by H. E. Bates
‘No?’ Horace said exultantly. ‘No?’
The noise of the fountain rang thrillingly in his ears, to be echoed suddenly by the notes of a blackbird almost bursting its breast in song somewhere at the very pinnacle of the acacia tree.
‘You do it rather well, too,’ she said.
‘My God,’ Horace said all of a sudden, ‘you must have been absolutely great when you were young!’
Instantly she regarded him with sly petulance, eyes bright with overtones of mocking reproval.
‘After that remark,’ she said, ‘I think I should take my leave.’
‘Oh! no, no. Please,’ Horace said. He felt suddenly reduced to the proportions of a small boy again. ‘I didn’t mean—no, please—’
‘Up to that moment you’d been very tactful.’
‘Oh! no please—’
‘It was heaven sitting here under the acacia and you went and spoilt it all.’
‘Now, really, listen—’
‘You wouldn’t say a thing like that to the tree, would you? My tree, I mean.’
‘Yes, but that’s different—’
‘How?’ she said. She gave him a glance of flirtatious severity, at the same time lifting his hand from her knee rather as if she were lifting up the arm of a gramophone. ‘The acacia is far more beautiful now than the day it was planted.’
‘So are you,’ Horace said. ‘So are you. I mean—’
‘It’s all very well to say that now.’
‘Yes, but I mean it.’ In an effort to exert physical as well as moral pressure Horace again put his hand on her knee. She moved it away at once, with a gesture aloof and almost prudish.
‘Oh! look, we were getting on so well—’
‘We were indeed. In fact I was thinking of letting you—’
‘Letting me what? Letting me what?’
‘It’s too late now.’
‘Oh! what was it?’ Horace said. ‘Please.’
‘I was thinking of letting you kiss me.’ She smiled teasingly. ‘My hand, of course.’ To Horace’s dismay and astonishment she drained the last of her wine-cup, gave him the glass and actually stood up. ‘But it’s too late now. You can kiss Miss Sanders instead.’
‘Miss Sanders?’ Either he or she was going mad, Horace thought. ‘Miss Sanders? Why on earth Miss Sanders?’
‘Because she’s coming this way. She’s looking terribly soulful. She’s obviously looking for someone like you to talk to.’
Horace turned his head to see, coming from the direction of the flaming azaleas, the wandering Dodie Sanders. Alone and shy, she seemed about to turn away when Miss La Rue waved her hand and called:
‘Dodie. Come over and sit down. Mr. Hooper’s dying to talk to you.’
‘Don’t,’ Horace said. ‘Don’t. Please. Don’t.’
‘Don’t be silly. She’s charming when you get to know her.’
‘I don’t want to get to know her.’
‘Don’t be unkind. She’s a girl who needs company.’
‘But not mine, for God’s sake.’
‘Don’t talk like that. It’s tactless.’ She gave him a maddening smile of mocking intimacy, with the added pain of a slight touch on his arm. ‘Of course you’re very young. You’ll learn better as you grow up.’
Speechlessly, crushed and in positive pain, Horace watched the arrival of Dodie Sanders as if she were chief mourner at the sudden and cruel demise of the summer morning. He was no longer aware of the thrilling voices of the fountain and the blackbird.
‘Come along, Dodie dear. Sit down,’ Miss La Rue said. Once again the polished curve of her chin caught for a moment a reflection of sunlight as on a shell. Her neat light figure, belying all its years, turned away with grace and poise. ‘There’s a little of Mr. Hooper’s wine-cup left. You can have my glass. Mr. Hooper will wash it out in the fountain, won’t you, Mr. Hooper?’
She walked away, airily, a moment later. When she had gone Dodie Sanders sat down on the seat, Miss La Rue’s empty glass in her hands.
‘Give it to me and I’ll wash it,’ Horace said.
‘Oh! please don’t bother.’
‘It’s no trouble.’
‘Oh! please don’t bother.’
After that Dodie Sanders stared, in complete silence, at the distances. Across the lawn some of the girls were drifting away in groups or in ones and twos. The casual uplift of semi-distant voices only seemed to deepen the pall of silence that hung between Horace and the shy Miss Sanders, who sat twisting the empty glass in her hands.
