by H. E. Bates
‘I think I ought to go too,’ Lydia said.
‘It’s a long way to walk,’ Nancy said.
‘Not if we take the footpath.’ I stood up to go. Her curtness gave a strained aloof look to her face.
‘I don’t mind either way,’ Lydia said. ‘I must just get my gloves from the car.’
We all listened again for a few moments for a sound from Tom, but nothing happened. Then Lydia went to get her gloves from the car.
A moment later Nancy and I stood in the yard to say goodbye.
‘It’s all starlight now,’ she said. She lifted her face to the mild luminous October sky, held it there for a moment and then looked at me.
‘Don’t forget us,’ she said.
‘When I forget –’ my mind searched amiably for some quotation I wanted about forgetfulness, but I could not grasp it, and I said – ‘You know, the quotation – when I forget thee or –’
‘Oh! you and your quoting,’ she said.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t matter. Give Tom my love when he wakes –’
‘And me?’ she said.
‘You too,’ I said. ‘Goodbye.’
I kissed her lightly on the lips and she said, very softly: ‘Goodbye. Take good care of yourself. Come back.’
‘Tell Tom not to worry,’ I said. ‘He’ll feel better about things when he’s slept on them. You always do.’
‘Do you?’ she said, and then Lydia came back, swinging the black kid gloves she had left in the car.
As Lydia and I walked down the hill together I said, ‘Fields or road? It’s starlight,’ and she said, ‘Fields, I think. It’s so long since I went that way.’
So we walked home by field-path, high on the ridge of the valley, under a full sowing of stars that seemed to be reflected below in the lights of Evensford and the towns beyond the river. Dew was rising heavily in the fields. It lay wet on the bars of gates and stiles as we came to them. Sometimes patches of white mist floated motionless in hollows and once as we walked through one, thirty or forty yards long, I walked in front of her to find the path and she called out: ‘I can’t see a thing – where are you?’ and I said ‘Here,’ holding out my arms so that she could touch me. ‘It was just blank,’ she said, ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ and when we came at last to clear starlight she took my arm and we walked the rest of the way like that, together.
I don’t remember much of what we said as we walked home that night, but when we reached the gates of the park I asked:
‘May I walk up with you? It’s so long since I did.’
‘Of course you may,’ she said. ‘Come in and see Aunt Bertie too.’
‘I’d just like to walk up with you, that’s all,’ I said.
Chestnut leaves were already beginning to turn and fall and as we walked up the avenue I could hear them floating dryly down through the silence, bouncing light and shrivelled against boughs as they fell. A sweetish humid smell of autumn rose damply from the spinney about the brook. A few rooks stirred in high still green elms and suddenly I remembered all my days there. The snow, the spring-times, the clovered summers came rushing back to me with pain.
‘I think this is as far as I’ll go,’ I said. I stopped under the limes, two hundred yards from where the avenue forked to skirt the terraces of the house.
She stopped too and turned to me. She began to say something about wishing me luck. I saw her lips parted to frame her words. She had thrown back the collar of her coat because the air was warm for walking, and I saw the triangle of her throat pale under the black edges of it and between the blackness of her hair. Then she stopped speaking and looked at me. She seemed to look at me for a long time, and then she came close to me and I was kissing her.
As I kissed her she moved her mouth with uneasy tenderness, trying to break away from me. Then I held her head with my hands, pressing it hard against me, and would not let her go.
At last I let her go, and she held my face in both hands, looking at me.
‘Have I been bad to you?’
‘Yes.’
She smiled softly and I said: ‘But then you warned me you would be. Only you didn’t say with whom.’
‘Don’t be so serious,’ she said. ‘You’re always so terribly serious.’
I did not answer.
‘If it comes to that you’ve been bad with Nancy,’ she said, ‘and perhaps Tom has been bad with Pheley.’
‘Not in the same way.’
‘How could it be the same?’ she said. ‘It would all be so easy if all the things you meant to do were the things that happened.’
I heard a shower of limes spurt with a sort of damp shudder from a tree along the avenue. When it ceased the park lay still under deep mild starlight, and I said:
‘Do you mean it with Tom? Because I hope you do.’
‘I do mean it,’ she said.
‘I’ll never forgive you if you don’t mean it.’
‘I do mean it,’ she said.
She looked at me with beautifully clear candid eyes that seemed to be full of the calmest gentleness.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll be good to Tom.’
‘You’d better be,’ I said, ‘because I love you both. More than anyone I ever knew. Except Alex.’
She smiled again. A shower of leaves fell from the limes. Across the park an owl let out a long soft-blown hoot that quivered away beyond the farthest trees.
‘You’d better go before the owls get you,’ she said.
‘Be careful the owls don’t get you,’ I said.
She laughed very softly.
‘I’ve a queer feeling they will, some day,’ she said, and while her lips were still parted to frame the words I kissed her again with a long dry empty pain for the last time.
I was still reading in bed at midnight when the telephone rang.
‘Is it you?’ Nancy said. I remember feeling slightly vexed at being fetched downstairs at midnight by Nancy. ‘Were you asleep? Did I wake you?’
I said no, she hadn’t woken me. ‘Where are you?’ I said. ‘What’s the matter?’
I thought she gave a fluttery sob into the telephone. ‘Tom’s not in the house,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t been here for an hour. He isn’t with you, is he?’
No, I said, he wasn’t with me. I spoke shortly. It occurred to me with some annoyance that she was using Tom as an excuse to talk to me.
‘Where do you suppose he can be?’ she said. ‘He was still asleep when I went to bed – and then I woke up and had a queer feeling he wasn’t there –’
Tom had always been one of those people who can freeze into sudden wakefulness in the night. He could go downstairs and drink milk or even, in summer-time, wander in pyjamas in the garden, eating and thinking. I remembered too that he was always getting up in the night because he imagined nervous flutterings among the hens or because he thought he heard Sir Roger.
‘He probably thought he heard the fox,’ I said. ‘He always imagines he can.’
‘Would he take the gun?’ she said. ‘Shall I look to see if he has taken the gun?’
‘Go back to bed,’ I told her.
‘Will you hang on a minute while I look to see if he’s taken the gun?’
I said I would hang on. The telephone felt cold in my fingers; and I had rushed down without slippers and my feet too were cold. I heard Nancy’s footsteps, hollow and diffused, running on the bare passage flags at the other end of the telephone.
There was a rattling of the telephone as she took it up again.
‘The gun isn’t there,’ she said.
‘Then he’s gone to have a pot at Sir Roger,’ I told her. ‘Just as I said.’
She did not speak. The silence, uncanny in its abruptness after her nervous garrulity so late at night, gave me an impression that she was no longer there.
‘Hullo?’ I said. ‘Are you there?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m here.’ She paused again. ‘I thought you seemed annoyed because I rang you –’
‘No, no. Of course not. Why should I be?’
‘You sound annoyed now.’
‘It isn’t that I’m annoyed at all,’ I said, and as I spoke I felt doubly annoyed. ‘It’s just that –’ I began to say something about her fussy protective instincts but a sudden rattling came over the wire and she said:
‘I didn’t hear what you were saying –’
‘I was just saying I wasn’t annoyed but that my feet were getting cold, that’s all,’ I said. ‘I ran down without my slippers.’
‘Then put them on,’ she said. ‘You’ll catch your death. You do do the silliest things.’
Back in bed I put the light out and tried to sleep. The coldness of my feet kept me awake and I lay listening to the bell-like strokes of Evensford church clock chiming the quarters until it was one o’clock. I lay troubled, at first, by the way I had spoken to Nancy. I began to feel I had spoken too sharply; I felt I had not been fair. Then because of being troubled by Nancy I began to be troubled also by her anxiety about Tom. Something behind all her fussiness about him made me think she was afraid. Earlier in the day I had been very logical and rather terse and not very patient about Pheley. Now I did not feel so logical. I was bothered by stupid recollections about the McKechnies that now, in the middle of the night, tended to grow haunting and magnified. I remembered what I had said about bigots and crucifiers. I remembered how Pheley had cried, that evening, that whatever happened to her would be the fault of Tom.
Suddenly I was terrified for Tom. Something started to jibber inside me. I felt the coldness of my feet run up and envelop the rest of my body.
I got up and fetched a bicycle and started to cycle out to the farm. There was no light on the bicycle. All the street lights were out. I took the back streets out of the town, on the northeast side. There would be no one in the streets on that side of the town, I thought, and then suddenly, on the outskirts, a policeman hailed me from a bakehouse door:
‘Hey – just a minute – where’s your light there?’
I got off my bicycle, waiting for the heavy footsteps running up the pavement.
‘It’s all right, Arthur,’ I said, ‘it’s me.’
‘This is a damn fine time to be out,’ Arthur Peck said. ‘Biking to London now?’
He laughed, and all at once I felt it difficult to explain my jibbering mess of premonition and anxiety about Tom. I started to explain and Arthur said, ‘Well, it’s a good tale, but I don’t know how it would sound to the magistrates. If I were you I’d buzz off back home.’
‘Otherwise –?’
‘Otherwise I’ll put you down in the old book tomorrow morning – no front light, no rear light, found wandering at night, suspicious circumstances.’ He laughed – ‘Come on, I’ll walk part of the way back with you.’
We walked back through the streets together. I felt rather stupid; and then a little flat and arid from fears that had decayed. I did not know quite what to talk about, but I said at last how extraordinarily clear the night was, and how full of stars.
‘I ought to have been a bloody astronomer,’ Arthur said. ‘I stand and look at them so much.’
‘Where’s the next bakehouse?’ I said.
‘Horseman’s, Denmark Street,’ he said. ‘They get nicely warmed up there about two o’clock. I generally have a round of new bread and cheese and a cup of cocoa there. Old Horseman’s good to me. He’s a good old stick.’
I got a pleasant impression that it was nice for Arthur, alone, so late at night, to have someone to talk to; and as we went through the streets, with Evensford asleep all about us, I felt lulled by his friendliness into a state where I was no longer troubled. Then Arthur remembered how, as a boy, he used to sell hot-cross buns for old Horseman, starting at six o’clock on cold Good Friday mornings, and I said: ‘I sold hot-cross buns once. For old Welsh. I got up at five. I couldn’t sleep I was so excited. I made three and fourpence –’
Arthur laughed and said that they were the days. He said Evensford wasn’t a bad town either, and asked me if I should miss it? Stars shone over rows of grey packed roofs with crisp autumnal brilliance and I said, ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ and a whole piece of my life seemed suddenly to go dead behind me and break away.
At the corner of Denmark Street we stopped and there was a wonderful small of new baked bread in the dark air.
‘That’s the smell,’ Arthur said. ‘I know it’s nearly morning now.’
We talked for a few moments longer and I watched the quivering filaments of stars. Then we exchanged addresses and Arthur said that we must meet in London for a drink or a cup of coffee. I said we would, and the smell of new bread grew warmer and sweeter in the night air. Gaslight from the bakehouse windows fell on the dry pavement outside in a long green bar and a glow of rosy crimson joined it as old Horseman opened the furnace door and stoked the fire. I listened to the shovel scraping harshly on the bricks of the bakehouse floor and saw the glow of crimson and green fuse and rediffuse and separate, leaving one clear pure tone of green when the door was closed. The glow of the bakehouse fire, warm and red and beautiful, and so swiftly extinguished, seemed suddenly like all my life in Evensford. The girlishness of Lydia, the love and the beauty and the springtimes and the secret moments of them, too fine and too exquisite and often too serious, fused into a single large collective flame of happiness that was suddenly cut off by darkness. I knew that it would not happen again. I knew that it would not reawaken itself. I was not even sure that I wanted it to reawaken, now or ever. I had no longer the feeling of trying desperately to grasp at something that was floating away; I wanted it to go; I knew that I could not bear it again if it came. Like the sweetness of new bread on the cool dark air it could only torment the hunger it made.
Then Arthur stood with his hand on the big brass knob of the bakehouse door. I heard it slip in his fingers. It had always been too big for me to hold as a child and it had always slipped through my fingers in exactly that way. Sometimes I used to stand there knocking softly, unable to get my small hands about the big slippery knob, asking to be let in, to be let in please, because I wanted a loaf of bread for my mother, until after a long time old Horseman would open the door with floury hands and let me through.
‘Well,’ Arthur said, ‘off you get. I’ll be seeing something of you. Goodbye.’ He shook hands. ‘I expect Evensford will be here if ever we want to come back.’
‘If ever we want to.’
‘I bet it won’t have changed at all if we don’t come back for twenty years. You see. Towns like Evensford never do.’
‘There’ll be different people,’ I said.
‘No, there won’t,’ Arthur said. ‘You see.’
‘Different ideas.’
‘No,’ Arthur said. ‘You see. Towns like Evensford never change.’
‘Well, it’ll be different in one way.’
‘How?’ Arthur said. ‘I bet it never will. How will it be?’
‘It won’t have us,’ I said.
We laughed at that, and then said goodbye again, shaking hands for the last time. The knob of the bakehouse door twisted properly at last and the door opened. I felt the warm deep glow of the ovens, the sweetness of bread, the flouriness, the yeast, and the smell of fire.
‘Come in, Arthur,’ I heard old Horseman say. ‘You’re late tonight. It’s after two.’
I walked slowly home, pushing the bicycle. I stood in the garden for a few moments, under the fading bronzy pear-trees, glad of solid people like Arthur Peck, of the comforting sweetness of new bread in bakehouses. I stared at the stars for the last time, thinking of Tom and Lydia, with tenderness, without malice, and with a feeling that everything about us all was tranquillized.
‘Goodbye, Lydia,’ I said.
Next morning at eight o’clock my father came to wake me.
‘There someone to see you,’ he said. ‘A policeman. I fancy it’s that boy you went to school with – only he’s grown so much I hardly know.’
‘Ar
thur Peck,’ I said.
I dressed and went downstairs. It seemed strange that Arthur should be standing on the far side of the garden, wiping and continually rewiping the sweat from the inside of his helmet with long strokes of his hand.
‘We’re always saying goodbye,’ I said. ‘What’s up?’
He stood still, wetting his lips. There is always something curiously undressed about a policeman without his helmet, and now I saw that he had unfastened the collar of his tunic too.
‘What is it, Arthur?’ I said.
It seemed to take him fully a minute, wetting and rewetting his lips, staring at me and then staring away again, to tell me that Tom was dead.
He began to say something about ‘An accident – we’re pretty sure it was an accident. Shot himself getting over a gate – after a fox or something, his sister said. It’s one of those things that could happen to anybody – climbing over a gate at night with a gun –’
I stood thinking of Nancy. I knew that it was not one of those things that could happen to anybody. I heard her voice crying to me over the telephone. I stared down at the orange-bronzy leaves of the pear-trees falling on the wet October grass, aware of nothing inside myself except the recollection of her voice trying to tell me how frightened she was.
‘Thank you for coming, Arthur,’ I said. ‘It was very good of you to come.’
Three days later Pheley McKechnie came back to Evensford; and I left, the next afternoon, by the London train.
Part Four
Chapter One
It was more than two years later when I came back to Evensford, in a wintry springtime of long cold evenings and days of dusty dry winds that stripped young buds from trees already backward and slow in breaking. ‘This is the year we don’t have any blossom,’ my father said. Our few apple trees were fixed in a cycle of alternate sterile and fruiting years. ‘There’s just one sprig on the Lord Derbys. That’s all.’
Evensford is a town of narrow and late development, of no tradition and a single industry, with its people confined for livelihood by the shoes they make and the leather they tan. It is something like a grey beehive in which every worker has his own cell of concentration for a single-minded purpose, exactly like an instinctive and brainless bee. For these reasons the slump had hit it very hard.