by H. E. Bates
‘And don’t forget that Mr Lubbock likes me to taste the wine first. He says my palate’s good. You’ll remember that, won’t you?’
‘Yes, miss.’
She smiled and then, for the first time, his hands started trembling. They were to suffer these bouts of acute trembling for several months afterwards. Sometimes they lasted for only a minute or so, sometimes for half an hour, but that first evening he was still shaking when he started to pour the wine at Lubbock’s table.
As the first drops went into the girl’s glass Lubbock gave a pugnacious sort of growl.
‘How the hell did you know Miss Howard liked to taste the wine?’
‘Ladies first, sir.’
‘You’ll do.’ Lubbock gave a half-belch that might almost have been a note of praise. ‘I shall want another bottle of this, do you hear?’
‘Yessir. Ready whenever you want it.’
‘It’d better be. And watch what you’re up to. You’re all of a bloody shake.’
The girl had been watching his trembling hands and now she looked straight up at him. Immediately something in the very fullness of the stare calmed him down completely. And then as if she wanted to put him finally at rest she said: ‘Your face seems familiar. Didn’t you used to work at The Dolphin at Brighton?’
‘No, miss. Never worked there.’
‘Funny. I seem to have seen you somewhere before.’
‘Don’t think so, miss.’
‘Ah! well, we shall be seeing you again I expect.’
‘Expect so, miss.’
He was about to move away when Lubbock growled ‘What’s your name, anyway? What do they call you?’
‘Squiff.’
‘By God, you look it.’ Lubbock gave a short crackling laugh that was more like an amused snarl. ‘Hear that, Stella? Squiff. How’s that for a name?’
Lubbock laughed a second time but by the time the sound had echoed round the high-pitched dining-room Squiff had gone.
He had hardly left the table before Lubbock drained his glass and then, sloshing more wine into it, gave another insolent boar-like growl from the lips that were so like lumps of crêpe rubber, telling the entire dining-room:
‘This place gets worse and worse. It’s going down the bloody drain. You can tell that. It’d better pick up or I’ll be hanged if we come here.’
‘I like it here.’
‘All right, if you like it that’s all right then. If it’s good enough for you—’
She accepted this rough compliment as if it were a gem. An extraordinary look of entrancement, almost adoration, came over her face, precisely as if she could see behind the brutish crêpe-like lips some engaging quality in Lubbock that was lost on the rest of the world.
‘Just like you to say that,’ she said. ‘Having a nice time?’
‘All right. You?’
‘Lovely. The wine’s just right on an evening like this. Somehow it never tastes the same anywhere else as it does here.’
What exactly prompted Squiff to begin to send her flowers every week was something he could probably have never been able to explain. It might have been the only way he knew of saying thank you for the help she had given him; it was something he couldn’t possibly have expressed in words. It might equally have been that he was trying to express, in silence and from far off, an otherwise inexpressible adoration.
It might also have been something of both these things but it wasn’t long before he heard that she was living with Lubbock in a farmhouse seven or eight miles away and there, every Saturday morning, bunches of red roses arrived, always without a card.
Lubbock had called her Miss Howard, but in reality she was still married to a man of Quaker sympathies named Bailey who kept a small stationery and fancy goods shop of an old fashioned sort in the nearest market town. Bailey was the sort of man who, rather than draw ten cheques to pay ten bills, would draw one cheque and walk round the town paying each bill by cash, thus saving nine cheque stamps. When he bought her a new coat or dress – and it hadn’t been very often – he gave her cash too and then insisted on having the few shillings, or even few pennies, change. It didn’t need much coaxing on Lubbock’s part to make her see that life could offer more than this kind of parsimony. She stepped in a few months from ready made coats and chain store dresses to mink wraps, hats from Mayfair, a car of her own and frequent trips across to the French coast to gamble and drink champagne on Sundays.
‘A girl like you’s got to see the sights,’ Lubbock said.
There are certain women who, though having refinements of their own, appear to relish a quality of brashness in a man. Lubbock loved her harshly, rudely and even brutally and in a strange way it excited her. The greatest of her qualities was not that she was very good looking but that she was gifted with curious powers of penetration. She saw behind all the barking insolence of Lubbock’s exterior a man desperately aware of his own deficiencies; the outer animal concealed a baby groping.
In the same way she had been able to detect, or at least guess at, the deficiencies in Squiff. She was quick to sense something more than a nervous upheaval of incompetence behind the trembling hands.
But when the roses began to arrive she failed to put the fact of them and Squiff together; it never once crossed her mind that the two might have a connection. At first she felt inclined to treat them as a joke but after two or three weeks they started to affect her in quite another way. She felt herself making something intensely secretive of them and when Lubbock teased her about them in his coarsest fashion she merely lied in rather a clumsy way.
‘New boy friend turned up trumps again, I see. More roses, eh? Generous bastard – a whole bleeding dozen again. Have to watch himself or he’ll be broke soon.’
‘I have them sent myself,’ she said. ‘They’re the new Baccarat roses. A special sort. I like them because they last so long.’
All the time, still acting as wine-waiter up at the hotel, Squiff waited for one Saturday after another. He hoped always that she would wear one of the roses in her dress at dinner but she never did. This hope threw him into a tremendous battle to keep himself calm but he could never manage to control the shaking of his hands.
One evening, as the weather turned sharply chilly in late September, Lubbock decided to drink red wine instead of white at dinner.
‘We’ll have number 15,’ he said ‘the Nuits St George’ – he pronounced it Newts Saint George and in a strange way something inside Stella Howard wept for him – ‘and see it’s the right bloody temperature. Nice and warm. I don’t want my guts froze out tonight.’
Squiff fetched up two bottles of wine from the cellar, found a convenient radiator, put the bottles on top and waited for them to warm up.
Ten minutes later Stella Howard was doing her best not to pretend that she knew the wine was cooked. Squiff’s hands, as usual, were shaking violently and something about them and about the way she stared up at him as he started to pour a quivering trickle of wine aroused in Lubbock a violent rush of suspicions.
‘Tip some in here!’ he ordered. ‘I’ll taste it.’
He drank rapidly at the wine and immediately jumped as if scalded.
‘You flaming wet! It’s like hot soup! Take the bloody stuff away.’
Squiff stood helpless, without a word, his hands still violently shaking. Stella Howard stared up at him in uneasy pity, without a word either. The clatter of a spoon falling on the bare oak floor at the far end of the dining-room was like a sudden signal to Lubbock, who abruptly turned on her in a lash of rage, for once not loud, but curt and cold.
‘And what are you grinning at? You harboured him in it, didn’t you? You knew it was cooked, didn’t you?’
‘I am not grinning.’
‘You were grinning like a bloody heifer.’
She at once took the mink wrap from the back of her chair, slipped it over her shoulders and got up.
‘And where d’ye think you’re going?’ he said.
She merely s
tared coldly past him, closed the wrap firmly across the front of her dress and started to walk away. She had hardly moved from the table before Lubbock leapt up, took one long stride towards her and half-pushed, half-knocked her back in the chair.
‘Don’t make a damn fool of yourself. Sit down.’
She sat there without attempting to make another move. There were tears in her eyes. The wrap, falling slowly from her bare shoulders, slid to the floor.
For a few miraculous moments Squiff’s hands had stopped trembling and he stooped down to pick up the wrap. He had hardly moved before Lubbock said:
‘And what are you dancing about at? She doesn’t want any help from you. When she wants any help from you she’ll send you a wire.’
Without answering or looking at either Lubbock or the girl Squiff walked away. He had seen the gleam of tears in her eyes and he carried the image away with him. As the evening went on the image grafted itself painfully and permanently on to his own eyes, so that not only was he afflicted with new, greater shakings of his hands but his vision was clouded too.
‘I’ll kill him,’ he started telling himself. ‘I’ll kill him. I’m going to kill him. Somehow.’
All the next week the idea of killing Lubbock chattered through his mind like a tortuous and clumsy tune. It drove him about in a daze. It kept him awake for fearful stretches in the night, his mind cold and haunted and indecisive. In his customary groping and innocent way he tried to fix on some method of killing Lubbock and finally came to a grotesquely childish conclusion.
‘Got to look like an accident,’ he kept telling himself. ‘Got to look like an accident somehow.’
What sort of accident it was going to be he couldn’t, for a long time, make up his mind. There was nothing in his nature remotely subtle enough to make any kind of ingenious plan. He merely groped; and in groping got himself into darker confusions where the only things of any abiding clarity were the tears in Stella Howard’s eyes, the way her wrap had slid to the floor and the way she had first looked at him. All the time he thought of the great stillness in her eyes.
By the following Saturday night, still without any real idea of what sort of accident it was to be, his nerves were screwed up like wire rope. His hands trembled constantly. His order for roses had gone off as usual and now and then he was able to pacify himself for a moment by dwelling on another secret image: that of Stella Howard unpacking the roses putting them in a vase, gazing at them and perhaps for a few moments wondering who had sent them. He would never be able to know what her feelings about the roses were but it calmed him briefly to think of it.
Then an unexpected thing happened. Just before half-past seven the head waiter came up to him and said:
‘Mr Lubbock’s just cancelled his table. Says he won’t be in tonight.’
He immediately felt desolate and lonely. The urge to kill Lubbock suddenly receded. The mere fact that he wasn’t going to see Stella Howard, even as a figure in a painful scene, put him in a new and different sort of daze. It was exactly as if they had been married or lovers and she had left him. It was almost as if she, and not Lubbock, had died.
He spent the whole of the following week battered by these opposing ideas: on the one hand of wanting to kill Lubbock and on the other of wanting to see Stella Howard back, as it were, from the dead. The nagging aridity of his thoughts was so great that for the first time in his life he started to take a few drinks. On evenings when the hotel was half-empty he stayed for long periods down in the cellar, staring into the half darkness with a glass in his hands.
Drink didn’t help him much; it merely seemed to push the days along a fraction faster towards another Saturday.
And when Saturday came he had another surprise. He was walking through the bar about half past six when he suddenly heard Lubbock’s voice, for some reason not so loud as usual, and saw him sitting at the bar. The night was cold and squally and Lubbock’s voice sounded curiously brittle, very like an echo of the many pine boughs cracking in the rough wind outside:
‘Ah! it’s old Squiff. How’s our old Squiff?’ Lubbock lugubriously waved a glass of gin about and wagged a heavy cautionary finger. ‘Look a bit pale and drawn, Squiff, old sport. Should take more of this – more of the old oil, eh?’
‘Evening, sir.’
‘More of the old oil, that’s what keeps the bloody cold out, eh?’
Squiff didn’t want to talk; he started to leave the bar.
‘Here, half a mo, where are you off to? Come ’ere a minute.’
Squiff, wondering over and over again where Stella Howard could be, stood motionless by the door. Behind Lubbock’s back the barman was making a prolonged pretence of polishing a bar that was in no need of polishing and Squiff said in a steady voice, his hands surprisingly steady too:
‘I was just off down the cellar, Sir. Thought I might get your usual up. You’ll have the red, I suppose?’
‘Not eating tonight, Squiff. No bleeding appetite.’
Squiff, staring straight at Lubbock, felt his whole body tautening up, stiffening with a fresh, sharp hatred of the man.
‘Madam not coming in tonight, sir?’
‘Blast madam. To bloody hell with madam—’
Out of the turbulent stream of alcoholic mutterings – drink seemed to twist the character of Lubbock inside out, suppressing both insolence and the louder of his coarseness, turning him introspective – it gradually grew clear that he and Stella Howard had been quarrelling long and bitterly that afternoon. There wasn’t much that was coherent in Lubbock’s muttered repetitions until Squiff, in a moment of paralytic astonishment, heard the words, repeated several times:
‘Red roses. The sod sends her red roses, regular as bloody clockwork. Every damn week – there they are, stuck all over the blasted place. Nothing but red roses—’
Squiff’s hands started shaking; the sinews jumped as if from acute bursts of electric shock. His tongue recoiled and pressed itself like a short snake against the back of his mouth and he heard Lubbock say:
‘They’re all bitches, the whole stinking lot of ’em. You give ’em the bloody world and they take it and then throw it back into your wet physog. Bitches – they stink, the whole lot of ’em – they’re only good for one thing—’
Squiff, not waiting to hear any more, turned suddenly, walked out of the bar and then out of the hotel. It was dark early that night and nips of rain were falling in the squalls. Pine boughs were cracking off like so many fireworks. He stood for some moments under the pines, shaking dreadfully, not really consciously thinking, not stopping to ask himself whether in fact Lubbock knew who had sent the flowers or whether it mattered if he did.
There was only one thing in his mind. The shape the accident was to take had suddenly become perfectly clear to him. It was all of miraculous simplicity.
Instinctively he looked round for Lubbock’s car and saw it, a big black Mercedes, parked under a big chestnut tree at the upper end of the hotel drive. So early in the evening there were no other cars about and without a second’s hesitation he walked over to it, his hands still shaking in that dreadfully helpless fashion, his mind and ears not really conscious, so that he wasn’t even aware of the odd chestnut or two that sudden squalls ripped out of the tree and sent bumping down on the asphalt below.
In another minute or two he had found a wheel-brace and a screw-driver in the boot of the car. It was all of a miraculous, grotesque simplicity. Presently he had taken off one of the front wheel hub-covers and was loosening the wheel-nuts with the brace. The concentrated pressure necessary to turn the nuts had the effect of locking his hands to the brace, so that for some time they actually stopped shaking.
With the loosening of each nut he seemed to see Lubbock, drunk, careering helplesssly down some distant hill in the squally darkness, the front wheel of the Mercedes flying off. The thing was of such fabulous simplicity that no one, he told himself, would ever know. But just to make doubly sure, he thought, he would loosen a second wheel.<
br />
He had actually started unscrewing the first nut of the front on-side wheel when a big taxi came up the drive in the rain. In a vague way he was aware of it stopping, of hearing one of its doors slam and of a couple of voices talking. But it didn’t occur to him to hide himself. He was thirty or more yards away and most of the sounds were muffled in the squalls.
Presently the taxi turned and drove off, head-lights swinging under the pines. For a few minutes he worked on at the remaining nuts, hands still not shaking, with the vision of Lubbock in a death-spin still vibrantly clear in his mind.
It took him fully another minute to realise that someone was standing by his side, watching him. He slowly looked up. It was Stella Howard standing there; she was wearing a bright yellow mackintosh and a blue scarf on her head.
‘What are you doing to Mr Lubbock’s car?’
Her voice was a low whisper but the loudest of shouts couldn’t have hit him with greater shock. His hands were suddenly taken by a gigantic spasm of trembling. It was exactly as if another pair of hands, invisible and frenziedly muscular, had violently seized hold of them and given them a shaking of superhuman power.
He was helpless to stop this shaking and he didn’t say a word. For almost another minute she didn’t speak either but all the time she was looking at him in that same steadfast way, her eyes full of a miraculous stillness, as when she had first sensed the greatest of his troubles, the fact that he couldn’t read or write.
Now for the second time she understood what he was doing. It was all perfectly clear to her and she was very calm.
‘That would be a terrible thing to do.’
Again he didn’t say a word and she stood looking down with pity at that dreadful trembling of his hands. She might have been moved to say, in that moment, something about the roses, how she knew who had sent them and why, or to chastise him or in some way threaten him for the thing he was about to do.
But she didn’t speak either. Instead she suddenly took hold of his hands and gripped them with her own. She held them like that for fully five minutes, neither she nor Squiff speaking, the squally rain flicking hard at their two silent faces, until the shaking of his hands stopped at last and he was completely quiet again.
