The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories

by H. E. Bates

  As he turned, he saw the face of Tom Willis. His eyes heavily disturbed, were looking straight at Dora Williams. He had assumed a kind of pained frailty, his arms loose at his sides, and he was looking at her with a sort of tender alarm.

  George Abrahams could not say anything. He felt that what he had to say was no longer important. Already the quartette had ceased to exist. He could not argue. In silence he stood looking down at the untouched glass of wine in his hands.

  The situation was saved by Miss Appleby, who said, ‘Well, rather than cry about it, let’s sing again.’

  He hesitated, but before he could make up his mind Dora Williams said yes, it was a good idea. She would like to sing again. It would get it off her chest.

  ‘Let’s sing “Standchën” again,’ Miss Appleby said. The thought of the song momentarily upset her and she said: ‘You mean you’re never coming again? But why? There’s no reason for it. No excuse. It’s not right!’

  No one spoke, and George Abrahams put down his glass on the table. His hands were shaking and suddenly he asked Miss Appleby if she would mind taking the accompaniment this time. She said yes and she sat down and began to play the first notes of the Schubert very softly.

  George Abrahams stood between Tom Willis and Dora Williams, who did not look at each other. As soon as he opened his mouth he knew that he was going to sing very badly, and a second later, for the first time in his experience, he was hearing Miss Appleby forcing her notes, the warm ripe texture of her voice dry and broken. But he could hear on either side of him the voices of two people singing out of a deep preoccupation, with painful beauty. He thought he could feel the passionate quality of their singing transcending the small hot room and the small bewildered minds of Miss Appleby and himself.

  When the singing was over he did not speak. He saw the hands of Miss Appleby as motionless on the piano keys as the wax flowers of the hyacinth in the window. He saw the light of the fire caught up again by the wine, and was aware of the strange upheaval of silence that comes after singing.

  Mr. Penfold

  Mr. Penfold, a travelling draper and haberdasher, easy terms arranged, a painfully shy, retreating man with almost invisible eyelashes, who looked as if he would have been much happier walking backwards, struggled out into the countryside every other Thursday on a massive basket-work tricycle, and called on Mrs. Armitage, a war-widow, and her daughter Katie. Mr. Penfold, who was in his early forties, was a single man.

  Mr. Penfold had been calling on Mrs. Armitage and her daughter ever since the war: so long that he had become like one of the family. To the Armitages, who lived at the bottom of a hill, in a red-brick house surrounded by large clumps of lilac under which there was a great trembling spread of snowdrops in early spring, Mr. Penfold had become an institution. ‘Well, it’s Mr. Penfold’s day,’ they said, every other Thursday; then, as the clock drew on to five in the afternoon, ‘it’s nearly Mr. Penfold’s time’; and then, at last, as they heard the huge wicker-work carrier of the tricycle squeak and clump over the grass verge outside the house, ‘that’ll be Mr. Penfold.’ Then they waited for Mr. Penfold’s knock: a gentle retreating kind of knock, as if Mr. Penfold had made it and run away. Finally, when with great timidity and decency Mr. Penfold stepped over the threshold they would say, ‘Well, it’s Mr. Penfold!’ as if he were a stranger turned up from a far country.

  On this same afternoon once a fortnight there was always a cup of tea for Mr. Penfold in the Armitages’s comfortable living room, and with it whatever the Armitages had: a boiled egg, tinned salmon, cake, fresh lettuce in summer. In return, after tea was over and the table cleared, Mr. Penfold would carefully and almost religiously lay out his lines, stockings, knickers, handkerchiefs, ribbons, elastic, buttons, woollen combinations. And there would suddenly hang in the air a smell which, after so many years, had become to symbolize Mr. Penfold: the dry, discreet odour of new drapery, a smell that had become to stand for the grave and timid discretion of a man who appeared to be forever on the verge of folding himself up and putting himself away. It seemed sometimes as if this discretion might flower into something else. It seemed to Mrs. Armitage, who was lonely and who had nothing to look forward to except the careful saving of her meagre pension and the growing up and perhaps finally the loss of Katie, that it might flower into something beyond friendship. For many years it seemed as if this might happen, but every Thursday she watched Mr. Penfold go through the same painful, too-discreet process of folding himself up and putting himself away for another fortnight. She watched him manœuvre the tricycle away from the house, and felt a strange conflict of anger and despair, and became resigned at last to the fact that Mr. Penfold would never change, was perhaps incapable of change, except under the impetus of a revolution.

  Though she did not notice it, this revolution was going on under her eyes, and once every fortnight under the eyes of Mr. Penfold, though for many years he did not notice it either. There was a revolution going on in the young girl, Katie. When Mr. Penfold first began to call on Mrs. Armitage there was a baby in the house, and sometimes he would take the child on his knee. He had a small gold watch which struck the hours like a little bell, and the child would listen to it for a long time, with dark eyes that had alternate moods of sulkiness and vivacity. As she sat on Mr. Penfold’s knee he would stroke his hand backwards and forwards with grave pleasure across her hair, which was the colour of sun-bleached straw and which, Mrs. Armitage said, would grow darker as she grew older. But for some reason, and to Mr. Penfold’s secret happiness, the hair never grew darker, but remained the one constant and beautiful element in the changing and growing girl.

  For some years there were no changes in the girl that could startle Mr. Penfold. He would see sometimes that the child had grown from one fortnight to another; there periodically came a time when she needed the next size in underclothes. When he expressed any feeling about the way the girl was growing and changing it was always one of surprise: surprise that time could go so quickly. ‘She’ll be telling us what to do before we know where we are,’ he would say.

  Then one summer, during the whole month of August, Katie went away to stay with an aunt, and it was six weeks before Mr. Penfold saw her again. During this time there were changes, but to Mr. Penfold unnoticed changes, in the behaviour of Mrs. Armitage. One afternoon she said that the plums were ripe in the garden. Would he like to see them? He said yes, and in his simple way, that had no connection with and did not understand subtleties, he went into the garden with her. The plums were dark and thick on the high tree, the skins warm in the rich August sunshine. He took off his coat and climbed the long high ladder and found himself in a deep sun-trembling world of fruit and leaves, his basket hooked on a branch, his two hands free for the great bunches of plums that hung everywhere like blue grapes on the brittle branches. After a time he heard Mrs. Armitage’s voice and looked down and saw her coming up the ladder. It was very warm and she had loosened the neck of her dress. She was a neat, firm little woman with dark brown crinkled hair and a still young figure, and he had only to glance down in order to see the hollow of her breasts opening darkly in her loosened dress. She came up the ladder smiling, with slightly parted lips, but he did not seem to see either her breasts or her smile, and it did not occur to him that he had only to reach down and she would fall into his life more easily than the plums were falling into his hands.

  He remained in the plum tree with her for more than two hours that afternoon, and at no time did he come near to understanding what had brought and kept him there. When he breathed the sweet, almost autumnal fragrance of ripe plums and saw the sunlight breaking through and quivering between the leaf-shadows on his hands and he said how lovely it was in the country, he did not grasp the meaning of her answer, that it was lovely but that you only understood how lovely it was until you lived there always. And when finally they left the tree and he carried the plums indoors for her and she gave him two glasses of her cool home-made wine to drink and begged
him to stay and have a little supper, he was still as remote from the meaning of it all as ever. It was still as if he could never reverse the fixed process of habit and nature, and for once unfold and give himself, instead of folding himself up and putting himself away.

  She was more angry than despairing when he went away that evening, but he did not know that either. He could not begin to know it, incapable as he was of understanding an inner meaning, kept as he had been by great shyness from any entry into a single great experience. He understood simple, visible things like a yard of velvet, a tree of plums, snowdrops in bloom, a pair of combinations. He understood that Mrs. Armitage had been buying things from him every fortnight more or less for fifteen years and that she paid him by a system of rather parsimonious instalments which in his shyness he called ‘this week’s’, but he did not understand that she was lonely and unsatisfied.

