The Golden Oriole

by H. E. Bates

  ‘It was just my whisky,’ Mr Plomley explained. ‘I dropped asleep and forgot it. Georgina and I generally have a couple at lunch-time.’

  Untidy, not to say slovenly, but also a whisky drinker, Phoebe Spencer thought. There was nothing terribly serious about that, of course, but suddenly she found that there was building up, on the receptive canvas of her mind, a picture of a girl whose every quality was unlikeable. She was instinctively hostile to this picture; it irked her sharply. It would not have been by any means an exaggeration on her part to have said that she thought Georgina was a slut.

  Paradoxically she immediately smiled on Mr Plomley, who was now putting the whisky glass on top of the dirty plates, and said:

  ‘I must say I envy you. I mean having a companion and all that. You know, someone to talk to, to have near—’

  Mr Plomley, still nervous from the unpremeditated vision of Phoebe Spencer’s knees, said with sympathetic quietness that he supposed it must be very difficult, alone. He thought he understood how wretched it could be.

  The softness of his voice might have been the brushing of a friendly hand. She held him for a few moments in warm and undisguised acceptance of his understanding, the large candied-peel eyes moistly aglow.

  ‘You’re a very sympathetic person,’ she said, ‘aren’t you? I can feel it.’

  Mr Plomley said he didn’t know about that. It was merely—

  ‘Oh! yes, you are. Georgina knows all about that, I’m sure.’

  The deliberate introduction of Georgina into the conversation, prompted by a violent curiosity, merely succeeded in making Mr Plomley impossibly shy and nervous again. It had been on the tip of his tongue, once and for all, to explain Georgina away. It was better to be frank and avoid all misunderstanding.

  Instead he merely smiled, without a word, and Phoebe Spencer took the smile to mean that she was right.

  ‘I’m not sure I don’t envy Georgina too,’ she said and gave a short provoking laugh. ‘Anyway I’ll bet I’ve got good reason to.’

  Mr Plomley said again that he wouldn’t exactly say that. He didn’t know what he would do without her, no doubt about that, but—

  ‘You said she was pretty and clever.’

  Oh! my God, Mr Plomley thought, I’m in an awful mess. He wished from the depths of his heart that people would leave him alone. He and Georgina, in isolation, understood each other. How on earth was it possible to explain a thing like that to a stranger? Desperately, knowing that every moment merely succeeded in making matters worse, he said:

  ‘I really don’t think you should attach too much importance to what I say about Georgina.’

  The words were all that Phoebe Spencer needed to cheer, indeed encourage her.

  ‘No?’ she said. ‘Well, if you say so. Perhaps I shall have the pleasure of meeting her some time?’

  Mr Plomley said he doubted that. He confessed that Georgina was inclined to be rather difficult – Oh! no, not in the offensive sense he didn’t mean. He simply meant that she kept herself an awful lot to herself. She was very much one on her own. In searching for some word adequately to describe Georgina’s precious singularity he suddenly blurted out before he could stop himself:

  ‘She broods.’

  ‘Oh! does she?’

  The words were dark; they hung in the air like raven’s wings, poised with insinuation.

  ‘Well, not quite in the sense that you think, I mean—’

  Good God, Mr Plomley thought, what on earth am I talking about? A great shadow of self-accusation, darker even than Phoebe Spencer’s words, shot through him. He was in an awful mess, a ghastly, irremediable, insoluble mess. He was really down the drain.

  As if to rescue him from the dark recesses of his predicament Phoebe Spencer suddenly turned on him the full glow of her big candied-peel eyes and said:

  ‘Joe used to be like that. Mostly when he was on night-shift. It was difficult to adapt himself – you know how I mean.’

  Mr Plomley, desperately silent, had not the faintest idea at all what she could mean. He felt he would have liked another good strong whisky to pull himself together and he was actually about to suggest that she joined him in one when he was suddenly startled by an appalling glassy crash from the kitchen.

  ‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘Please excuse me.’

  The sight of Georgina paddling about the kitchen floor in a greyish mess of milk, broken glass and droppings brought all his complicated anguish to the surface in a vitriolic fit of temper. Without knowing really what was happening he did something he had never done before; he picked up Georgina bodily, opened the kitchen door and, shouting, threw her into the yard.

  ‘And don’t look at me like that, you sulky idiot! You know quite well it’s wrong – you’d clean up the mess too if I had my way.’

  The words ‘sulky idiot’ came flying to a disbelieving Phoebe Spencer like a pair of frenzied fireworks exploding in her face. By the time Mr Plomley was back in the room, inconsequentially murmuring something about ‘Frightfully sorry – it was Georgina – didn’t know she was back—’ she was already on the point of leaving. She didn’t want to be involved in any nasty domestic scene.

  Nasty, broody, sulky puss, she thought all the way home, and the house like a pig-sty. What do men see in some of them? she asked herself and could, if she had only known, have got the answer from Mr Plomley himself, who was at that moment standing by the harmonium with Georgina in his arms, saying, half in tears:

  ‘Forgive me, dear, please. Georgina please, please forgive me. I didn’t, didn’t know what I was doing. It was just because someone else was here.’

  For the next four or five days Georgina seemed to sulk. She pecked daintily at her morning coffee-beans. The one egg she laid did not seem to Mr Plomley as large and brown and handsome as before.

  Mr Plomley, self-reproachful, felt that he himself was to blame for these things. He seemed to see in Georgina’s jaundiced eye a reflection of his own ill-temper. Desperately he tried to make it up to her.

  ‘Try to eat a little more mash, dear. I put cream in it this morning. Don’t you want it? You’ll never feel right if you don’t eat, will you? Come on, do try.’

  Georgina, eyelids and beak drooping, merely stared at him as if she had the pip.

  Mr Plomley tried another tactic. It now occurred to him that Georgina’s condition might be much less physical than psychological. Mildly he threatened her.

  ‘You don’t want me to send for the vet, do you? You know what happened last time. You didn’t much care for that, did you?’

  Georgina, affecting renewed sulkiness by letting her head droop in a crumpled heap on her breast feathers, seemed to make it clear that she didn’t think much of vets either.

  ‘There are times when all of us have to help ourselves,’ Mr Plomley said in rather stern fashion. ‘It’s no use giving way. You must pull yourself together.’

  In reply Georgina let out a ragged throaty snarl that might have been a hen-like oath or merely a belch of air. But to Mr Plomley it was yet another sign of sickness. The lustre of her comb had greatly faded. It drooped dreadfully down, like a piece of flabby ham.

  ‘I’ll see if I can get some aspirin from Mrs Spencer. One of them mashed up in milk can do no harm.’

  In his great preoccupation with Georgina’s declining moods he had lost all count of time and when he arrived at the shop two or three minutes later it was to find Phoebe Spencer locking the door and pulling down the blind. He hadn’t seen or spoken to her since the afternoon Georgina had disgraced herself and he himself had behaved even more badly in return. Now she seemed pleased, even delighted, to see him standing there and with pleasant alacrity she unlocked the door and let up the blind.

  ‘Just closing, but it’s perfectly all right. Come in, come in.’

  ‘It was just some aspirins – awfully sorry to put you about—’

  ‘Not the weeniest bit of trouble. How are things?’ she said and provided the answer herself af
ter a rapid rove of her eye. ‘You look all in. Had a bad day or something?’

  Mr Plomley, who increasingly felt as if he were under the worst afflictions of a hangover, confessed that he actually wasn’t quite up to the mark. He was awfully worried about Georgina; she wasn’t at all herself these days.

  While getting the box of aspirins from behind the counter Phoebe Spencer remarked that the weather had been extra warm for the time of year and it affected some women more than others, didn’t it? If this dark insinuation was designed to extract from Mr Plomley the particular nature of Georgina’s ailment it failed dismally and completely. Mr Plomley, who knew nothing of female ailments, merely stared.

  ‘Why don’t you come in a minute and sit yourself down and relax for a bit? I was just going to get myself a drink or something. What about it? Cuppa tea? – glass of ginger wine? With a drop of brandy in it. Favourite drink of mine.’

  Without quite knowing why, Mr Plomley all of a sudden felt that a glass of ginger wine with a drop of brandy in it might be both nectar and salvation. Two minutes later he was sitting in Phoebe Spencer’s neat back parlour holding in his hands a glass full of such brilliant amber light that it might have been the distillation of all her flaming orange hair.

  ‘Had the doctor?’

  ‘Oh! no, it hasn’t come to that. I’ve been thinking to myself that it may be more psychological.’

  ‘Oh? How do you mean exactly?’

  Another dark stroke fell on the canvas of Phoebe Spencer’s mind. The sulky puss, she thought again. Psychological, eh?

  ‘It’s hard to explain,’ Mr Plomley said and then suddenly heard himself make the most incredible, outrageous of statements. Born of all the day’s long irritations it leapt out like a striking serpent before he could do a thing to stop it: ‘Oh! let’s not talk about her.’

  The involuntary callousness of this remark immediately struck him utterly speechless. He felt as if it were not himself speaking. It was a stranger inside him, uttering foreign blasphemies.

  ‘Let them get on with it I say sometimes and then they snap out of it. That’s what I used to say to Joe.’

  This remark had the sudden effect of inducing a curious air of intimacy between them. Phoebe Spencer smiled at him over the ginger wine, imprisoning him in fruity steadfastness with her large sugary eyes.

  In order to get out of this trap Mr Plomley found himself making another unexpected remark, not so much outrageous this time as wholly desperate. He was, he told himself for the fiftieth time in less than a week, in it up to his neck.

  ‘I hope you won’t mind my asking – but I hope you won’t say anything about Georgina to anybody. You know how people talk – how it gets around.’

  ‘Oh! no, no. Wouldn’t dream of it.’

  ‘Good, good. I’m awfully grateful. Presumptuous of me to ask, I suppose—’

  ‘Good Heavens, no. Glad to keep a little secret for someone like you.’

  ‘We like to keep ourselves to ourselves. You know what people are.’

  ‘Yes. I saw all the notices on the gate,’ Phoebe Spencer said, and then, sipping ginger wine, looked at him slyly. ‘But I thought you said we weren’t going to talk about her.’

  That was so, Mr Plomley began to confess confusedly, but—

  ‘Still, I don’t mind what we talk about as long as I’ve got someone to talk to,’ Phoebe Spencer said. ‘I get sick of talking to myself.’

  ‘You don’t keep a dog or anything, do you?’ Mr Plomley said in another flurried exercise of desperation.

  ‘No. I did think of having a parrot at one time. Soon after Joe died. Just for the company.’

  Mr Plomley felt himself recoil at the idea of a parrot for company. They were such pompous birds. Somehow they dominated you.

  ‘They’re so expensive I didn’t get one in the end. Do you keep any pets?’

  ‘None at all. Unless you’d call Georgina a pet.’

  For a second or two Mr Plomley stood on the precipitous verge of confession. Then his courage faded. He sucked hard at ginger wine.

  ‘Call her what you like,’ Phoebe Spencer said firmly to herself, but not aloud. ‘Pet, my foot. I’d pet her, the slut, the sulky puss.’

  Against the chill of the evening Phoebe Spencer had switched on an electric radiator. The room was growing warm. The effect of the ginger wine with the drop of brandy in it was to make Mr Plomley lightly soporific. He suppressed a sudden yawn and at the same time heard Phoebe Spencer say:

  ‘Why don’t you shut your eyes for five minutes? You look all in. It would do you good.’

  ‘No really, I mustn’t do that. I really must be getting back to Georgina soon.’

  ‘Now, now – you weren’t going to talk about Georgina.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Then forget her for a moment. Have another glass of wine.’

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t, but perhaps just the merest—’

  She filled his glass to the brim. The glow of the fire infused into the amber heart of it a concentrated galaxy of ruby stars. Mr Plomley gazed at them until they seemed to revolve, and then dissolve, into space, the glass slightly tilting in his hand as he did so.

  When he woke it was dark outside. For more than a minute, as he struggled to focus the still revolving ruby galaxies in his glass, he clung to a dazed conviction that he was at home, having his nightly bout of whisky, with Georgina comfortably nestling on his lap before the fire.

  He could have sworn he actually saw crouched there in the glow of it, the dark brown feathers edged with a ring, almost a decorative halo, of a light rosy gold.

  A few seconds later he stretched out and touched Phoebe Spencer’s thick orange pyramid of hair and out of sheer habit, as he so often did with Georgina, started to stroke it gently with his hand.

  On a dull misty November afternoon he went through the last of a series of painful scenes with Georgina, in the potting shed. Eggs had been falling off dreadfully for the past week or two. An increasing lack of lustre in the comb, together with a continued loss of feathers that made him think she was moulting at the wrong time of the year, gave her the appearance of a slightly wanton hag.

  ‘No, I know you don’t like it down here. But here’s where you’re going to live from now on. It’s got to be absolutely intolerable lately.’

  The brainlessness of hens is nowhere more clearly seen than in the dividing curve of the beak. When viewed from the side it reveals itself to be nothing more than a grotesque and bony sneer.

  ‘And don’t sneer at me like that, my girl,’ Mr Plomley said, ‘just because you’re not in the harmonium. Your box is here now and here you can lay.’

  Georgina stood on the potting bench, moodily shuffling her feet, and viewed him with a detached and jealous eye. For a moment he was touched by her shabby and lustreless air into a recollection of the girl she had once been. He suddenly felt sorry for her. He was even now ready to forgive everything and said:

  ‘Oh! I won’t neglect you. I’ll see you’re all right. You’ll be taken care of.’

  A few moments later he went out into the garden, cut a large autumn cabbage and proceeded to hang it up to the potting shed roof with a length of string. She could peck on this, he told her; the exercise would do her good. She could do with more exercise.

  Suddenly, as if these were insulting words, she flew at him. With all the envious and rapacious fury of a woman scorned she flew wildly into his face, aiming the grey sneering beak at his ear. A sudden realization that drips of warm blood were dropping down his neck made him lash out protectively with both hands. A brown storm of feathers filled the air.

  All at once, by sheer luck, he caught her by both legs and pinned her against the potting bench. She was quivering and croaking in feathery anguish and he was shaking, too. In fury he held her there and started to say:

  ‘I’ve a good mind to—’

  The words he was about to say were ‘wring your damn neck’ but as he started to frame them he saw her look
ing back at him with a challenging glare of an old mistress, as if she were about to say:

  ‘Go on, hit me, you great brute. You’ve got me down now, haven’t you? Hit me.’

  With a burst of savage relief he let her go. She flew, squawking, into a cloud of seedy cobwebs, banging her wings against an ancient rope of onions that shed a flight of rustling skins. They fell on the air like panting breath.

  Finally he locked her in the potting shed and, still shaking, went across to the shop. His ear was running blood. In his distraction he had forgotten it was early closing day again and to his everlasting surprise he found Phoebe Spencer doing her accounts in the living room behind the shop, sitting at a table in bright vermilion house-coat loosely tied over a pink nylon slip and with the orange pyramid of hair collapsed into an exceptionally brilliant untidiness about her shoulders, as if she had just been washing it.

  She seemed almost to flush at his sudden arrival and started hastily to explain that she’d been having a bath and was sorry she was all untidy and then let out an alarming cry:

  ‘Oh! my goodness whatever’s happened? Your ear’s all blood. Have you been having a fight or something?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’

  He sat limply at the table. She fetched soap, towel and a bowl of warm water and started to wash his ear. The air was full of a lazy sort of perfume, as of bath salts, to which he could put no name. The great orange curtain of Phoebe Spencer’s hair kept falling handsomely down across her shoulders. It too was full of a drifting sweetness that Mr Plomley found difficult to define but soon the astringency of antiseptic cut across it and presently the bowl of water was lightly pink with blood.

  ‘It’s quite a slash,’ she said. ‘Looks like barbed wire or something. Were you crawling through a hedge?’