by H. E. Bates
‘Well, what do you make of our society?’ he said.
‘I only came last week.’
They were coming to that part of the avenue he disliked so much. There the chestnuts ended. Concrete tank bays, half ruined huts, old army kitchens and brick ovens blackened by fire, all overgrown by thick new nettles: that was all now as far as the big house, once painted so white that it could be seen shining from the hills five miles away.
‘Then how is it you know about the footpath?’
‘I used to come here as a little girl. My uncle lived here. My sister has his house now.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Russell,’ she said. ‘Did you know him?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t know people. Are you Miss Russell?’
‘My name is Ferguson.’
‘What else?’
‘Sara,’ she said.
In a gap beyond the chestnuts, where army hovels had been demolished to earth level, there was a place from which you could look down on the entire green circumference of parkland. It was so vast that it was like a kingdom of virgin grass. A few buildings, his new cowsheds, white concrete with green roofs of an excellent new material he had discovered, could be seen on the far edge: a slightly discordant touch which summer, the great world of leaves, would presently conceal.
He stopped and, leaning on the iron fence, looked down on it. A nightingale was singing somewhere in the direction of the big empty house, but he was so absorbed by that long deep view, the sheep-grazed kingdom, the grass coming to lushness under hot May sun that the singing, the sweetness, seemed only a secondary matter.
Making signals with his hat, he began explaining things to her: ‘You see we have everything under a system. Nothing haphazard. There are five-year leys and three-year leys and one by one we plough them in and then sow again. Grass is the key –’ He broke off and looked at her. ‘Boring you? I’m afraid grass is my pet thing. Sort of bible with me –’
‘What are the little yellow and white numbers I see on all the gate-posts?’
‘They’re the field map-numbers,’ he said. ‘Down at the estate office we have a map. We colour each field a different colour. We give it a number. Like that we can never go wrong –’
She turned her face away from him; her cream soft neck tautened, making a single line from her breast to the tip of her hair as she listened.
‘I think there’s a nightingale singing up by the house,’ she said. ‘I’ve been listening –’
‘I’m afraid I bore you with my leys and things,’ he said. ‘My grass.’
‘Oh! no.’
‘Not really?’
‘Bore me?’ She laughed; he saw her eyes sparkle quickly and beautifully and once again he felt his throat run hot as she held him for another second or two with dark eyes. ‘You surely don’t think so?’
She laughed again over her shoulder. Then she began walking on and he let her go: purely because now he could look from behind at the long lovely legs, the graceful sliding walk.
‘Is the house empty? Don’t you live here now?’
‘Yes, it’s empty.’
‘It used to be so beautiful.’
He strode out to catch her up. Where the front lawn of the house had been, between great Lebanon cedars, there was a forest of rising nettles. Snow had broken down the big shining magnolia from the white south wall. Hadn’t there been camellias there too at one time? He had a vague idea there had.
‘You ought to live in it,’ she said.
‘Here? Oh! one can’t. It’s impossible. The labour alone –’
‘It would be nice.’
‘Oh! no. It’s absolutely dog eat dog. One has servants to feed one and then servants to feed the servants and then servants still to feed – on! no, that’s dead, all that. It’s gone.’
‘I like this house,’ she said. ‘I always have liked it.’
She stood quite still, looking up. The nightingale, unmistakable now, drawing out a long needle-note, almost too exquisite, was singing in the limes beyond the stable tower. The clock on the tower, which he always kept going out of principle, showed half past eight, and it reminded him to ask her something.
‘Do you ride?’ he said.
‘Oh! no. Nothing like that.’
‘What a pity,’ he said. ‘I was going to say that you would be welcome to ride here. Any time.’
‘On the sacred grass?’
She laughed and he did not know, taken slightly unaware by the flash of her tongue in her open mouth and the sprinkle of light in the brown eyes, what to say in answer.
‘No. I’d rather see the house,’ she said. ‘Could we see it? Could we go in?’
‘To-night?’
‘Oh! no. I mean some time.’
‘There really isn’t anything to see,’ he said. ‘Things are boarded up and so on.’
‘Really it doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh! please,’ he said. ‘Of course. When would you like to go?’
‘Whenever you have time,’ she said. ‘I’m free – quite free.’
‘To-morrow?’ he said. Again, hot and sudden, he felt stabs of excitement leap up through his throat. ‘To-morrow evening?’ She seemed, as he looked at her, suddenly identifiable with all the rising summer, exquisite and young, desirable as sunlight and slightly lush. ‘When could you come?’
‘About six?’
He nodded and then checked, in the same moment, an impulse to kiss her. He thought instead that all summer lay before him; it would be pleasant to know her all summer. Now it was only May; the leaf was hardly open on the tree.
‘About six then,’ he said. ‘Here? I shall look forward to it very much.’
With flicks of one hand she swung the scarf; he hoped that to-morrow she would not wear the scarf.
‘What about the gate?’ she said. ‘The key?’
