In the Time of Greenbloom

by Gabriel Fielding

  In the diffused light from the side-lamps her mouth tightened and her eyes grew large. “Oh dear! I promised it would catch the last post, and now if it’s ten to seven I can’t possibly do it.”

  The man moved across the seat and stretched his hand out through the open window, he lifted her chin and when he spoke his voice was thick with sympathy. “The end of the World,” he said. “Darkness and Death! Give it me. I’ll pop it in the box for you.”

  “Oh thank you! You’re sure you don’t mind?”

  “Not me, just tell me where the Post Office is, give me my directions, and Bob’s your Uncle.”

  She could hardly speak fast enough.

  “Well it’s past the grocer’s shop on the right; you have to turn down towards the Church and then cross over the bridge and the Post Office is down a little side street; it doesn’t look like a Post Office, it’s—”

  “Here hang on! Give us a chance. I’m not a geography teacher and time’s getting short.”

  “Oh dear, do you know where it is, John? I’m sure you could explain better than me, I get so excited, I hate catching trains and posts—” In her agitation she was dancing about in the road.

  “I’ll find it,” said John. “Let me go with him and then I could run back.”

  “No!” she said with decision. “You’re such an old muddler, you’ll go into a dream and forget it or drop it and Mummy’ll never trust me again. I’d better go, and you go in and get on with the supper and tell Annie.”

  He drew in his breath to reply but found that he was unable to speak the words.

  Beside him, with a greater reality and solidity even than the shape of the car, he saw and sensed that the man was waiting for them to finish. He was waiting dreadfully, with a dry patience for whatever they were to decide; he was like people he had seen at race meetings, completely still and finally committed to such an extent that they no longer cared in the very least about the result. Something of his deliberation affected John himself so that although his alarm was supreme, he was momentarily immobilised and watched Victoria open the door and jump into the front seat with all the remoteness of someone performing this action behind a plate-glass window. Then, when it was too late, words and action returned to him and he sprang forward:

  “But Victoria! Victoria!” She blew him a kiss and must have seen some enormous comedy of dismay in his face, for she laughed before she spoke.

  “Don’t gloom!” she said, “I’ll be all right, I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  Through the window he clutched at the letter in her wet hands.

  “Please,” he said. “Please Victoria! let me.”

  The car started to move forward.

  “Now then,” said the man. “Watch yourself laddie, she’s made up our minds for us and I told you we were neither of us a match for her—”

  John jumped back as the car gathered speed. He saw the dark lips of Victoria’s smile through the window, the movement of her hair in the wind, even the last white flutter of her hand as she was carried past him; then he was alone on the wet road. He looked up at the uniform blackness of the raining sky, at the almost indistinguishable oak trees, and picking up the haversack and the mackintosh he walked slowly down the drive to the farm.…

  Making his way through the yard he entered the kitchen and found it in darkness. Tim, the farm cat, was sitting on the rag mat in front of the open range and in the firelight he could see that over the dresser the hands of the pendulum clock stood at five minutes past seven. Annie must have given them up and gone to keep her date, he decided. He switched on the light and looked round to see if she had left any messages for them about the vegetables or the oven; but there was no scrap of paper to be seen, so, leaving the haversack on the kitchen-table, he walked out through the wide hall and into the dining-room. The table was set for four and on the sideboard was a cold ham freshly crumbed and the half carcase of the roast chicken they had eaten for lunch. With memories of the Vicarage fresh in his mind, he looked round for a bowl of salad and a tureen of baked potatoes; but there were no signs of them, so he returned to the kitchen and opened the oven door. The potatoes were sitting there just as he had visualised them and in the larder he found the salad in its glass bowl.

  There was nothing for him to do then, except wait. Victoria would be upset of course; she hated breaking promises and would be hurt by the silent reproach of the cosilyprepared meal; but she would soon get over it. She would be so glad to be back in the farm-house after the ordeal of the darkness and the rain that she would not allow the prospect of Annie’s teasing or Enid’s unspoken displeasure to weigh heavily against the immediate delight of her return. She should not be long either; that fellow was very obliging, he would almost certainly insist on running her back to the farm. In ten minutes at the very most she would be—

  His thought shifted, in fact he was too obliging; the way he had fastened her mackintosh and patted her chest, the fuss he had made about the letter, his irritating interest and sympathy about—and then offering to come in and help with the potatoes like that. Couldn’t he see that they hadn’t wanted him? That they were longing to be rid of him? It should have been obvious from the moment he first appeared. Or did he perhaps think that Victoria liked him, that she had been bored by being with him alone, with himself, with John Blaydon? She had been eager enough to go off with him in the car, her anxiety about the letter might just have been an excuse. Girls always liked someone older, he knew that; his brothers, Michael and Geoffrey, were always drumming it into him. For all he knew, she might really have invited the man to join them at the cave; he hadn’t been there to hear her conversation by the gate, and her coldness when the man had actually arrived might have been due less to distaste than to guiltiness at not having told John the truth. If only he were older himself!

  Taking off his mackintosh he hung it in the hall and went into the sitting-room. A log-fire smouldered in the hearth and the room was faintly scented with the smoke from it. He lay down on the hearth-rug and stared at the patterns of the glowing logs. Their surfaces all divided up into separate rectangles with black centres and grey edges they looked like crocodile skin. Gusts of wind down the wide chimney played upon their surfaces, firing them to redness so that the charcoal whitened and flaked off into the mound of ashes on which they rested. Different from the picnic fire, different he was sure, from the fire in the boiler-house at Beowulf’s; schools never had fires, only semi-hot-water pipes in the day-rooms and class-rooms; so this would be one of the last real fires he would see for for nearly fourteen weeks.

  In the hall a clock struck. A quarter past seven. He sat up suddenly in the unlighted room; twenty-five minutes and no sign of her. What could she be doing? Walking slowly back down the drive? Sitting in the car talking to the man? Or trying to get rid of him, tactfully preventing him from coming in to help?

  He ran out through the front door. It had stopped raining and the wind had dropped a little. In the darkness he could smell the hay piled high in the dutch barn and hear the gusty fall of water through the wet leaves of the trees. The dogs in their enclosure behind the cowshed were silent. Annie must have fed them before she left or they would have barked at his coming. They were not yet quite sure of him and for his part, though he had not shown it in front of Victoria or George Harkess, he was terrified of them.

  There were dogs and dogs, he thought, and the nature of them depended more upon their owner than upon the dog. Some people shaped their dogs out of an absurd and boisterous affection and these dogs leapt out of their owners on a lead, rolling and grovelling on the carpet at one’s feet. They were lovable rather comical projections of some aspect of their owners which lay hidden in the absence of the dog. But there were other owners who bared their dog’s teeth and reddened his eye with an aggression and hostility which was carefully concealed when they were dogless; and these dogs of George Harkess’s were like that. They had their uses though; they did not like strangers, and even in play they were immedi
ately dangerous, jumping up suddenly in a half-fierce way, as though unsure of the mood they must reflect, and proud and heavy enough to knock even their owner flat on his back if he were unprepared for a sudden display of their affection.

  He made his way through the yard past the cowshed and round to the converted pigsty in which they were housed. Tiptoeing through the mud and over the cobbles in the darkness he approached the tall wire-netting fearfully and fumbled for the latch of the enclosure. On the other side, through the door of the sty itself, he heard the straw rustle and a wet rumble of sound from the throats of the mastiffs; then there was silence.

  “Good lads,” he called out harshly. “Jenkins boy! Maxim! Good dogs,” but there was no response; they were waiting. Six feet away from him on the other side of the wire-netting he could almost feel the cock of their ears and the tension of their gleaming black bodies. Swiftly he sought for the latch again, found it, and wrenching the gate open, turned and ran back round the corner of the cowshed, across the yard, and in at the back door.

  Behind him, the dogs were after him soundlessly; he heard no bay or bell-note as they ran, but only the fall of their pads through water and mud as they tore across the yard in his wake. They sensed his fear and they would have had him down if they could for his very cowardice; but he was too quick for them and slammed the door on their muzzles when they were still nearly six feet away from it. Outside, he heard the thud of a heavy body against its lower panel as one of them tried, too late, to check his speed over the wet cobble-stones. He smiled and wiped his feet carefully before returning to the sitting-room. Well! That was something done anyway. If Victoria came alone she would be all right; but if anyone came with her, anyone unknown to the dogs, he would not get very far.

  He put another log on to the fire, switched on the light and was suddenly still in the middle of the room. Up above, on the other side of the ceiling, someone had moved. He listened; the springs of the bed in Mrs Blount’s room relaxed; he heard their brief rusty sigh as they returned to their normal position, and then the diminished thud of stockinged feet crossing the carpet.

  He felt like a dog himself then; a dog that was a black-pointed ear, all its other senses resting and subdued to this one overriding interest, the discernment of the prickle of sound or silence in a place adjacent. Someone else in the house, some moving thing, some sweating odorous animal trespassing upon the selected domain. He knew now how a dog felt; it was an invasion of the dry form, a threat to the water-trough and the carrion, and it made him bristle with fear and indignation. Someone else up above, someone stealthy who did not wish to be heard; and now that the dogs were loose he was on his own, a house-prisoner responsible for his own imprisonment.

  He took off his shoes, switched off the light he had just switched on, and tiptoed out into the hall cocking his ears to the fall of the staircase. There was no sound; only the hollow rapping of the clock from its place by the panelled wall in the well of the staircase. He leaned over the banisters so that the stairs should not creak under his weight and drew himself slowly up hand over hand to the landing and there lay down on the carpet. There was no light coming from under the door of Mrs Blount’s room and the silence was absolute. Down below him, from the front door, he heard the growl of one of the dogs, the snuffing of its nose against the threshold as it drew in and questioned the dark air of the house. Quickly he got to his feet, slid down the length of the banisters, and running to the front door, threw it open wide so that he was penned safely behind its thickness.

  Slipping and skidding over the polished tiles of the vestibule the dogs hurtled into the hall; without pausing to investigate his own presence they galloped up the staircase to the landing. The house and the hall resounded to their barking as he switched on all the lights he could find and raced up after them. They were standing outside Mrs Blount’s door their tails thrashing as they whimpered and called and leaped against its shining panels.

  With no pause, he strode over to them and pushed open the door which let them onwards into the darkened bedroom.

  Dimly, he saw them hurl themselves on to the great double bed, the eruption of bodies, bedclothes, and eiderdown against the pale rectangle of the window; then he himself stepped into the room.

  “Got you!” he shouted. “Got you, you swine! Stay where you are or the mastiffs will tear you to pieces.”

  He switched on the light.

  George Harkess and Mrs Blount stared back at him from the chaos of the bed. The dogs, their tails wagging, their great mouths drooping with saliva and affection, bestrode their half-clothed bodies, and Mrs Blount struggled feebly to cover herself with the corner of an eiderdown which still remained on the bed. Her face white and old, ridged and bare as unglazed china, she regarded him with blurred, horror-stricken, eyes. She screamed loudly, the sound tearing out under the white ceiling, scream after scream, each one higher than the last, as though she were building a castle of agony beneath the electric light. Then she turned suddenly over on to her stomach and started to bite and tear at one of the pillows, her veined legs kicking in the air.

  George Harkess, in his shirt-tails, leapt out of the bed and sprang across the room. John saw only his wet moustache, the dogs round his thin old-man’s legs, the matt of his thick grey hair against his forehead before he switched off the light and, taking him by the shoulders, threw him with all his force across the landing. He felt the hammer of the standing wall against his shoulder, the numbness and sense-loss of the whole limb which precedes pain, as he slid peacefully and gratefully down on to the floor.

  He remembered only the smell of the whisky and the brightness of the light.

  * * *

  Under his eyes the basin was very white, the water clear and cold, rocking backwards and forwards as it was agitated by the hands. It reminded him of having his hair cut: the clumsy, comforting, haste of the hairdresser finishing a shampoo; had it not been for the pain somewhere to the right of him, he would have enjoyed it; it was soothing.

  “Whisky,” he said aloud, “whisky!”

  Beside him a soft voice spoke in reply. He couldn’t place it, though he knew he had heard it before. He sat up; he was in the bathroom and Mrs Blount’s arm was round his back. He looked up into her pale tortured face; it filled his gaze, blotting out all of the ceiling, and rocking gently like the water.

  “He had been drinking whisky,” he said with another voice that was quite effortless. “Have you been drinking whisky?”

  “There! there!” she said, “you’ll soon be all right.”

  “Where are the dogs?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know! You mustn’t worry, John—we want to—you must be quick.”

  He smiled at her; she was a very kind woman. Then he drooped down over the basin again, and with his left arm began to splash the water over his neck.

  Behind him, someone else came into the bathroom.

  “The young fool—I told you it was a mistake.” It was George Harkess’s voice: thick and angry.

  “Ssh—”

  He could almost see the finger to her lips.

  A hand, coarse, with black whiskers and nails, came under his chin and lifted his face upright.

  “Better? Are you better? Sit up man! Sit up!”

  John sat up.

  “There’s no time to be wasted—What have you done with Victoria?”

  “Victoria?”

  “Pull yourself together! This is no time for acting and the vapours.”

  He was shaken gently and he felt his head wobbling backwards and forwards like a doll’s. He stood up unsteadily; he was dizzy with the onset and fluctuation of his anger. It was warm; as satisfying as milk, and he loved it; he felt his face twisting under the grip of it.

  “She hates you,” he said, “hates you! She doesn’t know who you are, but she thinks you’re a fat pig with filthy ideas, and so do I.”

  The tweed waistcoat swayed towards him and he backed away; beside him, on the white-tiled shelf there was a tu
mbler of water. He seized and brandished it.

  Mrs Blount stepped quickly in front of him.

  “George!” she wailed, “for pity’s sake—he’s ill—”

  John jumped in front of her and faced George Harkess.

  “I’m not,” he said. “She’ll never let you marry Enid—never. She said so before she went off with the hiker and left me. You’re too old and too”—he swallowed his thin saliva—“people of your age—”

  George Harkess’s hand closed on the tumbler; he inverted it slowly and removed it from John’s hand.

  “Sit down,” he said, “there! On the chair.”

  John sagged on to the chair.

  “Now, what’s this about a hiker? When did she go off with him, when?”

  “I don’t know; ages ago. What’s the time? I don’t know how long anything is—It was before I found you in the bedroom—”

  “Think, man!”

  “I am thinking.”

  Mrs Blount kneeled in front of him on the squared linoleum. Her eyes floating in their moisture above the tired cheeks, she took his hand and looked up at him.

  “Please John,” she said, “for my sake try and remember. It’s only a few minutes ago—where did you leave Victoria?”

  “I can’t remember. I am trying but I can’t. All I can remember is seeing you in the bedroom—your legs—the eiderdown—Mr Harkess—”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, and a tear trickled over her left eyelid. “But before that John? Before?”

  “I heard noises upstairs—the bed squeaking. I thought the hiker, the man with the motor-car—it was a Sunbeam—I thought he might try and come back with her, so I let the dogs out; and then when I heard the noises upstairs in the bedroom—”

  Beside him George Harkess grunted furiously.