When the Green Woods Laugh

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Drink that in!’ he said. ‘Take a swig at that!’

  Mrs Jerebohm, in half-ecstatic rumination, found herself positively gulping at two acres of thistles, willow-herb and docks among which numbers of black conical cypresses and a half-derelict pergola of roses stuck up in the air like a sad fleet wrecked and abandoned. Beyond them a line of turkey oaks, black too in the blistering perpendicular light of full afternoon, cut off completely whatever view was lurking behind.

  ‘In winter,’ Pop started to say with a new, more vibrant lyricism, ‘in winter, when the leaves are down, and the light’s right, and it’s a clear day, in winter, Mrs Jerebohm, you can stand here and see the sea.’

  In a rush of disbelief, lyrical too, Mrs Jerebohm seven times repeated the words in heavy lisps.

  ‘The sea?-the sea? No? Really? The sea?’ she said ‘You mean we can really see the sea?’

  ‘Smoke of ships in the channel,’ Pop said impassively, ‘coming from all over the world.’

  ‘Oh! Sunbeam,’ Mrs Jerebohm said, lisping, ‘you hear that? You can actually see ships out there. Ships!’

  Mr Jerebohm, impressed though still wary, had no time to make any sort of comment before Pop struck him a resounding but friendly blow in the middle of the back. Mr Jerebohm recoiled uneasily but Pop, totally unaffected, merely told him:

  ‘This is the place where you got to use your loaf, old man. Get your imagination to work. Have a deck down there.’

  As Pop waved a careless hand in a quick flexible curve in the direction of the impossible thistles Mr Jerebohm had ducked, as if confident of another approaching blow, but Pop merely urged him, taking a great deep breath:

  ‘Imagine roses down there. Imagine acres of roses, A couple o’ thousand roses.’

  Without another word he suddenly flung open a casement in the church-like window, again drawing a long deep breath.

  ‘What price that air, eh? Take a sniff at that. Like medicine. Old man, that’s pure concentrated iodine.’

  ‘Iodine?’ Mr Jerebohm, incredulous, snapped sharp bloater-like lips. ‘Iodine? What on earth’s iodine got to do with it?’

  With stiff wariness Mr Jerebohm waited for an answer determined not to be caught by any cock-and-bull nonsense of that sort.

  ‘Air here’s stiff with it,’ Pop said. ‘Saturated. Due to being practically surrounded by sea.’

  To the speechless astonishment of both Mr Jerebohm and Pinkie he proceeded to toss off careless scraps of topography.

  ‘Got to remember this country is almost an island. Didn’t know that? Fact. Two-thirds of its boundaries are water. It’s an island on an island. Understand me?’

  Before Mr Jerebohm could begin to say whether he understood him or not Pop thundered out:

  ‘Nobody hardly ever dies here. People live for ever, same as tortoises. Everything grows ’ell for leather. Cherries, strawberries, hops, apples, pears, corn, sheep. Everything! Not called the Garden of England for nothing, this place. Not called the Garden of England for nothing, old man.’

  Suddenly, after Pop had closed the casement with a gesture almost dramatically regretful, Mrs Jerebohm felt quite overpowered, in a faint sort of way, by the projected grandeur of seascape, roses, iodine, and heights, and asked diffidently if perhaps she could see the kitchens?

  ‘Certainly!’ Promptly Pop started to lead the way downstairs, freely admitting as he did so that the kitchens were perhaps a bit on the large side, though of course that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing these days. It gave you a lot more room to put telly in for the maids.

  That, Mrs Jerebohm said, reminded her of something. Help. What about help? Could help be got? In London that, of course, was the great problem. Would she be able to get help in the country?

  ‘Sacks of it,’ Pop said. ‘Bags.’ If his conscience pricked him slightly as he recalled the constant eager race of village women to get to the rich pastures of strawberry fields, cherry orchards, and hop gardens and all the rest, when families cleaned up sixty or seventy pounds a week, tax free, he momentarily appeased it by reminding himself that, after all, business was business. A fib or two was legitimate. You had to allow for a fib or two here and there. ‘All the help you want. Only a question of paying on the right scale and giving ’em plenty o’ telly.’

  Lispingly Mrs Jerebohm confessed that she was relieved to hear it. The question had been bothering her. It was the thing on which everything depended.

  ‘Quite,’ Pop said blandly. ‘Quite.’

  A moment later he opened the door to the kitchens. A vast funereal dungeon opened up, half-dark, its windows overgrown with rampant elderberry trees. The air was drugged with mould.

  ‘Something would have to be done with this,’ Mr Jerebohm said. ‘Not much iodine here.’

  Pop, severely ignoring the sarcasm about iodine, freely admitted once again that it was all a bit on the large side but anyway you could always put in a ping-pong table for the maids. Help ’em to keep their figures down. He laughed resoundingly. They got fat and lazy quick enough as it was.

  Mr Jerebohm, in turn ignoring the joke, started to retreat with relief from the dankness of the kitchen dungeons, saying:

  ‘You’re quite sure about the help? What about chaps for the garden and that sort of thing?’

  ‘Oceans of ’em,’ Pop said. ‘No trouble at all.’

  His conscience, pricking him slightly a second time, forced him to mink of farm labourers who ran about in cars or mounted on splendid, glistening, highly expensive motorbikes and of how his friend the Brigadier couldn’t get a boy to clean his shoes, and he wondered, not for the first time, what Ma would say. Ma was strict about the truth. Still, you’d got to allow a fib or two here and there.

  ‘Well, I hope you’re right.’ Mr Jerebohm told himself he wasn’t sold yet. Much experience with house-agents, the liars, cheats, and swindlers, had left him sceptical, cautious, and, as he liked to tell himself, sharp as a fox. ‘It’s of paramount importance.’

  Pop, recoiling slightly from the word paramount as if it meant something shifty, said:

  ‘Well, now, what else?’ He too was relieved to escape from the kitchens’ dank elder-mould darknesses and he was bound to admit they ponged a bit. ‘What about a look at the outside?’

  He searched the air for a breath of Mrs Jerebohm’s light and exquisite perfume and, as he caught it, made her smile with perceptible pleasure by saying:

  ‘That scent of Mrs Jerebohm’s reminds me of Ma’s garden. She grows verbena there.’

  ‘You see, we’d plan to do a fair amount of entertaining,’ Mr Jerebohm said. ‘That’s why I spoke about the chaps. Shooting parties and that sort of thing. Lot of people at weekends.’

  ‘Beautiful shooting country,’ Pop said. ‘Marvellous. Bags of cover. What about a look at the lake now?’

  Mr Jerebohm said yes, he was ready to have a look at the lake if Pinkie was.

  ‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’d like to wander round the house again.’

  As she started to go upstairs Pop, in the moment before departing, called up after her:

  ‘If you change your mind it’s straight down from the front of the house. You’ll see the path. There’s a white gate at the bottom.’

  As he skirted the seed-smoking thistle forest with Mr Jerebohm Pop put to him what he thought to be an important question:

  ‘What business you in?’

  ‘Stock Exchange.’

  ‘Plenty o’ work?’

  ‘Mustn’t grumble.’

  ‘Hot weather affected you at all?’ Pop said. ‘It’s caned a lot of people.’

  ‘Not really.’ Mr Jerebohm couldn’t help smiling behind his hand. Really the yokels were pretty simple. And when you thought of it how could they be otherwise?

  ‘There’s the lake for you,’ Pop said. ‘Beautiful water-lilies, eh? Always remind me of fried eggs floating about on plates.’ The lake, low after months of drought, stretched glassy in the sun. On banks of grey cracked mud flies buzzed in
thick black-blue swarms. An odd invisible moorhen or two croaked among fringes of cane-dry reeds and out on the central depths great spreads of water-lilies shone motionless in the sun.

  Pop picked up a stone, aimed it at a distant clump of reeds and threw it. It might have been a signal. A line of wild duck got up, circled, and headed for the centre of the lake, crying brokenly as they flew.

  ‘Thought so,’ Pop said. ‘Whole place is lousy with ’em.’

  Pheasants? Mr Jerebohm supposed.

  ‘Wild duck.’ Dammit, these Londoners were pretty simple when you came to think of it. ‘Like wild duck? Ma does ’em with orange sauce. Puts a glass o’ red wine in too. I love ’em. Shot so many last winter though I got a bit sick of ’em by the end.’

  For a painful moment or two Mr Jerebohm’s sharply watering mouth told him he would never, never get tired of wild duck. He longed suddenly and passionately for wild duck with red wine and orange sauce, tired as he was of living on Yoghurt, toast fingers, consommé, and undressed salads in order to help Pinkie keep her weight down.

