Something Short and Sweet

by H. E. Bates

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have written the word whore, and I wouldn’t have done if it wasn’t for the fact that, as I sit here, my heart is really almost broken.

  V

  I am sitting in what used to be my bedroom. We have changed it into a sitting-room now. We ought to have it done up. We haven’t had new paper on it for seven or eight years.

  I am just fifty. I think Blanche is just about fifty, too. She is out somewhere. It’s no use thinking where. Passion is still as essential to her as bread. It means no more to her and I have long since given up asking where she goes. And somehow – and this is the damnable part of it all – I am still fond of her, but gently and rather foolishly now. What I feel for her most is regret. Not anger and not passion. I couldn’t keep up with her pace. She long since outdistanced me in the matter of emotions.

  Mrs. Hartman is dead. I am sorry. She was likeable and though sometimes I didn’t trust her I think she liked me. Hartman still hangs on. I keep the till-money locked up, but somehow he picks the locks, and there it is. He’s too clever for me and I can’t prove it. I feel as if, now, I am in a prison far more complete than any Hartman was ever in. It is a bondage directly inherited from that first catastrophic passion for Blanche. It’s that, really, that I can’t escape. It binds me irrevocably. I know that I shall never escape.

  Last night, for instance, I had a chance to escape. I know of course that I’m a free man and that I am not married to Blanche and that I could walk out now and never come back. But this was different.

  Hilda asked for me. I was in the shop, alone, just about six o’clock. I was looking at the paper. We don’t get many people in the café now, but I always have the evening paper, in case. This district has gone down a lot and the café of course has gone down with it. We don’t get the people in that we did. And as I was reading the paper the wireless was on. At six o’clock, the dance band ended and in another moment or two someone was saying my name.

  ‘Will Arthur Lawson, last heard of in London twenty-five years ago, go at once to the Nottingham Infirmary, where his wife, Hilda Lawson, is dangerously ill.’

  That was all. No one but me, in this house I mean, heard it. Afterwards no one mentioned it. Round here they think my name is Hartman. It was as though it had never happened.

  But it was for me all right. When I heard it I stood dumb, as though something had struck me down. I almost died where I stood, at the foot of the stairs.

  Then after a bit I got over it enough to walk upstairs to the sitting-room. I did not know quite what I was doing. I felt faint and I sat down. I thought it over. After a minute I could see that there was no question of going. If it had been Blanche – yes. But not Hilda. I could not face it. And I just sat there and thought not of what I should do but what I might have done.

  I thought of that hot day in 1911, and the Kersch job and how glad I was to get it. I thought about Hilda. I wondered what she looked like now and what she had done with herself for twenty-five years and what she had suffered. Finally I thought of that catastrophic ecstasy with Blanche, and then of the kimono. And I wondered how things might have gone if the Hartmans’ ice-cream freezer had never broken and if Blanche had been dressed as any other girl would have been dressed that day.

  And thinking and wondering, I sat there and cried like a child.

  Mister Livingstone

  ‘Mister Livingstone!’

  Livingstone knocked the nail into the fence, not quickly, as if in answer to the voice, but with a kind of sick drowsiness. Wasn’t he sick? He gave a bit of a cough, weakly. Chronic. Then, the nail in at last, almost caressed into the rotten wood by his feeble hammer blows, he turned to look at the farmhouse. His face, in the hot sun, was ruddily purple, his neck sun-burnished. He could see Mrs. Kilham at the bedroom window.

  She called again. ‘Mister Livingstone!’

  Livingstone opened his mouth. It was a sign that he heard, that he was listening. It was a big mouth, raw, red-lipped: a mouth proper to a man weighing, like Livingstone, nearly two hundred pounds. But by dropping it open Livingstone made it sick too.

  ‘I’m going out,’ Mrs. Kilham called. ‘Don’t let the calves get in, whatever you do. Get the fence mended.’

  He made a sick sign of acquiescence, a nod, a half closing of eyes, the dumb response of a man too weak to speak.

  ‘Whatever you do don’t let the calves in again.’ She was still straightening her white straw sunhat. Livingstone blinked as though it dazzled him. ‘I’ll be back in half an hour. There’s more nails in the kitchen if you want them. There’ll be no peace until we get that fence mended.’

