by H. E. Bates
On one particularly humid August night he said:
‘Did you know that the whole character of this common has completely changed? There was a big fire here about twenty years ago. It changed the entire life of the place.’
‘Ah! yes, I remember that fire. It burned for weeks.’
‘Months. It was really the peat burning. Underground. It was a long, hot summer, rather like this one, and when the fire was out nothing was the same any more.’
‘Rather like you and my life.’
‘The refiners’ fire?’
‘That’s a nice way of putting it. Yes, the refiners’ fire.’
‘I wonder which it’s nicest to be? The refiner or the refined?’
‘The refined isn’t complaining.’
‘Nor, I may say, is the refiner.’
‘Oh! God, you’re so marvellous to me.’
That night they lay there until long after darkness was complete. By midnight the air had scarcely cooled and it was about that time that he said:
‘You said I was marvellous to you. I could be even more marvellous.’
‘I utterly fail to see how.’
‘I could make love to you.’
She lay quiet, in one of her many forms of entrancement, scarcely daring to breathe.
‘Have you ever made love?’
‘How could I? There’s never ever been anyone to make love to me.’
‘I see.’
‘I’ve had to exist with brotherly love. And now even that’s gone the way of all flesh.’
‘Love is the way of all flesh.’
‘That’s a nice way of putting it.’
He laughed and said:
‘It must be getting late. How about coming back to the cottage for a night-cap?’
‘That’s also a nice way of putting it,’ she said and laughed too.
For a time, at the cottage, they sat more or less in silence, drinking whisky. Then at last he put down his glass, gently unzipped her dress and one by one drew her breasts free. The firm beauty of them not only surprised him but threw him into such an entrancement of his own that he was moved to kiss them.
In a further entrancement of her own she simply had nothing to say and it was finally he who spoke:
‘Do you have to go home tonight?’
‘Logically I suppose I do.’
‘Love isn’t logical.’
‘No.’ He was caressing her breasts now and she was trembling. ‘You were right the first time. It is the way of all flesh.’
Upstairs she entreated him to be tender with her.
‘Because,’ she said, ‘I feel like – oh! I don’t know – I suppose – Oh! I suppose it sounds silly. But I feel like—’
‘Like what?’
‘One of “those happy souls who dwell in yellow meads of asphodel”.’
When she got back home the following morning, about half-past ten, still slightly dazed with happiness, she found her brother standing on the front doorstep of the house. His hands were rigidly clasped behind his back, as if they might have been holding an invisible weapon with which to chastise a recalcitrant truant or a deserter. His bony face was not merely grim. It was part of a piece of statuary, hardened by pain.
‘Am I to suppose you’ve been out all night?’
His voice too was hard: the voice, almost, of a man opening a court-martial.
‘On the contrary. I’ve been in all night.’
‘In? Where?’
‘Bed.’
She moved to go into the house. He barred the way.
‘I think I’ve a right to know where,’ he said.
‘Really? Are you your sister’s keeper?’
‘We’ve always been very close. Now you’ve deserted me.’
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘But I propose to. May I now go into the house? I’d like some coffee.’
He stood firm, impotent, hard, face still a piece of statuary grim with pain.
‘I presume all this has something to do with Mr Trenchard?’
‘You presume quite correctly.’
‘You seem to have lost your head. I should have thought at your age you’d have known better.’
‘Emotions have nothing to do with age. I happen to be in love with him.’
‘Love? What do you know about love? You’ve never been in love in your life.’
‘Nor have I ever eaten caviare. But that’s no reason why I shouldn’t try it. And perhaps find it delicious.’
Speechless now, he merely made a sound between a grunt and a snarl.
‘And another thing. Since we are exchanging pleasant-tries you might as well know that I am going to be married. And very soon. Then the desertion will be complete. Now will you have the decency to let me go into the house?’
Still unable to speak, he stood biting his lip, his face agonised.
‘I really would like some coffee. Do you mind?’
‘Virginia, don’t let’s quarrel. We’ve never quarrelled. I can’t bear it.’
‘You might ask yourself who began the quarrel. And perhaps, if you come up with an answer, you’ll let me know.’
‘But you hardly know this man. How can you be sure you’ll be happy?’
‘I’ve never been so happy in my life. I’m one of “those happy souls who dwell in yellow meads of asphodel”.’
‘I simply don’t understand you lately. It isn’t the first time you’ve talked to me in riddles.’
‘Perhaps it’s because you fail to understand that there may be more than one woman inside a body.’
He could find no possible answer to this and stood aside, at last, to let her into the house. There she asked Grace to make her coffee and then, when it was ready, took it up to her room. Sitting there, by the window, drinking it, she stared out over the August garden brilliant with dahlias, phlox, verbena, golden rod and still many roses, without really seeing them. What she was really seeing were stars of sun-dew and the trembling flowers of asphodel.
Nor did she give any thought to the quarrel with her brother; it was a thing of pettiness that she had already thrown aside like a piece of soiled and unwanted paper. She was thinking instead of the way her breasts had been caressed, then kissed, then caressed again; she was thinking of her first experience of love and of how, when she woke in the morning, it had been repeated, longer and more beautifully.
* * *
All this time she was unaware that, downstairs, at first in his study, then during several walks in the garden, her brother brooded. His particular broodiness was not of anger; it didn’t even arise from any bitterness of the words they had exchanged. It was a bitterness of gnawing jealousy, of the pain of a man who had lost a lover, even a wife, to a rival contender. Several times this so affected him that he was near to tears and by the end of the morning near to despair.
By that time he had taken refuge in his sister’s remedy. When Grace finally announced that lunch was ready he replied that he wanted none. He was in fact in his study, silently lunching off whisky.
There Virginia found him.
‘Aren’t you coming for lunch?’
‘I am not.’
‘Then I’ll ask Grace to clear it away. I’m going out to lunch with Roger. He’s just come to fetch me in his car.’
‘What time will you be back?’
‘I haven’t the remotest, faintest idea. As I said before, are you your sister’s keeper?’
‘I used to think I was.’
He drank deeply at his whisky. Then he turned to entreat her not to quarrel with him, to say at last that he was sorry and how he could no longer bear it all; but by the time he had set down his glass and was ready to speak his sister was no longer there.
He brooded for another hour and several more whiskies. Then somewhere about mid-afternoon he got up, left his study and paused at the kitchen to tell Grace that he was going out, up through the wood, to shoot pigeons. There were more of them than ever; they were a confounded nuisance on the corn.
H
e walked through the wood with his gun. At the end of the path was a stile and beyond the stile a field of wheat, still uncut and burnt brown in ear.
He stood staring at the wheatfield for some minutes with pained eyes, as if not really seeing it, and then rested the stock of the gun on the step of the stile, at the same time tucking the two barrels under his throat.
At the violent sound of the double shot a great cloud of rooks rose from the field of wheat, black and frightened, and flew wailing far into the sky.
A Taste of Blood
Dillon woke with all his senses bruised and drugged, breathing heavily, unable to remember where he was.
The tortured impression that he had been lying unconscious on the bed for some long time, perhaps a day, changed harshly to raging pain. He was suddenly frightened by a ghastly conviction that his left arm had been severed just below the elbow and that the raw flesh was still hanging by a thread.
He sat up slowly. His head turned and throbbed like a ponderous roundabout. At times it seemed actually to click. Then it stopped momentarily and turned again, sickly. He shut his eyes, opened them glassily and slowly made several odd discoveries, the first of which was that he was still in his shirt and trousers. The second was that he had still one shoe on, the third that from top to bottom his left shirt sleeve was stiff as brown paper with thick dried blood.
He swung his feet slowly to the floor and sat for some minutes with his head buried in his hands. It wasn’t as if he had been drunk the night before; he was somehow sure of that. It was more as if he had dragged up and down great slopes, among battering rocks. Every limb had a savage sprain in it; his head seemed to have been mercilessly banged by boulders.
Even when he at last stood up and looked at himself in the mirror hanging over the wash-stand he still found it utterly impossible to remember a fraction of anything that had happened to him. He hadn’t the remotest idea of what day it was. He was unaware of the time of day; or how long he had been lying there with the arm oozing blood. His right cheek-bone had a sulphurous green bruise curled poisonously round it, oddly enough in the shape of a rough question mark. His thick black hair was matted with blood too. His left ear looked like a lump of red offal half-chewed by a dog.
In bitter pain he stripped off his shirt and made the further discovery that his arm was slit to the bone outside the crook of the elbow. It took him ten minutes or so to wash the arm free of blood and another ten minutes to wash the blood out of his hair and clean up the lacerated left ear. Sometimes he spat into the wash-basin. Clots of blood streaked from his mouth and the taste of blood was bitter too.
His ear, when washed, wasn’t exactly painful. It merely burned like a dynamo. It caused him also to be deaf on his left side. As a result, when he walked about the room looking for a clean shirt and a jacket, he walked lop-sided, half off balance, like a drunk.
Dressed at last, he stood staring out of the window. His van, a small dark green one, stood slewed diagonally across the yard, the driving door still open. He couldn’t remember anything about that either.
He went slowly downstairs. The back door was unlocked. Sunlight streamed across the yard. The metal of the van door was hot to the touch. He got the impression that the time was late afternoon.
Suddenly he was afflicted by a great thirst. He longed for a beer, a beer that would be endlessly deep and cold. He crawled into the van seat and then, after starting up the engine, discovered that he could scarcely crook his left arm.
He was forced to drive one-handed down the half-mile hill to the village. He was twenty-eight, a slow, mild, rather awkward giant of a man, easy going, obliging, unquarrelsome, eager to please. He would do any kind of job for anybody at any time. In winter he cut chestnut poles. In spring he did hop-stringing. In summer there was cherry-picking and in September a month in the hop-gardens.
Hop-gardens? For a fraction of a second he remembered something about hop-gardens, then his mind was blank again. He stopped the van and sat staring down the street, trying to think. He was outside the Black Horse and the door was open. Then he knew it was after six o’clock.
He got out of the van and went up the stone steps of the Black Horse and into the bar. He hung on to the edge of the counter, half-faint with the exertion of climbing the steps. Joe Stevens was alone behind the bar, wiping glasses. The image of Joe swam about a bit but at least he knew it was Joe. That was something. He remembered Joe.
‘Give me a beer, Joe, will you?’
Joe, shocked, staring hard, pulled the beer. A mass of froth overflowed yeastily across the brown counter. Dillon took the glass and held it to his lips. Suddenly he didn’t want the beer. His thirst was violent as ever but underneath and behind it all his body felt white and frail with sickness. He set the glass back on the bar and said:
‘Joe, where was I last night?’
‘You wasn’t in here.’
‘No? Where was I?’
‘You wasn’t in here all night. What’s happened to you? God Almighty, Dillon, what hit you?’
‘I dunno. I can’t remember. Where the hell was I?’
Joe stood mopping up the last of the froth from the bar.
‘Last time I saw you was when you drove past here last night. Six o’clock that was. Dead on. I know because I was just opening up, just unbolting the door.’
‘Six o’clock?’
‘Yes. You had a girl in the front seat with you.’
‘Girl?’
‘Yes. I thought it was funny. I said to Edna “that’s funny. Dillon with a girl. You don’t often see Dillon with girls”.’
‘Girl? What girl?’
‘Biggish girl. Fair. Wearing orange-coloured slacks. I didn’t get a good look at her last night but I did this morning.’
‘This morning?’
‘She was in here this morning. About twelve o’clock. Asking for you. They told her up in the gardens she might find you here.’
‘Up in the gardens? Is that where she was?’
‘Started Monday she told me.’
‘Monday? What’s today?’
‘Wednesday.’
Dillon took a slow drink of beer. His sickness receded a little. His body seemed less frail and white. He dwelt for half a minute on a blurred image of the hop-gardens, the figure of a girl slowly taking vague shape in it, cloudy and except for one detail unfamiliar.
‘Wear a sort of band round her head? Blue, I think.’
‘That’s her,’ Joe said. ‘That’s her.’
Dillon drove out of the village, back up the hill. The hop-gardens, a quarter stripped of vine, lay in three oblongs across the south slope of a valley. On the far side of the valley hills white with late barley lay crested by great summer-scorched woods, the upper edges of the trees already burnt to ginger, giving them the look of old, moulting bear skins.
He was still wondering whether to drive the van into the gardens or leave it on the road and walk the last hundred yards or so when he saw the girl walking down the hill. She was wearing the same orange slacks and the same bright blue band round her hair. Her shirt was the same colour as the band and her feet were in yellowish-brown sandals.
As soon as she saw him stop the van she started running. She was big in every detail, without being massive or heavy. The strong smooth thighs reminded him of a mare’s and her brown-blonde hair, thick and held down by the band, was like a mane.
‘God, there you are. Where have you been all day? I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
She snatched open the van door, got into the seat beside and took one wide shocked look at him.
‘God, your face. Your face! Whatever happened to your face?’
‘Dunno. Can’t remember. Must have had a crash with the van.’
She gave a brief bitter laugh that shocked his mild and unaggressive nature almost as much as the first sight of his battered face had done.
‘Van, my foot. They did it. It’s just like Iris said. Somebody gave them the tip. Somebody phoned them.’
He groped through clouds of dark bewilderment. He said he didn’t think he knew quite what she was on about. Iris? Who was Iris? Who were they?
‘Iris is my girl-friend. We work in Stepney together. We came down here to get a breath of fresh air.’
‘Who are they then?’
She looked quickly up and down the road.
‘I don’t think we’d better stop here talking. We’d better go somewhere else. Where you took me last night. Let’s go there.’
‘Where was that?’
‘Don’t you remember? Up on the hills there. You don’t remember? There was a big wood and we pulled inside. There was a hedge with honeysuckle on it. I didn’t know what it was and you picked a bit for me. You don’t remember?’
He said he didn’t remember. Not only that part but all the other parts. Not a thing. It was all a blank. He’d had a job even to remember her.
‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘It’ll be quieter there.’ A big scarlet petrol tanker drove past, setting up a great wash of air that started all the skeins of hops swaying across the gardens like pale green curtains. ‘No. I don’t think we’d better. Can you think of somewhere else? Somewhere quiet and out of sight? Off the road?’
He sat staring at the dashboard, his left hand on the ignition key, trying hard to do his first real coherent piece of thinking of the day. After almost half a minute a gap opened in the deep clouds of his confusion and he said:
‘Up in the old sand quarry. That ought to do. Nobody ever goes up there.’
‘That sounds all right. Let’s go up there.’
He paused for a few seconds longer before attempting to turn the ignition key.
‘We could go back to my place. You must be hungry. We could get you something to eat.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ she said. ‘I’d rather be out in the fresh air anyway. I feel freer outside. Besides, they know where you live by now. It wouldn’t be any good going there.’
She gave him a look of sudden tenderness, urging him to get started, at the same time giving his left arm a sudden squeeze of affection. In agony he let out a gasp of pain and at last, sick to the core of himself, turned the key.