When the Green Woods Laugh

by H. E. Bates

  Mr Jerebohm wasn’t at home, Pinkie said. Moreover she wasn’t at all sure that he rowed.

  ‘Pity,’ Pop said. ‘Very nice little boat.’ With a neat half-wink he invited Mrs Jerebohm to give the fresh-varnished boat the once-over. Montgomery, he thought, had done a very good job on her. ‘Even had the carpet-sweeper on the cushions.’ The cushions, a bright plum-purple with lemon pipings, looked very gay and springlike too.

  ‘Like me to give you a trip?’ Pop said. Perky as a terrier, he skipped from boat to bank, where he tied the painter to a tree-root, laughing freely. ‘Beautiful afternoon for it-might never get another one like it for weeks.’

  Pinkie Jerebohm, who was dressed in a close-fitting lavender jersey suit that only succeeded in showing how fruitless all her fond hard work at slimming had been, said that she had, as a matter of fact, actually started out to look for primroses.

  ‘Come to the right place,’ Pop said and with an extensive sweep of a hand enthusiastically indicated the wood that came down to the very edge of the shimmering lake at its farthest end. ‘Woods are full of ’em. Crowded. Fick as fick. You can even smell ’em as you go by. Hop in. I’ll take you over.’

  Mrs Jerebohm hesitated. She wasn’t at all sure about hopping in. She had Corinne Perigo coming in to tea at four o’clock and what time was it now?

  Impressively Pop’s wrist-watch flashed gold in the sun. ‘Only three o’clock,’ he said. ‘Bags o’ time.’

  For another apprehensive second or two Mrs Jerebohm hesitated. Among other things was the boat safe? It didn’t leak or anything of that kind? She couldn’t swim. She was, in fact, terrified of water.

  ‘Pity,’ Pop said. ‘I mean about the swimming. Oh! the boat’s perfickly safe.’ After a succession of unobtrusively quick glances at Pinkie’s figure, he decided that, slimming or no slimming, she wasn’t at. all bad in the right places and would probably look quite passable in a bathing costume. ‘Thought you might like to come over and use our swimming pool when we get it open next month. Lovely pool. All blue tiles.’

  Mrs Jerebohm thanked him for thinking of her, but said that it wasn’t all that much fun, was it, if you couldn’t swim?

  ‘Ma can’t swim,’ Pop said, ‘but she has fun all right. Trust Ma. Come over one afternoon and I’ll learn you. In a couple o’ days I’ll have you going.’

  Well, Pinkie said, she didn’t know about that. Though she didn’t say so there were, after all, limits. There were certain proprieties. Mr Jerebohm wasn’t often home in the afternoons and he mightn’t think it quite nice if his wife took swimming lessons with Larkin when he wasn’t there.

  ‘Good for your figure,’ Pop said, with some enthusiasm and several more rapid glances at it. ‘Not that it’s not good now.’

  An unusual flutter sprang through Pinkie Jerebohm. Some seconds later, almost without knowing it, she was accepting Pop’s offer of a hand and in a fraction of a minute afterwards she was in the boat, facing Pop, who began rowing her away.

  ‘But you will keep an eye on the time, won’t you?’ she said. ‘What I mean is-I mean I must absolutely dove-tail in with Corinne. I simply mustn’t keep her waiting.’

  Damn Corinne, Pop thought, determined not to spoil a perfick afternoon worrying about Corinne, who several times during the winter had put his back up in no uncertain way. At the Hunt Ball, at two o’clock in the morning, she had cornered him in a half-lit draughty corridor on the pretext of getting him to take out a subscription to a new country club about to be started up by Bertie Fanshawe. In reality it was merely an excuse to start pawing his neck. On an evening in January she had somehow winkled him out of the bar of The Hare and Hounds on the pretext that her car wouldn’t start. On that occasion, without ceremony, she began pawing him all over and then turned like a snake, actually hissing, when he told her to stop it and quick. ‘You need a good belting,’ he told her on a third occasion, when she telephoned twice in one evening to invite him over for a drink because the Captain was away. That, she told Pop with savage sweetness, was exactly what she hoped he was going to give her. She wouldn’t rest, in fact, until he did.

  She’ll rest a devil of a long time, Pop thought and a second later put Corinne Perigo completely from his mind by asking Pinkie Jerebohm if she could smell the primroses yet? In his own hypersensitive way he had already caught the lightest breath of them across the water.

