The Darling Buds of May

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Wait till the cocktail party,’ he said.

  *

  It was almost half past ten before Miss Pilchester fell bodily out of the taxi she had hired in desperation, four hours late, to bring her to the meadow. Pop, who was helping the Brigadier to string up gay lines of square and triangular flags about and among the tents, stared in stupefaction at a figure that might have been that of a tired and collapsing mountaineer descending from a peak. Miss Pilchester was armed with shooting stick, rolled mackintosh, a leather hold-all containing a spare cardigan, her lunch and a red vacuum flask, an attaché case containing the judging lists, The Times; several books, and a basket of pot-eggs. The pot-eggs, evidently brought for use in some pony event or other, rolled about the squatting Miss Pilchester exactly as if, in a sudden over-spasm of broodiness, she had laid them all herself.

  It was all absolutely ghastly, but both Pop and the Brigadier were too stupefied to go over and pick up either Miss Pilchester or the eggs; and Pop, for once, was utterly without words. It was the Brigadier who spoke for him.

  ‘Good God, Larkin,’ he said, ‘Edith must be either tight or egg-bound.’

  Five minutes later Miss Pilchester, the great organizer, was at her work. This was all done, as the Brigadier himself pointed out, at a half canter. With indecisive excitement Miss Pilchester rushed from tent to tent, inquiring if someone had seen this, somebody that, had the caterers arrived, and above all wasn’t it ghastly?

  The caterers had been on the field since seven o’clock; all of them had knocked off for tea. Where, then, was the loudspeaker for announcements? Hadn’t that arrived? It had arrived and Miss Pilchester tripped over two lines of its wires. Cancelled entries – were there any cancelled entries? – all entries, she wailed, should have been cancelled by nine o’clock.

  It was now, the Brigadier was heard to point out dryly, half-past ten.

  Where then, Miss Pilchester wanted to know, were the donkeys? Were the donkeys here?

  ‘Some donkeys,’ the Brigadier was heard to remark, ‘have been here all night,’ but the remark was lost on Miss Pilchester, who rushed away to inquire if the ladies’ conveniences had been installed. ‘They are most important,’ she said and disappeared into a far tent as if feeling it suddenly necessary to prove it for herself.

  At half-past eleven the sun broke through, beginning to dry at last the heavy dew on the grass, the trees of the bluebell wood, and the hedgerows. From the completely windless cloves the last transparent breaths of mist began to rise. A few water-lilies were in bud, heads rising above wet leaves, and they looked like pipes, gently smoking.

  It was then discovered that Miss Pilchester had completely forgotten to meet a London train, as she had faithfully promised, at ten forty-five. The train was bringing a judge who had, in counties west of London, a great reputation for judging such things as The Horse of the Year Show. The committee had specially asked for him.

  Now Ma came hurrying from the house to say she’d had a bulldog on the phone. ‘And did he bark. And oh! the language.’

  ‘Why the ’ell couldn’t he come by car?’ Pop said.

  ‘Said he flipping well couldn’t afford one under this fliping government.’

  ‘We must do something!’ Miss Pilchester said. ‘It’s absolutely ghastly!’

  ‘Mariette and Mr Charlton can fetch him in the stationwagon,’ Pop said. ‘They’ve got to collect more champagne anyway. Ma don’t think we’ve got enough.’

  ‘Champagne? What champagne? Who ordered champagne?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Not for this show?’

  ‘Cocktail party,’ Pop said. ‘Me and Ma. Instead of the fireworks tonight. You got your invite, didn’t you? Mariette and Mr Charlton sent all the invites out.’

  The word fireworks dragged Miss Pilchester back to Pop’s side like a struggling dog on a lead.

  ‘Now you will promise, won’t you, no fireworks?’

  ‘No fireworks,’ Pop said.

  Miss Pilchester, remembering Pop’s delicate investigation of her knee in the Rolls, the velvety battering ram of the kiss that, as Ma had predicted, had made her sleep so much more sweetly, now permitted herself the luxury of a half-smile, the first of her hurried day.

  ‘I know you. Sometimes you’re more than naughty.’

  Sun twinkled on Pop’s eyes, lighting up the pupils in a face that otherwise remained as dead as a dummy.

  ‘Not today though,’ Pop said. ‘Got to behave today.’

  ‘And promise no fireworks?’

  ‘No fireworks.’

  ‘Not one?’

  ‘Not one,’ Pop said and fixed his eyes on the hem of her skirt as she rushed away to attend once again to the matter of the ladies’ conveniences, which were not quite what she had hoped they would be. It was a matter of some delicacy.

  As she disappeared Pop reminded the Brigadier of how he had said Miss Pilchester was a splendid organizer and all that.

  The Brigadier was more than kind: ‘Well, in her own sweet way I suppose she is. Fact is, I suppose, she’s the only one who can spare the time. Nobody else has the time.’

  That was it. Nobody had the time. In the crushing, rushing pressure of modern life nobody, even in the country, had the time.

  A few moments later the Brigadier glanced hurriedly at his watch, saw it was after twelve o’clock and said he must rush back for a bite of cold. Pop begged him to come to the beer tent for a quick snifter before he went but the Brigadier was firm. Nellie would be waiting. He was going to be adamant this time.

  Pop, watching him depart with bemused admiration, remembered that word. The Brigadier had one shoelace missing and had replaced it with packing string. His hair badly needed cutting at the back, and his shirt collar was, if anything, more frayed than before. But the word adamant shone from him to remind Pop once again of all those wonderful fellers who could use these startling words. He envied them very much.

  Going to the beer tent he found that the bulldog of a judge had arrived and was drinking with two members of the committee, Jack Woodley and Freda O’Connor. The judge was a squat ebullient man in a bowler hat. With Woodley, a ruddy, crude, thick-lipped man who was wearing a yellow waistcoat under his hacking jacket, he kept up a constant braying duet, swaying backwards and forwards, waving a pint mug of beer. Woodley was evidently telling smoke-room stories, at the same time gazing with rough interest at the notorious O’Connor bosom, which protruded by several white marble inches above a low yellow sweater. The coarser the stories the more the O’Connor bosom seemed to like them. Like a pair of bellows, its splendid heaving mass pumped air into the hearty organ of her voice, setting the air about her ringing.

  All three ignored Pop and he knew why. He and Ma hadn’t invited them to the cocktail party. Not caring, he said in a loud voice, ‘How’s everybody? Fit as fleas?’ as he went past them. Nobody answered, but Pop didn’t care. He believed in treating everybody alike, fleas or no fleas.

  Glass of beer in hand, he found a companion some moments later in Sir George Bluff-Gore, who owned a large red-brick Georgian mansion that was too expensive to keep up. He and his wife somehow pigged it out in a keeper’s cottage instead. Bluff-Gore, yellowish, funereal, stiff, and despondent, had the face of a pall bearer cramped by indigestion. He was not the sort of man you could slap on the back to wish him well.

  Nevertheless Pop did so.

  Bluff-Gore, recoiling with dejection, managed to say that it was nice of Larkin to invite him and Lady Rose to this cocktail party. They didn’t get out much.

  ‘More the merrier,’ Pop said and then remembered that the Bluff-Gores had a daughter – Rosemary, he thought her name was – a big puddeny girl with sour eyes and a blonde fringe, whom he had sometimes seen riding at meetings or pony gymkhanas with Mariette. He wondered where she was; he hadn’t seen her lately.

  ‘Hope the daughter’s coming too?’ he said. ‘Welcome.’

  ‘Rosemary? Afraid not. Lives in London now.’

&n
bsp; ‘Oh?’ Pop said. ‘Doing what? Working?’

  With increasing gloom Bluff-Gore gazed at the grass of the beer tent and thought of his only daughter, who had suddenly decided for some utterly unaccountable reason to give up a perfectly sound, happy, normal home to go and paint in Chelsea. It had practically broken her mother’s heart; it was utterly unaccountable.

  ‘Gone over to art,’ he said.

  It was as if he spoke of some old despicable enemy and Pop could only say he hoped it would turn out well.

  Drinking again, deciding that art could only be some man or other that Rosemary had run off with, he suddenly switched the subject, charging the unready Bluff-Gore with a startling question.

  ‘When are you going to sell Bluff Court, Sir George?’

  Bluff-Gore looked white. For some moments he could find no suitable words with which to tell Pop that he had no intention of selling his house, Bluff Court, even though it was far too large to live in. Bluff Court had sixty rooms, an entire hamlet of barns, dairies, and stables, half a mile of greenhouses and potting sheds and an orangery where, for fifty years, no oranges had grown. You needed a hundred tons of coal to heat it every winter and eighteen gardeners to keep the place tidy and productive in summer. You needed to keep twenty servants to wait on you and another twenty to wait on them. It was dog eat dog. You couldn’t get the servants anyway and you couldn’t have afforded to pay them if you could.

  But to give it up, to sell it, even though you hadn’t a bean, was unthinkable. It was a monstrous idea; it simply couldn’t be entertained. Among its miles of neglected beeches, elms, and oaks, Bluff Court must and would stand where it did. It might be that one day it would be possible to let it to one of those stockbroker chaps who played at farming, made colossal losses but in the end came out on the right side because they got it out of taxes. Everybody was doing it and it was all perfectly legitimate, they said. It just showed, of course, what the country was coming to. It was grim. No wonder everybody you met was worried stiff. The country was committing suicide. ‘What makes you think I have any intention of selling Bluff Court?’

  ‘Well, you don’t live in the damn thing,’ Pop said, straight as a bird, ‘do you? And never will do if you ask me.’

  Bluff-Gore indicated with funereal acidity that he was, in fact, not asking him.

  ‘Damn silly,’ Pop said. He started to say that it was like having a car you never rode in and then decided on a more illuminating, more contemporary metaphor and said: ‘Like having a television set you never look at.’

  The illustration was, however, lost on Sir George, who had no television set.

  ‘There are certain aspects other than material,’ he said, ‘that have to be borne in mind.’

  Pop said he couldn’t think for the life of him what they were, and Bluff-Gore looked at the perky, side-lined face with tolerant irony and an oysterish half-smile.

  ‘You were not thinking of buying the place, by any chance, were you?’

  ‘Course I was.’ The gentry were, Pop thought, really halfdopes sometimes. ‘What d’ye think I asked you for?’

  The oysterish smile widened a little, still ironically tolerant, for the next question.

  ‘And what would you do with it, may I ask?’

  ‘Pull the flippin’ thing down.’ Pop gave one of his piercing, jolly shouts of laughter. ‘What else d’ye think?’

  ‘Good God.’

  By now Bluff-Gore was whiter than ever. The eyes themselves had become oysters, opaque, sightless jellies, wet with shock, even with a glint of tears.

  ‘Lot o’ good scrap there,’ Pop said. ‘Make you a good offer.’

  Bluff-Gore found himself quite incapable of speaking; he could only stare emptily and with increasing dejection at the grass of the beer tent, as if mourning for some dear, unspoken departed.

  ‘Cash,’ Pop said. ‘Ready as Freddy – why don’t you think it over?’

  Laughing again, he made a final expansive swing of his beer mug, drawing froth, and left the speechless, sightless Bluff-Gore standing dismally alone.

  Outside, in the meadow now gay with strung flags of yellow, scarlet, blue, and emerald, the tents and the marquees standing about the new green grass like white haystacks, Pop found the sun now shining brilliantly. Over by the river, well away from the ring, Mariette was having a practice canter. She had changed already into her yellow shirt and jodhpurs and her bare head was like a curly black kitten against the far blue sky. Mr Charlton was in attendance and suddenly Pop remembered the little matter of the baby. He supposed she wouldn’t have to ride much longer and he wondered mildly if Mr Charlton knew. He’d forgotten about that.

  Suddenly, from far across the meadow, he heard a rousing, familiar sound. It was Ma beating with a wooden spoon on a big jam-saucepan.

  It was time to eat. It was hot in the midday sun and there was a scent of bruised grass in in the air.

  ‘Perfick,’ Pop thought. ‘Going to be a stinger. Going to be wonderful afternoon.’

  *

  All afternoon Mr Charlton watched Mariette taking part in the riding and jumping events she had chosen. Once again, as she took her pony faultlessly through the walk, trot, canter, and run; he could hardly believe in that astral delicious figure, yellow, fawn, and black on its bay pony. Impossible almost to believe that it was the girl who had undressed him on the billiard table, scratched the eyes out of Pauline Jackson, and worked with him in the strawberry field. Once again she looked so perfectly aristocratic that she might have been the niece of Lady Planson-Forbes and he had never been so happy in his life as he watched her.

  Ma was happy too. Who wouldn’t be? All the children were properly dressed for the occasion, wearing riding habits, jodhpurs, and proper riding caps, even though only Mariette and Montgomery were going to ride. Each of them went about sucking enormous pink-and-yellow ice-creams; and the twins, who took so much after Ma, had large crackling bags of popcorn and potato crisps.

  Nor were there any flies on Ma. She was wearing a silk costume in very pale turquoise, with slightly darker perpendicular stripes. She had chosen a rather large dark-blue straw hat that shaded her face nicely and, as the milliner had predicted, ‘helped to balance her up a bit’. Her shoes were also blue, almost the colour of her hat, and her hair had been permed into stiffish little waves. The only thing that really bothered her was her turquoise rings. They had started to cut into her fingers again. She would have to have them off.

  Beside her the Brigadier’s sister looked, as she always did, in her beige shantung and pink cloche hat, like a clothes peg with a thimble perched on top of it.

  ‘Not going in for this ’ere ladies’ donkey Derby, are you?’ Ma said. Her body quivered with resonant, jellying laughter.

  An invitation to strip down to the bare bosom could hardly have brought less response from the sister of the Brigadier.

  ‘I think Miss Pilchester’s going in,’ Ma said. ‘Anyway Pop’s trying to persuade her to.’

  The ladies’ donkey Derby was a late, inspired idea of Pop’s. He had managed to persuade the committee that they owed it to him in return for the field. He had also found a silver cup. He had once bought it at a sale, thinking it would be nice to stand on the sideboard. It was engraved with the details of an angling competition, but Pop didn’t think it mattered all that much.

  While Ma wandered about with the children and Mr Charlton watched the various events, listening with pride every time the loudspeakers spoke the name of Miss Mariette Larkin, Pop was spending some time behind the beer tent, trying to induce Miss Pilchester to ride in the donkey Derby.

  ‘I honestly couldn’t. It would be absolutely ghastly.’

  ‘I thought you liked a bit o’ fun?’

  ‘I think you are trying to be very naughty.’

  Irresistible though Miss Pilchester always found him, she could not help thinking that this afternoon, in the brilliant sun, Pop looked even more so. He was wearing a suit of small, smart brown-and-white checks
, an orange-brown tie, and a new brown Edwardian cap. Like Ma, he compared very favourably with other people: with, for instance, the Brigadier, who was wearing a snuff-coloured sports jacket patched at the elbows with brown leather, his washed-out University tie, and a pair of crumpled corduroys the colour of a moulting stoat.

  For the second or third time Pop urged Miss Pilchester to be a sport.

  ‘Just one more rider to make up the seven.’

  ‘Who else is riding? I have never even ridden a donkey in my life before.’

  ‘All girls of your age.’

  Miss Pilchester darted one of her rapid glances at Pop. The cast of suspicion died in her eye as she saw the brown new cap. How well it suited him.

  ‘What about that time I took you home in the Rolls?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Best kiss I’ve had for a long time.’

  ‘You make me feel shy!’ Miss Pilchester said.

  ‘Beauty,’ Pop said. ‘Haven’t been able to forget it.’

  Miss Pilchester hadn’t been able to forget it either; she had even wondered if it might ever be repeated.

  ‘I admit it was far from unpleasant, but what has it to do with the donkey Derby?’

  Pop started to caress the outer rim of Miss Pilchester’s thigh. With upsurgent alarm Miss Pilchester felt an investigating finger press a suspender button.

  ‘People will be looking!’

  ‘Coming to the cocktail party?’

  ‘I think so. Yes, I am.’

  ‘Repeat performance tonight at the cocktail party. Promise.’

  ‘I know those promises. They’re like pie-crust!’

  At four o’clock Miss Pilchester was ready to ride in the ladies’ donkey Derby.

  A quarter of an hour before that Montgomery and Mr Charlton had ridden in the men’s donkey Derby. Most of the donkeys, including Mr Charlton’s, had had to be started with carrots and the race had been won by a pale sagacious animal named Whiskey Johnny, who didn’t need any carrots. Mr Charlton had ridden three yards and then fallen off. His mount had instantly bolted, ending up in stirring style far beyond the tea tent, by the river, where already a few lovers, bored by the events and stimulated by a warm afternoon of entrancing golden air, were embracing in the long grasses by the bank, profitably dreaming out the day in a world of rising fish, wild irises, and expanding water-lily blooms.