by H. E. Bates
She felt her heart leap again. She pressed her lips hard together and they were dry.
‘God, it’ll be like ruddy heaven,’ he said.
She was quiet.
‘God, how I loathe it. The army, I mean. God, how I hate it. It’s been like heaven up here.’
‘Means I won’t see you again for a bit.’
‘Oh! tomorrow. I’ll be up tomorrow. Then I’ll be away. Crack of dawn.’
She felt the dry sudden leap in her heart again and once more she had nothing to say.
The next day, at the butcher’s, she traded in two weeks’ meat coupons for a piece of beef. There were new broad beans in the store and the first new potatoes. At the pub she did another trade with three dozen eggs for six bottles of beer.
When she had time, which wasn’t often, she baked her own bread. That day she baked bread, made a caraway cake, a large apple tart and mixed batter for Yorkshire pudding. The afternoon was humid, airless and thundery. The voices of blackbirds from the beech-wood sounded warm and choked. The kitchen had the same humid choked air too and she was glad to sit with the door open, on the threshold, to scrape the potatoes and shell the beans.
Just before six o’clock a total stranger walked up the path from the wood: a young fair-haired man in a blue serge suit, carrying a brown canvas suitcase. For fully half a minute she failed to recognise the soldier. Then in the excitement of the moment of recognition she rushed irrepressibly forward and actually put her hands on his shoulders.
‘Oh! I could kiss you. I thought you were someone else.’
‘No.’ He grinned, blue eyes scintillating. ‘It’s me all right.’
‘But why the civvies?’
‘Leave started at midday today.’
‘And you didn’t go home?’
‘Thought it’d be nice to have one more evening up here.’
She took the peeled potatoes and shelled beans inside to the kitchen sink and washed them. Then she brought back another chair and set it outside, on the threshold. For several minutes, sitting here together, in silence, she and the young man in the blue serge suit behaved like, strangers. This feeling, in her, was so overwhelming that at last she confessed it:
‘I feel all sort of odd. I feel I just met you for the first time. You look different. So much different.’
‘Yes? Well, you look the same.’
An embarrassing sense of shame overtook her. She felt sharply self-conscious of her dirty denim trousers, her old brown shirt and her gum-boots.
‘Well, I shouldn’t,’ she said and had no idea why she said it. ‘Hot, isn’t it? I got some beer somewhere. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
She went suddenly into the house, not waiting for an answer. Inside, in the little living-room, the table was laid for supper. On another, smaller table stood bottles of beer and glasses.
She ignored them and went upstairs. In her bedroom she washed her hands and face and thoroughly brushed her hair. Then, for the first time for months, she put on a green blouse, a dark brick-coloured skirt and a pair of brown leather shoes. Then she brushed her hair again, sweeping it up at the back and pinning it. Finally she put on the lightest smear of lipstick.
Then when she looked at herself in the dressing-table glass she decided that the blouse, with its V-neck, was cut too low. She hastily put on a pale green chiffon scarf, then decided that that too was not right and took it off again. She hadn’t worn it since the earliest days of the war and somehow, now, it seemed fussy and dated.
She went downstairs. She felt curiously free and airy. The blouse and skirt seemed to lift her up. At the same time she was flushed and as she carried two bottles of beer and two glasses outside to the threshold her hands were clammy.
‘Now you look different.’
It was now her turn to feel shy. A desire to withdraw herself quickly away from him sent her back to the kitchen and the stove. She opened the door of the stove. The piece of beef was sizzling away inside. Its rich aroma filled the kitchen and he called:
‘Smells good. Different from army stuff.’
‘You like Yorkshire pudding?’
‘You mean you’re cooking this for me?’
Yes, she was, she said. She felt not merely shy but nervous now. She dallied in the kitchen, filling saucepans with water, putting them on the stove.
‘Can’t think why you should go to all this trouble.’
Well, in a way, she started to say – She was now almost back over the threshold. He was pouring himself a glass of beer. Towards the west, half way across the valley, two clouds like smoky mushrooms were slowly being drawn to each other, fusing into a single ominous thundery mass that shut out the sun.
It felt so hot, she said. It was awfully thundery. She felt for the scarf at her throat, remembered it wasn’t there and then didn’t know what to do with her hands. The supper? – it was sort of to repay him for what he’d done for her.
‘Oh! that. That’s nothing. I liked doing it. Made me feel at home. Just like home. You can’t think what it meant.’
‘I ought to put the pudding in,’ she said, and went suddenly back into the kitchen, nervous again.
‘It looks black out there,’ he called. ‘Like thunder. Wouldn’t you like some beer?’
‘Yes. Pour me a glass, would you?’
She fidgeted to and fro from sink to stove, putting vegetables into saucepans. Suddenly she was again overcome by a feeling that she and the young man in the blue serge suit were total strangers.
‘I’ve got broad beans. Do you like parsley sauce with them? or just a bit of butter?’
‘Parsley sauce. Yorkshire pudding. God, now I know I’m on leave.’
‘Don’t count on it too much. I don’t cook very much nowadays. I nearly forgot how to.’
