The Fabulous Mrs. V.

by H. E. Bates

  He opened his eyes and suddenly leapt up out of the deck-chair, all sweat, unable to bear it any longer. So real were the rays of Grecian moonlight, Miss Sumpter’s body and the phosphorescence of the sea that when he stared about him it was the back-garden that swayed, unreal in the afternoon sun.

  There was nothing for it, he told himself; he had to go round to the fruit shop. He had somehow to see Miss Sumpter, perhaps even talk to her, before the brilliant reality of the dream faded away. It was inconceivable that that realistic episode could have failed to get through to her.

  Perhaps, he asked himself as he half-ran into the house, he ought to do another ten minutes on the stretching-machine before he went? and then decided against it. It was clearly imperative to see her while the potency of the dream was so brilliant and so powerful.

  He paused to look at himself in the bathroom mirror, brushing his sweaty hair. He looked uncommonly pale and hot after all the exertions of making love with Miss Sumpter and his eyes had in them a moist and dilated glow. Several times he expanded his chest and tautened the muscles of his arms and once, just before departing for the shop, he stood immovably at attention, drawing up his figure to its full height.

  The fruit shop was crowded with customers. Miss Sumpter, lost in the heart of the crowd, was serving several pounds of onions to an elderly lady wearing a purple hat. The rustle of onion skins fell on his ears like the tormenting echo of many little waves breaking on a distant shore.

  ‘No hurry,’ he said several times to other assistants. The lady in the purple hat was buying peas now, fussily cracking open a pod or two in order to test their tenderness. ‘No hurry. Thank you, I’ll wait.’

  ‘Yes? What for you, please?’

  It was the aloof, vestal Miss Sumpter, free at last. He stood impotently before her, trying desperately to feel god-like again, hardly able to look at her. Her face, with its lovely gooseberry-green eyes, swam mistily in a frame of bananas and flowers, apples and cucumbers, apricots and onions. As these dissolved even more mistily into a background of Grecian waves gently lapping under a golden moon Miss Sumpter said, rather tartly:

  ‘Well? We’re awfully busy.’

  His whole body made a stammering effort at control and in the most ungod-like of voices he said:

  ‘A pound of apples, please.’

  ‘Jonathans? Cox’s? Cookers?’

  ‘Cox’s.’

  It was the shortest word of the three but it seemed to take a whole aeon of time to pronounce it.

  ‘Something else?’

  ‘Bananas.’

  ‘How many would you like?’

  ‘Two pounds, please.’

  She was immensely aloof, dreadfully distant. He was unable even to look at her hands, let alone the breast that had touched his face like a golden apple. She had become infinitely more than a stranger: she simply didn’t belong to his world.

  ‘Anything more?’

  ‘Well, I must just think.’

  He tried to think. His mind hovered like a cowering bat in a suspense of cavernous gloom.

  ‘Any celery today?’

  ‘Not today. Hasn’t started to come in. Hasn’t had a frost on it yet.’

  If there had been no frost on the celery there was a sering and darkening frost on the voice of Miss Sumpter. It seemed to cut down his stature by several inches. He stared helplessly this way and that and then said at last:

  ‘I think that’ll be all, then, thank you.’

  ‘Three and nine. Pay at the desk.’

  That final impersonal note wiped every remaining image of the dream from his mind. He wavered briefly on the point of departure and then in a courageously desperate moment decided there was something else he wanted to ask for.

  ‘Do you happen to have mulberries at all?’

  She would surely, he thought, remember the mulberries.

  ‘Do we have what?’

  ‘Mulberries. You know—’

  ‘Oh! mulberries. Yes. Three and six a tin.’

  ‘You don’t have fresh ones?’

  ‘Didn’t know they ever came fresh.’ She actually laughed, cutting him deeply, and turned away.

  ‘Yes, madam? Watercress?’

  Cooled and impotent, he went home to the back-garden and the deck-chair. He knew he never wanted to dream of Miss Sumpter again. She had crushed the dream under her feet like the shell of a snail. Her cold and impersonal nature wrapped him about like a fog. He started slowly to peel a banana and then shut his eyes in a grim and calculated effort to shut her image out.

