The Golden Oriole

by H. E. Bates

  When he begged Maisie to let him come to see her more often and even suggested Sunday as a new field in which they could be alone together he took her refusal as meaning another withdrawal of affection. Compassionately she begged him not to be silly, to take life easy, to live for the day; but in renewed moods of self-pity he could only feel that salt was being rubbed into the open sores of his soul.

  ‘But why not Sunday? It would be simple. All day together.’

  ‘Because Sunday is my day. I share it with myself.’

  The fact that she always shared most of it with Robert Prentice never struck her as being a fresh deceit or as being a source of danger, perhaps even a source of complexities so potentially twisted that they might perhaps grow tragic. She was free; she could please herself who she spent her days and nights with. As quiet as ever, she even drew satisfaction from lying awake at night, imagining first that Walpole was making love to her, then that Prentice was the one beside her in the bed. It was nice to compare their idiosyncrasies, their differing ways of expressing affection: Walpole cooler, slower, older, but skilled in the final, passionate act of satisfaction; Prentice spirited and quick, warm and excited even to the extent, sometimes, of being lyrical.

  Robert Prentice begged too to see her more often. Couldn’t he come in during the evenings sometimes? He finished pretty early these days at the bank; the evenings were awfully long and deadly.

  Her answer was almost word for word the one she always gave to Walpole:

  ‘The evenings are my own. I share them with myself. After all I have a long hard day.’

  He too took it to mean, as he felt it only could mean, a rejection of love. He too started brooding. There was an actual ache in his heart, stone-like, as he went on long walks, wretchedly beating out the oppressive minutes till Sunday. She in turn begged him, as she had begged Walpole, to take their friendship as nothing more than friendship, to enjoy her company like a glass of wine.

  ‘Let’s just get a little intoxicated, then sleep it off and start all over again.’

  It was impossible for his brooding soul to make sense of advice of that kind and one Sunday it seemed to her that, if driven much farther into himself, he might actually start weeping. She tried to counteract this boring possibility by making him drink another glass or two of wine and then, when that didn’t work, had a better idea.

  She excused herself, saying she wanted to powder her nose, and went into her bedroom. After five minutes she called him, saying she had something to show him, a surprise, and would he come in?

  A few moments later he was staring down at the same vision that had so shatteringly distracted Walpole: that of Maisie lying full length on the bed, naked except for Walpole’s necklace of glowing purple fire.

  As he saw her he did not bow down, as Walpole had done, with prayerful entrancement. He simply laughed with an amazed joy. ‘I thought that might cheer you up,’ she said and she laughed too. It seemed a nice sort of joke to her.

  And then, two or three weeks later, something else of unexpected importance happened. She met a third and far more interesting man.

  Breezily and busily he stepped into her life on a warm morning in late September: a traveller in electric sewing machines named Archie Bishop.

  ‘You want the best sewing machines? I got ’em. You want service? I give. You want to pay by instalment? I got the longest instalment plan since Delilah cut off Samson’s hair.’

  Quick as an eel, Archie Bishop never allowed his body a single breath in which to be still. His hands were semaphoric flags, flashing messages everywhere. His small brown eyes popped about in the volatile fashion of knobs of popcorn dancing up and down in a patent street-corner cooker. His neat golden moustache sparked with points of gingery fire.

  ‘Now, Miss Foster, we have three models. There’s the Olympus, the new de-luxe. Then there’s the Diana – bigger and better than Dors. And the Sheraton – the super-duper, out-and-outer. It does everything but make the tea.’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘You’ll do twice as much work in half the time and have bags of time left for having fun you never thought you could afford even if you’d got the time which you never had. Now where could I do a demonstration?’

  ‘Listen,’ Maisie said. ‘I do not want an electric sewing machine.’

  ‘You mean you think you don’t want one.’ A spontaneous, friendly laugh, about the twentieth of the morning, split the air. ‘There’s nothing so think but meaning makes it so.’

  ‘Also, if you don’t mind,’ Maisie said, ‘I don’t happen to have electricity.’

  ‘We’ll put it in!’ Archie Bishop said. ‘I’ll halve my commission and pay for it myself!’ He permitted himself the luxury of an abrupt, stunned laugh. ‘You haven’t what? Madam, in this day and age! You have not got electricity? Shades of Benjamin Franklin. I grow faint, Miss Foster. I fail—’

  ‘I manage perfectly well with gas,’ Maisie said. ‘It suits me perfectly—’

  ‘So you’re cooking with gas, now?’ he said, in mock American accents. ‘Great. Why not charcoal burners?’

  ‘Look, I’m awfully sorry, but I’m very, very busy—’

  ‘Busy? We’re all busy. Those who aren’t busy are dead.’ His hands made sharp concessionary contortions in the air. ‘Very well. As you wish. My time is yours. I can come back whenever you say. After lunch. After tea. Tomorrow. Next week. Christmas Eve, Good Friday—’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want the machine. I don’t want a demonstration. I don’t want anything. Besides, it’s lunch time.’

  ‘Have lunch with me!’

  ‘No thanks. I close for the lunch hour. I have to get my own.’

  ‘I can cook. I make omelettes. They look like leather. Chamois leather.’ Another laugh, infectious this time, actually caused Maisie to forget herself and break into a brief spontaneous giggle. He was quick to seize on this unexpected gesture of friendliness and said: ‘I must say I like the dress. I like the little itsy-bitsy, forget-me-notty, little-bit-of spotty, polka-dot—’

  Maisie was wearing a neat sleeveless dress of white linen covered in pale blue polka dots. The day was warm for late September, but in the dress she looked quiet, composed and cool.

  ‘Make it yourself?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You don’t need an electric sewing machine, Miss Foster,’ he said with sudden mock seriousness. ‘You have an angelic needle, dear lady. Quite an angelic needle. Bishop, you clueless moron, what in the name of holy silkworms are you up to?’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, go and have your lunch,’ Maisie said. ‘Do.’

  ‘Splendid thought! But I’ll be back.’ He laughed, took out a diary stuffed with dates, notes, addresses and figures, flipped over its leaves and said: ‘Now let’s see. I’ve got two aged widows to rob at half past two. A blind spinster at three o’clock and – how about five o’clock?’

  Five o’clock, Walpole’s hour, was utterly out of the question and for a second Maisie broke out of her customary quietness with a real bark of vexation:

  ‘Now for goodness’ sake get out, will you? I’ve had all I can stand. You’re enough to drive a saint up the wall. For the last time I am very very busy. I’ve got an order for a wedding to finish and I’ll probably be working till midnight—’

  ‘Ravishing thought.’

  ‘Please. Do you mind?’

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.’

  Suddenly, without argument or another quip or protest, Archie Bishop was gone.

  Maisie immediately locked her door, went upstairs and set about boiling herself an egg and making a cup of tea for lunch. Then suddenly she began to feel ashamed of herself for having lost her temper. She felt rather as if she had unjustly scolded a small boy for having played a practical joke on her.

  She ate her lunch moodily. She felt she would have given a good deal to retract the words hurled in temper at Archie Bishop. It was all very small and undignified and as the afternoon went on the incide
nt started to haunt her.

  ‘Oh! well he deserved it. It was enough to make you boil. It’s nothing to fuss about now. People like that get what they deserve.’

  But when Walpole dropped in, as always, about five o’clock, she was still moody, still distracted by self-reproaches.

  ‘No, you really can’t come upstairs today. I haven’t even time to stop for tea.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘There simply isn’t the time, that’s why. I’ve got this wedding order to finish and it has to be done. It has to be right.’

  ‘You seem short-tempered today.’

  ‘Perhaps I am.’

  ‘Is it my fault?’

  ‘I never said it was, but if you like to think so, if you like to think so.’

  The immediate effect of the incident was to drive Walpole further into himself. He withdrew into darker realms of self-pity. He started a parade of anguished suspicions about her. There was another man; he was sure of it; she had another lover.

  The effect on her was precisely the opposite. She felt increasingly self-critical. She worked on the wedding order restlessly, her mind continually snapping at itself. She even began to feel rebellious, for the first time in her life, against seclusion. She wanted to drop everything, rush out and get away somewhere.

  As evening came on she locked the front door and went on working, striving hard to get the wedding order done. About seven o’clock rain started to fall, bringing down the first big papery chestnut leaves in the churchyard. The sound of rain and leaves, in some way ghostly, did nothing to subdue her restlessness and presently she found herself listening for another sound, that of a knock on the door, of Archie Bishop coming back.

  She finished the wedding order about half-past eleven, then made herself some coffee and took it to bed with her.

  ‘I make omelettes. They look like leather. Chamois leather. I’ve got two aged widows to rob at half past two. You have an angelic needle, dear lady. An angelic needle. What in the name of holy silkworms? There’s nothing so think but meaning makes it so.’

  She lay awake for a long time, not thinking so much as working a treadmill of words. Stupid, gay, bright idiotic phrases surrounded in prancing dances, never letting her rest. Little forces, inspired by little gestures, looks and bursts of laughter, marched in on her throughout the night.

  Six months before she would have laughed at herself at the notion of having electricity installed simply because a stranger had slightly mocked her about it; but within a week of that slightly crazy and inconclusive morning meeting with Archie Bishop workmen were in the house, fitting the cables.

  In the installation of electricity she found another excuse to put first Walpole and then Robert Prentice a little farther away from her.

  ‘The house is an absolute pig-sty. No, you really can’t come in. There isn’t anywhere to sit down even. The bedroom is piled with clutter and you can’t turn round. And you know how workmen are—they’ll be ages and ages.’

  The two men, pushed out, brooded in their separate back-waters. The vision of Maisie on the bed, amethyst-clothed, persisted for each of them like a nightmare.

  In turn she had almost succeeded in putting Archie Bishop out of her mind when suddenly, on a morning in October fresh with a touch of frost, she heard a muted whistle at the front door and a voice saying:

  ‘Digging for buried treasure? Ducats or diamonds? Wouldn’t Benjamin be pleased?’

  Archie Bishop, in a new herring-bone pattern overcoat of smart light grey, came breezily into Maisie’s workshop as if life had spurned him in no single instant or particular since she had seen him last. He seemed, if anything, smarter, brighter, more inconsequential than ever.

  ‘More wedding orders today?’

  ‘Not today.’

  ‘Ah! then possibly we might have the little tête-a-tête?’

  ‘I still don’t want the electric sewing machine if that’s what you’re trying to say.’

  The first engaging, effervescent laugh of the morning bubbled about the air.

  ‘I no longer sell electric sewing machines, dear lady. It proved to be très, très difficile. It came to pass that I actually found some people who hadn’t got electricity. Not playing the game. Very awkward.’

  Her normally pallid face suddenly flushed darkly. Neither Walpole nor Robert Prentice had ever said a single word, in sarcasm or fun, to hurt her; in devotion both were blameless. But suddenly the mischief in Archie Bishop’s words went through her like a twisting needle. There were almost tears in her eyes.

  ‘No. Refrigerators now. Every man’s ice-box. Own your own igloo. Ever go to the flicks? Saw a film about Eskimoes the other day. Simple chaps. I believe you could sell them a refrigerator at that.’

  ‘You could.’ Her voice, if not quite bitter, carried sarcastic undertones that were not lost on him. ‘You could sell anybody anything.’

  ‘Now that,’ Archie Bishop said, again with the friendliest of laughs, ‘is what is known as coming the old acid.’

  ‘Whatever that may mean.’

  ‘You know what I always say – there’s nothing so mean but thinking makes it so.’

  ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘it was the other way round?’

  ‘Revised version,’ he said in the briskest of voices. ‘Winter season. All jokes now kept in the deep freeze. Now what about the fridge? Not until you’ve had one will you realize what pineapple and ice can do when you put them into a marriage bed of cream—’

  Whereas, a moment or two before, she had been on the verge of tears she now found herself giving another rather foolish, spontaneous giggle.

  ‘I suppose you talk to everyone like this?’ she said. ‘Even the aged widows?’

  ‘Given up robbing aged widows,’ he said. ‘I concentrate solely on young ones now. And married women.’

  ‘How nice,’ she said. ‘That lets me out.’

  ‘The loss is mine.’

  ‘And what will you do,’ Maisie said, ‘when you can’t sell any more refrigerators?’

  ‘I propose,’ he said, ‘to sell concrete mixers to Socialist conferences.’

  ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘How will that help?’

  ‘Oh! very much,’ he said. ‘Everybody will be able to mix his own concrete conclusions. In seven separate flavours.’

  She laughed again. A sudden strange light-heartedness, of a kind she had never experienced before, ripped quickly through her, leaving her feeling inconsequential too. She had never in her life heard anyone talk as Archie Bishop talked. Every quip, each piece of nonsense thrown off as a conjurer throws off an act, found her unready.

  Upstairs a workman started hammering and outside, across the churchyard, the clock chimed half past twelve. The two events made Archie Bishop lift his head smartly, rather like a handsome cockerel, and say that it was time for a snifter and wouldn’t Maisie nip out and join him in one somewhere?

  ‘Oh! I don’t drink much, thank you. And certainly not in the middle of a working day. Goodness, I’d go to sleep all afternoon.’

  And what, Archie Bishop wanted to know, was wrong with that?

  ‘Nothing, I suppose. Only—’

  ‘Only what? Me? – I always sleep all afternoon. Often. Have half a dozen drinks and a good lunch and then go and lie down in a hay-field somewhere.’

  ‘You’re not serious. Don’t you have to work?’

  ‘Work? What’s work? The man who invented it should have been choked with his dummy tit. Come on, let’s go and have one.’

  All that had happened to her in life, everything of excitement or importance, had hitherto happened in seclusion. In the isolation of the little house she had discovered, by the purest chance, what revolution a simple caress from Walpole could begin; it had been fun to repeat it with Prentice. Now it was exactly as if Archie Bishop had opened a door; at any moment, she felt, the façade of seclusion would start crumbling and melting away.

  ‘Come on, I’ll give you lunch. We’ll have a couple of snifters and
then lunch. And then we’ll take a boat out on the river for the afternoon.’

  ‘I never heard of anything so absurd.’

  ‘No? Just shows you haven’t known Archie from Karachi very long.’ He mocked her gaily, now in the accents of an Eastern gentleman. ‘I sell you big fine carpet?—’

  ‘You came to sell me a fridge and here we are boating—’

  ‘Oh! blow the fridge.’

  ‘I was going to say I’d probably buy one.’

  ‘Haven’t the heart to take the money, lady. Well, not today, anyway. By the way, what’s your other name?’

  ‘Maisie.’

  ‘Maisie, Maisie, give me your answer, do. Will you have lunch with me and boat at half past two?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘My lunch is all prepared and I’ve got to work this afternoon.’

  Soon he again breezed lightheartedly away, leaving her to her solitary lunch upstairs. Since the electricians were still busy in the sitting room she ate her meal of cold ham and salad in the bedroom. Across the churchyard the October afternoon glowed like a golden fruit; in the square the chestnuts burned richly in the sun. She had never before felt lonely in isolation; now she began to feel inexplicably, uncannily restless. She felt herself struggling against seclusion as a chrysalis struggles to free itself after winter.

  At three o’clock Archie Bishop breezed back again, refreshed with four double gins, a lunch of chicken pie and chocolate ice-cream and two cold beers. By no means drunk, he surveyed her on the contrary with an air almost sober, apologetically.

  ‘Played the fool a bit this morning. Of course I’ve got to work. As a matter of fact I’ve got to go over to see a man at Abingford. Wondered if you’d care to come for the drive? Serious, this time. Glorious afternoon.’

  All afternoon she had dreaded the arrival of Walpole; with something like dismay she had looked forward to the five o’clock visit, the fretting frustrations, the soul-searchings.

  ‘I’d love to come,’ she said.

  He drove his car slowly. The sky was like a thin azure globe. Empty wheat-fields caught the clear sunlight and lay like silky yellow squares against greenest patterns of meadowland. In the immense embalming peace of October the colouring trees hardly stirred.