The Daffodil Sky

by H. E. Bates

  ‘This is the first I heard that there was a young man on the aeroplane,’ Mr Carteret said.

  ‘You saw him,’ Mrs Carteret said. ‘He was there when we met her. You saw him come with her through the customs.’

  ‘I can’t remember seeing her with anybody.’

  ‘I know very well you do because you remarked on his hat. You said what a nice colour it was. It was a sort of sage-green one with a turn-down brim——’

  ‘Good God,’ Mr Carteret said. ‘That fellow? He looked forty or more. He was as old as I am.’

  ‘He’s twenty-eight. That’s all. Have you made up your mind which side you’re going to sleep?’

  ‘I’m going to stay on my back for a while,’ Mr Carteret said. ‘I can’t get off. I heard it strike three a long time ago.’

  ‘You’d get off if you’d lie still,’ she said.

  Sometimes a turn of humid air, like the gentlest of currents, would move the entire willow tree in one huge soft fold of shimmering leaves. Whenever it did so Mr Carteret felt for a second or two that it was the sound of an approaching car. Then when the breath of wind suddenly changed direction and ran across the night landscape in a series of leafy echoes, stirring odd trees far away, he knew always that there was no car and that it was only, once again, the quiet long gasp of midsummer rising and falling and dying away.

  ‘Where are you fussing off to now?’ Mrs Carteret said.

  ‘I’m going down for a drink of water.’

  ‘You’d better by half shut your eyes and lie still in one place,’ Mrs Carteret said. ‘Haven’t you been off at all?’

  ‘I can never sleep in moonlight,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how it is. I never seem to settle properly. Besides it’s too hot.’

  ‘Put something on your feet,’ Mrs Carteret said, ‘for goodness sake.’

  Across the landing, on the stairs and down in the kitchen the moonlight had the white starkness of a shadowless glare. The kitchen floor was warm to his bare feet and the water warmish as it came from the tap. He filled a glass twice and then emptied it into the sink and then filled it again before it was cold enough to drink. He had not put on his slippers because he could not remember where he had left them. He had been too busy thinking of Sue. Now he suddenly remembered that they were still where he had dropped them in the coal-scuttle by the side of the stove.

  After he had put them on he opened the kitchen door and stepped outside and stood in the garden. Distinctly, with astonishingly pure clearness, he could see the colours of all the roses, even those of the darkest red. He could even distinguish the yellow from the white and not only in the still standing blooms but in all the fallen petals, thick everywhere on dry earth after the heat of the July day.

  He walked until he stood in the centre of the lawn. For a time he could not discover a single star in the sky. The moon was like a solid opaque electric bulb, the glare of it almost cruel, he thought, as it poured down on the green darkness of summer trees.

  Presently the wind made its quickening watery turn of sound among the leaves of the willow and ran away over the nightscape, and again he thought it was the sound of a car. He felt the breeze move coolly, almost coldly, about his pyjama legs and he ran his fingers in agitation once or twice through the pillow tangles of his hair.

  Suddenly he felt helpless and miserable.

  ‘Sue,’ he said. ‘For God’s sake where on earth have you got to? Susie, Susie—this isn’t like you.’

  His pet term for her, Susie. In the normal way, Sue. Perhaps in rare moments of exasperation, Susan. He had called her Susie a great deal on her nineteenth birthday, three weeks before, before she had flown to Switzerland for her holiday. Everyone thought, that day, how much she had grown, how firm and full she was getting, and how wonderful it was that she was flying off alone. He only thought she looked more delicate and girlish than ever, quite thin and childish in the face in spite of her lipstick, and he was surprised to see her drinking what he thought were too many glasses of sherry. Nor, in contrast to himself, did she seem a bit nervous about the plane.

  Over towards the town a clock struck chimes for a half hour and almost simultaneously he heard the sound of a car. There was no mistaking it this time. He could see the swing of its headlights too as it made the big bend by the packing station down the road, a quarter of a mile away.

  ‘And quite time too, young lady,’ he thought. He felt sharply vexed, not miserable any more. He could hear the car coming fast. It was so fast that he began to run back to the house across the lawn. He wanted to be back in bed before she arrived and saw him there. He did not want to be caught like that. His pyjama legs were several inches too long and were wet with the dew of the grass and he held them up, like skirts, as he ran.

  What a damn ridiculous situation, he thought. What fools children could make you look sometimes. Just about as exasperating as they could be.

  At the kitchen door one of his slippers dropped off and as he stopped to pick it up and listen again for the sound of the car he discovered that now there was no sound. The headlights too had disappeared. Once again there was nothing at all but the enormous noiseless glare, the small folding echoes of wind dying away.

  ‘Damn it, we always walked home from dances,’ he thought. ‘That was part of the fun.’

  Suddenly he felt cold. He found himself remembering with fear the long bend by the packing station. There was no decent camber on it and if you took it the slightest bit too fast you couldn’t make it. Every week there were accidents there. And God, anyway what did he know about this fellow? He might be the sort who went round making pick-ups. A married man or something. Anybody. A crook.

  All of a sudden he had a terrible premonition about it all. It was exactly the sort of feeling he had had when he saw her enter the plane, and again when the plane lifted into sky. There was an awful sense of doom about it: he felt sure she was not coming back. Now he felt in some curious way that his blood was separating itself into single drops. The drops were freezing and dropping with infinite systematic deadliness through the veins, breeding cold terror inside him. Somehow he knew that there had been a crash.

  He was not really aware of running down through the rose-garden to the gate. He simply found himself somehow striding up and down in the road outside, tying his pyjama cord tighter in agitation.

  My God, he thought, how easy the thing could happen. A girl travelled by plane or train or even bus or something and before you knew where you were it was the beginning of something ghastly.

  He began to walk up the road, feeling the cold precipitation of blood take drops of terror down to his legs and feet. A pale yellow suffusion of the lower sky struck into him the astonishing fact that it was almost day. He could hardly believe it and he broke miserably into a run.

  Only a few moments later, a hundred yards away, he had the curious impression that from the roadside a pair of yellow eyes were staring back at him. He saw then that they were the lights of a stationary car. He did not know what to do about it. He could not very well go up to it and tap on the window and say, in tones of stern fatherhood, ‘Is my daughter in there? Susan, come home.’ There was always the chance that it would turn out to be someone else’s daughter. It was always possible that it would turn out to be a daughter who liked what she was doing and strongly resented being interrupted in it by a prying middle-aged stranger in pyjamas.

  He stopped and saw the lip of daylight widening and deepening its yellow on the horizon. It suddenly filled him with the sobering thought that he ought to stop being a damn fool and pull himself together.

  ‘Stop acting like a nursemaid,’ he said. ‘Go home and get into bed. Don’t you trust her?’ It was always when you didn’t trust them, he told himself, that trouble really began. That was when you asked for it. It was a poor thing if you didn’t trust them.

  ‘Go home and get into bed, you poor sap,’ he said. ‘You never fussed this much even when she was little.’

  He had no sooner turned to
go back than he heard the engine of the car starting. He looked round and saw the lights coming towards him down the road. Suddenly he felt more foolish than ever and there was no time for him to do anything but press himself quickly through a gap in the hedge by the roadside. The hedge was not very tall at that point and he found himself crouching down in a damp jungle of cow parsley and grass and nettle that wetted his pyjamas as high as the chest and shoulders. By this time the light in the sky had grown quite golden and all the colours of day were becoming distinct again and he caught the smell of honeysuckle rising from the dewiness of the hedge.

  He lifted his head a second or so too late as the car went past him. He could not see whether Susie was in it or not and he was in a state of fresh exasperation as he followed it down the road. He was uncomfortable because the whole of his pyjamas were sopping with dew and he knew that now he would have to change and get himself a good rub-down before he got back into bed.

  ‘God, what awful fools they make you look,’ he thought, and then, a second later, ‘hell, it might not be her. Oh! hell, supposing it isn’t her?’

  Wretchedly he felt his legs go weak and cold again. He forgot the dew on his chest and shoulders as the slow freezing precipitation of his blood began. From somewhere the wrenching thought of a hospital made him feel quite faint with a nausea that he could not fight away.

  ‘Oh! Susie, for Jesus’ sake don’t do this any more to us. Don’t do it any more——’

  Then he was aware that the car had stopped by the gates of the house. He was made aware of it because suddenly, in the fuller dawn, the red rear light went out.

  A second or two later he saw Susie. She was in her long heliotrope evening dress and she was holding it up at the skirt, in her delicate fashion, with both hands. Even from that distance he could see how pretty she was. The air too was so still in the birdless summer morning silence that he heard her distinctly, in her nice fluty voice, so girlish and friendly, call out:

  ‘Good-bye. Yes: lovely. Thank you.’

  The only thing now, he thought, was not to be seen. He had to keep out of sight. He found himself scheming to get in by the side gate. Then he could slip up to the bathroom and get clean pyjamas and perhaps even a shower.

  Only a moment later he saw that the car had already turned and was coming back towards him up the road. This time there was no chance to hide and all he could do was to step into the verge to let it go past him. For a few wretched seconds he stood there as if naked in full daylight, trying with nonchalance to look the other way.

  In consternation he heard the car pull up a dozen yards beyond him and then a voice called:

  ‘Oh! sir. Pardon me. Are you Mr Carteret, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  There was nothing for it now, he thought, but to go back and find out exactly who the damn fellow was.

  ‘Yes, I’m Carteret,’ he said and he tried to put into his voice what he thought was a detached, unstuffy, coolish sort of dignity.

  ‘Oh! I’m Bill Jordan, sir.’ The young man had fair, smooth-brushed hair that looked extremely youthful against the black of his dinner jacket. ‘I’m sorry we’re so late. I hope you haven’t been worried about Susie?’

  ‘Oh! no. Good God, no.’

  ‘It was my mother’s fault. She kept us.’

  ‘I thought you’d been dancing?’

  ‘Oh! no, sir. Dinner with my mother. We did dance a few minutes on the lawn but then we played canasta till three. My mother’s one of those canasta fanatics. It’s mostly her fault I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh! that’s all right. So long as you had a good time.’

  ‘Oh! we had a marvellous time, sir. It was just that I thought you might be worried about Susie——’

  ‘Oh! great heavens, no.’

  ‘That’s fine, then, sir.’ The young man had given several swift looks at the damp pyjamas and now he gave another and said: ‘It’s been a wonderfully warm night, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Awfully close. I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Sleep—that reminds me.’ He laughed with friendly, expansive well-kept teeth that made him look more youthful than ever and more handsome. ‘I’d better get home or it’ll be breakfast-time. Good night, sir.’

  ‘Good night.’

  The car began to move away. The young man lifted one hand in farewell and Carteret called after him:

  ‘You must come over and have dinner with us one evening——’

  ‘Love to. Thank you very much, sir. Good night.’

  Cataret walked down the road. Very touching, the sir business. Very illuminating and nice. Very typical. It was touches like that which counted. In relief he felt a sensation of extraordinary self-satisfaction.

  When he reached the garden gate the daylight was so strong that it showed with wonderful freshness all the roses that had unfolded in the night. There was one particularly beautiful crimson one, very dark, almost black, that he thought for a moment of picking and taking upstairs to his wife. But finally he decided against it and left it where it grew.

  By that time the moon was fading and everywhere the birds were taking over the sky.

  Third View on the Reichenbach

  The summer had been short and cool and where the pines parted, high up, there were still occasional thin white forks of snow. The sheer steepness of the slopes cut off from the valley locked below all view of great peaks and permanent snowfields. Pastures of acid greenness, feathered with autumn crocus, wet after rain, stepped up and up from the banks of a grey-green river until pines smothered them with thick black arms.

  ‘Frau Walter,’ he said every morning.

  ‘Herr Vaughan,’ she said.

  Even after three weeks she could not pronounce it quite correctly. ‘Herr Von,’ she seemed to say.

  She always gave him breakfast in the Stube. From there he could look straight through the garden, with its neat grave-like beds of leek and spinach and its several plum trees on which the fruit hung in thick and mist-bloomed bunches, like gigantic purple grapes. She sometimes worked on the patches of vegetables and once a day at least she was busy among the trees, lightening the branches of fruit or carefully picking up the grapelike plums from where they had fallen in the long, lush grasses.

  It was the scrupulous, nervous way she searched for the fallen plums, sometimes even getting down on her hands and knees and parting the grass-stems as if she were looking for mislaid eggs, that first began to trouble him.

  ‘Would you like to have some cheese?’

  Her English was very wooden. It might have been carved out of the heavy scoured pine-beams of the big Stube itself. Her face was wooden and unpolished too. The eyes were exactly like two dark-brown knots in the pine, the centrally parted light-brown hair like a crack in the grain.

  ‘You are walking somewhere today, Herr Vaughan?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘To the Reichenbach?’

  That was always her question. He noticed that she seemed more hesitant than usual when she asked it. Nervousness always gave her eyes a bright gleam that eventually became a smile, a very apologetic smile, and she would pluck shyly and painfully, with the extreme tips of her thin hands, at her pinafore.

  ‘If I go to the Reichenbach I shall miss lunch,’ he would say. ‘What is there for lunch?’

  All this, the Reichenbach, the lunch and whether he could miss the pleasure of one for the joy of another, had become a stilted joke between them, a catechism to be correctly repeated every morning while he helped himself to the excellent breakfast of three sorts of bread, two of confiture, coffee and vast slices of thick fresh cheese and butter.

  ‘Even for the Reichenbach you are not missing lunch.’

  When she said this she managed to press between each word a thin fluting leaf of laughter, so that the sentence quivered.

  ‘You should go there, Herr Vaughan. It is very beautiful. Everybody goes there.’

  That, he would try to explain to her, was one of the reasons why he d
id not want to go there. He enjoyed himself, if he could, without going to the places where everybody went. She did not understand that. Everybody, she said, had to see the Reichenbach. Even she, who did not get much chance in the summertime because the Gasthof was always busy and the grass always growing and the garden always crying for work and water, had seen the Reichenbach.

  ‘Often?’ he said.

  ‘Just once.’

  The way she said that was, he thought, exactly like the opening and shutting of a little box. It was dark inside the box; the lid was lifted swiftly, almost with a touch of guilt; but inside he felt he caught the barest glimpse of something that perhaps, he thought, she did not want him to see—at least, not quite so soon.

  ‘Only once?’ he said. ‘Then we should both go. We should go together.’

  ‘I?’ Her eyes were enlarged and shocked. ‘I?’

  ‘You could bring the boy.’

  ‘For that I could never have time. Never in summer. And in winter, when it is snow, persons are not going to the Reichenbach any longer. But you should go. That is something for you, Herr Vaughan. That is something wonderful.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll go if you will come with me.’

  ‘Oh! no, Herr Vaughan. Oh! no. That I couldn’t——’

  ‘One day when there is no lunch.’

  ‘Oh! Herr Vaughan. You know that is never happening.’

  His teasing gave to her flat wooden eyes the only touch he ever saw in them of anything like lightheartedness. It aggravated her shyness too, so that she put her fingers across her eyes in a protective nervous cage.

  ‘Well, all right. What is for lunch? Forellen blau?’ he said. ‘Blue trout?’

  ‘You are always liking blue trouts so much, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Yes, you may have blue trouts. Otto has gone already to fetch fresh ones.’ She smiled slightly, with her head to one side. ‘One or two?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Herr Vaughan, Herr Vaughan.’ Once again she managed to insert small leaves of laughter between the words. ‘Oh! Herr Vaughan.’