by H. E. Bates
A Funny Thing
My Uncle Silas and my Uncle Cosmo belonged to different worlds; but they were men of identical kidney. Uncle Cosmo was a small man of dapper appearance with waxed moustaches who wore a gold ring on his right hand and a wine-coloured seal on his gold watchchain, and a green homburg hat. He carried a saucy silver-topped walking-stick and smoked cigars and looked exactly what he was: a masher. If Uncle Silas was the black sheep of one side of the family, Uncle Cosmo was the black sheep of the other. He habitually did an awful thing for which, I think, nobody ever forgave him: he spent his winters abroad. He sent us picture-postcards, then, of orange-trees in Mentone, the bay at Naples, Vesuvius, the gondolas of Venice, of himself in a straw hat on Christmas day at Pompeii, and wrote, airily: ‘On to Greece and Port Said to-morrow, before the final jaunt to Ceylon.’ He was reputed, though nobody pretended so, to have a fancy lady in Nice, and there was something about a scandal in Colombo. Returning home in the spring of every year, he brought us oranges fresh from the bough, Sicilian pottery, oriental cushions, shells from the South Seas, lumps of gold-starred quartz and the war axes of aboriginal chieftains, and advice on how to eat spaghetti. He twiddled his seal and told amazing stories of hot geysers on remote southern islands and bananas at twenty-a-penny and how he had almost fought a duel with a Prussian in Cairo. Cosmopolitan, debonair, a lady-killer, Uncle Cosmo was altogether very impressive.
The only person not impressed by Cosmo was my Uncle Silas.
‘You bin a long way, Cosmo,’ he would say, ‘but you ain’t done much.’
‘Who hasn’t? I’ve travelled over half the globe, Silas, while you sit here and grow prize gooseberries.’
‘I daresay,’ Silas said, ‘I daresay. But we only got your word for it. For all we know you might stop the winter in a boardin’ house at Brighton.’
‘Silas,’ Uncle Cosmo said, ‘I could tell you stories of places between here and Adelaide that would make your liver turn green. Places – ’
‘Well, tell us then. Nobody’s stoppin’ you.’
‘I’m telling you. Here’s just one thing. There’s a desert in Assyria that’s never been trodden by the foot of man and that’s so far across it would take you three years to cross it on a camel. Now, one day – ’
‘You ever bin across this desert?’
‘No, but – ’
‘Then how the hell d’ye know it takes three years to cross?’
‘Well, it’s – ’
‘What I thought,’ Silas said. ‘Just what I thought. You hear these things, Cosmo, you hear a lot, and you’ve bin a long way, but you ain’t done much. Now, take women.’
‘Ah!’
‘What about this fancy affair in Nice?’
‘I haven’t got a fancy affair in Nice!’
‘There you are. Just what I thought. Big talk and nothing doing.’
‘She lives in Monte Carlo!’
‘Well, that ain’t so wonderful.’
His pride wounded, Uncle Cosmo took a deep breath, drank a mouthful of my Uncle Silas’s wine as though it were rat poison, pulled his mouth into shape again and said: ‘You don’t seem to grasp it. It’s not only one woman, Silas, in Monte Carlo. There’s another in Mentone and another in Marseilles and two in Venice. I’ve got another who lives in an old palace in Naples, two I can do what I like with in Rome, a Grecian girl in Athens and two little Syrians in Port Said. They all eat out of my hand. Then, there’s a niece of a Viscount in Colombo and a Norwegian girl in Singapore, and I forget whether its four or five French girls in Shanghai. Then of course in Japan – ’
‘Wait a minute,’ Silas said. ‘I thought you went abroad for your health?’
‘Then in Hong Kong there’s a Russian girl who’s got a tortoise tattooed on her – ’
‘Well, there ain’t nothing wonderful in that, either. Down at The Swan in Harlington there used to be a barmaid with a cuckoo or something tattooed on – ’
‘Yes, it was a cuckoo,’ Uncle Cosmo said. ‘I know, because I got her to have it done. She liked me. Yes, it was a cuckoo. And that’s why they always used to say you could see the cuckoo earlier in Harlington than anywhere else in England.’
My Uncle Silas was not impressed. He took large sardonic mouthfuls of wine, cocked his bloodshot eye at the ceiling and looked consistently sceptical, wicked and unaffected. When Uncle Cosmo then proceeded to relate the adventure of the two nuns in Bologna, my Uncle Silas capped it with the adventure of the three Seventh Day Adventists in a bathing hut at Skegness. When Uncle Cosmo told the story of how, in his shirt, he had been held up at the point of a pistol by a French husband in Biarritz, my Uncle Silas brought out the chestnut of how a gamekeeper had blown his hat off with a double-barrelled gun in Bedfordshire. The higher my Uncle Cosmo flew, the better my Uncle Silas liked it. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ Uncle Cosmo said, ‘of the three weeks I spent in a château in Arles with the wife of a French count?’
‘No,’ Silas said. ‘But did I ever tell you of the month I spent with the duchess’s daughter in Stoke Castle? The Hon. Lady Susannah. You can remember her?’
‘Well, I – how long ago was this?’
‘This was the winter of ’ninety-three. You ought to remember her. She used to ride down to Harlington twice a week, with a groom in a dog cart. Used to wear a black cloak with a splashed red lining.’
‘Dark girl?’
‘That’s her. Black. Long black hair and black eyes and long black eyelashes. A dazzler.’
‘Well, Silas, now you come to say, I – ’
‘Now wait a minute, Cosmo. You know what they used to say about this girl?’
‘Well – ’
‘Never looked at a man in her life,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Never wanted to. Cold as a frog. Nobody couldn’t touch her. Chaps had been after her from everywhere – London, all over the place. Never made no difference, Cosmo. She just sat in the castle and looked out of the window and painted pictures. See?’
‘Well, I – ’
‘You know the castle at Stoke? Stands down by the river.’
‘Oh, yes, Silas. Very well, very well.’
‘The grounds run right down to the river,’ Silas said. ‘Well, that winter I’d been doing a little river-poaching down there – eel lines and jack-snaring. You know? And about six o’clock one morning I was coming along under the castle wall with about thirty eels in a basket when she copped me.’
‘Who?’
‘Her. The gal. She was sitting in a gateway in the wall with her easel, painting. It was just gettin’ light and she told me afterwards she was painting the dawn over the river. “You been poaching,” she said. Well, what could I say? I was done. She had me red-handed and she knew it.’
‘What did she do?’
‘Well, Cosmo, she done a funny thing. She says, “I won’t say nothing about this business if you’ll come up to the castle and let me paint your picture just as you are. Old clothes and eels and everything.” So I says, “It’s a go,” and we went up to the castle and she began to paint the picture straight away that morning. “The whole family’s away abroad for the winter, and I’m all alone here except for the groom and butler,” she says. “And after to-day you come along every morning and catch your eels and then come up to the castle and let me paint you.”’
And my Uncle Silas went on to relate, between wry mouthfuls of wine, how for more than a week he had done as she said, trapping the eels in the early morning and going up to the castle and slipping in by a side door and letting the girl paint him in her room. Until at last something happened. It rained torrentially for a whole day and the succeeding night and when he went down to the river on the following morning he found the floods up and the small stone cattle bridge leading over to the castle smashed by water. It meant a detour of six miles and it was almost eight o’clock by the time he reached the castle. He slipped in by the side door as usual and went upstairs and into the girl’s room, and there standing before a cheval mirror, the girl was pain
ting a picture of herself in the nude.
‘And that just about finished it?’ Cosmo said.
‘No, Cosmo, that just about began it.’
‘Well,’ Cosmo said, ‘what did she do?’
‘A funny thing, Cosmo,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘a funny thing. She just went on painting. “I thought you weren’t coming,” she says, “so I got on with this picture of myself. You like it?” Well, I was standing so as I could see the back of her in the flesh, the sideways of her in the picture and the front of her in the mirror, and I was flummoxed. “Well,” she says, “perhaps you don’t like it because it isn’t finished? Let me put my clothes on and let’s have some fried eels and you tell me what you think of it.”’
So my Uncle Silas went on to say they had fried eels and talked about the picture and he said something about not being able to judge the picture on such short acquaintance with the model. ‘You’ll see me again to-morrow,’ she said, and so it went on: she painting herself in the nude, Silas watching, until at last, as Silas himself said, a month had gone by and he’d caught almost every eel in the river.
‘You heard me say she was cold?’ he said. ‘Never looked at a man and never wanted one? That’s a fairy tale, Cosmo. Don’t you believe it. It’s true she never looked at men. But she looked at one man. And you know who that was.’
‘And what stopped it?’ Cosmo said.
‘What stopped it? A funny thing, Cosmo, a funny thing. There were twenty bedrooms in the castle, and we slept in every one of ’em. Then, one night, I was a little fuzzled and I must have gone into the wrong room. As soon as I got in I saw her in bed with another man. She gave one shout. “My husband!” she says, and I ran like greased lightning and down the drainpipe. The funny thing is she wasn’t married, and never was, and I never did find out who the chappie was.’
‘You never found out,’ Uncle Cosmo said.
‘No,’ Silas said. ‘I never did find out.’
‘Well,’ Cosmo said, ‘it’s been a long time ago and I daresay it wouldn’t break my heart to tell you. I happen to know, Silas, who that man was.’
‘You do?’
‘I do.’
‘Well,’ Silas said, ‘who was it?’
Uncle Cosmo took a deep breath and twiddled his waxed moustaches and tried to look at once repentant and triumphant. ‘Silas,’ he said, ‘I hate to say it. I hate it. But it was me.’
For about a minute my Uncle Silas did not speak. He cocked his eye and looked out of the window; he looked down at the wine in his glass; and then finally he looked across at Uncle Cosmo himself.
‘Cosmo,’ he says at last, ‘you bin a long way and you’ve heard a tidy bit, but you ain’t seen much. Don’t you know there ain’t a castle at Stoke? Nor a river?’
Uncle Cosmo did not speak.
‘And don’t you know where you was in the winter o’ ’ninety-three?’
Uncle Cosmo did not speak.
‘Didn’t you tell me only yesterday,’ Silas said, with his hand on the wine, ‘you was in Barbadoes that year, a bit friendly with a bishop’s daughter? Now ain’t that a funny thing?’
Château Bougainvillaea
The headland was like a dry purple island scorched by the flat heat of afternoon, cut off from the mainland by a sand-coloured tributary of road which went down past the estaminet and then, half a mile beyond, to the one-line, one-eyed railway station. Down below, on a small plateau between upper headland and sea, peasants were mowing white rectangles of corn. The tide was fully out, leaving many bare black rocks and then a great sun-phosphorescent pavement of sand, with the white teeth of small breakers slowly nibbling in. Far out, the Atlantic was waveless, a shade darker than the sky, which was the fierce blue seen on unbelievable posters. Farther out still, making a faint mist, sun and sea had completely washed out the line of sky.
From time to time a puff of white steam, followed by a peeped whistle, struck comically at the dead silence inland. It was the small one-line train, half-tram, making one way or the other its hourly journey between town-terminus and coast. By means of it the engaged couple measured out the afternoon.
‘There goes the little train,’ he would say.
‘Yes,’ she would say, ‘there goes the little train.’
Each time she resolved not to say this stupid thing and then, dulled with sleepiness and the heat of earth and sky and the heather in which they lay, she forgot herself and said it, automatically. Her faint annoyance with herself at these times had gradually begun to make itself felt, as the expression of some much deeper discontent.
‘Je parle Français un tout petit peu, m’sieu.’ In a voice which seemed somehow like velvet rubbed the wrong way, the man was talking. ‘I was all right as far as that. Then I said, “Mais, dites-moi, m’sieu, pourquoi are all the knives put left-handed dans ce restaurant?” By God it must have been awfully funny. And then he said – ’
‘He said because, m’sieu, the people who use them are all left-handed.’
‘And that’s really what he said? It wasn’t a mistake? All the people in that place were left-handed?’
‘Apparently,’ she said, ‘they were all left-handed.’
‘It’s the funniest thing I ever heard,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it.’
Yes, she thought, perhaps it was a funny thing. Many left-handed people staying at one restaurant. A family, perhaps. But then there were many left-handed people in the world, and perhaps, for all you knew, their left was really right, and it was we, the right, who were wrong.
