by H. E. Bates
‘The sky’s clearing – I think it’s stopped. Yes – there’s a star.’
In the growing darkish coppery light he moved about the bedroom, finding his slippers and his dressing-gown. He said:
‘I’m going down for a drink of milk. Perhaps it’ll soothe the coffee down. Do you want some?’
I said no, and he went quietly downstairs, shutting the door after him. Through the window I saw one star after another reveal itself in a breaking sky. I lay watching them and thought of Tom and what he had said and how, at last, I felt I understood him. I thought of Lydia and what she had said, earlier, about love and the inconsequent business of love and how there were a great many things, some of them important to yourself and some of them monstrously impossible and silly to other people, for which you could not give any explanation. Stars began to brighten all over the lighter, rain-swept sky. All the eaves of the house dripped coolly into sloppy puddles in the yard. I thought a long way back to the day when Lydia had first skated, when Tom had first seen her and she had not even remembered his name. It was impossible to guess how tortuously and how far he had travelled round before he had reached the point of knowing consciously that he wanted her. She in turn had seemed desperately to try to gain one object, and now, at last, had succeeded only in gaining, as people so often do, another she had tried to avoid.
I lay there for a long time, watching a sky from which all cloud and rain and lightning had departed, leaving the entire sparkling naked range of stars. When at last Tom did not seem to come back I got out of bed and went and stood at the window, leaning on the lowered sash, staring across the fields.
From below Tom’s voice, and then Lydia’s, came from the yard. I saw a stream of light from the kitchen swing out to the barley stack, and I heard Tom say:
‘You see – all over. Every star in the sky out now.’ And then: ‘It’s drying already. It just ran through the cracks like a drain. Careful just here –’
Footsteps, voices, then the figures of Tom and Lydia went across the yard. I stood for a moment or two longer looking down. From the yard I caught the words ‘Tom,’ and then something else, and then something about ‘ploughing perhaps on Monday’. Tom’s voice threaded nervously into air alone, babbling on as he had done in bed, confused and groping.
I saw it at last silenced by an upward gesture of her arms. He seemed to stand stunned and then she began to kiss him. He had probably never kissed a woman before except perhaps at a party, in fun, at a dance, or in some stupid game at Christmas time. Now he was in love, for the first, the most miraculous time. I walked away from the window and lay down on the bed. I stared up at the stars again and thought of him, stunned, joyous, blown explosively out of himself by the force of a new and tender wonder.
‘All the stars are out,’ I heard him say again. ‘Every single star.’
Chapter Four
Tom’s neighbours were a family of Presbyterian Scots named McKechnie; they owned a farm of three hundred acres up the hill. In the beginning they had been, as neighbours are in the beginning, very friendly. McKechnie, a man of sixty or so, had something of the appearance of a thin cylinder of freckled steel gone rusty at the top. The McKechnie boys and the McKechnie girls, seven of them, were cylinders of comparable appearance, all stiff, all dry, all freckled, all rusty at the head.
Every Sunday the McKechnies did a regimental march to church in Evensford. Since there was no Presbyterian worshipping place in Evensford they had joined a chapel, the fearsome Succoth, that gave the nearest pattern of a tomb-like ideal. In summer they trailed across field-paths, the girls white-gloved, the men in squarish bowler hats; in winter they marched by road. They did not cook at the McKechnie house on Sundays. There were stories of midday dinners of cold pork faggot and bread and jam, with only streams of long cold prayer and cold water to wash them down. The McKechnies brought even to the Nonconformity of Evensford an essay in Sabbatarianism the severity of which it had no hope of matching. Even Evensford cooked and ate on Sundays. With the halo of the chapel pew went, just as deeply revered, the halo of the oven: roast beef and hymn book were equally sanctified. Only the McKechnies, spare and cylindrical, with their strange eyes of sandy-green, their vivid rustiness and their fleshless essay in self-denial, stood mirthlessly apart from a day that Evensford, both in belly and spirit, really enjoyed.
The friendliness of the McKechnies on week-days was entirely the opposite of this. Mrs McKechnie became a pale but jovial-feathered hen sending down to Tom, in the afternoons, plates of still warm girdle-scones. McKechnie lent him tools, promised a pup from a coming litter of sheepdogs and threw open to Tom, without prompting, the entire three hundred acres of shooting from the house with its drawn Venetian blinds of dark cocoa-colour up to the coverts on the hill. The McKechnie sons went to endless and selfless trouble, even once or twice at night, to bring us veterinary help when the six heifers had forty-eight hours of mild poisoning from a temporary pollution of the brook. ‘And if ever ye find ye can’t manage, Tom,’ Mrs McKechnie would say, ‘just shout and one of the girls’ll be only too glad to come over.’
One of the girls was Pheley. I thought at first her name was Phebey, but when the final entanglements of accent were cleared away it plainly emerged as Pheley, perhaps a diminutive of Ophelia: we never knew. Pheley, cast in the freckled-rusty-cylindrical mould of all McKechnies, was twenty-eight. Her figure seemed to have various spoon-like knobs stuck about it, like bony afterthoughts. In sunlight her eyes were a pale, sharp green. In other lights they were sandy, with irradiations of mild streaked emerald. She had a habit of saying ‘Ye never will!’ or ‘Ye never do!’ as other people say ‘There, now’ or ‘Fancy.’ Her voice had a light piercing astringence, a sort of over-eager gristliness, and her skin the pale embarrassing candescence of the sandy-haired.
It was Pheley who brought down to Tom her mother’s plates of still warm girdle-scones. At first it was only scones, with honey to put in them; then it was oat-cakes and currant biscuits and shortbread and damson pie. Tom, in the weeks before I joined him, was not ungrateful for these things. They saved his cooking, varied the monotonies of his cheese and eggs and bacon. It came, at first, as a pleasant surprise to him, an act of unsolicited neighbourliness that touched him. Then, alone there at the farm, lonely at times, oppressed by the death of Alex and miserable, as I afterwards knew, because I had abandoned him, he began to expect them. He began to look forward to the figure of Pheley coming down the hill.
‘Well, here I am again. The old nuisance. Always turning up like a bad penny. Well, we had a wee bit stuff left over –’
Soon she began to come every afternoon; she began to focus on Tom, during the hot weeks of August, the ferocious concentrations of a burning-glass. Through the pallid eyes, deceptively emotionless as marbles, poured a white heat of narrowed interest that must have throbbed under the colourless candescent skin like fever. She started to linger about the house. She stretched her long gaunt red-haired figure, with its uneasy afterthoughts prodding under the blouse like her own clenched knuckles, in his chairs. She gave him ardent help with buckets and horse and heifer feed and said: ‘Take the load off your poor feet while I rinse the tea-things – ah! ye’re awful, the breakfast things too. Didn’t you have any dinner? You know you could have dinner with us.’
Presently the McKechnies invited him home. In the four or five weeks before I joined him he went up to the venetian-blinded house, stuffed inside with manorial fumed oak, two or three times a week for supper. He walked over the farm with McKechnie. He was intensely anxious to succeed up there, in his own small neglected farm, by himself. He wanted to set out alone, severed from his father, from his family, as a sort of Benjamin hitherto overshadowed by big brothers. McKechnie was a good farmer and Tom, I think, felt that he could learn much from a man who had so succeeded on a comparable piece of neighbouring soil. So he was glad of McKechnie. He drank in a great deal of McKechnie advice, generously and gladly given, about the peculiarity of land th
at is so strong that it grows wheat like dark reeds but so harsh, in misuse, under rain, that it becomes savagely temperamental and intractably ruinous to people who work it stupidly and weakly.
So McKechnie would say: ‘Ye’ll never grow barley on that bit. That’s a mistake. Never do that again. Bring your barley up yon hill. There. That’s your barley land, boy. Keep your wheat down at the bottom. It’s terrible strong land there. Catch it right and y’re made. Catch it wrong and I doubt if prayer’ll ever put it right from now till Doomsday.’
Tom became intensely grateful for advice of this kind. Even when he didn’t go to supper he got into the habit of walking across, in the evenings, to the McKechnie land. The two farms shared for a short distance a cart-track that led, finally, up to the coverts. It was a mass of sloe and camomile and silver weed, with hare-tracks running across from one field to another, and some distance along it a pile of wurzels, sprouting pink-violet from a summer of clamping, stood unused by a gateway.
‘It’ll do your heifers no harm to eat a bit of water for a change. Roots are another way of feeding water – just come up and help yourself any time ye want them. The gate’s unlocked at the end.’
If McKechnie was not there Tom could talk to the sons; and if there were no sons Pheley was always waiting.
One evening, after about a month of this, Pheley met him on the hill. There was no one at home, she said, and she wanted to walk back with him. She seemed rather upset. If each of the McKechnie girls had been dressed as men and each of the McKechnie sons dressed as women, it would hardly have been possible to tell that a mistake had been made. Except for her thin narrow soprano voice, Pheley was very like a tall, pinafored boy.
That evening, as they walked down between alleys of ripening sloe-bushes, under a brilliant July sunset that seemed to inflame every McKechnie hair until it was a virulent shade of red-ochre, she asked him if he saw anything different about her.
And Tom, in exactly the way typical of himself and of most men, said ‘No. ‘I don’t think so.’
She turned, strained and nervous and drawn, and said:
‘Nothing? You mean you don’t see anything changed at all?’
And Tom said, with that honest innocence of his: ‘No. You look just the same as ever, as far as I can see,’ a remark that would have annoyed most women but that must have gone through Pheley like a sting of agony.
Then she stopped. ‘Take a look at me, Tom,’ she said. ‘Will you take a good long look at me?’
Tom took a good long look at Pheley. He could see nothing different. She stared at him, all fiery and sandy-eyed, with a blazing impression of being overstrung about something and on the verge of tears.
Then suddenly she whipped off her hat.
‘Good God,’ Tom said.
‘Now you see,’ Pheley said; and he saw that she had cut her hair.
Perhaps it seems ridiculous to recall, at this distance, the heart-burning intensity of days when girls were constantly whipping off their hats and saying to young men, with grief or triumph or some other high emotion, ‘There! I went out and had it off,’ and some poor stunned fellow would stand there trying to frame out of his incoherence a word of enthusiasm for a transformation that had reduced his lover to the level of a newly-barbered boy. It seems impossible now that homes were being torn apart by great rifts of anger and shock because fathers returned from offices to find daughters bobbed and shriven, with trembling mothers standing ready to placate and pacify men who grieved impotently for locks and curls they felt they would never see again.
When Tom looked at Pheley he was reminded of a girl he had known, at school, who had had her hair cut off because of ringworm; and how, for him, she had never really become a girl again.
‘Well,’ Pheley said. She spoke with a sort of doom-like abandon for which her high astringent voice was not fitted. ‘It’s done now. Whether anybody likes it or not. It’s done now.’
It seemed to Tom that there was nothing much to make a fuss about. He could not see much difference, as far as attraction went, between a long-haired Pheley and one who seemed to be wearing a red stage-wig. Then she rose in pure blasphemy.
‘Grief, there’s been hell to pay.’
Tom did not know what to answer; she had a curious naked look of unreality, all red and stagey and slightly embarrassing, as she stood there doubly fired by the setting sun.
Then wild, pressed, sandy-shot tears started springing from her red-rimmed eyes, and she said, whimpering:
‘He whipped me.’
Tom stood terribly stunned. He had not grasped that the cutting off of Pheley’s hair might be, to McKechnie, a sin second only in outrage to something like a damnation of the Holy Ghost.
‘He came upstairs and whipped me.’
She hung her head, a grown woman of twenty-eight, beaten and turned child, crying desperately. For some moments Tom experienced a terrible sorrow for her. It was all so monstrous and infamously typical of narrow sectarian prejudice that he did not think for one moment it had anything to do with himself.
‘Don’t cry,’ was all he could think of saying. ‘You mustn’t cry.’
She stood there crying a little longer, and then he took her to the house. He made a pot of tea, and they sat at the kitchen table, drinking it. Tears had reddened and enlarged the almost hairless lids of her eyes until they were as puffed and swollen as her mouth.
After a time she spoke, tremblingly, of her awful discontent. He began to get some idea of the monstrous iron that bound the McKechnie household. No cooking on Sundays, no music, no jokes, not even much talking, no papers, no reading except of sectarian things. A prayer-meeting once a week and often, especially in winter, twice or three times; a long dry scouring word of the Lord before breakfast every day. A hardness, an enamel of twice-fired prejudice and precept, held the family, the eldest son, a man of forty, in a kind of isolated and awful fealty. Pheley had never been to a dance, a cinema, a theatre, a public-house, or a public place where music was played. She did not know what these things were like. An inculcated horror of them bound her like a fear of disease. It not only seemed monstrously outdated and unreal to Tom but about as fatuous: a fatuity that left him shocked and disbelieving and amazed.
Pheley poured all this out to him and he listened. She drank tea slowly, dazed, as if her lips were bruised, and once or twice she stirred uneasily, with a corresponding tightening of her lips, in her chair.
After a time Tom asked her if she felt better and she said:
‘Except for my back.’
Tom grasped the meaning of this slowly. Her earlier remark about beating had shocked him, but he had not thought of it as being so harshly literal as that. He took it to mean a boxed ear, a few slaps of a hand about the head perhaps, not more.
‘Your back?’ he said, and she got up from her chair and said:
‘I’ll show you.’
She reached over her shoulder and undid the clasps of her dress and spread the panels of it outward with her two hands. She wore even then an old-fashioned camisole instead of a slip, and something had ripped it down the centre. Underneath it the flesh was so much like pale alabaster that where the strokes of beating had cut into it the lines seemed raised and crusted, already more blue than red. They might have been laid there with a hot and accurate bar.
When she sat down at the table, her shoulders naked, she started weeping again. Tom felt a wave of sickness that was exactly as sour and mortifying as the one he had felt when hearing Blackie Johnson and his mother quarrelling over the dead. The two things belonged to the same strange world of monstrous impossibilities. They did not happen. They were odious incongruities in a life that had never given him anything but decency and happiness and an immortal trust in the decency of others. He believed in that as profoundly as McKechnie believed in whatever God it was he believed in – and after that Tom didn’t think it was much of a God – and he came as near to hating McKechnie as he had ever hated anyone at all.
It was li
ke him, too, to be practical.
‘You must put something on that,’ he said. ‘Some ointment, some hound’s-tongue or something –’
Pheley smiled a little between her crying.
‘You don’t quite grasp it yet, do you?’ she said. She looked more than ever like a pasty, red-eyed doll with an ill-fitting crop of stiff sandy hair. Tom did not know what he had failed to grasp and she said:
‘You don’t get it. If I’m beaten I must bear it. I mustn’t heal it. It must heal itself. If you deserve the affliction you mustn’t anoint the affliction. Otherwise it has no value. Now do you get what I mean?’
Slowly Tom, shocked again, got what she meant. She cried again, this time, as on most of the others, not through pain but through the humiliation of being a grown woman, bludgeoned by chastisements she must have known were archaic and monstrous and which she found it hard to explain. Her face became a smudged and desolate mass of tear-marks that stained the pale auburn skin like a rash. She broke down a little, biting the fingers of both hands in order to quieten her tears, and then put her head at last on Tom’s shoulder.
‘We’ll see about this,’ Tom said. ‘I’ll get ointment tomorrow. You can come down in the afternoon and put it on.’
She stayed a little longer, and then gave a curious secrecy to it all by saying:
‘I’d better go now. Otherwise they’ll be looking for me and they’ll find the two of us here together. They’ll think it has something to do with you.’
It did not occur to Tom that it had anything to do with him. Nor did it occur to him, even remotely, until some long time afterwards, that the cutting of Pheley’s hair and the beating of her back might be two things by which Pheley and McKechnie might try to hold him to something, as it were to a promise, a solemn imputation of affection, he had never intended should be there.