by H. E. Bates
Yes, he said, he would like to stay for supper.
‘There’s not much, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘It’ll most likely have to be eggs again.’
As supper-time approached she was aware of a great increasing tension in the air. There was no sign of rain or storm but the strings of her nerves started to grow taut as she began to lay the supper table and once again her hands were clammy.
‘I’ll just give that suit of yours another brush. It was creased all over. I could run the iron over that shirt of yours too if you liked.’
Not to worry, he said, not to worry.
‘It wouldn’t take a minute. The stove’s hot – I – it really –’
Tensely, without really looking, she turned to go upstairs. As if by accident she ran into him in the centre of the kitchen. In a moment they were clenched in embrace.
‘Do you want to go?’ she said. ‘I mean the train –’
No, he said, he didn’t want to go.
In an inexpressible agony of relief she stood half-laughing, half-crying. Then once again she kissed him.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to go? I mean you can stay if you want to, but if –’
‘I’m sure. God, I’m sure.’
The week of his leave went past. Neither of them spoke again about a bus, a train, a moment of departure. For seven whole days he became as complete a part of the little farm as the cow, the tractor, the sheep grazing on the thin pasture below yellow fringes of rock roses beginning now to bloom on the hot exposed ridge of chalk.
It was now June. Some of the passion had gone from the first frenzied singing of nightingales but on the final evening of his leave the two of them walked to the edge of the beechwood, to listen through a darkening evening of tense clear air for some occasional suspended string of song.
All the time she dreaded any mention of the following day.
Several times she tried to push it aside either by making, aloud, such remarks as ‘If the weather holds I think I could get that four-acre bit cut for hay next week,’ or by telling herself, silently, that isolation and loneliness could never be quite as complete, as grey and empty again. There were always the evenings. He would come up in the evenings. She could always look forward to that.
All this time she was disposed to look at it all from her own point of view. She had forgotten his own.
‘God, that bloody army. Square-bashing, spud-bashing. Fatigues. Cock-eyed schemes. Guard. Bloody sergeants. Bull. God, it’s all so bloody pointless. God, who invented war?’
‘Let’s not talk about war. I’ve had a bellyful of war.’
‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to – but if you knew how I felt –’
She knew how he felt all right, she said. She knew also, though she didn’t at this moment say it, about the ecstasy of being in a vacuum. She knew, now, of how it felt to leave war behind, obliterated, as if it had never been. She knew all about that and it was a marvellous thing.
Suddenly he astounded her by a burst of anger that cracked the silence of the evening so sharply that she actually found herself jolted into an act of looking over her shoulder, instinctively to see if someone were there, listening.
‘I’m not bloody going back again.’
She was terribly quiet. Inside of herself she was aware of an awful anguish and for fully a minute she struggled to calm it.
‘You mean you’re going to over-stay your leave? You’ll be in trouble for that.’
No, he said, no. His voice was quite amazingly shattering for someone who out of sheer shyness had so often found it hard to express himself. No, no, not that. He didn’t mean that.
‘Then what do you mean?’
‘What I said. I’m not going back. I’m finished. It’s over the hill.’
Again she was terribly quiet. At last she said:
‘I’m sure that’s wrong. I’m sure you can’t be right about that.’
‘I tell you I’m not going back.’
‘They’ll get you. They always do. If you run to the ends of the earth they’ll get you.’
‘Then they’ll get me. Then I’ll be in the glasshouse. Then I’ll be out of it. Then I’ll run again. I’ll do time. But I’m not going back.’
Far above, in the darkening beeches, a nightingale started a bust of song, faded into silence and then emerged again in a long triumphant trill.
‘I’m sure you’re wrong. Where would you go, for a start, anyway?’
She knew the answer quite well, even before it came.
‘Here. I could stay up here.’
‘That lets me in.’
‘Oh! all right!’ – in the first flash of anger she had ever known in him he started to stride furiously towards the house – ‘all right, all right. I only meant for a day – a couple of days –’
In renewed anguish she ran after him.
‘I didn’t mean it like that. It’s all right. You can stay. For a day or two. You can stay. I didn’t mean you to think I was a coward about it. Don’t think that. Please don’t think that.’
He stayed the night. The night became a day and the day another night and then another day. The days and nights became a week and then another week and then a third. The third became a month and the month was July.
At first she was more nervous than frightened. She felt less guilty than tense. She tried, above all, to be practicable. He was never to go outside the house when she herself was away. He was never to answer the door to callers. Not that there were many callers. Since she baked her own bread and got milk enough from the cow neither baker nor milkman called. She drew her water from a well. She had no electricity. There were no meters to read. Once or twice a week she bicycled down to the village at the foot of the hill and bought the few essential things she needed: meat or fish, sugar and butter, rice and bacon and tea, a can of paraffin.
‘But don’t go out. Never go out. No matter who it is. There’s inspectors snooping everywhere nowadays. You got to fill in forms for this and that, everything, the way you breathe. They try to teach you farming. Oh! yes and another thing – I used to have a packman call when I first lived here. You know, on the never-never. Stockings and undies and things like that. I told him half a dozen times not to call again but he still turns up sometimes. Rides a bicycle with a sort of wicker sidecar.’
She imposed on him a necessary disguise. She packed away his army uniform and boots, together with the blue serge suit, and hid the lot behind a pile of straw in the barn. In their place she insisted he wear one of her own thick green sweaters, a pair of denim trousers and gum-boots. She made him wear a scarf over his head and then, more practical still, insisted he had a bust.
‘Don’t forget your bust,’ she would say as they dressed in the mornings and the joke became the only light-hearted thing they knew.
At first the bust consisted merely of another old sweater rolled up under the green one; but the appearance, it quickly seemed to her, was false and clumsy and instead she took a bra of her own, sewed cotton wool into the cups and insisted he wear that instead.
‘Nice figure,’ she said. ‘Now all you got to do is let your hair grow.’
By the end of July his hair had grown well into his neck. By August it was actually curling under the edge of the scarf. It was so fair in colour that soon, from some distance away, he looked like a girl, a pure natural blonde.
‘Some woman in the shop gave me a turn the other morning. Said she’d heard I had some help up here. I said it was Jill, my sister. Don’t forget that if ever you’re in a fix. You’re Jill, my sister.’
Her insistence on being scrupulously practical forced her to get up first every morning and then, before he stirred from bed, do a tour of reconnaissance through the barn, the fields and the yard. It also sharpened her wits. She grew resourceful, then cunning.
It occurred to her, for example, that he might, for reality’s sake, wear a smear of lip-stick. But this thought alone was not enough. At the shop one day she said:
‘I don�
��t suppose you’ve got a paler red lipstick than mine? It’s for my sister. That dark shade doesn’t suit her. She’s on the fair side.’
Her scrupulous insistence on detail made itself felt in other ways. With infinite care, every evening, in the kitchen, she sat and manicured his fingernails. In August, in a sudden brilliant spell of heat, when he spent entire days driving tractor and binder in a wheatfield, she made him wear dark glasses. At the shop she said:
‘You had a few bath cubes when I was in here last. Sort of rose-flavoured. Any left? My sister was jealous. I used them all.’
If loneliness and isolation had formerly made her jealous too, highly defensive in possession of her little stretch of land, she was now infinitely more possessive and jealous of him. Most of the time she didn’t sleep well. Most nights she lay for long periods wide and starkly awake, instinctively and remorselessly listening to any sound briefly stranger than the stir of leaves, the sound of a train, a shot or a car, the cry of an owl. Tensely she translated the merest of whispers into footsteps, the sound of a summer shower into that of clumping feet.
To these tensions were added others: mostly the fear of having a child and the constant nag of money. She still bartered eggs at the shop but now there were two mouths to feed and until she could sell her harvest corn there was a widening gap to fill. There was a six-months old bill for tractor repairs, another for fuel oil, a third for a new knife in the hay-cutter, yet another for binder twine. Sometimes long after he had gone to bed she sat up struggling with impossible arithmetic in the lamplight. Beyond the arithmetic she saw winter ahead and then beyond winter, she told herself, God knew what.
For some months she hadn’t touched her marriage allowance; there was some comfort in letting it accumulate at the post office. There was always a rainy day. Now, she told herself, the rainy day had come and one September evening, shortly after supper, she was suddenly caught out unawares, talking to herself, half-aloud.
‘It’s no good, I’ll have to –’
‘What’d you say? Have to what?’
‘Oh! it doesn’t matter.’ Then a sudden rise of tension forced her almost involuntarily to confess: ‘I’ll have to draw my allowance out. That’s what. I didn’t want to have to but –’
‘But you can’t do that!’
‘Can’t? Can’t? I damn well have to. I’ve got a pile of bills as high as a church-steeple.’
‘But that won’t do – I couldn’t have that.’
‘What won’t do? Can’t have what?’
‘It’s living on another man’s – God, I couldn’t do that.’
All her many tensions suddenly burst like a central fester into anger.
‘You haven’t much choice, have you? You haven’t much damn choice.’
He stared at her, across the lamplight, in pained bewilderment. He had never seen her angered before. In turn she stared at him with something like contempt. She saw him, for the first time, with his lengthening soft fair hair and transparently blue shocked eyes, as a woman.
This recognition, in anger, made her doubly bitter.
‘I’m keeping you, aren’t I? What difference does it make?’ She was almost shouting. ‘The money’s got to come from somewhere, hasn’t it, for God’s sake?’
He simply sat dumb. She hardly knew what she was saying next:
‘That’ll be the day when I don’t, won’t it? Keep you, I mean. Work that one out. That’ll be the day. For both of us.’
His next words came up slowly, breaking on his lips like the most fragile of bubbles.
‘You wouldn’t let me down now? You wouldn’t give me up?’
‘I could, couldn’t I?’ Her words were whipped out. ‘I could. Don’t forget it’s my funeral too.’
The next moment she realised that his blue, dumb and now curiously feminine eyes were near to weeping. She started to weep too, helplessly and with great harsh sobs of reproach, her face buried into her hands.
She wanted to shout ‘I can’t go on with it! I can’t go on with it! I can’t go on any longer!’
Instead she became suddenly and terribly quiet.
‘We’re like two people up a tree. We’re trapped. We can’t get down.’
Often by early November a spell of thin searing wind began to whip in from the eastern coast, skimming down the hill like an icy water fall. While the valley below still lay green there sometimes appeared long white tongues of snow on the upper hillside. The wind sang in crackling tones through the ramparts of beeches, still not stripped of final leaves, and along the fringes of woodland the big dark yews stood out blacker than ever.
On a morning just like this she went across the snow-flaked yard to the cow-shed, milk-bucket in hand, a little later than usual. The air was so vicious with driving wind that she told herself it was too cold to snow any more. Barton was erecting hurdles for sheltering sheep on the leeside of the yard, packing inside them a wall of straw.
Suddenly she saw two men talking together inside the gate of the yard. Both were in khaki. She almost dropped the bucket.
Seeing her, they started to walk across the yard. The taller was a lean-faced young subaltern, not more than twenty-two or three, in a trench coat, carrying a cane under his arm. The other was a sergeant, massively built but not fat, with sharp penetrative brown eyes and a well-clipped military moustache, brown too above lips that seemed continually on the verge of a smile.
‘Good-morning, madam.’ It was the subaltern who spoke and the very courtesy of the words might have been sinister. ‘Sorry to butt in on you.’
She stared stonily. ‘Good-morning.’
