by H. E. Bates
‘What sort of vegetables do you fancy? Asparagus? I got green peas and new potatoes but shout if you want anything different.’ It turned out that Montgomery wanted brown braised onions, the twins Yorkshire pudding, and Primrose baked potatoes. ‘Fair enough,’ Ma said, ‘as long as we know.’
At eleven o’clock, by which time Pop was no longer in the yard, Ma shouted that it was already so hot in the kitchen that she’d be sick by the time the meal was served.
‘What say we have it outside?’ she called. ‘Under the walnut tree?’
By noon Mariette, dressed in neat sky-blue linen shorts and an open-necked vermilion blouse, her legs bare, was laying a white cloth on a long table underneath a walnut tree that over-shadowed, like a faintly fragrant umbrella, the only civilized stretch of grass near the house, on the south side, beside which Ma would later grow patches of petunia and zinnia, her favourite flowers. It was cool and dark there under the thickening walnut leaves, out of the sun, and Mr Charlton helped her by bringing cutlery from the house on papier-mâché trays brightly decorated with hunting scenes, race-meetings, or pointers carrying birds.
At half-past-twelve Pop startled everybody by driving into the yard in a Rolls-Royce, a pre-war landaulette in black, with strawcoloured doors that actually looked as if they had been made of plaited basket-work. The horn, sounding with discreet harmonious distinction, brought everybody running to the centre of the rusty, dusty graveyards of junk and iron.
Pop stopped the car and dismounted with triumphant, imperial pride.
‘Here it is!’ he shouted. ‘Ourn!’
Before anyone could speak he leapt down to the doors, proudly pointing.
‘Monogram,’ he said. ‘Look, Ma – monograms on the doors.’
‘Royal?’ Ma said.
‘Duke, I think,’ Pop said. ‘The feller didn’t know. Anyway, duke or viscount or some toff of some sort.’
Ma was dazzled. She took several paces forward and touched the gleaming bodywork.
‘All in!’ Pop said. ‘Everybody in! Everybody who wants a ride get in!’
Everybody, including Mr Charlton, got into the Rolls-Royce. On the wide spacious seats of dove-grey upholstery, upon which heavy cords of tasselled yellow silk hung at the windows, there was plenty of room for everybody, but the twins sat on Mr Charlton’s lap. Ma herself sat in the centre of the back seat, her pinafore spread out crinoline-wise, almost in royal fashion, her turquoise-ringed hands spread on her yellow pinafore.
Soon an entranced look crept like a web across her face, only her eyes moving as they rolled gently from side to side, taking in the smallest details.
‘I wish I had my hat on,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t feel right without my hat on.’
‘Got a big picnic basket in the boot,’ Pop said. ‘Corkscrews an’ all.’
‘It’s got vases for flowers,’ Ma said. She leaned forward and fingered with delicacy a pair of silver horn-like vases fixed below the glass screen that divided the back seat from the front.
‘Notice anything else?’ Pop called. ‘Have a good dekko. All round. Want you to notice one more thing, Ma. Have a good dekko.’
After several seconds of silence, in which Ma’s eyes revolved on a slow axis of exploration, in pure wonderment, Ma confessed that she saw nothing more.
‘That thing like the bit off the end of a carpet sweeper!’ Pop yelled. In his own delight he laughed in his customary ringing fashion. ‘Mind it don’t bite you.’
‘No,’ Ma said. ‘No.’ Her mouth expired air in a long incredulous wheeze. ‘No –’
‘Speakin’ tube!’ Pop said. ‘Pick it up. Say something down it. Give me order. Say “Home James!” – summat like that.’
Ma, in possession of the end of the speaking tube, sat utterly speechless.
‘Give me order!’ Pop said. ‘I can hear whatever you say perfickly well in front here. Go on, Ma. Give me order!’
Ma breathed into the speaking tube in a voice pitched in a minor key of desolation.
‘I don’t know whether I like it,’ she said. ‘They’ll be putting the price of fish-and-chips up when they see us roll up in this.’
‘Never!’ Pop said. ‘They’ll be paying us.’
The receiving end of the speaking apparatus was just above the head of Mr Charlton, who was sitting next to Pop in the driving seat. The voices of Victoria and Primrose began to shriek into his ears like a gabble of excited young ducks.
‘Take us for a ride! Take us for a ride! Take us for a ride!’
Pop let in the clutch and started to steer a course of slow elegance between a pile of discarded oil-drums and a big galvanized iron swill-tub. No breath of sound came, for a full minute, from either the Rolls or its passengers.
Then Ma said: ‘Like riding on air. Not a squeak anywhere. Must be paid for.’
‘Cash down!’ Pop said.
He pressed the horn. An orchestration of low notes, harmonious, smooth as honey, disturbed into slight flutterings a batch of young turkeys sunning themselves in the lee of the pigsties.
‘That’s the town one,’ Pop explained. He flicked a switch with a fingernail. ‘Now hark at this. Country. Open road.’
A peremptory, urgent snarl, like the surprise entry of symphonic brass, tore the peaceful fabric of the yard’s livestock to pieces. A whole flotilla of white ducks sprang into the air and raced like hurdlers over rusty junk, empty boxes, and feeding troughs. Brown hens flew like windy paper bags in all directions, shedding feathers.
‘Special fittin’,’ Pop explained. ‘Chap who owned it once lived in Paris or somewheres.’
He completed with slow imperial pride the course of the yard, now blowing the town horn, now the snarl.
‘Comfortable in the back, ain’t it, Ma? Make a nice bed, don’t you think?’
Ma, who had recovered equilibrium, now spoke down the speaking-tube, shaking like a jelly.
‘Home, James. Else them geese’ll burn.’
Pop responded with the honeyed notes of the town horn and the Rolls, like a ship gliding to anchorage in smooth waters, skirted with a final swing of silent elegance past a strong black alp of pig manure.
‘Perfick, ain’t it?’ Pop said. ‘Ain’t it perfick?’
Ma, who had stopped laughing, breathed hard before she spoke again.
‘I got to have flowers in the vases,’ she said, her voice full of a pleasure so deep that it was at once loving and lovable in humility. ‘Every time we go out we got to have flowers.’
Back at the house everybody alighted and Ma once again stroked, with touching affection, the shining chariot wings, her huge body reflected in their black curves with a vast transfiguration of yellow and scarlet, distorted as in a comic mirror at a fair.
‘Gorblimey, I must run,’ she said suddenly. ‘I haven’t even started the apple sauce.’
As Ma ran towards the house Mariette remembered the table under the walnut tree and took Mr Charlton’s hand. Pop remembered the port and called after a dutifully retreating Mr Charlton:
‘Charley boy, like to do summat for me while you’re helping Mariette? Put the port on ice, old man, will you? Three bottles. Two red and one white. You’ll find two ice buckets in the cocktail cabinet. Give ’em plenty of ice, old man.’
At the same time Montgomery stood staring across the yard in the direction of the road.
‘Pop,’ he said, ‘I think we got a visitor. I think it looks like the Brigadier.’
Across the yard a straight, six-foot human straw was drifting. It was dressed in a suit of tropical alpaca, once yellowish, now bleached to whitish fawn, that looked as if it had recently been under a steam-roller.
It was the Brigadier all right, Pop said, and leaned one hand on the front wing of the Rolls with casual pride, raising the other in greeting. He wondered too what the Brigadier wanted and where his sister was and said he betted the old whippet had left him for the day.
‘General!’ he called. ‘What can I do you for?’
�
��Hail,’ the Brigadier said. The voice was low and cryptic. ‘Well met, Larkin.’
At closer range it was to be seen that the Brigadier’s elbows had been patched with squares of paler-coloured material that appeared to have been torn from pillow-slips. The cuffs of his jacket sleeves had been trimmed more or less level with scissors and then sewn back. His socks were yellow. The hat worn on the back of his head resembled more than anything a frayed bee-skip and seemed to be worn so far back in order to avoid his extraordinary extensive white eyebrows, altogether too large for the rest of his cadaverous face, which stuck above his pale blue eyes like two salty prawns.
These prawns were repeated on his upper lip in stiff moustaches, which contrasted sharply with cheeks consisting entirely of purple viens. The chin was resolute and looked like worn pumice stone. The neck was long and loose and held entirely together by a rigid bolt of fiery crimson, the Adam’s apple, which seemed over the course of time to have worn the soiled shirt collar to shreds.
The Brigadier shook hands with Pop, at the same time recognizing in Pop’s demeanour the divinity of new possession. He held the Rolls-Royce in flinty stare.
‘Not yours?’
‘Just got it.’
‘Good God.’
Pop made breezy gestures of pride. He wanted instantly to reveal possession of the monograms and then decided against it. It was too much all at one time, he thought.
‘Hellish costly to run?’
‘Well, might be, can’t tell, might be,’ Pop said. ‘But worth it. Always flog it.’
Sooner or later, in his energetic way, Pop flogged most things.
‘Good God.’ The Brigadier looked at the car with closer, microscopic inspection. ‘What’s all this?’
‘Monogram.’
‘Good God.’ In moments of humour the Brigadier drew on dry resources of solemnity. ‘No crown?’
The remark was lost on Pop, who was dying to demonstrate the horn’s orchestral variations.
‘Well,’ the Brigadier said, ‘I mustn’t linger. Down to staff work.’
Pop laughed in his usual ringing fashion and said he betted a quid the General wanted a subscription.
‘Wrong,’ the Brigadier said. ‘Not this time.’
‘Well, that’s worth a drink,’ Pop said. ‘What about a snifter?’
‘Trifle early, don’t you think?’ the Brigadier said. ‘Not quite over the yard-arm yet, are we?’
‘When I want a drink,’ Pop said, ‘I have a drink. Wevver it’s early or wevver it ain’t.’
The Brigadier, after a minor pretence at refusal, chose to have a whisky-and-soda. Pop said first that he’d have a Guinness and then changed his mind and said he’d have a beer called Dragon’s Blood with a dash of lime instead. The Brigadier looked astonished at this extraordinary combination but followed Pop into the house without a word.
In the sitting room he found it hard to concentrate even on the whisky-and-soda because of powerful, torturing odours of roasting geese that penetrated every corner of the house, delicious with sage and onion stuffing. He sat most of the time with his glass on his right knee, where it successfully concealed a hole that mice might have gnawed.
‘Might as well come straight to the point,’ the Brigadier said. ‘Fact is, Larkin, I’m in a God-awful mess.’
‘Wimmin?’
The Brigadier looked extremely startled. The prawns of his eyebrows seemed to leap out. He seemed about to speak and then drank with eagerness at the whisky-and-soda instead.
‘No, no, no,’ he said eventually. ‘Bad enough, but not that bad.’
Pop knew that the Brigadier’s sister, who resembled more than anything a long hairpin on the top of which she generally wore a cloche hat that looked like a pink thimble, was presumed to lead him a hell of a dance on most occasions and in all directions. Among other things he felt that she never gave the Brigadier enough to eat: a terrible thing.
‘No, it’s this damn Gymkhana,’ the Brigadier said. ‘That Bolshie Fortescue had a God-awful row with the committee Friday and has withdrawn from the field.’
‘Always was a basket.’
‘Not only withdrawn from the field,’ the Brigadier said, ‘but withdrawn the field.’
‘Means you’ve got nowhere to hold the damn thing.’
‘Bingo,’ the Brigadier said.
In a soft voice Pop called Mr Fortescue a bloody sausage and remembered Mariette. The gymkhana was in a fortnight’s time. It might be the last chance she’d ever get to ride in the jumps before she had the baby. She was mad on jumping; her heart was set on horses and all that sort of thing.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ Pop said. ‘You can hold it in my medder.’
‘Don’t let me rush you into a decision, Larkin,’ the Brigadier said. ‘You don’t have to decide –’
‘Good grief,’ Pop said. ‘Nothing to decide. The medder’s there, ain’t it? All I got to do is get the grass cut. I’ll get the grass cut this week and things’ll be perfick.’
The Brigadier was so much touched by this that he nervously held his glass in his left hand and started poking a finger into the hole in his right trouser knee, a habit about which his sister had already scolded him acidly twice at breakfast.
‘Can’t thank you enough, Larkin,’ he said. He several times used the words ‘eternal gratitude’ in low muttered voice, as in prayer. He coughed, drank again, poked at the hole in his knee, and called Pop a stout feller. He knew the committee would be eternally grateful. ‘Never be able to thank you.’
Out of politeness he rose to go. Before he was on his feet Pop was insisting on another snifter and Ma, hearing the tinkle of ice in glasses, called from the kitchen:
‘What about one for the old cook in here? What’s she done today?’
