The Golden Oriole

by H. E. Bates

  ‘It was excellent, the tea. Far better than I get at the Geisha.’ He laughed. ‘You should start a little tea-place of your own.’

  ‘You’re always welcome to a cup,’ she said. ‘Any day. I usually have mine about four.’

  After that he started to discover, almost every day, some sort of excuse to come across the square at four o’clock. Some new buttons had arrived; he had spotted, in a fashion magazine or somewhere, a new design for a collar; he had bought new, delightful silks from Italy.

  In the churchyard laburnum blossom succeeded cherry; the summer began to grow hot. Walpole started to wear a light cream linen jacket, but sometimes in the humid mid-afternoons he took even this off and sat sipping tea with Maisie in his shirt sleeves in the stifling little upstairs room.

  One afternoon it seemed hotter than ever and she got up to draw the curtains. She didn’t like drawing the curtains, she explained to Walpole; it might make people think that someone had died. Then as she reached up to draw them she turned suddenly and found him standing close to her, lips parted, fresh grey eyes more fidgety, more eager than ever. For some seconds she stood there transfixed in the act of drawing the curtains, one arm uplifted, her dress stretched tight across her breast. A moment later he was kissing her and with two swift sharp snaps she drew the curtains together, shutting out any possible gazer from the churchyard and the light of the hot midsummer afternoon.

  The two snaps of the curtains were the first of several signals that started to release the coiled spring inside her. At first the process was neither violent nor abrupt. It was much more like the unfolding of a flower. It didn’t even show itself in thrilling outward signs, in coquettishness or laughing responses, in the customary half-articulate lightheaded reactions of girls suddenly awakened. Her only visible sign of change was that she started to be a little more meticulous about her hair in the afternoons.

  She had in fact suddenly become acutely conscious of her hair and one afternoon, after two or three weeks of meeting Walpole, she brushed it vigorously out and then put it up, in a sort of brown pinnacle, in an entirely different way.

  When Walpole later arrived he was quick to notice the change. It made her look so much taller, he said, it seemed to lift her up. He gazed at it for some moments with a sort of compressed rapture and then in a sudden spontaneous gesture took it in both hands, slowly smoothing it upwards.

  These long slow movements of his hands on her hair were the next signals in the process of awakening. A crowd of nerves at the roots of her hair, low in the neck, started to quiver like an unrestrained chorus of strings. She found it suddenly impossible to hold still and presently she and Walpole were half-sitting, half-lying in a chair, embracing violently, he still smoothing her hair upwards, with one hand.

  ‘You know how to drive me mad now, don’t you?’ became a phrase of hers, repeated over and over again, during the next few hot weeks of summer.

  By this time the spring inside her, so long coiled up, had become completely released in all its strength. She now started to shut the front door at five, giving up the meeting for tea at four, so that Walpole could slip in when the last of her customers had departed.

  Throughout the hot afternoons of July she continually lay undressed on the bed upstairs, listening to, though over and over again not really hearing, a recital from Walpole on an age-old, long-familiar theme. It was not that his wife was cold, undemonstrative or casually un-receptive of the things he wanted to give – it was merely that he was lonely. He had been lonely for a long, long time. That was why he was often so early at business and away so late at night. That was why, cursed with loneliness, he was so glad of Maisie.

  After a time, she discovered, she herself began to be bored with this theme and it was with something like relief that she heard him say, one afternoon towards the end of July:

  ‘I’ve got bad news. I’m going away for a couple of weeks or so. I’ve simply got to give her a holiday. We’re going down to Bournemouth in the car. By God, I shall miss you.’

  ‘I shall be here when you get back,’ she said, calmly and quietly. ‘Waiting. Just the same.’

  But when he got back, nearly three weeks later, it was not the same.

  The interval woke her fully to a disturbing, almost intolerable reality. She now discovered, and with something like despair as time went on, that the one thing she missed more than anything else was Walpole’s simple ability to make her excited, almost mad. She wanted above all to feel the smooth, long hands slowly driving her to an exquisite distraction through the roots of her hair.

  One of her customers about this time was a robust, middle-aged countrywoman named Miss Walker. She had a habit of wearing men’s shirts with green bow ties, heavy tweed skirts, thick brogue shoes and a sort of green Tyrolean hat. She was extremely particular about the shirts. She liked them to be hand-made; she specially insisted also that they should be made from the sort of material obtainable only from men’s shops. ‘Not from that wretched Bon Marché or Walpole’s.’

  A gentlemen’s outfitters named Sampson & Marshall kept the shirting materials on which Miss Walker so meticulously insisted and late one morning she was in there, selecting several lengths for Maisie to make up. As she stood at the counter a young man in a light fawn check suit, neat brown shoes and a light brown trilby hat came in and began to inquire about shirts made to measure.

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t do them, sir,’ the assistant said. ‘There really isn’t all that call—’

  Miss Walker, overhearing, said in a peremptory way that of course there was a call. Here, in fact, was a call. They were all too conservative and stereotyped in the clothing business, she announced, in the matter of shirts especially. They needed a jolly good jolt from time to time.

  ‘Miss Foster will make them up for you. She’s quite first class. She’s always made shirts for me. I’m selecting some materials now.’

  In her robust, forthright way she went on to tell the young man that she herself was in fact going back to Miss Foster’s premises immediately and if he cared to come along—

  He thanked her and presently they were walking through the town together. It turned out that he had only just come to the town, was a cashier at a bank and had a temporary room at The George Hotel. No, he confessed to her, he didn’t like the town. It was dull, it bored him, especially on Sundays. It drove you mad on Sundays.

  ‘Do you hunt at all?’ Miss Walker said.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Pity. I could have introduced you to the hunting crowd.’

  Half an hour later she left him alone with Maisie. His name, he told Maisie, was Robert Prentice. When he removed his jacket so that she could measure him for the shirts it became obvious that he was not very well built but quite muscular in a sinewy sort of way. The shoulders were narrow; the waist and hips were fined down. A certain shyness of manner, though not excessive, merely emphasised the physical qualities and the thought crossed her mind that he might possibly have found it difficult to make friends.

  Soon he was telling her, as he had told Miss Walker, of his boredom with the town, especially the Sunday boredom. For Heaven’s sake what did a man do in a town like this on Sundays? What for example did she do on Sundays?

  ‘Me?’ she said. ‘Well now, what do I do on Sundays?’ She had finished taking his measurements and he was already putting on his jacket. ‘Well, I get up rather late, about half past ten, I suppose. I don’t have any breakfast, just a cup of tea. Then I cook myself a really good meal – I don’t have much chance to do that in the week – and sit down about two o’clock to eat it. Generally roast beef and Yorkshire.’

  ‘Sounds wonderful,’ he said. He interposed here a brief description of the remarkable roast beef and Yorkshire served on Sundays at The George Hotel. It was in the cat’s meat class, he explained, generally tepid and smothered always in a brown congealing paste that passed as gravy. ‘But that’s only half your day. What about the rest?’

  As she
went on to tell him that after lunch she invariably read the papers, had tea about five o’clock and then in the evening had a leisurely hot bath she looked instinctively at his hands. For a well built man they were unexpectedly small hands, far shorter than Walpole’s. She was greatly surprised about this; and instinctively too, as she looked at them, she seemed already to feel them stroking the roots of her hair.

  If her surprise about his hands was great his own about Maisie was far greater. He had expected a much older woman. She was in fact of his own age and presently he found himself saying:

  ‘But don’t you ever go out on Sundays?’

  ‘Never,’ she said. ‘Where is there to go? The cinemas don’t open. I hardly ever drink. And you’d hardly expect me to eat lunch at The George, would you? No, I like it here.’

  All this time her eyes were insidiously and consistently drawn back to his hands. For this reason she hardly ever looked him fully in the face, with the result that he somehow gained the impression that she too, with her colourless, unprepossessing appearance, was shy.

