by H. E. Bates
‘I wur comin’ to that,’ he said, ‘if you’ll let me git me breath.’
And what was the reason, I said, for being sorry for Pikey?
‘I wur comin’ to that an’ all,’ he said, ‘if you don’t keep a-chivvyin’ on me all the time.’
If there was anybody less out of breath and less chivvied at that moment it was my Uncle Silas, lying flat on his back under his soft straw hat in the shade of the raspberry rows.
‘You’re allus in sich a nation tearing hurry to git on,’ he said. ‘Pipe down a minute. I’m a-recollectin’ on it.’
For the next few minutes, while my Uncle Silas lay sleepily lost in recollection, I lay down myself and stared up at the clear calm blue sky. Presently I heard him give a long slow ripe smack of his lips and say softly:
‘Yeller ’uns. Beautiful yeller ’uns they wur.’
Yellow what? I said. I hadn’t the faintest notion what he was talking about.
‘Raspberries,’ he said. ‘The raspberries Pikey growed.’
I had to confess I had never heard of yellow raspberries and he said:
‘Best flavour o’ the lot. Beautiful an’ sweet. Ain’t so big, mind you, but lovely and soft. You don’t see ’em growed much nowadays.’
For the second time, perhaps a little impatiently, I said I had never heard of yellow raspberries.
‘Neither had she,’ he said.
And who, I said, was she?
‘Shandy Lil,’ he said. He smacked his lips again, softly this time, in what I thought was slower, riper, fruitier recollection. ‘Shandy Lil.’
And who, I said again, was she?
‘Pikey’s gal,’ he said. ‘Any rate the gal he wur arter.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Never forgit it,’ he said with remarkable quickness. ‘Allus remember it. Beautiful hot evening. I’d bin a-mowin’ a medder all day and I’d knocked down about seventeen pints and wur just orf to The Swan with Two Nicks for another quart or two.’
In one quick leap my Uncle Silas was far ahead of me.
‘Hardly got five minutes up the medder lane afore I come across Pikey,’ he said, ‘sitting on ’eap o’ stones, trembling like a good ’un.’
At this point I tried to draw my Uncle Silas out by saying, as he so often reminded me himself, that that was just what women did to you, but he ignored this inviting remark completely.
‘Nussin’ a paper bag,’ he said. ‘Lookin’ jist like a boy as’d bin caught bird’s-nestin’ and couldn’t git rid o’ th’ eggs. Blushin’ an’ quiverin’ an’ quakin’ all over.’
Sucking at another raspberry almost black with bloom, he went on to say what a terrible thing it was to see a big strong chap like Pikey in such a nervous state. ‘I felt onaccountable sorry for him,’ he said, ‘and arter a bit I asked him what wur the matter.’
After this he paused for so long that I was about to show my impatience again by asking exactly what was the matter when he lifted the straw hat rather sharply and said:
‘It ain’t allus the strong ’uns as make a goo on it. Ain’t allus the big ’uns. Strength ain’t everything.’
A go of what? I asked him. And who with?
‘Wimmin,’ he said. ‘Pikey wadn’t gittin’ nowhere with that gal. He wur frit to death on her. Bin tryin’ to speak to her for weeks. Heart failed him every time.’
What was she like? I asked him again, this time firmly. Pretty?
‘Her mother kept a pub over at Nether Dean,’ he said with that remarkable quick blandness again, not even lifting the straw hat.
‘The Blacksmith’s Arms. Seems Pikey used to goo over every night and have a pint or two there and stare at this gal across the bar. That’s all. Jist stare. Wadn’t gittin’ nowhere. Never said a word.’
What was she like? I said again. Big? Fair?
‘Dammit, man, how do I know what she wur like?’ he said. ‘I ’adn’t set eyes on her yit, ’ad I? I’m still a-sitting on this ’ere ’eap o’ stones with Pikey and this goodly bag o’ raspberries, ain’t I?’
His voice, though juicy, was quite acid and I lay back in silence between the raspberry rows, momentarily subdued.
‘I’ll outline her in a minute,’ he said, ‘if you’ll hold hard. But I got to git there fust, ain’t I?’
