Silver

by Graham Masterton

  Henry bought the girls a small bag of divinity each; and then they walked across to see the big painted swings; and the steam-calliope; and the helter-skelter.

  They were acquainted with almost everyone they met, and so as they walked there was a good deal of hat-lifting and smiling and saying ‘Good morning’; and Henry was complimented again and again on his pretty companions. George Davies, a broad-faced freckly boy with whom Henry spent two or three evenings a week drinking beer in the back room of the Gristmill Saloon, came across and bowed and showed them all a red India-rubber fat-boy doll which he had won on the shooting-range. He pressed its stomach and it squeaked shrilly.

  ‘Remind you of anybody?’ he winked at Henry. Doris tipped her nose into the air. She knew very well, as they all did, that George was mocking her father.

  ‘Had any rides yet?’ Henry asked him.

  ‘I was going to try the Colossal Whirler, but there’s a line for it all the way round the top of the meadow. James has been on it, though, and he reckons it’s just about the most terri-ferating experience he’s ever had in his whole entire life.’

  ‘Oh, let’s go take a look,’ Doris begged.

  ‘See you later, George,’ said Henry, and he and the girls made their way up to the top of the meadow, where the Colossal Whirler had been set up. George had been right: there was a hot and hopeful line of candidates for terri-ferating all the way along the fence and right the way down to the meatball tent. Boys and girls and fathers and mothers, even an oldtimer or two, with their jackets over their arms, eating peanut pops and rock candy, and mopping themselves with their handkerchiefs.

  ‘Just look at it!’ breathed Doris, and Cissy giggled in fear. ‘Oh, Henry, we just have to take a ride on that!’

  The Colossal Whirler had never come to Carmington before, although every enthusiastic fair-goer had heard of it by reputation. It was a huge wooden wheel, painted gold and crimson, rather like a water-wheel, with swing seats suspended from each of its spokes. It was driven by a steam-engine, connected by a wide leather belt, and when it built up top speed, the swing seats, as they reached the top of the wheel, would fly out so that their shrieking passengers were upside-down.

  A barker stood by the Whirler’s ticket-office, in a purple satin waistcoat and a bright green beaver hat, collecting the dimes that were being pressed into his hand as fast as the line could excitedly shuffle forward, and rapping out, ‘The experience of a lifetime! Guaranteed to make your blood run cold in your arteries! Not for the faint of heart! Not for the nervous! Genuine terror assured or your five cents back!’

  One young man who had already taken a ride on the Whirler turned around in front of Henry and muttered, ‘I wasn’t scared. Not me! I was damn near pooping myself!’

  Doris seized Henry’s hand, and said, ‘Do let’s have a ride. Please, Henry! You’re not going to be a spoilsport, are you?’

  Henry grinned, and squeezed her hand in return. ‘Of course not. But remember the golden rule. If you’re going to lose your lunch on a fairground ride, first of all you have to have some lunch to lose. So let’s go around the sideshows first, and then sit down for something to eat, and by that time everybody else will start getting hungry, and there won’t be so much of a line.’

  Eleanor said, ‘Let’s have our fortunes read. Cissy? Doris? Let’s ask who we’re going to marry.’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Doris enthused.

  ‘Well, you won’t be marrying me, if your father has anything to do with it,’ Henry told her.

  Doris stood on tippy-toe to kiss his cheek. ‘You wait and see,’ she said, kissing him again. ‘Papa can always be persuaded; especially if I bake him his favourite cakes.’

  They tried their hand at the hoop-la, and Henry won a tortoiseshell Spanish hair-comb, which he presented to Doris with a bow, and which she received with a curtsey.

  The day was growing hotter; although there was that noticeable darkness in the air which presages a storm. In spite of the heat, a restless wind would occasionally scurry through the grass, blowing hats and straw and candy-wrappers. The Brattleboro band was playing ‘Say Au Revoir, But Not Goodbye’; and as it neared luncheon-time, there was a waft in the air of sizzling sausages and grilled meatballs, all mingled with that dry-hay and cotton-candy aroma that distinguishes every meadow carnival from south Vermont to Colorado.

