by H. E. Bates
They always used to say, in Evensford, that there was nothing like leather and that everyone had to have a pair of shoes; but that spring it began to seem possible that perhaps a million people had suddenly decided to wear shoes no longer. I arrived home when the town was carrying a load of four thousand unemployed; when the three tanneries were shut down by the river; when factories were working, if they were working at all, three days or two days or even one day a week, and when every little while it seemed that my father came home with news of another smash. ‘Nicol’s have gone. Oakley’s have gone. They say Williamson’s haven’t a pair on the books. They say Green and Porter can’t last much longer.’ The streets were melancholy with three-men bands of shuffling heroes with strips of medal ribbons pinned on narrow chests. Back doors were haunted by slow-footed men carrying suitcases of cheap fibre that opened to reveal meagre wardrobes of hanging shoelaces and cards of buttons and rolls of cheap pink and blue ribbon for threading through ladies’ underwear. Over the streets, on the cold long light evenings, there hung that smell of burnt leather I hated so much, a yellow-grey cloud of smoke from grates that burned no coal. There was no joy in Evensford. ‘It has been an awful winter,’ my father said. ‘There is a lot of distress.’
It was typical of him, and indeed typical of Evensford, that he had decided, in his modest and generous way, to do something about all this. There was not much, in a practical way, that he could do; but he was very fond of singing and he had formed, that winter, a little choir.
‘There are fifteen of us,’ he explained to me. ‘Ten basses and five tenors. Part of the old Orpheus. It’s always difficult to get tenors, as you know. But we’re knitting together a bit now and it’s going very well. We sing at hospitals and places and concerts for charities and relief funds and after-care and that sort of thing. We go to the sanatorium a lot. We feel it gives a lot of pleasure to people – anyway it makes us very happy.’
I was very restless in the long cold smoky twilights of a backward springtime.
‘Why don’t you come and sing with us?’ my father said. ‘I think you’d like it.’
‘You know I can’t read a note,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t matter about reading,’ he said. ‘Charlie Macintosh doesn’t read. Will Purvis doesn’t read. They’re two of the best men we’ve got. It doesn’t matter about reading – your ear is good. And so is your voice. I’ve always said what a good voice you had.’
‘It’s been ages since I sang a note,’ I said. Nor, in fact, did I feel like singing.
‘So it has for all of us. You get back into it very quickly.’
Much of my restlessness rose, that spring, from an inability to decide what I wanted to do. I suffered, I felt, from a kind of mental cramp. But if there was one thing about which it was not difficult to make up my mind it was the question of singing part-songs at charity concerts or about the beds of hospitals.
‘Well, as you like,’ my father said. ‘But I think you’d find it would take you out of yourself.’
It was impossible to tell him that it was not out of myself that I wanted to be taken; and he went on with his singing, for another week or two of that backward spring, without me.
Then one day he said: ‘I wish you’d do something for me if you haven’t anything on tonight.’
I said I would if I possibly could.
‘We want somebody to give out the sheet music when we sing at the sanatorium tonight. Peggy Whitworth always does it, but he fell down this morning and broke his leg.’
‘That’s a bad blow for you,’ I said.
‘Oh! it was only his wooden one,’ he said, and I think he said this because he was aware of my restlessness and with the idea of cheering me up.
But as he said it I was not cheered; I could only feel impatient with myself that I did not share his generous simplicity. A great deal of myself was not merely cramped; it was depressingly complicated. What I wanted for myself was not clear, and much of what I felt about it seemed to twist back inside me, impossibly knotted.
‘Couldn’t you get someone else?’ I said.
‘I think you’d like it up there,’ he said. They give us a beautiful ham supper with coffee afterwards. It’s all very gay and cheerful. It would do you good to see their faces.’
He looked out of the window, into a garden of apple trees lightly sprigged with blossomless leaves.
‘I think it’s turned much warmer,’ he said. ‘I think we shall probably sing out of doors this evening. In that case you needn’t come inside if you didn’t want to.’
I still hesitated and he said:
‘It’s a beautiful garden there. Full of flowers. Full of daffodils.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘So long as you don’t ask me to sing.’
‘It’s a curious thing,’ he said, ‘you feel you want to sing when you see their faces. It makes you feel glad to be alive.’
In the gardens of the sanatorium my father and his friends made a semi-circle and sang, unaccompanied, a programme of songs. It was true, as my father had said, that the air had turned much warmer. The soft May evening became filled with a scent of daffodils. There was a slight astringent odour, too, of something clinical and dry on the long glass-verandahed terrace where rows of patients sat or lay in their beds, intent and listening. The daffodils were scattered in broad streams of yellow and white about grass lawns on which, in a wide line, a series of open white huts contained other patients from whom, at the end of each song, came the sound of a distant delicate clapping.
The choir sang There Was a Jolly Fisherman and Oh! My Love is like a Red, Red Rose and then Sweet and Low and then several comic songs and then Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms. These were the songs I had heard my father sing ever since I was a child. There is something very beautiful and touching, as Miss Aspen had once said, about the sound of men’s voices harmonizing softly in the open air, and I felt the evening begin to draw out, tense and fine and over-delicate, like a nervous string. Then as I collected the sheets of one song and began to give out another a young man beckoned me from his bed on the terrace outside the ward. When I went to him he said:
‘Do you suppose they could sing The Golden Vanity? – you know, it’s about the boy and the lowland, the lowland, they left him in the lowland sea – that’s a fine song. I like that song.’
‘I’ll ask them,’ I said. ‘Is there something else you’d like if they can’t sing that one?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s the song. They sang it last time.’
Then as I moved away to ask my father about the song I saw a thin strange girl stir on a bed. She gave me a bare, quick smile as I looked at her.
‘Hullo,’ she said.
‘Hullo,’ I said to her, and there was nothing about her face that I thought I could remember.
Presently the choir sang the song called The Golden Vanity, the song about the boy left in the lowland sea, and the sound of it seemed to drift about the garden in melancholy and beautiful waves. There was a great deal of applause for that song; it was a great favourite. By the time it was finished, the daffodils were motionless in a sunless air that had calmed down completely. Then the matron of the sanatorium made a speech of thanks and my father replied, saying how much they all liked coming there. Once again, he made the joke about Peggy Whitworth’s broken leg, and there were ripples of laughter along the terraces. Then there was a rattling of plates and cups. Nurses in snowy uniforms rustled as they handed round cups of coffee drawn from a large urn and plates of ham sandwiches and sausage rolls.
As I took a ham sandwich from a bright nurse I remembered something and said:
‘The girl in the end bed – could you tell me who she is?’
‘The end bed? – over there?’ she said. ‘That’s Nora Jepson.’
I remembered then, and went and sat on Nora’s bed.
‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘You didn’t know me, did you?’
‘Not just for that moment,’ I said.
‘I thought you didn’t.’
‘I didn’t know you were here,’ I said. ‘I’ve been away so long –’
‘I’ve been here nearly six months,’ she said. ‘I’ll probably be out by the end of the summer. What are you doing now?’
‘Not much,’ I said.
‘No dancing?’
She laughed with sudden thin brightness. She had always been a spare and sinuous girl, too fine-drawn, and now, as she lay in bed, a little excited at talking to me, I thought she looked much the same as ever, perhaps even a little less strained than when I had seen her before.
‘My dancing days are over,’ I said.
She looked thoughtful for a moment.
‘That was my trouble,’ she said. ‘Too much dancing. I know now. They have dances here sometimes – one Saturday a month – for the nearly-cured ones. It’s friendly and nice but I can’t bear it. I put my head under the clothes so I can’t hear the band –’
‘You were the great one for dancing,’ I said. ‘You used to float – positively float –’
‘That’s because there was nothing on me,’ she said. ‘I was worn away. Dr Baird said my bones were hollow when I came in here. Like a bird’s. Do you know Dr Baird?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘He’s the young one. He’s been wonderful to me. Here’s Mrs Montague coming – you know her, don’t you? She does the therapy side –’
‘She taught me in school,’ I said.
Mrs Montague, a tallish, sallow-skinned, spare woman of sixty, with rimless spectacles, who had taught me as a child, came up to the bed with strips of flowered petit-point in her hands, saying, as I stood up:
‘It was nice of you to come. Your father is very proud that you came,’ and then, ‘Don’t you think she’s wonderful, this Nora of ours? Doesn’t she look fine?’
‘She’s marvellous,’ I said.
‘You’d think she was more than that if you’d seen her when she came in here. She was ready to float away.’ She laughed, showing pleasant gold-stopped teeth. ‘We know who’s responsible too, don’t we?’ she said. ‘I must float too –’
She walked away and then, seven or eight yards up the ward, dropped some of her pieces of petit-point. I ran after her to pick them up and she said:
‘Not too much talking. They all incline to think they’re better than they are. It’s warm too this evening – it’s that muggy May weather that’s so difficult for them. Please come again, won’t you?’
When I went back to Nora Jepson, leaning over the foot of the bed to say that it was time for me to go, she said she was sorry she had gabbled on so long and kept me.
‘I’ve made you miss all the sandwiches,’ she said.
I said it didn’t matter, and she said:
‘Come and see me again, won’t you? I want to introduce you to Dr Baird. He’s a great reader. He loves to talk to people. You won’t forget, will you?’
I promised, as I moved away, that I wouldn’t forget; and then suddenly she called me back, saying:
‘Forget – forget – I’m the one that’s forgetting. I knew I had something to tell you.’
‘What was it?’ I said.
She turned her face sideways on the pillow. There was a smile on her face as she looked up at me.
‘There’s a friend of yours here – that’s what. She came in after Christmas.’
‘A friend?’ I said.
‘An old dancing friend.’
I stood still, wondering, looking down at her face on the pillow. ‘Who is it?’ I said and she gave me once again, lightly, the quick bare smile.
‘Lydia,’ she said. ‘Lydia’s in here.’
As I walked across the lawn and under the still almost leafless walnut trees where the daffodils made large motionless yellow sheaves about the boles I felt myself shaking. The scent of daffodils floated sweet and warm in the still air and there was a smell of bruised grass from the lawn that was fragrant and sappy. A blackbird was still singing, bursting and throaty and exquisite, in the first touch of twilight, and after the long cold spell of dry and gritty winds it seemed possible, almost, that summer had come.
Dark and unsurprised, Lydia lay flat on a bed in one of the open huts and looked at me.
‘I heard you were home,’ she said.
‘Lydia,’ I said. I sat down by the bed, trying to find her hands. They were under the bedsheets and she kept them there. ‘I didn’t know you were ill –’
‘You’re not supposed to touch me. You’re not even supposed to be here.’
‘I’m not the only one,’ I said. ‘For God’s sake how did you get here?’
‘Who told you I was here anyway? Nora did, didn’t she?’
‘How did you get here?’ I said.
When she smiled her teeth were bared in the spontaneous way that made her so unexpectedly beautiful.
‘Nora and I did it together,’ she said. ‘We went on a long binge – nearly two years of it. We did it together – every night. Until we couldn’t any longer.’
I asked her why, and the word was dryly shaken from me with the most pointless emptiness.
‘Because of a lot of things.’
She looked past me remotely.
‘What did you suppose it could be?’ she said. She stirred her hands under the sheet, still keeping them there. ‘You didn’t come and see me before you went. You didn’t even come to the funeral, did you?’
I had always been filled with oppressive horror of the paraphernalia of death. ‘No,’ I told her. ‘I couldn’t come.’
‘You didn’t even come to see me.’
‘I felt you didn’t want me,’ I said.
‘We all wanted you,’ she said.
I sat for some moments staring with perpendicular blindness at the bed. There was no sound except the blackbird singing in the walnut tree outside. I listened for some time to the unbearable sweetness of it and Lydia said:
‘He sings all day now. He wakes me in the morning and I lie here and listen to him before they bring my breakfast.’
If I had nothing to say it was simply because whatever I could think of saying was inadequate and deprived of all possible emotion except a stifling pain.
‘We had a terrible binge, Nora and I,’ she said. I let her talk for some moments, staring down at my hands as I listened.
‘We just burnt ourselves out – she’s a terrific person when you get her going, Nora. She’s got tremendous vitality. We tried to keep up with each other, but she lasted just a bit longer than I did. Now Dr Baird says she’ll be out by the summer – anyway soon.’
She had learned the trick of lying absolutely relaxed and prostrate, her hands covered, her head quite still as she talked.
‘I don’t believe you’re listening,’ she said.
‘I’m listening,’ I said. I had really been thinking of something Nancy had said, long ago, about Lydia going the way of her mother.
‘Don’t look so far away then,’ she said. She smiled again with a spasm of unexpected loveliness. There’s no need to be so gloomy – I’m not going to die.’ She paused for a moment, looking horizontally, from under her long dark lashes, down the bed. ‘I very nearly did, though –’
When I had nothing to say to this either she went on:
‘I always said the owls would get me one day. They very nearly did this time. I went down and down, right to the bottom, right down beyond everything, where nobody was – just nobody – oh! do you have to sit such miles and miles away from me –?’
When I turned my face and looked at her again I saw that she was crying. Because she lay so flat the tears did not fall away from her face. They made two pools in the dark sockets of her eyes, separate at first, and then joining together. Then for the first time she lifted her hands from under the coverlet. They were terribly like two casts of colourless plaster as she lifted them free and said:
‘Don’t be frightened – you won’t catch anything. Come and hold me for a minute – what there is of me.�
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I could not tell her how frightened I was as I held her there, as gently as possible, on the bed, and as I held her she said several times, very quietly:
‘There was no one there. I was down in a place where there was nobody at all but me. There was nobody there to be with me.’
I felt myself sink down and become submerged, for a few moments, in the dark crater of her awful loneliness.
‘You’re the first one I ever told about that,’ she said ‘I never spoke about that before.’
I kissed her face, and she said:
‘This won’t do at all. If Dr Baird or Nurse Simpson finds you here you’ll get six months. They’ll never let me have another visitor. You’ll have to go – really you will. Goodbye now.’
I could not even frame the word; I pressed my lips against her face instead.
‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘Come and see me again another day. Will you?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Often? – promise. I shall hate you if you don’t.’
That old expression of hers lifted me up a little.
‘If you were nice to Dr Baird,’ she said, ‘he might let you come in any day. See if you can get Nora to introduce you. He’s very sweet on Nora.’
I stood up, letting go her hands, and she slipped them down under the coverlet.
‘I’ll bring you some flowers,’ I said.
‘Oh! will you?’ she said. Her eyes sparkled under dispersing tears, with a flash of gaiety I did not share. ‘Oh! that would be nice – that’s just like you. You were always the great one for flowers.’
I smiled and looked at her and raised my hand in goodbye.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said.
When I went to take her the flowers, a bunch of copper-yellow irises that were like stiff torches, two days later, it began to rain with warm May-time thunderiness as I went up the hill. The gatekeeper took my name and telephoned it through to the matron’s office, while I stood in the doorway of his small entrance lodge, waiting for the answer. An avenue of sycamores led up from the lodge-gates to the main buildings. As I stood there rain began to drip warmly and heavily through the green-flowered leaves, splashing fatly and softly on to the gravel, on the knotting branches of lilacs, and on the formal beds of yellow tulips below. I waited a long time for the answer, and at last the gatekeeper said: