by H. E. Bates
‘Good afternoon,’ I said. I spoke nicely, sweetly: as though I wanted to sell her an insurance policy or a sewing machine.
‘Good afternoon.’ Her voice was prim: a white blameless-life kind of voice, decently distant, half afraid.
‘I was wondering,’ I said, ‘if you would allow me to take some notes about the house and garden. They have—historic associations.’
She looked more scared than ever. I could see at once that she thought I was a liar and a trickster. Her white-knuckled hand was tight on the door, ready to slam it in my face. Her prim eyes were full of the fear that I was about to burst in and take the spoons and seduce her and help myself to the food in the pantry.
Then I said: ‘I am a reporter. I represent The Nenweald Telegraph.’
The change in her was wonderful. She softened at once. She put the white knitting in the pocket of her white overall. But still a little of her fear remained.
‘My husband isn’t in,’ she said.
‘I have three children,’ I told her.
The remark finished it all. For one moment she seemed to waver, in doubt, and then I said:
‘It would make a nice little article. We might want a picture to go with it.’
I was saved again. She could see herself in the paper; the highest of all honours.
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you much,’ she said. ‘We have only just come to live here. We are only just married.’
‘Just so.’
I took out an old envelope and scribbled on it: ‘White bridal veil.’
‘When did you first occupy the house, Mrs——?’
‘Mrs Wade-Brown. Early this summer.’
‘Who lived here before that?’
‘An awful old man. I didn’t know him, but the place was in an awful state. Seeds hung up in paper bags all over the bedroom ceilings. Rotten apples on the bedroom floors. And there was no bathroom. We had to have a bathroom put in.’
‘You had to have a bathroom put in,’ I said, and I wrote on the envelope: ‘White bath.’
‘He was a terrible old man who lived here,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Did you know him?’ she said.
‘Everybody knew him. He was famous—notorious.’
‘We found hundreds of empty bottles in the cellar,’ she said. ‘He must have done nothing else but drink.’
‘He didn’t,’ I said. ‘He drank himself to death.’
She was speechless.
‘It was the cellar I wanted to see,’ I said. ‘It is the cellar which is historic.’
She hesitated.
‘In what way historic?’ she asked. ‘I was a school-teacher before I was married. I never heard of it.’
‘A man hid there,’ I said. ‘A sort of conspirator. A long time ago.’ I was not lying now: it was true. My Great-uncle Silas had hidden there, with the police of half the county looking for him, though that is another story.
I began to wipe my boots on the doormat, scribbling with mock deference on the old envelope all the time.
And, finally, she led me into the house. Stepping over the threshold, I breathed in at once, instinctively, to catch the smells of old tea and earth and wine and geraniums, all the warm rich odours of my Uncle Silas’s long existence there. But the air was dead: stale with the odours of new French-polished furniture and wool rugs and oilcloth. And one look at the room was enough: the prim, black-framed verses on the clear walls, new fire-grate in place of the old faggot-oven, the wedding presents all arranged on the piano and the sideboard with the correctitude of a showroom in a furniture shop. There was something ice-cold about its parsimonious respectability.
The woman saw me looking at it. ‘It’s very different from when we found it,’ she said.
‘Very different.’
‘You must mind the stairs down to the cellar. They’re very dark. We never use it.’
‘Perhaps I’d better go first,’ I said. ‘I could light a match for you.’
‘No, no. I’ll get a candle.’
There was a spirit of devilry in me, a sudden inheritance from my Uncle Silas himself, and suddenly, while she was looking for the candle in the back-kitchen, I slipped down the stairs as quickly and easily as unbuttoning the button of an old waistcoat—zip!
Then at the bottom, turning and looking up again, I saw the woman’s face above the unlighted candle. She looked scared again.
‘What happened?’ she said. ‘Did you fall? Wait a minute. I’ll bring the candle.’
She came timidly down the dark stairs, and I took the candle at the bottom and struck a match and lighted it.
We were in the cellar. And suddenly I breathed. It was like the breath of another world: the wine and dampness, the musty odour of ferment and dust and spider-webs. The walls were yellow in the candle-light. Big shadows fell and ballooned over them as I raised and lowered the candle.