  Arm-in-arm again, they found the small striped tent advertising Madame Waldorf’s Mysteries and Intimate Futures Revealed 10 cents. Cissy went first, and came out four or five minutes later giggling and saying that she was going to marry a man of the church, and have eight children; Eleanor went in next and came out looking petulant, to say that she wasn’t going to many anyone until she was thirty, and then he was going to be ‘a gentleman of advanced years’. Then Doris persuaded Henry to go in. ‘Go on, and then we can compare what she says.’

  Henry opened the flap of the tent, and ducked his head as he stepped inside. It was dim, and smelled of stale lavender and sour wine. At a small folding table, a robust-looking woman in a tight black dress and a black sequined bonnet sat with her arms folded in front of a display of tarot cards. She looked up as he came in, and touched the tip of her finger to her lips. ‘Sssh,’ she said. Henry sat down on the rickety bentwood chair facing her, his hat on his lap, and watched her for a while, without saying anything.

  At last she looked up. Her irises were so dark that they made her eyes look curiously dead, as if they were all pupil. Wide dead eyes that could penetrate right inside your head, and see what you were thinking; as if your head were a model theatre.

  She said, ‘Why did you come here, when you know already what will happen to you?’

  Henry grinned, thinking that she was ragging him, but then stopped grinning.

  ‘You will become wealthy one day,’ Madame Waldorf told him. She sniffed, and drummed her fingers on the cards. She turned one over, and then she said, ‘You will not become wealthy by talent; or by skill; but simply by chance.’

  Henry shifted on his chair, and asked, ‘What will it be, some kind of lottery prize?’

  Madame Waldorf frowned, and then she said, ‘No, not a lottery prize. Something to do with two men who are looking for something. One of them speaks very little English. You will know them when you meet them, at least you will if you remember my words.’

  ‘How about, well, romance?’ Henry asked her. He knew that Doris would pounce on him as soon as he came out, and demand to know whether they were going to be married or not.

  Madame Waldorf spent minutes on end consulting the cards, and Henry began to grow impatient. But at last she nodded, and said, ‘You will marry the woman you want to marry. There will be difficulty; perhaps great difficulty. But, at the last, she will be yours until you die.’

  ‘Can you tell me her name?’ asked Henry.

  ‘No. But I can tell you that she is very beautiful.’

  ‘Not even a clue?’

  Madame Waldorf closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips against the lids. She breathed deeply. Henry looked around the tent; at the shabby carpet-bag which Madame Waldorf kept close beside her, with the neck of a green-glass wine-bottle protruding from it. Oh well, he thought. Sitting in a stuffy old tent all day, telling other folks’ fortunes, that must be quite enough to drive anybody to drink.

  ‘D,’ Madame Waldorf said suddenly. ‘I see—I think I see a “D”.’

  ‘Doris?’

  ‘Well, it could be. I’m not sure. But it’s a very beautiful girl whose name begins with a “D”.’

  ‘That sounds very much like Doris,’ smiled Henry.

  Madame Waldorf began to collect up her cards. ‘If that’s who you want it to be,’ she said, obscurely.

  Henry didn’t know what she meant; but he paid her the 10 cents, and said, ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ and pushed his way out through the tent-flap.

  ‘Well? Well?’ Doris demanded, jumping up and down.

  ‘I’m going to be wealthy without even working for it, and I�
��m going to marry a beautiful girl whose name starts with a “D”,’ he announced.

  Doris hugged him. ‘It’s true! What did I tell you? Oh, isn’t it marvellous! Oh, Henry, I’m so happy!’

  ‘Come on, Doris, your turn now,’ Cissy coaxed her.

  Doris excitedly went into the fortune-telling tent, and Henry waited outside with Cissy and Eleanor and lit up a small cigar. ‘You seem quiet,’ said Cissy, after a while, taking his arm, and smiling at him.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Henry told her. ‘I was just thinking about that fortune-telling lady.’

  ‘You don’t believe in it, do you?’ Cissy asked him.

  Henry shrugged. ‘Not really. But how did she know my girl’s name began with a “D”?’

  ‘I believe in it,’ said Eleanor, grumpily. ‘I wish I didn’t. Fancy not getting married until you’re thirty! I’ll be ancient by then. An ancient ruin.’

  ‘Oh, Eleanor,’ said Cissy. ‘I bet you’ll be married before either of us. Jack Browning is absolutely mad about you.’

