The Darling Buds of May

by H. E. Bates

‘No,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘What would that be?’

  ‘Is your name Cedric? They all say your name’s Cedric out there.’

  The blush that ramped through Mr Charlton’s face and neck made every pore of his body break with sweat.

  ‘Oh! no,’ he said. ‘Goodness, no. Who told you that one?’

  ‘That’s what they all say. I said there was no such name.’

  She was laughing at him, he thought, in her drowsy, large-eyed way. He was sure of that. He fumbled about nervously with book, baskets, and papers and said:

  ‘Good Lord, no. Charley. That’s me.’

  She reached out a brown long-fingered hand and took a strawberry from a basket. She bit into it and then stood staring at the white-crimson juicy inner flesh.

  ‘Don’t you like strawberries?’ she said.

  ‘Ask the Larkins,’ he said. ‘Ask Mariette. They all call me Charley.’

  ‘Oh! her. She knows you, does she?’

  She put the rest of the strawberry in her mouth and pulled out the clean, white plug.

  ‘Last feller who was here did nothing but eat strawberries. Every time you came in here that feller was bolting strawberries.’

  Mr Charlton, confused again, murmured something about having no time. Having something else to do.

  ‘Such as what?’

  Mr Charlton didn’t know.

  She moved nearer the table to pick up another strawberry and then changed her mind and picked up Ma’s orange lollipop instead.

  ‘Don’t you like these either?’

  ‘Not frightfully –’

  ‘Don’t like anything, do you?’ She laughed, her voice drowsier than ever in her throat, the tongue drifting idly across her mouth. ‘Not much!’

  A moment later she started twisting the lollipop round and round in her brown fingers.

  ‘Suppose you’d think I was greedy if I asked you whether I could have it?’

  ‘Oh! no please,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘Take it if you want. By all means.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She laughed again, once more with that drowsy softness that made Mr Charlton feel dreadfully congested, sweating, and messy, sure that she was mocking him. ‘That’s the way to be nice to anybody. First time.’

  Unaware of it Mr Charlton said an extremely foolish thing:

  ‘Aren’t people always nice to you first time?’

  ‘Depends.’

  Mr Charlton, unaware of it again, said another foolish thing:

  ‘Depends on what?’

  She turned sideways, so that for the second time in his life Mr Charlton found himself confronted by an astral body of alarming shape, this time as firm and dark as ebony.

  ‘On whether I let them.’

  She had already started to peel the tissue paper from the orange lollipop when Mariette came in, carrying two baskets.

  ‘Oh! company,’ the girl said.

  Peeling the last of the tissue paper from the orange lollipop, she stared with flat cool eyes at Mariette. Mr Charlton thought Mariette’s eyes looked, in reply, like two infuriated black bees.

  ‘Well, I’ll push off,’ the girl said. ‘See you later, Charley.’ She tossed her hair from one side of her shoulders to another, at the same time giving Mr Charlton a glad, cool, backward look. ‘If not before.’

  She was hardly out of the tent before Mariette banged the two baskets on the table and shouted ‘Tart!’

  Mr Charlton was very much shaken.

  ‘Steady,’ he said. ‘She’ll hear –’

  ‘She’s meant to, the so-and-so, isn’t she?’

  ‘I really didn’t want the thing,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘I told her to take it –’

  ‘She’d take anything. She’d take the skin off your back – and a bit more if you let her!’

  He had never seen Mariette angry before. Her voice sounded raw.

  ‘She’s nothing but a –’ Mariette choked at some impossible word and then decided Mr Charlton wouldn’t understand it. ‘No, I won’t say it. It’s too good. I’ll bottle it in. She’s no virgin though!’ she shouted, ‘everybody knows that!’

  Mr Charlton, who was not accustomed to hear the word virgin bandied about very much, especially in public, was relieved to see two more women approaching the tent, but was disappointed a moment later to see that they were Poll and Lil. He had made up his mind to remonstrate as tactfully as possible with Poll about rubbing out and altering the figures in the book from two to three and thus twisting him. He was convinced that that was what had happened.

  But when he saw the two earringed women, one tall and scrawny as a scarecrow, the other brawny as a bare-armed fishwife, wife, both as brown as gipsies, he suddenly lost heart and said to Mariette:

  ‘Don’t go for a minute. Stay until these two have gone. I want to talk to you –’

  ‘I’ve got to cool off!’ Mariette said. ‘I’m going into the wood to cool off!’

