by H. E. Bates
‘Good thing Cath’s got blood in her veins. Eh, Cath?’
Barton gave a withdrawn, nervous smile, almost coy.
The brush travelled stiffly over the intricate surface of half another pine-cone before the sergeant spoke again.
‘Decorating for Christmas Eve?’
Stiffly the brush continued its travels. The sergeant picked up an acorn, still in its cup. Deftly he shelled it from the cup. Then in his quick, oily way, before she knew what was happening, he reached out, took the brush from her hand and with a few slick light strokes gilded the acorn-cup.
‘How’s that, Cath, eh?’ He held the gilded acorn-cup to Barton’s left ear. ‘Pair o’ gold earrings for free. Look nice at the dance, Cath, eh?’
The sergeant picked up another acorn-cup and gilded that too.
‘Pretty.’ The sergeant held the two gilded acorns together between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Nice pair. Pretty.’
From the gilded cups of the acorns his eyes travelled the width of Barton’s woollen jumper.
‘Nice pair,’ he said again. ‘Nice pair.’
Impotent with fury, she sat for some moments longer, sightlessly staring at the half-gilded pine-cones in her hands. Then she suddenly got up, went to the stove and started to pour herself a cup of tea.
‘You coming to the dance too?’ the sergeant said.
The tea was luke-warm and stale. The simple fact was enough to break her silence at last. Her words spewed out in anger.
‘What dance? Whose dance? Who said anything about a dance? Who wants to dance? Leave us alone, I tell you. What do you want here?’
‘The old acid again, Cath. The old acid.’
Again without quite knowing what she was doing she snatched up the gun.
‘If you’re not out of here in two minutes – God help me, I’ll do something I’ll regret, God help me I will. You said it would shoot fleas, didn’t you? Bugs?’
Now it was the sergeant’s turn to have nothing to say.
‘That’s what we’ve always used it for,’ she said. ‘Vermin.’
‘Don’t point that gun. Don’t be bloody silly.’
Barton sat white, frightened, seemingly more fragile than ever.
‘Go on,’ she said, ‘get out.’
‘All right, you don’t want to come to the dance, so don’t come to the dance. But Cath’s coming all right. Christmas Eve. We’ll have the mistletoe out, won’t we, Cath? Cath’s coming.’
In fury she seized the gun by the barrels, as if about to swing it. The sergeant made six measured, uneasy strides to the door.
‘And take your damn pheasants with you!’ She was shouting now, her voice choking. ‘Take them with you!’
She hurled the pheasants at the door. They struck it as the sergeant shut it behind him.
They fell as if simultaneously shot, as a pair, all brilliant in the lamplight.
‘Take them and hang yourself with them!’ she yelled. ‘Go and hang yourself!’
‘Now what have we done?’ Barton said. His voice gave an impression of being hollow, white and sepulchral. ‘Where do we go from here?’
‘Go? There is nowhere to go. I told you. We’re up a tree. We’re up a tree and we can’t get down. Ever.’
For a long time she sat with her face buried in her hands, drinking from a cup of darkness inside them.
She was eventually aware that she was shrouded in more than a darkness of her own making. The light in the lamp was going down.
‘Forgot to fill the lamp.’ The first words she had spoken for some time were sepulchral too. ‘Better do it before it gets too low –’
She wandered about from kitchen to scullery, fetching a can of oil, replenishing the lamp, wiping up with a rag the few drops she spilt about the base of the lamp. She cleared away tea-cups, tea-pot, a few oddments that lay about the table. Once she stopped, stock-still in the centre of the kitchen, listening to what at first she thought was the sound of footsteps, then wind and rain, then what she knew was merely a gust of falling leaves.
‘What in God’s name made you call yourself Cath?’
‘I had to call myself something, didn’t I? He asked me.’
‘He asked me. God.’
She sank into silence again, then beyond the barriers of complete despair into arid areas of black vacancy where she found it impossible even to think.
‘Oh! I know it’s my fault,’ he suddenly said and made a bashing strike at the table with the flat of his hand, so that the lamp shook. ‘I know. I know. Do you think I like parading about like a woman? False bloody this, false bloody that –’
‘You don’t like it.’
This was as near to any sort of coherent utterance that she got for another ten minutes or more. Several times she wanted to weep. She felt it might do her good to weep. There were times when you had to weep.
She didn’t weep. There were times too when you hadn’t the guts to weep. And this, she told herself, was one of them.
‘I’ll get you some supper,’ she said at last. ‘I managed to get a tin of pilchards.’
He made some muttering excuse, almost petulant, about not wanting supper, not feeling like it.
‘You don’t want supper.’
She passed the limits of coherence again and lapsed into yet another long silence in which she laid the table with knives and forks, bread, pepper and salt, plates and the still unopened tin of pilchards.
Then she went into the scullery and foraged about in a drawer there until she found a tin-opener. Then she came back into the kitchen and took up the tin of pilchards and he said:
‘I said I didn’t want supper. I don’t want it, I said.’
Now she in turn made her own swinging bash at the table, bringing down the tin-opener with one hand and the tin of pilchards with the other.
‘You don’t want this, you don’t want that. You don’t like this, you don’t like that. You don’t like parading like a woman. God, you not only look like a woman. You’re starting to be like one. Think like one. Act like one. You’ve started to get fussy and spoilt and choosy and –’
‘Don’t talk bloody daft.’
‘I’m bloody daft, am I? Well, I wasn’t bloody daft enough to make up to a sergeant, was I? Call myself Cath, promise to go to dances, put on the big flirt act? I’ve still got a brain or two left in my head, though God knows why.’
‘It was just a gag. A joke.’
‘A joke. It was a joke!’
‘I always hated sergeants. I was just playing hard to get.’
‘God, you’ll have to play harder than hard to get with that one. He starts undressing women by remote control.’
‘Why the panic, for Christ’s sake? I can take care of myself.’
‘You go to dances in skirts, remember? What are you going to do? Wear a chastity belt, put hand-cuffs on your bust?’
‘Oh! don’t bind. Don’t bind.’
She picked up the tin of pilchards and the tin-opener. She made as if to begin opening the tin. Instantly he snatched it from her.
‘I can do that, can’t I? I can do something for myself, can’t I?’
‘I can do it.’
Her voice was frozen, grim and calm.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I won’t go to the dance. We’ll call it all off. Forget it. I won’t go to the dance.’
‘Woman’s privilege, of course. Changing her mind.’
He held the tin of pilchards impotently above his head for a moment or two and then bashed it on the table.
‘Only a bitch would say a thing like that. Only a bitch would say a thing like that.’
‘Don’t call me that. A fool if you like. A plain, big damn fool if you like. A plain big damn fool. But not that.’
Once again she reached the limits of coherence. Consumed by an enormous bitter quietness she suddenly sagged to the table. The light from the lamp seemed momentarily to blind her. Then she buried her face in her hands and once again drank, without tears, from their inner c
up of darkness.
A day later, to her intense relief, snow began to fall again. She watched it from the windows of the house as a child would watch it, bewitched by transformation. Slowly at first, then in big soggy flakes and then under the driven power of a north-easter that skimmed it up into swift white vapours that piled eventually into drifts shaped against the hillside like curving scimitars, brooding white beasts or measureless glistening caverns of salt, the snow created its fast barricade of imprisonment.
When it stopped at last and she went for the first time to open the kitchen door a great avalanche fell in on her, a breaking drift the height of a man.
She was overjoyed. The sense of imprisonment created by the vastness of snow brought back a feeling of inviolate security. Again she felt herself and Barton to be cut off from the world: the world of the sergeant, the tanks, the dance, the ludicrous jest of Christmas Eve. This white imprisonment also uplifted her. Paradoxically, wonderfully, she felt free.
There were now three days to go before Christmas.
‘It’s going to be a white one,’ she said. ‘It can snow for a week. I’ve got everything. We won’t starve. I’ve even got two red candles. At the shop they said they’ve saved a few from before the war.’
When the snow at last stopped she felt totally embalmed in its world of pure white silence. The immediate past lost itself somewhere beyond the boundaries of a great tranquillity. Without ever saying it, she regretted deeply all she had said in anger. Her tenderness for him returned.
‘We said a lot of things we didn’t mean,’ was her way of expressing all she felt. ‘We never meant all those things.’
You could, she said to him once, fairly listen to the snow silence. And had he noticed, now that the sun had come out again, how the shadows were blue?
In the white, blue-shadowed world she saw, in broad daylight, a big dog fox ambling with a sort of careless stealth across a piece of ploughed land from which strong wind had so swept the surface snow that it was now a corrugation of black and white.
‘I’ll have that one,’ she said.
She got the gun and in gum-boots tramped out into the snow. She actually caught a second glimpse of the fox as she climbed the gate leading out of the farmyard. Then he suddenly paused, lifted his head, seemed to sniff at the air, then as suddenly doubled back on his tracks, slipped into a hedge of blackthorn and disappeared.
She started to walk across the field. A minute or so later a hare, perhaps disturbed by the presence of the fox, suddenly leapt up from the lower fringe of the hedge and began to run in great jumping bounds across the ploughed land.
She lifted the gun, fired and was sure that she hit the hare at the crest of a leap. Just to make certain she fired a second shot. Immediately the echoes of the first and second shots sprang sharp across the wide still space of snow and then, almost simultaneously, ricocheted back from the hills in a third. The hare was stone dead, blood running from its mouth, when she picked it up.
‘I’ll say this for the army,’ she said, ‘whoever fixed that gun knew what he was up to. It’s never fired like that before.’
Without thinking, she flung the hare on the kitchen table. Barton had just brought in a pile of beech logs for the stove and was packing them on the hearth. Patches of snow lay on some of the logs; and across the hearth lay dirty patches of water where some snow had already melted.
Barton suddenly saw the hare and let the last of the beech logs fall with a deliberate clatter.
‘Take that bloody thing out of here,’ he said. ‘Take that bloody thing out.’
‘What’s the fuss? We might be glad of it yet. The year before last we were snowed up for five weeks. I started killing the hens –’
‘I told you, I don’t like them things. They’re bad luck. That’s what my mother always said. Bad luck.’
‘You should thank your good luck for a change. This snow’s good luck. As long as this snow lasts nobody’ll come looking for you.’
‘Hares are bad luck. I don’t like hares.’
‘Well, you count your good luck, that’s all I say. You can’t ever be certain.’
‘After pretty nigh six months? Don’t worry. I’m buried away in some file somewhere.’
‘Don’t get cocky. Count your good luck, that’s all I say. Don’t get cocky.’
The blessing of snow lasted another day. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Christmas, she several times told herself. All of them crossed. For Christmas Eve especially.
That night she woke in the early hours and lay listening for fully five minutes to the steady continuous sound of dripping water. She got up, went to the window, drew back the curtain slightly and knew in an instant that the wind had turned and was now blowing from the westward. Hard rain was beating on the corrugated iron roof of the house and running in spate down the gutters. She could have cried as she stood there and felt, through a slightly opened window, the moist west wind soft as milk on her face.
When daylight came rain was still falling, heavier than ever, the air mild as spring. The farmyard was a marsh of white-grey slush; the lower stretches of valley looked like a green and white archipelago of a thousand islands. The hedgerows between the fields were black again. In places even the snake-riddle of tank tracks was visible again, half in green grass, half in snow.
The desolation of thaw was repeated in a greater desolation inside herself. She hung the hare out of sight in the cow-barn, then sat for part of the morning plucking the brace of pheasants in the scullery. Obsessed by some nervous premonition she frequently tore the flesh of the birds and then sat for long intervals staring inactively at what she had done.
When Barton came in at last from cleaning out the cowbarn and said ‘You might think it was spring. I’ll be damned if I didn’t hear a thrush singing,’ she could have cried again, aware now that her premonition sprang not only from the stark fact that the disappearing snow had once again left the two of them naked but from a new fear of Christmas Eve.
‘You know what I always said,’ she suddenly told him. ‘If it does come to trouble you’ll be safe in the old larder. The underground one.’
Old larder? He professed to have forgotten about the old larder.
‘You know where I mean,’ she said. ‘I took you along once. When you were first here. It’s along the hill there. A sort of cave. They used to keep the meat there in the old days, when the big house was there. It was their sort of refrigerator. It was always cold, underground. The meat would keep for weeks there, they said.’
‘Am I supposed to be classed as meat now?’
‘It’s just in case. You’ll be really safe there. Nobody knows about it. The entrance is all grown over.’
‘How am I supposed to know when to go? Does somebody blow a bugle?’
‘I’m watching. I’m always watching.’
‘And I suppose I run like that bloody hare you shot?’
‘You’d be covered all the way by woods. It’s only about three hundred yards. Then there’s a little gate and this place is in the middle of a big clump of blackthorn. You wouldn’t be in the open for more than a minute or so.’
‘Nice place to spend Christmas.’
She wanted desperately to tell him not to talk about Christmas. The dread of Christmas Eve was again so great that half in despair she suddenly got up from where she had been plucking the pheasants, washed her hands at the sink and said:
‘It must be nearly twelve. Let’s have a drink, shall we? I’ve got some gin. I was saving it for later but I can always get another at the pub. A couple of dozen eggs works wonders.’
They sat for an hour by the open stove in the firelight, drinking gin with a dash of water. The gin at first filled her with a hazy calm. With the second gin she moved into positive happiness. With the third gin Barton forgot to include water. Presently her body started melting and finally she laid her head against his shoulder and said:
‘That’s the worst of gin.’
‘What’s the wors
t of gin?’
‘Makes me feel amorous. Always makes me feel terribly amorous.’
She stroked his hair. Its extraordinary fineness, feminine as it looked, excited her still further. A moment or two later she was helping him to slip the sweater over her shoulders. In another moment her breasts were free.
Repeatedly she kept telling herself she wished it would snow again. But as she pushed her bicycle back up the hill from the shop on the afternoon of Christmas Eve there was neither snow nor wind in the sky. The air was dry and cool and still. The only snow lay in fine combs and bedraggled tatters under black hedgerows where the sun had failed to touch them.
In the kitchen Barton had been washing his hair. Now it hung in a fine bright mass almost to his shoulders, wonderfully fair, and he was brushing it. At the same time he was looking into a hand mirror propped up against a tea-pot, occasionally turning his head from side to side.
Seeing him, she simply stood staring, unable to think of a word to say.
‘Like some tea?’ he said. ‘There’s another cup in the pot.’
‘No thanks.’
By this time it was becoming twilight. Without another word she went to get the lamp. As she lit it her eyes seemed, in the fresh glow of it, to assume proportions so over-large that they looked vacuous and numbed.
‘Well, you don’t have to gawp at me as if I’d done a crime or something, do you?’
‘I don’t like the word gawp.’
Suddenly she caught sight of one of her dresses, a pink chiffon one, hanging over the back of a chair, airing by the stove.
‘What’s my dress doing there?’
Before answering he actually picked up the mirror in one hand in order to get a closer look at himself as he carefully brushed his hair with the other.
‘The corporal was here. They’re picking us up at half-six.’
‘Us?’
‘The dance starts at eight. They’ve got drinks laid on for seven.’
‘You must be stark, staring, raving mad.’
‘It’s Christmas Eve, isn’t it? Do you good to get out and enjoy yourself a bit.’
‘Good? Good? Enjoy!’
Impotently she picked up a beech log and then another and threw them into the fire. For an instant or two she was on the verge of picking up the dress and throwing that in too. Instead she turned on him with a quietness almost savage.