life of him he couldn’t imagine why.

  One thing he hadn’t any doubts about, however, was the partridge. He hadn’t the heart to ask if the birds had been shot on the estate. Once, as he struggled to get a mouthful of flesh here and there, he saw Mrs Jerebohm smile at him across the table. Half in sympathy rather than anything else he gave her a warm and winning smile in reply.

  ‘Like being in the country?’ he said.

  ‘Oh! yes.’

  Secretly, in fact, she had begun to hate it. The grounds were still full of thistles and willow-herb. The kitchen garden looked sordid and try as you could you couldn’t get help. The locals were independent, rude, and treacherous and it would be late spring before she could have asparagus. Even the Austrian girl, simple and nice as she had been on arrival, had started on the path of rural corruption, thanks largely to the strawberry fields.

  ‘Perfick here,’ Pop said. ‘Wouldn’t change it for nowhere else in the world.’

  ‘Never, never want to live anywhere else?’ Corinne Perigo said.

  ‘Never,’ Pop said and with such resolute finality that Mrs Perigo’s lips finally untightened and broke into a smile.

  All through the sweet-course, which consisted of ice-cream crowned with a solitary half of walnut, the westerly gale rose in the chimney. Smoke puthered into the fireplace in thicker and thicker clouds, until at last a light grey fog hung about the room. Ma found herself shivering more and more often and began to wonder how soon she could get home and cook herself some good hot eggs and bacon. She wasn’t sure she wouldn’t jump into a bath too.

  ‘Shall we find more comfortable chairs?’, Mrs Jerebohm said, ‘and some coffee?’

  Through increasing fog, with hollow footsteps, Mrs Jerebohm and her guests filed back to the drawing room, where Mr Jerebohm began to dispense minute thimbles of crème-dementhe and brandy.

  The Austrian maid was also there, serving coffee and actually smiling with unexpected pertness at Pop as she said, with her strong accent:

  ‘Sugar? One lump or two?’

  ‘Four,’ Pop said and while she was still laughing, went on: ‘Are you froggy? From France I mean?’

  ‘I am from Austria.’

  ‘Very nice,’ Pop said and was not unastonished, in view of the luscious smile he gave her, to see that she served the four sugar-lumps to him herself, smiling with a separate movement of her lips at each one.

  These gestures were not lost on Corinne Perigo, who presently cornered him at a safe distance from the smoking fireplace and said:

  ‘Sorry I won’t see you at the hunt, Thursday.’

  Pop said he wasn’t all that sure he could go. Might not find the time.

  ‘No? I’d go if I could change my perm.’

  Pop didn’t answer. The hunt really didn’t interest him this season. He was very busy and the present crowd were pretty rag-tag-and-bobtail. The country, too thickly wooded, with too many orchards, wasn’t really good for hunting either.

  Nor did Mrs Perigo interest him very much. Nobody could say he wasn’t interested in women; he was ready and willing for them any time you cared to name. But Mrs Perigo wasn’t quite his kind. Something about her, more especially the voluptuous glances, irked him. He didn’t want to go hunting with her either, one way or the other.

  ‘Well, anyway, even if I can’t go,’ she said, ‘you could drop in for a stirrup-cup in the morning, before you went, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Never drink in the mornings.’

  ‘No? Simply can’t believe it.’

  Captain Perigo drank like nobody’s business, starting an hour after breakfast.

  ‘Honest fact,’ Pop said, straight-faced as an owl. ‘Blood pressure.’

  Mrs Perigo gave him another deep, slow smile, this time both disturbing and enigmatic too.

  ‘I suffer from it myself,’ she said. ‘Sometimes. Depending on circumstances.’

  Whatever the circumstances were Pop didn’t bother to ask and he was glad to hear Ma’s warm, friendly voice inquiring of Mrs Jerebohm:

  ‘Get to know many people since you’ve been here? Made many friends?’

  Mrs Jerebohm was too reticent to point out that her poverty in country friendships was only too well reflected in the number of guests at her dinner table. She had conceived, once, the idea of having eight or ten guests that evening for dinner, or perhaps even a cocktail party, but somehow country people seemed to close themselves up, oyster-like, slow to accept you.