  A fortnight later he called again as usual, knocking in his timid way and waiting for an answer. But when the door opened he got for a moment the impression that it had been answered by a stranger.

  This impression, which went stabbing through his mind like a needle, was gone almost at once, and he saw that the stranger was Katie. He saw with astonishment a clear, unmistakable thing before his eyes. In her absence Katie had grown up. She was some inches taller, but he saw more than that. She stood very erect, her young, newly-formed breasts pushing against her frock, and it seemed to him that she looked at him with eyes that had in them a kind of sulky hostility. The one thing about her that had not changed was her hair: it had the same shining blondeness, but now against the dark self-conscious eyes it seemed doubly beautiful and striking.

  He was so affected by this transition in the girl that as he came into the house he felt as if something were waiting to explode behind his shyness. He wanted to talk about it, to remark to Mrs. Armitage how suddenly and unmistakably Katie had grown up. But he could not say anything and gradually his great sense of astonishment was repressed and folded away, to become in turn part of his shyness, to become as time went on something that he could not speak about or reveal.

  But that afternoon he found himself forced to face the change in the girl in other ways. It was time, Mrs. Armitage said, that Katie wore some sort of support. She believed in support early; there was nothing like it, she always held, for starting a good figure.

  ‘Besides, she’s going to leave school, and start to work.’

  ‘Work?’ Mr. Penfold said. ‘Why, what work, where?’

  ‘She’s going to work down in Denton,’ she said, ‘in Chapman’s office. She starts next week. Yes, she’s starting to work.’

  ‘Well,’ Mr. Penfold said. ‘It doesn’t seem five minutes since she was a baby.’

  As he said this, Mr. Penfold looked up at the girl, who was standing in the room, her back against a high dresser, her arms folded behind her. He smiled, half expecting her to smile back, but he saw on her face only the new-born, adolescent resentment, not yet hostility, to what he suddenly felt was a foolish remark. Her direct, sulky stare brought all his own self-consciousness rushing to the surface, and he felt strangely, miserably foolish.

  He turned hurriedly to the things on the table, and was immediately faced with a new problem. It was very rare that he carried such lines as belts or brassières and in fact corsetry was rather out of his line, and he knew that he had nothing suitable for the girl. ‘But I could run the tape round her and bring some over special tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, that would do as well,’ Mrs. Armitage said. ‘Katie, let Mr. Penfold run the tape over you.’

  Mr. Penfold produced the tape-measure from his pocket and unrolled it in his hands, but before he could do anything the girl sprung away from the dresser and went swiftly out of the room.

  ‘Well!’ Mrs. Armitage said. ‘Well! And that’s how she’s been ever since she got back. Too big to be spoke to, too big to do anything. And now throwing her weight about. Well!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Mr. Penfold said. ‘Leave her alone. Shall I bring some sizes over tomorrow and she can try them on?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mrs. Armitage said. ‘I’m sure I don’t know. Perhaps we’d better go down to Lee and Porters and go up into the ladies’ department and get it there.’

  ‘All right,’ Mr. Penfold said.

  ‘Seems they grow up to be ladies while your back’s turned.’

  The girl did not come into the room again, and later Mr. Penfold took away with him the startling impression of her sudden transition and the still more startling impression of her exit from the room. Whenever he thought of the two things he was filled with a sense of her beauty and rebellion. He was aware of the presence in her of moods and attributes which he had never foreseen in the child who had once sat on his knee, listening to his watch as it chimed the hours like a little bell.

  When he called at the house again, a fortnight later, Katie was not there. Mrs. Armitage looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and said, ‘She’ll be here very shortly. She gets home about half past five. Sometimes six.’

  ‘Does she like it?’

  ‘You better ask her!’ Mrs. Armitage said. ‘I can’t get a word out of her whether she likes it or not. She’s got that proud she won’t tell you anything.’

  Mr. Penfold did not know what to say. Proud? It was a strange thing to be angry about. He sat down at the table as usual and Mrs. Armitage gave him a cup of tea. And then, about half an hour later, he heard the door open and shut and the footsteps of the girl going upstairs.

  ‘That’s her,’ Mrs. Armitage said. ‘One time o’ day you couldn’t horsewhip her into washing her hands before she sat down to table. Now she finicks about with them for hours.’

  Once again Mr. Penfold did not say anything. He lingered over his tea with even more diffidence than usual, partly because the egg that Mrs. Armitage had set before him seemed suddenly distasteful, partly because he wanted to remain in the room until the girl herself came down. In this mood of uncertainty, in which there was also a strange feeling of suspense, he let his tea grow cold, drinking it without quite knowing what he was doing.

  The cup was actually at his lips when the girl came in, proud and silent and very soft-moving, so that she slipped into her chair, opposite him, as soundlessly as a soft blonde cat. He bade her good-evening, the tea still cold on his lips, and she answered him in a low voice. He saw at once that she had grown still more and that the transition from childhood to adolescence, just begun when he had seen her last, was now complete. Every movement and lack of movement now was mutinous with the self-conscious sense of her own beauty, so that he felt his own sense of surprise grow and change into a kind of absent-minded wonder, the cold tea-cup still in his hands and still foolishly suspended midway between his lips and the table, until he abruptly realized it and set it down with a clatter against the spoon.

  A moment later he got up from the table and made some excuse about going. He knew that he could not sit there at the table with the girl any longer without something happening: something momentous or foolish or even, to his way of thinking, something terrible. He went out into the warm early September evening with a feeling very like fear uppermost in his heart. He did not know what he had to be afraid about; he was not even sure that what he felt was fear. But like fear the emotion propelled him forward, deeply disquieted, uncertain. That evening it still seemed like summer, with delicate fingers of honeysuckle outspread in the hedges, and the sun flat and warm and golden on the bright renewed September grass. The papers were saying that it was the finest September for many years, but now all at once he realized that he felt its beauty keenly not just because it was splendid weather but because it was emotionally linked with the beauty of the girl. He saw in the straw-gold colour of the honeysuckle the exact shade of her hair reproduced with fearful and lovely fidelity. The honeysuckle floated dreamily by him as he cycled past and in the same way he felt his dreamy thoughts about her run past him and gather in the distance, too numerous and diffi
dent and troubled to catch.

  From this moment he went on thinking of her, as it were, from a distance. He called at the house every other Thursday, not as if nothing had happened but in the hope that as time went on something would happen. Sometimes he saw the girl, but always with her mother; sometimes she was late from the office. More often than not he never spoke to her. She continued to remain mutinous and cool, her lips richly defiant, her young breasts rapidly growing ripe, to be carried soon with a new and conscious air of voluptuousness. In her presence he felt shyer than ever: shy, painfully inexperienced and sometimes foolish, the girl old and mature and fixed in beautiful contempt above him.

  It was not until three years later that he suddenly found himself alone with her one evening. He had been held up by a puncture three miles away late in the afternoon and had mended it himself on the roadside. It was almost seven o’clock when he got to the house. He knocked shyly on the door as usual, and waited, and it was the girl herself who came in answer.

  ‘Oh! it’s Mr. Penfold,’ she said. ‘Come in.’

  He went into the house. It was November and the milk-globed lamp was alight on the table. The light shone upward into the girl’s blonde face and on her bright blue jumper and on her bare smooth arms and hands. But it was not only the beauty of her body, in the milky lamplight, that struck him. There was something else. There was a change in her voice and manner.

  A moment later he knew the reason. ‘Is your mother in?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ the girl said. ‘She thought you couldn’t be coming. She waited till six and now she’s gone down to the village.’

  Her voice was amazingly friendly and free of all the old mutinous reserve. He had not time to understand it before in a warm, eager way she asked him if he would like some tea. He excused himself by saying it was too late but she said no, a place had been left for him and all she had to do was boil the kettle.