The Golden Oriole

by H. E. Bates

  After four or five miles he stopped the car at the crest of the river valley. Down below, the river wound clear blue through wide meadows where red and white cattle grazed not unlike crowds of quiet ladybirds.

  ‘Peaceful,’ he said. ‘Could sleep.’

  ‘Me too.’

  For ten minutes or more he slept quite soundlessly. At first she shut her eyes too, but soon she felt restless and opened them. The chrysalis was stirring again and she sat staring in contemplation first at the valley below and then at Archie Bishop, no longer the clowning cockerel of the morning but a man sunk into an amazing trance of tranquility.

  When he opened his eyes it was to find her still staring into his face.

  ‘That’s a nice sight to wake up to,’ he said and turned slowly, kissing her fully and quickly on the mouth.

  ‘Just for luck,’ he said, with the merest touch of former lightness. ‘A free gift.’

  ‘Why luck?’

  ‘Everybody needs a little now and then.’

  ‘You treat all the girls like this? Don’t tell me you don’t, because you do.’

  ‘Those who know should never ask,’ he said. ‘Yes: absolutely right. Come one, come all. Married or single. Young or old. Same treatment.’

  ‘It’s comforting for all of us to know where we stand.’

  ‘Of course. I’m a fair-minded man.’

  ‘Do you suppose,’ she said, ‘there’ll ever be one who’ll be luckier than the rest?’

  ‘“I doubt it,” said the carpenter, and shed a bitter tear.’

  He grinned and then soberly, and for a little longer this time, kissed her a second time. To her astonishment the kiss had on her much the same effect as the embalming October afternoon. It seemed to seal all her emotions somewhere down in the deep core of herself, filling her with a profound and unexpected satisfaction.

  She felt, in her amazement, that she had to say something about this, and after staring down for some time at the meadows she said:

  ‘It was a big surprise, kissing you. I didn’t think it would be like that with you.’

  ‘Ah. The lady tactfully expresses disappointment.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I just didn’t think it would be like that, that’s all.’

  ‘Not quite enough zip?’ he said. She could feel the quips feeding themselves into his mouth, like bullets into a gun. ‘Of course I have other techniques.’

  Quietly she turned and took his face into her two hands, holding it there for fully half a minute before speaking.

  ‘It was very moving,’ she said.

  That evening, alone, she sat down and wrote two letters, in reality the same letter: one to Walpole and the other to Robert Prentice.

  ‘It must have been obvious to you for some time that this couldn’t go on. It isn’t that I’m not fond of you. It isn’t that at all. It’s simply that the longer we go on the worse the complications will be. It simply wouldn’t be fair to you if I let you go on thinking that I loved you or that I might perhaps love you in time. I know now that I never have – please will you try very hard to forgive me this? – and that I’m sure I never will.’

  After she had been out to post the letters she went back to her room and sat for some time looking out of her window at the clear night sky. An autumnal planet of great splendour, setting with a ripe glow in the west, seemed to reflect in the calmest distillation all the peace of the golden afternoon.

  As she sat there she started to think of Archie Bishop: not so much of the clowning cockerel with the facile quips, the carelessness and the quick magical banter, as of the few serious moments in the car, apparently on the surface light-hearted too, when she had finally confessed to him:

  I’ll count all the minutes till you come back. I will, really. Don’t be more than a week if you can help it, please. Promise me?’

  With the lightest of promises Archie Bishop declared his earnest intention of being back in no time at all. The bad penny, he reminded her, the bad penny.

  Again, and for almost a minute, she held his face in her hands. The chrysalis was moving now in its final tortuous struggles to be free and as she kissed him again she was so oblivious of everything outside her that she didn’t even bother to lift his hands to her hair. That easy, simple, electrifying gesture was necessary no longer.

  ‘I’ve never been kissed like that before,’ she said. ‘I never knew it was such a serious thing.’

  Neither Walpole nor Robert Prentice showed even a little willingness to forgive.

  After three tortured and intolerable days Robert Prentice borrowed a .22 shot-gun from the landlord of The George Hotel and, on the pretext of wanting to shoot rabbits, walked down to the river one evening and blew out his brains on the small jetty where townspeople hired boats and punts and did a little sailing at weekends.

  With demented forethought he left a letter for the manager of his bank, expressing sorrow for all he had done, and another to the coroner. In his note to the bank manager, a brief one, he wrote: It can’t be possible that God had to send me to this town just to meet a woman like Maisie Foster. It just can’t be possible. There must be some other sort of mercy I might have been granted.’

  With some indiscretion the bank manager, greatly upset, showed the letter to his wife who, under promise of silence, instantly spoke of it to her sister.

  When rumour started to poison the town Ashley Walpole went about in solitary horror, trying to nurse a mind broken to near craziness by hideous jealousies. He savagely conceived that he knew, now, why Maisie had written to him, why the turquoise afternoons were now all over. But if he bitterly hated the young man who had been stupid and unstable enough to make an unholy mess of himself at the boating jetty it was no more than mere petulance compared with the thoughts, revengeful to a point of black ghoulishness, that began to obsess him about Maisie. It was now not merely a question of not being able to sleep at nights. He tramped endlessly about the town, carrying an ancient umbrella that he had hastily snatched up either as if for a source of comfort or as a weapon. With this he made wild stupefied threats at the night sky and sometimes the umbrella came violently undone, flapping like a terrified mad bat with broken wings.

  Presently the local station sergeant thought it prudent to warn patrolling night constables of the possibility of running into that raving lunatic, Ashley Walpole, ‘who gets savage with the moon. They say he drinks them dry at the Liberal Club every night. He hit a steward with an umbrella the other evening and had to be carted out.’

  In final frenzy, late one night towards the end of November, Walpole half-ran, half-rolled to Maisie’s door and struck it several blows with the handle of the umbrella, a panting constable following him on heavy steps half a street away.

  Maisie, who had not been able to sleep well for some weeks either, was lying in a trance of recollection about Archie Bishop when the knocks came. She had waited a long time for Bishop. With an actual ache in her heart, much as Walpole had done, she had brooded alone and for a long time on small things. The little forces made up of looks, gestures, quips and finally a few revelatory sober kisses had become magnified until they too were like great dark bats, haunting her.

  She came out of the trance in a start of great excitement, telling herself that only that joker Archie could be knocking on her door in that way and so late.

  She hastily slipped into a dressing gown and rushed downstairs, only to open the door to a raging frenzy from Walpole, who started to batter her savagely about the face with the big bat-like umbrella, shouting:

  ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll murder you. I’ll kill you so help me!—’

  The threat of murder is a serious matter, more especially when made within the hearing of a policeman, and at Walpole’s trial the judge was at great pains to point out to the jury that the court was a court of law, not of morals. Whether or not a woman had been the lover of one man or even two was irrelevant; it was a shocking and wicked thing for her to be confronted, at the door of her own house,
in the dead of night, totally unprepared and defenceless, by a visitor whose palpable intention it was to kill. A woman had a perfect right to choose or reject her friends, or even her lovers, as and when she wished, and however painful such rejection might be to the rejected it could never in any circumstances be an excuse for taking the law into his own hands. It was fortunate indeed that a police officer had been in earshot that night, otherwise they might have now been listening to a graver charge. It was fortunate also that the prisoner had previously been a man of excellent, in fact exemplary character, otherwise the sentence might have been far longer than the two years he now imposed.

  A shattered Walpole, in stricken silence, listened without hearing a word. He stared into spaces beyond the courtroom with a peculiar, penetrative concentration, eyes half closed, as if searching for a tiny and barely perceptible object in the far distances: a scrap of colour, a turquoise button or even perhaps an amethyst.

  As the winter dusks began to close in earlier and earlier Maisie fell once again into her old habit of isolation. She kept herself to herself; she was busy with her needle; she hardly went out at all. She waited quietly, steadfastly, even with a sort of patience, for Archie Bishop, for ever listening to the echo of voices.

