by H. E. Bates
‘She’s asleep. It really isn’t visiting day. They say you could come back later, or you could leave the flowers.’
I left the flowers. After I had left them I walked up and down the road outside, listening to the blackbirds whistling continuously in the high rain-soaked branches of surrounding trees, and thinking of her, lying asleep there, in the thundery greenness of the afternoon, alone, in the rain.
Some days later my father said to me: ‘What did you think of the visit to the sanatorium? How did you like it? I saw you talking to quite a lot of people there.’
I said I had enjoyed it very much, and he smiled and said:
‘I’ll bet you could never guess where we’re singing next Tuesday?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘where?’
‘It’s quite a little honour,’ he said, ‘at least we feel it is.’ He looked enigmatical and pleased with himself.
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ he said at last, ‘we’re going to sing for Miss Aspen – oh! no, not your Miss Aspen. The old lady – up at the house, next Tuesday, at seven. Don’t you think that’s a bit of a feather in our caps?’
I said I thought it was, and he said:
‘Perhaps you’d like to come? It would give you a chance to see the house again.’ Then before I could answer he went on:
‘They say the old lady is going downhill fast. She doesn’t get up now. She’s a poor thing, they say. And Rollo –’
He stopped, and I said: ‘What about Rollo?’
‘They struck his name off the Liberal Club last month,’ my father said, almost as if it were a disgrace comparable to being barred from the gates of Heaven. ‘He’s been banned from “The Prince Albert” too. They say he’s soaking every penny of the place away.’
With these remarks I felt I was really back, at last, in the narrow aisles of Evensford, where disgrace could go no deeper than expulsion from the Liberal Club, a shabby fifteen-roomed Victorian villa in which a few boot manufacturers and leather men and shopkeepers earnestly played cribbage and solo-whist and snooker on an ancient table over thimbles of whisky for stakes of sixpence a time; where banishment from public-house bars for drunkenness was a sin even worse than the one of ever going there in the first place. Indeed Rollo had been so guilty of flouting canons of behaviour in a sphere my father thought reprehensible in itself that he seemed quite sorry for him.
‘It’s a great shame to see a man like that going down,’ he said. ‘Soaking it all away. After all, the Aspens are somebody.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’ll take him some time. There’s plenty to soak away.’
‘Is there?’ my father said. The question was so direct that it startled me. ‘That’s what everybody has always thought, of course. That has always been the popular idea.’
I thought of what had always seemed to me the immutable opulence of the Aspen house in its park of great trees. The fact of its richness, more impressive because it lay like an oasis in the centre of Evensford’s red-brick municipal mess of factory and chapel, of leather and Nonconformity, was something I had grown up to regard as inviolate, almost as unquestionable as things like the Commandments and the Royal Household.
‘They say they lost a good deal in the crash,’ my father said. ‘But then, so did everybody. George Baker of the Evensford Shoe Company died in February and his will was in The Shoe and Leather News this week. His father left him forty thousand when he died in 1916 and George was a director for forty years. But what do you think he left after all? He lived in that great big house in Park Way, and everybody thought he was the wealthiest man we had in Evensford.’
Before I had time to give my opinions of this my father said:
‘Seven thousand. That’s all. I tell you it stunned people here. They thought he was one of those quarter-of-a-million men. And then look at William Allen Parker, of Parker, Groome & Fletcher – there’s another man. The biggest people in the district. I remember when they had a Russian Army contract for two million. And you know what that meant. He had a stroke while inspecting the stitching room one day last January. At one time they talked of giving him a knighthood.’
My father paused for a moment and then informed me in shocked tones:
‘A bare four thousand. That’s all. Hardly enough to pay the duties.’
I knew that the fortunes of his fellow men were, in that town of narrow and single-purposed interests, like creeds; and that when they were assaulted or threatened it was a painful and momentous thing.
‘It isn’t always the people who look as if they’ve got it,’ he said. ‘Often the opposite. Look at Luther Edward Jolly. He wore the same straw hat for forty years to my knowledge, and picked up stub-ends in the gutter. The biggest skinflint in the whole Jolly family, and that’s saying something. You remember what he left,’ my father said, as if I were intimately acquainted with the balance sheets of every Evensford family – ‘a hundred and thirty-eight thousand.’
‘The Aspens have been here for at least five hundred years,’ I said.
‘I grant that,’ he said, ‘but you know what they say – the longer you’re here the longer you have to spend it.’ And he added sternly: ‘And let me tell you that drink is one of the surest ways –’
But on the following Tuesday, when I followed my father and his choir through the gates of the park, I did not think there seemed much change under the great belt of flowering chestnuts, all alight with blossom and noisy with the croak of nesting rooks, or along the avenue of limes, where fragile drifts of blue anemone were fading to pale green seed among deepening grasses and where, too, thicker larger drifts of narcissus were withering at last among opening lilac trees. It seemed to me the same as ever. The joy of it came rushing back to me, borne on the floweriness of May-time.
But you could not judge, as my father said, from outward appearances, and there was nothing like the rush of May-time for giving an appearance of eternal lushness. The grass was as thick as ever; the narcissus had never been so beautiful. Warm rains, after the long late spell of drying wind, had brought splashes of milkiness to the hawthorns all about the park, and there was already a touch of fiery blueness in the tips of cedar trees.
It was only when we gathered on the terrace, in preparation for singing under the windows of the bedroom where Miss Bertie lay, that I noticed how the conservatory had neither flower nor fern in it. I remembered its humid, exotic sweetness. I remembered the smell of water dripping from watered ferns, the odour of hot iron from the pipes and the crackle of the stove. It was empty now.
A maid with the customary old-fashioned winged apron showed us to the terrace, saying to my father, ‘I’ll tell Mr Rollo you’re here,’ and I began to sort out the part-sheets as we waited.
I think we waited fifteen or twenty minutes for Rollo. When he came at last he had the unbalanced, dusty, button-eyed appearance of a moulting bird stuffed and somehow reanimated and brought from behind the glass of its case. He stood blinking for some moments with his small dark eyes bloodshot and dazed. Then he said several times:
‘Frightful business.’
Then he changed this to ‘plum awful – heavy batch of letters to get away. Plum awful – how are you?’ and began to shake hands.
The veins of his face were a series of entangled purplish knots among which the rest of his features were larger knots of fierier looser flesh. His lips were like a pair of swollen blood blisters that dribbled, as he spoke, an occasional tear. He hovered among us with repetitive fumbling courtesies, shaking hands, and then shaking hands again. The sleeves of his straw-coloured Donegal jacket had evidently become frayed at the edges and had now been shortened and bound with strips of leather. From out of them his hands protruded with semi-crippled rheumatoid groupings, red in the vein, crooked and knuckled like dead birds’ claws as they sought to grasp our own.
‘I call it damn decent of you chaps to come,’ he said, ‘damn decent,’ and his voice had the liquefied lip-entangled clumsiness of someone who is toothless. He grinned sev
eral times as if to show that this was not the case, and his tongue licked at his lips with vague directionless stabs that ended in flutters of wet red laughter.
‘Well, fire away,’ he said at last, ‘fire the first jolly old shot – what’s it to be?’
‘Whatever you think Miss Aspen would like, sir,’ my father said.
‘Oh any damn thing,’ Rollo said. ‘Loud, though – she’s getting cheesy in the ears up there.’
‘Very good, sir,’ my father said. ‘I suggest we sing a few of the things that we like ourselves – and then perhaps you could go up and ask her if there is anything she would specially like us to do?’
‘Good idea,’ Rollo said. ‘Damn good idea.’
He staggered away through the french windows of the small drawing-room. Afterwards my father said to me: ‘I felt very sorry for him – it’s painful to see a man come down in that way.’
It was a bright, mild evening, full of late bird song from the spinneys, and the men sang beautifully. I sat on the wall at the end of the terrace, watching and listening as they sang the songs I knew. Miss Bertie’s room was at the corner of the house, in one of those hexagonal brick bays built on like the section of an enormous salt-cellar. Tea roses of pale gold, falling from loose extended sprays, unpruned and untied, were breaking into colour from trellis-work of green laths between the window bays.
The men sang Early One Morning and The Oak and the Ash and then Sweet and Low, their favourite, and several others. During this time Rollo did not appear again. There was a clatter, once, of a very young maid clumsily setting down plates and glasses in a porch at the other end of the terrace. Apart from this there was no sign from the house that anyone could be listening. I began to be haunted by an impression that the house was empty, that all the life of it had died away, and that the men were singing to themselves.
After the sixth or seventh piece there was still no sign of Rollo. The men had a rest while I went to look into the open windows of the smaller drawing-room. But there was nothing there except a mass of furniture covered with dust sheets, and when I got back to the choir my father said:
‘Perhaps you could find one of the maids and ask her instead.’
I went into the house by the side door. The long passage between the big main rooms was haunted by Rollo’s three black Labrador bitches asleep among moulting leopard rugs. A pungent dog-smell sprang nauseously from fainter odours of wax and paraffin. There was no sign of Rollo, and after I had called his name once or twice the Aspens’ old maid, Lily, came out of the kitchen recesses to answer me.
‘Oh! it’s you, Mr Richardson,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know where Mr Rollo is.’
Lily, a skinny grey-haired woman of sixty in a butterfly apron, as solid a part of the Aspen house as the newel-post of the stairs, stared at me with grim density.
‘Perhaps you would run up and ask Miss Bertie if she’s enjoying the singing,’ I said, ‘and if there’s anything special she’d like to hear?’
Awkward and hesitating, Lily stood there plucking at the front of her apron with her skinny red hands.
‘Perhaps she has a favourite song?’ I said.
The line of Lily’s mouth compressed itself so hard that it almost vanished as she bit into her lips.
‘It doesn’t matter if she hasn’t,’ I said. ‘It’s just that they would like to sing some little thing to make her happy.’
‘Happy? Who? – Miss Bertie?’ she said, and I thought there was a snarling break in her voice that was very near to tears.
As I stood awkwardly wondering what to say I swallowed an intense and nauseous breath of dog-odours. There was a glint of black muscles upheaved and floundering among leopard rugs.
‘Go on, you big slommacking great brutes,’ she said. She slapped skinny, angry hands at the Labradors, each of which slowly lifted a ponderous carcass, dumbly staring back at her. ‘Go on, you great ugly things – move yourselves. Mortaring in on my clean floors –’
Ponderous and old and flabby, the Labradors waddled ten or twelve paces, collapsing deflated on the porch.
‘Would you go up?’ I said.
‘Me?’ she said. From the compressed tight lips there was again the old tearful snarl. ‘I’m not allowed up there –’
I saw her teeth grating with agitation at her drawn lips. Her eyes held hints of inexplicable disasters.
‘I haven’t been in the room for three months,’ she said. ‘Nearly four – come Whitsun. Never been in. Never been near.’
To my dismay the tears broke from their snarling strangle hold. As they began to fall down her bony face she grabbed piteously at her apron, hiding herself in a starchy nun-like shield under which her voice shook with beating sobs.
‘I’m not wanted here, I’m not wanted, I’m not wanted,’ she said.
I said something tactful about being sure that she was wanted, but there were only tense agitations from behind the apron in answer.
‘Haven’t you any idea where Rollo is?’ I said. ‘Perhaps he could go up instead.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘no. Why should I know? I don’t belong here. I’m not part of it. It isn’t the same as when you used to come. They were the nice days –’
A Labrador rose from the porch and made up its mind to pad slowly back into the house, swinging a bloated belly of enlarged rose-black teats.
She heard it from under the apron; she released a tear-broken face, rushing forward with hatred:
‘Get out! Get out, you big slommacking brute! They drive my life scatty – they drive it scatty!’ she said. ‘They drive it scatty!’
The Labrador gave a slow bronchial cough, as if about to spit, and sank on the threshold.
I said it did not matter about the song, after all, but she scrubbed a bony hand across her tears and said:
‘I thought they sang so nice. It was so nice. It seems wonderful to have somebody here again – somebody else besides her and Rollo and dogs – dogs, dogs, nothing but dogs. The big ugly dirty brutes –’
She stopped suddenly. She seemed to think of something, and said:
‘You could go up if you like. You go up and ask her. She wouldn’t mind –’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘She wouldn’t mind. She often used to talk about you – take and go up,’ she said.
I hesitated for a few moments; and then a nauseous odour of bloated dog-flesh blew in from the porch and a skinny face stared in renewed pathetic appeal from the crackling wing of an apron; and finally I said:
‘All right. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling my father that I’ve gone up to ask her what she would like,’ I said.
‘I’ll tell him,’ she said. ‘You know which room it is?’
I heard her launch a final and hateful attack on the prostrate Labradors as she beat her way across the threshold. I went slowly upstairs. I remembered the bitter draught of snow-wind in the hall on the first night I had ever been in the house, the room that scorched and froze at the same time, the girl whose effect on me was to make me feel that I was poised on the edge of a knife. And the smell of the upstairs landing, closed and stuffy and sun-stale and free of the odours of dogs from below, made me remember the summer afternoons.
When I knocked on Miss Bertie’s bedroom door a voice of unrecognizable pitch, compressed and piercing, called back at me:
‘Who is that? Who is it?’
‘I’ve come to –’
‘Will you say who it is, please?’
‘It’s Mr Richardson,’ I said.
‘Who? Mr Who did you say? Mr Who?’
‘May I come in, Miss Aspen?’
‘Will you say who it is, please?’
I opened the door; I held it ajar six inches or so, and said, levelly:
‘Miss Aspen, I have come from the choir to ask you if there is anything you wish them to sing. It’s Richardson. Lydia’s friend.’
She gave a hollow bleat of surprise.
‘May I come in?’ I s
aid.
‘You may not,’ she said. ‘You may certainly not.’
I held the door a few inches ajar; I just could see, inside, the lower end of a sepulchral brass bedstead hung with patterned shawls.
‘The choir would be delighted,’ I began to say, but she cut me off at once:
‘How is Lydia? You saw her, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I saw her. She’s very well, I think –’
‘You think? You think?’
‘I’m sure she is,’ I said. And with querulous sharpness she snapped:
‘Who sent you up here? Who told you you might come? Lily? – was it Lily?’
‘My father was most anxious to put in a piece that you specially wanted,’ I said. ‘If you’d tell me –’
In a persecuted, trembling voice she said:
‘It was Lily, wasn’t it? Why is she here still? She was to have gone – I told her to go –’
‘Have you enjoyed the singing, Miss Aspen?’ I said.
‘Yes, I’ve enjoyed it, I’ve enjoyed it. It was very kind of – it was kind – it was very kind.’
She lapsed into a silence in which, presently, I caught the break of semi-exhausted breathing. In the background I could hear the voices of men talking to each other on the terrace below; and then, in the further background, the call of birds in the still evening across the park. In another month the clovered smell of drying grass would rise from the maze of swathes and drench the air about the place with the sweetness of high summer, but all I could smell as I stood there was the fustiness of a bedroom that had not been opened for a long time, the dry sour odour of someone old in the decay of self-imprisonment, and drifting in again, up the stairs, the rank whiff of bitches from the hall below.
I waited a little longer, listening to the grating croak of her recaptured breath. I looked at the grey peelings, imprinted with bright turquoise stars of dampness, of the yellow wallpaper above the fireplace, and then I said: