The Yellow Meads of Asphodel
Page 4
‘Now see if you can’t remember. What did you do when you left me last night? Outside the hop-gardens.’
He sat in the car, staring across the old deserted sand quarry. It formed a sort of arena, a hundred and fifty yards across, its walls rising thirty or forty feet in a rough circle like cliffs of rough, amber-coloured cheese. A shaggy fringe of burnt grass grew from the top and here and there big stumpy elderberry trees had taken root in gaps among the stone. The floor of it was like some arid bone-yard, completely flat and white, from which a flood had swept the bones away. From scores of holes in the cliffs dark clouds of sand-martins poured and swooped, crying thinly.
‘You kissed me good-night and then went down the hill. It must have been half past ten. Perhaps eleven.’
‘Kissed you good-night?’
She gave a short laugh and quickly brushed her lips across his own.
‘Yes. Kissed. Like that, only better. You don’t even remember that, do you?’
He had once again to confess that he didn’t remember.
‘Do you remember anything about being followed by a motor-bike? Perhaps two motor-bikes? Perhaps three? Does that mean anything to you?’
No: that didn’t mean anything to him either.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘who they are.’
‘I’m not sure how many there were yet.’ she said. ‘Three at least. Perhaps five. So I wouldn’t know who they were. But I know one for sure.’
‘Yes?’
‘He’s a fellow named Tooley.’ She made a movement as if to hold his arm and then remembered the pain of the previous time. ‘I may as well tell you. I was friends with him. Then he started to get big. Big-headed. Big-mouthed. Swelled-headed. The lot. Then he swizzed my brother out of seventy quid on a motor-bike deal. Then went about boasting of it, shooting his fat mouth. He’s as mad as a monkey about motor-bikes. They all are.’
The talk of motor-bikes entered Dillon’s mind with the sudden click of a key. It seemed, he thought, that he might be on the verge of remembering things.
‘So we had one big hell of a stack-up. I told him I’d never see him again and I damn well meant it too. He started to rough me up then – that’s all he knows about, roughing people up – but I hammered him back again. He knows I’m not scared of him. You don’t have to be if you get on that flaming bike with him. I know.’
Dillon sat thinking again of motor-bikes. A raw note of fast engines searing up a hill scorched the vague distances of his memory. Across the quarry a huge segment of shadow lay almost black against the brilliant face of sand.
‘Got a cigarette?’ she said suddenly. ‘I don’t smoke much since this cancer scare. But I could do with one now.’
He fumbled in his pockets. He brought out half a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. He sprang the lighter catch and it flamed the first time.
‘Thanks,’ she said and blew smoke.
‘You’d better hold on to the lighter,’ Dillon said. ‘You might want it again.’
‘Just thought of something,’ she said. She slipped the lighter from one hand to the other and back again. ‘Bet you don’t remember my name.’
‘I thought it was Shirley.’
She laughed. It was a friendly, deep sound.
‘First thing you asked me. Said you liked it. Thought it suited me. Olga, not Shirley.’
‘You must think I’m a damn fool.’
‘You looked at me all afternoon,’ she said. ‘I could feel you out of the back of my head. I can see you now. You were riding on the back of that trailer and every time you went by I had a funny sort of feeling you wanted me. You remember all that, surely, or don’t you?’
All of a sudden he saw her again as he had seen her all the golden afternoon in the hop-garden, his memory absolutely bright. He could see her big sun-reddened arms pulling at the bine. She was looking at him with large bee-brown eyes and the orange slacks were stretched tight across her thighs.
‘I remember now,’ Dillon said. ‘It’s all starting to come back.’
‘Remember anything else?’ she said. ‘About last night, I mean?’
In an almost explosive flash that too came back. The searing roar of motor-bike engines dinned itself cruelly into his consciousness. He was driving home in darkness down the hill. A bike suddenly came up at great speed beside him, cutting so fast across his head-lights that he braked and swerved. Then it stuck in front of him, full in his head-lights, never more than five or six yards away. Then a second bike came roaring up beside him and he could hear a third at his back.
He saw the faces of the first two riders grinning with wide leers under their black crash helmets. He remembered yelling madly, shaking his fist out of the window. Every now and then he accelerated and then they accelerated too. They had him trapped in a sort of mobile vice. There was no escaping. And finally when he stopped they too stopped. They had him caught as if he were a criminal on the run and the first thing he saw on getting out of the driving seat was the swing of a big spanner in the lights of the van.
Slowly he told her all this. She listened without a word. He was still distraught and bewildered by the naked recollection of the first spanner blow crashing against his ear and all he could ask was:
‘Who’d want to do a thing like that to me? What have I done? I was just going home. Minding my own business.’
She threw her cigarette out of the window. She played tensely with the lighter, tipping it from hand to hand.
‘Somebody must have told them. Like I said, somebody must have phoned.’ She suddenly let out a half-shout. Her voice was savage. ‘Iris. Nobody could have done it only Iris. My friend, the jealous bitch, my friend. God, what a blasted fool I’ve been. What a blasted, cock-eyed fool.’
She rammed a second cigarette into her mouth. She struck the lighter into flame and then lit the cigarette, her fingers shaking with anger.
‘We’d better go,’ she said. ‘I got to have a few words with Iris. I got things to say to that bitch. My friend.’
* * *
Dillon supposed they must have travelled less than half a mile from the sand quarry when her ears, far sharper than his, suddenly picked up the sound of bike engines from some distance behind. A second after she heard it she shouted:
‘Turn off! It mightn’t be them but turn off all the same. Is there some other way back to the quarry? We’d be out of sight there.’
‘Think so. I’ll take the next turn.’
Dillon drove faster, half skidding round the next turn. In another two minutes a thick chestnut copse cut off all sight of the road behind. From under the dark chestnut leaves the wind blew cool into the windows of the car, but he could feel sweat pouring down his face, stinging the smashed raw flesh of his ear.
Suddenly she picked up the sound of bikes again, roaring past the turn.
‘Five of them this time. Two big Nortons in front. I’d know them anywhere.’
Dillon stepped hard on the accelerator pedal. In the confusion he was having some difficulty in remembering the road. Beyond the chestnut copses was a field of late wheat, half-cut, a big red combine harvester standing in its centre, and beyond that a farm.
Suddenly he remembered a back-cut, not much more than a cart-track, behind the farm. He slowed down and swerved into it and in another five minutes he could see once again the rough, amber-coloured cliffs of sand.
He stopped the car and switched off the engine. His face was running with a heavy sweat of weakness. He had an overwhelming desire to get out of the car and walk about and drink fresh air but he suddenly knew his legs would never carry him.
She suddenly recognised the fresh agony of his weakness and drew down his head and let it rest on her shoulder. She got a handkerchief and wiped some of his sweat away. Once her thick hair fell across his face and the act of its falling drew a curtain across his memory, so that for a second time he didn’t know where he was.
He was shaken out of this half-coma by her sitting up with a violent jerk. She could h
ear the bikes again, she said, and this time her voice was a whisper.
‘Where?’
‘I can hear them coming up the hill. They’re going back now they couldn’t find you.’
He saw her with vague eyes. She was tense, her face taut with the strain of listening. Soon the sound of engines was so loud that he could even hear it himself. The bikes, it seemed to him, roared across the mouth of the quarry. The walled arena was battered with echoes.
Then it was suddenly quiet: oddly and unhealthily quiet, like the quiet after sudden thunder.
‘They’ve gone,’ he said, his mind still too vague to notice that she didn’t answer.
Through sheer weakness his head dropped again on her shoulder. This time she made no attempt to touch it. She sat upright, braced as if to receive a blow. Then suddenly she half leapt to the window, leaning out.
‘Oh! my God. Like I thought,’ she said.
‘What is it? What’s up?’
‘They’re here. Five of them. Over there.’
A single bike started to come at slow and sinister speed across the sand. The remaining four lined up behind, engines ticking over, closing the gap in the quarry.
The bike came up to the van and stopped. The figure riding it was a big, crusty fellow with a square jaw. His crash helmet was black. His leather driving coat was black too. A skull and cross-bones was painted in white across the back of it. He seemed about nineteen.
‘Well, if it ain’t our Olga. Well, well. Long time no see.’
‘Buzz off. Make yourself scarce.’
‘I only just got here. How’s the boy friend? Looks nice and healthy to me.’
‘How’d you know we were here?’
‘Funny, really. Little accident of nature. You know. We thought it looked like a good place to water the horses.’
‘Buzz off. Go on, buzz. Get lost. Before I lose my temper.’
‘Now, now. If you don’t mind your manners, little lady, I might mark you.’
She played with the lighter. She clenched it in her right fist in such a way that the nozzle protruded through the two centre knuckles.
‘And there might be ways of marking you too, big-head. Now buzz. Start motoring.’
‘Billy Boy looks bone-lazy to me. Boy friend looks tired. I thought you like strong blokes? Country boy needs exercise. Start driving, country boy.’
‘Driving?’ Dillon said. ‘Where?’
‘Just round. Just round and round and round and round. Till me and the boys tell you to stop. Won’t be long. Couple of hours or so. I’ve got time.’
Dillon, almost too weak to hold the wheel, hesitated.
‘Better drive,’ she said. ‘This one’s the big strong man. He loves odds. Five to one. He loves that. Tell me something. Did Iris phone you? Was it that jealous bitch?’
‘Iris?’ he said. ‘Who’s Iris? Never heard of her. Drive.’
Dillon started to drive. Only two bikes now guarded the entrance to the quarry. Like evil black beetles, the other three took up the escort of the van, one on each flank, the other three or four yards ahead. Now and then the three black helmeted riders signalled Dillon to go faster. On the cramped circle of the quarry floor they hotted the speed up to thirty, then forty and beyond. To Dillon it seemed like fifty. He drove as in a drunken daze, his head battered by engine roar, his vision bewildered by the wild flight of frightened martins crying everywhere.
After the fifth or sixth circuit they thought up a trick. Each time the van turned westward the slanting sun drove shafts of light flat into Dillon’s eyes, dazzling him. Half-blind, he struggled desperately to keep the van upright. He drove as into a blazing arc-light, each rider in turn jinking in front of him, swerving, half-horizontal, like a dirt-track rider, dragging feet, raising searing white dust against his screen.
He now began to drive in a sheer suspense of terror. He lost all count of the number of circuits. Only half-conscious, he presently felt himself to be performing in a wall of death, in a dusty nightmare, on some hellish fairground. In his terrified concentration on the blinding dust in front of him he was no longer even aware of the girl.
It must have been at the twentieth circuit or so that his head seemed half to fall from his shoulders and the entire face of the quarry turned black. The girl shouted and grabbed the wheel. A second later a jinking rider sliced in front of her and she drove straight at him, the engine stalling violently as she cut him down.
In a flash she was out of the van, the cigarette lighter in her hand, already alight. Tooley lay half pinned under the big Norton, petrol pouring from the carburettor.
She stood two yards from him, holding the lighter at arm’s length.
‘Now will you buzz? or shall I put it to the carburettor?’
‘Don’t be a bloody fool! Take it away! I don’t want to burn!’
‘Then call them off from me!’ The other two riders were beetling madly up from behind the van. ‘Call them off, I tell you, or I’ll throw it. I don’t mind burning. I’ll burn. I’m not scared of that. Call them off, I tell you!’
She raised the lighter high above her head as if to throw it. Tooley actually screamed, yelling for the bike to be lifted off from him.
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Lift his cradle. Take him away in his cradle now.’