In the process of getting there my Uncle Silas dwelt for some time on the pitiful nature of the raspberries in the paper bag. They were Pikey’s idea of a present to a girl, a sort of opening offering, but yellow or not, Silas said, they wouldn’t do at all.
‘“Fust you got wrap everything up, Pikey,” I told him. ‘That’s what wimmin like. Surprises. Unwrappin’ things. A bit o’ mystery. Next you got to roll up to that pub as if you are somebody. Git a trap and a spankin’ little mare and drive up in that. Tie a bit o’ ribbon on her tail and another bit on the whip and put a big Sweet William in your button-hole. You’ll never git nowhere crawlin’ and tremblin’ on your hands and knees. Wimmin don’t like that.”’
All Pikey could do, it seemed, was to sit on the heap of stones and say, over and over again: ‘I dussn’t do it, Silas, I dussn’t do it. I ain’t made that way.’
By this time I had begun to feel quite a bit sorry for Pikey myself. There is nothing quite so touching as a shy, helpless, muscular man.
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘Well,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘when a chap don’t know how to do his courtin’ you best git on and show ’im. That’s what I say.’
Accordingly, two nights later, my Uncle Silas borrowed a trap and a little brown mare from a man named Joe Billington and tied a blue and yellow ribbon on the mare’s tail and a crimson bow on the whip.
‘Pikey picked a beautiful lot o’ raspberries and I laid ’em on a nice bed o’ leaves in a little bit of a flat basket. Then I covered ’em over with a bit o’ white muslin and tied it on with blue ribbon and then slipped a few cornflowers round the handle and tied them on too. Then I put a big red rose in me buttonhole and a big pink and white Sweet William in Pikey’s and we spanked off like a couple o’ dukes gooin’ to the races.’
This time I didn’t ask what happened. Somehow I knew that when they got to The Blacksmith’s Arms Pikey would sit in the trap outside, all of a tremble, and say ‘I dussn’t do it, Silas, I dussn’t do it. I ain’t made that way.’
‘Said it forty times if he said it once,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Couldn’t git him into that bar nohow. Wild horses wouldn’t git him in.’
At this point I made the inviting suggestion that my Uncle Silas had naturally had no such misgivings but, reposing blandly under the straw hat, he ignored that invitation too.
‘“Pikey,” I said, “you sit out here and hold the basket while I goo in an’ coax her. I’ll coax her the best I can and tell her all about you and arter a bit she’ll come out and then you can coax her. You can take her up the lane for a ride and gather a bit o’ honeysuckle. Beautiful honeysuckle I noticed on the edge o’ that spinney back there. Nothing like a bit of honeysuckle for coaxing gals.”’
When I asked how long the coaxing had taken and what had happened afterwards my Uncle Silas didn’t even bother to raise the rim of his straw hat.
‘It wur gittin’ a bit dusk when we come out, I know that,’ he said. ‘It wur still nation hot and the mare wur a bit restless. But that wadn’t all. Only thing in the trap wur th’ basket. Pikey had done a bunk. Chap sittin’ outside with his missus having a quart said he’d gone tearin’ down the road as if his beard wur a-fire.’
With slow care my Uncle Silas chose himself another raspberry. As he sucked it into his loose red lips it stained them with an almost purple smear.
‘Growin’ on a very tall hedge, that honeysuckle,’ he said. ‘Had a job to reach it.’
‘What was she like?’ I started to say again. ‘Dark? What was she—’
‘Growin’ up a big tall hedge, other side of a big dyke full o’ medder-sweet and willer-herb and burnet and all that.’
I did
n’t ask what she was like any more. For some reason I had made up my mind that she was dark and how nice she would have looked with golden fingers of honeysuckle in her hair.
‘They say the best fruit’s allus at the top o’ the tree,’ Silas said. ‘So wur that honeysuckle. Too high for me. Couldn’t git at it nohow.’
With what I thought was some effort he managed a bit of a sigh.
‘Had to lift her up,’ he said. ‘On’y thing for it. Had to lift her up.’
Then he went on to say how light she was, light as a feather, and how he sat her on his shoulder. At first he clasped her round the legs but she laughed so much she couldn’t lift her arms. Then he put his hands round her waist and tried to lift her that way but the honeysuckle was still far out of reach and in the end they both fell down.
‘Fust time she fell a-top o’ me in the medder-sweet,’ he said. ‘Then we tried it again and I fell a-top of her.’
He sighed again, as if re-living, I thought, the long July dusk with the honeysuckle, the meadow-sweet and Shandy Lil. But suddenly he said:
‘That’s why them yeller raspberries allus remind me of her—’
‘Oh! damn the raspberries,’ I said. ‘I know all about the raspberries. What was she like, man?’
With solemn slowness he lifted an edge of his straw hat and cocked his eye at me.
‘If you goo over to The Blacksmith’s Arms at Nether Dean,’ he said, ‘you’ll see a gal there behind the bar. That’s Shandy’s grand-daughter.’
‘Anything like her?’
‘Spittin’ image,’ he said. ‘Same white skin. Same light brown hair. Colour o’ beer but not quite. More like a drop o’ Shandy.
He sighed again and from the spinney a breath of wind stirred the leaves and ran along the raspberry rows, blowing all the ripe fragrance of red-black fruit into the heat of afternoon.
‘Beautiful white skin,’ he said. ‘Beautiful little figure.’ He held up a big ripe raspberry and contemplated the firm red cone of it in a musing dream. ‘Hadn’t got a blemish on her nowhere.’
‘Nowhere?’
He chuckled for the last time, ripely.
‘Not as far as I could see,’ he said, ‘but then it wur gittin’ dark at the time.’
The Sun of December
‘I am so old,’ he said, ‘that the only way I can get out of a damn taxi is to crawl out backwards, on my hands and knees.’
‘You don’t look a day older,’ I said.
‘Than what?’ He looked at me with eyes as bright as water forget-me-nots, from under handsome white brows that were like the head feathers of an owl. ‘I’m eighty-seven remember.’
‘A mere youth.’
‘Dammit, Hell,’ he said, ‘they’re talking of putting me in a wheelchair.’
Across the garden, from the terrace along which a few pale violet winter irises were in bloom, delicate as orchids in the December sun, I could see beyond an expanse of marshland the bright gold saucer of sun. Over the windless bay a track of low sunlight made an elongated pool of light exactly the colour of the sherry that clung to two of three glasses on a silver tray.
‘Not too dry for you?’
The sherry in fact was rather sweet; but before I could answer he said:
‘Women never like it dry. I know Mrs Arkwright doesn’t.’
‘Mrs Arkwright?’
‘She’ll be coming to lunch,’ he said. ‘She’s a near neighbour of mine.’
I hadn’t really been invited to lunch; I had simply dropped in with a few pots of things that I knew he wanted, a fuchsia or two, a house-plant in silver-green that I thought would charm his window.
‘I must be going,’ I said.
‘Oh! Good God, no,’ he said. ‘Dammit. You’re staying to lunch. You don’t come all this way simply to have a glass of sherry and then rush back again.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘I won’t hear of it,’ he said. ‘What about this houseplant, this trailing thing you brought me? How does it do?’
I said it was probably the easiest thing in the world, especially for a gardener like him, and he said:
‘There’s a marvellous thing I want to show you down in the peat-garden before you go. See if you know it. I won’t tell you what it is.’
He breathed deeply at the air. The day was utterly unwintry, delicate and soft-breathed, without a touch of malice. Geraniums were still blooming, pale crimson, along the house wall. Below us there were bushes of late yellow roses; a thrush was singing in the woodland.
‘Hark at that thrush. By this time last year we’d had snow,’ he said. ‘In November. I remember pulling back the curtains when I went to bed and there it was like cotton wool on all the trees.’
He leaned forward to pour another glass of sherry but at that moment there was a fluffy sort of cry, fluffy then cracked, from along the terrace. I looked up to see a vision in what at first I thought was a rosy nightgown trimmed with bird-like edges of swansdown. Across the shoulders of it was a fur wrap of vole-brown with a fox-head clasped by a silver chain.
‘Wolfie, Wolfie,’ she said. ‘Dear Wolfie.’
I thought he looked excessively pained when she called him Wolfie. There was a thickish scent of clove carnations in the air. Her umbrella was mauve, with a long black handle, and she was wearing a bunch of violets in the way I remember women wearing them when I was a boy: at the waist and a little to one side.
She kissed him several times on both cheeks, calling him Wolfie again. With great difficulty he had managed to get to his feet and now stood, arthritic, crabbed, and as erect as he could get himself, balancing between the table and the chair.
When he introduced us she seemed so surprised at my being there at all that she could not even smile. She giggled uncertainly instead and said several times:
‘What a heavenly day. What a heavenly day to come up here.’
I poured sherry. She sipped it with eagerness, spilling some of it down the uppermost of her three powdery chins. Then when we were all sitting down again she touched the marbled frontal waves of her silver-grey hatless hair. Nothing, I thought, could possibly have disturbed those metallic corrugations but the preening movements of her hand made me aware, for the first time, of her eyes.
They, too, like his own, were very blue.
‘Well, don’t you notice?’ she said to him. ‘Don’t you notice? Wolfie! – You’re a gardener and you don’t see the very most important thing about me.’
It was some seconds before he noticed; and then he smiled with apologetic charm.
‘Violets,’ he said.
‘Yes, and from my garden,’ she said. ‘Note that. From my garden. In December.’
She bent to touch them, croaking again with cracked and fluffy exclamations.
‘Oh! my dear. They’ve gone already. I got them at ten this morning and they’ve gone. All flabby and floppy – look at them. No, don’t say it, don’t say – I know what you’re thinking.’ She giggled erratically. ‘I know what you’re thinking – they fade, they fade!’
‘Only because,’ I said, and the words were out before I could think about them, ‘you’re wearing them wrong side up.’
‘Oh! Wrong what?’
‘If you wear them head downwards,’ I said, ‘the moisture from the stalks runs down to the flowers and they never fade.’
‘Well, you learn something every day, don’t you?’
If there had been a breath of ice from the sea it could not have chilled me more.
‘Mrs Arkwright has a wonderful garden,’ he said. ‘She is lower down the hill. They’re more sheltered there.’
‘Oh! Wolfie. You know it’s just a mess. You know I haven’t got the touch. Things never do for me. They never respond. I haven’t got the touch. Not like you. You’ve only got to look at things—’
‘I rather think we ought to go in to lunch,’ he said.
‘What about that thing you were going to show me? – you talked about it the other day – something in the p
eat-garden? I want to see it – I want you to take me down.’
‘I ought just to go in and see about the wine,’ he said. ‘I tell you what – let Mr Richardson take you down. He’s a great gardener. You two go down together.’
‘Oh! no,’ she said. ‘It will do after lunch. The sun doesn’t go down till four.’
I felt, in fact, that it had gone down at that moment, off the terrace, off the bright buds of the yellow roses and from across the limpid surface of the sea.
We had sweet white wine for lunch. It was too sweet for me and I thought it too sweet, also, for him, but it seemed perfect for Mrs Arkwright, who said:
‘Delicious wine. You always find the most delicious wine, Wolfie. We never have wine like this. Never like this – I don’t know where you find these things.’
Her face, fired by the wine, began to come out in a series of blotches, especially under the eyes, almost as bright a red as her lipstick.
‘And the lamb-chops. I’ve never had a lamb-chop like this since before the war. I can’t think where you get them. We’ve got a butcher who kills nothing but dogs, and here you get meat like butter.’
I thought his occasional smile at these things, from the old vivid blue eyes, was nothing like as fresh and positive as it had been when he and I, alone on the terrace, had little to talk of but the spring-like air, the singing thrush and the sea.
‘Shall we have coffee inside?’ he said, ‘or shall we brave the terrace?’
‘We don’t want you to get cold,’ she said.
‘Dammit,’ he said, ‘I’ve been sitting there all morning.’
‘Well, anyway, first you have to show me the flower in the peat-garden.’
‘Let’s have coffee first,’ he said. ‘Coffee first.’
It was decided, after all, to have coffee on the terrace, and again we sat in the incredible, golden, soft-aired afternoon. A few moments before this Mrs Arkwright left us for the cloakroom, so that for five minutes the two of us were alone again on the terrace, he sitting down, I looking at the gold-grey bay of sea.
‘Immense energy,’ he kept saying. ‘Immense energy. How old would you think she was? She’s been married twice. She lost the second about a year ago.’
