The Golden Oriole

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Oh! the Pearce loves her pipe,’ Monty said. ‘Cigars too.’

  ‘We’ll have cigars after supper,’ the Pearce said. ‘We nearly always do when Niggler comes.’

  As the fragrance of roasting chicken filled the air her resentments against Mr Featherstone seemed gradually to cool. She actually thanked him heartily for peeling the spuds – job she personally hated – and asked his opinion on how they should be done – plain boiled or roasted round the chicken?

  ‘Both,’ Niggler said. ‘I’ll do ’em. Leave ’em to me.’

  ‘Marvellous man,’ the Pearce said. ‘Nothing he can’t do. Niggler, where did you learn all these things?’

  ‘Army cook,’ Niggler said. ‘Picked it all up there.’

  ‘I shall never forget that delicious goose your friend let you have last autumn,’ Monty said. ‘That was a dream. You cooked it like an angel.’

  Niggler, modest under the extravagant praise of the goose, puffed at his fag and stared hard at a newspaper, studying form.

  ‘Now there’s a nag here,’ he started to say, ‘what might do us a bit of all right—’

  ‘Don’t want to hear it!’ the Pearce said. ‘Don’t want to hear it! Much prefer not to know. The thrill of the thing is not to know. It might easily break the spell if one knew.’

  Airily Niggler waved a hand, conceding that perhaps the Pearce was right. What the eye didn’t see the heart didn’t grieve over.

  ‘That’s a true word,’ Mr Featherstone said.

  Niggler stared hard, almost as if hurt, at Mr Featherstone, who stood sipping milk and gazing out of the window at a mass of nettles invading what had once been a large rose-bed. The evening was delightful after all, with cuckoos still calling, and flies were dancing in the golden April air.

  ‘Once we even had venison,’ Monty said.

  ‘Good God!’ Mr Featherstone said. ‘You mean you actually brought a deer?’

  ‘Knocked it over with the lorry outside a big park,’ Niggler said. ‘I could hardly leave it dying there, could I?’

  A combination of shag-smoke and that of mild fragrant flake now filled the air. The Pearce stood with trousered legs staunchly apart, puffing at her pipe, and asked Niggler heartily if it wasn’t time the spuds were on? Niggler said he thought it was and got up to perform the necessary tasks, his fag dipping from one corner of his mouth, so that a cloud of ash fell smartly into the saucepan.

  By half past eight, as the meal began, Niggler was well into his fourth pint of beer. The Pearce confessed several times that she was dying of hunger and confided in Mr Featherstone that it was only on the occasions of Niggler’s visit that she and Monty ever had a damn good blow-out like this.

  ‘I can’t cook an egg myself,’ she said, ‘and all Monty can make is toad-in-the-hole.’

  The two ladies and Mr Featherstone each had a glass of sherry with the meal and immediately before the attack on the chickens began the Pearce lifted her glass and said:

  ‘Well, here’s to your good friend who kindly lets us have the chickens.’

  ‘Here’s to my friend,’ Niggler said, studiously avoiding Mr Featherstone’s chilly eye, ‘bless his heart.’

  After that it was almost a free for all. Hungry as any trawlerman on the high seas, Mr Featherstone pronounced in a simmering stammer of enthusiasm that the food was frightfully, frightfully good. He congratulated Niggler. If this was the style the army lived in—

  ‘I was cooking for officers in France,’ Niggler said, ‘when all we’d got was ‘K’ rations. That’s the time it finds you – when you got to conjure up trout with almonds and duckling in red wine sauce out of ‘K’ rations.’

  ‘Conjure is the word,’ Mr Featherstone said.

  A little later he looked up to see the Pearce attacking a chicken bone, already deprived of most of its meat, with the voracity of a starved dog, gnawing at it as she grasped it in both hands. Monty was more polite; she merely sucked at hers, as at a lollipop.

  Niggler was shovelling in green peas with a knife and explaining between swigs of beer, how he had once had a delightful little arrangement with a countess at a chateau. Very convenient – sort of give and take—

  ‘She gave and you took, I suppose,’ Mr Featherstone said.

  Niggler made noises indicating that his pride was hurt.

  ‘No: I gave and she took,’ he said. ‘She had some of the best brandy you ever tasted.’

  Niggler’s astute mention of brandy reminded the Pearce that she had been saving half a bottle since Christmas. About this time Niggler asked permission to take off his jacket and sat for the rest of the time in his braces, occasionally belching. Now and then he described incidents of a romantic order involving girls in Flemish farmhouses, to which Monty and the Pearce listened with a combination of laughter, envy and awe.

  Soon the brandy appeared, together with a cigar for Niggler and one for the Pearce. The evening darkened and cuckoos ceased to call. With fluting charm Monty asked what time the lorry would be leaving in the morning. Whatever time it was there would be an early cup of tea.

  At the same time the Pearce reminded Niggler of the weekly flutter. She was going to have three pounds on this week; the meal had been so good she felt positively reckless. Monty said she would stick to her usual two – she had been reading her stars that morning and they pronounced in favour of some caution in financial affairs.

  ‘Better give you the money now,’ the Pearce said, ‘in case it slips our minds tomorrow,’ and Niggler pocketed the fiver with the polite and slightly absent restraint of a man accepting a cigarette.

  Having pocketed the money, disposed of most of the brandy and finished the cigar Niggler announced that he was just about ready to kip down. Mr Featherstone was going to have a real bed in the spare room but he, Niggler, would be perfectly happy on the kitchen sofa. He’d kipped there before.

  With something like choral adoration in their voices the two ladies said ‘Good-night’ and thanked Niggler over and over again for his company, his generosity and above all his thoughtfulness. It was so thoughtful of him to remember the chickens; it had absolutely made their day.

  Left alone in the kitchen, Niggler prepared to kip down. He had scarcely begun to remove his collar and tie when a tap on the kitchen door was followed by Monty’s whispered voice asking if she might come in.

  ‘It was about the chickens,’ she said.

  As she attempted to slip a pound note into his hand Niggler made a pretence of recoiling painfully, as if the money would positively burn holes in his fingers.

  ‘No, no, no,’ he said. He spoke as if being mildly insulted. ‘Couldn’t do that. They were a present from me.’

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please. Not another word. I knew the Pearce wouldn’t do it because she’s so frightfully forgetful. And I couldn’t very well do it in front of Mr Featherstone because it would have been embarrassing.’

  Niggler, accepting this further largesse with something like a sigh, presently started to take off his shoes and trousers. He was still unlacing his shoes when the Pearce announced her presence by giving a sharp masculine ‘Rum-tiddly-um-pum’ on the kitchen door. She too had come about the chickens.

  With a voice wrung by injured pride Niggler protested that he couldn’t accept a penny for the chickens. It was all done in the name of friendship.

  ‘Of course. I know that,’ the Pearce said. ‘But even so you have to pay your friend. Don’t be foolish, dear boy. Take it – I might have forgotten it. You don’t know how forgetful I am.’

  With a heavy show of reluctance Niggler pocketed another pound.

  ‘Soon,’ he said, as if in an attempt to atone for it all, ‘the green peas’ll be in. When they are I’ll try to get a couple o’ nice young ducks. I think I know where I could pick up some good ’uns.’

  ‘Delicious, delicious,’ she said. ‘Good-night, dear boy. Sweet dreams. We’ll call you at six with tea.’

  ‘They’re the sort what don’t get married,’ N
iggler said to Mr Featherstone as they drove away the following morning, the information being imparted as if it were a profound discovery.

  After a good breakfast of bacon, sausage and eggs, with plenty of toast, marmalade and coffee, Niggler was also well provisioned for the day with two bottles of beer, several hard-boiled eggs, a hand of bananas, a stout wedge of fruit cake and half a cold chicken still plentifully packed with stuffing.

  ‘Speaking of marriage,’ Mr Featherstone said, ‘are you married?’

  ‘Oh! yes,’ Niggler said. ‘Don’t see much of the old trouble-and-strife, though.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it’s rather hard sometimes.’

  ‘Question of give and take,’ Niggler said. ‘Can’t have it all ways, can you? I mean if you’re here you can’t be there, can you?’

  Mr Featherstone waited for some moments for this enigmatic sentence to be enlarged upon but after an almost sad if not sorrowful sigh from Niggler the dark hints went wholly unpursued.

  It was a fresh, sunny morning, with cuckoos calling everywhere, and there was a spring sweetness in the air so far unblemished by Niggler’s clouds of shag.

  ‘Lovely morning,’ Niggler kept saying. ‘Good to be alive.’

  Mr Featherstone eventually remarked with restrained acidity that he should think it was too. After what happened last night.

  ‘Here, steady on, Feather,’ Niggler spoke again with an air of profoundly wounded pride. ‘You’re comin’ the old philosophical a bit this morning, ain’t you?’

  ‘Philosophical! I’ve just decided what your philosophy is,’ Mr Featherstone said. ‘It’s one of the oldest. What’s yours is mine, what’s mine’s my own.’

  ‘Here, that’s a bit orf,’ Niggler said, ‘ain’t it? That’s a bit steep.’

  ‘Look what you did to the ladies,’ Mr Featherstone said. ‘You know perfectly well you put less than half that money on the horses.’

  ‘Yes, but they had the chickens. I give ’em the chickens, didn’t I?’

  ‘But good God, man, they weren’t yours to give! They belonged to that wretched farmer—’

  ‘Yes, but I done him a good turn, didn’t I?’

  ‘Good turn?’

  ‘I give him the number of that Ford Zephyr, didn’t I?’

  ‘But there wasn’t any Ford Zephyr!’

  ‘No,’ Niggler said darkly, ‘but they might have been. You never know. Probably full of blokes on the fiddle too.’

  ‘For Heaven’s sake, man,’ Mr Featherstone said, ‘how do you know they’d be on the fiddle even if they were there?’

  ‘Everybody’s on the fiddle,’ Niggler said blandly. ‘You included.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Course. You’re fiddlin’ lifts. You’re a college man. You ought to be bleedin’ well payin’ good money to the railways, but you’re hitchin’ lifts instead. No wonder the railways don’t make no bleedin’ profits. How the bleedin’ hell can they with blokes like you fiddlin’ and mugs like me harbourin’ you in it all the time’?

  Delivered with steady but good-natured passion, this speech had the effect of reducing Mr Featherstone to complete silence for some time.

  ‘That’s me,’ Niggler said. ‘Joe Mug. Always doin’ everybody a good turn. Gettin’ chickens here. Geese there. Cookin’ ’em. Layin’ money on the gee-gees. Givin’ lifts. Blimey, I’ve saved you the bleedin’ fare to Penzance, ain’t I?’

  Mr Featherstone was beginning to think that this was, perhaps, a prudent moment in which to change the subject.

  ‘I must say too that I thought that beer-trap for rats was a bit tall.’

  With a voice of mild innocence Niggler confessed that in fact it was, in a way.

  ‘How do you mean, in a way?’

  ‘Well,’ Niggler said, ‘they was overrun with rats and asked me if I knew of anything that could be done. All they had to drink in the house at that time was milk and water. I couldn’t go rat-catchin’ on that. I’d had eight hours drivin’ in heavy rain. So I said I’d set my patent beer-trap if they’d get the beer in. They did.’

  Mr Featherstone laughed briefly.

  ‘You’ll be telling me next you’ve got a patent brandy-trap for pheasants.’

  Niggler answered by saying that as a matter of fact he had. You soaked raisins in brandy – or gin, or whisky, it didn’t much matter – and stuck them on fish-hooks. The pheasants went for them bald-headed and dropped down like flies.

  Again Mr Featherstone deemed it a prudent moment in which to change the subject.

  ‘By the way, speaking of driving,’ he said, ‘shall we make Penzance tonight?’

  ‘Not tonight,’ Niggler said. ‘Have to kip down with some more friends of mine.’

  ‘Ladies again?’

  ‘Wimmin again,’ Niggler said. ‘Mother and daughter. Very nice. Daughter about your age. Might suit you.’

  With caustic brevity Mr Featherstone made it clear that he hardly cared for such casual associations.

  ‘That may be,’ Niggler said. He had started to roll, with customary deftness, one of his lethal cigarettes. ‘But when you’re like me, away from home an’ all that, you’ve got to look arter these little kips. They save lolly. They come in handy.’

  Smoke filled the air in pungent, evil clouds.

  ‘You ain’t in all that much of a tearin’ hurry, are you?’ Niggler said. ‘I mean is Auntie expectin’ you?’

  ‘Oh! no, oh! no. I was merely asking.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. Didn’t want to keep Auntie waitin’.’

  ‘Oh! she simply expects me when she sees me. She never worries. She’s got her companion and all the servants around. Plenty to occupy her.’

  ‘All the servants? Difficult to get these days, ain’t they?’

  ‘Oh! They’ve all been with her for donkey’s years.’

  Fag dangling precariously from one side of his mouth, Niggler remarked out of the other that it sounded as if Auntie was pretty well breeched. ‘You know, comfortable?’

  ‘Oh! yes, you could say that. She has this really rather nice house by the sea.’

  ‘Goin’ to spend all your holiday with her?’

  ‘I always do. You see, it’s really my home. I’ve got no father or mother. She’s my guardian and all that.’

  After listening to all this Niggler stubbed out his fag and remarked that it seemed funny that Auntie didn’t send him the railway fare.

  ‘Oh! she would. Like a shot. But it’s more fun this way.’

  ‘I see. I just thought she might be on the near side or summat like that.’

  On the contrary, Mr Featherstone confided. She was most generous, without being extravagantly so. She always saw him very comfortable at the beginning of every term.

  It now seemed an excellent moment, Niggler thought, for him to change the subject.

  ‘This friend of mine and her daughter keep a very nice pull-up dinin’-rooms,’ he said. ‘The grub’s not bad. They often have very nice mackerel done with mustard in the season. And about the best sausage-and-mash in the country. Don’t know if you like that?’

  Oddly enough, Mr Featherstone said, it was one of his favourite dishes. There was a place in Oxford to which he often went and they did it pretty superbly there.

  ‘Then you’ll be quids-in tonight,’ Niggler said. ‘Don’t suppose it’ll cost us a penny either.’

  ‘No? You seem to have very generous friends on all sides.’

  ‘Well—’

  Niggler, pausing, seemed to drift away into a sudden dream. The face that in its many distortions seemed to have been flattened by a mighty blow softened appreciably, in a not insensitive way, almost in fact sentimental. The darting blue eyes seemed to reach out and, as it were, finger the distant landscape of leafing hawthorns, budding oaks and occasional cowslip fields with a warm, fond sense of anticipation.

  ‘Well, it’s a bit difficult to explain,’ Niggler said. ‘It’s a bit more than friendship with Lil an’ me. Well, I mean, we got a sort of special
arrangement.’

  The very nice pull-up dining-rooms, called The Rose of Killarney Café, consisted of a stucco bungalow and two disused railway carriages painted bright vermilion with window frames in equally brilliant mustard. Two tin chimneys, looking very like leg pieces from a suit of armour, stuck out of the carriage tops, belching dark smoke across a hillside already cloudy with impending rain.

  An odour as if perhaps cart grease were being fried came out of the railway carriages, the windows of which were thickly steamed with fog. Across the cinder pull-in outside the café a few lorries were parked but not half so many, Niggler said, as usual. It was Friday night and blokes were making for home.

  Inside the dining-rooms the odour of frying cart-grease not only became increasingly more powerful. It was now shot with searching flavours as diverse as fish and bacon, pickles and mutton chops, sausages, boiling ham and vinegar.

  A big fat girl of seventeen or eighteen with hands of dough and a home-style perm was serving at red-topped tables where several drivers sat washing down plates of food, mostly sausage-and-mash, with large pots of steaming tea. The permed hair, very blonde, had something of the violent appearance of a yellow golliwog recently frightened by something very shocking in the dark.

  ‘Oh! Mum, it’s Niggler! Mum, Niggler’s here!’

  The voice of the girl was plummy. It fell on Mr Featherstone’s ears with all the distastefulness of a moist and disconcerting kiss.

  ‘Be back in a jiff, Feather,’ Niggler said. ‘Must pop into the kitchen. Make yourself at home. How’s Eadie?’ he asked of the fat girl. ‘This is my friend, Mr Feather. Expect he’d like a cuppa.’

  ‘Any relation of Mrs Feather?’ the fat girl said and laughed in Mr Featherstone’s face with rich and companionable fervour from a chest ample as a pumpkin. ‘Don’t suppose so?’

  ‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Featherstone.’

  Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Niggler was being not only cordially but desperately embraced by a stoutish woman who had previously been frying sausages and was now in an almost fainting attitude.