by H. E. Bates
‘No? Is she fair to you?’
Again Fred had no answer; he hadn’t ever looked at it that way before.
‘Are any of them fair to you? From what you told me I don’t think they’re very fair.’
While Fred sat solemnly considering whether in fact his sisters were fair to him or not she laughed again and said:
‘Well, this won’t get the ironing done. I’ve got to be down at the shop by eight. I’ve got to get dressed.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Fred said. ‘I’ll go now. Don’t worry about the breakfast things or anything. I’ll do all that.’
‘Thanks again for the breakfast,’ she said. She handed Fred the breakfast tray and he took it and set it on the table. ‘One thing I missed though.’
‘Oh! I’m sorry if—’
‘Just a drop of music, that’s all. I always have a record or two on for breakfast. Gives the day a nice start. Haven’t got a gramophone, I suppose?’
Fred said he thought they had, somewhere, but it was old, twenty years old, perhaps more.
‘Wouldn’t play the modern speeds,’ she said. ‘Ah! well, not to worry.’
And then, just before she pushed back the bedclothes and swung her legs to the floor, she said something that struck Fred, already at the head of the stable stairs, as the oddest thing of all:
‘Not having music is the one thing that makes me lonely.’
It was this sentence, and nothing else, that dominated his mind all morning, haunting as a snatch of music he couldn’t identify. And once again it made him forgetful: forgetful first of Aggie, the post and the papers; then of Flossie, who had specially asked to be called early, at half past ten, because she was going shopping with a Mrs Templeton, chairman of the Ladies Liberal Club; and finally forgetful of Ella and the tortoise, whose day for communion service it was.
It was nearly half past eleven before he remembered William; and then, having remembered him, he could find no sign of him in the garden. Twenty minutes’ search brought no sight of the trailing string.
Finally he went upstairs to Ella’s room and stood outside the door.
‘Ella, I’m terribly sorry. There’s no sign of William. I can’t find him anywhere.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve got to find him. It’s Friday.’
‘Yes, I know. But sometimes he gets off the string.’
‘Nobody has left the gate open, have they? You know what happened once before.’ Once William had been found far away, trundling steadily down the avenue. ‘I’m scared he’ll get run over.’
‘I don’t think anyone would—’
‘Well, go and see!’ Her voice was imperious and fretful. ‘Don’t stand there! The poor dear will get run over!’
A quarter of an hour later he was relieved to find William behind a compost heap, in the farthest corner of the kitchen garden, calmly eating lettuce leaves in the shade of a plum tree.
‘I found him, Ella. I’ve got him here.’
Ella, in an old-fashioned white tennis frock, appeared at her bedroom door to snatch William from him like a long lost child.
‘Oh! the lamb, my lamb. I prayed so hard for you, darling. I prayed all the time. I knew you’d come.’
Oblivious of Fred, she shut the door. Fred called:
‘Ella, I’m going out for half an hour or so. I’ve got a little shopping to do. Is there anything I can bring you for lunch?’
‘You know I never eat on Fridays,’ she said. ‘You know it’s my fasting day.’
That was something else he had forgotten completely. Then as he went downstairs he realised that he hadn’t seen Francis all morning either. Perhaps Francis was lost too. The day would surely come, as Aggie feared, when Francis would be eaten by a cat. Days of deep mourning would descend and suddenly, with intolerable foreboding, Fred rushed into the garden, giving a piercing whistle on his fingers.
To his relief he saw Francis perched on Aggie’s window-sill, dutifully awaiting her call, and in that moment of relief he felt the dominating, haunting tune of the girl’s odd words lift itself from his mind for the first time that morning.
Two minutes later he was walking briskly, not quite in the old absent way, but almost buoyantly, down the avenue.
He had made up his mind to buy a gramophone.
After that the girl came back, every evening, to sleep in the loft above the stable. From the dairy she brought butter, bacon, milk, eggs and tins of various foods and Fred cooked her an evening meal.
Always, as soon as she came in, she put on the gramophone. She played pop records such as What Do You Want If You Don’t Want Money? and What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes at Me For? She had another record called Possess Me and she played it every evening while she sat eating, over and over again. There was another called It’s Time to Cry and she never listened to it except with a smile on her face, her elbows crooked on the table, her long pointed chin in her hands. She knew all the words of the records, even the new ones, and she sang them in a low, shadowy, crooning sort of way. Her favourite was What Do You Want If You Don’t Want Money? but sometimes she slipped in a word of her own, changing it to What do you want if you don’t want love? Then it was as if she was singing them not to herself but to someone who wasn’t there, a third person far away.
‘It was a wonderful thought of yours to get the gramophone,’ she was always saying. ‘I felt so lonely without it. Funny feeling. Know what I mean? – like when you listen sometimes and you think Oh! my God, my heart’s stopped beating. You know that feeling, don’t you?’
Fred didn’t know that feeling. His feelings generally were becoming chaotic, inconclusive, hard to define. The single recurrent simplicity that ran through them was that the days, from eight in the morning to six in the evening, were terribly empty. Only the evenings seemed now worth living for.
All his life the days had been very full; there was always so much to do for the girls; he had been so absorbed in the needs of Aggie, Ella and Flossie that he had never even stopped to ask himself if, after all, they were not stupid, frivolous, wholly inessential needs. Aggie with her messages, Ella with her prayers, Flossie with her steak-eating poodle: there had been no more need to question them all than there had been to question the colour of the sky or that of the leaves on the catalpa tree.
The time had been when he liked the solitude the stable gave; he actually looked forward to it as a solace, a restoration at the end of the day. Now when he sat up there alone he found it was merely a painful experience; he was haunted by prolonged, endless echoes. The air was full of the sound of the girl’s sharp laughter, or her voice crooning pop songs towards hidden distances and of the round of repetitious words. Presently he began to try to think of ways of softening the edge of loneliness. It occurred to him that William would keep him company. William was a companion who was silent, who never answered back. But when at last he took the tortoise up to the stable loft it was like having an unhappy marching prisoner there on a treadmill, hard feet endlessly scraping, to no purpose, on the bare wood floor.
Soon he had another idea. He took Joey and Mr Sylvester up to the loft in their cage and hung the cage in the window overlooking the garden. The broken edge of chestnut shade left the window bright but cool. The two birds seemed to like the change of scene from the kitchen and Mr Sylvester chattered continually, repeating such things as:
‘Everything in the garden’s lovely! What about a day at Brighton? Have a nice ripe tomato!’
When the girl came back that evening she was as excited by the budgerigars as she had been by the gramophone. She sang bright snatches of song to them while Fred did his best, in his slow way, to explain about Joey and Mr Sylvester – how Joey had always been the slow, lazy, backward one and Mr Sylvester the quick, clever one, always eager to learn.
‘I think he’d have made a good politician,’ Fred said. ‘Never at a loss for an answer.’
‘Can he sing?’
‘I’ve never tried him but I wouldn’t be surprise
d if he could.’
‘Why don’t we teach him to sing?’
After that she frequently sang through the bars of the cage to Mr Sylvester, who looked intelligently back at her while she repeated the words of older songs. In another week or two the girl had actually induced Joey, the reluctant one, to say the two words Possess Me, chirped out as a sort of chorus.
Every evening, after saying ‘Good-night’ to the girl and politely shaking hands and telling her he hoped she would sleep well, Fred took the budgerigars back to the kitchen and covered them over for the night. In the morning he uncovered them as usual and Mr Sylvester greeted him with a mixture of both old and new quotations – When I Was a Young Girl and Never Been Kissed What About a Day at Brighton? and sometimes Joey said Good Morning. Possess Me.
One morning Flossie made one of her very rare pre-noon appearances in the kitchen to ask Fred, rather pettishly, how it came about that the steak for Bobo, her poodle, was chopped so coarsely? Before Fred could reply that he’d been extra busy gathering and bottling the season’s first plums Mr Sylvester sang out:
‘What Do You Want If You Don’t Want Love? Have a nice ripe tomato!’
‘Possess me!’ Joey chirped. ‘Possess me!’
In an offended way Flossie asked with unfriendly astonishment what on earth Fred thought Mr Sylvester was doing? Wherever did he pick up that kind of thing?
‘Oh! he picks anything up,’ Fred said. ‘It’s a song. You know Sylvester.’
‘I must say I think it’s awfully vulgar. I don’t know what Aggie would say if she heard.’
‘Aggie never hears him anyway.’
‘No? And a good thing too, I should say.’
‘I can’t help it,’ Fred said. ‘He hears it on the radio.’
‘But you don’t have the radio in here. You hardly have it on at all.’
‘I’ve started to have it on a good deal more than I used to,’ Fred said. ‘It keeps me from being lonely.’
‘Don’t be silly. You’re not lonely. You’ve far too much to do. I’m off now. See that Bobo gets her steak properly chopped. It almost choked the poor lamb.’
‘Will you be back for lunch?’
‘No. I’m going to lunch with some of the girls and we’re going to play bridge in the afternoon.’
‘What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?’ Mr Sylvester said.
Over after-lunch coffee at the club Flossie, still perturbed by Mr Sylvester, asked Mrs Freemantle, one of the girls, if she had ever heard of a song that began What Do You Want If You Don’t Want Money? or something like that. Mrs Freemantle said she had. It was one of the pops; you were always hearing it on the radio; but why did it interest Flossie?
Flossie said she regretted Fred had taught it to Mr Sylvester, one of the budgerigars, together with other phrases, mostly vulgar slang.
‘By the way I ran into Fred yesterday morning,’ Mrs Freemantle said. ‘In the wine merchant’s.’
‘Oh? I wasn’t aware Fred ever went to the wine merchant’s.’
‘Well, this was Fred’s double then. He was looking remarkably spruce and smart, I thought.’
‘Spruce? That sounds quite unlike Fred.’
‘Spruce, I tell you. Very. In a new alpaca jacket. Ordering half a dozen of gin.’
‘Gin? You’re dreaming. Fred never drank gin in his life.’
‘Oh! well, it’s the same colour as water,’ Mrs Freemantle said. ‘He was asking the price of a Sylvaner Riesling too.’
‘What’s a Sylvaner Riesling?’
‘It’s a rather pleasant white wine,’ Mrs Free-mantle said. ‘We have it at home sometimes. George is fond of it. It’s light and cool in the warm weather.’
Flossie, flushed and fussy, stirred her coffee with an imperious spoon.
‘I don’t know whether to believe you or not,’ she said. ‘I really don’t. White wine? I don’t suppose we’ve had a bottle in the house for twenty years. And what in heaven’s name, pray, would Fred be doing with half a dozen of gin?’
‘Drinking it, dear,’ Mrs Freemantle said. ‘That’s what men usually do.’
Soon, in addition to teaching Joey and Mr Sylvester new words for their vocabulary the girl was teaching something new to Fred.
‘Just let your whole body go, Fred. That’s it. Loosely, loosely – that’s better. Let your knees go. And swing a bit – swing.’
‘You know, I really haven’t danced since—’
‘Never too late to learn.’
Dancing, Fred had several times explained, wasn’t much in his line. A waltz or two, many, many years ago, as it seemed generations past, remained as his last surviving memory in that direction. Tennis dances were then, he told her, all the rage. Flannel dances they were sometimes called. You wore your tennis flannels and your blazers and the girls their tennis frocks.
‘And straw hats?’
‘Oh! often. Straw hats, yes.’
The girl told him she loved that. She laughed uproariously, with all her beguiling infectious brightness, at the thought of straw hats.
‘Had you a moustache in those days?’
Fred confessed that he had begun to grow the moustache at nineteen. He had longed, in the natural fashion of youth, to look older.
‘I like your moustache. It would look great waxed at the ends. And you in a straw hat.’
‘I like this tune,’ Fred said. They were dancing up and down the floor of the loft, in the falling light of a late August evening, to a tune called April Heart. ‘I used to think the tunes you hear nowadays couldn’t compare with the old ones, but now I’m not so sure.’
‘Some of the old ones are still good.’
‘There used to be one about Keeps Raining All The Time. That was good.’
‘Very good. I’m beginning to believe you were gay in those days.’
‘No. Not me.’
‘Lots of girls?’
Fred could only smile.
‘No?’
‘Well—’ Fred said.
A few light taps on the window pane, several minutes later, announced the arrival of Francis, who sat droopingly on the sill outside, waiting to be let in. The girl opened the window and took the bird in her two hands, stroking his back feathers with a soothing forefinger.
‘He looks tired, poor thing. He’s worn out. You can hear his heart thumping like a dynamo.’
‘I rather fancy he’s had a long day,’ Fred said. ‘I saw him go off at seven this morning.’
‘He’s flat out.’ Francis actually sagged, a moment later, and flopped in her hands. ‘She’ll kill this bird. He needs a drink. What shall we give him? Gin?’ Laughter was never far away; even the cheerless sight of the exhausted Francis couldn’t prevent the girl giving a delightful peal. ‘How about that? Let’s give him a sip. We’ll have one too.’
Fred thought both ideas were good. He had begun to like gin; it cheered him up; after a glass or two he really began to feel like living.
To his surprise Francis liked it too. He responded to a tumbler of gin and water by standing up, shaking his feathers and giving a croak.
Fred laughed. ‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘I’d never have thought of giving him gin.’
‘Why not?’ the girl said. ‘Look what it does for you. Two gins and you’re as bright as a pearl button. Drink up – let’s have another.’
Fred readily poured another gin for himself and one for the girl. They were getting through two or three bottles a week comfortably now, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. He didn’t care.
‘Affects people in different ways, gin,’ the girl said. ‘Makes some people moody and depressed. Some suicidal. Used to make my sister really vicious.’
‘How does it make you feel?’
‘Oh! sort of affectionate. Whoosy. Amorous. Want to love strangers. You know?’
She sat down on the sofa, curled up her legs and looked dreamily at Francis, still taking sips of gin and water from the tumbler on the table.
‘Where does h
e sleep? Francis, I mean?’
‘In the catalpa tree, I think. In summer, that is. I’m not sure about winter.’
‘I think it’s a shame. Working him all day like that. You know what I think? I think we should tie a protest message on his leg.’
‘Oh! I don’t think Aggie—’
‘Oh! pot to Aggie. Who cares about Aggie? Drink up. Put your thinking cap on – think of something good.’
Fred, sipping gin in a fast gathering twilight across which the jackdaw looked no more than a charred heap of paper in the centre of the table, made so little effort to think of something good to tie on Francis’ leg that the girl actually accused him from the sofa:
‘You’re not thinking. I know. I can feel it.’
‘Yes, I am. But actually—’
‘No, you’re not. You’re leaving it to me. Oh! well—’ She laughed again, more to herself than anything this time. ‘How about this then? What say we send him off with this?’ She laughed a second time, brilliantly. ‘On strike for shorter hours and more gin. Eh?’
Fred laughed too. She thought of crazy things, he said.
‘Of course I think of crazy things. That’s me. Like I told you before. Come on, find a piece of paper. Let’s write it down.’
Less than half a minute after Francis had been released from the window with the strike message on his leg the girl turned abruptly to Fred and said:
‘You were going to tell me something just now, weren’t you? When you said you were thinking?’
‘Well, I don’t know—’
‘You were. I could sort of feel it in the darkness.’
A candle was burning on the table now. The girl was sitting in the Windsor chair in her favourite attitude, her pointed chin in her cupped hands, staring at the heart of the flame. Her hair was a cone of fire; her eyes were bright, concentrated buttonholes of yellow.
‘Well, actually it was just this,’ Fred said. ‘I didn’t know whether to tell you or not – but tomorrow’s my birthday.’
‘Oh! good. I love birthdays. I’ll take you out—’
‘No,’ Fred said. ‘I sort of got a little thing planned for up here. A rather special supper. And a bottle of wine.’ He started to make odd noises, as if to indicate apology. ‘I suppose, after fifty, you don’t really bother about birthday parties, but I thought—’
