by H. E. Bates
‘Well, you’ve seen everything,’ the Captain said. ‘We’ll have another snifter before you go.’
‘No thanks. I really ought——’
‘No?’ he said. ‘Then I’ll have one for you. Eh? Good enough?’
‘Good enough,’ I said.
We climbed down from the tower and he came to the gate in the fields to say goodbye. Across the fields there were nearly two miles of track, with five gates to open, before you reached the road. The Captain’s eyes were full of water and he had begun to bite his nails again and his face was more than ever like a florid fester in the sun.
There was no sign of his wife, and as I put in the gears and let the car move away he looked suddenly very alone and he said something that, above the noise of the car, sounded like:
‘Cheers. Thanks frightfully for coming. Jolly glad——’
Half a mile away, as I got out to open the first of the five field gates, I looked back. There was no sign of life at all. The Captain had gone into the house to beat it up. The greenhouse was hidden by the great cross of stone. All that moved was the cuckoo blown once again from the dying elms like a scrap of torn paper, and on the tower, from which the view was so magnificent, the flag curling in the wind.
No More the Nightingales
When she had finished her afternoon nap she stood by the open bedroom window, still in her yellow slip, looking over the harvest field. She could feel the heat rising in a great steamy breath across the plain. On shimmering waves of it, across a half-cleared field of wheat where every stalk of stubble seemed to quiver like a crest of water, an orange tractor appeared sometimes to bob up and down, rocking under the glare of sun.
She always felt relaxed and soft after sleep, her body lovably smooth and damp, the skin almost oily, like the skin of a sleepy pear put away and kept in a drawer too long. She was growing a little over-ripe and fleshy and the straps of her yellow slip had made weals of bright pink where they had cut into her deep white shoulders while she slept. In London she sometimes did exercises for it before she went out at midday, but it was not much use, and Andrew was always telling her she should work in the harvest field and do healthy things like throwing sheaves or shocks about and always teasing her because she did not know one from another. But the weather was too hot and her arms always skinned raw in the sun and her face and the deep plump front of her neck got an awful unhealthy appearance, like a heat rash, that powder could never quite conceal.
When the tractor and wagon came nearer to the house she could see Andrew quite clearly, bronze arms pinning his pitchfork into the top of the truck. He was growing tremendously thick and dark-skinned and healthy, and already, she thought uneasily, he looked more than eighteen. It was surprising how, in their last terms at school, boys suddenly became men and before you realized it were completely detached and separate creatures.
She thought she saw him begin to lift his hand to her. She wanted to wave in reply, but she knew if she did so that George Bellamy, the man who camped in the trailer caravan down by the brook, would see it and think it was meant for him. She had to avoid that sort of thing; she had to be careful with Bellamy. In other years there had never been anyone like Bellamy on the farm. There had just been the country folk: farm-hands, women who came in to help in the fields, Jess Martin and his wife and two boys, Wilf and Charlie; just the country folk. Nobody intruded. Only once, during the war, there had been an American army lieutenant from Illinois who had come to help with the harvest and who had looked at her several times rather as Bellamy did: not so much with his eyes as in deep oblique pulses of feeling and a slow smile with his tongue wet and red as it pushed down over his fleshy underlip.
Bellamy, like the lieutenant, made her very uneasy. It was not simply that she felt he knew so much about her; that he might suddenly disclose something Andrew would hear. It went much deeper than that. In London, in other circumstances, in circumstances that were so different that she could never quite relate them to empty corn-fragrant August nights when nothing stirred about the farm except countless frittering poplar leaves above the pond, she would have picked out Bellamy in a million. She did not need to be very expert for that.
Standing by the window, still drowsy and dreamy with sleep, it came to her suddenly that the tractor had drawn in to the very edge of the field and that Bellamy, who was driving it, was sitting there staring up at her. The light of mid-afternoon was so fierce that she saw a smear of new oil flame-green on his near check, where he had freshly wiped his hand.
She went back into the bedroom and immediately began to dress. As she put on her clothes she felt the little room, close under the rafters, insufferably thick and stifling with sun. There was so little movement of air from the fields that she simply put her short-sleeved white dress over her slip and combed her thick red-brown hair and put on her flat-heeled white shoes. It was too hot for stockings.
Later, when she went out with a can of tea and cups in the basket that she always took to the men at half-past three, the tractor had moved away on a half-circuit of the nearly empty field. Once she was clear of the poplar-trees shading the gate by the end of the farmyard there was no sound across the white stubble except the voice of a single yellow-hammer, almost bleating its song, in a still green patch of burnt hedgerow where corn had caught fire three days before.
The four men, Andrew, Bellamy and the two Martin boys, sat by shocks of corn in narrow shade cast by the truck while she poured tea. Her skirt was rather short, and she found it a little difficult to manipulate and sometimes as she struggled to her feet it slipped briefly up over her white plump knees and she saw Bellamy looking at her with drowsy mindless eyes.
‘When are you coming down to look at the caravan?’ he said.
‘Oh! it’s so hot,’ she said.
‘Always cool by the brook. Coolest place on the farm.’
‘Oh! I don’t know—anyone for more tea?’
Both Martin boys said ‘Yuh, please,’ and tossed arcs of tea-leaves across stubble before holding out their cups. Andrew said, ‘I could drink for ever. I just wish I was a tea-urn and they made it inside me,’ and the high fluent public-school voice, not strange to her except when she heard it with others, made her proud and glad with renewed confidence that, over the years, she had done so well for him.
‘Come down tonight,’ Bellamy said. ‘Bring Andrew.’
‘We don’t get supper before nine, and then it’s so late,’ she said.
‘The boy wants to fish,’ he said. ‘I’ve been telling him I saw trout there. We could all fish.’
‘I’m not much good at that sort of thing,’ she said.
‘I’d awfully like to have a smack at them, I really would,’ the boy said. ‘Mr. Bellamy has rods.’
‘It’s always so late when you get finished and then somehow we sit talking and before you realize it——’
‘We’re on the last field,’ the boy said, ‘it’s all we have to do.’
‘Well, you go,’ she said. She saw Bellamy looking at her with eyes on which the lids were lowered like heat-sapped petals: sleepy but challenging, and immediately she felt confused and uneasy again and blurted out:
‘You go by all means. I’d rather stay up in the garden and listen to the nightingales.’
The Martin boys roared with such gusty cracked laughter that she hardly heard what Andrew said and could not look at Bellamy sprawling back against wheat sheaves with legs and arms splayed, his brown naked chest heaving with laughter under his open shirt.
‘Mother, you’re the limit,’ the boy said.
‘Now what have I said?’
‘There aren’t any nightingales, darling. They’re finished. It’s past the season. They’ve gone.’
‘Then what is it I hear at night? It’s birds of some sort—what are they?’
‘God only knows,’ he said, ‘but they’re not nightingales.’
‘Oh, all right’—she smiled, indulgent, unoffended but still uneasy—‘I just don’t
know about these things.’
‘You can’t know about everything,’ Bellamy said.
He was looking at her closely, directly. She tried not to look back and was glad when one of the Martin boys said, ‘Load up, chaps. Sooner we load sooner we git done,’ and swished away his tea-dregs in a black sparkling arc against the truck of wheat-sheaves.
She began to pack up the other cups, but Bellamy said:
‘Here, what about me? I only had one cup.’
‘Well, if you just lie there helpless,’ she said, ‘expecting to be waited on hand and foot.’
‘I can come and get what I want,’ he said.
As he heaved himself upright and came over to her with his empty cup one of the Martin boys shouted, ‘I’ll drive!’ and a second or two later the tractor moved past her like a lump of solidified oily heat, leaving her with a curious sense of being unsheltered in the middle of the completely shadeless field under a naked sun.
Bellamy lolled on one elbow and held out his cup. She filled it steadily while he looked beyond it at her dress drawing itself tightly across plump knees and then smoothly, under the strain of her arms, across her body.
‘Sorry I laughed about the nightingales,’ he said. ‘But it’s just about two months late—even for the Berkeley Square kind.’
‘There’s no need to apologize.’
‘Ever hear them in Berkeley Square?’ He drank tea, looking up at her over the tilted cup; but she did not answer. ‘It used to be a nice Square. But now it’s gone over a bit. Gone down.’
When she did not answer again he looked straight at the shadow between her legs where the white skirt pulled stiffly across the heavy flesh and said:
‘Come down tonight. The boy really wants to come.’
‘He’s perfectly capable of coming by himself without me.’
‘Well, I know that.’
‘If you know it, why keep asking me?’
He smiled, running his tongue across his lower lip, slowly, infectiously, so that she felt herself stir warmly and uneasily again. Sun hit the nape of her neck with blunt pain and she felt the world of the empty harvest field, with the tractor so far away now that it was simply like a thumping pulse in the heat, rock and tremble momentarily about her.
‘I really must go,’ she said. ‘The heat’s something awful. If I sit in it too long it makes me sick.’
Unconcerned, as if he had really not heard what she said, he asked:
‘Going back to business now the harvest is finishing?’
‘I’m independent.’ She spoke coldly, trying to repress her uneasiness, and she felt her voice intensely trite and unreal. ‘I’ve got no business.’
‘Very lucky,’ he said. He drank the rest of his tea in a single swift movement that became, in the swivel of his head, a rapid glance down the field to see where the tractor was. It glowed under distant grey smoky poplars like a ball of fire. In another second he had let the cup roll out of his hand across the stubble and was leaning and pressing across her body, kissing her.
It came to her so naturally that she felt her arms widen responsively and her mouth open moistly before she realized that she did not want it to happen at all: that she wanted it to happen less than anything in the world. She struggled against sensations that were hypnotic and repellent. It was only when she felt the sharp barbs of stubble pressing like needles into her back that she cried out a little and he let her free.
‘Now perhaps you’re satisfied,’ she said. She sat up and combed her fingers madly through her straw-laced hair and then stood up, smoothing down her dress.
‘You’re good,’ he said. ‘I knew you would be.’
He stood up too.
‘Why all the fuss?’ he said.
‘Bring the cups,’ she said. She strode off, face away from the sun, her neck bluntly pained by the naked heat of it again.
‘He’s got to find out some day,’ he said. ‘After all.’
She felt her entire body, in a single sickening drain of strength, go weakly cold, as if nothing were left to clothe the pared and frigid bone. When her blood came back it was with a corresponding stupefying thickness, so that as she turned to him she could hardly see.
‘Please,’ she said.
His brown and white figure seemed to quiver and temporarily explode into fragments against the sun. When they solidified again he was holding her. She was glad of it and did not protest, and he said:
‘You can trust me. It’s all right.’
She did not answer.
‘Come down after supper. Will you? It would be nice. We could talk——’
‘All right, if I can go now.’
‘Go,’ he said. Quite gaily he let his arms open in a mocking sort of way as if she were a tame hen that he knew could not possibly fly.
And later, lying on the bed again in the stifling little bedroom, she felt rather like that herself: a tame, crumpled helpless hen, too stupid to know which way to run. When she got up at last her face, too, was ruffled and hen-like, her cheeks greyish with sweat-caked powder, like gills, her hair moistly matted, like a tattered comb. She felt awful as she stared at herself in the glass; she had never looked so ghastly. The evening air was full of what now seemed the intensely annoying sound of perpetually turning poplar leaves. Swallows were flying high over the empty wheat-field and she noticed them simply because they recalled her foolish and amusing remark about the nightingales. They might have been nightingales, too, she thought, for all she knew.
She dressed slowly and went down to supper. All through the meal, early tonight because it was Saturday and the last field was cleared, she could hear the perpetual fretting and frittering of poplar leaves. It seemed as if millions of them were falling in the wind; it created for her the strange feeling that at last summer was breaking.
‘I’m not coming fishing,’ Andrew said, ‘I’m going into town with Wilf and Charlie.’
‘You promised Mr. Bellamy to come down to the caravan,’ she said.
‘You go.’
‘I’m not in the slightest bit interested in fishing,’ she said.
‘Well, listen to the nightingales,’ he said.
Again, from Martin and his wife as well as from the three boys, there was much laughter. She smiled and tried to take it well.
‘The trouble is I’m too easy-going,’ she thought. As she walked away from the house, in the still hot evening ripely heavy with the strawy sweetness of corn, she felt her nerves recovering and smoothing out; she felt less and less like a frowsy crumpled hen. It was only when she was two fields away from the house, in sight of Bellamy’s caravan and the brook, that she realized she had left the poplars and their irritation of leaves behind.
‘I’m too easy-going, that’s it,’ she thought. ‘I always was.’ She felt herself, in the cooler air about the brook, relaxing. Odd how she always felt more human at night, a fraction more indulgent and tender; curious that night never brought its good resolutions. It was only during daytime that she gnawed at herself, telling herself to end this and that, to pull herself together.
Bellamy came out from the caravan and across the meadow, to meet her. ‘Where’s Andrew?’ he said. He had changed his working suit for a blue one. Three fishing-rods were standing ready, with pale sky-blue casts, by the van.
‘I came down to tell you he went into town,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want you to wait or anything.’
‘Oh! it’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Come in.’
‘I mustn’t stay.’
‘There’s nothing to prevent your coming in to have a drink is there?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘I should suppose not at all,’ he said.
It occurred to her suddenly, as she went into the bright chromium and plastic living-van that her coming had nothing to do with indulgence, with being easy-going; she had come because she was frightened of what Bellamy would say.
‘How do you like your gin?’ he said. ‘With water or pink? Sit down.’
�
��Pink.’ She sat on the bed.
‘What shall I say?’ he said, holding up the glass so that one blue eye seemed to flower with cold globular irony about the brim, ‘here’s to the next time? or this time? or what?’
‘Just what,’ she said.
He smiled and drank and said, ‘When do you leave?’
‘Day after tomorrow.’
He twisted his mouth and seemed about to make some fresh remark of crisper and obliquer irony, but nothing came of it and suddenly he drew her down on the bed. She did not protest. Her body melted into incredibly swift fusion with his, her blood beating up into her throat and ears. ‘You’re good,’ he said. ‘I knew you were good the first time I saw you,’ and she felt anger and heat rise up in her in a ravenously sweet impulse to bite the words from his mouth.
Some time later, when darkness and a slight late summer breath of coolness had crept up from the brook, she heard him say, ‘I ought to light the lamp,’ but she felt once again like a hen, clipped and frowsy and scraggy and old, all passion gone out of her, and she said:
‘For God’s sake don’t. I can dress in the dark.’
He lay still in the darkness while she was dressing.
‘Will the boy come fishing tomorrow?’
‘You must ask him.’
‘You brought him up well. You made a lot of sacrifices. It must have cost something.’
She did not answer; she felt there was nothing to answer; and he stirred on the bed.
‘I’ll walk across the fields with you,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I can go alone. I’d rather.’
As she walked across the fields, up the rising slope of grass towards the cleared stubbles of corn, the light in the farmhouse and the renewed trembling sibilant sound of poplar leaves, she kept telling herself that she was too easy-going, that she ought to give it up, that she had to pull herself together and be firm with herself now, once and for all.
‘I shall really have to do something,’ she thought.
Two days later, when the taxi drove into the stackyard, between gold-white houses of corn, to drive the boy and herself to the station, the whole family, with Bellamy, stood by the gate to say goodbye.