  Presently he was saying:

  ‘I hope you didn’t mind my asking all that just now, but I just wondered—’

  ‘Wondered what?’

  ‘I wondered if you’d perhaps like to come out with me on Sunday?’

  Again she stood watching his hands; again she seemed to feel the touch of them on the nape of her neck.

  ‘Where would we go?’ she said. ‘What would we do? What could we do if it rained?’

  He hardly knew, he said. Of course the situation would have been easy if he had had a car, but unfortunately a bank clerk’s salary didn’t run to that. As he said this he threw up his hands rather demonstratively, in a gesture of resignation that bemused her completely. A sudden unbearable web of tension spun itself round her, trapping her as if she were a fly.

  ‘It’s very nice of you to ask me,’ she said and the words came thickly, almost congealed, in her throat, ‘but I tell you what—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If it wouldn’t bore you too much you could come and share Sunday lunch with me here.’

  He reacted with almost pitiful delight. It was the nicest thing that had happened to him since he came to the town. She couldn’t imagine how much he’d look forward to it. She couldn’t have asked him a nicer thing.

  He arrived soon after one o’clock the following Sunday, a thunderously warm day already humidly overcast but as yet without rain, carrying as gifts for her a box of burnt almond chocolates and a bottle of Johannisberger Riesling – perhaps not the best thing to drink with roast beef, he confessed, but the best The George could do.

  ‘It’s really more than kind of you,’ she said. ‘I hardly ever have wine.’

  All through lunch thunder hammered at the distances. The smell of roast beef, made richer by the oppressive quality of the air and then by the cool white wine, drifted almost voluptuously about the little upper room.

  Several times during the course of the meal Maisie confessed that she was afraid of thunder. She was really a coward about thunder. Among other things she had a dreadful premonition that one day the church would be struck and the spire come tumbling down. He was inclined to laugh at all this and when he laughed it was not merely in the gay fashion of a man completely happy but also as if released from something, set free at last from his Sabbath bondage.

  Somewhere about three o’clock a single snarl of thunder seemed actually, as she had always dreaded, to bounce off the church spire. Within a second she was shouting to him to draw the curtains. He leapt up and drew them quickly, plunging the little room into almost total darkness while the rain, beginning at last, teemed torrentially outside.

  For a few seconds he found himself actually having to grope his way back to his chair. He asked her if she was all right, if it was true she was really afraid, and in passing her chair put his hands, more by accident than anything, on her shoulders. They were trembling. In an instant her hands sprang up and grasped his own and pressed the fingers against her hair.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon in his arms, in a luxurious and tempestuous trance heightened by her genuine fear of the storm. It seemed as if the rain would never stop. The air became yellow with the strangest of thunder lights. Whenever the clock on the church chimed it was on cavernous notes, echo repeating echo, uncannily oppressive and near.

  It was six o’clock before the rain stopped and she could draw back the curtains. She was calmer now. The storm sailed suddenly and completely away, taking her fears with it as surely as a kite dragging its tail. The effect of the wine, which had at first made her sleepy, had worn off by this time and now she was herself again.

  ‘I’ve loved it here,’ he said, ‘absolutely loved it. When am I going to see you again?’

  ‘Next Sunday?’

  ‘Not before? I hoped—’

  ‘I don’t think so. I really have so little time in the week.’ She was thinking already, not precisely in a calculating sort of way, but quite coolly, that Walpole would be back by Tuesday. ‘You see I’m busy all day. Then I have to get a meal and there are always accounts to do.’

  Choked with disappointment, he could only murmur, as Walpole had so often done, that it was all so lonely in the week, so damned lonely. Once again the words bored her and she said:

  ‘You mustn’t let yourself be lonely. I’m alone here but not lonely. Think of me. I shall think of you.’

  ‘You will?’

  ‘Of course. A lot. Yes, you can see me next Sunday. You can come to lunch again.’

  ‘Thank you. That’s wonderful.’

  ‘Don’t you really think it’s perhaps a good thing if we don’t see each other for a week?’ she said. ‘After all you hardly know me.’

  ‘I could get to know you more if I saw you in the week.’

  A renewed desire to be caressed again suddenly overcame her and she put her head on his shoulder, at the same time raising one of his hands to her hair.

  ‘You’ll have heaps of time to get to know me next Sunday,’ she said. ‘Sunday’s always a long day.’

  The following week Walpole came back with distractions of his own. As if three weeks of hotel life were not enough, his wife had developed moods. With petulance she refused breakfasts, didn’t get up until midday and left him to walk by the sea alone. In the enervating southern air he drowsed away long empty days under pines, building up a brittle edifice of self-pity, telling himself that he was lonelier than ever and longing above all for a glimpse of Maisie, so unexpectedly superb in body, in the little upper room.

  As if nothing had happened in his absence she took him back into the quietness of her special seclusion as she might have picked up a dress that had been laid aside unfinished. She slipped off her clothes for him with no more compunction than if she had been taking off a hat and with hardly a thought of Robert Prentice. It was wonderful to be caressed again. It was wonderful to feel also that when both the week’s ecstasy and boredom had built themselves up to be equally intolerable there would be a change of hands on Sunday.

  ‘Did you miss me?’ Walpole said. ‘Did anything happen while I was away?’

  Of course she missed him. But nothing had happened at all.

  It never once occurred to her that there might have been some sort of deceit in this. If anybody were being deceitful it was Walpole. What she did with Robert Prentice actually took place, as it seemed to her, in a world apart, a privileged, private world in which Walpole had no place.

  ‘I’ve got a surprise for you,’ Walpole said and asked her to shut her eyes.

  When she opened them again it was to find herself holding a necklace of amethysts, particularly dark ones of burning violet, set in gold.

  ‘Oh! I’ve never had jewellery. Never really before. I couldn’t afford it. I always said I’d never have any if I couldn’t afford the best.’

  Later that afternoon Walpole found himself in stunned contemplation of the most extraordinary vision he had ever see
n in his life: that of Maisie lying full length on the bed, wearing nothing but the amethysts. This one glowing piece of decoration had the effect of even making her unprepossessing face, with its colourless, tepid skin, seem celestially ravishing, so that he actually went down on his knees to her, hopelessly, almost prayerfully entranced.

  The effect on him of incidents of this kind, however, did more than merely entrance him. He began to speak of divorce. He announced that he would go to his wife, tell everything and beg for release from her. He would marry Maisie, bejewel her, make her a partner in the business, set her up on a plane of such delight that she would realize, he assured her, that life had really only just begun.

  Maisie was silently horrified. She shrank from divorce and all its distasteful associations as from something leprous. She wanted no part of the complications of courts, lawyers or even businesses. To be caressed, in isolation, was enough. It gave her refined excitements; it left her free of obligations.

  ‘You must think carefully before you take a step like that,’ she said to Walpole. ‘It’s something you might regret for ever.’

  ‘Are you trying to say that you wouldn’t marry me if I got the divorce?’

  ‘I’m saying it’s something I’d have to think about.’

  ‘You mean you don’t love me?’

  ‘I’ve never said I loved you. I like being with you. I like all the things we do together. Otherwise I wouldn’t do them. But love – I don’t know about that.’

  Her apparent calmness in the face of a situation Walpole regarded as both complex and critical made his own confusions infinitely worse. Beyond confusion he could see, he thought, new and impossible wastes of loneliness; beyond loneliness only intolerable despair.

  He started not to be able to sleep at nights; he wandered about the house, playing interminable games of patience, drinking whisky until the small hours. At business he presented the crumpled appearance of a blind that had been badly rolled up and as badly unrolled again. Creased and slack, he groped at the simplest of problems and accepted defeat with the limpness of a man half-sick. In the eventual and necessary act of pulling himself together he went about barking, hostile as an ill-tempered dog.