  ‘Not too many,’ she confessed. ‘I did invite a Miss Pilchester to tea last week, but she didn’t even answer my note –’

  ‘Batty,’ Mrs Perigo said. ‘She probably didn’t even open it. Or she wove it into a scarf on her loom.’

  Ma, who wouldn’t have such remarks at any price, rose to Edith Pilchester’s defence swiftly and sharply.

  ‘She’s not been well, poor thing. Appendix or something. One of those grumbling ones. The sort you have to put up with because they’re not bad enough to have out. I keep telling Pop he’ll have to go and massage it for her.’

  Ma found her rich loud laugh enveloped in a chilly cloud, out of which Corinne Perigo’s voice inquired with slow sarcasm:

  ‘Oh? Does he make a habit of massaging appendices?’

  ‘Oh! he’ll massage anything for a lark,’ Ma said, laughing in bountiful fashion again. ‘He’s got a waiting list a mile long.’

  The frigidity with which the Jerebohms received this announcement sprang less from shock than confusion, which was not improved by Pop saying, with a fresh laugh, that he’d never massaged an appendix in his life.

  ‘Oh! really?’ Captain Perigo said. ‘Well, I’m damned.’

  ‘You’ll have to come over and have a bite and wet with us one day,’ Ma said, ‘and meet a few people. We’ll get the Brigadier and a few more in one Sunday –’.

  ‘That’s it,’ Pop said. ‘We’ll knock off three or four geese and Ma’ll stuff ’em with sage and onions.’

  Painfully in a low voice, Mr Jerebohm said:

  ‘Thank you. We’d be glad to.’

  This uncordial acceptance threw another chilling mist over the conversation, which stopped completely for half a minute, until. Mrs Jerebohm said:

  ‘I hear you have several children, Mrs Larkin. Your house must be full already.’

  ‘Seven so far,’ Ma said. ‘Quite a little brood.’

  ‘Little? You mean you’d like to have more?’

  ‘Oh! Pop would,’ Ma said. ‘There’s no holding him back.’

  In the cool, smoky drawing room there was no sound but that of coffee spoons stirring at sugary dregs in cups and a few sharp sniffs from Captain Perigo struggling with some obstruction in his nose.

  Almost at once Pop’s own nose started to sniff out the increasing chill in the air and he was suddenly half afraid that somebody would soon be asking him and Ma if they were married or not and he turned the conversation smartly.

  ‘Seen any hares at all, Mr Jerebohm?’

  Mr Jerebohm confessed stiffly that he hadn’t seen any hares. He was about to remark that he thought hares in fact were extinct, like wild duck, deer, pheasant, woodcock, and a lot of other things, but Pop broke cheerfully in with:

  ‘Tell ’em how you do hares, Ma. That French recipe, I mean. The one with burgundy and prunes.’ In his sudden enthusiasm for the French way with hares he lifted a hand in the air, as if about to strike Mr Jerebohm in warm comradeship in the middle of the back. ‘That’s a beauty. That’ll make your gills laugh.’

  The prospect of Mr Jerebohm’s gills ever laughing again seemed an utterly remote one. The coffee spoons tinkled emptily again in their cups. Captain Perigo sniffed again and then actually brought out his handkerchief and blew at his nasal obstruction, loudly, with
a single trumpet snarl that earned him a fresh look of contempt from Mrs Perigo.

  ‘Play crib?’ Pop said with great cheerfulness. ‘What about a couple of hands at crib?’

  Crib? What was crib? Mr Jerebohm was unfamiliar with crib.

  ‘Card game,’ Pop explained. ‘Very old card game.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s getting a little late for cards,’ Mrs Jerebohm started to say and was suddenly saved the necessity of continuing by a violent crash of timber or masonry, or both, somewhere in the region of the back door.

  ‘Getting damn windy,’ Captain Perigo said and added that he wasn’t sure he liked it.

  A moment later the agitated Austrian maid burst into the room to say excitedly that half a tree had fallen on the stable roof and that she was getting very frightened. She wasn’t used to such winds. They sounded like the sea.

  ‘Better be going,’ Ma said. The sudden opening of the door, bringing a driving draught, had set her shivering again. ‘Don’t want to get myself steam-rollered under a beech tree. That’d be a jammy mess.’

  ‘Well, be seeing you!’ Pop said, as they shook hands all round. ‘Thank you, Mrs Jerebohm. Thank you, Mr Jerebohm. Don’t get doing anything I wouldn’t do.’

  Mr Jerebohm received this cheerful advice in further silence. The sound of yet another crashing tree branch startled Pinkie Jerebohm into almost running across the wide baronial hallway with Ma’s mink stole and Corinne Perigo’s big white sheep-skin jacket, which she clutched closely about her shoulders as she turned to Pop to say:

  ‘Well, don’t forget that stirrup-cup. If you can find the time.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Captain Perigo said. ‘Roll up for a noggin at any time.’

  After Ma and Pop had driven home under a sky of lashing rain and a falling barrage of autumn boughs, Pop was dismayed to find that television had already closed down and that only Charley and Mariette were still up, studying plans for a bungalow on the kitchen table.

  While Ma sipped at a good gin-and-mixed and started to fry eggs and bacon, ‘because if I don’t eat soon my stomach’ll drop out,’ Mariette said:

  ‘Ma, we can’t quite decide. What do you say? Shall we have one bathroom or two?’

  ‘Oh! two, dear,’ Ma said with not the slightest hesitation. ‘After all, you might not always want to bath together.’ She and Pop quite often did.

  For crying out gently, Pop thought What next? He gave Ma a severe and disapproving look which she, over the frying pan, completely ignored. He didn’t go much on that lark. It was almost as bad as having separate bedrooms. He stood a fat chance of becoming a grandfather if Ma was going to start putting obstacles like that in Charley’s way.

  Over the eggs and bacon, together with a few glasses of port, Ma warmed up, saying several times:

  ‘Thought I’d never get the circulation back in my feet. I think I’m going to have a hot bath even now.’

  Pop said good idea. He thought he might hop in with her.

  ‘Well, do,’ Ma said cordially. ‘Why not?’

  Ma always got into the bath first, for the simple reason that she displaced such an enormous amount of water that Pop could gauge the depth better when he followed her. Tonight the water-line came almost up to the top of the bath, so that not much more than Ma’s handsome dark head, wide olive shoulders and upper bosom was revealed.

  ‘Well, that was an evening,’ Ma said. ‘I thought I’d never get warm again.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Pop was feeling human now. A bath with Ma was about the cosiest, pleasantest thing in the world.

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought you were cold,’ Ma said, ‘with the steamy way that Mrs Perigo kept looking at you. I hope you didn’t get any ideas about her?’

  ‘Not my type,’ Pop said. ‘She’s sour.’

  Ma, washing her neck and shoulders with a flannel impregnated with special French soap, said she was very glad to hear it and at the same time asked Pop if he could reach the Schiaparelli bath-oil from where it stood on the stool. She’d like a drop more in.

  ‘I’ll have to get a bigger size next time,’ she said as she peppered the water with a generous spray of oil, ‘I use so much of it.’

  ‘Soap at your end?’ Pop said.

  ‘Somewhere. Had it a moment ago.’

  With adroit hands Pop started a swift search for the soap, but Ma’s body occupied such a large space of water that there was very little area left to search in. His hand kept finding Ma instead, so that presently she was half shrieking:

  ‘Sid! If you do that again you’ll have me under. You know what happened last time.’

  Once Ma had laughed so much that she slid suddenly under, unable to sit up again until Pop climbed out of the bath and pulled her up.

  ‘Sid! I told you. You’ll have me under.’

  ‘Got to find the soap, Ma,’ Pop said. Ma, all pink and olive, seemed to him to blossom through hot clouds of perfumed steam. ‘Can’t very well get clean without the soap.’

  ‘Well, it’s not down there!’

  ‘No?’ Pop said and confessed he was surprised. ‘Thought you might be hiding it.’

  ‘What’s that against my left foot?’ Ma said. ‘Is that it? or is it you?’

  Slightly disappointed, Pop found the soap beside Ma’s left foot, the sole of which he tickled lightly, making her shriek again, so that she slapped him playfully in protest. In return he started splashing her with water, saying at the same time:

  ‘Wonder if Mr and Mrs Jerebohm ever bath together? What do you think, Ma? Doubtful?’

  ‘Never,’ Ma said. ‘She locks herself in and does exercises. She told me.’

  Laughing, Pop said some people never had any fun and started tickling Ma again about the soles of her feet, so that she suddenly wallowed backwards like a huge handsome olive seal, laughing too.

  Almost prostrate, she lay for some moments helpless and shrieking, half the global map of her body revealed, until finally with an ecstatic rush of joy, telling himself that this was perfick, Pop stretched out his arms towards the familiar continent of pink hills and olive valleys and fished her up again.

  6

  By ten o’clock on Thursday morning Pop decided that he wouldn’t go to the hunt meeting after all. Something big was brewing up in the way of another Army surplus deal and it would take him most of the day to sift the prospects out. Probably show something like five hundred per cent if it came off: anyway, wurf while.

  Nevertheless as he drove away from the house in the Rolls he told himself there could be no harm in stopping off at The Hare and Hounds and saying hello to one or two people, just to see what sort of rabble had turned up. The weather had turned very mild again. The first elm leaves were colouring a clear bright yellow and above them the sky was a sharp northern blue, washed clean of any trace of cloud. If anything it was too blue, Pop thought, and as he got out of the Rolls his hypersensitive nostrils instinctively sniffed the morning air for the smell of rain.

  Outside the pub hounds were prancing and snuffling about the paddock, tails raised like a collection of pump handles. A few pink coats loped to and fro. Captain Perigo, blue of chin and already slightly watery eyed, was having whisky outside the bar door, his hard hat sitting well down on his ruby ears. Mr Jerebohm had turned up too and was clearly not used to riding very much. His pose of squatting on his horse, posterior pushed out like a rudder, looked part of a game of leap-frog.

  Corinne Perigo had, after all, also turned out and was talking to a man named Bertie Fanshawe, the man whom Ma had mistakenly suspected she had run away with. Perhaps Ma had mixed her up with Freda O’Connor, who also often had a fling. She was a girl of spanking bosom and voice of low husky passion who was now talking to Colonel Arbor, a shortish man who rarely talked much but, like a bronchial horse, merely guffawed in a rusty sort of way. Bertie Fanshawe was beefy. You could have cut his face up into prime red steaks. He guffawed too, but brassily, on coarse trumpet voluntaries all his own.

  They were a
pretty ripe old lot, Pop thought. The cream of country society, eh? It was a good job, he thought, that Mariette had turned out, neat and beautiful as usual, with Montgomery as escort. He was proud of them both. He was glad too to see the Brigadier, though on foot, the poor devil not being able to afford a second-hand motor car, let alone a nag. It would have been pleasant to see Angela Snow appear too but it was, he feared, too much to expect. She lived too far away.

  Then, to his great surprise, he saw, less than a minute later, a jeep-drawn horsebox draw up; and out of the jeep, bright as a quince among a collection of sacked potatoes, Angela Snow.

  She was a band-box of a girl if you liked, he thought. She even had the knack of being able to choose a horse that perfickly matched herself. Today she was riding a brilliant burning chestnut, lean and silky of body as she was.

  It showed Mr Jerebohm’s lean black mare up, Pop thought, as rather a poor old bag of bones: an animal with a decidedly uncharitable look in its eye.

  ‘My sweet.’ In a moment or two Angela, unabashed by public gaze, was kissing Pop full on the mouth; to the extreme consternation of the Brigadier, who had not been quite the same man since the passionate upheavals on the hearthrug, and the unpleasant surprise of Corinne Perigo, who started flashing glances of jagged glass on all sides blackly. ‘Not going to come with us today? Abysmally disappointed.’

  Pop, who hadn’t seen Angela since the gay evening with the Brigadier, blandly explained that he was only a working man.

  ‘Can’t afford the time to go gallivanting. Got to scratch a living somehow. Been up since five as it is.’

  ‘Suppose so. And how’s the swimming pool? Coming on?’

  Slow, Pop said, slow. They didn’t work all that hard these days. The heating apparatus had been held up too.

  ‘You stand there, you croaker, and tell me it’s going to be heated?’

  ‘Course,’ Pop said and laughed in his most friendly rousing fashion. ‘Can’t have Ma catching cold.’

  ‘Naturally not. Didn’t you murmur something to me about having a party to celebrate the opening?’