The Daffodil Sky

by H. E. Bates

  She stared past me coldly.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘It’s no trouble.’

  She stared into me this time, rather as she had done so many times on the journey. For a second or two her eyes were, I thought, less chilly. I fancied there was perhaps a little relaxing in the lips. For another second or two I thought of the way she had exposed her knees and how attractive they were and how pretty. I thought too of the wallflowers, of Elaine, of the lily-of-the-valley hat and of how there were pansies on one side of the square and wallflowers on the other. Most of all I remembered how men were sentimental about them.

  ‘Are you quite sure?’ I said.

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘It’s absolutely no trouble. I have nothing to carry and if——’

  ‘Good night,’ she said.

  Outside, in the station yard, a light rain was falling. As I stood unlocking the door of my car a sudden wind seemed to throw her out of the station. She came out without dignity, as if lost, clutching parcels and briefcase and umbrella and newspaper, and she could not put up the umbrella against the rain.

  Thirty yards ahead he was striding out, oblivious, still grossly out of balance, brandy-coloured head down against the rain.

  When she saw him she gave a little cry and began running. I could see her pretty legs flickering under the lights of the station yard, white against the black spring rain.

  ‘Darling,’ she called after him. ‘Darling. Couldn’t you wait for me?’

  The Maker of Coffins

  Every Sunday evening in summertime she sat at the front window and watched until he came up the hill. Her hands on the horsehair rests of the chair were like pieces of stone-grey paper painted with thin lines of water-colour, palest blue, the skin transparent and the fingers crabbed over the little palms. She always wore a straw hat that had once evidently been purple with black trimmings, but now there were no trimmings: only the shadows of the trimmings, dark grey, on the mildew grey of the faded, remaining straw.

  She sat surrounded by a mass of greenery in brass and china pots, set about on bamboo stands. The curtains in the big bay window were like blankets of red chenille bearing fruitings of soft bobbles down the sides. The old-fashioned gas-brackets over the mantelshelf bore opaque globes of pink and under them were ornaments of twisted yellow glass from which sprouted dead stalks of feathery brown reed and bunches of paper spills. She made the spills for Luther, with her own hands, every Saturday.

  Whenever he came round the corner of the long steep hill she always thought that he looked, in his black suit and carrying the black fiddle case, so much like a doctor. Even from that distance the big rough-angled body dwarfed the fiddle case so that it did not look much larger than a doctor’s bag. She had in mind particularly Dr Farquharson’s bag because it was the bag she had known best. It had brought her the twelve children, beginning with Luther.

  The illusion of bag and doctor remained with her through his journey up the hill. He walked with a slight groping roll, big feet splayed out as if he wanted to grip the hill with his toes. She knew he did not roll like that because he was drunk but only because his feet were bad. His feet had always been bad. They had been bad ever since the time he was a child and had grown so fast that she could never afford to buy shoes to catch up with him. In those days he had had to suffer a lot of things in that way because he was the first and times were desperate. She felt keenly that she had never been able to do her best for him. The others had been luckier.

  When he came into the room at last it was always with a series of bungling noisy clashes as he tried to find a resting-place for the fiddle case somewhere among the many little tables, the piano, the bookcase and the chairs. He could never find room for the damn fiddle, he thought. The bookcase and the piano were both locked up, polished as glass, and she kept the keys on a chain. He groped among the chairs with bull-like stupor but she never at any time took a great deal of notice of it. He had always been clumsy on his feet. He had been a day or two short of nineteen months before he had started walking at all. She always remembered that, of being so afraid that he would never walk: an awful thing, to have a child so fragile that it never walked.

  If she was aware of feeling that the enormous body still enshrined the fragile child she did not reveal it. She turned on him with little grunts of peevish affection that had no effect on him at all.

  ‘It’ll be dark before you get up here one of these days.’

  ‘Had a rush job on. Wonder I got finished at all.’

  When he had at last disposed of the fiddle he liked to sit by the piano, in the dark patch caused by one end, so that she could not see his face.

  ‘Who was it?’ she said. ‘Thought you said trade was so bad.’

  ‘So it is. Man in Canal Street. Burying tomorrow.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘A man named Johnson.’

  ‘Who’s he? What name?’

  ‘Johnson. Call him Polly Johnson. Kin to Liz Johnson——’

  ‘Nobody I know.’

  The lines of her face would crease themselves in deeper ruts of disapprobation. Her mouth would go on muttering without sound for some moments longer while he settled himself by the piano with hot discomfort and perhaps a belch or two.

  ‘You can take your coat off.’

  She liked him better with his coat off. It reminded her of the Sundays when all of them were at home, a dinner, all the little boys with clean white aprons on, so that the gravy from the Yorkshire pudding did not drop on their chapel suits.

  The absence of the coat revealed a man of gross, crusty width, with watery blue eyes starting beerily from a face fired by summer to lines of smouldering bruisy red. His collar-stud pressed brassily on his thick throat and his shirt-sleeves were rolled up above arms massive and blackly haired.

  His voice had a yeasty thickness:

  ‘All of ’em gone chapel?’

  ‘Rose and Clarice and Will have gone. Lawrence and Nell went this morning.’

  Lawrence and Will were good boys: steady boys, fellows with enough ambition to get good jobs and enough sense to hang on to them when they got them. They were solid, pin-stripe men. She had never had any bother with Will and Lawrence; they never troubled her. They did not approve of Luther, but then, they did not understand him.

  ‘Ain’t bin out nowhere this week, I reckon? Too hot for you.’

  ‘Went up to Rose’s Thursday,’ she said.

  ‘Git the bus?’

  ‘Bus! What d’ya think my legs are for?’

  ‘You wanta git the bus,’ he said. ‘One o’ these days you’ll be doing that traipse up there once too much and you’ll be dropping down.’

  ‘If I do you’ll be there measuring me out ‘fore I’m cold,’ she said swiftly, ‘I’ll warrant that.’

  ‘Ah, don’t sit there horse-facing so much. You horse-face too much by half.’

  ‘Don’t you tell me I horse-face,’ she said.

  He did not answer. It pained him when she horse-faced at him. He dreaded the day when he would be measuring her out, he thought. His only compensating thought about that was that he would make her something very nice; something really high-class and lovely; something fitting and worthy of the old lady.

  She sat there for some time looking like a bone carving, and at last he broke the silence by saying:

  ‘Anything to eat? I could do with a mite o’ something.’

  ‘I’ll be bound you never got your dinner again, did you?’

  ‘Never had time. Bin at it since daylight.’

  ‘Funny how you get so many jobs a-Sundays,’ she said and her nose rose, pointed as a bird’s.

  Then because he sat there without moving for a second or two longer she said:

  ‘Well: you know where the pantry is. You don’t expect me to put it in your mouth for you, do you?’

  Daylight was fading a little when he came lumbering back into the room with hunks of jam tart and cheese and bread and cold new potat
oes and a slice of cold Yorkshire pudding on a plate. He sat with the plate on his knees. He knew that he had to be careful of the crumbs; he knew she would horse-face if he dropped the crumbs. But the taste of the new potatoes and the cold Yorkshire pudding were the taste of all the summer Sunday evenings of his boyhood and he crammed them in with blind-eyed pleasure, bolting them down, licking thick red lips and wishing to God she had a pint in the house to wash them down.

  She muttered at last:

  ‘Anybody’d think you’d never had a mite in your life. Don’t she ever get you nothing a-Sundays?’

  ‘Never care whether I get much a-Sundays,’ he said.

  ‘It don’t look like it,’ she said.

  That was the worst of his mother, he thought. She couldn’t hit it off with Edna. He had given up trying to make her now. It was like trying to turn a mule.

  ‘You can get yourself a spill when you want one,’ she said.

  Edna was a bit easy-going, he knew, but on the whole he didn’t complain. She had let herself go a bit, perhaps, after the last baby. She was a bit sloppy round the middle. Her face was nothing much to write home about but then he wasn’t a picture either. The chief thing was she didn’t nag him; he really didn’t get drunk very much and if he was late at The Unicorn on a Sunday she and the children ate the dinner without him and he pacified her with a pint of Guinness afterwards.

  By the time he had finished eating it was almost dark and he got up and did the thing he always did, without fail, every Sunday. He lit one of the gas-lamps above the mantelshelf and then, holding his big red face under the light, adjusted the burner until it gave a pure white glow. Then he filled his pipe and lit one of her paper spills from the gas-mantle and put it to his pipe. The flame was sucked down by his red powerful mouth into the pipe bowl until at last he blew out strong blue clouds of smoke that almost smothered him.

  As she sat in the window she let the smoke come over to her with her head slightly uplifted, as if it were a cool breeze blowing through the warm airless room in which no window had been open all day. There were three moments she really waited for all evening, and this was the second of them. The first was when she saw him turn, so like a doctor with the fiddle case, at the bottom of the hill. The second was the moment of the gas-lamp, the pure white glow on his face, the great sucked-down flame and the smoke puttering across the room in blue string clouds. It was the smoke above all that she associated with that clumsy massiveness of his and after she smelled it she was aware of the slow dying of cantankerousness inside herself, a softening of all the edges of the day.

  When the pipe was really going she knew what he was going to do next. She began unconsciously to finger the keys of the piano and the bookcase that hung on the chain round her neck. That was the third moment: the moment when he reached for the fiddle case and undid it and opened it and took out the bow.

  He had begun to play the fiddle when he was seven years old. That had been her ambition for him: a fiddler, a violinist, a great player of the violin in the household. Mr Godbold, who had been a fiddler himself in a great orchestra in Leicester or Birmingham or some other big city up in that part of the world, gave him lessons in his front room, twice a week, after school, at two shillings a time.

  ‘He has fine hands,’ Mr Godbold said. ‘He will make a fine player. He is slow but in the end he will make a fine player.’

  The walls of Mr Godbold’s front room were hung with many pictures of Mr Godbold playing the violin as a soloist or in orchestras or at social evenings and smoking concerts. She thought Mr Godbold, in pieces like The Spring Song and excerpts from Mariana and Il Trovatore, played like an angel, and she thought it would be wonderful if Luther could rise as far as that. The first winter he persevered through many exercises and the second winter he came to his first piece, Robin Adair. Most children who learned the piano or the violin went to a Miss Scholes, in the High Street, where they learned The Bluebells of Scotland as their first piece and Miss Scholes gave them sixpence for doing so. Mr Godbold did not believe in bribing his pupils; they worked hard on exercises that were the real foundation of music and then went straight on to pieces like Robin Adair.

  Luther stuck at Robin Adair. He played it through for a whole winter and then his hands began to grow. By the time he was twelve he was a big awkward gargoyle of a boy in whose hands the violin looked effete and fragile. She thought by that time he could play beautifully: perhaps not quite as beautifully as Mr Godbold. Perhaps it only seemed to her almost as beautiful because he was so very young.

  ‘You want the key?’ she said. She took it off the chain and held it out to him.

  The sound of the fifths as he spaced them out on the piano was, she thought, a most wonderful thing. It was different from anything else that was ever heard on the piano: those queer, sharp steps of notes climbing up and starting a trembling on the air. That was the true violin sound: that wonderful prelude of quivering that drew out finally into the glassy, soaring singing of strings.

  She had never been very happy about his being a carpenter and at first she opposed it. It was probably that, she thought, that had made his hands so large and clumsy. She was certain the hands of a carpenter could not also be the hands of a violinist; the one could only ruin the other. But his father had said a man had his living to earn and what was wrong with a man being a carpenter? ‘There was One who was a carpenter and there was no shame in that,’ he said.

  ‘Play th’ old un?’ Luther said, but she said nothing because she knew he never began with any other.

  The time he took to play through Robin Adair always seemed to go by, perhaps because she shut her eyes, very quickly. It flew away on the song’s own delicacy. He liked to play too with the pipe in his mouth, so that it seemed as if every scrape of the bow gave out its own rank cloud of smoke that finally choked the room with gas-green fog.

  After Robin Adair he played several other pieces he knew: The Jolly Miller and Oh! Dear What Can the Matter Be? She thought he played better as he got older; but that, after all, was only natural. That was only as it should be. He was a man of over fifty now. He had been playing the same pieces, on the same violin, for forty years.

  ‘Gittin’ dark,’ Luther would say, after the third piece. ‘Better be gittin’ steady on home.’

  He sat with the fiddle case on his knee and the pipe and the violin in his right hand, waiting to pack up. There would be just time, he thought, to nip into The Unicorn and have a couple of beers, perhaps even three or four beers, before they closed at half-past ten. Old Shady Parker would be there and Bill Flawn and Tom Jaques and Flannel Clarke and they would stand each other a round or two. That would rouse him up nicely and he would go home to Edna happy, belching through the dark summer streets, up and down the hills. Tomorrow he would begin to cut out another coffin. Trade was never what you called good in the summer but someone was always going, unexpected or not, and he mucked along somehow. Damn what the family said. That was good enough for him.

  ‘Better put the key back afore you forgit,’ he would say and she would take the key from him and clip it back on the chain.

  The poise of her hands, held for a second or two about her throat, was a signal that she gave him every Sunday.

  ‘Want me to gie y’ another?’

  ‘Have you got time? Don’t you hang about if you haven’t got time.’

  ‘Plenty o’ time.’ The big voice was crude and massive as the hands. ‘You jes’ say and I’ll play it. Want another? What’s it goin’ a-be?’

  ‘Play me the old one,’ she would say.

  The old one was Robin Adair. As he played it she stared beyond the smoky gaslight into spaces empty of shape. She sat ageless and tranquil as if already embalmed among the greenery of fern-pots, before a shroud of blanketing curtains, under a gas-blue summer sky. The harsh sound of the fiddle strings drew out thinner and thinner across the spaces into which she was staring until her eyes went cloudily after them and she was sightless as she listened.


  ‘Ah! y’ can’t beat th’ old uns,’ Luther said. ‘They take a bit o’ beatin’.’

  She did not answer. She felt always that she could hear the sound of the strings long after they were silent. They were like the sound of pigeons’ voices echoing each other far away in summer trees, and in the sound of them was all her love.

  The Treasure Game

  From the calm of her place under the acacia tree, on the swinging canopy seat, Mrs Fairfax listened with growing impatience to the loud chock of croquet balls cracking the silence of afternoon, each stroke like the chime of a wooden clock setting off peals of senseless and exhausting laughter. She did not know how anyone, even the young, could be so energetic or so furiously amused in the three o’clock heat of July.

  ‘Children—please! Couldn’t you please? Melanie!—Fay!—couldn’t you please shout a little less? It sounds like a madhouse—please!’

  She supposed that if they could hear her they were taking no notice. Or if they were taking no notice it was because of that old habit of hers of calling them children when they were nineteen and twenty.

  ‘Fay—don’t shriek like that! I won’t have that shrieking. Melanie—stop her!’

  She thought there was nothing so irritating in girls as shrieking. It was worse too because the shrieking sounded like something disembodied, quite pointless. She was cut off from the main lawn of the house by a semicircular bank of azaleas and guelder-rose, so that she could not see the figures of her daughters and the three young men. She did not think she had ever been allowed to shriek like that as a girl. It irritated her exactly as if someone had started to fire off rockets in mid-afternoon.

  ‘I shall have to stop it. I shall go and speak to them. I won’t have that sort of thing.’

  Then she remembered that going to speak to them would be awkward because she herself had suggested croquet. She had remembered, after lunch, the old croquet box in the stable loft. It struck her as being just the sort of quiet and companionable game that did not require energy on hot afternoons and she thought it would keep them out of mischief.