  ‘No,’ she said and in fact the boat was already drifting in to the far bank, where young hazel and sweet chestnut and a few high, gold-flowered oaks came down to the water’s edge, before she actually detected the first scent of them floating on the lightest of airs.

  ‘Wonderful scent,’ Pop said. ‘Fancy there’s a few bluebells there too.’ He drew deep breaths, with selective sharpness. Yes, you could smell the bluebells too. ‘Get ’em?’

  Pinkie Jerebohm, helped out of the boat by Pop’s two outstretched hands, had to confess that she couldn’t get them. It was all too elusive for her. It was wholly impossible to separate one scent from another, especially when she scarcely knew which was which, and suddenly at the woodland’s edge she was deeply aware again of an uncommonly nervous flutter darting through her, leaving her slightly uncertain at the knees.

  For the rest of the afternoon, at irregular intervals, she kept experiencing that same sensation without ever being able to decide what caused it. Crowds of white anemones and primroses covered the whole floor of the wood with endless drifts of the softest unwinking white and yellow stars. The tops of the trees were gold-green belfries of bud pouring down bird-song in tireless peals. From across the lake cuckoos called continually, bell-like too, the notes taken up, transformed, and repeated in the wooing moan of doves that Pop adored so much.

  Pinkie, bending among primroses, sometimes even kneeling among them on patches of big dry papery chestnut leaves, gradually felt intoxicated and absorbed to a point where time no longer mattered. Nor did Pop remind her. It was pretty nearly perfick by the lakeside on such a day. It was his idea of heaven. The only thing that could perhaps have made it more perfick still, he thought, was the chance of having a short, gentle squeeze with Pinkie.

  He wondered how she’d take it? Just the same as Edith Pilchester did? he wondered, and then suddenly found he couldn’t be sure. They were rather très snob, the Jerebohms. She might go sour.

  Still, a casual brush among the primroses, accidental or otherwise, would soon tell him. Couldn’t do no harm. It wasn’t every girl, after all, who got the chance of being stroked in the middle of a primrose wood on a hot April afternoon.

  Several times afterwards he found himself watching the bending, rounded figure of Pinkie, plumpish and smoothly tight in its lavender jersey suit in spite of all her slimming, and told himself that the time had surely come when a little bit of dovetailing might be fun.

  Each time she suddenly straightened up and walked away. Each time, too, he told himself he couldn’t be absolutely sure about her. Something about the big bunches of primroses that she had gathered and now held in front of her as she walked gave her an odd look of innocence that he couldn’t quite get over.

  All this time he himself had been gathering violets, mostly fat white ones, but also a score or two of the daring purple kind. Every now and then he buried his nostrils in them, draining them of scent. All the nerves of the spring afternoon seemed to vibrate tautly as he smelled the flowers and once he felt impelled to call out:

  ‘Beautiful, ain’t it? Nowhere like the country.’

  Pinkie, who was now gathering separate bunches of white anemones, said she agreed, though in fact the winter hadn’t taught her so. The winter had been a trial, hard to bear. That was largely because Mr Jerebohm still insisted on living in Gore Court not because it was pleasant, convenient, or in any way desirable but merely as a means of losing money. Mr Jerebohm in fact was now raising pigs. Palatial sties had sprung up everywhere and Mr Jerebohm found a certain satisfaction in feeding the animals on pig-swill made of gold. Pinkie, who didn’t
understand the reasoning behind making money on the Stock Exchange and giving it to pigs to eat in the country, couldn’t help feeling she would have preferred a maisonette on the front at Brighton, where she could occasionally parade in her best hat, gossip over morning coffee, and gaze at the sea.

  Here there was hardly anyone to gossip with except Corinne Perigo. The natives, she thought, were uncommonly hostile. They kept themselves steadfastly to themselves. Friendliness seemed no part of their nature. The Austrian maid had left two weeks ago in a huff and now, with the arrival of spring, all the women of the village were planting potatoes, hoeing strawberries or doing strange jobs in hop-fields. She knew now that she couldn’t get any help for months and suddenly as she thought of it for the fiftieth time that week she gave a long, uncertain sigh.

  Pop, hearing it from some distance off, came over to her bending figure, carrying his bunch of white and purple violets like an offering.

  ‘Surely not sighing on an afternoon like this?’ he said. ‘Too perfick by half for that. Smell the violets.’

  Laughing, he thrust the violets up to Pinkie Jerebohm’s face and for a delicious second or two she dreamed over them, drinking scent. Broken sunlight fell like a light veil on her face, which was not unpretty in its simpering way, and on her two hands, clasping almost more primroses and anemones than they could safely hold.

  This, Pop told himself, might be just the moment for a trial run. Perhaps he should try her under the chin first and see what happened? But suddenly Pinkie, from being almost completely unbalanced one moment in scent and sun and flowers, darted out of herself with a lisping exclamation:

  ‘Oh! you know it’s really awfully awfully sweet of you to bring me over here. I do appreciate it. Spending so much of your valuable time –’.

  Pop, still locked in indecision, uncertain whether to brush her lightly under the chin or go in for a proper squeeze where there’d be no mistaking what it meant, hadn’t a second longer in which to make up his mind before she almost threw up her flower-crowded hands in the air.

  ‘Time! But whatever time is it, pray? We must have been here half an hour or more.’

  Pop, laughing, flashed a look at his watch and said:

  ‘More like hour and a half. It’s nearly half-past four.’

  ‘Oh! my goodness. Corinne will be frantic!’

  To Pop’s intense surprise Pinkie broke into running, actually dropping flowers as she scurried under the trees to the waterside. He followed her on light springy steps, hoping she might possibly slip and fall in a harmless sort of way so that he could have the pleasure of picking her up, but to his disappointment she made the boat without a trip or stumble.

  A moment later he was there too, catching her lightly by the soft upper flesh of her arm as he helped her into the boat. To his further surprise a couple of extra velvety squeezes had no effect at all on Pinkie, who seemed utterly oblivious not only of Pop but of everything else as she half-stumbled into the boat and flopped rather heavily down on the plum and yellow cushions.

  ‘Don’t rock the boat,’ Pop said.

  ‘Whatever can I have been thinking about? An hour and a half! Whatever was I thinking?’

  Pop, taking up the oars and quietly starting to row the boat out into the lake, where silver shoals of small fry were leaping up like little fountains in the sun, noticed that Pinkie in her haste and distraction hadn’t had a moment in which to put her dress straight. Her lavender skirt had ridden up well above her knees.

  Charmed and slightly excited by the unexpected vision of Pinkie’s rather plump silky legs, Pop found himself paying less and less attention to her lisping self-chastisement as he rowed her across the lake in the sun. Except that he damned once or twice the irritating and oppressive entry of Corinne Perigo into the conversation he was enjoying himself very much, both actually and in anticipation. Pinkie, he decided, wasn’t half a bad shape after all. Her legs were quite pretty and he could see an awful lot of them.

  ‘I’ll never, never forgive myself. It really is a granny knot, isn’t it? Inviting people to tea and then just not being there. Oh! I am a careless fool.’

  ‘You’ll be at the house in ten minutes,’ Pop said, full of airy comfort. ‘Women are always late anyway.’

  ‘That remark doesn’t help,’ Pinkie said. The social strain, keeping her at full stretch, almost made her voice break. ‘You don’t see any sign of Corinne, I suppose?’

  No, Pop said and told himself that he was damned if he wanted to. There was something crude about that woman. After all, as Ma often said, you had to have a bit of finesse about you.

  The boat was still thirty yards from the opposite bank when Pinkie, hands full of flowers, sat forward on her cushions with all the appearance of a frog ready to leap.

  ‘You wouldn’t mind awfully if I absolutely made a dash for it, would you?’

  Not much time now, Pop thought. The golden afternoon was slipping away. His chances were disappearing as rapidly and surely as the boat was drifting through shoals of unfurling water-lily pads into the bank.

  ‘Sit still,’ Pop said. ‘Don’t stand up.’ Pinkie had actually, in her anxiety, tried to stand up in the boat. ‘Wait till I tie her up. You don’t want a wet tail, do you?’

  Utterly oblivious of her risen skirt, Pinkie sat on the very edge of the cushion, an inch or so of bare thigh revealed above her stockings.

  Now or never, Pop told himself. ‘Don’t move until I say,’ he warned her. ‘It’s a bit deep just here.’

