The Daffodil Sky

by H. E. Bates

  He had wanted to be early at market that day. The trade in Midland market-squares did not begin till afternoon but he had reckoned on being there by twelve o’clock. He stayed drinking with her until nearly two. They ate most of the cheese from the big dish on the bar counter and he began to feel his eyes crossing and rolling as he looked at her. He thought several times of the daffodils in the cart and the drink of water he ought to be giving to his horse. He worried about it for a time and then it did not matter. Hail seemed to spring and lash at the windows every time he made up his mind that he ought to go, and then the fierce, flashing daffodil sun was out again and the railyards were steaming in the cutting below.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘Nobody gets up to market-hill yet awhile. It’s Friday. Take it easy. You’ll catch folks as they come from the factories. You’ll be lucky.’

  ‘I ought to go—I got a lot to unpack——’

  ‘You’ll be lucky,’ she said. ‘You’re the sort. You’ll get on. Your sort always does.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m lucky for them,’ she said. ‘I always am.’

  Presently that was how it turned out; all that day and other days the luck was with him. Hail closed in again that afternoon, rattling white bullets across the black setts of the market square, but the evening was clear and fine, with a bright yellow-green frosty April sky. People came late to buy under the orange paraffin flares. The daffodils shone a deeper yellow in the oily glow. Everything was good and the luck was with him.

  The motor-bike followed the cart. He had thought about it already and decided he couldn’t afford it. Then it turned out she knew a man named Frankie Corbett who had a Beardmore combination that he was willing to sell very cheap and that she could even get for less than that, she thought. He made the side-truck himself from packing cases, with a detachable tarpaulin hood for wet days. It was a natural step from that to the car.

  ‘You see I’m lucky for you,’ she would say. ‘Like I told you. I’m lucky. I always am.’

  That summer he began to go to the house in Wellington Street. Her mother was dead and her father worked a night-shift at the furnaces. That made it easy to spend the nights with her. Her body was like her face: big and frank and bold, running against him like a brassy flame. In exactly the way that she always seemed to speak to him through her large brown eyes rather than her lips so all her thought about him did not come from her mind but through the pores of her skin.

  ‘You know what?’ she would say. ‘I know when you turn the corner by the bridge. I feel it. That’s how I feel. I can tell you’re there.’

  He rented his land, five acres of it, from an elderly man named Osborne who kept chickens and geese on an adjoining ten acres, most of it an orchard of apples and plums where the daffodils grew thick and almost wild in spring. ‘I’m gittin’ old,’ Osborne would say. ‘I’m gittin’ past it, boy.’ He had a room with Osborne in a square wooden bungalow surrounded by a cart-hovel and a few disused pig-sties and a stack of hay that was taken every year from the orchard. Osborne pottered about the place with a scythe or a feed-bucket or a basket of eggs. At certain times of the year the house seemed full of geese-feathers. In wet weather the yard was sloppy and green with web-flattened droppings.

  ‘I’m gittin’ past it,’ Osborne said. ‘If you could raise the money I’d git out and be glad on it. I’ll go and live with my sister. Raise part on it, boy. You’ll git on. Raise part on it and pay me later.’

  He remembered the day, most of all the evening, Osborne had told him that. Suddenly all his life seemed to pull him forward like a bounding dog on a leash. It seemed to tear at the socket of his mind with a terrible excitement. He was going to own his own land, his own house, his own poultry or heifers or bullocks or whatever it was he wanted. He was going to have his feet on his own piece of earth.

  He drove her out that evening across the valley, along a backwater of the river, not much more than a wide ditch after the heat of summer, where meadowsweet and willow-herb and thick red burnet with a smell of cucumber made a deep barrier that hid the two of them from the road. They lay down by the backwater and it was so still that he could hear young pike rising below him, making soft sounds like blobs of summer rain in the warm pools. He took off his coat and lay on his back and stared at the sky and spoke of his plans. He was for rushing in and fixing it up at once, before there could be any hitch in things, but it was she who held him back.

  ‘Very like this Osborne is crafty. They’re always the same. They seem simple and then they’ve got something up their sleeves.’

  ‘Osborne’s all right. He’s as straight as the day is long.’

  ‘Yes, and some days are longer than others,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget that.’

  She lay on her back too, staring with brown eyes at the August sky, giving the impression once again that her words flowed sleepily out of them.

  ‘You get it right from the beginning,’ she said. ‘Then you’ll know it’s right. How much money have you got?’

  He had saved a hundred and fifty pounds. He thought the farm could make him three hundred a year. ‘I seen the bills for eggs. That’s more than a hundred,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll put your hundred and fifty down as deposit and then what’ve you got?’ she said.

  ‘I got all the stock. The geese and the hens. The fruit—there’s a lot of fruit. The goodwill.’

  ‘What’s goodwill?’ she said.

  ‘You know what it is. Every business has got goodwill.’

  ‘So has your grandmother,’ she said.

  She lay for some time longer staring at the sky. Then she shut her eyes. Dusky olive, the lids seemed to throb softly and steadily under the evening heat, and suddenly she turned with closed eyes and put her mouth against his face, finding his own mouth with instinct, without mistake or clumsiness, the first time. Her way of kissing was in long, soft strokes of her lips, from side to side, each as if it were the last, as if she could not bear it and must break away.

  After a long time she broke away. She seemed to have been thinking and she opened her eyes.

  ‘What if I came in with you?’

  He felt he needed only something like that for the completion of his plan and his happiness.

  ‘I’ve got fifty saved up,’ she said. ‘What does he want for the place?’

  ‘A thousand for the bungalow and everything in.’

  ‘That’s two hundred we’ve got. Could you raise any more?’

  ‘I don’t know where from.’

  ‘I might raise it,’ she said. ‘Frankie Corbett might raise for us. He’s got it—I’ve only got to talk round him somehow.’

  Suddenly he was leaning over her, holding her face in his hands.

  ‘We’ll get married,’ he said. ‘You know what you said—you’re lucky for me.’

  ‘Are you asking me?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’m asking.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you asked me.’

  He would never forget that day: the soft summer evening with fish plopping in the pools of the backwater, the smell of water and meadowsweet and willow-herb, the cool cucumber smell of burnet which they crushed with their bodies as they lay there; and all his green, bounding satisfaction at his luck, his success and his future, a young man with a car, a house, a farm-holding and the woman he wanted.

  ‘And to think it all started,’ he said, ‘with the daffodils.’

  ‘It’s always little things like that,’ she said.

  Six weeks later, almost to the minute, on a rainy October evening, he was killing Frankie Corbett in a street below the bridge.

  He walked slowly and deliberately up Wellington Street. The houses were all the same, long rows of flat boxes in blackened yellow brick, with gaping oblong holes for porches. It was getting darker with the swing of the storm coming back across the railway yards.

  A man came up the street with two whippet dogs quiet as long-le
gged ferrets covered with red and yellow jackets as they trotted before him on a double leash. That was how Frankie Corbett had come up that evening, except that he had only one dog, a wire-haired white mongrel that yapped in front of him without a lead. It had been getting dark then too, with spits of rain and a cold touch of autumn in the wind, and he knew the man was Frankie Corbett because of the dog. He had to admit he had been waiting for Frankie. He was too honest not to admit it and it was the honesty of it, subsequently, that had him damned. He was simply waiting to have a word with Frankie, that was all. He knew Frankie exercised the dog every evening about the same time. That was the only thing about it he had managed with any subtlety. He had tricked Cora into telling him that. The rest was clumsy and stupid.

  What he ought to have realised, and did not realise till afterwards, was that he had been blinded with the stupor of a slow-eating jealousy. First there was the way she began to call him Frankie. ‘Frankie’ll get the money. I’ll see Frankie. I got to see Frankie tomorrow. No, I can’t see you because I got to see Frankie. Of course I’m going to his house—where else would I go? You don’t suppose he carries a couple o’ hundred quid round with him any day?’

  How long had she known this Frankie? That was the next step in his rising suspicion of her.

  ‘Oh! years. I never knew the time when I didn’t know Frankie.’

  Had she been with him? She knew how he meant—that way? more than friends?

  ‘Oh! I don’t say we didn’t have a bit of fun sometimes. Girls do—it’s been known.’

  He wasn’t talking about fun. He was talking about something else. What about that?

  ‘Oh! we courted a bit once. But we were always squabbling. We were no good for each other.’

  Then why didn’t she give it up? Once and for all? Why did she go on seeing him? Why did she think she had the pull with him to get the money?

  ‘Oh! I can get round him,’ she said.

  Get round him? That was a damn funny expression. What did that mean?

  ‘We want the money, don’t we?’ she said. ‘I got to get it the best way I can, haven’t I? You can’t just rush in and ask for a couple of hundred quid like that, can you?’

  It took a month to get the money. Long before the end of it his mind was eaten by something more than suspicion. He began to lie awake at night with his head feeling black and soft and heavy as a rotting apple, and in it a vast dark canker, ugly as death, slimily eating its way outward.

  That was how he came to be standing in the raining October street, waiting for Frankie. His dream of the house, the farm, the little orchard with its daffodils had been eaten by the canker.

  Presently, after that ugly obliteration, he knew that she was going to have a child. And somehow he felt that the child was ugly and cankerous too: that was not because he knew it was Frankie’s. It was because he didn’t know. And that was why, in the end, he had to have a word with Frankie.

  That evening he waited for nearly half an hour in the street and there were people who passed and saw him waiting. Then the dog came, yapping, and then Frankie came, a man older than he was, with jockey legs in brown buckskin breeches and a yellow check muffler and black check cap and a cane crop in his hands.

  He stopped him, and they stood on the pavement and spoke a word or two. He was trembling violently and the air was a confusion of red and black. A few heavier spits of rain came hastily down and Frankie said he was getting wet and hadn’t all night to stand there jawing over trifles. ‘There’s no trifle about this and all I want is a straight answer.’ Then the dog yapped, splashing in a gutter puddle, and Frankie began to swing the crop.

  He had a sudden blind idea that the swing of the crop was meant for him. A moment later he was hitting at Frankie with a broccoli knife. It was a thin curved knife and he had sharpened it that morning on the grindstone, with Osborne turning the wheel. Then Frankie lashed at him with the crop and then in return he hit out with the knife again. At the fourth or fifth stroke Frankie fell and hit his skull against the iron lip of the gutter, and suddenly there was bright blood in the rain.

  It was exactly as she had said: it was the little things that started it. The broccoli knife, the grindstone, the yapping dog, the people seeing him waiting in the rain.

  And then, on top of these, his jealousy of Frankie. She had made a great deal, in the witness box, of his jealousy of Frankie. ‘What sort of jealousy would you call it?’ they had asked her. ‘Normal jealousy? Blind jealousy? A passing sort of jealousy? What kind of jealousy did it seem to you?’

  ‘I’d call it black,’ she said.

  And he knew, again, that that was true. She knew, as always, exactly how he felt about things. She was full of the uncanny instinct of the blood.

  The number in Wellington Street was eighty-four. He stood for a moment outside. He felt his blood plunging and beating in his chest like a clumsy suction pump exactly as it had done the night he had waited for Frankie. If she was there what was he going to say to her? What was he going to do?

  It was like an argument that for all those years had not been finished. He wanted to have the last word: perhaps another violent one, perhaps only to tell her what he thought of her, perhaps merely to ask why in God’s name she had had to do a thing like that? Perhaps it was a damn fool thing to do. Perhaps he ought to have kept away. A man of his age ought to know better. He was a man of forty now; the young man with the dream of a piece of orchard land and a place of his own had long been eaten by the canker.

  He rapped on the door by twice lifting the knocker above the slit of letter box. A streak of lightning went forking across the darkening brown-purple sky and seemed to be answered, a moment or so later, by the flash of a naked light in the passage of the house.

  His hands were trembling and he locked them together. The door dragged on the jerry-built bottom step. He felt the same dragging sensation across his chest and then a terrified and blinding idea that if she opened the door he might not be able to restrain himself but would rush straight at her and kill her exactly as he had killed Frankie. Then he remembered that this time there would be no manslaughter about it, and he gripped his hands even harder behind his back, waiting.

  When she opened the door he knew at once that she had not changed much. The light from the naked electric bulb illuminated reddishly the mass of chestnut hair. The curious thing was, he thought, that he had no agony or bitterness about her. He felt only the flame of her stab through him again exactly as it had done on the day he had run against her in hail and sun, the day of the daffodils.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  Then he knew that the voice was not the same. It was quieter and lighter in key. And then in a quick movement she turned her face and peered at him and he knew that the face was not the same.

  He knew that it was, after all, not her at all.

  ‘I am looking for a Miss Whitehead,’ he said, ‘or perhaps it’s Mrs Whitehead.’

  ‘I’m Miss Whitehead,’ she said. ‘Mrs Whitehead isn’t in.’

  ‘Are you Cora’s girl?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, that’s my mother,’ she said.

  He began to say that he was an old friend of her mother’s. He found himself clumsily using the words ‘stranger in the district,’ and asking when would she be back?

  ‘Not tonight,’ she said. ‘She’s just gone on shift. She’s out at the stocking factory.’

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I could call again.’

  ‘You could catch her tomorrow.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. He found he could not take his eyes off the mass of reddish, familiar, light-framed hair. ‘I’ll see if I can drop in tomorrow.’

  ‘What time? What name shall I say?’

  A burst of thunder seemed to fill the street with a solid spout of rain before he could answer.

  ‘It’s coming back. You’d better wait,’ she said. ‘You could come in and wait.’

  ‘No. I’ll get a bus back to the station,’ he said.

/>   The street was drowned in storm-white curtains.

  ‘You’ll get soaked,’ she said. ‘Wait till it lets up a bit.’

  Overhead the thunder made a raw lash, with long overtones of echoes, and heavy rain swept in as far as his feet in the porch.

  ‘You’d better stand in the doorway,’ she said.

  She pushed back the door as far as it could go and he stood with his back to the door-frame, she on the other side.

  ‘Frightened of thunder?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  Suddenly he felt the rising steam of rain in the air, making it hotter and thicker than ever. His blood began to beat again with heavy suction strokes in his throat. She had turned her face now and she was leaning one bare shoulder on the door-frame, her arms folded across her breasts. They were the same kind of arms, full and naked and fleshy, that had inflamed him on the day he had first met her mother. He wondered suddenly if the eyes were the same, brown and large, with that strange and compelling manner of eloquence, and then a moth flew across her neck, darting for the light in the passage, and as she turned to brush it away he saw the same perfect brown depth in the pupils, the same blueness in the large whites, the same eloquence that could say things without speaking.

  ‘It seems as if it’ll never let up,’ she said. ‘It’s been rolling round all day.’

  ‘Perhaps I’d better make a dash for it.’

  ‘You’ll get soaked. Have you got a train to catch? If you haven’t I could lend you an umbrella and you could bring it back tomorrow.’

  He peered for a second out of the dripping doorway. ‘It looks lighter across the yards.’

  ‘Wait one more minute,’ she said. ‘Then if it doesn’t let up I’ll lend you the umbrella.’