by A. J. Cronin
He was much alone – Florrie, when not occupied in the processes of securing her concession from the Corporation, was supervising the erection of her stall, Jenny had her hands full in the shop, while Ernie, every afternoon, made the ‘caller’ round with the cart. But on Wednesday an excursion was proposed, en famille.
‘Can you get away?’ he inquired of Florrie.
‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,’ she answered cryptically, then, taking pity on his ignorance: ‘We close half-day Wednesday. So we’ll go shrimping.’
‘Shrimping?’
‘You heard me the first time. Aren’t you always pestering me about them blinking shrimps? Well, now I shall show you where, when, and how we catch ’em. For your further information we shall boil a kettle and make tea. And if you want to freeze to death you can have one of your North Pole bathes. That suit you, Michael Angelo?’
‘It sounds delightful, Florrie,’ he agreed amiably.
Florrie, at his tone, almost smiled in return. In a cautious manner, she had slightly softened towards him. She could not forget the drawing of Ginger, which, although studiously avoiding all reference to the matter, she had privately taken to W. H. Smith’s to be passepartouted. Moreover, Stephen’s repeated offers to do duty in the shop had, though firmly rejected, inclined her to the view that he was not ‘stuck-up’ – a view reinforced when, one evening, she had come in to find him in his shirt sleeves, washing up the supper dishes.
Wednesday arrived, overcast but dry. Punctually at two o’clock the shutters of the shop were put up and the party set off in the pony-cart, driving out of the town and along the east shore road towards Cliftonville. After about five miles, Ernie turned from the main highway to a lane which wound between hedges of budding hawthorn and ended in a grassy track passing through an osier gate into a field of burdock and rough sea-grass. Here the pony was unharnessed and turned loose to graze while Florrie, with an air of cicerone, led the way down through the tufted dunes to a small secluded sandy bay guarded by rocky promontories and open only to the sea.
‘What a lovely spot!’ exclaimed Stephen.
‘Tide’s on the turn, just right,’ noted the practical Ernie. ‘That’s when you get them.’
‘You’ll have a dip with me, boy?’
‘Got to gather sticks and dig the cockles.’ Ernie excused himself, hastily moved off.
‘I’m game,’ said Jenny, and at his look of surprise, burst out laughing. ‘Race you first in.’
They undressed behind two not too adjacent rocks. Despite the supposed complexities of feminine attire, she reached the water before him and struck out through the surf.
‘Where did you learn to swim?’ With an effort he had made up on her.
‘Joe Tapley’s wharf. As kids we were off it all summer long.’
She turned and floated with eyes closed. Rounded and young, she seemed quite unchanged by those years which had passed since first he knew her. He saw in her a freshness, a natural attractiveness which made him marvel that she had not found another husband. A sudden curiosity overcame his natural reserve.
‘Jenny … why have you never married again?’
She sat up with a splash and a splutter, gazed at him, then shook her head.
‘Never had the chance, I suppose. Well, yes … I’ll admit. A few fellows have come messing around. But I couldn’t fancy none of them.’ She smiled suddenly. ‘You know how it is, Mr Desmonde. Once bitten twice shy.’
Before he could speak she darted off towards the shore.
When they had put on their clothes, except for shoes and stockings, they walked barefoot to the sheltered side of the cove, where Florrie and Ernie were waiting with the shrimp-nets, each attached to a long pole with a wooden end bar, like a rake.
‘Better late than never,’ Florrie greeted them caustically. ‘Take your net from Ernie. And if you’re actually ready we’ll begin.’
Resting the wooden cross-bar on the serrated bottom, she started off through the shallow water, pushing the net before her, raising a smoky cloud of sand. Ernie and Jenny ranged themselves in line moving slowly behind, and a little further out, Stephen followed. In the clear water just ahead he could discern faintly the outlines of the shrimps, gelatinous shapes almost invisible, with delicate antennae. Quite translucent, transmitting only the mottled colour of the sand, each had a tiny jet-black eye which gave the frail organism substance, seemed to attune it to this common danger, which sent the whole school scurrying hither and thither in desperate mobility. Many escaped, but at the end of the drag, when the poles were upended, the nets held a reasonable haul.
‘Bring the bucket, Ernie,’ Florrie commanded. ‘Only keep the biggest ones, turn the tiddlers back. And you three carry on. I’m going by the rocks for cockles.’
The wind blew soft, the sun came out like a shiny orange, ankle-deep they ploughed their primal furrows, in the space of an hour the bucket was filled. Then, from the rocks, where a drift-wood fire smoked and sparked, came Florrie’s shout. They joined her. A white cloth had been spread on a smooth dry ledge, weighted at the corners with round, streaky pebbles, the tea was made, and on the fire stood an iron pot of boiling water.
‘I shall have chilblains after this,’ said Florrie, holding her blue toes to the blaze. Then, with a nod towards the shrimps: ‘In with them.’
‘Shame,’ murmured Jenny, with a little shiver as the squirming crustaceans disappeared in the steam. ‘Poor things.’
‘They don’t feel nothing,’ Ernie reassured her. ‘Ain’t got nerves like us. That so, Mr Desmonde?’
Stephen, staring at Jenny, scarcely heard the question. All unconscious, she stood there, shrimp-net still on her shoulder, bare legs planted apart, slightly foreshortened, skirt tucked back, showing a clean flounced petticoat, blouse open at the throat, sleeves rolled back, her cheeks stung by sea and scudding sand to a bright vermilion, wind-tangled hair a deep blue-black, her figure, short and sturdy, bent slightly forward, turned against the dull and disappointing sunset. He had neither pencil nor paper, but he thought to himself, with an ache of desire, My God, if only I could paint her like that, with those fierce reds and blues and that smudged madder sky.
The tea was strong, dark as over-cooked meat, scalding hot. Florrie insisted they drink a mugful to take the chill off their stomachs. Then, with her eye on Stephen, she served the cockles, noting with a knowing compression of her lips the surprise which he evinced on tasting them.
‘Never thought they’d be so good, eh?’ she chided him. ‘Swallow the juice as well.’
‘Beats oysters hollow,’ agreed Ernie, laying in.
They were delicious – each in its white fluted shell, delicate and saline, a fresh sea-fruit, holding the essence of the ocean, perhaps the first act of creation.
Next came the shrimps, straight from the pot, a tender pink, shedding their armour without a murmur, crescentic, succulent. They ate them with thick slabs of cottage loaf spread with country butter. More tea. Then a cheesecake which Jenny had baked the previous evening. A silence followed, intensified by the slow, rhythmic rustle of the incoming tide. No one seemed to want to move – in a strange and glowing mood of indolence, watching the pale moon take substance in the still clear sky, Stephen wished this lovely hour might not quickly end. But at last Florrie stirred.
‘Getting dark. Better make a bend.’
The picnic things were gathered up, the pony re-harnessed, the lamp-candles lit, Florrie and Ernie took their seats in front. Stephen, already in the cart, held out his hand to pull Jenny up to her place beside him in the back. He clasped her fingers tightly, drew her towards him. And in that simple act, as by a lightning stroke, he experienced the liberation of an emotion that had burgeoned within him throughout the afternoon, a physical sweetness in the pressure of her dry, warm skin, a flooding tide of intoxication which made his heart turn over with a tremendous throb and – so unexpected was its onset, so violent its intensity – left him speechless.
E
rnie jogged the reins, they set off at a steady amble. Because of the basket, which restricted space, Jenny and Stephen were obliged to sit close together. From the soft contact of her thigh and side, waves of warm vitality seemed to flow into him. Not for years, not since his futile pursuit of Emmy Berthelot, had he looked at a woman with desire. It had died within him; self-discipline, perhaps, had killed it, destined him to an existence of perpetual celibacy. But now, not to save his life could he have spoken a coherent word. Was she conscious, he wondered blindly, of the longing which had suddenly stricken him? Could it be that she shared the same emotion? She too was extremely silent, perhaps over-consciously still. And that throbbing pulse, where their limbs met in the darkness, was it from the pounding of his blood? Or was hers pounding too?
They drew into the town, which welcomed them with a glitter of lights, reflected on the oily water of the harbour. And as they approached the quay Florrie exclaimed prosaically:
‘These there shrimps do give you a thirst. Shall we stop at the Dolphin for a mild and bitter?’
‘Let’s,’ said Ernie. ‘I’ll have a mineral.’
‘You ain’t allowed in such places, not under eighteen.’
‘But Aunt Flo …’
‘No,’ said Florrie firmly. ‘I’d forgot about you. We shall have something at home.’
They drew up at the end of the Row, where the stable was situated, and as Ernie, somewhat peeved, pressed Jenny to stay while he unharnessed the pony, Florrie and Stephen set out for the shop alone. As they walked slowly along the quay, Stephen, still deeply disturbed, was conscious of his companion’s sidelong scrutiny.
‘Been a real good day,’ she began conversationally.
He gave a murmur of assent.
‘Jenny’s a nice little thing,’ Florrie resumed, without apparent continuity. ‘She’s wise, yet she’s simple. Works hard … had a bit of a struggle too. As for kind-heartedness! I do hope she’ll make up with a fine steady fellow one of these days … I should hate to see her make a mistake. Someone with a good regular wage, as would take proper care of her.’
There was a pause. Then again, in that same detached voice, as though thinking aloud:
‘For instance … there’s a local feller by the name of Hawkins, half owner in a brand-new trawler … worth a tidy bit. We’d p’raps have met him if we’d went to the Dolphin. Sociable feller. Throws a beautiful dart … he’s pretty gone on her.’
He kept silence, not knowing how to answer. Although her tone was casual, he sensed behind it a note of warning. At any rate, her meaning was clear, he could not dispute it.
They went up the stone stairs and into the house. In the kitchen she turned to him with a brightness which convinced him that her remarks had been deliberate.
‘How about a sandwich? And a drop of ale?’
No, at this moment he could not remain to face Jenny in a false, convivial atmosphere. He forced a smile.
‘I’m rather tired, I think I’ll turn in. Good night, Florrie.’
He went to his room, closed the door and stood for a long moment in perturbed thought, from which, almost automatically, he tried to rouse himself, reaching for his sketch-book, telling himself he must record that beach impression while it was still fresh in his mind. Using crayon, he made, during the next hour, several pastel drawings, but none of them pleased him and, in the end, with a kind of nervous exasperation, he put the book away, began to undress.
In bed, he switched off the light, stretched at full length in the cool sheets. Through the wide, open window, lit by an invisible moon, he could see a swathe of milky sky in which the Dog Star hung, low and placid. But there was no placidity in him. His skin, smarting from the strong air, seemed on fire.
Presently, footsteps sounded next door, and through the thin wall he heard the quiet movements, the low-toned conversation of the two women as they prepared to retire. Abruptly, he covered his ears with the pillow. Yet if he could occlude the sounds of Jenny’s disrobing – the click of corsets unhooked, the snap of an elastic, the tap of heels as she stepped from her petticoat – that sunset vision which by some strange alchemy, fusing with wind, sea and sand, had made an image, clear and shining as Venetian glass, that was less easy to dismiss. At last, drugged with air, his mind clouded, he fell asleep.
Chapter Fifteen
His two weeks’ stay would end on Saturday, he was due to leave in three days’ time. And he believed that by an effort of will, and the exercise of some self-control, he might get through this brief period without making a fool of himself. So he set himself to work on a series of marine impressions. On Thursday he took a block of handmade paper, matt-surfaced and of a soft yellow shade, which he had found in a second-hand book-shop off the Row, and went to the inner harbour. He began a gouache, showing a low line of tied-up smacks, two trawlers beyond, and on either side, leading the eye inwards, nets drying on weathered wooden piles. But his heart was not in it, even before it was half done he knew he had something as insipid as a Christmas calendar. After wasting two sheets of his precious paper he went moodily to the Dolphin and, sitting alone in a corner, lunched on bread and cheese and a pint of shandygaff.
The afternoon was no better – the sun kept dodging amongst the clouds, his touch was not swift enough to catch the fleeting play of light, and just as he began his fourth attempt the trawlers cast off and steamed out of the pool, leaving a gap in the composition like an extracted front tooth. He gave up in disgust. Yet he would not go back to the shop, but instead, with the block under his arm, hands in his pockets and shoulders hunched, he hung around the old town, staring into the windows of marine stores, presumably appraising the stock-in-trade of ships’ chandlers, rope-and-tackle-makers, purveyors of heavy-duty kerosene motors, simply killing time.
Was he seriously in love? The situation seemed so manifestly impossible, he was forced to reject it, telling himself that he was thirty, temporarily fit, perhaps, but subject to a recurrent weakness of the chest, disowned by his family, with scarcely a shilling in his pocket, bound irrevocably to that profitless mistress, art. And Jenny? … she herself was no longer a girl, however, much his fancy might deceive him, but a working-class woman approaching middle age, short of stature, blousy-cheeked, quite uneducated, with no more knowledge of painting than an Esquimo, and a hideous taste in hats. Besides, hadn’t he been warned off, with tactful insistence, by Florrie? Then in the name of sanity, let him put her from his mind. But for all his show of logic, he could not.
In desperation, he set out for a brisk walk along the front. As he was passing the Grand Hotel, which occupied a central position on the promenade, a man in a bowler and a seedy overcoat with a velvet collar, carrying a square black bag, emerged from the swing doors and came towards him. Something in the figure, in the swing of the shoulders, was vaguely familiar, and indeed as they approached each other there came an instant of mutual recognition.
‘Dash it all, if it isn’t Desmonde! What a surprise. Fancy seeing you again, old boy.’
It was Harry Chester. Seizing Stephen’s hand, he shook it effusively, expressing his satisfaction at the encounter and remarking on the strangeness of chance and the smallness of the world.
‘I was in the Grand having a quick one, thought I’d have another, but didn’t. If I had, I should never have run into you. Providence, old boy. Nothing else.’
He had put on weight since their last meeting, there was a roll of fat at the back of his neck, and his tight waistcoat, of a sporting check, failed to conceal the beginnings of portliness. His face, though still quite handsome, was coarsened, and while his eyes beamed with that same heartiness, they held a shiftiness that would have been suspect even to a stranger.
‘Come along back in. You must have one with me.’
They went into the bar of the hotel, where Chester smiled at the barmaid and, his foot automatically seeking the brass rail, tilted back his hat.
‘What’ll it be, then? Glass of bitter. I’ll have a Scotch and splash.’<
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‘What brings you to Margate?’ Stephen asked, when, at last, he had an opportunity to speak.
‘Business, my boy. The south coast is my beat. I do all the hotels on that circuit.’
‘You’ve given up painting?’
‘Good Lord, yes. Long ago. There comes a tide in the affairs of men … Shakespeare, old boy … I have a job … and a damned good one …’. He delivered the fiction with an affable smile, stroking his unshaven chin. ‘Promoting the cleanliness of the nation.’
‘In what way?’
‘I sell soap, old boy … for Gluckstein Brothers. Damn good firm. I’m well in with them … in line for a partnership, in fact.’ Glancing in the mirror, he adjusted his tie, which, Stephen now observed, openly advertised the improvement in Harry’s position – it bore the old Etonian pale-blue stripes. ‘It’s nice work. I enjoy travel.’
There was a silence. Despite the jollity, the oozing good-fellowship, there were lines at the corners of Chester’s eyes and his charm, like the nap on his velvet coat collar, had worn a trifle thin. His nails, for a man with the country’s hygiene at heart, were lamentably dirty.