by H. E. Bates
When I first met Pheley we were down in the barley field; and in her first words there was a sharp thin-lipped hostility.
‘Oh! Who’s the friend?’
She was quick to notice my small hands, inadequate and much stabbed by barley ears.
‘Ye’ll have to learn to make the sheaves half-size,’ she said, ‘won’t you?’
‘I’ll make them twice as big,’ I said, ‘and then you can lift them.’
‘Ye never will!’ she said.
One afternoon she brought us, with the girdle-scones, a large blue can of tea. As we stood drinking it she took up the rake and began raking up big rustling rolls of barley. She had very long, freckled and, as it were, red-nosed arms that went right round the sheaf in a pale, sinewy, expert lock. She made a dozen of these sheaves in, as it seemed, no time at all, leaving them like fat lolloping sheep among my rows of skinny lambs.
‘That’ll give ye some idea,’ she said, and the point of this was not lost on me.
But the point of it was lost, that day, every other day and even for some time after she had cut her hair, on Tom. He accepted her simply as the pointed expression of the McKechnie character. It did not occur to him that she was any more than another boy, flat, angular, several years older than himself, who wanted to show a decent and generous neighbourliness to a newcomer.
To me, at first, she was a sexless barb that irritated.
‘Ah! here comes the friend,’ she would say.
‘And here,’ I got to answer, ‘comes the enemy.’
In this way we tried unsuccessfully to hate each other off the place.
By the time we had the party for Nancy’s birthday Tom had grown to accept her as something awkward on the landscape that had to be tolerated. Her high voice, crow-like, cawed at us through the afternoons. Tom paid his dutiful calls to the farm house in the evenings, taking back a washed tea-can, using the telephone, asking advice from McKechnie. Whenever and wherever he went Pheley was there.
Once he saw it in an amused light. ‘I was having a look round for Sir Roger,’ he said, ‘and I damn near had a shot at something red. It was a McKechnie!’
After that I used to say: ‘Here she comes, Tom. Here’s your vixen.’
When Tom went up to use the telephone on the night of Nancy’s birthday most of the McKechnies had gone to bed; but Pheley, her mother and father and an elder sister named Flora, married to a console-operator in an Evensford factory who had deserted after six months, were still in the parlour, waiting for the storm to subside.
The McKechnies had electricity in the house. Naked bulbs were suspended at economic points from opaque white shades, of the kind used in offices, so that a harsh glare pierced here and there the ecclesiastical fumed-oak gloom. That night, as Tom was telephoning, the entire system fused, plunging the house in darkness.
Tom called that it was probably nothing to worry about – perhaps a transmitter had been struck by the storm somewhere – and the two McKechnie girls, Pheley and Flora, went groping upstairs for candles.
By the time they came down again Tom had finished telephoning and it was Flora, not Pheley, who said:
‘I see there’s a light in your house, Tom. Upstairs.’
‘Oh! it’s Nancy making up the beds,’ Tom said. ‘She and Miss Aspen are going to stay the night.’ He treated it all very naturally and then said:
‘If you showed me the fuse-box I could find out what’s wrong for you before I go back. It might not be a transmitter – there’s always the chance it’s a fuse.’
Half-way down the whitewashed cellar steps Tom was shown the fuse-box by McKechnie, who stood on an upper step, holding a candle so that Tom could see. The main house fuse had blown. In the two minutes it took Tom to mend it McKechnie said:
‘Who did you say was staying the night with you?’
‘My sister and her friend.’
‘Just the three of ye?’
Tom said I was there too, and McKechnie asked:
‘Richardson? Would it be someone I knew?’
‘Probably not,’ Tom said. ‘Used to work on the county paper. You know – the offices in Evensford High Street.’
‘Ah! yes,’ McKechnie said. ‘I know. I used to see the light in there on Sundays. Always burning away there after we came from chapel.’
A moment later Tom plugged in the fuse. The naked economic bulbs flared harshly about the gloom. At the foot of the stairs Pheley, a delighted, candle-bathed, eager figure, stood overwhelmed at Tom’s swift excellence with fuses.
‘Ah! Tom, ye’re so quick. That would have taken Ian or Jamie half an hour or more –’
‘Take your candle and go to bed,’ McKechnie said. His voice too was like a switch, snapping out all conversation. ‘You too, Flora. It’s after ten,’ and the two sisters, wordless except for almost inaudible goodnights, cowed as recalcitrant children, turned and went after their petering candles upstairs.
Tom said ‘Goodnight,’ and then remembered the telephone and asked if he could pay the call.
‘Y’owe me nothing,’ McKechnie said. ‘Goodnight’
For a few eager days Tom was lost in a world that contained nothing but Lydia. I withdrew myself from it with unobtrusive excuses that I do not think he even heard. It was late September. The countryside had begun to be embalmed in soft eggshell light, under skies of drowsing turquoise, with delicate settling night mist that began to give back to the grass-lands a first renewal of green. It was warm and cloudless by day and during my absence Lydia came up to spend a whole day at the farm with Tom. They cooked lunch together and afterwards sowed grass-seed in a rectangular plot in the front garden, beyond the porch. ‘This will be our lawn,’ Lydia said, ‘this is where we shall sit – we shall get the sun here all afternoon.’
Lunch had been a howling failure. ‘Literally howling,’ Tom said. ‘I never laughed so much for years.’
The meal was to have consisted, it seemed, of fried steak and potatoes, with tinned apricots and cream. I doubt if Lydia had ever cooked a meal in her life. She put the frying-pan on the oil-burner, flopped the steak in, without fat, and hoped that presently God, or someone else, would announce it ready. While it heated she got herself absorbed with Tom in the other room. I think he was still too shy to make advances, and a blinding flash from the oil-stove, ten minutes later, could have done nothing to help him. He flew into the scullery and discovered that a sort of dry explosion had blown the frying-pan from the stove. There was a horrible odour of blue-flamed steak and Tom said something about the outlook for young farmers’ wives, to say nothing of young farmers, was not very rosy, and Lydia said ‘It’s nothing but your beastly stove,’ and chased him with the frying-pan.
The chase with the frying-pan added much to the loveliness of the day. Tom laughed so much that he could not run more than fifty yards across the paddock. At one point Lydia lost a shoe and Tom called back at her ‘There was an old woman came hippety-hop,’ and she threw the frying-pan at him and then fell down. After this Tom chased her back to the house, where they finished up with boiled eggs and bread and butter. They laughed so much over these too that they could hardly eat them. ‘I think we must have given them fifty minutes,’ Tom said and I did not ask why.
In the afternoon they sowed grass-seed and lay for a long time in the sun. Later they took the water-cart to the brook and Lydia, taking my place, stood in the stream and filled the buckets. She tucked her skirts into her knickers, Tom said, as if she didn’t care a damn for him or for anyone else, and she took off her shoes and stockings. Sooner or later it was inevitable that she started throwing water at Tom. They started to laugh again too and on the green and stony stream-bed she slipped and sat down. As she sat there, telling him rather drolly how cool it was to feel the water about the nice parts of herself, he cried with laughing. ‘And now what do I do while everything hangs out to dry?’ she said, and when Tom drove back up the hill, seeing the road through a simmering veil of laughing tears, Lydia sat on the water-cart, wrin
ging water from her skirt and knickers so that it ran down her bare legs and thighs in such noisy streams that they laughed about that too.
It was perhaps here, as they came up the hill, perhaps earlier, as they shrieked after each other with the frying-pan across the paddock, that one of the McKechnie sons saw them fooling together.
Back at the house Lydia stripped, put on an old mackintosh of Tom’s and hung all her wet garments on a line in the stackyard. ‘Just like a proper old washing day,’ Tom said. ‘They took years to dry,’ and once again I did not ask him why.
Nothing could have been happier than his face as he told me all this next morning, when I came back.
He kept laughing, and then, as he reached some point where he did not want me to go further with him, he would suddenly stop and choke back his words, going off into some unnarratable private dream. I was glad of all this; there was something wonderfully touching about seeing him rise excitedly out of his shell of shyness, and if I did not shout with laughter too it was usually because an occasional dream of my own kept insistently returning to trouble me in spite of anything I could do to hold it back. I was haunted, briefly, sharply, and sometimes in a peculiar elusive way still harder to bear, by a small recollection of partridge chickens running among summer ferns, by the sound of fingers scratching at a counterpane in a hot bedroom, and a voice sobbing to me convulsively.
I had previously thought I had got over these things. It now appeared that I had not got over them; because of it, that day, I had something of my own to tell Tom.
‘Going away?’ he said. ‘Where?’
‘London,’ I told him. ‘I’ve got a bit of a job there.’
‘Job? – what sort of job?’
‘Books – sort of –’
‘Books again,’ Tom said. ‘Always the old books. Just like you.’
‘Always the old books,’ I said.
‘I shall hate it without you,’ Tom said, ‘but I’m damn glad. You know what I mean?’
I said I knew what he meant, and we laughed together.
‘Anyway we’ll have a good bust-up one night before you go – a good old send-off,’ he said. ‘With some more of that wine.’
That week Tom began to put the plough into the barley stubble. The land was still iron-hard and because he was busy there and because we now had an extra horse I went down with the water-cart, that afternoon, alone. It was light dreamy weather and I stayed down at the bridge for nearly an hour, talking with an old turkey-cock named Sturman about the way the summer had baked us up. ‘Rare weather,’ he kept saying, and went off into some reminiscence of how the stream had dried up completely in the summer of ’87.
By the time I got back it was four o’clock. I drove the water-cart into the stackyard and left it there. And then, as I crossed to the house, I saw Tom leaning on the paddock-gate staring heavily across the field. Down on the near corner of the barley stubble the plough-horse was browsing the hedge.
‘Tired out from yesterday,’ I said. ‘That’s what comes of running after girls with frying-pans – among other things.’
He turned slowly to look at me from the gate with a face that was white and expressionless. There was no kind of emotion in him. He stared at me blank and stunned.
‘Good God, you look dicky,’ I said, and then I saw his gun at his side.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, ‘the oddest damn thing happened when you were gone –’
He stared up the field, telling me of what had happened. About half an hour after I had gone Sir Roger had loped up the hawthorn hedge, not fifty yards away. Tom had got into the habit of taking the gun with him almost wherever he went, and it lay that afternoon under the hedge at the end of a furrow.
He ran up towards the McKechnie land, seventy or eighty yards behind the fox, with the gun in his hand. The fox, as always, did not seem to hurry. Once he stopped and dallied and leered back. By the time Tom got to the gate leading into the track the fox was not more than fifty yards away.
‘I’d have got him if it hadn’t been for the gate,’ Tom said.
The gate was padlocked. Then Tom saw McKechnie coming down the track. Tom yelled something about the fox but McKechnie came straight on, as if he did not hear. Then he began shouting at Tom, in a throttled shaking voice:
‘Here, I want you, I want you! – ye’re the one I’m looking for –’
Somewhere beyond the sloe-bushes the fox lost himself, and McKechnie came shaking and strutting down the track.
‘Dinna run off – I want ye, I want ye –!’
Tom stopped in the track and waited. There was something inexplicably hostile about the action of McKechnie as he came stumbling on, panting.
‘Dinna run off – ye needna think ye can get away like that.’ He glared at Tom with a vast holy sort of outrage, his eyes glittering and reddening with excitement. ‘I want you – I’ve got one plain simple straightforward question to ask ye, young man.’
Tom simply stared, too staggered even to ask what question it was. And when it came it stunned him.
‘I want to ask ye this, young man.’ And Tom said afterwards it had a sort of throttled staginess about it, so that even then he could not think of it as real. ‘What are your intentions towards Pheley? – my daughter?’
The pole-axe effect of this blow lasted until I saw Tom at the gate. ‘We had a terrible row,’ he kept saying, ‘a terrible row – I thought he was going to hit me –’
It was all so stupidly in the monotonous McKechnie fashion that I began to laugh.
‘Pheley,’ I said. ‘Pheley. What have you done to Pheley?’
‘I can’t even look at her,’ he said.
I could understand that; no one could look into those stripped hairless green-sandy awful eyes.
‘You came into it too,’ he said. I laughed again at that.
‘Me? What have I done to Pheley?’
‘You all come into it. Nancy, Lydia – he raved about you all.’
‘The bloody old fool,’ I said. ‘Come and have a cup of tea and forget it.’
‘You might have thought I’d violated her,’ he said as we went into the house. ‘Either her or the Kingdom of Heaven –’
‘Good grief,’ I said, ‘think of Heaven populated with the McKechnies.’
Some of the trouble went out of his face, leaving me, if anything, the more furious of the two of us. I had strong views about bigotry and parsimony and conventions and the high discount charged by small-town moralities on happiness, and I kept urging him angrily to treat it for what it was, to forget it, to let Pheley and the McKechnies, in general, go to hell.
But suddenly the tea we sat drinking at the table reminded him of something. He hit the table with both hands.
‘Good God, it was the day she came down here about her hair.’
Then he told me of the hair, the beating, the rage, the tears, and the way he had listened.
‘That still doesn’t alter it,’ I said. ‘The bigots will wreck your life if you let them. Don’t let them. Forget it and let them go –’
That evening a more fatuous and in a sense more terrible thing happened.
About seven o’clock there was a knock at the door. When I went to answer it – Tom and I had been having a drink together, and I had just been saying that if he couldn’t forget it one way he’d better forget it another, and drink was as good a way as any – Pheley stood there, with her sister Flora, the deserted one, behind her.
‘I’ve come to see Tom,’ she said.
I hesitated.
‘We’ve both come to see him,’ Flora said.
‘Tom’s down in Evensford, I said.
‘Oh?’ Flora said, ‘his car appears to be in the garage,’ and after that it was not much use pretending, and Tom came out of the kitchen to the door. He was white again, his blue eyes terribly troubled.
‘Well?’ he said.
Flora said that it was a nice thing when people started by telling lies, and Pheley said in a grim hollow
whisper:
‘I’ve got a few things I want to say to you.’
‘I’ll buzz off, Tom,’ I said.
‘No, you don’t,’ Flora said. ‘You’re in this too. And if the pair of you don’t mind so am I.’
The monstrous thought did not strike me until afterwards that she had come as a witness. She began to put on her sinister deserted voice:
‘We’re going to have this out,’ she said. ‘I’ve had some of this before.’
We had it out. An evening of pallid lamplight flamed with idiotic words. Nothing plausible or logical or conclusive or of plain sense emerged in anything that anybody said. But two festering texts ran through it all, suppurating hate:
‘This is what they do to you if you give them a chance,’ Flora said. ‘And what else can you expect of people who begin by lying and end by blaspheming?’
‘Good God,’ I said.
‘There you are!’ she said, pulsing and sour and triumphant.
After this I withdrew from the contest, pouring myself a drink. She crowed ‘And drink too,’ and I walked out into the garden saying: ‘Excuse me. Before I either say or do something I shall regret for ever.’
‘It’s already been said! It’s already been done!’ she screeched.
For some time I walked about the field. Nothing so stupid had ever happened to us. Then I thought of Pheley’s hair, the way she had cut it off, and the way her father had beaten her; and suddenly I knew what, under the sexless, sterile pale-eyed face, she evidently felt for Tom. That seemed, incredible as it was, to alter everything. I saw it suddenly from their point of view: how Pheley had committed the next worst thing, perhaps, to adultery, and had been whipped for it; and how, for both outrages, Tom was the cause.
I went back into the house in time to hear Flora saying:
‘And girls riding about undressed on carts. And running about half-naked like mad-women.’
‘I think this is finished,’ I said. ‘We’re going to bed.’
‘With whom?’ she screeched.
I held open the kitchen door. ‘Goodnight,’ I began saying. ‘Unless you’d like to search upstairs –’