by H. E. Bates
If the sentence had continued it would have been to convey, somehow, that he knew there wouldn’t be another time. It was his last chance, or thereabouts, of celebrating with her.
‘Oh! that’s lovely,’ she said. ‘I shall think about it all day. Are you going to invite Francis too? I hope so. Then we can think up another good message to send.’
It was eleven o’clock before he finally got up to say good-night. He was a little fuzzy with gin, but stable enough, and happy. She always came as far as the top of the old staircase to say good-night to him, generally with the candle in her hands, so that she could light the stairs and he wouldn’t miss his footing.
That night, as always, there was an awkward pause before he said:
‘Well, good-night. I hope you sleep well.’
‘Good-night, Fred,’ she said. ‘Sleep well too.’
Fred stretched out his right hand. She was carrying the candle in her left.
‘It isn’t quite your birthday yet,’ she said. ‘But you can kiss me good-night if you want to.’
Fred’s face was blank in the near candlelight. His almost paralysed hand stayed for fully half a minute outstretched in air.
‘Don’t you want to?’
Fred, without actually moving his head, gave a despairing glance at the candle.
‘I can put the candle down,’ she said.
A moment later she stooped and put the candle on the floor. Then she stood up, took his face in her two hands and put her lips full on his mouth.
For the next thirty or forty seconds Fred could think only of some words he had once heard her say: ‘Like when you listen sometimes and you think “Oh! my God, my heart’s stopped beating.”’ He knew that feeling now.
When she broke away at last she looked at his face, not blank now but crossed with shadow in the upward light of the candle-flame, and said:
‘Happy birthday.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve just remembered something. You haven’t still got your straw hat, have you?’
‘I might have. I think it’s quite probable.’
‘Not the blazer too?’
‘I think I probably have.’
She gave the briefest of laughs, her eyes dancing, and said:
‘Bring them tomorrow. Put them on tomorrow. You’d look so gay.’
He promised to do his best to find them and then stepped aside, ready to go downstairs. To his surprise she still stood there, not moving. The candle was still on the floor and in a strange way the up-cast light of it made her seem much taller than she was.
‘You can kiss me again,’ she said, ‘if you want to.’
For the second time she reached out, held his face in her hands and kissed him full on the mouth. All the time his hands hung loosely against his sides.
‘Good-night now,’ she said. ‘I’ll remember every birthday you ever have.’
When at last he started to walk across the garden, he suddenly stopped, turned and walked some distance back again. Then he stopped again, indecisively, some way between the house and the catalpa tree.
In a sky now fully dark the stars seemed of intense, exceptional brightness. The stars of August always seemed the largest, most luminous of the year, but tonight, he thought, they looked miraculous.
He sat for a long time under the catalpa tree, looking up at them beyond the fringe of leaves. He wondered what Aggie would say about that message in the morning; he simply couldn’t think what Aggie would say.
He could only think, caught up in a web of new confusion, that the many stars were really too brilliant altogether. There was something unreal about that special kind of brightness.
He sat there half the night, watching them. He didn’t think much but all the time he was oppressed by an uncomfortable feeling that their brightness couldn’t last much longer now.
‘It was a lovely idea to have Joey and Mr Sylvester to the party,’ the girl said. ‘It wouldn’t have been the same without them.’
By six o’clock next evening Joey and Mr Sylvester were in their cage by the window in the stable loft, though with the door of the cage open, so that they were free to fly about whenever they felt inclined. They felt inclined, in fact, every half minute or so and made sudden fluttering blue and yellow excursions across the room, attracted mostly by the four scarlet candles already alight in a silver candelabra set in the middle of the round Victorian table. Once Mr Sylvester perched himself on top of an orange in a big glass bowl of fruit but Fred promptly picked him off, scolding him gently:
‘We all know you’re the new Johnny Ray, but you’re not to sit on the fruit. The fruit is not for sitting on.’
Mr Sylvester perched on Fred’s left forefinger and gave him a silent sideways glance, quizzical and calculating, as if he thought that Fred was dumb. Fred, half as if thinking so too, smiled apologetically and appeased him by saying to the girl:
‘Well, he really does sing quite nicely now. Thanks to you, of course. I’d never have thought of teaching him all the things you have. I’d simply never have thought he could do them.’
‘Good evening,’ Mr Sylvester suddenly chirped, ‘nice evening. What’s for supper?’
‘I didn’t teach him that one,’ the girl said, laughing. ‘You taught him that.’
‘What’s for supper?’ Mr Sylvester said.
‘Wait and see.’ Fred, who was wearing his blazer, sipped at his second large pink gin. There was something very stimulating, he had discovered, about pink gin. It lifted him up. The blazer, with its vertical black, red and yellow stripes, lifted him up too. Everything in sight lifted him up: the scarlet candles, the sudden flights of the two birds, his straw hat lying on the sofa with its black, red and yellow hat band, his red tie with its design of small white unicorns and the two tall slender green bottles of white wine standing side by side in the candlelight. He had never been so lifted up in his life; it was a new reality.
He was entranced above all by the dress the girl was wearing. He had never seen it before. It was sleeveless and white, with a big overall design of crimson roses flowering from sprays of emerald leaves. The skirt was stiff and stood out from her legs, scalloped as a shell. The neck was low and round, leaving her chest and shoulders bare.
A third pink gin, and then a fourth, took him beyond his first clear entrancements into what he thought was an even clearer appraisal of the colour of her skin. It was a pure creamy yellow, he kept telling himself, like the skin of a pear. And now and then, as she bent down to pick up her glass or an almond or a biscuit from the table, the neck of the dress fell loosely away and he found himself looking down at the smoky hollow between the upper curves of her breasts. Each time it set him trembling and each time, as she straightened up again, he looked shyly and swiftly away.
It was after nine o’clock and one or two more pink gins before he started to open, with slightly uncertain hands, the first of the bottles of white wine. The wine, too, immediately began to uplift him. There was something about it that was remarkably young and cool and gay. He had managed also to find the correct tall green glasses to serve it in and soon these, it seemed, were ten feet high.
All the time the gramophone played shrill, swinging tunes. A dance between melon and lobster mayonnaise, another between lobster and salad, another and yet another between salad and fruit took him so far out of himself that he was presently no longer aware that he was eating and dancing with the straw hat on the back of his head.
It was nearly eleven o’clock when he started to open the second of the bottles of wine. By that time the meal was over and he was sitting on the sofa, laughing a good deal and trying to stick the point of the corkscrew into the cork.
Suddenly his straw hat fell off and rolled on the floor. The girl picked it up and put it on her own head and posed in front of him, hands on hips, her rosy skirt flared out, and said:
‘How do I look in it? How does your hat suit me?’
A strange youngness, a totally unexpected simplicity, seemed suddenly to spring out of her. The
hat seemed to confer on her a sort of childishness. She was suddenly a rampant, truant schoolgirl: something out of another age, out of his own youth, a thousand years away.
Some long time later, still sitting on his sofa, pouring wine, he was aware of her, still with the straw hat on, urging him to put the bottle away.
‘Put it away and sit still,’ she said. ‘How can I manage it if you don’t sit still.’
‘Manage what? What are you doing to my face?’
‘Waxing your moustache. I want you to look period.’
‘But they didn’t wear them like that in my day,’ Fred said. ‘At least – waxing it? Waxing it what with?’
‘Mayonnaise. Hold still if you don’t want it in your eye.’
Five minutes later he was on his feet again and she was telling him, between peals of laughter, how splendid he looked. Marvellous: real period, real dandy. She said something about looking years younger too and Fred echoed it with a rising bark of pride. By God, he told himself, all his new uplifted reality abruptly flaring into abandon, he felt it too. The tripe that was talked about age! – the awful tripe that was talked about age!
Mr Sylvester, startled by the barking joy of Fred’s voice, suddenly flew down to within inches of the candle flames. A moment later the girl picked an orange off the fruit dish and then, as a record came to its end, went over to the gramophone to put on another number.
A moment later Fred caught the girl by the waist. She still had the orange in one hand. With the finger tips of the other she held Fred lightly at the shoulder. In rapt abstraction he gazed into the brilliant grey-green eyes, which started to come closer and closer, and then found his forehead finally meeting hers, the orange held between.
Like that, arms outstretched, the orange held between the two foreheads like a ball, they started to dance through the number that Fred liked so much that sometimes he actually bellowed the words. Several minutes later, as from the end of a vault, he heard a rasping voice trying to make itself heard above the din of the gramophone.
‘Fred! What on earth do you suppose you are doing? Fred!’
The orange dropped to the floor. Turning to pick it up he saw Aggie, Ella and Flossie standing at the head of the stairs. All three were wearing dressing gowns, as if they had just been roused from bed, and Flossie’s frilly hair was actually in curling pins.
He picked up the orange, speechless. Through the continuing beat of the gramophone he kept telling himself he was drunk, blind drunk. He was seeing things; he was off his head. The girls were simply not there. They couldn’t be. Aggie for instance hadn’t been downstairs, out of purdah, for a dozen years.
‘Fred! Who is this girl?’ Aggie said.
‘My friend.’
‘She’s the girl from the dairy,’ Flossie almost shouted. ‘That’s her. She’s the one I’ve been hearing all the rumours about. The one Mrs Freemantle told me—’
‘Is that right?’ Aggie said. ‘Is she from the dairy?’
‘Yes. I’m from the dairy,’ the girl said. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘I am not addressing you.’
‘Fred, you look a terrible sight,’ Ella said. ‘What on earth have you been doing with your moustache?’
Fred, grinning, gaily twirled the mayonnaise ends of his moustache with his finger-tips without saying a word.
‘A meal? Wine.’ Aggie, staring at the table with distraught severity, suddenly threw back her head. ‘And how much longer am I supposed to shout against that wretched gramophone?’
Fred, after a couple of uncertain jabs, lifted the arm off the record and Flossie said:
‘That was what I could hear all the time. It sounded like a circus.’
‘What is this girl doing here?’ Aggie said.
‘Having fun,’ Fred said. ‘She sleeps here.’
‘That’s right,’ the girl said.
‘Fred!’ Ella said. ‘Fred!’
‘Absolute fact,’ Fred said. He turned to the girl with something like a giggle. ‘How long is it now, Kitty? Two months or more?’
‘You’re either drunk or lying. Both of you,’ Aggie said. ‘How could it possibly be all that time? We’d have known.’
‘Would you? Well, we’re going on strike next week,’ Fred said, giggling again. ‘For shorter hours and more gin.’
‘I dislike jokes. Especially of that sort.’ Aggie stood in the centre of the floor like a grey, panting bloodhound. ‘And also jokes that are tied on Francis. Fred, have you gone mad?’
‘Probably,’ Fred said.
‘Ask about the other business,’ Flossie said. ‘Ask her, Aggie.’
‘Don’t bother,’ the girl said. ‘Yes, I’m going to have a baby. Everybody knows that by now. You can’t keep a thing like that to yourself.’
‘Oh! my dear lord,’ Ella said. ‘I shall have to go back to the house. I can’t bear all this. I’m beginning to feel sick—’
She turned to make for the head of the stairs but succeeded only in freezing herself to the upper hand-rail.
‘Fred, how on earth could you do this to us?’ Flossie said.
‘This is my den,’ Fred said, ‘and what I do in it—’
‘A baby,’ Aggie said. ‘Fred, it’s utterly disgusting. You’re fifty-eight today. Are you supposed to be celebrating this repulsive episode, or what?’
‘Oh! tell it to Gandhi,’ the girl said. ‘Don’t be damn silly. Fred’s not responsible.’
‘I suppose you expect us to believe that?’ Aggie said. ‘That I’m not surprised to hear.’
‘Then if he’s not responsible,’ Flossie started to shout, almost hysterical now, ‘why have you been sleeping here?’
‘It would take a long time to explain,’ the girl said.
For the space of several seconds nobody had anything to say. In the meantime Ella, at the head of the stairs, had begun to make sounds like those of a saucepan blubbering to the boil. Mr Sylvester, on a completely speechless flight from one side of the loft to the other, as if awe had silenced him, flew into the cage and settled down close by Joey, who looked sleepy and didn’t even say ‘Possess Me.’
‘This girl must be got out of here at once,’ Aggie said. ‘She cannot stay here.’
‘She’ll go when she’s ready,’ Fred said. ‘Not a minute before.’
‘I’ll go,’ the girl said. ‘Tie me round the leg of a jackdaw and let me fly away.’
‘It’s unreal,’ Ella sobbed. ‘It’s so unreal. I feel it’s never happened.’
The notion of unreality suddenly woke in Fred the habit of ready laughter he had learned from the girl. That was good, he told them all, expansively. Guffawing, he seized the bottle of wine, waved it about and poured himself another glass. Unreal? That was good. He guffawed loudly again. That called for another drink, that did.
‘You have put us all in a terrible position in the town,’ Aggie said.
‘What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?’ said Mr Sylvester.
‘You’ve made even the birds sound vulgar,’ Flossie said.
‘What birds?’ Fred said laughing again. ‘I don’t see any. Birds? They’re unreal. Everything here’s unreal.’
From the stairs Ella started to blubber that Fred was drunk. In attitudes of comfort, pressing against her, Flossie looked more than ever like an oversized marshmallow, her podgy hands waving in agonies of pink protestation.
‘Sober as a newt,’ Fred said. ‘Sober as—’
‘Fred, you’re being flippant,’ Aggie said, ‘and in view of the seriousness—’
‘Frivolous,’ Fred said. ‘That’s the word. Not flippant. Eh, Mr Sylvester? Frivolous?’
‘What Do You Want If—’ Mr Sylvester started to sing, but the remainder of the words were drowned in swift snake-like hisses from Aggie.
‘Flossie vows and declares your bed wasn’t slept in last night. Where did you sleep? Here?’
‘In the garden. Under the catalpa tree. The stars looked terribly big. Like big white bull daisie
s—’
‘It’s perfectly obvious you slept here,’ Aggie said. ‘You sleep here, yet the child isn’t yours. Either way it’s disgusting.’
‘Don’t talk about it,’ Ella said. ‘Don’t talk about it. It’s all too terrible to talk about. Oh! I feel so sick—’
‘If you were a hedgehog, Kitty,’ Fred said, with sudden, gentle sobriety, ‘Ella would pray for you. Or am I being flippant?’
Nobody had anything to say to this, but a moment later Fred was aware of a strange new sound. It was the sound of the straw hat falling to the floor. He turned sharply in the direction of it to discover the girl flopped on the sofa, her head in her hands, weeping.
Without a word he went over to her, put his arms completely round her and held her quietly against him. As he pressed his face against the mass of her thick red hair he had sense enough to realize that the last thing she wanted was words. He had heard her laugh so often that now the sound of her weeping was like a blow. It stunned him into a groping daze.
When he came to himself again it was to realize that Aggie, Ella and Flossie had gone. Mr Sylvester and Joey were asleep in the cage and on the supper table the candles were burning down.
When he spoke at last it was in a whisper.
‘You said you were going to tell me something earlier on.’
‘Yes.’ She was not weeping now. ‘I had a letter this morning.’
‘A letter?’
‘From Micky.’
‘Who’s Micky?’
‘He’s the one – you know, down in Plymouth. You remember.’
Fred remembered. In the act of remembering his thoughts retracted. He sat apart from her, staring sightlessly at the candles. With a curious air of resigned gentleness, almost in its own way dedicated, he sat like a boy waiting to be told the details of a coming punishment.
A moment later she drew him back to her.
‘Hold me again, Fred,’ she said. With bemused obedience he put his arms round her again and pressed his face against her hair. ‘It’s for the last time. I’ll be going down to Micky as soon as I can raise the fare.’
