by H. E. Bates
‘She wanted you to have this,’ she said. He found himself with a large black handbag in his hands. He remembered it as one Edna had had ten years before.
‘This? What’s this?’
‘I never asked her. I never looked inside. She said you was to have it, that’s all.’
In a complete daze he walked back to his room with the bag. He sat down on the bed and gazed at the bag for some time before opening it and looking inside.
‘It was all in a big envelope,’ he told me. ‘Every penny.’ Edna had written a little note of explanation about it. She was sorry she hadn’t spent it and she hoped he wouldn’t mind. ‘All the fish-and-chip money. About a hundred and eighty quid.’
‘She always hated wreaths.’ After he had unloaded all the flowers and taken them through the front door of the little terrace house – the blinds at the windows were still drawn – we sat for an hour or two in the bar of The King’s Arms, Bill steadfastly taking meagre sips of whisky. Now and then he made that abrupt and troubled gesture of rubbing his thumb against his old potato, confessing two or three times that he’d been sleeping bad. ‘Terrible bad. Perhaps I’ll be better now I’ve got her the flowers.’
He sat for some time longer, over more whisky, explaining about the flowers. He said again how he wanted to even things up – did I understand? He’d given her that raise of his all that long time ago and she’d put it all away. There’d been no pleasure for her. She’d got nothing out of it. Nothing. Not even a bag of chips.
‘I bought about twenty quids’ worth,’ he said. His eyes, perhaps because of the whisky, were covered with a gentle film. ‘The young lady at the flower shop said I’d need a truck. They couldn’t deliver – bit difficult at Christmas time. No trouble about that, I told her. I could borrow one from work.’
He was silent for some moments after that and then he fumbled in his pockets and brought out the first of the pictures of Edna.
‘Nice looking girl,’ he said. ‘Very pretty. Don’t you think she’s pretty?’
I looked at Edna’s mild-looking face, with its nondescript hair and the complexion that I thought must be of a parsnip shade, and said yes, she was very pretty.
‘Come in for a minute?’ Bill said. We were home now. ‘I got half a bottle of whisky inside. Had to get it. Helped me on a bit.’
I went inside with him, into the one room with the gas-fire, the meter and the bed that looked so much as if it had been built from ancient bicycle frames. Another picture of Edna, the one when she was plumper, hung on one wall and below it, on a shelf above the bed, stood a single white hyacinth in a pot. It glowed wonderfully waxy in the light of the gas-lamp Bill had lit and the room was full of the scent of it.
Bill poured the whisky. I stood for some moments staring into my glass, not knowing what to say. It was almost on my lips to say ‘Happy Christmas’, but I checked myself in time and said simply:
‘Here’s to you, Bill. And to Edna.’
He didn’t speak. The inevitable gesture of rubbing his thumb against his old potato had suddenly the strangest effect on his face. It actually unlocked a smile: making it seem, as it had done to Edna, almost beautiful.
‘Thanks. I’m glad I ran into you. Been nice talking. Hardly said a word to a soul since it happened. Did me good to get it off my chest.’
A few minutes later I said good night to him, at the same time telling him how I hoped he’d sleep much better now.
‘Thanks,’ he said again. We shook hands. ‘I got a feeling I will. I feel better now I’ve given her the flowers. It’s sort of evened it up. Bit difficult to understand, I know, but—’
I said I understood and a moment later, as I put my hand on the doorknob, ready to go, he stopped me.
‘Have this,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to have this.’
He was thrusting the white hyacinth into my hands. I started to protest. I felt I couldn’t bear to see the little room with its gas-ring, its meter and the old bicycle bedstead to be deprived of the blessing of its only Christmas flower. But Bill, actually raising another smile, insisted and wouldn’t hear me.
‘You take it. You have it. It’s a little gift. For Edna’s sake. Eh? For Christmas. I want you to. It would sort of, you know, make me—’ I thought he was about to say happy, but he broke off and said, ‘Well, lift me up a bit’, instead.
I took the hyacinth and went downstairs and into the street. I carried the flower in front of me, carefully, holding it in both hands. It was exactly like a steadfast fragrant candle, pure and white as snow, lighting the outer darkness.
A Teetotal Tale
‘Fust started to drink beer when I wur three,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Not all that big amount, mind you. Jist a pint for breakfast.’
I confess it didn’t surprise me very greatly that my Uncle Silas had set himself so early an example in the matter of drinking and I merely remarked, half to myself, in a casual sort of way, how useful that early training had turned out to be, since he’d been going at it with unbroken relish ever since.
‘Jist wheer you’re wrong, boy,’ he said. ‘Jist wheer you’re wrong.’
A rather worried and melancholy look came over his face as he said this: a mere glimmer of uncertainty, but significant. At the same time he wiped a small drop of moisture from his bloodshot eye and gave a mumbling sort of sigh, letting up a little wind.
‘You’re not trying to tell me,’ I said, ‘that you gave it up at some time or other?’
Before answering he leaned back against the haystack where we had been sitting all afternoon and stared at the sky, blue and feathered with late May cloud above the masses of high yellow oak flowers that crowned the spinney. Between us stood a clothes basket full of cowslips, wilting in the genial warmth of afternoon. For over an hour we had been de-flowering the golden-fingered heads and laying them out on an ebony coloured tray to dry.
‘Gospel truth,’ he said. ‘I give it up once, boy. Good and proper. Strike me down if I tell a lie. I went teetotal.’
‘For how long?’ I said. ‘Five minutes?’
My Uncle Silas ignored me dreamily and for some moments longer went on de-flowering one cowslip after another. The weight of memory seemed to bear down on him rather heavily, I thought, but finally he struck one knee of his corduroys with a stern and solemn palm.
‘Prit near two months,’ he said. ‘Gospel. True as I’m a-sittin’ here aside this ’ere hay-stack. Prit near two months, boy. Teetotal.’
I remarked that it was a great wonder how he’d ever managed to survive the ordeal, but for nearly a minute he ignored that too. When he spoke again his eye was on the sky.
‘It damn well wur an’ all,’ he said. ‘Prit near the death on me.’
After this the melancholy look came back to his face again and he gave another rather worried, weighty sigh.
‘It wur cruel,’ he said. ‘Wuss’n being chained up. Wuss’n a nightmare.’
I started trying to think of some possible explanation to account for this extraordinary lapse on my Uncle Silas’s part and it came to me without difficulty.
‘Nothing to do with women, I suppose?’
My Uncle Silas slowly de-flowered another cowslip.
‘Two on ’em,’ he said. ‘They got round me, boy. They got round me. Two on ’em. Gal and her mother.’
The notion of anyone getting round my Uncle Silas, still less putting him off his beer for two months, was almost too much to bear. I couldn’t speak a word.
‘Beautiful gal an’ all,’ he said. ‘Beautiful.’
He paused and held a pensive hand above the cowslips.
‘Ever seen a big ripe pear ’anging in a muslin bag?’
I said of course I had. That was the way my Uncle Silas had the big golden Williams hanging every September on the house wall.
‘Jist like that she wur,’ he said. ‘Firm and ripe. Like a nice ripe pear in a muslin bag.’
‘All ready for you to pick.’
He took up another cow
slip. Then, instead of de-flowering it, he put it in his mouth and started reflectively chewing on the pale green stalk.
‘That’s about what I thought,’ he said.
Cuckoos had been calling across the meadows all afternoon and now one flew over the haystack, chased by two more. My Uncle Silas watched them disappear beyond the oak tree with a bleary eye.
‘Fust met her at a fair,’ he said. ‘Allus remember her. In a white muslin dress and a big white straw hat. Trying to win a clock on the hoop-la.’
‘With Ma?’
‘With Ma,’ he said. He seemed to brighten a little, I thought, at the mention of Ma. A sprightlier glint came back to his eye. ‘Ma wur a good looker too, mind you. And only about thirty-five.’
‘Another pear?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘She wur more like a big yeller rose. A bit full blown.’
Still chewing at the cowslip stalk, he went on to tell me what a poor mess the girl and her mother were making of the hoop-la and how, pretty soon, he was helping to put this right.
