by H. E. Bates
‘Oh! but that’s very nice of you,’ she said, as if taking it for granted.
Under the pressure of great embarrassment he gave her the flowers, and then stood locking and unlocking his empty hands.
‘It’s all right. I like doing it,’ he said. ‘I just like doing it.’
‘Well——’
‘I just hope you like them, that’s all,’ he said. ‘I just hope they’re the right colour.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You’ve got a nice little shop here.’
‘Yes?’ he said. ‘You think it’s all right?’
‘Lovely.’
‘Bit of a struggle at first,’ Joe said. ‘But I got over that.’
‘Well, thanks for the carnations,’ she said.
‘That’s all right, it’s nothing,’ Joe said. ‘Any time you want something particular and you don’t see it, just ask. I can get it. It’s no trouble. Anything. Any time.’
‘I’ll remember,’ she said.
As the days of the spring went past she would remember it quite often. When strawberries were five shillings a pound, Joe had a punnet put away for her at the back of the shop. Soon there were long pink stalks of gladioli, early Napoleon cherries. Joe talked to her every day.
These things were presents. At first, when she tried to pay, he said, ‘I couldn’t. Not from you. I couldn’t take money from you.’ After that she did not offer to pay; it became as if she expected these things.
Joe, discovering that she worked in a printing-works office, wondered what she did with her evenings. A terrible sickness of fear took hold of him when he thought that she might have boy-friends, young men of her own age. A sense of heavy embarrassment depressed him when he remembered how old he was. He felt among other things that there were between them awful spaces of age that could never be made up.
He began to be stupefied by a great sense of devotion. After the shop was shut at night he went into one of the two rooms at the back. He would lie down on the bed or the sofa and think of her. In anxiety he would rub over his face his large clammy hands that smelt of fruit. Late at night he would remember that he had not made up the books for the day. He would get out the books and try to enter up the figures. It was no good. The anxiety of thinking of her, of wanting her, jumbled his brain. He would realize finally that he was hungry. He would go down into the shop and bring back handfuls of fruit. Lying in bed, eating it, he would look up at the stars and try to measure what he felt and wanted and feared.
‘I’m surprised you don’t have a car,’ she said. ‘With your business.’
‘I’m getting one,’ he said. ‘There’s a fellow trying to do a deal with me. Keeps bothering me every time I see him.’
He wondered why he had not thought of it before. That evening, instead of sitting behind the shop, he went round to the nearest garage and bought a second-hand coupé for two hundred and thirty-five pounds, taking an evening’s driving lesson at the same time. On other evenings he took more lessons; by the weekend he could drive.
Polished up, the car stood outside the shop. Because it was Saturday there were many customers. To Joe they were momentarily of no importance. The girl came and stood for a long time by the car, her manner idle and cool. As Joe stood talking to her, turning his back on the shop, a few customers walked away.
‘What about a drive now?’ Joe said. ‘Just when you like. You just say when.’
‘Well, what’s wrong with this afternoon?’
‘But I got the shop,’ he said. ‘I don’t shut.’
‘Oh! well——!’
‘It’s Saturday, you see, it’s Saturday——’
‘I know it’s Saturday. But you said any time. You shouldn’t say any time if you don’t mean it.’
‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘I do mean it. I can shut. I can go. I’m sorry. I meant any time. Where can I meet you?’
‘Pick me up outside the post office at two,’ she said.
Joe drove the car to the post office about a quarter to two. The girl did not come until almost three. Dispirited and nervous, Joe was afraid of reminding her she was late. It was a warm day and the coupé was stuffy from standing in the sun. Joe wore a brown suit and a trilby to match. ‘Take your hat off,’ the girl said. She put the side window down. ‘It’s so hot and you look so much better with it off.’
Joe put his hat in the back seat. Though he was pleased, he was afraid also of catching cold in his ears.
All that afternoon he felt emotion simmering like something about to boil in his throat. Eyes hard on the road, he was aware of the girl as something not quite positive. Fear of her being bored made him talk a lot. He wondered why he had not thought of a car before, why such days as this had never happened. As he looked at the sun on the young corn and the cherry orchards, it seemed to him that life, in a way to him not fully expressible, was only just beginning.
The girl did not like the country. ‘Another time let’s run down to the sea.’
‘That’s sixty miles,’ Joe said.
‘Well, the sea won’t come to us, will it?’ she said.
After that, on Sundays, they drove to the sea. Joe brought with him baskets of fruit, which they ate as they drove along or as they sat on the beach, watching the sea. Later they had lunch at one of the hotels on the sea-front. Joe was aware of these visits costing him money. In the past he had straightened up the weekly accounts on Sundays. Now he left them. They would do some other time. Life was beginning and he did not care.
Yet in a strange way the girl did not come to life. It seemed to him that she remained shut away from him, in a cool compartment of youth. He felt that he could not touch her. He used her Christian name, Myra, uneasily, with a sense of sharp embarrassment. It was almost three weeks before he took her with great clumsiness into his arms and kissed her. ‘You don’t mind?’ he said when it was done. ‘You don’t mind?’
‘Well, I like that!’ she said.
Presently he rushed forward in a series of heavy attacks, caressing her body with his large uneasy hands. After a week or so of this the girl began to hold him away, slightly mocking.
‘Kiss me,’ Joe would say. ‘Kiss me.’
‘I just kissed you.’
‘Again. Come on, again.’
‘You’ll wear it out,’ she would say. ‘You’ll make it stale.’
‘No,’ Joe would say. ‘It’ll never be stale. It’ll never wear out. Not what I feel for you. It never will. My God, no.’
‘You’ve got it bad,’ she would say.
Sometimes she held away altogether. The more she held away the more deeply he felt he wanted her. Her lips became small and hard in resistance. He wanted to break them down. With his eager fleshy lips he tried to drive response and warmth into her mouth; his hands wandered over her body.
‘Oh! stop mauling me,’ she would say. ‘For God’s sake stop mauling me.’
‘I love you,’ he would say. ‘I want you.’
‘Well, if you do that’s not the way to get me!’
‘I’ll buy you something nice.’
‘I don’t want anything nice. Let me alone, that’s all.’
‘Let you alone? You mean not come out with you?’
‘I don’t know!’ she would say. ‘I don’t care!’
The next time he saw her Joe would have a little present for her: chocolates, a bottle of expensive perfume. Once he dared to buy her a silk house-gown. After these gifts she would be more warm towards him. ‘I like nice things,’ she would say. ‘I’d love to be able to dress well.’
In the car Joe caught a slight cold in his ears. ‘You’re like me,’ she said. ‘You feel the cold quickly. All last winter I was perished. Before next winter I want to get a good thick warm coat.’
Joe told her soon how he would like to buy her a coat: not an ordinary coat, not a tweed or even a camel-hair, but a fur coat. He did not mind how much the coat cost. Thirty or forty pounds, perhaps. He did not mind. Only, by means of it, he felt that he could brea
k down the cool resistances, the slight barrier of mockery that kept him apart from her.
Soon after the excitement of the fur-coat had passed Joe discovered that the shop accounts, neglected for nearly three months, were in a mess. He told the girl how, for two or three evenings at least, he must stay at home and straighten things out.
‘I thought you were taking me out?’ she said.
‘But just this once. Just for a night or two.’
‘Just this once my foot. You either want to take me out or you don’t. You can do the books when you get home. Who do you think I am?’
When she spoke to him like this he was pained and felt quite small. Pain and love and fear would drive him to do as she asked. In the evenings that were now growing dark a little earlier, he would still drive with her down to the sea. It was a long way and by the time he got back to the shop it was too late and he was too tired to touch the accounts. A great fear of losing her began to make him spend money recklessly. ‘Let’s have a good time,’ he would say. ‘Let’s have a good time!’ From a few gay evenings by the sea, under the heavy August stars, among the holiday crowds, he extracted from her momentary concessions of tenderness. They went to dances that were hot and crowded and where they drank champagne. For a little while the dark sea itself would seem to him to have the appearance of wine, glowing softly. Next day he would feel old.
Now, too, he began to be more worried about the accounts and the weekly takings. The shutting of the shop on Saturday afternoons, in the face of the weekend trade, was a bad thing. Many customers had gone away and not come back. He tried to confide to the girl, vainly, what was on his mind.
‘All you talk about is bananas,’ she said.
He decided to cut out the luxury trade. In a few days he saw the effect on his better-class customers, who dropped away. One day a woman remarked tartly, ‘When I come for a pound of apples I don’t expect an exhibition of spooning.’
To the girl he tried to conceal his dismay by anger. ‘Snobs! That’s what they are. Because I won’t give ’em credit. That’s how they treat you. She’s one of these caterpillarists. Treat you like dirt.’
‘Oh! stop worrying,’ she said.
‘You never sympathize,’ he said. He felt that he needed guidance and confidence.
‘Sympathize?’ she said. ‘You want me to cry on your neck?’
A day or two later she did not keep the evening appointment. He wandered idly round the streets, looking for her, trying to think. After some hours he went back home and sat in the room above the shop. A huge sense of oppression held him immobile by the window. For some time he sat there looking down at the street, not thinking or moving, and then at last he saw her, walking on the opposite pavement with a stranger. As he saw her he felt his whole body rock, so that he trembled heavily on his feet.
When she came by the shop in the morning she did not stop. Joe walked desperately after her, beseeching her to tell him what it was all about, uselessly lifting his hands. She raised her small hard face, expressing weariness.
‘You just make me tired, that’s all,’ she said.
In the evening he waited outside the office where she worked. Coming out, she walked straight past him. Again he hurried after her.
She turned angrily on him. ‘For God’s sake don’t keep following me!’
‘I want you. I got to talk to you. What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What have I done?’
‘Nothing.’
‘There must be something. It just can’t happen like this. You just can’t go.’
‘I tell you there’s nothing!’ she said, ‘and I’m going. That’s all.’
After that, whenever he got the opportunity, he would wait for her in the street. Raising his large hands in a hopeless sort of way, he would run after her. He began to close the shop a few minutes before five in the evening, so that he could meet her outside the office.
‘Can’t you take no for an answer?’ she would shout at him.
‘No.’
‘Well then, learn! Because it’s the only answer you’ll get!’
Gradually there was aroused in him a sense of deep cold anger that began to vent itself on the customers. He began to be annoyed when they squeezed the hearts of cabbages or tested the ripeness of plums and pears. In resentment he put up a large notice in the shop. ‘Don’t handle the goods! It’s unhygienic!’
‘What’s the reason for that?’ a woman asked.
‘A lot of people have got dirty hands, that’s all!’
The trade of the shop fell rapidly away. It was almost October; the days were cooler. People did not like standing outside the shop, in the wind, to be told that they had dirty hands. When Joe came to straighten up the accounts that had been left for so long he got up and walked about the room, hitting his forehead with his hands.
His anger broke down into despondency. What he felt about the girl, what he had felt about her since first seeing her go past the shop with her bright careless eyes, was not changed. When he saw her in the street, from a distance, or thought of her, he experienced the rush of trembling tenderness that made him rock on his feet.
By the time he had given up the shop and had decided to go back to the street trade, with a horse and cart, it was late November. He once saw the girl in the fur coat. She walked softly, small bright eyes glittering above the brown fur, like a cat that watches people. Seeing her, he remembered with an acute, blinding pain, the days of the summer.
As he drove round the back streets of the town with the small cart and its boxes of fruit and vegetables and occasional flowers, he caught cold in his ears through forgetting his Balaclava helmet. The pain drove through his head, breaking down his nerves. But beside the pain of frustration and the everlasting feeling of tenderness for which there was no outlet it seemed a little thing.
‘I see you’re back, Joe,’ the people said. ‘Give up the shop, after all.’
‘Yes,’ he would say. ‘Yes.’
For a moment he would be at a loss to explain his return.
And then, finding an explanation that had nothing to do with the frustration, the tenderness or the pain, he would raise his heavy hands and let them fall again.
‘It’s the caterpillarists, you see,’ he would explain. ‘It’s the caterpillarists. There’s no room for a man like me.’
The Park
1
In spring tall acacia trees bloomed early with inverted pagodas of white flower against the steel-blue cypresses that flanked the house. Later, in hot summers, at symmetrical intervals along the stone terrace, stiff blue yuccas blossomed with great bells of deep ivory, and still later a grape-vine on the south sun-bleached wall began to colour countless bunches of small sweet fruit, until in full ripeness they were a shade of dusty purple-rose. Between the trained arms of the vine three storeys of windows, open a little twice a week, were backed by white shutters faded by sun to ivory, like great frames from which the pictures had been removed. Below the terrace and for about a mile beyond the last formal beds of neglected lemon tea-rose the park spread away down a bland south slope of grass, broken only by large groups of elm and chestnut and crimson rhododendrons.
They said that once, when the Donnellys had lived there, a quarter of a million had been spent on the house; but now the only inhabitants were Ashton, the caretaker, and his young wife. On summer mornings, as early as six o’clock, Ellen Ashton unlocked the south door and came out and went down on her knees to scrub the step. As she scrubbed she kept her eyes lowered to the ground, not once looking up; as if the park, the sunlight and the beginning of another day did not interest her. She had features modelled of rather delicate bone, with grey thoughtful eyes in which there was a touch of un-kindled, mute affection. Although she and her husband had now been caretakers for two years, she remained unaware, as completely as on the day of their arrival, that there were yuccas which bloomed on the terrace or red islands of rhododendrons in the park below. Summer came and went;
grapes turned dusky on the south wall and shrivelled for want of gathering; but she hardly noticed the ripening of the fruit or the year. Soon it turned cold and the great boiler-stove was lit in the basement and gales drove into fantastic drifts along the terraces crowds of brown and lemon leaves that were eventually replaced by snow. But if she remained unaffected by such things as the changes of the year, she was deeply affected by something else. She was guided and oppressed by a sense of duty that had long since taken the form of fear.
Her fear, for some reason, was that time would overtake her. She was afraid that there would come a day when, at the end of it, the steps of the house had not been scrubbed, the closed rooms not aired, the great mahogany handrail of the staircase not polished. Fear kept her from leaving the house because the telephone might ring with an important message. It drove her fretfully about the empty unwanted house on agitated feet as if there were really people calling and wanting and watching her. It drove her upstairs three or four times between six and ten in the morning to call her husband, who had not then thought of getting up.
Albert Ashton had plump white features thrown into prominence by oiled black hair. He would lie in bed looking with sulky admiration at the half-moons on the fingers-nails of his finely-kept hands. What was there to get up for?
‘Damn all!’ he would shout at her. ‘Why don’t you stop worrying your head off? Who’s going to know whether the damn place is cleaned or not?’
‘Nobody. Only me.’
‘Ah, stop worrying your insides out. Who cares?’
‘We got the job. It’s up to us to do what we’re paid to do.’
‘Job? Job?’ he would say. ‘Who’s worrying about a job? There’s more jobs than men.’
‘I see in the papers,’ she would say, ‘there’s a million unemployed.’
‘What about it? A million unemployed where? Not in the servant class. People’ll go down on their hands and knees to get you.’
‘I don’t want people going down on their hands and knees to me.’