The Darling Buds of May

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Come and sit over here and I’ll tell you.’

  Mr Charlton moved to sit on the other side of the table. Rising abruptly, he stood stunned. It seemed to him that something remarkable had happened to Pop. Pop, it seemed to him, had disappeared.

  ‘I didn’t see Pop go out,’ he said. ‘Where’s Pop gone?’

  Ma began shrieking.

  ‘I’m under here!’ Pop said.

  ‘Under me! I’m sitting on his lap,’ Ma said. ‘Why don’t you ask Mariette if she’ll sit on yours?’

  Mariette, who needed no asking, sat on Mr Charlton’s lap. The illusion of being caressed in a silken, sinuous, maddening way by the goose’s neck returned to Mr Charlton as he felt her silken legs cross his own. A sensation that for the second time his blood was turning white, while being at the same time on fire, coursed completely through him. The soles of his feet started tingling. The scent of gardenia overwhelmed him like a drug.

  ‘Tell me what the scent is,’ Mr Charlton said.

  ‘Gardenia.’

  ‘Gardenia? Gardenia? What’s gardenia?’

  ‘It’s a flower. Do you like it?’

  ‘Like it? Like it?’ Mr Charlton said madly. ‘Like it?’

  With extraordinarily soft hands Mariette took his own and held them high round her waist, just under her breasts. With stupefying tenderness she started to rock backwards and forwards on his knee, with the result that Mr Charlton could not see straight. His eyes were simply two quivering balls revolving unrestrainedly in the top of his head.

  ‘Well, getting late,’ Pop said. ‘Hitch up a bit, Ma, and I’ll mix another before we go to shut-eye.’

  Pop reappeared presently from underneath the salmon canopy of Ma and announced that he was going to mix a new one this time.

  ‘How about a Chauffeur? Dammit, the Rolls has to have a Chauffeur,’ he said. He stood earnestly consulting the Guide to Better Drinking. ‘One third vermouth, one third whisky, one third gin, dash of angostura. Sounds perfick. Everybody game?’

  Everybody was game. Mr Charlton was very game. He said so over and over again. Mariette held his hands more closely against her body and a little higher than before and Mr Charlton let his head rest against the velvety, downy nape of her dark neck.

  ‘You’re my goose. My gardenia,’ he said.

  ‘Wouldn’t you think,’ Mariette said, ‘that it was soon time to go to bed?’

  Some moments later Mr Charlton had drained the Chauffeur in two gulps and was addressing Ma and Pop in what he thought were solid, steadfast tones of gratitude.

  ‘Can never thank you. Never thank you. Never be able to thank you.’

  He shook on his feet, grasped at air with aimless hands, and started jiggling like a fish.

  ‘Should be a cocktail called gardenia! A sweet one –’

  ‘I’ll make one,’ Pop said. ‘I’ll think one up.’

  ‘And one called Mariette,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘Sweet one too! –’

  He staggered violently and some time later was vaguely aware of walking arm-in-arm to the billiard room with Mariette. There was no light in the billiard room. He felt filled with inconsolable happiness and laughed with wild immoderation, once again feeling her legs brush against him like the goose-neck, in the darkness. Once again too he called her a gardenia and stretched out groping hands to touch her.

  Instead, unsurprised, he found himself kneeling by the billiard table, caressing in the corner pocket a solitary, cool abandoned ball.

  ‘Where are you? Where are you?’ he said. ‘Mariette –’

  Mr Charlton got up and fell down, breaking the thrushes’ eggs in his pocket as he fell.

  ‘Climb up,’ Mariette said. Mr Charlton found it impossible to climb up and Mariette started pushing him. ‘Upsadaisy. Up you go. I’ll get your collar off.’

  Meanwhile Pop, who was sitting up in bed in his shirt, thinking of the evening sunshine, the meadows shining so beautifully and so golden with buttercups and the prospect of summer growing to maturity all about his paradise, decided that the only thing to make the day more perfick was a cigar.

  ‘I’m the same as Churchill,’ he said. ‘Like a good cigar.’

  He lit the cigar and sat watching Ma undress herself. The thing he really loved most about Ma, he had long since decided, was that she didn’t have to wear corsets. She didn’t need them; her figure was all her own; pure and natural as could be.

  ‘Ma, I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘when does Mariette expect this baby?’

  ‘She can’t make up her mind.’

  ‘Well, she’d better,’ Pop said.

  ‘Why?’ Ma said.

  From the depths of her transparent petunia canopy, as it floated down over the global map of her white, wide territory, Ma spoke with her customary air of unconcern.

  Smoking his cigar, gazing thoughtfully through the open window to a night of warm May stars, as if pondering again on summer and the way it would soon embroider with its gold and green his already perfick paradise, Pop made a pronouncement.

  ‘I’m a bit worried about Mister Charlton. I don’t think that young man’s got it in ’im,’ he said. ‘At least not yet.’

  4

  Mr Charlton woke late and to a dark, disquieting impression. It was that he was lying alone in the centre of a large flat green field. A cold storm was raging about him. Overhead drummed peals of thunder.

  Agony taught him some minutes later that the thunder rolled from somewhere inside his own head and that the field was the billiard table, from which he was about to fall. He got up off the table and groped with uncertain agony about the semidarkened room, white hands limp at his sides, stringy and strengthless, like portions of tired celery.

  He was wearing Mariette’s pyjamas, which were silk, of a pale blue colour, with a pattern of either pink roses or carnations all over them – he was too distraught to tell which. He could not remember putting the pyjamas on. He could only suppose Mariette had put them on. He could not remember that either.

  Presently, after managing to pull on his trousers over his pyjamas, he groped his way out of the billiard room. In the kitchen the apparition of Ma, now wearing a parma-violet jumper instead of the salmon one, overrode all other objects, like a circus elephant. She was making toast and frying eggs and bacon. His hands trembled as they grasped a chair.

  ‘Ah! there you are, Mister Charlton. One egg or two?’ Ma, in her customary fashion, started laughing like a jelly, her voice a carillon. ‘Two eggs or three? Sleep all right?’

  Mr Charlton sat down and thought that even if wild dogs had begun to chase him he would never again have the strength to move.

  ‘Cuppa tea?’ A heavy weight, like a descending pile-driver, hit the table, shaking cups and cutlery. It was a cup. ‘Like a drop of milk in it?’ With shaking bosom Ma roared happily again. ‘Cow’s or Johnny Walker?’

  Mr Charlton prayed silently over the comforting fumes of tea.

  ‘Mariette waited for you but you didn’t seem to come so she’s gone for a ride now to get her appetite up,’ Ma said. ‘She’ll be back any minute now. Pop’s feeding the pigs. He’s had one breakfast. But he’ll want another.’

  Life, Mr Charlton felt, was ebbing away from him. In his cup large tea-leaves swam dizzily round and round, the black wreckage of disaster.

  ‘You never said how many eggs,’ Ma said. ‘One or two? How do you like ’em? Turned over?’

  ‘I –’

  A moment later a rough sledgehammer hit Mr Charlton in the middle of the back.

  ‘How’s the taxman?’ Pop said. ‘How’s my friend? All right, old man? Sleep well? Perfick morning, ain’t it?’

  Whereas overnight Mr Charlton’s veins had run white, in crazy, voluptuous courses, he now felt them to be some shade of pale, expiring green. There was also something seriously wrong with his intestines. They were dissolving under waves of acid. He could no longer claim them for his own.

  ‘I don’t think Mr Charlton feels very well,’ Ma sa
id.

  ‘No?’ Pop said. ‘Pity. Didn’t sleep very well? Potted the white, eh?’ Pop barked with violent laughter at his joke. ‘Hair of the dog I should say.’

  Mr Charlton had never heard of hair of the dog. Pop sat down at the table and drummed on it with the handles of his knife and fork, whistling ‘Come to the cook-house door, boys’ through his teeth.

  ‘What’s your programme this morning, old man? Like to come with me and take the pig over to the bacon factory?’

  ‘I think I shall have to go home.’

  Faintly Mr Charlton spoke for the first time, his voice full of pallid distress. Echoes of his words rang through his head in hollow tones, as through a sepulchre.

  ‘Don’t say that, old man,’ Pop said. ‘We was looking forward to having you the whole weekend. I want to show you the place. I got thirty-two acres here altogether. Lovely big medder at the back. Beautiful stretch o’ river. Perfick. Do any fishing?’

  While Pop was speaking Ma set before him a plate of three eggs, four six-inch rashers of home-cured bacon, three very thick brown sausages, and a slice of fried bread. Pop attacked this with the precipitate virility and desperation of a man who has not seen food for some long time. In an excruciating moment the last of Mr Charlton’s intestines got ready to dissolve.

  Suddenly Pop slapped down his knife and fork, troubled.

  ‘Something wrong?’ Ma said.

  ‘Don’t taste right.’

  ‘You forgot the ketchup, you loony, that’s why.’

  ‘Gorblimey, so I did. Knowed there was summat wrong somewhere.’

  Pop reached out, grabbed the ketchup bottle, and shook an ocean of scarlet all over his breakfast.

  Mr Charlton shut his eyes. This grave mistake made him think that he was on the deck of a sinking ship, in a hurricane. He opened his eyes with great haste and the deck came up at him.

  ‘Hullo there, bright eyes. Good morning. How are we this morning?’

  The astral figure of Mariette, fresh in yellow shirt and jodhpurs, was all that Mr Charlton felt he needed to set him weeping. The pristine, cheerful voice was beyond his range of thought. He tried to say something and failed, faintly.

  ‘Mister Charlton doesn’t feel all that well,’ Ma said. ‘He says he might have to go home.’

  Pop belched with enormous pleasure, as usual surprising himself.

  ‘Manners. Early morning breeze. Pardon me.’ He struck his chest with the handle of the fork, as if in stern reproval. ‘Home, my foot. Stop worrying, old man. That’s the trouble with you office fellers. You all worry too much by half. After all, here today and gone tomorrow.’

  It was not tomorrow, Mr Charlton thought, that he was worried about. Unless he could find some speedy, drastic remedy he would, he was convinced, be gone today.

  ‘Heavens, I’m hungry,’ Mariette said.

  She sat down at the table, stirred a cup of tea, and started laughing. Her voice put stitches into Mr Charlton’s head: stabbing lines of them, on hot needles.

  ‘See something funny out riding?’ Pop said. ‘Like the Brigadier’s sister?’

  ‘I was just smiling at Mr Charlton. He’s still got the pyjamas on.’ She started laughing again and Mr Charlton could not help feeling there was some sinister, hidden meaning in the word smiling. ‘Oh! that was a laugh, getting them on last night. First we couldn’t get one lot of trousers off and then we couldn’t get the other lot on. Oh! Mr Charlton, you were a scream. Absolute scream.’

  Mr Charlton, who began to feel among other things that he was not grown up, did not doubt it. Everything was a scream. His whole body, his entire mind, and his intestines were a scream.

  ‘Most of the time you were making love to a billiard ball in the side pocket.’

  Pop started choking.

  ‘I said you potted the white, didn’t I?’ he shouted. ‘Ain’t that what I said, Ma?’ With immense glee Pop beat a tattoo on the tablecloth with the handles of his knife and fork. ‘Potted the white. Damn funny. Just what I said.’

  ‘Tonight I’ll make you a proper bed up,’ Ma said. ‘In the bottom bathroom. Nobody uses it very much now we’ve got the new one upstairs.’

  ‘I really think,’ Mr Charlton said, his voice limp, ‘I’d better go home.’

  In a sudden gesture of fond solicitude Pop put an arm round Mr Charlton’s shoulder.

  ‘You know, Charley boy,’ he said, ‘I wish your name was Charley instead of Cedric. It’s more human. I can’t get used to Cedric. It’s like a parson’s name. Can’t we call you Charley? – after all it’s short for your other name.’

  ‘Please call me Charley if you wish,’ Mr Charlton said and felt once again like weeping.

  ‘What I was going to say, Charley boy,’ Pop went on, ‘is this, old man, I think you need a Larkin Special.’

  Mr Charlton had no time to ask what a Larkin Special was before Pop was out of the room, across the passage, and into the living-room on the other side. Presently there were noises from the Spanish galleon, the monster cocktail cabinet that could have only been moulded, Mr Charlton thought, by a man of evil, demoniac designs.

  ‘That’ll put you as right as a lamplighter in no time,’ Ma said. ‘Acts like a charm.’

  ‘A nice walk after breakfast,’ Mariette said, ‘and you’ll be on top of the world.’ Mr Charlton felt sure that that in fact was where he was, but in the act of falling. Mariette was now eating bacon, eggs, large burnished brown sausages, and fried bread. ‘We could walk across the meadow and have a look at the motor boat if you like.’

  ‘Motor boat?’ At the same moment some curious reflex of thought made Mr Charlton remember the buff-yellow tax form. He hadn’t seen it since sharing his boiled eggs with the twins the previous day. ‘You’ve got a motor boat?’

  ‘Nice one. Little beauty. We keep it in the boathouse on the other side of the meadow.’

  ‘Pop took it in exchange for a debt,’ Ma explained.

  ‘Mrs Larkin,’ Mr Charlton began to say. He felt suddenly, in a guilty fashion, that he ought to make some sort of atonement with himself for all that had happened. He was actually bothered by a sense of duty. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen that buff-yellow form –’

  ‘Coming up, coming up, coming up,’ Pop said. ‘There you are, Charley, old man. Larkin Special. Don’t ask what’s in it. Don’t stare at it. Don’t think. Just drink it down. In ten minutes you’ll feel perfick again.’

  Pop set before a demoralized Mr Charlton, on the breakfast table, what Mr Charlton could only think was a draught of bull’s blood.

  ‘I think I should go and lie down –’

  ‘Don’t think a thing!’ Pop said. ‘Drink it. Say to ’ell wiv everything and drink it.’

  Mr Charlton hesitated. His intestines rolled.

  ‘I can vouch for it,’ Ma said.

  The soft dark eyes of Mariette smiled across the table. The familiar astral vision of cool olive skin against the light lemon shirt, of dark hair and the firm treasured breasts that Mr Charlton had almost clasped the previous evening, revived an inspiring, momentary recollection of his lost white fire.

  He ducked his head and drank.

  ‘Now I must get cracking,’ Pop said. ‘I got a bit of a deal to do about some straw. I got the new deep-freeze to pick up. And the pigs. And the port.’

  With fond assurance he laid a hand on Mr Charlton’s shoulder.

  ‘Charley, old man,’ he said, ‘by the time I get back you’ll feel perfick.’

  For some time Mr Charlton sat in tentative silence, reawaking. A feeling of slow intestinal restoration made him give, once or twice, a tender sigh. He grasped slowly that the thunder in his head had now become mere singing, like distant vespers in a minor key.

  ‘Feeling more yourself now?’

  Mariette was eating toast and golden marmalade. As she opened her mouth to eat he saw, for the first time, how beautifully white her teeth were and how pink, in a pure rose-petal shade, her tongue now appeared as it darted out and c
aught at golden shreds of marmalade.

  He even found himself thinking of gardenia, its compelling, torturing night-scent and the pure whiteness of its flower.

  ‘It’s absolutely wonderful in the woods this morning,’ Mariette said. ‘All the bluebells out. Millions of them. And the moon-daisies. It’s hot too and the nightingales had already started when I was coming back. You’re not really going home today?’

  A lyrical wave passed over Mr Charlton. With distaste he remembered his office: the in-tray, the out-tray, the files, the other chaps, the ink-stained desks, the chatter of typewriters.

  ‘If you’re sure it’s no trouble –’

  ‘Trouble!’ Ma said. ‘We want you. We love to have you.’

  ‘I’ve finished,’ Mariette said. ‘Like to get a breath of air?’

  Mr Charlton went to the door and stood in the sun. With reviving heart he stared across Pop’s paradise of junk, scratching hens, patrols of geese, and graveyards of rusty iron, in the middle of which Montgomery was milking goats under a haystack. Over all this a sky as blue as the thrushes’ eggs that had come to disaster in his pocket spread with unblemished purity. The near fringes of meadows had become, overnight, white with moon-daisies, drifts of summer snow. A cuckoo called and was answered by another, the notes like those of tender horns, the birds hidden in oak-trees, among curtains of thickest olive flower.

  ‘How do you feel now?’ Mariette said.

  The pale face of Mr Charlton broadened into its first unsteady daylight smile.

  ‘A little more perfick than I was.’

  *

  By Saturday night the deep-freeze was installed. By Sunday morning, three nine-pound geese, well-stuffed with sage and-onion, were sizzling in a pure white electric oven that could have spoken, Mr Charlton thought, if spoke to. A light breeze drove with frailest spinnings of air through the bluebell wood and bore across the hot yard the delicious aroma of roasting birds.

  Ma, who loved colour, cooked in a canary yellow pinafore with big scarlet pockets and at intervals shouted across the yard, either to Pop or Mariette, Mr Charlton or the children, or whoever happened to be there, a demand for instructions about the meal.