by H. E. Bates
A second or two later the big front door was opened by a girl of nineteen or twenty, blue-eyed and very fair, with her hair done up in the shape of a plaited bread roll. She gave Pop and Ma the slightest suspicion of a curtsey and ‘Good evening. To come in please,’ in an accent so strong that Pop, fixing her with a gaze like a limpet, told himself she must be froggy.
Inside the huge baronial entrance hall, lit only by a big brass lamp hanging over the head of the stairs, the air struck cold as a vault. It smelled mouldy too, Ma thought, and a bit mousey into the bargain, rather like that hotel they’d stayed at in Brittany.
‘No, I’ll keep my stole on,’ she said to the girl when she offered to take it, ‘thank you.’
‘Bitte,’ the girl said and then corrected herself. ‘Please.’
Bitter it would be an’ all, Ma thought, if you had to live in this place all winter and couldn’t get it no warmer than it was now. She’d get pleurisy in no time.
She thought the drawing room, huge though it was and with all its treacle-brown panelling about as cheerful as a church vestry, seemed a little better. A fire of birch logs a yard long was sulkily smoking-burning was too definite a word for the thick pink mist gushing out of the silvery pile of wood-in a brick fireplace as large as a cow-stall. The heat that came out of it might possibly have warmed a fly, Ma thought, but not a very big one.
‘Ah! Larkin.’ Mr Jerebohm, with outstretched hand, advanced from the smoky regions of the fireplace. ‘Mrs Larkin.’
Mr Jerebohm, who was wearing a black velvet jacket and a claret-red bow-tie, said of course they both knew Pinkie, who now simpered rather than walked across the drawing room to lisp ‘Good evening’ and shake hands. Pinkie was wearing a silk evening dress of an indefinite brown colour, rather like stale milk chocolate. It was sleeveless, off the shoulder and rather low at the bust, so that some inches of a dough-coloured pouchy bosom were revealed.
‘It’ll be pride that keeps her warm,’ Ma thought. ‘Nothing else will.’
Pinkie lisped that it was awfully nice to see them and did they know Captain and Mrs Perigo?
Still clinging to him, is she? Ma thought. Thought she’d run off with that feller Fanshawe long ago.
‘Evening,’ Pop said. ‘Think we’ve met a couple o’ times.’
Captain Perigo said ‘Really?’ in a voice remarkably like the groan of an un-oiled gate, and said he didn’t believe they had. In expressing his words his bony jaw, which was much the colour of pumice stone and about as fleshless, unhinged itself with rusty difficulty and then remained emptily open, unable to hinge itself back again.
‘Often seen you ride at the point-to-points,’ Ma said. ‘My daughter Mariette rides a lot there.’
‘Really?’ Captain Perigo said.
This monosyllabic eagerness of welcome was in direct contrast to Mrs Perigo, who spoke heartily and had eyes like ripe black olives. If Captain Perigo, from continuous association with horses, looked remarkably like an undernourished hunter himself, Mrs Perigo had all the plushy creaminess of a cow. In tones like those of a deep-blown horn she drawled good evenings, at the same time giving Pop a look of openly inviting greeting, eyes in a deep slow roll.
High society now, Ma thought. There was a certain mannered stiffness in the air quite foreign to her nature and she was glad she’d brought her mink.
‘Our summer seems to have left us, don’t you think?’ Mrs Perigo said. ‘Absolutely heavenly. We’ll never have another one like it, ever, will we? I mean ever? You been away?’
‘Not this year,’ Ma said. ‘Been too busy strawberry picking.’
‘Really?’ Captain Perigo stared at Ma in open-mouthed pain, as if she had been doing time.
The unmistakable chill in the air prompted Pop to think that a large snifter would go down well. A moment later he found himself confronted with a tray held by Mr Jerebohm. On it were three or four pink glasses, each about the size of a thimble.
‘Care for sherry?’
Pop thanked Mr Jerebohm, raised a thimble of pale amber liquid and stared at it dubiously, not certain whether to knock it back in one go or husband it for a while. He decided on husbandry. Something told him there might not be another.
‘Admiring your mink,’ Mrs Jerebohm said to Ma, who was also holding a thimble. ‘Hope you don’t mind? Quite gorgeous. That lovely new colour.’
‘Bought it with the money I made in the strawberry field,’ Ma said. ‘Put in a lot of extra time this year.’
Pop, overhearing this, was ready to laugh aloud and was only saved from doing so by the sudden languorous approach of Mrs Perigo, who bore down on him with dark still eyes and swinging hips. Pop knew all about Mrs Perigo, who was wearing a tight evening dress of geranium-leaf green that fitted her like a pod, and he was already on his guard:
‘You sort of live next door, don’t you?’ she said.
Sort of, Pop said. Half a mile along the road.
‘Never see you around anywhere. How can that be?’
That, Pop said, could only be because she didn’t keep her eyes open, a remark that caused her to give him another slow inviting glance, openly ripe and full.
‘I will in future though,’ she said.
Pop laughed and then was silent. He wasn’t going to be drawn by Mrs Perigo. There were men in every village for a radius of ten miles round who wished with all their hearts they’d never met Corinne Perigo.
‘Silly to be so near and never have a peep of anybody,’ she said. ‘That’s the worst of the country though, there’s so damn little fun.’
Pop, drinking sherry in sips so minute that he could hardly taste it at all, thought that if any woman had had any fun it was Corinne Perigo, who had in her time run off with a naval commander, a veterinary surgeon, and an agricultural inspector. The naval commander had shot himself and the inspector was in a home. Pop didn’t know about the vet, but in the process of her adventures the forbearing Perigo had turned into a monosyllabic horse.
‘Heard you say there was no fun in the country.’ It was Pinkie Jerebohm, offering a plate of the snippiest of cocktail snippets to Pop and Mrs Perigo. ‘Have one of these. And what about your glass?’
What about it? Pop thought and was dismayed to hear Pinkie say as she peered into his glass:
‘Oh! you’re still all right, I see.’
Pop simply hadn’t the heart to say anything and he could only suppose there was so little recognizable difference between a full and an empty thimble that you really couldn’t blame her.
‘Well,’ Mrs Perigo said, ‘do you think there’s any fun?’
‘My husband does,’ Pinkie lisped. ‘He adores it. He thinks the days are so long. Much longer than they are in town, miles longer. Perhaps it’s because he’s always up with the lark. The only thing is that you can’t get help for love nor money. I had to get this Austrian girl in. She can’t cook though and even she’s been spending her days off in the strawberry fields.’
All would be well, Pop assured her, now that the strawberries, potatoes, and sugar beet were finished. She’d get plenty of help now.
‘I profoundly hope so.’
A moment later, over in the fireplace, a heavy gust of wind came down the chimney and erupted in a pungent cloud of birchsmoke, so that Captain Perigo, in the act of trying to get a little warmth into his haunches, seemed visibly to rise up, exposed as on a funeral pyre.
This seemed like a signal for Mrs Jerebohm to muster her chilly guests together, which she did with the simpering of a hen gathering stray chicks.
‘Shall we go in? I think we might, don’t you? I think all’s ready. Shall we? Shall we go in?’
Pop gave his thimble sherry a final despondent glance and then switched his gaze to Ma, who was shivering. Better knock it back, he thought, profoundly glad at the same time that he’d insured himself with three Red Bulls. He didn’t care for sherry much at the best of times and he was quite right: it was perfickly obvious there wasn’t going to be another.
The dining room was vast too, with polished oak floors that echoed hollow with every step and a big stone fireplace that sheltered yet another pile of smoking birch. If the air didn’t quite take your breath away, Ma thought, it wasn’t very much better. It was like a stable in wintertime.
The dining table looked nice though, she thought. Tall red candles rose from green china bowls filled with scarlet hips and haws. There were rose-pink dinner mats, cut wine glasses, pretty silver salt cellars and butter knives with painted handles, all looking discreet and pleasant under golden candlelight.
Everything looked very très snob, Pop thought and only hoped the food would be up to the same standard. He was pretty well starving.
Half a minute later, sitting next to Mrs Perigo, he found himself staring down at a small green glass dish in which reposed a concoction consisting of five prawns, a spoonful of soapy pink sauce, and a sixth prawn hanging over the edge of the glass as if searching for any of its mates that might have fallen overboard. You could have eaten the lot, Pop thought, with two digs of an egg-spoon.
‘I hope everybody likes prawn cocktail?’ Mrs Jerebohm said. A wind whined and whooped like an owl in the chimney as if giving answer. ‘I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t join you. I’m not allowed it. I have my yoghurt.’
‘Give you gee-up?’ Ma said. ‘Onions serve me that way too.’
Mrs Jerebohm looked frigid. ‘Not exactly. It’s my diet. I have to watch it all the time.’
‘Ma went on a diet once,’ Pop said. ‘By the time she’d got the diet down her every morning she was ready for a good square breakfast.’
‘Really?’ Captain Perigo said. ‘I mean to say –’.
What Captain Perigo meant to say nobody discovered. Mrs Jerebohm toyed with yoghurt. Pop toyed with a prawn, thinking it tasted more like a bit of last week’s cod than anything else he could name. Ma sniffed the chilly air, hoping she might catch a smell of steak or something cooking. She rather fancied steak tonight but she merely felt a sense of denial when she remembered how far away the kitchens were.
Presently Mrs Jerebohm swallowed a pill, washing it down with a glass of cold water, and Mr Jerebohm walked round the table, filling glasses with chilled white wine.
Pop, who had made the prawn cocktail last as long as possible, decided he couldn’t put off the end any longer and sucked at the last meagre spoonful just as Mrs Perigo dropped her serviette on the floor.
‘Do you mind, Mr Larkin? I’ve dropped my serviette.’
Pop poked about under the table. The serviette had dropped between Mrs Perigo’s not unshapely legs, which wère held generously apart. The temptation to caress one of them or even both was a strong one which Pop successfully resisted just in time.
When he finally retrieved the serviette and put it back in her lap he was not surprised to notice that she was eyeing him with a keen but voluptuous sort of disappointment. He wasn’t at all sure there didn’t seem to be a hint of annoyance there too and with a nippy gesture towards Mr Jerebohm he changed the subject.
‘Had many pheasants yet, Mr Jerebohm?’
Mr Jerebohm confessed, with a certain air of annoyance too, that he had, in fact, not had many pheasants. Hardly a damned one.
‘Oh?’ Pop expressed a most fervent and sympathetic surprise. ‘How’s that? Thought you had plenty.’
So, confessed Mr Jerebohm, did he. But where did the bounders get to? You could walk all the way to the lake and never see a brace.
‘Knocking the stoats off?’ Pop said, airily.
What on earth had stoats got to do with it? Mr Jerebohm said.
‘And what about jackdaws?’ Pop said. ‘Eh?’ Bigger menace than stoats. ‘And magpies?’ Bigger menace than jackdaws. ‘And hawks?’ Bigger menace than the lot. Deadly.
Mr Jerebohm, who didn’t know a lark from a sparrow, let alone a magpie from a hawk, sat almost as open-mouthed as Captain Perigo while listening to Pop’s fluent recital of the pheasant’s countless deadly enemies.
‘You mean –?’
‘Perfickly obvious,’ Pop said. ‘Your birds are being taken by summink or other.’
Pop stared hard at Ma as he spoke, but Ma didn’t move an eyelash in reply.
‘Really?’ Captain Perigo said. ‘I mean say –’.
‘No doubt about it,’ Pop said. ‘You’ll have to get among the stoats and things. Won’t he, Ma?’
Ma cordially agreed. And the foxes.
‘Dammit,’ Mr Jerebohm said, ‘I thought the hunt took care of the foxes.’
‘Half and half,’ Pop said. ‘The hunt takes care of the foxes and the foxes take care of the hunt.’
‘Had a fox fetch a goose the other night,’ Ma said. ‘Right under our noses.’
‘I think we fed ’em too well in the first place,’ Mr Jerebohm said. ‘They simply didn’t want to fly.’
‘Never. Got to feed ’em. Got to fatten ’em up a bit,’ Pop said. After all, what’s a pheasant if it’s all skin and bone?’
Mr Jerebohm said he simply didn’t know; he hadn’t even seen one. He hadn’t seen a snipe, a deer, a hare, or a damn rabbit either. Had Larkin?
‘Caught sight of a few in the distance once or twice,’ Pop said. ‘Too far off, mostly.’
‘Really?’ Captain Perigo said.
While all this was going on the blonde Austrian maid had been clearing away the cocktail dishes. She was rather a fresh, pretty little thing, Pop thought, and recalled that he hadn’t seen her about the village at all. He must look out a bit more and as she picked up his dish he turned and gave her a short warm smile.
She gave him the hint of a smile in reply and a second later he felt the air between himself and Mrs Perigo positively dry up, parched by a withering glare.
While the girl was out of the room Mrs Jerebohm daintily swallowed another pill and drank another glass of water. Pop tried the white wine, all flavour of which appeared to have been chilled out in some deep and distant tomb.
‘What about wild duck then?’ Pop said.
As if unprepared to discuss the subject of wild duck Mr Jerebohm went over to the sideboard and started sharpening the carving knife. No, he said rather tersely, he hadn’t seen any wild duck either. He doubted in fact if there were any wild duck about the place. If there were they were damn widely scattered.
‘They come and go,’ Pop said. ‘We had a brace last week, didn’t we, Ma? Not much on a wild duck, but they’re beautiful with orange sauce. Perfick.’
Tortured by the renewed description of Ma’s wild duck with orange sauce, Mr Jerebohm found himself faced with the task of dismembering three small larded partridges brought in on a dish by the Austrian maid. They not only looked on the small side but they seemed, he thought, rather crisp. He gave the girl a look of slightly curt reproval and then with sinking heart proceeded to thrust the carving knife hard into the breast of the first partridge.
Under this first prod the bird gave a sharp leap about the dish. A second made it dance sideways, skating in gravy. The knife grated against bone as hard as ebony, setting Ma’s teeth on edge, and with depressing insistence Mr Jerebohm attacked it again. This time it skated into the two other birds, one of which leapt completely from the dish and slithered full circle round the sideboard.
After the Austrian maid retrieved it deftly Mrs Jerebohm called, lisping:
‘Not for me, dear, you know I mustn’t. I have my peanut pâté.’
On Mrs Jerebohm’s plate there reposed the smallest portion of brown-grey pâté, looking not at all unlike a mouse nibbling at a solitary lettuce leaf. A still smaller portion of grated celery, together with one sliced tomato, covered some part of the rest of the plate and for a few moments Mrs Jerebohm stared at it all either as if in disbelief or as if wondering whether something, possibly, could be missing.
Watching her, Ma thought she had the clue.
‘Salt?’ she said. ‘Looking for the salt?’
‘Oh! never salt,’ Mrs Jerebohm lisped. ‘Salt is absolutely fatal.’
Never? Ma said. She hadn’t heard.
‘And pepper. They both put on more weight than bread. Oh! I never, never eat salt. Never, never pepper.’
‘Really?’ Captain Perigo said. ‘I mean say –’.
By this time the first of the partridges, tortuously dismembered by Mr Jerebohm, were coming to table, garnished with frozen peas and game potatoes. The birds looked, if possible, more charred than ever and as each meagre portion was set down in the pool of glass and silver and candlelight Ma’s customary epitaph ‘Shan’t get very fat on this’ flashed sadly through her mind. No doubt about it: they wouldn’t either.
‘Absolutely delicious,’ Captain Perigo said, uttering his first real original sentence of the evening.
In return Mrs Perigo gave him a look of flat-iron contempt, as if he were not supposed to utter sentences of originality. His jaw, falling open suddenly, expressed a pained acquiescence that showed no sign of receding until he presently found time to pick up slowly, one by one, three or four peas on the end of a fork. Even these remained for some time poised before the empty gap, in air.
‘Anyone going hunting on Thursday?’ Mr Jerebohm said.
He hadn’t hunted much yet. The mid-week meets were awkward and not, it seemed, very well patronized. These days, it appeared, you couldn’t get the chaps.
‘I’ll be there,’ Captain Perigo said. The peas had only just gone in when his mouth opened again.
This time there was no answering look of contempt from Corinne Perigo, who merely half-glanced at Pop and said:
‘I know I can’t. I’ve got a perm.’
‘You going, Larkin?’ Mr Jerebohm said.
Pop, rather uncheerfully, said yes, he thought he might. He was struggling with elastic bits of partridge, longing for a cheese-pudding or something, a steak-and-kidney pie or something, to fill him up. Had to take a day off now and then, he said, and he hadn’t hunted once this year.