Then the bell as suddenly stopped. For the second time the door opened—this time it was burst open and there in his shirt-sleeves stood the landlord’s son, short, shirt-sleeved, able, with a clipped black moustache. He was beginning to shout: ‘Time now … please!’—when he saw the large man and whistled:
‘Lord—Moony! How in the hell did you get out? Come along, Moony, there’s a good chap….’
He walked easily over to the large man. And the large man seemed to have collapsed his strength. He looked embarrassed, and even in that great body, shy. He started to shuffle over to the landlord’s son, dragging his hand grudgingly like a bad boy along the table-cover.
‘Just having a little game, a hundred up—’
The landlord’s son took his arm:
‘Now, now. You don’t want to be playing today; you want to be in your room, nice and quiet—’
Big Moony let himself be led easily away: his face hung and his eyes looked down at his shambling feet. As they left through the door the landlord’s son turned his head round to Patten, screwed up his little moustache, and with his free hand gave three short taps to his forehead.
*
There are dreams of the condemned cell, of all hope lost, of a final situation where nothing at all more can ever be done and the dreamer faces nothing and absolutely nothing but the end. And then—perhaps—the weight is magically lifted; the walls recede, the pursuing beasts dissolve, the falling viaduct resumes its road. Free air returns, all is relief! But after the first sweet thankfulness, very soon after—the dreamer looks round him and finds that there he is, indeed safe, but alone also, and with nothing and no one to use his freedom upon. The first need is for another person, someone to tell, someone upon whom to begin to exercise his new-found energies.
Thus with Patten in the billiards room. His chest drew in what felt like strong fresh air as those two left through the door and he looked round at the blessedly empty room. There was no question of not believing it was over—he believed it. He relished that empty room. Then gradually as he looked round the furniture assumed other identities—the locked windows no longer looked locked, the shrouded table shrank, the hat-stands ceased to loom but simply stood plain as hat-stands, the clock looked about to tick. He began to wonder how he could ever have been so enclosed. And then the room began to lose all significance, it became a worthless empty room, a silly place to be. Downstairs there would still be people, the second bell had not rung, he could hear distant laughter. He hurried to the door and to the stairs.
The stairs led straight down into the bar. There, spread out beneath, lay the familiar lighted place. In one corner two ladies laughed, emptying their last drinks. Looking down, he felt an irritation that his release had been so easy, that others had rescued him, that he himself had done nothing towards it. This agitated a greater need than ever to speak of it, to make more of it. He hurried down: and then saw a third lady join the others—it was his saviour in the satin blouse. He remembered her instantly. And he went straight up to her, flushed and smiling and powerful, to thank her and tell her the whole story.
At first the ladies were surprised, then awed, and finally the lady in the blouse broke down laughing. The barman laughed, too, Patten laughed. They all laughed in wonder and relief. Then the barman said how Moony had always been a bit touched, always a big boy for his mum; mum had died one night when Moony was having a game upstairs. He was strong; they gave him the cellar jobs in the pub.
‘He wouldn’t hurt a flea‚’ the barman said.
In a way, instead of making him feel foolish, this made it even better for Patten. He felt that it had been all right after all. And he addressed himself seriously to the lady in the pink blouse.
On Stony Ground
ONE moment with eyes blinking into the shade of that department store, one moment entering it and with head bowed thinking how I must insist on a particular seed and on no account be persuaded otherwise, and indeed seeing already the bright-coloured flowers grown up and wrestling in heady luxuriance—and the next morning standing in front of her who seemed then unquestionably the most beautiful of all, her in the pale khaki smock among the green-handled tools and bark benches of the garden accessory department.
At length I managed:
‘Carnations … and pansies, Hoffman’s Giant.’
‘Seedlings? Plants?’
‘No. That is, seeds.’
‘Giant Chabaud carnations, we have. But we’re out of Hoffman’s. Wouldn’t Scrutton’s Mammoth do you? They’re warranted tested.’
‘Certainly, certainly. By all means. Scrutton’s will do fine.’
She handed me then quite simply the little coloured packets.
‘Will there be anything else?’
I looked round at the pigeon cots and lawn-mowers and the green artificial grass. It never occurred to me then that I might just go on buying more and more seed. Perhaps there was an instinct stronger than the wish to stay, an urgency to withdraw from the brilliant danger? I could not bear to look into her eyes. Only when her head, her dark healthy hairy head was bent down over the little pad which she held so delicately to her breast and upon which she wrote out my bill—only then did I dare again look fearfully at her.
‘Would you please pay at the cash desk?’
Dry words of parting, they were said with no emotion—with a staged softening of the corners of her mouth, a substitute smile. I took the little slip—taking it carefully at its very edge with the tips of my fingers to avoid touching hers, the pale varnished tips—and threaded my lonely way through the hoes and pergolas to where the bright light of the cashier’s cottage shone, a depressive light of destination, homecoming, severance from adventure. Thus the distance uncoiling its cruel tape between us: but then as the cashier stamped the three separate parts of the bill—I realized there was a slip I must take back to her … the journey was not over! Walking at first quickly, but more slowly as I drew near, I returned and held out my slip. Already she was engaged with another customer, a rugged-necked mackintoshed man buying a hose-whirler, a purchase that can be discussed at length. I stood there for some time before she turned and handed me my seed. But when she said ‘Thank you,’ she had already turned back to the hose-whirler. I stuttered my ‘good afternoon’ and left, receiving no reply nor another look.
*
For the rest of the day, on and off, I saw her face. Why that particular face persuades me so I can’t say—it is certainly a pretty face, but so are many others. We know this belief that every man is in love with one women all his life, a forgotten face that once peered down at him in childhood and whose presence coincided with some stage of early excitation. Perhaps it was so with the face of the woman in the garden accessories. It held significances incomparable with other faces, it was adored as soon as seen; it was also remote and untouchable. Round wide-open eyes, crescented beneath with deep shadows like bruises, and of a pale colour that asked sympathy for her great unguarded helplessness. Dark hair, dressed in the ordinary style of today. A mouth full and sculpted, but bloodless, almost white. A shape of face oval, perfectly regular and of a helpless strength that suggested the plastic features of a classic sculpture. Generally—it can be said at this remove—an anaemic face, but in its pale flesh crying for the manly protections.
The next day I was back buying seed.
And on each day following. I have no garden—only two window-boxes. For these I have no affection, and I love a garden too—but having none, and no gardener’s knowledge, the atmosphere of such an accessory department was dry, dry and in many ways fearful. None of the things there had any relation to the earth, they were new and shining and weatherless. Tools in real gardens are rusted and caked with earth, summerhouses and sheds are paled and softened by rain and sun and lichen, wooden sticks turn grey and even the black eel of hose takes on the softer, weathered look of old water. But here on the clean soaped floor such rustic sheds stood yellow and gummy with bright varnish, tools of steel were
painted postal scarlet and locomotive green, and everywhere there flashed the white of unsoiled wood—sticks, axe-handles, fresh rakes. Stiff sacks of bone-meal stood with big tins of blight control and liquid manure—even the dark steel of spades had been stuck over with bright paper labels. For a place dedicated to the fruits of the earth, a place packed with fertilizers, it smelled only sterile. It smelled of wood, machine oil, and fish-glue.
Yet there against the false green grass, against a rotating summer-cot and a tin of creosote, there stood my pale woman in her khaki smock—and there too was life. At first I bought only seeds. The gay packets of hardy annuals began to mount on my mantelpiece at home. But after a while I progressed—I could scarcely afford a garden roller, nor did I want one, but I made careful enquiries. Together we wheeled the green-painted rollers over her polished floor. Together we discussed the endurance of dove-cots. At length I bought a long brass pest-syringe. Practical considerations were remembered—the syringe would come in for watering my window-boxes and in winter for moth-spray.
Slowly we grew to know one another. I kept a most reserved distance. I bought my seeds and went quickly away—scarcely noticing her, scarcely giving her the usual words of polite encounter. In this I hoped to be ‘different’: my adoration told me that day after day this woman was pestered by men trying to get her to meet them after hours—and I would be different. I would be sincere. I was not one for idle flirtation but instead he who recognized the flame of her great soul, her worth. I kept my distance—until the day when I judged sincerity to be established and consulted her upon the roller. From then on our acquaintance grew. But not apace. It may sound as if all this were coldly and carefully calculated—but nothing of the sort. My simple hopes were the companions of unbearable terror, of failures of strength and sudden exits, of tentative pleasantries that smothered me as I stammered them—it was then like balancing on some impelling precipice—and I was dogged by an overwhelming distate for the falsehoods I had to tell. I had, for instance, to invent a garden. But gradually we grew to know each other.
And there were aspects of great charm in our development. When, for instance, I noticed how in her very words she began to change towards me. At first she had spoken to me only in the aloof, impersonal vernacular of gardens. When I enquired how to use an insecticide—I was told that I must ‘broadcast among the plants’. About a carton of lime—this must be dusted along the rows of peas to ‘hasten pod-filling’. But as time went on and ease overcame her, it was ‘just scatter it everywhere’—and ‘pod-filling’ became ‘the peas come quicker’.
There were setbacks. Though these derived from circumstances more than from her. Once, for instance, I thought I would alter the quality of our discussion, seek in fact the more pleasurable atmosphere of striped summer garden-cushions and steel-sprung hammocks. I thought this more congenial for a proposal I promised myself the courage to make. But it proved only a step back—I had to be handed over to a male attendant, a hardened specialist in garden comfort, and with him was squandered a whole day’s advance. Then again—on another day she was not there at all! It was her afternoon off—in that store they had some system of special afternoons. I never went on a Wednesday again.
But, how, finally, to make this proposal? What words? Every phrase I invented took to itself a leer, the most innocent words suggested not only sin but underhand, slimy, disreputable sin. Several times I was on the point of speaking. But always a pre-resonance of the phrase in my own ears stopped me. At length, quite casually, for no more reason perhaps than that she was feeling fit and tolerant, she herself made the breach. We had been speaking of bone-meal. Suddenly she said:
‘You ought to take me to see this garden of yours one day. I’m getting quite to know it.’
She was smiling—and in a way that comes to those placid faces where one least expects it, her eyes flashed. For once confounding the consequences—for I had no garden—I took my plunge.
‘But of course you must! Could you—could you spare one of your Wednesdays? And come to tea? We—we could drive down.’
‘Well!’
Her face had fixed suddenly stiff and pressed. She fixed me with a hard astonished eye—as outraged as her voice. I started to stammer my apology—and then the coldness was as instantly gone, she broke out laughing, she had been playing.
‘Well, that’s very nice of you I’m sure! As it is—I don’t see that I’m doing anything on the Wednesday, no, nothing Wednesday….’
‘Then Wednesday it is! Here? Where?’
‘I don’t know that I ought, really.’
‘Oh, come on—it would be fun.’
‘Fun would it be? Fun for who? You, I expect.’
‘I mean, you’ll enjoy seeing the garden.’
‘Well … ye-es….’
‘You will really’
And after much more of this—frightening, trivial, painfully so pleasant—she agreed to meet me at three o’clock on the following Wednesday. I made a point of not coming in the next day—to show I was not too eager—but of coming in on each alternate day—to show that I was still the customer. I remember that week particularly buying Sweet Brandenburg Dianthus—and a pack of hybrid pinks called, after their breeder, Robinsonii.
*
Wednesday came round. At three o’clock she was there, standing by the last of the long row of plate-glass windows. At first I was unsure, I had been looking for a khaki apron. But of course she was dressed in other clothes, a hat and a coat which I noted with disappointment and apprehension. On no account of bad quality—they were well chosen and, as I saw later, they suited her: but at first they made her less attainable, reducing instantly the intimacy to which I had grown accustomed—and also they revealed her suddenly as a girl with a life of her own. Thus the cool ministress of impersonal equipment was gone and in her place there came a confusing vista of flat and kitchen and relations and friends, of a district and shops and recreations and habits. However—through all this her old attraction shone.
I came up to her flustered.
‘How do you do? Am I late?’
‘Oh, how do you do? No, not at all.’
She was more assured—the clothes—and she smiled capably. She turned a little and said:
‘All my own work!’
I looked at her hat and searched for some definitive compliment—then simply stammered how well it looked. In fact, she was referring to the window by which we stood, and which was filled with a new garden scene from her department. A pink wax man in white flannels mowed a false lawn, paper doves hung in ghostly flight round a thatched pedestal, implements of all kinds were scattered about separately like giant insects—it was called ‘Spring Offensive’. The sight of it put me again at ease. I said:
‘I say, I’ve got terrible news. I’d have got here this morning to tell you, but I couldn’t. I’m afraid—the car’s packed up.’
‘Oh!’
‘I’ve tried everything. But not a murmur out of her.’
‘Then what are we going to do?’
‘I—don’t really know. Perhaps—couldn’t we have tea here in town, go to a movie … or what you like?’
‘Well. Well, I don’t suppose there’s anything else for it.’
That was the beginning. ‘There wasn’t anything else for it. Placidly—never tartly said. We went to a film, had tea, and I saw her on to her bus.
*
‘There wasn’t anything else for it.’ As I grew to know her better. I found those words to be the bone of her character. If I said: ‘Wouldn’t it be pleasant to be in the Scillies—now, with all the spring flowers out?’—the answer would come: ‘Why? We’ll have our own spring flowers soon.’ Or if, thinking for a subject to amuse her, I would grumble at food prices, she would reply in her pale way: ‘Well, after all we must make do.’ Making do, in fact. And from so serene and lovely a face, a face as slow as a statue. It is difficult to convey these placidities. She was neither dull nor dumb. Nor was she disinterested, nor bor
ed. She spoke neither from humility nor from resignation—but more from an absolute acceptance of events. A difficult manner to criticize—no ranting cheeriness to set one on edge, no lassitude to provoke one’s energies. But, of course, it was at times uneasy. The temperate voice spoke and stopped. And there it was. Another conversation complete, another topic gone.
Yet for me—a magic outweighed such difficulties of communion. And on occasions there sparked from the placid face an energy of spirit and understanding that both startled and proved its constant, if unexercised, capacity within her. I first saw such a spark after we had been out together several times. We did not always meet on the Wednesdays: I had work to do, and could not often get off—so we met sometimes in the evenings. But already the evenings were growing lighter, and that fictitious car could not remain much longer in the workshops. In the end I took the plunge, I confessed there was no car, no garden, and that even my visits to the store were false. Such involved dissimulation was, when you considered it, of course a compliment: it had been taken so far that it could no longer be thought of as a means to a fickle end. But at least I expected some show of consternation, some little fuss, a period of reprimand. Whatever the reason, it is never flattering to find onself deceived. However, Desirée—Desirée Griffiths—simply sat quiet for a second, her eyes widening and her mind placidating, until she said in a voice of unusual tenderness:
‘How very, very sweet of you.’
But there was one subject that did always animate her. This was the mention of a certain circle of her friends. At the sound of their names, and she pronounced them often, she brightened and became more affirmative. She used to repeat what they said fervently, as though she might have wished such views herself—yet was thankful she could express them at least at second-hand thus from the mouths of those she trusted. I knew none of these strangers looming somewhere within the strange citadel of her home life. They had names that grew huge in significance; yet they themselves remained formless. I could see no faces, imagine neither appearance nor manner. George. Kay. Norbert. I grew stonily envious of them. But because I could not see them, such envy remained remote and cold, I felt markedly indifferent to them, they were labelled the least important people alive.
The Stories of William Sansom Page 24