by H. E. Bates
I remember not bothering to unlatch the tow-path gate, but vaulting it. I heard what I thought were the wheels of the train cranking. The sound clacked hollow across the fields. Then I knew it was the fall of the signal I had heard. Steam squeezed in a long hiss across the meadows and one by one the truck buffers hit each other, irregular chock against chock, until the train was pulled straight and began to move away.
By the time I turned and vaulted the gate again I could see Tom swimming in to the bank, bringing somebody with him. I fell down the bank and we lashed together in shallow water, above a shelf of reeds. I dragged somebody through the reeds, half out of water, and I saw that it was Blackie. Tom was drawing his breath in long grating gasps. He took a single wild look at Blackie as I pulled him through the reeds. He seemed surprised, as I was, that it was not Alex. Then he dived again in a long spoon-curved sort of action that took him half across the river.
From the bridge Lydia ran down and we laid Blackie on his face. He was sick, spewing water in coughs on the grass. She did not speak a word. Across on the line the signal flapped back to danger behind the receding train. Blackie turned slowly on his face, the hairy pack of his chest muscles black and wet and faintly shining in the growing daylight, and I heard the train drawing farther and farther away.
A patch of floating mist in the river seemed to grow white. It was really Tom, struggling to free himself of his shirt before he made another dive. On the bridge Nancy screamed his name again, Tom! Tom! ‘T – om!’ in a long wail, and then went on screaming it at each successive dive.
Then I saw him appear in a new place. He was clinging to a buttress of the bridge. He was hanging, on alone, against the current. It was not strong but his own strength was going and I saw the river beating him, pulling his body out from the tips of his fingers. Lydia called:
‘There’s a rope in the car,’ and I rushed up to the bridge. The car tow-rope had a hook on it and I paid it out over the parapet to Tom. ‘I felt it tauten as he held it. Then I caught a new sound. It was the engine of the car, still running, the exhaust puttering softly like sobbing breath.
Something hit me in the face, and then hit me again, on either cheek, and then afterwards so many times that I lost count of it. It was Nancy. She struck me over and over again until I could only go on holding the rope and bow my head and let her hit me just as she would.
I think it was Mrs Sanderson who finally stopped her and took her away. In a stunned fashion I walked along the bridge, feeling the rope taut as Tom held it. I knew by that time that there would be no Alex. Mrs Sanderson did not cry. The last sounds of the goods train climbing slowly through the valley met the sounds of returning echoes and then faded away. Blackie lay on the bank and coughed for breath, sick, and spitting, and Nancy cried piteously, alone now, against a gate in a field beyond the bridge, weeping: ‘Tom, oh! Tom – oh! Tom – my God, what have we done?’
I pulled Tom by the rope through the reed shelf. He crawled up the bank and lay on his face beside Blackie. Rising pale grey mist left the black skin of water as clear and still as if no one had touched it.
I turned Tom on his back and knelt by him and wiped water from his face. The light of the sky was growing clearer every moment. The under arcs of stone cast sharp ovals of white on the water. The sound of the receding train had ceased entirely and as weeping hatred went through me I began to shake all over again, asking myself, as Nancy did, for God’s sake what had we done? Then Tom staggered to his feet and said:
‘One more try – I think I could get him,’ and then, with a cry of exhaustion, fell down.
Some time later the light in the east came to full strength. Sun threw yellow patches on a river that was not black any longer, and I realized, very slowly, that we had only just begun the longest day of the year.
Chapter Two
Perhaps I ought not to have been surprised that Bretherton came to see me two days later. In the summer evening he stood on the doorstep, notebook sticking from his pocket, small pink-lidded eyes blinking like a pig that wakes in a glare of sun.
‘Thought you might be able to do us a good turn – give us a line on things.’
I had neither a good turn to do nor a line to give, that day, on anything in the world.
‘You know – personal stuff. Do you think he did do it?’ They were still dredging, that day, for Alex’s body; the river had always been quick to take people but equally slow to give them up again. ‘Any reason? – you know?’
I did not know. Alex was dead and a great part of myself – that day I felt almost all – was dead with him. But Bretherton took my silence as tacit acquiescence to the idea that Alex had killed himself.
‘You know – strickly’ – As he said ‘strickly’ he took his pencil from his breast pocket. ‘Strickly between our two selves. In confidence – under the Old Pals’ Act.’
I had nothing to give under the Old Pals’ Act either. I stared past him and said:
‘It might just as well have been an Act of God. It probably was.’
‘You know, you’d have made a good reporter if you’d cut out the idealism,’ he said. ‘You’ve always been too idealistic. Now how did it happen? – strickly –?’
I had nothing to say.
‘You were there,’ he said, ‘you ought to be able to describe it, didn’t you? That was a wonderful effort of young Holland’s – we’re playing that up. Did you go in?’
‘I don’t swim. I’m too idealistic,’ I said.
‘No need to come the old mild and bitter if you are,’ Bretherton said.
‘I don’t know anything,’ I said. I began to shut him out, suppressing some further words about the Old Pals’ Act, a good turn and strickly between ourselves. ‘It’ll all be in the records, Mr Bretherton,’ I said, ‘all you want to know –’
‘Yes, that’s all right. But I wanted to get the human side –’
I shut him out at last. I had nothing to tell; I could not explain. I could not explain that Alex had been killed not so much by a fall from a bridge as by an accumulative process of little things, of which some were gay, some stupid, some accidental but all of small importance in themselves. Perhaps he had died on the icy evening when Lydia had first taken notice of Blackie; or on the occasions when she had led him on, or had appeared to lead him on, exactly as she had sometimes led on Tom and myself. Perhaps then, perhaps later. Perhaps on some other occasion. I didn’t know. He might even have died under the Old Pals’ Act, under the pressure of our own affection for each other, in our secret loyalties. We had been very good pals: that might have been it. If we had not been very good pals we should never have talked, as young men do, in terms of starlight and solemnity and bravado and fun and all that self-centred sort of holiness that is so wonderful when you are young. Everywhere there was a confusion of reasons. We shouldn’t have been idealistic. We should have known better. Lydia could have killed him. His mother could have killed him because in her generous and charming way she had treated him with too much indulgence, giving him too much money, letting him drink too much. It didn’t matter. I myself could have killed him, and I believe that Nancy, like myself, thought I had.
I went slowly through a summer without affection; I invented a sort of sterile and loveless vacuum for myself. When I walked it was always out of the town on the east side, where we lived, and never south towards Busketts, or south-west, towards Lydia and the Aspens, or towards the station, behind which the Sandersons lived in their Edwardian villa in a cul-de-sac of poplar trees that screened the branch line trains. I did not want anybody; I had given up my job. The summer was very hot and whenever I could I used to stuff sandwiches into my pocket and walk, mostly across fields, by path and green lane, into country I did not know. I was away early in the morning and back after the factories closed at night. It was suffocating and hot in the streets about the factories that summer, and the ploughed lands about Evensford, on heavy yellow clay, began to dry up. By late July clergymen had started the usual business
, in churches, of offering prayers for rain. There was no rain and by August the tips of the elms on the high clay-land were scorched yellow, then brown and dry. Corn began to catch fire by railway tracks. Sheep stood under long hawthorn umbrellas, sheltering from the glare of an otherwise treeless countryside, panting in the bony hollow way they have under the distress of heat, painfully convulsed and shuddering, snatching for breath. In bean-fields you could hear the splintering crack of exploding pods, burnt black by heat, and one of the commonest sights was the water-carts hauling slowly across simmering horizons, to and fro from the brooks, carrying water about the farms.
One August afternoon I was coming home across fields to east of Evensford, about three miles away, where a country of open land for a brief space suddenly closes in, tightened up by a range of small fox coverts, the last before the ash-tracks of the town begin. This is the country where, ten years later, they carved an airfield with bulldozing ruthlessness through every fox-covert and farm and pond and pigsty until nothing but a grey circus, with a perimeter five miles long, a trapeze of radio towers and landing lights, and a herd of black flying-elephants, remained above the steeple of a tiny church below. But that day war was still a long way off and there was only heat to trouble me.
I had become so transfixed and stupid about solitariness that I had even invented a system, a sort of game, rather as children do when they play hop-scotch on pavements, of avoiding roads wherever I could. If I stepped on a road it was, as in the game, a black mark against myself. It gave me a little excitement to make long detours so that I did not touch a road. It set me problems in physical complexity against all the complexity inside myself. It kept me from going mad, and through it I discovered new country.
That afternoon I was walking across a farmstead – a small stone house with a few blackthorn hovels and a railed garden lay below – when I heard the clank of a water-cart across the baked clay field behind me and a voice yelled across the sizzling air:
‘What do you think you’re doing on this land?’
The water-cart was spotted bright red, almost camouflaged, with areas of fresh lead paint. A fair-haired man bare to the waist stood up on it. tightening the reins. The horse had ash-boughs stuck into its bridle. Suddenly I caught from the man, in the brilliant glare of sun, a flash of pale blue eyes.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he shouted.
I started to move across to him; and then he jumped down and I knew by the jump of the body who he was.
‘Tom,’ I said. ‘Tom –’
I remember how we stood there, staring at each other and shaking hands. Tears started to well up inside me and I saw his mouth shaking as he smiled.
‘Did you know it was me?’ I said. ‘Or do you –’
‘I knew all the time,’ he said. ‘I saw you the other day, but you were too far away. I’d know by that walk of yours.’
‘You’re a long way from Busketts,’ I said.
‘This is my farm,’ he said. ‘Dad bought it for me – to set up on my own. Only sixty acres, but it’s got water and the house.’
‘You live here?’ I said.
‘In the house,’ he said. ‘Come on down and see.’
We sat for a long time in the stone kitchen of the house, drinking cups of ice-cold water from a well that came up under the scullery floor. Sun-withered hollyhocks, pale rose, turned by heat to a florid purple, covered the kitchen window. A few hens pecked beyond the threshold, scratching in the neglected flower-bed outside The stone-dark coolness of the house after the blaze of heat was exactly like the shock of a frozen hand across my neck. It made me draw my breath. And once again I could have cried as I sat there listening to Tom telling me of the farm, his one horse, his six heifers, how it had been too late that summer to start crops, how he cooked for himself, how at last he was free and independent, how Nancy came over once or twice a week to tidy up the place and perhaps cook an extra meal or a cake or a pie for him, and how so far he was working it single-handed, seven days a week, all alone.
‘And where have you been?’ he said.
‘Nowhere.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I gave up the job.’
I felt icy water flow through my body. Feeling woke in me like a cold moving pain. I had been nowhere and done nothing and felt nothing and had asked for nothing. Suddenly feeling was rushing back and I knew I could not hold it and then he said:
‘If you’re not doing anything why don’t you come up and give me a hand? – for a day or two a week – if you like.’
Loneliness burst inside me like a fester. A suppuration of self-affliction poured through me, hot as the air outside. I could not say anything, but I must have nodded, because he said:
‘That’s absolutely wonderful. Nance will be thrilled to bits. I’ll nip over and tell her tonight and then –’
‘Not for a day or two,’ I said. ‘Let me settle in.’
‘All right, all right, anything,’ he said. ‘When do you want to come?’
‘Just when it suits you.’
‘It suits me as soon as you can throw some stuff together. Tonight if you like – we’ll have a damn good supper of home cured and four eggs –’ and for the first time since Alex had died we laughed together.
That evening we drove into Evensford and fetched my things. In one of the hovels behind the farm Tom had a brand new Ford. ‘Nance bothered me to sell her the old one when I came over here,’ he told me. ‘She has to have something to run about in.’ We drove back through dusty hedgerows at a gentle pace. ‘Another week and this one’ll be run in.’
From that day, for the rest of the summer, I felt rather like the car. I felt as if I were running myself in, gently working back to living. Of Tom’s sixty acres four fields were grass. They were small fields bounded by hedgerows of mighty hawthorn, with trunks like rubbed mahogany under which the six heifers panted all day in shade. In the fifth field, a crop of barley, the only crop that year on the place, about five acres left by the previous tenant, was flaring white on the small hillside. Tom had begun to mow it by hand, and when I arrived we started tackling it together. That field too was bounded by big neglected hedges of hawthorn and heat lay compressed in it, over the blinding patch of barley, like the breath of a bakehouse oven. We worked stripped to the waist. Tom worked with a scythe and I followed him with rake and bonds, making sheaves. Sometimes when I bent down and stood sharply up again the field seemed to rock about me, dazzling, pitching slantwise, almost melting away under hard blue sky. We used to start work at five and then have breakfast, in the old-fashioned way, about nine. We always had thick rashers of home-cured bacon and fatty fried eggs and new bread and gallons of strong milky tea. We ate like wolves and soon the blisters on my shoulders skinned, raw and sharp, like peeled pink onions. After breakfast we took cold tea into the field and worked on till noon. In the afternoons we carried water for the cattle, fetching it in the red-scabbed water-cart from the brook, the Biddy brook, that ran over the road down the hill. Pale pink willow herb and flowering cresses and water-dock had almost choked the narrow gullies of water under the white footbridge, and every day the depth of water seemed a little less. Every day I stood in the brook, without even taking off my boots and socks, and made a new water-dip among the weeds and cresses, handing buckets up to Tom on the cart. The coldness of water running over my feet was very like the first cold shock of well-water in the cool kitchen after the heat of the afternoon when I had first met Tom. It did more than cool my body; it acted like a compress on my injured mind.
Sometimes at this point the brook, from liquefied deposits of iron, ran very red, staining cress-roots as I pulled them out a kind of rusty scarlet, and one afternoon the redness clotted on my socks and boots and the legs of my trousers and when I hauled myself up on the bridge Tom laughed at me from the cart and said:
‘Now you look a rare bloody mess,’ and I laughed too and said:
‘I feel wonderful.’
>
About the fourth or fifth afternoon – I am not sure which, because the days melted into each other – I came into the kitchen, naked to the waist, in boots still squelching pads of water from the brook. I had come to put the kettle on the paraffin-burner for tea. As I came into the kitchen I could hear the sound of the burner. Then I could see that already the cloth was laid.
Then Nancy’s voice called from the scullery ‘That you, Tom?’ and she came into the kitchen, carrying a pink glass jug of milk in her hands. It was one of those transparent jugs that turn the milk, in a fascinating way, a pure light pink. She stood absolutely still, clasping it in her hands. I could see her fingers pink through the upper glass of the jug. Then the milky fleshy cheek of her face turned almost the same colour, flushing up to bright pale eyes.
‘Where did you come from?’
‘I live here,’ I said.
‘I think Tom might have told me.’
She put the jug down on the table. She turned quickly and went out of the kitchen; and turning she saw my red boots and the watery pads they had made on the floor-bricks.
‘And where have you been? – you’re plastered up to your neck.’
She did not wait for answer to that; I stood at the scullery door, looking in. The scullery had an open square-foot of window shaded by the branches of an elderberry. The odour of elderberry was strong and dark, and Nancy moved pale and big between narrow shady walls about the singing paraffin stove and the fat brown teapot.
‘How do you like your tea?’ she said.
‘Strong and black,’ I said.
The kettle spouted steam; she forgot the heat of the handle and burnt the tips of her fingers, sucking them. ‘Damn,’ she said. She picked up the kettle by the fringe of her apron. She poured water into the teapot and said:
‘It’s hotter than ever today, don’t you think? I was going to cook a few things when the sun went down a bit.’