She took her mind back to the restaurant down in the town. There was another restaurant there, set in a sort of alley-way under two fig-trees, where artisans filled most of the tables between noon and two o’clock, and where a fat white-smocked woman served all the dishes and still found time to try her three words of English on the engaged couple. From here they could see the lace-crowned Breton women clacking in the shade of the street trees and the small one-eyed train starting or ending its journey between the sea and the terminus that was simply the middle of the street. They liked this restaurant, but that day, wanting a change, they had climbed the steps into the upper town, to the level of the viaduct, and had found this small family restaurant where, at one table, all the knives were laid left-handed. For some reason she now sought to define, this left-handedness did not seem funny to her. Arthur had also eaten too many olives, picking them up with his fingers and gnawing them as she herself, as a child, would have gnawed an uncooked prune, and this did not seem very funny either. Somewhere between olives and left-handedness lay the source of her curious discontent. Perhaps she was left-handed herself? Left-handed people were, she had read somewhere, right-brained. Perhaps Arthur was left-handed?
She turned over in the heather, small brown-eyed face to the sun. ‘Don’t you do anything left-handed?’
‘Good gracious, no.’ He turned over too and lay face upwards, dark with sun, his mouth small-lipped under the stiff moustache she had not wanted him to grow. ‘You don’t either?’
For the first time in her life she considered it. How many people, she thought, ever considered it? Thinking, she seemed to roll down a great slope, semi-swooning in the heat, before coming up again. Surprisingly, she had thought of several things.
‘Now I come to think of it, I comb my hair left-handed. I always pick flowers left-handed. And I wear my watch on my left wrist.’
He lifted steady, mocking eyes. ‘You sure you don’t kiss left-handed?’
‘That’s not very funny!’ she flashed.
It seemed to her that the moment of temper flashed up sky high, like a rocket, and fell far out to sea, soundless, dead by then, in the heat of the unruffled afternoon. She at once regretted it. For five days now they had lived on the Breton coast, and they now had five days more. Every morning, for five days, he had questioned her: ‘All right? Happy?’ and every morning she had responded with automatic affirmations, believing it at first, then aware of doubt, then bewildered. Happiness, she wan
ted to say, was not something you could fetch out every morning after breakfast, like a clean handkerchief, or more still like a rabbit conjured out of the hat of everyday circumstances.
The hot, crushed-down sense of security she had felt all afternoon began suddenly to evaporate, burnt away from her by the first explosion of discontent and then by small restless flames of inward anger. She felt the growing sense of insecurity physically, feeling that at any moment she might slip off the solid headland into the sea. She suddenly felt a tremendous urge, impelled for some reason by fear, to walk as far back inland as she could go. The thought of the Atlantic far below, passive and yet magnetic, filled her with a sudden cold breath of vertigo.
‘Let’s walk,’ she said.
‘Oh! no, it’s too hot.’
She turned her face into the dark sun-brittled heather. She caught the ticking of small insects, like infinitesimal watches. Far off, inland, the little train cut off, with its comic shriek, another section of afternoon.
In England he was a draper’s assistant: chief assistant, sure to become manager. In imagination she saw the shop, sun-blinds down, August remnant sale now on, the dead little town now so foreign and far off and yet so intensely real to her, shown up by the disenchantment of distance. They had been engaged six months. She had been very thrilled about it at first, showing the ring all round, standing on a small pinnacle of joy, ready to leap into the tremendous spaces of marriage. Now she had suddenly the feeling that she was about to be sewn up in a blanket.
‘Isn’t there a castle,’ she said, ‘somewhere up the road past the estaminet?’
‘Big house. Not castle.’
‘I thought I saw a notice,’ she said, ‘to the château.’
‘Big house,’ he said. ‘Did you see that film, “The Big House”? All about men in prison.’
What about women in prison? she wanted to say. In England she was a school-teacher, and there had been times when she felt that the pale green walls of the class-room had imprisoned her and that marriage, as it always did, would mean escape. Now left-handedness and olives and blankets and the stabbing heat of the Atlantic afternoon had succeeded, together, in inducing some queer stupor of semi-crazy melancholy that was far worse than this. Perhaps it was the wine, the sour red stuff of the vin compris notice down at the left-handed café? Perhaps after all, it was only some large dose of self-pity induced by sun and the emptiness of the day?