  ‘Wait just a minute –’

  ‘I’ve got to cool off! That’s where I’ll be if you want me.’

  A moment later he was alone with Poll and Lil, who had been having a conference as to whether they could twist him a second time so soon or whether they should leave it for a while and do a double twist next time. Between them they knew a few good ones and they generally worked better, for some funny reason, in the afternoon.

  ‘Hullo, duckie,’ they said. ‘Here we are again.’

  *

  By the middle of the afternoon it was so hot that Mr Charlton got Montgomery and the twins to bring him a bucket of water drawn from a standpipe by the gate of the field. He drank a big draught or two of water and then plunged his head several times into the bucket and then dried his face on his handkerchief and combed his wet, cooled hair. After this he cleaned up his spectacles, polishing them on the driest piece of his shirt he could find, and went to stand at the door of the tent, slightly refreshed, to get a breath of air.

  The sun hit the crown of his head like a brass cymbal. He had never known it so hot in May. It seemed to affect his eyesight for a moment and when he looked across the strawberry field he was astonished to see a startling change there.

  Almost all the women had done what Poll and Lil had said they would do. They had stripped off their blouses and shirts in the heat and were working in nothing but bodices and brassieres. The effect was that the lines of coloured flags had now become like lines of white washing hung out in the blazing sun to dry.

  Mr Charlton went back into the tent and tried to satisfy his curiosity about what Pop called the strawberry lark by adding up how many pounds of strawberries had been in and out of the tent that day. He calculated, astonishingly, that he had checked in more than a ton. That meant, he reasoned, a pretty fair lump for the pickers.

  His trained mind wondered what the tax position about that was. He would have to ask Pop. He was sure Pop would know.

  He was still thinking of this when he looked up and saw Pauline Jackson standing in the door. She was not wearing a black sweater now. Like the rest of the women she had stripped down to her brassiere. She had very fine suntanned arms and shoulders but the lower part of her deep chest was as white as the inside of a young apple by comparison.

  It was this startling whiteness that made his heart start bouncing. She smiled. She came to the table and said in her lazy way:

  ‘Not much cooler, is it?’

  She put twenty-four pounds of strawberries on the table. He started to fumble with pencil and paper, his eyes downcast. She leaned forward as if to see what he was writing down and said:

  ‘How many does that make for me today? Eight dozen?’

  He started to say, ‘I’ve got an idea it’s more than that, Miss Jackson,’ determined to keep it as formal as possible, and then looked up to see, not ten or twelve inches from his face, most of her bared, white, perfectly sculptured bust, blazingly revealed, heaving deeply.

  Like Ma, Miss Jackson did not seem unduly perturbed.

  ‘Two more dozen,’ she said, ‘and I
think I’ll pack it up for the day.’

  ‘I see. Are you paid every day, Miss Jackson, or do you leave it till the weekend?’

  ‘What makes you keep calling me Miss Jackson?’

  He started to write in the book again when she said:

  ‘What time are you knocking off? Going back to Fordington? If you are I could give you a lift on my Vespa.’

  Where on earth did these people get the money from? Mr Charlton started thinking. He supposed –

  ‘What about it?’ she said.

  Too nervous to think clearly, Mr Charlton said:

  ‘I don’t know what time I’ll finish. I did want to go to Fordington to fetch some clothes from my room, but –’

  ‘Might go on and have a swim at the pool’, she said, ‘afterwards. How about that?’

  He said: ‘Well –’

  ‘I could wait.’ The sculptured breasts rose and fell heavily and came an inch or two nearer, their division so deep and the pure whiteness so sharp in the shade of the tent, against the darkbrown upper flesh of her shoulders, that Mr Charlton was utterly mesmerized. ‘No hurry for half an hour one way or the other. Just tell me when.’

  She swung her body away. He saw the splendid curves turn full circle in such a way that he was dizzy in the heat. She laughed and reached the door as he stuttered:

  ‘You know, I actually couldn’t say if – I mean, there’s nothing definite –’

  ‘Just say when,’ she said. ‘All you got to do is to tell me when.’

  She had hardly disappeared before Poll and Lil came in. They too had stripped down to the bust and Poll had an unlighted cigarette dangling from her lips. They had decided to work a new one on Mr Charlton.

  ‘Hullo, duckie,’ they said and Poll took the cigarette from her lips, broke it in half, and gave one half to Lil. ‘Last one, dear. Not unless Charley can help us out. Haven’t got a gasper, duckie, I suppose?’

  Mr Charlton, who smoked moderately at the best of times, had recently given it up altogether because he was scared of cancer.

  ‘Afraid not. Don’t smoke now –’

  ‘Came out without a bean this morning,’ Poll explained. Too early for the damn Post Office. Else we’d have got the kids’ allowances.’

  ‘How many baskets?’ Mr Charlton said.

  ‘Three dozen.’ Poll lit her cigarette and then gave Lil a light, both of them exhaling smoke in desperate relief. ‘Gawd, it’s hot out in that field. You want a drag every two minutes to keep you going at all. Don’t suppose you could lend us five bob so’s Lil can nip down to the shop on her bike, can you? Pay you back first thing tomorrow.’

  Mr Charlton wrote desperately in the book while the two bare-chested women watched him, though he did not know it, like two brown, hungry, calculating old dogs watching a bone. There probably wasn’t much meat on Mr Charlton; they’d better get it off while they could.

  ‘Five bob, duckie. Gawd, it’s hot out in that field. Two women fainted. Did you hear about that, duckie? Two women fainted.’

  ‘Work it orf as dead horse,’ Lil started to say.

  Touched, nervous, and swayed against his better judgement, Mr Charlton was just thinking of lending Poll and Lil the five bob to be worked off as dead horse when he heard, from the field, a sudden pandemonium of yelling and shrieking.

  He followed Poll and Lil to the door of the tent. Thirty yards from the tent a ring of semi-naked vultures were shrieking and flapping in the sun. ‘Somebody’s at it. Somebody’s catching a packet,’ Poll said and Mr Charlton caught a glimpse, somewhere in the vultured circle, of two bare-shouldered girls fighting each other, like wild white cats.

  Poll and Lil started running. Mr Charlton started running too. Then, after ten yards or so, he suddenly stopped as if his head had been caught by an invisible tripwire.

  One of the white cats was Pauline Jackson; the other was Mariette. Like cats too they were howling in the unrestricted animal voices that belong to dark rooftops. With alarm Mr Charlton saw streams of blood on the flesh of hands, faces, bare shoulders, and half-bare breasts, and then suddenly realized that this was really the scarlet juice of smashed strawberries that the girls were viciously rubbing into each other’s eyes and throat and hair. The fair horse-tail was like frayed red rope and the neat dark curls of Mariette that he cared for more and more every time he saw them were being torn from her face. Somewhere in the centre of it all the colossal bulk of Ma was shouting; but whether in encouragement, discouragement, or sheer delight he never knew.

  Half a minute later he heard the highest shrieking of all. It came from behind him. he turned sharply and saw The Little Twopenn’orth running from the shelter of the wood, waving her tiny arms in excitement. That high-pitched voice of hers was more like a train-whistle than ever.

  When she reached him she started bobbing wildly up and down, like a child too small to see over a fence, and Mr Charlton realized that she could not see any part of the cat-and-strawberry horror that by now had him completely spellbound.

  ‘Hold me up, mister!’ she shrieked. ‘I s’ll miss it!’

  He took her by the arms and the tiny body rose into the air like a spring.

  ‘Blimey, it’s good!’ she shrieked. ‘It’s good!’ By now she was actually sitting on Mr Charlton’s shoulder, her tiny short legs drumming continually on his chest and her fists in his hair. ‘That’ll take some getting out in the wash. Git stuck into her, Mariette! It’s good! It’s good! It’s good!’

  Mr Charlton didn’t think it was good. He was afraid Mariette would get seriously hurt and he felt a little sick at the thought of it. Suddenly he felt constrained to rush in and separate the two combatants, all scarlet now and weeping and half-naked, before they disfigured each other for ever; and he said:

  ‘I’ve got to stop them. I’ve got to make them stop it. Anyway, what on earth are they fighting for?’

  ‘Gawd Blimey, don’t you know, mister?’ The Little Two-penn’orth shrieked. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know!’

  Even when he was riding home that evening in the back of the truck Mr Charlton still could not really believe that he knew. The notion that two girls would fight for him still had him completely stunned.

  Everybody had been sternly briefed by Ma, before the truck arrived, not to say a word to Pop. ‘Might give her a good leatherin’ if he knew,’ Ma explained, ‘and it’s hot enough as it is.’

  Everybody agreed; they were all for Mariette. Mr Charlton was all for Mariette too; he felt himself grow continually more proud of her as the truck, driven at Pop’s customary jolting speed, rocked homewards through fragrant hedgerows of honeysuckle, the first wild pink roses and may. He kept smiling at her and watching her dark, pretty, red-stained hair. Somebody had lent her a green sweater to wear over her ripped bodice and you could hardly tell, now, that she had been in a fight at all.

  In a curious way it was Mr Charlton who felt he had been in a fight. A total lack of all feeling of uncertainty, together with an odd sensation of actual aggression, began to make him feel rather proud of himself too.

  ‘Well, how was the first day, Charley?’ Pop said. In the sitting room Pop had poured out a Dragon’s Blood for himself and one for Mr Charlton, who felt he really needed it. He was as hungry as a hunter too. ‘How was the first day? Everything go orf all right? Smooth an’ all that? No lumbago?’

  ‘No lumbago,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘Everything smooth as it could be.’

  ‘Perfick,’ Pop said.

  He drank Dragon’s Blood to the day’s perfection and called through to the kitchen to Ma:

  ‘How long’ll supper be, Ma? I’m turning over.’

  ‘About an hour yet. Roast beef’s only just gone in.’

  ‘How’d you get on today, Ma? Good picking?’

  ‘Earned fourteen pound ten,’ Ma said.

  ‘Hour yet,’ Pop said to Mr Charlton, ‘plenty o’ time for you to take Mariette for a stroll as far as the river. They’ll be cutting the grass in that medder tomorrow.’


  Mr Charlton agreed; he had his thoughts very much on the buttercup field.

  Just before going outside, however, he remembered that he had a question to ask of Pop. It was the one about tax on the strawberry lark.

  ‘An awful lot of money gets paid out to these people,’ he said. ‘Strawberries. Cherries. Hops and so on. Take for example all these Cockneys coming down for the hops. Strictly, in law, they ought to pay tax on that.’

  ‘Pay tax?’ Pop said. He spoke faintly.

  ‘I mean if the law is to be interpreted in the strict letter –’

  ‘Strick letter my aunt Fanny,’ Pop said. ‘Dammit if they was taxed they wouldn’t come. Then you wouldn’t have no strawberries, no cherries, no nothink. No beer!’

  The logic of this argument dashed the last of Mr Charlton’s reasoning and he went away to find Mariette, who was just coming downstairs, dressed now in the cool green shantung of which he had grown so very fond.

  As Mr Charlton and Mariette disappeared across the yard in the evening sun Ma’s only complaint, as she watched them from the kitchen window, was that she hadn’t got a pair of fieldglasses, so that she could watch ‘how that young man’s getting on with his technique. If he’s getting on at all.’

  Pop, after pouring two gills of gin into his second Dragon’s Blood in order to pep it up a bit, retired to watch television. It had been on for some considerable time, out of natural habit, though no one was watching it, and now there was a programme on the screen about life in central Africa, about wild animals, pygmies, and their strange, baffling customs.

  Pop sat back happily in the greenish unreal semi-darkness. He had had a very good day doing a big lark in scrap that showed six hundred per cent with not a very great deal of trouble. He would tell Ma all about it later. Meanwhile he was perfectly content to sit and sip his beer and watch the pygmies, all of whom hopped about the jungle and the village compounds with unconcern, without a stitch on, all the women bare-breasted. There was hardly a programme he liked better than those about strange hot countries, wild animals, and queer tribes, especially those who had never seen civilization.

  Out in the buttercup field Mariette and Mr Charlton were lying in the tall brilliant flowers and the even taller feathery grasses. Mariette, so dark and so pretty in her green shantung, was drawing Mr Charlton very gently to her and Mr Charlton was responding with a proud, searching look on his face so that Ma, if she could have been watching him at that moment through binoculars, would have seen that he had gone some way, in certain directions, towards improving his technique.