When the Green Woods Laugh

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Quite sure?’

  ‘Sure as I like a–’.

  ‘Answer yes or no!’ the clerk said.

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Very well. You don’t know her as Mrs Perigo,’ Pop said. ‘But you do know her?’

  ‘Oh! yes, I know her.’

  ‘Mr Larkin,’ the clerk interrupted. ‘Can you tell us what all this is designed to show? Where is it meant to lead us?’

  ‘To the truth!’ Pop thundered.

  ‘Very well. Proceed.’

  ‘Now,’ Pop said, ‘can you tell the court when you last saw the lady?’

  ‘About three weeks ago.’

  ‘And can you say,’ Pop said, ‘where you saw her?’

  ‘In bed.’ Uncle Perce spoke with smart emphasis, almost with a snap of his jaws.

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘With a gent.’

  Several people in the gallery broke into spontaneous laughter but the various policemen, the clerk, and Sir George Bluff-Gore seemed momentarily mesmerized and offered no word of reprimand. Nor was there any word from Corinne Perigo, who was now as grey and tense as Pinkie still was.

  ‘You say you saw the lady in bed. Can you tell us where this was?’

  ‘At The Three Swans o’ course. I took their early morning tea up. One of the maids’d got bronchitis and we were short-handed at the time.’

  Pop permitted himself a smile. He was really starting to enjoy himself. The court lark was a drop o’ good after all.

  ‘But the lady, you say, is not Mrs Perigo?’

  ‘No. Her name’s Lancaster. Mrs George Lancaster.’

  A sensational tremor seemed to go through the court and Sir George Bluff-Gore sat forward on the bench by more than a foot, eager for every word.

  ‘Are you quite sure the name is Lancaster?’

  ‘Course I am. I had another dekko at the visitors’ register yesterday.’

  Pop waved an airy, modestly expansive hand.

  ‘So the lady describing herself in this court, on oath, as Mrs Perigo, did in fact register herself at the hotel as Mrs Lancaster?’

  ‘That’s a fact,’ Uncle Perce said. ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Which amounts to this, does it not’ – Pop, television-taught, paused for emphasis again, convinced that this was the right time, if ever, to let the dog see the rabbit – ‘that either at the hotel or in this court the lady has been telling a lie?’

  ‘You’re right, Sid!’ Uncle Perce said. ‘And a thundering big ’un too if you ask me.’

  ‘Bingo!’ the Brigadier said softly and gave a smile of winning triumph at Angela Snow, who returned it affectionately.

  Ten seconds later Pinkie Jerebohm suddenly fell forward in a bumping faint. Corinne Perigo, chalk-faced, rushed from the court as if scalded. Two policemen lifted Pinkie bodily and carried her out through a door, closely followed by a buxom policewoman carrying her handbag and flapping a big white handkerchief. The clerk scratched among his papers rather like a black-and-white hen searching for a mislaid egg and Sir George Bluff-Gore conferred for some moments with his magisterial colleagues, all of whom looked suddenly like hens too, heads slightly to one side, clucking under their breaths.

  From somewhere at the back of the public gallery Mr Jerebohm, breathing like a train on a difficult gradient, pushed with flapping arms past ushers, policemen, solicitors, and clerks and finally disappeared in the direction where Pinkie had gone. In the confusion everybody seemed to have forgotten Pop, who stood not unconfused himself in the well of the court, and it was not until Sir George rapped sharply on the bench in front of him that order was restored. Then a policeman shouted ‘Silence!’ and Sir George said:

  ‘Mr Barlow, do you feel in the circumstances that you can carry this case any further?’

  ‘No sir,’ Barlow said. ‘In the circumstances I do not.’

  ‘Very well. The defendant is discharged.’

  ‘You may go,’ a police sergeant said to Pop, who went without delay, finding himself two minutes later in the bar of The Market Hotel, where Ma, Mariette, Charley, Montgomery, Miss Pilchester, Angela Snow, the Brigadier, and the landlord of The Hare and Hounds were all waiting, glasses in hands, ready to give him a chorus of acclamation.

  ‘Everybody’s staying to lunch here,’ Ma said, giving him her own personal greeting in the form of a kiss laid on his lips like a cushion. ‘I’ve got it all fixed. Smoked salmon and steaks for the lot.’

  ‘Well done, Larkin,’ the Brigadier said. ‘Damn good staff work.’

  ‘Sweet man,’ Angela Snow said, kissing him lightly on both cheeks. ‘Blistering success. Had ’em cold from the word go.’

  ‘Don’t they call it purgatory?’ Ma said, laughing splendidly over a Guinness, ‘or is it perjury? I never know. By the way, where’s Uncle Perce?’

  To her almost stupefied surprise Uncle Perce came in a moment later with the old enemy, Mr Barlow, who immediately came up and shook Pop by the hand, told him he had done well, in fact, very well, and what were he and his good lady going to have?

  Ma, remembering the word attacker, thought for a moment she’d a good mind to sue him for defamation of character and then abruptly changed her mind and said ‘A large Johnnie Walker’ instead. That would learn him.

  ‘Yes, you did well, Larkin,’ Mr Barlow said. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Oh?’ Ma said. ‘You didn’t help much, did you?’

  ‘All in the day’s work,’ Mr Barlow said. ‘All got to live.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear it,’ Edith Pilchester said. ‘It was absolutely terrible. Every minute was ghastly.’

  ‘Uncle Perce is the one we got to thank,’ Pop said, gratefully accepting a quart of light ale from Mr Barlow, at the same time catching him a fraternal blow in the ribs with his free elbow. ‘Thirsty work, our job, eh?’

  Mr Barlow laughed, proving to be as human as anyone else after all, and Uncle Perce, finding a brief moment when he could lift his face from his own quart glass of ale, laughed too and said:

  ‘I told you I’d remember that piece, didn’t I, Sid? I knew I’d remember. I can see her now in that bed. She’d got a black lace nightgown on-that’s what brought it back to me.’

  ‘Don’t talk about that woman,’ Ma said. ‘Don’t spoil the party. I always said she’d got no finesse.’

  ‘Well, cheers,’ Angela Snow said, her voice more than ever cool and languid. ‘It only goes to show.’

  Show what? Ma wanted to know.

  ‘The truth,’ Ángela Snow said, ‘of the old Chinese proverb.’

  What proverb was that? Pop wanted to know and a second later heard Angela Snow, to the accompaniment of golden peals of laughter, telling him the answer.

  ‘If you’re going to be raped,’ she said, ‘you might as well relax and enjoy it while you can.’

  10

  It was not until a warm Saturday evening in early June that Angela Snow, in a pure white swimsuit gleaming as a snail-shell, dived with cool grace from the springboard of the Larkin swimming pool and swam the whole length of the bath under water before finally surfacing and turning on her back to float motionlessly in the sun.

  ‘Pool’s christened!’ Pop shouted. ‘Everybody in!’

  Soon everybody was in the water, which shone clear and blue as turquoise. The Brigadier, spidery of leg, his middle covered by what looked like a discarded length of faded pink face-flannel, duck-paddled to and fro in the shallow end, where Ma, in a bright magenta bikini that seemed to sit on her body like an arrangement of well-inflated balloons, was playfully teaching little Oscar a gentle stroke or two. Little Oscar, fat as a balloon himself and wearing a startling costume of blue-and-yellow stripes, wasn’t very interested in strokes and spent most of his time bobbing out of the water to lick at an ice-cream, a melting super-bumper in thick layers of chocolate and raspberry.

  At the deep end of the pool the twins, together with Victoria, Primrose, Mr Charlton, and Montgomery, were either diving off the board or the edge of the pool. Primrose
, grave and bewitching in a bikini of emerald green, sometimes sat on the edge for long periods in a dream, staring mostly at Mr Charlton. She wasn’t at all sure she wasn’t in love with Mr Charlton, who in turn thought she was growing more and more like Mariette every time he looked at her. Mariette was in the house, occupied with the final touches of preparation to ham and fresh salmon sandwiches, prawn vol-au-vents, sausage rolls, asparagus tips, cheese tarts, salads, and things of that sort. She was being helped in the kitchen by a more than usually shy, fussy, and indeterminate Edith Pilchester, who was trying without success to summon enough courage to change into a swimsuit, a royal blue one, which she’d bought specially for the day She hadn’t worn a swimsuit for years.

  ‘You see I’m not all that frightfully good a swimmer,’ she was explaining, ‘and somehow –’.

  ‘Ma isn’t either,’ Mariette said. ‘What’s it matter? Go up and change in the bathroom. Pop won’t like it if you don’t try the pool.’

  ‘You don’t think he’ll take offence?’

  ‘Not offence exactly,’ Mariette said. ‘But you know how Pop is. He adores people to enjoy themselves. He’s been waiting a long time for today.’

  ‘I know. I absolutely long to. It’s just that I –’.

  It was just that she was so dreadfully shy about that sort of thing, she persisted in explaining several times. She wasn’t used to it. She supposed she was getting too old for it or something, she said, and it was not until Mariette finally made the suggestion that what she needed was a little Dutch courage to stimulate her that she allowed herself the luxury of a whisky and said she’d have a stab at it after all.

  In the pool, in an evening growing more and more embalmed every moment, the air a pure light gold, Pop was enjoying himself by giving imitations of a porpoise or riding little Oscar on his shoulder. Sometimes he dived under Ma, brushing her body playfully on the way up or down.

  The Brigadier, watching this sportive play and listening to the steam-valve of Ma’s laughter shrieking into air every time Pop touched her, couldn’t help wishing he had the courage to try something of the kind on Angela Snow, but a queer sort of diffidence had come over him too. Every time he watched her white cool figure cutting the water or diving from the board in the evening sunshine he knew he could have done with a little Dutch courage himself.

  All this put him into a daydream of his own and when he finally came out of it some time later it was to see with relief that Pop, in his customary fashion, was handing round drinks on a tray.

  ‘Drink, General? Everybody enjoying themselves? Help yourself. Eats are coming in a moment. Everybody here? Where’s Edith? I don’t see Edith nowhere.’

  ‘She was in the house helping Mariette a few minutes ago,’ Ma said.

  ‘Time she was here,’ to Pop said. He liked his guests on the spot; he liked a party to go with a bang. You couldn’t have people missing when the party was just warming up. ‘The grub’ll all be gone if she don’t soon get here.’

  ‘You’d better go and find her, hadn’t you?’ Ma said. ‘If you don’t want her to starve.’

  Pop, agreeing that this was something like the right idea, went into the house, deciding to renew the trayful of drinks at the same time.

  ‘Help yourself to another before I go, General,’ he said. The Brigadier didn’t hesitate and then, with a drink in either hand, padded on thin white legs to the far side of the pool, where Angela Snow sat gazing at a half-empty glass, softly splashing her long legs in the water.

  A palpitating remembrance of all that had happened on the hearth-rug swept through the Brigadier as he sat down beside her and she said:

  ‘Hullo, my lamb. Thought you were never coming to talk to me. Afraid you’d jilted me.’

  She was hardly his to jilt, the Brigadier thought. He only wished to God she were. A twinge of loneliness nipped him and then was gone for a moment, banished by the sudden pleasant realization that he was sitting only a bare inch or two from her smooth long limbs.

  ‘How are you, my sweet?’ she said. ‘You look sort of pensive to me.’

  The Brigadier, with a rumbled bark of heartiness that didn’t deceive her at all, said that he was actually in fact splendid. Absolutely splendid.

  ‘Sweetie, you’re in a dream.’

  ‘Oh?’ The Brigadier was greatly startled. ‘Really?’

  ‘I’ve been watching you.’

  The sentence was of such direct simplicity that the Brigadier, momentarily unnerved, said:

  ‘Your glass is half empty. Have some of mine-allow me? May I?’

  With a hand on the verge of trembling he poured a generous part of his second glass into hers and then added the remainder to what was left of his first. As he did so she felt an inexplicable twinge of her own, a sudden bristling at the nape of her neck, that caught her unprepared. She remembered then how the Brigadier had surprisingly found her weak spot in the darkness and she started wondering what she would do about it if he found it a second time.

  ‘Well, cheers, honey,’ she said. She lifted her glass to him, turning on him her pellucid, almost over-large olive eyes. ‘Nice, sharing your drink with me. That’s made my day.’

  The Brigadier, for the first time, found himself looking straight into her eyes. He hadn’t realized before how remarkably sympathetic they were. It struck him that they were like wide, warm pools. They held him closely, with a great stillness, and he couldn’t get away.

  ‘It’s rather made my day too,’ he said and to his infinite astonishment she started running one of her fingers along the back of his hand.

  Meanwhile, in the house, Pop had searched both kitchen and living room for Edith Pilchester without success. Mariette had vanished into the garden too and he was about to follow her with a second tray of drinks when an alarming sound, like that of a battering ram, brought him to the base of the stairs.

  Edith, in shy haste, bathing cap in hand, had slithered down the full flight of stairs and now lay, a vision of royal blue and purest white, prostrate on her back.

  ‘Oh! I do feel a ghastly fool.’

  ‘All right?’ Pop said. ‘Not hurt?’

  Edith, in her bathing suit, relieved of the encumbrances of tweed, corset, and heavy woollens, was suddenly revealed as having a figure of modestly good proportions. Her legs were smooth and hairless. She had very white, sloping shoulders.

  ‘No, absolutely all right. Absolutely.’

  Eager not to miss anything, Pop hastily set down the tray of drinks and helped her to her feet. Edith, clumsy as ever, half-jumped, half-rolled from the stairs, to find herself a moment later in Pop’s arms, held in a palpitating squeeze.

  ‘How’s your operation today?’ Pop whispered and held her so uncompromisingly close that Edith, who had never been so unashamedly near to anything male in her life, had hardly breath enough left to say:

  ‘I won’t put you in court. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Wouldn’t stand a chance if you did,’ Pop said, laughing. ‘No corroborative evidence. One more?’

  ‘One more. Please.’

  Pop kissed her for the last time and a moment or two later, with a final spirited slap from him, she was in the garden, flushed and feeling almost naked as she half-walked, half-ran to the pool.

  Pop, following with the drinks, met Primrose coming into the house, graver than usual and with only half a sentence to offer him in answer to his ‘Not going to bed? Party’s only just begun.’

  ‘Just going to the wood for a walk,’ she said dreamily, ‘and –’.

  From her visit to the wood she came back, half an hour later, carrying a bunch of butterfly orchids, like palest green wax insects, which for some reason she gave to Angela Snow, who said ‘Sweet. Thanks, my pet,’ and then tucked them into the bust of her bathing costume.

  The intoxicating, almost too sweet breath of them rose at Angela’s throat. The little swarm of greenish flower wings seemed at the same time to give fresh lightness to her splendid bare skin, so that th
e Brigadier, who had never seen anything remotely like it in his life, suddenly realized that even the most arid moments had magical impulses, the power to bloom sensationally.

  He wanted suddenly, in a wild moment, to ask her to marry him, but he either daren’t or couldn’t frame the words. Instead he started to murmur something about whether she could cook or not, then suddenly felt it was all too obvious and said instead:

  ‘Perhaps you’d come and have dinner with me one night, I mean?’

  Adore it.’

  ‘Which night would suit you?’

  ‘Oh! any night, honey,’ she said, saying the words as if she were making a personal sacrifice for him alone.

  He could hardly suppress his joy and in a lyrical moment thought of how he would give her scampi, asparagus, and veal cutlets or something of that kind. You could get them all, even the scampi, at the village shop nowadays. It was part of the rural revolution. He would try to cook all the meal himself. He would do his damnedest to make it nice for her.

  All of a sudden the tranquillity of the evening was heightened by the sound of church bells. Across the meadows the pealing changes, in practices ready for Sunday, came in waves of crystal clearness, pursued by their own echoes.

  ‘Do you go to church?’ she said.

  ‘Very occasionally.’

  ‘Would you come to church with me tomorrow morning?’ she said, ‘if I came and fetched you? And then come to lunch with us? I’ve always wanted my father to meet you.’

  Almost before his stuttered ‘Yes, most kind of you, delighted,’ was out of his mouth an ebullient Pop had arrived, loudly uttering reproaches about empty glasses.

  ‘This won’t do, General. This won’t do. Refills all round, come on!’ he said and then to his utter surprise saw that Angela Snow had actually laid two fingertips on the back of one of the General’s hands.

  Back with Ma, who was sitting on the edge of the pool holding little Oscar on one enormous knee and a Guinness on the other, Pop confessed that you could knock him down with a feather. It was perfickly stunning. Angela and the General were sitting holding hands.

  ‘Why shouldn’t they?’ Ma said. ‘Perhaps he’s going to ask her to marry him. Lucky girl.’