The Four Beauties

by H. E. Bates

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean? – no?’

  ‘No.’

  In a withering second she turned cold on me; her spectacles were icy.

  ‘No? I’m shocked. I thought you were so frightfully keen on that sort of thing?’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘International good-will and all that. International understanding. You’re always on about it, anyway. It’s one of your hobby-horses.’

  It was a typical, blatant, outrageous lie. I will admit, it is true, to a few hobby-horses, but international good-will is not one of them. I am, on the whole, less interested in that subject than in the love-making of snails. It was now my turn to be icy.

  ‘And that, I suppose, is a picture of the great Otto you’ve got there?’

  She snapped The Courier & Gazette at me with all the crackling vehemence of a pistol trigger being cocked.

  ‘I don’t know what’s behind that word great,’ she said, ‘but there isn’t a doubt that’s him, being greeted by the Mayor of Flimshurst at the quayside.’

  ‘Not the mayor. The Chairman of the Urban District Council.’

  ‘Well, whatever he is. Anyway, I think he ought to be Mayor. It sounds so much more equal.’

  Eagerly but coldly watched by Aunt Leonora, I turned to the picture, on the front page of The Courier & Gazette, of Anglo-German friendship. The Chairman of the Urban District Council looked, except for a thick ecclesiastical bunch of white hair curling in his neck, remarkably like a well-gnawed bone. He also looked to me like the kind of man who smiles too easily. A glittering chain of office was looped about his neck.

  In his left hand he was holding aloft the German flag; with his right he was shaking hands in smiling effusion with a bald-headed man whose face looked like a pot of lard that has boiled over and eventually congealed in white, flabby, unhealthy drifts and folds. He was waving the Union Jack. Enthusiastic and even strenuous though this gesture was, he somehow hardly looked to me like a man who had ever, even in youth, scaled high mountains. Nor could I detect in the heavy Teutonic furrows of his face any sign of that marvellous forehead, that fine brow.

  ‘And what,’ I said, ‘did you say that Otto’s other name was?’

  ‘Oh! Heimberger. Hunnegar. Honnegger. Heimburg. Something like that.’

  ‘According to the paper here this is a Herr Otto Untermeyer.’

  ‘Oh! is it? Oh! yes, I suppose it could be. After all these years. Untermeyer – well, yes, it isn’t all that – anyway, it does say Otto?’

  ‘It does say Otto.’

  ‘Good, then it must be. It positively couldn’t be anyone else.’

  Here I thought it pertinent to ask:

  ‘Yes, but does it look anything like the man? Would you recognise him again, for instance?’

  ‘I shall invite him to tea. No, lunch. That would give us more time.’ She actually laughed as she suddenly stopped talking of lunch and scaled the inconsequent steps of memory. ‘The thing I remember most is the wild flowers. Gentians and soldonellas and anemones – those lovely big greyish-yellow ones. And the butterflies. And the vast amounts of sausage. Wurst – Lieberwurst, Bratwurst – Oh! it became quite a joke, the wurst. Especially with Otto. Follow me, all, he would say – Achtung! all will now follow – Achtung! – I will go wurst! Wurst, you see? – first!’

  I said I saw; Uncle Freddie, at the same moment, rather dismally started to sop the last piece of buttered toast in his tea.

  Abruptly and unexpectedly, as she often did, Aunt Leonora became pensive. Behind the dancing golden spectacles, so icy a few minutes before, her eyes became dreamy, wide and globular. She might for a second or two have been living again some long-uncaptured moment of Teutonic romance, gentian-starred, listening to a thousand-belled peal of soldonellas between summer meadows and summer snow – or that, at least, is what I thought until with equal abruptness all her dreaminess evaporated and she said with that simplicity that both endeared and disarmed:

  ‘I should like to show him something really English. A real English memory. Like the wurst is for me. As German as that is, only English. You know?’

  I was about to say I didn’t know and then to make some innocent suggestion about fish-and-chips when she suddenly gave a series of chirps, either of delight or revelation or both, and danced across the room to pick up the telephone directory.

  ‘Oh! what is his name, that man, that Chairman of the Council fellow? I know it as well as my own. Doesn’t he keep a shop or something?’

  ‘Several. Among other things.’

  ‘Other things? What other things?’

  ‘Anything that will earn a dishonest penny.’

  She glowered at me with extreme accusation.

  ‘I always thought you judged people too hastily,’ she said. ‘There’s good in everybody.’

  I said I didn’t doubt it; you had to be good to go as far as her George Wilbram, Chairman of the Urban Council, had done.

  ‘What was that? What did you say? Don’t mumble so. I’m always telling you.’

  ‘You’ll find him under Wilbram,’ I said. ‘Or Augustine Developments or Abbey Enterprises.’

  ‘What charming names. I think I’ll try Augustine. Will you come to lunch too? I think you’d adore Otto. Something tells me you’d have a great deal in common.’

  While waiting for Mr Wilbram’s number to come through she several times urged me to put my thinking-cap on in the matter of German wines. We had to do our utmost to do Otto well on that score; we had to match the vintage to the guest.

  ‘Rather soignêe,’ she said. ‘You know what I mean? I don’t know the German word. There must be one, mustn’t there?’

  I started to say that undoubtedly there must and turned in readiness to wink at Uncle Freddie, only to find that he had dropped off, head on chest, the last piece of buttered toast precariously poised in his fingers, like some half-smoked cigar.

  ‘Oh! Mr Wilbram? You won’t know me, but – I saw all about that marvellous Anglo-German unity thing of yours. Yes. In the paper. Oh! yes, I’m a great friend of Otto. We once climbed together.’

  Ten minutes later, after a conversation as one-sided as the progress of a snow-fed torrent careering down one of the many valleys at the foot of the Zugspitze, Aunt Leonora at last drew breath, went in brief silence to the window and looked across, eastward and southward, to the modest summer hills that grace the skyline like folds of gentlest green cloth between her house and the sea.

  In the sigh that she finally and suddenly gave there was, I thought, a depth not unmystical. It revealed too, like her words, how tender and endearing at heart she really was.

  ‘If we can’t show him gentians and anemones and soldonellas and all that we can at least show him the orchids. All those rare native ones of ours that grow up there – the Spider, the Butterfly, the Bee, the Soldier – you know – they’re so English, aren’t they? And to think that the Romans must have seen them too – marvellous thought!’

  She actually gave a short, ecstatic clap of her hands. Much startled, Uncle Freddie woke with a jump. The remaining piece of buttered toast dropped into his tea-cup. With feverish haste he scrambled to his feet, knocking cup into saucer, looking rather like a pink, fat baby roused cruelly from milky slumber, and said:

  ‘What was that? I thought you called me.’

  ‘The most marvellous thing has happened,’ she said. ‘A sort of Prodigal Son thing – in a way, sort of.’ She suddenly turned to me those inquisitive innocent spectacles of hers, as if seeking some confirmation of this preposterous parallel of hers. ‘Don’t you think so? It is rather like that, don’t you feel? – Otto coming back. Quite a miracle in a way. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh?’ For a single second she looked wildly hurt. Then she looked utterly stern. ‘And if it isn’t a miracle what in your precious book is it then?’

  Something prompted me to say ‘the trump of doom’, but I remembered myself in time an
d said:

  ‘Never mind about the miracles. What are you going to give them to eat? I’d like the wine and the food to marry as well as they can.’

  ‘Steak and kidney pudding,’ she said with such promptitude that Uncle Freddie actually emerged into full consciousness, like a schoolboy bidden to a sudden banquet. ‘And Christmas pudding for afters. I always keep one or two back – one for Easter and one for emergencies.’

  Uncle Freddie actually gave something like a cheer. ‘The old Kate and Sidney!’ he started to say when she abruptly interrupted him with renewed sternness, as if rebuking the man for interrupting holy ritual.

  ‘That will do,’ she said and suddenly rose inconsequently away from both of us and such worldly matters as steak and kidney pudding by saying very softly, in a sentence now more mysterious than mystical: ‘I’d have you know the chords of youth are sometimes very slender,’ leaving us both abruptly chastened and without an answer.

  It was only some long time later that it occurred to me that the word might well have been ‘tender’.

  For lunch on the following Friday I selected a white wine, a Deidesheimer Hofstück ’59. That this was unlikely to marry very well with the steak and kidney pudding, or for that matter with the Christmas pudding either, was something that hardly seemed to matter. Nothing else would marry anyway. The choice was merely a gesture in the cause of Anglo-German unity. With the Deidesheimer Hofstück ’59 we made our bow, so to speak, to the Reich. With the two puddings we raised the English standard high.

  For some time before lunch I had an uneasy feeling that Aunt Leonora might take the cause of friendship even further. For some reason or other I was over-possessed by the notion that the chords of youth might well prompt her to go, ridiculous though it may sound, all Bavarian, peasant costume and all. I need hardly have worried. She finally appeared in a mustard-and-pepper tweed costume, a shirt blouse and brown brogue shoes.

  These, she said, were just the stuff for walking.

  ‘Oh! Herr Untermeyer. Otto. It was weather just like this, wasn’t it? You remember? A little mist first thing and then – achtung! the sun. Wurst!’

  Herr Untermeyer looked much more than startled. I could have sworn that his transparent pork-like eyes, too small for the immense inflated paper-bag of his face, turned pink. He looked, gross and flabby in a grey summer suit cut to disguise the vast lines of his figure and now much-creased with travelling, very like a prisoner rudely captured on a foreign field, nervously wondering if his captors were about to treat him well or not.

  ‘Wasn’t this a piece of luck, Mr Wilbram? It was just by chance that I saw it in the paper. What’s the name of the town you’re twinning with, or adopting, or whatever it is?’

  ‘Traben. It’s—’

  ‘Oh! would that be near the Zugspitze? Have you been to that part, Mr Wilbram? There’s a marvellous blue lake there. All blue.’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ Mr Wilbram said. ‘It’s farther north – Traben, I mean.’

  ‘You’ve talked to Otto about how we met and climbed the Zugspitze and all that, I suppose? It’s all of thirty years.’

  ‘Herr Untermeyer doesn’t speak English very easily,’ Mr Wilbram said. ‘He’s all right if he takes it slowly.’

  ‘Really? It used to be so beautiful.’

  ‘Yes? I suppose you tend to forget it over the years.’

  Mr Wilbram might, I thought, have been a medieval prelate. His lean countenance – face is too simple a word – exuded goodness as a ripe plum exudes juice, except that there was neither juice nor ripeness in Mr Wilbram. The goodness of his eye was cold. His hair, white and slightly curled as fresh lamb’s wool, as I had noted in the picture in the newspaper, had been allowed to grow rather long in his neck, where you felt it had been carefully tended with a comb of piety.

  ‘Now what about a drink? You,’ she said to me, ‘organise the drinks with Freddie. A pink gin for me. And you, Mr Wilbram, what for you?’

  ‘For me, nothing. I rarely—’

  ‘No? Not even for an occasion – a day like this?’

  ‘For an occasion, sometimes. But midday, never.’

  ‘But Otto will. Herr Untermeyer? You’ll have a little – schniff, you know? You remember schniff? You remember how we all used to have schniffs? I said in English we called it snifter and you said in German it was schnapps and so in the end it got to schniffs. Eh? You remember? That was a good example of Anglo-German unity all right, Mr Wilbram, wasn’t it? Schniffs?’

  ‘I suppose it was,’ Mr Wilbram said.

  ‘And that,’ she said, ‘in the early days of the Nasties too.

  I always called them the Nasties. So much nearer the truth. Still, we’ll forget all that. Enough of that. This is our day, isn’t it, Otto? What about a schniff now?’

  Herr Untermeyer, it seemed to me, didn’t seem to think it was their day. Nor, I thought, was he much inclined to schniffs. Prisoner-like still, he stood painfully erect, as if under orders of silence, awaiting the terms of his sentence.

  ‘I know! I’ll give him red-currant wine,’ she said. ‘After all it was in Germany I first drank it. And you, Mr Wilbram, too? Yes? It’s my own – from a German recipe. Guht, yes? Red-currant, Otto, you understand? That will do you?’

  ‘So,’ Herr Untermeyer said.

  ‘Your pink gin,’ I said, ‘or would you rather have redcurrant now?’

  ‘Oh! red-currant, I think, now, don’t you? I think so. It’s all the better for the unity.’

  So we drank red-currant for unity. Even Mr Wilbram drank a modest half-glass, sipping it with something between a touch of disapprobation and an air of penance, rather as if it were communion wine. By contrast Herr Untermeyer seemed to approve greatly. Uncle Freddie had somehow drawn him aside, towards the window, through which and over ruby glasses they were contemplating the hills.

  ‘Orchids,’ I heard Uncle Freddie say. ‘Very rare.’ Uncle Freddie raised his glass, in what might have been a gesture of salutation. ‘You know them? Orchids? They are disappearing fast.’

  ‘So? Disappearing?’

  ‘My wife,’ Uncle Freddie said, making another gesture with his glass towards the hills, ‘will show them to you. After lunch. Up there. You like the wine?’

  ‘Was good.’

  ‘I’m rather for it myself,’ Uncle Freddie said and reached out to a side-table for the bottle. In re-filling Herr Untermeyer’s glass and his own he referred once or twice more to the orchids. It was a great shame. They were disappearing fast. A tragedy. Being stolen, he explained. It was the same in Germany, he supposed? Picnickers and motorists and all that?—’

  ‘The rape of the countryside,’ Aunt Leonora said. ‘Oh! I’m sure it goes on everywhere. That at least we have in common.’

  ‘In common? Rape?’ Herr Untermeyer stared at Aunt Leonora greatly mystified, eyes rapidly growing pinker. ‘So? This word I am not knowing. And orchids? Was is orchids?’

  ‘They are referring,’ Mr Wilbram said, ‘to a certain kind of flower. Blümen.’

  ‘Ah! blümen. So?’

  ‘Some,’ Aunt Leonora said, ‘are shaped like soldiers. And some like spiders. And some like men.’

  ‘Soldiers?’ Herr Untermeyer said. ‘Blümen? This I am not—’

  ‘Soldiers,’ Aunt Leonora said. ‘What is the German for soldiers? Wehrmacht?’

  ‘No, no. Soldaten,’ Mr Wilbram said. ‘Soldaten.’

  ‘We have them shaped like butterflies too,’ Uncle Freddie said. ‘And bees. And there is one, the Military—’

  ‘Soldaten? Ah! you are in military service?’

  ‘Do I smell something boiling over?’ I said.

  Aunt Leonora promptly rushed to the kitchen, calling as she went, ‘Don’t rush, don’t rush. We’ll be ten minutes yet. Give everybody another schniff, dear boy, will you? Don’t let Otto get dry.’

  I immediately armed myself with a fresh bottle of red-currant.

  ‘Another schniff, Herr Untermeyer?’

  �
�Danke. Schniff? What is this word schniff?’

  I was about to say that it was a word born out of international fraternity or something of that sort when Mr Wilbram said:

  ‘From here, Herr Untermeyer, we are actually looking straight across to where the Romans camped. Straight up there.’

  Herr Untermeyer, glass replenished, eyes pinker than ever, slowly followed the direction of Mr Wilbram’s pointing finger to the line of hills a mile or two away.

  ‘Takes you back a bit, doesn’t it?’ Uncle Freddie said. ‘Always gives me a sense of history. To think the Romans—’

  ‘Romans?’ Herr Untermeyer said. His eyes were fixed on the hills in a kind of jellified mystification. ‘Romans?’

  ‘Caesar’s soldiers,’ Mr Wilbram said. ‘Soldaten – Romanisch—’

  ‘Ja, ja?’ Herr Untermeyer said. ‘So! I understood.’ All mystification gone, all military secrets unravelled, Herr Untermeyer actually laughed, bellying guffaws, begging us please to excuse the badness of his understanding about the blümen. He had foolishly confused them with the military. Blümen were for gardens, ja?

  ‘You do much climbing now?’ Uncle Freddie said.

  What answer Herr Untermeyer was about to give to this discomforting question I never knew. In that same moment Aunt Leonora came back from the kitchen, instantly seized Herr Untermeyer affectionately by the arm and led him to the window. For an awful moment or two I saw us being launched yet again on the tortuous seas of flora and fauna, of orchids and Romans, blümen and the military, when to my infinite surprise she looked Otto straight in the face and said:

  ‘Let’s have a good look at you. No. You really haven’t changed. Not all that much. I’d have known you again – even without the photograph.’ In a gesture of affection quite touching in its disarming simplicity she held up her pink gin. ‘Schniff, eh, Otto? Cheers! Wurst! It’s such a pleasure to have you here.’

  ‘Also for me it is great pleasure. Also to be in England.’