  She disappeared and Livingstone dropped the hammer in the long rye-grass by the fence. Wearily, as if there were no peace anyway, he began to roll himself a cigarette. The fence divided the paddock from what had once been the garden and what was now a calf-stamped mass of dock and poor cabbages and cotton-headed thistle. No potatoes, no beans, nothing in cultivation. Livingstone kept it. First he had been too sick to dig it, and then automatically too late to plant it even if it had been dug. Then the calves would keep getting in. The pigs followed, snouted and rootled round the gooseberries, rubbed the fence into an even more rickety-decay. It was Livingstone’s duty to mend the fence, to keep the calves out, to curb the pigs. But what could a sick man do? Kilhams expected him to do everything.

  And when, two minutes later, Mrs. Kilham came out of the house and across the sun-baked, cow-stinking yard he could tell by the way she shut the door that she was in one of her tempers. He dropped the rolled unlit cigarette into his waistcoat pocket.

  ‘I’m only going to get a loaf,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back in half an hour.’

  ‘Boss about?’ Livingstone said.

  ‘He’s down the bottom field,’ she said, ‘hoeing swedes.’ As if to say: ‘Hoeing swedes, where you ought to be.’ Livingstone knew.

  ‘We ought to get the fence mended as quick as we can now,’ she said, as though, Livingstone thought, she were helping.

  ‘I can’t do two men’s work,’ he said. He looked at the fence, the long wind-smashed snaky line of rotten wood and wire. ‘It wants one holding and one nailing.’ He shook it, sharply, with too much strength, so that he had to shake it again, with proper feebleness. ‘It’s no naughty weight. It takes some holding. I can’t do two …’

  ‘I’ll help you hold it when I get back,’ she said. ‘I can hold it.’

  Before he had time to make a gesture she walked off. With his big cow-like eyes he watched her disappear beyond the pond and the damsons and then through the road-gate. She walked quickly, young bare legs very brown against her white skirt. Hold the fence. Her holding the fence. She wanted nailing together herself. He belched contempt: a strong, healthy belch of a man in full prime of strength and digestion. He knew she hated him, wanted to get him out, had her knife in him. But so long as he was sick …

  Out in the road she herself walked along with no other emotion but that hatred. Livingstone this, Livingstone that, always Livingstone. Always Livingstone, Mister Livingstone. The afternoon heat and the heat of her own anger fused and burnt her up completely, so that she walked almost in a physical trance. Mister Livingstone, Mister Livingstone.

  A year ago she had been a dentist’s assistant: attending to patients, answering the telephone, a good job. And now look at her. Married to Fred Kilham, bound irrevocably to a derelict farm, to a life sucked dry by Livingstone before she could even taste it. She remembered the beginning: what big hopes she and Kilham had had, how they had searched for a farm, how they had found it, complete with Livingstone. She wondered, now, how they could have been deceived by Livingstone – Livingstone the caretaker, Livingstone the man left in charge, Livingstone who had been so sick, Livingstone who had his furniture stored in the best bedroom, Livingstone who would be out as soon as he was well enough to lift a finger.

  She looked back on the struggle, to the gradual evolution of the conflict to make ends meet, of the conflict between hers
elf and Livingstone. Eighteen months of it were focused down into a single needle-point of clear hatred in her mind. She walked rapidly, downhill. First she had been compassionate, since Livingstone was sick, then suspicious, then depressed, then antagonistic, then in despair – always because Livingstone was sick.

  Or rather because he was not sick. Had he ever been sick? She doubted it now. Why hadn’t she seen it? Why hadn’t Fred seen it? She remembered Livingstone’s first wheedlings – to be allowed to stay a little longer, to be given a bit of a job, to be allowed to do the garden. And how gradually that had evolved into Livingstone will do it, ask Livingstone, leave it to Livingstone. Until at last Livingstone had become, to her at least, a kind of perpetual evil.

  Livingstone this, Livingstone that. Always Livingstone. Mister Livingstone. When could they hope, now, ever to get him out? He would go next week – how often had he promised! He would go as soon as he was well. He was never well. They couldn’t turn a sick man out, furniture and all, into the road, could they?

  Coming back, later, with the loaf, she could see the farmhouse, with decayed roof patched with reddened corrugated iron, set among tarred shacks beyond the damson-fringed pond. Seeing it, she felt for some reason calmer, more reasonable. Why shouldn’t they say to him ‘Get out to-morrow. Pack your things and get out’. Why shouldn’t they say that? She would say it herself. Why shouldn’t she say it? She would say it simply, calmly, without fuss or fear or anger. They were all afraid of Livingstone. She would make him finish the fence, so that the calves never got in again. She would dig the garden herself. She would sow radishes in it, and next year peas and beans and potatoes. It would be like a beginning all over again.

  She came back in by the back of the house, across the cow-yard. Sunk down, the yard, between its barns, held the heat, the thick heat of sun and cow-water and cow-dung intermingled. The place almost made her angry again – always they were going to do so much with it, clean it, rebuild it, modernise it, put it into an altogether new order. And always they did nothing. She had seen herself, at one time, as a dairymaid, white smock, white hands, white milk. Oh! everything so white. It was a stupid illusion. The milk was not even clean. How could it be clean? In that muck. How could anything be clean? ‘Oh, it’ll do for now. We’ll make shift. One day I’ll get Livingstone t’ave a clean-out and we’ll whitewash it.’

  She heard Fred saying it, and the words were symbolic of all the ramshackle, hand-to-mouth, rotten methods by which the farm was run. And then, to be reminded again of that eternal fatuous reliance on Livingstone – it was too much. It sent her into a kind of furious despair. She walked through the yard and the cow-stinking hovels without any longer knowing what she meant to do.

  And then, coming round to the house, she heard sounds – quiet sounds, muffled, the sound of calves’ feet. She began to run. She knew, even before she came within sight of the fence and the garden and the young calves browsing among the few cabbages, what had happened. A dozen calves – no Livingstone. No Livingstone. She dashed into the garden, madly waving her hands and the loaf, shouting, stampeding the calves against and at last through and over the smashed-down fence.

  And having done that, she heard another sound. It came from among the damson trees. It was Livingstone stirring in the orchard grass. She half ran towards the trees with a fury that surprised even herself.

  Livingstone sat up, sick-eyed. ‘I didn’t feel …’

  ‘You pack your things and get out,’ she said. ‘To-morrow. If you don’t pack them I’ll throw them out!’

  ‘I ain’t well … I …’

  ‘Don’t tell me that! Don’t … Why didn’t you mend that fence?’

  ‘I didn’t feel …’

  ‘Whether you’re well or not you get out tomorrow. For good.’

  ‘The boss …’

  ‘Never mind about the boss. I’m boss! I’m boss! You hear me? Get up and get that fence done. Get up! Get up! Do as I tell you! Get up.’

  Suddenly before Livingstone could make the habitual sick sound of protest, she brought the loaf down on his head. She brought it down with two hands, like a thunderbolt. Livingstone went suddenly drunk. Eyes upraised, he looked at her for one moment with aggrieved astonishment. Before he could move she brought the loaf down again, flatly, two-handed, with full strength and hatred. Livingstone, this time, upraised his hands, put them defensively on his head. She brought down a terrific blow on them, crashed him into a momentary senselessness. He fell slowly back on the grass. She got him by the shirt and pulled him upright again and hit him full in the face with the bread. His face changed from its strong blood-richened purple to white, to the first signs she had ever seen in it of sickness.

  ‘Get up!’ she shouted.

  He made some kind of inarticulate sound of wrath and despair.

  ‘Get up!’ She held the loaf like a bomb. ‘Do you hear me? Get up!’

  Meekly, sick in reality now, he got up out of the grass, over two hundred pounds and almost six feet of healthy flesh. On his feet, he staggered about for a moment like a man after a knock-out.

  ‘Get on with that fence!’

  ‘I … Boss’ll … I …’

  ‘Get on with that fence!’

  ‘I lost the hammer …’

  ‘Find it!’ He moved. She raised the loaf, with a gesture that was meant to be terrible. He accepted it. Shuffling off under the trees, he found the hammer in ten seconds. He began on the fence.

  ‘You get out to-morrow!’ she shouted.

  He did not speak.

  ‘You hear me? You get out to-morrow.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs. Kilham.’

  He knocked in his fifth nail. Simultaneously she, for some reason, burst into tears and began to run into the house.

  Livingstone did not look up. He felt that there was no need to look up. Hammering the nail with sick drowsiness into the wood that was too rotten to hold it, he felt suddenly that there was no need to worry any longer. The tears made it all right.

  And she, crying in the house, hearing the feeble sound of hammer against rotten wood in the hot still air, felt that she was, after all, up against something besides Mister Livingstone. And it seemed worse because, in her misery, she did not know at all what it was.

  The Case of Miss Lomas

  I

  In the dining-room of the Bellevue Boarding House Miss Lomas and Mr. Sanderson ate their fish in silence. They sat at separate tables. They were the only guests. Miss Lomas was somewhere between thirty-five and forty: a woman of medium height with pale brown hair and a reserved, almost apologetic manner, who looked as though keeping to the medium, even the unhappy medium, had been her life’s most constant ambition. She had a habit, never varied, of staring out to sea as she ate. To-day the rain was coming down in thin curtains between great islands of cloud shadow and vast blue storms lying over the coast of France. It was already late October, and it looked as if the weather were breaking up at last.

  Mr. Sanderson felt that he might say so. He had been at the Bellevue, now, for three days, but Miss Lomas, except to say ‘Good morning’, or ‘Good afternoon’, had not spoken to him. She had not even got so far as saying ‘Good night’. She looked in some way preoccupied with melancholy, with herself, with some indefinable and perhaps even unmentionable grievance or difficulty. He himself was not feeling too cheerful either; he had lost his wife, he had not been over-grand all summer. He was rather an upright, handsome man of fifty-two, though he felt, if anything, a little older. Nor was the Bellevue too cheerful. The smell of stale food was so thick and almost sickening everywhere that it was like an anaesthetic. It was perhaps hardly the place, after all, to put him on his feet again.

  At last he spoke. ‘Well,’ he said, in a deliberate voice, ‘I rather think …’

  He got no further. The maid, at that moment, came in to clear the fish plates. He sat silent, playing with the salt. The girl took Miss Lomas’s plate. She came over to take his own. It was just then that he made up his mind to sa
y to her what he had wanted to say to Miss Lomas.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I rather think it looks as if the weather has broken.’

  ‘Oh! you never know,’ the girl said. ‘The autumn goes on a long time here.’

  She spoke in a friendly voice, and Mr. Sanderson felt cheered. She was not much more than a girl. He watched her go out of the dining-room, eyes fixed on her slim legs.

  She came back with plates of boiled mutton, and then dishes of potatoes and cabbage. All the time Miss Lomas gazed out of the window. They both ate in silence. Miss Lomas’s mouth, while she ate, was a mouth with no expression of emotion on it at all – no hunger, no pleasure, no distaste, no annoyance, no weariness, nothing. It seemed to express a personality that was at once upright and negative. So that Mr. Sanderson could not help wondering about her. What was she, what was she doing, why was she so standoffish? She was negative almost to a point of mystery.

  And then the pudding came. Before he had realised it Miss Lomas had refused it. Her only sign of refusal was to walk out. She was gone before he could make a gesture.

  It began to rain before the girl brought in the coffee. The sea was turned by rain into a stormy expanse of steel, and the afternoon seemed suddenly almost dark, with rain sweeping along in dark gusts that splintered white on the deserted promenade.

  ‘Nice how-d’ye-do,’ he said.

  ‘Were you going out?’ the girl said.

  ‘Well, I was and I wasn’t. I didn’t really know what to do. What can I do? You know more about this place than I do?’

  ‘Go to the pictures. Or if it clears up you could walk over to the Flats. It’s grand out there. I love it. It’s always so grand and windy out there.’

  Somehow that didn’t seem like a waitress. She spoke nicely, easily, with some sort of refinement.

  ‘Been in service long?’ he said.

  She stood and grinned at him, openly, almost pulling a face. ‘Me? I’m Mrs. Harrap’s daughter.’