by H. E. Bates
‘There’s nobody out,’ I said. ‘The only people I saw were the Aspen sisters. They came by in the Daimler. The two of them, with a girl –’
He lay for some time across the desk, swaying slightly, saying nothing, beating his elbows mournfully on the blotter so that the teacup rattled. An occasional incoherent sound was sucked in through his teeth and then exhaled. I felt a dry sickening rawness in my upper throat liquefy into bile that drained down into my stomach with scalding bitterness.
‘Get your hat,’ he said at last. ‘Put your hat on.’
Bretherton always forgot that I did not wear a hat. Snow was now falling in such large, easy blowing flakes that it created a mist in the air behind which the town had disappeared.
‘You will need your hat,’ he said. ‘Because it’s polite for a young man to have a hat. And you are going to be polite to the two Miss Aspens.’
He spoke quietly now, with restraint that terrified.
‘You are going to get a story from them,’ he said. ‘Perhaps there is a story about the girl – she’s the niece, she’s the one who will come into the money – you never know. Get your hat and go up there now.’
‘Now?’ I said. ‘They’ll hardly have arrived. They’ll hardly be there themselves –’
‘For the Good Jesus!’ he shouted.
He flung his short squabby arms sideways and then sideways across his neck, tearing at the shoulders of his jacket with clawing movements of rage, his eyes expanding like intolerable yellow bubbles moist with tears.
‘They’ll hardly be there themselves!’ he said. ‘But you will – you will – you will. For once you will.’
He threw back his face and I thought for a moment he would spit into the cold milk-skinned tea that stood before him on the desk.
‘You will – for once. For the first time. Perhaps,’ he yelled at me brokenly, ‘for the last time –’
As he turned and prepared to spit at the stove I found my coat and walked out into the street. Broad feather-like flakes of snow blotted out the distances of the street of closed shops, bringing to the afternoon an air of relief, a wonderful softening, after weeks of snowless frozen wind. In the shop windows with their drawn blinds the reflection of snow had an effect of scintillation. It began to transfigure them all. The gauze-windowed offices of solicitors, the club where local gentlemen met and played billiards over tots of whisky, the Succoth chapel with its narrow windows of stained glass, the piano shop where Miss Scholes gave music lessons, Thompson’s barber saloon with the umbrellas in the windows, the shuttered banks and the Temperance Hotel with its tea room on the side and its copper tea urn, boiling under blue gas flames, on the marble slab on the counter: curtained by falling snow, it grew more delicate and unreal and transfigured as I walked through it, sick and nervous and nursing my sprained wrist, to call for the first time on the Aspen sisters, Bertie and Juliana, and their niece, whose name I did not know.
Chapter Two
My father was a man of gentle and unargumentative temperament who loved music and spoke sometimes of the sin of pride. He was most anxious, as he said, that I should not get above myself.
We lived, intensely respectable, behind drawn lace curtains, in the end house of a row of six, adjoining a factory from which the thump of presses shivered the crockery on the table and fluttered the artificial flowers in the ornaments on the mantelpiece. At the back was a little garden bounded by a tarred fence on two sides and part of the factory wall on the other. In summer there were lilies in bloom by the factory wall and a pure white Frau Karl Druschki rose by the water butt and along the fence a row of sunflowers and shrubs of pale yellow flowers whose name I did not know. We had no light upstairs. I went to bed either in darkness or by candlelight and then in the after-darkness watched the glow of furnace lights across the valley. On Saturday nights I heard Joe Pendleton, our neighbour, quarrelling with Clem Robinson, his neighbour on the one side. Everybody seemed to get drunk on Saturdays; neighbours threw buckets of water on each other and violently against back doors. The days were filled with the beating of ragged bits of matting on backyard fences and the chant of women gossiping in curling pins and sackcloth aprons and men’s caps. I had a text on my bedroom wall which told me that God was the unseen listener to every conversation; but the walls were so thin that we could hear the conversation of the Pendletons too and the sizzle of kippers in their frying-pan. Joe Pendleton played the euphonium in the Rifle Band and practised sometimes in the bedroom next to mine, so that I could hear the metallic clatter of valves between the notes of music. Clem Robinson kept homing pigeons in a gas-tarred dove cote made from orange boxes at the end of the garden, and in the evenings and on Saturdays and Sundays the birds circled gracefully over a world of other little gardens, other back-jetties lined by gas-tarred fences and other factories, gaunt and silent and covered with a snuff-brown bloom of leather dust that was sometimes blown too on gritty little winds down the streets outside.
‘The trouble with you is you’re too damn shy,’ Bretherton said to me. It was six o’clock the following evening before I could in fact bring myself to walk up to the lodge of the Aspen house, where the lodge keeper came out with an old-fashioned hurricane lamp and let me in. I had pleaded the sprained wrist and a doctor’s surgery as excuses to Bretherton for not going before and that morning he had yelled at me about my damned shyness – ‘that’s what you’ve got to get over,’ he said, ‘that’s what you’ve got to conquer. Yourself!’
As I walked through the gates of the Aspen house and up the avenue of limes on the other side no snow was falling, but sometimes from the trees a few wind-feathered flakes detached themselves and floated slowly down and it was quite quiet except for the clip of high ash-boughs swinging stiff and frozen against each other in the darkening air. Under snow the avenue, the trees and the park looked larger than perhaps they really were, and the house seemed more impressing and more secluded and farther away.
In Evensford’s world of steep back-alleys and whining stitching machines and clattering dray-horses pulling loads of belly leather into granite factory yards there were no aristocrats except the Aspens; there was no possible suspicion of any monogram but theirs. Everyone else in the town had climbed up, self-made, self-projected, sometimes self-taught, to whatever he was, and if he could not climb he remained whatever he had been.
The town had grown swiftly from a long stone street and eight hundred people and an open brook in 1820 to a place of fifty boot factories, ten chapels, a staunch Liberalism and ten thousand people in 1880; and to a town of Rotarian and Masonic circles, many gleaming fish-and-chip shops and a public library, of golf clubs and evening classes, of amateur operatics on winter evenings and sacred concerts on Sunday afternoons, in 1929. Long rows of bright red brick, or houses roofed with slate shining like blue steel, had rapidly eaten their way beyond the shabby confines of what had been a village, beyond new railway tracks and gas works, obliterating pleasant outlying farms and hedgerows of hawthorn and wild rose, to stop only where the river-valley took its steep dip to wide flat meadows that were crowned in turn by the iron-ore furnaces I could see flaring at night along the escarpment beyond. Gauntly, in a few generations, a valley-side had been transformed; a skyline of factory chimneys and railway viaducts, gasometers and chapel cupolas, temperance hotels and bus depots had marched in, replacing old horizons of cornstack and farm and elm. Continually new roofs spawned along clay hillsides, encrusting new land, settling down on the landscape in a year or two with the greyness of old ash-heaps under rain.
In the centre of all this the Aspen house stood in a circle of land diametrically split by great avenues of lime and chestnut and elm. The town had been kept away from it by the barricade of a stone wall a mile long and a perimeter of great trees. Outside the barrier men crawled with despondence into and fled with a sort of hungry distraction out of opaque-window factories and their dark bloom of leather dust. Odours of burning leather hung on all Evensford streets, in puthering cloud
s, on windless afternoons, after waste had stoked the fires. Men like Clem Robinson kept homing pigeons in stunted cotes in back gardens and watched them, mostly on Sunday mornings, with a sort of forlorn possessiveness, carving patterns of grey and pearl and white on Evensford’s sky. Life in Evensford and life behind the long Aspen walls were not merely different. It was possible to live in Evensford for a long time, even for a generation, and not see the Aspen house, the Aspen garden or the Aspens themselves. It was possible to drive through it and never know that behind the factories and their alley-ways and the streets that were like parallels of smoky ash-heaps, desolate under rain and transfigured only under snow, a great house remained.
The only house of comparable size in all Evensford was the Sanatorium. It stood high up, almost within sight of the Aspen house, behind a barricade of trees, on the south side of the town. It was always full, and there seems to be no doubt that it was more healthy there.
When the maid let me in at the high rounded front door and said to me, ‘If you’ll wait a minute I’ll tell Miss Aspen you’re here. The Press, is it?’ the fingers of my sprained hand were so cold and shaking that I held them inside the overcoat, trying to warm them with the other hand. I could feel a draught of east wind clear as a knife as it whipped under the door, and then with something of the same level steeliness a voice called in a piercing accent from a room at the end of the hall:
‘Mr Bretherton, is it? Is it Mr Bretherton there?’
‘It’s Mr Richardson,’ I said.
‘Mr who?’
‘Mr Richardson.’
‘Mr Richardson? What Mr Richardson is that?’
‘I’m Mr Bretherton’s assistant,’ I said.
‘What is it you wish to speak to me about?’
‘The late Mr Aspen,’ I said, ‘if you would be so kind.’
She did not answer. A moment later the maid came out of the room, into the long cold hall, and beckoned me in. The voice pierced the air loudly again as I went over the threshold into a room draped everywhere, it seemed, with curtains of plum-red chenille.
‘What is the matter with Mr Bretherton?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘He doesn’t like me,’ she said. ‘He sent you instead.’
The two sisters were sitting by the fire, one on either side, Juliana still wearing the high mauve scarf pinned round her neck and Miss Bertie still sitting, as she had done in the Daimler, like a pale round dumpling. I began to say something about not disturbing them when I saw, or rather heard, Juliana eating soup from a basin. She took it in with deep broad sucks from a spoon. There were large pieces of bread in the soup and each piece of bread was a suck, short and determined and ferocious.
When she stopped sucking to speak to me, to turn on me a pair of remarkably blue assertive eyes, she said:
‘How do you get on with Bretherton? What are you doing there?’
‘I’m supposed to be a reporter.’
‘Supposed? Don’t you like it?’
‘No,’ I said.
She seemed, I thought, to like the candour of this.
In the moment before taking another suck at the bread she smiled, showing her teeth. They were very long, fang-like, unfortunate teeth. Her lips could not cover them. They were prominent and ugly and yet, whenever she smiled, swiftly, spontaneously, they made her attractive.
‘You needn’t stand up. This is my sister. Does it snow?’
Miss Bertie nodded her head to me. It was not until afterwards that I knew she was the elder. Her skin, distended and gentle and rosy, had a curious bloom of preservation on it that misled me. She had a sort of dampness about her round soft face, a certain dewiness, that made her seem self-effacive, without power. She was not eating soup. She sat poised instead, rotund and gentle and as if watchfully expectant about something, on the edge of a low chair, her skirts up, so that I could see a pair of soft elephantine calves encased in thick fire-coloured stockings, with sometimes a glimpse of pale brown bloomers falling from above.
No, I said, it was not snowing any longer, and Miss Juliana took a passionate suck at her soup and said:
‘What have you done to your hand?’
I told her about the skating. The division of heat and cold in the room was so sharp that when I sat down I felt as if I were perching on a knife. I gave an involuntary excruciating shudder, my face hot from the fire, the back of me iced by the steady whipped draught that came in somewhere through the thick curtains behind.
‘You had better slip off your overcoat,’ she said. ‘You’ll feel the benefit when you go out again.’ She sucked passionately and ferociously at bread and soup as I took off my overcoat and laid it on the back of the chair. ‘You look awfully thin. You ought to have hound’s-tongue for your hand.’
As she stood up to take more soup from the tureen keeping hot in the hearth I saw that she was very tall. She stood bony and large and monolithic, the mauve scarf round her long neck, her long teeth ugly and attractive and glinting. She belched once or twice with genteel reservation into the fire as she ladled her soup, saying between each belch and its suppression: ‘We both of us caught our deaths yesterday.’ Her angular body rumbled again as she sat down. ‘We are going to have a glass of port when Lydia comes down,’ she said. ‘It will probably do you good to have one too.’
It struck me several times that she had not the faintest idea what I had come there for; and I hoped she would not ask me. I had some sort of story to make up about Elliot, the dead brother, and in the morning Bretherton would either rage, in jaundiced ironies, because the facts were wrong, or forget it altogether. I need not have worried about these things. Passionately sucking, blowing and belching, monolithic and almost masculine, Miss Juliana failed to let any word of Elliot come between us as we sat there.
‘If you are not going to work with Bretherton,’ she said, ‘what are you going to do?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Does he drink as much as ever?’
‘About as much.’
‘You’re frightfully thin,’ she said again. ‘You ought to live in the country. You need country air. You’ll be better when you’re twenty-eight – that’s the fourth cycle of seven and if one can get over it it’s all right. All men go through that. How old are you now?’
‘Nineteen,’ I said.
‘Just Lydia’s age,’ she said.
‘Oh! No,’ Miss Bertie said. She spoke for the first time, and I caught in her voice an irresistible precision, calm and firm and so unlike the rosy gentleness of her dumpling face. ‘Lydia’s nineteen and eight months. She’ll be twenty-one next year.’
‘Ah yes,’ Juliana said; and for a single moment, for the first and only time, her changing enthusiasms were stopped and subdued.
At once there was an awkward silence, the smallest touch of antagonism in the air. I became aware, after a moment or two, of the scent of hyacinths. Until then I had not noticed deep Chinese bowls of them, pale mauve and pink, in full flower, in the far corner of the room. Now I saw them and said:
‘The hyacinths are very beautiful –’
‘They are Bertie’s. It’s Bertie who’s the one for flowers. Aren’t you, Bertie?’
‘You like flowers?’ Miss Bertie said. ‘Oh! I can see you do. How nice – it’s not often men like flowers.’
‘I am very fond of them,’ I said. I felt the conversation, through flowers, spring a little further out of formality. ‘It’s one of the things in our family. We all like them. My father especially.’
‘Do I know your father?’ she said.
I said I did not think so; I said he sang – it was the first thing I could think of in possible identification – in the Orpheus Choir.
‘Is that the choir that sang at the Coronation?’ Miss Bertie said; but because the Coronation had been in 1912 and myself a baby at the time I said I did not remember. Miss Bertie declared at once, assertively:
‘I rather think it must have been. I feel quite sure. They sang on the
terrace here. I thought they sang most beautifully. I remember it very well. It was quite lovely – there is something so beautiful about the sound of men’s voices in the air.’
For a few moments she seemed to consider all this, and I wondered if she were satisfied.
‘You are Church?’ she said.
‘Chapel.’
‘I see.’
She seemed to weigh it all up, the skating, the flowers, the singing, the chapel, my father and last of all myself. She seemed to be on the point of deciding whether I was a satisfactory person or a dubious person. She looked hard at me for some seconds and I looked steadily at her in return. A breath of ice crept across the room from under the chenille door-curtains, which shuddered distinctly. The scent of hyacinths faded perceptibly. I could hear the whine of wind through tree boughs in the frozen darkness outside and then it was Miss Juliana who said:
‘We ought to get the port. We ought to have Lydia down,’ and Miss Bertie cut in, cross-wise:
‘I find it rather a refreshing manifestation in a young man to like flowers. I find that something of a phenomenon these days,’ and I felt she had gone a great way towards accepting me. She seemed to have decided, above all, that I was intensely respectable.
‘Pull the bell,’ she said.
Two great enamelled bell-pulls, like the lids of enormous soup dishes, were let into the wall on either side of the fire that scorched us and yet left us icy, and when Juliana pulled one of them I heard the bell jangling down long cold passages through the house.
‘We must tell Lydia about your skating,’ she said. ‘I don’t think she skates. You ought to teach her. Where can one skate in Evensford?’
‘On the old marsh,’ I said. ‘Anywhere on the flood water.’
‘Where is that?’ she said. I caught in the words the mark of her isolation. She did not know that for forty miles the floods were frozen, as they had not been frozen for many years, in a mile wide lake. Her life behind the stone walls, in the island of trees, shut her away from such things. But she startled me at once by saying: