The Bride Comes to Evensford

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Well, I must go,’ he said.

  ‘Must you?’

  ‘I think so. I really think so.’

  He got up from the sofa, stretching his arms. She felt awkward and shy. She held her hands together and then dropped them by her sides.

  ‘You’ll come in again?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Do you play the piano?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You could come to tea.’

  ‘Some day,’ he said.

  She did not know what else to say. She walked with him to the door. She opened it and felt the night air cool on her face. The street outside was very quiet. She longed suddenly to walk down the dark streets, without her hat, to the other end of the town, and walk back alone and think of what had happened. She waited for a moment or two in silence, wanting him to speak. She wanted him to say how nice it had been, to be polite, to say thank you. He stood with his hands in his pockets, the book pressed under his arm. She could not see his face very clearly, but she felt she knew just how calm and careless it was. She hated it and was hurt by it at the same time.

  ‘Good night,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll come in again. I do hope so.’

  ‘’Night,’ he said.

  He walked down the alley-way and into the street before she had time to speak again.

  She shut the door and latched it and slowly walked upstairs. She sat down on the bed. Her hands were trembling. The light of the shop had been automatically switched out and the room was dark. She felt her loneliness, dispelled momentarily by the foolish behaviour downstairs, come back again. She lifted her trembling hands to her face, to comfort herself, and smelled the stale sweet odour of oranges on them still.

  ‘Why do I live in Warren Street?’ he said. ‘I thought you’d want to know that.’

  He lay stretched on the sofa, his feet up. He had come to tea at last, on a Sunday. It was past the end of the summer.

  ‘Why do you?’ she said. ‘You—living in that street.’

  ‘You own it,’ he said.

  ‘But that’s different.’

  ‘Different? How is it different? You own it and I live in it—for the same reason.’ He looked at her steadily, nonchalantly. ‘Suppose I want money too? The cheaper I live the more I save.’

  ‘Money? What good will money do you?’

  ‘You ought to know,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but you’re young,’ she said. ‘You’ve got life. You don’t need money.’

  He looked at her, not smiling now.

  ‘We lived in Birmingham,’ he said. ‘My father was a brass-foundry hand. There were eight of us. Brought up on thirty bob a week. Don’t talk to me about not wanting money. I know what it is to want it. To want it terribly and not to get it. I know.’

  ‘It isn’t everything.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but it’ll do as a substitute until I find something better.’

  ‘That’s awful talk,’ she said.

  ‘Awful?’

  ‘To hear you say that—it’s awful. You’re young. Don’t you ever think of anything else—friends, home, career, that sort of thing?’

  ‘They’ll come,’ he said.

  He reached out and took a cake from the table standing between the settee and her chair. He bit into it and took a mouthful of tea, washing it down. He wiped one hand across his mouth. She hated suddenly the nonchalant ill-manners, the cocksureness, the bright black eyes and their flash of superciliousness.

  ‘I know what I want,’ he said.

  She sat staring at him. She felt she despised what he said and yet she was fascinated by the voice which said it. As she sat watching him she found herself gradually becoming oblivious of the words he used.

  All the time she was troubled by his neck-tie. The knot was loose and did not reach the collar of his shirt. She felt an extraordinary desire to knot it tightly. It needed a little invisible pin underneath it in order to keep it tight. It needed to be tied in just such a way that it would never loosen. She sat for a long time staring at it, knotting and re-knotting it in her imagination, her hand fretful and her ears oblivious to what he was saying, until she could bear it no longer.

  She suddenly got up and went over to him and knelt by the sofa. She tried to make fun of what she was doing but her hands were trembling.

  ‘Come here, do,’ she said. ‘Your tie is an awful sight.’

  ‘Oh, my tie’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘It isn’t all right. It’s awful. Just look at it. It’s awful.’

  He fingered it irritably.

  ‘Don’t touch it!’ she said.

  ‘Then why must you touch it?’

  ‘Because it looks awful. It’s loose and you look a disgrace. Hold up your head.’

  ‘God!’ he said.

  She began to tie the neck-tie softly and slowly, with a kind of finicky tenderness. He held his head away from her, irritated. She tied the neck-tie once and then undid it and began to tie it again.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘hold still. Please hold still. Just for a moment. Please.’

  Her hands were close under his throat; the fabric of the tie was smooth and soft. She found herself enjoying a sensation of immense satisfaction. It seemed to her that she had discovered for the first time the pleasure of doing a little thing for another person.

  ‘Must you do this?’ he said.

  She went on knotting the tie, kneeling down before him. To do something for him, however small and however foolish, seemed suddenly an important thing. She leaned back and looked at the tie with warmth and pleasure in her eyes.

  ‘Satisfied?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, please,’ she said. ‘Just one more second. Then it’ll be perfect—’ She stretched out her hands.

  ‘Oh, God!’ he said.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please. Just one moment. It’s almost right. Be a good boy.’

  ‘Boy!’ he said. ‘Boy! Is that all you think of me? Perhaps you’d like to brush my hair and clean my nails too?’

