The Wild Cherry Tree

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Last term.’

  ‘And now what are you going to do?’

  ‘Photography. I hope.’

  She said that was interesting and sliced the pear in half and then scooped out the cores, leaving the hollows half-filled with juice. This too ran down her chin as she ate the pear and once again she licked it away voluptuously.

  ‘I didn’t bring my camera down this morning. First time for days. Stupid of me – I’d awfully like to take a picture of you.’

  ‘Oh! would you? That’s nice.’

  ‘Would you mind? I could easily go back and get it after lunch. I’ve got one of those jobs that takes dozens. You could pick out the ones you liked best and I’d have them blown up.’

  ‘You see. I was right. I said you were generous.’

  Half an hour later he got up to go back to the hotel to fetch his camera. In the moment before he walked away she said:

  ‘By the time you get back I’ll have retreated to the pines. I’ve had my ration of sun for the day. You’ll find me in the shade.’

  By the time he had fetched his camera it was nearly half past two. All across the sand gay coloured umbrellas were going up in the sun; the shore was filling with people.

  Just as he reached the sand he heard a shrill voice saying ‘I’m going to play with the crab again’ and turned to see the German girl and the two children a dozen yards away. The boy said ‘Heidi, look, that’s the man who was talking to Mummy.’ Franklin stopped and waited and said ‘Hullo’ and the German girl gave him a short, rather frigid smile without a word of greeting.

  It suddenly struck him then that what he thought to be superciliousness was perhaps, after all, mere shyness. The effect on him was to make him feel slightly shy and awkward too and in order to counteract it he said to the boy:

  ‘Did you wash?’

  ‘Oh! yes, he washed,’ she said. ‘I saw to that.’

  ‘Good. Now I can take your picture.’ He smiled at the German girl, who promptly dropped the illustrated magazine she was carrying. He picked it up with equal promptitude, dashed sand from it and said: ‘Perhaps I could take yours too?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Are you keen on photography?’

  ‘Very. I hope to take it up. I mean professionally. For a living.’

  Back at the hotel he had slipped on a white rowing blazer and from one of the pockets he now took out his light exposure meter. The boy at once wanted to know what this was and Franklin jocularly said it was a gadget for measuring whether little boys were telling the truth or not. The joke was lost on the boy but the German girl immediately laughed with such spontaneity, her mouth wide open, her head thrown back, that everything about her was suddenly and amazedly warm. The transformation was so startling that he laughed infectiously too and in a second of quick inspiration lifted the camera to his eye.

  ‘That ought to be a beauty.’

  ‘More probably I shall look an awful sight.’

  ‘Oh! no, you couldn’t possibly do that.’

  At once her face was cool again, the shyness back. He too felt a moment of awkwardness and started to say that now he would take the three of them together, but to his surprise he suddenly realized that the boy’s sister was no longer with them.

  ‘I didn’t see her go. Where on earth –’

  ‘Oh! I have my eye on her. She’s right over there, by the sea. It’s very typical of her – she’s what you call contrary in English – independent. Still, I’d better go after her before she goes too far – it’s more than my life’s worth –’

  ‘Just one more before you go – may I?’

  ‘I think it better I go. We shall see each other again perhaps?’

  ‘I’m sure – I hope so.’

  A moment later she and the boy were running across the sand. Looking after them he found the glitter of light on the sea almost painful to his eyes. He took a pair of sun-glasses from his pocket and put them on and then started to walk slowly away in the opposite direction, towards the pines.

  In the shade of the pines, as she had said she would be, Mrs Palgrave was lying flat on her back, her long elegant legs looking for some reason even more golden in shadow than in sun.

  ‘Oh! there you are. I hardly recognized you in that smart white blazer and the dark glasses. You seem to have been gone an awful long time.’

  He took off the sun-glasses and sat down on the pine-needled sand beside her.

  ‘I ran into the children and the German girl. That’s why.’

  ‘Oh! you did?’

  ‘I think I got a good picture of Heidi. A real beauty.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  The air under the trees, thick with pine odour, seemed oppressive. He started to take off his blazer and she watched him in silence for some moments before saying:

  ‘Would you be an awful dear and let me use that as a pillow? Would you mind? The sand isn’t so soft here.’

  ‘Of course, of course –’

  With great eagerness he started to fold up the blazer.

  ‘Just tuck it under my head, will you? I feel terribly lazy – I suppose it’s the warm afternoon.’

  He knelt down and she half lifted her head, drowsily. Then he put one hand under the thick red mass of her hair and lifted her head still higher and slipped the folded blazer underneath it.

  ‘That’s lovely. That’s nice. Thank you.’

  She gave a sleepy sinuous movement with her body, closed her eyes for a fraction of a second and then opened them again to smile at him with slow bemusement.

  ‘What’s the blazer for? Tennis?’

  ‘Rowing.’

  ‘That makes the muscles strong, I know.’

  She gave his right forearm a sudden compulsive grip and he said:

  ‘Careful with that. I broke it a year ago.’

  She gave him another slow smile that lingered for some moments somewhere between teasing and mockery and then said:

  ‘How did you come to do that? Resisting some terrible Amazon or something of that sort?’

  ‘No. Quite simple. I was just skating.’

  She patted the forearm quickly and then withdrew her hand.

  ‘What sort of boat do you row in?’

  ‘An eight. Or did, rather. I had to give it up because of the arm.’

  ‘Did you win lots of marvellous races?’

  ‘A few. We got a third in the Head of the River once. On the Thames. Then we were going like stink on the Serpentine once, leading by three lengths, and then caught a crab.’

  ‘A crab? Not the sort that wretched child of mine found this morning?’

  ‘No, it’s when a man gets his blade stuck in the water, sort of locked, and he can’t get it out. There’s nothing you can do about it. It stops the boat.’

  ‘I’ll bet it didn’t happen to you.’

  ‘I’m afraid it did. It can happen to anyone. You feel an awful damn fool.’

  She suddenly let the conversation end, simply giving him another long, searching enigmatic smile.

  At once he felt his body tighten like a bow string. He drew breath deeply, inhaling draughts of pine odour that were stronger, warmer, more oppressive than ever. On the white sand the red mass of her hair seemed to smoulder and as he stared down at it, fascinated to a point of intoxication, she asked him in the most casual of voices why he didn’t come and lie down too? It was awfully, awfully comfortable.

  In another moment he was lying side by side with her, looking close into her face. She gave the lightest of laughs and then slowly ran one hand across his bare shoulder. He moved his mouth rapidly to kiss her but she drew her face very slightly away, smiling and saying so this was the way he liked to amuse himself on warm –

  She never finished the sentence. He suddenly smothered her mouth with his own. For fully a minute she lay there unresistant and it was only as his hands began to wander across her shoulders and then her breasts that she broke slightly free and said:

  ‘And who gave you permission to do this sort of thin
g?’

  ‘Do I need permission?’

  ‘Well, at least an invitation.’

  ‘Invite me –’

  ‘You’re invited.’

  A moment later they were locked together and when finally they broke free again and his hand made a long caressive movement down the curve of her body there was only a single scalding thought in his mind.

  ‘Not here,’ she said, ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea, here. I know a better place. Round the headland. A tiny bay about two miles down the coast. I go there sometimes – there’s a bit more privacy – I’ve got the car –’

  ‘Now shall we go?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Don’t rush things. I’m here all summer.’

  ‘In the morning then?’

  ‘Afternoon. I must have my ration of morning sun.’ She gave her golden body a long still glance of self-admiration, slightly lifting her breasts. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t think it’s worth it? Sun in the morning. Love in the afternoon.’

  After that, every afternoon, they drove down the coast, through pine forests, to where at last, like a small central bit taken out of an amber quarter moon of melon, a little bay lay within a bay. Dark rocks, like monolithic barriers, locked in a secret arena of sand not more than thirty yards wide, the roots of big pines grappling at the rock crests like claws of animals holding down stricken lumps of prey.

  Here, in calmer moments, she coaxed him to talk more about himself. She on the other hand had little or nothing to say of herself and once when he started to question her she merely said ‘Me? You don’t want to know about me. Isn’t it enough that I’m here?’

  Every day he took many pictures of her, sometimes in the nude, sometimes in the sea, several times perched high on a rock, like some fabulous red-gold sea creature. She several times confessed that it gave her a strangely uncommon thrill to be photographed quite naked. It was something she’d never known before – it was like being watched by some secret eye.

  From time to time he wondered if there could, possibly, be a Mr Palgrave, but there was no way of asking her this. Finally, as the secretive rapturous afternoons drew out to a number past counting he decided that it couldn’t possibly matter about Mr Palgrave. Mr Palgrave was either divorced or dead, a faceless unhaunting shape somewhere far outside the world of sand and pines and sun and bristling salty air.

  Then one afternoon she suddenly said:

  ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you.’

  At once his heart started bounding with shock. His throat choked thickly and he could barely manage to say:

  ‘I thought you were here for the summer. You mean you’re all going away?’

  ‘Oh! good gracious, no. Only me. I’ve got to go back to London for a few days to see my solicitors. It’s about a flat I’m buying. Papers to sign and all that.’

  ‘Will you be gone very long?’

  ‘At the outside three days.’

  ‘God, I’ll miss you.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. You’re trying to flatter me. Out of sight out of mind. Anyway it’ll do you good to have a rest from me. You can get sick even of love.’

  ‘Not with you. I’ll be bored to death again.’

  Bored? Being bored, she told him with a teasing laugh, was merely like being hungry. When the excitement started again you ate it with so much better appetite. Ravenously. Even passionately.

  But curiously, after she had gone, he found that he hardly missed her at all. All his emotions were exhausted, drained to a state of dry fatigue. In revulsion from passion he found that he wanted merely to swim, walk idly along the beach, read in the sun. What had been boredom now became a balm.

  It wasn’t until the early evening of the second day after Mrs Palgrave had left that he suddenly ran into Heidi and the two children as they crossed the shore. The day had been much hotter than usual, the air charged with a sharper exhausting saltiness, and he thought the children looked hot and tired.

  ‘They’re simply panting for iced drinks.’

  ‘Me too. Let me treat you all. Will you? I feel I could drink beer by the gallon.’

  By contrast to the children Heidi looked composed and cool. Under the shade of a big pink umbrella outside the kiosk her fair skin had the softest overtones of rose that gave her a more than usually friendly air, making him more than ever certain that her habitual aloofness arose merely from being shy.

  ‘This orange is good,’ she said. She rattled ice round and round in her long glass. ‘They always make it of the real oranges here.’ The children were drinking something of a lurid purple shade, capped with ice cream and dusted with flakes of chocolate.

  ‘The beer’s good too. It’s awfully hot today.’

  In less than five minutes all that remained in the children’s glasses were smears of purplish cream.

  ‘Another one, please, Heidi. More please. Heidi, be a pet.’

  ‘A swim first. Then we’ll see.’

  When the children had gone off to the beach again she was very quiet for some moments, as if perhaps shy of being alone with him, and then she said:

  ‘Mrs Palgrave has gone to London for a few days. Or perhaps you know?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘I saw you with her several times.’

  ‘Yes.’

  At this she was very quiet again, her eyes lowered as she gently swished the ice round and round in her glass. He felt the silence to be of increasingly acute embarrassment and then realized that it was, after all, the first time they had been completely alone together.

  ‘Oh! by the way, the picture I took of you came out very well. I haven’t got it with me but I’ll bring it next time I come down.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Another and rather longer silence followed and he had just started to wonder if this might even be one of disapproval, as if perhaps she instinctively sensed how far his relationship with Mrs Palgrave might have gone, when he suddenly remembered that he had a question to ask her.

  ‘Was there a Mr Palgrave?’

  ‘Oh! yes, there is a Mr Palgrave.’

  She took several slow sips of her orange juice, bending low over the glass, so that a strand or two of her extraordinarily fair hair fell across her face. She brushed them lightly back with her fingers and said:

  ‘He is in some sort of business. I don’t know what. In the city somewhere.’

  ‘Does he ever come over?’

  ‘Sometimes for a week-end. Every couple of weeks or so. He is always working.’

  ‘What is he like?’

  ‘He is rather older than she is. Rather a silent man.’

  ‘A good old yes-and-no-type.’

  ‘Yes, but rather more no than yes, I feel.’

  The discussion of Mr Palgrave’s virtues ended in another wall of silence. After several minutes Franklin finished his beer and then raised his hand to call the waiter for another. Would she perhaps like another orange juice at the same time?

  ‘No, really, thank you.’

  Before his second beer arrived he interrupted yet another silence to say:

  ‘Would you mind very much if I asked you something?’

  ‘Please ask.’

  ‘Do you like fish?’

  She actually broke into a high peal of laughter. He laughed too but was it really all that funny?

  ‘What a question. You said it so solemnly. Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Why do you ask me?’

  ‘My father says there’s a mavellously good restaurant called L’Océan about six or seven miles down the coast. Nothing but fish. Lobsters, soles, moules, langoustines, mountains of fruits de mer. I wondered if you’d like to go there tonight. I can have my father’s car.’

  For some moments she sat silent again, gently swirling the ice in her glass, as if carefully thinking the matter over.

  ‘Thank you. Since Mrs Palgrave isn’t here I think perhaps I could.’

  ‘You mean you couldn’t come if she were here?’

  ‘Oh! no.’


  ‘Because of the children?’

  ‘Oh! the children will be all right. They will have dinner and afterwards play donkey. For hours.’

  ‘Donkey?’

  ‘It’s a card game.’

  Then if it wasn’t the children what was it? He didn’t quite get the point of it all.

  ‘Oh! she simply doesn’t approve of me – what’s the word you use? – gallivanting around.’

  He suddenly felt an extreme spasm of distaste for Mrs Palgrave. It was so totally unexpected that now, for once, he too was driven into silence. He even felt cut off from her presence, distracted by a queer nagging uneasiness, so that he was quite startled when Heidi said:

  ‘Will you call for me? And what time?’

  Oh! yes, he was sorry. He would call for her. Of course. What time could she be ready? Seven?

  ‘Yes, if that is all right, at seven.’

  ‘I’ve never been to this place before, but I think it should be good. My father’s generally right. He’s a tremendous connoisseur.’

  She slowly sipped her orange juice down to the last inch or so and then looked at him for the first time with a long glance that was completely direct, easy and no longer shy.

  ‘I’m sure,’ she said, ‘it will be wonderful.’

  As they drove down the coast they passed wide salt fiats, long artificial oblongs of drying salt glistening like virgin snow in the smouldering western sun. Out at sea a group of sardine boats, some blue, some emerald, all with sails of burning orange, were drifting westwards on an ocean of bright green-grey, every sail a tongue of flame on the vast expanse of whitewashed water.

  L’Océan was white too: a sparkling low fortress set on a black bastion of rock overhanging the sea, a green flag emblazoned with a great scarlet lobster flying overhead.

  ‘Let’s get a drink outside first. My father says we must see the fish tanks. You choose your own lobster while it’s still alive.’

  As they sat outside on the terrace, sipping Dubonnet, watching the last of the sardine boats being consumed by the orange cauldron of sunset, the effect of the ocean’s vastness was so great that it held him spellbound, almost embalmed. Mrs Palgrave seemed not only far away; she might never have existed.

  For the first time, he noticed, Heidi was wearing a dress; a simple affair of deep blue with pipings of white at the sleeves and collar. Against it her hair looked more than usually pale blonde almost to whiteness. Her rather thin brown arms were smooth and hairless and she sat with them stretched across the table, her glass held lightly between her ringless fingers.