The Greengage Summer

by Rumer Godden

  “Exciting?” That was unexpected.

  “Of course.”

  “But . . . how?”

  “Because now you are ready for love.”

  Love! Probably nothing in the world that Eliot could have said at that moment could have helped me more. Love! Like Mademoiselle Zizi, Juliet, Cleopatra, Eve, like . . . Joss, level with Joss. “I, Cecil,” I whispered, dazzled.

  “You.”

  “But . . .” The tears came back. “I am not pretty like Joss.”

  “You are not pretty like Joss. You are pretty like Cecil.”

  With my Bullock sturdiness, my pinkness and mouse hair? “I, pretty?”

  “Very,” said Eliot, and he kissed me on the mouth.

  “That scoundrel,” Uncle William called him. I only know that night he seemed like an angel to me.

  He had to go to dinner, but he took me downstairs and put me to sit in the office which was empty; somehow, in the rush and hubbub, he got Toinette, who was motherly, to make me some tea. How did he know there were only two things in the world I could have swallowed, things English and familiar, bread and butter and tea. I had not known tea could be had in France, though it was tea such as we had not seen, served in a glass, the leaves in a little paper bag tied with a string and soaking in hot water. It was weak, but it was hot, and I made it sweet and ate four slices of bread and butter. The pain had the edge taken off it now and Toinette patted me and called me ‘pauvre gosse’. Soon I felt much better.

  It was a long peaceful wait until people began to come from dinner to dance or sit at the tables in the bar. I stole out on the stairs to watch. Nobody noticed me and I was glad. Then Hester came to sit beside me; she had been dancing and was excited. “Joss is the belle of the ball, isn’t she?” she said.

  Everyone wanted to dance with Joss. When the men tapped one another on the shoulder, taking one another’s partner, she changed partners all the time; she was flushed, far more excited than Hester, but that game was going on. Eliot danced with Mademoiselle Zizi, with some of the wives and daughters, with Vicky and Mauricette, but he never seemed to see Joss nor Joss him; she carefully looked away when they passed; she smiled at her partner and tossed her hair back and fluttered her lashes up and down. “Is that flirting?” asked Hester, but I was beginning to see there was another kind of growing pain. I knew Joss was miserable and I ached for her.

  “Qui a laissé ces trucs-là dans mon bureau?” Madame Corbet had found the tray with my plate and tea glass. “Is the whole house to be a nursery?” she scolded, and I had to take them to the kitchen. On the way back I had to wait at the service door. They were dancing the carpet dance, the danse du tapis, when the men make a circle and a woman takes a little square of carpet and stands in the centre. When the music stops she kneels down on the carpet in front of the man she chooses, who kisses her and dances with her while everybody claps. He takes her into the circle and this goes on till all the women are in the circle. The crowd had moved back against the wall to watch the dance and I could not get past. As I stood, there was a loud sound of eating in my ear, a smell of sweat and garlic, Paul, and I had another glimpse of what it was like to be Paul. His face and neck were glistening with sweat, his hair hung limply, his apron and shirt were soaked and covered with stains. He must have been washing-up for hours and had taken a moment to eat; he had a piece of sausage clamped in a length of split bread, as he used to make our goûter.

  We shouldn’t have sent him to Coventry, I thought, and this time was going to make myself speak to him when I saw he had not noticed me; he was watching Joss. When people are watching they forget to pretend and there was something in Paul’s face that made me afraid; it was wild, like a wild animal that does not think of itself or any other animal but only of what it wants. Then I learned part of the explanation of why he looked like that; Monsieur Armand called impatiently and Paul turned to go but left the door open and I saw him take a bottle from the shelf behind the door; he tilted it right up before he drank so that I knew it was almost empty. When he put it back he nearly missed the shelf and a moment after I heard a crash of plates.

  He came back. Three or four times I noticed him in that door, and then I saw that Joss was smiling at him. She only smiled because she was smiling at everyone, but, “It is flirting,” Hester said disapprovingly when I got back to the stairs.

  It grew late. Some of the people were going home. Vicky had fallen asleep on a sofa; Madame Corbet looked at her two or three times, then picked her up and carried her to bed. The Brass Instruments Band had finished, but a pianist and violin had taken its place. The music sounded very quiet after the band, and the notes of the violin came softly across the floor, sweet with a faint throbbing that made it sound tender.

  Joss was standing just below us, and for the moment she was without a partner. I think she hoped she would be left without one, for she turned this way and that and I was sure she was looking for Eliot. Then she saw him, and for the first time that night they looked at one another. She stood still and I knew her eyes would not plead, only look, unmistakably look. She had had to humble herself to do that, but Eliot walked away to the bar. I clenched my fists. Was Eliot quite impervious? To the throbbing music that seemed to us so beautiful? To Joss? Eliot, who had kissed me upstairs? It was only a moment; the next, Joss was smiling at the piccolo, at the Town Clerk; then she smiled and waved at someone else. I looked to see and it was Paul. The wave was too much. He gave a tug at his apron that broke its string, wrenched it from his neck and threw it away, combed his hair with his fingers and reached her before the piccolo, who was weaving through the dancers. “Mademoiselle Joss,” said Paul and bowed.

  If he had been clean it might have been different. Mauricette had danced and Monsieur Armand, “but not Toinette or Nicole,” said Hester. Monsieur Perrichaut called out sharply and a gentleman, who Mauricette told us was Monsieur Dufour of the Commissariat, came up and said to Paul as he stood just below us, “Et toi, mon gaillard, rentre chez toi et restes-y.” Monsieur Dufour was, I suppose, in charge of Paul, but Paul had emptied all of that bottle and he shouted so that the words were heard through all the rooms above the music, “Galeux! Gros dégueulasse!” to Monsieur Dufour.

  Other men came up; the older ones talked soothingly, but the Town Clerk took hold of Paul, who shook him off.

  “Paul! Fais-pas l’imbécile,” cried Mauricette and ran for Madame Corbet.

  “Rentre,” said Monsieur Dufour curtly. “C’est ce que tu as de mieux à faire,” but Paul had Joss by the hand.

  Joss did not know what to do. Gently she tried to take her hand away. “Dance me,” said Paul in his poor English.

  “They don’t want me to,” said Joss.

  “Foutez-nouse la paix!” Paul shouted at them. “Elle n’est pas une sacrée snob.”

  Without his apron Paul looked tall and, in his untidiness and dirt, almost savage among those Sunday clothes. Joss shrank from him though she was trying not to shrink. “Attendez, Paul,” she said, “wait,” but he was putting his arm round her, when suddenly between them was Eliot.

  He had cut in front of Paul so quickly that no one had seen him come up and almost from inside Paul’s arm he took Joss and danced with her away down the room. At the same moment Monsieur Dufour caught Paul by the shoulder, the Town Clerk took his other side, and between them they marched him to the door where Madame Corbet and Monsieur Armand were waiting. “Tordu!” shouted Paul as they took him away. “Pelé! Galeux! Fumier!” The words died away along the passage. Hester was crying, “Poor Paul! Poor Paul!” I felt too miserable to speak.

  Joss and Eliot did not speak either as they danced. She kept her eyelids down so that her face looked closed; Eliot’s was set.

  The music stopped when they were by Mademoiselle Zizi, who had come to the foot of the stairs and was watching. Eliot slowly took his arm away but kept Joss’s hand. Joss’s chin began to shake. For a moment I thought they would have made it up, that he would take her into the gard
en in the moonlight among the fair lights, but Eliot did another of his incomprehensible things—“He was trying to look after her,” said Hester; “he always did look after us,”—he held out his free hand to Mademoiselle Zizi, who gave him her hand wonderingly. He put Joss’s into it. “Take her to bed, Zizi,” he said.

  “No!” They said it together. Joss’s was a curt refusal, while Mademoiselle Zizi sounded as if she were being stifled. “No!”

  “Yes,” said Eliot gently and inexorably. “The party is over now.” He turned away abruptly and said, “Good night.”

  “Eliot, where are you going?” It was a cry from Mademoiselle Zizi.

  “Into the garden to smoke,” he said, still gently, and stepped outside.

  CHAPTER 14

  “CECIL. CECIL.”

  I had been asleep . . . one minute, I thought, and Joss was standing by my bed. She had put her cold hand under the bedclothes and was clutching me. “Cecil.”

  My eyelids seemed to have weights of sleep on them. I could not open them.

  “Cecil.”

  “Wh-what is it?”

  “Ssh! Don’t wake Willmouse.”

  “What is it?” but I had sunk my voice lower, jerked awake now by her cold and shivering.

  “It’s Paul.”

  “Paul?”

  “On a ladder, looking in at my window.”

  “Paul is?”

  “Yes. He is coming in.”

  “What for?” I said stupidly, but Joss only shivered and said, “Oh, Cecil!”

  Then I knew it was true and fear started up as I remembered that look on his face at the dance, but some wisdom saved me from telling Joss. “He has been drinking,” was all that I said.

  “What can we do?” she asked. Her teeth was chattering.

  There was only one thing to do and I sat up. “I will get Eliot.”

  “No!” She sounded outraged.

  “But . . .”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  “Then . . . ?”

  Joss reluctantly said, “I will go and call Madame Corbet.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Why?”

  “She will send Paul away.” We were whispering like conspirators. “He will lose his summer bonus and not get his lorry.”

  “I don’t care about his lorry. I must get Madame Corbet or he will come in.” She was shaking and I made up my mind. I know now it was one of those moments when one is more noble than one is capable of being. I turned back the bed-clothes. “Get in,” I said; “I will go and talk to Paul.”

  “But . . .”

  “I’m not afraid of Paul.” But as I said it, that was not true; I was afraid of that look in him, of the words he had shouted as he was taken away, but Joss was horridly easy to convince—it seems to me now she was astoundingly selfish; she agreed at once. “You are sure you don’t mind? It isn’t you he has come for,” she said, “so you will be all right.”

  Slowly, fearfully, I opened the door, but Paul was not in Joss’s room. There was no sign of him, and I slid along the wall and into her bed with a feeling half of relief and half of flatness. Then, with a thrill of fear, I saw that, though no one was there, the two ends of the ladder were against the sill.

  I knew then a little of what it must have been to be a sacrifice, a maiden, for instance, bound on the faggots—or, perhaps not as noble as that, one of the goats Father had told us about, tied up as bait for a tiger. Paul was a little like a tiger, and tigers have no pity. What would he do when he found I was not Joss? Would he do what he wanted to do to her? Besides being frightened I was filled with a dreadful curiosity. I had Eve’s Curse, that meant I could have a baby although my breasts were only like lemons; they were tingling and I remembered Paul’s hand on them, and my thighs tingled too.

  Faint and far, I heard the Hôtel de Ville clock strike three times. I remembered that afterwards, three o’clock, and then I heard the ladder creak as somebody came up. I gripped the clothes round me and lay as flat as I could in the bed, my heart beating so that I could hardly breathe but, oddly, in the top of my head. My cheeks were hot, and my eyes stretched to see what they must see. It was not Paul coming up the ladder—it was an animal thing, the tiger. A head and shoulders rose black outside the window, dark with a white patch of face—I had almost expected to see it striped. A hand shook the catch loose so that it fell; the window slowly opened.

  I screamed, though without a sound. Nothing hurts as much as a scream in silence. Eliot! Eliot! Eliot! It was a scream, a wild prayer, and I heard footsteps running on the gravel.

  The ladder and its figure lifted backwards into the air. Paul gave a cry, half muffled, an animal’s cry, as he disappeared, and there was a thud. The ladder had fallen backwards on to the courtyard grass.

  I slid out of bed and crept to the window to look. I remember I was so clammy with fear that the night air struck icily on me, and I shivered as Joss had as I looked down.

  The ladder lay on the grass; it must have spun as it fell and fallen hard, for it was still quivering, but Paul was standing up, miraculously jumped clear or fallen off. He was standing, though rubbing his elbow and knees, and facing him was Eliot.

  Then Eliot had come; but how? How had he heard me? His room was not on this side, nobody’s was except Joss’s and the visitors’ rooms on the first floor, which were empty now. Then my sense woke up. How could Eliot have heard me when I had not made a sound? And what was he doing in the garden in the middle of the night—or not the middle, three o’clock in the morning?

  Paul was still without his apron, and again I saw that without the long white limp garment he looked a man; all at once it seemed possible, even fitting, that he should drive a lorry. It was no longer like Willmouse’s atelier, half a child’s dream. Eliot was not as usual, either; he was wearing . . . and I stopped.

  Was he Eliot? What made me so sure he was? This man was in what Willmouse had said Eliot once wore, ‘Not Eliot’s clothes’, cotton trousers, a striped jersey, the cap. The sight of the cap brought back the fear when that face had looked at us, the dark man’s face. In the moonlight I strained to see who it was, and yes, it was Eliot. Yet that made me more afraid. I saw the glint of his eyes as he lifted his head and . . . what was he doing? As I asked that I saw what I had not noticed before, a small case on the grass. He must have dropped it when he ran to the ladder. Then was Eliot going away? The case was too small to count as luggage but suddenly I knew Eliot was going away.

  I think Paul knew that too. I thought I heard him say, “Vous partez, hein?” with some swear words, though it was too far for me to catch the whole of the quick French.

  “Ssst!” That came from Eliot like a whipcrack, a warning, but Paul was drunk, drunk and angry, I thought, and . . . ‘balked’ was the animal-sounding word that came into my mind, as he had been balked from dancing with Joss. Now he was daring to bait Eliot. “Vous partez, hein?”

  He went nearer. Out of my small experience I could have told him not to go near Eliot when Eliot was that cold stranger, but Paul made a sudden sideways lunge at the case.

  I could not see what happened then, who hit whom. Paul’s arms went as they had done when he battered me, but Eliot was fighting as . . . one must not fight, I thought appalled. ‘Never hit in the stomach or kick,’ Uncle William had taught us, but I saw Eliot’s knee come up into Paul and Paul let out a sound as if he were torn; then he doubled over, took two or three steps bent across the grass, made a noise like a gurgle and fell on his knees and was sick, his hands beating at his chest, his head wagging.

  Eliot waited. I can see him waiting now, nothing seemed as cruel as that, and then he was . . . unfair again, but it was worse than unfair, it was cowardly and—a word from school plays came back to me—dastardly. ‘Never hit anyone who is down’, that was Uncle William too, but, as Paul’s head bent lower, Eliot struck down at his back. It was so quick I could hardly believe I saw it, like lightning. What made it truly like lightning was that, in the moonlig
ht, I thought I saw a long thin thing flash in Eliot’s hand. For an odd moment I thought it was his paper-knife . . . but he would not carry a paper-knife in the garden.

  Paul slid gently forward on to the grass, face downward. His legs kicked once or twice, then there were only quivers, like the ladder.

  Eliot looked towards the house, along the windows. I shrank behind the curtains. I could not bring myself to look at his face below the cap; I think I expected it to change into that other man . . . the third Eliot. There was our Eliot and the cold unkind one, and him. When I looked again he had lifted Paul; he stood a moment, put Paul down and moved the case, putting it under the bushes. Then he came back to Paul, lifted him again and carried him away round the house.

  What had I seen? I did not know. I remember only that heart beating in the top of my head and I seemed to have turned to ice against the window. I could not even shiver. I looked out into the garden where there was nothing but the garden and the moonlight, a few marks on the grass, and the ladder. I could not believe there had been anything else, been that . . . But what was that? What had Eliot done to Paul? As I asked the question I seemed to hear Eliot’s voice saying, “I’m sorry. I had to do that.” Then . . . ? Then . . . ?

  I do not know how long I stood there by the curtain, my hands on the sill. It might have been a few minutes, it might have been half an hour, but suddenly as I looked down I saw Eliot was back.

  He was alone. I do not know why that frightened me, but I could not bear it that he was alone.

  He came to the ladder, at which he looked down consideringly. It had left marks on the grass, two long sears. I thought he was wondering if he should take the ladder away when, through the night, came a sound that might have been a low hoot from the river or an owl. Eliot turned and picked up the small case.

  Once again he scanned the house and again I shrank back against the curtain. Then he was gone.

  When I took my hands from the sill the marks of them were there, soaking wet.

  CHAPTER 15