by H. E. Bates
‘I’m walking slowly,’ she said, ‘only because I don’t want to get anywhere,’ and looked down for some moments in silence at her feet.
Horace looked at them too. The ankles were surprisingly small, delicate and well-shaped. Each of her grey shoes had a black frontal bow with a single white spot on the wings, giving the effect of a resting butterfly.
‘Women chatter so,’ she said. ‘The nice thing about you is that you don’t talk too much.’
She sipped wine-cup as she walked along, a feat of such accurate balance and ease, with no hint of haste or awkwardness, that she might have been doing it every day.
‘Why was Maude Chalmers so vinegary?’ she said.
‘I didn’t notice it.’
‘Of course you noticed it.’
‘I suppose the party makes a lot of work,’ he said. He recalled the incident of the mint; though so small it now seemed embarrassing. ‘I suppose the wine-cup put her out of her stride.’
‘She was angry with you.’
‘With me? Oh! dear no.’
‘Flaming.’ She turned and looked him squarely in the eye. It was a look of both intimacy and penetration. ‘You’d been flirting with her.’
‘Oh! never!’
‘Of course you had. She was red all over.’
Ahead, the azaleas flamed. No single petal had yet fallen from the thickly fringed branches. Below them, and to one side, a platoon of delphiniums, palest blue to near black, stood in arrested grandeur, unshaken by wind.
‘I see there’s a seat over there,’ she said. ‘It’s easier to drink wine sitting down—’
‘No, you don’t. No, you don’t. I’m stealing him. Tommy’s desperate.’ It was the strident voice of Connie Stevens metallically beating across the lawn. ‘The wine-cup’s giving out fast. And Phoebe says you have another bottle left.’
Horace, jerked to his feet as by an invisible string, uttered very small disturbed noises.
‘Come, come, come,’ Connie Stevens said, as if bringing a poodle to heel. ‘Oh! he shall come back. I’ll send him back.’
‘Take my glass, young man.’ Miss La Rue drained her glass, lifted it towards Horace and fixed him with a sort of accusative charm. ‘Don’t let them keep you. I want to talk to you.’
As if actually ordered to do so, Horace drained his glass too and then, half-dragged by the imperative hand of Connie Stevens, took both empty glasses away.
‘Oh! you dear man, we work you to death.’ In the drawing-room Miss Tompkins, flushed with gin and after-doses of wine-cup, was full of giddy solicitude. ‘Empty glasses too! Empty glasses! No one should empty a glass when they can have it filled up.’ She laughed on dithering notes, at the same time grabbing from a table a consolatory glass of something that Horace presently discovered was gin and tonic. He drank at it timidly. ‘Oh! drink up, you dear man. You need it. We’ve got work for you to do. That comes of being so popular.’
Popular? The word, sped on its way by gin and wine-cup, rushed through the chattering wings of female voices like an arrow. A bare feminine arm, belonging to someone he didn’t recognise, held him momentarily suspended, just long enough for him to hear:
‘Absolutely marvellous, your cup. Making the party.’
Another voice, cooing gently, primed him to beware. ‘I’m after you for the recipe. Don’t forget, will you? Just scribble it down. I’m after you.’
‘I go for this cup,’ he heard another one of the girls saying. ‘I really do.’
‘You can feel it going down,’ another girl said. ‘You know—creeping.’
Horace presently found himself back in the kitchen. Maude, who had the two Venetian jugs, the remaining bottle of wine and a fresh nosegay of mint in readiness on the table, greeted him with the long rattle of an ice-tray and the voice of a skeleton:
‘Oh! you’re back, are you?’
A certain chill in the air was softened by the unexpected discovery by Horace that he was still holding the glass of gin and tonic in his hands. He drained it gratefully.
‘No more brandy,’ Maude said, in a tersely detached voice, rather as if it were his fault, ‘and the maraschino’s nearly all gone. But I found some Kirsch. Cherry, isn’t it? Tommy brought it from Germany once. Will it do?’
Horace didn’t know and suddenly, impelled by gin mixing itself with wine-cup, didn’t care. He started shovelling cubes of ice into a jug. Popular, was he? He poured generous measures of Kirsch over the ice and stirred madly with a spoon. Popular? Peals of laughter coming from across the lawn made him pause abruptly and gaze through the window. The garden was bright with chattering, wine-flushed girls.
‘Seem to be enjoying themselves,’ Horace said. ‘Gay sight.’
Maude, otherwise speechless, gave a snort that clearly dismissed all other womenfolk as worse than pitiful. Horace, hardly noticing, pulled the remaining Moselle cork and tipped the bottle upside down, vertically, in a gesture meant to be expert. The neck of the bottle struck his gin glass, sending it crashing to the floor.
Unserene and highly silent, Maude swept up the broken glass with brush and dust-pan and then left the kitchen abruptly, in even higher silence, carrying with her a tray of strawberries and cream.
Left alone, Horace discovered that he was actually laughing to himself. Popular, eh? It was getting to be rather fun. Popular? He stirred with joyful energy at the nearly completed cup, raising a veritable sonata from the ice as it went swirling round and round. An over-generous squirt of soda sent the level of liquid too high in the jug and suddenly it was all brimming over. Horace, laughing to himself again, remedied the situation by pouring himself a generous glass of wine-cup and then tasting it deeply. Not bad at all, he thought. Not bad. Small wonder it was popular. The Kirsch, allied to maraschino, had undoubtedly given it a remarkably bizarre and haunting flavour.
After giving the jug its final garnish of mint he bore it back to the drawing-room, now three parts empty. One of the girls, elderly by any standards, was holding trembling court in a corner by the fire-place, listened to by Mrs. Sanders and three others, who now and then responded by laughing sweetly and bobbing up and down, like puppies.
Another, crowned by a precious piece of millinery in black velvet, dancing bits of jet and what seemed to be the hind part of a vermilion cockatoo, suddenly bore down on him as from some secret hiding place, saying:
‘Ah! Ha, ha. I’ve caught you.’
A smoked sprat, speared on the end of a silver fork, waved merrily in front of his face.
‘The pageant, wasn’t it? I’ve been drilling my brain all morning trying to remember. You haven’t forgotten, have you?’
Horace had hardly begun to protest that he had indeed forgotten when the waving golden sprat cautioned him, with the accompaniment of laughter as thin as a tin-whistle, not to be silly. Of course he hadn’t forgotten.
‘Gorgeous day, that. I ran a fish-for-the-bottle stall. You won nearly every time. You knew the knack. I knew you did. I knew all the time you knew the knack, but I wouldn’t split. You did know, didn’t you?’
A moment later the sprat described a smart elliptical dive in the air and fell on the floor. Horace, hastily setting down the jug of wine-cup on a side-table, rushed to pick it up, holding it by its tail.
‘Well, that’s the end of that.’ The precious piece of millinery suddenly disdained all connection with the sprat. ‘I hardly knew what it was for, anyway.’
‘You mean you don’t want it?’
Horace, left suddenly alone, turned to dispose of the sprat by dropping it into a vase of irises but then thought better of it. At the same time he recalled the excellence of the fresh-made cup and told himself that now was as good a time as any to sample it again. But before he could pick up the jug the peremptory hands of his sister had snatched it away and the bullying voice was at him again:
‘Where on earth have you been? They’re all panting with thirst outside. And what’s that in your hand?’
Phoebe Hooper actually pu
shed him through the open french windows and into the garden. It was blissfully warm outside and her voice was jagged as glass as it nagged him about his duty and the way he had neglected it. He wondered how and where he had failed and, still holding the sprat by its tail, wondered equally what on earth he should do with it. He made as if to throw it casually into a bed of pansies but at once she positively flew at him:
‘Not in there. That’s disgusting. Put it in your pocket or something.’
He dutifully put the sprat in his pocket. He then remembered Miss La Rue and how much she wanted to talk to him and that it was his urgent duty to take her another glass of the cup.
He hurried back into the house for glasses, only to be met on the threshold by Maude, bearing another tray of strawberries and cream. She made way for him in silence; their paths might never have crossed; she was a cold stranger a thousand miles away.
In the corner of the drawing-room the elderly girl and her court were all eating strawberries and cream, bending closely over their plates like lapping puppies at their dinners.
Horace picked up a pair of empty glasses and started to pursue his sister across the lawn. The girls were scattered everywhere in the sun and now in his haste he half ran into one of them. Solitary and confined as if by an invisible wall of glass Dodie Sanders held him for the swiftest moment in too exquisite embarrassment, eyes dropping into excruciating shyness a moment later.
Something made him say: ‘You haven’t got a glass,’ but a moment later she timidly lifted one containing a thimbleful of sherry, as if from somewhere up her sleeve. The smile on her face was wan; the three words she dropped were a ghostly trinity of whispers:
‘Quite all right—’
Disturbed, and with some of his own shyness unaccountably returning, Horace was about to tell her that he would be back in a minute with more sherry when Phoebe Hooper, accusing him yet again of slacking about and doing nothing when everybody was dying of thirst, thrust the Venetian jug into his hands and flew away.
He paused to look at Dodie Sanders. The lids of her eyes quivered and fell again. She looked for a moment like a fish embalmed in the centre of a dazzling aquarium of aimless light.
‘Have you tried my cup?’
No, the droopy lips confessed, she hadn’t—she—
‘Try it.’
Horace waited for her to drain her glass of sherry. He thought he actually saw her start to smile, and then think better of it, as he poured a little of the cup for her.
‘Did you try the first lot?’ he said. ‘This is different. Would you hold my glass? I’d like a drop myself. No harm in the barman having—’
Eyes downwardly fixed on the two glasses, she was utterly silent as Horace poured wine-cup from the jug. The interlude, Horace thought, was almost like a dreamy doze after all his hectic travellings between kitchen and garden, with Maude and his sister and the various girls at his heels, but he woke suddenly to hear:
‘Popular man, popular man. Can’t have you being cornered.’ Miss Tompkins, laughing frivolously, caught his arm and started to pilot him away. He had just time to grab his glass from Dodie Sanders and take a hurried drink at it before she set him fully on his course. ‘Miss La Rue was one of those who was asking—’
He moved about the lawn, topping up glasses. A group of five girls, standing by a magnolia that had only recently shed the last of its blossom in big ivory curls, were clearly telling stories of doubtful character, he thought, and a hush like a strait-jacket encircled them tightly as he arrived.
One by one they all refused the cup. They were all ginny girls, they said. Eyes much reddened, they laughed with unseemly pleasure into his face as he prepared to retreat with jug and glasses, but just before he turned his back one called to him with arresting winsomeness:
‘I’ll have a spot. I’ll try it. They all tell me it’s been ’normously popular.’
A well-built girl of seventy, with hair as light as the head of a seeded dandelion, came forward to capture him with a pair of violet eyes brimming over with alcohol. A pair of heavy garnet ear-rings dangled against her neck. The front of her carmine dress was low. Her bosom, unusually white, exposed itself like the upper portions of a pair of wrinkled turnips. She gazed down on it with the most possessive and flirtatious of glances, all the creases of her neck quivering like crumpled lace, and said, laughing:
‘One man and his jug, eh? Well, let’s try it.’ Horace, now laughing too, the word popular again dancing mystically in his ears, poured wine-cup into his own glass—it was important to keep the other one, he thought, for Miss La Rue—and the well-built girl drank with heartiness, telling him:
‘ ’Licious. Absolutely ’licious. Can’t think why you didn’t come before. Nice to share your glass—’
She gave it back to him, empty. The possessive and inviting glance that she had previously reserved for her own bosom was now suddenly turned on Horace. She muttered a few low, amorous words about his big, brown eyes, at the same time gazing into them, and Horace glowed.
‘Got to do the rounds!’ he suddenly told her in an amazing burst of abandon. ‘Customers everywhere.’ An abrupt turn of the heel caused him to stagger slightly. ‘Too damn popular, this stuff. That’s the trouble.’
‘ ’Licious. ’Bye,’ she said. She waved a hand infantile in its spidery fluttering, her seedy violet eyes overflowing. ‘Quite ’licious—’
He went in search of Miss La Rue. He found her beyond the azaleas, alone, sitting on a white iron seat against the trunk of a vast acacia. Although she sat with grace, legs crossed, she had allowed the skirt of her costume to ride up, exposing a shapely silken knee. A delicate and bewitching smile accompanied her invitation to Horace to come and sit close to her. She actually patted the seat an inch or two from her thigh, affectionately scolding him at the same time:
‘You’ve been naughty. Where have you been? You neglected me.’
Horace protested that he had been rushed off his feet. The cup had taken some time to make and there were customers everywhere.
‘Nonsense. You’ve been flirting again.’
‘My goodness, no.’
‘I saw you. I watched you from here. First Miss Sanders and then the creature in the red dress.’
From somewhere behind the acacia a fountain tinkled. Its bright and spirited notes might have been Horace’s own responses to Miss La Rue’s flattering, warming words.
‘Well, now that you’re here you might at least give me some cup. Of course if you’re too engrossed in looking at my knee—’
‘Oh! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
‘Oh! I don’t mind.’ She turned the knee delicately from side to side, appraising it. ‘I’m rather proud of it. Not at all bad, I think, do you?’
‘Well, certainly it—’
‘Don’t be afraid. You were going to say for a woman of my age, weren’t you?’
Horace, embarrassed, started to pour out the remainder of the wine-cup, at the same time making apologetic noises intended to indicate that he couldn’t agree with her at all.
‘Oh! yes you were,’ she said. ‘The trouble is you’ve no idea how old I am, have you?’ Not waiting for an answer, she raised her eyes to the sky, wonderfully remote and ethereal in its clear blue spaciousness beyond the little white flowers of the gigantic acacia. ‘I am a little older than the tree—the acacia, I mean. It’s eighty-five. I know to the day. I remember it being planted.’
It was on the tip of Horace’s tongue to pay her an immediate compliment but shyness overcame him again and he stopped in the middle of his opening syllable.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘Oh! nothing, nothing.’
‘I thought for a moment you were going to flatter me.’
‘Oh! no, no.’
‘How disappointing,’ she said. ‘I hoped you were.’
Glass in hand now, she moved more closely to him, squeezing his elbow gently with her free hand. She drank, raising miraculously bright eyes to the summer sky.
‘You’ve been experimenting with the cup.’
Horace, once again engrossed in the shining silken knee, confessed that as a matter of fact he had. It had been forced upon him.
‘Kirsch,’ she said. She drank again and smacked her lips appreciatively, with the utmost delicacy. ‘And a touch of maraschino. Strange combination but clever of you. Fill me up.’
She gave him a flattering and vivacious glance and he filled her up, at the same time topping his own glass too. Freed of his sister and the chattering demands of the girls, Horace was beginning to feel absolutely splendid again. Clever, was he? Popular? Popular and clever! Ah! well, the party was terrific too. He was very glad, after all, that he’d come. He was just the chap to have around at a party. All the girls appreciated him.
He drank again and Miss La Rue moved closer. All the warm intoxication of the summer day seemed suddenly to descend like a pillar of light fire from heaven and Horace gave the exposed shining knee a long look, covetous and almost idolatrous at the same time.
Miss La Rue was quick to notice it and beguiled him further by saying:
‘Go on. You may squeeze my knee if you want to.’
Horace, freshly flushed with wine-cup, started to protest that nothing was further from his mind but she merely laughed, mocking him slightly.
‘Don’t be silly. You’ve been wanting to for some time.’
The beginnings of an outrageous fire started to dart about Horace’s veins. He felt himself drawn with irresistible force to the knee and suddenly, with an impulse of considerable abandon, started caressing it.
‘It’s perfectly all right,’ she said with a light coolness that was also slightly mocking. ‘Don’t be afraid. No one’s watching.’
Horace, encouraged, squeezed the knee with relish, at the same time laughing a little tipsily. Miss La Rue laughed too and pressed the side of her face close to his ear, the little veil of her hat touching and slightly tickling him. The whisper she gave him a moment later might have been a thunderclap of emotional surprise:
‘It isn’t the first time it’s been squeezed. Nor, I hope, the last.’