by H. E. Bates
When you came to Christabel, who was eighteen, you instantly felt you were in the presence of a character flamboyant but never in the least vulgar, a healthy lioness with golden eyes, hair the colour of oat straw and breasts of sensational splendour. Every strand of her hair and every pore of her smooth blonde skin radiated the feeling that she couldn’t exist for a day without the food of love and that the richer and more bountiful the food the better. She was in fact the quietest of the three; the veins that seemed to diffuse that immoderate need for passion were often, in fact, tenderly, enchantingly sleepy.
These astonishing and disarming differences in the three sisters – it was almost as if Mrs Davenport, in various moments of desperate abandon, had gone off to seek solace in the arms of an Italian waiter, a red-headed Irishman and some giant athletic devotee of health-and-strength – were not only remarkable enough in themselves. They constantly made it impossible to believe that the girls had sprung from the shabby cradle of the little café, the slightly shabby Mrs Davenport and the even shabbier stout-addict whose sole interest in life seemed to be the racing results.
But the girls had still another characteristic, this time a similarity, which was also remarkable. All three were irrepressibly, almost unreasonably gay, with Christabel as the only one who sometimes slipped briefly into a drowsy minor key. Always as they came into the little café, giving Mrs Davenport a hand with the customers, there seemed to be in every poached egg a hidden secret joke; every saffron cake seemed to be leavened with laughter; not a single chip or pot of tea came in from the kitchen without the accompaniment of a sonata of giggles: so much so that I constantly felt that the little café would one day explode, evaporate into thin celestial air and, with its three beauties and their mother, vanish for ever.
And as it turned out I was, in a strange way, almost right about this.
One rainy evening in May, when the lilacs in the churchyard drooped flowers like wet pink sponges, I called in at the café about seven o’clock. Mrs Davenport never had any sort of regular closing time – sometimes she was open until eleven o’clock at night – but that evening she was already standing over the till, totting up the day’s takings. There were no customers in the café and no sign at all of the girls.
‘Oh! I’m sorry, Mrs Davenport. I didn’t realise you were closing up.’
‘Oh! that’s all right. Sit yourself down. What can I get you?’
I really hadn’t come with the intention of having anything, I said. I really wanted to speak to Christabel.
‘They’ve all three gone to a film. It looked like being a long miserable wet evening and I packed them off. You know how they are. They like a little gaiety. I couldn’t bear to have them moping. You say you wanted to speak to Christie?’
It was about a dance, I explained. I sometimes got free tickets for various occasions from the office. I now had two for the Golf Club dance the following Saturday and I wondered if Christie might come? That was if Mrs Davenport didn’t mind and had no objection?
‘Oh! she’d adore it. Mind? Of course I don’t mind. My girls are free to enjoy themselves. They’re not tied to the counter here.’
There was sometimes a certain reflective sadness in Mrs Davenport’s voice and whenever it was there she drooped the lids of her eyes. I detected it now and I noticed too that she didn’t look at me as she said:
‘Do sit down, won’t you? And can’t I get you something? Some tea? I’ve got coffee already made.’
I thanked her and said I would like a cup of coffee. Rain beat in a sudden dark squall at the café window and she said, again in that sad voice, that she’d better put on the light. As she switched it on the naked brilliance of the bulb above the counter gave her something more than an air of sadness. She looked, I thought, in some way inexpressibly lonely, even troubled.
‘Something to eat with it? Toast? or would you like a saffron cake? I baked them fresh this afternoon.’
I said I would have a saffron cake. She poured out a cup of coffee and put a saffron cake on a plate beside it. I spooned sugar into the coffee and as I did so she begged me once again to sit down.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll stand and talk to you.’
Once again that reflective sadness spread across her face, giving it a distant air. Another squall of rain slashed at the window and then suddenly she said:
‘Would you mind very much if I asked you something?’
‘Of course not.’
It struck me suddenly that she was about to issue some sort of instruction as to my behaviour with Christie but instead she said:
‘Do you like my saffron cakes? Honestly what do you think of them?’
‘Oh! I like them. I always have.’
‘I mean would you say they were something rather special? Very special?’
‘I’ve certainly never come across them anywhere before. Why?’
She didn’t answer my question. Instead she started to say that she made them from a very old recipe, from Norfolk, given to her by their old family cook.
‘I was really rather like the girls in those days. Always teasing. I used to tease the coachman and the groom and the gardeners, everybody. Especially Cook. But she always let me copy out her recipes.’
The distant air on her face grew stronger. The veil of sadness showed no signs of lifting. Instead it was as if she had slightly opened a door, giving me a glance into another room in her mind.
‘Why did you ask me about the cakes?’
Oh! yes, they were very well off in those days, she suddenly went on to say. Then her father got killed when a carriage and pair bolted. Not long afterwards her mother got tied up with a waster and suddenly everything started to go to pot. At eighteen, in desperation to get away from it all, she married Davenport, one of the grooms.
Once again I asked her about the cakes but again she didn’t bother to answer.
‘I expect I’m boring you to death, but tell me something. Supposing you were sort of trapped and you suddenly had the chance to get away. Say in your job. Do you like your job or not?’
‘I loathe it.’
‘Why don’t you leave?’
‘I’m going to. It’s mad, I suppose. I’ve got nothing else—’
‘Of course it’s mad. But you won’t be in the trap, will you?’
Slowly she folded her arms on the counter and for the first time looked clearly and directly at me. Her eyes, like Tina’s, were a dark clear brown. The air of sadness had considerably lifted now but it was still hard to believe that somewhere far behind the clear brown pupils another Tina had once existed, teasing, impudent and gay.
‘Well, it’s like this. Or am I boring you?’
‘Far from it.’
A couple of weeks before, she said, a traveller from one of the big biscuit firms had dropped in at the café. He ordered a pot of tea and then proceeded to go quietly mad about the saffron cakes. They were so good he was convinced she ought to market them: advertise them, set up a mail order business or something, get a traveller to push them around the shops. That was the way big things began. A little old lady started to make old-fashioned mint humbugs in a back kitchen, or marmalade, or almond rock, or gingerbread, and suddenly somebody took it up and in ten years it was a household word and they were quoting shares.
‘Sounds fine. But you’d need capital.’
‘Exactly. I told him that. And there isn’t any capital. Or wasn’t. Until today.’
Yes, he’d been in again that very afternoon, so convinced he was right that he’d got the capital all arranged. He was sure she couldn’t go wrong. She could pay it all back with interest over three or four years.
To my infinite astonishment I saw her smile. This sudden turn of brightness, almost a blossoming, made me realise for the first time how young after all she was. With that sudden smile some of her shabbiness dropped away. I even told myself that I half-detected, in the bright brown pupils, the remotest reflection if not of Tina’s impish impudence, at least a sli
ght awakening.
‘Have you made up your mind?’
‘Not quite. I’m going to sleep on it. He’ll be in again on Saturday.’
It was now almost dark outside. The sky was a strange brilliant electric blue and I thought the rain had stopped.
‘I ought to get back to the office,’ I said. ‘Will you ask Christie about the dance? You think she’d like to come?’
‘Of course. She’ll adore it.’
‘The dance starts at eight. I’ll call for her just before.’
She actually smiled again, not briefly this time but broadly, so that I suddenly realised how pretty, underneath that veil of shabby sadness, she really was.
‘I warn you, though. The other two will be raving jealous mad.’
A minute later I said good night to her and walked across the churchyard. The rain had stopped. In the deepening twilight big fat drops of it were falling from heavy sprays of lilac, splashing on the tombstones below.
One of the more curious things about the Davenports was the way, in the presence of one, I would be haunted by the absence of another. For some days I was haunted by Mrs Davenport; there was something strangely discomforting about that talk of ours in the café. But it was nothing to the way, shortly afterwards, I was to be haunted by Tina.
When I called for Christabel on Saturday evening Mrs Davenport was busy serving half a dozen customers in the café and there was a sound of music from the room in the back.
‘I don’t think Christie’s quite ready yet,’ she said. ‘She always takes an age. Anyway go through to the living room and sit yourself down in comfort. Tina’s there.’
When I went through to the back room Tina was dancing round the table to the tune of a fox-trot being played on a portable gramophone. Her arms were holding an imaginary partner and her dark head was thrown well back, so that her bare neck looked sleek and long. For some reason I also thought she looked older than usual and it was some time before I discovered why.
‘I’m having my own private dance,’ she said. Impetuously she stretched out her arms and held me by the shoulders, the very dark bright eyes fixed on me in an impish open stare. ‘Will you have the pleasure?’
I held her by the waist and she responded by putting a bare arm lightly but caressingly across my shoulders. This deliberate gesture of intimacy had the immediate effect of sending a series of brittle electric waves through my spine. But it also had another odd and unexpected effect. I suddenly found myself uneasy, almost half-frightened: not merely because she was so young but because, in spite of it, she was also so disturbingly, even alarmingly, mature.
‘Come on, dance,’ she said. ‘You’re like a wooden horse.’
Then, as we danced, I suddenly discovered the reason for my thinking that she looked so much older than she really was. She was wearing a dress at least a couple of sizes too tight for her and it struck me all at once that this too was a deliberate gesture. The dress, cut rather low at the neck, was of emerald green chiffon – she might well have worn it for her birthday party a year before – and its tightness had the effect of throwing her bust into firm, tender and very startling prominence. It was almost as if her young breasts, though by no means as striking in form as Christie’s, had miraculously matured in the day or two since I had seen her before. The effect of them was sensational.
In this bemused state of amazement and half-fear I hadn’t the vaguest idea what to say to her. Then the side of the gramophone record came to an end and she released herself from me and went across the room to turn it over. The gramophone was standing on a low bamboo coffee table by the window and as she deliberately bent deeply over it I caught a glimpse of the shadowy hollow between her breasts. Almost at once, knowing perfectly well I was staring at her, she looked up, unabashed, and calmly said something about it being a waltz on the other side.
I said I was afraid I really didn’t waltz all that well and she at once said:
‘That won’t suit Christie. She adores waltzing. It’s her favourite dance. Anyway I think you’re an awful old pig. You might have taken me.’
I murmured something about her being a little on the young side, perhaps, and she said: ‘Oh! nonsense. Someone told me the other day I look at least seventeen.’ She deliberately straightened herself up to her full height, arching her bust, once again holding me in that frank, dark gaze of hers. ‘Do you think I do?’
In that moment I was bound to admit that she did. A little later the music started again and once more she came across and to my infinite embarrassment laid that bare, caressive arm on my shoulder.
‘You only asked Christie just to make me jealous. Promise me you’ll take me next time you get tickets.’
‘I shan’t get any more tickets. I’m leaving the paper next week.’
‘If you’re hard up I can pay for myself.’
‘It isn’t anything to do with being hard up. It’s – well—’
‘It’s – well, what?’
‘You may look seventeen but in fact you’re only fourteen. You’re still at school. It’s a bit much.’
‘Oh! it’s a bit much, is it? Thank you.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Oh! you’re sorry, are you? Well, I’ll forgive you if you promise to take me next time.’
More out of renewed fear than anything else I hastily promised I would take her next time and as an immediate gesture of gratitude she kissed me full on the lips, and not with casual lightness either. If the sudden relevation of her maturing breasts had an air of the miraculous about it that first kiss of hers was even more sensationally so. It had in it all the rare ardour of a girl long practised in the pursuits of love.
‘We must do that again some time,’ she said. ‘Christie’s just coming down.’
In that moment I had never been quite so relieved to see anyone as I was to see Christie. She was wearing a pale primrose dance frock, with a lime green wrap and a double row of pearls. There was never a time when the Davenport girls looked anything but striking but that evening Christie looked so supremely lovely that I was filled with an entirely fresh rush of embarrassment, this time born of sheer wonder.
‘Don’t care much for the pearls. They don’t go with that frock.’
‘No? Well, nobody asked you to wear them.’
‘Good thing, too. Jewellery doesn’t suit me either.’
Christie didn’t say a word in answer. Instead she simply turned to me and said:
‘Shall we go? I’m sorry if I’ve been rather a long time but I had a bit of trouble with the zip of my dress. It really isn’t quite right even now. Of course it would help if some people – do it up for me, will you?’
She turned her back towards me and I saw that the zip of her dress was still open a couple of inches from the top. As I moved to touch it a dark shadow marched across the room. It was Tina, in fiery departure.
‘Don’t let him ask you to waltz. He doesn’t do it very well.’
‘Thanks for telling me. But I think,’ Christie said, ‘we are old enough to please ourselves.’
All that sultry May evening I danced physically with Christie, but in spirit with Tina. That special quality of the Davenports, of being able to haunt in absence, was so manifestly strong that several times I only saved myself by the sheerest miracle from calling the girl in the pale primrose dress by the wrong name.
The evening had begun by her going to the ladies’ room and coming back without her pearls. When I remarked on this she said:
‘I really didn’t think they suited me after all. She’s nearly always right, Tina. She’s got taste, that child.’
‘I’m sorry you’re not wearing them. I thought they looked marvellous. Won’t you put them on again?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
Then later, as we were having supper of ham sandwiches, coffee and, believe it or not, raspberry jelly and cream, she suddenly took off her bracelet – it was a simple gold affair with a single locket attache
d – and said:
‘I don’t think I’ll wear my bracelet either. It keeps half-slipping off anyway. Put it in your pocket, will you?’
I duly put the bracelet into my pocket and promptly forgot it. Somehow she looked only half-dressed with neither pearls nor bracelet and again I said:
‘I really do think the pearls suit you. Won’t you wear them after supper?’
She clearly must have felt flattered by this, because just before we began dancing again she went away to the ladies’ room and came back, some ten minutes later, wearing the necklace. I at once said how charming the pearls looked and again how much they suited her and in return she gave me the warmest of responses with those large golden eyes of hers.
For a girl with such a big and splendid body Christie danced with amazing lightness. She was as light as a fresh-made meringue and the feeling she gave with it was similarly cool and sweet. Mistakenly, as it turned out, I at first found her beauty that night to be neutral and unexciting. Perhaps it was the continually tumultuous recollection of that dark and precocious kiss of Tina’s that was responsible for this but it became clearer and clearer, the more we danced, that my interpretation of her as an impassioned creature insatiably hungry for the food of love was a mistaken one. The lioness was gorgeous but tame.
‘Don’t you really waltz?’ I had already excused myself from one waltz and was really half-dreading another. ‘Or is it just that you don’t like it?’
‘I don’t do it very well and I don’t want to make an ass of myself. Or stamp on your toes.’
‘That’s all right. Then you won’t mind if I dance the next one with George Parkinson, will you? He asked me at the interval.’