‘Oh! of course. I forgot.’
He held the key out to her; and for a second or two she held it at the same time, watching him with beautiful brown eyes that held him with something between gravity and the gentlest mockery.
‘What shall I do with it?’ she said. ‘Give it up? Surrender it?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Keep it. For a time. Then you can let yourself in.’
‘That’s nice,’ she said.
With high thrilling needle-notes the nightingale continued to sing in the quietness about the house as she walked away down the drive between the ruins of tank bays and army huts; the evening flowered about him with an exquisite after-light that left on the limes, the candled chestnuts, the oak-tassels, the curdling boughs of hawthorn, and above all on miles of grass a tender lucid glow.
To the yellow scarf swinging away down the chestnut avenue he raised his black homburg hat for the last time, smiling as he did so. There would be all the time in the world to-morrow, he thought. The summer had hardly begun.
2
When he got to the small converted farmhouse on the north side of the park the door was open to the warm evening and he called inside:
‘You there? Anybody there?’
His wife did not answer. It was not often that she did answer. But the woman who did the cooking appeared from the kitchen in her evening apron and said:
‘Good evening, sir. Mrs Fitzgerald is out for the day, sir.’
There was never a day, he thought, when she was not out for the day.
‘The day’s getting old,’ he said.
‘Will you have dinner, sir? It can be ready when you like.’
‘I’ll have a drink first,’ he said. ‘Call me when you’re ready.’
He poured himself half a tumbler of whisky and took it into the garden. Scarlet beans, budded low down with sprays of flower, were already curling far up a row of hazel sticks beyond the flower beds. He could see a great difference in them, as in everything else, since yesterday. Swallows were flying high in the warm air above the house, crying thinly, and on the single-storeyed wall beyond the din
ing-room, where there had once been only pigsties and a filthy little copper-house for boiling potatoes one day and washing the next, the new Gloire de Dijon rose was already in bloom, its fat flowers like stirred cream in the evening sun.
He had converted the pigsties into a sort of loggia and summer-house. Everything had been done very tastefully; and now it was not possible to believe that there, where the rose flowered and where big pots of blue agapanthus lily would bloom all summer, the hideous pigsties had ever existed or that a family of half-gipsies had lived in care-free squalor in the rest of the house. It showed what could be done.
Walking about the garden, looking at the climbing beans, the roses that had rushed into bloom in a day, the blue and orange steeples of lupins, he felt once again that summer was overflowing too fast, rising like a warm and delicious torrent. He felt he wanted to hold it up, to make it permanent where it rose, before all the tender and dark and fiery greenness deepened into solid June.
He wondered, without real thought, where his wife was. It did not matter very much; he simply wondered. If speculation had not bored him long since he would have guessed with the doctor’s wife, or with Mrs Naval Commander, or somewhere in the smug outposts of the local metropolis, the railway junction, playing bridge. She seemed to spend most days playing cards of some sort with the wives of local doctors, local solicitors, local sheep-breeders, local cattle auctioneers. Somewhere in that bleak society there must be someone, he often thought, who would not bore or chill or depress him but he had, so far, never discovered them. In winter he arranged excellent shooting parties; but he and his wife had for a long time quarrelled with great unpleasantness as to whom they should invite to them, The solution could only be, as he once put it, that they should shoot each other’s friends.
Part of the trouble with that simple and perhaps admirable arrangement was that he had very few friends for her to shoot. He wandered about in the garden, drinking as he walked. A breath of new perfume, from the edges of the rock path, arrested him under a big gum-stained plum tree he had left to shade the path, and underneath it he saw that already there were white pinks in bloom. He picked one of the flowers and smelled it, threading it into his button-hole. He saw too that already there were hundreds of small plums, like beautiful pale green grapes, all over the tree.
At this moment a voice called from the house:
‘Dinner is ready if you are.’
He could not believe for some moments that it was not the voice of the cook who called. But with amazement he turned and saw, across the garden, that his wife had come home.
He felt at once moody and thwarted and did not answer. She stood in the small brick courtyard by the front door, wearing over her head, as always, the pale blue and white scarf with its scrawled views of Paris and tags of French quotations that he so hated.
She was thirty-nine, three years younger than himself; but her voice, cutting across the warm luxuriance of garden, was husky, almost rough, and it seemed no longer young:
‘Are you coming? The soup’s on the table.’
‘I’m coming,’ he said.
As he walked across to the house, slowly, he knew that he did not want to eat. A whisky or two, combined with evening, was enough. He wanted, really, nothing but that: the whisky, the evening, the scent of summer. It was an arresting, enchantingly pleasant thought that for him there would be, and always was, more summer than for most people. Summer, for him, rose and blossomed from four thousand acres. There, in his special province, everything he looked at and touched and smelled, grass and bluebells and corn and chestnuts and grass again and still grass, was his own. More even than a province, perhaps: almost a kingdom. From the big empty house down to the shooting hut that the fellow had bothered him about after the meeting, in a territory so large that he was really never sure about the outer girdle of its geography, summer was not simply on the grand scale. It was his own.
In the dining-room his soup was cold, After tasting it once he got up and poured himself a second whisky and stared at his wife.
‘What else is there?’
‘Chops, I think.’
‘You think,’ he said. ‘If you were here you’d know.’
She did not answer and the chop, when it came, was greasy and rather gristly; he sawed away at it, washing it down with whisky.
‘Couldn’t we have pork again before the summer comes? What do we keep pigs for?’
‘I gave the last of the pork away.’
‘Why?’
‘You tired of it. You always tire of it. There’s always too much of it. I gave it away to friends – ’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘how are the horse-stealers?’
It was on old drab dry joke of his to call her friends the horse-stealers. She looked straight beyond him, not answering. She was getting rather fat in the face, he thought. Perhaps it was because she lived awfully well and did nothing; perhaps it was simply the podginess of forty a little before its time. Whatever it was he knew that he could not endure it, now, for much longer.
‘This meat is disgusting,’ he said. He set down his knife and fork.
Again she did not answer. He remembered the days, before the war, before his father died, when splendid and beautiful meat had come up, after being properly hung, from their own slaughter-house. Pork and beef and lamb and pheasant and veal: whatever one wanted had always been at hand.
‘Our situation’s rather like the meat,’ he said, ‘isn’t it? It’s bad and if we were honest we’d say we didn’t want any more.’
‘I’ve never said I didn’t want any more.’
‘Because you’re not honest.’
‘I don’t think it’s a question of honesty.’
‘No?’
How stupid it was; how stupidly idiotic to begin an argument like that. Only a tirade, an abusing match, already developing in the air, could possibly come from it. He gripped his hands under the table and determined that, if possible, he would stifle every single abusive word. It helped if you remembered that in a house as small as this the servants heard everything, and quite calmly, in a low voice, he said:
‘Could I talk to you reasonably a moment? Will you listen?’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Will you finish it? Will you let me get out?’
‘I’ve already said what I have to say about it,’ she said.
In the quietness he could hear, through the open door, from far across the park, a series of haunting bell-like notes of a calling cuckoo as if they were chimes of a clock striking, and he recalled, for the first time since he had sat down, the girl swinging her scarf about her long slim legs under the chestnut trees.
‘I’ll provide the evidence and so on, the usual thing,’ he said. ‘I’ll do everything.’
She did not answer. He noticed she had really not combed her hair properly before coming down to table, and he could see where it had been flattened and dishevelled by the scarf. That irritated him too; but another thought of the girl, so tall and slender and summery, pressed the irritation away. Someone like that: someone new and unknown and fresh, he thought. He remembered how, as she waved goodbye, he had let the thought of kissing her, to-morrow, all in good time, not too soon, lie pleasantly in his mind. All his anticipation about her had seemed to tremble gently on the very edge of summer.
‘There’s nothing you need do,’ he said, ‘really. I’ll provide all that’s necessary –’
‘Had you someone in mind?’
She had finished her chop to the last; her mouth, rather too magenta with lipstick, shone thick and greasy as she looked up.
‘No,’ he said.
‘I thought perhaps you might have.’
‘Why?’
‘It was just a thought.’
The young girl who helped in the kitchen came in, a moment later, to clear the plates away. He stared at the table and his wife said:
‘You have a pink in your buttonhole. That’s nice.’
‘Summer has come all of a sud
den,’ he said.
Into this interval of polite conversation his wife pressed a new pin-prick of irritation:
‘What’s for afters, Margaret?’
In a soft voice the girl said that there were gooseberries and his wife repeated, as if he had not heard it and it were a circumstance of exceptional joy:
‘The first gooseberries. Isn’t that marvellous?’
There could be nothing marvellous about it, he thought. He detected too that south-country, half-cockney expression, so cheap in some way, by which afters signified dessert. Everything about his wife now fused into a central irritation: the scarf, the uncombed hair, the greasy mouth, and now the way she spoke, the words she used, her jubilation concerning commonplace things.
‘Custard with the gooseberries?’ she said.
‘I don’t want either,’ he said.
‘As you like.’
‘I want to get this thing cleared up,’ he said.
He stared at her grimly, tightening his hands under the table.
‘If I told you I hated you would that make any difference?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Would anything make any difference?’
‘No.’
She was eating gooseberries bathed in yellow custard. She ate with a certain hearty lustiness, like a schoolgirl, and slops of yellow stuck to her magenta lipstick. She fixed him calmly with her pale grey eyes and said:
‘I’m quite content with things. I like the house and I have friends.’
‘The horse-stealers,’ he said, ‘spongers.’
‘Perhaps they don’t like you, either.’
‘They like what I have,’ he said. ‘That’s what they like.’
He got up to take a little more whisky from the side table. As he stood drinking it, not knowing quite what to say, the girl came in from the kitchen and said: