by H. E. Bates
Francie, at twenty-nine, was big too. She was one of those women, fair, steamy-eyed, generous of mouth and with a girth of thigh that recalled a brood mare, who matures at a sensationally early age and often by thirty decays into fat and sloppiness, half run to seed. But at the time Williams died her skin still had on it the bloom you see on a plum at the height of its ripeness and there was still a deceptive, smouldering, steamy light in the pair of big violet eyes that were really extraordinarily tender.
Williams had been dead three months or so when a brand new Mini estate car drew up one afternoon at the pump with a middle-aged man and his wife inside. The man asked for four gallons of petrol and then, jumping out of the car, started fussing over it with a yellow duster like an over-zealous hen with an only surviving chick.
‘Serve teas here?’ he said and Francie said no, she was afraid she didn’t, but they would get some at The Blue Schooner Café, a few miles down the road.
‘We passed that. Seems to be closed. Looked as if they might have had a bit of a fire.’
Francie said it was the first she’d heard of it and the man gave a big thirsty sigh, almost gasping at the warmth of the July afternoon.
‘Couldn’t manage us a cup, I suppose?’ he said. ‘Dying for one. I think it’s the salt in the air.’
Well, she supposed she might, Francie said. She generally made herself one about this time of day.
Ten minutes later she was carrying a tray of tea out to the car. With the tea was the only thing she could find in the kitchen to eat: half a cold Cornish pasty left over from her lunch and which she had now cut up into neat, narrow fingers.
Almost at once the man went into a state of near-poetical rapture about the pasty. He had never tasted anything quite so good in all his natural. The pastry melted away in the mouth like butter. The meat, the whole thing, was a dream. Did he assume it was of her own making?
Well, yes, Francie admitted, it was. She didn’t ever think of it as anything all that special though.
‘You should open a place here,’ the man said. ‘Start a café. There’s a big call for a place like that along here. You could make a bomb.’
‘Some hopes,’ Francie said. ‘Me? I’ve only got one pair of hands.’
The incident passed completely from her mind, never prompting another thought, and might have remained thus utterly forgotten if it hadn’t been for a second one a few days later.
On a warm salt-laden morning of brisk wind she had just finished serving a baker’s delivery van with half a dozen gallons of petrol when she turned to see, on the concrete apron, a small dark man of about forty staring at her. He seemed suddenly to have dropped in from nowhere.
Black hair, black eyebrows and mild brilliant blue eyes gave his face an air of strangely innocent illumination. But these were by no means the most arresting things about him, The most remarkable thing about him was that in one hand he was carrying a bunch of wayside flowers, already drooping in the sun, and in the other a parcel of newspaper from one end of which protruded the gaping curious heads of three or four fresh herrings.
‘Good morning,’ he said, ‘any kind of work around this place?’
Something about the flowers and the fish had the effect of inducing in Francie first a desire to laugh and then to cry. His voice, like his face, was bland with an altogether disarming innocence. Not knowing quite what to say she simply stood there, staring at the flowers.
He lifted them up. ‘All sea flowers. That’s a sea poppy.’ The sea poppy was pale yellow. ‘This is a bit of sea thistle.’ The sea thistle was as blue and sharp as steel. ‘I gathered them coming in from the coast. I’ll do any kind of work.’
His eyes wandered across the cracked concrete apron, over the piles of rusting junk and the gale-battered repair shed.
‘What happened to the shed?’
‘A gale –’
‘I’ll clean the drains.’
‘I don’t know that they want cleaning.’
‘You want the roof put back on the shed? I’ll have a go at the shed.’
Irresistibly the innocence of the blue eyes held her uneasily captivated. Then suddenly he held out both fish and flowers. Would she like the herrings? They were fresh. He’d bought them straight from a man with a boat. He had soles too.
‘Let me have a go at the shed.’
Between that moment and the end of the long light summer evening he worked, single-handed, and put the roof back on the shed. As the light faded seawards into a breathless sky, half green, half-apricot, she thanked him and asked him what she owed him now.
‘Give me somewhere to doss and we’ll call it quits.’
‘Oh! that’s not fair. I’ve got no room anyway.’
There was an old Chrysler limousine behind the shed, he told her. It was still good inside. He could doss in that.
Just as she had agreed to take fish and flowers and let him work on the shed, almost against her will, she now agreed to the impossible notion of his sleeping in the limousine.
‘You’ll need a blanket or two,’ she said and went into the house to get some.
Coming back with the blankets, some minutes later, she observed him walking from the direction of the shed. All day she had noticed the lightness of his walk. His feet, like his hands, were very small. While not actually dancing across the concrete he appeared to be lightly blown along. And once again she found herself afflicted with the impossible impulse to laugh and then to cry.
‘Where are you making for, anyway?’ she said.
‘I’ve been working with a pipe-laying gang. Contract work. The money was good but I suddenly had a fancy to take a month or two off. I’m making for Liverpool.’
‘Are you a Liverpool man?’
‘No. Irish. From Ulster.’
‘You’re not walking there?’
‘Yes, I’m walking.’
‘That’s a long, long way.’
‘I’ve all the time in the world,’ he said. ‘All the time in the world.’
Before turning in to sleep in the limousine he said, ‘I’ll clean out the shed tomorrow and then later in the week –’ an assumption of permanence that presently began to be repeated from day to day. Tomorrow he would do this, the next day that, and irresistibly Francie drifted into letting him stay.
Almost a week later an elderly couple drew up one afternoon in a car. They were friends of the people who had heaped their almost celestial praise on the Cornish pasty. They had come to sample it themselves.
Francie was sorry: there was no Cornish pasty. Disappointed, the couple urged that she should do something about this regretful state of affairs. There was, they were convinced, a great opening for a café here. You couldn’t get a cup of tea along the whole ten miles to the coast.
‘Get me another dozen pairs of hands,’ Francie said.
The small, light-footed man stood listening.
‘Well, you’ve got four,’ he said.
‘How’s that?’
‘Mine and yours. I could fit the shed up as a café. Easy. I’ll paint a sign. A good big one.’
Once more she drifted into acquiescence. Within a week the sign – TEAS – CAFE – SNACKS – was painted, broad and high in white and green. At an auction sale down on the coast she bought a quantity of second-hand tables and chairs, cutlery and crocks. She acquired two vast brown teapots and discovered within herself an untapped capacity for lightness in cooking. She began to turn out not merely the celestial Cornish pasties but meat pies, sausage rolls, currant buns, fruit cakes, tarts, sandwiches, hot dogs.
In the way that news of such things spreads she presently found that anything up to ten heavy lorries might be parked on the concrete apron at midday and even more between four and six in the evening. Soon she was confronted with an insatiable demand for bacon and eggs, bacon and chips, egg and chips, fish fingers and chips. She acquired more crocks and cutlery, hired a larger brand-new electric stove. The young wife of a farm labourer from down the road began to come in to
help and then brought her sister too.
It presently began to be clear that many drivers were drawing up not merely to sample Francie’s cooking but on the chance, if possible, of sampling Francie herself. Many remembered Williams; not a few were quick to notice that far from shrouding herself in lamentation for the departed handsome alcoholic she appeared rather to have flowered. She was stupefyingly mature but still young, physically more immensely desirable than ever, and to not a single one of them did it ever occur why.
It appeared to the greater part of them that she was what men called easy meat. Such a body had clearly been created from more than mere admiration from afar off. It was a feast of flesh. There appeared a sudden crop of wives who didn’t understand their husbands, of drivers tormented with the woman-less darkness of long night distances, of drivers who wanted a bed, and if possible Francie’s bed, for the night.
Not one of them had the slightest persuasive effect on her. If the big expansive body appeared to be outwardly promiscuous, warm to a point of steaminess, the inner woman remained cool, withdrawn, even frigid. To not one of them, for some long time, did it ever remotely occur that she might have her own secluded source of devotion.
By August of that year the little light-stepped man, whose name now turned out to be Brady and who had first brought fish and flowers and who still slept in the old Chrysler limousine, had dug up a fairly large patch of ground at the back of the café and had planted it with potatoes, onions, carrots, beans and lettuces and, at one end, a few rows of larkspur, cornflowers and marigolds. Sometimes in the evenings she stole ten minutes or so from the greasy heat of the café and went out for a breath of fresh air, watching him dig or hoe. Never once did the extraordinary lightness of his movements fail to induce in her the strangest waves of excitement, rising always to that same almost unbearable desire to laugh or cry.
On a particularly busy evening towards the end of that month, with the café full of men guzzling tea and scooping up chips in every form, Brady suddenly came in with a bunch of marigolds and larkspur. They were merely for the purpose of decorating the café counter but something about the way he held them straight out in front of him, like a rather ashamed supplicant seeking to beg some sort of forgiveness, had about it that air of innocence that to her was always so touching but that now, in public, seemed to verge almost on the ridiculous.
Throughout the café there were several seconds of utter silence and then every man began laughing.
A wave of white-hot anger swept through Francie. She picked up a cup and promptly dropped it. An impossible, impassioned impulse to pick up a knife and drive it into someone leapt through her, died and left her coldly sweating. In another spasm of silence, after the laughter had spent itself, she incredibly heard the word ‘Billikins’, never once dreaming or discovering until later that this was the mocking little name by which every man now knew Brady.
She consciously knew then, for the first time, that she was in love with him. She knew too that it wasn’t merely a possessive or obsessive love but a highly imperative one. There was revealed inside her not only an immeasurable depth of tenderness but an even greater cavern of hunger waiting to be satisfied.
It was quite dark when she finally shut the café, slipped on a dressing gown and went over to the old Chrysler limousine. The back windows of the car were wound down but she tapped gently on the door and asked was he asleep, was she disturbing him?
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m awake.’
Might she come in?
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Come in.’
She opened the car door and climbed into the back. He moved along the wide plush seat to give her room to sit down. Insufferably nervous, she tried to put into her voice a note that was casual:
‘It’s a warm evening. I thought I must get myself a breath of fresh air.’
‘It’s warm. Yes. It is that.’
For some moments longer she had nothing more to say. She stared through the windows of the car at a sky that, seawards, still carried the faintest white glow above the horizon, with an early star or two hanging above.
‘You were extra busy tonight,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry about what happened. About the flowers.’
‘It did nothing to worry me.’
‘It did to me. I don’t like a man to be laughed at.’
‘I say it did nothing to worry me. You know how the fellers are.’
His voice, very soft and disembodied in the darkness, seemed to intensify every moment with an air of great intimacy. She found her own voice lowering itself too.
‘You’ve been here two months now.’
‘Like I say, I’ve all the time in the world.’
‘It’ll soon be getting too cold to sleep in this thing.’
He laughed very quietly. ‘I can always get myself a hot water bottle.’
Something about this quiet laugh stirred her deeply. Without conscious impulse she stretched out her right hand until she could feel one of his in the darkness. The small fingers were surprisingly cool on so warm an evening and her own started tingling sharply at the moment of contact. This tingling presently started running down through her body. Her legs quivered. A hot flush of excitement made her impulsively throw back the lapels of her dressing gown and a second later she stretched out both hands.
‘Where are you?’ she said. ‘I can’t see you in the dark.’
Unbearably excited, she caught his two hands.
‘Feel of me,’ she said. ‘Feel of me –’
The innocence in him that she had so often found impossibly touching now kept his hands rigidly suspended, some distance away from her, the fingers half-clenched. She let them remain like that for some seconds longer and then, as it were, unlocked them and started to guide them towards her big breasts.
Even when the small cool fingers touched her warm skin there still seemed to be an enormous innocent reluctance in him. For some moments she waited in vain for some caressive movement of his fingers against her breasts but they still remained rigid and suspended and at last she said:
‘You’re not afraid of anything, are you? You’re surely not afraid of me?’
Amazingly the fingers slowly relaxed, drawing her breasts together and then letting them part again. The gesture prompted in her a great rush of emotion, so that she suddenly leaned forward and pressed her open lips against his face.
‘There’s no need to sleep here any longer.’
He said nothing and again the often repeated impulse to laugh and then to cry ran through her, this time taking her near to tears.
‘Don’t go away from me, will you?’ she said. ‘Ever. Don’t ever go away from me.’
From then onwards he slept in her bed and for the next two months or so she became the victim of a deep delusion. It was that what went on between Brady and herself was an affair of utter secrecy.
What she didn’t know, at least for some time, was that it was a means of common gossip, common fun, to every driver who ever pulled up at the café. Brady himself, small, light of step, soft spoken, was himself a figure of some inadequacy, even slight ridicule. Set beside the big voluptuous steamy-eyed figure of Francie he became the easy, obvious, contemptible joke.
‘Billikins the Lover Boy’, they all called him. ‘Francie’s Fancy’.
All this might have gone on for much longer if it hadn’t been for an incident early in September. Dusk was just falling one sultry evening when she saw from the windows of the café a green three-ton lorry pull up at the pumps outside and the driver, alighting from it, go straight to the air pump and begin to check his tyres.
More curious than annoyed, she went out and found a driver she had never seen before, a big, dark-haired, muscular man of thirty or so, rather of Williams’ swaggering build, with longish side-linings, whistling with a cocky sort of air as he moved from tyre to tyre.
‘Help yourself,’ she said. ‘Don’t bother to ask.’
‘Always help myself first, duckie, and ask a
fterwards.’
‘Perhaps you’d like to help yourself to petrol? All free of course.’
‘All right for petrol, duckie. Just the air.’
She felt herself bristling. Cockily whistling again, he made the air tube dance and coil about the back of the lorry like a long thin snake.
A second later she could have sworn that there was a warm ripe smell of strawberries in the air.
‘Right first time, duckie. Got a couple o’ ton aboard.’
Strawberries in September? She’d never heard of strawberries in September.
‘Well, you’ve heard now.’ He lifted the green tarpaulin canopy at the back of the lorry, revealing in the half light trays of fat scarlet strawberries stacked high. ‘Second crop. You set fire to the fields as soon as the first crop’s finished and if the weather’s right you make a bomb in September.
‘Try one?’
With that cocky air of his he picked up a strawberry of luscious ripeness and size, held it by the stalk and actually pressed it against her lips. The sweetness of the berry caused her to give an involutary gasp of pleasure. The exuding juice ran down her chin.
‘Pretty good flavour, eh?’
‘Marvellous.’
‘Take a tray.’
‘Oh! I couldn’t do that, thanks all the same –’
‘Plenty more where they came from, duckie.’ Already he was reaching inside the lorry to take a tray of strawberries down. ‘Always sling a few extra on board. Where will I put them?’
Quite without thinking she said ‘Better put them in my sitting-room. If they see them in the café there’ll be a riot.’
He carried the tray of strawberries into her sitting-room. It was still not quite dark. The warm fragrance of strawberries was rich on the air. Cockily he picked out a berry even larger than the first, bit into it and then held out the remainder, pressing it against her lips.