  Momentarily calmed by sensible advice, Pinkie sat precariously still on her cushion while Pop, yellow shirt fluttering, nipped on to the bank and pulled the boat in.

  ‘Hold hard till I tell you!’

  A second offering of sensible advice was completely lost on Pinkie, who suddenly leapt up, staggered forward to the bank and into the unready arms of Pop, who still had the boat’s rope in his hands. Staggered too, Pop dropped the rope, felt Pinkie begin to slip down the grassy slope towards the lake and managed to catch her firmly with both arms, just in time.

  ‘Neat bit o’ rescue work,’ Pop thought and in a moment had Pinkie in a swift and uncompromising embrace, at the same time caressing her with one hand some inches below the back waistline.

  For some moments a light but intoxicating perfume of half-crushed violets, primroses, and anemones filled the air and Pinkie, almost breathless, gasped as she caught at him. At the same time her lisping mouth half opened in what Pop thought was a gesture of encouragement. Stimulated, he gave the roundest part of one thigh an extra nip of affection and was on the point of kissing her full on the lips when, to his pained surprise, she started screaming madly.

  He hadn’t ever heard anyone, he thought, scream quite so loud. You could surely hear it a mile away. On high, full-throated notes Pinkie lifted her face to the sky and for nearly half a minute wailed wordlessly, at the same time dropping every flower she held.

  ‘Better try to comfort her a bit I suppose,’ Pop thought and was just wondering how to start this delicate operation when he saw a new figure running towards him along the lakeside.

  It was Corinne Perigo, advancing in a hatless charge.

  ‘Wherever have you been? Whatever has happened?’

  Pinkie Jerebohm, white-faced, standing in a pool of stricken flowers, allowed herself a moment of deathly silence before answering in a whisper:

  ‘This man has just tried to violate me.’

  Pop had hardly grasped the words before Corinne Perigo gave him a venomous, curdling look.

  ‘You absolute swine,’ she said. ‘You absolute swine.’

  Pop, for once, was at a loss for an effective reply. No one had ever called him that before. It was rather much, he thought. A moment later he was startled to hear Corinne Perigo’s voice again, now speaking in tones of even colder venom.

  ‘Have him charged, Pinkie. Put him in court. Let the police deal with him. The swine. It’s high time. I’ll be a witness for you.’

  As a weep
ing, flowerless Pinkie was led away along the lakeside Pop found himself staring with mild disconsolation at the lake, dismayed to find that the boat, which he hadn’t had time to tie up, was drifting away.

  One way or another, it was a bad end to a perfick afternoon.

  ‘Not sure you haven’t gone and torn it this time, Sid,’ he told himself. ‘Not sure you haven’t gone and torn it now.’

  8

  On that same shimmering April afternoon Edith Pilchester, succumbing at last to the grumbling appendix that had been troubling her for weeks, went into hospital to have it out. When Ma heard of this nearly a week later she was not only full of sympathy for the wool-gathering Edith, always so lonely, but at once urged that Pop must pay her a visit as soon as possible, at the same time taking something nice with him to cheer the poor thing up.

  ‘You’d be worth a dozen boxes o’ pills to her. She’d be up and about in no time.’

  Pop agreed and presently, on a showery April evening full of thrush song, took Edith Pilchester two bottles of port, a basket of fresh peaches, pears, grapes, and apricots, a box of milk chocolates, a large bunch of deep yellow freesias and several slices of cold breast of turkey. All spring came flowing richly into Edith’s room on the strong fragrance of freesias and Edith, pale and meagre, wept.

  This, Pop said, they couldn’t have; it wouldn’t do at all; and immediately sat down on the bed and held her hand. This warm and unexpected gesture merely had the effect of making Edith weep afresh, not quietly now but in a loud, spinsterish blubber, so that soon, when a nurse came in to fuss with a chart, there was cold severity in the air.

  ‘And what,’ she said, ‘have you been doing to my patient?’

  ‘Making love to her,’ Pop said, quick as a jackdaw. ‘Like a sample?’

  ‘That will do. I must ask you not –’.

  ‘See what he’s brought me!’ Edith Pilchester sobbed. ‘Freesias. Wine. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh –’.

  The effect of this outburst was so touching that the nurse suddenly felt like weeping too and hastily remembered she had something to do in another ward.