When the Green Woods Laugh

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Couldn’t do it,’ Pop said, speaking with great blandness. ‘The demolition rats would give me more than that.’

  Mrs Jerebohm recoiled from the expression ‘demolition rats’ as Mr Jerebohm himself had done down by the lakeside. It was an expression so nauseating that she actually had a vision of real rats, live and repulsive, gnawing away the stone and marble of her beloved folly, and she pinched Mr Jerebohm sharply on the arm.

  ‘I’ll split the difference,’ Mr Jerebohm said.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Pop said. ‘Seventeen thousand.’

  Mr Jerebohm had no time to protest against the neatness of Pop’s arithmetic before Mrs Jerebohm lisped:

  ‘Oh! Splendid. Splendid. I’m so glad we’ve got it all sewn up.’

  Sewn up it was, an’ all, Pop thought. Ma would be pleased. And Mariette. They could have the swimming pool easy now. And probably even heated.

  ‘Well, that’s it then, Larkin.’ Mr Jerebohm shook Pop not uncordially by the hand. Mrs Jerebohm, smiling with winning, crossed teeth, shook hands too. ‘Thank you. I’ll tell my solicitors to contact you. Presume you’d like some sort of deposit?’

  Wouldn’t cause him no pain, Pop said. Couldn’t manage cash? he supposed.

  Mr Jerebohm said he didn’t see why not. There were times when it was better that way. The times being what they were, in fact, it actually suited him.

  As the three of them walked back to the house Pop turned to Mrs Jerebohm’s tight, white-suited figure and asked if there wasn’t perhaps something else she wanted to see? The kitchen garden? The asparagus beds? The greenhouses?

  ‘You could grow some beautiful orchids there.’

  Orchids were one touch of poetry too much for Mrs Jerebohm, who said rather peremptorily that thanks, there was nothing else they wanted. At the same moment Mrs Jerebohm pointed across the valley, where smoke from the strawberry fields was still drifting across the blue brilliant sky.

  ‘A fire!’ she said. ‘Isn’t that a fire?’

  Yes, Pop said, it was a fire and went on to explain how, for the first time in living memory, they were burning off the strawberry fields. The strawberry lark was over for the year. In a couple of weeks harvest would be over too. Everything would be over. It would all be finished months ahead of time, thanks to the marvellous summer, and he offered Pinkie Jerebohm the final crumb of comfort needed to make her day supremely happy.

  ‘The women’ll all be coming in from the fields early this year. You’ll get all the help you want in the house. Been a perfickly wonderful summer, don’t you think, absolutely perfick?’

  It certainly had, Mrs Jerebohm said, it certainly had, and with one long ecstatic backward glance at the lake and its lilies she felt her eyes slowly fill with tears of joy.

  This, she told herself, was paradise.

  ∗

  That night Pop felt the deal called for a bottle of champagne in bed with Ma and an extra good cigar. As he sat in bed, sipping and puffing and watching Ma brush her hair at the dressing table, he caught pleasant glimpses of her body, vast and soft, under the forget-me-not blue nightgown, thin as gossamer, he had bought her for Christmas.

  ‘Think the kids were pleased about the swimming pool,’ he said, ‘don’t you? I thought the twins would die.’

  At the supper table he had been surrounded by children choking with excitement. The twins were half-hysterical. Montgomery, Victoria, and a fast-maturing Primrose–he wasn’t sure she wasn’t going to be the prettiest of the lot after all–were not much better.

  ‘Didn’t think Mariette and Charley sounded all that wild though,’ Ma said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. After all you promised you’d build ’em a bungalow with the stuff you pulled out of Gore Court. And here they are still living with us.’

  ‘Stuffs too good for a bungalow. You couldn’t do it,’ Pop said. ‘I’ll give Mariette a thousand for her birthday next month. They can start on that.’

  Well, that was nice and generous, Ma said, and got into bed to sip champagne, her nightgown giving off strong clouds of heliotrope, her new perfume.

  ‘Thundering hot still,’ Pop said.

  Still, he thought, they mustn’t grumble. Been a pretty fair day on the whole. He hadn’t expected to get more than ten or eleven for Gore Court at the best, but thanks largely to Ma he’d done much better. Ma was a sharp one really. By the way, he said to her, what about Mariette? Any sign of any increase and all that?

  ‘Not yet,’ Ma said. ‘Charley’s going to have a test.’

  ‘Test? Good God.’

  The subject of a test was so embarrassing that Pop felt both relieved and glad when Ma changed the conversation abruptly and said:

  ‘You didn’t really tell me what Mrs Jerebohm was like.’

  Ma, as always, was pleasantly curious, even eager, to hear more of Pop’s female acquaintances.

  ‘Fairish,’ Pop said. ‘Uses some funny expressions. Dithers a lot. Says things like dove-tail and zip-up and clock and so on. Excitable.’

  Ma looked sharply up at him at the word excitable and said she hoped he hadn’t been up to any hanky-pankies of any sort?

  ‘No, no,’ Pop said. ‘Nothing like that.’

  Ma said she was very relieved to hear it. Unabashed, Pop asked why?

  ‘Because they’re going to be our nearest neighbours,’ Ma said. ‘That’s why. We’ll be having them in for drinks and all that. You want to start off on the right foot, don’t you?’

  Pop, sipping champagne, said he didn’t mean excitable in that way. He meant she got sort of emotional about little things. He recalled the tears he had seen in her eyes at the lakeside. She was all excitable about the joys of country life and all that lark.

  ‘Expect she thinks eggs grow on trees,’ Ma said, ‘and cream comes out of a tap.’

  Well, it wasn’t quite so bad as that, Pop said, but it was a damn cert Mr Jerebohm didn’t know a duck from a jackdaw. Typical Piccadilly farmer–every peapod was going to cost him a bob and every pheasant a tenner.

  ‘Well, if he don’t mind,’ Ma said.

  Oh! he didn’t mind, Pop assured her, it was all part of the game. But what a world, wasn’t it? What a world when you had to lose a lot of money so as to make more? What a world, eh?

  ‘Certainly is,’ Ma said and went on to say that there were times when she thought we were all half crazy. ‘Not sure we haven’t forgotten what it’s all about sometimes.’

  Forgotten what all what was about? Pop wanted to know.

  ‘Oh! you know,’ Ma said, ‘just being here.’

  The sudden conscious reminder that he was alive on a hot summer evening full of stars was enough to recall to Pop something he had meant to ask Ma earlier on.

  ‘Had a good mind to ask you to have a lay-down when I got back this afternoon,’ he said, ‘but you were watering your zinnias.’

  ‘Well, I’m not watering my zinnias now,’ she said, ‘am I? You never want to spoil a good mind.’

  Pop thought that this, like so much that Ma said, made real sense and presently, after getting out of bed and drawing back the curtains and gazing with his own special sort of rapture at the blazing summer stars, got back into a world of chiffon and heliotrope in order to demonstrate to a silently waiting Ma what a good mind he still had.

  4

  Several weeks later, about five o’clock on a warm October evening Pop, in his shirt sleeves, was sitting comfortably in a deck chair on the south side of the house, a quart glass of beer at his side, occasionally potting with a shot gun at odd pheasants flying over from the Jerebohm domain to roost in the bluebell wood beyond the yard.

  It was just the sort of shooting the doctor ordered. You sat in comfort, with a nice supply of beer at hand, and picked off the birds like one o’clock. Perfick sport. Like fishing for trout with worms, he didn’t suppose it was the real and proper sporting thing to do, but at the same time he reckoned it was streets in front of tramping over sodden stubbles on rainy winter afternoo
ns, waiting for birds to be beaten out of copses at ten quid a time. The pheasant tasted no different anyway and he was very glad he’d managed to persuade Mr Jerebohm to buy a couple of hundred young ones at precisely the right time. Well fed on corn, the birds had fattened beautifully in the extraordinary warm autumn weather and were now as tender and tasty, he thought, as young love. Now and then you missed a bird because at the critical moment you had the beer up to your lips, but on the whole he couldn’t grumble. He’d bagged a brace already.

  It was not often that he was alone about the house, but Ma and the children, together with Charley and little Oscar, were still hard at the strawberry lark. It was the first time in living memory that the strawberry lark had extended into September and October. There were years when a few odd pounds ripened in autumn but now, thanks to the long hot summer that seemed as if it would never end, there were whole fields of them. Splendid fruit was being gathered in tons. The burnt fields of July had been fed by August thunder rains and had woken into sudden blossoming, as deserts do. It was the most remarkable lark he’d ever known. Ma and Charley and the kids had been at it for six weeks, making pots of dough.

  In the fading evening light he missed a bird that planed over too low and too fast for him and then, a minute later, found himself without beer. For a few minutes he sat debating with himself whether to fetch another bottle or to give up shooting altogether and was finally saved the necessity of making a decision by the sight of two figures crossing the yard.

  The sudden arrival of the Brigadier, who dropped in quite often, left him unsurprised. It was the sight of Angela Snow, silky haired and lovely as ever, wearing the dreamiest of thin summer dresses, a shade deeper than pale sherry, that made him leap up from his chair. He hadn’t seen her since that tenderest of holiday farewells in France, a year before.

  ‘Lambkin,’ she said. ‘Darling. Given me up for dead or lost or as a bad lot or what?’

  Pop, kissed first on both cheeks and then with a light flowering brush on the lips, was actually at a loss for words.

  ‘I was waffling into town to buy an evening paper,’ said the Brigadier, who did a great deal of walking, not from choice but necessity, since he couldn’t afford a motor, ‘and Angela picked me up in the car. Must say I wasn’t sorry either. Been damned hot again.’

  The word hot set Pop hurrying to the house for drinks, ice and glasses, which he brought out on a tray vividly scrolled in magenta, orange, and scarlet scenes violently depicting Spanish dancers.

  ‘The Brigadier, poor lamb,’ Angela said, ‘has been crying on my shoulder.’

  The Brigadier, angular, thin, and shabby as ever, the elbows of his alpaca actually looking as if gnawed by mice, coughed several times in embarrassment, quite shy.

  ‘Come, come,’ he said. ‘Now really.’

  ‘Honest to God,’ Angela said. ‘And I was the great stupid. I hadn’t heard about his sister.’

  On a morning in April the Brigadier’s sister, going upstairs with a small pile of ironing and suddenly lacking strength to reach the top, had simply sat down on the middle steps and quietly died.

  ‘Nice brace of birds,’ the Brigadier said, eager to change the subject. ‘Got them in the meadow, I suppose?’

  Pop, pouring large whiskies on to hillocks of ice, laughed resoundingly and explained how the birds, flying over from the Jerebohm domain, were on the contrary picked off in comfort, from the deck chair.

  ‘Good God,’ the Brigadier said. Shocked, he relapsed after the two words into immediate silence. It was really a bit beyond the pale. By Jove it really was. Even for Larkin.

  ‘And what,’ Angela said, ‘is the great big hole doing in the garden?’ She laughed flutingly, pointing across the garden to where, beyond the flaming yellows and scarlets of Ma’s zinnias, a vast earthwork had been thrown up, dry as stone from the heat of summer. ‘The grave for the poor wretched birds as they fall?’

  ‘Swimming pool,’ Pop explained.

  ‘Good God,’ the Brigadier said again. Whisky in hand, he stared incredulously across the garden, prawn-like brows twitching. The apparent vastness of the pool, seemingly half as big as a public bath, shocked him even more than Pop’s unsporting habits with pheasants. Coughing, he tried a dry joke of his own. ‘Quite sure it’s large enough?’

  ‘Got to be big to take Ma,’ Pop said.

  ‘Scream,’ Angela Snow said. ‘And when do you hope to use it?’

  ‘If the wevver’s nice, early next spring,’ Pop said. ‘Going to have it heated.’

  The Brigadier did his well-mannered best not to choke over his whisky. Angela Snow laughed in her incomparably musical fashion, on bell-like notes, her pellucid eyes dancing.

  ‘And shall we be invited for a dip?’ she said. ‘If we’re not I shall write you off as a stinker.’

  ‘Course,’ Pop said, ‘probably have a party to christen it,’ and went on to say yes, Ma would have it heated. If it wasn’t heated, she said, she’d have to have a mink bathing suit and what about that? The trouble with Ma was that she wasn’t all that much of a swimmer and got cold very quickly. She floated mostly and if it was warm she had more fun.

  ‘I heard of a bathing party once,’ Angela said, ‘where all the bathing suits melted as soon as the chaps jumped in. How about that?’

  Perfick idea, Pop said. He’d have to think about mat. Eh, General?

  A certain shyness, not shock this time, left the Brigadier speechless again and it seemed to Pop that Angela Snow, laughing no longer, looked at him with a touch of pity. He suddenly felt overwhelmingly sorry for the General himself. He had heard stories of a daily help serving him bread and cold bacon for lunch or leaving him to dine alone on cold pies of sausage meat as hard as rocks. He felt a chill of loneliness in the air and made up his mind to give the General the brace of pheasants when he left. He could knock off some more tomorrow.

  ‘Another snifter?’

  The invitation cheered the Brigadier considerably, though not nearly so much as Pop’s sudden recollection of a dish Ma had made that morning and of which there was some left in the fridge. It was a sort of open cheese tart decorated with thin strips of anchovy. It was equally delicious hot or cold. He’d go and get it.

  ‘Ma got the recipe from Mademoiselle Dupont, in France, on that holiday last year,’ he said on coming back from the house with the tart, which Ma had cooked in a baking tin a foot wide. ‘By the way, Angela, did you go again this year?’

  Pop cut handsome wedges of tart and proceeded to hand them to the Brigadier and Angela, who said:

  ‘Couldn’t, dear boy. Had to stay at home and look after Iris.’

  Pop said Oh? he was sorry about that. Ill or something?

  ‘Nothing so simple, darling. Married.’

  For crying out gently, Pop said. That was a surprise. He hadn’t thought she was the type.

  ‘Nor did she. Not until that party of yours at the Beau Rivage. That altered the outlook. She lost a precious possession there.’

  Pop laughed. He must remember to tell Ma that. The Brigadier, by contrast, showed no sign of amusement at all, not because he was shocked again but merely because he wasn’t listening. Chewing with almost excruciating relish on the wedge of cheese tart he stood bemused, a man lost. Two sandwiches of crab paste at lunch time hadn’t shown much staying power.

  ‘What about staying for supper?’ Pop said suddenly. ‘I daresay Ma’ll find a couple o’ brace o’ pheasants. I shot ten or a dozen last week. Expect there’ll be strawberries and cream too. Ma generally brings back a few pounds from the field.’

  The Brigadier, silent still, felt he could have wept. A prick or two of moisture actually pained his eyes, in fact, as he gave a low cough or two and finally said, in tones intended as cryptic but polite in refusal:

  ‘Oh! no, no, Larkin. Really mustn’t. Thanks all the same. No, no, no.’

  ‘Oh! you’re a sweetie,’ Angela Snow said and the Brigadier looked perceptibly startled, as if thinking or even hoping for
a moment that the remark was meant for him, ‘of course we’ll stay. I’m absolutely starving anyway. Aren’t you, Arthur?’

  The Brigadier himself had never looked more startled than Pop did at the sudden mention of the General’s Christian name, which he had never heard before.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good, Ma’ll be tickled to death. Especially when she hears you’re starving.’

  The Brigadier, who was always starving, had nothing to say. The light was fading rapidly now. The scarlet and yellow of Ma’s zinnias were like burning embers dropped from the heart of the sunset, the quiet air still like summer, the sky unfeathered by cloud, the sweet chestnut leaves hardly touched by a single brush stroke of brown or yellow. Perfick evening, he heard Pop say as he poured yet another whisky and offered another wedge of tart-that touch of anchovy was masterly, the Brigadier thought, it started all your juices up-and then, a moment later, he heard the first laughing voices of the Larkin family coming home from the strawberry field.

  Half a minute later he was aware of a young vision crossing the yard in the twilight. The dark head and olive skin of Primrose were exactly like those of her mother. For a few seconds it actually hurt him to look at her, taller by several inches than when he had seen her last, growing rapidly, her bust ripening. She seemed to him like a younger, less vivacious Mariette. The dark eyes were shy, big and serious, even a little melancholy, and suddenly his heart started aching.

  It was uplifted a moment or two later by Ma, carrying in her arms a little Oscar looking as fat as a young seal. Boisterous as ever, brown from weeks of sun, she breezily invited the Brigadier to have a strawberry. In the twilight the baskets of lush ripe berries looked almost black.

  ‘Not surprised to see you here, General,’ Ma said. ‘But Angela too! Going to stay for supper, aren’t you?’

  ‘Already fixed,’ Pop said. ‘Already fixed.’

  ‘Lovely to see you,’ Angela said. ‘Can’t think what’s come over this man of yours, though. Been behaving like a curate. Never a caress.’

  ‘Wait till he gets you in the swimming pool,’ Ma said and, laughing like a jelly, went away to put the pheasants into the oven and little Oscar into bed.