‘In about half hour I’d got ’em a clock and all sorts o’ fancy bits-o’-kit like vases and dolls and mustard-pots and milk jugs and looking glasses and I don’t know what. It wur a warmish day and by the time I’d got ’em loaded well up I started to think it might be a good idea to have a wet or two at The Rose and Crown.’
He laughed for the first time that afternoon and the cowslip fell out of his mouth as if in surprise.
‘You mighta thought I’d suggested stranglin’ the pair on ’em,’ he said. ‘Ma went white with ’orrer. The gal – Arabella her name wur – said “We do not drink, thank you. We have seen enough of that.” And in a lot less time than it takes to git a pint down they wur gone.’
With renewed sadness my Uncle Silas started to de-flower another cowslip.
‘Well, I couldn’t git this ’ere gal outa my mind,’ he said. ‘You know how it gits, boy. They start ’auntin’ on you.’
They lived in a keeper’s cottage on the edge of the wood, the girl and her mother, he went on, and pretty soon he was trying to court her there. He didn’t have all that lot of luck at first and it took him a week or more to find out why, in his own words, ‘they were so darnation ostropolus about a little thing like beer.’
Then he found out that the girl’s father, a gamekeeper, had got as far as having D.T’s about every three or four weeks and was now resting in a home for drunks on the other side of the county.
‘If you are coming to see Arabella,’ the mother said, ‘there must be no drink. Absolutely no drink. No talk of drink. We’ve been through purgatory enough already.’
‘Not half as much as I went through in the next five or six weeks, though, I’ll tell you,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Wust time I ever remember. Terrible. Like being in a desert. Thought I’d go mad.’
‘But the girl,’ I suggested, ‘was nice? She was worth it?’
With thoughtful melancholy my Uncle Silas started to de-flower another cowslip.
‘That wur the trouble,’ he said. ‘I wadn’t gittin’ much fur me money either.’
I found it hard to reconcile this remark with my Uncle Silas’ repeated description of the girl as a big juicy pear ripe for picking and I had actually started to say so when he pulled me up quite sharply.
‘Ah! but you forgit Ma,’ he said. ‘Ma was allus there.’
In the parlour, in the kitchen, in the garden, in the woods, across the meadows – Ma, it seemed, was always there.
‘Never went quite so far as smelling me breath,’ Silas said, ‘but that wur the rough idea. I be damned if I could ever git the gal alone.’
I could hardly believe that my Uncle Silas had utterly failed to find a way of removing the final obstacle to this frustrating state of affairs and I was quite relieved to hear him say:
‘Then I had a bit of inspiration. Bit of a brainwave. Very like it wur this teetotal business keepin’ me ’ead oncommon clear for a week or two, but suddenly it come over me all of a pop what was up with Ma.’
I ran my hand through the clothes’ basket and picked out a handful of juicy cowslip stems, at the same time watching Silas with an inquiring, crucial eye.
‘Jealous,’ he said. ‘That wur the trouble with Ma.’
Philosophically chewing on another cowslip stem, Silas expanded a little further on the theme that there are mothers who are sometimes uncommonly jealous of their handsome daughters.
‘Arter all it wur a bit lonely for her,’ he said. ‘With ’im not there and she only thirty-five. Got to remember that.’
I started to inquire how far this interesting discovery had carried him and he laughed for the second time that afternoon and said:
‘Arter that it wur easy. Plain sailing all the way. Decided I’d give it up. Rather have the beer than the gal. Hadn’t got the gal anyway.’
This seemed, I thought, rather a disappointing end to an episode that I felt would itself ripen like a pear, but my Uncle Silas hadn’t finished yet.
‘One night I decided I’d nip off home and never come back,’ he said, ‘but at the last minute I hadn’t the heart to tell the gal. Damn it, she wur a beautiful gal, she wur.’
Picking up another handful of cowslips, he went on to tell me how he said good night to the girl and her mother for the last time. It was summer and for some time after leaving there he walked up and down in the lane outside. ‘I wanted that gal very much,’ he said, and at last he could bear it no longer. He decided to go back to the house and see if he couldn’t talk to her alone.