The other two riders pulled the bike from Tooley, who swung fiercely back into the saddle, white and savage.
‘I’ve a good mind to run you down for that, lady.’
She held the lighter out to him, like a torch.
‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Try.’
Ten seconds later a slow procession of three bikes started across the sand. It joined the other two at the gap and went on like a dusty cortège to the road.
The girl went back to the van and sat with Dillon. The sun began to go down. Without a word she drew his head on to her shoulder and kissed his face. For a long time he had neither the strength nor the will to say a word either but finally he moved and brushed his mouth against her own.
‘It’ll soon be dark,’ she said. ‘Think you can drive?’
‘Think so.’
‘Take it steady,’ she said. ‘Take it easy. You think there might be time to gather me a piece of honeysuckle? It might do something to sweeten the air.’
Dillon leaned his head out of the window, breathing hard.
‘It feels sweet to me already,’ he said.
He started the engine. With pain he drove slowly forward and once again the air was filled with a crying tumult of wings.
The Love Letters of Miss Maitland
On a prematurely dark, rainy evening in April, Miss Gladys Maitland sat down in her bedsitter, alone, to write – or rather type – the last of her many letters to herself. She had written the first, the only one which she had failed to keep with all the rest, a little under two years before.
She well remembered the circumstances that led up to that first letter. For some months previously she had begun to suffer from an illusion that she was ill – perhaps very ill, even incurably ill. A small indefinable pain in her left side gradually magnified itself to something that seemed to spell malignancy. In turn this led to sleeplessness, which in turn brought on periods of lassitude where she no longer cared whether she ate or not. These in turn led to nausea, which then brought on headaches of melancholic and sometimes paralysing pain.
It never once occurred to her that these things had anything at all to do with Mrs Braithwaite, her companion typist at the office. Mrs Braithwaite was a singularly good-looking girl, with sensationally smooth golden hair and light blue eyes immensely radiant with the ecstasies of recent marriage.
Before the marriage she and Miss Maitland had been intimate friends, sharing a small flat together. With selfless joy Miss Maitland did all the washing, ironing, cooking, bed making and so on for the two of them: tasks of willing, silent, affectionate devotion. She asked for nothing in return. The friendship and beauty of Mrs Braithwaite alone was reward enough for her.
Constantly Miss Maitland was made to feel more painfully aware of the drabness, the inadequacy, of the bedsitter. The brand-new curtains of Mrs Braithwaite’s brand-new house were of yellow wild silk; the olive-green flock wallpaper was the most expensive in the book; the fridge, the television set, the car, the carved pine mantelpiece, the Chinese carpets – all were symbols of a world utterly remote from Miss Maitland, which she could never hope to share.
Nevertheless, eventually, Miss Maitland felt compelled to speak to Mrs Braithwaite of her fear of illness. Mrs Braithwaite listened with bored tolerance, then cool indifference and finally with open impatience.
‘Perhaps if you didn’t think about it quite so much—’
‘I’m sure I don’t think of it all that much.’
Well, it’s the mental attitude that matters. In any case you’re so worried, why don’t you see your doctor?’
The greater fear of having fears confirmed ran sharply through Miss Maitland like another pain. She confessed she hated the thought of a surgery.
‘It’s probably all imagination,’ Mrs Braithwaite said, and though her voice was slightly superior, cool and acid, she actually laughed too. ‘You know, la malade imaginaire.’
Miss Maitland could hardly be called drab. She simply lacked lustre. She always wore her mole-coloured hair in a net. Her legs were straight and thick and her eyes had something of the appearance of small brown snails.
When she arrived at the doctor’s surgery a surprise awaited her. ‘I’ve always seen Dr Cameron …’
‘I’m Dr O’Brien.’ A thin young man, with brilliant brown eyes and hair that seemed to spark at every tip with a gingery point of fire, spoke with a scarcely detectable Irish brogue. ‘Dr Cameron has retired.’