The Bride Comes to Evensford

by H. E. Bates

  The Bride Comes to Evensford

  H. E. BATES

  To

  Dilys Powell

  and

  Leonard Russell

  Contents

  A Note from the Family

  Foreword by Lesley Pearce

  The Bride Comes to Evensford

  A Note on the Author

  A Note from the Family

  My grandfather, although best known and loved by many readers all over the world for creating the Larkin family in his bestselling novel The Darling Buds of May, was also one of the most prolific English short story writers of the twentieth century, often compared to Chekhov. He wrote over 300 short stories and novellas in a career spanning six decades from the 1920s through to the 1970s.

  My grandfather’s short fiction took many different forms, from descriptive country sketches to longer, sometimes tragic, narrative stories, and I am thrilled that Bloomsbury Reader will be reissuing all of his stories and novellas, making them available to new audiences, and giving them – especially those that have been out of print for many years or only ever published in obscure magazines, newspapers and pamphlets – a new lease of life.

  There are hundreds of stories to discover and re-discover, from H. E. Bates’s most famous tales featuring Uncle Silas, or the critically acclaimed novellas such as The Mill and Dulcima, to little, unknown gems such as ‘The Waddler’, which has not been reprinted since it first appeared in the Guardian in 1926, when my grandfather was just twenty, or ‘Castle in the Air’, a wonderful, humorous story that was lost and unknown to our family until 2013.

  If you would like to know more about my grandfather’s work I encourage you to visit the H.E. Bates Companion – a brilliant comprehensive online resource where detailed bibliographic information, as well as articles and reviews, on almost all of H. E. Bates’s publications, can be found. I hope you enjoy reading all these evocative and vivid short stories by H. E. Bates, one of the masters of the art.

  Tim Bates, 2015

  We would like to spread our passion for H. E. Bates’s short fiction and build a community of readers with whom we can share information on forthcoming publications, exclusive material such as free downloads of rare stories, and opportunities to win memorabilia and other exciting prizes – you can sign up to the H. E. Bates’s mailing list here. When you sign-up you will immediately receive an exclusive short work by H. E. Bates.

  Foreword

  I have always believed that H.E. Bates was the absolute master of short story writing. He managed to create a little world for you to enter into, and that soft focus world would stay with you long after you’d finished the story.

  When I first started writing I tried my hand at short stories, assuming quite wrongly it would be easier than attempting a book. Bates was my guiding light; there appeared to be a simplicity about his work that I sought to emulate. I did get a few short stories accepted by magazines, but they could never be in his league. I certainly never created anything as lovely as ‘The Watercress Girl’. Did any writer before or since? I think I found it in a magazine and read it curled up in my aunt’s spare room one wet school holiday and then went on to rush to the library to find more of his work. Fair Stood the Wind for France was the first book I borrowed and I was totally hooked on his work, but it was always the short stories I really admired the most.

  Lesley Pearse, 2015

  The Bride Comes to Evensford

  It was thirty-one years since she had first come up by the one-track railway to Evensford, where from—only two people knew: a girl of twenty-three, carrying all her belongings in a new straw dress-basket, on a wet April afternoon when flocks of pearl-grey sea-gulls floated in the spring floods by the river and the clear rain shone grey on the unpainted domes of the new gasometers of the station. Then, as it still did, the three-coach train came in backwards, engine behind. It ran up from the junction past the iron furnaces, across the fourteen brick arches of the track over the river, past the wooden signal-box where the key of the branch-line was surrendered and then retrieved by the fireman on the return journey, past the brick-works and the factories, and so under the yellow footbridge to where on the platform the carrier pigeons muttered softly in flat baskets as they waited for the returning train. In thirty-one years it was surprising how little these things had changed. Nor was there much change in Evensford itself. To her it still seemed, except for herself and one other person, a town of the dead.

  She had come to Evensford that day to be head assistant in the drapery shop of Fred Cartwright, Manchester and London warehouse. Cartwright had known her for about two years as Miss Cassell, head of the blouse department of a Macclesfield warehouse in Cannon Street, where he went to buy on the first Monday of every month. The Miss Cassell whom Fred Cartwright knew was a tall girl with light brown hair and delicate, efficient hands. She was not particularly good-looking, but Cartwright liked her. Her neck seemed rather too long, but she wore round it a band of black velvet that gave her a sort of stateliness. Apart from her lovely hands—she could play the piano very well—the most striking thing about her was her eyes. They were very curious, though Cartwright never seemed to notice that. They were a cold clear grey and they would have been as shallow and bright as glass except that they seemed to draw all their life from preoccupation. But it was a preoccupation that was not sad; nor regretful; nor even troubled. It seemed to express a kind of wistful calculation.

  That afternoon there was no one to meet her as she came out of the station in the heavy rain. She thought perhaps Cartwright might have been there, and she was bitterly disappointed. As she walked out of the station and into the High Street, feeling very alone and friendless, she lifted her face to the rain and had her first sight of Evensford. Any moment of the future when Evensford seemed like a town of the dead was half a repetition of that moment. The emptiness of the street made her stop abruptly on the pavement. The rain beat on her face and clothes and hands, but she did not seem to notice it. It was early closing day and the blinds of the shops were down and there was no traffic moving. The slates of the roofs were grey in the rain and the street too was grey except for the patches of horse-manure washed into tobacco-yellow pools by the rain and the rainbow patches of orange-skin oil streaming down the camber of the road and flowing down the brown water of the gutters. As she walked up the street, feeling the handle of the dress-basket grow stickier under the rain, she looked at the shops. Here and there a blind was not drawn and she could see in a window a few boxes of fly-blown confectionery, rolls of cheap lino, a pile of dirty cabbages pressed against the glass, a group of clumsy, fusty dummies wearing last year’s styles. And in the windows where blinds were drawn she could see the reflection of herself, tall, slim-waisted, rather stately, rather aloof, skimming smoothly past. One or two people passed her as she walked farther up the deserted street, but whenever they looked at her she lifted her head and looked at the names on the shop-fronts, her face deliberately upturned. ‘So this,’ she thought, ‘is Evensford. This is it,’ as if she had clearly made up her mind never to be part of it all.

  When she got to the Cartwright shop, a double-windowed place with black strip shutters and a small gallery with a flagpole outside the windows upstairs, she rang the bell of the private door in the side alley-way. But it was not Cartwright who answered her, and again she was disappointed.

  ‘I am Mrs. Cartwright,’ the woman said. ‘Mr. Cartwright’s mother.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I am Miss Cassell.’

  ‘Miss Cassell from London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But we thought it was Saturday.’

  ‘No, it was Thursday. Mr. Cartwright said distinctly Thursday. I’ve got the letter
. It was distinctly Thursday.’

  ‘How ridiculous. How stupid.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, no! Not you, not you. Not you at all. Fred, Mr. Cartwright. Just like him. No sense of reality at all. He just floats from day to day. One day just like another. Anyway, come in out of the rain, Miss Cassell, come in.’

  Mrs. Cartwright was dressed in black with many pins stuck into the bodice of her dress. Her face was angular and thin and white, with brown eyes that were dark underneath. As she stepped back into the house she seemed to dissolve into the darkness of the passage, so that only the pale face and the pale hands and the little silver pins remained distinctly visible. Miss Cassell followed her into the passage and set the wet dress-basket on the floor. Mrs. Cartwright picked it up. It was a gesture of suave annoyance. It made Miss Cassell so blank and impotent with resentment that she could not speak or move. ‘I’ll take it into the kitchen,’ Mrs. Cartwright said. ‘Then I’ll show you upstairs.’

  They went upstairs, neither she nor Mrs. Cartwright speaking. The house had a clean, barren smell, almost a holy smell, of cleanliness. It came down the dark pine stairs like a cool draught and it hung in the bedroom, about the white wooden chest-of-drawers and the small brass bedstead and the ivy-flowered shining lino and over the plush-framed texts on the walls, like a sterilizing invisible cloud.

  ‘This is the room we thought of giving you until you can find lodgings,’ Mrs. Cartwright said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You will excuse me now. I’m doing the books. I always do the books on Thursday afternoons.’

