The Flying Goat

by H. E. Bates

  One Sunday he did not come in at three o’clock. It was after four when she heard the bicycle tinkle against the woodshed outside. She raised her head from the newspaper and listened for him to come in. Nothing happened. Then after about five minutes Thurlow came in, went upstairs, remained for some minutes, and then came down again. She heard him go out into the yard. There was a stir among the chickens as he lumbered about the woodshed.

  Mrs. Thurlow got up and went outside, and there, at the door of the woodshed, Thurlow was just hiding something under his coat. She thought it seemed like his billhook. She was not sure. Something made her say:

  ‘Your saw don’t need sharpening again a’ready, does it?’

  ‘That it does,’ he said. ‘That’s just what it does. Joe Woods is going to sharp it.’ Thurlow looked upset and slightly wild, as he did when the plate in his head was hurting him. His eyes were a little drink-fired, dangerous. ‘I gonna take it down now, so’s I can git it back to-night.’

  All the time she could see the saw itself hanging in the darkness of the woodshed behind him. She was certain then that he was lying, almost certain that it was the billhook he had under his coat.

  She did not say anything else. Thurlow got on his bicycle and rode off, down the hill, his coat bunched up, the bicycle slightly crazy as he drove with one tipsy hand.

  Something, as soon as he had gone, made her rush upstairs. She went into the back bedroom and flung the clothes off the mattress of the small iron bed that was never slept in. The money: it was all right. It was quite all right. She sat down heavily on the bed. And after a moment’s anxiety her colour returned again – the solid, immeasurably passive calm with which she scrubbed, read the newspapers, and pushed the bicycle.

  In the evening, the boys at church, she worked again. She darned socks, the cuffs of jackets, cleaned boots, sorted the washing for the following day. The boys must look well, respectable. Under the new scheme they went, now, to a secondary school in the town. She was proud of this, the first real stepping-stone to the higher things of the future. Outside, the night was windy, and she heard the now brief, now very prolonged moan of wind over the dark winter-ploughed land. She worked by candlelight. When the boys came in she lighted the lamp. In their hearts, having now some standard by which to judge her, they despised her a little. They hated the cheapness of the candlelight. When they had eaten and gone lumbering up to bed, like two colts, she blew out the lamp and worked by candlelight again. Thurlow had not come in.

  He came in a little before ten. She was startled, not hearing the bicycle.

  ‘You want something t’ eat?’

  ‘No,’ he said. He went straight into the scullery. She heard him washing his hands, swilling the sink, washing, swilling again.

  ‘You want the light?’ she called.

  ‘No!’

  He came into the kitchen. She saw his still-wet hands in the candlelight. He gave her one look and went upstairs without speaking. For some time she pondered on the memory of this look, not understanding it. She saw in it the wildness of the afternoon, as though the plate were hurting him, but now it had in addition fear, and, above fear, defiance.

  She got the candle and went to the door. The wind tore the candle flame down to a minute blue bubble which broke, and she went across the yard, to the woodshed, in darkness. In the woodshed she put a match to the candle again, held the candle up at eye level, and looked at the walls. The saw hung on its nail, but there was no billhook. She made a circle with the candle, looking for the bicycle with dumb eyes. It was not there. She went into the house again. Candleless, very faintly perturbed, she went up to bed. She wanted to say something to Thurlow, but he was dead still, as though asleep, and she lay down herself, hearing nothing but the sound of Thurlow’s breathing and, outside, the sound of the wind blowing across the bare land.

  Asleep, she dreamed, as nearly always, about the bicycle, but this time it was Thurlow’s bicycle and there was something strange about it. It had no handles, but only Thurlow’s billhook where the handles should have been. She grasped the billhook, and in her dream she felt the pain of the blood rushing out of her hands, and she was terrified and woke up.

  Immediately she put out her hands, to touch Thurlow. The bed was empty. That scared her. She got out of bed. ‘Thurlow! Bill! Thurlow! Thurlow!’

  The wind had dropped, and it was quiet everywhere. She went downstairs. There, in the kitchen, she lighted the candle again and looked round. She tried the back door; it was unlocked and she opened it and looked out, feeling the small ground wind icy on her bare feet.

  ‘Thurlow!’ she said. ‘Bill! Thurlow!’

  She could hear nothing, and after about a minute she went back upstairs. She looked in at the boys’ bedroom. The boys were asleep, and the vast candle shadow of herself stood behind her and listened, as it were, while she listened. She went into her own bedroom: nothing. Thurlow was not there – nothing. Then she went into the back bedroom.

  The mattress lay on the floor. And she knew, even before she began to look for it, that the money was gone. She knew that Thurlow had taken it.

  Since there was nothing else she could do, she went back to bed, not to sleep, but to lie there, oppressed but never in despondency, thinking. The money had gone, Thurlow had gone, but it would be all right. Just before five she got up, fired the copper, and began the washing. At seven she hung it out in long grey lines in the wintry grey light, holding the pegs like a bit in her teeth. A little after seven the boys came down, to wash in the scullery.

  ‘Here, here! Mum! There’s blood all over the sink!’

  ‘Your dad killed a rabbit,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

  She lumbered out into the garden, to cut cabbages. She cut three large cabbages, put them in a sack, and, as though nothing had happened, began to prepare the bicycle for the day. She tied the cabbages on the carrier, two oilcans on the handlebars, and then on the crossbar a small bundle of washing, clean, which she had finished on Saturday. That was all: nothing much for a Monday.

  At half-past seven the boys went across the fields, by footpath, to catch the bus for school. She locked the house, and then, huge, imperturbable, planting down great feet in the mud, she pushed the bicycle down the hill. She had not gone a hundred yards before, out of the hedge, two policemen stepped into the road to meet her.

  ‘We was wondering if Mr. Thurlow was in?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘he ain’t in.’

  ‘You ain’t seen him?’

  ‘No, I ain’t seen him.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since last night.’

  ‘You mind,’ they said, ‘if we look round your place?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you go on up. I got to git down to Miss Hanley’s.’ She began to push the bicycle forward, to go.

  ‘No,’ they said. ‘You must come back with us.’

  So she turned the bicycle round and pushed it back up the hill again. ‘You could leave your bike,’ one of the policemen said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’d better bring it. You can never tell nowadays what folk are going to be up to.’

  Up at the house she stood impassively by while the two policemen searched the woodshed, the garden, and finally the house itself. Her expression did not change as they looked at the blood in the sink. ‘He washed his hands there last night,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ the policeman said. ‘Don’t touch it.’ And then suspiciously, almost in implied accusation: ‘You ain’t touched nothing – not since last night?’

  ‘I got something else to do,’ she said.

  ‘We’d like you to come along with us, Mrs. Thurlow,’ they said, ‘and answer a few questions.’

  ‘All right.’ She went outside and took hold of her bicycle.

  ‘You can leave your bicycle.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll take it. It’s no naughty way, up here, from that village.’

  ‘We got a car down the road. You don’t want a bike.’

 
‘I better take it,’ she said.

  She wheeled the bicycle down the hill. When one policeman had gone in the car she walked on with the other. Ponderous, flat-footed, unhurried, she looked as though she could have gone on pushing the bicycle in the same direction, at the same pace, for ever.

  They kept her four hours at the station. She told them about the billhook, the blood, the way Thurlow had come home and gone again, her waking in the night, Thurlow not being there, the money not being there.

  ‘The money. How much was there?’

  ‘Fifty-four pounds, sixteen and fourpence. And twenty-eight of that in sovereigns.’

  In return they told her something else.

  ‘You know that Thurlow was in the Black Horse from eleven to two yesterday?’

  ‘Yes, I dare say that’s where he’d be. That’s where he always is, Sundays.’

  ‘He was in the Black Horse, and for about two hours he was arguing with a man stopping down here from London. Arguing about that plate in his head. The man said he knew the plate was aluminium and Thurlow said he knew it was silver. Thurlow got very threatening. Did you know that?’

  ‘No. But that’s just like him.’

  ‘This man hasn’t been seen since, and Thurlow hasn’t been seen since. Except by you last night.’

  ‘Do you want me any more?’ she said. ‘I ought to have been at Miss Hanley’s hours ago.’

  ‘You realise this is very important, very serious?’

  ‘I know. But how am I going to get Miss Hanley in, and Mrs. Acott, and then the poultry farm and then Mr. George?’

  ‘We’ll telephone Miss Hanley and tell her you can’t go.’

  ‘The money,’ she said. ‘That’s what I can’t understand. The money.’

  3

  It was the money which brought her, without showing it, to the edge of distress. She thought of it all day. She thought of it as hard cash, coin, gold and silver, hard-earned and hard-saved. But it was also something much more. It symbolised the future, another life, two lives. It was the future itself. If, as seemed possible, something terrible had happened and a life had been destroyed, it did not seem to her more terrible than the fact that the money had gone and that the future had been destroyed.

  As she scrubbed the floors at the poultry farm in the late afternoon, the police telephoned for her again. ‘We can send the car for her,’ they said.

  ‘I got my bike,’ she said. ‘I’ll walk.’

  With the oilcans filled, and cabbages and clean washing now replaced by newspapers and dirty washing, she went back to the police station. She wheeled her bicycle into the lobby and they then told her how, that afternoon, the body of the man from London had been found, in a spinney, killed by blows from some sharp instrument like an axe. ‘We have issued a warrant for Thurlow’s arrest,’ they said.

  ‘You never found the money?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ they said. ‘No doubt that’ll come all right when we find Thurlow.’

  That evening, when she got home, she fully expected Thurlow to be there, as usual, splitting kindling wood with the billhook, in the outhouse, by candlelight. The same refusal to believe that life could change made her go upstairs to look for the money. The absence of both Thurlow and the money moved her to no sign of emotion. But she was moved to a decision.

  She got out her bicycle and walked four miles, into the next village, to see her brother. Though she did not ride the bicycle, it seemed to her as essential as ever that she should take it with her. Grasping its handles, she felt a sense of security and fortitude. The notion of walking without it, helplessly, in the darkness, was unthinkable.

  Her brother was a master carpenter, a chapel-going man of straight-grained thinking and purpose, who had no patience with slovenliness. He lived with his wife and his mother in a white-painted electrically lighted house whose floors were covered with scrubbed coco-matting. His mother was a small woman with shrill eyes and ironed-out mouth who could not hear well.

  Mrs. Thurlow knocked on the door of the house as though these people, her mother and brother, were strangers to her. Her brother came to the door and she said:

  ‘It’s Lil. I come to see if you’d seen anything o’ Thurlow?’

  ‘No, we ain’t seen him. Summat up?’

  ‘Who is it?’ the old woman called.

  ‘It’s Lil,’ the brother said, in a louder voice. ‘She says have we seen anything o’ Thurlow?’

  ‘No, an’ don’t want!’

  Mrs. Thurlow went in. For fifteen years her family had openly disapproved of Thurlow. She sat down on the edge of the chair nearest the door. Her large lace-up boots made large black mud prints on the virgin coco-matting. She saw her sister-in-law look first at her boots and then at her hat. She had worn the same boots and the same hat for longer than she herself could remember. But her sister-in-law remembered.

  She sat untroubled, her eyes sullen, as though not fully conscious in the bright electric light. The light showed up the mud on her skirt, her straggling grey hair under the shapeless hat, the edges of her black coat weather-faded to a purplish grey.

  ‘So you ain’t heard nothing about Thurlow?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ her brother said. ‘Be funny if we had, wouldn’t it? He ain’t set foot in this house since Dad died.’ He looked at her hard. ‘Why? What’s up?’

  She raised her eyes to him. Then she lowered them again. It was almost a minute before she spoke.

  ‘Ain’t you heard?’ she said. ‘They reckon he’s done a murder.’

  ‘What’s she say?’ the old lady said. ‘I never heard her.’

  Mrs. Thurlow looked dully at her boots, at the surrounding expanse of coco-matting. For some reason the fissured pattern of the coco-matting, so clean and regular, fascinated her. She said: ‘He took all the money. He took it all and they can’t find him.’

  ‘Eh? What’s she say? What’s she mumbling about?’

  The brother, his face white, went over to the old woman. He said into her ear: ‘One of the boys is won a scholarship. She come over to tell us.’

  ‘Want summat to do, I should think, don’t she? Traipsing over here to tell us that.’

  The man sat down at the table. He was very white, his hands shaking. His wife sat with the same dumb, shaking expression of shock. Mrs. Thurlow raised her eyes from the floor. It was as though she had placed on them the onus of some terrible responsibility.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ the man said, ‘when did it happen?’

  All Mrs. Thurlow could think of was the money. ‘Over fifty pounds. I got it hid under the mattress. I don’t know how he could have found out about it. I don’t know. I can’t think. It’s all I got. I got it for the boys.’ She paused, pursing her lips together, squeezing back emotion. ‘It’s about the boys I come.’

  ‘The boys?’ The brother looked up, scared afresh. ‘He ain’t – they – ’

  ‘I didn’t know whether you’d have them here,’ she said. ‘Till it’s blowed over. Till they find Thurlow. Till things are straightened out.’

  ‘Then they ain’t found him?’

  ‘No. He’s done a bunk. They say as soon as they find him I shall git the money.’

  ‘Yes,’ the brother said. ‘We’ll have them here.’

  She stayed a little longer, telling the story dully, flatly, to the two scared pairs of eyes across the table and to the old shrill eyes, enraged because they could not understand, regarding her from the fireplace. An hour after she had arrived, she got up to go. Her brother said: ‘Let me run you back in the car. I got a car now. Had it three or four months. I’ll run you back.’

  ‘No, I got my bike,’ she said.

  She pushed the bicycle home in the darkness. At home, in the kitchen, the two boys were making a rabbit hutch. She saw that they had something of her brother’s zeal for handling wood. She saw that their going to him would be a good thing. He was a man who had got on in the world: she judged him by the car, the white-painted house, the electric light, the sp
otless coco-matting. She saw the boys, with deep but inexpressible pride, going to the same height, beyond it.

  ‘Dad ain’t been home,’ they said.

  She told them there had been a little trouble. ‘They think your dad took some money.’ She explained how it would be better for them, and for her, if they went to stay with her brother. ‘Git to bed now and I’ll get your things packed.’

  ‘You mean we gotta go and live there?’

  ‘For a bit,’ she said.

  They were excited. ‘We could plane the wood for the rabbit hutch!’ they said. ‘Make a proper job of it.’

  4

  That night, and again on the following morning, she looked under the mattress for the money. In the morning the boys departed. She was slightly depressed, slightly relieved by their excitement. When they had gone she bundled the day’s washing together and tied it on the bicycle. She noticed, then, that the back tyre had a slow puncture, that it was already almost flat. This worried her. She pumped up the tyre and felt a little more confident.

  Then, as she prepared to push the bicycle down the hill, she saw the police car coming along the road at the bottom. Two policemen hurried up the track to meet her.

  ‘We got Thurlow,’ they said. ‘We’d like you to come to the station.’

  ‘Is he got the money?’ she said.

  ‘There hasn’t been time,’ they said, ‘to go into that.’

  As on the previous morning she pushed her bicycle to the village, walking with one policeman while the other drove on in the car. Of Thurlow she said very little. Now and then she stopped and stooped to pinch the back tyre of the bicycle. ‘Like I thought. I got a slow puncture,’ she would say. ‘Yes, it’s gone down since I blowed it up. I s’ll have to leave it at the bike shop as we go by.’

  Once she asked the policeman if he thought that Thurlow had the money. He said, ‘I’m afraid he’s done something more serious than taking money.’