by H. E. Bates
Presently Ma, concerned at Mr Charlton’s air of retreat, uncertainty, and fatigue, spread hands like lardy legs of pork across her salmon jumper and said with earnest kindness:
‘Taking your holiday soon, Mr Charlton? Where do you usually go?’
‘I hadn’t –’
‘You should come strawberry picking with us,’ Ma said. ‘Do you the world of good. Else cherry picking. Best holiday in the world if the weather’s nice. Make yourself a lot o’ money too.’
‘Perfick,’ Pop said. ‘Don’t cost nothing either. Here’s Mariette. Perfick, I tell you.’
Mr Charlton rose from the table to find himself stunned by a new astral body, now in a lime green dress with broad black belt, a flouncing skirt, loose neck, and short scalloped sleeves. Her beautiful dark eyes were smiling at him splendidly.
‘Is that your shantung?’ Ma said. ‘You’ll be warm enough in that, dear, will you?’
‘Oh! it’s hot,’ Mariette said. ‘It’s nice to feel the breeze blowing round my legs again. You ready, Mr Charlton?’
Mr Charlton, the buff-yellow form forgotten, turned and followed Mariette, who actually stretched out a friendly hand. As they crossed a yard noisy with hawking geese, mumbling turkeys, and braying goats being led to milking by Montgomery Pop called:
‘Remember about Sunday, Mr Charlton, won’t you? Don’t forget about Sunday.’
‘You really mean it?’ Mr Charlton halted and turned back, amazed. ‘Are you quite sure?’
‘Sure?’ Pop said. ‘Blimey, old man, I’m going to kill the geese any minute now.’
‘Thank you, Thank you very much.’
‘One goose or two, Ma?’ Pop called. ‘Two geese be enough? Or shall we have three?’
Mr Charlton, still stunned and amazed, turned to face the waiting figure of Mariette and saw it miraculously framed against piles of junk, rampant nettles and, in the near distance, deep strips of bluebells fenced away, in the strip of woodland, from flocks of brown marauding hens. Her legs, in pale beige silk stockings, were surprisingly shapely and slender. Her breasts protruded with grace from the soft lime shantung.
He could not believe in this figure. Nor, five minutes later, could he believe that the yard of nettles and junk, Pop’s beautiful, incredible paradise, lay only a hundred yards away, screened by thickets of hornbeam and hazel, oaks in olive flower and may trees carrying blossom as rich and thick as Ma’s lavish Jersey cream.
‘You didn’t really believe about the nightingales, did you?’
‘No.’
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You will.’
Walking along the woodland path, Mr Charlton could hear only a single untangled chorus of evening birdsong, unseparated into species, confusing as the tuning of orchestra strings.
‘Let’s stand here by the gate and listen,’ Mariette said. ‘Let’s stand and listen here.’
Mr Charlton, transfixed, utterly bemused, stood by the gate and listened. Patches of evening sunlight, broken gold, sprinkled down through oak-branches, like delicate quivering translations in light of the bird-notes themselves.
‘No, not that one,’ Mariette said. ‘That’s a blackbird. Not the one over there, either. That’s a wren. Now – that one. The one in the chestnut up there. The one with the long notes and then the long pause. Can you hear it now? That’s a nightingale.’
Mr Charlton listened, hardly breathing, and heard for the first time in his life, in a conscious moment, the voice of a nightingale singing against a May evening sky.
Enthralled, still hardly believing it, he turned to see the deep black eyes holding him in utter captivation and heard her say again:
‘You really didn’t believe it, did you?’
‘I must say I didn’t.’
‘I tell you something else you didn’t believe either.’
‘What was that?’
‘You didn’t believe about me, did you?’ she said. ‘You didn’t believe I was the same girl you saw riding at Easter, did you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘How did you know?’
‘I guessed,’ she said. ‘I could see it in your eyes. I was watching you.’
She lifted her hands and held them suddenly against his cheeks without either boldness or hesitation but with a lightness of touch that woke in Mr Charlton’s legs exactly the same melting, unnerving sensation as when the geese had brushed against him under the table. A moment later he saw her lips upraised.
‘Who did you think I was?’
Mr Charlton made a startling, embarrassed confession.
‘I thought – well, I was actually told you were someone else in point of fact – that you were a niece of Lady Planson-Forbes – you know, at Carrington Hall –’
Mariette began laughing, in ringing tones, very much like her father.
‘Now you’ve just found I wasn’t.’
‘Well, yes –’
‘You feel it makes any difference?’
‘Well, in point of fact –’
‘I’m just the same, aren’t I?’ She smiled and he found his eyes level with her bare, olive shoulder. ‘I’m just me. The same girl. Just me. Just the same.’
Again she touched his face with her hands and Mr Charlton took hurried refuge in a sudden recollection of the buff-yellow form.
‘By the way I musn’t forget to get your father to sign that form before I go –’
‘You’ll have to sign it for him,’ she said, ‘or Ma will. He can’t write his name.’
She laughed again and Mr Charlton, his limbs melting once more as she lifted his hand to her bare warm shoulder, heard consciously but dizzily, for the second time in his life, a passionate burst of song from the nightingales.
At the same moment, back in the house, Pop returned to the kitchen after wringing the necks of three fat geese and poured himself a much-needed glass of beer.
‘A few days like this, Ma,’ he said, ‘’ll put a bit o’ paint on the strawberries.’
Ma was raking the kitchen fire, putting on to it empty icecream cartons, scraps of fish-and-chips, eggshells, pineapple tops, and Mr Charlton’s buff-yellow paper.
‘I don’t know as I shan’t get a few bottles o’ port wine in for Sunday,’ Pop said, ‘so we can celebrate.’
‘Celebrate what?’
‘Well,’ Pop said, ‘what about Mariette?’
Ma laughed again, jumper shaking like a salmon jelly.
‘The only thing is,’ Pop said, ‘I hope he won’t want to take her away from here.’ He carried his beer to the kitchen door and from there contemplated, almost with reverence, the paradisiacal scene beyond. ‘Gawd A’mighty, Ma, you know we got a beautiful place here. Paradise. I don’t know what we’d do if she were took away from here.’
Standing in the evening sunlight, gazing across the pile of junk, the nettles, the rusting hovels, and the scratching, dusty hens, Pop sighed loudly and with such content that the sound seemed to travel with perfect definition across the surrounding fields of buttercups and may, gathering its echo at last from the mingled sounds of the remaining geese, the voices of cuckoos calling as they flew across the meadows and the small, passionate, invisible nightingales.
‘Perfick,’ Pop said. ‘You couldn’t wish for nothing more perfick nowhere.’
2
When Mariette and Mr Charlton came down from the bluebell wood an hour later, Mariette carrying a bunch of bluebells and pink campion, Mr Charlton bearing in his palm, with the tenderest care, two blue thrushes’ eggs a bird had dropped in the grass at the woodside, Pop was washing pig-buckets under the tap in the yard.
‘Pigs look well,’ Pop said. ‘I think we’ll kill one. Hear the nightingales?’
Mr Charlton had not a second in which to answer this question before Pop said:
‘Wondering where you two had got to, Mister Charlton. Tea’s ready. Just in time.’
A searching odour of frying kippers cut almost savagely through the warm May air.
‘I thought we just had tea,’ Mr Charlton said.
‘I ought to catch my bus,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘I must. The last one goes at eight o’clock.’
‘Ma won’t hear of that,’ Pop said. ‘Will she, Mariette? Daresay Mariette won’t either. Like to wash your hands? What you got there?’
Mr Charlton revealed the thrushes’ eggs, brilliant blue in his office-pale hands, and Mariette gave him a small dark smile of fascination that held him once more transfixed and speechless.
‘Always run you home in the truck,’ Pop said. ‘Next time you come out you must bring your car. What kind of car you got, Mister Charlton?’
Mr Charlton confessed that he had no car. Pop was stunned.
‘No car, no car?’ he said. ‘That’ll never do. Can’t have that. Hear that, Mariette? Mister Charlton ain’t got no car.’
‘I don’t think I’ll have the time to come out again,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘Do you think we could go into the question of the tax form before I go? It’s very important.’
‘Tea first,’ Pop said. ‘Must have a cuppa tea first. Don’t want to make Ma mad, do you?’
Pop finished drying his hands and gave Mr Charlton the towel. Mr Charlton put the two thrushes’ eggs into his pocket and ran tap water over his hands, washing them with a gritty cake of purple soap. Mariette gave him another intimate, flashing smile and then went towards the house, calling that she was going to powder her nose, and Mr Charlton, completely captivated by the delicate vision of green shantung retreating in the golden evening sunshine, forgot the thrushes’ eggs and said:
‘I don’t know if you appreciate how severe the penalties are for not making a tax return, Mr Larkin.’
‘Ma’s calling,’ Pop said.
Mr Charlton listened but couldn’t hear a sound.
‘I shall have to make some sort of report to my office,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘Then if you don’t cooperate it’ll be taken out of my hands and after that –’
‘Beautiful evening, ain’t it?’ Pop said. Once again, caught in his own web of enchantment, he turned to stare at an evening distilled now into even deeper gold by the lower angle of light falling across still seas of buttercups and long-curled milky waves of may.
‘I strongly recommend you –’
‘Pair o’ goldfinches,’ Pop said, but Mr Charlton was to slow to see the birds, which darted past him like dipping sparks of scarlet, black, and gold.
In the kitchen Ma was frying a third batch of four fat tawny kippers in a brand new aluminium pan while Mariette powdered her face over the sink, looking into a heart-shaped mirror stuck about with little silver, pink, and violet seashells.
‘How’d you get on with Mr Charlton, duckie?’
‘Slow,’ Mariette said. ‘He’s very shy.’
‘Well, he mustn’t be shy,’ Ma said. ‘That won’t get you nowhere.’
‘He would talk about horses.’
‘You’ll have to find something a bit better than that to talk about, won’t you?’ Ma said. ‘Bit more stimulating.’
Mariette, who was busy making up her lips with a tender shade of pink, not at all unlike the pink of the rose campion that went well with her dress of cool lime shantung, did not answer.
‘I think he looks half-starved,’ Ma said. ‘No blood in him. Wants feeding up. I’ll find him a good fat kipper.’
Mariette was wetting small wisps of short hair with her fingertips and winding them about her ears like black watch-springs.
‘Put some of my Goya on,’ Ma said. ‘The gardenia. Or else the Chanel. They both stand by my jewel-box in our bedroom.’
While Mariette went upstairs to dab perfume behind her ears and in soft hollows of her legs, Mr Charlton and Pop came in from the yard to join Montgomery, Primrose, Victoria, and the twins, who sat at the table licking thick bars of choc-ice and watching a television programme in which three men, a clergyman, and a woman were discussing prostitution and what should be done about it all.
‘Strawberry picking on Monday over at Benacre, Pop,’ Montgomery said. ‘I heard from Fred Brown.’
‘That’s early,’ Pop said. ‘Earliest we’ve ever been. I said this wevver’d soon put the paint on ’em.’
Ma came in bearing a big dish of stinging hot kippers running with fat dabs of butter and on the television screen the woman shook a condemnatory finger at the gaping children and said: ‘The women are, on the whole, less to be blamed than pitied. It is largely the fault of man.’
‘Ma,’ Pop said. ‘Strawberry picking Monday. Better get that deep-freeze, hadn’t we?’
‘Sooner the better,’ Ma said. ‘Better go in first thing tomorrow. It’s Saturday.’ She began to serve kippers. ‘Start pouring tea, Primrose. Kipper, Mister Charlton? Here we come. Nice fat one. Help yourself to more butter if you want to.’
While Ma served kippers and Primrose poured tea Pop rose from the table and fetched a bottle of whisky from the cocktail cabinet.
‘Milk?’ he said to Ma.
‘Please,’ Ma said. ‘Just what I need.’
Pop poured whisky into Ma’s tea, then into his own, and then turned to Mr Charlton, the bottle upraised.
‘Drop o’ milk, Mister Charlton?’
‘No, no, no. No really. Not for me. No really not for me.’
‘Relieves the wind, frees the kidneys, and opens the bowels,’ Pop said blandly.
‘No, no. No really. Not at this time of day.’
‘Do you all the good in the world, Mister Charlton.’
Pop, after filling up Mr Charlton’s teacup with whisky stood for a moment staring at the television screen and said:
‘What the ruddy ’ell are they talking about? Kids, how much money you make on the stall?’
‘Eighteen pence. There was a policeman on a motor-bike come along.’
‘Pity he hadn’t got summat else to do,’ Pop said.
With elbows on the table Victoria, who was trying to eat kipper with a spoon, said in a shrill quick voice:
‘I don’t like kippers. They’re made of combs.’
‘Now, now,’ Pop said. ‘Now, now. Manners, manners. Elbows!’
‘Pop has ’em at a word,’ Ma said.
Mr Charlton sat held in a new constriction of bewilderment made more complex by the arrival of Mariette, fresh and lovely with new pink lipstick, face powder, and a heavy fragrance of gardenias that overwhelmed him in a cloud of intoxication as she came and sat at his side.
As if this were not enough she had brought with her the bluebells and the rose campion, arranged in an orange and crimson jar. She set the jar in the centre of the table, where the flowers glowed in the nightmare marine glow of the television light like a strange sheaf of seaweed. The bluebells too, smelt exquisitely.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she whispered to Mr Charlton and he could have sworn, in another moment of shimmering agony, that her silky legs had brushed his own. ‘Just had to make myself presentable.’
‘By the way, Mister Charlton,’ Pop said, ‘what’s your other name? Don’t like this mistering.’
‘Cedric.’
Ma started choking.
‘Kipper bone!’ Pop said. ‘Happened once before.’
He rose from the table and struck Ma a severe blow in the middle of the back. She boomed like a drum.
‘Better?’ Pop said and hit her a second time, rather more robustly than the first.
Except for bouncing slightly Ma did not seem to mind at all.
‘Worst of kippers,’ Pop said. ‘Too much wire-work. Fetched it up?’
On the television screen a man in close-up stared with steadfast earnestness at Mr Charlton and the eight Larkins and said: ‘Well, there it is. We leave it with you. What do you think? What is to be done about these women? Is it their fault? Is it the fault of men? If not, whose fault is it?’ and once again, for the third time, Ma started laughing like a jelly.
‘Play crib at all, Mister Charlton?’ Pop said.
Mr Charlton had to confess he had never heard of crib.
‘Card game,’ Pop said. ‘We all play here. Learns you figures. Mariette plays. Mariette could show you how.’
Mr Charlton turned to look shyly at Mariette and found his vision, already blurred by the curious light from the television screen, clouded into more numbing and exquisite confusion by the thick sweet fragrance of gardenia. In return she gazed at him with dark silent eyes, so that he could not help trembling and was even glad when Pop said:
‘Like billiards? Or snooker? Got a nice table out the back there. Full size. We could have a game o’ snooker after tea.’
‘You know,’ Mr Charlton said, ‘I’m really awfully sorry, but I must catch this eight o’clock bus.’
‘No eight o’clock bus now,’ Montgomery said. ‘They knocked it off soon after petrol rationing started.’
‘That’s right,’ Ma said. ‘They never put it back again.’
Mr Charlton half-rose from the table, agitated.
‘In that case I must start walking. It’s eight miles.’
‘Walking my foot,’ Pop said. ‘I said I’ll run you home in the truck. Or else Mariette can take you in the station wagon. Mariette can drive. Mariette’ll take you, won’t you, Mariette?’
‘Of course.’
Mr Charlton sat down, mesmerized.
‘Why don’t you stay the night?’ Pop said. ‘That’s all right, ain’t it, Ma?’
‘More the merrier.’
‘Perfick,’ Pop said. ‘Ma’ll make you a bed up on the billiard table.’
‘No, really –’
‘It’s so simple,’ Mariette said. ‘After all tomorrow’s Saturday. You don’t have to go to the office Saturday, do you?’
‘Course he don’t,’ Pop said. ‘Offices don’t work Saturdays. They don’t none of ’em know what work is no more.’
‘That’s settled then,’ Ma said. ‘I’ll put him on that new superfoam mattress Mariette has for sunbathing.’
‘Oh! that mattress is marvellous,’ Mariette said. ‘You sink in. Your body simply dreams into that mattress.’
In another unnerving moment Mr Charlton saw the girl, hands raised to her bare shoulders, luxuriously enact for him the attitudes of dreaming into the mattress. As her eyes closed and her lips parted gently he struggled to bring himself back to reality, firmness, and a state of resistance and he said: