by H. E. Bates
‘We’ll see.’
‘I’ll take it as a promise,’ he said. He laughed again and kissed her neck and she felt excited. ‘You can keep a promise, Thelma, can’t you?’
‘Never mind about that now,’ she said. ‘What time shall I call you in the morning?’
‘Call me early, mother dear,’ he said. ‘I ought to be away by six or just after.’
She could not sleep that night. She thought over and over again of the way George Furness had kissed her. She remembered the moist warm lips, the red gay tongue flicking at beech-nuts, and how sunlight breaking through thinning autumn branches had given a dancing effect to his already light-hearted face and hands. She remembered the way he had talked of promises and making hay. And after a time she could not help wishing that she had done what George Furness had wanted her to do. ‘But there’s always next weekend,’ she thought. ‘I’ll be waiting next weekend.’
It was very late when she fell asleep and it was after half-past six before she woke again. It was a quarter to seven before she had the tea made and when she hurried upstairs with the tray her hands were trembling. Then after she had knocked on the door of George Furness’ bedroom she went inside to make the first of several discoveries. The bed was empty and George Furness had left by motor-car.
Only a few years later, by the time she was twenty-five, almost every gentleman came and went by motor-car. But that morning it was a new and strange experience to know that a gentleman did not need to go by train. It was a revolution in her life to find that a man could pay his bill overnight, leave before breakfast and not wait for his usual can of shaving water.
All that week, and for several weeks afterwards, she waited for George Furness to come back. She waited with particular anxiety on Fridays and Mondays. She found herself becoming agitated at the sound of a motor-car. Then for the few remaining Sundays of that autumn she walked in the forest, sat down in the exact spot where George Furness had thrown beech-nuts into the air and caught them in his red fleshy mouth, and tried intensely to re-experience what it was like to be kissed by that mouth, in late warm sunlight, under a million withering beech-leaves.
All this time, and for some time afterwards, she went about her work as if nothing had happened. Then presently she began to inquire, casually at first, as if it was really a trivial matter, whether anyone had seen George Furness. When it appeared that nobody had and again that nobody even knew what Furness looked like she found herself beginning to describe him, explain him and exaggerate him a little more. In that way, by making him a little larger than life, she felt that people would recognise him more readily. Presently there would inevitably come a day when someone would say ‘Ah! yes, old George. Ran across him only yesterday.’
At the same time she remained secretive and shy about him. She did not mention him in open company. It was always to some gentleman alone, to a solitary commercial traveller sipping a late night whisky or an early morning cup of tea in his bedroom, that she would say:
‘Ever see George Furness nowadays? He hasn’t been down lately. You knew him didn’t you?’
‘Can’t say I did.’
‘Nice cheerful fellow. Dark. Came from London—he’d talk to you hours about London, George would. Used to keep me fascinated. I think he was in quite a way up there.’
And soon, occasionally, she began to go further than this:
‘Oh! we had some times, George and me. He liked a bit of fun, George did. I used to show him the forest sometimes. He didn’t know one tree from another.’
One hot Sunday afternoon in early summer, when she was twenty, she was walking towards the forest when she met another commercial traveller, a man in hosiery named Prentis, sauntering with boredom along the roadside, flicking at the heads of buttercups with a thin malacca cane. His black patent leather shoes were white with dust and something about the way he flicked at the buttercups reminded her of the way George Furness had cut with his cane at dancing clouds of late October flies.
‘Sunday,’ Prentis said. ‘Whoever invented Sunday? Not a commercial, you bet. If there’s one day in the week I hate it’s Sunday—what’s there to do on Sundays?’
‘I generally walk in the forest,’ she said.
Some time later, in the forest, Prentis began kissing her very much as George Furness had done. Under the thick bright mass of leaves, motionless in the heat of afternoon, she shut her eyes and tried to persuade herself that the moist red lips of Furness were pressing down on hers. The recaptured sensation of warmth and softness excited her into trembling. Then suddenly, feeling exposed and shy in the open riding, she was afraid that perhaps someone from the hotel might walk past and see her and she said:
‘Let’s take the little path there. That’s a nice way. Nobody ever goes up there.’
Afterwards Prentis took off his jacket and made a pillow of it and they lay down together for the rest of the afternoon in the thick cool shade. At the same time Prentis’ feet itched and he took off his shoes. As he did so and she saw the shoes white with summer dust she said:
‘You’d better leave them with me tonight. I’ll clean them nicely.’
And then presently, lying on her back, looking up at the high bright mass of summer leaves with her bleached far-off eyes, she said:
‘Do you like the forest? Ever been in here before?’
‘Never.’
‘I love it here,’ she said. ‘I always come when I can.’
‘By yourself?’
‘That would be telling,’ she said.
‘I’ll bet you do,’ he said. He began laughing, pressing his body against her, stringing his fingers like a comb through her sharp red hair. ‘Every Sunday, eh? What time will you bring the shoes?’
Presently he kissed her again. And again she shut her eyes and tried to imagine that the mouth pressing down on hers was the mouth of George Furness. The experience was like that of trying to stalk a butterfly on the petal of a flower and seeing it, at the last moment, flutter away at the approach of a shadow. It was very pleasant kissing Prentis under the great arch of beech-leaves in the hot still afternoon. She liked it very much. But what she sought, in the end, was not quite there.
By the time she was twenty-five she had lost count of the number of men she had taken into the forest on Sunday afternoons. By then her face had broadened and begun to fill out a lot. Her arms were fleshy and her hips had begun to stand out from her body so that her skirts were always a little too tight and rode up at the back, showing the hem of her underclothes. Her feet, from walking up and down stairs all day, had grown much flatter and her legs were straight and solid. In the summer she could not bear to wear her corsets and gradually her figure became more floppy, her bust like a soft fat pillow untidily slept in.
Most of the men who came to spend a night or two at the hotel were married men, travellers glad of a little reprieve from wives and then equally glad, after a week or two on the road, to go back to them again. She was a great comfort to such men. They looked forward through dreary days of lugging and unpacking sample cases to evenings when Thelma, pillowy and soft, with her soothing voice, would put her head into their bedrooms and say:
‘Had a good week, sir? Anything you want? Something you’d like me to get for you?’
Many of them wanted Thelma. Almost as many of them were content simply to talk with her. At night, when she took up to their bedrooms hot jugs of cocoa, tots of whisky, pots of tea or in winter, for colds, fiery mugs of steaming rum and cinnamon, they liked her to stay and talk for a while. Sometimes she simply stood by the bedside, arms folded over her enlarging bosom, legs a little apart, nodding and listening. Sometimes she sat on the edge of the bed, her skirt riding up over her thick knees, her red hair like a plaited bell-rope as one of the travellers twisted it in his hands. Sometimes a man was in trouble: a girl had thrown him over or a wife had died. Then she listened with eyes that seemed so intent in their wide and placid colourlessness that again and again a man troubled in loneliness gained the impression
that she was thinking always and only of him. Not one of them guessed that she was really thinking of George Furness or that as she let them twist her thick red hair, stroke her pale comforting, comfortable arms and thighs or kiss her unaggressive lips she was really letting someone else, in imagination, do these things. In the same way when she took off her clothes and slipped into bed with them it was from feelings and motives far removed from wantonness. She was simply groping hungrily for experiences she felt George Furness, and only George Furness, ought to have shared.
When she was thirty the urge to see George Furness became so obsessive that she decided, for the first and only time in her life, to go to London. She did not really think of the impossibility of finding anybody in so large a place. She had thought a great deal about London and what it would be like there, with George Furness, on the spree. Lying in her own room, listening to the night sounds of a forest that was hardly ever really still all through winter and summer, she had built up the impression that London, though vast, was also composed in large part of trees. That was because George Furness had described it that way. For that reason she was not afraid of London; the prospect of being alone there did not appal her. And always at the back of her mind lay the comforting and unsullied notion that somehow, by extraordinary chance, by some unbelievable miracle, she would run into George Furness there as naturally and simply as if he were walking up the steps of The Blenheim Arms.
So she packed her things into a small black fibre suit-case, asked for seven days off, the only holiday she had ever taken in her life, and started off by train. At the junction twelve miles away she had not only to change trains but she had also to wait for thirty-five minutes for the eastbound London train. It was midday on a warm oppressive day in September and she decided to go into the refreshment room to rest and get herself an Eccles cake, of which she was very fond, and a cup of tea. The cakes in fact tempted her so much that she ordered two.
Just before the cakes and the tea arrived at her table she became uneasily aware of someone looking at her. She looked round the refreshment room and saw, standing with his foot on the rail of the bar, beside a big blue-flamed tea-urn, a man she knew named Lattimore, a traveller in novelty lines for toy-shops and bazaars. Lattimore, a tallish man of thirty-five with fair receding hair and a thick gold signet ring on the third finger of his right hand, was drinking whisky from a tumbler.
She was so used to the state and appearance of men who took too much to drink that she recognised, even at that distance across the railway refreshment room, that Lattimore was not quite sober. She had seen him drunk once or twice before and instinctively she felt concerned and sorry for him as he picked up his glass, wiped his mouth on the back of his free hand and then came over to talk to her.
‘Where are you going, Mr Lattimore?’ she said.
‘Down to the old Blenheim,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’
She did not say where she was going. In the few moments before her cakes arrived she looked at Lattimore with keen pale eyes. The pupils of his own eyes were dusky, ill-focused and beginning to water.
‘What is it, Mr Lattimore?’ she said.
‘Blast and damn her,’ he said. ‘Blast her.’
‘That isn’t the way to talk,’ Thelma said.
‘Blast her,’ he said. ‘Double blast her.’
Her cakes and tea arrived. She poured herself a cup of tea.
‘A cup of this would do you more good than that stuff,’ she said.
‘Double blast,’ he said. He gulped suddenly at the glass of whisky and then took a letter from his pocket. ‘Look at that, Thelma. Tell us what you think of that.’
It was not the first time she had read a letter from a wife to a husband telling him that she was finished, fed up and going away. Most of that sort of thing, she found, came right enough in the end. What she chiefly noticed this time was the postmark on the envelope. The letter came from London and it reminded her suddenly that she was going there.
‘Have one of these Eccles cakes,’ she said. ‘You want to get some food inside you.’
He fumbled with an Eccles cake. Flaky crumbs of pastry and loose currants fell on his waistcoat and striped grey trousers. To her dismay he then put the Eccles cake back on the plate and, after a pause, picked up her cake in mistake for his own. Something about this groping mistake of his with the cakes made her infinitely sad for him and she said:
‘You never ought to get into a state like this, Mr Lattimore. It’s awful. You’ll do yourself no good getting into this sort of state. You’re not driving, are you?’
‘Train,’ he said. ‘Train.’ He suddenly drained his whisky and, before she could speak, wandered across the refreshment bar to get himself another. ‘Another double and what platform for Deansborough?’ he called. He banged his hand on the counter and there was a sudden ring of breaking glasses.
Ten minutes later she was sitting with him in the train for Deansborough, going back home, his head on her shoulder. It was warm and oppressive in the carriage and she opened the window and let in fresh air. The wind blowing on his face ruffled his thinning hair and several times she smoothed it down again with her hands. It came to her then that she might have been smoothing down the hair of George Furness and at the same time she remembered London, though without regret.
‘What part of London do you come from?’ she said.
‘Finchley.’
‘That isn’t near the parks is it?’ she said. ‘You don’t ever run across a man named George Furness, do you?’
The little local train was rattling slowly and noisily between banks of woodland. Its noises rebounded from trees and cuttings and in through the open window so that for a moment she was not quite sure what Lattimore was saying in reply.
‘Furness? George? Old George?—dammit, friend of mine. Lives in Maida Vale.’
She sat staring for some time at the deep September banks of woodland, still dark green from summer, streaming past the windows. The whisky breath of Lattimore was sour on the sultry air and she opened the window a little further, breathing fast and deeply.
‘When did you see him last?’ she said.
‘Thursday—no, Wednesday,’ he said. ‘Play snooker together every Wednesday, me and George.’
Within a month the leaves on the beeches would be turning copper. With her blood pounding in her throat, she sat thinking of their great masses of burning, withering leaf and the way, a long time before, George Furness had held out his hand while she peeled nuts for him and then watched him toss them into the air and catch them on his moist red tongue.
‘How is he these days?’ she said.
‘Old George?—same as ever. Up and down. Up and down. Same as ever.’
Once again she stared at the passing woodlands, remembering. Unconsciously, as she did so, she twisted quietly at the big signet ring on Lattimore’s finger. The motion began to make him, in his half-drunk state, soothed and amorous. He turned his face towards her and put his mouth against her hair.
‘Ought to have married you, Thelma,’ he said. ‘Ought to have put the ring on you.’
‘You don’t want me.’
‘You like the ring?’ he said. ‘You can have it.’ He began struggling in groping alcoholic fashion to take the ring off his finger. ‘Have it, Thelma—you put it on.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’ And then: ‘How was George Furness when you saw him last Wednesday?’
He succeeded suddenly in taking the ring from his finger and began pressing it clumsily on one of her own.
‘There y’are, Thelma. You put it on. You wear it. For me. Put it on and keep it, Thelma. For me.’
The ring was on her finger.
‘How was George?’ she said.
‘Getting fat,’ he said. ‘Can’t get the old pod over the snooker table nowadays. Rest and be thankful—that’s what they call George.’
Half sleepy, half drunk, Lattimore let his head slip from her shoulder and the mass of her thick red hair down to the
shapeless comforting pillow of her bosom and she said:
‘What’s he travel in now? The same old line?’
‘Same old line,’ he said. ‘Furniture and carpets. Mostly carpets now.’
She realised suddenly that they were talking of quite different things, quite different people. She was listening to a muddled drunk who had somehow got the names wrong. She stared for a long time at the woods rushing past the rattling little train. There was no need to speak. Lattimore was asleep on her bosom, his mouth open, and the ring was shining on her finger.
Next day Lattimore did not remember the ring and she did not give it back. She kept it, as she kept a great many other things, as a memento of experiences that men liked to think were services she had rendered.
A drawer in the wardrobe in her bedroom was full of these things. She hardly ever used them: handkerchiefs, night-dress cases and bits of underwear from travellers in ladies’ wear, bottles of perfume and powder, night-dresses and dress-lengths of satin, necklaces of imitation pearl and amber; presents given for Christmas, her birthday or for a passing, comforting weekend.
Some of the men who had given them came back only once or twice and she never saw them again. They changed jobs or were moved to other districts. But they never forgot Thelma and travellers were always arriving to say that they had seen Bill Haynes and Charlie Townsend or Bert Hobbs only the week before and that Bill or Charlie or Bert wished to be remembered. Among themselves too men would wink and say ‘Never need be lonely down at The Blenheim. What do you say, Harry? Thelma always looks after you,’ and many a man would be recommended to stay there, on the edge of the forest, where he would be well looked after by Thelma, rather than go on to bigger towns beyond.
By the time she was forty she was not only plumper and more shapeless but her hair had begun to show the first cottony signs of grey. There was nothing she disliked more than red hair streaked with another colour and from that time onwards she began to dye her hair. Because she could never shop anywhere except in the village or at most in Chippingham, the junction, twelve miles away, she never succeeded in getting quite the right shade for her hair. The first dye she used was a little too yellow and gave her hair the appearance of an old fox fur. One day the shop in the village ran out of this dye and sold her something which, they said, was the nearest thing. This shade made her hair look as if stained with a mixture of beetroot and bay rum. It was altogether too dark for her. Later when the shop got in its new supplies of the yellow dye she uneasily realised that neither tint was suitable. The only thing that occurred to her to do then was to mix them together. This gave a strange gold rusty look to her hair and something in the dye at the same time made it much drier, so that it became unnaturally fuzzier and more difficult to manage than it had been.
