by H. E. Bates
‘Hard to say.’
‘Seventy-four. She wouldn’t admit it. But I know.’
He kept looking arthritically over his shoulder, with stiff difficulty, as if half-terrified she would hear.
Some moments later I looked at my watch. It was already nearly three o’clock and I said:
‘I ought to run along. It’s later than—’
‘Good God, man, dammit,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to go yet. You must stay to tea. You’ve not been over for months and now you rush away.’
When she joined us again there was a smell of new powder in the air. I noticed now that she had pinned her violets upside down and that their dark heads were wet with water. She didn’t look at me very much, but the fox’s head did and the lion-brown pupils seemed almost to snarl, I thought, whenever they caught the sun.
‘Now the peat-garden,’ she said, when we had finished coffee. ‘Come on. What is this flower?’
It had been a cruel business to get his twisted stiffened back into a chair at all, and now she hardly seemed to notice that it was an even crueller business to get it out again.
‘My dear Lilah,’ he said to her at last, ‘I can’t make it.’ He sank back. ‘I’m just a damn miserable bone-bag. I can hop like a two year old if I can get on my feet but I can’t get on my feet. Dammit, you’ll have to let Richardson take you down. I want you both to see it anyway.’
‘Oh! Wolfie, you mustn’t talk like that.’
‘Like what?’ he said. ‘They’re going to put me in a damn wheelchair.’
‘Oh! Wolfie – rubbish. Not for a million years. I wouldn’t let them.’
‘There’s damn little you can do about it.’
‘Oh! Wolfie,’ she said. ‘You’re not ready for a wheelchair. You don’t look a day older than you did when we first came here two years ago.’ She turned to me for one of her rare, bright-eyed, smiling questions. ‘You don’t think he does, do you?’
‘Not a day older.’
‘I sometimes feel a hell of a sight older,’ he said, ‘that’s all.’
‘What, with eyes like that? With those blue eyes?’ she said. ‘Oh! Wolfie.’
I finished my coffee and stood up.
‘I must say good-bye,’ I said.
‘Oh! no, but must you?’ he said. ‘You were going to see that thing in the peat-garden. Don’t run off. I’ve got to take you down.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Sit still. I’ll go out that way and find it myself.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ she said.
‘Tea will only be an hour,’ he said. ‘It’s always at four. Dammit. Surely you can stay for tea?’
‘I really ought to go,’ I said.
She smiled at me with unexpected ease and sweetness.
‘Have you far to go?’
‘Ten miles.’
‘Oh! quite a way.’
‘Well, all I can say is I’m disappointed,’ he said. ‘I’m disappointed.’
The merest breath of wind, a moment later, blew up from the sea, not cold, but a mere opening and unfolding of a pocket of air that closed almost immediately again, leaving the afternoon as soft as ever.
‘Wolfie, it’s turning colder,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s wise for you to be out here on the terrace. I’ll tell you what—’
She turned, to my great surprise, to me.
‘I’ll just run down to the peat-garden with Mr Richardson and see this thing. You get yourself inside.’
‘Well, if you must go, good-bye,’ he said. ‘Come over again soon. Don’t let it be so long. Remember I’ll have a cyclamen for your wife at Christmas. One of those big frilled white ones that she likes so much—’
‘Ah! like the one you promised me?’ she said.
In a cloud of carnation scent I followed her down to the peat-garden. The air was beautiful. The sea startled the entire valley with a flash of vivid brassy light. She chatted in a high voice about the day, the garden, the altogether remarkable weather and the fact that it was so nice that I was a gardener too.
‘Have you any idea what this thing could be?’ she said. ‘Because I haven’t the faintest.’
It turned out to be a little rhododendron, pinkish, wintry, delicate in the dying sun. She looked at it for a second or two indifferently and then said to me, with eagerness, with the brightest of eyes and a prancing scarlet smile:
‘Oh! it’s been so nice to see you. I can’t tell you how nice it’s been. That’s one of the things about Wolfie – his marvellous friends.’
She turned to go back up the path to the terrace. Then she hesitated, remembering something.
‘And that was a nice touch about the violets. I never knew. You see, they’re already fresh again.’
She gave me a final flash, a little coy, very blue and half-cajoling, of her bright blue eyes.
‘You know the way down to the bottom gate, don’t you?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know the way.’
In the second before I turned to go I saw him still standing on the terrace. The spring-soft sunlight of the winter afternoon was bright on his face. He did not lift his hand.
Seeing her turn too, he fled like someone doomed.
The Courtship
I ran into him on one of those moonless, muggy evenings, a couple of days before Christmas, when the air is like lukewarm stew – or rather, to be truthful, he ran into me. He was pushing a sizeable hand-truck loaded with flowers: all sorts of them, mostly in pots, azaleas, hyacinths, narcissi, cyclamen, tulips, and several bunches of yellow mimosa, all fresh and fluffy.
It was not merely that the street was exceptionally dark there or that the truck was exceptionally heavy. He himself seemed almost sightless, unaware of where he was going. The truck seemed to lurch at me as I was about to step off the pavement and I just saved myself in time by clutching the side of it.
The damp winter air was full of half a dozen fragrances as he stood there panting, absent-eyed, muttering something about being sorry. He seemed, I thought, about sixty and he coughed heavily several times, struggling to get his breath.
I couldn’t give him a pound, he supposed, could I? – and for a moment I thought he was talking of money. Then I realised that we were on a sharp incline and that he was talking of pushing the truck.
‘Going far?’ I said.
It was three or four streets away, he said, not more than half a mile. His voice was husky. Phlegm seemed to be choking his throat, so that whenever he opened his mouth the words came out all broken up, even the syllables severed apart. His eyes groped in the damp lamp-lit distances in the same broken way and he seemed to be trying to focus, in the stony darkness, some object far beyond them.
‘Got to take ’em just past The King’s Arms in Victoria Road,’ he said. ‘Know where I mean?’
I said I did. A moment later my hand was on the truck and presently, side by side, we were pushing it away.
As we moved into lighter parts of the street the thing that struck me most about him was not his eyes or his hands or that huskily broken voice of his. It was his nose. It was exactly like an old potato.
Not just a plain old potato, either, but one that had been baked in its jacket, pinched about a bit, left to get cold and consequently looked terribly rough, misshapen and sad. His hair was equally unbeautiful. It was matted, stiff and grey, looking more than anything else like an old wire-haired terrier’s ear that at some time or other had been rudely mangled in a fight. Sometimes he lifted a hand as if to ruffle the hair but the gesture always ended abruptly and in the same way: he gave a sudden jab with his thumb at the side of the old potato.
I don’t want to give the impression here that what he subsequently had to tell me presented itself in an easy, fluent rush. It came out in a typically broken way, in bits and pieces. It was for me almost entirely a matter of picking up echoes and half clues, muttered and difficult snaps of memory falling in the darkness.
‘Bill Browning,’ he said and then, half a
minute later, as if he had entirely forgotten it, said it again. ‘Bill Browning. That’s me.’
He was living, it seemed, all alone, in one room, with a bed, a gas-fire and a meter. The bed – I saw it later – looked as if it had been built from old bicycle frames and he had slept in it for thirty years.
That was some time, I gathered, before he met a girl named Edna. It seemed that he was forty, perhaps more, before he began to court her. She was over forty too but he thought of her then, and for ever afterwards, as a girl. She worked in a wholesale clothing factory and later, when he showed me a picture of her, I could see that, like Bill, she wasn’t very much to look at. She was smallish and rather mild looking, with pale, indeterminate eyes, nondescript hair and a face whose complexion, I guessed, could have been of a kind of parsnip shade. Somehow I could see her wearing hats five or six years out of date, old fashioned corsets of the sort that creak and plain black lace-up shoes that probably pinched her.
Without doubt Bill thought her very beautiful and equally without doubt, I fancied, she thought him beautiful too. The pair of them were locked in mutual devotion and they met on regular nights, every Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. I seemed to see them meeting on some secluded corner somewhere, she with a springy walk in the tight black shoes and Bill, as he waited, rubbing his thumb in nervous anticipation against the old potato.
All this time he was working as an odd-job man for a firm of grocer’s and when he was just over forty they gave him a raise. It wasn’t very much of a raise but the extra four shillings prompted him to ask if Edna, perhaps, would marry him. Edna said she was thrilled and would love to but it couldn’t very well be, anyway not just yet.
‘Why?’ Bill wanted to know.
It was because of her mother, Edna explained. Her mother had a poorish heart, was seventy and couldn’t do much for herself. Edna conceived it not only her duty to look after her; she had actually promised her father as much before he died. She was a cautious girl to whom conscience meant a great deal. She wanted to be true to her word.
‘She could come and live with us,’ Bill said. ‘That wouldn’t worry me. I wouldn’t mind.’
No. Edna was quite firm about that. That sort of thing never worked out. She knew two other girls who had gone to live with their in-laws and yet another who had her husband’s mother living in one room with her and sharing the kitchen. It was just a cat-and-dog life. It never worked out.
Bill, disappointed, even upset – I seemed to see him begin to rub his rough potato nose with his thumb, as he always seemed to do in moments of emotion or uncertainty – said something about the future didn’t seem to hold very much for them, did it, like that?
‘I don’t want to seem cruel,’ Edna said, ‘but I don’t somehow think she’ll live all that long. She has terrible bad turns every so often. I don’t want to lose her but really I don’t think we’d have to wait all that long while.’
Bill, to whom Edna was obviously his first consideration always, was too good-natured to say that he hoped not. He supposed they’d just have to wait, was all he said, but apparently a note of such disappointment as to be almost sepulchral must have been so sharply marked in his voice that Edna actually stopped suddenly in the street where they were walking, clasped him hard with both hands and said with what I gathered was quite uncharacteristic vehemence, almost passion, that it would be the same for both of them. They’d still have each other.
‘I don’t mind waiting,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait for ever.’
The four shillings raise had seemed so much part of his plan for Edna and his future that presently Bill began, in a curious way, to be troubled about it. He actually began to feel selfish. He felt that he wanted to confer on Edna the benefit of his raise, or part of it, without positively thrusting the money into her hands. Somehow he wanted to make a gesture of some sort that would compensate her for waiting.
But finally, on a cold November Saturday night, he actually did thrust the money into her hands: all four shillings of it, saying at the same time, while probably rubbing his potato nose hard with his thumb, that he sort of wanted her to treat herself. Perhaps there was some little thing—
‘I don’t want anything,’ Edna said. ‘Not a thing. You save your money. We’ll need it one day.’
‘No,’ Bill said and again I guessed he was too considerate, altogether too good-natured, to say what he was thinking – that one day might never come. ‘I want you to have a treat. Now.’
‘What sort of treat? What could I buy?’
It suddenly came to Bill as an almost desperate thought that she might, perhaps, buy herself some fish-and-chips.
‘At Albert’s,’ he said. Albert’s was five or six doors beyond the terrace house where Edna lived with her mother. Its windows steamed with strong fishy clouds until late into the night. ‘They’d be nice and hot if you took them straight in.’
‘Well, I don’t really—’
‘Please,’ Bill said and again I seemed to see him rubbing his old potato nose hard, in complexity. ‘I want you to. It would sort of even things up.’
‘Even things up?’ Edna said. She didn’t know what he meant.
Nor, in fact, did Bill. Apparently he could only blurt out, in his great eagerness to please, that he would even go into the shop and get the fish-and-chips for her himself.
‘No,’ Edna said. ‘It’s very sweet of you but I’ll get them.’ I seemed to see them at the corner of the street now, fifty or sixty yards from the steaming fish-shop windows. I could imagine a light cold fog coming down and that perhaps Edna was clutching at her coat collar, tilting her face. ‘Let’s say good night here, shall we?’
‘I always come as far as the house—’
‘Let’s say good night here,’ Edna said. ‘Old mother Parker was having a good look at us the other night. I saw the curtains move. I don’t like being spied on when I kiss you.’
After that, every Saturday night, winter, spring, autumn and summer, Bill gave Edna his four shillings, kissed her good night at the street corner and then watched her, with tender consideration, depart for fish-shop and home.
This simple act of generosity not only became a habit as satisfying in itself as an evening prayer might have been to another person; it became a means of fortifying him in courtship, in what were to be the long years of waiting for Edna.
As a result it seemed hardly any time at all before he and Edna were fifty. He himself didn’t feel much older at fifty, I gathered, than he had done at forty and I rather suspected that the only change in his appearance was probably that his hair, greyer by this time, looked rather more dog-eared and his nose slightly enlarged, rougher skinned and more sadly misshapen than ever. Edna, I fancied, looked hardly any older herself and in another photograph the only change I could detect in her appearance was that she was obviously rather plumper about the chin, hips and bust. I could only guess that this extra weight might have caused her shoes to pinch a little more, so that she perhaps walked a little more springily.
Now whenever he went to meet her Bill was filled with the remotely uncharitable hope that one evening he would see a change in her. There would come an evening when she would be walking droopily, perhaps even in tears, or perhaps even running towards him with outstretched arms, and it would mean that her mother was dead.
But as the years went by – and in the strange way that time seems to have they probably appeared to go by much faster – there was never any change in her step. She continued to meet him always in the same way and to depart, every Saturday evening, towards distant clouds of fishy steam.
And soon, as they progressed from their early fifties into middle fifties, it seemed that the subject of marriage was hardly ever mentioned. It hardly seemed to matter. The mere habit of meeting, being with each other, drinking a glass of stout together in The King’s Arms, holding each other’s hands in a cinema, walking home and finally kissing good night became a pattern that was not only satisfactory in itself. It was con
solatory.
So much so that I gathered that Bill sometimes found himself thinking with foreboding of what might happen if Edna’s mother did die. You never knew, he hinted, with marriage: it was a funny thing. Not only that, he’d probably have to do something about his one room and its gas fire. That would hardly do for Edna. He would have to change all that. And most of all, I gathered, he had a strange idea that marriage might change Edna. She would sort of grow up. She wouldn’t be his girl any more.
And then, one late October evening, at the time when darkness had started to close in early, she wasn’t there at the corner when he went to meet her. It was the first time it had happened, I gathered, in more than fifteen years.
For a time he paced up and down a bit and then, presently, began to worry. After nearly an hour he started to be really troubled and he set out to walk to the little terrace house where Edna and her mother lived, between the fried fish-shop and The King’s Arms.
It took him some time to grasp, I think, that the blinds of the house were drawn. Even when he did so he still paced nervously up and down for some time longer outside, confessedly as agitated at the idea of Edna’s mother dying at long last as he would have been at the reality of leading Edna to the altar.
Finally he rapped the knocker of the door. It was some time before the door opened and when at last it did open Edna’s mother was there.
‘She’d gone,’ Bill said to me. His voice broke completely now. ‘Edna, I mean. That morning. She was bad just two or three hours, that’s all, and then—’
He followed her mother into the house. She kept crying all the time, apologising over and over again that she hadn’t sent him a message. She would have come down herself to tell him, she kept saying, but she didn’t like to leave the girl alone.
Bill, too stunned to say much, presently managed to mutter that he thought he’d walk home. He’d perhaps get over it a bit if he started walking. Then, just as he reached the street door, she called him back, weeping again that she was a forgetful fool.