The Brigadier, under indeterminate protest, had a second whisky-and-soda. Pop had a change of mind and had a whisky-and-soda too. Ma ordered beer because she was parched from cooking and came to the sitting-room door to drink it from a big glass that spilled foam down her hands.
‘Bung-ho,’ she said to the Brigadier. ‘How’s your sister today?’
‘Gone to see an aunt,’ the Brigadier said. Now that Ma had opened the kitchen door the smell of browning goose-flesh was attacking him in even more frontal, more excruciating waves. ‘Over in Hampshire. Day’s march away.’
‘Sunday dinner all on your lonesome?’ Ma said.
‘Not quite that bad.’ Torturing waves of sage-sharp fragrance from the roasting geese made him suddenly feel More heady than even the whisky-and-soda had done on his empty stomach. ‘I shall waffle down to the pub and grab a bite of cold.’
‘Cold on Sundays?’ Ma was deeply shocked. ‘You wouldn’t catch Pop having cold on Sundays. Why don’t you stay here and eat with us?’
‘No, no, really no. No, thanks all the same, really –’
‘Encore,’ Pop said. ‘More the merrier. Perfick.’
‘Bless my soul, with all your brood –’
‘Of course,’ Ma said. ‘Cold, my foot.’
‘Ma,’ Pop said, ‘pity you didn’t put that leg o’ pork in after all.’ Ma had calculated that, within reason, three nine-pound geese ought to be enough. ‘Too late now I suppose?’
He seemed quite disappointed as Ma said, ‘Not unless you want to eat about five o’clock,’ and went away kitchenwards. She hated having to skimp on joints and things; it made it hard work for the carver.
From the kitchen Ma called a minute later:
‘Come here a minute, Pop, I want you. Lift the geese out of the oven for me, will you? I want to baste them.’
Pop went into the kitchen, realizing as soon as he went through the door that the call was after all merely a ruse to get him away from the Brigadier. Ma was standing by the window, arms folded like huge white vegetable marrows across her bolstered bosom, looking towards the walnut tree.
‘Take a look at that,’ she said.
Under the tree, at the dinner table, cloth and cutlery ha
ving been laid, Mariette and Mr Charlton were coolly sitting some distance apart from each other, absorbed in the Sunday papers.
Ma made noises of puzzled disgust, which Pop echoed.
‘What’s wrong with ’em?’
‘Wrong? Don’t he know his technique?’ Ma said.
‘Very like do better on the boat this afternoon,’ Pop said. ‘There’s some very good quiet places up the river.’
Ma, as if she could not bear the sight any longer, turned away to stir the apple sauce with a wooden spoon as it simmered away in a new bright aluminium pan. After looking at it critically she decided it needed a touch of something and dropped into the steaming olive-yellow purée a lump of butter as big as a tennis ball.
‘Brigadier looks seedy, I think, don’t you?’ she said. Pop agreed. He felt immensely sorry for the Brigadier. ‘Trouble with these people they never get enough to eat. Like Mr Charlton. Half-starved.’
Pop agreed with that too. ‘Cold at the pub Sundays,’ he said, as if this was the depths of deplorable gastronomic misery. ‘Can you beat it?’
Ma said she could. ‘Because if I know anything about it he wasn’t going near the pub. He was going home to a Marmite sandwich and a glass o’ milk. Perhaps even water.’
A moment later she turned to reach from a cupboard a new tin of salt and Pop, watching her upstretched figure as it revealed portions of enormous calves, suddenly felt a startling twinge of excitement in his veins. He immediately grasped Ma by the bosom and started squeezing her. Ma pretended to protest, giggling at the same time, but Pop continued to fondle her with immense, experienced enthusiasm, until finally she turned, yielded the great continent of her body to him and let him kiss her full on her soft big mouth.
Pop prolonged this delicious experience as long as he had breath. He always felt more passionate in the kitchen. He supposed it was the smell of food. Ma sometimes told him it was a wonder he ever got any meals at all and that he ought to know, at his age, which he wanted most, meals or her. ‘Both,’ he always said. ‘Often.’
This morning, against the shining white stove, the glistening aluminium pans and the background of sunlight on the young coppery green leaves of the walnut tree, he thought she looked absolutely lovely. She was his dream.