by Henry Green
‘So you will, Charley Barley, won’t you?’ she ended.
‘I might,’ he said, feeling sick.
This afternoon of Christmas day, down at old Ernie Mandrew’s, she took Charley out, determined by hook or by crook to bring him to the point at last, for, however little she knew about his intentions, her own mind was still made up.
‘Would you ever want to have children?’ she asked, as they set off together over the snow, on the way to the village. This made him think of Ridley, whom he had not considered in a long while.
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Oh, why does a person ever put a question?’ she gently enquired. ‘To get their answer, of course, you old silly.’
‘I don’t know.’ He still did not realize that they might come on the boy when they reached the first houses, and he was not to know this until it was too late.
‘Come on,’ she insisted. ‘Having children’s one of the few things anyone can do for herself in this old world, that is if she can rake up a boy to do it with,’ she laughed.
‘Would you?’ he asked.
‘We’re not talking of me, this instant minute, thanks,’ she replied. ‘Why won’t you ever tell me anything?’
‘I might have one already.’
‘Go on,’ she said, laughing still. ‘Why, you’ve never been wide awake enough for that.’
‘I might,’ he insisted.
‘Charley, I really do believe . . . No, look here, you haven’t, have you, now?’
He did not answer, or even glance at her.
‘You said it in such a way that you might at that . . .’ she went on, when he said nothing. ‘But, Charley, it would be living a lie.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well, wouldn’t it?’
‘I still don’t get you,’ he cautiously explained.
‘Why, being like me,’ she elaborated. ‘Not having a real father all my life. That’s been my trouble. Oh it mightn’t matter for a boy, but it’s very different where girls are concerned.’
‘Rotten luck,’ he said.
‘No, Charley, you never did, did you?’
‘What would you give for me to tell?’
‘But this is serious,’ she entreated. ‘You can’t play about with this. It’s all there is that people the same as us can do with their own lives.’
‘A man never knows if the kid is his own, or not.’
‘Now there’s no need for you to be sarcastic,’ she protested. ‘I haven’t brought you all this long way for that,’ she said, with more truth behind the remark than she proposed to reveal. ‘Can’t you be serious, once in a while,’ she begged, although he was the most serious of men.
The snow, and the sun above, lit her face so that each eyelash stood out on its own, and the grain of her skin, until, with those blue eyes, and the way she had of addressing him, on which he had come to rely for peace of mind, and with her walking by his side, she grew upon him, became an embodiment of everything comforting, and true, and good. So much so, that he lost the drift of this argument. She had to press to get him to say he did not really know if he had a child.
‘But who with?’ she demanded. She was getting upset.
‘That would be telling.’
‘Oh, I believe it was only your old Rose,’ she brought out at last, very much relieved. ‘And there was me, supposing all that over and done with, ages ago. Did you love her very much then, Charley?’
‘It was a long time back.’
‘That’s not much help to a girl,’ she replied. ‘Did you or did you not? That’s what I want to know.’
‘I suppose so,’ he said, unmistakably with no trace of feeling.
‘Oh, pity us poor women,’ she cried out loud, delighted, thinking this would have taught Rose, if the woman could have been here to learn it. ‘D’you mean you can’t be certain?’
‘I thought I knew, dear. Then she went and married someone else,’ he explained.
‘Yes, but you carried on seeing her, surely? You told me.’
‘I did.’
‘Well then?’ she demanded.
There was a pause.
‘She properly played you up, didn’t she,’ Miss Whitmore made comment. But Charley was several sentences behind once more.
‘I didn’t trust her quite the same,’ he brought out, with difficulty.
‘When was that?’ she gleefully demanded.
‘After she married Jim.’
‘Trusting is different,’ she announced.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said. ‘But I seemed to need her more.’
‘You know a great deal more than I sometimes credit you with,’ she admitted, soberly, sadly.
‘Was it the same with your husband?’ he asked, greatly daring.
‘With Phil? Oh that’s all over, done now. And we didn’t have a kid. I shan’t forget him till the day I die, but he wouldn’t want me to go on to be an old maid.’
‘But you never would, would you? I mean you were married once?’
‘Well, of course,’ she said with a happy laugh. ‘But if you live on long enough without a man, you go back to be a virgin.’
This remark enormously excited him somehow.
‘You don’t,’ he cried out.
‘Then what’s an old maid, then?’ she wanted to know.
He could not think what to say, so stayed silent.
‘Oh yes, you know all right,’ she insisted. ‘And it’s not for me. No thank you. Besides, I want kids.’
‘Why do you?’ He spoke loud.
‘Because they’re good for your health, if you’re a woman. But that’s not the real reason. I want to have them so as to love.’
He was very nervous about where all this was leading. But he considered he had been let down so often, in his time, that he was not going to give himself away again just yet.
‘You could love the man you married?’ he asked.
‘I don’t see it that way,’ she replied. ‘You can’t get more out of anything than you put in. And kids are your own flesh and blood. A woman risks her life having them. There’s nothing more a girl can put into it than having her own children, doing everything for them, till they’re of an age to look after themselves, it’s her most.’
‘Not much of a look out for the husband, then,’ he had the courage to say.
‘What d’you mean?’ she asked. ‘What is there that’s wrong for him, in all I’ve just said? I don’t see life as sitting in another person’s lap, as you and your Rose seem to have done together, from what Mother tells me. It’s starting a home and working for it, that’s what I call it,’ she said.
‘Did your Phil see things that way?’
‘You leave him out, Charley. He’s nothing to do with what we’re discussing.’
They fell silent. They were getting near the village.
He was becoming really agitated. She could talk about Rose playing him up, yet she’d had a shot at the same game once or twice herself, or so it seemed. But then, of course, it was all his own fault, he felt. A wife and kids were not for Charley Summers. He knew that. He was too slow. He’d never find a woman to put up with him.
‘Then there’s Panzer,’ she said suddenly, and, so it appeared, at a tangent, but, in actual practice, with a great deal of purpose. ‘I couldn’t leave her,’ she pointed out.
‘You don’t have to,’ he objected.
‘If I married,’ she explained, and spoke as if talking to a child. ‘No,’ she went on, ‘whoever took me to be his wedded wife, would have to take my cat on with me.’
‘Well, why not?’ he asked, wondering.
He became aware that she was watching him.
‘That’s all very fine, but Panzer’s one of those things I’d have to get straight right off,’ she insisted. ‘Her future kittens as well, oh yes. I could never leave them behind.’
He did not know what he was supposed to say. He was floundering.
‘Why sure,’ he said. ‘But you’d leave Mrs Gra
nt?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s not room for two in my digs, and houses aren’t easy to come by these days. I’d stay on where I am now. She’d be glad to welcome my husband in her home.’
‘I thought she had a niece in Leicester,’ he brought out.
‘And so she has, Charley, but she’s not sure of her welcome there. Oh we’ve had this out. She’d be quite agreeable.’
‘Well that makes it easier, certainly, with the cat and her kittens.’
She accepted this. ‘There you are,’ she said.
They had almost come to the single village street, in which he had met Arthur Middlewitch during the August holiday, and through which he had so often strolled with Rose, after her marriage to Phillips. It was also where Ridley used to play with the Gubbins children. He did wonder for a moment whether they would run across the boy, but the little street was quite deserted. He supposed the locals were sleeping off their Christmas dinner. He was glad, because he did not want James to know that he was down. He was not going to have him getting in first with this girl, as Jim had done the last time. Then, absolutely without warning, stepping out of a surface shelter in the roadway, and not three paces from them, was Ridley, his eyes fixed on Nance. Afterwards, when Charley went over it in his mind, he thought he had never seen such pain on any face. For the boy had blushed, blushed a deep scarlet in this snow clear light. He must have thought he was seeing his mother step, in her true colours, out of his father’s microfilms. And Nance, who did not know him, passed him by.
Charley managed to turn round, without attracting her attention, in order to make the child a sign. All he could think of, and he did not know why, was to put a finger to his lips. At that, Ridley turned, and ran off fast.
Charley was so upset that he did not take in the sense of the words with which Nance then broke the silence that had fallen between them.
‘We could make a go of it between us, you know, if we tried,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’
‘You wouldn’t have heard, would you dear?’ she said gently. ‘I was making a proposal.’
He still did not trust his ears.
‘I didn’t quite catch,’ he lied.
She stopped in her tracks. She put her hands up to the lapels of his coat.
‘I was proposing, dear,’ she said.
He felt his heart beating so hard that he was afraid he would suffocate.
‘You really mean it?’ he asked, and for the rest of his life, for the life of him, he could not remember anything of what passed during the remainder of that afternoon. It was bliss.
So she had asked him to marry her, and had been accepted. She had made only one condition, which was that they should have a trial trip. So it was the same night, under Mr Mandrew’s roof, that he went to her room, for the first time in what was to be a happy married life.
She was lying stark naked on the bed, a lamp with a pink shade at her side. She had not drawn the black-out, and the electric light made the dark outside a marvellous deep blue. In an attempt to seem natural, he said something about showing a light.
‘Come here, silly,’ was what she replied.
Then he knelt by the bed, having under his eyes the great, the overwhelming sight of the woman he loved, for the first time without her clothes. And because the lamp was lit, the pink shade seemed to spill a light of roses over her in all their summer colours, her hands that lay along her legs were red, her stomach gold, her breasts the colour of cream roses, and her neck white roses for the bride. She had shut her eyes to let him have his fill, but it was too much, for he burst into tears again, he buried his face in her side just below the ribs, and bawled like a child. ‘Rose,’ he called out, not knowing he did so, ‘Rose.’
‘There,’ Nancy said, ‘there,’ pressed his head with her hands. His tears wetted her. The salt water ran down between her legs. And she knew what she had taken on. It was no more or less, really, than she had expected.
CONCLUDING
Mr Rock rose with a groan. Crossing to the open bedroom window he shone his torch out on fog. His white head was gray, and white the reflected torch light on the thick spectacles he wore. He shone it up and down. It will be a fine day, a fine day in the end, he decided.
He looked down. He clicked his light out. He found there was just enough filtering through the mist which hung eighteen foot up and which did not descend to the ground, to make out Ted, his goose, about already, a dirty pallor, almost the same colour as Alice, the Persian cat, that kept herself dry where every blade of grass bore its dark, mist laden string of water. Old and deaf, half blind, Mr Rock said about himself, the air raw in his throat. Nevertheless he saw plain how Ted was not ringed in by fog. For the goose posed staring, head to one side, with a single eye, straight past the house, up into the fog bank which had made all daylight deaf beneath, and beyond which, at some clear height, Mr Rock knew now there must be a flight of birds fast winging, Ted knows where, he thought.
The old and famous man groaned again, shut the window. He began to dress. He put working clothes over the yellow woollen nightshirt. The bedroom smelled stale, packed with books not one of which he had read in years. He groaned a third time. Early morning comes hard on a man my age, he told himself for comfort, comes hard. How hard? Oh, heavy.
When he put the kettle on downstairs he did not lay out his granddaughter Elizabeth a cup because Sebastian Birt might be with her still, in the other bedroom across the landing.
Five minutes more saw him off to fetch Daisy’s swill. It was lighter already, but with pockets of mist that reached to the ground. Over his shoulders he wore a yoke. The hanging buckets clanked. He wondered if he should have brought his torch, but it seemed the sun must come through any minute.
He went slowly and was overtaken by George Adams, the woodman, going up for orders.
They did not speak at once, went on together down the ride in silence, between these still invisible tops of trees beneath which loomed colourlessly one mass of flowering rhododendron after another and then the azaleas, which, without scent, pale in the fresh of early morning, had not yet begun, as they would later, to sway their sweetness forwards, back, in silent church bells to the morning.
The man spoke. ‘It’ll turn out a fine day yet,’ he said.
‘Yes, Adams,’ said the other.
They walked on in silence.
‘How’s your wife, Adams?’ Mr Rock then asked.
‘Why I lost her, sir, the winter just gone.’
Mr Rock said not a word to this at first. ‘I’m getting an old dodderer,’ he ventured in the end, sorry for himself at the slip.
‘You’re a ripe age now,’ George Adams agreed.
He never offered to help carry those buckets, the man reminded himself, because whatever the position Mr Rock had once held, this long-toothed gentleman did his own work now, which was to his credit.
‘Yet I feel not a day older,’ Mr Rock boasted.
‘It’s my legs,’ the sage added, when he had no reply.
There was another silence. It was too early yet for the birds, or too thick above, because these were still.
‘Nothing anyone can do for the bends,’ Adams said at last, out of an empty head.
At this instant, like a woman letting down her mass of hair from a white towel in which she had bound it, the sun came through for a moment, and lit the azaleas on either side before fog, redescending, blanketed these off again; as it might be white curtains, drawn by someone out of sight, over a palace bedroom window, to shut behind them a blonde princess undressing.
‘It’s not fair on one to grow old,’ Mr Rock said.
Adams made no comment.
‘And how’s Miss Elizabeth?’ the man asked, after a time.
‘Better, thank you,’ Mr Rock replied.
‘She overtaxed her head where you put her out to work?’ Adams hazarded.
‘Don’t they all?’ the old man countered. He adored his granddaughter and, if it had
not been for Birt, could have talked readily about her. ‘Same as those children up at the house.’ She was thirty-five and they between twelve and seventeen. ‘Breakdown from overstrain,’ he ended, cursing Sebastian Birt in his mind, because, although she was not working now, she would never get well while she could meet that man, he knew.
‘You’ll find her a blessing to have at home. Somebody by you,’ Adams said in self pity.
A blessing and a curse, the old man thought, then repented this last so violently that he could not be sure he had not spoken out loud.
‘Why, that’s strange,’ Adams said. ‘Did you hear summat?’
The sage looked blank at his companion. But it was too dark with sudden mist to read the expression on his face.
‘I heard a call,’ Adams volunteered.
‘I’m a mite deaf,’ Mr Rock answered.
‘And I caught the echo,’ Adams insisted.
Which reminded Mr Rock of the argument he had had with Sebastian on this very point, not long since. ‘It would be from the house, then,’ he said in a determined voice, referring to the great sickle-shaped sweep of mansion towards which they moved like slow, suiciding moles in the half light.
‘It’s the trees throw back the sound, sir.’
‘Yet if you face about, Adams, call away from the place down this ride behind, you won’t get a whisper in return.’
‘I never heard that,’ the woodman said, politely disbelieving.
They walked on. Then the old man took the buckets off his yoke.
‘I’ll have an easy now,’ he announced, laying the heavy object by, to one side. He put the buckets bottom upwards, and they sat on these.
‘You don’t want to rush it when they’re full,’ Adams said.
I do this for Elizabeth, Mr Rock told himself, but out loud he exclaimed, ‘I hope I have more sense.’ His glasses were misted, fog still hung about, but the sun coming through once more, made it for a second so that he might have been inside a pearl strung next the skin of his beloved.
‘It’s what them younger ones haven’t got, sense,’ Adams said. Elizabeth, Eliza, Liz, Mr Rock thought.