‘They were both in bed by that time,’ he said, ‘and I had to git a ladder and prop it up aside the house so as I could wake her.’
He tapped softly on the window several times and called, ‘Arabella’ and at last a figure in a white nightgown appeared.
‘Arabella,’ he said, ‘I’ve got summat I must say to you.’
‘It’s not Arabella,’ a voice whispered, ‘it’s me.’
My Uncle Silas was never one to lose his head on such occasions and he said quickly:
‘Ma, I jist wanted to tell Arabella I shan’t be coming this way no more.’
My Uncle Silas laughed softly.
‘Thought she’d a fell outa the winder when I said that,’ he went on. ‘Thought she’d a shed a tear.’
‘Upset?’
‘Terrible. Couldn’t pacify her. Went on summat chronic – about how they liked me so much and how they’d miss me and all that. I wur so surprised I nearly fell off the damn ladder.’
‘Instead?’
He laughed softly again.
‘She said wouldn’t I come into the bedroom a minute and talk it over? So I nipped in for a minute or two.’ He was de-flowering cowslips quite fast now, chuckling. ‘Matter of fact we talked it over fur the best part o’ the night. Very understanding woman she turned out to be.’
‘And after that?’ I said. ‘What about the girl?’
‘Well,’ my Uncle Silas said, ruminating on the flight of two cuckoos in pursuit above the spinney, ‘we come to a sort of pact. I said I’d keep Ma from being too lonely fur a night or two if she’d leave me alone now and then with the gal.’
The cuckoos, calling with throaty bubblings in the warm air, disappeared across the meadows of buttercups, their voices echoing in the still air.
‘Very useful ladder that wur,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Up one winder one night and t’other the next.’
I had nothing to say and my Uncle Silas, laughing with a voice as soft and juicy as a full ripe pear, de-flowered another cowslip.
The Picnic
‘Now you won’t on any account be late for the picnic on Saturday, will you?’ Aunt Leonora said. ‘I want everybody here as sharp as a packet of pins on the dot of eleven. If your Uncle Freddie’s going to get in an hour’s fishing before lunch we must make a good early start.’
With casual amiability I always reserved for these charming and unheralded surprises of Aunt Leonora’s I inquired to know what
picnic?
My aunt and I were sitting in the garden, on the lawn, under the deep shade of a large Blenheim apple tree. It was late June and already the young apples were about the size of walnuts. Many had already fallen but now, as if struck by the winging shrillness of Aunt Leonora’s voice, a few more pattered down from the boughs.
‘Great Heavens, man,’ she said, ‘you can’t have forgotten the picnic? It was all arranged the very last time you were here.’
It was a typical blatant, thundering lie. I knew of no such picnic. I knew that none had ever been arranged. That a picnic obviously existed in the mind of Aunt Leonora I knew beyond all possible doubt, just as I knew that for her a lie was the truth provided she thought it up fast enough.
‘I don’t think,’ I said, ‘I could have been here when you arranged it.’
‘Not here? You hear that, Freddie?’ she called. ‘What a spoof! He’s trying to say he wasn’t here when we arranged the picnic. Of course you were here! We were all sitting exactly where we are now. Freddie, isn’t that so?’
Uncle Freddie, rotund, radish-pink and utterly unassertive, lay in a hammock attached to the far side of the apple tree, enjoying his customary zizz in the warmth of the afternoon. He waved, without a word, what might have been a dissentient hand but equally one that didn’t care.
‘In fact,’ she said to me, revealing in the sweetest of smiles those large, long teeth of hers, ‘you actually threw out the idea yourself. “Let’s have a fishing picnic,” you said, “on the Mill Lake. Just like the one we had last year.”’
I couldn’t help admiring the words ‘threw out’. They had a marvellous casual cunning of their own. They almost had me believing, for one moment, that I had actually concocted this myth of picnics, even the one from last year.
‘Moreover you promised to bring that girl – that rather jolly one – what is her name? Penelope.’
With amiable restraint I begged to inform Aunt Leonora that I knew of no girl named Penelope.
‘Well, it’s a name of that sort. Something like it.’
‘Is it?’ I said. ‘And when was she last on the scene?’