  ‘Yes. Is Mr. Cartwright in?’

  ‘Mr. Cartwright is asleep. He generally sleeps on Thursday afternoons.’

  ‘Could I have my dress-basket? My things?’

  ‘It was very wet,’ Mrs. Cartwright said. ‘The girl will bring it up.’

  Later it took her more than an hour, moving slowly, to unpack and change her things. Her coat and hat and stockings were wet, and she hung them on the brass bedrail to dry until she could take them downstairs. The house was completely silent: as if Cartwright and his mother, and even the maid, had forgotten her. As she dressed she looked down on the wet street below. It was from her window that you reached the little balcony. She stood for a long time watching the rain dripping from the empty flagpole down on to the empty street, and then finally when she was dressed and ready she went downstairs.

  It was a strange reception, but it became stranger still. Downstairs she stood in the dark hall and listened for a sound of life. Somewhere the rain was dribbling with a choking sound from a gutter, and it was the only sound she could hear for some time. The passage was long and narrow, with two doors on either side and a single door at the opposite end from the entrance. She opened one of the side doors and looked in. It was the dining-room and tea was laid at a round mahogany table, but the room was empty. She shut the door and stood rather apprehensively listening again: not nervous, only rather proud and lonely and injured. Then before she could open another door, and while she was still wondering about Cartwright and his mother, she heard a sound. It came from the door at the end of the passage: a soft irregular sound rather like the sound of a gently bouncing ball.

  She opened the door, and it was the shop itself, dark now except for a little light coming in at the unshuttered side-window, and the sound was the sound of a white cat playing along the counter with an unravelled roll of dark red ribbon. She took the cat in her arms and stroked it and walked slowly round the shop with it in her hands. As she looked up at the shelves of materials, the print, the satin and the calico, the hat-boxes, the ribbons, the ranges of drawers all neatly lettered, the flat rolls of fabrics and blankets piled against the walls, she looked something like a cat herself, very quiet, rather deliberate, her eyes full of sleepy concentration. She was to know later that Cartwright’s was the largest shop of its kind in Evensford; but the knowledge did not tell her any more than her walk round the shop on that first wet April afternoon with the white cat in her hands: the cat that was to be almost her only friend in Evensford for quite some years. The shop, fusty and dark, a little old-fashioned but sound and prosperous, satisfied and comforted and even excited one part of herself. The cat thrust its cool wet nose against her long throat and comforted and excited another.

  Coming out of the shop, still carrying the cat in her hands, she was in time to see Mrs. Cartwright emerging from another door. The long angular face looked grim and spare.

  ‘I couldn’t find my way,’ Miss Cassell said. ‘I opened the wrong door and found the cat playing with the ribbons.’

  ‘All right,’ Mrs. Cartwright said. ‘In future this is the drawing-room, that is my office, and this is the dining-room. I daresay tea will be ready now, Miss Cassell,’ she said. ‘Fred!’

  A few moments later, from the drawing-room, came Cartwright himself. He was sleepily smoothing his thin dark hair with his hands. He did not seem to Miss Cassell at all like the Mr. Cartwright she knew: the well-brushed, easy-talking, persuasive Mr. Cartwright who in London gave the feeling of self-reliance and prosperity and took her to lunch at somewhere a little above the usual A B C and rode with her on the tops of buses with his hat on his knees, laughing rather too heartily, and bought her buttonholes of red roses and maidenhair on early spring afternoons. There was no sign of this Mr. Cartwright, who seemed to have been replaced by someone who had suddenly been cruelly awakened and was trying to decide what day and what time of day it was.

  ‘Fred, if you’ve had your sleep out,’ Mrs. Cartwright said, ‘this is Miss Cassell. And why pray did you say Thursday if you meant Saturday?’

  ‘I think—I—’

  ‘Sometimes I think you’ll never grow up,’ Mrs. Cartwright said. ‘Sometimes I think you’ll never grow up.’

  ‘I’m sorry, mother. I’m sorry, Miss—’

  ‘I should think so. I should indeed pray and hope you are sorry. Now say good afternoon to Miss Cassell in a proper manner.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss Cassell,’ Cartwright said.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry I—’

  ‘Let us have tea now,’ his mother said, ‘let us have tea. And pray put the cat down, Miss Cassell, please.’

  At tea the girl was very silent, listening and watching. It was as if Cartwright, a man of twenty-eight or nine, were a small boy. ‘Your tea is already sugared, Fred. Don’t be so absent-minded. Pay attention!’ It was as if he had never made, and had no means of making, an independent personal decision about his life. ‘Some more bread and butter, Fred! Take another slice. Go on! You don’t eat enough!’

  It surprised her very much that Cartwright should be so meek. In London he had sometimes given her the impression of a man of rosy enterprise. There was a dream or two of which he had sometimes given her a glimpse as they rode home to her lodgings on the bus-top. They were dreams of the shop. From these dreams she already knew something of what the turnover of the shop was, how it had decreased or stood still, how Cartwright planned to increase it. She was attracted by these figures, by the possibility of the dreams, as another woman might have been attracted by the dream of marriage. They were in fact her dream of marriage: she would marry Cartwright and in marrying Cartwright she would marry the shop. In London she saw her life foreshortened by the dark walls of Cannon Street. In Evensford it opened out: bright, infinite, prosperous. In Evensford anything could happen. She saw Evensford, as represented by the shop, the parochial angularity of Mrs. Cartwright and the empty rainy street, as a little town populated only by little people, and she knew that the littleness of it could not frustrate her.

  ‘When do you plan to start with us, Miss Cassell?’

  ‘To-morrow?—when you like,’ she said.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Mrs. Cartwright said. ‘We have been grossly understaffed since Miss Garvin married that man.’

  ‘To-morrow then?’

  ‘Friday is very busy. They are paid h
ere on Fridays. We shall be glad of all the help we can. By the by, there are four other girls besides yourself. Miss Johnson, Miss Clark, Miss Dickins and Miss Hustwaite. We open at half-past eight and close at seven on ordinary nights. Eight on Fridays and nine on Saturdays. Are you chapel?

  ‘I—’

  ‘We are chapel ourselves,’ Mrs. Cartwright said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I try to attend once every Sunday. Fred goes twice, sometimes three times. He is in the choir. We have a good many musical Sundays. It is rather a musical town.’

  ‘Miss Cassell plays the piano,’ Cartwright said.

  ‘Oh, yes? Oh! indeed?’ Mrs. Cartwright said. ‘That will be useful.’

  ‘Very,’ Cartwright said. ‘Very. I—’

  ‘Don’t sprawl on the table, Fred! You’ve got jam on the sleeve of your coat as it is. Pray put yourself in Miss Cassell’s place for a moment. I wonder what she thinks of you.’

  Cartwright sat silent, meek and overcome, rubbing the sleeve of his jacket with his hand and then licking his fingers.

  ‘And don’t lick your fingers! Go upstairs and wash! And before you go to choir-practice put on a clean collar. It looks quite disgraceful.’

  Miss Cassell sat silent. She sat silent for most of the rest of that evening, she on one side of the fire in the sitting-room, Mrs. Cartwright on the other. Mrs. Cartwright, too, scarcely spoke. The rain fell heavily all evening and Miss Cassell could hear it running down the roof pipes in the long silences.

  About nine o’clock she said good night and went to bed. Going up stairs she felt something run past her legs. It was the white cat. She caught it in her hands and held it against her blouse, in the crook of her arm, and took it into her bedroom. She undressed by the light of the street lamp that shone through the window, and while she undressed herself the cat lay curled on the bed. She got into bed and the cat lay with her, quiet against her shoulder. She lay awake for a long time, watching the rain, lemon and silver from the street-light, slowly pouring down the window panes beyond the curtains, listening to the sound of feet splashing past on the wet pavement below and to the sound of the rain, and thinking of Cartwright, of the man as she knew him and of the man she had seen that day. Thinking, she lay perfectly still, like the cat. Her eyes were made more grey and cool by the wet light falling on them from outside, the preoccupation of them not sad or regretful because she had come to the empty streets of a little town like Evensford, but simply preoccupied, detached and unemotional as the eyes of the cat lying at her side.