The Golden Oriole

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. Back with her again, he sat down and she briefly gripped his hands.

  ‘Don’t do that again,’ she said. ‘I know how you feel but please don’t do it again. Everything you did then was exactly like him. You looked so terribly lonely. It might have been him standing there.’

  ‘I missed him like hell when it first happened,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s why I dreamed so much about him. Now somehow I’ve started to miss him more and more.’

  For the next few moments he was so imprisoned by the blinding reality of his own emotions that he almost forgot that she was there. He finally found himself staring at her in stupefied astonishment. Her face was buried in her hands.

  He started bitterly to reproach himself and begged her not to cry but she went on crying, almost silently, for some minutes longer. When it was all over she sat biting her knuckles and in a double rush of affection for herself and his father he sat helplessly wondering what to say.

  ‘There was something I wanted to ask you,’ she said at last.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How much longer are you staying here?’

  ‘I’ve got to go back home,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to see my mother.’

  ‘Do you have to go?’

  Uncontrollably all his emotions suddenly broke in a bitter rush of fury against his mother: the vain, brittle toast-scraper, the darling Babs, the lover of pretty things.

  ‘Good Jesus Almighty,’ he half-shouted, ‘don’t you understand? She even sits there waiting for the damned insurance! She killed him – she and that bastard – and she sits there calmly waiting to collect the blood money—’

  He was pacing up and down across the short grass now, hair blowing untidily in the wind, one fist beating into the palm of the other hand.

  ‘I’ve got to get back there today,’ he said. ‘There’s a million things I’ve got to say.’

  She had sense enough not to try to check or pacify him and for some minutes he continued to rage up and down. Finally, when he appeared a little calmer, she said:

  ‘Will you be coming back?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll be coming back.’

  As if a sluice had been opened all his rage suddenly poured clean away; he simply stood there gazing into the thoughtful, troubled brown eyes, holding her face in his hands.

  ‘I’ll be back late tomorrow. Have your bag packed.’

  ‘My bag packed?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re going to marry me, aren’t you? I hope you will, Kitty. I’m asking you.’

  With a little cry, but not speaking, she started laughing for the first time that day.

  ‘Mind you’re waiting,’ he said, laughing too. ‘Be here.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting,’ she said.

  It was already dark when he arrived home that evening but the light in the sitting-room was still burning. He had stopped at The Cartwright Arms farther down the street to book himself a room for the night and get himself a double whisky for his nerves but when he went into the sitting-room he was still tense and trembling.

  His mother was sitting by an electric fire, reading a magazine. It was raining outside and he didn’t even bother to unbutton his mackintosh.

  ‘You’re back. Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?’

  ‘I just dropped in for some things. I’m going straight back.’ He put his hat on the table. ‘I’m going to be married.’

  ‘Nice of you to tell me.’

  With extreme difficulty he kept his voice terse, even restrained.

  ‘Surprised you’re alone,’ he said. ‘No company? Where’s Harry?’

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Yes, Harry. Don’t tell me you don’t know our Harry.’

  If he had struck her full in the face she couldn’t have looked more stunned. For fully a minute she continued to sit in the chair and then slowly she got up, dropping the magazine in a noisy slide.

  ‘As it interests you so much, I haven’t seen Harry since your father died.’

  ‘How Harry must miss you.’

  ‘And nor, since it still seems to interest you so much, shall I be seeing him again. Quite satisfied?’

  ‘Don’t tell me Harry’s dead too.’

  If anything was dead, he thought, it was her face. It had never been, he thought, a very soft or ardent face. Vanity had always given it, with those extremely fair lashes, a veneer of superficiality. Now it was white and, like an old skeletonised leaf, almost transparent too.

  ‘Harry got married,’ she said.

  ‘I hope you congratulated him.’

  ‘His mother died and left him an awful lot of money. He got married almost immediately. He’s got a house in Cannes.’

  Her voice, like her face, seemed skeletonised and lifeless too. Still tense and bitter, he was about to make some remark in the most cynical possible manner about how it was all rather a bad stroke of luck for her when she said, in the flattest of voices:

  ‘It was almost directly after your father died. You don’t know Harry, do you? Harry’s the sort of man who gets a great kick out of having other men’s wives while their husbands are alive. When the husbands are dead it’s all too tame. Not fun any more.’

  He made no attempt to match her bitterness with a renewal of his own until a sudden thought struck him.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘He was here last week. Wasn’t that his damned umbrella hanging up in the hall?’

  ‘I told you the truth about the umbrella. Anyone can have an umbrella like that. Anyone can leave an umbrella by mistake, can’t they? It was the insurance man’s.’

  ‘Ah! the insurance,’ he said. ‘We come to the insurance.’ He could control himself no longer; all his rage boiled over in a hot stream of shouts. ‘You killed him, you and that bastard. Oh! I don’t mean you poisoned him or anything so bloody simple as that. You didn’t hit him over the head with a wrench. But you killed him just the same. He died of an overdose of shame, poor devil. And now you sit waiting for the insurance. Oh! I like the insurance part very much. Very much. It’s bloody funny.’

  He picked up his hat from the table.

  ‘So you haven’t seen him?’ he said. Once more the main stream of his rage had drained suddenly away. ‘What about the night you didn’t come back until half past two?’

  ‘I was just walking.’

  ‘Of course. Naturally. With the great Harry.’

  He was on the verge of shouting at her something about being a damn bad liar too when she said:

  ‘Yes, just walking. By myself. All alone.’

  Her face, he thought, looked older than ever. It was even more a skeleton of a face than before. Pity for her suddenly fused with all his blinding affection for his father and kept him speechless. He heard her say:

  ‘I haven’t had anyone to turn to. I thought perhaps you’d help me a bit. I need some help. I’m almost in despair—’

  He changed his name! his mind started shouting. He was ashamed of his own name. He went creeping about the country like a stranger, afraid of being recognised.

  ‘I can’t help you!’ he shouted. It was all over. He felt empty and old himself now. ‘I’ve nothing left to help you with.’

  Early next day he drove northward under moist humid clouds that gave occasional showers of drizzle. Half way to Skelby Moor he decided, on a sudden impulse, to stop and buy his wedding present to Kitty. He thought that one of those beauty boxes, with internal fittings of brushes, powder-puffs, mirrors and so on, would be the very thing.

  He stopped at the next town and found a shop and eventually picked out what he thought was a neat, stylish box in scarlet leather. As the shop assistant was making out his bill he suddenly found himself saying:

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got such a thing as a post-card album, have you?’

  ‘No, sir, I’m afraid not. There’s no call for them now. We never stock them. They seem to be out of fashion now.’

  ‘I see. Thank you. I just wondered.’

/>   He paid the bill and picked up the beauty box.

  ‘They were good fun, those old albums, weren’t they?’ the assistant said. ‘Don’t you think so?’

  ‘Great fun,’ he said. ‘Awful fun.’

  He drove northward again. Soon in the distance the hills began to rise through the drizzle and as he drove on, thinking more and more of Kitty, he watched them: slowly appearing and then suddenly disappearing, almost mysteriously, in the drifting summer cloud, like creatures in a dream.

  ‘Be there,’ he kept saying to himself. He seemed to see her lying once again in the bed, with the crimson bar of light travelling across the ceiling above her. ‘Be waiting.’ He seemed to see also his mother’s face, old and skeletonised by its own despair. ‘And for God’s sake be true to me.’

  The Quiet Girl

  When Maisie Foster was a child her mother sent her to one of those Edwardian villa private day schools where, for a few guineas a term, she could be sure of a kind of exclusive but wholly inadequate education that commoner children were denied. Other girls might rampage happily about the streets, spinning tops, skipping, playing hop-scotch or even having fun with boys, but those things were not for Maisie. Much of the useless curriculum was undoubtedly concerned with decorum, but it is equally certain that Maisie learned there two of the most important things in her life: sewing and the art of isolation. She was what everyone would have called a quiet girl.

  At seventeen she left school and, since sewing was her chief accomplishment, went to work for a dressmaker named Miss Parsons, who had a small establishment of the customer’s-own-material-made-up type behind the churchyard. The short back street there was made up mostly of solicitor’s offices in Georgian buildings with black front doors, two doctors’ houses, an estate agent’s and an auctioneers: a quiet street very much in keeping with her nature.

  Half way along the street a narrow stone-paved alleyway branched off and here Miss Parsons lived on two floors: work-rooms below and modest living quarters above. Miss Parsons was sixty, papery of appearance and short of breath; she had been warned of the dangers of stairs. Dressmakers, owing probably to the nature of their work, often tend to seem delicate, even meticulous of movement; but this was never true of Maisie. In spite of her quietness she seemed very much like a strongly coiled spring. It seemed likely that some day something or someone would touch her and she would respond like a rampant charge of electricity. All this was belied by an undistinctive appearance: her face was soft, rather dripping-coloured and never really quite healthy in appearance; the skin seemed slightly greasy and the dark hair never quite adequately brushed up; her brown eyes had that downy appearance seen on moth wings.

  She was the sort of a girl that men are popularly supposed never to look at twice, but she belonged also to the category of women who, unblessed with good looks, nevertheless have excellent figures. She was generously formed but compact, rather large in the hips but on the whole very well-proportioned.

  Five years after she had joined Miss Parsons she one day heard a short cry and a thumping sound from upstairs and ran there to find Miss Parsons face downwards on the top step, struck down by a sudden heart attack. In two days she was dead.

  Maisie was now twenty-two and living with her mother and her father’s sister on the far side of the town. Her father, a clerk to a firm of leather factors, had been dead ten years or more. Presently, in her quiet way, she was going home to tell her mother:

  ‘Miss Parsons left a codicil to her will saying that if I wish I can take over the lease and the business without having to pay anything for the good-will. I think I shall take it. It was very generous of her. It seems the opportunity of a lifetime.’

  Her mother agreed that it was. ‘Will you go there to live?’ she said, ‘or will you carry on here with us?’

  ‘I shall go there, I think,’ she said. ‘I’d really like to start out on my own.’

  Within a week she retired into the dressmaking establishment quietly and unobtrusively, as into a shell. Customers continued to bring in their own materials, to ponder over pattern books, to take fittings and chat about the weather. The order books were nearly always full; in her quiet way she worked industriously.

  One afternoon a woman of twenty-six or so, just engaged to be married, came in to ask if Maisie could perhaps find her a material of rather a special colour. It was to match the turquoise ring she was wearing – not quite the blue of a thrush’s egg and not quite that of a forget-me-not. A very difficult blue, but one she had set her heart on.

  In the square in front of the church there were ten or a dozen shops of the sort you always find in small country towns: a grocer’s, a pork-butcher’s, a seed-shop, a tea room and so on. The biggest of these, with a fairly large double front, was a draper’s owned by a man named Ashley Walpole. Maisie occasionally went to the shop for odd materials, buttons, cottons, accessories and so on.

  Later that afternoon she crossed the square, went into the shop and began to describe the particular blue colour to the chief assistant, a Mrs Fitzgerald, who went up to London once or twice a month on buying missions, often for special orders. Once again the particular shade of blue proved to be a very difficult one to define.

  ‘It isn’t exactly a thrush egg blue,’ Maisie was saying, ‘perhaps it’s nearer that vitriol blue – you know, a sort of chemical blue.’

  As she and Mrs Fitzgerald were discussing this, but without much success, a voice behind her said:

  ‘Some difficulty, Miss Foster? Something I can do to help?’

  It was Ashley Walpole himself: a man of forty, tallish, unspontaneous of movement, rather correct but at the same time eager to please, a man who never missed the chance of doing business. He wore starched collars which shone like porcelain and this porcelain shininess was reflected in his pale, rather fidgety, fresh grey eyes.

  ‘Not quite a thrush-egg, as we were saying—’

  ‘I rather think we had a roll of shantung in something of that shade,’ Walpole said. ‘A customer ordered it and then some friend or other told her the colour was unlucky. I think we might still have it. If we have it’ll probably be stowed away somewhere in my office. I’ll have to look it out.’

  Maisie thanked him and Walpole went on to say:

  ‘Are you going to be at home again this afternoon, Miss Foster? If I find it I could snip a length off and drop it in as I go out to tea. I generally go across to the Geisha for a cup about half past four.’

  It was nearly five o’clock before Walpole did in fact arrive and she was then astonished to see that he carried a small box of water colour paints in his hand. The roll of shantung, he explained, was not in his office after all; but in his eagerness to please, always keen to do business, he was ready to mix blues of all sorts until the right one was found.

  ‘It’s awfully good of you,’ Maisie said. ‘I’m afraid if you want water for the paints we’ll have to go upstairs. Do you mind?’

  Maisie’s small sitting room upstairs, with its window overlooking the churchyard, had all the embalmed silence of a cloister. It was a mild late spring afternoon and a tree of double white cherry had shed a snowstorm of petals on grass, gravestones and path below. Looking down at it Walpole remarked to Maisie on the surprising isolation of it all. He would never have guessed how quiet she was here, how comfortable, how tucked away.

  ‘If we can mix this colour right,’ he said, ‘I’m going to London tomorrow myself and I’ll try to match it up.’

  As he sat at a table, mixing and then painting strips of colour on a sheet of white paper, she couldn’t help noticing that his hands were of surprising thinness. The fingers were long and exploratory. They were the kind of hands pianists are popularly supposed to have and she half-expected him to start playing tunes with paints and paint-brush.

  ‘I hope you’ve had tea,’ she said. Walpole was being exceptionally studious and careful with his mixing of colours, she thought, and it was already half-past five. ‘Because if you haven’t—�
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  ‘I had to cut it, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘I got held up by a long telephone call.’

  ‘Oh! I’ll get some,’ she said. ‘I haven’t had mine yet.’

  He thanked her with his usual eagerness that was also in some contradictory way so correct.

  ‘Would you care for me to bring some sample buttons too if I can get them?’ he said over tea.

  She said she would, very much, and after that they talked with triviality of the dress-making trade, how fussy customers sometimes were, what stupid things they said and how absurdly they contradicted themselves. She several times said ‘Oh! yes, Oh! don’t they?’ in delighted and surprised exclamation at some point he made.

  ‘Of course I’ve seen you often in the shop,’ he said, ‘but I don’t suppose I’ve ever really spoken to you.’

  ‘No, I suppose not, really.’

  ‘I suppose I’m always at the grindstone. I’m often at the shop by half past six in the morning and sometimes I don’t leave till nine or ten at night.’

  ‘Not much time at home. What does Mrs Walpole say to it all?’

  ‘Oh! she reads a lot,’ he said. ‘I suppose she’s sort of conditioned herself to it. After all, in business—’

  He seemed, she thought, to speak of his wife with indifference, as of another piece of material rolled up, put away and waiting to be used.

  ‘I think perhaps if we concentrated on these four samples,’ he said, ‘and I could try to get something in that range—’

  Some of the blues were really exquisite, she suddenly told him. They really were. She herself thought he was really very artistic.

  ‘Oh? you think so? I did do some painting at one time. I used to do designs on fabrics, but I gave it up. The business came first.’

  ‘You should never have given it up,’ she said. ‘You have just the right sort of hands.’

  Soon he was packing up the paint-box, ready to go; the business called; in his eager way he was thanking her for the tea.