She put the saucepans on the stove and the beef and its batter back inside the stove. Again she made the gesture of fingering the scarf that wasn’t there. Then she went outside again. Across the valley the clouds had moved prodigiously fast. They were now completely fused, above vivid emerald fields, into a single canopy of iron.
‘I poured your beer.’
‘Thanks.’ She took her glass and drank. He looked at her quickly, then away at the gathering thunder clouds. In the rapidly darkening sky his eyes had a brilliant lightness that struck her as being in a way unearthly. Again she felt totally estranged and said:
‘Supper won’t be long now. How are you getting home?’
‘Catching the milk train.’
‘Oh? What time does that go? Shall I hurry things up a bit?’
‘Oh! no. Midnight.’
They sat for twenty minutes or so longer, drinking beer, watching the impending ominous clouds speeding across a pattern of emerald fields set here and there with motionless figures of cattle cut brilliantly in copper.
‘It’s so quiet,’ she said. ‘You’d think it would begin to thunder. It feels odd. You’d think it would rain.’
‘Are you frightened of thunder?’
‘Oh! no. No, no.’
Again she made an excuse to go back into the kitchen. She had managed to skim a little cream from the day’s milk and now she took a fork and nervously tried to whip it in a basin. He evidently heard the sound and came to the door and said:
‘Anything I can do to help you?’
‘No, no. We’re nearly ready now. Well, you could whip this cream – I’m never much of a hand at it.’
She was glad to be rid of the cream. Her hands, she discovered, were shaking.
‘I’d better bring the beer in,’ she said. ‘In case it rains.’
As she brought back bottles and glasses from outside she actually managed a confused sort of conjuring trick, drinking as she walked. A great oppressive humidity filled the air. With the heat of the stove, under the corrugated roof of the house, the little kitchen itself smouldered like an oven.
Five minutes or so later the two of them sat down at the table in the sitting-room. At this point he seemed shy a
gain and with some slight agitation she urged him to eat while it was hot and then laughed briefly and said:
‘Not that it’s likely to get cold all that quick. Why don’t you take your jacket off, anyway?’
‘That’s an idea,’ he said, and took his jacket off.
This was all they had to say to each other for some time longer. Once he made a gesture of half-raising his glass as if the occasion were one of some sort of celebration but the moment passed without a word.
When the next word did come at long last it was from her. And again, as she spoke, she fingered for the absent scarf at her neck.
‘You know what I feel? I feel the war isn’t on any more.’
‘How?’ he said. ‘Why?’
Well, she said, she supposed it was something about themselves: he in his civvies and she wearing a dress for the first time for the Lord knew how long.
‘Makes you feel sort of outside it. You left it behind somewhere.’
He merely nodded, earnestly eating beef.
‘I suppose you could do that? Leave it behind somehow. Pretend it had never happened.’
‘Wish to God you could.’
The first course of meat and vegetables being at last cleared away, he went on to eat large slabs of apple tart, with cream. Several times she poured more beer. Several times also she congratulated him on the cream. He’d done a super job on the cream.
‘Listen,’ he suddenly said. ‘Hark at that.’
She thought immediately of nightingales and then knew that she was wrong.
‘Rain,’ he said. ‘Listen. That’s rain.’
Great solitary drops of rain, like slow loud bird-droppings, were starting to fall on the corrugated roof above.
‘Strange,’ she said. ‘Rain before the thunder.’
Steadily the rain increased. Soon it was falling densely, a drum tattoo. Then an astonishingly distant, puny grunt of thunder came from beyond the woods, to be at once repressed like a pardonable belch and never repeated.
‘They do that sometimes, these storms,’ she said. ‘They go away along the hills.’
‘God, that’s belting down.’
‘That’s how it does. The thunder gets away somehow but the rain gets trapped. Something to do with the hills. Might rain all night now.’
For some time they again sat without speaking, but now for the simple reason that under the drowning bombardment of rain on the roof it was simply not possible to make themselves heard. All the time the room was growing darker. She thought once of getting up to light the lamp. Then she felt that the strange, unreal, premature twilight somehow had her trapped and all she could do was to stare furtively at the figure in the blue serge suit and wait and listen.
Then he tried at last to say something. It was totally inaudible under the great clatter of rain and she almost shouted:
‘Move your chair round. I can’t hear.’
He didn’t seem to understand this. She moved her own chair to his side of the table.
‘Couldn’t hear a thing over there. Shall I light the lamp?’
‘Like the miser once said.’ He laughed shortly. ‘No need to waste money. We can see to talk in the dark.’
His laugh, for some reason, made her feel less tense. ‘What were you going to say just now?’
‘Oh! I – Oh! yes, something about it being a long swim to the station.’
‘Oh! you’ve hours yet. It’ll let up before then.’
‘If it doesn’t I’ll have to be in at the deep end.’
Steadily, trapped, as she herself said, by the hills, the rain increased. At the same time, in the premature summer gloom, the little house grew more and more airless, more deeply stifled. She refrained from talking of lighting the lamp again and said instead:
‘Let’s sit by the door. At least we’ll get some air like that.’
They took chairs and sat side by side at the open door. Already a small stream was rolling down the path of flagstones beyond the threshold. Through the gloom it was just possible to make out the woods at the edge of the farm-yard. They too had an imprisoning effect and in the great oppressive sultriness seemed to be steaming against the glowering sky.
‘You’ll never make it in this,’ she said.
‘I’ve got my gas cape.’
Several times, at loss for something else to say, he thanked her for the meal. Each time she would say it was nothing. She was glad to do it. It was a pleasure. Then he sat in contemplation for some time and seemed to remember something and finally said:
‘What you said about the war not being here any longer. I get what you said now. I didn’t at first. But I do now. I get what you mean.’
‘But it’s right what I say, isn’t it? Suddenly you feel it’s not here any more.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You’re just two people and there isn’t anything else and you’re sort of – I don’t know –’
‘Sort of in a vacuum.’
‘That’s it. Sort of in a vacuum. You’re just two people and you’re here and nothing outside matters. There isn’t anybody else. There isn’t any war. You’re not part of anything except what’s here.’
‘The way you put it you’re dead right.’
As he said this he turned and gave her a quick, spontaneous smile. She allowed herself to dwell on it for a few moments, disquietly. Then she felt her heart starting to pound. She actually stretched forward and put both her hands on his shoulders and said:
‘I said once I could kiss you. God, and now I –’
She kissed him impetuously, with the merest brush of her lips. His response surprised her completely.
‘I wanted to do that for a long time,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t know quite – you know how I mean. About your husband –’
For some time they sat locked together in a completely silent embrace, oblivious even of the rain.
It was only when the rain, driving down more fiercely torrential than ever, actually began to splash in at their feet that she at last disengaged herself from the lock of a long embrace and said:
‘Something tells me you’ve missed that train.’
‘To hell with the train.’
‘There’s a bed here, anyway,’ she said. ‘No need to worry about that. There’s always tomorrow.’
By morning the rain had stopped. The great width of sky across the valley was blue and crystalline.
When she woke just before six o’clock she lay for some time listening to strange sounds from the yard: somebody whistling, the noise of a bucket clanking on stones. During the hot clammy night she had thrown off most of the bedclothes and now lay with only a sheet over her naked body, wondering for a few brief moments what world she had woken to.
Finally she dressed, went downstairs in a daze and stood at the threshold of the kitchen door, shading her eyes against the brilliance of morning sun. Presently she discovered that he had already done the day’s milking; boiled a kettle for tea, cleared the table of its dirty supper things and was now tinkering with a spanner on the tractor.
Walking to him across the yard she found him dressed in his army trousers, army shirt and army boots. The illusion that he was a total stranger had receded as completely as the thunder and the rain.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You’re about early today.’
She fully expected that he might kiss her good-morning. Nothing happened. The old shyness, she discovered, was completely back again. The blue eyes were more transparent than ever.
‘I made a cup of tea,’ he said. ‘I think it’s still hot.’
He left the spanner on the seat of the tractor and they went back to the kitchen. The tea was still hot. She poured herself a cup and then another cup for him. Arms crooked on the kitchen table, she held the cup for some minutes against her face, and then at last said simply:
‘Well?’
‘Well.’
‘Rain’s cleared the air.’
‘Yes.’
She stared through the kitchen wi
ndow. The entire valley shimmered with a great brilliance of early summer light. Here and there rain still sparkled on grass. The air everywhere was all intensely pure and still. And once again, she found herself in a vacuum, the war a myth, a million miles away.
‘I wonder what it’s going to be today,’ he said. ‘The weather I mean.’
‘You can see a long way. Sometimes that’s a bad sign.’
This was almost all they had to say before breakfast. Then halfway through breakfast she said:
‘You left your nice blue suit all over the place last night. I folded it and hung it up for you. You won’t want to have it creased all day.’
‘No.’
She got up to go to the stove for the tea-pot and in the act of pouring out tea she suddenly turned impulsively and kissed the side of his face.
In return he seemed about to say something and then was quiet again.
‘I expect you’re wondering about your train.’
‘I hadn’t thought.’
‘There’s a bus goes down about eleven. You could get that. It’ll drop you near the station.’
‘No idea what time there’s a train.’
‘They’ll tell you at the station. I got an idea there’s one about twelve.’
The morning went past, soft and quiet, all brilliant. She did some housework while he, out in the sun, tinkered with the tractor. The time for the bus, never mentioned again, went past too and with it, unmentioned also, the time of the train.
By afternoon he had fallen into a routine of jobs about the place that made it seem as if he had always lived there. He put the tractor into final order, mended a fence and did the afternoon milking. Most of the time she stood poised between an anxiety that he would miss a train and a dread that he would catch one.
About five o’clock a thin white wreath of smoke wound its way westward across the valley. She actually drew his attention to it and said:
‘That’s the five-ten. I do know what time that one goes. I’m not certain how they are after that.’
He had no comment to make about the train; and it was almost supper-time before she said :
‘Were you thinking of getting that milk train again? It’s just that – I mean I was thinking about supper. Will you stay for supper?’