‘Wondered if you could help us.’ From his trench coat pocket the subaltern produced a map. ‘Doing a spot of survey.’ He started to open the map. ‘Not exactly what you’d call summer this morning.’
‘No.’
Everything about her, from eyes to speech, finger-tips to brain, was frozen. The sergeant stood slightly aside, sizing her up, eyes penetrative, looking clean through her.
‘According to our map there should be a road going down here? the subaltern said. ‘Bang through the farm. This your farm?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Bawbey Wood Farm.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Damn funny. We haven’t mis-read, sergeant, have we?’
‘No, sir. Don’t think so, sir.’
The subaltern again consulted the map. The sergeant, by contrast, showed no interest in the map. His eyes instead were concentrated on exploring the contours of the woman carrying the milk-bucket.
‘Damn funny. There isn’t a road through here?’
‘The track ends at the wood.’
‘Odd. There can’t be two Bawbey Wood Farms?’
‘No.’ The stiff hinges of her brain moved a fraction. ‘There used to be a Bawbey Wood Grange, though. Farther along the hill. That way. It got burnt down just before the war. Struck by lightning.’
‘Was it, by Jove?’
‘After the fire the land was all split up and sold. We bought this bit. It was only a keeper’s cottage then. Wasn’t a farm. We called it the farm.’
‘Ah! sergeant, much is explained.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The sergeant, it seemed, was not concerned with explanations. Throughout the conversation he had been solely concerned with systematic penetrations of her figure. She was aware of being openly undressed. Once or twice he smiled.
‘We?’ the subaltern said. ‘You mean you and your husband?’
The question, innocuous enough, chilled her more than ever.
‘Yes.’
‘Husband about?’
‘He’s a prisoner of war. With the Japs.’
The sergeant seemed positively to beam.
‘Bad show,’ the subaltern said. ‘All alone here then?’
‘No.’ Out of sheer fright she spoke without thinking. She actually lifted an arm and pointed to where, on the far side of the yard, Barton was erecting hurdles. ‘No. I got my s
ister.’
The sergeant seemed positively to beam a second time. A moment or two later the fair head of Barton, wrapped in a blue-grey scarf, suddenly appeared above the height of the hurdles and as suddenly ducked and disappeared again. The sergeant noted it with refreshed anticipation.
‘Mind if I look around a bit?’ The subaltern’s voice was casual. ‘This road foxes me a little –’
He started to walk away in the direction of the hurdles. In a vain effort to distract him she said:
‘The road goes down by the old Grange all right. They used to have their own private chapel there as well. But that’s gone too.’
The subaltern, without reply, disappeared in the direction of Barton. In the absence of the subaltern the sergeant seemed to preen himself a little. He sniffed at the bitter morning air as though he found it drenched with honey.
‘All nice an’ tucked away up here,’ he said. ‘Keep pigs?’
The sudden crudity of the question seemed to mock her.
‘No. Why should you ask?’
‘Just wondered. Plenty of swill down at the camp. Could have had some sent up to you.’
‘Sorry, we don’t keep pigs.’
Now her voice too was cold. The sergeant merely beamed, all coldness lost on him.
‘Lot o’ money in pigs. Blokes are making fortunes. Millions. Free swill. No bother. One day you got one pig. Next thing you know you got a dozen. Breed like flies. Then fifty. Then a hundred.’
‘It’s too cold for pigs up here. Pigs don’t like cold.’
Frigidly she turned her head in the direction where Barton was erecting hurdles. There was no sign either of him or the subaltern.
‘Sister older than you?’
‘Two years younger.’
‘Don’t get much delight up here?’ The sergeant seemed positively to relish the word delight. ‘Not much to keep you warm, like.’
‘Work does, if nothing else.’
‘Dance at all?’
‘Don’t get time for that sort of thing.’
‘Used to dance?’
‘Used to.’
‘Miss it? Bet there’s things you miss.’
She had nothing to say.
‘Sister married too?’