‘Was it in here he hid?’ she said.
‘In here.’
And then I saw something: bottles, dark dust-covered bottles, six or seven of them, standing in the darkest corner.
‘Bottles,’ I said. I tried to be casual, indifferent, as though bottles could mean nothing to me.
‘Where?’ she said. ‘I thought the cellar was empty.’
I put the candle on the stone floor and took up one of the bottles. It was full. I held it in my hand for a moment in suspense. Then I took out the cork and sniffed. It was wine, elderberry. I did not know what to do with myself. I was smelling the wine again when the woman said:
‘What is it?’
‘Vinegar,’ I said. ‘Smell.’
She smelled. ‘It’s queer vinegar,’ she said.
‘It’s worked,’ I said, ‘fermented. It’s in a state of ferment.’
I hardly knew what I was saying. I put back the cork and picked up another bottle and uncorked that and sniffed again. It was elderberry.
‘Vinegar,’ I said.
Then I took up another bottle and another and another.
‘They’re all vinegar,’ I said.
Then suddenly I saw a bottle of light glass: I could see the wine in the candlelight, glowing with the lovely translucent cowslip light I knew so well.
‘What’s that?’ she said.
I smelled. The old delicate flower aroma of the wine was wonderful.
‘Harness oil,’ I said.
I put the cork back before she could move or speak. There were still two other bottles. I picked them up and sniffed of them and recorked them before she could wink.
‘All harness oil,’ I said.
‘The old man left them. That awful old man,’ she said. But I was looking at the bottles in mock perplexity.
‘They’re dangerous,’ I said.
‘How? Dangerous!’
‘They may burst—blow up. You’d better get rid of them.’ I picked up the candle. ‘Get a sack and we’ll put them in and I’ll dump them in the ditch when I go.’
‘Would you?’
Five minutes later we came up the cellar steps again, she carrying the candle, I with the sack of wine on my back.
‘Outside,’ she kept saying. ‘Outside. Whatever you do, put them outside.’
I laid the sack tenderly on the earth outside the door.
‘It’s very good of you,’ she said. ‘Have you taken all the notes you want?’
‘I should like to see the garden,’ I said.
We walked together down the garden path. The place had been ruined: a neat, parsimonious little lawn had been laid down where Silas had grown his potatoes; the old sun-flowers had gone and the old lilac trees; the place where the loveliest of all lilies had grown was a bed of red geraniums. I could not bear it. Only the thought of the sackful of harness oil and vinegar kept me from flying into anger again.
Then, at the foot of the garden, I saw something which almost shocked me. It was the pig-sty. The lilacs and cherry trees and lilies and roses had gone, but the pig-sty remained.
‘You keep pigs?’ I said.
‘Oh, no, no. I should be sick.’
‘But there’s the sty.’
‘Oh, but it’s empty. It’s going to be knocked down. My husband is going to knock it down. We shall use it for firewood when winter comes.’
I leaned over the sty-rails and looked on dung-stained bricks and whitewashed shelter. Then I unlatched the gate and walked into the sty. I was just bending down to look through the pig-door when the woman cried out:
‘Oh, don’t go in there!’
‘I’m very sorry,’ I said.
‘There’s a gun in there.’
‘A gun?’
‘It’s been there ever since we came. My husband found it. It’s loaded. He daren’t let it off.’
I looked at her seriously.
‘Have you a licence?’
‘Oh, no.’
‘You know you can get into serious trouble for having a gun without a licence,’ I said.
‘Trouble? No!’
‘Yes.’ I said. ‘And then guns are dangerous. You say it’s loaded?’
‘Yes.’ She was scared, whiter than ever.
‘I’d better have a look at it,’ I said.
I bent down and went into the inner sty. The floor was still strawed and the gun was hanging on a nail on the wooden wall. I took it down. It was plainly my Uncle Silas’s gun. His name was lettered on the stock in crude letters almost smoothed out again by use and time. It was an old muzzle-loader, and the barrel had been stuffed with paper and filings and old nails and ball bullets and powder. I had seen my Uncle Silas knocked flat on his back into the potatoes with the kick of it.
After a moment I went through into the sty-yard, carrying the gun in my hand as carelessly as though it had been a banana.
The woman retreated away.
‘Do be careful,’ she said.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m going to let it off.’
She was terrified. ‘When? How?’
‘Have you got some string?’ I said. ‘Good string. A long piece.’
She fled into the house. While she was gone I leaned the gun against the sty-rail and stared about the garden, trying hard to find some object in it that I could blow to smithereens, but the place was as bare as a piece of ploughed-land. And very soon the woman came running back with the string in her hands.
‘You won’t hurt anything? You’ll be careful? You won’t do any damage?’
I began to fix the gun to the sty-rails, lashing it with string, and when that was finished I tied the remaining string to the trigger.
The woman was trembling.
‘You’re not frightened?’ I said. I spoke sweetly to her, with the greatest consideration.
She shook her head.
‘You must stand away,’ I said.
At first she stood a yard or two away, and then ten yards, and then when she saw me cocking the gun and letting out the string she was thirty yards off, and the last I saw of her was as she stood on the threshold of the house, with her hands over her ears and her face as white as her wool.
A second later I pulled the string. The bang was terrific, shattering. I had aimed the gun at the pines, and the moment after the shot had torn through the trees there was a sound as though the sky were suddenly hailing cotton reels. And then before the last of the pine-cones had clattered down it seemed as though I had peppered all the rooks and jackdaws in the parish. There was nothing but a wild sound of the cawing and squalling birds flying high over the garden and the pines in the still, autumn air.
It was a wild, crazy sound, and it brought the woman running out of the house again.
‘Is it all right? What have you done? What is it?’
I was untying the gun from the sty-rails as she came up, and I turned to her and spoke with great seriousness again.
‘You see what might have happened,’ I said. ‘You see? This gun is so old it might have burst.’
She nodded.
‘I’ll take the gun away and ditch it with the bottles,’ I said. ‘It’s no good.’
The rooks were still flying wildly round and round, and the sound of their calling and of my voice seemed to terrify her into acquiescence. She said nothing, and I finished untying the gun.
We walked back up the path in silence, the rooks and daws still circling madly above the pines. It was not until we reached the house that she spoke at all.
‘I’m sorry you had that trouble,’ she said. She spoke as if I had done her a great service. ‘I shall be glad to be rid of the awful things.’
‘I’m sure you will.’
‘My husband is a teetotaller, and he doesn’t shoot,’ she paused. ‘Have you got your notes?’
‘I’ve got my notes,’ I said.
We stood in silence for a moment, awkwardly. I wanted to get away before her suspicions began again and she sent for the police, and I began to screw up the neck of the sack in readiness to swing it over my shoulder.
And then she remembered something.
‘Once before,’ she said, ‘someone else came and wanted to look round the house.’
‘Yes?’
‘A woman,’ she said. ‘She said she wanted to look at the place again for the last time.’
For some reason I could find nothing to say, and I stood in silence while she told me of how on a day in summer a woman—it could only have been my Uncle Silas’s housekeeper—walked into the garden and stood there like someone stupefied, not saying much except to repeat at intervals that she wanted the old bath. ‘I should like the old bath as a keepsake, to do my washing in.’ The young woman didn’t understand her, and then the old woman stood there in the garden and began to cry, still saying that she wanted the old bath, until finally, as the young woman herself said to me, ‘I had to send her away because I could see she was either drunk or wrong in the head.’
I picked up the sack and slung it on my shoulder. ‘I shan’t want to carry it far,’ I said.
‘It’s good of you to carry it at all,’ she said.
A moment later I thanked her and said good afternoon and opened the white garden gate and began to walk down the lane with the sack filled with the bottles on my shoulder.
At the foot of the lane I turned back. She was still standing there, at the white gate, watching me, as though she were still thinking about me.
I was thinking, too. But not of her, or the changed house, or the desolated garden, or the heavy wine-bottles clanking in the sack, or even my Uncle Silas himself.
I was thinking instead of that tart and irascible housekeeper, a flint-hearted iron-corseted woman, a tartar, a sour old tyrant, standing there in the summer garden, all broken up and stupefied, weeping her heart out for something nobody would ever understand.
Sugar for the Horse
My Uncle Silas had a little mare named Jenny, warm, brown and smooth-coated, with a cream arrow on her forehead and flecks of cream on three of her feet. She was a very knowing, friendly creature and she could take sugar off the top of your head. ‘Goo anywhere and do anything,’ my Uncle Silas would say. ‘Only got to give her the word. Goo bed wi’ me.’
‘Upstairs?’ I said.
‘Upstairs, downstairs,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Anywhere. Where you like. I recollect——’
‘Start some more tales,’ my grandmother would say. ‘Go on. Stuff the child’s head with rubbish. Keep on. Some day he’ll know the difference between the truth and what he hears from you.’
‘Is the truth,’ Silas said. ‘She come to bed with me arter the 1897 Jubilee. Over at Kimbolton. I oughta know. There was me and Tig Flawn and Queenie White——’
‘That’s been a minute,’ my grandmother said. She was very small and tart and dry and disbelieving. ‘How old’s Jenny now? Forty?’
‘Well, she’s gittin’ on,’ Silas said. ‘I recollect that day Queenie had a big hat on. We got the hat off her and put it on Jenny and she come up to bed with me just like a lamb.’
‘Who was Queenie
White?’ I said. ‘Did she come to bed with you too?’
‘I’m only tellin’ on you about the horse,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Queenie was afore your time.’
‘Pity she wasn’t before yours,’ my grandmother said.
‘Ah, but she wadn’t. Course,’ he said to me, ‘I could tell you a lot about her. Only you wanted to know about the horse. Well, she come to bed wi’ me——’
‘Did she?’ my grandmother said. ‘Well, I warn you here and now she’ll never come to bed in no house of mine.’
Some time later my Uncle Silas came down to Nenweald Fair, on the second Sunday in August, about the time the corn was cut and the first dewberries were ripe for gathering, with Jenny in a little black trap with yellow wheels and a spray of ash-leaves on her head to keep the flies away. There was always a wonderful dinner for Nenweald Fair and Silas always kept it waiting. There was always roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and horseradish sauce and chicken to choose from, and little kidney beans and new potatoes with butter, and yellow plum pie and cream with sugar on the pastry. There were jugs of beer on the sideboard by the clock with the picture of Philadelphia. The batter of the Yorkshire pudding was as buttery and soft as custard and all over the house there was a wonderful smell of beef burnt at the edges by fire.
But my Uncle Silas was always late and my grandfather, an indulgent, mild-mannered man unaccustomed to revelry and things of that sort, was always full of excuses for him.
‘Very like busted a belly-band coming down Longleys Hill or summat,’ he would say.
‘Start carving,’ my grandmother would say. ‘I’m having no dinner of mine spoilt for Silas or anybody else.’
‘Hold hard a minute. Give him a chance.’
‘The meat’s on the table,’ she would say, ‘and if he’s not here that’s his lookout,’ and she would plant the meat before my grandfather and it would sizzle in its gravy.
It was my Uncle Silas’s custom, and my grandmother knew it and knew it only too well, not only to arrive late for that dinner but never to arrive alone. He had a habit of arriving with strange men with names like Tig Flawn and Fiddler Bollard and Slob Johnson and Tupman Jarvis. That day he arrived, about two o’clock, when most of the meat had gone and the last of the yellow plums were cooling in the dish, with a man named Ponto Pack. I always wanted him to arrive with Queenie White and see what my grandmother thought of that, but he never did and I was always rather disappointed. Whenever he did arrive my grandmother always looked as if she could hit him over the head with the pastry-board or some other suitable instrument, and that day, when I looked out of the window and saw Silas and the man Ponto, like some gigantic blond sow, falling out of the trap, I felt the carving knife would hardly have been too much.