  ‘Jack Browning? That big clumsy lunk? He can’t even walk across a carpet without tripping over it.’

  Henry smoked his cigar and stood with his hands in his pocket looking around him and feeling unusually contented and pleased with himself. Inside him somewhere, there was still a small dark pocket of sadness that his mother was gone; but on this hot summer’s day at the Carmington Fair he felt on the whole that life was being good to him, and that nobody could ask for very much more. Perhaps he would never be rich (not unless Madame Waldorf’s prediction came true) but if he could marry a pretty girl like Doris and keep up the monument business with his father, whom he was growing to know and like more and more as time went by; and if people continued to die in Carmington at more or less the same rate as they had done for the past twenty years, then he reckoned that he would have achieved something that even Mr Paterson couldn’t quibble about: and that was happiness.

  The tent-flap opened and Doris came out.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Henry, smiling, taking the cigar out of his mouth. ‘And did she tell you the name of the man you’re going to marry? Does it begin with an “H”?’

  Doris turned and stared at him. To Henry’s surprise, there were tears in her eyes, and she had lost all of her colour. She was as grey as if somebody had hit her. Cissy took her hand and said, ‘Doris, what on earth’s the matter? You look awful! Why are you crying?’

  Without a word, Doris twisted her hand away. Then she lifted the hem of her skirts and began to walk off across the grass, very quickly. Cissy glanced at Henry and pulled a mystified face; then she called, ‘Doris! Doris! Come back! What on earth’s the matter?’

  Henry tossed aside his cigar and ran after her. He caught hold of her sleeve just as they passed the rifle-shooting tent; and they were almost deafened by the sharp crackle of small-bore percussion rifles.

  ‘Let go!’ shouted Doris, above the noise. ‘I’m just upset, that’s all!’

  ‘Oh, come on, Doris. It’s only a fairground fortune. What did she say that made you cry?’

  ‘I’m not telling you! Now, let me go!’

  ‘You listen here,’ Henry insisted. ‘I promised your father I’d bring you home safe and happy; and safe and happy is just how you’re going to be. Now you tell me what that Madame Waldorf had to say that made you storm off so; and by God I’ll go back there and wrap that tent up with her in it and put her on the first freight-waggon out of town.’

  Doris couldn’t help smiling through her tears. She blinked them away from her eyelashes, and then she stood close to Henry, stroking and fiddling with his silk-braided lapels as she tried to tell him what had happened.

  ‘She said I was unlucky, that was what frightened me so much. She said I was probably never going to get married; although there might be a chance, if I stayed away from the boy I thought I loved. I mean, that seems like such a contradiction, doesn’t it? I don’t understand what she was trying to say to me. I asked her why I was going to be so unlucky, but she said she didn’t know, and that there was a sort of cloud over it, and she couldn’t see. But she said I had to take very great care, or else I’d never get married and I’d never have any children of my own.’

  The tears began to slide down her cheeks again, and Henry took out his handkerchief, and snapped it open as if he were starting a running-race; and then dabbed her eyes for her.

  ‘Darn me if that isn’t the silliest thing I’ve ever heard,’ he told her, in a gentle, encouraging voice. He lifted her chin with his hand, and smiled at her, and then hugged her close. ‘A fat old gypsy like that, drinking wine in a tent, and you let her upset you.’

  Cissy came up and stroked her sister’s hair. ‘He’s right, Doris. It’s only superstition. Like walking under a ladder or spitting at frogs. You remember Lonnie Tremlett, when he went to see that fortune-teller last year at Williamstown? She said that he was going to have a lucky break; and what happened, he caught his hand in a baler and broke his arm in five different places. Well, that’s how right fortune-tellers aren’t.’

  Doris swallowed, and nodded, and said, ‘I suppose you’re right. But what a terrible thing to say to anyone. And the way she said it was scary, too; very straightforward, like it was all true.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Henry, ‘let’s buy ourselves a lemonade, and something to eat; and then take a ride on the Colossal Whirler. That’ll cheer us all up.’

  He led Doris down to the luncheon-awning, cool and canvassy, where the girls chose a table close to the duckboard walk that was laid through the centre of the field, so that everybody could see and admire them as they walked past. Henry went up to the trestles where there were waiters in stiff white aprons and curly moustaches, speedily serving out platefuls of boiled ham, fried rabbit, chicken Delmonico, grits, salads, and sausages. Eleanor came to help him and between them they heaped up four plates with food, and collected four large lemonades on a tray, and sat down to eat. Henry could have done with a beer; but he minded what Mr Paterson had told him, and didn’t think it would do his chances with Doris much good if he went back to the Paterson house smelling of Burlington pilsner.

  The wind was fresher now, and more persistent. But still the crowds came bustling and shuffling into the fair, and the steam-calliope played reedy off-key waltzes; and the Colossal Whirler creaked and clanked as it started off again with another cargo of happily-shrieking passengers; and over by the saloon-tent there was lusty cheering as the boxing competitions started.

  While they were eating, the other two Davies brothers, Jack and Sam, came strolling past and doffed their hats. They were all alike as triplets, Jack, Sam, and George; and even their friends had difficulty telling them apart from a distance.

  ‘Good afternoon, fair ladies,’ said Jack, to Cissy and Eleanor. ‘How about a ride on the swing-boats with us? That’s if your noble escort has no objection.’

  ‘Of course not,’ grinned Henry. ‘But bring them back straight afterwards. We’re all going for a ride on the Colossal Whirler.’

  ‘Phew, you wouldn’t get me up in that thing,’ said Jack. ‘Upside-down, it isn’t natural.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re a scaredy-cat,’ gibed Cissy.

  Jack blushed. ‘Nothing to do with scaredy-cat. It’s just gravity, that’s all. You only to have to look at that thing. It’s flat against the natural laws of gravity.’

  ‘Then how come nobody ever falls out?’ Eleanor wanted to know.

  Jack stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat. ‘Just lucky, I guess.’

  ‘Just lucky!’ Cissy exploded, in sarcastic mirth. ‘Come on, then, off we go to the swing-boats; and make sure you hold on tight, Jack Davies. We wouldn’t want you to tumble out and bump your head. It might knock some sense into you.’

  Cissy and Eleanor finished up their drinks; and the Davies boys drew out their chairs for them and ostentatiously offered them their arms. Henry and Doris smiled to see them go; and Henry said, ‘Growing up, aren’t they? Real lad
ies these days.’

  ‘Don’t you start getting any ideas about Cissy and Eleanor,’ Doris warned him.

  ‘Not a chance,’ said Henry. Then, ‘Let’s take a stroll in the woods, shall we, while we’re waiting for them? I’m getting a little tired of all this bustle.’

  Doris gave him a flirtatious little nod of her head, feeling better after her lunch; and so they left the refreshment awning and walked hand-in-hand to the rough edges of the fairground, and into the woods. It was surprising how quickly the clamour of the fair died away, once they were two or three hundred yards into the trees; and soon they were crossing a sun-flickered clearing between elms and scarlet oaks, and apart from the faintest of tunes from the steam-calliope, and the occasional crackling of gunfire, there was no sound at all but the birds and the wind and the sound of their own feet treading through the undergrowth.

  Henry stopped, and took hold of both of Doris’ hands. She looked so pretty just then, with her plumed bonnet and her hair in shining ringlets, and those intensely blue eyes of hers, that he couldn’t resist leaning forward and kissing the smooth curve of her forehead, and then her soft and lightly-powdered cheeks. She raised her lips to meet his lips with an innocent sensuality that made him feel as if he were someone else altogether; that he was imagining all this, the woods, and the crisscross shafts of sunlight, and the chirruping birds, and yet the reality of it was so detailed and intense that he was stunned by it. For the very first time he said, ‘I love you, Doris,’ and it was as much of a revelation to him as it was to her.

  Her eyes were half-closed, her lips half-parted. He held her tight in his arms, in her beautiful dress of cream and burgundy silk, and felt the narrow restriction of her corset around her waist, and the way in which her full breasts bulged over the top of it; and she aroused him so strongly that he crushed his mouth against hers, and kissed her until she had to push him away, for fear that her lips would be bruised.

  ‘Please,’ she said, breathlessly but not upset, touching him, stroking his cheek. ‘Please let’s walk a little. I have to catch my breath.’