  ‘There’s nothing so think but meaning makes it so,’ was one of the many silly inconsequential phrases that all through the long winter roamed hauntingly about her mind, together with another, ‘You have an angelic needle, dear lady. Quite an angelic needle.’

  And still a third, putting its constant nagging question into the quietness of the little house: ‘Do you suppose there’ll ever be one luckier than the rest?’ and its great dark bat of an answer:

  ‘“I doubt it,” said the carpenter, and shed a bitter tear.’

  The Golden Oriole

  Every evening when he came home from the office Mr Mansfield knew that his wife would be hiding from him somewhere. She had been hiding for many years.

  It was not always easy, even in a rather large Edwardian house surrounded by dense old shrubberies of laurustinus and lilac and rose and rhododendron, together with a kitchen garden full of apple and pear trees and currant bushes, to find a new place in which to hide away every evening and he tried always to be fair. Even when he guessed where Mrs Mansfield would be hiding – in the early days of their marriage a favourite place in the summer was among the currant bushes and in winter she often buried herself behind the coats and hats hanging in the cloakroom or behind the thick red curtains in the hall – he tried not to guess too soon. It was nice to prolong the sensation of having lost her and then to enjoy, with a sudden skipping thrill, the experience of finding her again, as if for the first time.

  Mr Mansfield, who was in insurance, was rather a heavy man of fifty with plummy grey cheeks and slow slate-coloured eyes. His clothes sat on him baggily. Skipping of any kind seemed to be utterly foreign to his nature. He moved gracelessly and when sometimes he was late for the train in the morning he trotted rather than ran the last few yards to the station, feet barely rising from the ground, his floppy trousers giving him an earnest, obedient, elephantine air.

  By contrast his wife, though in her middle forties, seemed to have an almost girlish look about her. This seemed largely due to her excessively light fair hair, light in texture as well as tone, in which there was not the faintest trace of grey. Her eyes, a very smooth pale blue, were as fresh as birds’ eggs, with the same air of pristine innocence, lightly touched with wonder.

  As the years went past she began to find more subtle hiding places. Sometimes these were so difficult that she eventually had to make small noises, bird-like or mouse-like or even like the purring of a cat, before Mr Mansfield’s attention could be finally attracted. She hid on one occasion in a big old-fashioned wheelbarrow, with a piece of dirty sacking over her, so that she might have been mistaken for a sack of potatoes. On another she crept under a large empty barrel, generally used for blanching rhubarb. The open bung-hole of the barrel made it possible for her to spy on Mr Mansfield as he roamed with elephantine caution and concern about the kitchen garden, softly calling ‘Prinny! Prinny!’ his pet name for her, a diminutive of princess.

  ‘You really are my princess,’ he had said to her many years before. ‘I want to put you on a throne. I want to keep you there.’

  Whenever she was eventually found – she remained undiscovered in the barrel for nearly half an hour – she always broke into a strange splintered sort of laughter. A feeling of fear and joy ran through her and the laughter had a girlish, virginal, half-frightened tone.

  ‘Prinny, my Prinny, I really thought I’d lost you that time.’

  One evening in early June Mr Mansfield was padding heavily up the gravel drive towards the house when he suddenly noticed, under the branches of a crimson rhododendron, a dying thrush. He stooped and, with great concern, picked up the bird with both hands, cradling the still warm, white-gold breast in his palms.

  ‘I’ll take you into the house,’ he said in a crooning sort of voice. ‘Milk – warm milk – that’s what I’ll give you,’ and it was almost as if he were speaking to Prinny.

  In fact, for once, he had completely forgotten Prinny. In his deep concern for the thrush – he began to give it little sips of milk with the aid of a salt spoon – all thought of Prinny had strangely slipped his mind. It was more than an hour before he thought again of Prinny, his princess, and Prinny’s hiding places.

  Meanwhile, in the kitchen, he wrapped the thrush in a piece of flannel and laid it on top of the warm stove. The bird opened its mouth peakily from time to time and glassily rolled an eye. Continuously Mr Mansfield stroked its feathers and murmured words of comfort:

  ‘You’ll sing again. Take it quietly. You’re going to be all right. I’ll see you sing again.’

  When at last the bird twitched a wing strongly enough to lift the edge of the flannel Mr Mansfield gave a positive crow of relieved delight. He felt that he wanted to seize the bird and toss it, like a released dove of peace, into the air. His feelings at the slow restoration of life were expressed in that same skipping thrill he always experienced on finding Prinny in her hiding place.

  A moment or two later Prinny walked into the kitchen. Her customary air of innocence, touched with wonder, seemed strained. Her face, unusually pale, seemed almost embalmed behind a stiff transparent shell.

  ‘Wherever have you been? What are you doing? Whatever has happened?’

  ‘Happened?’ Mr Mansfield said. ‘It’s the thrush. It was dying—’

  ‘Thrush? But where have you been?’

  ‘Here,’ Mr Mansfield said. ‘Here. All the time. I’ve been nursing the thrush. It was in the garden, dying, and I’ve got it back to life again. It flapped its wing just now—’

  Prinny did not appear to be listening. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask Mr Mansfield why he had forgotten to come to find her, but before she could open her mouth the words rolled themselves suddenly into a stony ball. A moment later it seemed to drop with a bruising thud into the deep cavity of her heart and lie there frozen.

  At the same time she was aware of another sensation. She felt a curious hot confusion about her eyes. Mr Mansfield, picking up the thrush and unfolding it with all the considerate tenderness in the world from its swaddling flannel, like a baby, suddenly seemed to her, for the first time in her life, a figure of monstrous irritation.

  ‘Oh! why all the panic about a thrush?’ she said and the words, piercingly uttered, were so unlike her that Mr Mansfield actually picked one out and shot at it with an arrow of amazed concern.

  ‘Panic? Panic? Whatever do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ she said and a moment later ran from the room. ‘How should I know?’

  They ate supper coldly, hardly speaking. Her jealous brooding on the thrush kept her separate, invested with a sense of ridicule. That evening she had chosen to hide herself in an old aviary, no longer used, at the bottom of the garden, and for an hour or more
she had stayed there in isolation, uttering beseeching musical cries, hoping Mr Mansfield would hear her as a bird.

  ‘It was merely that I couldn’t bear to see it dying,’ Mr Mansfield told her several times. ‘I was coming to find you – of course I was—’

  She had no answer to give. The joy of hiding and being found seemed, for once, a stupid thing.

  For a few evenings she made no hiding place for herself. She sat instead on the lawn, in a deck chair, in open view, reading or sewing or merely staring at the flowers.

  ‘Ah! there you are,’ Mr Mansfield said, with an enforced cordiality that might have been born of surprise, as if in fact she had been hiding and he had really found her. ‘Train was a bit late, I’m afraid.’

  Mr Mansfield’s kiss on her forehead brought no response from her. She merely looked about her coldly.

  Then, after a few evenings, she relented. It was childish to sulk, she told herself. It was silly to be stubborn. It was unthinkable that she should never again hide away and, having hidden, taste the joy of being found.

  She decided at last to hide in an apple tree. That particular June evening was exceptionally warm and sultry; on the house wall, facing south, a thousand yellow roses were in bloom, big soft curds of petals spreading fragrance even as far as the apple tree, where she sat half-curled up in the mass of leaves.

  For some time she waited with excitement, listening. The train, she told herself several times, was late again. Then, looking at her watch, she made the astonishing discovery that in her excitement she had entirely mistaken the time. She had really hidden herself a full hour too soon.

  In the brooding sultry afternoon she dropped into a doze. Presently she vaguely heard what she thought was the sound of a thrush battering a snail on a path and she woke with the beginnings of a renewed irritation that vanished when she realized that the sound was really that of footsteps coming up the drive. Mr Mansfield was home.