‘My Heavens it’s hot,’ Horace said. A long and intolerable interval of utter silence had left him constrained and sweating. ‘I really think I shall have to go in.’
A moment later he took out his handkerchief to mop his forehead and as he did so the smoked sprat fell to the ground.
For almost half a minute Dodie Sanders gazed down at it with uninspired gravity. Once she lifted her head and stared up into the acacia tree, as if thinking perhaps that the sprat might mysteriously have dropped from there.
‘Where did that come from?’
‘It fell out of my pocket.’
‘It’s one of those sprats, isn’t it?’
Horace said it was. After another silence of considerable length, during which Horace suffered himself to be tortured by a vision of Miss La Rue’s brilliant ageless eyes seemingly doting on him to a mocking chorus of fountain and blackbird, she made a remark so astonishing that it reduced him to a profound and impotent silence too.
‘In a way sprats are rather beautiful,’ she said, ‘aren’t they?’
Horace squirmed; he uttered, mentally, a protesting ‘Blast!’ And suddenly, as if the imposition of yet another awful silence were not enough, he heard a familiar goading voice driving across the lawn:
‘Horace! Time to go! We’re departing!’
‘My sister,’ he explained. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to say goodbye—’
He fled across the lawn. Hastily he bore the Venetian jug and the last dregs of its wine-cup out of the deep acacia shade, past the flaring azaleas, across the lawn and through the drifting procession of departing girls. A late glimpse of Miss La Rue getting nimbly into a black limousine aroused an echo so searing that he uttered, aloud this time and almost involuntarily, another monumental ‘Blast! and blast again!’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Phoebe Hooper said. ‘Didn’t you enjoy the party? I thought it was you who was the great success?’
‘Of course he was, of course he was.’ Miss Tompkins, in almost passionate assertion, waved delighted and almost tipsy hands to the sky. ‘He was like the weather. He was wonderful. He improved all the time he got better.’
Half an hour later the lawn was empty. The heat of early afternoon had already woven a hush so deep that each water-note from the fountain beyond the acacia tree could be distinctly heard in a separate crystal fall. The only figures to be seen now were those of Maude and Miss Tompkins, occasionally darting into the garden to pick up a glass, and the solitary figure of Dodie Sanders, silent under the old acacia, staring down at the fallen sprat, golden at her feet.
She alone did not seem to realise that the party for the girls was over.
The Cat Who Sang
Wilfred Whitmore, who was exceptionally fond of music and taught Latin and Greek at a local school for boys, had overworked himself so much during the hot summer term that he began, about the middle of August, to suffer from odd hallucinations.
Once he believed himself, very briefly, to be Octavius Caesar and that he was eating large quantities of green figs and snails under the shade of an enormous cedar tree. Another time he was a Greek athlete, always in pursuit of other athletes or running away from them, along cruelly brilliant, stony distances.
Finally, after a too heavy lunch of sausages and mashed, fried onions and apple pie and cream, he fell asleep at his flat, in an old rocking chair, to wake suddenly under the powerful impression that his cat Susie was actually singing Schubert’s
Die Forelle, The Trout, or at least that particular passage in it that starts
At first he thought that this was merely part of a waking dream but when he at last sat up and heard with amazed and fully awakened ears Susie’s unmistakable rendering of the song he was so excited that he rushed straight to the telephone without thinking there was anything absurd about the whole affair and immediately rang his fiancée, Shirley Baines, who worked as secretary to the general manager of a local paint factory.
Miss Baines, who was hard at it in the middle of an unbearably hot afternoon, typing letters and desperately longing for a stir of breeze to drive some of the acrid odour of emulsion paints from the humid air, was not particularly pleased to be interrupted.
‘But she sings, I tell you. No mistaking it. Positively sings.’
‘Who on earth are you talking about?’
‘It was just after two o’clock. I’d given her a nice lunch and suddenly she sat up and started. Clear as a bell. Just as if she’d learnt it all off by heart.’
‘For goodness’ sake can’t you tell me who you’re talking about?’
‘Susie. Didn’t I say Susie?’
‘No, you didn’t. And what’s more I don’t like being interrupted at the office. I’ve told you before—’
‘What makes it all the more exciting is that she doesn’t just sing any old piece. She’s shown taste—it’s that awfully nice thing of Schubert’s, The Trout, the bit that goes like—’
Wilfred suddenly began to hum over the telephone, in a rather uncertain tenor, the relevant passage from the song. At the end, trying to round off with a few bars of the accompaniment, he gave what seemed to be a series of hiccups, so that Miss Baines had great difficulty in restraining an impulse to ask him how long he’d been drinking. She remembered in time that Wilfred never drank and she could only suppose that the unbearable heat of the afternoon had in some way affected him. He’d been a little strange lately.
‘And it wasn’t as if she sang it just once. Then I might have been mistaken. But she sang it three times—two encores, note for note the same.’
‘In the right key too, I suppose?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Of course you’ll put her on television at once.’
Something in the tone of Miss Baines’ voice jolted his enthusiasm sadly.
‘You sound a bit peeved. Don’t you believe me?’
‘Of course I do. Tomorrow you’ll be telling me she plays the trombone. What’s the matter with you? You must have been sitting out in the sun. You’ve been acting a bit odd lately—’
‘I have not been sitting out in the sun.’
‘Then what’s the matter with you? It all sounds terribly fishy to me.’
In cold, level tones Wilfred said that if that was her idea of a joke he didn’t think it was a particularly good one.
‘And I can’t say I think it much of a joke to be rung up in the middle of a scorching afternoon to be told about cats singing Schubert.’
‘It is not a joke. It’s deadly serious. Don’t you realise? Susie’s a singing cat. A phenomenon. I’ve got a phenomenal, wonderful creature on my hands.’
‘Well, you haven’t got me on them, because I’ve got work to do and if I don’t do it I’ll be here all night.’
‘Very well. Will I see you tonight?’
‘I thought that was the idea.’
‘Perhaps you’ll come to the flat and hear Susie sing?’
‘If she’s still at it I will. In the meantime you’ll probably find she’s got a bone stuck in her throat or something and it’s that what’s causing it—Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye,’ Wilfred said and then in a sudden spasm of anxiety rushed to the kitchen, half afraid that Miss Baines’ painfully jocular words might be true. But to his great relief Susie was asleep under the table, a passive ball of smooth black fur.
‘They don’t believe us, Susie,’ he said. ‘They don’t believe about you. But I’m sure Schubert would have. And so will they. I’ll make them.’
Back in the office Miss Baines tried vainly to repress the rising edges of her temper. She felt as if a hot iron had been run over her neck and she at once made several mistakes on the typewriter. Her hands felt repulsively clammy as she worked with her india-rubber to erase the misspelt words.
Finally she gave the typewriter a bang of near exquisite anger, snatched up her handbag and went first to the wash-room ro rinse her hands and make up her face and then down to the first floor canteen to get herself a drink of something cool.
‘Hullo. You look as if you’ve been having a dust-up with somebody. Robbie?’
Dawn Edwards, who changed the colour of her hair twice a month, sometimes to a deep-sea blue or to a shade rather like that of an under-ripe tomato, sat at a plastic-topped table sipping at a glass of cold milk. Robbie was Mr. Robertson, the general manager. Miss Edwards was secretary to a Mr. Watt-Forbes, whom she called Old What-not, in accountancy. Today Miss Edwards’ hair was a strange shade of gold-green, rather like that seen in certain mosses after a dry summer.
‘Robbie’s gone swimming, lucky devil. I’d give something to be in that water.’
‘I wish Old What-not would take a dive. He never lets up. Who were you fighting with?’
Miss Baines, who was now sipping cold orange juice, explained that she’d been fighting with Wilfred, over the telephone. It had made her very cross too.
‘Not like you two, is it? You don’t often have dust-ups.’
‘No. But this was plain ridiculous.’
Miss Edwards thought for a moment, staring at Miss Baines’ hair, which was a pleasant natural shade of dark brown, and then said she thought it mightn’t be a bad idea if she tinted it for a change—say red or cocoa. It was wonderful what a change of colour did to men. They started to look at you in quite a different way.
‘He’s gone completely barmy about a cat. Completely off his rocker.’
‘In what way?’
‘It sings.’
Dawn Edwards started laughing, rather shrilly.
‘Oh! they all do that. I hear them all night long on the roof next to ours. You want to throw cold water on them.’
‘This one’s different. It sings Schubert.’
‘Oh! classical. No rock ’n roll?’
‘Nothing so common. And he made such a God-Almighty fuss about it too. I never heard of anything so ridiculous.’
Miss Edwards pondered again, staring hard at Shirley’s hair. A nice shade of light cocoa would do a lot for it, she thought.
‘I don’t know that it’s so ridiculous. After all they get dogs to count. I saw one once on television.’
‘There’s a big difference between barking a few times and singing Schubert’s The Trout in the right key.’
‘Yes, but they get elephants to dance in circuses and all that. That must be difficult. And what about those porpoises or whatever they’re called? They’re almost human.’
Miss Baines suddenly drained her orange juice and said she must get back to the grindstone, or she’d be there till the cows came home.
‘The thing that made me feel so mad was that you’d think the wretched animal was far more important than I was.’
Dawn Edwards laughed again and said that a situation like that called for something drastic. She urged Shirley once again to do something for her hair: say a nice cocoa or squirrel red or milk chocolate or something of that sort.
Two hours later, when Miss Edwards left the office, sharp on five, she was surprised to see Wilfred Whitmore standing outside the paint factory gates, waiting for Shirley Baines. Wilfred was very thin and tall and rather fragile of appearance. She thought he looked tired. His skin looked rather like greasy parchment and his longish blonde eyebrows were so pale as to seem almost as if dipped in salt.
‘Oh! Wilfred, I’ve been hearing about your marvellous cat.’
‘You have?’
‘I think it’s terrific. No wonder you’re excited.’
�
��You mean you actually think Susie can sing? You don’t think it’s a joke?’
‘Of course I don’t. As I said to Shirley they get dogs to count numbers and all that. And you see elephants dancing to tunes. And bears. And you can get budgerigars to say anything.’
Wilfred said he could quite see that at first sight it seemed a little far-fetched that a cat should suddenly start singing, and Schubert at that, but when you thought about it a bit it really wasn’t. After all there’d long been a theory that cats were in some way the reincarnation of human beings—it was what made them so close to man and so sagacious—and who could say whether Susie wasn’t in fact a reincarnation of someone who had lived in Vienna in Schubert’s time? Perhaps a person of some eminence, above the common rut; perhaps one of Schubert’s friends?
Miss Edwards’ eyes, which were a sort of golden toffee colour, seemed almost to melt as she listened to this theory and she could think of nothing to say except:
‘And of course she could always have heard it on a record.’
‘Yes, of course. Why not? I’d never thought of that.’
At this moment some instinct made Miss Edwards turn her head, just in time to see Shirley Baines leaving the front door of the office. With the lightest of fingers she touched the side of her mossy hair and gave Wilfred Whitmore a final gaze with her buttery golden eyes, saying:
‘Anyway I’d love to hear her some time.’
‘You honestly would? Really?’
‘Of course. I’d adore it. It would be marvellous.’ She smiled with sudden beatific warmth, so that Wilfred was momentarily embalmed in a daze. ‘Whenever it’s convenient, I mean. Well, I must rush now.’
‘I’ll let you know. I’ll let you know.’
After a bare, brief hullo to each other Wilfred Whitmore and Miss Baines walked away from the paint factory, silently. The white pavements seemed to dance with heat. Miss Baines felt herself longing for an ice-cream as big as a clock tower and for somewhere cool to swim.
‘You didn’t say you were coming to meet me out.’
‘No, but I wanted to go to the fishmonger’s for Susie and I thought I’d do the two things together.’