by H. E. Bates
His sense of caution, his almost fearsome correctness, returned in an expression of concern about the blackout blind. He got up and went, as it were, head-first into his spectacles, as a man dives into the neck of his shirt. When he emerged with the glasses on he realised, more or less sane now, his vision corrected, that I had put up the blind.
‘Oh! You’ve done it,’ he said.
A respectable remorse afflicted him.
‘Do you think it was seen?’ he said. ‘I hate doing that sort of thing. I’ve always felt it rather a point to be decent about the regulations.’
I said it was probably not serious. It was then nearly March, and I said I thought the war was almost over.
‘You really think so?’ he said. ‘What makes you think that? I’ve got a sort of ghastly feeling it will last for ever. Sort of tunnel we will never get out of.’
I said that was a feeling everyone got. His spectacles had grown misty again from the sweat of his eyes. He took them off again and began slowly polishing them and, as if the entire hideous episode of the mustard had never happened, stared down into them and said:
‘Where do you live? Have you been able to keep your house on?’
I told him where I lived and he said:
‘That isn’t awfully far from us. We live at Elham Street, by the station. We have a house that practically looks on the station.’
He put on his spectacles and with them all his correctness came back.
‘Are you in the country?’ he said. ‘Really in the country?’ and when I said yes he said that was really what he himself wanted to do, live in the country. He wanted a small place with a garden—a garden he could see mature.
‘You have a garden?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Nice one?’
‘I hope it will be again when this is over.’
‘I envy you that,’ he said.
He picked up his hat and began brushing it thoughtfully with his coat sleeve. I asked him if he had a garden too and he said:
‘No. Not yet. The war and everything—you know how it is.’
He put on his hat with great care, almost reverently.
‘Not only that. We haven’t been able to find anywhere that really suits my wife. That’s our trouble. She’s never well.’
‘I’m sorry——’
‘They can’t find out what it is, either,’ he said. He remembered his handkerchief and as he folded it up and stuck it in his breast-pocket the combination of handkerchief and homberg and his own unassertive quietness gave him a look that I thought was unexpressibly lonely and grieved.
‘We move about trying to find something,’ he said, ‘but——’
He stopped, and I said I hoped she would soon be well again.
‘I’m afraid she never will,’ he said. ‘It’s no use not being frank about it.’
His hands, free now of handkerchief and homberg, demonstrated her fragility by making a light cage in the air. His spectacles gave an impervious glint of resignation that I thought was painful.
‘It’s one of those damnable mysterious conditions of the heart,’ he said. ‘She can do things of course. She can get about. But one of these days——’
His hands uplifted themselves and made a light pouf! of gentle extermination.
‘That’s how it will be,’ he said.
I was glad at that moment to hear the train slowing down. He heard it too and got up and began to grope about along the hat-rack.
‘I could have sworn I had my umbrella,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘That’s odd.’ His face tightened. An effort of memory brought back to it a queer dry little reflection of the anger he had experienced about the sandwiches of mustard. He seemed about to be infuriated by his own absent-mindedness and then he recovered himself and said:
‘Oh! no. I remember now.’
Two minutes later, as the train slowed into the station, he shook me by the hand, saying how pleasant it had been and how much he had enjoyed it all and how he hoped I might one day, after the war, run over and see him if it were not too far.
‘I want to talk to you about gardens,’ he said.
He stood so smiling and glassy-eyed and uneager again in final good-bye that I began too to feel that his lapse of frenzy about the mustard sandwiches was like one of those episodic sudden bomb-explosions that caught you unawares and five minutes later seemed never to have happened.
‘By the way my name is Saxby,’ he said. ‘I shall look for you on the train.’
Trains are full of men who wear homberg hats and carry brief-cases and forget their umbrellas, and soon, when the war was over, I got tired of looking for Saxby.
Then one day, more than a year later, travelling on a slow train that made halts at every small station on the long high gradient below hills of beech-wood and chalk, I caught sight of a dark pink rose floating serenely across a village platform under a homberg hat.
There was no mistaking Saxby. But for a few seconds, after I had hailed him from the carriage window, it seemed to me that Saxby might have mistaken me. He stared into me with glassy preoccupation. There was a cool and formidable formality about him. For one moment it occurred to me to remind him of the painful episode of the mustard sandwiches, and then a second later he remembered me.
‘Of course.’ His glasses flashed their concealing glitter of a smile as he opened the carriage door. ‘I always remember you because you listen so well.’
This was a virtue of which he took full advantage in the train.
‘Yes, we’ve been here all summer,’ he said. ‘You can very nearly see the house from the train.’ This time he had his umbrella with him and with its crooked malacca handle he pointed south-westward through the open window, along the chalk hillside. ‘No. The trees are rather too dense. In the early spring you could see it. We had primroses then. You know, it’s simply magnificent country.’
‘How is your wife?’ I said.
The train, charging noisily into the tunnel, drowned whatever he had to say in answer. He rushed to shut the window against clouds of yellow tunnel fumes and suddenly I was reminded of his noisy and furious charge at the window in the black-out, his nauseated frenzy about the sandwiches. And again it seemed, like an episodic explosion, like the war itself, an unreality that had never happened.
When we emerged from the tunnel black-out into bright summer he said:
‘Did you ask me something back there?’
‘Your wife,’ I said. ‘I wondered how she was.’
The railway cutting at that point is a high white declivity softened by many hanging cushions of pink valerian and he stared at it with a sort of composed sadness before he answered me.
‘I’m afraid she’s rather worse if anything,’ he said. ‘You see, it’s sort of progressive—an accumulative condition if you understand what I mean. It’s rather hard to explain.’
He bent his face to the rose in his buttonhole and seemed to draw from it, sadly, a kind of contradictory inspiration about his wife and her painfully irremediable state of health.
It was rather on the lines of what diabetics had, he said. The circle was vicious. You got terribly hungry and terribly thirsty and yet the more you took in the worse it was. With the heart it was rather the same. A certain sort of heart bred excitement and yet was too weak to take it. It was rather like overloading an electric circuit. A fuse had to blow somewhere and sometime.
Perhaps my failure to grasp this was visible in my stare at the railway cutting.
‘You see, with electricity it’s all right. The fuse blows and you put in another fuse. But with people the heart’s the fuse. It blows and——’
Once again he made the light pouf! of extermination with his hands.
I said how sorry I was about all this and how wretched I thought it must be for him.
‘I get used to it,’ he said. ‘Well, not exactly used to it if you understand what I mean. But I’m prepared. I live in a state of sus
pended preparation.’
That seemed to me so painful a way of life that I did not answer.
‘I’m ready for it,’ he said quietly and without any sort of detectable desire for sympathy at all. ‘I know it will just happen at any moment. Any second it will all be over.’
There was something very brave about that, I thought.
‘Well anyway the war’s over,’ he said cheerfully. ‘That at least we’ve got to be thankful for. And we’ve got this house, which is awfully nice, and we’ve got the garden, which is nicer still.’
‘You must be quite high there,’ I said, ‘on the hill.’
‘Nearly five hundred feet,’ he said. ‘It’s a stiffish climb.’
I said I hoped the hills were not too much for his wife and he said:
‘Oh! she hardly ever goes out. She’s got to that stage.’
But the garden, it seemed, was wonderful. He was settling down to the garden. That was his joy. Carnations and phloxes did awfully well there and, surprisingly enough, roses. It was a Betty Uprichard, he said, in his buttonhole. That was one of his favourites and so were Etoile d’Hollande and Madame Butterfly. They were the old ones and on the whole he did not think you could beat the old ones.
‘I want gradually to have beds of them,’ he said. ‘Large beds of one sort in each. But you need time for that of course. People say you need the right soil for roses—but wasn’t there someone who said that to grow roses you first had to have roses in your heart?’
‘There was someone who said that,’ I said.
‘It’s probably right,’ he said, ‘but I think you probably need permanence more. Years and years in one place. Finding out what will do for you. Settling down. Getting the roots anchored—you know?’
The sadness in his face was so peculiar as he said all this that I did not answer.
‘Have you been in your house long?’ he said.
‘Twenty years,’ I said.
‘Really,’ he said. His eyes groped with diffused wonder at this. ‘That’s marvellous. That’s a lifetime.’
For the rest of the way we talked—or rather he did, while I did my virtuous act of listening—about the necessity of permanence in living, the wonder of getting anchored down.
‘Feeling your own roots are going deeper all the time. Feeding on the soil underneath you,’ he said. ‘You know? Nothing like it. No desk stuff can ever give you that.’
And then, as the train neared the terminus, he said:
‘Look. You must come over. I’d love you to see the place. I’d love to ask you things. I know you’re a great gardener. There must be lots you could tell me. Would you come? I’d be awfully grateful if you’d care to come.’
I said I should be delighted to come.
‘Oh! good, oh! good,’ he said.
He produced from his vest-pocket the inevitable diary with a silver pencil and began flicking over its leaves.
‘Let’s fix it now. There’s nothing like fixing it now. What about Saturday?’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Good. Saturday’s a good day,’ he said.
He began to pencil in the date and seemed surprised, as he suddenly looked up, that I was not doing the same.
‘Won’t you forget? Don’t you put it down?’
‘I shall remember,’ I said.
‘I have to put everything down,’ he said. ‘I’m inclined to forget. I get distracted.’
So it would be two-thirty or about that on Saturday, he said, and his enthusiasm at the prospect of this was so great that it was, in fact, almost a distraction. He seemed nervously uplifted. He shook hands with energetic delight, repeating several times a number of precise and yet confusing instructions as to how to get to the house, and I was only just in time to save him from a spasm of forgetfulness.
‘Don’t forget your umbrella,’ I said.
‘Oh! Good God, no,’ he said. ‘You can’t miss it,’ he said, meaning the house. ‘It’s got a sort of tower on the end of it. Quite a unique affair. You can’t miss it. I shall look out for you.’
The house was built of white weatherboard and tile and it hung on the steep chalk-face with the precise and arresting effect of having been carved from the stone. The tower of which Saxby had spoken, and which as he said was impossible to miss, was nothing more than a railed balcony that somebody had built on the roof of a stable, a kind of look-out for a better view. That day it was crutched with scaffolding. In the yard below it there were many piles of builders’ rubble and sand and broken timber and beams torn from their sockets. A bloom of cement dust lay thick on old shrubberies of lilac and flowering currant, and in the middle of a small orchard a large pit had been dug. From it too, in the dry heat of summer, a white dust had blown thickly, settling on tall yellow grass and apple leaves and vast umbrellas of seeding rhubarb.
There was nowhere any sign of the garden of which Saxby had spoken so passionately.
It took me some time, as he walked with me to and fro between the derelict boundaries of the place, to grasp that this was so. He was full of explanations: not apologetic, not in the form of excuses but, surprisingly, very pictorial. He drew for me a series of pictures of the ultimate shapes he planned. As we walked arm-pit deep through grass and thistle—the thistle smoking with dreamy seed in the hot air as we brushed it—he kept saying:
‘Ignore this. This is nothing. This will be lawn. We’ll get round to this later.’ Somebody had cut a few desultory swathes through the jungle with a scythe, and a rabbit got up from a seat in a swathe that crackled like tinder as it leapt away. ‘Ignore this—imagine this isn’t here.’
Beyond this jungle we emerged to a fence-line on the crest of the hill. The field beyond it lay below us on a shelf and that too, it seemed, belonged to him.
Spreading his hands about, he drew the first of his pictures. There were several others, later, but that was the important one. The farther you got down the slope, it seemed, the better the soil was, and this was his rose garden. These were his beds of Uprichard and Madame Butterfly and Sylvia and all the rest. He planned them in the form of a fan. He had worked it out on an arc of intensifying shades of pink and red. Outer tones of flesh would dissolve with graded delicacy through segments of tenderer, deeper pink until they mounted to an inverted pinnacle of rich sparkling duskiness.
‘Rather fine,’ he said, ‘don’t you think?’ and I knew that as far as he was concerned it actually lay there before him, superbly flourishing and unblemished as in a catalogue.
‘Very good,’ I said.
‘You really think so?’ he said. ‘I value your opinion terrifically.’
‘I think it’s wonderful,’ I said.
We had waded some distance back through the jungle of smouldering thistle before I remembered I had not seen his wife; and I asked him how she was.
‘I fancy she’s lying down,’ he said. ‘She feels the hot weather quite a bit. I think we shall make quite a place of it, don’t you?’
He stopped at the point where the grass had been partially mown and waved his hand at the wilderness. Below us lay incomparable country. At that high point of summer it slept for miles in richness. In the hotter, moister valley masses of meadowsweet spired frothily above its hedgerows, and in its cleared hayfields new-dipped sheep grazed in flocks that were a shade mellower and deeper in colour than the flower.
‘It’s a marvellous view,’ I said.
‘Now you get what I mean,’ he said. ‘The permanence of the thing. You get a view like that and you can sit and look at it for ever.’
Through a further jungle of grass and thistle, complicated at one place by an entire armoury of horseradish, we went into the house.
‘Sit down,’ Saxby said. ‘Make yourself comfortable. My wife will be here in a moment. There will be some tea.’
For the first time since knowing Saxby I became uneasy. It had been my impression for some time that Saxby was a man who enjoyed—rather than suffered from—a state of mild hallucination. Now
I felt suddenly that I suffered from it too.
What I first noticed about the room was its windows, shuttered with narrow Venetian blinds of a beautiful shade of grey-rose. They only partially concealed long silk curtains pencilled with bands of fuchsia purple. Most of the furniture was white, but there were a few exquisite Empire chairs in black and the walls were of the same grey-rose tint as the blinds. An amazing arrangement of glass walking-sticks, like rainbows of sweetmeats, was all the decoration the walls had been allowed to receive with the exception of a flower-spangled mirror, mostly in tones of rose and magenta, at the far end. This mirror spread across the entire wall like a lake, reflecting in great width the cool sparkle of the room in which, on the edge of an Empire chair, I sat nervously wondering, as I had done of Saxby’s mustard sandwiches, whether what I saw had the remotest connection with reality.
Into this beautiful show-piece came, presently, Mrs Saxby.
Mrs Saxby was an immaculate and disarming woman of fifty with small, magenta-clawed hands. She was dressed coolly in grey silk, almost as if to match the room, and her hair was tinted to the curious shade of blue-grey that you see in fresh carnation leaves. I did not think, that first day, that I had ever met anyone quite so instantly charming, so incessantly alive with compact vibration—or so healthy.
We had hardly shaken hands before she turned to Saxby and said:
‘They’re coming at six o’clock.’
Saxby had nothing to say in answer to this. But I thought I saw, behind the flattering glasses, a resentful hardening bulge of the kidney-brown eyes.
Not all beautiful women are charming, and not all charming women are intelligent, but Mrs Saxby was both intelligent and charming without being beautiful. We talked a great deal during tea—that is, Mrs Saxby and I talked a great deal, with Saxby putting in the afterthought of a phrase or two here and there.
She mostly ignored this. And of the house, which I admired again and again, she said simply:
‘Oh! it’s a sort of thing with me. I like playing about with things. Transforming them.’
When she said this she smiled. And it was the smile, I decided, that gave me the clue to the fact that she was not beautiful. Her grey eyes were like two hard pearl buttons enclosed by the narrow dark buttonholes of her short lashes. As with the house, there was not a lash out of place. The smile too came from teeth that were as regular, polished and impersonal as piano keys.