  ‘And all this goes with the house? The lake and everything?’ he said. ‘What’s beyond?’

  ‘Parkland. See the big cedar?’

  Mr Jerebohm stared at a tall dark object on the skyline and might as well have been looking at a factory chimney. ‘Starts there. Quite a few deer in it still. Used to be a pretty big herd. Like venison?’

  God! Mr Jerebohm thought. Venison?

  ‘Ma always does it in a big slow double pan in plenty of butter,’ Pop said. ‘Nothing else, just fresh butter. We always have red currant jelly with it. The meat fair falls apart. Perfick. I tell you, old man, perfick.’

  Mr Jerebohm, who had lunched exceptionally early, in unison with Pinkie, on thin slices of lean ham, butterless rye biscuits and China tea, thought ‘God!’ again in agony, feeling his stomach perform involuntary sickening acrobatics of hunger. There was something not fair about talk of food sometimes.

  ‘Not sure how the trout are holding up,’ Pop said. He’d got to be fair about the trout. No use over-praising the trout. To be perfickly fair the herons fetched them almost as fast as you restocked and you never really knew how they were. ‘Caught sight of two or three fat ones though last time I came down. Still, it’s cheap to re-stock if you wanted to.’

  Mr Jerebohm, staring hard at the lake as if in hope of seeing a fish rise, resisted with great difficulty a powerful and insidious temptation to ask how Ma dealt with trout.

  ‘Same with pheasants,’ Pop said. ‘You’d have to start thinking of re-stocking soon if you wanted to shoot this autumn.’

  ‘I thought you said the place was stiff with them?’

  ‘Old birds,’ Pop said with swiftness, unperturbed. ‘Pretty wild too. You want a couple o’ hundred young ’uns. It’s not too late. They’re well advanced this summer. Hot wevver.’

  Mr Jerebohm, deeply tormented again by agonies of hunger, suddenly abandoned all thought of foxiness and dizzily saw himself as the proud master of all he surveyed. The whole scene was simply splendid. This, he thought, was it. Lake, trout, pheasants, park, deer, wild duck, venison–God, he thought, this must be it.

  Rapture left him abruptly a moment later, leaving him rational again.

  ‘What, by the way, are you asking?’

  ‘Going to farm?’ Pop said.

  The question, short and simple though it was, was an astute one. If Mr Jerebohm was going to farm he naturally wanted to lose money. Pop knew most of the dodges and this was the popular one. You made it in the city and lost it on the land. The countryside had never been so full of ragged-trousered brokers–what he called the Piccadilly farmers–pouring their money down the furrows.

  ‘Roughly the idea,’ Mr Jerebohm said. ‘Pleasure too of course. Mrs J. is mad keen to have a nice rural domain.’

  ‘I’ve been asking nineteen thousand.’

  That ought to dove-tail it all right, Pop thought. Mr Jerebohm, though speechless, didn’t flinch. A few thistle seeds, borne on the lightest of winds, floated angel-wise down the bank of the lake, here and there settling on reeds and water. Mr Jerebohm watched them with eyes that might have been idle but were sharp enough to see a fish rise in a startled circle, a moment later, far out among the water-lilies.

  ‘Big ’un there,’ Pop said. ‘Ever have ’em blue? The trout I mean. We had ’em in France once and Ma got the recipe. You want plenty o’ brown butter. You get ’em fair swimming in brown butter and then they’re perfick.’

  Mr Jerebohm disgorged a low, hungry sigh. He felt he couldn’t bear much more of the poetry of eating and wished to God Pinkie would come and help him out a bit. In vain he looked back in the direction of the house and then said, snapping:

  ‘I’ll give you twelve.’ Sentimentality was out. Absolutely out. You had to be firm from the beginning. The class was there all right but you had to be firm.

  Pop laughed in a certain dry, easy fashion.

  ‘I think it’s about time I went home,’ he said. ‘Ma’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’

  ‘Oh? It’s a perfectly good offer in my view.’

  Pop laughed again, this time more loudly.

  ‘Well, maybe in your view, old man,’ he said, ‘but that ain’t mine, is it?’

  Again Mr Jerebohm wished to God Pinkie would come to help him out a bit. There were times when he needed Pinkie.

  ‘To be perfectly honest I really ought to consult my wife about it first and then let you know,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be precipitate.’

  ‘Should think not an’ all,’ Pop said, at the same time wondering what the hell precipitate meant. It sounded like something catching.

  ‘Shall we start to walk back?’ Mr Jerebohm said. The afternoon was really shatteringly hot. Sweat was pouring off him in uncomfortable streams. Where on earth was Pinkie? ‘I could give you word by Monday.’

  Monday, Pop said, might be too late. The chap from Birmingham was coming down again to look at the window and another chap was after the panelling. You didn’t see linen-fold like that every day It was worth all of fifteen hundred if it was worth a bob and once these demolition rats got to work you wouldn’t see the place for dust.

  The expression ‘demolition rats’ disturbed Mr Jerebohm to the core. It was even worse than venison with red currant jelly and wild duck with orange sauce. God Almighty, where on earth was Pinkie? As he followed Pop up the path he again looked towards the house in vain.

  With inexpressible relief he heard Pop say, less than a minute later:

  ‘Ain’t that your missus standing up there under the trees?’ Pop paused to point to a grassy knoll, a hundred yards away, crowned by a ring of big sweet chestnuts. ‘Waving her hand.’

  ‘Waving both hands!’

  It was clear, Mr Jerebohm thought, that Pinkie was in a state of some excitement: unless, as was possible, she was trying out some new slimming exercise. Both arms were waving madly above her head, the hands waggling like spiders.

  ‘Sunbeam!’ she started to call. ‘Sunbeam!’

  The excited lisping call dragged Mr Jerebohm up the slope of parched grass to the knoll as if he had been attached to Pinkie by a rope. He felt unutterably glad to see her and wondered, twice and aloud, what it could be that so excited her?

  ‘Probably came across some buried treasure,’ Pop said. ‘They say Cromwell was here. One of his prisoners escaped from a window in the house –’

  Mr Jerebohm, utterly uninterested in Cromwell, half ran forward to meet Pinkie, who lisped liltingly in return:

  ‘Come and see what I’ve found. You wouldn’t guess in a thousand years.’

  Pop started to follow Mr Jerebohm and his wife through the chestnut trees. Masses of prematurely fallen blossom, in dry pollened tassels, had fallen from the trees and clouds of pungent yellow dust were raised as Mr and Mrs Jerebohm ran.

  ‘There! I discovered it. I just absolutely ran across it. I wasn’t thinking of a thing and suddenly it sort of conjured itself ou
t of nowhere. It just sort of dove-tailed –’

  A kind of pepper box, in white stone, with a domed roof and a marble seat inside, sat with forlorn elegance among the chestnut trees. Black piles of decaying faggots were propped against one side.

  ‘It’s a summer house, isn’t it? The sort they built in the eighteenth century?’ Pinkie said. ‘Didn’t they call them follies?’

  Folly or not, Pop thought, the chap who built this thing was on my side.

  ‘And the view. You must look at the view.’

  Turning, Pop had to admit that the view was pretty stunning. It was better than perfick. The lake, sown with water-lilies and framed with long fingers of reed, could now be seen entire, with park and cedars spread out in a mature, calm background. It needed only a herd of deer to run lightly across the cloudless blue horizon to set the last romantic seal on it and send Mrs Jerebohm finally and sedately mad.

  ‘Come and sit inside a minute,’ Pinkie said to Mr Jerebohm. ‘You’ll get the full flavour then.’

  Though the shady marble struck with ice-cold shock on Mr Jerebohm’s seat Pinkie might have been cased in armour for all she noticed the chill on hers.

  ‘Sunbeam, we’ve absolutely got to have it. What is he asking?’

  ‘Nineteen thousand.’

  ‘Is it an awful, awful lot?’

  ‘I offered him twelve.’

  ‘Would he split do you suppose?’

  ‘I expect so. I could have a stab.’

  Mr Jerebohm knew, in his heart, that whether he had a stab or not it really didn’t matter. The folly had finally achieved what roses, panelling, iodine, and seascape had failed to do. Whatever doubt remained after trout, venison, duck, and pheasant had done their all-tormenting work had gone for ever.

  ‘Try him with fifteen,’ Pinkie said. ‘We’ve got to get it laced up somehow. I couldn’t bear –’

  A sudden dread of colic made Mr Jerebohm rise quickly from the marble seat, his rump half-frozen. It was a positive relief to get out into the hot, stifling air.

  ‘Well, Larkin, my wife and I have talked it over. I’ll give you fifteen.’