by H. E. Bates
In three days she had bought the shop. In three or four weeks the builders were pulling it down. She liked to stand outside and watch the raw hole growing wider in the street. She liked the idea of the clean autumn wind driving through the gap. Above all she liked the clean feeling in herself. She felt renewed and happier. Even the cat did not seem to matter. She thought more and more of herself now.
In a year or two the shop as the Cartwrights had known it was no longer there. The front was lengthened; wide windows opened to a circular arcade, where people could shelter from the rain. Upstairs there was a café. Every two months the young Mrs. Cartwright, already looking not quite so young, presented Evensford with a mannequin parade, and served tea and coffee and cakes without charge. She illuminated the windows at night, after the shop was shut. She kept the light burning until most of Evensford had gone to bed. Inside, the old system of dusty boxes on shelves had gone; and the pine staircase; and the clanking clumsy overhead railway for the cash. Gradually she had torn out the dark, dusty, ugly insides of the place. What now remained was select, cool, rather aloof: the expression of herself. The paint was bright and hard. You walked on soft carpets that were without friendliness.
During this time and for the next ten years she worked very hard. She liked work. She liked acquiring something, changing it, effacing the recollection of what it had been. It became almost a mania with her to buy property everywhere in Evensford. Whenever there was a property sale she was there; she sat at the back of the auction room, too conspicuous for Evensford, too well dressed, very alone, very aloof, not moving except for a flicker of her pencil as she raised the bidding. She bought mostly shops; after that rows of working-class houses in the poorer parts of the town. She bought and then waited. She waited and then, on some trivial excuse, put up the rent. She liked that too. She liked the feeling of power: the deliberate, cool, unpleasant power of imposing herself on a town that did not want her.
She had been in Evensford more than thirty years when she bought a row of houses in Warren Street, a section of the town between the railway and the river. They were the sort of houses that made up more than half the streets of Evensford: flat, grim red little boxes fronting straight on to the street. The long flat frontage was split open by recurrent entries. The backyards, filled with dirty hen-runs and water-butts and clothes lines, were out of the sun.
She began to go every Friday to Warren Street, as she went to all the other houses she owned in Evensford, to collect the rent. In most houses the rent-money lay ready for her on the rent-book on the kitchen table. She knocked on the back door, went in, and took up the rent. She counted the money, signed the book and came out again. Sometimes people did not speak to her. She hated this feeling of hostility as she hated the overcrowded back-kitchens, with the washing drying under the ceiling and the men washing at the sinks and the mangle in the corner and the dirty roller towel on the door. She hated the stale smell of boiled onions and boot polish and drying napkins. She hated every part of the mean, fusty, overcrowded life.
In Warren Street the people were new to her. She did not know them. Yet she might have known them for ever. They were a replica of all the people in all the streets she had ever known in the town.
It was not until the third rent day that she found any difference in Warren Street. She went into the kitchen of Number 8 and at the table a man of about thirty was reading a book.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘I’ve called for the rent,’ she said.
‘I don’t know anything about it,’ he said, ‘I only lodge here.’
‘Wasn’t it left? It’s always left.’
‘If it had been left,’ he said, ‘it would have been here.’
The man had black, direct, rather mocking eyes. He held his head in his hands as he read. His black hair fell in his hands. The book was on the table. He moved his head stiffly upwards as he spoke.
‘You read a lot?’ she said.
‘Quite a lot.’
As if to say, ‘What has it to do with you?’
‘I’m afraid you’ll find no bookshop in Evensford.’
‘I found the library.’
‘That place?’
‘That place,’ he said.
‘The books have all been there for years. Filthy. Out of date. I thought nobody ever went there now. It should have been pulled down long ago.’
‘Like some of the houses,’ he said.
‘What did you say?’
‘You don’t like Evensford, do you?’ he said.
‘How do you know?’
He looked at her, black eyes mocking but calm, sharp elbows jabbed against the table, chin forward.
‘I can tell what people like and what they don’t like.’
‘You can?’ she said. ‘Well, do you like Evensford?’
‘It’s as good as any other working town.’
‘Which means?’
‘Which means the working people live where they work and lump the place if they don’t like it.’
‘But you? You can read anywhere?’
‘I can read anywhere.’
‘You read quickly,’ she said, ‘don’t you?’
‘I read pretty quickly.’
‘You’ll soon exhaust the poor little library at Evensford if you go too often.’
‘Think so?’ he said. ‘I hear there’s five thousand books. Three times a week and I’ll still be a long time.’
‘You will.’
‘I will,’ he said.
He looked at her steadily for a moment as if to say ‘Have you finished with me?’ and then, after a moment or two, she left. She left without asking any more about the rent and he did not get up from the table. Going down the backyards of the houses she found herself trembling. No one had ever talked to her like that.
To be interested in someone, to talk to someone, to feel her interest in life filtering out beyond the shop: this was new. It produced in her a feeling of rather troubled excitement.
She went to the library on the following evening and on the evening after that, but the man from Warren Street was not there. The library was in the old Church Rooms, where huge red cards marked ‘Silence’ were placed on pale grim walls above the dark shelves of books, and the quarter strokes of the church clock, very near outside, beat down into the silence regularly. It was summer and the evenings were light outside, but inside, between the dark shelves, a gas lamp burned above the books. At the entrance the librarian sat behind a pigeon-hole. The door into the shelves was opened by a foot spring, and until she worked it you could not get in or out. When she worked it the door slammed shut behind you with a loud explosion in the silence, and it was as if you were in a trap.
Mrs. Cartwright came away from the library, and went again, as if she were trapped: as if suddenly, completely without warning and for the first time, she were trapped by something outside herself and not of her own responsibility. At the shop she went to bed with the books she had borrowed. She did not even look at them. She lay and watched the light of the street lamp on the ceiling and thought of the annoyance, the calm and the sharp white elbows of the man in Warren Street. ‘I can tell what people like and what they don’t like,’ she remembered.
Did he also know what people were thinking and feeling? What she was thinking and feeling? It occurred to her suddenly that he might have stayed away from the library because he really did know what she thought and felt and might do. ‘I won’t go again,’ she thought.
The following evening she stayed in the room behind the shop until after nine o’clock. The library closed at ten. She felt very restless. She tried for a time to play the piano. Finally she went out of the back door and down to the library as the church clock was striking half-past nine.
She did not know what to say to the man from Warren Street, who stood in the library under the gaslight, turning over the books. She felt more than ever as if she were trapped. Her eyes looked filmy and uncertain and had lost their look of calculation.
‘I come.’
‘Often?’
‘When I want something new.’
He put the book back on the shelf.
‘What sort of things do you read?’ she said.
‘Detective stuff.’
‘Only that?’
‘Mostly that. Keeps me excited.’
‘Life isn’t very exciting for a stranger here, is it?’
‘I told you it’s like any working-class town,’ he said. ‘Pubs, pictures, chapels, shops. You ought to know. You’ve lived here. You’re part of it.’
‘Part of it? Me? You can live here and be a stranger.’
He picked up another book, glanced at her and turned over the pages.
‘Why don’t you go somewhere else if you don’t like it?’ he said.
‘Somewhere else?’
‘You’ve got money. You’ve got nothing to keep you. People let themselves get too complicated. All you’ve got to do is get up some morning and say “I’ve finished with this. I’ll start afresh. Somewhere else.”’
‘Where?’
‘Anywhere you like better.’
‘Alone?’
He did not answer.
‘Are you happy?’ she said. ‘I mean here? In a town like this?’
‘I’m all right. I’m happy,’ he said. ‘I don’t want much. I’ve got my job. I’m all right.’
She felt she had nothing to say. It was almost ten o’clock. They talked in very low voices. It was twilight beyond the windows and the librarian was packing up her papers.
‘Haven’t you got a book?’ he said.
‘Not yet. If you wait I’ll get one.’
‘It’s closing time,’ he said. ‘Hadn’t you better get one quickly?’
She took a book from the shelves, hurriedly, at random, not knowing what it was. ‘We can go now,’ she said.
‘We?’ He glanced at her, sideways, mocking a little.
‘You could go my way. It’s partly on your way.’
‘Partly?’ He had a way of smiling and then closing his eyes. The dark lids, pulled too smoothly down, seemed instantaneously to curl upward the too smooth full lips. When he opened his eyes again the smile remained for a moment or two fixed, softly ironical. It seemed to magnetize her.
They walked down the street in the darkening air: the hideous little street, with the flat brick houses, the boot-shop next to the library, the slaughter-house opposite, the tea-shop with the fly-blown cakes in the window, the youths sprawling against the pillar-box on the corner. She did not notice any of it now. Before, coming alone from the library, she had always been conscious of the young men at the corner, looking her up and down. She had caught the faint odour of the slaughter-house, the smell of the stale cooking-fat from the little café. She had held her breath as she passed the people of Evensford coming up the High Street, late from the cinemas, fish-and-chips in their hands. She had felt her breath sour into a lump of sickness in her throat. She walked down the street now as if none of it existed.
In her own shop, in the new bright windows, the light was burning. The dresses on the models were like splashes of flower-light in the dark street. She stopped by the window. She gazed for a moment at the sharp clean light cast across the dusty summer pavement, the dirty gutter, the oil-stained roadway that shone like polished iron. She felt for a moment proud of it: her light, the light of an achievement. It looked smart and positive and fashionable. It had taken her many years to achieve that white clean glare across the pavement. She wished that he would notice it too.
He stood looking down the street, hatless, his black eyes rather sleepy and indifferent, as if he did not know she was there.
‘Wouldn’t you come in?’ she said.
‘It’s late for you.’
‘Oh, no! Oh, no! It really isn’t.’
‘Well—’
She found her latch-key and unlocked the door in the alley-way. She switched on the light in the passage inside and the old heavy smell of drapery was thick in the closed house. She switched on the light in the drawing-room and called him to come in. She was struck suddenly by the awful emptiness of the place. How long had it been since she had asked anyone into that room? How did she come to live here alone? She felt the loneliness of years, broken suddenly, stream down through her body in a cold shiver of excitement. Her hands were damp as she wiped them across her face.
‘I don’t know if you’d like something to eat?’ she said.
‘Oh, no!’
‘A drink or something? An orange? Have something, please.’
‘Oh, well, an orange,’ he said.
‘They’re nice,’ she said. ‘I got them to-day. They’re very nice. Take a good one.’
He sat on the sofa and took an orange from the dish on the table at his side. He rolled it in his hands, using the palms of his hands. His fingers were long and white and straight. They stood away from the orange, almost insolent. There was something about their sleekness which kept her fascinated. It was very foolish, but it was as if he were going to do a conjuring trick and suddenly the orange would disappear and he would look up at her, with the lids of his eyes smoothly drawn down and the smooth ironical smile on his face, and say, ‘You see?—simple. Very simple. Quite simple. You see?’ All the time she sat fascinated and yet, in a way, hating it. All the time she felt the loneliness of years, dispelled, running through her body in excitement.
‘What do you do in Evensford?’ she said. ‘What does a person like you come to be doing here?’
‘I’m a teacher.’ The smile spread slowly over his face. ‘Train the child in the way it should go.’
He began to peel the orange. She saw the fine spray of juice squirt up from the pressure of his thumb on the skin.
‘You’ll ruin your suit,’ she said.
‘Suit?’ he said. ‘What with?—oh, that’s nothing.’
‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you a serviette. It’s all over you.’
She went out of the room and brought back the serviette. She unrolled it and spread it on his knees. It seemed suddenly to her like an act of familiarity. It pleased her to do it, to give part of herself in service. He smiled a little, mocking, and let the golden sections of peel fall on the white cloth. Then he broke the orange in his fingers, and then broke the parts again. Then he began to eat it, taking the pips out of his mouth and holding them in his hands. He held them and looked at her, sideways, eyes half closed.
‘There’s a look on your face like the look of a small boy,’ she said.
‘Doing what?’
‘Waiting.’
They looked at each other for a second or two, not speaking.
‘Waiting for what?’ he said at last.
‘For the chance of doing something to somebody who isn’t looking.’
He smiled ironically again.
‘The pips?’
‘The pips,’ Mrs. Cartwright said.
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really,’ she said. ‘As if you didn’t know.’
She saw him rubbing the oily-wet orange pips in the tips of his slender fingers, and the gleam of juice on his hands. There was a look in his eyes of tender mockery as he looked straight at her.
‘Dare me to,’ he said.
‘Just like a small boy?’
‘Dare me to.’
‘You daren’t do it as a man. You want me to dare you to do it as a small boy. And then you dare do it, daren’t you?’
‘Just dare me,’ he said.
‘How old are you, playing with orange pips?’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘Just a small boy.’
‘Dare me,’ he said very softly. He rolled the orange pips slowly in the tips of his fingers. ‘Dare me.’
They sat looking at each other for perhaps another thirty seconds, half smiling, waiting for each other.
‘What will you do if I dare you?’ she said.
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p; ‘Dare me.’
‘All right,’ she said, as if she had suddenly become young and careless and stupid and utterly irresponsible for the first time in her life. ‘Since you want me to.’ She began to laugh now as she spoke. ‘I dare you to.’
He squirted the first pip at her, from between his fingertips, almost before she had finished speaking. She shrieked a little as it flew past her face. He shot another, and she picked up a cushion and held it in front of her face, and then she heard other pips bouncing on the cushion. ‘I can see a lot of you besides your face,’ he said.
‘Oh, no, please, not my dress!’
She felt the pips begin to strike her body. They struck her softly on the breast and on the bare arms, and they fell in her lap. She tried to pick them up so that the juice should not stain her dress, but the cushion fell as she did so and he began to shoot the pips again at her face. She was laughing and panting and she felt quite foolish and for some reason partly annoyed and partly happy. One of the pips struck her on the face and she begged him to stop. ‘You dared me to,’ he said. ‘You know you dared me.’
‘Yes, I know, but stop now.’
‘You don’t want me to stop,’ he said. ‘You like it. You’re laughing.’
‘Yes, I know, but stop.’
‘You’re laughing so much there are tears in your eyes.’
She lay back in her chair, looking at him through the soft film of tears brought on by laughter, her mouth open and her breath panting quietly through it, her hands loosely grasping the cushion to her body.
‘Oh, dear! Oh, God!’ she said. ‘I haven’t laughed so much for years.’
He looked at her casually, smiling silently, eyes half closed.
‘Oh! it was really awfully silly,’ she said.
She smoothed her dress awkwardly with her hands. He did not move. She patted her hands against her hair.
‘Awfully silly,’ she said. ‘Awfully silly.’
‘You dared me,’ he said.
‘Yes, I know. But you looked so like a small boy.’
She looked up at him, tenderly, but the expression on his face did not change. She suddenly felt embarrassed before the casual, ironical, almost pitying glance. The last of the orange had gone, and still looking at her he took his handerkchief and wiped his lips, then his fingers and then his lips again. Her embarrassment did not bring them any closer together. The expression on his face remained exactly the same: as if he were faintly amused by the sight of a woman of fifty panting with shyness, excitement and laughter.