  Presently he was dreaming instead of a girl named Shirley Chalmers, a typist, who worked in the office at the printing works. She, like Miss Sumpter and Mrs. Fortescue, was rather taller than himself but she had, he was sure, both a nicer and more sympathetic nature. Her figure was very beautiful and her hair, which she wore rather long, was an exotic deep bluish-black, with a clear shine on it like that of ripe elderberries in September.

  He had a strange idea too that Miss Chalmers wore black underwear; he had once caught a brief glimpse of shadowy lace under the hem of her skirt as she ran upstairs, her legs meltingly seductive. For some reason he thought that girls who wore black underwear were exceptionally passionate. Warm, friendly blood, he was sure, flowed through Miss Chalmers’ veins. She was also, he felt certain, a person of great understanding. You could tell that by the fine depth of stillness in her eyes.

  She was just the sort of girl, he now decided, to take to Morocco. Ah! the bougainvilleas and the palms, the markets and the Kasbah, the mystery, the heat and the mountains—what a wonderful thing it would be to have a companion like Miss Chalmers there, the exotic, passionate, understanding Miss Chalmers.

  He needed a companion like Miss Chalmers. He needed her very, very much.

  A Nice Friendly Atmosphere

  A fine male blackbird was singing throatily, with two cuckoos calling in the near gold-green distances of oak and chestnut and a woodpecker laughing somewhere beyond them, almost in mockery, as Mr. and Mrs. Barclay sat down to lunch on the first Sunday in May.

  ‘What is this?’ Mr. Barclay said and proceeded to prod the joint of meat in front of him with the wrong end of the gravy spoon.

  It was the leg of boar, in the Pyrenees style, Pierria di Jabali a la Pirenaica, Mrs. Barclay explained, that they had in Spain last year. The only difference was that she had had to do it with leg of mutton. Nor had it been possible to get the globe artichokes the dish called for so early in May and she had had to do the best she could with swede turnips, though she thought that with lavish use of the sauce espagnole you would hardly notice the change.

  ‘The possibility of life on Uranus?’ Mr. Barclay said. The gravy spoon, poised in air, seemed to be held ready for the act of carving. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  This was Mr. Barclay’s answer to a question, put quite some time before, by his elder daughter Philippa, who was twelve and wore her coarse fair hair long and loose, in the style of Alice in Wonderland.

  ‘Yes, but do we know?’ she said. ‘Is it a fact, I mean? Are we certain?’

  Mr. Barclay, now vaguely prodding the meat about as if searching for some favourable point at which to make an incision, confessed that he supposed they were not. The great distance of the planet precluded any certainty.

  ‘Yes, but what do we mean by life? That’s what I want to know.’

  The youngest of the Barclay children, Henry, put his question in a severe inquisitorial treble. He was seven. He was wearing a thick dark blue polo-neck sweater, home-knitted and three sizes too big for him. His brown-rimmed spectacles were large and thick and gave him the look of an inquiring deep-sea diver who had just surfaced from under the table.

  ‘There’s no point in being vague,’ he said.

  ‘Astronomically speaking,’ Michaela said—she, the middle one of the Barclay children, wore her stiffish onion-brown hair in a plain round bob that might have been idly trimmed up with the aid of a colander some weeks before—�
�I suppose there is no such thing as uncertainty.’

  ‘Quite. What did Pope say?’ Philippa said. ‘“Whatever is, is right”?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Henry said. ‘Absolutely.’

  Mr. Barclay now actually exchanged the gravy spoon for the carving fork and gave the Pierria di Jabali a la Pirenaica a sharp poke with it. A protesting squeak, like that from a tight leather sole, came out of it, but Mr. Barclay took no notice at all, merely declaring instead that Michaela was quite correct. Science knew no uncertainty.

  ‘Those blasted bull-finches are playing hell with the cherry-buds again!’ Henry suddenly shouted, shaking a dirty fist. ‘I’ll murder the lot! The greedy bastards!’

  Mrs. Barclay, who was wearing a dark brown hairy sweater, also home-knitted, and who would have been pretty in a mole-like way if only she had used lip-stick and left her light brown hair to grow naturally instead of pinching it into a stringy Victorian bun that hung well down her neck, started spooning mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts on to the plates that Mr. Barclay had so far left empty. The potatoes, steaming ever so slightly, had a grey, cement-like look about them and the brussels sprouts the appearance of old chestnuts par-boiled in soot water.

  Mr. Barclay, after solemnly reminding Henry that everything had to live and that in the very nature of things bull-finches couldn’t differentiate between good and evil, again stuck the carving fork into the mutton. Nature was neither moral nor immoral, he said and picked up a butter knife in preparation, at last, to start carving the meat.

  ‘Help yourselves to the sauce espagnole,’ Mrs. Barclay said to the children, as if in veiled warning that the meat might be some time in reaching them yet.

  Mr. Barclay, who was thirty-two, prematurely bald and rather podgy, was wearing a shirt of Italian-red flannel, expansive blue shorts, horn-rimmed spectacles and a pair of Spanish slippers made of rice-straw. He had somehow managed to get himself a government grant to attend classes at Art School four times a week. He painted rather well on silks. It was a bit of a struggle, even with a cottage in the country, to get through.

  ‘Telephone!’ Henry said and sprang up from the table as if to answer the ringing of the bell.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Mr. Barclay said.

  In the sudden absence of Mr. Barclay his wife seized the opportunity to start carving the Pierria di Jabali a la Pirenaica, mutton style. She had been dreadfully suspicious for some time that all was not quite well with it. Perhaps she had marinated the meat too long; or perhaps not long enough. The principal thing she understood about cooking was that, as in science, you applied heat to things and certain changes took place. In due course, in a miraculous way, objects became fried, boiled, baked, steamed or casseroled. If the taste in most cases was very much the same this seemed to make little difference, at least to the children, who didn’t know any difference anyway and were always as ravenous as vultures.

  ‘Who was it for?’ she said. In the absence of Mr. Barclay, now back at the table, she had succeeded in stabbing off several stumpy cuts of meat and serving them out to the children. The mutton, which had been cooking for some four hours, still seemed decidedly gristly. Perhaps, she thought, she ought to have cooked it longer?

  ‘Nobody,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘The line was dead.’

  Mr. Barclay stared at the plateful of meat, grey potatoes, brussels sprouts and compressed turnips, now generously covered with sauce espagnole, which Mrs. Barclay had set before him. He was unable to distinguish between one object and another or to detect that the food was almost cold. He attacked it instead with a shovelling vigour and relish, head close over the plate, only pausing once to say:

  ‘It doesn’t taste awfully like boar, does it? You think so?’

  ‘You must pretend it’s boar,’ Philippa said. ‘Taste is illusory. Relative, I mean. It’s merely a question of—’

  ‘Telephone again!’ Henry said and again jumped up as if to answer the bell, only to be restrained this time by Mrs. Barclay, who said:

  ‘I’ll go this time. I don’t think it is the telephone after all. I’ve a feeling it’s the front door bell.’

  As she left the room Henry stared hard through the open casement window at the garden, his jaws grinding moodily on a sinewy lump of Pierria di Jabali a la Pirenaica. This gave him a certain air of savage preoccupation as he watched a pair of bull-finches stripping to shreds, on the far side of the lawn, in a gay combination of mischief and hunger, the pink buds of a late flowering cherry-tree.

  ‘I hate bloody bull-finches,’ he said. ‘I absolutely and positively hate the blasted things.’

  ‘That’s a great mistake,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘I’ve told you before—the application of human emotions to the complex structure necessary to preserve the balance of nature only leads to a falsity of attitude about life. And above all sentimentality.’

  ‘Is that the same as the pathetic fallacy?’ Michaela said.

  ‘Not quite,’ Mr. Barclay said, ‘but there are certain features common to—’

  He paused, suddenly aware that Mrs. Barclay had come back into the room. She had in fact stopped just inside the doorway, where she was anxiously and dryly rubbing her hands together.

  ‘There’s a man here,’ she whispered, ‘who says you invited him to Sunday lunch.’

  ‘Never. Impossible. We’re half way through it anyway.’

  ‘He seems awfully positive about it.’

  ‘He can’t be. Ask him what his name is.’

  ‘I did and—’

  ‘It’s Floater, Mr. Barclay!’ a voice called with muscular familiarity like a clarion from the passage outside. ‘It’s me, Mr. Barclay. Floater.’

  ‘Good grief!’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘I could have sworn it was next Sunday.’

  ‘Who is Floater?’ Mrs. Barclay said.

  ‘Take it calmly,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘He’s from Art School. He’s had a marvellously interesting life. He’s been everywhere.’

  ‘Well, since he’s arrived here too I’d better put the meat back into the oven. This sort of dish is never so good if it gets cold.’

  While Mrs. Barclay hastily took away the Pierria di Jabali a la Pirenaica, now less than luke-warm, Mr. Barclay rushed forward towards the passage with extravagant greeting, saying:

  ‘Floater, my dear fellow, Floater. We thought you were never coming. We’d given you up.’

  ‘Eh? You told me—’

  ‘Sit down. Here, next to me. I fear we’ve started, but only just. Philippa, Henry, Michaela—this is Floater Pearson. I’ll get some beer.’

  Floater Pearson gave a large friendly grin and sat down at table.

  ‘Morning all,’ he said.

  ‘Strictly speaking it’s afternoon,’ Michaela said. ‘Good afternoon.’

  ‘I see,’ Floater said. ‘It’s like that, is it?’

  ‘Well, it’s either afternoon or it’s not, isn’t it?’ Philippa said. ‘It can’t be both at the same time.’

  Floater Pearson, looking rather wistfully about the table, said it wasn’t afternoon with him, not until he’d had his dinner; and he hadn’t had it yet.

  ‘That’s a mere arbitrary distinction,’ Michaela said.

  ‘Time is time,’ Henry said. ‘You can’t change it. Don’t be so artificial.’

  Floater Pearson opened his mouth sharply and then, utterly at a loss, shut it again, so that the upper plate of his false teeth gave a bony snap. He seemed slightly affronted, even hurt.

  ‘Blimey, I—’

  Floater started to protest and then, with a gasp, gave up. He was rather tall, very broad in the shoulders, which were padded out, and narrow at the waist, where his trousers were held up by a thong of plaited leather by a magenta and chromium buckle shaped like a mermaid. His suit was a bright plum colour. His shirt, a pure canary, had an accompanying white tie patterned with prominent blue figures, a climbing galaxy of naked buxom girls.

  ‘I’m seven,’ Henry said. ‘How old are you?’

  Floater scratched his int
ensely black head of hair and said he was a year younger than Mr. Barclay. He knew because they’d compared notes the other day.

  ‘That makes you thirty-one,’ Henry said. ‘And where did you come from?’

  ‘Oh! I live at Fordstone,’ Mr. Pearson said. ‘Near the Art School.’

  ‘I didn’t mean like that,’ Henry said. ‘I meant in the first place. I came from a cell. You did too, I expect.’

  Floater Pearson suddenly laughed with singing clarity, showing three gold teeth in his broad and rather handsome mouth.

  ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Could be.’

  ‘What exactly do you take at Art School?’ Philippa said.

  Floater laughed again, rather more warily this time.

  ‘Mostly what I can catch,’ he said.

  During this conversation he had become more and more fascinated by what the children had on their plates. It puzzled him considerably. There was nothing recognisable at all in the mess of brown and white and orange lumps except perhaps the potato. As if sensing his doubts Henry said:

  ‘This is boar. We had it in Spain last year.’

  ‘Boar?’

  ‘A male pig. Only wild of course. It’s mutton really.’

  ‘Good Gawd,’ Floater

  Here Michaela interposed to say that what Philippa had really been asking was whether Mr. Pearson painted or sculpted or what? Floater scatched his head again, in what was evidently a favourite gesture of his and was just beginning to explain that as a matter of fact he wasn’t exactly at Art School any longer when Mr. Barclay came back into the room with a big glass jug of beer and two glasses.

  ‘Well, here’s the beer,’ he said. ‘The food won’t be a minute.’

  A moment later, as Mr. Barclay started to pour the beer out, Henry suddenly got up and threw his dinner out of the open window, plate and all. Mr. Barclay took no notice whatever of this; nor did Philippa and Michaela who went on eating with a voracity almost enraptured.

  ‘What’s he gone and done that for?’ Floater said.