  ‘I’d do even that,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you women!’ he said. ‘You women.’

  ‘All of us?’ she said. ‘Or only me?’

  She leaned back on her knees, smiling, her eyes alight, teasing him.

  ‘Oh! I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I—’

  ‘Now you’re offended,’ she said.

  He got up suddenly from the sofa, leaving her there on her knees. He walked about the room, pulling his tie.

  ‘Please don’t be offended,’ she said.

  ‘Who’s offended? Who’s offended?’

  ‘Don’t be angry.’

  ‘Who said I was angry?’

  ‘Don’t be angry any more.’

  ‘I’m not angry!’ he shouted. ‘I just don’t want to be fussed by you. I don’t want to be touched by you. I’ve got something better to do than be fooled about by someone old enough to be my mother!’

  She did not speak and she did not raise herself up from her knees. She sat staring at him as if she did not believe what he had said. Her mind felt wooden with pain and she was only half aware of him going out of the room, furiously banging the door of the hall, and of the abrupt and painful silence of the house.

  That night she wrote a letter to him and went out, very late, to post it at the letter-box on the corner. It was raining and cold and the summer now seemed finally over. ‘Please forgive me,’ she said. ‘Perhaps what I did seemed very foolish to you. It was not meant like that. Send me a word to say you don’t think too badly of me. Just a word. It isn’t much. It’s a little thing.’

  Autumn came on with cold gales of rain that brought down and flattened wetly on the pavement the brown leaves of the street trees. She waited for an answer to the letter, but there was no answer.

  She continued to go down to the library, borrowing books she never read, two and three and sometimes four evenings a week, all that autumn and on into the winter
. The young man from Warren Street was never at the library; she did not meet him in the street or when she collected the rent. She went to the library with the almost automatic hope that one evening she would grasp the handle of the glass swing doors on one side, and he the other, and that each of them would try to pull the doors open and there would be a moment of deadlock before they smiled at each other through the glass. After that he would come to tea again. She would fuss round him and pour his tea and give him a serviette to wipe his fingers. It would be all right and she would be happy. She would be happy because for the first time for thirty years she was giving something to someone and not taking it away. Her eyes, as she stared at the books in the dim light of the library, had lost their look of calculation. When she thought of him she was struck by the incalculable force of little things: the pips of an orange, a neck-tie, a serviette. She thought of Cartwright, the elder Mrs. Cartwright, the faded assistants of the shop, all dead now, from whom she had never had a moment of life that she herself had not calculated. None of them had left a fragrance of orange on her hands. None of them had ever filled more than a fraction of her life. She had been able to calculate their lives in relation to her own. She had almost been able to calculate the way they would die. When she lay awake at night and listened to the sounds of the trees and the feet in the street below, she was listening, in reality, to her own thoughts—always how she would acquire something, change it, progress a little further, calculate a little more. Now when she heard the last of the autumn leaves flapping wetly on the branches it was as if they fell damply and with monotony into the emptiness of her own mind. She lay awake all the nights of that autumn and listened to the leaves with an empty agony, and sometimes because she could not sleep she got up and stood by the window and pressed her head against the cold glass and listened to the rain streaming wildly down the cold face of the window as if it were her own infinite tears falling for the things she could not describe.

  What she wanted now was very simple. To be given something, and not to take it, to be given not even affection but only the means of expressing it. She wanted something at last that she could not buy: the privacy, the privilege, the affection of another life. Was it, she thought, very much to ask?

  On the evenings when she did not go to the library she sat in the room behind the shop. She would sit staring at the fire and, staring, forget to make it up. She would get up and wander nervously about the room, stopping to touch the notes of the piano. Her shoulders felt cold. She did not want to eat. She remembered the time when she had not wanted to come close to Evensford and when she knew that no one in Evensford would ever trouble her.

  Finally, because she could bear it no longer, she wrote another letter. ‘I would like to try and explain a little what I feel. I hoped I would see you again. I know you were angry that day but there is no need to be angry. It isn’t easy to explain what I feel. You must know that people grow fond of other people for the most unlikely reasons, and in a way that is the trouble. If I knew why I was fond of you it would be very simple. But I don’t know. I just know that when I first saw you I felt differently from the way I’d ever felt about anyone before. I just don’t know any other reason. I just want to sit with you and do things for you and talk to you and know that you like me. It isn’t easy to explain. Perhaps it seems rather silly at my age to be saying this. Perhaps I ought not to say it. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I am writing this because it is so much easier to write it than to say it, and it does seem sometimes as if I shall never see you again. You are very young, but can you see what I mean? I know that one often can’t be bothered to understand when one is young. But if you can understand, will you come to see me—please, some time? Please, will you? You needn’t stay long, and you needn’t ever come again. But if you come I shall know that you understand.’

  She wrote the letter at the close of the year. She had spent Christmas alone and the weather was very cold. Early snow turned to black slush in the streets and then froze again into crusts of black ice. The wind blew bitterly up the valley from the sea, and there were not many people at the library in the evenings. Mrs. Cartwright felt the cold and wrapped a big brown woollen scarf over her head and tied it under her chin. It was colder than the days when the elder Mrs. Cartwright had died. She wore an old fur coat because it was lined and warm. In the darkness it did not matter much.

  She waited a fortnight but there was no answer. She went to the library every evening without seeing the man from Warren Street. She walked up and down between the shelves in a state of great distress. She took out books from the shelves and put them back again. The big red notices on the walls seemed to stare painfully down at her. The door of the library clicked open and closed with an awful hollow sound like a trap.

  She went home alone every evening, wrapped against the cold in the big brown scarf and the old fur coat and went straight to bed. She knew now that there would be no answer. She began to feel now as she had done when the cat had died. She felt all the isolation of the years she had spent in Evensford narrow into a single prolonged experience of loneliness. Formerly she had not wanted the cat to suffer. Now she did not want to suffer herself.

  When after three weeks there was no answer and it struck her finally that he might have gone away altogether, she got up out of bed one night and walked about the room in her bare feet, vaguely raising her hands to her face and letting them fall again. She felt all the emotions she had felt when the cat had died: the painful, difficult, blinding tears and the helplessness. She lay down on the bed and clutched the wooden bars of the bedstead with her hands and felt everything simplify into a moment of pure agony: the agony of knowing at last what was wrong and of knowing that nothing would put it right. To want someone and not be wanted: that was wrong. That was the explanation. ‘Oh, God!’ she said, ‘Oh, God!’ She muttered the words helplessly and vehemently, as she had done when the cat had died: the same words, out of the same despair. ‘Oh, God, don’t let me live and suffer!’

  She went on the following day to collect the rent at Warren Street. Snow lay on the asphalt backyards in crusty frozen heaps, and ice on the water-barrels by the back doors. She tried to be calm as she walked from house to house. The wind was cold and beat her hair into her face untidily. The little backyards were treacherous and grim and bare and the cabbages were frozen in the gardens. She walked on the frozen snow with small agitated steps, exactly as if she were frightened and trembling.

  What she wanted had become more simple than ever. She wanted him simply to be there, in the house, reading at the table in the living-room with his sharp white elbows on the table and his cool eyes lifted to recognize her. She wanted him simply to exist. It was a very simple unextravagant thing to want and it seemed strange that she had lived in Evensford for more than thirty years before it should happen.

  When she saw the table in the living-room empty except for the rent-book and the money lying on it she made a great effort to be calmer than ever.

  ‘Has Mr.—, has your lodger gone?’ she said. Her voice sounded stupid and false. She tried again. ‘I mean—I—’

  ‘Mr. West?’

  ‘Mr. West,’ she said.

  ‘He’s off to Birmingham again.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Been going there twice and three times a week this fortnight.’

  ‘Working?’

  ‘Working or playing, I don’t know what you’d call it. Amounts to the same thing. Bringing his girl down and going to be married.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘In the John Street Baptist next Thursday. They’re coming back on the three train to-morrow.’

  ‘That’s very nice,’ she said.

  She walked out of the house and down the backyards, over the frozen snow.

  The afternoon train came in to Evensford at 3.13; for over thirty years it had come in at about the same time. Walking down to the station on the following day, wearing the brown scarf folded high under her hat and the old fur coat t
hat was too long by several inches for the style of that year, she remembered how she had first come on the train herself, a girl with a yellow dress-basket, and how much she had wanted Cartwright to meet her. No one had spoken to her that day as she walked up the High Street between the closed shops, in the rain, and now no one spoke to her to-day as she walked to the station in the snow. Fresh snow had fallen in the night and lay to a depth of three or four inches, light and pure, on the roofs. It was churned to dark ribbons of ice-slush in the High Street and padded black by feet on the pavement: but in the side streets and in the gardens of the houses and finally on the railway track itself it lay clean and untouched and pure too. The reflection of it was cast up into her face as she walked, her head bent slightly, so that her face looked dead white and frozen itself, her eyes like frosted glass. She had always been frightened of falling on the snow and she had put on a pair of big black goloshes that were a little too large for her. They made a slopping sound as she walked in the snow.

  At the station no one but herself was waiting for the train. She did not feel very much as she stood there. It was cold to her feet and for a time she walked about and then finally she walked up and stood on the footbridge. Looking down the tracks she felt exactly the cold emptiness she saw there. The thin steel lines curved away on the pure white ground of snow and seemed to meet on the bare horizon. Her life seemed destined somehow to be bound up with the idiotic little train. When she had first come in by it she had felt proud and aloof and very sure: very sure of herself and Cartwright, very sure she was the one and only Miss Cassell, very sure of what she wanted. Now she did not feel sure of herself, and what she wanted was so simple that it was quite ridiculous. It was like expecting the two railway lines actually to converge and become one at a given point; whereas you knew that they never could, never did and never would come the slightest fraction nearer to each other. Up the track the train would be coming in backwards; in the train were two people. She did not know one of them much; she did not know the other one at all. It was very ridiculous that it should make her feel as if her heart were broken up.